“For some reason, I was expecting it to be all gray and cratered, like Earth’s moon,” Rei said.
“No, Dara has a substantial atmosphere and weather,” Rome said. “That is why we picked it. It reduces the engineering requirements that we’d need for a vacuum. Plus aero-braking is easiest when you have an atmosphere to rub against.”
“Still, you have to take off and land every time you need to do something. Wouldn’t a space station be better?” Rei asked.
“No,” Rome answered. “Most gas giants like Skyler’s World usually put out gigawatts of lethal radiation. We need the atmosphere of Dara to provide some shielding. Plus it undergoes rhythmic gravitational contractions which causes it to radiate IR which is trapped by the moon. It makes it easier to maintain a comfortable temperature.”
“But the gravity well?” was all Rei could counter with.
“The gravity well would only be an issue on take off. It is not an issue for landing,” Rome answered.
From my perspective, putting the first part of Rome's Revolution on Dara allowed for the dramatic final scene when Rei thought he had lost Rome forever. That was good enough for me.
Entry 2-106: April 11, 2014
In media res
In media res is a Latin phrase meaning "in the midst of things". It is a literary device that you are supposed to use in a novel to increase the reader's level of excitement as you go from one chapter to the next. If a chapter picks up exactly where the prior scene left off, the lack of jump would cause the reader to ask why you put a chapter break there in the first place.
When I wrote the original long-form version of Rome's Revolution, I did not know about this. I was going for a more you are there kind of vibe so to me, chapters were just a convenient place to let the reader breathe.
However after the thunderous silence that greeted that original version, I set about collapsing my original three novels into one and that meant a severe edit job.
At that point I had been taught about in media res so I took the opportunity to cause a break in time between chapters. For example, the original Chapter 1 ended with Rei and Rome leaving the airlock/iso chamber and walking down the corridor. Chapter 2 started with them continuing down the hallway and encountering Estar. Now I have Chapter 2 starting with Rei staring up at the ceiling in the Great Room in the middle of the star base proving that at least a little bit of time had passed.
In the current version, I have Chapter 3 starting the morning after Rome and Rei have slept together. Chapter 3 and 4 are pretty seamless. I would say I failed there. Chapter 5 starts up after another afternoon of passion. The rest of the chapters break as best as I could.
However, there was one pair of chapters where I broke this rule on purpose. Chapter 11 ends mid-sentence on an ellipsis and Chapter 12 picks up with a leading ellipsis. Chapter 11 ended with "as soon as the inner hatch opened, he jumped through the doorway and…" and Chapter 12 started with "…ran right into Rome, almost knocking her over." This violation was the chapter break (no in media res) that got the manuscript thrown at me one time. That was awesome!
Entry 2-107: April 12, 2014
The story I always wanted to tell
Many times I have told you that I think these stories are real, they just haven't happened yet. I get glimpses of the stories all the time, mostly in the shower, but they aren't always in sequence and many times they don't make any sense.
The whole concept of Rome's Revolution just came to me out of the blue in 1973 and ever since then pieces of the story have filtered down to me until I could weave them together into a coherent novel.
However, there were always a few stories that just didn't fit anywhere. When I combined the original three novels into one, the entire story of the Flying Horse had to be excised. But it was a story I always wanted to tell.
My fallback plan for all of these stories is The Vuduri Companion. This is the book I plan to put out after I complete The Milk Run. It will be short stories, deleted scenes, the original 1973 version of VIRUS 5 and Rome's Revolution plus much, much more.
Rei's last day on Earth was always slated to go into this compendium but I never actually wrote it. When I started Rome's Evolution, I realized I had to have connector pieces to tie up all the loose ends that had been left hanging. One of the stories was Rei's space walk where he retrieved his solid state music slab. Another item was why Rei didn't have a pair of sunglasses and how is it that Rome was familiar to Rei before he ever met her?
It was at this point that I knew I had to write the full version of Rei's last day on Earth. It was so satisfying to knock out the complete story and it came out so effortlessly since I had been thinking about it for some 40 years. I posted an article back a few weeks called What Sally Saw and even that was fun to finally connect with that fateful day in January of 2067 AD.
Entry 2-108: April 13, 2014
When is a tunnel not a tunnel?
In Rome's Revolution, during the 35th century, most of the travel between the stars takes place using PPT tunnels. However the word tunnel is misleading. We all think of a tunnel as dark hole that extends over some distance with a distinct entry and exit point. However, a PPT tunnel is infinitely thin. So thin that its edge is sharper than the sharpest blade ever constructed. It has been used to slice off hands, construct a campus (like in The Ark Lords) and yield other miracles.
Rei Bierak had the same notion as we do when it comes to the word tunnel. Here is a little passage to illustrate the first time he entered and exited one made by PPTs:
Rei watched in wonder as they passed through the tunnel but he felt no sensation other than the acceleration due to the engines. As soon as they were through, Rome told him to release the throttle. The plasma thrusters cut out and they coasted forward.
Rei look up and around. “Did we do it? Where’s Tabit?” he asked.
