Michael Brachman's Blog: Tales of the Vuduri, page 140

The Houston Dome, for real

My idea of having Brandon, Jody and Muriel born out of wedlock under the Houston Dome suffered greatly because of The Simpsons Movie and Stephen King's Under The Dome. Because of the similarities to these two juggernauts, there was next to no chance I would ever finish this story.

But the fatal blow for the story came, of all places, on the Discovery Channel program called Mega-engineering when, on June 8th, 2009, they presented a show called "Saving Houston with a Dome"



I kid you not. The graphic above is from that show. The idea was the Houston is too vulnerable to hurricanes, heat, humidity. The solution? Put a giant geodesic dome over the city and make everyone safe.

Now seriously, after seeing this show, how could I ever publish such a novel? Houston? Sorry, Brandon. Sorry, Jody. Sorry, Muriel. It ain't never gonna happen. RIP.

Squashed by Stephen King

In 2004, after I wrote my first novel Future Past, I revisited my extensive treatment of Brandon, Jody and Muriel. I renamed the two separated lovers (B, J & M's parents) Lee and Beth and linked them back to that book. Further, I decided to turn Brandon into Rei Bierak’s father to link Rome’s Revolution together with the other two.

I made a little more progress but I put the book aside again. As mentioned yesterday, The Simpsons Movie came out and I thought to myself, well, there goes that book. Imagine my surprise when Stephen King published Under The Dome two years after The Simpsons Movie.



I couldn't help but think to myself, isn’t he just copying that movie? Well, I was not alone. Many people approached Mr. King and pointed this out to him. His claim that he never saw the movie and didn’t know what it was about didn’t seem strong enough.

Eventually, Mr. King posted his original draft of the novel called The Cannibals, on its own web page, complete with photographs of the typescript to prove that his novel, in its original form (written in 1978), predated The Simpsons Movie by almost 20 years. Here is what he said when he published this excerpt:

There’s another reason for publishing this on the website. Several Internet writers have speculated on a perceived similarity between Under the Dome and The Simpsons Movie, where, according to Wikipedia, Homer’s town of Springfield is isolated inside a large glass dome (probably because of that pesky nuclear power plant). I can’t speak personally to this, because I have never seen the movie, and the similarity came as a complete surprise to me…although I know, from personal experience, that the similarity will turn out to be casual. Unless there’s deliberate copying (sometimes known as “plagiarism”), stories can no more be alike than snowflakes. The reason is simple: no two human imaginations are exactly alike. For the doubters, this excerpt should demonstrate that I was thinking dome and isolation long before Homer, Marge, and their amusing brood came on the scene.

Still, to have to defend an original idea from something that resembles it never ends. You will recall that I had asked John Dixon about this feeling because his book, Phoenix Island, spawned the TV show Intelligence which sounded to me to be a lot like the TV show Chuck.

So there’s The Simpsons Movie and Stephen King’s Under The Dome. I think that kind of reduces the likelihood that Brandon, Jody and Muriel will ever be born. Well, no. The chances are zero. The reason is even more bizarre. I'll explain tomorrow.

Stymied by The Simpsons

In yesterday’s post, I explained how I thought of this story about a dome that descended upon Houston and cut off the people within and the aftermath of this disaster. The fact is that I first wrote the story in 1999 but you’ll see that that fact counts for very little. In fact, the story will never get written because of The Simpsons.

In 2007, The Simpsons Movie came out and the basis of the plot was that Springfield was so eco-unfriendly that the powers that be decided to put a large dome over the town and trap the people (and the pollution) inside.


The dome was not completely secure. A sinkhole becomes a secret passageway and the Simpson family escapes to Alaska. Eventually, the family returns to Springfield and Homer and Bart save the day by seizing a bomb that was being lowered into the dome and using it to shatter the dome forever.

