Obvious spoilers for my forthcoming story ‘Rage’.
A while ago, I became aware of a project called the ‘Blake’s 7 Annual 1982’ and committed myself to working on two things to contribute to it. I’ve mentioned them already on this blog. Clearly the death of Yahoo! Answers has removed one source of procrastination from my life. Nonetheless I want to stick to the commitment of blogging daily for as long as possible, but today I’ve decided to do it in a way which will aid my writing process rather than hindering it. Here, then, is an outline of various issues relating to the story and some cogitations on the way I write. I’m also hoping this tangential essay will constitute a catalyst for the actual story-writing.
The story is mainly set in Series D of ‘Blake’s 7’, although it begins in the 22nd century, long before the events of the show itself. In it, the People’s Republic of China masterminds the manufacture of a space ark to colonise a planet circling 82 Eridani, which is in reality a Sun-like star about twenty light years away. It’s made from a largely iron-nickel asteroid in a similar manner to how Larry Niven, and probably others, proposed it would be manufactured: take an iron-nickel asteroid, put tanks of water inside it and superheat the water either with lasers or focussing sunlight so that it becomes steam and eventually gets hot enough to melt the metal of which the asteroid is made, expands and pushes out the surface, so that rather than having to hammer something together in space, a hollow structure is essentially created from readily available resources. The steam can then be allowed to condense, although in order to do this an atmosphere needs to be provided. Some moulding is also necessary in order to form a cylindrical surface, which is needed because the illusion of gravity needs to be created by rotating the structure and for that to be equal, it needs to be on a surface parallel to the axis of rotation. Shielding from ionising radiation can then be provided by crushed stony asteroid, which could also form soil. Slight irregularities in the surface lead to land and water topography, with streams and other bodies of water such as lakes. The interior then needs to be lit. Near a star, that’s feasible simply by providing windows, but this is a vehicle, not a space station, and has to travel between the stars. Nicking an idea from Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Rendezvous With Rama’, a strip light can be placed along the axis of the cylinder. It needs to have enough red light to support photosynthesis and really needs to have the same spectrum and brightness overall of the Sun, although the fact that it’s a strip rather than a disc reduces this somewhat. It also needs to turn on and off in a twenty-four hour cycle which includes reddening at dawn and dusk. All of this also needs a prodigious energy source and energy storage, and it shouldn’t be presumed that technobabble handwaving will provide this, so I’m going to say there’s a fusion power source backed up by solar. The entire outer surface of the ark is plated with solar cells.
The interior then needs to be terraformed. This is done by providing the right organisms. The Biosphere II project turned out not to be sustainable even in the short term. This was a closed dome-like environment in Arizona intended to test whether a viable self-sustaining environment was possible, or rather to learn from the mistakes made in these circumstances. It lasted two years and the ultimate problem was that respiration outstripped photosynthesis, leading to a rise in carbon dioxide and a drop in oxygen. Some of the biomes encountered problems. For instance, the desert ecology ceased to be so because of condensation from the windows providing precipitation and there were problems in the rainforest zone because of the lack of wind preventing proper wood from forming. Coral throve though, which is surprising considering the presumed acidification of the water from the carbon dioxide, which could’ve been expected to dissolve the mineral matrix it relies upon. One issue with Biosphere II was the small size at 1.27 hectares. The larger such a system is, the longer it takes for entropy to take over. This can be seen, for example, in small and large aquaria and ponds. The larger your fish tank, the easier it is to maintain.
A somewhat separate and predicted problem with Biosphere II resulted from the psychological interaction between the human inhabitants. This is particularly important to ‘Rage’ because in the end it’s a story and the drama in many such pieces arises from these interactions. Antarctic bases can also be studied in this way, and since this is a twenty-second century scenario, it can be presumed that interpersonal psychology has advanced as well as technology and natural science. Anyone who’s lived in a shared house will be familiar with some of this. The group, which comprised eight people (there were actually two sessions), split into two inimical factions after about a year, even though they’d been close friends at first. However, they all felt very proprietorial about their habitat and a sense of bonding with the project. It was special to them. Nobody was ‘phoning it in. It wasn’t helped that in the early part of the project, everyone was constantly hungry. Eventually, someone decided they would start eating seeds which had been provided from outside rather than relying on crops grown inside the project, and this person was sacked, but stayed inside the dome because she realised it was unenforceable – if she’d been forcibly removed it would’ve ended the project as it would’ve exposed the environment to the outside world.
Some of this is kind of petty, and I don’t mean this as a criticism. There’s a radio sitcom called ‘Bird Island’ which is about three people on an Antarctic island, because this “trapped” situation works really well for those purposes (and is also low-budget). This kind of pettiness is part of human nature, and since the group was very small it can be expected to happen. The ark, which I’m going to call 天園, Tian Yuan, for reasons I’ll go into in a bit, will have a population of about fifty thousand, so the entropy which applies to smaller social groups will be more limited. This population is of the order of many small island nations such as Gibraltar, and the land surface area is about the same as that of the Isle of Wight at 380 km2. However, there’s also extensive water, perhaps about the same as Earth’s surface at 71%, making the total internal surface area 1310 km2. Given a twelve kilometre diameter, this makes the ark around thirty-two kilometres long, so it’s not particularly densely populated at 131 people per square kilometre, about the same as Thailand and a quarter that of the UK. Hence people wouldn’t get under each other’s feet that much and it’s more like a micronation than an outpost. Perhaps a medium-sized town.
