Go go Gadget

Writing is a process of accumulating. Like a bit of dust falling through a supersaturated cloud, when you have a germ of a story it just starts collecting stuff from the environment around you.

My intended quick-and-dirty, write it in six months retro SF book has been collecting slowly. The cloud layer over there is sparse. Ran into a nice Reddit thread on Cassette Futurism, I've got lots of History of Tiki popping up in my feed, but...

The book I am trying to put off (the last book in the series moved ONE electronic copy. And as far as I can tell every print copy went to family or friends) is, however, sitting in an atmospheric river. Right now I just stumbled into a whole bunch of stuff about the locals who got irradiated in the Trinity test. I was thinking a lot about setting the climax there anyhow.

That's the thing, though. The magnet for the retro-SF novel is a weak one. That's most of it, right there; "retro SF adventure." I don't feel I have much to say or much to explore.

The Athena Fox story I'm trying not to get too involved with yet (or perhaps ever?) is measured in tesla. NAGPRA, indigenous archaeology (ran into a book that was briefly free on Kindle and snagged that right away). And the original seed is the still controversial pre-pre-Clovis footprints in White Sands. The Anthropocene (which as of when the novel is set hadn't been shot down by geology yet). And then there's the Drake Equation...

See, each Athena Fox story more-or-less has a location, an aspect of modern archaeology, and a slice of history. The slice for this one is Olaf Stapleton sized; the human race itself, from the first humans to cross into the Americas, to the Fermi Paradox and the possibility that we might be ending our own species some day (it looked a hell of a lot more likely to some in the early Atomic Age). And in typical Athena Fox style, brought into the plot, with a Persistence Hunter chase scene across the desert and a climax at the Trinity site.

And, yeah, this is...I don't know what you call it, but there's probably a term like "Pathetic Fallacy" that contains some of the same dismissive air. Maybe I'll waste the rest of today web-crawling in search of that. I wonder if the Turkey City Lexicon has anything?

That, and finish reading the nukee and laser-guy blog I discovered via Hackaday while looking for adapters...