Blue

Another plot bunny visited. This one is blue.

 

(From fanpop.com)

The first novel I finished, I had been writing an article for a gaming magazine. This was a little more straight-forward; I was thinking about concepts as a way to grasp cinematographic challenges of AI.

In that mix is thoughts I've had about wanting to do one of those Hornblower-esque career space navy things, and about wanting to do an engineer (who is more of a hacker), and thoughts about how to help Penny survive those situations where being Mistress of Waif-Fu would really, really come in handy.

And I ended up with a nice demonstration of how one idea can snowball into elaborate world-building...if you follow the potential implications. Start with a "heuristic implant." We're not going to get into the specifics of the tech here. Practically speaking, the young would-be soldier is sat under a helmet for a few hours, and when they get up;

Except experimental, very think-tank, with all the McNamara that promises. It is a whole set of combat skills that are deep-level muscle memory and happen basically automatically under the right stimuli. That right there is a whole host of problems. Bad enough your hands need to be licensed as deadly weapons -- now they are self-driving.

So that's a great character flaw, this killer instinct that could fire at the wrong moment, but at the same time, something that could help them through a sticky situation. Obviously (obviously, that is, when looked at from the needs of story, not through empty speculation on fantasy technology), they start meditating to at least control when it happens. And their relationship with this phantom driver...evolves.

(Yeah...Diadem from the Stars, The Stars My Destination, The Last Airbender -- not like this is exactly new ground.)

And that suggests a evolving situation, where a new kind of low-intensity warfare is challenging a military that organized entirely around capital ship combat. Of course that's a tired truism; the "always fighting the last war."

But that leads to wondering if this is really a navy at all. Or more like United Fruit Company, a massive corporate mercantile thing that works by rote and training and regulation, has been largely getting by with having a huge industrial base and leading-edge tech, but has expanded into a sector of space where the rules are a little different.

And now we've got multiple parties in the mix; old-school frontier traders who have the wisdom of experience, a cadre of experienced officers who want to create an actual military with a good esprit d'corps (not the same thing as free donut day at the office and "work smarter" posters in the cubicles), the friction between what is becoming an actual navy versus what is more like a merchant marine, the fresh-from-university theorists who pay far too much attention to how management thinks the world works (or should) and want quick-fix technological solutions over expensive training...

...and Ensign Blue in the middle of it, a trial run of one of the crazier outliers of the "super-soldier" package that various hard-liners have convinced themselves is the best way to win low-intensity conflict in an extremely politicized environment, a ship's engineer for a merchant ship who has no business at all getting hauled off to do dangerous missions on contested planets.

Oh, yeah. And engineer? Blue is the kind of engineer I've been seeing a lot of recently. Can (and often will) science the hell out of something, making the most amazing calculations. Then can't resist trying out a idea with ham-handed duct-tape and rat's-nest wiring that too often breaks (and sometimes catches fire).

Where does this go in character and career progression? Is there some third party, some out-of-context threat lurking behind what are still seen as basically raiding parties on the company's mining outposts? Are the rules about to go through another paradigm shift, tipping everyone from new enemies to unexpected allies into a brutal war?

Yeah, I got other books to write.