Tag: imagination

Musings

[Blog] Heights

Faith Hakimian

I have this memory from when I was a kid and our whole family went to San Francisco on vacation. The room (suite?) we stayed in was on the top floor, offering us this magnificent view of the city through a huge window that covered what I remember to be the entire wall and ran floor to ceiling. As you can imagine, my siblings and I, being young and fearless and completely unaccustomed to beautiful cityscape views, responded by plastering our small selves against the glass and staring out at all the everything.

Which apparently made my dad a little nervous, because I remember being gently (if urgently) ushered away from the glass.

And honestly, I can’t say I blame him. Because I rather doubt I would be able to do the same thing today, no matter how strong I “knew” the glass was. Chalk it down to a greater sense of my own mortality, or the realization of just how far down it was to the ground. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have a true fear of heights, but I definitely have a certain… respect for them.

That being said, I love the views you get when you do get up high. And close to the edge. I noticed this the other day when I was up several floors in some building in LA, and the hallway ended up going along the edge of the building and the entire wall was made of glass that let you see out and down. I wasn’t expecting it, and I felt a sudden excitement somewhere in my gut.

It was a similar feeling to the one I get when I’m in a plan looking down, especially at take-off or landing. When you’re already at altitude it can be easy to just accept that this is what the world looks like through the window of a plane, but when you actually watch the ground fall away or reach up to meet you, that illusion gets shattered. And it’s amazing.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, except to try to put down my thoughts on something that clearly touches some deeper part of me. As a writer, there’s always value in finding these things, because once you realize it, it’s easier to synthesize it and draw connections to other things. I’m never going to ride a gryphon through the clouds, but I’ve ridden a horse at a gallop and I’ve flown in a plane– so I can imagine what it must be like.

Or maybe something just took my breath away, and I want to share it with all of you.

Musings

[Blog] Camp July ’21 Update

Faith Hakimian

Well… I don’t want to jinx it… but this might be the time I break my Camp failure curse! At any rate, I’ve already written more by this point in July than I have in any of my other attempts in their entirety.

It’s not a guarantee, of course, and this is all in the middle of starting a crazy new schedule at work, but I’m feeling excited! It definitely helps that my sister has been choosing some awesome prompts, too.

They’re not in anything like a presentable state yet, of course, but I’m really happy with the bones of all of them so far. And if all goes as planned, you’ll be seeing some of the finished products in the next few months.

What about you guys? Anyone else participating in this Camp NaNo? How’s it going for you?

Musings

[Blog] (More) Musings on Spacestations

Faith Hakimian

It’s entirely possible that working in an actual, honest-to-goodness city has gotten inside my head. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been spending sizeable portions of every week actually in Los Angeles for the better part of a year: I still stare up at the buildings like the country girl I apparently still am. In case there’s any question, yes, I’m completely okay with that.

Now, nerd that I am, staring at the seemingly never-ending stretch of buildings inevitably leaves me considering the logistics of space stations. Well. Some of the logistics. I don’t mean things like creating gravity and making sure life support works (okay, so maybe now I am, in a purely theoretical sense) but more what it would be like to have a city’s worth of people living suspended in space.

Assuming for a moment that the fictional civilization in question figured out how to build and maintain a structure that could support millions of people, what would it be like to live there? How would someone move between the different places they need to go? LA has its chaotic mess of tangled freeways, but it’s hard to imagine that this:

would translate well to this:

If only because it’s going to be hard to find a place to put all the cars (or their 25th century equivalents). It’s just not the most efficient use of space. Plus, in our modern day cities, you’ve got to deal with miles and miles between the places people live and the places they work. Or play. Or run errands. And part of that is because there’s a limit, either cultural or physical, to how much we want to build up as opposed to out, and because we do, to one extent or another, have the space to build out. That’s not going to be a luxury the fictional inhabitants of a massive space station are going to have.

On the one hand, that’s going to mean that anyone living in that kind of orbital city is going to feel more or less like a sardine. On the other, there’s a certain convenience to being within walking distance of anywhere you need to go. Add in a few snazzy, high-tech elevators that can bus you from floor to floor or from section to section at remarkably high speeds, and things might be a little more reasonable.

And maybe people will continue to be more and more able to work remotely, cutting down on even more of the need to scramble from one place to another. Or maybe some sort of complicated shift system would exist, which would preempt any overwhelming surge of people at a particular time of day. Imagine that… a world without rush hour! Even so, I suspect it would take a certain sort of person to be able to thrive in orbit.

It’s all speculation, of course. But then, isn’t that why so many of us enjoy the science fiction genre? Hard or soft, there’s something about such speculative fiction that keeps us excited, engaged, and curious. Something that keeps us wondering about what might come…

… in the 24th and a half century!