The Lost Men

David A. Colón was born in Brooklyn, New York. On Saturday mornings-before he was old enough to play baseball-he would beg his father to read him again "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or "Kubla Khan." Twenty years later he packed everything he owned into a truck and drove across America to study literature at a good university in California. He now finds himself in Texas, a professor of English. He loves literature that explores the innermost darkness of the human experience while respecting the beauty of language at its most pristine. And he believes that fiction should be just that; it should be that which nothing else can be.

In a world where the human population has been decimated, self-reliance is the order of the day. Of necessity, the few remaining people must adapt residual technology as far as possible, with knowledge gleaned from books that were rescued and have been treasured for generations. After a childhood of such training, each person is abandoned by their parents when they reach adulthood, to pursue an essentially solitary existence. For most, the only human contact is their counsel, a mentor who guides them to find 'the one', their life mate as decreed by Fate. Lack of society brings with it a lack of taboo, ensuring that the Fate envisioned by a counsel is enacted unquestioningly. The only threats to this stable, if sparse, existence are the 'lost men', mindless murderers who are also self-sufficient but with no regard for the well-being of others, living outside the confines of counsel and Fate.Is Fate a real force, or is it totally imagined, an arbitrary convention, a product of mankind's self-destructive tendency? Is it our responsibility to rebuke inherited 'wisdom' for the sake of envisioning and manifesting our own will?


In this allegory, David Colón uses an alternate near-future to explore boundaries of the human condition and the extent to which we are prepared to surrender our capacity for self-determination in the face of apparently benevolent authoritarianism.