Tag: scifi

This Novel Project Has A Dollop Of Speculative Fiction To It

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the reasons why I’m feel pretty good about this novel series is I’ve finally — finally got it through my thick skull that your protagonist can not, should not be in any way passive. As such, I’ve figured out a way that a novel scifi / speculative fiction element of this project can be a real integral part of the plot because we see its use through the eyes of our Amerasian heroine.

Even though I don’t have a wife or a girlfriend to be a “reader” to tell me I’m full of shit in this regard, I do think the speculative fiction part of the story makes it a bit more interesting, a bit more spicy than it might be otherwise. This particular plot point is found in another series of novels, but it’s used in a magical mystery way, while my use of the trope is set very much in speculative fiction.

I hope there isn’t too much comparison between the two uses of this little bit of scifi / fantasy. I suppose it’s inevitable that it will be. But there’s nothing new under the sun as they say. But anyway, as I’ve said before, the framework, at least, is there for a pretty good pop novel.

A lot of what happens next is out of my hands. I need a lot of luck. I need to strike the zeitgeist in just the right way in about a year. The idea that anyone with a traditional career would take my little dream seriously is kind of deep. It would be one of the greatest — if not THE greatest — event of my life to date if I managed to get an actual normal person to take my novel seriously enough that they would be my literary agent.

I’m still concerned that, of course, if they do due diligence on me they’re going to think I’m completely bonkers. Which, maybe I am. But I make no apologies for who I am. I’m an eccentric. I get drunk and rant on this blog — and on Twitter — sometimes.

But as the late Annie Shapiro said of me, I’m a “delusional jerk with a good heart.”

Settling A New Planet Would Be Incredibly Difficult

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have an idea for a novel that would take the principles of The Martian and apply it to not just one person, but, say, 1 billion. If an Alien Empire could zap a big chunk of Humanity to a new, inhabitable planet on the conditions that we work together and we could only use existing 2022 technology to do, how would you do it?

The answer, after thinking about this for 15 years is — it would be very, very hard.

The chief reason is bootstrapping a new civilization on a new planet would take far, far longer than you might think. Think of all the different products we use everyday that would be extremely difficult to build without a number of years of development to get there.

Even under the best of conditions — say, the Alien Empire gave us the absolute basics of electricity and the Internet — where would people live? You might have a very surreal situation of people using laptops and cellphones while otherwise living in some pretty primitive conditions. A least for a few years, maybe a few decades.

And then, there’s one of the biggest issues — how do you organize your new global government and society? The most obvious answer is you use the USA as the basis of your new mega colony. If you were trying to settle that 1 billion people on a new planet, you could use 200 of the 335 million Americans as the core of the settlement.

But that, unto itself, would be the source of a great deal of conflict. Which, if you were trying to use all of this as the basis of a novel or a movie would be GREAT. And, of course, using the USA as the basis of a global civilization would allow you to pander, hard, to your American audience.

The whole thing is a lot of fun to think about because there are so many different ways to look at it.

Someone Remake ‘Dark Star’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Before there was Alien, there was Dark Star. It’s a difficult movie to explain. It’s sort of a comedy scifi movie with very bad special effects. Like, piss poor. But the overall effect of the movie is quite good. It ends with the memorable scene of an astronaut surfing his way into a planet’s atmosphere.

Anyway, it seems like just the type of movie that you could use as a stepping off point for a new, big budget Hollywood movie. It would be a lot of fun.

How Humanity Might Settle And Govern A New Planet


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One thing I’ve always thought was interesting was the specifics of how humanity might settle a new planet. I’ve come up with a very elaborate scenario that would allow humanity to settle planets in a solar system that, say, a galactic empire gifted us as a “homeland.”

But how you would go about settling and governing any of these plants is very, very difficult to figure out. Let’s take earth — in real terms, there are two USA size places that dominate the entire planet — North America and Europe. There are a few other first world nations, but they’re very small in population. While China is growing in economic and military power, the world is still pretty much controlled by the “Western World” of the USA and Western Europe.

Why is this?

Well, let’s talk the Pacific Ocean. The world we live in has more to do with the size of the Pacific Ocean than you might think. It’s this huge ocean that prevented China from settling the New World and makes the type of climate necessary to establish and grow a First World nation so precious. (In other words, it’s easer to warm machinery up than it is to cool it down during an Industrial Age.)

