Scuba diving on Europa was supposed to be fun
20 June 2018
Two stories in Broad Knowledge involve space travel (as does Sharp & Sugar Tooth’s “And When We Die They Will Consume Us†by Betsy Aoki, which we featured on June 16th): “The Cold Waters of Europa†by Claudine Griggs (from which our title comes) and “The Ladies in the Moon†by Xin Niu Zhang.
“The Ladies in the Moon†is the story of Fletcher, an enforcer for a gang called the Solars, who gets a chance at a spot on a moon colony.

“The Cold Waters of Europa†is a story about a disaster in space that results in the narrator fighting not to freeze to death in (as you may have guessed) the cold waters of Europa, as she watches her wife plummet to the bottom of the ocean.
Claudine Griggs writes:
Wondering about what folks might do for recreation several hundred years in the future, I came up with the story idea in “The Cold Waters of Europa,†which involves scuba diving under the ice on that frozen moon. A small group on a working vacation to explore Europa’s teeming aquatic ecosystem find deep trouble instead, and their adventure becomes a story of survival. The female protagonist exceeds her own expectations but not without consequences.

About the Authors
Claudine Griggs is the Writing Center Director at Rhode Island College, and her publications include three nonfiction books about transsexuals along with a couple dozen articles on writing, teaching, and other topics. She has also begun writing fiction and plans to draft more science fiction, her first-love genre as a teenager. Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Zahir Tales, Leading Edge SF, The Chaffey Review, and Baen Books’ Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction. Griggs earned her BA and MA in English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Publishers’ Weekly has called her writing “quietly terrifying.â€
Xin Niu Zhang was born in Shanghai, grew up in Toronto, and is currently studying at the University of Waterloo. Her ultimate aspiration is to write a book glamorizing the lives of accountants.
Entry filed under: Anthology, Fiction, News. Tags: Claudine Griggs, women up to no good, Xin Niu Zhang.