Author notes

181 - Nurturing Type

El Cid

on Aug. 11, 2017

And now a bit of a shift. Some breezy character insights here and now we'll be flipping over to see what's going on at the Nova Dagon docks, where things are about to become very not idyllic. I guess that qualifies as a spoiler?

Writing the dialogue for this page was tricky, because I was trying in one page to flesh out Captain Savage and Commander Benny, and make it both not too wordy and also sound like a natural conversation. Overall, I'm happy with it, and more importantly I won't be bothered to agonize over it any more than I already have!



REFERENCES

S.O.I.: acronym, “Sphere of influence.” Loosely analogous to the Hill Sphere in astronomy, which is the region around a celestial body in which it dominates the attraction of satellites. Essentially, it's the imaginary zone surrounding a large object – like a planet – in which all its moons orbit. In the context and vernacular in which it's used here, it's a plainspeak way of referencing Neptune and its immediate vicinity (moons, colonies, etc.). Its “airspace,” for all intents and purposes.

swarm colony: A colony within the Dyson Swarm around the sun. A popular retirement destination, it's like the Florida of the solar system in this fictional universe. Of course, retirement isn't truly retirement for most people; just a very long vacation before they re-enter the workforce or start a new family.

ice freighter: “Ice freighter” is a Neptunian term for freight vessels coming in from the Kuiper Belt, as opposed to from the inner solar system. In general, people don't use unwieldy terms like “Kuiper Belt” and “scattered disc” in everyday conversation, so on Neptune and Uranus, “ice”-anything is a catch-all way to reference something from the Kuiper Belt or beyond. People from the inner system use the same term to reference both the Kuiper Belt and Uranus and Neptune. It's sort of like French fries in France, or Buffalo wings in Buffalo, I guess.

Nova Dagon is an O'Neill cylinder colony in orbit over Triton. It is the final destination for Captain Savage's ship, the Diablo. (p. 154, p. 156, p. 164)





I hate time travel stories. Sorry, I just do. The only way they ever make sense, is if you don't think about them very much, which sort of defeats the purpose of them being (supposedly) high concept sci-fi in the first place. Either that, or the authors need to invent a bunch of plot-convenient rules which explain away the paradoxes while having exactly nothing to do with any sort of actual science.

Let's say you're Mister or Misses Clever Writer Person and you write a story about someone who goes back in time and kills Hitler before he rises to power. Okay… but now Hitler doesn't exist, which means our time traveler never had a reason to go back in time to kill Hitler in the first place… which means our time traveler wouldn't have gone back in time to kill Hitler… which means Hitler isn't dead… and so he rises to power… and now our time traveler goes back in time to kill Hitler… and then your head explodes.

Yes, you can always go the Copenhagen route and say that killing Hitler creates a new timeline, and so there's no paradox… but what does that actually mean? That means one of two things: Either (A) there are two timelines now, one in which Hitler died early, which you've created by assassinating him, and meanwhile the timeline where Hitler isn't assassinated goes on unchanged. In that scenario, you've effectively changed nothing for your own timeline. World War II still happened, the Holocaust still happened, all of it still happened. You've just escaped into an alternate multiverse where that stuff didn't happen. So good for you… but you haven't helped anyone in your own universe, which you've abandoned. Or, there's interpretation (B) whereby you actually destroyed the original timeline you came from, and created a new one in which Hitler is assassinated early. In this case, you've actually murdered billions of future people in the timeline you came from when you evaporated it by creating a new one. That would appear to defeat the purpose. Not only is it pointless, but in this interpretation, time travel is a monstrous form of total genocide.



I don't know what other interpretation of time travel there is that makes consistent sense. You're either creating an infinite causal loop, or you're escaping into a new timeline, or you're erasing billions of future people.

That's not the main reason I don't read time travel stories, though. Mostly I just don't like them because they're confusing and lame.