Working on a story, I seem to have crossed an unthinkable boundary. In working out the details of a plot so that human colonists could flee Earth, I roughed in the idea that Israel attacked Iran again, and then the Iranians promptly detonated a nuclear weapon in Al Aqsa Mosque. Most westerners call it the Dome of the Rock. The Iranians had been quietly building the device for many years in preparation for such an event. When we toured Jerusalem, we were taken into tunnels said to honeycomb the area under that mosque.
Needless to say, said device made the whole city uninhabitable. Of course the WWII atomic bombs have not kept people from trying to live in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
I've related my plot idea to a couple people and it is like I did something completely unthinkable. I'll probably remove it from the story.
Wow, I had no idea.
Gwen
Comments
You should do what you think best
I have had positive and negative feedback on the stories I have written or posted.
The point is that you cannot make everyone happy. If you feel strongly that a certain event should happen in your story, that is up to you. My editors have come back to me about things in my stories and I have thought hard about each suggestion that has been made before I decide to take their input or not. The people I edit for do the same kind of thing.
It seems to me that if the Holy City were destroyed, that might sever an emotional tie to Earth for a lot of people. It could have an even deeper impact upon people from a religious standpoint. I'm looking forward to seeing your story.
TAKE IT OUT?
Why?
It is your story. Tell it how you see it happening. I have read several novels by authors that involved the middle east as a tinderbox waiting to blow, blowing up and consuming everyone around it, or turned to glass by religious fanatics of several different persuasions.
I realize that to many people, the Dome of the Rock is a sacred place. After all, it is the birthplace of 3 different religions. It has been the location of religious mayhem dating back centuries.
The capability of fanatical human beings to destroy their own homelands, shrines, and holy places has been apparent for years. So-called Christian maniacs burned southern churches in the 1960s. Catholic and Muslim maniacs fought the crusades. Islamic maniacs destroyed priceless religious shrines. One Catholic pope decided to mutilate some of the most beautiful works of art mankind has ever created.
The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were certainly devastating, as was the fire-bombing of Tokyo; but compared to the genocidal top leaders, it was relatively minor. Mao killed between 30-60 million of his own people. Stalin was a close second. Hitler, Tojo and Pol Pot combined had a paltry (in comparison only)14 million lives.
Human beings are continually our own worst enemies. Our capacity to race toward our own destruction boggles the mind.
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
And it is exactly that capacity...
for self-destruction that we need to follow the advice of Stephen Hawking and start exploring space and building colonies. Or else we are going to extinguish ourselves on this mudball.
your idea
your idea is no more taboo than anybody else's idea. At least not to me. If i feel its a good plot device then I'd write the pope was caught in bed with a goat. on this site there are more than one story that involves the sexual assault of children so I say what's a nuke or two going off in a holy place going to really matter.
quidquid sum ego, et omnia mea semper; Ego me.
alecia Snowfall
Uhhh...
Anything requiring colonists to leave earth would be unthinkable and offensive. After all...that's why they're leaving. You tell your story as you wish. What I want to know when I read a story is what parts of the writer am I being shown. We all put a little bit of ourselves into our tales so go with it!
Words Like Water in the Wilderness...
Kelly
Does it...
Does your idea seriously strain the reader's willing suspension of disbelief, or outright break it? Does it sound like propaganda?
Here's a possibility. Human colonists flee the earth not because of present-day conditions, but because of future prospects. (My own view is that they're leaving the frying pan for the fire, in all but the absolute worst situations.) Another possibility: a powerful nation, ruled by incompetent, stupid, sociopathic, overconfident leaders start a war to stomp on what appears to be a gadfly of a menace, only to see things escalate badly.
-- Daphne Xu
My only problem with this
My only problem with this idea is that it's not big enough. Sure people will be upset, but what else is new.
Now if you have it cause WW3, that's different. Get Pakistan and India involved, then China, the USA, Europe, etc, and the bombs start flying, and you have a good reason to jump off into the unknown.
IDK
There are both push and pull factors involved in any human migration. A conflagration in the middle east could upset segments of the society who believe that it is a harbinger of death for the planet. That is a push factor, regardless of whether the war expands to the rest of the world. Pull factors could be the discovery of eden-like planets with the potential for prosperity and harmony within a like-minded society.
Wars, pestilence, disease, and famine have always been push factors. So have intolerance and bigotry. The opportunity to live your own life by the rules of your own society has always been a pull factor, as have economic prosperity, freedom, tolerance, and adventure.
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
Eden-Type Planets?
Well, you could make your universe whatever you choose. But if it's to resemble our universe at (roughly) our stage of advancement, then Earth is the only "Eden-Type" planet available. The Middle-East attacks in your story suggest that Earth is roughly at our stage. The only places to escape to are the moon and a man-made satellite orbiting the earth.
Consider the difference between manned and robot (or drone) space missions. Then consider the moon mission of the 1960s.
Short summary: moon colonies and man-made satellite colonies are long-term propositions -- not something to flee to quickly. Mars and Venus manned trips are also long-term propositions. Mars and Venus (cloud) colonies are so much longer-term. Not-to-mention the contamination of any microscopic life forms that might exist on Mars. (Major sin!)
-- Daphne Xu
True enough. I'm just
True enough. I'm just thinking to take such a blind leap of faith to actually leave the solar system rather than forming a habitat around Jupiter would require a very big shove.
But t depends on the story and the plot.
Extra-Solar Planets
I can just barely envision drones going interstellar. My own idea would be to sweep up interstellar matter for fuel, and use proton-deuteron fusion (or maybe deuteron-deuteron fusion) to provide the energy and the remaining hydrogen and helium as the exhaust to accelerate the spacecraft. A physicist (not much of a writer) wrote a novel with a semi-hypothetically possible way of using matter-antimatter as propellant energy. Use solar energy on Mercury to create the antimatter. Accelerating the spacecraft entails annihilating matter-antimatter, letting the pi-zeros go to waste, and using a huge magnetic field to curve the charged pions and direct them backwards.
It would still probably take generations to reach the nearest stars. Future generations would have to take data continuously radioed back, and analyze it, studying the interstellar medium, using parallax to refine distances to much further stars, etc.
A group of humans in such a situation, they're committing themselves to live in something whose only difference from a man-made satellite is that it's leaving the solar system, accelerating, and trying to go somewhere. It's Biosphere 2 up to eleven, and they can't ever leave.
-- Daphne Xu