Back in the 1960′s, when I was growing up and my best friend was the local library, I spent a lot of time reading. Since I began reading at a fairly early age, a lot of the fare I enjoyed was adult–and most of these books were science fiction.
I admit I’m a Child of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. At the time I began reading the era was dying out, but some of those writers were still around, and some would remain with me for decades to come, though they would have written their last stories, for the most part, by the 1980′s and 90′s. It was a glorious era, filed with inhabited planets in the far corners of the galaxy, robots insane and otherwise, huge fleets of spaceships preparing to do battle . . .
Sure, it was all wild as hell, with writers coming up with faster than light drives, and hand weapons that could turn a man into vapor, shields of energy, dark aliens waiting to eat us alive: if they could dream it, they would write it. The majority of the writers had little in the way of a scientific background, but there were authors who knew their math and engineering, and would often bring that knowledge into play when writing a story.
One of the most famous example of this was Edward E. Smith, aka “Doc” Smith of Lensman and Skylark fame. Smith had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and worked in the food industry before becoming a writer. Robert Heinlein wrote about how he and his wife once spent three days calculating a orbit change so they could get one one line in a story right. (When later asked by someone why he simply didn’t use a computer, his reply was, “My dear boy, it was 1948.”) Issac Asimov had a BS and MA in chemistry, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry. They weren’t the only ones, but what they knew tended to show up in their work.
With science fiction, it’s important to create your world and set your rules. E. E. Smith knew that a lot of the stuff he wrote was too incredible to ever be real, but he wanted to create incredible stories, and didn’t care that the science was pure Handwavium. (Look up the trope “Lensman Arms Race” and you’ll see some of the stuff the Doc pulled out.)
Back in the Golden Age, writers could do just about anything and get away with it. These days, we know more about the universe around us; we know there are certain kinds of space drives that just won’t work as we’d like (I’m looking at you, Bussard Ramjet); we know how genetics works; we understand evolution better; we have a better knowledge of engineering. There are some things that we know just won’t work the way we want them to work if we write about them in a story.
Does this take away from a story? Or does it even prevent us from writing them in the first place? Has technology and a greater interest in science mean there are stories we can no longer write?
This was true even one hundred years ago. Certain things that had been accepted as fact in the early 1800′s was known to be bullshit by the 1920′s. The trick here is not to throw a lot of stuff into your story that is just going to be crap science; the trick is to keep things tight with science that’s a good as it gets when we’re dealing with real things, and for the stuff you gotta handwave, keep the rules constant. The Mote in God’s Eye was a good example of this: the world was extremely real, with only a couple of things that were pure fantasy. But, the rules for those items were kept consistent, and there was no instances where something that couldn’t have happened did.
In my own stories I have things that are pretty much handwavium, that likely can’t ever happen in real life. But, for those things I keep the rules consistent. I try not to pull things out of my butt that will violate my universe to the point where it implodes, and, at the same time, concentrate on the characters who are the real stars.
After all, if I wanna make my television the star of my story, I’ll rewrite Videodrome.
Thursday night is Relaxation Night due to a combination of things happening early in the evening, then Project Runway coming on and remaining on my television until nine-thirty PM. There are only two or three more episodes of that show remaining, so I’ll soon be back to working on Thursday nights–and by working, I mean writing.
The way things work our, I’m looking at a lot of editing and formatting throughout April, with an occasional article here and there posted just to keep my hand in. I’ve looked at my Idea File (I do have one), and I’ve not seen too much that is blowing a draft up my skirt, at least not yet. Yes, they are my ideas, but what seemed like a good idea one moment doesn’t always translate into, “I gotta write this now!” As I’ve found, you gotta let an idea stew a bit before you jump into it, otherwise it’s going to die stillborn.
But what do I want to write next? I’ve been into the horror and the fantasy the last two novels, so I need something different. But what? Science Fiction? Erotica? Maybe Science Fiction Erotica, where In Space, No One Can Hear You Orgasm Unless You’re Really Loud.
I have been thinking of trying to write some science fiction that’s more in line with what’s considered “hard”, which means there’s no energy weapons that vaporize people, no gravity fields that make your space ship layout look more like the Queen Marry 2 than any tall skyscraper you can bring to mind, no super-duper space drive that will get you from Point A to Point B in a matter of hours.
There’s a term for that in the community: Handwavium. We’re talking a complete disregard for any of the laws of physics, where we can travel faster than the speed of light, or we can use an electromagnetic field to deflect light, or we don’t worry about heat when we’re using weapons that can take out stars. Most of the science fiction from the Golden Age was like this, mostly because there were a lot of things we simply didn’t know at the time, but these days most writers have a better understanding of the universe, and they know what can and can’t be done . . .
