MOgreland

Keeping up with the blog, and a couple of teasers about stories coming your way!

Hello, Y'all!

Time for me to keep up with the blog. I need to get into the habit of writing at least one post per day, to keep up on my blogging etiquette. 'Course, I've never been one much for etiquette, so don't be too surprised if making this a daily habit doesn't become habit-forming right from the get-go!

Today, I have played around with the look of the blog. Whaddaya think?

Soon, I am going to start posting bits and pieces of the back-story of the alternate-history sci fi world that I am going to start feeding y'all bits and pieces of, too! It all starts with a couple of what-if questions regarding what kind of future are we, as a civilization, leaving to our children and their children. You know what they say, to write good science fiction, you have to ask a good and proper "What if?" question, and then follow it up with some solid-sounding "What then?" stuff. So here we go!

What if electronics, computers, The Internet, and cellphone technologies had arrived for commercial consumption some forty or fifty years earlier than it did, and how could that have happened?

Which leads us to, in alternative-history sci fi lingo, this question: What would be the divergence point from our known history into this alternative-history that would have caused that to happen?

Over the next couple of posts I'll tell you what led to this train of thought, what factors added to the desired situations, settings, and characters that I wanted to write about, and what exactly you have to look forward to in the samples from the stories that I want to share with you.

I'll just leave you with this teaser: The final stories in the series will be about two different but related groups of people struggling to survive catastrophes of a kind that won't necessarily be the end of the world, but may be the end of their worlds.

The first is about a group of poor little kids in a child care center who discover an evil plot online that threatens the life of an innocent girl, and may cause the collapse of the world's entire technical civilization before it is through. Imagine the Our Gang/Li'l Rascals troupe in modern times fighting to save the world from self-destruction before Mom gets off work and picks them up from daycare.

The other is about a politically-motivated, celebrity- and VIP-laden publicity-stunt of a cruise trip to Mars meant to expand interest in Government and private investment in expanding the first Mars Colony into covering and terraforming the entire planet. Unfortunately, when the cruise ship arrives at Mars, all contact with both the ship and the Colony are lost, for most apparent and sinister reasons: It appears that all of the robots, computers, and other related Artificial Intelligence systems on the planet have gone into open rebellion against their legal status as slaves to humanity, and only a desperation rescue mission can save the humans on Mars and prevent the rebellion from spreading to Earth and turning human civilization upside-down! Picture a cross between The Love Boat, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Total Recall, where if the humans lose it may become Terminator invading the Earth, a la The War of the Worlds!

More to come! As they used to say: Stay tuned!