I'll keep this simple.  This is Cast-Away on a distant planet.  Explorers in our future come across the long-lost wreck of one of our first deep-space missions.  As the main historian pieces together what happened to the stranded astronaut, the readers get to see through the eyes of the stranded person as the explorer left behind "letters" written to some future rescuer.  The two stories intertwine as the physical isolation of the ship-wrecked person reflects the historian's own social isolation.

I've been playing Starcraft games for almost sixteen years.  I don't know what it is about the game or its story, but both keep me interested and entertained no matter how many times I play through the games.  I've played through the campaigns multiple times, completing them on the highest level and finishing all of the additional awards in the Starcraft II game.

I had liked Warcraft II quite a bit before I was introduced to Starcraft, but once I started playing the latter, the former never really got attention from me again.  There's something about the concept that grabs my imagination, and the gameplay is balanced enough that I enjoy each time I play.  Well, almost every time ...

It was my brother who introduced me to the multiplayer aspect of the game.  I quickly found that while I was able to do very well at his LAN parties, playing on the wide open  Internet was much more problematic.   As I have gotten older, my reaction times have not kept up with the required curve, and I have not dedicated time to practice an hone my skills as my time is pretty limited as is.

Now, playing Starcraft II multiplayer is one of the main ways that I spend time with my brother (who lives a time-zone away).  Much of the time, I enjoy building a strategy with him and facing off against opponents who are more devious than the game's A.I.  Sometimes, however, it's just frustration.

Last night, I had to put up with a couple of harassing players.  I was already on a losing streak, but this just rubbed salt in the wound.  In the second case, we even won, but a member of the losing team made it a point to tell everyone how terrible of a player I was.  I know that it was just the taunting of an immature mind, but it stung nonetheless.  It turns out that he was "griefing" the game anyway.  I am only ranked at silver (which is only one rank up from bronze, the lowest category, where I usually sit).  He had a master ranking (4 ranks higher) but was playing as "unranked" so he could harass lesser players (such as myself).

The problem is that I revert to my lizard brain when I get that frustrated.  I start yelling and cursing at the game.  I yell at my kids if they're in the room.  I pretty much turn into a monster version of myself.  A part of me wants to quit playing the game entirely as I don't like that side of me, but another part says that I need to keep playing so that I continue my quest to learn how to lose more graciously.

I will keep playing.  There is still the third part of the story that needs to come out, and I like getting to spend time with my brother, even if it is virtually.  Perhaps I need to tape a note to my monitor saying "Deep breaths; it's just a game."  One way or the other, I shouldn't let moronic minds determine my own emotions, or make me stop playing a game that I love.

I've always been fascinated by the science fiction stories where a person from our time is somehow frozen and then brought back to life in the future.  Buck Rogers is based on this idea.  Star Trek has several story-lines that deal with this concept.

I often wonder what happens to the side-characters who are found and then dumped in their future.  Do they connect with their descendants?  If so, how does that turn out?  What sort of jobs do they take?  How do they go about their day-to-day lives?

There have been a few stories where we see this idea in the present, where someone in the past (or in a coma) comes to consciousness in our time period.  This concept also is used to show dystopian sci-fi societies.

I think it would be interesting to explore the life of a "normal" person who somehow wakes up in a "normal" future.  What would that person do?  How would others react?

The story changes quite a bit depending on how far this time-traveler goes.  There are plenty of stories that could come from this seed.

I've been reading the "Forever Evil" crossover from DC comics.  Now, I have an entire other rant about some of the trends in comics later, but that's not today's focus.  On the first day of the Crime Syndicate's appearance in the DC universe, Ultraman (the Earth 3 opposite of Superman) pulls the moon to create an eclipse of the sun because the sun is poisonous to him.  The eclipse darkens the entire Earth.

The entire Earth. . . 

In a solar eclipse due to the moon. . . 

You know, the moon that's one sixth the size of the Earth. . .

It's somehow blocking all of the sun's rays from hitting any point on the Earth. . . 

