Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Props to the Man From Singapore

A Singaporean member of my alternate history Internet forum--who I actually met in person when I went to Great Britain in 2006--came up with some very interesting snippets that, in my opinion, would make a sound basis for speculative fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, or horror).

The first one emerged as a result of discussing Singapore's plan to build an underground nuclear reactor.

http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking+News/Singapore/Story/STIStory_311184.html

The board member whose handle is Nietzsche suggested this meant Singapore was well on its way to becoming a real-life Dwarven kingdom.  Flocculencio (the Singaporean) riffed on The Lord of the Rings a bit and posted the following:

Fifteen hundred years later...


The King under the Equator held in his hands the gate between East and West...but the merchant princes of Singapore delved too greedily and too deep and they woke the sleeping Darkness. Who knows what dwells in the nighted caverns at the bottom of the world, who knows what strange blasphemies burrow the living rock?

No man knows. But the jackal and the lizard haunt the vine-encrusted towers of Singapore- Queen of the East, once proud now dust. Mariners sail far clear of that cursed isle for at dawn and dusk they say the shattered lights of the City glow once again, and in that hard, unwholesome light strange things are seen.

But they do not like to speak of it.
 
The second snippet came from a discussion of Stephen Hawking's warning that contact between humankind and a more advanced alien race would not end well for humanity.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm

Flocculencio suggested the reason Earth hasn't been visited by aliens before is because we're the first species to achieve sentience.  He then wrote out the following scenario:

Maybe we're the first ones. A million years from now they will speak of us; Human, Terran, words that mean angel- or demon- in a billion languages. We walked among the stars in fire and shadow, we stretched our hand across the galaxy and called it our own. At our command races were uplifted or cast down. Only a few fragmented tales and corrupted records remain of those times. And spacefarers still speak of dark and disturbing legends, of the few damned ships which have slipped off course and come at last to ancient Sol where the husks of mighty defence platforms still ring storied Earth and the brave- or foolish- spacer who slips past comes at last to the threshold of glory and awe and madness, the ancient planet where Humans raised themselves from the dust and from whence they hurled themselves across the void. The legends are whispered for few- if any- are those who return from that dire globe, if the legends be true. A strange light glows in the ancient cities of Earth and things live which should long since have perished for the Humans knew secrets far beyond the ken of any latter day sentients. Perhaps the foolhardy spacer who has grounded his craft in an ancient city will step forward and walk the dusty streets and who knows what will step forth to greet him, shrouded in dark energies? Some things are best left undisturbed, a memory of glory and agony among the stars and the name of Human should not be spoken lest it summon that which cannot be endured. They are the First Ones. Let them rest.

That was so awesome it initially gave me the chills.

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