One issue which is frequently ignored or waved away in science fiction is the language barrier. H2G2 has the Babel Fish and Star Trek the Universal Translator, both of which are said to work in the same way. But these are plot devices intended to remove that specific barrier and allow other stories to be told. I have no intention of doing this here. Iceland is a small nation of around three hundred thousand people, and consequently its language is very conservative and hasn’t changed much since the Dark Ages. I envisage seven centuries passing between the settlement of the Tian Yuan and the arrival of our heroes, but in that time the Mandarin Chinese spoken initially on board is unlikely to have changed much, although it might have had time to become a dialect. By contrast, the Terran Federation probably does not speak English. This is ignored in ‘Blake’s 7’ where almost everyone, even the aliens, speak southern English English, but in fact they can be surmised to be speaking a language which could be called something like Terran or Standard Galactic, as close to a language spoken in the twenty-first century as that would be to one spoken at the time of the European Middle Ages. We also don’t know the roots of that language, as it could be a mixture of the dominant languages spoken on Earth now, a development of a specific language spoken by the conquerors or even an artificial language that aids mind control. We do appear to know that certain idioms and puns are the same as in English, for example Vila’s jokes in ‘Ultraworld’, and there’s some mileage in the possibility that the existence of audio recordings since the twentieth centur has slowed the change in the English language, but it seems unlikely that no linguistic change has happened at all. Therefore I choose to posit that it has, and that the encounter between the Scorpio crew and the people on board the Tian Yuan will involve some kind of linguistic obstacle along with a way round it which doesn’t involve an easy technical fix. Arguably, ‘Blake’s 7’ is in the Whoniverse and the usual explanation there is that there are nanotech motes which rewrite the brains of people communicating in order that they understand each other, but that technology is Gallifreyan and very vague-sounding, so it isn’t available to the Federation
Then there’s the question of genetics, the founder effect and the number of generations involved. The ark launched seven hundred years before and has a steady population of roughly fifty thousand. This can’t be allowed to fluctuate because of resources. Assuming a generous average age of thirty, there are twenty-three generations (and a bit) in seven hundred years. This means that someone living on the ark will have had over eight million instances of an ancestor in the first generation, meaning that people will have overlapped over a hundred and fifty times, so any genes available will be thoroughly mixed by now and will have been for seven generations, unless something happened like factions developing which don’t interbreed. This means there will be a founder effect: loss of genetic variation compared to the wider human population. In many ways this is an island ecosystem, and there will also be founder effects among the crops and any non-human animals who may be along for the ride for whatever reason.
I’ve decided that one individual, Dr Hu Wei, has a monogenic trait which gives him intermittent explosive disorder. This is a condition giving the individual sudden violent anger. Before he boarded the ark, like everyone else Dr Hu underwent extensive testing and it was decided that he needed anger management without it being realised that his issue is genetic. Hence he is able to manage his anger but he passes the trait onto his children, and it’s triggered by the red light emitted by the central illumination column in the evenings, causing everyone afflicted to have an outburst of destructive rage for about an hour every evening. This is more poetic than realistic of course. This means that the structures of the habitat are in ruins, since they’ve been smashed up by the people involved, and of course many of the people themselves are injured through fighting. Hence the title of the story, ‘Rage’.
The initial plan was to send the ark to settle the 82 Eridani system. In the real world, 82 Eridani has three “super earths”. These are rocky planets considerably more massive than Earth. Even the third planet is likely to have a mean surface temperature of about 115°C, probably higher, although extrapolating the situation here to there, that could mean the poles are at a hot but just about bearable temperature. However, I choose to imagine there is also a habitable body in that system, since the gravitational pull of these planets would be too high for human survival long term. Since it’s a space ark, the Tian Yuan can take centuries to reach its destination, two hundred years in fact, but that’s still one heck of a clip at 10% of the speed of light, bearing in mind also that the craft could comfortably cover the Isle of Wight, so that’s a very large mass to accelerate to that velocity. It also has to accelerate and decelerate gently enough that it doesn’t interfere with the artificial gravity.
