Behind The Scenes

The Dizzy Dean caretaker crew has to admit that they haven’t a clue as to whether or not any of the popsicles are infected. They will be paying rapt attention to new decontamination and quarantine protocols that are being developed. Some of the crew will have served in the Interdiction Patrol and will be adamant about crew safety. By now even the most ardent supporter of the popsicles will be treating them as meat puppets.

They will scout the planet when they get there, they will determine it is sufficient for the needs of the popsicles, and they will drop the huge cargo canisters down on the planet. They will drop supplies, etc. And then they will awaken the colonists remotely.

As the colonists awaken and their true nature is revealed, the crew will split. Some of them will be sleeper agents placed for this possibility. They will seize control of the engine room and the defenses. The remaining crew will control the bridge and shuttles.

The Spacers will attack at some point in the stalemate. They will be lead by Jenny Dalton - most combat experience and ties with the crew.

I’m at that point where the stories are coming to life in my mind, but I don’t have the experience or confidence to write them.

In some cases, details just pop into my head. The Dizzy Dean is the name given to the hijacked ship, Jenny Dalton will become the main driving force in defining the Clan culture, etc.

So Jenny is on the Spacer asteroid ship (no name yet!). Five or so years in, the two ships detect a derelict vessel, perhaps it is broadcasting an SOS? For some reason, they both need to go to it:

1. The Dizzy Dean crew need some component to fix something vital.
2. They need to pool resources to get back to their ships.
   1. 1 month journey out.
   2. 5 weeks journey back.
3. The Dizzy Dean crew have pass codes to board?
   1. I.e., this is the first of the Pandora’s Boxes.

Jenny is assigned to be the captain of the Spacer recovery ship:

1. Combat experience
2. Highest ranking scout ship pilot
   1. Sinecure post because of her combat record
      • 1 year of corridor missions
      • 27 confirmed kills
3. Gets flack that she is no longer physically capable

They meet at the derelict, have some fun, help each other out. Jenny ends up pregnant from one of the hijackers (instrumental in forming the matriarchal culture of the Clan and thought of live as I typed this!). They discover that the research done on the derelict allows nanotech probes to store the contents of a person’s mind and dump it back into a clone. The Dizzy Dean has the facilities to do this, because of the popsicles, and the Spacers do not.

The father-to-be of Jenny’s child takes a sample of her and now has the ability to bring her back on The Dizzy Dean. Jenny doesn’t know this, but she gets the plans back to her ship and they send it back to Luna Central. This will allow Interdiction Patrol pilots to be be infected and still go on their colony ship with their family.

This sets the table for the crews to really start gossiping together, it gives some conflict in Jenny’s life as she deals with having gone on a mission and coming back preggers, it introduces the need for caution when opening a Pandora’s Box, etc.

Hmm, how did the box go wrong and what do they need to overcome?

1. Clones that have a group mind!
   • We never run into intelligent alien lifeform
   • The technology advancements on the Pandora’s boxes push the boundary of the alieness of humanity.
2. It needs to be something which forces factions to not have multiple copies of people running around.
   1. They can’t clone younger versions and apply the nanotechs
   2. It is tried and the nanotech probes age the subject.
   3. Might be the reason why Jenny can’t be cured?
      1. I like this rationalization.
3. How does Jenny get in a position to become pregnant?

In the The Plague Years, I had a story idea:

A story arc might be a hijacked ship going close to where a spacer ship goes. During the long journey, the two crews keep in contact to pass the time. The spacers help the hijackers deal with emergencies. The crew disgorges the popsicles on the planet and decide they have more in common with the other ship. They leave to be with their friends.

In thinking about this some more, I want the two ships starting out as antagonistic to each other - nothing more than the stress of opposing each other during the Plague Years. The crew of the hijacked ship should be about 500, which will be much less than the 10,000 on the spacer ship. And there should be about 20,000 popsicles.

The hijackers will need help.

Also, the crews should start to share entertainment between each other, gossip, etc.

