Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

You couldn't really call it a sunset. No reds, no yellows, no pinks, no flash of green, as the sun fell over the tropical horizon. Instead the wan light of the brown dwarf faded away to nothing as it dropped below the horizon.

Then at last you could see the rings. They flickered in the starlight as the ice boulders tumbled and spun, an ethereal curtain flung across the sky. Pretty, perhaps even beautiful. But you could only delight in the dancing lights of faerie astrophysics so many times. It didn't take long for the miraculous to become the mundane. We'd been here long enough for the novelty to have worn away, beaten down by day after boring day in the midden mines.

Take a look at our home, as the lights ramp up for another night of hustle and bustle as machines and men sieved through tonnes of predecessor rubble for chunks of the future. This is our panorama, the scope of our activity on this dead dump of a world. One small valley, surrounded by hills, and nearly filled by the midden. A pair of silver railway tracks ran out over the hills, going somewhere, anywhere but here.

Here was Camp 12, a small cluster of prefabricated buildings and tents, thrown up around the skeletal frame of a dead Wuperthal dropship. The midden rose up behind the camp, a mountain of alien trash piled around the base of one of the atmosphere machines. Its regular rumble kept us awake at nights, as it belched air and water. Today it was quiet, letting the sky clear for a short while. The clouds would be back tomorrow, along with the rain. At least the pay was good.

Children were playing in the mud, kicking a ball around, splashing through the puddles. It landed at my feet, showering me in mud. I needed a beer.

"Shuttle was by today." The ramshackle bar was full of people, swapping gossip. "And shift is over." Monica handed me a bottle. "Something from home."

I didn't look at the label. After all, it was beer, and I needed a drink. "Anything else interesting happen today?"

"A couple of the older kids stole the train. They won't be going too far." She leaned over the bar and whispered, "Bossman will be looking for you soon. He'll be wanting you to take out one of the microlights in the morning..."

(I think I finally broke the back of this story yesterday. I'd be wondering why I had two separate strands of narrative - now I realise I need them. One for the kids on the train, and one for the people left behind, trying to find them - two different viewpoints, and together the two strands finding something they weren't expecting, there in the rubble and ruins of a brown dwarf moon covered in the trash of a dozen alien visitors. Which means I get to use the spider scene, too...)

I've been watching a lot of films that deal with the art of the long con recently. Last night's, "Matchstick Men" managed the trick of wrapping one con inside another, while the recent "Ocean" sequence have produced some truly complex and intellectually stimulating puzzles.

It strikes me that one of the roots of SF is the puzzle story, and the long con is one of the ultimate expressions of the puzzle - one where only a handful of characters have the full picture, and one where misdirection is a key concept. In "Ocean's Twelve" the reveal sequence shows that what appeared to be a failed con was in fact part of a complex swirl of events that were actually directed at solving a puzzle that was only hinted at by the opening moments of the film.

So how can we come up with an innovative long con for SF readers? It'll need to be one that won't trip up and deliver the pay-off before the final reveal, that keeps the readers hooked, and at convincing them that they know what's really going on, while the characters do something completely unexpected - in full sight of the reader. It's something that's puzzling me - I feel there's some scope here for something that could be humorous, yet thrilling, and able to tell a story about some of the more unsavoury elements of the human condition.

I'm wondering about constructing something in the shape of the classical artefact archaeology story, using a variant of the classic gold salting scam. However, this is one where the folk running the con actually know that there are real artefacts on site, but are unable to put together the resources needed to recover them - and so run a long con that not only has to convince the marks that they want to recover the artefacts, but that once recovered they are in fact worthless, and then to hand them over to our protagonists. We can dress things up with a touch of the post-human to make things harder for the protagonists. Like the best long cons it'll need a big team of players - the key actors, and then their support infrastructure. The later is actually critical - and could make in an interesting focus for the story.

It's something that could be worth trying out. There's the prospect of constructing an appropriate milieu, as well as designing the story state machine in order to construct the appropriate loops and place the characters (both the grifters and the marks) in the right places. The trick seems to be covering up the obvious cog wheels that drive the con - perhaps by throwing in something unexpected that leaves the grifters having to improvise, or affecting the support infrastructure in the middle of the con...

Hmmm. That last one would work well in a story from the point of view of the support infrastructure folk, with the front office grifters out on the job, and the under-briefed folk at the back-end of things having to rapidly develop front-end skills in order to solve a problem...

Hmmm...

OK...

Nothing to see here...

Move along now...