Writing: Sci-Fi Technology

 Almost at 200,000 words.  Currently—according to MS Word’s Wordcount—at 199,838 words.

 

Finally sat down and worked most of the way through a fight scene with (mostly) swords.

 

So, no lightsabers, so why swords?

 

Guns are common.  Different types of guns are common in this sci-fi world.

 

However, they are extensions of modern technology and modern tech already has a problem with overpenetration in civilian structures.

 

Just imagine how you’d need to build to stop future tech in a city or on a spacecraft….

 

So, I’ve gone three directions.

 

One is weapons following the inverse-square law of power.  So, powerful point blank, rapid decrease in power over a short distance.  Directional stunners, for example, or—to a lesser degree—what I call “boarding guns” which are high mass, low velocity weapons usually used to fire things like shot, flechettes, and low velocity payload items. 

 

A second is your low energy beam weapons with “triggered” effects.  Some overlap with the first group.

 

The last set are melee weapons because you know exactly how far your effective range is.

 

Now, shields do exist—a technology tied to gravity and inertially linked plating in this fictional universe because I’m entitled to speculate some “ubertechs”—but their primary effect is against light, fast projectiles including light and particle beams…

 

So, no Dune-shields and while a heavy slow blade can penetrate, it’s probably going to not be the same ever again and not have much of a precise edge on the other side.

 

So, people have and carry compact, extendable blades called “flickblades” and not everyone is Zorro or Inigo Montoya or Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.

 

Now, hopefully I can write something believable although—to be honest—my only “fencing” training was bayonet training a couple decades ago so sword fights will be brutal, hurt on both sides, and people that get solidly hit will probably leave bleeding—at least—if they leave at all.

Necro-Blogging

Oh, wait, I have a blog?

Oh, yeah.  THAT blog.

I seem to be writing a science fiction novel.

I like writing dialogue.  I'm loving worldbuilding.  I keep developing odd aliens and--to be honest--most aliens are not exactly compatible with humans.

Why should they be?

I mean, imagine sharing a dorm room with a dolphin.

In spite of being from the same planet and being an air-breathing mammal, imagine the difficulties in day-to-day life sharing a living space.

One of you is going to be miserable.  

Not just that, dolphins can function 24-7 by letting one hemisphere of their brain sleep at a time. They also have, let's call it, "an alternative morality," different senses in some situations, a tendency to excrete wherever they happen to be at the time, and some challenges operating human technology.

And that's a species from the same planet.

So, aliens will exist, there will be a few interactions, but the ideas of "humans with odd body colors and bits glued to their foreheads" and "snake women with breasts" are not my thing.

I like stories that make sense to me.

So, the rough draft is probably way too much detail, too much backstory involved, intricate plotlines considered--as much as possible--from both sides.

The challenge will be paring it down in the edit to have it make sense, stay detailed enough, but not drag on.

In the meantime, I keep doing side notes on worldbuilding including histories of planets, systems, people, and tech that might show up in a sequel/prequel if the first one works out.

As far as AI goes...

I hate AI text.

I'm using the hell out of AI images that I won't publish for two reasons.

One, I like having a touchpoint for physical descriptions I can work off.

By generating an image, I can go back and redescribe that element without having to use the same words, and there's an honest narrative there.

Second, I like to take descriptions I make, plug it into several AI image generators and see what "garbage in-garbage out" AI generation comes up with.

When it comes up with something that looks like what I'm after, I know I'm in the ballpark.

If it isn't, I know there's a difference between the image I have in my head and what I'm communicating on the page.  It tells me to revise what I have on the page.

Now, I'll also use AI for stuff like "Give me a list of 20 Latin/French descriptor words for planets that don't appear in other major works," and "Explain how commas work in quotes again?" because I had always thought of quotation marks like I did parentheses and brackets in math...

What's inside is its own thing; what's outside is its own thing.

Which, of course, is not correct.

Overall, though, I don't use AI writing or text and--if it's AI art--I'll either not share it or tell you exactly what it is.

Wish me luck!