Tag Archives: future

Writing prompt: Turning 200

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

(A quick aside: travel this month has damaged the regularity of my posting, but I am back now, with a Monday post and a Thursday writing prompt.)

“turning 200” (this prompt inspired by my grandmother-in-law’s recent 90th birthday.)

Heather surveyed the room of happy faces, here for her birthday party. She wasn’t the first person to turn 200, but she was the first she knew. She had lived a healthy life, reaching 95 before the longevity treatments became available. Since then it had been smoothing sailing. She didn’t feel a day over 65. Physically.

Several of her great-great-great-great grandchildren played across the room. She mostly didn’t know their names or the names of their parents. That was odd to realize. When she had an expiration date, the young had seemed like the greatest investment she could make, the only real way to some kind of reach beyond the grave. Now that she was still around… well even the 100 year olds had so much to learn. Apparently the country agreed with the average age in the senate at 120.

The guests sang happy birthday, and Heather sat politely through it. She could bear anything with equanimity. She had time. After cake, she checked the news, something to do.

Third bicentennial dies under unknown circumstances, one headline read. She pushed the article up. The authorities couldn’t tell what had killed the man. A scientist sourced noted how little was known about the physiology of the extremely aged, due to small sample size. The three cases would be researched extensively, no doubt.

Heather had faced death before. But now she quaked in her chair. If the treatments had limits, she would surely face them before they were solved. She wasn’t prepared. She had been before, resolved to her fate for decades. She walked out of the celebration. There were things to do.

Writing prompt: Pop-up People

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Pop-up people”

Light speed was a drag—it left the far colonies as alien to us as Victorians from Flappers. So when GE broke the barrier, a cheer went up. There was more celebration than when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. But the scientists soon realized the limitations to their ©SuperWarp Field. No space more than a cubic millimeter could exceed light speed. We had communication, but no transportation.

Every attempt to spread the field beyond a cubic millimeter failed, often disastrously. Finally another idea arose—if the field couldn’t grow larger, maybe the object could grow smaller. The nucleus is compact enough, but around it, electrons swim in a luxuriant, and frankly wasteful, vacuum.

Using the repulsive nature of dark matter, Sandia devised a way to compress matter as in a neutron star. Suddenly, a cubic millimeter was a damned fine amount of space. We sent little grains of rice to the colonies, full of a thousand people and a multitude of machinery in compression stasis.

The pop-up people went to the stars.

Writing prompt: I’ve never seen one, but how hard could it be?”

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“I’ve never seen one, but how hard could it be?” (This prompt inspired by the Erie Canal, built by four men who hadn’t even seen a canal when they set out to build one.)

 

“I’ve never seen one before, but how hard could it be?” Emmaye Cevluss said. “They built them practically in medieval times, it’s just a ditch full of water.”

*

Three months later and how she regretted those words. Without construction equipment, how did she remove the dirt? Without drafting software, how did she visualize the project? How would she calculate stress loads? On this new world, where would she find the materials for good concrete? For good steel?

How hard could it be? A canal connecting the bay to the western part of the peninsula with the quarries and mines. It might as well be a space elevator. Since they had arrived on this world, every day was a day spent learning to adjust to all the things it didn’t have.

Their ship, the Neva, was supposed to help with many of these things. Instead it sat broken, useless, to the west. All the energy it held was devoted to cold storage, to keep biological samples like seeds and useful fungi and bacteria until they could be properly used. And now the cold storage was having issues.

And it was starting to rain a lot. Especially a lot for a supposed desert region.

It was going to be a while before there was a canal.

Writing prompt: Feeling spooked while camping

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Feeling spooked while camping”

I’m not really a camper. But still, I couldn’t turn down an invite from a friend to go camping in the newly opened Blue Ridge preservation area. Even with trees designed to sequester radiation, no one but researchers and workers had been allowed in for nearly 200 years, after the one that missed DC. Now my researcher friend had passes for the soft opening, and what could I say? The Appalachian Mountains were nearly 500 million years old, and I’d never seen them except in pictures of spooky decaying ruins—Monticello falling into the Earth and the old Blue Ridge Parkway cracked beyond recognition in some vids online.

Jaden set up the tent. He’d camped before, but not in this area of course. Tonight and this week, 500 people tested the park, carrying dosimeters and basically giving things one last look-over. I helped Jaden build the fire that night, and I imagined eyes watched us from the trees. I’m sure they weren’t, and I focused instead on what a tricky cooking medium fire and charcoal could be. I couldn’t even tell the cooking temperature.

