--- R C Macaulay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Howdy Kyle,
>
> Writing fiction requires "fictional imagination". By
> reading your comments,
> you are suggesting injecting truth to make it
> believable...
> That's not the way to tell a story at the Dime Box
> saloon best liar's
> contest.
Well, there's certainly enough to require suspension
of disbelief sometimes. But I wanted to do something
sort of unusual compared to most of what is out there.
Some (but not all) premises I'd like to explore:
1. "We" (human kind) are fighting "Them", but it is
ambiguous for a while who is 'good' and who is 'bad.'
2. "They" don't come in flying saucers. They fly
things that have air-breathing engines and delta
wings.
3. "They" don't fly around in space in the U.S.S.
Enterprise or something like it. The flight here took
15 years, required an exotic engine which we don't
understand, in that it is reactionless. E --> kE, no
mass dumped overboard. (Yes I know that invokes a
preferred frame of reference, I'm OK with that.)
The device to do this is massive, complex, very
expensive, and hard to manufacture. So for in system
flight, nuclear pulse propulsion is used. I.E.,
Project Orion, but using fusion nukes.
If anyone's worried that I'll invoke FTL travel or
communications, be worried, I do. At some point,
"They" figure out how to do it, much to the irritation
of our scientists. FTL communications, they've had for
decades. A conversation from the storyline:
HUMAN: "You can't do that, I read it someplace.
Nothing can go faster than light, it ain't possible."
ALIEN: "Really?"
HUMAN: "Yeah. Einstein and all that. You can't do it."
ALIEN: "Really?"
HUMAN: "I'm just telling you."
ALIEN: "Oh. Well, when I see my kind again, I will
tell them that we shouldn't have been doing that,
because your people say we shouldn't, and you are
clearly smarter than us, given that you went to your
moon a few times and then stopped, and all we did was
travel a few hundred million times that far. So what
do I know?"
(who say's there can't be smart-assed aliens?)
4. No "photon torpedos" or "disruptors." KE kill
weapons (rods from God), the aforementioned
pure-fusion nukes, conventional explosives, some
lasers. "They" use machine guns, something like we
have, but with caseless ammunition, to make it a bit
different. Hey, a high velocity projectile kills just
as well light years away as it does here.
5. They know about antimatter, but don't use it. Why?
They have a way of doing m --> E at high efficiency,
but not so well as to 'bombify' it.
6. Their motivations are not human, nor are they evil,
nor do they ever entirely make sense to us. They are
very smart (more so than we), but due to a different
way of displaying emotion, may come across to the
average human as a bit...airheaded.
7. There is no 'point' to writing this story, per se,
as far as making money, a name for myself, etc. I
would never want a single dollar from it even if it
was the greatest story ever written (it won't be.) I'd
rather just share it for free, if I ever choose to do
so. It's just good to do something to keep one's
sanity (assuming I ever had it), and to have some fun
in a sad world.
8. "We" don't win.
9. It will have a happy ending, and the future of
mankind, alongside "Them" will look very bright and
hope-filled. If I want a bad ending, I can drive down
Elmwood Ave. at 1 or 2 am.
Soooo....yeah. That's about it I guess. We are way off
topic now, but maybe this is a little less 'bad' off
topic than politics.
Hmmm...maybe I should have my intrepid heroes visit
the Dime Box Saloon at some point in their travels.
--Kyle
