For starters if you don’t get the title to this blog:
A) you just made me feel old
and
B)
The point is that sometimes completely unrelated things happen to go together and make something new and wonderful.
I have been plotting out a series of science fiction books about the Galactic Consortium. The Consortium arrives in space above Earth in the present day (our timeline diverges from reality at 2013). They terraformed Earth eons ago as a base for their expansion into this galaxy. They sent settlers, humans, to this planet thousands of years ago. What happened to cause us to lose this history and their technology is anyone’s guess.
The series mostly deals with the cultural and political upheavals that occur when this much older and powerful culture shows up on our doorstep. These upheavals are seen through the eyes of ordinary people whose lives are changed by the unfolding events.
Lately I have been watching a lot of documentaries on Netflix. One of the subjects that has always fascinated me is cults. So I’ve watched a number of good documentaries about people who have escaped from cults. I am particularly interested in how the children from very restricted groups adjust to life outside the confines of their practice.
And like peanut butter and chocolate, my next work in progress is starting to come together. The main character is a young transwoman. She has fled from a polygamist cult to become herself. Finding the world outside only slightly more accepting of her, she takes her chance on Shoshone Station.
Shoshone Station was a gift from the Consortium to the people of America. In geosynchronous orbit above Denver, Colorado, the station has a huge solar array, which produces an incredible amount of energy. The station is tethered to the ground via a nanotubule cable and a space elevator hauls people and goods up and down.
The station arrives with a skeleton crew of Consortium people onboard. It’s supposed to be under joint control of the Consortium and U. S. authorities. Due to diplomatic issues and mistrust, most Americans are hesitant to embrace the station and it is mostly empty as Zoey arrives.
The Consortium has sophisticated medical technology and long familiarity with transgender people. Their culture has a complex system of gender that includes a broad spectrum of gender expression for both men and women and numerous traditional groups and categories that fall outside our narrow concept of male and female. (There are seventeen basic genders. I charted them. I’ll share that in a later blog post, perhaps.) For Zoey, becoming a woman is only the first step, she must also figure out what kind of woman she wishes to be.