While the ark is underway, technology marches on. Faster than light travel is achieved and people from Earth overtake the Tian Yuan and settle 82 Eridani anyway. Meanwhile on board, the population becomes attached to its home and develops its own culture, and by the time they reach the nearby star, they don’t want to disembark and the people in the system don’t want them to settle, so instead they upgrade the engines and they decide to continue near a line of sight to a star system with more powerful radiation, namely the triple star system of Acamar, because what they really need is starlight. They recharge their batteries and set off for a five century journey to Acamar, a further hundred light years away. As they continue on their way, the genetic issue of the daily rage comes to affect the entire population and they forget that it isn’t usual because to them the ark is the world, although they’re aware of the Galaxy gradually being settled around them. In the outside Galaxy, technology continues to advance but about three centuries into this second journey, the Terran Federation takes over, having become a totalitarian régime. Tian Yuan has been forgotten by the wider Galaxy at this point and they eventually reach Acamar, by which point the Federation has undergone the Intergalactic War with the Andromeda Galaxy, ending in stalemate, and has begun to claim back the Galaxy with its soporific gaseous mind-control drug Pylene-50. They stumble across the ark and attempt to subdue it by injecting the gas into their atmosphere, assuming it will work. Because of the genetic variation leading to the daily rage, it doesn’t and all the troops end up getting killed.
And this is where our heroes come in. Xenon Base intercepts a distress signal from Acamar to Earth and Vila and Soolin are sent to investigate. On reaching the ark, they are greeted warmly by the inhabitants but notice that the whole place is a bit smashed up. They realise that the atmosphere has been filled with Pylene-50 but notice that they too are immune. Tarrant comes over to repair their guidance system and they work to extract the gene and splice it into a virus they can use as a vaccine against the effects of the drug. They go back to the Scorpio and try out Pylene-50 followed by the drug on Avon. His sociopathic character is altered by the drug. Meanwhile, back on the ark, the daily rage starts and the natives start attacking Tarrant. In a break with his usual character, Avon decides to rescue Tarrant and teleports him back on board the Scorpio. The Federation then turns up and, realising the Tian Yuan is a threat, blows it up and kills everyone. On the Scorpio, Vila gets the drug and the vaccine mixed up and accidentally throws away all the vaccine, so hopelessness is satisfyingly restored.
That last paragraph is the actual story, which is currently about a quarter written. I still need to fill in a couple of details here.
Tian Yuan, or rather 天園, is the Chinese astronomical name for the part of the constellation of Eridani the ark is headed for. It means “Celestial Orchard”, and therefore works quite well as a name for the ark. Acamar itself is either a binary or a triple star system consisting of two or three type A (white) stars. I’ve seen two estimates for its distance from here: 120 and 160 light years. It’s also known as θ1 & θ2 Eridani, because the components are far enough apart that they can be seen separately from Earth through a fairly small telescope. It’s also suspected that the first may be a double itself. For some reason I don’t know, triple star systems are always organised such that two companions are much closer together than the third, and this is the case here if the system does turn out to be triple. Θ2 is around 300 times the distance of Earth from the Sun, and is slightly less massive than θ1, and as is usual with binary systems the two stars both orbit their centre of gravity around half the distance between them. The possibly double one has a mass of 2.6 times that of the Sun and is due to become a red giant quite soon as it’s used up all its helium, and the other one is slightly less advanced. Like any star of that kind of mass, for instance Sirius A, their lifetime up until becoming red giants is only a few hundred million years, so if they have any planets which support life that won’t be more than simple microbes unless they’ve been settled from somewhere else. Tian Yuan can nevertheless use them as a power source.
Grafting all this onto a ‘Blake’s 7′ story makes it rather hard SF compared to the series itself, which usually lacks the scientific rigour required. Real stars and planets are not often mentioned in the series and there are huge issues with the often frankly confusing science. However, in order to do any kind of job at all here, I have to be able to believe in what I’m doing rather than letting myself go along with mushy science. However, the series really scores with the characters, and this is what I find most difficult. This is partly because I’m not good at characterisation, but the way the series is written doesn’t help, particularly with female characters. Not all of this is even the writers’ fault because of the pressure of time. Terry Nation said there was a tendency for first drafts to become the actual script for broadcasting due to pressure of time. However, particularly with female characters there’s a tendency for them to start strong and well-drawn and for them to end up “making the tea”, and for this reason actresses tended to leave. I currently have this problem with Soolin. She was in it for most of Series D but at the start she was given Cally’s lines to some extent because of Cally being written out and leaving rather suddenly and firmly, so the characterisation is difficult. She’s said to be a “female Avon” and her back story is good. She is supposed to have had a mining operation taken over her planet and kill her family, then be raised by one of her family’s killers, have been trained in use of weapons by this man, then gone on to murder him and everyone involved, even off-world, in the mining. This is somewhat clichéed by today’s standards and reminds me somewhat of ‘Leon’, but at the time may have been quite original. I don’t know. Vila is the easiest character to write, at least for me, but it’s important to remember that by Series D he had substance abuse issues and was unable to get over Cally’s death. Avon is the sociopathic cynic. Tarrant I’m not sure about except that he’s supposed to be a good pilot and is quite arrogant and self-centred.
Finally, every episode of Series D has a one-word title, hence the title ‘Rage’.
This has been an exercise in putting compost on my story in the hope that it doesn’t turn out to be compost itself. I hope it has served to amuse to some extent. It’ll end up having about 3400 words, which is almost as long as the story.
A Box Of Chocolates 