Yeah, but we still like stories about getting from one star to another, and doing it in a way that doesn’t make us wait forever for our characters to make the trip. Star Trek wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if it took an entire season of fifteen shows (actually twenty-two back in the day, but that was back in the day) to travel from Earth to Vulcan, which in terms of the scale of the galaxy is like me walking to the end of the driveway to get the mail. The Dominion War becomes a lot less worrisome if it takes the Jem’Hadar six months to travel from the Bajor Wormhole to DS9–and Starfleet won’t show up for eight months after that.
There is something intriguing about staging a story in a world where most of what happens in a world is more or less real. Sure, you can stretch science and engineering a bit to make the world a little move interesting: you see that happen now and then where the space habitats are little too nice, the ships a little too fast, the terraforming a little too quick. And yet, the reality is just enough that it feels like a world that isn’t too out there, that’s it’s just real enough to be a place that could happen.
We come to this place in the sun, there local that I call “Breakfast”, and I express my thoughts for some to read. Today I tell you that I’m on the last chapter of my work in progress, Suggestive Amusements, and if I’m exceptionally lucky, I’ll finish the story tomorrow. If not, I’ll finish it Monday night, but in the next three days, rain or shine, hot or cold, the first draft is complete.
I look at the text card in Scrivener that’s going to be Chapter Eighteen, and I know what’s going in there; I’ve seen it for a few months, and I’ve been waiting to get to this point for many weeks now. I know, with Scrivener I can just write when I feel like it, I don’t have to do everything in sequence. Scrivener makes the writing experience like making a movie: as you film all your particular scenes when you are on the right set or location, you can write your scenes as the need arises. Need to write the last chapter now? Do it. Need to add a scene that makes sense? Do it. Scrivener liberates you to do that–
If you so want. I don’t. I’m too old school, in that I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I do them in that order. Which is not a bad thing to do for a first draft, because there were things I did in the last few chapters that have minutely changed events in the last chapter.
If I didn’t want until the end to write the end, I’d have to rewrite. I hate rewrites. Best to write it correctly the first time.
Chapter Eighteen is on tap for this weekend. Three thousand words, put it a little over the seventy thousand word line, and finalize it with the big finish. But . . . that’s not all.
I’ve decided to write an article today. I’ve passed off a couple of my old game reviews for a friend who runs another site, and he’s posted one, and will likely post the other in a few days. A long time back I promised him an article, so today is a good day to write said article, and it’ll be a far better usage of my time than playing Facebook games when I’m not word slinging.
I don’t know if this article-writing thing is going to be something I want to get into all the time. My friend was asking about the possibility of doing a few articles on spacecraft propulsion systems, both real an imaginary, and I was like, “Well, yeah, I could do one of those . . .”, but the brain often says what the fingers can’t deliver.
However, I’m going to be in a lull for a bit. I’ll be waiting on a book cover, and I’ll find myself mostly editing throughout April. With that in mind, writing a few articles to keep the brain sharp might not be a bad idea.
If nothing else I might just entertain someone with what I have to say. Or piss them off.
By the time you read this, chances are 2012 DA14 will be a fond memory. The asteroid, about fifty meters in diameter, will soar some 27,520 kilometer over the Indonesian island of Sumatra at 1:25 PM Chicago time. No chances at all it’s going to hit anything, though it’s going to be watched closely, because Earth is gonna kick its orbit a bit and send it screaming off into the black. Though, again, there likely won’t be a lot of kicking, and definitely no scream, because we all know, no one can hear you scream in space.
Then again, if you were in Central Russia, near the Ural Mountains today, you didn’t need to wait for 2012 DA14; you had your own close encounter. A ten meter hunk or rock or ice flew in, lit up the sky, disintegrated and kicked out a sonic boom that broke windows for miles. Reports are that over five hundred people have been injured by flying glass, ’cause in Russia, meteors open windows on you!
