7 Billion Years BCE

The universe is young and rapidly expanding. Fewer galaxies and a relative handful of bright new stars. Orbiting these closely neighboring stars are a few thousand planets cradling intelligent life.

Solar systems are closer together, and the fabric of the galaxies are lousy with tears– wormholes. Given the speed with which travel is possible between planets and systems, the sentient species sail on solar winds and the tides of space/time.

Question is, do I keep humans as one of these sentient cultures– keeping in the trope of human as touchstone and anchor for the audience– or do I do away entirely with us? Focus on what could be called, from our standpoint, older races?

Want to move away from visual stereotypes of space opera. Definitely a Froudian aesthetic. Imagine The Dark Crystal as a space opera, at least visually. Very organic technology, living ships. Space whales. But not Farscape.  More an age of established empires.  Empires of what we call the Old Gods, now simply the Gods.  The Untenables.  The great, unknowable beings of the Cthulhu Mythos.  Likewise probably Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana, and Carcosa ain’t so lost, and the King in Yellow sits enthroned.  Maybe not directly, but certainly inspired.  If Gaiman can get away with a Lovecraft reference in everything he writes, then so can I, doggammit.

Life During Wartime

Been listening to Talking Heads. About to start re-reading Hadji Murad. This is, properly speaking, a brain attack.

The whole thing took less than a month. They’d gotten to the truckers first, paralyzed the flow of food and trade,. Corporate pressure on the unions, inside agitation. Most of the churches were already preaching against the incumbent administration. Apparently, eleven years of progressive rule was too much to stomach. The current president had won by a margin, and they took it as justification for rebellion. The militias activated, and sympathetic cells in the military picked up on that end.

The attackes started in the terrorist vein– bombings, shutting down loyalist media hubs, murdering leftist spokesmen. After the very public execution of Senator Joseph Harris (D, GA), they mobilized and got down to straight military action. They called themselves the New American Union, and claimed divine right. Claimed crusade against the Anti-Christ in the White House. Entire military bases went turncoat– sick of the budget cuts and secular rhetoric coming out of D.C. Sick of the “emboldened faggots” in their ranks. Five-hundred openly gay soldiers died in the week of conflict between loyalist and N.E.U.-Patriot factions. Blatant sacrifices by “God’s soldiers” to bring His hand down upon the “Satanist opposition to their holy and just revolution”. The armed forces still loyal to Washington were too engaged in fighting the N.E.U. cells in their own ranks to keep a clamp down on the swelling citizen militias; militias already heavily armed and organized. Sympathetic citizens joined them by the hour.