Space

The final frontier.

Is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.

Okay, this one may ramble just a bit. I need to describe space to the readers of my second book in a few choice paragraphs, and I'd like your thoughts about my choices of words.

By the way, if you actually need me to give you the sources of those two quotes above, please turn in your sense of wonder, because you're not using it.

This is the first science fiction story that I have written, though if chance favors me it won't be the last. What usually comes out of my pen are horrific stories about people, ones like you and me. If they seem to have one or two traits that make them different, hopefully by the end of the story it's clear that those variations are rather tiny, and that those people aren't that different after all.

This book is also about a person, and I've already bent your ear about the work that's going in to make him someone we can cheer for. Now I need to focus on the environment. It doesn't have voice, I can't describe it so that you associate it with that one teacher who was kind to you grade school or that dog you were always terrified of, and it sure as hell isn't going to have a sudden epiphany and become our hero's sidekick. But it's a character too, and I need to make you believe it's real.

I've got a small advantage, of course, in that this one actually exists. Real people, ones like you and me, have flown up and met it face to face. We've loaned it tools and toys, and gotten some of them back with little notes describing it's likes and dislikes. It's all around us, and there's more of it than there is of us, our home, or anything else. Whatever isn't something else, is it. It's the default.

But, as we've said, this is fiction. Reality is there for us to use, and we NEED to be selective in what facts we use, dishing out the ones that support our narrow points of view and tucking all the others under a loose corner of the carpet somewhere. If we don't, all we'll have is an amateurish documentary and the story will sound like a Monty Python skit where a character from last week's show seems to walk onto the set by mistake. We decide the attitude of the universe and everything in it.

Space is not our friend in this tale. It wants to kill us, in very unpleasant ways. We haven't mastered it, and we know it. We can hold it back, keep it from taking our heat, our water, and our air, but only imperfectly. It can feel every strength of our defenses, and every flaw. It has killed men, families, and entire rocket ships. Not through any intent, but just by being what it is, and through the simplest and dumbest circumstances possible: human error.

You forgot to check that seal on your air tank? Or you didn't check it again after the valve contracted from the colder outside temperature? Oops. Maybe you should just sit down and think pleasant thoughts. Think that little light built onto your helmet is enough for you to find your way back to the hatch after you're done with your work outside? I hope you're right, because the ships are big, don't have outside lights, and there's no sun to show you which way is which. Did the person who put your suit together break up with their spouse the night before they punched in to work and installed all that insulation? Hope they kept their mind on their job, because when hypothermia starts to set in you may or may not notice. Are there any holes in the layer of material that keeps out all those really nasty cosmic rays? Let's not dwell on what would happen if there are. Do you know how dry the near-total vacuum of space is? Dry enough to leach water out of your skin, from your eyes, and every time you open your mouth. How much water is in your body? How much can you lose before things get unpleasant? No seal is perfect, after all.

You did check the line that keeps you attached to the ship, right? If it breaks, you'll drift away an inch at a time, for eternity.

Maybe that's how I need to describe it: death by default. A reader would throw the book away if I wasted their time by describing all those little details in every single scene that could have them, so when I spell them out once or twice the first few times and then mention that so and so 'went through the drill' a couple of times after that, it'll seem normal. A few more pages, and a reader might have forgotten about them altogether. Then when someone we like suddenly says, “Oh God, my lungs are burning,” we'll remember and (hopefully) say to ourselves, 'Oh shit, I forgot about that.'

That's the main thrust that I want, that it is a threat, and the second you forget that, you're the example they'll mention to the next guy. If I can do that, and include some point of view descriptions that show how all that nasty potential has shaped people's feelings about it, that might be enough. That might work.

Thanks. It really helps to use you as a sounding board to bounce these thoughts off of.

Now I just need to write it.

P.S. Happy Veteran's Day!