12/29/2025 - Paul SB - Incompatible sub03 - 3555 words

[Paul SB]

And now for our third installment. In Entry 5 we have a prison break, and my main concern there is that it might come across as too easy. Entry 6 is more world building and character dev, with our intrepid hero stuck inside a cramped little spaceship with the alien who spoke to her in Entry 4. It's early enough in the story that the world building is necessary, as long as it doesn't come across as too data dumpy.

 

Thanks for taking a look, and feel free to share any thoughts.

 

Summaries by Entry: Incompatible with Love

Entry 1 — Daisy Viramontes, who has stowed away on an autonomous cargo ship heading for Mars, becomes alarmed when she realizes that the ship is still going after it should have landed. When she goes up to the bridge to see if she can find out what is happening, she discovers that there is another stowaway. He is a spy for the European Union, and tells her that the ship is going to to the dwarf planet Ceres and he is there to find out why.

 

Entry 2 - The ship reaches Ceres and Daisy and the spy try to hide from the cargo handlers. Guards see them and chase them through a secret base. The chase ends when they crash into a lounge full of aliens.

 

Entry 3 - Our intrepid hero is captured and imprisoned after her spy buddy is shot.

 

Entry 4 - The aliens contact our intrepid hero and ask questions about the social systems of humans, after revealing that they have suspicions about the particular humans they are working with.

 

 

Bon apétit!

 

[AnAirSickFool]

Finished with reading the chapter

First though I did have a question. How hard of a sci fi system are you trying to have for the book?

I ask since for the scene where they travel faster then light everything goes black outside the ship. From the research I have done on the subject I would assume that only the area 180 ish degrees behind them would go black and everything in front would go through very high red shift. If you found that it behaves differently then I would love to read the source on that.

I would also be interested in how the alien guns work. Not for story purposes but just out of curiosity.

Other then that I liked the chapter. Good movement through the action

I did feel the comparison on page to the inside of a room being like the inside of a large pizza box was an odd comparison. It seems like a complicated way of say the room was square.

 

[Paul SB]

Okay, to answer your questions (in no particular order), the guns the aliens used were explained in the previous book, and I didn't see a real need to explain them here. If you have ever had the unpleasant experience of hyperventilating, one of the weirder effects is the excess oxygen in your bloodstream starts to bond to the calcium in your bones. When this happens the joints become extremely stiff, to the point that you can barely move, if at all. I have no idea if there will ever be a technology that could cause this bonding effect, but if it's possible then you have a physiologically plausible way to make a stun gun.

As far as the FTL system goes, I didn't put a huge amount of thought into it. FTL is such an old trope in sci-fi that it's kind of boring, and most readers aren't anywhere near as interested in it as they were back in the '60s. Science fiction without some kind of scientific speculation isn't really science fiction, but physics isn't the only kind of science. I have a Master's in Anthropology, the science go humans, and that's what I'm generally playing around with when I write. That's not exactly unprecedented. Ursula K. LeGuin was the daughter of California's most famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, and if you read The Left Hand of Darkness or The Lathe of Heaven it's pretty clear she wasn't writing physics fiction. Most people assume that these books are psychological, but if you know the anthro you see that she was working with concepts like The Law of Segmentary Opposition (Lathe of Heaven) and the arbitrary nature of gender (Left Hand of Darkness). I'm sure I could have done more research on FTL. 

[Appol PhD they/he]

I like some of the smaller dynamics here, like D helping the aliens understand human customs so that their takeover and sabotage doesn't escalate unnecessarily. This is good because D is really the only one in a position to help the aliens, so it means there's good pressure and stakes for her. On the constructive side, I think we need more on the larger stakes and motivations. What do the aliens want by taking D with them, and how is that going to inform the challenges she'll be facing next?