Category: Literature

Thoughts on Jack London’s Short Story, “To Build a Fire”

photog Book Reviews, Literature, photog's Corner, Reviews , , ,

When I was young, every high school English curriculum would include a review of some classic short stories and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” was inevitably among them.  And rightly so.  Within the space of seven thousand words London casts a spell that draws you into the inhuman realm of winter in the Yukon.  We barely have a thumbnail sketch of the protagonist; “the man” and his unwilling accomplice; “the dog.”  But we learn the tragic details of what can happen when a man ignores the physics of arctic winter weather.

‘At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolfdog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man’s heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.’

…

‘Already all sensation had gone out of his feet. To build the fire he had been forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly gone numb. His pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the surface of his body and to all the extremities. But the instant he stopped, the action of the pump eased down. The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow. The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his body. The extremities were the first to feel its absence. His wet feet froze the faster, and his exposed fingers numbed the faster, though they had not yet begun to freeze. Nose and cheeks were already freezing, while the skin of all his body chilled as it lost its blood.’

…

‘A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.

…

He drifted on from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek. He could see him quite clearly, warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.

“You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.

…

Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.’

London reveals the emotions and thoughts that race through the mind of the man as he tries to escape the consequences of his terrible mistake.  But at every turn he’s thwarted by the limitations that cold have imposed on his failing body.  And we listen to his thoughts as his time runs out and he accepts his fate.

Jack London created a remarkable story.  There is no filler.  The story only includes what is needed to paint the picture of a tragic human tale.  And I will say that if I ever write anything half as good as, “To Build a Fire,” I will consider myself an accomplished writer.  Well done Mr. London.

Life over Art

photog Book Reviews, Literature, photog's Corner, Reviews , , , , ,

Thomas Mann was a famous German author whose heyday was the first half of the twentieth century.  He had a Nobel Prize in literature for one of his novels and a reputation for writing psychological stories that were full of melancholy and longing for lost happiness.

In addition to his novels which were too long for my liking he wrote a handful of novellas that were collected in an English translation under the title “Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories.”  One of these stories is named “Tristan” and is the story of a sanitarium up in the Alps that especially treated people suffering from tuberculosis which is never actually named in the story but only hinted at when a patient would cough and then check a handkerchief for blood.  But in addition to the actual patients at this sanitarium called Einfried there was one resident who stayed there for the atmosphere; a “novelist” named Detlev Spinell.  And novelist would be an exaggeration.  No one has ever read his book and even letter-writing is an enormously slow and painful exercise when performed by him.  In the story, this writer is the cause of the death of a woman who is attempting to recover from a mild case of tuberculosis which is several times emphatically stated to be only affecting “the trachea, and not the lungs, thank God.”  He is a malevolent force that insinuates into the young woman’s mind that she is the victim of a crass, plebian existence that sacrificed her health and artistic spirit at the altar of mundane human activities, specifically; marriage and childbirth which was the event that sapped her strength and weakened her body sufficiently to allow the wasting disease to get the upper hand with her.

And this unhealthy influence by Spinell eventually causes her health to completely break down.  And so, the doctors call for her husband to return to the sanitarium before her incipient death.  And while this catastrophe is occurring Spinell takes it upon himself to write a letter to this husband who at this point is occupying a room in the same building.  He painstakingly writes the letter, mails it, smiles at the husband in the hallways when they meet and gives no thought to what will happen when the letter returns from the post office to the building that they both reside in.  The letter is an insulting and disparaging polemic attacking the husband for his “plebian” tastes and lack of artistic feeling.  And he announces that he has awakened the wife to her true spiritual stature and thereby causes her to renounce her allegiance to ordinary life (and by that choice, life itself).

