Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Octavia Butler said, “SF doesn’t really mean anything at all, except that if you use science, you should use it correctly, and if you use your imagination to extend it beyond what we already know, you should do that intelligently.”
SF Trope: robots
Event: http://www.livescience.com/topics/robots/
“The Serpent In Eden, Nebraska”
Caleb Ogallala stared at the hole in the ground. “‘bout wide enough for me to get my arm down. Probably to my elbow,” he said. Looking up at his sister, Isabella Pearson nee Ogallala, he said, “You probably don’t believe I saw what I said I saw.”
Isabella – who went by Bell at SolaRobotics in the far, frozen northland of Winnipeg – said, “You’re my brother and I believe you saw what you thought you saw.”
“Not the same thing. You may be all of twenty-three and all I am is seventeen, but I know what I saw. It was a robot shaped like a snake and it dug this here hole.”
Bell winced at the Plainsism. She’d barely managed to ditch the weird accent after she did her undergrad work at the University of Minnesota. She’d finally got that accent right. Now she was struggling to fit in at her newly adopted home in Canada. She nodded, then squatted, “All right then. I apologize. You saw a robot shaped like a snake go down this hole.” She looked up at her brother. He didn’t seem as happy as he used to. Mom and Dad dying from MERS while she was away at college probably hadn’t helped with the mood. Not that their family laughed much. Salt-of-the-Earth Dad had called them...She shook off the melancholy image and shielded her eyes with her hand as she said, “First question is: has the county let the prairie dogs back in?”
His lips twitched in a smile. It was the first one since he’d picked her up at the skip-port in Ogallala, sixty klicks straight north of here. He said, “Not that I know of, but people ‘round here, they don’t much trust nobody’s government, even when it’s the Accordion Party.”
She stood and straightened up, “It’s the Accord Party.”
He shrugged then said, “It had your logo on it.”
“What?” she said, suddenly intent.
“The second letter of your name the round sun with black diamond eyes. It was on the snake head.”
Unexpectedly, Bell was cold despite the heat from the late morning sun…
Names: Nebraska, USA ♀;♂
Image: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/C2nVRtyWKDsGheTkefwup8-970-80.jpg.webp
On October 7, 2007, I started this blog. Eighteen years later, I am revising and doing some different things. My wife and I are now retired senior citizens, our kids are both married, we have a bonus daughter and her wife and we have three grandchildren, (with a fourth on-the-way!) the oldest of which will soon finish his first year in high school, one smack in the center of Middle School; the third almost done with kindergarten. I have forty-five professional publications, plus countless other publications as a slushpile reader, and sometime essay contributor to Stupefying Stories https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/.
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.
Some five years ago, I went to stay with my son, his wife, and two kids in Waegwan, South Korea ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waegwan) for a month. As a family, they LOVED nothing better than to travel…and travel we did! A short distance from the North-South Korean border all the way to the “Hawaii of South Korea”, Jeju Island, they made sure we visited everything of interest (and even NOT so interesting) and stopped at any museum we happened to drive by (have you ever heard of the Museum of Banned Writers? Apparently it’s disappeared from the internet…hmmm…The most sobering day was when we went to the Hill 303 Memorial not far from where they lived (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_303_massacre#Monument).
At any rate, I had a fabulous adventure and was shaken to find out that South Korea is immensely proud of its FUTURE…yes, you read that right. They are proud of their future because they see themselves in SPACE – on the Moon, Mars, and eventually launching to the stars. Several of the museums we went to were the history of Korean interest in space.
For example, we stopped and read the plaques at a stone tower, Cheomseongdae that was, emphatically an astronomical OBSERVATORY “the oldest surviving astronomical observatory in Asia, and possibly even the world’ and not some kind of horoscopes, spiritual guides, nighttime clocks, alarms tracking cosmic cycles – Egyptians
worked to predict the exact timing of the annual Nile flooding, navigational guides for the dead, celestial
maps to help a deceased soul navigate the night sky and reach the afterlife, tracking seasons by precisely record the movements of
the sun, moon, and planets; establishing accurate
365-day calendars for religious festivals, helping the government
organize tax collection, drafting labor, and harvesting; tactical lookout points for invading forces and sacred
spaces to honor protective deities; gateways to eternity; tombs for rulers; as
well as astronomy; literal launchpads for the
soul; eventually aligned to true cardinal points
(N, S, E, W) with mind-boggling precision; and permanently mirroring the order
of the universe on Earth.”
