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#1 |
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Urban Fantasy Geek
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 267
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Things to do between here and Jupiter
I'm planning on writing a near-future sci-fi story set on the 4 biggest moons of Jupiter. The idea is that the moons are completely terraformed, but the inhabitants don't know how it's done. They want to apply it to Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, but first they need to make a trip to Earth to find out how the terraforming is done.
The setting is so that communication as well as space travel has ceased only about a decade or so after people first started living on the moons. Also, traveling takes a long time. I'm thinking about it taking a week or so for a single trip. I was already planning to take a small detour to Ceres, which just happened to be roughly on the route (about an extra day or so of traveling) at that time. This would mean I'm not going to put Mars on the route as well, because that would be just too much of a coincidence. So what else can be done on the route? I already know that the belt which holds Ceres is by far not dense enough to form any real danger to navigation. |
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#2 |
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That hairy-handed gent
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Who ran amok in Kent
Posts: 26,229
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If you can get readers to suspend disbelief far enough to accept that a near-future terraforming of the four major moons of Jupiter is not only possible, but accomplished, you can get them to believe anything you invent. You could blunder onto a derelict alien craft full of exotic skeletons and carapaces, all dressed like Bozo the Clown.
And the idea of "a week" representing a "long time" for travel between Earth and Jupiter is even more exotic. In our current technology, it takes unmanned exploratory craft three years or more. caw |
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#3 |
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How novel.
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Beverly Hills
Posts: 629
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Hehe, when I saw your thread title "Things to do between here and Jupiter" the first thing that sprang to my mind was checkers...
If there's nothing in space for them to run into, you could always add in a nice shipboard mutiny. Or checkers. Or, how about this, they run into an old Soviet spacecraft with evidence that until very recently a cosmonaut had survived aboard it. How and why did he live and what secret was he protecting that will impact their lives?
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Live in LA? Love K-town? So do I, and I blog about it here: I love Koreatown in the springtime... Last edited by Ravenlocks; 08-13-2007 at 01:30 AM. Reason: Got another idea! |
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#4 |
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New kid, be gentle!
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 1,956
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One thing that's really unlikely about the story is that communications ceased. Compared to flying earth <-> jupiter in a week, setting up a radio dish isn't even child's play.
No communications must mean something like total breakdown of all technical civilisation on earth. |
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#5 | |
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Company Man
Join Date: Dec 2005
Posts: 6,210
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Quote:
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"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein |
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#6 |
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Urban Fantasy Geek
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 267
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Hmm... I'll have to rethink the week of traveling then.
It is established that even the first ones to arrive know how the terraforming was done. It was already mostly done when the first people arrived. I want to try and steer clear of aliens as much as possible. Though I was thinking of maybe putting some results of failed experiments along the way. |
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#7 |
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Darth Vader is my co-pilot
SuperModerator
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: The land of cow pies
Posts: 15,983
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Hey! My band of intrepid heroes own these moons! And have been defending them against space pirates since before you started writing Sci-Fi! Probably. Then again I can't complain -- Asimov got there decades before I started writing Sci-Fi. The circle of life....
I'd be interested in finding out what kind of engines your guys are using to travel from Jupiter to Earth in one week. And that includes a small detour to Ceres. Funny, I always figured most sane spacemen would avoid flying through the Asteroid Belt. ![]() -Derek
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Absolute Visions Anthology of Speculative Fiction 19 tales of magic, wonder and science. |
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#8 | |
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Dazed & Confused
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
Posts: 4,247
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Quote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6907018.stmChess maybe?