I like the headlines, though: ”Rare Russian Meteor Strike” is a misnomer if there ever was one. First, the meteor came apart in mid-air, so it was really a strike. And lets dress the “rare” part: Tunguska, anyone? Sure, it’s been more than a hundred years, but nature doesn’t want you to get complacent it likes you to know it’s got your ass in its hands, and it can take you out any time it feels. We don’t even have to go back one hundred years, thought: 12 February, 1947, Russia experienced the Sikhote-Alin meteorite strike, which touched down in the middle of nowhere–
Though if you want to make this last one a little scary, Sikhote-Alin occurred about four hundred fifty kilometers northeast of Vladivostok, and about five hundred kilometers due east of the Chinese city of Harbin. 1947 was a scary time: imagine the reaction of the Chinese if they’d had a huge meteor disintegrate above one of there cites. Not saying they’d have done anything–they were sort of busy with their own internal issues–but it might have made them go, “Hummm”.
These things happen all the time. There’s a lot of things out there in space, and we run into it every day. Most of the time were talking about something the size of a coffee cup burning up and making a bright flash for a second. Sometimes you get something like the object that shook up Russia, about thirty feet across, breaking up and leaving a loud boom in its wake.
And every so often you get a Tunguska: a hundred meters of rock air busting some five to ten kilometers up, developing an explosion like that of a fifteen megaton hydrogen bomb. Not the sort of thing Micheal Bay would screw with, save to take out Paris, but if this sucker had detonated over Russia this morning, the videos popping up would have been a lot different.
When people say, “Hey, what do we need science for? What good is a space program?” This is why. We’ve reached the point where it’s even money that a cosmic shot is going to take out something significant. People were injured by flying class today; in five years a slightly bigger rock might set a few fires with a heat burst and kill some people. Or maybe it’ll be a little larger than that, and people will once more have the opportunity to know what it was like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a couple of dates in 1945.
This was the argument Arthur Clarke put forward in Rendezvous with Rama: after parts of Europe are devastated by a meteor breakup on a particularly lovely morning in 2077, the governments of Earth decided they couldn’t afford any more of these cosmic potshots, and beefed up their ability to detect these threats, and a way to move them the hell out of the way should it be necessary. There’s no reason we can’t start on this now; it only takes the willpower to make it happen. And don’t tell me about costs: take a NOLA/Sandy sized disaster, and start scaling up. As Clarke pointed out in Rama, Earth in 2077 couldn’t not afford another strike like the one that had taken out most of Northern Italy, and had sunk Venice.
And just to show you Arthur was on to something when he wrote in 1972 about an event that wouldn’t occur for another one hundred and five years: the date of his meteor strike was . . .
Monday nights after work are usually filled with brain dead activities, because after that first long day of the week, I don’t feel like doing much. It’s never a good feeling, because you sit there and feel as if you’re empty of energy, that your biorhythms are not only at their lows, but they are never returning to something akin to normal.
It makes it difficult to write, because to write you need your mind, you need your imagination, and when both are stuck in neutral it means your story isn’t going anywhere. However, I found my interest being nudged by something that wasn’t actually writing related. It was, but not that way–
As I’d mentioned yesterday, I needed to put a solar system together for a friend. It’s not a big deal to do this–I’ve had experience, so you just need to figure out a few things, then go to town getting it done. But it does take time: one does not simply wave their hands and a solar system appears.
I brought up my programs, I found some figures, and I started plugging numbers. When I’d reached the place where I could make from pretty pictures from screen shots to show my writer friend, nearly ninety minutes had come and gone. This was a good thing, however, as I was now awake. My mind had begun churning, and by the time I’d zipped together everything I needed to zip off to my friend, the toxins that keep you in a stupor had vanished.
I was awake. Which meant I could now write.
My own Muse told me that doing something like designing a solar system was sometimes needed, because it broke up the routine and forced the brain to do something else beside what it’s always doing. If you’re writing all the time, then read or design something–do something that’ll allow your mind to work without working at the same thing again and again. With me, it was building other worlds. With you it might be . . . crocheting. Unless you crochet all the time, then you might want to take up modeling, or something.
With that I found time to write before heading off to bed. What did I write?
Pain.
My story muse isn’t in a good place right now. She’s upset, she’s feeling down . . . she’s lonely. The other night my main male character made a remark about her age. Um, not good. Erin the muse isn’t in the right frame of mind to be reminded that she’s older than–well, just about everything. As she points out, she saw Spartans get their asses kicked at the Hot Gates. She talked dirty to Cleopatra and gave Nefertiti back rubs. She was even around before that, which gave Keith, her charge, an idea about how old she really was–
Old and randy. But that’s another story.
After the heights of system creation, it was time to dig down into the dirt of immortality, and the loneliness it must bring to anyone whose lived long enough to see nearly all of written human history. You have your friends who are equally immortal, but after a couple of thousand years, who wants to hang with them all the time? Particularly when you know a fraction of them have to be complete doucherockets, and who wants to put up with that crap?
