ROWELIT
Author's Commentary: "Scion: Year of the Dragon"
Welcome back, Lifeboat! As much as I am loving every minute in the Battery, I’m happy to be back where this adventure started, at that beautiful pale blue dot all these amazing, crazy future-humans came from. And this week, we’re building a spaceship—or at least an engine anyway.
I knew about the Hatton name, and some of the problems with the A-5, because (spoiler) it may play a critical role in the forthcoming novel. What I didn’t know is how it may never have come about if not for a ski crash.
My upload ritual, since my videos started getting more attention this winter, has been to hit publish and then get the heck away from a computer for a few hours, and for me, this has meant heading to the slopes. It’s an old familiar world to me, and I thought that as the season wound down, an ode to a sport that I love would be fitting. I used to coach a little, so I met a lot of people who ran in circles like the Hatton family—high-powered people. Families like the Hattons often get a bad rap in fiction, and maybe justifiably so in some cases, but I can’t think of too many cases where they get humanized, much less portrayed in a sympathetic light. Not every corporate leader is a ghoul, nor are their kids all trust-fund ingrates and degenerates. I found the exact opposite to be true, almost exclusively, but it’s so much easier and satisfying to Gatsby the wealthy and powerful whole-cloth because, yeah, there are certainly a fair amount who deserve the Gatsby treatment. Not today. Last week’s story was a story about brothers, so this week, I also thought it would be appropriate for us to meet a brother/sister pair worth rooting for—at least I think so.
I can’t say too much about the space engine that’s not in the story without giving away elements of Lifeboat, but I decided to go this route because I’ve already touched on the origin of FTL in this universe (“To Geddes”), and I wasn’t inspired to dive deeper there. So fusion rocketry it is. I’d done a fair amount of research into theories for how it might work for Lifeboat, so I hope that comes through along with the passion for engineering that gets so many amazing machines built.
So if you’re out there somewhere where it’s still cold enough, steep enough, and wintry enough, remember to get countered high in your turns and keep a sharp edge on!
Thanks for stopping by!
Rowe