Space Time Stories

Nazareth. What am I doing here? I wanted to stay out of sight in the backwaters, now I’m at the center of the universe. There are 2 main trade routes in this world: Baghdad to Rome and Cairo to Damascus. Those 2 paths intersect right here in Nazareth. Thousands of travellers pass through this city every year. Hundreds of caravans. At least nobody will wonder where I’m from. Half the people in Nazareth are just visiting from somewhere else.

I tried a few carpenter shops asking about some farming instruments. The prices were all over the map, there certainly isn’t any price fixing here. Unfortunately none of the carpenters were very friendly, and none of them knew a carpenter named Yeshua.

I found an inn on the outskirts of the city and rented a room. It had a straw mattress on a wooden frame, a chamber pot, and a window with a woven curtain. The air was stale and the lighting poor. But I had privacy which was been rare since I arrived.

I sat against the door and opened my pack. I reviewed my 15 bugs, a wireless receiving station and lamented that I had no place to put any of them. “If I can’t make any progress in Nazareth I’ll start bugging the synagogues and then return home” I muttered. I reviewed some of the pictures and video on my shoulder cam. What a wild place. Camels and donkeys everywhere, children running in packs laughing and scrounging. A few Roman patrols can be seen on major streets, but Nazareth appears to be a calm and peaceful marketplace.

Not trusting the “lock” on the door and not trusting the bedframe to be sturdy enough I lie down in front of the door, wedge my back against it, and let myself nap. I dreamed that I was crying while standing on a beach watching fishing boats. My best friend is gone and he’s never coming back.

I’m jolted awake when my wire buzzes. I answer it in a soft voice, hoping nobody can hear my English.

“Agent Jensen, what is your status?”

“I’d rather ask you for your status. Has the bug in Caphernaum been recovered?”

“Not yet, the signal is so weak we are having trouble locating it. It appears to be buried roughly 2 meters beneath the old synagogue ruins. The Israeli authorities are none to keen to let us randomly dig in the hopes we’ll find it. We’ll need more precise coordinates before we can retrieve it.”

“When”

“Probably 2 more days our time, that’s 6 hours your time. Where are you?”

“Nazareth.”

“What?”

“I know I know, but there was no place else to go. I tried Cana and Mt Tabor and several fishing villages on the Kinnaret. Nobody knows a carpenter or rabbi named Yeshua.”

“How many people have seen you in Nazareth?”

“A few hundred, but nobody cares. This place is like a major airport. Thousands of people travel through here every week. I’m just another stranger.”

“But you are still changing hundreds of lives. That’s just a lot more energy we’ll need to refocus the timeline. When can you get out of there?”

“I guess a few more hours won’t make much difference. Unless there’s a secret rabbi carpenter around here”.

A few hours later I was walking south a few hundred yards behind a caravan. They were strewing garbage as if they needed to unload ballast. “What a waste, this is such a beautiful place.” I pulled off the road at the town of . This time it was worth it. A poor family outside of town offered a crust of bread. Chatting with them I learned of a carpenter up the road named Yeshua. He had finished rabbinical training and was on the verge of moving to Caphernaum. His mother’s named was Mary and his father had died long ago. When I took my leave I left behind a gold coin, probably enough to feed them for a year. And I accidentally left a second in an obvious spot.

Whistling as I neared town I found my heart beating wildly. It was really him. In preparation I loaded 2 of the locusts and attached them to the edge of my cloak. They should last 5 years before they burrowed into the dirt for their 2000 year nap. I would release them near Jesus and walk away and go home and wait for them to be dug up.

I found a couple of blogs which discuss free science fiction. One of the reasons I plan to write science fiction short stories here on my blog is that I see little value in trying to get them published. The financial incentive is not worth the wait, and would not enough to allow me to quit my day job. Basically my goal is to build a fan base, people who are familiar with my work and might buy my novel when it is ready later this year.

The first blog I found is BestScienceFictionStories. Their post on The 10 Best Web Sites for Free Online Science Fiction Short Stories is very useful. Hopefully my site will be on the list soon.

