Two Very Old, Very Incomplete, Very Half-Baked SF Projects Of Mine
Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2022 9:36 am
On a whim, I decided to do a post on two partly interconnected science fiction scenarios on which I worked for a fairly short time in the late 1990s when I was in my teens. Neither of the projects ever got anywhere. Since all my writings about those projects were on now long-lost computers, I have to reconstruct it all from memory.
For the record, since, back then, I was too lazy to write proper stories, all my writings were basically fragments of movie scripts. Also, I was going through a misanthropic teenager phase at the time, so I had a fairly low opinion of my fellow human beings and the general prospects for our future, which was reflected in both the general scenarios and the story lines.
(content warning: brief discussion of very unappetizing food, which you might not want to read if you're about to have a meal. You've been warned.)
The first scenario was a future in which Earth had become completely uninhabitable, first thanks to environmental destruction, then finally thanks to an abundance of rats, which had managed it to handle the harsher environmental conditions a lot better than humans. The surviving humans were scattered across the local reaches of space in a number of refugee groups, and were often disliked and distrusted - "What, these people managed it to make their own planet completely uninhabitable? Let's just hope they don't do the same to our planet!"
The heroine of the story was a combined adventurer/starship officer/politician from a planet where one of the human refugee groups had settled down. Her fellow politicians gave her, not really with her consent, a starship and the mission to solve a specific mystery. That was done at the instigation of representatives from an alien species, the Fkrck (back then, I wasn't even really aware that conlanging existed, although I already knew about Esperanto and Klingon). The Fkrck had found evidence that the mystery in question somehow involved humans, and therefore insisted that the nearest group of humans should investigate it. One Fkrck was sent along with the heroine and her crew as an observer.
The Fkrck, by the way, had the kind of completely alien emotions I talked about in this part of the Random Thread:
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php? ... start=2500
Or at least they were supposed to - I never worked out what the emotions in question were.
It would later turn out that the Fkrck observer had a much more dangerous mission. A group of local alien species, including the Fkrck, had decided that people who had made their own planet uninhabitable might be too dangerous to be left alive, and were now seriously considering a systematic genocide of the surviving humans. The observer had the mission of carefully watching how the human heroes handled their mission, and, based on that, make a final recommendation on whether to go ahead with the genocide plan or call it off.
One scene early in the storyline involved two human minor characters sitting in a bar/restaurant-like thing on a non-human planet and talking, among other things, about how bad the supposedly Terran food served to humans inevitably was in a place with no human cooks.
Later in the storyline, the heroine would investigate the same bar/restaurant-like thing and, to her great shock, discover a Terran rat there. The owner would tell her that creatures of that kind had appeared in the area a while ago, and while he had tried to turn them into Terran hamburgers, in his opinion, the results hadn't been good enough to serve them to his customers yet. The question of how the Terran rats had ended up on that planet would become an important part of the mystery the heroine was investigating.
I had no idea how all this was connected, though.
The second scenario and story was set in a future in which Earth was still inhabited, but already in a pretty bad shape environmentally. Among other things, the skies were no longer blue, but yellow. There was a global government, which was mostly corrupt, inept, and buffoonish. For some reason, members of the Earth Cabinet wore capes.
The hero was a young man/teenage boy from Earth, loosely modeled on myself, who really really really wanted to get away from Earth and therefore took a job on a starship run by an alien species called the Targane. They would look mostly like humans, except that they were extremely pale, and their hairs were each a few centimeters in diameter. Oh, and the plot involved yetis.
You see, in the German dubbed versions of the Star Wars movies, "Jedi" is pronounced sort of the way it would be if it were IPA rather than English, so it sounds a bit like "yeti". Therefore, I thought it might be funny to have a movie titled "Return of the Yeti". I thought I was being very clever at the time.
Anyway, in that scenario, the Yetis had been a powerful spacefaring species that had lived on Earth many thousands of years ago, and then mostly disappeared. Later, the heroes would uncover that modern humans were the descendants of hybrids between Yetis and Targane.
An important part of the plot would be the discovery of a hidden cave in a remote part of the Himalayas were the last of the Yetis were resting in deep freeze hibernation capsules. They would be woken up by the heroes, and then eventually save the day. The cave would be guarded by a very old and somewhat cranky man who would call himself "The Wise Man from the Ice". (It rhymes as bit better in German.)
In all the aspects I described so far, the two stories/scenarios were different from each other. But they shared the same main villain with the same motivation. In the first scenario/story, he was the leader of a long-lost group of human refugees. In the second scenario/story, he was the Space Minister of Earth. But in both cases, his main motivation was a passionate belief in the idea of fate or destiny. His goal was to found a new political structure controlling as much of the local reaches of space as possible, which would be named the "Cosmic Order", and whose guiding principle would be to force every sentient being under its rule to live their life in submission to their supposed destiny. Of course the main villain believed that his own destiny way to be the Supreme Master of that Cosmic Order.
