Here are a couple character sketches and some rough concept art for the cover of the next novella, Valorous Daughter.
Meet Shaifennen Roehe, the Terror of Twelvety Town her very own self. The upcoming full-length novel(s) are from her point of view.
This one's Zeddie, the protagonist in Valorous Daughter. She appears briefly in The Terror of Twelvety Town and will play a major part in A Kiss For Damocles. I've started using DAZ 3D because not only is it faster than sketching by hand, but once I've designed my models I can use them to create references for my own freehand drawing. Plus, real-world models won't work for toaster shakings and good intentions. Still learning my way around the program, but it lets me create concept art to feed my actual cover artist. Easier than saying "Noooo.... her nose should be... I dunno... more nosier or something..." I've still go to learn how to tweak the settings... get the shine in her hair to look like shine rather than grey, etc. I'll be doing some freehand work later, but right now Manuscript Editing is my master.
The Terror of Twelvety Town actually takes place an Ayeden year (just under two Terran years) after Valorous Daughter. In Terror of Twelvety Town, Zeddie's not only a full Rider, but assigned to act as Lead Rider for Shaifennen's escort detail. In Valorous Daughter, Zeddie is a lowly Cadet-Petitioner.
Her full name is Zeddinbecker te' Emhain-Abhlach. She was named by committee and Vivienne of the Gentle Walkers has been threatening to tell her how her adoptive father, Kadien Jess came up with "Zeddinbecker." Alcohol played a role. As a Foundling, all Zeddie knows is that her mother died. Her pedigree tattoo is down the back of one shoulder rather than a cheek or the side of the neck like those of Homesteaders and Townies. Instead of T'Ren scripts like Arabic, Korean or English, the characters on Zeddies tattoos are a vertical strip of characters formed with upright lines with the odd angled branch or dot. Zeddie's spent a great deal of time studying the T'Ren diaspora and has narrowed her heritage down to the Punjab region of Terra. A good many of Ayeden's original colonists where Sikhs from New Amristar, so that's a possibility.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Some thoughts on making starships and steam engines play well together...
In all honesty, the Tales From the Long Night setting can’t accurately
be categorized as “Steampunk” any more than it is “Post-Apocalyptic” or “Dystopian.” (Emerging Civilization is more accurate.) The steampunk genre is typically more about
alternate history where steam and clockwork technology never went out of style
and frequently relies on a fantasy element or Victorian era scientific theories
that didn’t pan out, like “the luminiferous aether.” (If you’re into steampunk and wonder where
the term “Aether” came from in terms of historical scientific theory, check
this article out…
Overall, I try to keep the science
in these stories as hard as possible, although I do allow some Space Opera
conventions such as “artificial gravity” and anthropomorphic aliens (I do take
steps to ensure that the Imps aren’t just “people with things on their
foreheads.”) So while there are
airships, steam engines, and clockwork technology, those are based on existing
technologies rather than mystical Aether Crystals and suchlike. Basically, old technologies that the Gentle
Walkers blew the dust off of so folks could get things done without generating
the electromagnetic noise that could get those old blockade drones riled up.
The first limitation Ayeden’s
surviving communities face is energy. Thanks
to the “Damocles” blockade drones, the colonists can’t exactly start building
oil refineries or fusion power plants. Wood,
peat, and biogas are their main fuel sources.
While biogas would work fine for internal combustion engines, those
require electrical systems that bring us back to the sort of electromagnetic
noise that would give Damocles a tickle.
A two-stroke engine might not rise above the targeting thresholds, but
those don’t provide the horses to do any heavy moving. Diesel-style engines are also a no-go because
the colonists really can’t produce petroleum distillates in a meaningful
quantity and no community can spare the crops bio-diesel would require.
That leaves us with steam power.
Historically, the problem with steam power was that by the
time materials and metallurgy had improved enough to make steam safer and more
efficient, internal combustion had come along and provided a better power
source. While the colonists can’t
fabricate high-end alloys, composites, or ceramics on a large scale, they can
reshape and repurpose salvaged materials.