Insects began as twilight grew deeper, unnerving and yet exciting. These must be the eyes I imagined watching me.

Writing prompt: An impending storm

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“An impending storm”

Enka jabbed at the thin soil with her trowel. If the flimsy little sprouts took to this thin soil, it would be a miracle. She knew that this work was essential, but understanding its importance didn’t make it any more enjoyable. Sometimes Sasha sang when she worked, low and slow, like a dirge. That matched more with how Enka felt about the work.

Around her, people paused in the work. “The tower,” they said. Enka looked up, and indeed, there was a light in the tower. She and the others watched the light, eager to know how severe the coming storm would be. The sky was clear and purple now, but Enka knew not to trust it. She’d heard stories of how confusing the sudden weather was to the Founders. People who lived with radars and satellites and never had to rely on their instincts. Not that instincts did much in the sudden and violent weather on this planet.

Two long blinks. A bad storm was coming. She helped the others pull tarps over the delicate seedlings. Then they would have to find shelter. Sometimes she wondered what the storms must be like for the towerkeepers, so high in the air during such violence, unable to run. A few months ago, one to the north collapsed, taking its keeper and several homes with it. Enka was glad that her own home was not in the shadow of the tower.

A little part of her longed to be up in the tower. Every time the storms came, she hid, and she saw the beautiful violence afterwards. It must be enthralling to stand within. The others had already fled home. Did she really have to be in the tower to stay and watch the storm?

Writing Prompt: Monkey Day

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Time: 5 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Monkey Day” (This is actually a real thing, every December 14)

Today was Monkey Day, the biggest day of the year for the elevated chimps and tarsiers. Although it originated centuries ago amongst humans as a joke, it was no such thing now. The elevated walkways for the monkeys above the streets were be-decked in glittering tinsel, far more interesting than the lights that glittered below for Christmas. Monkeys swung across the path, throwing toys and playing with tinsel. Not that such things held their mighty intellects anymore, but Monkey Day was a celebration of how far they had come since those days. It was a day where elevated primates had a little joke at themselves, where they had come from. In a way, it was like April Fool’s Day, except the monkeys actually recognized the inherent silliness of all sentient beings, rather than pretending such things were isolated to a few members of the species.

Bananas decked the table of every monkey, and the day started with the shrill, high-pitched laughter one used to hear only in zoos. Beware, humans, it was the Monkeys’ Day!

 

Book Review: Holy Fire (Bruce Sterling 1996)

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Note: in this review, I spoil nothing past the first 20-30 pages or so. You can see more reviews and an excerpt of the book here.

Rating: 4/5 stars

I really enjoyed “Holy Fire”. Though it is high-tech, low life in the fashion of cyberpunk, I found the characters much more believable than most cyberpunk books. The characters still have ambitions and hopes and don’t just spend their time dwelling on how awful life is (any more than we do now). The book is set about 100 years in the future, in a society where the very elderly call the shots and society is about collectively minimized risk and efficiency. The main character, Mia, is an elderly woman who partakes in a medical procedure to extend her life, and her subsequent adventures. Mia struggles with the effect on the young of a society dominated by the old and her own risk-averse tendencies. Along the way she meets a lot of fun people.

Before I read “Holy Fire”, I was aware of Bruce Sterling and his reputation as a cyberpunk author. I had read the canonical cyberpunk work “Neuromancer” by Gibson, and I was not impressed. Cyberpunk seemed just like rebranding dystopia. But a friend (check out her well-received science fiction work here) loaned me “Holy Fire” by Bruce Sterling, so I read it.

The book is also populated with cool gadgets that are irrelevant but colorful. Sterling doesn’t dwell on any particular one, and the book is peppered with fun droplets of future tech. There is a dog that has been technologically enhanced to be able to talk, but in the fashion that a dog might. There are cities built of edible bio-materials. There are programmable wigs.

Ultimately, I’m not sure if the book hangs together fully in the end for me. I’m not sure if the tales of Mia add up to say something to me. So perhaps it is not a masterpiece. But I enjoyed it thoroughly the entire time I was reading it, which is a rarity. Also a vivid female protagonist is nice (this was actually why my friend recommended the book). To anyone interested, I would definitely recommend a read.