2001

What Dreams May Come:

Posted by dougdandridge on May 25, 2014
Posted in: 2001, Acceleration, eBooks, Fantasy, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, History, Kindle, Military, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Nuclear Weapons, Robots, science Fiction, self publishing, Space Program, Tropes, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , . 2 Comments

So, yesterday was a really cool day of writing from many aspects, none of them involving actually putting words on the hard drive.  I finally got Orbit Xplorer to work on Hohman Transfer Orbits, which are minimum thrust orbits that allow a spaceship to transfer from one planet to another. Playing around with the velocities I was able to do a transfer from Earth to Mars in 74 days, and a return in the same.  Any faster and the ship just flew off to nowhere.  This involved velocities much higher than we can generate today, with greater delta Vs, but, as the book I was working these out for was to be set in 2250, or thereabouts, I would hope we could do better than today.  Anyway, looking up the possible transfer dates from another website, I noted that this would make possible one transfer to Earth from Mars, followed by about a twenty day layover, then a 74 day trip to Mars from the Earth, followed by about a two hundred day layover in Mars orbit before the whole thing could be repeated.  Now I had some information to develop some plot from, an example of the science actually driving part of the story.  This fit in perfect with what I wanted to happen to the power (Earth) that had the space navy.  They would still have torchships (fusion drive vessels that can go from A to B at one gee constant thrust) but the cargo and troop carriers depended on these set in stone schedules.

Then I went to bed, and the truly weird part occurred.  I still had some problems with the storyline in one area.  I was still suffering from the effects of a cold, and I went in and out of sleep last night, and worked the problem while I dreamed, coming up with characters, setting, the flow of a chapter, and how that chapter would impact on later portions of the book.  I woke this morning with all of that in my memory.  Now I have a good portion of the storyline worked out, without having to actually do anything.  I used to joke that I could write in my sleep, and it turns out that I really can.  An example of the subconscious coming to the aid of the conscious.

Forbidden Planet

Posted by dougdandridge on November 13, 2012
Posted in: 2001, Acceleration, Alien Invasion, eBooks, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Golden Age, History, Military, Movies, Near Future, Plotting, Quantum Physics, Robots, science Fiction, self publishing, Space Industry, Space Navy, Space Program, Titles, Tropes, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

When I was growing up there were a large number of science fiction movies appearing at the theater. Most involved cigar shaped space
ships with flames curving out of the ends (a product of filming the things in an Earth gravity field and atmosphere). There were bug eyed aliens, and men in flight suits and jet pilot helmets fighting them with .45 caliber pistols in hand. Or the men fell in with the hot women from Venus, or some other hokey plot. The actors were the B-list marvels who we saw in the same kind of movie last year and the year before. Some were decent actors. Most weren’t. They were still exciting to a young mind, who imagined blasting off with the spacemen and patrolling the lanes of the Solar System. And then there was the first of the truly modern science fiction movies, Forbidden Planet.
Forbidden Planet was a different sort of beast. Made a year before I walked this planet (or should I say the year before I lay in a crib screaming for food and crapping my diapers) Forbidden Planet had a cool looking flying saucer (that was stolen by Twilight Zone and many others later on), a great robot (also stolen for Twilight Zone and many others), an alien civilization that made you think, disintegrator beams, and really out of this world electronic music. Of course, since it was done at the beginning of the atomic age everything was atomic, with Neutron Beam disintegrators, in a time when the risks of nuclear power were not as clear. It had big name stars like Ann Francis and Walter Pidgeon, and Leslie Neilsen when he still considered becoming a serious actor. The setting was a planet around another star system. The special effects were wonderful for the time, even better than what Star Trek boasted ten years later, though to give Trek credit, they were a TV Show and as such low budget. I kept trying to catch Forbidden Planet on TV when I was small, but my parents kept taking me to other events when it was showing, so I never really saw the whole movie until I was twelve. When I did I was amazed. And science fiction movies as a whole got better.
Oh, not immediately. There were still low budget flicks with bug eyed monsters or civilizations of gorgeous women and no men, and rocket ships that would take forever just to get to Mars, but could get to the imaginary inhabitable worlds swarming our Solar System in days. But the seeds were planted by Disney, and we started getting some better movies in the 60s, even more in the 70s, and now we have a bunch of really high quality space movies coming out each year. Forbidden Planet opened up the possibility of movies about travel to other stars, a mainstay of written science fiction at the time, but not explored on the big screen. It opened up robots that weren’t just clunking pieces of stove pipe. And it opened up alien civilizations that weren’t just cruising the Galaxy looking for easy marks to conquer, and that didn’t look like us with silver skin. I think Forbidden Planet was a risk at the time. But it was a risk that paid off. I have watched the movie several times lately. Friends have remarked that it seems dated. To me it still looks wonderful. No, it’s not Star Wars or Trek, but keeping in context the time it was a very well done movie, a true classic that set the stage for Star Trek and Wars. And now I discover a Facebook Page called Forbidden Planet, that is not just a celebration of the movie, but of all science fiction. So hooray for Forbidden Planet, and may the Krell always dwell in our hearts and our imaginations.