At the time, I really hated the idea of fate or destiny, because I thought it violated human freedom. So I thought it made sense to have a main villain whose ideology was based on the idea of fate or destiny.
That's all. Not just all for now, but all that I remember of the whole thing.
For the record, since, back then, I was too lazy to write proper stories, all my writings were basically fragments of movie scripts. Also, I was going through a misanthropic teenager phase at the time, so I had a fairly low opinion of my fellow human beings and the general prospects for our future, which was reflected in both the general scenarios and the story lines.
(content warning: brief discussion of very unappetizing food, which you might not want to read if you're about to have a meal. You've been warned.)
The first scenario was a future in which Earth had become completely uninhabitable, first thanks to environmental destruction, then finally thanks to an abundance of rats, which had managed it to handle the harsher environmental conditions a lot better than humans. The surviving humans were scattered across the local reaches of space in a number of refugee groups, and were often disliked and distrusted - "What, these people managed it to make their own planet completely uninhabitable? Let's just hope they don't do the same to our planet!"
The heroine of the story was a combined adventurer/starship officer/politician from a planet where one of the human refugee groups had settled down. Her fellow politicians gave her, not really with her consent, a starship and the mission to solve a specific mystery. That was done at the instigation of representatives from an alien species, the Fkrck (back then, I wasn't even really aware that conlanging existed, although I already knew about Esperanto and Klingon). The Fkrck had found evidence that the mystery in question somehow involved humans, and therefore insisted that the nearest group of humans should investigate it. One Fkrck was sent along with the heroine and her crew as an observer.
The Fkrck, by the way, had the kind of completely alien emotions I talked about in this part of the Random Thread:
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php? ... start=2500
Or at least they were supposed to - I never worked out what the emotions in question were.
It would later turn out that the Fkrck observer had a much more dangerous mission. A group of local alien species, including the Fkrck, had decided that people who had made their own planet uninhabitable might be too dangerous to be left alive, and were now seriously considering a systematic genocide of the surviving humans. The observer had the mission of carefully watching how the human heroes handled their mission, and, based on that, make a final recommendation on whether to go ahead with the genocide plan or call it off.
One scene early in the storyline involved two human minor characters sitting in a bar/restaurant-like thing on a non-human planet and talking, among other things, about how bad the supposedly Terran food served to humans inevitably was in a place with no human cooks.
Later in the storyline, the heroine would investigate the same bar/restaurant-like thing and, to her great shock, discover a Terran rat there. The owner would tell her that creatures of that kind had appeared in the area a while ago, and while he had tried to turn them into Terran hamburgers, in his opinion, the results hadn't been good enough to serve them to his customers yet. The question of how the Terran rats had ended up on that planet would become an important part of the mystery the heroine was investigating.
I had no idea how all this was connected, though.
The second scenario and story was set in a future in which Earth was still inhabited, but already in a pretty bad shape environmentally. Among other things, the skies were no longer blue, but yellow. There was a global government, which was mostly corrupt, inept, and buffoonish. For some reason, members of the Earth Cabinet wore capes.
The hero was a young man/teenage boy from Earth, loosely modeled on myself, who really really really wanted to get away from Earth and therefore took a job on a starship run by an alien species called the Targane. They would look mostly like humans, except that they were extremely pale, and their hairs were each a few centimeters in diameter. Oh, and the plot involved yetis.
You see, in the German dubbed versions of the Star Wars movies, "Jedi" is pronounced sort of the way it would be if it were IPA rather than English, so it sounds a bit like "yeti". Therefore, I thought it might be funny to have a movie titled "Return of the Yeti". I thought I was being very clever at the time.
Anyway, in that scenario, the Yetis had been a powerful spacefaring species that had lived on Earth many thousands of years ago, and then mostly disappeared. Later, the heroes would uncover that modern humans were the descendants of hybrids between Yetis and Targane.
An important part of the plot would be the discovery of a hidden cave in a remote part of the Himalayas were the last of the Yetis were resting in deep freeze hibernation capsules. They would be woken up by the heroes, and then eventually save the day. The cave would be guarded by a very old and somewhat cranky man who would call himself "The Wise Man from the Ice". (It rhymes as bit better in German.)
In all the aspects I described so far, the two stories/scenarios were different from each other. But they shared the same main villain with the same motivation. In the first scenario/story, he was the leader of a long-lost group of human refugees. In the second scenario/story, he was the Space Minister of Earth. But in both cases, his main motivation was a passionate belief in the idea of fate or destiny. His goal was to found a new political structure controlling as much of the local reaches of space as possible, which would be named the "Cosmic Order", and whose guiding principle would be to force every sentient being under its rule to live their life in submission to their supposed destiny. Of course the main villain believed that his own destiny way to be the Supreme Master of that Cosmic Order.
At the time, I really hated the idea of fate or destiny, because I thought it violated human freedom. So I thought it made sense to have a main villain whose ideology was based on the idea of fate or destiny.
That's all. Not just all for now, but all that I remember of the whole thing.