Now all of this is quite bizarre but Mann paints the personalities of husband, wife and Spinell very skillfully.  And this allows the personalities and their relationships to each other to make sense.  The husband is a very plain and “normal” individual.  A businessman who embraces the life of a husband and father along with his hard charging life as a capitalist.  He loves his wife and child but he isn’t above pinching a maid in a hallway when the opportunity arises.  The wife loves her husband and child but she has the artistic side to her personality and she can be influenced into believing that the prosaic life of a housewife and mother is a demeaning occupation for someone as sensitive and with such an elevated soul as herself.  And then there is Spinell.  He is an abnormal spirit of the “artistic” type who sees life through a prism that only values the spiritual and pure emotions and sensibilities of the artist.  All ordinary things like the normal male/female relations are fraught with unacceptable amounts of inartistic reality.  Thus, his hatred of the husband in the story and his beatification of the wife.

The climax of the story, to my mind is the collision when the husband reads the letter and confronts Spinell down the hall from him.  He reads parts of the letter to the author and then rains verbal abuse on the head of his frightened and contrite adversary.  But just as his screaming abuse reaches its crescendo, from out in the hall, comes news that his wife’s lungs have collapsed under the ravages of her ailment, causing her to cough up an enormous quantity of blood and that she is on the edge of death.  The husband shifts his focus onto the bearer of bad news:

‘“Is she dead?” yelled Herr Klaterjahn.  As he spoke he clutched the Rätin by the arm and pulled her to and fro on the sill.  “Not quite?  Not dead; she can see me, can’t she?  Brought up a little blood again, from the lung eh?  Yes, I give in, it may be from the lung.  Gabriele!”  he suddenly cried out, and his eyes filled with tears; you could see what a burst of good, warm, honest human feeling came over him.  “Yes, I’m coming.”  He said and dragged the Rätin after him…’

Mann shows us the reality of life and compares it to the shadow of life that Spinell hides in.  He uses art to hide from life.  As for the husband, who really was a crass, plebian individual full of crass plebian faults, he is also a living, breathing human being.  Spinell is a wraith.  His artistic sensibilities and motives are pathetic and infantile.  Now this is coming from Thomas Mann who embraced art as the central motive of his life.  What I find interesting is that he so clearly shows us the primacy of life over art.  I find that powerful.

Exaggerations of the Simple Stuff of Human Life

photog Book Reviews, Literature, photog's Corner, Poetry, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , , ,

Act 4, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when the second witch says:

“By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.”

And Macbeth enters.  What a marvelous scene.  Witches, bloody ghosts and a demigod truly drained of his humanity.  A horror story in a stage play.  And then Ray Bradbury takes that line, “Something wicked this way comes” and makes it the title of his own American ghost story; the story of a haunted carnival.  Now what does Macbeth have to do with Bradbury?  Well, in both cases we have basically good people seduced by the devil.  Whether it’s Shakespeare’s witches or Bradbury’s Mr. Dark it is the story of men succumbing to the devil’s promise for their heart’s desire in exchange for their souls.

Macbeth wants the Scottish crown.  Bradbury’s Green Town denizens want various things.  Tom Fury and Mr. Crosetti succumb to lust.  Mr. Tetley wants money.  Miss Foley and Charles Halloway want their youth back.  Jim Nightshade wants to be older so he can indulge his various negative desires.  And for these things they risk becoming permanent prisoners of Mr. Dark and Mr. Cooger’s haunted carnival travelling the American continent in search of more souls to consume.

What a marvelous conceit.  An ancient locomotive from the Civil War era, arrives in small towns in the middle of the night and sniffs out the spiritually wounded inhabitants and lures them into the haunted attractions of the show.  If they wander into the house of mirrors, they will see their heart’s desire or their greatest fear.  Or they can follow the barker’s lure and enter the tent where the belly dancers expose their bodies for a silver dime.  And those that disappear are no longer recognizable as themselves and so cannot be rescued by any police force.

And redemption can only be had in Bradbury’s story if the devil is laughed out of town.  Laughter and happiness are the only cures for this evil.  The secret is to realize that life is not a tragedy.  Even at its worst, it is better than the alternative which is nothingness.  Pain and sadness and even death are a human story and in fact the only certainty in this world.  But it’s also still better than never existing.  Because no matter how sad and awful our existence, it’s still ours.  We get to feel it and react to it and maybe win a few rounds before we’re finally cornered and beaten by death.