Space Habitats as Settings

Posted by dougdandridge on September 16, 2012
Posted in: 2001, eBooks, Far Future, Future Prediciton, Genetic Engineering, Genetics, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Plotting, science Fiction, self publishing, Space Industry, Space Program, Tropes, Websites, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

I have always been fascinated by habitats in space. Now I’m not taking about those small structures with a couple of pressurized rooms and maybe space for a dozen people. No, I’m talking about those multi-kilometer long and multi-kilometer wide cylinders or rings or series of domes that might house ten to a hundred thousand to a million people in an artificial world with plants and trees and maybe even some animals. Like miniature planets in their own right. I have seen designs on the internet, and videos on Youtube, but the things just aren’t used enough in science fiction literature and film. Rama was a self propelled habitat with no people, on a journey to another star, passing through our system. Babylon Five was a space habitat, though we were mostly treated to corridors and rooms. There were always the few tantalizing visions of the artificial habitat as seen by the center mounted train car, with fields and foliage and houses in the open. We may never make it to the stars. We may never terraform other planets in our system, though I believe we will, someday. But I am sure that we will build massive habitats in space, maybe by the millions at some point, establishing a Dyson ring around our sun. They could each house their own culture and government, a place for people to try out new things while still within range of rescue should those things go very wrong. We can experiment with different gravity fields, even if artificial gravity is never developed, just by changing the rotation speed of the ring. I believe that a whole new world will open up for us, and maybe Earth will be relegated to the position of place to be nostalgic about and preserve as a museum, but just too hazardous to actually live on. There are plenty of materials in space to construct huge numbers of such structures, from metals, to carbonaceous materials for soils, to volatiles for air and water. They are just there for the exploiting in the Asteroid Belt and the Cometary Halo around the system.
But what about these places as settings for stories. That is the part that really fascinates me as a writer, the millions of different settings that can be constructed in a hard factual universe where the stars are out of reach and the planets to inhospitable for more than mining bases. Now these structures can contain surface areas in their rotation rings or cylinders from dozens to thousands of square kilometers, larger than most counties in the United States. Imagine them forested, or filled with jungle. And imagine hunting preserves stocked with animals that were illegal to create. Or cults of peoples who don’t want the scrutiny of outsiders. Or plagues or viruses, or maybe even nanites. And imagine entering this structure through the hanger area, and seeing a thousand square kilometers of jungle, not just to front and side, but also overhead. Of winding rivers in the sky. Of people who may have reverted back to savagery, or mutated to some new form. This would be plausible setting for many of the old pulp style adventures. I have some ideas for settings like these, and may explore them in the near future when my current projects are done. A setting for a sequel to The Deep Dark Well, or in one of the sequels to the future series based on that novel. Or perhaps a volume of short stories, all showcasing a different environment on one of the habitats. The possibilities are endless. It surprises me that more has not been done in this area. Maybe the time is coming.

Finally, the Conquest of Space

Posted by dougdandridge on April 25, 2012
Posted in: 2001, Future Prediciton, Near Future, science Fiction, Space Industry, Space Program. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

Very exciting news came out the other day; at least as far as all of us children of the Space Age are concerned.  Those of us who grew up in the 1960s were promised Moon bases, space stations with Howard Johnson’s restaurants, and missions to Mars.  2001 A Space Odyssey showed a glimpse of the future that we expected to see.  Regular trips into space by commercial airlines (spacelines?), a city on the Moon, even a mission to Jupiter by the turn of the century.  Instead, after the initial excitement of the Moon Race we were treated to space buses into the lower orbitals, satellite launches, and lots of robotic probes.  Now the information sent back by those satellites and probes, especially the Hubble, were exciting.  But the thrill of men and women going into space was subsumed under a work a day attitude for NASA.  Now granted, the Cold War sucked in a lot of money that might have gone into planetary exploration.  And the two shuttle disasters made the powers that be more cautious.  But realistically pioneers have always taken risks, and some have always been burned.  Ships went out into the unknown and never came back.  Fragile aircraft crashed on a whim.  But because there was money to be made the pioneers forged on.  That was the catalyst that made people risk all to gain all.

The other day Producer James Cameron and the executives of Goggle announced that they were starting up a company to mine the asteroids.  While they certainly will not be able to carry out this dream by themselves, they hope through some practical demonstrations to attract capital that can be used to grab a foothold in space and expand.  The simple fact is that the most expensive part of the exploration and exploitation of the Solar System is getting off the Earth in the first place.  It is horribly expensive to put things into orbit and beyond.  But once beyond it becomes almost ridiculously cheap to go further.  The pursuit of space by private companies has been in the news lately, but Cameron and Google’s announcement is the most ambitious to date.  And they have a reasonable timetable for its accomplishment.

