Oppytunity

I decided a while ago I'd take a trip to research the next Athena Fox story. I'm almost out of places I've visited and I'd want to write a novel around. Bangkok was too short (less than three days) for me to really have a good sense for the place, and Berlin was just long enough ago that there's gonna be a lot of changes in that city.

Of course San Francisco is right next door.

Well...turns out the only open house this year for the Trinity site is October 18th. That's...pretty soon!

And I haven't nailed down nearly enough for that story.

This one has a big problem for me. One of my goals for the Athena Fox series was to do real history. To not fake it up with Atlantis and whatnot. Well, this story is getting into real history, even if it is fairly recent history.

The fossilized footprints at White Sands. Real discovery, real archaeologists. And my brain went immediately to, well, the rest of White Sands. I really wanted to construct a plot around the SLAMM project -- the nuclear-powered cruise missile -- even if that was mostly at the Nevada Test Site. Still, that's also real people and real history.

If it is wrong to pretend that somehow historians never noticed Atlantis, or that Napoleon was hiding fifty tons of purloined gold behind a series of elaborate clues, then isn't it just as wrong to have the wrong people and the wrong motives digging at White Sands, and especially wrong to have nefarious nuclear hijinks going on somewhere south of Albuquerque?

(I mean, besides the real stuff Kerr-McGee was getting up to...and let's not even on some of what was committed on tribal lands and against the Diné.)

Even a disclaimer isn't enough. Even having a totally unrelated excavation that just happens to be in a similar area isn't working for me. Because that may not be lying about history, but it does cross a line where the world of the series is truly fictional.

So far, I've just had a few fictional buildings which were deniably fictional (I can't swear there isn't an Irish Pub called something a lot like "The Harp that Once..." in the Battersea area). Oh, and an Elon Musk stand-in called "Jameson." But he's only been mentioned in passing as existing in Penny's world and being well-known as the same kind of tech-bro.

So I kind of don't want a fake version. And I kind of don't want the real version. It's a problem!

(Be a great trip anyhow...have to rent a car anyhow to get through Stallion Gate, but I'd really want to get out to Roswell while I'm at it. And Shiprock. I can leave Blackwater Draw alone, though. And it is probably a good idea to skip Trementina Base!)

(Also tempting, though, to just put the story around Jackass Flats to begin with, and make the biggest detour in the direction of Goodsprings instead.......)