I ate my homework!

[elfs]

Yesterday, on the bus ride home, I opened up a new project file in emacs-outline-mode and started writing up an outline for Caprice Starr and the Slums of Mars, as well as an overall outline for the series, including the (hopefully not too hokey) backstory. I'm going to be doing a bit of farrago with this homage, dumping in a few tics from Foundation even as I riff over the Lucky Starr series.

Obviously, the series needs major surgery: Mars rotates, Venus has no oceans, and the hokey energy beings living underground in Mars need some serious work. The Caprice Starr series will contain a strong mixture of mundane SF and transhumanism: the Sirians (the traditional baddies) are posthumans living around Sirius, and Sol is under a repressive biochauvinist regime in response to an almost Randian economic and ecological collapse after the Second Sirian Migration (which happened approximately eighteen years before Lucky was born). The Science Council Bureau for Appropriate Technological Deployment is a government entity with one major responsibility: prevent a posthuman outbreak within the Sol system. This is hard, as several different propaganda transmissions from different Sirian polities bombard Sol regularly, Sol's outposts around Jupiter and Saturn are rather independent-minded (one might say rebellious) and may be inhabited by people inclined to try to build Migration Machines, and there's always the possibility that Sirius may try (again?) to invade Solspace physically with their AIs and nanotech. Caprice Starr, neice of David Daniel Starr, former head of the Bureau, now retired, is a newly minted agent of the Bureau who starts out as a well-meaning, well-intentioned officer who believes her duty is to prevent individuals from harming their own or others' humanity and personhood, and who comes to understand that when statis (and status) is the measure of success corruption is the norm.

I had much more written, about the history, the timeline, the whole shebang of where Caprice came from, some of her, Daniel's, and Terra's backstory, and all that.

I forgot to hit save. On my way to bed, I kicked the powerblock, dislodging the cord. This morning, the battery was dead, the work was gone, and I couldn't even write on the way in to the office because I didn't have time to recharge it.

Bleah.

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[elfs.livejournal.com]

It was outline minor on top of Muse on top of SVN. Somewhere in there, something went wonk. I've changed some of the settings; I hope it won't happen again.