The other is Auxiliary Memory where I found a post on Free Science Fiction. Free audio scifi books is a great idea.

Tor Books offers free science fiction downloads every week just for signing up. Not sure if they ever have science fiction short stories.

This week’s book is In the Midnight Hour by Patti O’Shea. The next book will be Battlestar Galactica by Jeffrey Carver.

They don’t appear to have a science fiction blog.

Fermi’s Paradox can be resolved in many ways. My preference is the following:

Natural evolution of advanced species is much rarer than most Darwinists would have you believe. It is in fact so rare that the probability of at least one species evolving in any given galaxy is below 1 (perhaps well below 1). Many galaxies never host intelligent life. The number of galaxies which evolve 2 or more is a very small number.

No aliens have contacted us yet because there are no others. We are the first (in the Milky Way). This is not anthropomorphic, rather it is an honest assessement of the probability that random chance will produce intelligence.

A recent post on TopTenz offered the Top 10 time travel movies. With all due respect it’s not clear that “time travel” was an important concept in this list. For example, in the Terminator movies there is a single time travel event at the very beginning of the movie and then nothing more. While the characters attempt to change the future there is no evidence they succeed. There is no foreknowledge or time loop or time machine. I would not call this a time travel movie because time travel is not possible for anyone after the beginning of the movie. As for Star Trek movies, they just aren’t serious enough. The time machine is their spaceship, and apparently they can travel in time whenever they like.

I think a time travel movie should have

1 A time machine or time travel mechanism right there in full view

2 Multiple instances of time travel

3 A time loop or paradox

4 Tension associated with the time-travel, a chance of temporal disaster.

So here is my own list of the Top 10 Time Travel Movies (free of Amazon links)

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1 Primer

2 12 Monkeys

3 Back to the Future I, II, and III

4 Timecop

5 The Time Machine (new and old versions)

6 Time Bandits

7 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

8 Frequency

9 Timeline

10 Butterfly Effect I ( II was not good enough for this list)

Unfortunately there is a dramatic difference in quality towards the end of the list. I think Hollywood should look at this an opportunity.

I’m worried my blog is on the verge of achieving sentience. I’ve noticed that some of my time travel stories have achieved a life of their own. What would it mean for a blog to be self-aware? Would it take comments personally? Would it seize control of the entire Internet and retaliate for poor digg rankings? Would it attempt to manipulate the US Presidential election? Or would it humbly accept its role as an aspiring science fiction blog and generate outstanding content?

My personal preference would be for it to send time travel email 24 hours into the past with the names of 2-3 top performing stocks from each trading day! Now that would be a useful AI.

Chapter 1

Cautiously I peered over the ridge, waiting for the Roman soldiers to pass by. I was dressed in rags to intentionally look like the poorest of the poor. Not only was this my best method of avoiding the authorities it should make it easier for him to find me. Looking around for signs of life I decided to risk using my goggles. I pulled them on and adjusted the lenses. I turned my gaze upon Caphernaum. I could make out a few dark boats floating on the Kinneret and wondered if he sat in one of them. I took a few stills and put the goggles away. I began walking.

Behind me the city of Tiberius faded into the distance. Gauging my pace I estimated I would arrive near dusk. Despite the secret padding built into my sandals my feet hurt. They were also disgusting and I was actually avoiding the piles of manure which littered the path.

Suddenly hearing laughter I paused and looked for cover. Seeing none I crouched near the side of the road and began mumbling. Three men and 4 children came up behind me and didn’t even pause as they passed me. I glanced at them and marveled at their indifference.

I stopped for lunch near the shore. I squeezed my canteen flat and pushed it under water. Osmotic pressure filled it with pristine water in a few minutes. I waded out into the water washing my feet and looking for a wayward fish. After a couple of fruitless minutes I walked back and chewed on a protein bar.

