These days, I write whenever I want to – or when I’m not busy exploring the world with my wife or kids or grandkids. I write and read constantly. Then I discovered that I was writing longer and longer pieces. My new focus is to write shorter; and to write HUMOR. On purpose. Maybe I can still irritate people while being funny. It works pretty well for John Scalzi! We’ll see what happens. Oh, I also discovered that more and more of my stories are falling into a set of futures I’ve invented. This is all because I dislike "disposable worlds" -- too much like the society we live in. I want to reuse the places.
THE COLLAPSE: Invented by Jeffery Kooistra (https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Jeffery_D._Kooistra) I have permission to tell stories in his world!
WHEETAH WORLD: Humans and WheetAH are the ONLY sapient life we know of.
KOREA COLONIZES SPACE: South Korea kidnaps North Korea to a prepared Valles Marineris while the reigning Kim is visiting the World using teleportation technology and their advanced fusion power tech…
RIVER: Humanity split into the Confluence of Humanity, which is a secular, biotech-anything-goes society where Human is whatever we want it to be (which of course, raises problems, like Irog and Gordon Oyeyemi…) and the Empire of Man, which has “Emperor Reverence” and Humans MUST be 65% Original Human Genome Project DNA or more…it encompasses 4 worlds, one of which is River…includes Enstad’s Planet and Sirmiq.
VERTICAL VILLAGES: After the near-collapse of the environment, Humanity passed (“with strong coercion”) the Climate Rescue Edict from the World Council of Authorities Secular and Religious (WCASR) which moved most of Humanity into Two-Kilometer-Tall arcologies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology) of 500,000 each; 20,000 arcologies named after the nearest large, sprawling city it replaced. This also birthed the Return To the Wilds Act which sent most people who had no “wild world” skills packing in to the Vertical Villages. Deconstruction And Recycling Robots (DeARRs) rolled out to take everything unnecessary apart, transport it to 10,000 person Towns for processing and shipment to the Vertical Villages for reuse. Being a Townie was a temporary assignment and entailed being shipped to an area you were totally unfamiliar with (culture, language, etc). Also, Narns had started to appear (initially raccoons and crows – already smart, but driven by Human intersection with their natural world and driving them to evolve far more quickly than would have been possible. (What if Humans were used to “educate” alien races less advanced in order to pay off the Debt incurred when we got FTL, extended life, and fusion power? How does The Information Apocalypse and the Library in the Erg of Bilma fit in? And what about the subjugation by Western Civilization (BTW – initiated by the Greek and Roman Empires, proceeding to the British Empire, then the American Empire, followed by the Chinese Dynasties, and the Indian Empire; concluding with the Mayan and Aztec and Inca cultures; have done to countless cultures) in fact the idea of Human Cultures subsuming successive cultures? Is that our biology or a Fact Of All Life?
UNITY OF SAPIENTS: Humanity was one of the weakest members of an association of Diverse Biology Sapients (DBS classifications ala James White’s SECTOR GENERAL interstellar hospital books and stories) by virtue of our first interstellar probe swarm bound for Proxima Centauri’s single planet, literally running into the Shabe who had been studying Humanity (ostensibly to incorporate Humanity’s oddly flexible DNA into a service branch of Shabe. In FACT, there were three factions vying for power who wanted to use Humanity to further their cause and figure out how Humans remained so “plastic”…)
So far, I’ve written at least ONE story in each world – mostly unpublished (though there are several that ARE.) In future posts I’m going to talk about the creation of each one of the “universes” and what I did to make them real…and how you can do it if you’d like!
That’s it for now!
So far, I’ve written at least ONE story in each world – mostly unpublished (though there are several that ARE.) In future posts I’m going to talk about the creation of each one of the “universes” and what I did to make them real…and how you can do it if you’d like!
That’s it for now!
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