Onwards.

Ye gods. I’ve got piles of notes, I know where the plots going, I can even visualise out the next scenes, know what should happen its all just waiting to be written. But motivation to do so …

Right! Right, thats its. Coincidentally on this night of pitiful wailing, it is also one calendar month before I come home for Christmas. Thus – I shall have an mark two draft ready for then. I will do corrections on the airplane. No more Fallout, no more Fall from Heaven – no loading Halo or Oblivion or Bioshock! No ordering more books (not more than the half dozen on their way already) – no nothing!

Fun time is over, time to write.

Wait, this was fun time?

Quiet you.

Checking my notes, my task list has ‘antagonist background/POV’ stuff that I don’t know if it should be included at all and setting flavour stuff that will have to go in at reedit. Ah… except that one there, that needs to go in. Ok, tomorrow.

Once I’ve proofed this I’ll have to get it looked at to see does it say what I think it says; I’ve stolen the title from Attempt II, theres a bunch of characters who’ve been written in as I did the scenes, I need a big chunky clean-eyes continuity check – but that can wait until I’ve made sure there are no dead sentences and remaining ‘[insert scene X here]‘ flags left…

So far so good.

I am quite pleased that I called islamic terrorism as ‘the issue’ but I was way, way too optimistic on the march of technology on one hand and missed the behavioural stuff like once people have a mobile phone all arrangements become ad hoc… and if people are still ‘base station’-ing its because they’re using fat pipe for high bandwidth web use – if its just talk, that’s done on the move.

The classic cyberpunk crash is happening now, rather than a few years ago… the underclass never teched up, they’re still killing each other with iron-age analogues… the police never went ‘Tank Police’ in response…

Though the ‘monocycle’ I stole in turn from Venus Wars maybe on its way…

I dodged the question because I didn’t want to go dredging through the muck and provide presentable evidence of this creative outlet, in case the asker wanted to know more. In the years that followed, I managed to write fiction that, while still bad, might be considered presentable in the right context. I presented it in the right context, and it was received well. (This hasn’t encouraged me to open it to a wider audience, however, so don’t ask.)

Nothing I write is succinct enough to cut the mustard in this context, but I encourage y’all to check out the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The task is to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. The spectacularly earned grand prize went to this entry:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.
Jim Guigli
Carmichael, CA

The runner up made me laugh so hard I was glad no one else in my office had shown up yet:

“I know what you’re thinking, punk,” hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, “you’re thinking, ‘Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?’ – and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel loquacious?’ – well do you, punk?”
Stuart Vasepuru
Edinburgh, Scotland

* I was not a knitter when this question was asked. If asked today, I would still not mention knitting, both because I don’t chat about it with strangers and because I don’t apply that much creativity to it. I could, but I don’t.

Its genius is only rivalled by the Perry Bible Fellowship. I don’t know who the kid who does xkcd is, but he seems like the sort of person who should be in Gamers. It’s particularly freaky to reverse through the archive and see a romance-backwards.

Either way, even if you don’t get that joke, you will get some of them. Trust me, I want to be a Dr.*

*of philosophy in Computer Science.

The constable on the platform has halted my luggage, who are just sitting there now while he insists on seeing papers. He’s twice my age, if that, fat from the easy life in Thaos and probably as corrupt as he is stupid. Only someone truly cretinous would think that someone else would try something as stupid as march through a public terminal with illegal creatures. Even my ragged little familiar, my first real success at invigoration, is legal, albeit two half-cats stitched together – a ginger one and a black one – to make a whole one. Nothing in the city ordinances about having posession of dead creatures who are not a threat to public health, and apart from a rather strong odour of embalming fluid, the only threatening thing about Leo is the fact that he’s ever so slightly lop-sided, so it is possible that if he was somewhere high, he might slip and he is a rather large cat. Was a rather large cat. Two rather large cats. Needless to say it could hurt if he fell on you.
The contents of the chests on the other hand are in fact questionable – but they are under diplomatic protection, as am I, with the relevant seals and permits. I pull these out of my belt to hand to the constable. He flinches. How endearing – he thought I was going to strike him down with my awesome mastery of death.

Idiot.

He takes my passport, beaten steel covers etched with the seal of the Thaosian Consul General. He should have stopped there, he should have known that meant the Princes court had reviewed and accepted my papers. But no. He opened it, letting the document unfold to display my credentials, letters of authority and authorisation as a diplomatic envoy of the Inheritors. I pluck my papers from his fingers as his hand goes limp and he pales.