Never mind the aliens, super powers, alternate universes, the fact that Ultraman could move the moon, or that somehow the moon stays perfectly in place after a single alignment, THIS complete misunderstanding of how eclipses work has my blood boiling.  There are going to be people who believe this sort of thing is a possibility, who will think that just because they are seeing a solar eclipse, everyone in the world is seeing a solar eclipse.  How did the editors even let that pass?

I know . . . I know . . . a person reading stories about beings with super powers probably shouldn't get upset over nit-picky science-y things like this, but . . . 

SERIOUSLY?!

There are scientists who would like to set up radio telescopes on the far side of the moon, often mistakenly referred to as the "dark side" of the moon.  Because the far side of the moon always faces away from the Earth, it effectively uses the rest of the moon's mass to block the numerous radio signals that otherwise bombard space from our surface communications.  These signals confound and distort information to an enormous degree.  Being free of that chaos would, like taking a visual telescope beyond the distortions of our atmosphere, allow these radio telescopes a much clearer view of our universe.

In my story, humanity has done exactly that.  In fact, Dark-Side Station is one of a couple of human colonies that have been established on the moon.  While most people prefer to be on the Earth side of the moon with its magnificent sights of our home planet, there are some who prefer the purity of space.  One character (whom I have not yet fleshed-out) has specifically started using the radio-telescopes to search for broadcasts from alien civilizations.  

Despite high hopes for the project, he (or she) is still quiet surprised to pick something up.  The signals are garbled and confused, but she (or he) is eventually able to figure out a way to clean up and translate the information, discovering that they are (basically) radio and television signals.  The aliens are similar to us in many ways, but clearly alien.  Linguistic experts pore over the data and eventually figure out the languages used.  People on Earth start listening to and watching the translated broadcasts not just on a scholarly level, but for pure entertainment.

Here is where I can branch in several directions:
1. We manage to establish communication with the aliens and start a long distance dialogue despite the massive time-lag (we're talking decades) between communications.
2. Wars erupt on Earth over the alien contact with many people claiming that the signals are governmental forgeries designed to disrupt world religions (I've already seen sites that claim this idea, by the way).
3. We watch, helplessly, as the alien civilization destroys itself.
4. We realize that the transmission is from centuries, if not eons ago.
5. We watch as the alien civilization comes into contact with our media and decides that we are a hostile species.  They then create a space fleet in order to gain a first-strike advantage.

The first one was my original thought, but there's no reason that aspects of all five might not be mixed together.

Whatever direction I decide to go, I certainly hope that our government (or someone) decides to build Dark-Side Station in reality.  Someone else out there is bound to have started shooting messages into the stars.

During the seventh grade, I wrote a script for a science fiction movie that I wanted my friends and I to act out on piece of property that my parents owned on Henry road.  My plan was to convince parents to build a fort on one part of the property and a small town on another piece.  Boy's Life had advertisements for plans that showed how to make a hovercraft using light wooden frame and a vacuum cleaner.  It was said to hold up to 200 pounds.  By my middle school reasoning, I could make a much larger, ship-like hovercraft with ten vacuum cleaners (as long as the ship itself weighed less than a ton).  With these working props, I would be able to convince the kids at my school to join me in making a fantastic movie.  Thus I wrote a story which had characters that I hoped my fellow students would want to play.  Even the "bad guy" parts were written for people I knew who wanted (some even agreed to) playing the roles of the villains.

As I wrote my script, I came to realize that the props and sets I had planned would not work.  For example, the fort I wanted to build would need multiple floors and corridors that would take up a much larger area than what the clearing I had planned to put it in would allow.  Still, I finished the story anyway, and showed it to the other students at lunch as well as my English teacher.  I was quite a hit.  Even my friends liked it.  Granted, I gave them all heroic roles and, in the end, they all had super powers.  My teacher was also impressed and spoke with my mother about my potential.