Imagine, however, if there was an Africa-size continent between East Asia and North America. If it had a geography and climate similar to Europe’s, then the world we live in now would be dramatically different. You could probably fit another billion+ people on such a huge landmass.

Anyway, if you take that idea and apply it to a new planet that is empty and ready for humanity to settle, you have a shit tone of problems. On earth, you could literally organize North America and Europe such that you had only two nations that everyone lived in. I mean, we’re not doing the globe’s environment any favors by having so many people live in South America and Africa.

But it’s easy to imagine that if humanity was “gifted” a few planets for our homeland, that there would be a fundimental problem: who gets to settle such a homeland? There are 1 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians. They’re just as human as anyone else, why would you automatically say the West should get the opportunity to settle new planets?

I go over this problem again and again in my head because it’s impossible to solve using the conditions of the scenario. The USA makes the most sense as the basis for a planet wide settlement, but everyone hates the USA and a lot of MAGA New Right people would hate the idea of the States having to absorb a lot of non-Americans (Read: non-white).

I really want to give this scenario a plot and characters and write something using it, but it’s still impossible to figure out at the moment.

A Critique Of Space The Nation’s Deep Dive Into Orson Scott Card’s ‘Ender’s Game’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve been a fan of Ana Marie Cox’s since she was at Wonkette many moons ago. So, I really like her scifi podcast that she does with Daniel Drezner. I was really impressed with their take on Alien. But, I have to take issue with some of their hot takes on Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.

The key thing about the book for me is while it’s a very influential, popular and well-regarded book, in some respects there’s not a lot of there there. As I recall, it’s almost all dialogue and what really makes the book meaningful is the shocking twist ending.

Meanwhile, I have always really like the sequel to the book, Speaker For The End. I read as a young man in the 80s and it changed my life. As such, I found it really annoying that Drezner shat on that book for some weird reason. Speaker For The Dead is an actual novel novel while Ender’s Game is, if I remember correctly, kind of half-assed in some respects. Even Cox observed that much of the third act is “telling” not “showing.”

So, Ender’s Game unto itself, at least for me, isn’t all that big a deal other than it’s really popular. It’s Speaker For The End that really shines in how it talks about if we ever encountered an alien species we really would need to walk a lightyear in their shoes before we came to any snap judgements about them. (A theme that is also found in Ender’s Game.)

Overall, I really like their podcast. It’s not too often that scifi nerds get a chance to geek out.

James Bond Has Really Let Us Down In The Gadget Department


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

My novel is growing far more scfi in nature far earlier than I predicted. Or, put another way, my heroine’s interaction with advanced technology is beginning to become a central part of the plot sooner than expected.

Right now, I have two major issues to deal with — how often we get to see the heroine’s POV and how often the “embraced and extended” gadgets of James Bond I’ve given her influence what she does as part of the plot. I also have the issue of the nattering nabobs of negativism at VOX waiting to pounce on my pop-lit novel if it doesn’t fit their corporate liberal metrics.

But I’m being both “delusional and stupid” about even selling this novel at this point. I’m an untested, unknown male author who probably comes off as just a well-meaning Internet crank if some lit agent looked at my online ID at this point. I can always self-publish if need be.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with the gadgets I’ve come up with for my heroine. They’re very innovative, next generation and kick ass. And, in the second book, some REALLY cool things are going to happen because of them. I’m really into flipping the script as much as possible, so a lot of themes one might expect in a novel such as this are implemented in an unexpected fashion.

I at least hope so.

The point of all of this is I feel the folks at Eon have let James Bond — and us — down. Bond is about girls, gadgets and guns. While the girls are still hot, the gadgets these days are so so. Just turn on the TV for your inspiration. There’s some seriously cool things being cooked up in tech right now, why not use it?

I guess some of it is producers and screenwriters just aren’t woke to some of the cooler things being designed right now. So, I guess, in a sense, I have my in to entertain readers in an unexpected fashion. I’ll put a move on you, as they say.

V-Log: The State Of The #Scifi #Novel I’m #Writing As Of Oct. 21st, 2018

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Some rambling about my big creative project of the moment.

V-Log: The State Of The #Scifi #Novel I’m #Writing As Of Sept. 12, 2018

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The premise of the scifi novel I’m writing is a mysterious wall appears in Virginia that surrounds the rural Piedmont region. The story is what happens after the wall is built and its consequences. While it sounds a lot like Stephen King’s Dome, there is much, much, much more to it than that.