More voices echoed behind me, this time the reeds hid me well enough. I sat listening as the voices faded. I caught a few words but could not hear the entire conversation. As the sun began its downward journey I gauged my progress would get me to Caphernaum by dinner time. Nobody else crossed my path the remainder of the journey. When I reached the village I asked a few people for dinner and the third one agreed. He was a fisherman named Andrew but he had no brother.

I slept on a mat in Andrew’s living room that night pondering his answers to my questions. No carpenters lived in Caphernaum, he knew 2 men named Yeshua but neither was a carpenter nor had a mother named Mary. He was only vaguely aware of the name of the Roman procurator, and certainly not keeping track of the number of years since the last one. In short I still had no idea exactly where I could find Jesus, or where I would go next. After everyone was asleep I pulled out goggles and read through the histories.  This would be more difficult than we had planned.  There were only a few hundred thousand people in this part of the world, but they were so spread out it could take weeks to find him.

What are some of the best science fiction movies never released to theaters?

May 25 we may see the best one yet, The Andromeda Strain on A&E looks excellent.

Children of Dune was outstanding on SciFi.

Slipstream was never released in the USA because it was a flop in the UK.

Anybody know of any good time travel or space time stories never seen in theaters ?

Thanks to Gordon van Gelder for the July 2008 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Two stories caught my attention: Reader’s Guide by Lisa Goldstein had an interesting twist at the end, at least I thought so. Seems that a young apprentice might be rising up in the organization. This was an interesting format for a story, but probably not one which should be imitated.

The other was Fullbrim’s Finding by Matthew Hughes. In this story Mr. Hughes offers an explanation as to why this world seems so imperfect. The vocabulary was almost a roadblock, too many clever new words. But he stayed on this side of decipherable. The character of the detective was slightly derivative of Dirk Gently, but his personality and techniques were not central to the storyline.

Enfant Terrible by Scott Dalrymple is a short story about a gifted child whose gift is not exactly desirable. But child abduction is a controversial subject regardless of the motives.

I’ve never understood the fascination with alternative histories. 1949 in Nazi dominated Russia is fairly boring (to me) in Albert Cowdrey’s Poison Victory.

Richard Morgan has some hostile words for the battles ongoing within the science fiction community.

http://www.richardkmorgan.com/article_soundfury.htm

His comments are great, but we need more analysis. Why is there civil warfare inside our genre? Isn’t there room enough for all of us?

1 First of all, more than anything else, this is about money. There are only so many euros to go around and everybody wants more. Anyone who shows some success is an immediate role model and target. Campy space-opera, hoky stories which appeal to NASCAR fans sells.

2 A long time ago somebody decided to call their story science fiction, ignoring the fact that the word science has an unambiguous meaning. This may have been a slur, a derogatory comment aimed at a teenager who appeared to be wasting his life. Or it may have been a wannabe, somebody writing a story about magic pixie dust. In the end the name stuck, and any supernatural and possible future story was branded “science fiction”. How many bookstores make any effort to separate out fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction?

3 Most of us hope, anticipate, or desire that our story will eventually come true. Even sword wielding wizards usually represent a desire for reality. Faster than light travel, talking robots, and time-travelling hobbits are frequently dreams for a different reality than we have now. If I predict a post-apocalyptic wasteland where street urchins scrounge petrol for their dirt bikes then how could your story about a drug dealing robot with empathic wifi signals also come true?

4 For real science fiction there is almost always an idea which contradicts the canon of science. It’s too easy to criticize fake science such as faster than light or time travel, perpetual motion, communications satellites, or a planetary network carrying video, voice, and real-time text messages. Some of these ideas come true, some are reasonable predictions, some are outlandish. But all of them are necessary to tell a story. In the end this is about telling a story, it’s not about predicting the future. The fake science helps us tell a good story.

5 If scifi writers or readers were polled we would see even more hostile commentary towards Grisham, Follet and any host of popular authors. Derisive opinions and scathing hatred are there for the asking outside the genre.

Thanks to Neal Asher for pointing out Mr. Morgan’s comments.

S