SFFSat 8/03/2014

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

Poisoned Ice   part 5

This is the fifth part of a science fiction short story.  The earlier segments are earlier in this blog. (Worryingly, I haven't posted anything since last SFFSat - I knew life had been hectic this last few weeks!). Anton is in trouble; his spacecraft in the rings of Saturn has been poisoned, and he can see no prospect of surviving. 

   The murderous pirate was making slow progress harvesting. Anton briefly sneered at its incompetence, knowing that he could have cropped the Svenskites far more cleanly and swiftly.

     Anton looked across the ring core and then glanced at his chronometer. Before seperating from Titan-D station, he had been talking to Kellerman. She had mentioned that she would be working in the Cassini Division between the rings: she had a contract to repair one of the navigation beacons. He had nothing to lose by trying to punch a laser signal through the core and trusting to luck that she passed through the beam. A corner of his mind briskly computed the probability, but he coldly suppressed the answer he got.

     He reset the laser, boosting the power to maximum, and set a simple, short, desperate cry for help to repeat. The beam shone briefly, already breaking up as it passed through the ice crystals in the core mist. There was ten kilometres of ice between him and the ring surface: the beam would be negligible by the time it passed through. He noted wryly that his crop of photo-synthesising Svenskites seemed to like the beam: where the laser shone, the Svenskites were turning to face it, forming a clear line in the ring as their solar grids changed orientation.

     Anton watched the line for a few moments, and began to wonder. He gingerly adjusted the direction of the beam, and swung it across the ring core. After a few moments, more Svenskites turned, their snowflake lattices shimmering in the laserlight. Anton chuckled, beginning to see a chance, and started moving the beam across the ring, the path turning those Svenskites that the beam crossed.

As always, comments welcomed. 

 

SFFS 1/2/2014

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

 Poisoned Ice   part 4

This is the fourth part of a science fiction short story.  Anton is in trouble; his spacecraft has been poisoned, and he can see no prospect of surviving.

Anton gazed through the thinning viewport at the Svenskites around Emerald. The few unfortunate enough to be near the ship were also dying, victims of the same dose that was murdering his ship, but most were still healthy. 

 

Emerald's now tortured song was getting appreciably weaker. The ship had little time left. Anton swore, and found himself wondering if he could boost the comm laser to turn it into a weapon. Maybe he could take the pirate with him. He glanced instinctively at the power readouts, even though he knew the idea was crazy. Yes, he had the energy: but comm lasers were designed so that they could not cause any injury to other ships. He briefly considered blasting the Svenskites, and robbing the pirate of its loot: but even that was not an option. The laser would, at its strongest, merely rival the sunlight: the Svenskites would thrive on it, not die.

 Comments, as always, are welcome - I've had problems with Google+ recently, so I've reset the comments system not to rely on Google+, but it seems to have wiped out previous comments as a result. I don't think Blogger likes me at the moment...

SFFSat 25/1/2014

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

 Poisoned Ice   part 3

This is the third part of a science fiction short story.  Anton is in trouble; his spacecraft has been poisoned...

Anton briefly glanced at the comm laser: he still had ample power in the banks to send a myriad of signals. The ice and dust in the ring would break up any laser pulse before it reached Titan, or even another working singleship. He would have to rise out of the ring to signal. But Emerald was struggling even to maintain her basic cohesiveness. When the bio-engineers had conceived singleships, the prospect of deliberate slaughter of the semi-sentient spacecraft had not even been considered. A dying singleship could not use her impellers to move any distance. Emerald could not draw herself out of the source of her death.

Anton glanced at the viewport, seeing that the toxins were already eating away at the clear organic fabric. He suspected that the whole exterior of the ship was coated with the foul chemical soup: even had he suited up faster, he doubted he could scrub the fibrous hull clean. And by now she had already absorbed too much for her to live.

 Blogger seems to be behaving itself now, so comments, as always, are welcome.

Lost Worlds

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may be most famous for creating Sherlock Holmes, but he is also responsible for putting a name to the pulp/fantasy genre of the lost world novel. Professor Challenger's journey onto a plateau in South America where dinosaurs still roamed has affixed the phrase “lost world” to all such ventures into lands that time forgot, where creatures thought lost to the mists of history remain and thrive.

We are lucky to have an ancient copy of The Lost World, an edition by John Murray and co, published in 1914, complete with beautifully-faked “photographs” from the expedition, showing the mysterious plateau - I'll post scans from it in a later post.

 

Other writers have created lost worlds of their own, for example on Antarctic islands - Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot and sequels.

 

Another good place for a lost world is in chambers inside the earth. Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth is the obvious example, but Edgar Rice Burroughs also got in on the act with his Pellucidar stories.