So, the ride’s the thing.  That’s the lesson that Charles Halloway learns by the end of the story.  Even though he’s old and overwhelmed with trying to be the father of a young boy, that overwhelming challenge is his greatest opportunity to squeeze every bit of meaning and gusto out of what remains of his life.  And the boys get to see that fears and desires are exaggerations of the simple stuff of human life.  Lust and greed and fear are just the ingredients of life taken out of balance from their normal proportions and occasions.

I wonder who will take this theme up next?  Maybe I will, someday.

Does Fiction Publishing Still Exist?

photog Book Reviews, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews ,

Selling intellectual property has changed radically in the last thirty years.  We used to buy books at a book store.  We bought music at a record shop.  And we rented or bought movies at a video store.  And then we bought all these at a Walmart or an electronics store (well, maybe not the books).

Now we stream movies and pay by the minute or the month and listen to music more or less for free and books are just this thing that exists on Amazon as a free service or a minor expense.  And the marketing and advertising of these works is some inexplicable algorithm that somehow links up people to the things that would appeal to them.

Now, the only way a musician can make any money is by live concerts that people pay to attend.  But no one would pay to attend a reading of a chapter of a book.  So maybe very soon books will cease to exist as a commodity.

And I guess that’s just the way it will be.  Now I’ve been trying to finish up a novel (and fixing the last ten percent of the book has been much harder than writing the first ninety percent).  And when I attempt to market it, I’ll try it on some traditional publishers and if that doesn’t work, I’ll probably self-publish it on Amazon.  I have noticed that lately some authors try to start a “go fund me” campaign to drum up the support for the book before it’s released.  But I’m not sure how that would work for a new author.

I guess pretty soon I’ll know as much about it as anyone else.  But isn’t it interesting that now that technology allows for avoiding all the obstacles that the “gatekeepers” of traditional publishing provided, that the real problem would be the “needle in a haystack” reality of many millions of self-published books thrown together in an endless slush pile with no way to stand out to a jaded reading public.

Well, they say that Americans have always made the best salesmen.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that self-promotion is the real talent behind entertainment.  Hollywood was successful because they could get millions of eyes on their product.  I’m sure the same applies to selling books, movies and music.  It’s just that it’s a field I never got involved in.  Engineering is product that has to be sold but I was always just the product.  I was never one of the sellers except when I would be sent out with the marketing team to convince the buyers that we knew what we were doing and could provide them with the services and hardware that they wanted.  Books on the other hand need fancy covers with somewhat-undressed women and weapons of war and starships to attract the buyer’s attention and get him to plunk down his electronic money.

I’ve seen some marketing going on by some of the people I follow on X and YouTube and it all feels very tiring but maybe that’s because at heart I’m a very lazy guy and hawking product is hard work (at least for me).

And maybe this is all a transitory situation and eventually some more efficient way to link readers with new books that match their tastes will appear among the AI gods.

Well, just some musings.

Tom’s World – 12JUL2025 – The Joy of Reading

photog Guest Contributors, Literature, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

The gift of the ability to enjoy fiction, or nonfiction for that matter, has a requirement: an attention span exceeding a minute or two. And that seems to be becoming increasingly rare. Both my parents were readers, likewise myself and two siblings.

I don’t remember exactly when I started reading Sci-Fi but it was as a teenager somewhere along the line. But I suspect that I’m one of the few people on earth who, while in grammar school, read every single volume of Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover.

I really wish that Nook and Kindle were available back then. I started with Nook probably around 2010 and now use both. Point being that every book I’ve read in the last 15 or so years is still available to me. When, in 2009, I moved from my last residence in metro Atlanta where I had lived for 20 years, I “donated” a long bed and a half pickup truck loads filled to the brim with mostly paperbacks. What a loss! And that wasn’t the only donation made from that house.

I could have that entire mass of books on around several gigs on a thumb drive with lots of room left.