The similarities to my story about Brandon, Jody and Muriel are limited only to the fact that a giant dome trapped people inside a city. The intent, the characters and the eventual outcome are totally different. But if I ever published this story, people would say, “Isn’t that exactly like The Simpson’s Movie?” I’d have to say no and even though I could prove I wrote my first draft in 1999, this fact would count for nothing. So as I said above, this story will never get written.

I’m not the only victim to by stymied by The Simpsons. Stephen King wrote a novel and published it two years after The Simpsons Movie came out. The novel was called “Under The Dome” and eventually it was turned into a TV series. Imagine being Stephen King and asked if he copied his idea from The Simpsons Movie? More on that tomorrow.
 

Brandon, Jody and Muriel

I have told you many times that I don’t know where these stories come from. The whole basis of Rome’s Revolution came out of nowhere in 1973. Another idea that came to me was the idea of true love. I wanted to write a story that distilled love down to its essence. So I crafted a science fiction story in 1999 entitled “Brandon, Jody and Muriel” to try and create the pure environment I needed to study the emotion.

In this story, a man and woman (I don’t remember their original names) were very much in love. They lived in Boston. The man was an engineer and was working on a NASA-sponsored project that involved force-fields. He was on a site visit to Houston when they attempted to create their first force-field bubble. Unfortunately, they miscalculated and the force-field was huge, so huge that it encased most of downtown Houston and a good part of the outlying sections. Realizing their error, they cut the power but the force field was self-sustaining and the people inside were cut off from the outside world for an indefinite length of time.

The novel was roughed out as a series of letters from the man to his wife describing life within the force-field (they called it a dome because they could only see the top half) and it is very sad. The man is forced to take up housing in an apartment with a female co-worker. Even though he was completely devoted and truly in love with his wife, circumstances eventually drove the man into the co-worker's bed and ultimately they had three children together. The man died before the dome came down.

The story starts with the three children showing up at the man’s wife’s doorstep and delivering the letters. The man was so devoted to the woman that he taught them that his original wife was really their mother and the woman who gave birth to them was just a placeholder. The title of this article are the names of the three children.

It was a sad story and some of the sex scenes were pretty explicit and I always planned on getting back to it one day to flesh it out completely. I had kind of an outline of the content of each of the letters but that’s as far as it went. However, this story will never see the light of day and I’ll explain why over the next few articles.

Stephen King once said that two stories could be about exactly the same thing but totally different because, in his words, “The reason is simple: no two human imaginations are exactly alike.” Well, in the next few articles you’ll see how this isn’t exactly true. I don’t think someone could do another movie like “The Sixth Sense” where the big reveal is the person is dead. I only think there’s room for one of these.

The Doors and The Crystal Ship

I don’t think that books are supposed to have theme songs. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, Rome’s Revolution very much does. It is the song "I Know You're Out There Somewhere” by the Moody Blues. I didn’t know it when I was writing the books but as I mentioned before, during my research for Rome’s Evolution, the words leaped out at me as embodying the spirit of the whole series.

Now that I am working on The Milk Run, I decided to look and see if there was a song that represented the spirit of this new novel as I was starting out, rather than waiting until I was done. In a previous post, I teased the fact that the world of Ay’den has silicon-based life in addition to the sentient plants that inhabit the planet.

When Jim Morrison and his friends were trying to figure out a name for their band, they stumbled upon William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In that book, Blake wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." So they named their group The Doors because they were going to bring this new perception, that of infinite possibilities, to people through their music.

One of their more popular songs was “The Crystal Ship” and here is a portion of the lyrics:

The days are bright and filled with pain
Enclose me in your gentle rain
The time you ran was too insane
We'll meet again, we'll meet again

Oh tell me where your freedom lies
The streets are fields that never die
Deliver me from reasons why
You'd rather cry, I'd rather fly

The crystal ship is being filled
A thousand girls, a thousand thrills
A million ways to spend your time
When we get back, I'll drop a line

Sort of fits, doesn’t it? Maybe, maybe not. For now, I’ll keep it until something better comes along.

