The Big Idea

NOTE: The flash fiction story below I wrote for a contest. I didn't win, but it relates to an earlier blog post I called  The Wheel in the Heart of the Universe , a story idea I advanced some time ago based on Stephen Hawking's description in  A Brief History of Time  of a realistic time machine using worm holes. Hope you enjoy my little paradox and I hope it inspires potential writers out there to do similar stories that feature time travel through worm holes: The spinning wheel was enormous, 6,000 light years across, far too large for all of it to be seen. Jax Sorens turned left to look at Dr. Ono. The starship Jax piloted, the White Hand, hovered 200 light years away from the center of this rotating behemoth. “It really is what we thought,” whispered the doctor in awe. “Over 3,000 years ago an ancient alien civilization constructed a set of spinning wormholes, laid out in a gigantic rotating disk. The outer end of the holes travel near light speed, so time ...

I've attempted to expand the purpose of this blog to go beyond talking about story ideas to launching some of my stories based on the ideas I blog about. This particular post will promote the stories, but also will talk about how the ideas from this blog fed into them. The Unknown Biologic  tale actually was a story of mine first, one from maybe five years or so ago which I revised quite a bit recently. I scoured the tale for an idea behind the story to justify creating a blog entry for it. The idea I picked was about aliens having DNA that matches the DNA of planet Earth. There were other points I could have talked about instead. I portray a future medical station in an interstellar war, featuring a main character who is a Hutterite. The Hutterian Brethren are Anabaptists like the Amish, with the same tradition of pacifism, but not the same attitude towards technology. The "Unknown Biologic" is the alien that they pick up, which happens to be very much like an oceanic ...

As reported in this  Icarus Interstellar  link, there's a natural effect of our sun's (or any star's) gravity that should be included in realistic science fiction stories. It turns out that the sun's gravity bends space enough, and thus the light passing though space, to allow a space telescope or a space telecommunications array to get a significant boost in resolution. So every spacefaring race (or nearly every) would naturally build stations at a sufficient distance from their star to make use of this natural gravitational effect, receiving a huge boost in gain essentially for only the cost of putting the arrays or telescopes in place. You'd probably need multiple stations of this type, at various points around the sun, because the focus would naturally be on things on the other side of the sun relative to the station. And the distance is far, around 700  AUs  from the sun, so it wouldn't be easy to shift a station from one side of the focus to another. (Fo...

Science fiction likes aliens. I've written a story,  Unknown Biologic , that illustrates a twist on the conventional alien tale. There's a presumption which naturally goes along with believing that evolution produced human intelligence that it would produce many other intelligences in the universe, ones that don't necessarily have much in common with the human race. Respectfully, I happen to believe the universe was created by God, so God produced human intelligence and logically would also have created any aliens. I've talked in a previous post about  7 christian objections to the existence of aliens , dismissing those objections for a Christian writer who wants to write science fiction and include aliens in the story. In my posts  four faces around throne of God  and  alien God of the Christian rapture  I offered some distinctly Christian twists on writing about aliens. Now I'm offering another twist. What if when aliens are discovered in a story ...

Some of the most colorful characters in science fiction and fantasy are those whose primary interest is--or seems to be--collecting the money due them. Whether it turns out the hired hand in fact has a hidden heart of gold like Han Solo, or is nothing but surly voice in scarred armor like Boba Fett, characters who enter the plot with apparent or real disdain in the outcome of the story allows them to casually wisecrack when more engaged characters like Luke Skywalker are committed to being sincere, which at times makes them a bit boring. I must say I'm an earnest kind of guy myself, which is probably why I usually write sincere characters who deeply care. About everything. So when my friend  Mike Lynch  invited me to write a story about his "Rescue Broker," a category of character he created himself, I didn't know what to think. A rescue broker is someone who will do pretty much anything a bounty hunter, smuggler, or mercenary would do, but as specifically hire...

In the vast realm of speculative fiction, there exist a number of blends of science fiction and fantasy. "Magical space opera" is term I haven't heard used before, but a relative of mine in the know says isn't original to me. But perhaps what I mean by the term isn't standard and can inspire some stories of a new type. To get to what I mean, let's define space opera. Wikipedia has it as:   "A subgenre of  science fiction  that often emphasizes  romantic , often  melodramatic  adventure, set mainly or entirely in  outer space , usually involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities. The term has no relation to music but is analogous to ' soap opera ' ." A lot people think of classic science fiction stories when they think of space opera (an example I'd give is  Ray Gun Revival , which deliberately tried to revive the style of Golden Age science fiction space opera). But really, as opposed to hard sc...

Inspired by the history of Europeans coming to the New World carrying bacteria to which the native inhabitants had little to no immunity, I thought: "What if aliens visiting Earth carried their own sort of infection or infestation, to which we humans had no immunity?" Sort of a War of the Worlds scenario in reverse... But I'm sure that sort of thing has already been done by someone, aliens carrying virulent disease(s) humans don't carry. So what if the infestation were of nanites--what  if nanites become a standard part of healthcare for any advanced technological species? (Just as hand washing and sterilization of medical instruments become standard at a certain point of development--once bacteria are discovered and found to be potentially harmful.) So that nanites are literally crawling all over (and inside) the bodies of high-tech aliens (or perhaps time travelers from Earth's distant future). What if these nanites potentially posed a risk to the human race? ...