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For Tincakes, our assignment was to write a story about curses. That was it. Just, curses. Well, I knew going in that the bulk of my compatriots were going to hit it from a fantasy angle: sorcery, witchcraft, occult, voodoo, et cetera. Me being me, I immediately thought -- not of demonic or mystical curses -- but of sports curses. The Curse of the Bambino, The Curse of the Black Socks, The Curse of Muldoon, et cetera. I also wanted to write a story that would be sufficiently science-fictional to sell to the editors who were familiar with and had enjoyed my previous work.

So, my thoughts turned to racing.

Now, the idea of the futuristic or "space race" is a recurrent concept in SF -- the pod racing sequence from the first of the three Star Wars the-curse-of-sally-tincakesprequels being a notable high-profile example. Contests of speed are as old as human civilization, so it stands to reason that we'll still be having them long after we've become a truly interplanetary people.

And as long as we have races, I suspect we will have racing curses too.

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