ALL of this to reach the point of this essay to introduce something I “foresaw” after the whirlwind tour of museums in South Korea – and even something as odd as the South Korean definition of “wealthy digs”. Apartments on the ocean are consider HIGHLY desirable, while living in a home is for poor folks. At first blush, you might shrug and say, “weird”, like I did. Then, as I experienced greater and greater emphasis of the South Koreans visioning of themselves in SPACE, I started to realize that they are not just IMAGINING themselves there – they are PLANNING on being there.
Starships of all types will be small compared to Earth – or even minor asteroids – quarters will be cramped, and whether they did it intentionally or not, South Korean society has created a plan where the WEALTHY and SMART live in apartments. Small ones. They have prepared themselves by shifting the paradigm. As an American, I look in my neighborhood – I live in a what was once called a single-story “ranch-style home”, plus apartments. The “mansions” are in the next suburban ring out and are lavish and much, much larger than the houses of me and my neighbors. The area I live is regularly referred to as “the hood”, and the city I live in has one of the highest crime rates in non-core city: “Brooklyn Center frequently ranks alongside core urban centers for higher relative rates of violent and property crimes due to its inner-ring location and regional economic pressures.”
South Korean sees themselves in space – and Elaine U. Cho is one of the first authors I read that sees South Korea in space as well. NOT just as residents, but as movers and shakers; as important PLAYERS in interstellar space. The multiple rave reviews are perhaps best illustrated by Booklist: “…satisfying cultural-background details for the characters and the world and plenty of room for development.” I’ll be rereading this book again and I will certainly be adding TEO’S DURUMI (which you won’t understand at ALL unless you read OCEAN’S GODORI…)
OTHER South Korean Posts: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2025/03/possibly-irritating-essays-of-nasa.html
On October 7, 2007, I started this blog. Eighteen years later, I am revising and doing some different things. My wife and I are now retired senior citizens, our kids are both married, we have a bonus daughter and her wife and we have three grandchildren, (with a fourth on-the-way!) the oldest of which will soon finish his first year in high school, one smack in the center of Middle School; the third almost done with kindergarten. I have forty-five professional publications, plus countless other publications as a slushpile reader, and sometime essay contributor to Stupefying Stories https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/. 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.
I just finished a short story that asks the above question.
At this time, the short story’s (6000 words) title is Down Below the Industrial Nightclub and Tandoori Inn and it takes place on the Mars of my most recent novel (if you’re interested in it, here’s a link so you can test read the first two chapters for free: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2026/02/martian-holiday-read-chapters-1-2.html
Anyway, Down Below the INTI was hard to write because it intersected with something I’ve experienced both as I grew up and seen more times than I’d like to admit during my decades as a science teacher and guidance counselor: wealthy people (like myself later in life), and students, teachers, staff, and the community as it regarded the school I was teaching at from the outside.
The details were often used against students (and sometimes staff) to explain how we couldn’t really expect much from our students because… “Well…you know…they’re…up…poor. Definitely at a disadvantage is life! Surely that’s something you have to deal over there!”
The details? “Robbinsdale Cooper Senior High School in New Hope, Minnesota, has a diverse student body where roughly 70% to 82% of students are students of color and about 70% qualify for free or reduced-price meals. Racial breakdown of the 1,396 students: Black: 38.2%; Hispanic: 25.0%; White: 17.7%; Two or More Races: 9.8%; Asian: 8.7%; American Indian/Alaska Native: 0.5%; Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0.1% Economic Need: About 70% of students receive free or reduced-price lunch, which is a standard measure of low-income household status in public schools.
The “expectation” of the public – even the parents of our students – was that Cooper was going to be a “bad” school. Why? Because of the socioeconomic data above.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t graduate from Cooper – I graduated from Park Center High School (which was a BRAND NEW (opened 1971) high school in a largely new First Ring Suburb of Minneapolis. The houses were nice, the owners (some of them CAPABLE of owning a house for the first time in their lives (aka as my parents) and it had EVERYTHING possible for a Late 20th Century High School could have: a “Media Center”, carpeted classrooms and “cafeteria” with four-sided TABLES; a “sunken gymnasium”; modular construction; AIR CONDITIONING ALL THE TIME; and BLOCKS of lockers rather than hallways lined with them. State-of-the-art laboratories; and more startling than anything else… A COMPUTER IN EVERY CLASSROOM! Incredible.
