Aug 12, 2023 by Fat Fish Farmer
I started the Weight of Space sometime shortly after the 2008 financial crisis that changed my life forever. What began as regular daily practice writing fiction dialog, inhaled the theme of our human responses to the unexpected circumstances that God throws at us.
Life is full of Black Swans. I’m a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. None of us want to believe that life will hand us, or rather, hand us over to the unexpected. Clearly, people normalize denial to avoid that.
What do we do when the crap hits the fan? What do we do about events we cannot control? Do we overcome?
How we fail and manage overcome in a righteous way is what interests me. Got the t-shirt.
People Change… or Do They?
The #WOS book is intentionally a Near Future Tale. Silly me.
This challenge might be the hardest fiction to write.
Life in such a book must somehow be reasonable even though our real future will be nothing like, and then again everything like, the way things are today.
Hmmm? How do I explain that?
Most of us are not wired to predict the future. We focus on the repeatable, the habitual, and the ordinary. Our lives depend on it. I call this the human autopilot. The ordinary changes a tiny bit every day. The future becomes a blur in the cloud of micro-changes.
We remember the big stuff. Errr. Actually, we construct a narrative that explains to us what we remember.
You may not recall that the first iPhone came out the year before I started the book. What do you think cell phones will be like in another 10 years? 25 years?
My flutter fingers take in the Weight of Space surprises even me. The gestures reality in the WOS is way more true today than it was then.
Tell me how you think the technology works…it's covered not in the book. It is life in the Black.
Life in Space
The Weight of Space addresses many questions of that level because those are a lot of fun and many are worth asking. In a fun way the book attempts to ask the harder human questions about habitation in space and a Near Future life on the Edge of Black. Our human history and the science tell us life may be more wonderous and brutal. This comes with the territory.
I completed most of the story before the 2013 release of the movie Gravity (which annoyed me) and before Andy Weir’s inspirational book, The Martian, hit the street.
Reusable rocket systems were only a gleam in the eye for the few way back then.
I am proud to say I encouraged one of my best employees back then to quit and finish his advanced engineering degree in rocket engineering.
Sadly, he had to leave the country to do that.
Guess who the man works for now. Eheh.
Truth is, I spent years working on other products and on technical writing projects. My other publishing project – the Framework for Civil 3D paid the bills.
I probably put the novel aside too often to do that. You know the drill.
“The Plans of Mice and Men”
Silly me. I wasted years and, in retrospect, I was too old school. The published writers that I knew had agents. Agents had approached me more than once to write those software technical tomes we dummies see in bookstores.
I thought finding a literary agent first was necessary. It is and it isn’t.
Thank you to my family, friends, fans, and volunteer readers who encouraged me to get ‘er done.
They will all remind me to remind you to…
Tell Someone About the Weight of Space
The trade paperback edition the Weight of Space will officially ship to customers on Aug 15, 2023. The ebook (epub) format edition will also be available on Amazon on the same day. God willing.