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Fictional History
What to do about Space Opera backstory? How do you handle the "getting there from here" aspect of the unforseeable future? I'm using a history i prepared earlier for the Buonarotti Transit -discovered, lost and found again over the course of the Aleutian Rule on Earth. Plus the prehistory: the emergence of Newurophysics and Mind/Matter tech, from a fusion of occult beliefs and neuroscience, in the 21st Century CE. Attentive Gwyneth Jones readers may notice that Japan didn't actually sink, Misha Connelly's father gets a namecheck in a military history lesson, the perils of mind/matter tech are the same as in Bold As Love; and Li Xi-feng's World State didn't last -must have collapsed when the Gender War broke out- but she is remembered as First Emperor.
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THE STORIES The
Fulcrum Bricks
Sticks Straw Emergence
THE UR-VERSION
ESCAPE PLANS: Normal space is a bust, the size of the universe is an illusion, our solar system is in a local area that's trapped in a Black Hole, how the hell do we get out of here? Millie Mohun, a direct-cortical sports star with a secret, meets ALIC, a privileged tourist from the Lagrange habitats, where the great systems are honoured like a Pantheon of Roman Gods. ALIC takes a dive into the teeming warrens tastefully concealed under the beautiful park world of Earth, where the masses live in poverty and concoct weird religions. My Higgs Boson novel. See also: Aliens In the Fourth Dimension: (On Writing The Aleutian Trilogy) |
Bibi
sat in the neuro-suite at Small Torus Station wearing nothing but a paper
exam gown, vulnerable and docile in her nakedness. She hadn't seen anything
tropical at the Elevator Base, not a glimpse of a mangrove swamp or a
palm tree: now there was nothing to tell her that she was already in Outer
Space. She knew she weighed maybe half what she'd weighed on earth (gravity
was expensive), but she couldn't feel the difference. The micro-gravity
games arena at Gagarin Circus had been more convincing. Honesty had elected
to make the transit to Speranza in dreamtime. Bibi wanted to be awake.
That was why she was here, having passed the physical that everyone had
to take. She was terrified of the Buonarotti process, but the idea that
she would be having a fake experience, which was like being in prison,
while her real mind and body were taken apart, scared her even more. .
.