I had expectations when I got a job at Cooper – that it would be tough. Our “sister-high-school” Armstrong (yes, named after the Apollo astronaut, Neil A. Armstrong) was the “sweetheart” of Robbinsdale Schools and every expectation of success and greatness was laid on them…
But…it was easy to convince the public that Armstrong would be a school of successful FUTURE architects, astronauts, engineers, doctors, and all the other high profile careers. Cooper would supply the world with construction workers, store clerks, and welfare recipients…
The expectation then was easy to translate from Cooper students were “lazy”; Armstrong students were “hard-working and successful”.
How did we change that – after ten years at the middle school feeding Cooper, I was able to get the job helping to SHAPE the student body at Cooper; eventually arriving at pulling my own kids from Park Center to Cooper for their four years of high school – because I believed that success was less about annual household income…
Among other things, teachers who believed in the inherent intelligence of Cooper kids despite the common-factor of similar socioeconomic factors worked to get Cooper certified as BOTH an International Baccalaureate school and (eventually) an Advance Placement school. When Cooper was IB certified, teachers at Armstrong FIRMLY believed that they didn’t NEED no fancy program to be the best in the Robbinsdale School District (Robbinsdale Cooper High School officially became certified as an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School in July 1997, and Advance Placement certified in the early 2000’s. Armstrong became and AP-certified school a few years later. Both schools have the AP program, only Cooper has IB and AP…
The staff talked the school up. Were there violent incidents at Cooper? Yep, there were. Teenagers who don’t have easy access to both higher expectations and more enthusiastic support like to get into trouble.
Of course, teenagers who have easy access to both higher expectations and enthusiastic support get into trouble as well. They fail classes, have to do make up in summer school, and drop out. Teenager who don’t have these drop out as well. They’re kids.
The question is: HOW DO WE CONVINCE THE RICH THAT THE POOR AREN’T JUST LAZY? Part of the answer is advocating for the poor. Another is by giving the poor the same opportunities that the rich have – that was one of our main tools at Cooper. The facts don’t support this myth, either. We’ve all heard people say, ‘If they worked hard, they’d succeed.’ [“Like I do!” is always implied.] “Politicians warn that such programs will reduce incentives to work.”
“I think that’s one of those sayings like “All politicians are liars.” FACT: “Work requirements rarely incentivize the poor to work any longer or harder than they already do, according to a Harvard research study. The truth is people in the US work hard, sometimes multiple jobs, and still have trouble covering their rent, utilities, health care, and groceries to last the week.” (https://www.familyhealthproject.org/debunking-the-myth-the-poor-are-lazy)
Anyway – idiots will always think idiot thoughts: “I can’t go to college! I’m poor!” is one of those idiot thoughts. “All poor people are just lazy!” is another one of those things that idiots think. Neither one is true. The real challenge is shouting those idiot ideas down whenever we hear them. As a high school counselor, I’ve done it before. Even as a normal person, you can make a difference, too.
And the connection to Down Below the Industrial Nightclub and Tandoori Inn? Parts of Human DNA have been removed from clones that are then declassified "Human" and considered expendable Inti (Introns removed during the cloning process...but you'll find that out when you read the story once I sell it!)
Inspiration: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2019/02/possibly-irritating-essays.html
Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNrJW4Wk_pI
Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Regarding horror, I found this insight in line with WIRED FOR STORY: “ We seek out…stories which give us a place to put our fears…Stories that frighten us or unsettle us - not just horror stories, but ones that make us uncomfortable or that strike a chord somewhere deep inside - give us the means to explore the things that scare us…” – Lou Morgan (The Guardian)
H Trope: Ghost Towns
Event: http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/mn/taconiteharbor.html
Mary Croft may have been the only certified dredge operator on the North Shore of Lake Superior – but she hadn’t expected to be the ONLY operator in the abandoned town of Taconite Harbor.
The dredge she captained was mostly operated by an “artificial intelligence idiot”, which was why she was required by Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company to actually direct the floating suction dredge boat. The harbor was a small one, the taconite loads mostly taken out by rail, and the robots inside did most of the work in the town.