But at least I have the last 15 years and I find myself rereading. +The device keeps perfect order, organizing by order of purchase, title or author.

The Wise of Heart: A Modern-Day Re-Imagining of the Scopes Monkey Trial by Hans G. Schantz – A Book Review

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Fake Science, Literature, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , , ,

“Inherit the Wind” was a famous fictionalized account of the Scope’s Monkey Trial of the early twentieth century.  It centered on a young school teacher who was arrested and put on trial for teaching the theory of evolution in the Bible Belt where laws had been passed to forbid it.

Dr. Schantz has managed to swap out transgender orthodoxy for fundamentalist creationism in his story and crafted a courtroom drama that captures all of the nuances of our present-day retreat from reality that calls sexually mutilating adolescents, “gender-affirming therapy” and allows grade school teachers to conspire with social workers to perform these procedures on minors despite parents’ horrified resistance.  A high school biology teacher is accused of teaching the biological facts of human sexuality and this throws him in conflict with a state law that forbids a teacher from challenging a student’s “selected gender identity.”

For those familiar with the movie version of “Inherit the Wind,” some of the plot twists will reappear in a new analog.  But this isn’t a rehash of the old story.  This is a very in-depth look at the illogic and fallacies of the transgender narrative and the way different parts of the government, the medical profession, media and academia pander to the delusions of confused children and frighten their parents into allowing terrible things to be done to their children.

The story is inhabited by a cast of characters that interlock at multiple points.  Small town politics and society mesh with national political figures who have their own agendas but seize upon the trial as the perfect battlefield to win a victory for their side.  Both sides are portrayed believably.  The woke activists aren’t just straw men but sound quite close to what their real counterparts sound like in news clips.  The details of the trial sound extremely close to what the transcript of a trial would consist of.

So, what did I think of the story?  I think the story takes a while to get going.  There is a set-up needed to get all the pieces in position for the trial.  During this period the reader will have to be patient.  Once the trial gets going the story finds its stride and becomes a courtroom drama.  And I found the ending satisfying without being overdone.  As with its predecessor it doesn’t attempt to write a conclusion to the clash going on in the story but rather capture the flavor of the two opposing sides and show how each side attempts to paint itself and its opponents using the weapons that each prefers.  The Left fixates on emotions and idealism while the Right points to logic and reality.

Who is this book for?  Well, first off, people of the woke persuasion will not be amused.  Despite being reasonably accurate in his portrayal of the woke side they don’t come off as sympathetic characters.  So, this leaves moderates and people on the Right.  Also, this book is a courtroom drama and folks who read these are its intended audience.  Personally, I liked the book.  I liked the defense attorney and I despised the prosecutor.  This made the courtroom battle satisfying for me.  But you’ll have to make up your mind based on what I’ve described whether this is your kind of story.

Can We Move on from the Zombie Apocalypse?

photog Literature, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , ,

Since Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 there has been a steady stream of zombies.  Now that stream has become a raging torrent in the last ten years.  It’s been relentless.  TV shows, spinoffs, movies, sequels, commercials, comedies, romance novels, you name it.

But hasn’t it become an enormous bore?  First off, how ridiculous is the whole concept?  The rotting corpses of the dead are walking around attacking and devouring the living.  It’s really incredibly stupid as science fiction.  And as horror it’s so played out it’s hard to imagine there are still people willing to pay money to watch any more of this fare.

Isn’t it about time we came up with a more interesting apocalypse?  Even the Mad Max dystopia is better than zombies.  For instance, the Lord Humungus looks like he might have an interesting back story.  Maybe he was bullied as Schoolboy Humungus and would have preferred to rule the Wasteland with a more humane and progressive regime but you know how those dogs of war are once they’ve been unleashed.

After all, this is a big world full of all kinds of interesting people and customs and problems.  And with the Global American Empire seemingly winding down, writers and storytellers could concoct any number of fascinating local plot lines involving wars and criminal enterprises and local disasters that would require heroes and villains to give the audience their best efforts.