At some point, the hijackers will make a breakthrough and cut 5 years off of the journey. They share this engineering feat with the spacers.

The two crews think that they are going to end up in different systems, but they both end up in the same one. The spacers occupy an asteroid belt and the hijackers land their cargo on a planet. When they wake the sleepers, they discover that while they have changed in their outlook, the sleepers have not.

Also, perhaps the sleepers were not the people the hijackers thought they were. Instead of a democracy, a dictatorship is set up.

The crew decide that they are not going to stay. They ask the spacers to rescue them. The spacers have to decide if it is a trap or not. In any event, they do not want to be in the same system as the dictator. They need to capture the other asteroid ship or destroy it at a minimum.

Or perhaps when they board the ship to destroy it, the crew sides with them?

In any event, the two asteroids take off to the next system.

I want the initial exodus from Earth to start out slow and controlled. This would the colonization of our solar system. And I want them to be self sufficient. But I don’t want them to be self governing.

And I want some probes sent out to Alpha Centauri and Bernard’s Star. Some asteroid ships with crews in the thousands would also have been launched. These crews would all be second generation spacers - most would never have stepped on a planet. The ships would mostly not have gravity and would have acceleration cylinders where the crews could exercise.

And then I want the Plague Years to start - 10% of earth bound humanity wiped out in the first 3 months. The spacers impose martial law and establish a blockade around the Earth. This will be run from the moon. A patrol will be set up to destroy smugglers, etc.

The race for a cure will be at a space station orbiting the Earth. There will be a well defined flight corridor to and from it. Leave the corridor and die - have radioactive remains rain down on the Earth.

The reason why the space station will be the focus for the cure will be the development of vaccines in weightlessness and the safety of the vacuum. Infected people will be brought up from the planet and tested.

And the spacers will be afraid of ships breaking the blockade - this will be seen as an extinction event. Asteroid ships are going to be pumped out quickly. They will be carrying tens of thousands of colonists. The asteroids will launch with minimal facilities and the passengers will be engaged in construction during the long voyages.

Competition to ship out will be fierce. One of the ways to buy space will be to do duty patrolling the blockade. The closer you patrol to Earth and the corridor, the faster you can earn spots for your family - because only families go.

The danger is that if your ship is exposed to the plague, you are doomed to stay on Earth. Some crew arrange for clones of themselves if exposed.

Some factions on Earth attempt to hijack asteroid ships for themselves. Some go out with plague carriers and become ghost ships. Some go out and the new colonists do not have the needed skills to survive. Some story arcs could be survey crews finding these asteroid ships and dealing with them.

So the spacer colonist ships will have a strong bond with each other. And they are not necessarily looking for a planet to settle on - they distrust gravity wells, know that they can thrive in space, etc. In fact, their asteroid ships will be their first habitat in the new systems.

But the hijacked colony ships which survive will be a different matter. They will want to land on a planet, they will not be strongly bonded with others, etc. Some of them will have freeze dried members along. Even if they awake crew and their descendants adapt to life in space, the popsicles will not.

A story arc might be a hijacked ship going close to where a spacer ship goes. During the long journey, the two crews keep in contact to pass the time. The spacers help the hijackers deal with emergencies. The crew disgorges the popsicles on the planet and decide they have more in common with the other ship. They leave to be with their friends.

So I want the Plague Years to really push the exodus out of the Terran system. It will see leaps in biological research and development. Indeed, the era of the research asteroids starts here. These would be smaller versions (crews in the low hundreds) of the colony ships. In some cases the crew would be infected, near infected, etc. The ships would launch to go to other systems to look for biological specimens. Or they would launch to test new propulsion systems, etc. The reality will be that the stated research will not match the actual research. And these ships will be a joy to explore when found.

The story Misfits is about Miri and what happened on Klamath.