Computers, viruses, reboots and Rome

In Rome's Revolution, after Rome takes Rei up for his first training mission, she returns the tug to Dara in preparation for landing. However, in what later turns out to be yet another attempt on Rei's life, the nav-computer malfunctions and instead of slowing down, it speeds up heading right for the moon. Certain death was looming.

I work in the computer industry and I cannot tell you how much of my life I waste cleaning out computers from malware, viruses, trojans, rootkit incursions and more. I don't know who these people are that write computer viruses and while I am mostly against the death penalty, I heartily endorse it for these people. And a slower, more painful death it should be.

I digress. Because of my experiences with computers, or rather with people calling me for help because something is not working or the computer is locked up, the first thing I always tell them is to reboot. This fixes 90% of the problems.

This measure is not just limited to my Windows PC, I have had to reboot my iPad and my Mac and even power-cycle my Samsung Convoy II dumb-phone.



So, too, it was with this scene where Rei and Rome were going to die due to a malfunctioning nav-computer. We discovered later that Estar had planted a small virus causing the computer to lock up. My solution for Rome was to have her simply reboot the nav-computer. However, they were going to crash long before Rome could disconnect and reconnect the machine.

Rei's out-of-the-Vuduri-box thinking saved the day. While a well-formed PPT tunnel requires a complete stop relative to the nearest gravitational well, that doesn't mean you can't form a little one even with substantial velocity. In this particular case, the tunnel only traversed a distance of five or ten thousand miles but it was enough to go past Dara thus giving them the time they needed to reboot the nav-computer and return safely to the moon.

Yesterday, I discoursed about the 6502 microprocessor and told you it was relevant to today’s post. Well here’s why. When Rome asked OMCOM to reboot the nav-computer, OMCOM could not and his answer was:

“I cannot contact the nav-computer. It is locked into a tight loop. I triggered the non-maskable interrupt but its execution cycling will not stop. You will need to shut it down and restart it for me to reestablish communications.”

The non-maskable interrupt or NMI was one of the most useful pins on the 6502 chip. Not matter what it was doing, if you tripped that pin, the microprocessor would stop what it was doing and jump to the location stored in a special set of registers. In other words, if the computer was locked up, it would always let you reboot. If it didn’t listen to the NMI, you were screwed. Obscure? Sure. But I wanted to say thank you to the 6502, my favorite chip ever, in one of my books as sign of love.

The 6502

The 6502 was a microprocessor chip created by MOS Technology in 1975 to compete with Motorola’s 6800 microprocessor that was introduced one year earlier. What made the 6502 so successful was two-fold. First, it cost less than 20% of its competitors and secondly, it had “indirect mode” and true indexing.

The first microcomputers I worked with were the PDP-8 (although some might call it a mini-computer) and the Altair 8800:



But my first true love was the 6502-based KIM-1 micro-computer:



KIM stands for Keyboard Input Monitor and came with the huge total of 1K bytes of RAM. That’s 1024 bytes. However the first 256 bytes, called Page 1, were reserved for the special addressing mode and the next 256 bytes were reserved for the stack so you really only had 512 bytes to play with. Think about that. I just bought a 2 TB external hard drive for $99 and the KIM-1 had 1K!

Even though it was just a technology demonstrator, the KIM-1 could play games like Wumpus, Lunar Lander, Blackjack and even Chess! But it was the 6502 that was the star. I memorized the entire instruction set (all 56 op codes) and started my career. The chip itself was a fabulous success and not just because of its low price. Its address space allowed for a whole 64K of RAM. Take a look at the computers and devices that were based upon this chip:

Rockwell AIM-65
Atari 2600 Game Console
Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64
The Apple II computer (and the late, lamented Apple III)
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super Nintendo
Many video arcade games

The 6502 and its variants (e.g. CMOS, 16-bit, etc.) are still in production today (that’s nearly 30 years for those of you counting) with widespread use, especially in the telecommunications industry.

