Science Fiction

Interstellar Dragons, Part 3

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A Short Story by A.B. Timothy

Matthew bounced up and down in a rhythm that had taken more than some time to get used to. Aloft and behind him, he carried across the black plain of space a white banner, flowing and fluttering to the full length of his newest friend, Su’onna, a glorious, great gold dragon whose body and tail stretched across many fields. Matthew was careful not to even refer to the dragon as beautiful in his mind, even though the great Su’onna was that. The great beast, he didn’t like the term, so Matthew did not use it.

It had been many months since his ‘death’ at the hands of the swarming wyrms back above their homeworld. Now he was one of them… lost among the people of their world and becoming entrenched in the traditions and customs of a dragonrider. Now… Well… Now, he wanted nothing more than to go home to his people and pursue peace. He wanted to hold Sarah in his arms again; he wanted to wrestle Jonathan and Fred, teach them, after such a long educational lapse, who was still in charge; the pair had more than likely grown arrogant in his absence.

If they had grown arrogant, he must have grown ten times as such. Of course, as a boy, he’d read stories, watched movies, “boy suffers tragedy, boy learns new ways and new culture, boy returns to his own, his own received him with hesitant optimism, everyone lives happily ever after,” or something. The play-by-play is different in every story, but Matthew had faith that his might be different. He wanted it to be different because he’d done it twice, first when initially joining up with the hunters as a member of the Joyriders, but also now becoming a part of the dragonriders. These people were his friends, but who would he give his loyalty to, the Joyriders? Or the Dragonriders? All of these contemplations whipped through his mind as the banner whipped through nothingness, mimicking the dragon’s curling and whipping bodily motions as it warped space to fly therethrough.

“It, Matthew? I thought we’d been done with this ages ago.” Su’onna said.

“Right, forgive me, Su’onna, it was a slip,” Matthew replied.

“I’m sure,” The great beast said, rolling his eyes.

“The proximity field says we are close, Su,” Matthew said. “Is there anything I can do to increase the likelihood that they see the white flag?”

“You tell me,” Su’onna replied, “The flag of peace for our people, as we told you, is the red banner, which, given what you’ve now taught us, explains why our suings for peace were always met with drums of war, not carpets of peace.”

“Right.” With that, Matthew lifted the banner a little higher and, after squeezing the dragon’s saddle with his knees, took his other hand off the saddle and onto his compression suit, adjusting and tweaking this connection, or that joint. He was a little short for these tall suits, but they hadn’t had time to fit one for him. Not before the sources in Earth’s forces warned of a fleet moving into the gap, pierced by the Joyriders, preparing for a full-scale invasion of Gaia, the Dragon’s homeworld. Now, Matthew and Su’onna were approaching their enemy’s staging ground.

Matthew was extremely nervous, but felt confident that his people would respect a white banner. They did just that! Matthew breathed a sigh of relief as two pilots fell into the stream with Su’onna and waved him onto the main station. As Su’onna came to a rest on the massive landing site the asteroid had, a dome was enclosed around them, and the place became pressurized. He took his helmet off and slid off Su’onna’s back, carrying the motionless white banner behind him.

A few fighters had slipped in before the dome was shut and had landed nearby. Off in the distance, Matthew saw all kinds of weapon emplacements locked on Su’onna. Matthew felt a great deal of anxiety coming from the beast and placed a hand on his scales, “Don’t worry, Su, they’re gonna have to get through me first. He turned to begin walking toward the now landed jets and, just after he had cleared Su’s giant tail, he felt someone grab him from behind, pinning his arms to his chest, Matthew acted on instinct, dropping his weight and breaking the assailant’s grip with a sharp thrust of his arms before he grabbed his assassin’s neck and flipped him over, slamming him to the deck of the station, with an arm reared back and fist aimed at Sarah’s throat, Sarah? “Sarah?” The word came out with a thick wyrm-ish accent.

Read “Interstellar Dragons” from the Start…

Interstellar Dragons, Part 2

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A Short Story by A.B. Timothy

“I wasn’t ready, but I am now.” The words of her friend still rang in Sarah’s head. The last words she had heard him say to her in private before they had gotten behind their throttles that last time. Matthew’s brown eyes were burned into the side of her skull, always just out of sight, but always watching.

The pilot thrust her throttle forward and screamed with rage, through the pain. A dragon exploded in a mist of green fire before she blew threw its remains at nearly full fight speed. She twisted her control stick and wrapped around herself in a dodge before laying into the dragon that had tried to vaporize her from the sky. Another one died. She saw Matthew’s ship careening to the surface, smoke and fire billowing from the engines. She screamed again. More dragons died. An alarm blared before her world suddenly went black.

