Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Sitcoms are one way to deal with that, but Buffy The
Vamp slayer dealt with far more than comedy and ran
for 7 years. Why? because, while the top level of the
story dealt with fighting monsters, the really
interesting story was about the interaction of the
characters with each other, Buffy with Angel, the gay
female stars, the longing of one male for the girls,
etc.
I.E., who, did what, to whom,,,

Battlestar Galacticas top story involves running from
the Cylons(more monsters) and the real story is about
Starbuck vs Adamas son, Adamas relationship with the
Pres, etc.

I expect stories of space habitats will be of interest
when we can write about the conflicts involved in
establishing the colonies in the first place, the
politics involved, the human stupidity of those
opposed to such massive infrastrusture investment, who
made money, who lost it, who married whom to cement
what deal, etc.

People make the stories interesting. Gimicks (nearby
novas, or a wandering planet or dark star, aliens
mining our OORT cloud, etc)are the hook.

Gary 7

>
> > One difficulty with writing High Frontier-type
> fiction is that
> > orbital habitats make such excellent homes and
> solve so many
> > problems. For example, there's little logic in
> waging a war of
> > conquest to take over someone else's land if it's
> less expensive to
> > simply manufacture additional land for yourself.
> How much science
> > fiction plotting is driven by wars which, even if
> only implicitly,
> > involve the desire to acquire someone else's
> territory?
>
> Right. Which is one of the reasons I went for the
> family sitcom
> format. The conflict is more of the the "why do you
> and Dad always
> treat me like a baby?" or "why would a girl say she
> crazy about me and
> them just dump me like that?" variety. I guess a
> cop show could be
> done. About the only way to justify a war theme
> with habitats is to
> have fanatics who want to destroy all infidels.
> Fanatics who don't
> want to acquire the infidels' land, but simply want
> the infidels to die.
>
> > I gravitate more to "man against the elements"
> myself, but even that
> > has challenges. The threats which most people
> find scary about
> > space like radiation, explosive decompression, and
> meteoroids can be
> > easily engineered for. You can't easily threaten
> protagonists with
> > stuff like this without assuming the design
> engineers were
> > incompetent idiots, which is a bit dishonest.
>
> A bit, yes. I was going to have an episode where
> the family sees a
> movie that does exactly that (meteor destroys
> habitat), and the little
> girl is scared that it might happen for real. Then
> she learns how
> easy it is to engineer for such things, and that
> indeed the habitat
> designers have done exactly that.
>

The fish are biting.