What blowed me away was that as I reread the cycle of books, I came across little details which basically said the Lee and Miller already had either written Misfits or they had a good outline. I.e., Miri’s treasure box has the master key, she regrets leaving the suit, she knew Brunner, etc. I know Lee and Miller didn’t sneak into my house and rewrite the books.

Steve Miller and Sharon Lee have a nice setup for doing Serialized Science Fiction over at korval.com: Home of the Liaden Universe®.

I’ve been reading their work for quite some time and I’ve even paid for some of their work in the Embiid Publishing electronic format. Luckily I’ve been quite good at backing up both the reader and the contents.

• List of nearest stars, but not what is close to them
• SolStation.com allows you to determine which stars are close to a given star - i.e., it is not Sol centric.
• Stars and planetary systems in fiction lets you know how other authors have used the systems.

I was trying to decide where the first interstellar probe would be going in this fiction and also trying to get a handle on a timeline.

Epsilon Eridani has planets, at least as far as we know. Tau Ceti is likely to have asteroid belts. And Epsilon Eridani is about 5.5 ly from Tau Ceti.

As far as a timeline, Project Daedalus proposed 50 years to get to Barnard’s Star (5.9 light years away). And Project Longshot would take 100 years to go to Alpha Centauri, at 4.39 light years. Both craft with technology currently not available.

So the impact on the timeline is that I’m envisioning that the next 100 years or so would see the exploration and development of the Solar system. At some point, the first exploration ships would go out to Alpha Centauri. I’m going to speculate a journey of 20 years. And the first ship would be an asteroid. Note that the production facilities would have to be able to be regeared from time to time to take advantage of discoveries.

In the meantime, other asteroids would be sent out - some with longer flight times. I.e., the one to Tau Ceti would be close to 60 years and the one to Epsilon Eridani would be closer to what, 50 years.

These would be the first generational ships and whole families would be sent - by this I mean adult siblings. In some cases the crew might be from the same station or nationality. In others they would be a hodge-podge.

In some, additional ships would be sent out in 5 year intervals.

After a time, a primitive form of suspended animation would be available, and cordwood crews would be sent as well as the generational crew.

Cloning and nanotech learning would be discovered. Hmm, this could be the basis of one of the experimental asteroid ships.

Title says it all. I got in all of the notes and I now have a good grasp on where some of  the ideas fit and where some do not.

I have several one line story pitches, but no clue as to where to go. I seem to have a detailed culture, economic battle ground, etc in my mind,  but no characters. Hmm, maybe that is what I need, a character in a background.

Or I could do a timeline?

I’ve decided to start using my MacBook Air to do all of my writing.

It goes with me wherever I go and it has shells for me to run my perl scripts, to scp my stuff upto Serialized Science Fiction, etc. I probably will use it differently than most people attempting to write would if they had it.

I need to find out how to use a command line spell tool on it.

Also, in the back of my mind is the thought that the Sol system does not have a slingshot. So to trade with Earth, you need to first travel a short distance to another system.

The implications are huge:

• The Earth could be very isolationist, much like America in the first half of the 21st Century.
• I want a sense of remoteness to build up the development of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.
• There could be three trade factions
  1. Corporate - upspin
  2. Clan - downspin
  3. Government - Earth to nearest slingshot

The real impact is that communication would be on the order of years and not months.

When man first starts exploring other stars, it will take decades to get started. A good story would be the impact of the discovery of slingshots on colonial governments. Where mandates used to be ignored because they were very out of date, they suddenly start becoming very pertinent. If ignored, your replacement might arrive in a few months.

This would force expansion to further sites along the slingshots. Each slingshot would take a rebellious sole further away from Earth. Get far enough away and you might be back in the years. Of course, what happens when you think you are far enough away and the next link takes you back in a loop to the Earth link? :->

Or it might force you to go further down systems which are not connected via the slingshots.

I.e., the first expansion would be out towards nearby systems. The slingshots would not follow those paths. So we would see the development of newer stations with closer ties to the Earth. These would be the corporate traders.

And the earlier expansion could see the rise of the trader clans.