General conflict is not between life and death. Both persevere. Life is motion, and many things move. Sure, death is longer-lasting (I hope that’s not a surprise to anyone), but life does last and arrise often.

It’s higher things. The push for moving things in a different direction, of imposing one’s will, of wishing for something more—whatever that may be.

It’s things falling apart. It’s struggling however against the way things are.

And the happiest are those on the periphery of the story. The “suppporting caste” are generally as happy as they are oblivious. The more they simply ignore life’s stuggles and think in bland, tried ways about things, the more undisturbed they are.

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• Story begins with someone being delayed leaving somewhere because his spacecraft has to be disinfected of space bears. He’s thus late giving his talk about, essentially, the battle between life and death, something obtuse-but-sounds-like-it-must-sound-clever-to-someone like “Entropy as Discrete, Symmetric Construct in Pan-Dimensional Physics: The Rebirth of Death in Our Lives” The technician cleaning out his craft gnetly points out htat if he didn’t keep so many plants in his craft, he probably wouldn’t have the problem this badly. The speaker simply remarks that he’s amazed anything can live out here—plants or animals. The technician points out that we live out here.
• Different types of space:
  • Naught: empty space, less than a few atomic particles per meter or so
  • Dust
  • Chunky dust
  • etc.
  • A battle (a bullfight?) within a star nursery
  • The pirate queen’s ship uses an orthogonal dimension, collapsed-position AM drive: the matter and Am are housed in orthogonal localized mini-dimensions and so simply can’t interact unless released into this dimension. And there’s a whole lot of matter and AM crammed in those mini-dimensions because it’s collapsed into a superposition onto itself
  • Government structure is based on voting with money. However, there are a set of rights that are at least in principle independent of money. In addition, there is a maximum and a minimum wage (again, at least in theory: no system is any stronger than the government that’s behind it).
    • And I think that’s the beef I have with small-government Republicans. You really want a lawless society? A small, weak government is really a neat idea to you? Huh.

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  So, story starts with botanist not being able to give his talk because of his craft needing sterlized.

  At that conference is where the Dean makes his move. The botanist (and many others) knew this. Things move quickly from there. Backstory is through flashbacks. The problems people can solve are the simpler, more personal ones. The big ones people miss or die trying to hit.

  So, basic story is the Dean breaks away to form his own society. The rest fights him. The Dean is very clever and wins most battles—including the final plan to just step aside and let the Growth chew up the rest. The rest find them, though, and spank the Dean into retreat. The Dean, though, had implemented a plan to exterminate the rest just like they did the aliens. Then they all get eaten.

  In the sequel, the botanist learns from the pirate queen that after the beast, the aliens came in and hunted humans into subjugation. Wouldn’t exterminate them, but keep them down to less than a hundred thousand (just like they do the other race that fills the niche of something or other). Humans have become highwaymen. Well, yeah, but they do need to settle into a niche that’s still win-win.

  So, things to sort

  • Timeline of basic story
  • Warfare ideas
  • Subplots and cool twists

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Dust to Dust, created by William Ellery Samuels, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be sought by contacting Dr. Samuels; his contact info is at http://www.viriya.net/samuels/main.html.