Why do I bring this up? A better question is, what’s it got to do with Rome’s Revolution? The answer is quite simple but you will have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

Any landing

It's been said many times that any landing you can walk away from is a good one. While it may seem silly, it underscores the inherent danger in landing any aircraft or spacecraft.

During Rome and Rei's first foray into space, Rome trained Rei on how to perform a stop-jump using PPT tunnels. When they returned to Dara, however, Rome would not allow Rei to land the space tug. Here is her exact take on the subject:

“Very good,” Rome said, lifting Rei from his reverie. “Now we land. It is just a little trickier. I will have to show you. This is not a procedure that you can practice. We normally do not do this manually, but you need to know just in case.”

When we review all the takeoffs and landings in the entire Rome's Revolution series, you will discover there is never actually a documented instance in which Rei landed the spacecraft they occupied.

He did not land the tug on Dara that first time. He forced Rome to take over their emergency landing when they arrived at Deucado. When they got to Earth, the unseen controllers from Earth Space Command took over the controls of "The Flying House" and landed for them. When they returned to Deucado, MINIMCOM had already morphed into his starship form and handled all the takeoffs and landings for them.

Even in The Ark Lords, when Rei is at the controls guiding Junior to Darwin Base, Rome had already handled the entry into the atmosphere. In Rome's Evolution, MINIMCOM does all the heavy lifting and Rei never actually manually controls anything.

Oh well, maybe some day he'll get to do a landing on his own. I hope it's a good one!

100 light minutes

In the post entitled "When is a tunnel not a tunnel?", Rei and Rome had just taken a small jump through a PPT tunnel and traveled about 100 light minutes. I thought I'd just give you a little perspective on how far that is.

Light travels at 300,000 kilometers a second. At 93 million miles, the Earth is 8 light-minutes away from the Sun. Mars is about 20 light-minutes from the Sun. Jupiter is 45 light-minutes and Saturn is about 80 light-minutes from the Sun. That means in a single jump, Rome and Rei traveled 20% farther than the distance from the Sun to Saturn. It's not nearly as far as Neptune which is 160 light-minutes from the Sun but it's still pretty far.

In the original, long-form version of Rome's Revolution, I also noted, as author that the tug 'was facing the harsh glow of Tabit which now stood in front of them'. But from that distance, would Tabit have a "harsh glow" or would just look like any other star? Here is what the Sun looks like from Saturn in a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft.



100 light-minutes is more than 10 to the ninth miles (greater than 100 billion miles) or as Rei observes, nearly 200 billion kilometers. That's a nearly incomprehensible distance. But look what else you can see. That tiny dot, indicated by the yellow arrow, is the Earth, glowing quite brightly as seen from Saturn.



How cool is that?

Nu2 Lupi

Since much of the action of the upcoming novel The Milk Run takes place in the star system of Nu2 Lupi, I thought I'd give you a little more information about the star. From Wikipedia:

Nu2 Lupi (ν2 Lup) is a 6th magnitude G-type main-sequence star located approximately 48 light-years away in the constellation of Lupus. The physical properties of the star are similar to those of the Sun, though Nu2 Lupi is significantly older.

The fact that it is 48 light-years away meant that Ark IV, traveling at 5% of the speed of light, would take 960 years to get there under the best of circumstances. However, that far away, it took even longer. And it is so far away that there was no coming back and no secondary target. The Ark IV had double-sized propulsion module just to make it that distance.

Nu2 Lupi is thought to be one of the oldest stars in our stellar neighborhood. Three extrasolar planets have already been discovered orbiting this star however they are called "super-Earths" and are way too close to the star to be habitable. But where there's smoke, there's fire so I'm assuming that if the star has big but barely detectable planets, it might have a few smaller, habitable ones as well. The fact that the star is very old means if there were habitable worlds and life did bloom, it would be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. Who knows what's left?

You'll find out.