Hilarious Joke
Fool
What are these?! I am imagining something quite awesome.
Metal birds! Titanium avians! Aluminium magpies!
Collaborative Writing Project Re-start
- Thread starter Zubi-Ondo
- Start date
What are these?! I am imagining something quite awesome.
Metal birds! Titanium avians! Aluminium magpies!
chopper
Steven Poore - Epic Fantasist & SFSF Socialist
chopper
Steven Poore - Epic Fantasist & SFSF Socialist
Wings of Steel - next bit...
ok, here we go. following on from Mayfield's bit above. it's a bit slow at the moment, but a lot of it is kinda scene-setting. have i got Slak and Hakkonnen right?
ok, here we go. following on from Mayfield's bit above. it's a bit slow at the moment, but a lot of it is kinda scene-setting. have i got Slak and Hakkonnen right?
No one commented, did they? And I'm part of that non-existence.
Yes, fun; I'm not much into football, so I'll probably miss all the in jokes, but I can do Rotherham…
Yes, fun; I'm not much into football, so I'll probably miss all the in jokes, but I can do Rotherham…
chopper
Steven Poore - Epic Fantasist & SFSF Socialist
cheers, chris
i'm still enjoying writing these, even though they've fallen down the priority list of late. this one is intended to be a lot lighter than the Inquisition one, but i'm trying not to put people off too much with the soccer bits. there will be dragons too.....
i'm still enjoying writing these, even though they've fallen down the priority list of late. this one is intended to be a lot lighter than the Inquisition one, but i'm trying not to put people off too much with the soccer bits. there will be dragons too.....
Hilarious Joke
Fool
Well I certainly enjoyed it (I've been really busy of late so haven't been on the Chron... I'm posting this from Hawaii, incidentally).
Assume a big lump where they get to know the inhabitants of this sheave; I just haven't written it yet.
The world was dying.
Oh, not literally. There would be enough organisms surviving that in a few million years there would be a new ecological balance, but between times many species would disappear, and one of them would be Homo Sapiens.
Actually, it was quite probable that none of the higher vertebrates: – mammals, reptiles, amphibians or birds – would survive, but in the long run this was fairly irrelevant.
Unfortunately Sonja was incapable of taking a view that long. Not that she could be considered chronistically myopic; she was fully aware of the irony of the fact that the sheave from which they had arrived was emerging from a protracted biowar and the planet’s hundred million or so inhabitants lived in well-educated luxury, with Europe’s forests stretching from mountain slope to the sea, while here they’d avoided major conflicts, found diplomatic solutions to their problems, made the concept of the league of nations work on a planetary scale, never developed nuclear or targeted biological weapons, and their progress, population growth and industry had brought them to a blighted, sterile situation.
For there were still humans here; possibly as many as in the next door sheave. The underground cities, fed by hydroponics and robot planter/harvesters under the roofed fields and distilling the polluted sludge that fell from the skies.
Then there were the stunted, short lived biologicals, who traded with the cities for more of the transparent film and attempted to establish pockets of nature round springs where the water had been years filtering through the rock.
In the depths of the sea it was evident the poisons were not infiltrating the ooze fast enough to kill everything, and the fishing boats, their crews enveloped in more of the plastic sheet, brought in catches that were adapting to the heavy metals and complex organics faster than their human predators ; who knows, some of them might adapt to the new conditions.
Global heating had drowned most of the coastal cities, but there wasn’t enough population left to have used them anyway.
The crew of the Heinlein were frustrated. These peaceful, doomed people were sharing their libraries unreservedly, and there was no knowledge to give them that would appreciably slow their end. They might last a century, even another five hundred years, but they had no future unless some major discovery were made in this time. We could do nothing for them, even if we dumped all essential gear we could carry maybe twenty at a time, and say good-bye to any hope of profit ; and that would involve us getting dumped even faster by our sponsors back home.
More irony – the sheave we had dubbed ‘Eden’ could absorb them, and would be delighted to have both their manpower and genetic diversity. One transition at seventy five percent to save the tattered remains of a population, but no way it was going to happen, even if we gave them every scrap of the information needed to save themselves (which, of course, we had done ; we might be forced to count the cost, but we’re not monsters).
The problem was just too big for us, even if we managed to get all the other ships to co-operate with us.
If it had been home sheave, there would have been long queues of people offering anything, everything for escape; armed raids, kidnapping anything to save themselves or loved ones. Here they were very civilised and understanding; perhaps we could find seeds of some plant that would flourish in the polluted, UV blasted soil, so the planet would at least go on green ? Most oxygen now came from phytoplankton in the oceans, and they weren’t as effective as in the past.