The pod she had placed herself in hissed open. She pulled her head from the full immersion device to see who had disrupted her. Well, that is what she would tell you she did. In reality, she ripped out her head, screaming bloody murder at the poor sap who had dared disturb her. “Captain Peregrine.” Fred, Matthew’s second, stood looking back at her, emotionlessly dismissing her rage. “Captain, Peregrine.” He said again, having waited for her to take a breath before trying again.

“I have to keep flying, Frederick. You can’t pull me from the Dive-Deck like that.” Sarah Peregrine argued. Her hair was a ratty mess, her eyes wild, and her lips cracked.

“You have been running the same, unwinnable simulation for the past fourteen days.” Frederick, his hair buzz cut, his eyes deep with concern, and his lips balmed, poured empathy into his voice.

“I wasn’t ready that day, Frederick. I have to be ready the next time it happens.” Peregrine said.

“I am telling you, Peregrine, that if you do not extract yourself from this Dive-Deck and get some sleep, there will not be a next time for you. You’ll be stuck flying sims in a beachfront house somewhere in the California Islands.” Frederick was still compassionate, but also deadly serious. “You want to be ready for our rescue mission? Then you’d better get some real sleep. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir.” Captain Peregrine slowly, and reluctantly, began extracting herself from the Dive-Deck and plopped her wobbly feet onto the hard plutosteel floor of the space station. Sarah felt Frederick’s tender hand on her shoulder as she steadied herself. In a strange display of emotion, the young man hugged her and rubbed her back. She cursed the tears that fell onto his consoling shoulders.

He whispered to her, like a father comforting his daughter, “I miss him too. We can’t get him back if we destroy ourselves.” Sarah hugged her friend back. She knew he was right, but she also knew, finally, just how exhausted fourteen days of no real sleep can make you.

Is your Sci-Fi Setting Real Enough? Part 2

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Yesterday, I left off encouraging you to improve your world-building by seeing my listicle on the subject. Today, however, I want to continue to drive home a few points.

Individualism in Short Form

Something that I have done, and I have read other authors successfully doing as well, is taking a moment to realize your world on a deeper level in between story beats. What do I mean by this? Well, look at Brandon Sanderson’s “Skyward” series. I will admit I have only read the first book so far, but there in the first book he does what I want to suggest you do. In between the acts, in his three act book, he breaks POV and moves the story to someone else, someone we later find is still connected to the main character, but still a different POV. In this POV we learn several things about the world implicitly and it gives us very real, very human characters outside the head of the main character. It reminds us, “Hey look over here at this other thing that is still happening in this very real world!” Try that!

As I mention in my listicle on world building writing short stories is huge for any world and it is a wonderful way to ensure that this creation of yours feels alive. Why not take a moment and write what it’s like for a planetary senate to convene? Do they all connect to a holo-server and beam themselves to a forum from the sectors over which they preside? Are they all contacted and asked to beam themselves half-way across the planet for a special session?

Caste Struggles

Look at any Sci-Fi setting you adore, Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, Skyward, or insert your Sci-Fi of choice. In all of these you will find a deeper issue behind the epic space battles and existential threats. In Star Wars you have a very traditional economic caste struggle between the rich and powerful elites and the regular everyday citizens. I have not seen it, but I am told that the show “Andor” on Disney+, is a great example of everything I have been talking about. They dive deep into personal motivations while still giving us the epic landscapes and space battles that Star Wars is known for. In Warhammer 40k (limiting the scope for this discussion to just the humans) there is a struggle between the Imperium and Chaos. Humans split into two factions which only serves to highten the tension between Humanity and its impending doom. In Skyward there are the citizens of the undercity, the place where humanity is forced to hide to avoid being bombed into oblivion by an ominous alien threat, and the pilots of the Defiant Defense Force or DDF.

Closing thoughts…

Did I stress you out? Did I give you delusions of grandeur? Or did I inspire you to something you feel is too daunting to tackle? Well, good! Writing a world of Fantastic Speculation is not going to be an easy task and you need to realize that we in order to succeed in this space you have to shoot for the moon and hit the stars.

Go now and realize your grand designs! Write that epic story, pain that epic landscape, or whatever it is you do, but go now and do it! Per Audacia ad astra.

Is your Sci-Fi Setting Real Enough?

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From Star Wars to Warhammer 40k and from Dune to Starship Troopers, something sticks out. Planetary Governments. More often than not, the politics behind the cool sword fights and bureaucracy behind the epic space battles get overlooked. This is because the interior design of a senator’s office is much less attention-grabbing than the trenches of an alien battlefield. Truthfully, however, the inner workings of a political movement and how it infects a populace could be great fodder for a story.

