It’s a quiet Sunday, but I’ve been chipping away at both Fleeing Victory #5 (title pending) and Atoning Mirror. I’m starting to get my head around the direction the latter is going to take. FV#5 is looking similar to FV#1 so far, in terms of the pacing and information presented. I guess that’s inevitable when you’ve got to introduce a few new characters. I might be able to have FV#5 done tomorrow or Tuesday. We’ll see. Atoning Mirror is definitely going to take longer.

There are some other stories I really want to work on but they’ll have to wait until at least next month. I don’t want to get bogged down working on five different things at once and miss my deadline.

I do want to ramble about one of them a bit.

In the Zion setting there’s an event that involves saving the Earth. Several massive military organizations were created to prepare for it. Without getting into spoilers, there were two important groups that originate here. The one I’ve been itching to hash out first wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me.

Autonomous warships, an entire fleet of ships with their own minds and goals. I’ve always loved that concept, and it’s what I love about Arpeggio of Blue Steel in particular. There’s nothing quite as interesting as a weapon system with an identity on par with a human. This genre is nothing new, but Arpeggio did it in a way that doesn’t just shove the hulking ships aside when they aren’t needed, that or compress them into fashionable backpacks. If a ship isn’t around anymore, it’s because it was either blown up or dissolved for materials.

Now imagine this in space.

The Reapers from the Mass Effect series and the Basestars from the Battlestar Galactica series come to mind, which was something I liked about them both. I think sentient starships and their equivalents are at their best in a narrative when they’re ‘elite’ in threat terms: extremely powerful, but far from invincible. Mass Effect had more Lovecraftian inspirations, so they needed to go in the other direction. A story focused on them would probably have needed their power scaled back, though.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand with the sentient ship concept, but focusing specifically on the ships. What’s it like for a powerhouse fleet of sentient starships to try and exist in a universe that takes one look at all their weapons and either quakes in terror or gets ‘ideas’?

(Hmm, imagine a Godzilla movie that focused on Godzilla. Wild.)

I want to find out how it would go, and I want to find out in my own way. That’s all I can get into right now so I’ll call it there for the day. I’ll come back to this once things are further along. Likely some time next year.