I just don’t feel like telling you right now.

But I’ve reached the point in the story where I need to explore the world that the Wall has created. That’s my immediate goal — figuring out which character is going to be the reader’s avatar in exploring that world.

V-Log: The State Of The #Scifi #Novel I’m #Writing As Of Sept. 12, 2018

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am starting from the beginning of my novel yet again, but I’m going to be re purposing a lot of material I’ve already written. I’m slowly getting a sense of what this story is about, even though I still need to do a lot of backend hard work that I just haven’t managed to do yet.

But we’ll see. I have one really strong chapter written and it’s just a matter of sitting down and doing the work.

Here’s a sample of the one chapter I’ve managed to write that’s pretty good.

Tagger looked up as he drove and watched as the thousands of small pods he’d just seen fall from the sky along what he assumed was the Virginia – North Carolina border slowly bury themselves into the ground.  He went just across the affected area that was now rumbling, parked his car and stood in amazement as an enormous wall-like structure began to slow ascend from ground nearby. He snapped out of his rever long enough to notice that Nuk had also driven across the border and was standing next to him.

The wall was what looked like 30 feet deep and was quickly reaching at least 30 feet in height. It was slow and steady in its growth and they watched a few cars attempted a last ditch effort to cross the ever-growing wall. Titanic sounds could be heard to their left and right as the the wall destroyed everything it its path towards the sky.

In the middle of all of this, he hear the sound of a strange push notification on his phone. He looked down and saw a new app with a strange icon of three interlocking stars on his smartphone.

He hit the app’s icon and it quickly began to sink in the significance of all of this. According to the App, the wall was the handy work of a galactic spanning civilization which called itself the Galactic Collective. As he watched the wall in front of him grow taller and more imposing by the moment, he struggled to comprehend it all.

It was First Contact. Humanity wasn’t alone in the universe, after all.

A small, curious crowd began to assemble and walk towards the gigantic black wall. After about 10 minutes of constant growth, there appeared to be some stabilization in the height of the wall. It registered that Nuk was live streaming all of this with her phone and without thinking about it, he slowly walked up to the towering wall and placed his hand flat on its surface. This scene became quite historic in the coming days, with nearly a billion views on YouTube  in a week. For his part, Tagger’s mind was having difficulting processing the sheer enormity of what he was seeing.

The first notification on the app also noted that the area surrounded by the wall would be immediately evacuated. How this was going to happen, was unclear. Tagger and Nuk looked in shocked as the realized they were now walled off from the rest of the world. From his initial inspection of the First Contact App, there were some basic things immediately apparent — the Galactic Collective not only was well-versed in human civilization, but they had particular interest in English speakers. The First Contact App was only available in American English, required at least a limited knowledge of some basic Western concepts and seemed directed specifically at what traditionally would be referred to as the Western World.

Tagger then noticed Nuk frantically making phone calls as all of this was happening. It sounded like she was on the phone with her editor in New York City. Once the call was over, she looked at Tagger, her eyes enormous.

“Tagger,” she said. “You’re a star now. Like, a huge star. You’re the first person ever recording touching proof of alien life.”

The shock was beginning to wear off and Tagger looked at Nuk. She was a striking brunette with long black hair that reached past her shoulders

They heard a slow humming sound from the interior of the wall and they looked on in amazement as large holes could clearly be seen forming in the wall in front of them. In a moment something clicked in Tagger’s mind and he started racing to his car. “Get in if you want to live!” he screamed at Nuk.

Within seconds of them closing their car doors, there was a loud “whoosh!” sound as millions of microscopic black objects zoomed past their car. After a moment, the thick black cloud produced by these snowflake-sized probes could be seen dispersing into the cityscape ahead of them. Without thinking, Tagger gunned the gas and made his way through the city.

Whatever the mission of the black cloud, it was sufficiently distracted at the moment that they could make their way safely through the now abandoned streets of the city at high speed.  A small backwater of about 40,000 souls, this was the most excitement the city of Danville had seen since it was the last capital of the Confederate States of America in 1865. The city had seen far better days and up until a few minutes ago appeared doomed to quietly shrink into oblivion.

Driving towards Tagger’s house, they looked intently around them in constant fear they would see the black cloud again .