jeriendhal | Entries tagged with sci fi

( In which Willah is an Official Problem, and encouters a clash of ideals )

[2] Steven Miller [birth-death], eventually became head of NMC’s Theatrical Studies program, serving in that position for fifteen years. -Ed.

[3] Roughly: Human torsos are shorter, and their legs are longer than foxen. In addition, human pants lack the need to accommodate our much higher ankle joints, given their plantigrade stance. -BB

[4] Social Media is a concept that is difficult to explain within the restrictions of this narrative. Imagine ordinary Commoners having the ability to transmit information instantaneously and with the reach of a newspaper or wireless broadcast network, but with no filters to prevent the propagation of harmful or misleading ideas. As horrifying as the concept sounds, for the more academically minded that are interested in studying the concept, I suggest looking up Professor Colonel Angila Blackrock’s paper entitled Promise and Peril of New Means of Information Transmission, Green River Academic Press. -BB

[5] How little I knew at the time what this suggestion would lead to… -BB

[6] Suffice it to say at that point in her life Lt. Bookbinder was a product of her time. It would not be until the Library Wars some fifty years later that her attitude would change to a more open way of thought. -Ed

Current Mood: creative

Hi, I'm not dead.

Honestly I'd almost forgotten about my Dreamwidth account, but given the mess on certain other social media platforms I should post here more regularly. So here's the start of a little story I've been working on set in the early days of my RVA universe, inspired by cozy works like Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes and more directly by

rix_scaedu 's The Travels of Anadrasata Nearabhigan which I strongly recommend you support on her Patreon .

So without further ago, please enjoy The Exchange Student. And if you like this story, please consider supporting me on my own Patreon.

***

( In Which Our Heroine Arrives at an Alien World )

[2] Here we see a hint of why Bookbinder became such an extraordinary diplomat, and one of the driving forces in the creation of Galactic Basic. As her Mandarin teacher Pin Quinya noted during Bookbinder’s education, “She has a ferocious intellect when it comes to learning languages, even ones utterly lacking in cultural context to her own.” -Ed.

[3] To the Home of the Humans, by Alorain Greenfields is perhaps the most accessible primary source available in Galactic Basic. -Ed.

[4] 2.5 meters. -Ed

[5] “Dragons” are a race of beasts from human mythology. Though they seem to vary wildly in human culture, they are generally very large and very greedy. Which I fear is a pernicious insult to wazagans in general, as all the ones I met aboard the Columbia were of a generous nature, as you will soon discover in my narrative. -BB

[6] Captain, later Commodore Huy Nguyen (Birth-Death), was an experienced starship captain, and commanded the Columbia when it delivered the first Terran Confederation diplomatic team to Foxen Prime two years after Endeavour returned to Earth. -Ed.

[7] Viscount Shanang Blackfang (Birth-Death) eldest son of Countess Tanara Blackfang. He served as an assistant diplomatic attaché at the Motherhome Embassy in Geneva for next twenty years, eventually rising to the rank of Senior Ambassador the final two years of his Terran career. -Ed

[8] This was of course prior to the discovery of the Shinzen-Mohammad Principle, allowing the creation hyperspace beacons that permitted vastly improved superluminal navigation and dropout transitions much closer to planetary bodies. -Ed

[9] As was common in days before advanced superluminal drives and improved stellar navigation, Humanity Prime had several wazagan enclaves, small homesteads or neighborhoods where the accommodations were built sized to be comfortable for the larger aliens. Similar enclaves for humans near Wazaga Prime were confined to orbital space stations, as most humans avoided living on the surface due to Wazaga Prime’s high gravity. -Ed

Current Mood: productive

"Stuck in the Middle with You" my latest Red Vixen Adventures story and a direct sequel to "I Fought the Claw, and the Claw Won" is now available for pre-order through Amazon.

The Reclamation Project: Year One is now available for pre-order through Furplanet. It's a Solarpunk sharedworld anthology edited by John Robey, and features my own short story "Silence and Sword," a little adventure feature loony robots, and an AU version of Ali.

Crossposts: https://jeriendhal.livejournal.com/1324706.html

Pondering titles for stories.

I've got two currently in my queue in various states of unreadiness, that I wish to eventually finish, both of them coincidentally First Contact novels.

The first is the meeting between the Foxen of my "Red Vixen Adventures" universe and Humanity, set in Foxen Prime's late industrial era (about early post-World War 2 tech). *Technically* since it stars an older and creakier Rolas the First from "Prisoners of War" and the nearly complete "Prisoner of Midnight" it should logically follow with another "Prisoner" based title, tentatively "Prisoners of History." The downside to that is (bluntly) the first two Prisoner books are smut, and PoH would be more straight up sci-fi (more specifically an homage to Alan Dean Foster's Humanx novel "Nor Crystal Tears.") So I either keep the name and lose the chance to get conventional sci-fi fans, or I keep it and have disappointed smut fans. 

