Mental Crudites: Mental Crudites, #1

By Rob Johnson

Mental Crudites – Appetizers for the Creative Mind gives the aspiring Science Fiction writer lots of ideas for building their future worlds. This volume, Helping Science Fiction Writers Get Their Ideas Off The Ground, contains fourteen chapters describing different spaceship propulsion systems that authors can use to move their characters from a planet's surface to orbit, between planets in a star system, or across the interstellar void. Journeys can take weeks, years, or generations, depending on the needs of your plot. Or they can happen in the blink of an eye. Every topic is grounded in science, or at least my interpretation of the strangest quantum and cosmological phenomena.

 

The final chapter is a short story which uses some of the ideas in the first fourteen chapters to help tell a tale of betrayal, heartache, and retribution.

 

The chapters were originally written as blog posts based on a series of challenge prompts. I hope you enjoy this book at least half as much as I enjoyed writing it.  

 

Rob Johnson

January, 2021

• Language: English
• Publisher: CROW-IP
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393039907

Rob Johnson

Rob Johnson has written professionally for trade magazines, academic journals, and marketing publications during his forty-year career as a software engineer. He has also written two novels, The Templar Lance, and Lady 355: Mother of Freedom, several short stories and novellas. His weekly flash fiction blog can be found at www.robjohnsonwriting.net/blog.

Book preview

Introduction

Worlds

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As I write this, we are all locked down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Being shut-in for nine months to date has provided plenty of time for what passes in my mind for deep thinking. I’ve written a lot since our favorite bars and restaurants have been boarded up. Much of that writing resulted from a challenge posted to the Fiction Writers Group, of which I am an active member. I routinely submit flash fiction pieces based on the prompts that the FWG posts weekly. These three-hundred word stories are bite-sized fun. It’s fun to write them, and it is fun to read other writers’ submissions. Taking a break from whatever work-in-progress is front of mind for an hour or so is refreshing and recharges my mental batteries.

In addition to those prompts, Gary Holdaway posted a different challenge that I knew would take a commitment of more than an hour or two per week. Gary’s challenge came in the form of fifteen daily pictorial prompts leading to a thousand-word piece for each. With his permission, I’ve included them leading into the chapters that inspired them.

But, wait. We’re talking about a thousand words a day for fifteen days! That was a lot more words than I was used to writing per day. In a strange way, though, the COVID-19 lockdown helped. Understand that in 2020 I was the Chief Architect of a family of security software products. For the first several months of the lockdown, my former hour-long commute each way turned into two extra work hours every day. Although those extra work hours didn’t directly cut into the little writing time I afforded myself, they did drain my mental capacity significantly. And I am by no means a fast writer to begin with. My first novel took almost two years to write and my second over four years. I never thought I could write fifteen thousand publishable words in fifteen days. But I really wanted to, so I decided I needed to make some changes to my daily routine. I did that by going back to commuting to work. My commute wasn’t an hour in the car, though. Instead, it was an hour or more spent writing before logging into work. Those morning sessions not only gave me the freedom to write the essays in this volume, they also formed a morning writing habit that I have continued.

I’ve revisited each of the essays, revising them a bit with the luxury of time and hindsight. Each one represents a chapter herein. I seriously considered expanding them, but, in the end, I decided to just polish them a bit and use them per their original purpose. The expectation for Gary’s challenge, of course, was to inspire short fiction pieces. I took a different tack, though. As I explain in Chapter One, I instead decided to write what I call mental crudites—appetizers for the creative mind. Specifically, I do my best to explain several real and imagined space transportation technologies. My hope in putting these thought-provoking essays out in the world is that they will get other writers’ creative juices flowing. I know they have mine. So, if you like writing hard SF and you’re stuck figuring out how to get your characters from Earth to Mars, or Alpha Centauri to Luyten b, then maybe something in here will get you over the hump.

I've been thinking about this stuff for years—decades, really. As I said, these chapters aren’t stories. Instead, they’re fodder for stories, grist for the creative mill, fictional feedstock. You get the point. I contend that they are still creative, but without a story structure, per se. Each chapter discusses, in as much detail as I can muster, the fictional mechanics of space travel. I say fictional mechanics because, except for a couple entries, each piece discusses either a method of space travel I've read about over many decades or an approach I've come up with myself.

Just to set the record straight, I am not a rocket scientist. I’m a software architect who designs network security products used by military, public sector, and multi-national commercial enterprises around the world. But that’s just my day job. In my spare time, I’ve laid tile and hardwood floors, finished my basement, built decks and generally remodeled two houses. I also read—a lot. Science fiction, suspense, thrillers, mysteries, history, science, engineering, or pretty much anything I can get my hands on. Oh, and I write.

I’ve always been a writer of one form or another. I think I submitted my first story to Boy’s Life magazine way back in the early 1970s when I was about twelve. They rejected it, of course. But through my school years, I kept writing stories that just seemed to pop into my head. I can’t answer the age-old question, Where do you get your ideas? because I don’t get them. They get me. They suddenly appear and latch onto my brain like leeches, burrowing in and sucking my limited attention span until I have to excise them by writing them down.

After college, I started a real job and set about building a real career. That meant long hours banging away on keyboards writing stuff with strange symbols and lots of numbers and upper case letters. Those programs in ALGOL, Pascal, C, C++, and just about every other programming language you can name, along with the design documents behind them, whitepapers, and articles for journals and trade magazines that followed, became my stories. For over thirty years I sublimated my creative urges into my career, my home remodeling projects, and my family.

Always, though, lurking in the