SciFi (nonspecific) – Page 17 – Erin Penn's Second Base

Writing Exercise: 50-Word Prompts 2019

August 27, 2019August 16, 2026 Erin Penn

WRITING EXERCISE

Remember last year working on a couple of 50-word prompts. (50-Word Prompts 2018) I’m just back from Pennsic and really don’t have the energy to come up with a new writing exercise, so here we go again!

Write two 50-word flashes. Aim for 50 words, give or take five extra words. Don’t read my attempts until after you do your own. Writing them directly in the comment section below will help you focus on the flash aspect – just getting words out.

How does this exercise help you as a writer: (1) just write things out quickly; (2) learn to work from prompts (important for the anthology world); (3) practice writing to a word count.

TEXT PROMPT FOR 50-WORD FLASH: Market

VISUAL PROMPT FOR 50-WORD FLASH

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

My Attempts

TEXT PROMPT: Market

“How much for him?” I waved at the male sex bot behind the counter. I never considered buying one ever before, but today’s town mating fair had left me feeling unexpectedly lonely. Too old to join the youngsters on the breeding platform, and too poor to join the contract buyers. (first published 3/21/2022; 50 words)

VISUAL PROMPT

She stared, a brunette tress falling in front of her right eye. I didn’t have money to give her. The wind cut us both, slicing skin with Jack Frost knives. Me, I would be going home and a warm bath would ease the ice wounds. I passed her my blanket. (first published 3/21/2022; 50 words)

Series: 50-word Prompts

Flash: Burn the World

August 25, 2019January 12, 2022 Erin Penn

Photo by Idea go from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Staring out at the burning world, the red blaze sinking into his dark skin, the warrior grinned as the ancient quote from Genghis Khan came to his mind, “It is not sufficient for me to succeed. All others must fail.” While Damdin had not yet succeed to his full sufficiency, those before him had surely failed.

Viking. Such a perfect term. To raid, to go on a quest to pillage, rape, and burn. While those cowering in their homes associate the term with white men in flowing blonde hair on the covers of the bodice rippers from yesteryear, the term applied to anyone who participated in those types of activities, if he remember rightly, and considering he taught history for over a decade, he did.

Now he and those who have joined him created a new Viking history, a new Mongol Horde as they leveled what is left of the false society. Burn everything to the ground and start over.

The aliens started the process, taking down the centers of commerce with strange weapons, destroying and changing everything they touched, before those who had believed their false claims of “coming in peace” turned the tide with even stranger weapons created by mad scientists reverse engineering stolen technology. None of the scientists started mad, but by the time they had worked on the creations enough to understanding them, all of the scientists were mouth-frothing insane.

He and his band will finish what the aliens had initiated, while watching the thousand falling chunks of starstuff from the aliens’ failure steak across the sky each night as they celebrate their victory in the arms of captured women.

“Damdin, Elba has sent a messenger to negotiate.”

“Is she pretty?” the war chef asked without turning around, knowing if the messenger had been male no report would have been made. His aide had been with him since the beginning.

“If you like pale-skinned, thin women used to sleeping in soft beds.”

“Brand her, feed her, and put her in my lean. Tomorrow we take Elba. Either they will offer us their soft bellies or we will slit them.”

The nineteen year old, a student from Damdin’s teaching times and disciple since the burning times had begun, ran to accomplish precisely that with no further acknowledgment, his booted footsteps fading quickly.

Once satisfied that the false dawn his raiders had made will shimmer on the horizon all night, reminding the town of Elba of their coming doom, Damdin retired to his lean-to to see what Elba deemed worthy to distract him from 30,000 souls they sheltered. Souls he would bend to his will on the morrow.

(words 440; first published 8/25/2019)

Flash: New Leaf

July 21, 2019September 20, 2023 Erin Penn

From Article : A Graduate Student Created First Man-Made Biological Leaf Which Can Produce Oxygen Just Like a Plant

“Captain wants to know when you’ll be up and running again.” Computer processors judged the XO’s projection within the SoftSuit to how far his voice would carry if the room actually held air and aimed the broadcast accordingly while he ducked another dozen hanging wires and stepped over debris littering the floor to get close enough to carry on a conversation with the department’s senior surviving lieutenant. Whichever of the HardSuits around contained that person.

Normally he would have addressed the lieutenant by name and the software would have closed off a direct communication channel. Normally Cheshire would have known who was in charge as the organizational chart resorted instantly from incoming status reports. Hell, normally the captain would have use her direct link with the ship’s net to know the exact status of everything happening on the colony ship.

But things were far from normal after the Wittzerk attack. And since the captain was integrated with the ship for the trip’s duration, submerged in a gel-bath as the living part of the combination living and artificial intelligence directing the ship through real-time and folded space, one of the elite humans capable to the feat, he was crawling through the guts of the ship on her behalf using a jury-rigged radio to send reports up to the bridge, at least until wires could be reconnected by the scrambling techs, getting his uniform dirty for the first time in decades.

It was exhilarating. He had forgotten what line work was like.

Not something he wanted to do all the time, but acting a TrNaval officer instead of a glorified cruise director for a bunch of sleepers brushed off the spider webs.