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Destiny Deceived - Internet serial story. Written by one of the best writers I have ever been. "Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk." Douglas Adams |
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#9 |
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That hairy-handed gent
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Who ran amok in Kent
Posts: 26,229
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Alas, one of the problems for hard SF writers these days is that we now know so much about these extra-terrestrial bodies in the solar system. A half-century ago Ray Bradbury could write a classic story about endless rains in the lush jungles of Venus. A few decades earlier, Edgar Rice Burroughs could write adventures of daring warriors and evil monsters on both Venus and Mars, as well as on the Moon. No one can credibly write such things now. The idea of terra-forming any of the major moons of Jupiter, given what we now know of them, is a bigger stretch than I'm ready to accept. Callisto and Ganymede are dead balls of cratered cryogenic ice, having no atmospheres. Io is a sulfurous volcanic hell-orb bathed in radiation hundreds of times beyond what a human could tolerate for five seconds. Europa is the most interesting, appearing to be a watery world encased in ice tens of miles thick, or more.
As an SF reader, I'll more quickly accept faster-than-light travel than the industrial terraforming of such known places. It would be better to postulate another star system having more amenable planetary bodies. caw |
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#10 |
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practical experience, FTW
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico
Posts: 289
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Singing 400,0000,0000 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall?
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¡100% Patasalada, wey! |
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#11 |
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That hairy-handed gent
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Who ran amok in Kent
Posts: 26,229
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When I was in high school, on the basketball and track teams, traveling on buses to away events, we developed a song to drive the bus drivers mad:
Infinity bottles of beer on the wall, Infinity bottles of beer, If one of those bottles should happen to fall, There'd be . . . infinity bottles of beer on the wall. Infinity bottles of beer on the wall, Infinity bottles of beer . . . caw |
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#12 |
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come in, all you jesters
SuperModerator
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: enter, all you fools
Posts: 19,903
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"Look, Paul, a Sea of Holes..."
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8. Rewrite until it stops being a horrible incoherent mess (in other people's opinion, because what do I know). -- RichardGarfinkle |
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#13 |
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That hairy-handed gent
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Who ran amok in Kent
Posts: 26,229
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#14 |
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Banned
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 4,306
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Good point
This sounds like a fun story to me. I wrote a whole stack of stories along these lines in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, I became excessively interested in the mechanics of waking people up from deep Virtual Reality passtimes and your average Sci-Fi editor just could not figure out whether that was a plot problem or a character problem. I'd say it was a writer problem...but that's just me.
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#15 |
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I have plans...
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Junior Nation
Posts: 5,640
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Mars robots developed AI, stoppped sending photos back to earth and began lichen farming and a nice little agrarian society. One of the robot trade ships got caught in a solar current and lost an engine. As the robots rush to repair their craft, your protags panic and assume the robots are in a kamikaze preemptive strike...
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![]() "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." Charlie and the Chocolate Factory |
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#16 | |
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I have plans...
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Junior Nation
Posts: 5,640
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Quote:
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![]() "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." Charlie and the Chocolate Factory |
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#17 |
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Survivor
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 12,960
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This is the best thread title I've seen in a long time.
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#18 |
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Urban Fantasy Geek
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 267
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Thanks
![]() Though I'm beginning to doubt if I ever get to write this. People do have a point that now that we know more about the other planets and moons in the solar system it is much more difficult to write about people living there. |
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#19 |
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Survivor
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 12,960
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Yep. Hate to break it to you that way, but science fiction is a lot harder when you include the science part.
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#20 |
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Midnight Reading
Join Date: May 2006
Location: In the toidy.
Posts: 8,430
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Easiest way around that is to put your story in a completely different system, with planets you'll have to create. When you're mentioning planets we know so much about now, it's harder to play with reality.
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#21 |
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practical experience, FTW
Join Date: Mar 2007
Posts: 375
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how about die slowly from radiation poisoning - or ahve a really long discussion about whether the moon landings were faked.
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#22 |
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Company Man
Join Date: Dec 2005
Posts: 6,210
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Change thruster to dwarven flamepot and you are all set...
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"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein |
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#23 |
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Survivor
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 12,960
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Exactly. Now THAT would be an awesome book. 1901: A Steampunk Odyssey
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#24 |
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New Fish; Learning About Thick Skin
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 48
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"Things to do between here and Jupiter "
Lots and lots of freaky, weightless space sex. |
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#25 |
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Survivor
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 12,960
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/note to self... avoid long trips with Darth Iggy.
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