“Behind us,” Rome replied. “Here,” she said and took over the controls, twisting the navigation stick, rotating the tug so that it was facing the harsh glow of Tabit which now stood in front of them once again. The glint of the star reflected off the silver nose of the shuttle.
“How is that possible? We never entered a tunnel,” Rei noted.
“The word tunnel is meant figuratively, not literally like a tunnel on Earth,” Rome replied. “The word tunnel is from a perspective outside the ship. From inside, the tunnel would appear infinitely thin.”
“I still would have expected something,” Rei said. “Does your bloco and stilo work out here?”
“Insofar as it receives data from the on-board computer. Not from OMCOM,” Rome said, “not from this distance.”
“So do you know how far we jumped?” he asked Rome.
She closed her eyes for a second then said, “approximately one hundred light minutes.”
Pretty cool, huh? An infinitely thin tunnel that lets you travel between stars. Way better than a wormhole built from a black hole.
Entry 2-109: April 14, 2014
Suspension of disbelief
All of science fiction, not just the Rome's Revolution series, requires a certain suspension of disbelief. I mean my whole trilogy takes place in the 35th century, for gosh sake. I find it funny when people select one part of a work which is inherently implausible and say I couldn't buy this one part.
Take a look at this photograph by Laura Williams:
Pretty cool, huh? Remind you of anything? How about Rei's invisible chest because he was using the PPT vest during the first half of Rome's Evolution.
On its surface, you can buy that MINIMCOM invented a miniature, portable self-sustaining PPT tunnel that protected Rei's back (and later his chest). But he couldn't walk around like the woman in the picture. So I had MINIMCOM invent a tailored shirt with an electrostatic charge that kept it inflated in a shape that made Rei look normal. Of course if you pushed on the shirt, it would collapse in and your hand would come out the other
side.
And the electrostatic charge part is the one section that doesn't seem to be possible? Huh?
Entry 2-110: April 15, 2014
The Milk Run has begun!
I know I have been promising you The Milk Run starring Aason and Lupe Bierak for a long time. Well, I'm pleased to announce that finally it has begun. I have completed a draft of the first chapter which sets up the protagonists, the conflict, in fact, the entire plot. Just to prove I am not making this up, here are the first three paragraphs.
“AASON!” Lupe shrieked, her voice warbling in terror. The teenage girl’s bloodcurdling scream shattered the peaceful calm of the starship cabin which moments before had been filled by the gentle shushing sound of the Null Fold star-drive.
21-year-old Aason Bierak was caught by surprise. He had been staring straight ahead, lost in the mesmerizing blackness of null-fold space just beyond the cockpit’s windshield. It was a trap and Aason knew it but it was one in which he allowed himself a few minutes of entanglement. With a titanic effort, Aason tore his eyes away from the lush void to face his sister. He was horrified to see a waving set of translucent tentacles had emerged from nowhere, enveloping Lupe, constricting her in their grasp.
“What!?” Aason gurgled. He clawed at the clasp of his X-harness, snapping it open. He flipped off the straps, extending his frame. Even as he jumped out of the pilot’s chair, the crystal-like extensions of light were dragging his younger sister into a not-hole. There was no other way to describe it. Her whole body was distorted and it looked like she was being sucked into a vacuum hose. Aason leaped toward her, arms outstretched, but he was only able to brush his hand across one of her fingertips just as she disappeared into nothingness.
Exciting, huh? I am relieved to finally get going on this thing! I currently have it scheduled at 35 chapters and about 110,000 words. There will be one flashback in the story to help with a critical plot point and my first ever "flash-sideways" to show what is going on in another part of the universe that will dovetail with the main plot.
Stay tuned!
Entry 2-111: April 16, 2014
More on The Milk Run
Yesterday, I gave you a teaser for the beginning of my next novel entitled The Milk Run. Well, today I want to give you a little more of the setting and the main characters.
Of course there is Aason Bierak, son of Rome and Rei, now 21 years old. Also along is Aason's sister Lupe who is 16 going on 30. However, as you can see from yesterday's post, she disappears in the opening paragraphs and is gone for three-quarters of the story.
The starship "star" of this book is Junior (MINIMCOM, Jr. actually) and also in attendance is a clone of OMCOM's library clone as well. The story starts out near Tabit, home of Planet OMCOM but quickly shifts to the Nu2 Lupi star system which was supposed to be the home to two habitable worlds. When Aason arrives, he only finds one which is puzzling.
That one world is called Hades by the residents and is very cold most of the year. The vegetation has adapted and the forest in which the denizens reside is embedded in something they would call a forest but it looks more like a pile of Jenga blocks to me. Here is an image of what sort of resembles this forest:
From there we move on to the "invisible planet" called Ay'den by the residents who happen to be intelligent, ambulatory plants.
The plant people, who refer to themselves as the K'val, have three stages of life. The first stage is the seedling stage. When they get large enough, they pull their "feet" out of the ground and become mobile. Later in life, they replant their "feet" and grow tall and willowy and resemble trees that can talk.
