I got my hair cut last friday and while I was waiting for my turn in the chair, I did a little writing with my ipod touch, which was an experience onto itself.^ipodtouch But this is a post about what I wrote, not how I wrote it...

In recognition of my need to work on a new story I began to work on developing a new story. For the past year or so I've been working in a much "harder" context than I might otherwise be prone to. No FTL, no aliens, and if we ignore station keeping, no alien worlds, no terraforming, and nothing more than say 500 years in the future. I mean I'm not particularly rigorous from a technical perspective, and while I have a rough grasp of Hohmann Transfer Orbits and Lagrangian points I don't exactly do the math to check if there'd be a fuel efficient launch window arriving on Mars in late 2542.

Also at issue is the experience of my first-highschool-era novel which was very FTL/military/alien worlds/terraforming/etc and as I went back I found all that absurd.

So I figure, I have a fiction blog, I could write something short, play with a world briefly with hyperspace and aliens and what not, and if it sucks, it'd be over soon enough. So I sat down, and began to write some notes for the world and for the character that I want to (re)use.

Guess what?

No FTL. Alien worlds and terraforming, and outlandish technology on the interstellar ships, but no FTL.

It seems that no matter what I do I really want to write stories about isolated populations of people, because that's where cool things surrounding group identities/histories develop, and if people can hop on a ship and be "home" in a week or two, the creation of new worlds doesn't provide a cultural situation that is fundamentally unique from our current globalized world.

Sigh.

Thoughts?

/Onward and Upward