Steve Dean’s Blog
This idea came to me when I had some trees pruned in my garden. One of the resulting branches got left behind and dried out in the sun. It, of course, looked like a wizard’s staff, although I have yet to produce a single fireball with it or make myself invisible. I came to the realisation that it was just a stick.
“Well now, lucky we found you,” she said.
“I wandered away from my companions, upstream somewhere. I don’t suppose you could get me down?”
“Have you down in no time, one of the kiddies has gone for an axe.”
“Once we get inside we’ll find the buried temple and so much treasure we’ll have to come back three times to get it all.”
“What’s in there, smells like gobbos.”
“Yep, just some goblins between us and the treasure.”
This story involves brave women risking their lives to provide evidence of wrongdoing to the outside world. That simple premise was all I had to start with, and the rest just followed along. The ending came as a genuine surprise, although it made sense for the rest of the story, so I suppose it could have been subconscious.
Graham Langdon was nervous for the first time in years. He was head of PR at a very prestigious technology company, had many years of experience and was good at his job. He’d met kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, and once, an emperor. But he’d never met an alien.
The idea for this story came after I had re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I was thinking about a certain scene, you’ll probably know which one when you read the story and my mind, as it often does, went into the gutter, and this story was born.
Where the idea for this story came from, I don’t know. I was sitting in front of my computer with a blank document open trying to create some short story ideas when this one arrived. It’s a near-future SF story about a young man who is something of an artist. It’s not to be taken seriously, but it does predict the future.
This story was inspired by what Elon Musk has apparently said about the need for humans to expand to other planets in order to guarantee our survival. That is, if something happened to Earth.
The common link here, and some would say the weakest, is the human being at the centre of it all. At this point my mind, as it often does, dropped into the gutter and I began thinking about all that genetic baggage we humans have to drag around with us.
What is a moral dilemma? While in self-drive mode and faced with a collision, the car might have to decide who or what to run into. For instance, if a child ran into the road, does the car swerve to protect the child, or stay on the road to protect the driver? This is just a philosophical debate, of course, because the car will be programmed to protect the customer.
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