Converging Series

Proofs came in for Sometimes a Fox. Found one mistake already. Wrong tense...so tell me again how automated grammar-checkers are so great, huh?

Speaking of software, also purchased Affinity Photo. After I've given it a spin, I'll start the process of trying to get out from under my Adobe subscription. It isn't anything about the latest news, exactly. It is just that I was already unhappy and this is not only an excuse, but a time when better options are being offered.

Relapsed on Friday but I think I'm finally on the mend. I miss being a recently ex-soldier, with all the strength youth and stupidity. Did not expect to take this long to recover and I'm still weak.

So...good time to continue assembling, towards making a choice of what to write next. I'm simultaneously reading books on Venus and on Indigenous Archaeology. And thinking about a third book but that's not really the same kind of research problem.

There's no show-stoppers for Venus, not yet. I am still learning about the chemistry, and Venus is all about the chemistry. Unfortunately my best book is fifteen years old, and although we haven't been sending any landers lately, science still marches on.

Always been a problem with Venus, really. At the time of writing, those steamy jungles and those planet-wide oceans were defendable from current knowledge.

But this is a convergent thing. I'm more and more accepting, for the purposes of the book, of it being a very rare thing indeed to be bare-faced to the wind there. The main location is above the deck of the clouds so temperature and pressure not issues, and you aren't swimming in sulfuric acid, either (the Venusian clouds are actually quite thin, by cloud standards. They are opaque because they are so damned deep. That, and chemistry.)

The lack of a magnetic field has interesting trickle-downs. Also, more chemistry happens because of it. But anyhow; I'm not as concerned about cosmic rays because those things explode in upper atmosphere anyhow. Solar storms, on the other hand, is an open question. But since those don't happen all the time, that smells to me like plot.

That's what I mean about convergence.

And the UV? You can block that with whatever is holding the breathing air in. And if you are out on deck -- well, you are wearing those brass goggles anyhow, unless you really like getting mild acid in the eyes.

So the books may go on about this not being viable for colonization, but there's a real difference between Futurist paintings of people cavorting on carefully manicured green lawns, and the kind of conditions real human beings have lived and worked in. If the combination of ray burn and acid and all the rest means you get blind and scarred and your lungs rot by thirty -- hell, there's even some people today who would trade for that.

The more I can play with the real Venus, the better. That's an argument I've always made about historical fiction, and research in general. Sure, you can image fun stuff. But the real world has been imagining crazy shit for four billion years and it is likely to surprise you. Find the real thing first. See if story comes out of it. Plenty of time to argue later.