Lifeboat, 2028

By Rick Cramer

A Movie Length Tale™ from Aisle Seat Books™.

After a nuclear war destroys the Earth, seven passengers trapped in the world's first space elevator must put aside personal and cultural differences to try to reach a fledgling colony on Mars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aisle Seat Books
• Release date: Nov 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781935655558

Book preview

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A Movie Length

Science Fiction Tale

For Readers

13 and up.

Written by

Rick Cramer.

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Lyme, New Hampshire

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Copyright © 2011 Rick Cramer

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-935655-55-8

ISBN-10: 1-935655-55-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011942492

Published by Aisle Seat Books, an imprint of

GrayBooks LLC

1 Main Street

Lyme, New Hampshire 03768

www.Tales2Film.com

www.AisleSeatBooks.com

Electronic Edition

About Tales2Film™ and Aisle Seat Books™

Read a good movie lately?

Every good movie starts with a script, and every good script tells a riveting story. Long before the actors are chosen and the filming starts, a writer sits down, crafts that story, and submits it for consideration by the producers, directors, and other creative talents in the film industry. It can take a long time. A script may spend years making the rounds before getting the elusive Hollywood green light. If it ever does. Some of the greatest movies ever written are ones that none of us will ever see on the screen.

Tales2Film finds the best of those not-yet-produced tales and brings them to you as Movie Length Tales™ just as the writer envisaged them. Each of the tales in this series has been converted by the script’s writer from the technical shorthand of screenplay format into the familiar prose format you see here, a process called novelization.

These little books are not novels, or even novellas. Think of them as written movies. Like the screenplays they come from, each is presented in real time, written in the present tense to allow you to see the movie’s scenes in your mind’s eye as if they were unfolding on a theater’s screen before you.

So. Here’s a movie. Take your favorite aisle seat and enjoy it.

And when it’s over, take a look at out Featured Previews in the back of this book. Your next Movie Length Tale™ is already here...

Now Showing:

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Science Fiction

Ages 13 and up

Theater lights dim.

Fade in:

WHILE OPENING CREDITS ROLL:

A man scrolls through an encyclopedic list on a large video monitor, slows, stops, selects 06 May 2028.

A narrated video begins:

After shocking the world by implementing a gold standard for the Yuan in 2015, China quickly became the world’s only economic superpower. Countries around the world which were unable to adopt a gold or silver backed currency were economically devastated.

The man watches footage of riots, military and police actions against citizens in every major city of the world.

The Chinese monopoly on rare earth elements used in electric car batteries had caused the price of oil to fall to a ninety year low. The New Soviet Federation and OPEC nations were particularly hard hit.

Border clashes between Chinese and Russian troops, riots in Mecca fill the video monitor.

As a result, the N.S.F. forcefully reasserted its ownership of the long disputed, mineral rich Kuril Islands traditionally claimed by Japan, resulting in a naval standoff.

New Soviet Federation and Japanese ships destroy each other on the monitor.

With the World’s attention focused elsewhere, China launched the Dz-Yu, or ‘Freedom’ mission that deployed a one hundred ten thousand kilometer long carbon nanotube ribbon which formed the backbone of the world’s first space elevator.

The monitor displays orbital footage of the Dz-Yu satellite followed by animated footage of a small rocket unspooling a carbon nanotube ribbon from the satellite. It dives back through the atmosphere to a massive floating structure resembling giant deep sea oil platforms cobbled together in the South China Sea.

Within a year, Chinese Space Elevator One, or CSE-One as it became known, was operational.

Two ribbons in close proximity rise from the completed CSE-One Base Station. Space elevator cars ascend one ribbon, descend the other.

In space, broad red laser beams that power the elevator cars from Earth are visible as the cars at Shenzhen Station, a massive two story circular structure pierced by the space elevator ribbons.

With space access now cheap and readily available, China declared that CSE-One was built for the benefit of all mankind. Within a year, a private company had constructed a space elevator on the moon. Lunar colonies were then established by China, the United States, Russia, Australia, India and Japan.

The monitor displays orbital fly-by footage of a space elevator on the moon above a domed lunar colony. Other settlements lights shine out from the still dark areas of the moon facing Earth. The images morph from the moon to orbital views of Mars.

Mars One, a self sustaining, international settlement initially housing two hundred fifty-five permanent residents, was completed in 2028.

Fifty buildings huddle together under a clear dome at the foot of the giant extinct volcano, Olympus Mons.

Images of a second, still-under-construction domed city fill the monitor as the narration concludes.

"Mars Two was scheduled for completion by 2038. However, construction was halted as a