And of course, with the advent of AI and drones and all the other aspects of high technology leaving the precinct of science fiction and entering reality there really is no end to the possibilities available to a writer looking to thrill his audience with wholesale mayhem.  I hesitate to play up the bio-weapon genre because that comes too close to the “realistic” school of zombie apocalypse (ala the “I Am Legend” virus plotline).  But whatever the angle, the world is full of marvelous dangerous stuff where the most marvelous and dangerous stuff is human beings; live human beings not walking cadavers.

I am drawn to the idea of a future world where technology breaks down over the majority of the planet and has to be reignited by some local renaissance.  Maybe we reach peak oil and we get pushed back to steam locomotives and coal fired industry.  There could be some havens of modernity with old nuclear power plants limping along using fissile material scavenged from ICBMs.

And then some genius comes up with a new power source.  Or maybe it’s an old power source that he improves.  But whatever it is it would cause a ripple of change in this stalled out world.  And anyone with a little imagination can spin that into an epic of a bunch of novels.  In fact, it’s not that different from the Foundation books.  And of course, it’s a variation on the history of Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Of course, there is probably someone reading this who looks at this the other way around and says, “Wait a minute!  Why not write a zombie apocalypse in Roman Britain?”  To which my only answer would be, “Damn you, George Romero!  Damn you to hell!!!!!!!!!!”

Tempus Fugit – Part 5

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

“I said, That’s impossible.  That world has been dead forever.  You must be mistaken.”  Bertram McKenzie shook his head and I could see there were tears in his eyes, “No the stars don’t lie.  We are one thousand years in the future and that is Earth or what’s left of it.  And the rest of the solar system has also been impacted.  Mercury is completely gone.  Venus is worse than Earth and even Mars has lost its atmosphere completely.  The only thing I can think of is that a massive disruption of the Sun’s fusion process occurred in the last thousand years; something like a nova.  And the Earth as we knew it was destroyed utterly.”  I asked him exactly when did it happen and he said, “Without searching for the event it’s impossible to know.  It could have happened just a few years after our present day in the twenty first century or it could have been almost a thousand years in the future, right before when we are now.”

And then I asked him the question I had been thinking about most, “Bertram did we cause this?”  And he shook his head violently, “No!  No, no, no.  I didn’t do this.  This is just a coincidence.  How could the tiny energy I used to transport us cause this stellar event.  It’s not possible!”  But I was pretty sure there was fear in his voice and panic.

I was as frightened and panicked as McKenzie but I could see we had to get back to our time as quickly as possible and try to get ourselves re-grounded with reality.  I told him, “Alright none of this is anything we can act on here and now.  Let’s go home.”

The boys did some calculations and set up the drive within a few minutes and we made another run.  This time it was our Earth.  Alive and blue and beautiful.  I think there must have been tears in everyone’s eyes.  We were back about the time we left the LHS 1140 system to come back to Earth.  We had decided that two sets of “us” in the same time period even fifty light years apart might be asking for trouble.  We brought the craft in for a landing and I sent everyone home for the day.  And I went home that night and got pretty thoroughly drunk.

The next morning, I tried to think of who I should tell this awful thing to.  In a 1950s science fiction movie there would be a convenient convention of physicists with someone resembling Albert Einstein to break the news to.  All we had was tech billionaires and all they would be interested in was how to short the market at the perfect moment.

So instead, I decided to tell the President of the United States and let him figure out how to let the world know they were doomed.  Or maybe not let them know.  After all, maybe we should have some smart men think about this for a few days and then break the news in a way that won’t stampede civilization off a cliff any sooner than it already was.

I got on the phone to the White House and I set up an appointment with the President and his science advisor.  And I got a few of the wise men from the voyage to put together a dog and pony show to give some proof to my story.  It wasn’t a normal experience.  I don’t think either man actually believed me.  But the President told me not to breath a word of this to the press or anyone else until the NSA had a chance to think up a way to break it to the public.