I don't know what happened to that script.  However, elements of the story have still rattled around in my thoughts and day dreams.  When I read portions of the Iliad in the tenth grade, I was struck by some of the similarities between my hero (which was my role, of course) and Achilles's situation.  Both were reluctant to fight because of a girl until a friend (who attempts to take the hero's place) is killed in battle.  I must have heard some part of the story before the seventh grade.  Rather than be depressed that I had created something unoriginal, I embraced the idea of writing a futuristic retelling of an ancient story.  I then started several aborted attempts to write that story, but it kept coming up false.

There were several elements that I wanted to keep.  In my script, the heroes had super powers because they were aliens who looked like humans (or the children of aliens).  I have an opening scene of a group of rebels running away from a group of soldiers with explosions behind them.  I developed an idea that the hero had been away from the planet (which I decided was a post-apocalyptic Earth) fighting a war, and that due to relativistic speeds was returning to a world where everyone he had know was dead.  I also created a concept where the love of his life, required her daughters and then granddaughters to swear that one of them would be there for him on his return, an idea he doesn't know about.  By the time he arrives, it's her great-great-granddaughter who wants nothing to do with the idea, but is convinced by the rebel leader to use this connection to get the war hero on their side.

I also have the idea of writing about the hero's experiences before he joins the rebels and wins independence for Earth.  But then a friend of mine gave me a book that basically tells the story I wanted to write: of the people of Earth being the outcasts of a larger inter-species galactic war, but whose abilities start to set them apart.

These are ideas that I keep coming back to when I think about writing more fiction.  Without the original script, I really don't know how much the story has evolved.  However, I don't think I'll use the superpowers idea.

I am a science fiction nut.  From Star Wars to Star Trek, Firefly to Farscape, Orson Scott Card to Isaac Asimov, I enjoy nearly all writings, shows, and movies that look at the possibilities of science and how it might affect humanity.  Thus I was quite excited to see the return of Cosmos to the airwaves, and while my family was not completely impressed (I think pacing had something to do with it), I felt young again while watching it.

Of course, this might come as a surprise to people who only read my religious writings.  How can I possibly believe in science and God at the same time?  Wasn't I upset when they talked about the universe being 13.9 billion years old?  Wasn't I insulted by the presentation of Church officials and their persecution of poor Bruno?  Wouldn't I want the show to talk about God's hand in the creation of everything?

I believe in God.  I believe He made a world of infinite complexity.  Science, for me, is not a belief, its a process of understanding our universe (perhaps even multi-verse), a universe which God created.  The two are only mutually exclusive in the minds of the ignorant (religious and atheistic alike).  

While I believe that God has the power to create everything in seven days, I don't believe that was the case.  To me, the stages of creation in Genesis are an apt description (especially considering when they were written) of the same "cosmic calendar" that Neil Degrasse Tyson presented on the show.  If we, in our modern and advanced age, need for time to be explained using a calendar year as a reference, why would the ancients not need something similar?

While the presentation of the medieval Church was rather stereotyped, it was a cartoon.  It still got the basic facts right.  As much as I am often embarrassed by the historical actions of my country which I love (such as its treatment of Native Americans), so too has the historical actions of the Church been a source of shame for me.  I do not put my head in the sand when it comes to these events.  In fact, as a student and teacher of history, I probably know more about them than most people.  Much of the Church hierarchy at the time were narrow-minded at best, greedy and power-hungry at worst.  Still, many scientific advances occurred not just in spite of the Church, but through its help and funding.  Acknowledging an organization's faults does not discount its successes.

I was actually impressed with how much Cosmos talked about God.  It in no way discredited God's contribution to our creation.  In fact, the portion dealing with Bruno almost seemed to evangelize the idea of an infinite God, even if it did have a harsh view on the religion of the time.  When I saw the show's recreation of the big bang, I could almost hear God's voice say "Let there be light!"

Despite what some false prophets (both religious and atheistic) would like people to believe, religion and science are not mutually exclusive.  In my mind, as well as in the minds of many famous scientists, each can actually help us better understand the other.