SPSFC 4 Quarterfinalist: Saint Elspeth

Each judging team in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC) decides its own method for getting from their initial scout pile of novels to the ones that advance to the next stage. Ground Control to Major Tom had two to four judges read each of our 32 books in full, giving some of them a Strong Yes or Yes vote to recommend.

With eight books getting at least one Strong Yes vote and another 10 getting a Yes, there was an extremely close competition to become the six novels to advance. The second quarterfinalist we're revealing is Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker.

How did humanity handle the arrival of aliens dropping from the skies in giant organic pods shaped like zeppelins, ablaze from atmospheric friction? Not well:

I slept only an hour the first night in the underground bunker. My back ached from positioning the baby to my left all night. Acid reflux raged in my throat, stealing my appetite as I got in line for breakfast the next morning, but I shoveled eggs and oatmeal onto the tin plate. I quickly learned that bunker people are muted people. Conversation is lacking when, just the day before, you're hurried onto a helicopter and corralled into boxes of concrete and steel thousands of feet below the Sierra Nevada mountains. Word of the first nuclear strikes since 1945 graced our stressed out brains as we descended rock and earth the night before. The sky had been pregnant with alien invaders only two months before the world of men decided to turn against themselves. The powder keg of brinksmanship and geopolitical opportunists had finally been lit while Clive was still out there somewhere.

Countries nuked the pods within their borders and then nuked the ones in countries that left them alone. This game of global thermonuclear war leaves the world in ruin and a mere sliver of humanity hunkered down in bunkers until they can eventually come out. Twenty five years after the conflagration, Dr. Elspeth Darrow has set aside the grief for her lost family and operates the last hospital in Neo San Francisco. With medical supplies running out, she must venture into the California danger zone on a salvage run to find antibiotics and diuretics with a few old-world scientists and new-world medical students.

Judges loved the lead character and the realism that Welker brought to the subject as a doctor himself -- though not one who has 15,000 patients and nowhere to send a prescription.

Richard's Reviews (Goodreads)

Elspeth is a war widow, who lost her baby in childbirth, prefers working in a lab away from people, but who has been thrust into the role of primary healer for a group of humans who survived the apocalypse in an underground bunker near San Francisco. ...

While it is a first contact novel, the aliens are not a focus into much later in the book and it is the humans, not the aliens, that pose the biggest threat.

InkFinger (Goodreads)

I'm really glad I read this book. In the end, Welker has something to say about humanity, the nature of first contact, the possibilities of a post-apocalyptic world, and the essential decency of people when you let them be decent. I like Elspeth Darrow. I rooted for her.

SPSFC · SPSFC 4 · Wick Welker ·

2025/02/21 · Link

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