Sadly this isn’t the final version of the draft, that’s been lost somewhere along the line but I thought I’d post it here in case anyone fancied reading it anyway.
The bit with the wolf and the woodsman as well as the end where I needed to get the final act down are missing. If I can find them and if anyone’s bothered I’ll see if I can dig it out from somewhere.
And I’m too busy to take part again.
Still, at least this time around I’m gainfully self-unemployable. Zoe seems to be hammering through her story, almost 8k words in on day three. That’s good going if she can keep up the momentum. I’ll try again next year.
Matt’s not doing the script frenzy with me. He’s got his physics degree last exams to battle through.
Guess it’s a one-man effort this time round then, I’ll grab him for NaNoWriMo.
I dug out my yellowing copy of Mirrorshades this morning, almost burning the facon in the pan when I got a bit too absorbed in one of the stories. It’s an amazing little compilation that I suggest any modern sci-fi fans get a hold of if you still can. It’s got stories from Rudy Rucker, Greg Bear and William Gibson in it. The latter is the first story he ever had published and it is absolutely amazing, called the Gernsback Continuum. The compilation was only printed when Gibson had released Neuromancer and Count Zero so although he was already firmly entrenched in the sci-fi genre pantheon as a new god he was still quite wet behind the ears and hadn’t gone on to finish the Sprawl series or even start the Bridge trilogy. The Gernsback Continuum is such a beautifully crafted little story about the 30s – 50s future America that didn’t happen, covering only twelve pages but doing so with such aplomb that I’m left jealously wishing that I could have even half the grace traversing the English language as he does. If you can’t find a copy of it, have a google for it, it’s really worth reading.
I think it was late in twenty thirteen or fourteen when the last of the Sperm Whales was found dying on a beach on Australia’s west coast. They said it had sang itself to death, beached itself from the madness of loneliness. Final miserable proof of intelligence if any where needed. Ironically it was the Japanese who shouted loudest about the horror of such a majestic creature being hurled over the precipice to extinction. It brought human awareness of what it was doing to the world’s ocean into sharp focus and mankind saw that it was on the brink of an extinction level event the likes of which had only occurred twice in the entire planets past. The difference was that this had been caused by mankind. By centuries of over-fishing we had culled the top-level predators for our own food, the marlin, the tuna, the cod, the hake, we had tipped the delicate aquatic balance. The fishing industry took an enormous hit as the memory of that last great beast of the sea moaned and baked in the hot antipodean sun, its peeling skin exposing first white blubber then red raw nerves to be pecked by gulls, it’s flukes pinched by crabs and rats alike. There was a televised twenty four seven candle-lit vigil for it. I remember watching it and crying sea-salt tears of my own.
The Probe slipped in from the elliptic to the asteroid ring circling the system. It had spent a good proportion of galactic spin decelerating into its current trajectory, expending a great deal of its bulk in carefully chosen particles from within its body. Keeping its shape as evenly weighted and asteroid-like as possible, mass-driving bits of its being against its direction of motion from deep, hidden barrels. Apart from the odd minor roll and course correction, the rock, smooth and featureless like a huge river polished pebble, yet as matt and black as the surrounding vacuum, pitted and scarred by countless minute impacts during its frozen velvet journey, was still. Surrounded by the rubble of proto-planetary matter, it scanned silently and as unobtrusively as it was able. It listened.
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