I feel sorry for my muse, but it’s life. And Suggestive Amusements is probably going to get a lot sadder before I crawl out of the chasm and back to where I can see the stars.
The weekend was one of business and writing, among other things. I started playing with Daz3D, and it didn’t take me long to realize that I need to work with the training videos, because I stumbled about for about thirty minutes before realizing I had no freakin’ idea what I was doing. You graphic models, you know how to drive me crazy.
I got into writing Chapter Ten–and, man, is my muse a nasty person when she wants to be. Not only that, but she’s a potty mouth, big time. Probably picked it up during the Dark Ages, you know? The story continues, and I understand why there is so much hesitation with my storytelling these days: this is a somewhat dark tale, and there is a lot of unhappiness ongoing. I’m not good with unhappiness but I admit it exists, and you have to work it into your writing. No, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns: most of the time it’s a lot of pain, and I’m starting to feel it now.
On the other hand I could write about virgins having sex with their stepparents . . . naw, I think I’ll leave those masterpieces for the amateurs.
As the night wore on, I discovered I had–here it comes–nothing to do. I mean, that does happen from time to time, but last night it was driving me a little nuts. I was finished with writing for the evening, and if it hadn’t been so late I may have added a few hundred more words, but they wouldn’t have been good words, so no point there.
That was when I started talking . . .
See, someone I know on Facebook, another writer who is starting her research on her story, wanted to know if she could pick my brain in a non-zombie way about something science fictiony. I said sure, go for it. With that, we got into a discussion about what would happen if the moon were much closer to this planet, or if the moon were, say, twice as big, and what it would do to the Earth–or another Earth-like planet similar to one a reader might find in a story.
I love this sort of thing, building systems. I don’t claim to have all the math right all the time, but it’s a good experience letting you mind wander and imagining what could happen if this were in place. So I started talking about Roche Limits, about higher tides and fewer ice ages because the primary is going to be more stable. I spoke about how shorelines will look difference because of more erosion, and how the day will be longer because the moon is slowing the primary down.
I asked a few more questions, the made the offer: give me some broad outlines about what you want, and I’ll put the system together for you.
See, I am a nice person. Just ask most anyone.
Now I wait and see what comes my way. After that, I start working things out, and before you know it, another system will be out there shining.
As a kidlette I read a lot. Since I was reading at an adult comprehension level when I was seven, there was very little Dick and Jane in my life, and a lot more Hell at 50 Fathoms, which I read at least a dozen times before getting out of the 6th Grade.
The one genre I was into, however, was science fiction. I got my hands on most of the Golden Age authors and bought their books, read them cover to cover again and again, and went looking for more. There was something awe inspiring to live in that time and know your book store would soon carry the new Clarke, the new Asimov, the new Heinlein, the new Ellison . . .
There was something that the writers back then spoke of when talking about science fiction and fantasy. It was known that some of the things they wrote about were, perhaps, going to never come about. There were items and subjects and characters that might not ever be anything but words on the page. And they knew this, because–hey, writers, we make stuff up, right?
The trick, they said, was to follow your internal logic, and to keep your rules consistent. If your technology could only do A, B, and C, you damn well better not have it do E at some point. As David Gerrold once point out, if you write your story so that people can only use their right hands, then you damn well better now have the hero save the day at the end of the story by using their left hand. Anything that plays hard and loose with your internal logic, that violates your rules and laws, it cheating that would make Lance Armstrong say, “Dude!” while giving you the stink eye.
When you’re writing anything–not just science fiction, but anything that requires some “facts” to come into play–it’s always best to do your research and make certain when you’re setting up your premise, you are working with something that not only makes sense, but is also something that can’t be taken as complete bullshit. Given what we know about space flight these days, it’s difficult–if not impossible–to write a story about some kids cobbling a rocket together in an abandoned field and flying it into orbit. Oh, sure, you can adjust the rules of your universe and all that, but you best make certain that is spelled out so people don’t scratch their heads and go, “Huh?”
I’m in a few groups on Facebook where I hear and see about new novels and stories from people like me, writers who hope this will be our job one day. I saw something like that the other day: a new book, by someone I know. I’m checking out the blurb, and right off the bat, I see something stated as a major plot point–
That is totally, scientifically wrong.
Now, I do things with time travel and faster than light space drives. I can hand wave with the best of them, and I always try to keep my facts straight when I do this. If my ships go this fast, I find out the distances between two stars and calculate travel times. That’s how you do things. When you’re stating as fact something that can be fact checked on any number of databases as all sorts of wrong, you’ve pretty much ruined the story for me–and probably for a number of readers as well.