“We could help them.” Sonja is a great linguist, and could make any statement with poetic conviction but, even if she had convinced us to let her keep her husband, she couldn’t argue with physics.
“We could save a few tens of children, say, and the Edenites would look after them – but you know to the gram how much extra lift we have available”
“That’s thinking in the box. If I could show you how to save a hundred thousand at reasonable expense, would you listen ?”
“I would still have to contact the trustees for ‘reasonable’, but I’ll hear what you have to say, and not reject it without consideration.”
“If there’s one thing these people are good at, it’s plastic sheet – their agriculture depends on it. If we decide to go on exploring in this direction… ”
“If. We’re a good long way from home.”
“In a high diversity region, which means a good width of new ideas. If. We can come here from Eden with millimetric accuracy.
We can get them to build an airship, maybe a metre less than the Heinlein in each dimension, and when we’re coming through they load it up with emigrants. No coils, no engines, nothing but people? They could get a thousand up, fifteen hundred if they’re not allowed any luggage at all. We make our transition exactly where they are, and the blimp is in Eden by mass/energy conservation; drifting, of course, but the local population will help them down. Then they load the thing with healthy, uncontaminated food, and a witness of what happened, and tether it right back where it was. As we go home, inverse reaction, and that load ends up here. Repeat to taste.
We’ll need the total co-operation of the Edenites, of course, and protection clauses for the – Purgatrites ? – In Eden they’re so drastically short of manpower the temptation to introduce effective slavery might be too much for them. Still, even that would be better than those poor wretches have to look forward to now.”
She was breathing heavily now, her normally totally controlled voice harsh, whether from emotion or the empathy required to absorb languages as fast as she did. “I will accept the decision to do nothing, should it come to that, but the people should know the nature of the choice, and its consequences.”
There was an organised ‘hate Sonja’ movement at home, and most of its members were lawyers or politicians who’d tangled with her. They definitely didn’t like the way she did things as she saw right, then persuaded the majority of the public to follow her, to the point where attacking her was social suicide.
A hundred thousand people ; it was a good rallying cry, and maybe even possible if they packed more children and babies than adults. But we both knew, without conveying that knowledge to the onboard recorders, that the humane solution would be for the inner sheaves to co-operate in building a much larger transition ship, that could bounce between sheaves twice a day for a year or more, moving millions.
Would she be able to convince the public of that?
The world was dying.
Oh, not literally. There would be enough organisms surviving that in a few million years there would be a new ecological balance, but between times many species would disappear, and one of them would be Homo Sapiens.
Actually, it was quite probable that none of the higher vertebrates: – mammals, reptiles, amphibians or birds – would survive, but in the long run this was fairly irrelevant.
Unfortunately Sonja was incapable of taking a view that long. Not that she could be considered chronistically myopic; she was fully aware of the irony of the fact that the sheave from which they had arrived was emerging from a protracted biowar and the planet’s hundred million or so inhabitants lived in well-educated luxury, with Europe’s forests stretching from mountain slope to the sea, while here they’d avoided major conflicts, found diplomatic solutions to their problems, made the concept of the league of nations work on a planetary scale, never developed nuclear or targeted biological weapons, and their progress, population growth and industry had brought them to a blighted, sterile situation.
For there were still humans here; possibly as many as in the next door sheave. The underground cities, fed by hydroponics and robot planter/harvesters under the roofed fields and distilling the polluted sludge that fell from the skies.
Then there were the stunted, short lived biologicals, who traded with the cities for more of the transparent film and attempted to establish pockets of nature round springs where the water had been years filtering through the rock.
In the depths of the sea it was evident the poisons were not infiltrating the ooze fast enough to kill everything, and the fishing boats, their crews enveloped in more of the plastic sheet, brought in catches that were adapting to the heavy metals and complex organics faster than their human predators ; who knows, some of them might adapt to the new conditions.
Global heating had drowned most of the coastal cities, but there wasn’t enough population left to have used them anyway.
The crew of the Heinlein were frustrated. These peaceful, doomed people were sharing their libraries unreservedly, and there was no knowledge to give them that would appreciably slow their end. They might last a century, even another five hundred years, but they had no future unless some major discovery were made in this time. We could do nothing for them, even if we dumped all essential gear we could carry maybe twenty at a time, and say good-bye to any hope of profit ; and that would involve us getting dumped even faster by our sponsors back home.
More irony – the sheave we had dubbed ‘Eden’ could absorb them, and would be delighted to have both their manpower and genetic diversity. One transition at seventy five percent to save the tattered remains of a population, but no way it was going to happen, even if we gave them every scrap of the information needed to save themselves (which, of course, we had done ; we might be forced to count the cost, but we’re not monsters).
The problem was just too big for us, even if we managed to get all the other ships to co-operate with us.