On the flight back to Texas I got a text from McKenzie.  He said he needed to talk to me so I told him to meet me at my home at midnight.  He was there when I arrived and he looked like hell.  He said, “I think we did spark the nova.  When we caused the surge in the field that threw us back into the distant past it must have disrupted the time-space environment of the solar system and triggered the solar activity that destroyed Earth.”  I said, “Well, it’s too late to do anything about that now.  What we have to do is figure out how to save humanity from this disaster.  And I don’t think it’s a good idea to be taking the blame for all of this.  That’s probably the fastest way to commit suicide I can think of.”

But he shook his head and said, “But there is a way to fix this.  We take the ship and travel through both time and space and meet up with our ship while it’s in the LHS 1140 system and tell them how to adjust their program to avoid the surge.  Then the disruption will be prevented and everything will be back to normal.”

I think I looked at him as if he had three heads and said, “Do you know how insane that sounds?  How can we change the past?”  But he just shook his head and said, “It’s the only way!”

I told him to take the week off and we’d talk about this crazy idea when we’d both had a chance to get some rest.  I went to bed and when I got up in the morning there was a message from the field saying that McKenzie had refueled the ship and taken off.  At about the same time there was a message from Bertram it read, “Devon, I performed the mission.  Meeting myself was a frightening but interesting experience.  I convinced them to change the program and afterward I took a time trip, about fifty million years into the future and the big beautiful blue earth was still there.  So, all’s right with the world.

But I realized that this technology is much too dangerous for humans to fool around with.  So, I’m not coming back and I’ve taken all the key documents you would need to duplicate my invention.  I’m going home.  Goodbye.

Bertram McKenzie”

And that’s almost the end of the story.  He never came back.  But he said he was going home.  So, I had a contractor do a metal detector search of the area where the McKenzie family has lived in Maine for the last two hundred years and sure enough, they found a lot of those precious metals buried out in a field in Maine.  There was a rock with an inscription carved into it, “HEY DEVON.  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.””

At that point Devon stopped talking and just stared out at the wall behind me.  I said, “Well, it sounds like it all worked out for the best.”  His eyes snapped back on my face and he said, “Sure, sure.  You’re right, everything’s great.  I guess I’m just tired.”

But as I sat there, I thought of something, “Devon, if McKenzie met up with his earlier self and yours in the LHS-1140 system and they came back on time where are they now?”  He looked at me and nodded his head, “That’s what I’ve been thinking about.  I think the program fix he gave them destroyed their ship inside that system.  We’ll probably never know but I kind of think in some sense I may be a ghost.”

He was preoccupied so I said my farewells and left.  I’m not sure I believe the story, but I think he does.  I think I feel sorry for the richest man in the world.

Tempus Fugit – Part 4

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

“McKenzie’s face paled and his eyes were wide.  He said, “Something must have happened at the end of the program.  It got us back to Earth alright but then some kind of power surge must have caused a tachyon overload and shot us back along the time axis.  I need to review the instrument data.  I can figure out a way to send a tachyon pulse in the opposite phase and throw us forward but I need to do some calculations to calibrate the size of the pulse.  This is an enormous time change.  It may take a few oscillations forwards and backwards to calibrate it perfectly to our present day.  So, it may take us a few days to get home.”  I calmed down considerably after hearing this and told McKenzie to take his time and not to get upset.  And he did seem calmer after I said this.

The seven wise men got to work and were buzzing away at the data from the drive instruments for several hours.  And over the course of those hours, I suddenly began to see this accident as an opportunity.  I asked the photographic expert to see what he could do to capture as much data on Earth at 55 million BC.  And when I said this, it was like a switch was snapped on him and he got incredibly excited realizing what a scientific opportunity was in front of him.  And McKenzie lost one of his assistants as this fellow worked feverishly to record everything he could before we left the distant past.

And within a day they had their program worked out.  They even found out what had gone wrong.  Apparently, the drive needed a slower de-ramping at the end of the cycle to completely rule out the overload we had experienced.  McKenzie even cavalierly said it had been a lucky break because now we could add time travel to the capabilities of his drive.  And I laughed seeing him so full of bravado.

