I’m in the process of downsizing.
Downsizing, at least for most people, means getting rid of stuff you haven’t used in a million years. In this case, it’s a filing cabinet. Correction. Two filing cabinets.
Most baby boomers remember them. Some were metal. Some were wood. Almost all sat in the corner of an office and were rarely opened.
Each held items or information that might someday be useful.
Mine held dreams and memories.
While cleaning them out, I came across items that were of no interest to anyone except me. There are birthday cards from birthdays past. Cables for computers that no longer fit any system I own. Long lost trinkets materialized from the lands and battlefields I’ve been on around the globe.
But one thing I found were several CDs. The CDs held documents and, in this case, a series of very early novels I’d written. I’ve downloaded them to my hard drive. Despite the fact they were written almost forty plus years ago, they are interesting.
They’re interesting to help trace a writer’s career.
I started writing when I was in the 5th grade. That was the year my friend, Ronny Decker, loaned me a book by James Blish. it was a novelization of episodes from Star Trek (TOS), and it was the first time I’d read (hadn’t seen it yet) the episode titled “The Doomsday Machine.”
I was hooked. The story thrilled me, and so when I did see the episode, I decided I wanted to write that stuff. After that, I started keeping binders full of stories.
To be honest, most of it was Star Trek rip-offs. The crew was different, but the ship was a Constitution-class starship just like the Enterprise. About the only thing that changed was the name of the ship (from Enterprise to Challenger). Some of the stories I wrote were essentially nothing more than rewrites of existing Star Trek episodes.
Then I read a little book called 2001: A space Odyssey.
Mind blown.
Now, here’s something really funny. Anytime I read science-fiction, I felt ashamed. It was like I was hiding under my bed covers with a flashlight and leafing through a Playboy. I wasn’t supposed to be reading this stuff. I guess you could call it Future Porn.
Blame it on my elders. I was always told anyone who would read something like that had something wrong with them. What can I say, they were a totally unimaginative lot. I even told them that they had Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon. Star Trek and the like was the same thing, only the girls were hotter and the effects and stories better (looking back, that didn’t help my case).
But shortly after reading 2001, I met Mrs. Trent, my 8th Grade English teacher. Her and her husband were huge Science Fiction fans, and they opened their library to me. I raced through Childhoods End. I devoured Orphans of the Sky. And I was stunned by the world building of Dune. I began seeing there was much more to Science Fiction than Star Trek.
And it showed in my early writing.
One day, I wrote something called “The Traveler.” I’ve lost the last typewritten copy years ago, but the premise was this. A distant civilization has had Pioneer 10 wash up in their backyard so to speak. It takes a lot of work on their part to decipher the plaque on the probe, but they figure out where it came from and launch a mission to find its builders. They arrive in our solar system to find out they’ve missed us by billions of years. The Sun long ago went through its red giant phase and devoured the inner worlds to include Earth. Indeed, the solar system is mostly assorted wreckage as planetary orbits changed and planets smashed into each other.
But at the outskirts of our system, an old spaceship is found. And in its memory banks is the genetic code for a human being and information on our civilization (books, pictures, and so on). Their science is sufficiently advanced that they could take the information and bring the human race back from the dead so to speak.
The question becomes, do they dare?
Our history, complete with wars and atrocities had been included in the memory banks of the ship. Seeing all that, they had to ask if they did bring us back, what would they be unleashing? it was an attempt to answer the question, what makes people bad. Is it genetics? Or is it society?
I sent that story off to almost every magazine in the old Writer’s Market book that I thought would be interested. In due course, I collected enough rejection slips to paper a wall.
It never occurred to me that while the premise was mind blowing, I hadn’t matured enough as a writer to make it even a contender. I was just learning to tell a story, and to tell a story well, takes time and practice.
There were tons of mechanical issues with the stories as well. The word processor was still a dream, and all my tales of star-flung adventures were pounded out on an old Royal typewriter I’d purchased for twenty dollars. There were hundreds of spelling and grammar errors. Looking back, I’d have rejected the stories, too.
Of course, that didn’t stop me. There were several other aspiring authors at Centauri High School. Mr. Gary Benson was one of the teachers. Like us, he was an aspiring author. He used to talk writing with us, and the idea of a club came up. it wasn’t long before we founded the Writer Club.