The second story is set in my "For Your Safety" universe, with the Groupmind being confronted with some rather desperate refugees entering the Solar System, and finding itself caught between a desire to eliminate their ship just to be safe, a human exploration crew who wants to save it, and a fragment of its own mind who thinks the Groupmind could use some competition. Currently this has the very generic title of "The Visitors." I'd rather ditch that, but my alternatives so far are "The Invaders" (also painfully generic) "Invaders of Mars" (gives away too much plot) or "For Your Defense" which sounds a bit too much like a Baen style Mil-Scifi piece.

Thoughts?

Crossposts: https://jeriendhal.livejournal.com/1308001.html

So I was poking around Netflix and much to my joy, I found that Jason of Star Command is now available for streaming. Suffice it to say that it was the final product of Filmation's 70's live action shows, where they attempted to do a Star Wars style adventure on a Saturday morning children's show budget.

This worked out about as well as can be expected. While the effects are impressive given that they were made on a budget a $20 and unlimited cheese sandwiches, the cheese also extends to the action, acting and scripts (and the music beyond the opening theme was cribbed from Star Trek: The Animated Series). On the plus side, it did help James Doohan pay the bills until ST:TMP started filming.

John Clute and Peter Nichols have recently created a 3rd edition of their massive Science Fiction Encyclopedia and put it up for free online. Basically it's now a massive, if closed, wiki project supervised by them. While the scholarship is top notch, I'll admit there are annoying gaps. In particular web comics aren't mentioned at all, the sole entry on comics concerning itself with traditional dead tree printing. Hopefully someone will point them in the direction of Freefall and Schlock Mercenary at least and correct the void.

(Okay, I'd love to see one in there for Terinu as well, but realistically it doesn't have audience of the first two I mentioned, despite superior artwork.)

Another one of those sci-fi classics that I'd never gotten around reading until now. It's about wheat we'd consider novella length these days, which is all right since the plot is a fairly thin travelogue of the nameless Time Traveler arriving back to a regale his rather startled dinner guests with his adventures in the year 803k.

Like most people I knew the story already, about how mankind is divided between the Eloi and the Morlocks, with one using the other for cattle, if only from George Pal's famous adaptation. Less well known was the Upper Class/Laborer division that Welles discusses, keeping in line with his Socialist politics. Also less well known are what the Eloi are really like. Weena, the Eloi that the Time Traveler befriends, is not a pretty, adult (but brainless) human, but rather a small, childlike creature along the lines of

chaypeta's ferin. More shocking was her fate in the book, when she's lost and apparently killed while her and the Time Traveler are caught in a Morlock ambush.

Recommended.

It's finally letting me post this. Hurrah.

( Villain's Motivation Rant ahoy! )

Continuing my dive through books I haven't read for a decade or more...

Ah, good ol' Will Gibson, a man so cutting edge that these days he'd not writing sci-fi so much as contemporary fiction. But this book, the third of his loosely connected Sprawl trilogy, was still cutting edge back in the late 80's when it was published, when the idea of a future with low lifes having access to cutting edge hardware was still a new idea, not the world we live in today.

Summary: Four disparate individuals, Mona, a white trash, drug addicted prostitute with a hustler boyfriend, Slick Henry, a ex-con trying to expell his demons with his robotic artwork, and Kumiko, the young daughter of a Yakuza don sent to London for her safety, and Angie Mitchell, a top "stim" star who can connect to the Matrix's[1] powerful Voudon inspired "Loa" through just her mind, come together as the creation of a new being in the Matrix's system comes to a head.

( Spoilers behind the cut )

( Yup, things are worse. )

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Page Summary

RVA: The Exchange Student, Chapter Three
RVA: The Exchange Student, Chapter One
"Stuck in the Middle with You" is now available for pre-order!
The Reclamation Project now available for pre-order!
Title Pondering
I so want James Nicoll to review this
Not *quite* as bad as TV Tropes, I'll admit
Review: The Time Machine, H.G. Welles (spoilers)
Fic: The Summer Intern (cont.)
Review: Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson
Fic: Flyboys, Part Twenty Six

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A Dark Journey Into Pointless Trivia

Entries tagged with sci fi

RVA: The Exchange Student, Chapter Three

RVA: The Exchange Student, Chapter One

"Stuck in the Middle with You" is now available for pre-order!

The Reclamation Project now available for pre-order!

Title Pondering

I so want James Nicoll to review this

Not quite as bad as TV Tropes, I'll admit

Review: The Time Machine, H.G. Welles (spoilers)

Fic: The Summer Intern (cont.)

Review: Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson

Fic: Flyboys, Part Twenty Six