We set the time voyage for the next “morning,” whatever that meant, and when the time was upon us, we put on a brave face but I could tell everyone was keyed up.  We strapped in and the drive snapped on.  All the familiar feeling happened and then after what felt like a slightly longer period it shut down.  We cranked back the cover off the viewing port and there was Earth.  And it was awful.  The oceans were gone.  The planet was a blasted airless rock like the Moon.

We were all hit hard.  I said to McKenzie, “What is this?”  He looked even more upset than before but stammered out, “I must have overshot by a billion years.  This must be Earth after the sun runs out of hydrogen and becomes unstable.  But it doesn’t seem possible I could have been off so badly.”  He said he would use the position of the stars to get a read on how far in the future we were.  I said, “Sure, go ahead.”  And I tried to sound casual but I was scared, plenty scared.

The boys got busy figuring out the date from star locations.  After a few hours McKenzie came back to me and said he had the date.  I asked him how far in the future we were and in a flat intonation he croaked out, “A thousand years.””

Tempus Fugit – Part 3

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

“When we returned from Pluto we began the planning for the first interstellar trip.  We had about fifty stellar systems that had earthlike planets in what we measured to be the Goldilocks Zones around their stars.  We selected a red dwarf about fifty light years from earth; LHS 1140 whose second planet was believed to be a super-earth well within the habitable zone of its star.  We intended to take a lot of measurements of the planet and its neighborhood and then head straight home.

The crew would be me, McKenzie and a six-man science team that would take the measurements of the exoplanet and the surrounding system.  I also insisted that Bertram train one of his colleagues on his star drive in case any accident incapacitated him before the return.  He started laughing when I told him this, “Afraid I’ll jump ship and go native?”  I told him this was a dangerous mission and we had to have some redundancy for something as important as the astrogation.  He laughed again but he put together a manual for running his equipment and trained one of his “bosses” for the upcoming flight.

McKenzie set up the program for LHS1140 and the ship was equipped for a one-month voyage; oxygen, water, food, medicine.  I even brought some firearms, only because I realized where we were going there was no law in effect other than force.  I kept the locker those were in under lock with me the only one with a key or even knowledge of their existence.  I guess that was a little paranoid but you never know.

Came the morning of the trip everything had been inspected three times and the dashboard was all green lights.  We launched into the upper atmosphere and McKenzie set the program and a display counted down from sixty seconds.  When it reached zero, we felt the strange sensations of the drive for a few moments and then we felt normal again.  When we uncovered the viewing port there was a strange world far below us and the light of a red star was illuminating it.  The whole crew burst into spontaneous cheers.  You never saw seven nerds happier than these boys.  I thought they would never stop slapping each other on the back and jabbering about who had been most right about the planet’s appearance.  I have to admit I was pretty excited too.  That world was a mostly ocean planet with white clouds and what looked like island chains sprinkled across the equator.  There were even what looked like ice caps at the poles.  It was an amazing sight.

The boys spent the next week photographing and taking spectrograms of everything they could see.  I made a decision that for this first trip we would not enter the atmosphere of the planet.  Probably out of an exaggerated sense of caution I wanted to make sure that no microbes from this alien world found their way back to Earth.  The boys were bitterly disappointed but shrugged their shoulders and took it in stride.  After all, even a week flew by shockingly fast because of how busy all the observations and tests kept them.

Finally, I set the return hour for the morning of the eighth day.  McKenzie recalibrated his instruments by stellar observation and as the final minutes ticked off, we took our places and strapped in for the ritual.  Once again, the skin numbness and mental unease hit me but a few moments later it ceased and we cleared the viewing port to see Earth below us.  The rotation of the Earth had us facing the Eastern Hemisphere and so we could see Africa and Asia.  But something was screwed up.  India was floating off shore.  There was ocean between it and the Asian continent.  And when you looked at the whole world all of the land masses were “off.”

One of the scientists explained it to me, “That’s what Earth looked like 55 million years in the past.”  I looked at McKenzie and said, “I hope you brought your tools because we’re a long way from home.””