Also on Ay'den is a second class of creatures, based upon a silicon version of DNA. I wrote about these "living crystals" in a previous post.
I think that's enough spoilers for now. The only thing I'll mention is you get to meet Lupe's "cousin" who is also a starship named Fury. This particular ship is pink! So is her livetar. It's going to be wild.
Entry 2-112: April 17, 2014
Nu2 Lupi
Since much of the action of the upcoming novel The Milk Run takes place in the star system of Nu2 Lupi, I thought I'd give you a little more information about the star. From Wikipedia:
Nu2 Lupi (ν2 Lup) is a 6th magnitude G-type main-sequence star located approximately 48 light-years away in the constellation of Lupus. The physical properties of the star are similar to those of the Sun, though Nu2 Lupi is significantly older.
The fact that it is 48 light-years away meant that Ark IV, traveling at 5% of the speed of light, would take 960 years to get there under the best of circumstances. However, that far away, it took even longer. And it is so far away that there was no coming back and no secondary target. The Ark IV had double-sized propulsion module just to make it that distance.
Nu2 Lupi is thought to be one of the oldest stars in our stellar neighborhood. Three extrasolar planets have already been discovered orbiting this star however they are called "super-Earths" and are way too close to the star to be habitable. But where there's smoke, there's fire so I'm assuming that if the star has big but barely detectable planets, it might have a few smaller, habitable ones as well. The fact that the star is very old means if there were habitable worlds and life did bloom, it would be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. Who knows what's left?
You'll find out.
Entry 2-113: April 18, 2014
100 light minutes
In the post entitled ‘When is a tunnel not a tunnel?’, Rei and Rome had just taken a small jump through a PPT tunnel and traveled about 100 light minutes. I thought I'd just give you a little perspective on how far that is.
Light travels at 300,000 kilometers a second. At 93 million miles, the Earth is 8 light-minutes away from the Sun. Mars is about 20 light-minutes from the Sun. Jupiter is 45 light-minutes and Saturn is about 80 light-minutes from the Sun. That means in a single jump, Rome and Rei traveled 20% farther than the distance from the Sun to Saturn. It's not nearly as far as Neptune which is 160 light-minutes from the Sun but it's still pretty far.
In the original, long-form version of Rome's Revolution, I also noted, as author that the tug 'was facing the harsh glow of Tabit which now stood in front of them'. But from that distance, would Tabit have a "harsh glow" or would just look like any other star? Here is what the Sun looks like from Saturn in a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
100 light-minutes is more than 10 to the ninth miles (greater than 100 billion miles) or as Rei observes, nearly 200 billion kilometers. That's a nearly incomprehensible distance. But look what else you can see in the picture below. That tiny dot, indicated by the yellow arrow, is the Earth, glowing quite brightly as seen from Saturn.
How cool is that?
Entry 2-114: April 19, 2014
Any landing
It's been said many times that any landing you can walk away from is a good one. While it may seem silly, it underscores the inherent danger in landing any aircraft or spacecraft.
During Rome and Rei's first foray into space, Rome trained Rei on how to perform a stop-jump using PPT tunnels. When they returned to Dara, however, Rome would not allow Rei to land the space tug. Here is her exact take on the subject:
“Very good,” Rome said, lifting Rei from his reverie. “Now we land. It is just a little trickier. I will have to show you. This is not a procedure that you can practice. We normally do not do this manually, but you need to know just in case.”
When we review all the takeoffs and landings in the entire Rome's Revolution series, you will discover there is never actually a documented instance in which Rei landed the spacecraft they occupied.
He did not land the tug on Dara that first time. He forced Rome to take over their emergency landing when they arrived at Deucado. When they got to Earth, the unseen controllers from Earth Space Command took over the controls of "The Flying House" and landed for them. When they retur
ned to Deucado, MINIMCOM had already morphed into his starship form and handled all the takeoffs and landings for them.
Even in The Ark Lords, when Rei is at the controls guiding Junior to Darwin Base, Rome had already handled the entry into the atmosphere. In Rome's Evolution, MINIMCOM does all the heavy lifting and Rei never actually manually controls anything.
Oh well, maybe someday he'll get to do a landing on his own. I hope it's a good one!
Entry 2-115: April 20, 2014
The 6502
The 6502 was a microprocessor chip created by MOS Technology in 1975 to compete with Motorola’s 6800 microprocessor that was introduced one year earlier. What made the 6502 so successful was two-fold. First, it cost less than 20% of its competitors and secondly, it had “indirect mode” and true indexing.
The first microcomputers I worked with were the PDP-8 (although some might call it a mini-computer) and the Altair 8800:
But my first true love was the 6502-based KIM-1 micro-computer:
KIM stands for Keyboard Input Monitor and came with the huge total of 1K bytes of RAM. That’s 1024 bytes. However the first 256 bytes, called Page 1, were reserved for the special addressing mode and the next 256 bytes were reserved for the stack so you really only had 512 bytes to play with. Think about that. I just bought a 2 TB external hard drive for $99 and the KIM-1 had 1K!
Tales of the Vuduri: Year Two Page 13