I’ve been playing around with writing a story or a few stories about transpiration infrastructure,
I spend a lot of time on trains. And I in a part of the world where there’s a lot of transportation infrastructure, but most of it is nearly 100 years old. So while it’s nice that there are trains, it’s also apparent that the trains are designed to serve a reality which is radically different from the one that people today occupy.
I think I’m drawn to stories about people living in worlds that are out of sync with their reality. The story I’m writing now revolves around this idea, using the problem of relativistic space travel as a device to pull people “out of time,” but I think there are ways that people’s relationship to their present is shifted without science fictional devices: by history, by political rhetoric, by development, and by illness.
The two ideas I’ve been playing with recently are:
- a story about the people who build some sort of railroad system on a new colony or outpost. I’m thinking Mars Trilogy (Robinson) meets Heart of Darkness meets Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin).
- a story about a commuter on the Moon mid/post-Accelerondo. Sort of “Philadelphia in Space.” This is probably more of a short story/vignette sequence, and I have a little bit sketched out but it’s all in first person and I need to make that not be the case.