Steve

I think I've figured out why I've been in "snarling badger" mode lately; there's a story hatching in my brain. It is, alas, not a happy story... it's more of a wild-haymaker-to-the-limbic-system story, with all the pain the metaphor implies, and it promises to be a rather unpleasant one to write. It seems to want to be in 2nd person present tense, too, sort of a voice-in-your-head story with a lot of sensory content and not a lot of imagery or other poetic touches.

So now to find some more resources to do some background reading on proposed Mars missions, and what life is like on ISS and was like on Skylab and Mir.

Also, the story is predicated on the Mars mission taking two identical landers for redundancy; should both birds be cleared for landing status, one would land the crew for the primary mission and the other landed near the end of the mission at a different site to serve as a long-duration teleoperated lab. Is this practical, or would the weight penalties be prohibitive?

-- Steve hopes that putting this blasted thing down on electrons will stop it from eating its way out his skull.

Because I haven't done anything with the idea for nigh-on twenty years, feel free to thieve this.

SFnal locked-room murder mystery. The victim, a genetically-engineered telepath, among the first of his/her kind, living in a Faraday cage because the electromagnetic sensitivity required to pick up thoughts makes any source of radio interference agonising. The weapon, a "singing" greeting card somehow smuggled into the cage.

-- Steve's clearing out old stuff cluttering the mental attic in preparation for a sweep-out and the possibility of moving in newer stuff.

Y'ever have a chunk of something stuck in your brain that won't let you sleep? Well, here's what got caught in my cerebral folds... an opener for a story I have no intention of ever writing. So, free to a good or bad home:

The first war in space was not fought with lasers or missiles or guns; it was fought with fists and cutlery and tools and pieces of broken furniture. Make no mistake, for all its primitive savagery it was war, it was in space, and for a helpless world looking on from below it changed history.

-- Steve has only the vaguest idea of where to take it, and those aren't places he's particularly interested in going... but the blasted lines won't go away. Bad brain, bad, no biscuit...

This is probably trivial, but it felt like a revelation while I was sipping the First Cup of Coffee on the balcony this morning and starting the Fionavar Tapestry series.

We are the Fey. We live on Elf Hill, and we have become the alfar of our myths.

Think of it from the viewpoint of an educated but preindustrial observer. This morning, through the gentle and easing rain, I saw mighty towers of steel and glass rise above the mist and forest canopy. At night the sky is a riot of colour from building and traffic lights. With a gesture I summoned music from the ether (or so it would seem, unless our sharp-eyed medieval noticed the palm-sized remote control) and sat on an impossibly-light chair of a deep and lustrous blue. A warbling cry from my pocket, and suddenly I'm talking to people so far away it'd take a week to walk there yet their voices are as clear and sharp as if they were present.

Bookshelves crammed with page upon arcane page; flickering images on glass; heck, even the popular media supporting elfin profiles (I suspect that the concept of bulemia would be entirely beyond the understanding of those up against famine every winter) and speaking of ideas utterly incomprehensible to our ancestors, and more of them in a night than would arise for them in seven years' of news...

So, have we been subconsciously working to fulfill these myths? Did those writers make a lucky stab? Or am I transposing too much in order to jam today into the mold of those older stories?

-- Steve's had some storyline ideas bubbling in his head again, too, which may explain the musing.