One of our activities besides talking about writing was we published a quarterly magazine. One of the more Avant Garde members suggested the name of “The Eye” for the magazine, and “The Eye” it was.
Not a one of us knew anything about running a magazine. Maybe, that’s why it was so much fun. Almost every contribution was accepted and some of them were amazing. Mr. Bill Mahan, my history teacher, submitted a piece called “Duty of the State.” It would have made one hell of an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Then there was poetry, shorts, and so on.
It was printed off on the old mimeograph machine, stapled together, and sold for twenty cents a copy. I don’t know if any copies still exist. Maybe someplace in the dusty archives of the school library?
But the Star Trek rip-off began to move away from the worlds Star Trek had built and evolve into something different.
Part of it was technology. I’d finished reading Dr. Gerard O’Neil’s premise on how to build colonies in space and the epic scope of the idea floored me. It also introduced me to the idea of space mining, solar arrays, and really, really big structures.
That eventually found its way into my writings. The Challenger went from a Constitution-class ship to a sprawling ship that was home to three thousand people. While the Galaxy class ships in Star Trek: The Next Generation could house 3000 men and women and aliens, the Challenger dwarfed the Enterprise-D. In the rewrites, the Challenger was three times the size of the island of Manhattan. Most of that was engines, fuel, and life support. The actual crew compartment was tiny in comparison.
The newly designed ship was so large, it couldn’t even come close to the Sun but stayed parked well beyond Saturn. And that led to another issue with the stories.
In Star Trek, they invented warp drive for story telling purposes. Roddenberry and company knew the universe was big. It could easily take years to go from one star to another. Doesn’t make story telling easy if they didn’t have the Enterprise scoot about at ludicrous speeds.
In my universe, warp drive had never happened, so voyages could last centuries. The mission my series would focus around would take over thirty thousand years there and back. Thanks to relativity, only a few months might pass on the ship, but Earth would be changed beyond recognition upon their return.
Assuming they ever returned could they survive in that world.
To understand what I’m getting at, here’s an analogy. Take a Roman from the time of Christ and drop him in today’s world, say Denver during rush hour. He might not last long. Crossing streets, getting food, even the language would be beyond him.
In the novelization of 2001, Heywood Floyd has an encounter with a young woman that illustrates at least some of this perfectly. He meets the daughter of one of the scientists at the base. The girl is as tall as he is, but still not in her teens. She was born and raised on the Moon and the confines of the base are her home. He asks her if she would ever want to visit Earth and her answer is interesting. She says no because you hurt yourself when you fall down. Having been born and raised in what most of us would consider an alien world, she could never return to Earth simply because her muscles aren’t strong enough.
And that’s what my characters would return to. A world they couldn’t survive in.
And maybe that’s why that series ended up on disk and looked at only a little while ago. I couldn’t imagine a world where people would leave home and never return because of that reason. These voyages would be of such duration, they could easily return to find humans gone and the Earth a wasteland.
Leaving to never return was something most people just don’t see a point in.
That was before I realized that people have being doing just that for thousands of years. They packed up a few meager belongings and left for distant lands. Humans first did it by following game out of Africa without realizing what they were doing. Others simply hopped from island to island. And around us, there’s people in the so-called New World whose ancestors didn’t come from here. They came from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Each had their reasons for coming. Some came for a second chance. Others because they were on the run. Yet others came here against their will.
They left behind mothers and fathers. They left families and the familiar. And they never returned.
There might have been occasional letters, but as time went by, the families drifted apart. Today, there’s people in Europe and the Middle East with whom I share genetics and family lineage. I don’t know them and if I were to encounter them, we might be amused that we share a last name.
But as a species, we’ve left the familiar behind time and again. I now understand why people would leave their home for a hope and future on an alien shore.
Maybe I’ll dust off those old stories. I’ll convert them from Word Perfect to Microsoft Word, do some rewrites and clean them up. And maybe, just maybe, the Starship Challenger will set the Sun at its back, and its crew will go out among the stars and find a home for themselves.
William R. Ablan, pen name of Richard L. Muniz 