Delia’s Delightful Dancing Emporium

This novella began as a short story, my first real foray into speculative fiction. At the time, I didn’t think of it as science fiction. It was just a story about people, about longing and rhythm, set somewhere unfamiliar. It sat on my laptop for five years before I submitted it to a competitive anthology called 21 Futures. It was selected. I was delighted.

Then something changed.

I began writing professionally about digital twins. Not of infrastructure or data systems, but of people, real people. Lifelike replicas trained on memory, personality, and voice. The more I learned, the more I realised the core of my story had always been about this. About what it means to endure. To be remembered. To love in strange places.

So I returned to Daria. To her emporium. To the music that outlives grief.

The result is this expanded novella. It is part memory, part resistance, part love letter to something we can’t always explain.

Digital twins may seem uncanny. The future might look bizarre. But love is still love, even on Mars.