If it had been home sheave, there would have been long queues of people offering anything, everything for escape; armed raids, kidnapping anything to save themselves or loved ones. Here they were very civilised and understanding; perhaps we could find seeds of some plant that would flourish in the polluted, UV blasted soil, so the planet would at least go on green ? Most oxygen now came from phytoplankton in the oceans, and they weren’t as effective as in the past.
“We could help them.” Sonja is a great linguist, and could make any statement with poetic conviction but, even if she had convinced us to let her keep her husband, she couldn’t argue with physics.
“We could save a few tens of children, say, and the Edenites would look after them – but you know to the gram how much extra lift we have available”
“That’s thinking in the box. If I could show you how to save a hundred thousand at reasonable expense, would you listen ?”
“I would still have to contact the trustees for ‘reasonable’, but I’ll hear what you have to say, and not reject it without consideration.”
“If there’s one thing these people are good at, it’s plastic sheet – their agriculture depends on it. If we decide to go on exploring in this direction… ”
“If. We’re a good long way from home.”
“In a high diversity region, which means a good width of new ideas. If. We can come here from Eden with millimetric accuracy.
We can get them to build an airship, maybe a metre less than the Heinlein in each dimension, and when we’re coming through they load it up with emigrants. No coils, no engines, nothing but people? They could get a thousand up, fifteen hundred if they’re not allowed any luggage at all. We make our transition exactly where they are, and the blimp is in Eden by mass/energy conservation; drifting, of course, but the local population will help them down. Then they load the thing with healthy, uncontaminated food, and a witness of what happened, and tether it right back where it was. As we go home, inverse reaction, and that load ends up here. Repeat to taste.
We’ll need the total co-operation of the Edenites, of course, and protection clauses for the – Purgatrites ? – In Eden they’re so drastically short of manpower the temptation to introduce effective slavery might be too much for them. Still, even that would be better than those poor wretches have to look forward to now.”
She was breathing heavily now, her normally totally controlled voice harsh, whether from emotion or the empathy required to absorb languages as fast as she did. “I will accept the decision to do nothing, should it come to that, but the people should know the nature of the choice, and its consequences.”
There was an organised ‘hate Sonja’ movement at home, and most of its members were lawyers or politicians who’d tangled with her. They definitely didn’t like the way she did things as she saw right, then persuaded the majority of the public to follow her, to the point where attacking her was social suicide.
A hundred thousand people ; it was a good rallying cry, and maybe even possible if they packed more children and babies than adults. But we both knew, without conveying that knowledge to the onboard recorders, that the humane solution would be for the inner sheaves to co-operate in building a much larger transition ship, that could bounce between sheaves twice a day for a year or more, moving millions.
Would she be able to convince the public of that?
Hilarious Joke
Fool
Cool, Chris.
You never sent me instalments on my email?
You never sent me instalments on my email?
Did I promise? I'm sorry, I forgot completely; I've popped something into your letterbox…
That is, quite obviously, the "tell" version. I have yet to write all the contacts with the two doomed societies that pushed her to that point. Not my strongest suit, but, having got the end planned, my characters shouldn't be able to drag it too far off subject.
Should they?
Hilarious Joke
Fool
Ha ha, read half of it last night Chris, enjoying it, looking forward to reading the rest tonight perhaps.
Looks like it was an interesting project. My problem is I'm an ideas person who zooms off at 100mph in my own direction! I immediately thought of societies who steal ships, or a renegade quasi-realigious planet bent on purging these ships and the "contaminated" worlds as they are spreading a "multi-verse heresy" and must be removed as they conflict with the religious teachings of the Unified Faith (a fantical doctrine which finds common ground with other faith groups on worlds they encounter and destroy. Also the original travellers stole the technology and/or another faction want revenge, opportunity for military expansion. Finally there is "safe haven" a planet so advanced that they have techology and psychics who can manipulate ships into believing they are in their home sheaf and get all visitors to dowload their information. Possibly these are the very original creators who seeded the information to another world so that different Earths would do their exploring for them - providing them with the information they require at no cost to them.
chopper
Steven Poore - Epic Fantasist & SFSF Socialist
Me too - i had 10000 words done by the end of the second week. unfortunately my second attempt at a story lost a leg at the first fence....
well, not quite, but i got the Inquisition into mine, bent on using the sheaf-ships as WMDs against the Moors (read: entire Arabic/Islamic world).
Hmm. with this thread reactivated, maybe it's time to pump some life into the stories again....
I was just thinking, the other day, how I might write a new short story using one of characetrs that I havne't written about yet. I have plenty of sotry ideas, and I'm keen to keep a little of life in this old bird., or should that be air in this balloon. 
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