The Five Sentence Fiction prompt for this week is Inspire. While I'm not really one for poetry, there are a few pieces I like, and I got my idea from one by Shelley. Though I might have come away with a different lesson than the one intended.

Picture from here

They always say "Think big!" but they never really mean it. My imagination is fueled by Golden Age Science Fiction and B-Movies. In my dreams, I am not bound to merely this ball of mud. Ozymandias was on the right track, but he had too much humility. My monument will be made of stars, wrenched from their orbits in a design of my choosing.

Stars

I heard that October the 4th we were meant write something about Stars. Rather than whipping up a piece of fiction, I thought I'd instead write something based more on fact. These snippets are some observations about observation of stars, both here and back home. The picture is of the star chart from that most fantastic of games Star Control 2. The name Snellopy comes from there, his race is the Spathi, and their sphere of influence is marked out in yellow.

The sky in Hanoi is usually pretty sparse - there's plenty of smog, light pollution and other nastiness up there, so it's rare that you'll get many bright twinklies. On quite a few occasions we've been walking and my wife has said "Wow! Look how many stars there are!" and there's been maybe six, maximum. She said it wasn't always like that, back when she was a kid, things were different. There were lots of them. She used to fall asleep on the roof of their house, looking at them, and recalled being groggily carried downstairs in her father's arms.

I've seen lots of stars, not just on charts of various science fiction games when I'm battling aliens. I used to work out bush. When holidays came, we'd team up and drive back to civilization. One time on a drive when it was my turn to sleep, we were going past Brunette Downs on the Barkly Highway. It's a cattle station larger than Northern Ireland, so there's obviously not much light pollution going on. I only woke up after we'd stopped, and so my eyes were perfectly adjusted to the darkness. Looking up, I was amazed by the pinpoints scrawled across the ceiling, far more than I'd ever seen before. I pissed all over my feet as I leaned back in amazement, trying to get it all in.

At Tet a few years ago, I excitedly called my housemate out to have a gander at the skies. Just like me back when I'd been working in the Outback, everyone here had taken advantage of the holiday to get the hell out of Dodge. The roiling tendrils of pollution had relaxed their grasp on Hanoi somewhat, and we could see maybe 20 or 30 stars. But that wasn't what was so amazing to me - happily, I pointed.
"What?" he asked, "It's just Orion."
"I know," I replied, "But this is the first time I've seen the bugger in the flesh (so to speak) and he's not standing on his head. Damn you northern-centric celestial cartographers!"

I just got a necklace made for Tho. Originally it was going to be for her birthday, but just after I had paid the deposit she forbade me from getting anything custom made, so I kept it around for a while longer until a suitable occasion arose. It was of a starred star - A gold star (from the Vietnamese flag) with the Southern Cross (from the Australian flag) picked out on it in four sapphires for the cardinal points and a diamond for the wee one. It looks quite good if I say so myself, and it’ll be perfect to pass down to Madeline too.

We're now looking to head back to Australia soon, and while Tho did see a more representative smattering of stars when we were there for a holiday, I will make sure she gets to see them in all their glory. I didn't spend enough time looking at them before, but after losing them for the past few years, I'll try not to take them for granted in the future. There's probably a lesson there, I'd say, but I’m a slow learner.

Scenes from a Stellar Skirmish

Well, the less said about Nano the better. November is a rough month for free time, what with it being prime wedding season here. That doesn’t mean my book is dead and buried, it just means it’ll take longer.

Alliteration, that’s the challenge for this week. I wasn’t sure if it was meant to be just the title, or the whole shebang, so I figured it was safer to go with lots of alliteration. I’ve always been a fan of epic poems, which often tend to have quite a bit of alliteration in them. They’re writing in hard mode, as they’re often translations, so it can be tricky to stay true to the idea being expressed and find the right word to represent it.

I decided to go with space for my short story - a titchy wee one, as there’s quite a bit of alliteration going on. I’m neither Virgil nor a skald, and they tended to limit themselves to three repetitive sounds on a line, mixing it up with normal words too.

And since it’s space a space theme, I might as well throw in a nice picture, which has a special place in my heart. In Star Control 2, this is the main image we’re presented of the race of aliens called the Spathi. One of their pilots is called Snelopy, a name I liked so much I added an extra l to and took it as my own.

<Picture lifted from http://www.star-control.com/hosted/happycamper/gifs/spathi.gif they pinched it from Star Control II. He is supposed to animate, but he's not doing so at the moment, and I'm running out of time to fiddle with it>

Scenes from a Stellar Skirmish

As always, the attackers approached from Andromeda. Sweeping silently through space, shields set, the squadron started to intercept. Descending on the dreadnoughts, determined to dispatch them... Flying in formation, fighters at the fore, with the frigates following - the foe failed to flee. Commands were cried out, combat codes cleared: crews at the ready.

We waited, weighing up the odds for our exact time to engage the enemy. My units mission: maneuver in amongst their ships, seeking to snare one before it was blasted to bits. Force fields fell to phaser cannons and concussion charges.

Time! Twenty troops touched down, hacking into the hull, hewing hunks off. Gaining egress, guns up, eyes guarded, we blasted bulkheads until they buckled. Klaxons clanged, interspersed with the chittering and clicking that made up their speech.

Finally, we faced our foes in the foredeck, vulcan cannons and the vacuum giving them vacant eyes, tentacles twitching as they twisted round the levers and lights that comprised their control panel. Proud of our prize, we hauled it into our hold and headed home, hyperdrive humming.