Given that they’re from a civilization that had interstellar travel, it’s
not much of a stretch to assume that their tech base had developed polymers,
alloys, and composites that would be to our modern day tech base what foamed
alloys, titanium or tungsten carbide goods would be to a Bronze Age society. So Ayeden’s boilers and steam engines are not
only efficient and safe, but are also quite superior to anything we could
produce today.
So where’d they get the equipment to work those materials? The fact that underground maglev network that
became Greenline Town has such capabilities is the result of two factors.
The first is a cultural issue at play there. In this storyverse, humanity has lost its
homeworld and damn near caught the Darwin Express to Buh-Bye centuries before
Ayeden Prime was even colonized. After
the Fall of Terra, it was considered in imperative that every community on
every colony had to be as self-sufficient as possible. Every community had to have the tools to make
tools, rather than rely on external sources for basic survival. While they didn’t have Star Trek style
replicators, it seemed reasonable that any machine shop, motor pool or equipment
bay would have on hand the high-tech, nano-bot based equivalent of a 3-D
printer. Feed in the base materials and
elements, and fabricate whatever parts you need. All that needed shipping was whatever base
elements that couldn’t be produced locally.
They couldn’t lay a starship’s keel outside a proper spaceyard, but they
could produce maglev cars and engines for example.
Ok… then why was that maglev network underground in the
first place?
That’s the second factor.
Ayeden’s on the chilly edge of its system’s liquid water zone. The equatorial regions where what we’d call “temperate”
rather than “tropical.” Throw in a more
pronounced axial tilt and a longer day/night cycle, and winter really, really,
sucked. There were open-air cities near
the equator, but communities farther from the equator were typically
underground or arcologies. Those all
fetched rocks in the initial bombardment. (The old Mutual Prosperity Coalition was big
on making examples, and was fine with scorching whatever earth they failed to
take. They intended Ayeden to be an “example”….)
The old maglev tunnels had been built underground because of
Ayeden’s environmental conditions.
Originally, they carried raw materials and passengers from the
spaceports to the outlying arcologies and cities. They were just full of maintenance bays and
depots, where parts and equipment could be fabricated as needed. The concourses and terminals also had basic medical
facilities and shops which had their own light production capacity for small
scale consumer goods.
Most of Ayeden’s current population is descended from people
who were already in that system or were close enough to shelter there when the
attack started. There are some
exceptions, like the refugees who made it there because of the Watchful Mother’s
broadcasts and the Pridesmen who originated in the southern equatorial plains which
were spared the ashfall. Not to mention
the odd Foundling here and there who constantly acted as a source of fresh
genetic material… but you’ll have to read the forthcoming Valorous Daughter for more on that…
The Terror of Twelvety Town is now available on Kindle
And Nook
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Welcome to Ayeden Prime.
"When
the enemy come, they dropped rocks on our seas so the waters just howled in and
drank up all the cities from the coast to the mountains.
That weren’t even the worst of it.
Old Tattershanks says that when Ayeden felt
all them millions of her children get murdered, she went mad with grief. Tore herself open in her pain. He likes to wax poetical sometimes.
Now Kethie, she don’t wax poetical so
much. She says that some of the rocks
was big enough that they made a big old caldera bust loose with an eruption
that lasted months and pushed our climate past a tippin’ point, brung us the
Long Night.
And me?
I don’t see why they can’t both be right." — Shaifennen Roehe, Twelvety
Homestead.
Shaifennen Roehe's world's seen better days. Ayeden was once a cultural and industrial hub, a center of trade and learning. After a devastating orbital bombardment and centuries of volcanic winter, Ayeden's climate is finally beginning to normalize to the point where the descendant's of the war's survivors can begin to grow again rather than merely survive.
If I had to slap a label on it, I'd have to describe these stories as a mix of Lost Colony tale, with Post-Apocalyptic, Frontier, and in some stories, Military Sci Fi. The technology has some Space Opera elements, usually wrapped in a nice, crunchy Hard Sci-Fi shell when possible. The setting isn't Dystopian, by any stretch of the imagination. That's been done to death... sometimes magnificently, sometimes... not so much. I'm more interested in exploring what choices Ayeden's children will make, and what direction their fledgling civilization will choose.
The first novella in this world is The Terror of Twelvety Town, and it's currently available in all e-book formats.
For Kindle:
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