Her job would take a week and the company wanted her to work as much time as possible, so they’d given her one of the floating suction dredgers with an actual bed, galley and deck. “Henry?” she said.
“Please call me Hal,” said the idiot.
She shook her head. “I’d rather not. I have an original DVD of the old movie 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.”
“You can’t,” said Henry.
“I can’t what?”
“Have an original DVD. The movie 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was filmed in 1967 and premiered in 1968. The first true DVD was not manufactured for movies until 1995.”
“You know what I mean."
“I do not.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Let’s call it a day and shut down operations,” she said, tapping the shutdown key on the flat screen.
“Very good, ma’am.”
Mary rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and stepped out on the deck. Henry would take it from here until the actual docking procedure which she would do in the gloaming. She loved that word, she thought, unfolding and dropping into the lawn chair she kept carefully stored until the end of the day. No one would have said anything if she’d lounged about all day, issuing orders to Henry via her cellphone, but that had never worked for her. When she did a job, she wanted to actually DO something. For the time being, however, Henry was working hard pulling in and storing the collapsible pipe they used to siphon sediment from the floor of the harbor. It was pumped to a barge where it was dried and shipped down to Duluth for further processing or shipment to central North American markets.
The sun had fallen behind the steep shoreline to her left. It was a calm evening, a choice night on the cool waters of Superior. Such a night was rare enough to make her sigh.
Farther out across the water, to her right on the lake, waves rippled like a thin band of diamonds reflecting sunset light.
What was left of the town was now invisible as was the power plant. It had once operated on coal and had had a solar conversion during the third term of America’s first black president. There was no one left living there.
When the three remaining streetlights farther up the shore, intermittently lining the stretch of road that had once been the main street of the long-abandoned town, abruptly lit, she frowned.
When lights on either side of the abandoned basketball court at the near end of the street, close to Taconite Harbor itself, suddenly lit, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She went into the boathouse and grabbed a pair of digital binoculars, took them out and scanned the shoreline.
The lights were gone.
Frowning, she lowered the binoculars and rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, the lights were on and in the distance was the slow, faint thup-thup-thup of a basketball bouncing...
Names: ♀ Hebrew, English; ♂, acronym of: Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer; also “a venerable nickname for Henry, Harry and Harold, famously used by Shakespeare in King Henry IV as the name of the king's son, the future Henry V”
Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Octavia Butler said, “SF doesn’t really mean anything at all, except that if you use science, you should use it correctly, and if you use your imagination to extend it beyond what we already know, you should do that intelligently.”
SF Trope: sanitation in the future is non-existent in cities…
Event: http://www.smh.com.au/world/mexico-city-fails-to-solve-its-garbage-crisis-20120127-1qlr2.html, http://fryingpannews.org/2012/02/09/big-step-taken-to-resolve-las-trash-crisis/
Trey Jackson and his family live in rural Nebraska – but the city of Omaha is a big part of their lives.
Especially the smell.
The city has been nearly buried under its own waste since, in 2029, the state legislature banned Omaha from dumping outside of a 20 mile radius. While few people in the CITY agreed to the law, legislators from outside the urban areas voted them down.
In 2041, Omaha has been walled in and in order to deal with the trash situation, they have moved their garbage to the edge of the city and hire companies to come in and search through the trash to find reusable, recyclable and useful things. Because the US economy slid into The Really Great Depression after an unprecedented eight Democratic Party dominated legislatures from 2008 through 2040, few people work – but everyone continues to produce garbage.
Trey and his family are part of a garbage caravan heading into Omaha to collect and distribute the trash West. When they arrive, they make camp in their covered wagons in Collector’s City and file for a permit to dig through the trash of a particular dump Trey’s dad and mom have researched. His twelve little brothers and sisters wait for their permit to clear.
In the meantime, Trey’s parents allow him to take the older of the siblings to the Collector’s Carnival. There he meets the amazing Francine La Flesche, descendant of the Indigenous people for who the city is named. She’s not supposed to be there, though.
In fact, she’s missing from her parent’s home – and they are powerful lawyers deep in the center of Omaha, living among the city’s wealthy elite. On the Ferris wheel ride, as it stops so that they are at the top and can see the Core City, she tells him she’s run away to see the world and was wondering if she can go with his family…
Names: ♀ France ; ♂ Latin (=3)
