A work in progress. On one level Castles in the Sky is a consideration of the issues raised by the Singularity; on another it is a work of fan-fic along the lines of “whatever happened to…” applied to the young heroine of a couple of childrens' fantasy stories for which the author has admitted that there was a third story, but that he cannot now write it — here names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty. A third strand is to pick up on the hints in my annotations of my last long fiction — reworking the future history and building on the fragment I quoted, recycling the previously developed main character, and an alternate existance of a superhero RPG feminist separatist martial artist.
What wasn't intended, but has just happened, is that this has meant that all the major characters are women.
There is occasional strong language. There is a little sanitized violence. Two characters have same-sex preference, but there are no explicit passages or even public displays of affection that would shift it into the shoujo-ai bracket. (I don't feel inclined to add to the pool of mediocre smut on line. The rest of the internet is there if that's what you're after - just filter to your own kink. Alternatively, as the Stranglers put it, “use your twentieth century imagination, if you've got any, that is.”.) The main challenges are clashes of philosophy. Would probably get a 15 certificate were it a film.
Chapter Index
- Epoch
- Celestial
- Albion
- Empyrean
- Eternity
- Avalon
- City — about half finished, when I really have stalled hard. The main characters are pulling in directions I hadn't anticipated. Maybe I'll revisit it later. There needs to be about one more chapter after this.
Alternate Endings
Not alternate endings starting from a point partway through the tale above, but, as Nancy Wolf is seeking in her own way to imminentize the Eschaton — bring about the End of the World — this is a place where I can put implicit alternatives to the whole, where she gets involved in other such final events. Nancy's journey through time is a matter of manipulating the quantum foam, to reach a configuration something like her past. As such, her destination suffers a degree of uncertainty. With low, but non-zero, probability her world line could be directed anywhere, and under the Many Worlds model that I'm using for her cosmos, if so, it is.
- Redemption-E — Neon Genesis Evangelion : arrival 2015, as the 15th Angel attacks Tokyo-3. In a few places, in making references to Angels, this presumes the slant on the nomenclature in the English translation. Not a happy ending — Evangelion doesn't do happy endings. About as long as the missing chapter and a half from the above. *sigh*