Garfield

I am not excited about the book project that's currently on the table. A big part of it is that I don't have anything to say in this one. There's no theme or question -- not like the Athena Fox stories. Well, okay; the Paris book was floundering until I stumbled on "The book will be the death of the cathedral" and that led me to where I wanted to go with the idea of how to read history, and how to explore history without breaking things in the process (always a problem when you are playing a character modeled after Indiana Jones.)

This current book was intended to be built from well-used furniture. Familiar and well-understood sci-fi props. That may not, however, be compatible with a unique or interesting setting that offers something novel. I contrast that with the Venus setting, which may be implausible but at least is diverting.

The problem might also be character. In part because I was thinking pastiche, I was planning an everyman character who can fit equally well in any setting (the way that Equal Temperament on musical instruments makes all scales sound equally good. And equally bad). That removes having an interesting internal conflict or journey, however. And having a rotating cast takes away from having a strong set of interpersonal interactions to drive the story.

So I tinkered a little to see if I could find an underlying theme, or at least something about the setting that wasn't basically a visual style (because that translates poorly to prose.) Raygun Gothic might be amusing but the only direction I can see involves deconstruction; and these days, deconstructed is pretty much the major presentation of that stuff.

Plus, you know, primarily a visual style.

(There's more here, in a subtle way. Just typing "fins" or "chrome" or "googie" doesn't give you a strong sense of place. What does, is going into the functionality and the five-senses stuff. How exactly a bubble helmet works and feels, for instance. And that is backing right into deconstruction again. Plus it is work, which goes against the utility of setting out to build with used furniture.)

I explored the option space to see what were the directions that interested me more. 1960's spaceflight sort of attracted me. Especially given a flip, overly-stylish (even Spy Movie) UFO sort of spin. But think about it; near-future, the actual science de-emphasized so all this is, is a visual style...

What do you know; I just invented Starfield.

Incidentally, the "Deliver Us..." series does a much better job with this aesthetic. Because in Starfield, the ships and spacesuits is just the paint job and underneath is exactly the same bullet-sponge armor and mix of weapons and handy loot crates of your basic looter-shooter. Deliver Us the Moon (I've just started Deliver us Mars and I'm still unsure whether I like that one as much), the setting is the gameplay. Since it isn't a run-and-gun, you are mostly interacting with the tech, or reading logs or talking to people about what can be done with the tech.

(Deliver us the Moon you play as a one-man rescue mission to figure out what happened to the Moon-based beamed-power facility that is keeping energy-starved Earth alive. So you are mucking about with microwave antenna and Helium-3 scrapers...)

And I still want to see if I can get Tiki to work. There's some potentially interesting space to explore re created cultures, exoticism, even urban archaeology. But there are people who have dedicated a life to tiki culture and...what do I really know about the stuff?