My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge is to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), will consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. Some 12 chapters are already written so I have a bit of a head start…
Please comment with any opinions good or bad – you have no idea how much I need feedback at this stage…

 

Arctane is one of three human home-worlds mentioned in Train Wreck besides Earth, the decimated world of origin of the human race. It is the least important in the novel since none of the characters go there and its not involved in the plot, however it is a good starting point for exploring the universe of the Pan-Human Federation as these four worlds are called.

I was amazed to learn that imagining alien worlds goes back a long way – Dante in his “Paradiso” (1320) imagines his narrator ascending through sphers of the Moon and planets to eventually join with Angels. Giordano Bruno was martyred in 1600 for describing multiple, inhabited worlds orbiting other suns in his “De l’infinito universo e mondi” (“Concerning the Infinite Universe and Worlds”, 1584) – fortunately it is not so dangerous to write Science or Speculative Fiction these days…

When I was boy, scientists were coy about stating that there must be other suns with other planets bearing life since we had not even seen evidence of a planet crossing the disk of its star or causing a wobble in the stars orbit. As of 2018, 3078 exoplanets have been detected using such methods in our galaxy alone, although only 53 are “optimistically described as having the potential for life. There are of course an incalculable number of other galaxies…

The problems with travelling to other stars to explore such planets, are distance, the means of covering the distance and getting in and out of the gravity wells at either end of a planet-to-planet journey.- Most science fiction books skip lightly over these massive problems by having had someone invent the requisite drives for both interstellar journeys and getting on and off planets. So the Speculations of Science Fiction, fall into three categories – they are either about what we will find should we ever get there; considerations of what it is to be human by imagining us against some alien backdrop; or lastly, they are just a good yarn, cowboys and Indians, detective story, thriller or pirates of the asteroid belt dressed up in a futuristic setting. The realities of how and when we might ever be able to achieve such voyages lie far in the future.

My novel “Train Wreck” is really the second type of science fiction – what it is to be human – framed as the third type – a detective mystery. There is a crime at the outset and by the end of the book, we will have found out the who and the why, but along the way, is an examination of a Utopia and how people might succeed in expressing or suppressing human nature in such a society…

Arctane is a “mere” mining planet where materials valuable enough to human activities and rare enough to merit transporting between the stars have been found. The rarity of suitably inhabitable planets is such that all the planets in the Pan Human Federation orbit different stars and so you can bet that whatever interstellar drive has conveniently been discovered, its pretty d**n quick and even then, it takes an appreciable length of time to make the journey. Of course, like the canal-boats of Earth’s nineteenth century (a period of Industrial Revolution), although slow, once a flow of boats is under way, regular deliveries arrive.

Arctane is the very opposite of a Utopia, it is practically a “Company planet” since everything that happens there is by and for “The Company” and Arctinians are, as mining folk throughout human history have been, a rough and ready lot with no time for the niceties of civilisation. I have perhaps included the existence of Arctane simply to offer a contrast to the paradise that is the Utopian experiment which is Hawaii 2 and a worse alternative to the main replacement, human home-world for Earth that is Hawaii 1. Those who volunteered to go to Arctane in search of fortune, were almost diametrically opposite to those who first volunteered but were then carefully picked, to inhabit the Utopian experiment of Hawaii 2.

If you want to explore some of the many worlds science fiction writers have imagined, Wikipediadoes not disappoint and for images of imagined worlds – including the one shown at the start of this post, click here.

 

And now for the Frontispiece, Prologue and Chapter 1 of Train Wreck…

Train Wreck.

Hawaii:- from the Polynesian word Owhyhee meaning homeland. As the Polynesian peoples spread out across the Pacific Ocean, each new island colonised was initially called Owhyhee, Once the numbers of settlers rose to a suitable capacity for the island, a new group would set out in search of the next Owhyhee.