The idea of Sub-genres is what comes up here. Science Fiction, and speculative fiction more broadly, is usually hosted in the same aisles in bookstores. We, as readers and creators in the space, understand there is more nuance than that, however. We understand that some Sci-Fi stories will be about political intrigue on a galactic scale, while others will be war chronicles of fighting men and women doing heroic deeds on their far-flung battlefields. Even still, there are space operas that contain much of both of the aforementioned categories. If you dig down deep enough, however, you will find politics on the battlefields and battles raging in the space senate.

As the author, we get to decide how much of each is shown to the reader and why. That is the balance that I am here to talk about today. If you lack politics, it becomes mindless action page turners with little to no character. If you forget action, your story can get bogged down with speeches and exposition that lose readers. A realistic world has both.

The place where I often roll my eyes the hardest is when a book or franchise says, “Oh yes, this entire planet with billions of people is ruled by one government with no dissent.” That is just a plain lie that we are expected to just accept as readers. It’s a lie that you should avoid trying to feed your readers. How you do that is up to you. If world-building is not your strong suit, then I would definitely check out my other posts about that. Like this one! There is so much more to talk about here, but I am out of time today. Look for part two of this tomorrow. In the meantime, let me know ways you have made your sci-fi worlds more real in the comments below, and subscribe so you never miss a blog.

Interstellar Dragons, Part 1

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A Short Story by A.B. Timothy

Matthew sat in his cockpit when the nails began scraping another chalkboard. Whilst he had been traveling faster than light, there was no problem, but now that he had slowed to a total stop orbiting the Dragons’ world with his flight, he was keeled over in the pain of ear-splitting screams. Before it was just a background, headache-inducing buzz, here he could make out actual screams of rage, and… they were getting closer? “They’re coming, prepare for combat, Joyriders, open wings, bombers, divert shield energy to cannons.” He called out the commands to his squad, proving that, even in the midst of the sheer agony, he could do this. Those commanders would be proud to have chosen him, not ashamed. Just as he predicted, the screams of anger roared to a new volume—no, volume was the wrong word, intensity? That was closer—at the same time, the squad started receiving proximity klaxons in their headsets. Sarah, Jonathan, and Fred all scrambled and began fighting for their lives. Fred called in the midst of it all, “How did they find us? Our cloaks are still up!” No one had an answer for him, except, perhaps, Matthew.

The young pilot pressed a button on his command module and hurled the remains of his breakfast into a blue plastic bag, before it was sealed shut and locked in the refuse container on his little flier. “Captain, look alive!” Matthew forced up his head, took the throttle in his hands, and steeled himself. He used every ounce of fortitude he could muster and threw the throttle forward in an attempt to join the fray. The engine roared with a mighty fire as it powered up to zoom forward.

“I’m-” Matthew began to say before he cut off alongside his engines. Something was very wrong. “Mayday!” He called, “Mayday, Fred! Circle-back Protocol! Take them and get out of here now!” Matthew was running through the ingrained ship-reboot protocols whilst he spoke.

He began to panic as he watched from his cockpit, his friends fold into the fray. Slithering beasts of immense proportions clashed with Y-shaped ships only half their size that they could not see. The pilots could not possibly win this, and it was his fault. Matthew’s connection to the dragons had been what warned them of his arrival. Their only chance was a plan that was compromised when they fell out of the hyperstream. One of his ship’s three engines flared to life, and he knew he had to do what he could. Flying through the invisible dogfight, he barrel-rolled and launched three dozen flares, at the same time deactivating his cloaking device. “Come and get some, you space-whales!” He cried.

“Welcome to the fight, sir!” Fred called triumphantly.

Matthew barely had time to respond amidst the hell of flame and acid he was flying through. “Circle-back Protocol! Fred, that was an order. Get out of here!” His distraction had worked, though. The sudden emergence of a visible target and the challenging flares had called most of the beasts and their riders from Matthew’s crew and onto him. More furious telepathic voices joined the song of rage, actively burning around the young man, and he shook his head. “Please! Live!”

The pilot pulled and twisted his stick, completing maneuvers he learned in basic. The maneuvers might have been basic, but the pilot behind them was anything but. The dragons converged and swarmed him like a host of bees defending their nest from a hornet; this hornet, however, had fangs, claws, and a stinger. Every psyonic voice he silenced was replaced by two more as he held his ship’s trigger. His viewport became black with reptilian blood as more and more died.

Matthew looked at his instruments. On the radar, he watched as the signals of his flight zipped into the hyperstream back in the direction they came. He was so engulfed by satisfaction that he almost did not react when the first claws pierced his hull. The claxons were background noise, the screams in his mind enveloped nearly every thought, and the air was sucked out of the cockpit. The last two thoughts he remembered having were that they got away and that they were safe.

The stars rose from the horde of dragons as he was vacuumed into space and above the mass that was ripping apart his ship. One voice in his mind rose above the rest. It spoke with words he could understand. “Rest now, warrior, prepare for what comes next.” As the words were finished, his entire world was engulfed by the void.