“Go..” his voice is a hoarse whisper and he struggles to control his gag reflex.

“Certainly.”

I fold up my papers without looking at them. Even just touching the horrid living script that old Suquol wrote conjures mental echoes of depth and darkness and the disturbing feeling that everything around me is a poorly painted stage set hiding crouched and ravenous horrors. Its a hint of how the Inheritors perceive reality – their world inhabits the same location as ours but has more dimensions. What I perceived as crouched horrors, they would recognise as their fellows. I am not a dimensionalist but from what I have gathered through my time among them an Inheritor ‘inhabits’ far more space than its physical form that we perceive and this space is not necessarily contiguous to our sense of things.

This comes across in their writing which is why I never, ever read what they write in their own tongue. Leading my luggage onwards I hear the constable retch behind me. At least he will be reasonably functional for his undemanding duty in a short time; the shock and skewing effect it has on me is usually sufficient to rob me of my talents for hours, if not days.

I guide my luggage onboard and chivvy them into one of the luggage racks at one end of the carriage. They clamber over one another to stack, then brace their legs to lock into place. I take a seat further down in the open carriage with a view of the racks. Most of my classmates would not deign to travel in such low class surrounds, but I find that details such as my skull-topped staff and my ragged familar tend to keep irritating people away. Those who do approach are usually worth talking to.

I fold my cloak and put it on the overhead rack before sitting down and pulling out out my slide-rule and the most precious sorcerous resource I posess. Not, as many would have, an elixir of eternal youth or pact with the hells or some staff of devastation. No, my most precious possession is my mimic-book, a small, light brass-trimmed quarto with about five dozen pages each of which holds the imprint of what ever was pressed against it – and right now I get to do what I have been putting off for my entire trip. If I have to invigorate some two dozen cadavers, whats the minimum energised ichor I will need? If monkshood is roughly two-and-a-half times a potent as hellebore, but I want to use hellebore because its far easier to aquire, what secondary impacts will that have?

The logistics of the undead. I bet they’re glad they have no brains and don’t have to bother with all this.

I’m going to bring Fang and Mandible (Fangs fold out keyboard) and get started on My Novel, which I shall write in the next month. I’ve written my report for college and finally finished committing to record The Burning, so I’ve been very writey and feel optimistic.

I imagine an world where the idea of zero point energy has been develloped – in that a practically limitless amount of energy can be made available anywhere and shaped into any sort of ‘thing’ of energy or matter. So one could feed a world with replicators in every living quarters or a transfer grid keyed to your phone – “Hub, I want a margharita.” – and ding it appears.

So anyone can have anything, anytime they want. Nothing physical is ‘unavailable’ therefore nothing physical is of any value unless its sentimental. Anything scanned can be replicated. Even planets are largely disposable – if one is shattered in fighting, just build a ringworld or whatever. Over a long enough time frame, even stars can be fabricated. And so we come to the Empire of the title. Empires are viewed as being bad because generally they enrich the Imperial heartland at the expense of the subjects in the dominions. In a cornucopia this ceases to be an issue.

But given that this is Leaguespace, and that a vicious and ruthless Empire has been in charge for millenia, this turns into a Military Empire; where all worlds are settled by ‘our’ people, and guarded to ensure no threat ever arises. In the case of Leaguespace this makes sense since there’s two of them – the Adversary and the Leader out there, possibly even ‘in here’ through stooges.

An Empire is the only way to centrally control a large galactic union, and given the paranoia of its rulers, massive use of military force to wipe out any insurrection would be appropriate response since industrial capacity is no longer meaningful and populations are replaceable.

Suddenly mindsets become the only things holding things together. Beliefs and ‘why’ boil down to dogma, lust for power and all the other things that come from being at the top of the pile and knowing that if you don’t stamp very hard on anyone who looks up from further down, they’ll come after you, in large numbers, with the best weaponry their omnifabricators could magic out of the ether.

So – where coin is worthless the only coin of the realm is power and the will to use it without hesitation or compunction. In fact, it suddenly appears to me that only a system as structurally malicious as the Draxian Creed, with cruelty and viciousness ingrained into its very reasons for being could survive the shock of unlimited energy/resources. If technology provides unlimited plenty, then it turns into a sort of galactic night-watch state (of varying levels) where the only aim is to maintain the status quo and prevent something horrible like a nanoplague or other internal threat.

Essentially everyone in the galaxy lives under the heel of the Navy so that the Imperials can feel safe. Does this sound reasonable?