Prologue

HAWAII 2, DECEMBER, ANNO GALACTICUS 1243

If the explosion that severed the Spacelift Express had happened any further from the capital then the fatalities, at least in that section of the train aft of the explosion, might have been total. A parched tongue extended from the vast wastes of the New Sahara Desert and pushed its way almost to the city. The tongue was lapped either side by two valleys verdant with man-made greening right up to their watersheds. This desert tongue was the scene of the atrocity and was within range of rescue vehicles, both land based and, as luck would have it, the weather permitted airborne rescue helicopters too.

 

The explosion, the result of a bomb, it was quickly but discretely established, occurred in the dining car, severing the carriage at that point as well as the maglev monorail on which the train ran. The carriages behind this point hit the break in the rail, jumped off its guiding influence and concertinaed – the train swinging alternatively left and right. The forward section of the train carried on a little further around the gentle curve of the track at this point for although the catastrophic break in the monorail had cut power to the maglev engines, the aerodynamic air intake that helped compress the air flow smoothly beneath the train when in motion, carried the sinking carriages just far enough to avoid being crushed from behind by the rear section. The sudden sinking of the carriages onto the monorail caused a sudden enough braking that some passengers, especially those on their feet sorting out their luggage ready for the imminent arrival at Grand Central were thrown to the floor in the front section. In the rear section of the train those standing formed the majority of the dead. Those still seated fared proportionally better in both sections but having said that, there were plenty of dead amongst the seated of the rear section too.

 

One young couple were particularly lucky as having been closest to the explosion yet partially protected by having both entered the toilet at one end of the dining car and just closed the door behind them when the explosion happened. They were thrown around badly and were both in an unconscious state which resolved, once all other possible care had been given to their battered bodies, into intractable comas in both their cases.

Fortunately… 

Chapter 1
Awakening.

HAWAII 2, MAY, A.G.1244

He could hear a baby.
He could hear a woman talking to the baby in the high-pitched voice that even men adopt instinctively when talking to babies, he remembered Anna telling him how that worked.
“Yes you are a beautiful boy, aren’t you!”
Gurgling from the baby.
“Just like your Dad there! The Sleeping Beauty! Who’s a beautiful boy? Coodgie, coodgie, coo!”
More gurgling followed by spluttering and a tiny sneeze.
“Bless you!” The woman’s voice. Wait! That was his mother’s voice! What was she doing here and where was here?
He tried to speak but there was something stuck in his throat but a rasping sound emerged followed by his Mother’s voice calling for a nurse and then suddenly there were lots of voices around him.

“BP please?”
“BP normal at one-two-five over eighty but pulse is up to ninety-eight.”
Okay let’s de-intubate please. Gently does it he’s had it in a long time!”
He feels like his throat is being ripped out. He liked it better when the baby was here and his mother.
“Murrghm!” He tries to sit up and call her but he feels as weak as a kitten and his throat is dry and sore.
Gently now! Lie back Jack and let me wet your lips.”
Something spongy is applied to his lips and a trickle of water slips into his mouth and down his throat, he nearly chokes. He tried to open his eyes realising that if he could hear then he should be able to see but something was stopping them opening. He tried to raise his hands to his eyes but they weighed too much and they seemed – encumbered. He panicked and started thrashing his arms and crying out for his mother and suddenly her voice was there again.
“It’s okay Jack, just relax a minute and the doctors will help you.  You’re in hospital but you are ok!”
Someone was holding his hand, holding it down but stroking his arm. It was his mother’s touch, the touch when he was in bed settling down after a story and slipping into sleep. He calmed down. Hands removed something from his face, undid tape from his eyelids. The doctor spoke again.
“Now Jack – try opening your eyes please.”
At first everything was blurry, heads bent over him in a semi darkened room then a blinding light from the doctors torch, first in one eye and then the other. Then there was more light as someone twisted the blinds open and the bright sunlight came flooding in and finally, there was his mother, tears of happiness running down her face as she bent forward to hug him as he lay there and he felt her tears run down his cheek. After a bit she stood up again and a nurse moved in to remove something from his arm the bed was tilted upwards bringing him to a near sitting position.
“There was a baby!” he said “Where’s the baby?”
His mother looked at the doctor who shrugged and nodded at the same time. His mother turned to him and with a pained look but in a bright voice, a too bright voice, said
“Jack you have a son! You are a father Jack!”