Your stories live and die by facts and rules. Create your rules based upon the first, and never violate the later.
Otherwise, you could find yourself becoming the Next Big Internet Meme.
If you put any time into self publishing, you’ll quickly understand that one of the most difficult processes that needs to be finished before you can upload your story isn’t the editing, or the formatting, or even getting out the word that you have, once more, published something for the masses to read.
It’s getting your book cover created.
I’ve done two book covers, though only one has seen the light of day. (Both have, actually; you’d have seen the second cover if you’d visited my NaNoWriMo page for my 2012 novel.) Both are very simple; they give a hint at things within the story without actually telling the reader anything. As a friend told me yesterday, “My opinion on covers is that less is more,” and there is a lot of truth to that.
But there is something to be said about having a cover that’s, well, slick. The cover printed for Captivate and Control made my heart sing when I first saw it, and even to this day I can’t help but look at it and feel a lot of pride for the work that went into making that cover. But I know there was a huge amount of work that went into producing that cover, and if you want something that detailed, and lovely, to grace your ebook, then you’ve got to shell out some coinage.
See, this is all about making all the book covers.
Bryce and Blender can help with creating landscapes; DAZ can help with getting figures set up, dressed, lighted, and posed so I can put them into a scene. Once that’s all finished, it’s a matter of doing a render (that’s the same as actually building the picture) then maybe doing a little photomanipulating on said picture before turning it into a cover. With Blender it’s even possible to create an animation, so if I really wanted to get into some viral marketing, I could try my hand and creating an animated short that would become my book trailer–oh, you didn’t know those existed? Then you need to get informed, no?
It’s been pointed out many times that as self-publishing becomes more of the norm, a writer is going to need to understand, and maybe even know, all the skills that go into making a worth-while story, collection of stories, or a novel. It’s not enough to simply write: you need to get involved in everything.
I understand that some people just won’t get this software stuff that may allow them to build a cover for their latest opus. That’s okay: if I know how to do this, then I can sell my skills to you. So when I have a little down time when I’m not working on a story–like now–I can go around asking people if they need someone to whip up a cover for their novel.
Because I’ve seen some of the covers that people have created.
Of late I’ve been rising very early. Is this a return to my old habits, or is it that I don’t need that much sleep any more? I don’t know–but I was sleepy for about an hour yesterday afternoon, a drowsiness that vanished about four PM. I don’t want to find myself heading back into the cycle of work and exhaustion that I ran through over the summer. That needs to end right now, and in a big way.
The mind was working overtime when I woke up, however. There was a song in my head that shouldn’t have been there, and visions that I should have ignored. This seemed to happen as well, probably because my brain is trying to pull me away from whatever dreams I had that were, in all honesty, crappy enough that they would have bummed me out in the long run.
Then I wake up, get on Facebook, and am greeted by another in a long line of post that indicate you are indeed a manly man if you wear a kilt. I’ve even seen posts that say you’d never see a gay man wearing a kilt, which leads to me believe that somewhere on the Internet there is a picture of John Barrowman in a kilt–oh, look: ask, and the Internet provides! So much for gay men in kilts . . .
It’s the time of year for visions to be upheld, for things to be viewed through a dark lens of remembered that isn’t always that clean. This time of month is when everyone goes on about holidays of the past, gathering with family, sitting around the tree and enjoying the kidlettes ripping up all those carefully prepared packages, then running off to their rooms for the next few hours while dinner is being readied.
I want to say I had a lot of memories like this, but I don’t. Oh, I spent my time around the tree, getting presents. I also remember getting yelled at a few times because I didn’t seem “appreciative” enough for what I got, and there was one time when I was yelled at for almost an hour to write a thank you note to my grandmother for sending me two dollars in a card. Good times, yo.
I know you might find this strange, but the only really good Christmas memory I have as a kid was the broadcast from the moon by Apollo 8. I didn’t listen much to what was being said–particularly the whole “reading of Genesis” thing, which I didn’t need under any conditions–because I was watching the landscape being filmed. That was what drew me in: not the words, but the vision.
We spend way too much time thinking of the past and using that to drive our present. Where we fall down is there’s no vision for what’s to come. I tell my daughter, “Do something that will make you happy, not what’s going to make you the most money,” and I mean it, because there is a singular lack of people following their dreams these days. Seems like most people are scrambling to pay bills and get shit for the holidays that will be looked at, come March, with an expression similar to, “Why the hell did I need this?” Or someone will look at that iPhone they received from Santa and thing, “Fuck this: I need a new Android!” thereby proving that gifts of this nature are usually bullshit.
