Introduction
Utopian Science Fiction Short StoryThis story was written for the August 2014 Eight Hour Fiction Challenge. The point of this challenge originating from the Kboards discussion forum for independently published authors was to create an ebook within eight hours and publish it. This was available separately for USD 0.99 via Smashwords, the only publication I ever published using that site. While Smashwords does have some nice features such as the ability to create coupon codes for books to give them away, the site itself sports the most ungainly shopping interface I have ever seen. I continue to be amazed by anybody who manages to actually find something of interest here.
In addition to this, the book did not sell at all on any platform. I cannot say I blame anybody, and for the same reason, this is the last story in this collection. It is just too different from most people's expectations of what a story is, aiming far more at showing its world instead of a traditional plot. Maybe contextualized by my other writings it is far clearer, what the point of this was. Anticipating the collection you are reading right now, I unpublished it as a separate entity in early 2016.
Unusually for a story of more than 2,000 words, I always referred to it as a flash fiction owing to the way it was written and structured. To me, giving such labels based on length alone is meaningless. I prefer to sort them by the way they are written. Certain ways of writing stories lend themselves to certain lengths which is how word count comes into play, but I do not consider it the defining quality of a tale. Thus, I call it flash fiction if it lacks a traditional narrative structure, setting it apart from other sorts of fiction by way of the reading experience itself instead of merely its length. To me, that seems much more useful. So, this is much more of an unusually long flash fiction than a short story. Because I am aware that although it is short, it is at most just barely a story.
The oceanic city-state of Pacifica had been an idea floating (sorry) through my head for quite some time. There were quite a few story ideas I wanted a Tabula Rasa scenario, a nation with no history prior to the stories where anything could happen. Likewise, it had always puzzled me why the oceans were not settled. What started out as Atlantis eventually turned into Pacifica for the Pacific Ocean's calmer nature.
The core idea was to showcase my idea for a space elevator to be a replaced by the far more feasible (in my mind) concept of a space ladder. A series of stacked airships connected by shorter elevators, reaching far enough into the upper atmosphere to just barely not be considered in space. Even so, the project is one of the most ambitious ones in human history and is far from being finished by 2061. The idea stemmed from several Youtube videos of cameras filming at extreme heights, carried there by balloons. There was also Felix Baumgartner jumping out of a balloon-born contraption at about 24 miles high two years prior.
Another idea playing into this story was uplifting animals. While the idea of making animals sentient is about as old as literature itself, the term uplifting and thus the main inspiration for this aspect was of course inspired by David Brin's Uplift series of novels. Brin focuses on the diplomatic developments in a universe populated by uplifted species with naturally evolved humans being the odd ones out. I prefer to keep it to earth, focusing on the uplifts themselves and what that does to societies on earth.
I am absolutely confident the pet industry will eventually create pets able to talk to humans in some capacity, starting an inevitable journey toward a world of many species, all terran in nature, long before we meet any extraterrestrial civilization. Which is good, we will be used to dealing with alien cultures long before meeting actual space aliens. So, by 2062 mankind has already uplifted the most obvious pet species. As Chang Wu is about to find out, a far more alien one is about to enter the mix.
I needed a point to my little tour around Pacifica, so the octopods came into the frame as the eventual goal Chang Wu heads to, even if he does not yet know it.
New Venice is something I developed as I wrote. If you ever want to understand climate change, visit Venice for a few days. The Piazza San Marco is a famous tourist trap, feels like Europe’s headquarter of pigeon operations during low-tide, and like world's largest foot bath during high-tide. I experienced this back in 2000 and am confident this has only grown worse since. Admittedly, the development is being worsened by the city itself sinking into the mud below at the same time as oceans are expanding. Anyway, in the world of Pacifica, Venice eventually was abandoned by all but an optimistic few, most of its population seceding from Italy and resettling in Pacifica after feeling betrayed by Italy's failure to save the city.
This is part of my vision of the city being as much of a melting pot of global cultures as possible, as should be natural for something like this emerging out of nothing in the middle of the ocean.
I am sure I will return to Pacifica at some point with a complete story.
August 2014
Available in:
How to Sing Butterflies