The green and yellow HardSuits of Environment and ShipMain swarmed around him as he reached cleared floorspace, but no one stopped. After enjoying the artificial gravity steadiness for a moment, Liquid lost power twice while he was there and he nearly lost his lunch, he barked into his microphone, “Senior, report!”

Two people jumped, one deep green and one eye-searing glow-in-the-dark-of-space yellow, as software directed a more precise message than the previous general broadcast. Cheshire steps ate up the distance between him and the green one, while Hinson’s voice filled his ears. “Primary Gravity functional for the deck one-beta grid, additional maintenance will be required to meet spec, secondary gravity online to spec, trieary gravity … yeah Robert, we stealing parts from that to get prime and second going and until manufacturing is working again ain’t nothing going to get that stuff to work. Three nodes were complete losses. Water will be online in ten more minutes, probably and air pressure in sixteen hours. Too many holes. Stupid frigging shotgun weapon.”

“Thank you ShipMain. Continue, priority on this grid AirProduction and embroyo status tubes.” Hinson was the second best ship maintenance worker so Cheshire let the use of his first name slide. Most of the time they used first names around the colonists awake for transition training; no surprise a good portion of his staff couldn’t switch back to military protocol.

(words 511, first published 7/21/2019)

Geeking Science: Writing Prompts

June 20, 2019November 14, 2019 Erin Penn

Image courtesy of Somkiat Fakmee at FreeDigitalPhotos.net4

Over at Mythcreants, they put together eight natural phenomena to use in your stories. These are really geeking cool science phenomena on Earth and in Space.

Lake Vostok
Ball Lightning
Solar Flares
Gamma Ray Burst
Natural Nuclear Reactors
The Space Roar
Catatumbo Lightning
The Great Science

Read the details at “Eight Natural Phenomena to Use in Your Stories”. https://mythcreants.com/blog/eight-natural-phenomena-to-use-in-your-stories/

WRITING EXERCISE: Our world is weird. Using one of the eight phenomena, or another weird science fact, write a flash. Science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, or other fantasy option – have the phenomena play a critical role in the turn of the story BUT remember the characters are the star.

Book Review: Space Prison

May 7, 2019April 4, 2018 Erin Penn

Book Cover from Amazon

Space Prison by Tom Godwin

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON

AFTER TWO CENTURIES….The sound came swiftly nearer, rising in pitch and swelling in volume. Then it broke through the clouds, tall and black and beautifully deadly—the Gern battle cruiser, come to seek them out and destroy them. Humbolt dropped inside the stockade, exulting. For two hundred years his people had been waiting for the chance to fight the mighty Gern Empire … with bows and arrows against blasters and bombs!

MY REVIEW

For a long while, after I got old enough to read big words for myself, my mother would pass books she thought were good to me – Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, for example. Eventually she approved me going into the collection directly and I worked my way through her shelves which included this gem from HER college years – first published in 1958. A book she loved enough to transport from one end of the country to another through at least four different moves.

I loved it too. Massive worldbuilding, MacGyvering, action. I reread it again and again. Now a group of sci-fi classic lovers have uploaded the book for free viewing on Kindle.

Note for the formatting – if you get the free one – it’s free, the page numbers are included in the text and there are a couple-few transcription issues. The overall result is fine though – especially free for a book which only had a 5,000 first run.

I reread the book in 2017, and the worldbuilding still remains amazing. The ecology of Ragnarok from its climate to its animals is breathtaking. Originally titled “The Survivors”, this book makes you feel the hell planet a group of colonists are dumped on by their enemies. The MacGyvering to survive and then thrive remains really cool – gems always have worth.

Downside for modern times – no female characters of note. The women and children are a background group – dying but essential to survival. Mr. Godwin does show them working along side the men, doing the same sacrifices and more; much more, there are no old child-bearing women. On a 1.5 gravity world where reproduction is as essential as exploration, the explorers will be limited to the men – and those are the ones Mr. Godwin follows. The women stay home and die in childbirth. Not the exciting part of the story for the 1950’s readers. The author never demeans women or says they can’t do what the men can do, but because they can do something the men cannot do they are not a part of the story.

The story follows the colonists and their descendants for 200 years.

The main lacking in this story is character attachment, you sympathize with the characters but don’t empathize. Consider how many people die, not feeling each death personally is a plus. The initial two nights after the colonists arrival on the hell world makes George R.R. Martin’s Red Wedding look sedate.

Still a great worldbuilding story even after 60 years; definitely worth the space on your kindle if you like classic sci-fi.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Eric Flint, in conjunction with Baen Books, has collected many of Tom Godwin’s works into “The Cold Equations” (published 2003), including The Survivors/Space Prison and his famous short story “The Cold Equations”. While not free, like kindle edition linked above, it’s available in paperback so you can have it for your shelves.

SECOND ADDITIONAL NOTE: Side amusement, the cover of Cold Equations is for “Space Prison” story and has a person standing holding a crossbow and unicorn goggles (should be black), with a mocker on the shoulder and two prowlers – but, typical of early sci-fi, the person is a scantily garbed woman.

THIRD ADDITIONAL NOTE: Mr. Godwin did a follow-up to this story. Do not read it. Think Highlander number 2 and hopefully it will eventually disappear off the interwebs.