I’ve always tended to think solitary confinement, one of the serious prison punishments was a bit meeeh. I am very happy in my own company, and I only see my wife for any length of time on weekends. That rather smug perspective has been tested to destruction by the C19 pandemic. Although I’m retired, I was contracted to draft some work for my old employers. They have closed the office, and while I can work from home, I miss the contact with friends and colleagues.
Solitude and sanity have long been a trope in science fiction films. In the film Alien, the crew of the Nostromo are in suspended animation. The crew of the Prometheus are also in a similar stasis condition but looked after by the Synth, David. In my forthcoming novel, He might be still on Mars, suspended animation is only needed to make long journeys out as far as the Oort Cloud, which takes a year to reach at just beyond light speed. As with the Prometheus saga, Synths take care of the sleeping humans, while ships that might travel at double or triple light speed are on the drawing board.
I don’t ignore Einstein’s relativity theories but neither do I play fast and loose with them. Lights speed is not warp speed, and I postulate the use of a massive electro-magnetic field, generated by superconducting magnets to achieve light speed and above. Vessels flying at speeds below light speed, but ranging from 0.1 LS and above, use PLASMA engines which similarly have to work their way around Einsteinian physics.
Sadly, my book will be classed as science fiction, not fiction with some futurist science. At heart it’s a love story between a human and a Synth. Just to complicate things a little, and just because I can, as the author, there is a cyborg in the story in love with both the Synth and my human protagonist. Higher functioning Synths are locked to their owners. Letting Synths have emotions makes them more independent and less compliant. Some Synths supercede their programing, becoming self-aware and developing personalities. These unfortunates are either reprogrammed or destroyed for recovery of precious and rare earth metals.
If you are looking for a good read in this time of Plague, watch out for the release of my new book. Otherwise check out my four novels, two of which are about vampires and humans, or my latter two which cover loss and redemption, and a James Bond like character in the South Pacific. I’ll return to dwell at length on the South Pacific as a great venue for fiction, sadly overlooked in the Bond novels in favor of Jamaica.
The author J. Maarten Troost has written some great factional accounts of the South Pacific, and there are books and stories by RL Stevenson, Somerset-Maugham, Mark Twain, Arthur Grimble etc etc. James Michener wrote Tales of the South Pacific and other Pacific Island novels. The book Tales of the South Pacific was made into the musical South Pacific, but its focus is American military for the most part. Plus, I find Michener’s plodding pedestrian writing sucks the romance out of the subjects on which he chose to focus.
Anyone wanting a reasonable overview of the South Pacific could do worse than Donovan’s Reef (with the Duke himself) and His Majesty O’Keefe with Burt Lancaster. The second film is about a freebooter who makes his fortune from copra in the Yap Islands of Micronesia.