I don’t think about gifts this time of year, because I’m as generous as get out for 364 days of the year (365 this year, yeah!). If someone needs something, I get it. There was a time when Christmas wasn’t about some kid being born (which, in reality, he wasn’t–not at this time of the year at least, but don’t let that spoil the fun . . .), but more about lighting bonfires and making lots of noise because you thought if you didn’t, the Wild Hunt was coming for your ass. Yule was a blow out party, celebrating getting through another year in one piece, and you decorated trees–not ones that were cut down, but those things that grow in something called a forest–to give your thanks to nature not dropping a Storm From Hell on you and your family, or infesting you with the Black Death.
Set a vision for yourself. Go with it. Make that your gift, not just to yourself, but to the world. Maybe it won’t pay off right away, or even ever, but you owe it to yourself to do. I saw the moon when I was eleven years old, and I wanted to go there. I couldn’t in real life, but I could in my imagination. It’s taken a while, but I’ve gone there, gone to other worlds, gone to other dimensions. I don’t think about getting something for the holidays, because for me, it’s just another day.
Last night was my first midnight drive in a very long time–from before I was laid off from The Hole of Doom. It was a very cloudy and cool night, which is what you’d expect with the moon waning towards new.
I was tried, and no one traveled with me to work out plots and stories and the like. The night didn’t feel like one for creative processing, and so my mind was on other things. And with that, my mind turned back to something I hadn’t thought about in a very long time . . .
The year was 1985, and I was working in South Bend. I was driving sixty-five miles to get to work, and for have the year the company was in the eastern time zone, which mean it was a hour ahead of me. I had a woman for a boss (first time for that) who was a very good boss, and there was a strange collection of people working in IT.
There was Mr. Super Patriot, who had done his time in the Air Force, was Republican to the core, and talked about all the guns he owned. There was PC Guy who was some kind of fundamentalist dude who believed in six thousand year old Earths and Noah’s Ark. And there was, lastly, The King of Bullshit.
The King was a consultant, some guy in his 50′s who knew everything, knew everyone, and who would always argue you down with the phrase, “I could tell you what I know about this, but I can’t, ’cause it’s secret.” Yes, the mantra of every person who’s ever done work in, or for, the government, and though they know The Secrets of the Universe, they’re unable to do any work short of becoming a consultant in the computer field. (Come to think of it, I’ve know four people like this. Hummmm . . .)
One day a group of us was gathered around The King of Bullshit’s cubical, talking about something, I don’t remember the exact conversation after all these years. It was then he pulled out one of the most incredible statements I’ve ever heard anyone utter as fact: that there were a dozen astronauts flying around the galaxy in a Bussard Ramjet, exploring “the universe”, and that they’d come back home in five hundred years only about five years older.
For those who didn’t click on the link above–and I know that’s most of you–a Bussard Ramjet is a hypothetical sort of space ship that uses a huge magnetic scoop to gather hydrogen from the interstellar medium, and turn into fuel for its fusion engine. In a way, it would be like having a car that could scoop petrel out of the air, so you’d never need worry about filling up again. (It would also make rain showers real interesting, if you know what I mean.)
Only one problem: the Bussard Ramjet is found only in the realm of fantasy. We can’t build anything like that, at least not for a few hundred years. You’ll find them in a lot of Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, and in Poul Anderson’s novel Tau Zero, but you won’t see one in your life time. Ever.
The problem was I knew this, even then. This wasn’t an unknown concept for me, and I knew it to be completely fictional. So I called him on it. I said that’s impossible, Bussard Ramjets don’t exist, so there are no people flying “through the galaxy,” going where no one has gone before, set to return in five hundred years . . .
The King got very pissed, because none of the other people believed me, they thought for sure he was telling the truth. He called me out in return, saying he knew this was a fact, that it had launched ten years before, because he’d been at Cape Canaveral when it was launched . . .
I had to call him out again. The Bussard Ramjet is a huge ship, and it’s not one deigned for flight anywhere save space. That meant (1) you couldn’t launch it from the surface of any plant, (2) you’d have to build it in space, (3) he was full of shit. I once more told him that was nuts, that sort of ship is, as a minimum, ten times larger than a Saturn V, and since you couldn’t “secret launch” one of those monsters, one sure as hell wasn’t going to “secret launch” something that was bigger.
