The Kickstarter for my latest book; ‘Queen Mabs Palace’, launches TOMORROW, on the 1st of October at about NOW UK time.
So, over October I will be trying to blog and post as much as possible. All of my posts will have the ‘Queen Mab’- suffix during that period and all should have an image with a link to the Kickstarter.
They will also be original content!
I will try to focus my posts around Mabbish subjects, on two main poles; Autumn, for the Fey and Fantasy aspects of Queen Mabs Palace, and Echoing Stars, for the Science Fiction aspects.
None of these are ‘additions’ or content for the book, but could be parallel texts; essays and creations on similar and not-not-canon subjects.
Echoing Stars is a concept for a dark Science Fiction reality influenced by the background suggested by the Alien films, their adjacent tie-in fictions, partner stories like Predator, The Ice, by Stephen Pyne, the work of Peter Watts, and several other things. It would probably fit in reasonably well with my old setting Cryogenic Rats.
This is not ‘the background to the Alien Universe’ as large parts of that are either contradictory, or not very good, but a reality suggested by those stories. It’s a dark reality, and a gothic one, but a purely secular creation, without demons, ultra-powerful evil aliens* or any grand conflict to give meaning to existence. In fact, though it has elements of survival, exploration and discovery, its really about finding or forcing meaning upon reality.
(*Though it will have super-scary monster aliens, they just don’t have any actual plan or aim, but are more like abandoned guns discovered by savage children.)
Echoing Stars
About two hundred years from today, explorations in the Solar System confirm that life on earth is the product of an ancient weapons test.
At around the same time the truth is formally recognised, and becomes common knowledge; that mathematics is not real, and provides only an approximate description of reality. The art is fit for engineering, but little else.
Exploration of our Local Sphere through cryo-sleep and crude Gravity Drives discovers worlds strewn like poisoned gems. Cryo itself puts unavoidable stress onto the human form, taking off days, weeks, months or years of life, inculcating uncurable neurological problems and vague psychological distress, depending on the quality of equipment, expertise, length and repetition.
While mankind gains the power to move to other worlds, life does not spread, and worlds do not sustain. No human colony breeds above replacement level. Earth writhes and rots. Humanity may spread amongst the stars, but only as water spills across a table, petering out and evaporating, drying to a stain.
The Tomb Worlds seem to prove this is a universal rule. It has happened before, to strange species separated by millions or millennia. They rise, spread briefly, and slowly die away. In all the Galaxy, the only Life is the product of ancient weapons, cultic observances or acts of worship to an unknowable other. The only living worlds are research sites, empty palaces, regressive, dying colonies, or those things feeding upon them. The only aliens are incoherent degenerates who do not understand their own technology, votive species sculpted by long dead sophonts as acts of unknowable ritual, literal weapons, or the effluvia of dark experiments in forgotten wars.
As are we.
Life won't spread. Technology fails or ascends beyond comprehension. Mathematics isn't real. Science and the capacity of the human mind to understand, hit a hard limit; this is known. What persists in man is the curiosity of a fly as it mindlessly slams itself against a barrier it cannot perceive; alchemy and engineering, though such names are rarely used; divining through complex rules of thumb, but without full conceptual understanding, combining and 'experimenting' with recovered tomb-tech, without really understanding what will happen. Sometimes the same exact experiment or combination produces different results.
There is no Great Enemy, no grand opposing force. No drive but shallow greed and fear of personal death. While many things are dangerous, and there are spheres from which none return, they have no interest in us, and seem not to understand the harm their mere attention might do us.
Few hope any more for transcendent meaning, god-machines, post-humanity, alien congress, or escape from this galaxy. Mankind walks the stars, not in hope but seeking trinkets - knowledge, or fragments of portable wealth, curiosities for the Wunderkammer, to return to the solar spheres and perhaps buy a life of comfort on one of the bright, rare pinnacles of nature left upon a teeming overwritten earth.
Cold worlds and curious flies, rats among echoing stars.
Hell yeah