 

South America was also popular (and quickly became very crowded with supernatural creatures and regions). As well as Conan Doyle's Lost World. A Merritt's The Face in the Abyss is probably the best early contender here.

 

By the late 1930s, Earth was becoming crowded and the presence of dinosaurs or other creatures was becoming more difficult for writers to suggest, and so lost world-style stories moved elsewhere in the solar system. 

As well as Edgar Rice Burroughs (whose heroes travelled to most planets in the solar system), contemporaries such as Otis Adelbert Kline, Ralph Farley and Manly Wade Wellman explored visions of colourful alien worlds.

As scientific knowledge grew apace the solar system became too difficult to justify. Now, the lost worlds have moved to other dimensions, fantasy lands and distant worlds. But they still have a sense of wonder about them – it is a field of fantasy that (unlike the dinosaur) is still alive and kicking, both in books and films.

SFFSat 18/1/2014

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

 Poisoned Ice   part 2

This is the second part of a science fiction short story.  Anton is in trouble; this time, we find out why...

Anton had barely seen the unknown singleship as Emerald weaved gracefully towards the Svenskite crop. He had seeded the ring segment nearly a Titan year before with the bio-engineered photosynthesisers, and had rightly expected to see a rich harvest. As he approached the area, noting his beacons staking the limits of his farm, he had spotted the stranger with its wings extending. As anger flooded through him at the blatant theft of his crop, the thin mist of the ring core changed from white to yellow, and Emerald's song had faltered. Anton had heard of pirates poisoning space to murder a singleship, but had dismissed such stories as spacegold – pretty, but worthless.

Now, Emerald was dying. And when the ship expired, Anton would die soon after. He bit back the curses brimming on his tongue, anger and terror vying with his frustration at being so helpless. He ran his hands over the interface that allowed him to talk to Emerald, trying wordlessly to communicate to the ship his feelings, trying to tell her how sorry he was and how much he cared. The murder of his ship hurt almost as much as his own approaching demise.

As always, comments welcomed.
Blogger seems not to be displaying some comments at the moment - if your comment doesn't show up, please email me, so I can try to work out what's wrong!

 

SFFSat 11/1/14 - Poisoned Ice

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

Just to prove I can write something other than Sorrel, I'm going to present a short story over the next weeks. This one is hard science fiction, as opposed to the steampunk/fantasy that is Sorrel's universe.

So with no further ado, I present... 

 Poisoned Ice.

 

The singleship was dying slowly around Anton. He tried to shut out the ship's keening wail from his ears, and pulled his helmet into place. He checked his suit seals again; Emerald was trying to maintain her internal atmosphere to the end, but he could no longer depend on her. He gazed hopelessly out of the clouded viewport at the silent, nearly motionless hailstorm around the ship. The rings were beautiful, and he and his poisoned ship were in their midst. Chunks of ice the size of office blocks spun in slow, stately majesty, the occasional collision spreading fragments of silver hail in increasing arcs. Between the largest boulders Anton could see the fragile loveliness of Svenskites spinning as they drank in the thin sunlight, turning slowly in unison to focus on the distant star. The crop here should have made him rich. He seethed, and gazed across the ring through the poisoned wonderland towards the other singleship as it turned its wings again to draw in the lifeforms. Even if he expended all his air to push him towards the pirate, he would not get there before his power expired, and he froze. 

 As always, comments welcomed!

 

SFFSat 4/1/14

This is my snippet this week for SFFSat. SFFSat is a place where a number of authors post snippets from their written works, and give the opportunity for comments, support and encouragement. Please also explore the other blogs that are part of this set - you can find the information here. 

This time, I'm putting up a snippet from Sorrel in Silver, the third volume in Sorrel's saga, still many months from publication and only a quarter written. Sorrel's adoptive town has been attacked by lloruk again. Sorrel is drowning her sorrows afterwards.

 

The tavern on Lantern Street was more volging comfortable than the Chancelry had ever been, even before it became a smoking ruin. I sat in one of the plush, upholstered chairs in the taproom with a pint tankard of cider, and thought to myself that in this respect, at least, the cascade of fire that had devastated the town's heart had not been such a bad thing. I'd needed five pints of cider to come to that conclusion, I might add.

I looked round the room, noticing that everything seemed brighter and a little fuzzier than it had been half an hour ago. I obviously needed more cider so I wouldn't notice how drunk I was getting.

'Daryan, Zandraal, now Tolgrail' Berindyl snarled. She and I had never been on the best of terms. I thought she was an appalling Guard Commander, and she thought I was an insufferably arrogant outsider.

So we were both good judges of character.

  As always, comments welcomed!