At this point The King of Bullshit just affixed me with a pissed-off stare, and told me, “You have no idea what’s going on. If you knew what I know–”
Right, dude. What I did know then was if you cut out of work on a Friday afternoon, about one PM, but leave your monitor on so people will think you’re still working, and that you’ve just stepped away from your desk for a moment, you’re gonna get caught and fired–which is what eventually happened to The King of Bullshit.
What is the point of this rant?
For a long time one of my mantras has been, “Don’t believe the hype.” When someone starts going on about anything with a certain amount of hyperbole, it’s always best to turned a jaundiced eye to their comments. I’ve done the same thing in the past, but I’ve gotten better about throwing things out there without thinking about where it sits on the Hype Meter.
Hype also works against you at times. I’m trying to break into the writing business in a full-time way, everyone knows that. Problem is, breaking into the writing business is a tough thing to do. It takes a butt-load of work, and the payoff may be very slow in coming.
It also seems that there’s something printed every week that is there to remind us that, not only is it a hard thing to break into, it’s getting harder. It’s a big, hard, uphill battle, and everything is stacked against you–or so it seems. It’s like the Hype Machine goes out of its way to knock your ass into the dirt, then stand over you laughing its evil laugh as you grovel.
Not a lot of fun, let me tell you.
So more than a few people just give the hell up, often going out screaming on Facebook that they’ve HAD IT, that they AREN’T WRITING ANYMORE, and that their DREAM IS OVER! (Or is that “ovar”? I can never get that one right.)
I’ve said it before: the only one who kills your dreams is you. Not that guy over there, not that publisher who gave you stink eye, not The King of Bullshit who knows things, and if only he could tell you . . .
The best way to combat hype is with facts, and when someone gives you shit, hit back with the facts. And I mean well founded, researched facts, not the sort of facts you’re going to find on Fox “News” any particular minute of the day. Someone says you suck as a writer? Get others to read your manuscript, see what they say. One house rejects you? Send out the story again. People don’t like your idea? Screw them: it’s yours! Who asked them anyway?
Hype is never your friend, so you shouldn’t ever let it bother you. I know that’s not possible, because we’re not automatons, we’re people, and our feelings get twisted by others who have the facts, who know things. Only thing to do is get into your research, keep working, and keep writing. If it’s going to happen, it will.
As for The King of Bullshit . . . I’m sure he’d dead by now, as he was in his late fifties back in ’85, and the dude wasn’t in the best of health then. If he’s not dead, it’s even money he’s some cranky old man missing everything cool while he bitches about all the people who don’t know what he knows.
Here’s one thing I do know, dude. There’s been a bit of research done on your Ramjet since you told me this story almost thirty years ago, and what did scientist find? That the Bussard Ramjet is affected by drag caused by the interstellar medium. (Don’t ever let anyone tell you space is empty, ‘kay?) That means it has a top speed, which is . . .
Twelve percent the speed of light.
That means in a flat out run to Alpha Centauri, the sorta closest star to us, your ship that’s going to spend five hundred years exploring the galaxy will get there in . . . 36 years, give or take a few months to get up to speed; longer if you decide to slow down and take a look. I’m pretty good with math, and I know twelve percent the speed of light does not allow relativity to raise its ugly head, so time dilation does not come into play.
I’m not bad with math, so let me see: if this crew was, say, 35 when they left Earth, that would mean when they get to the closest star they’ll be . . . add six, carry the one . . . at least 71, maybe 72. Which means when they come back they’ll be . . . add nothing, carry the nothing . . . dead.
Wasn’t it nice of me to share my top secret knowledge with you?
The allure of space is strong with me. When I was thinking about stories, I was playing out a scene within my alternate space history story, where a woman, whose father was involved with Soviet Space program from the mid-50′s until the early 1980′s, is recollecting watching Valentina Tereshkova and Irina Soloviyova prepare to lift-off on Vostok 6.
That time Tereshkova flew and became Seagull, but her recollections covered two more important memories. The first was standing at a launch pad two years later and saying goodbye to Tereshkova and Soloviyova as they prepared to lift-off on Voskhod-5, and how she felt a year later after Yuri Gagarin did everything he could to keep his best friend Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov from flying Soyuz 1, where upon he suffered the same fate his friend suffered in this reality.
Where is this taking me? Yesterday I became interested in a program I downloaded last year, a simulation program named Orbiter. The person who created set it up so that it would be as realistic a space flight simulator as possible, and given the number of times I’ve already crashed, I’d say, yes, it very much is.