So what is our future in space as a species?  If, of course, we don’t just blast each other out of existence, still a possibility, but with the end of the Cold War standoff less of one.  We will definitely colonize the moon, build orbital habitats and go on to the other planets.  Asteroid mining of course, including bringing some of the smaller ones to Earth orbit to use for the materials needed to build the orbital infrastructure.  Colonies on Mars eventually, and even on the moons of the gas giants and the larger asteroids.  Beyond that?  Once we control the energies then the Terraforming of Mars is a distinct possibility.  Venus not so much, but not impossible.  Maybe even our moon with a mantel of atmosphere.  We may never reach the stars, though even if Einstein remains the ultimate authority that may be possible.  Once megascale production becomes mundane then generation ships may not be far behind.  Beyond the light speed barrier, wormholes, warp drive?  We just don’t know.  Some would say that star ships are impossible, but real scientists are looking into the possibilities of hyperlight travel, or at least some way around the distance barriers, some of which we can’t even imagine.

So the news is hopefully the beginning of something really big.  It probably won’t happen according to any projected time frame that we can formulate today.  It probably will contain some unforeseen pitfalls, as well as unforeseen promise.  Some will grow rich and powerful, while others spend all and lose everything, just as merchants and explorers did in the past.  People will die, dreams will be realized, new cultures and nations will be born out there in the Solar System.  Wars will be fought.  Never believe that everything will be peace and love and joy in the greater Solar System.  But I believe with these new steps outward we will forge on.  This is an exciting time to live in, and I truly hope I see some of this come to pass.

Remember The Future

Posted by dougdandridge on January 17, 2012
Posted in: 2001, Future Prediciton, Golden Age, PhutureNews, science Fiction, Space Program, Writing. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Many years ago, when I was in the Army stationed in Germany, I remember seeing an album cover by a local band called Nektar.  The title of the album was Remember the Future.  I always thought it was a cool cover and a really cool title.  But what did that title mean, remember the future?  I believe we all make up our futures depending on what we see around us.  We predict, we plan, and most times we are wrong.  Each generation makes its own future.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, in Beyond The Farthest Star, envisioned a world where great air fleets battled the skies at supersonic speeds, with props.  That was what they saw as the ultimate in aerial technology, so they pushed the envelop with what they knew.  Back in the Golden Age it was thought that we would have moon bases in the 1960s, space stations in orbit, maybe even flights to Mars and beyond.  It was also thought that the world would have three or four massive computers and everyone would send their data in to be crunched.  Sure, we have mainframes, more than they imagined.  But no one saw the billions of smaller computers, desktop, notebooks, even intelligent phones, and the international net that links them together.

The future of my childhood was shaped by the space program.  From the west coast of Florida I watched the launches of Saturn Vs across the peninsula, their sun bright flames pushing them into orbit and beyond.  Man walked on the Moon.  There were plans to push the envelop, Moon Bases, Space Habitats, trips to the outer Solar System.   2001 came out in the 60s, a science fiction novel written by a real scientist.  It predicted Howard Johnson’s restaurants in orbit, regular flights into orbit (though Pan Am didn’t survive much past the novel), a major complex on the surface of the Moon, even a voyage of exploration to Saturn (the original destination, which was changed to Jupiter in the movie and subsequent books).  So WTF happened?  I think it was the Cold War that sucked all the funding out of the planned space programs of the two superpowers.   Fortunately the other prediction of the time, Nuclear Armageddon, also didn’t come to pass.

This generation’s vision of the future includes genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and virtual worlds.   Again we predict the future we think will come, as well as the future we hope to hell never rears its ugly head.  The old mainstays of scifi are still there.  Space travel, FTL, Interstellar Empires.  Most are set so far in the future that the writer does not have to worry about his world being destroyed by time.  Some still make the mistake of wishful thinking and make the technology come too fast.  My old mentor Charles Sheffield wrote novels in the early twenty first century that predicted an explored and settled Solar System in 2080, a date most thought was much too optimistic.  As far as more Earthly technologies, everyone’s guess is as good as any others’.   We can make predictions based on what we know about the here and now, and the logical progression of trends and technologies.  What we can’t always predict is the new and the unusual, things which come without warning out of laboratories and Universities.  The things which generate new trends, industries and cultures.  But we still take a shot at developing the future, the settings for new stories, new characters, new history.

Follow Future Trends on PhutureNews, a blog of some hot scifi writers and new comers.  Link on the side of the page.

Find my books, The Deep Dark Well, The Hunger, Diamonds In The Sand and soon The Scorpion on Amazon, Smashwords and my website, Imagination Unlimited.