In a (New) World of My Own

The dry spell is nearly at any end, my laptop’s charger should be here tomorrow. Once it’s here I can finish some very outstanding processing and printing works.

But truth be told it’s been nice to hang up the camera for a spell and not have to go snapping the kids or anything else for that matter. I haven’t even been looking at anyone else’s works in that time, for that matter, outside of trolling randomly on photographic forums.

“How is my photo?”
“It needs more truthiness!”

Har.

Of all things, I’ve been working on a short story that I’ve had in mind for some time. I’m particular about my science-fiction – it must be a certain kind of hard, or a certain kind of soft…it’s like porn with ray guns, now that I think about it. There’s good porn, bad porn, and downright nasty porn that you’ll eternally regret watching.

So, as far as hard sci-fi goes, I like the entire book to be realistically believable. What do I mean? As a Linux and general computer geek, I have a good grasp of what the actual state of the art is, which is incidentally why I think that Hollywood writers as a whole should be put through a few CompSci classes.

I’m an armchair astronomer and again, I have a fair idea of the technical and practical difficulties involved in space flight. Even something seemingly trivial, say beaming a photograph back to Earth, is an involved process. To quote an email from the Cassini imaging team:

The spacecraft points its high gain antenna toward Earth and transmits the data from all of its instruments, as well as information about the operational status of the spacecraft. These telemetry signals make their way across 1.6 billion kilometers of space and are received by the giant dish antennas of the Deep Space Network. These packets of telemetry are piped to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where they are “unpacked.” Raw ISS image files are assembled from the data stream and are forwarded to CICLOPS…

I want my story to have a solid base, grounded in established facts. It’s honestly a daunting task,because the more I learn, the I need to learn. Do you know what a planetary magnetic wake is, and what it’s relationship is to protecting people from the hard radiation of a gas giant’s magnetosphere?

It’s something I happily do as I’ve always found anything related to space fascinatingn and before me is as good as reason as any to buff up on it. There is a line though. At some point I have to bend the rules in favour of telling a good story. It’s great that I might educate you a little on some of these things in the course of telling you a story, but if you want a wanton deluge of facts, just go follow links on Wikipedia for a few hours.

There’s an even hazier line to be found in Things You Don’t Need to Know. In his excellent novel Titan, Stephen Baxter spares nothing in immersing you in the story of a hobbled-together mission to Titan, including detailed sections of the effect of sustained nutritional deficiency in low and zero-gravity environments. In layman’s terms, zero-g diarrhoea. It’s something that brings home their dire situation and adds another level of involvement, but it’s also something that personally made me step back: I want escapism, not poop stories!

Technical and scientific facts aside, there’s a more subtle difficulty: The mindset of the protagonists. To put it to you directly, the author is affected by his world, and this in turn influences the characters. I’m a young person from a western society who has twenty four hour access to a little thing called the internet. I have immediate and arbitrary to information, communication, entertainment in just about any audio-visual and text format I care to name. That influences me, and it would influence my characters also. How would you react in moving from an environment saturated with instantly available information to one where, at best, there’s a twenty minute time lag..each way?

If I look back to books written before the invention of the internet that are set in quasi-modern times and settings, the characters look dated. Their reactions to events and thought processes aren’t what they would really be if the book was written today. It’s an odd and personal peeve.

Those are my challenges, or at least the first ones to rear their heads.