While most of the simulation is taken up by the space shuttle Atlantis, and the ISS, there are a few fictional craft that will let you experience things that you might not ever do in real life. One craft, the Dragonfly, allows you to take off from the ground, fly into orbit, and even fly off to and land upon the Moon if you so desire. There is another craft called the Saturn-A that is used on the Moon and Mars, but last night I managed to lift-off from Earth and fly into orbit–for a little bit, that is. I did something bad, and I ended up putting the ship into an uncontrollable flat spin (or, in the vernacular, I entered an excessive yaw-right maneuver, and exhausted my RCS fuel trying to correct) and reentered the atmosphere somewhere beyond Africa. One moment you’re trying to fix your situation, and the next thing you know there’s all this glowing red mist just outside your window . . .
Trying to figure out what you’re doing is half the battle. I’ve gotten good enough that I can figure out how to get into orbit without burning too much fuel (I’ve still gotta learn those angle of attacks so I don’t rocket straight up and out), but I’m still learning the fine points of trying to go from the Earth to the Moon. Tried that today, and ended up getting to the moon’s orbit–only the moon wouldn’t show up at that point for a couple of weeks. Oops. It’s that sort of “accident” that leaves you gasping for air, wondering what the hell happened.
I’ve already got my eye on a few adons, but first I’m going to figure out how to fly better than I am, ’cause these ships cost a lot of money, and I don’t want to spend my time crashing them, or ending up lost in space for eternity–
Hey: Lost in Space. Sounds like a good title. I wonder if I can do something with that?
I remember a time when no one walked on the moon, save in the science fiction stories I read, or movies I watched. Hell, wanna get real, when I was born no one had even launched a satellite; I beat Sputnik I to the gate by five months and one day, and it would be another four years before a Russian went up for one orbit around the Earth, mostly because he was a very good parachutist–but that’s another story for another day.
I was big into science fiction as a kid, which meant I was big into space–’cause, we’re talking about reading stories that had been written during the Golden Age of Science Fiction–and that meant I was into everything that happened regarding space flight. We had no internet, so everything came from papers, from radio and TV news, from Life Magazine–which used to print most of the pictures released to the public–and from the few books pertaining to the American efforts, as those wacky Soviets just didn’t want to talk about their stuff. Hell, they even named their launch complex after a town that was hundreds of miles away, just so we’d get confused . . .
Whenever I had the chance I watched whatever was shown. I tried to keep up; I tried to gather as much information as possible. It’s not easy when you’re nine, ten, eleven years old to get your hands on stuff that wasn’t normally available to the public, or had limited accessibility. That’s the 1960′s for you: we just weren’t on the cutting edge of the future, you know.
I saw it all. I watched every mission that went into orbit. I watch every one that went to the moon. And I watched, to the best of my abilities, every walk upon the moon. Even saw a few cars drive around, saw three Lunar Modules take off, and once watched one of Galileo’s experiments get proven. It was a great time for science, and an even better time if you were a geek.
Those times are long gone. We haven’t walked on the Moon since December, 1972. If you removed the trips to the Moon, we haven’t had anyone higher than a few hundred kilometers above the Earth since the last days of the Gemini Program. While we’ve had a continuous presence in orbit for a long time, we’ve lost our will to explore.
There will come a time, probably within the next five years, that everyone who has ever walked on the moon will have died. The youngest of the walkers is 76; the oldest 82. After that, we might have to wait until the middle of the 21st Century before someone does it again–unless people do start walking on the Moon in the late 2020′s, as some are saying. And the chances are good those people who do the walking again are Chinese, because it seems like no one here gives much of a shit anymore.
In the U.S., there is a definite feel that science is for people who are just too damn smart for their own good, and who are pretty anti-religious as well. That ignorance is just as good as intelligence, and in some ways better. When you have people yelling at Bill Nye, as they did a few years back when he spoke in Texas, that the Moon gives off light like the Sun ’cause the Bible says so, one has to wonder where they hell we are going. When you still have people saying they have “proof” that we never landed on the Moon, you have to wonder how we are ever going to continue. And when you hear people state, as “fact”, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and they have “proof”, it makes you want to just end it all.
One day we, as a species, will get back out into The Black. It might not be us as a country, but someone will go. Someone is going to take more steps–on the Moon, maybe Mars, maybe somewhere else.
Say it won’t happen? You’re surely wrong. ’Cause one day I’m gonna hop on my unicorn and take my own trip . . .
And join those who can tell me what it was really like to skip along in the dirt of another world.
