henryneilsen.bsky.social
Sci-fi and Speculative author and writer of essays about extremely nerdy stuff. Anti genAI, pro humanity. Lefty. Environmental designer by day.
337 posts
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And it sucks.
I don't really have more to say about it. It just sucks. We're really bad as a species at doing things to collectively benefit our fellow man, even when we're fully aware of the destruction our choices cause.
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We seem to keep doing this to one another. Create something and then, while we argue about how to best use it (or not use it), the most base, mean, power grabbing thing becomes the status quo.
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So there were a heap of memos and meetings and dissenting opinions that called for control and international agreement and they all just... Failed.
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Even before Germany's surrender they knew it was a device to suppress the Russians, but after the war the combination of horrific destruction and relatively low cost of production was perceived as a potentially world ending threat. Quite rightly, too.
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Thanks! And yeah, Aurealis is a great sci fi mag if you're interested in sci fi shorts
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Thank you!
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Thank you so much! It's been a long time coming haha
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So Sunward Sky has some of that, too.
Get your copy of Sunward Sky here, and support an indie author (me!) today:
books2read.com/u/bWxz2M
www.booktopia.com.au/sunward-sky-...
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This kind of ballsy confidence and assuredness in doing something incredibly dangerous for the benefit of others is something that I find inspiring, and some of the best values the human condition has to offer.
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More than that, a subset of these people elect to test medications on themselves prior to their approval by drug administration policies.
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Modern medicine is incredible. The work that researchers are able to do to construct and understand how viruses work and mutate is incredible. When I was writing Sunward Sky, I was following the development of the Covid-19 Vaccine, one of the most incredible joint human efforts ever achieved.
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But I wanted my story to have hope.
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The idea that people sent to space would be sent to what was effectively a death sentence, that the company in question would let their assets degrade to the point of danger, and the fact that a group of these people would eventually decide to say “screw it” and burn it all down, stuck in my head.
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Space travel is dangerous, incredibly so. The degradation of the muscles means months of physio when you’re up there. It can increase cancer risk, stuffs your skeleton up, it’s a bad time. I wrap this up into one thing, “Space Palsy” as a catch-all for the effects of the zero-gravity environment.
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The company behind the Hawk’s Nest tunnel still exists. The web runs on Bezos’s AWS. And we all know what Musk is up to these days.
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What’s more, in most of these cases the responsible parties are the companies themselves, who operate as a set of intellectual ideas rather than manifest agents. So many times, it’s functionally impossible to punish those who have caused manifest harm.
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This is an ongoing problem with the nature of Capitalism. In order to maximise profits you have to be truly innovative to charge more money, or you have to minimise your costs, and human labour is a massive cost, so what’s a board of directors to do?
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This has been going on forever. The Hawk’s Nest tunnel saw hundreds of people die of silicosis because of cost-cutting and profiteering. The union movement began because of the exploitative conditions in factories during the industrial revolution.
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Musk forced people back to the factory, creating hundreds of new Covid cases in the process. Six people died in an Amazon warehouse when they weren’t allowed to leave prior to a natural disaster.
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More than that, I wanted the grievances to feel real. Around the time I was writing Sunward Sky, many stories were coming out about the way people like Musk and Bezos were treating workers at their factories.
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Andor has an amazing example of this kind of place - covered in junk and barely surviving, riffing on the retrofuturism of Star Wars in a really interesting way.
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I wanted the world of Sunward Sky to feel lived in. I wanted it to seem like our current race toward climate collapse and technofeudalist didn’t stop, and we were surviving, trapped on the surface of the world we killed.
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Images like The Day the Earth Smiled with the earth visible as barely more than a pixel, the Hubble spacecraft’s pillars of creation, or any of the dozens of pictures I had in coffee table books that blew up my imagination with thoughts of the immense loneliness of the universe.
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Speaking of Aliens, Alien has always been my favourite of the franchise because of the way it depicts, first and foremost, a bunch of people doing a job. The militarism and jingoistic hoo-ra of the sequels doesn’t do as much for me as the terror of people having just the worst day at work.
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Then, the 2003 series of Battlestar Galactica. This series was a study into how humanity behaves when there’s nothing left, and showed me what a space story with no aliens could look like. A story about people and their relationship to one another.
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The first and most overt comparison is to The Expanse. Corey’s space opera blends all of the magic of a space opera with the grounded feeling that I like so much in other types of sci-fi. Corey’s world has given us the solar system, but I wondered what would happen if we didn’t even get that far.
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This is available to read in full at henryneilsen.substack.com/p/inspiratio...
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Henry Neilsen ( @henryneilsen.bsky.social ) is an Australian SF author with a new novel, Sunward Sky, out imminently.
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You're lovely! Thank you :)
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Thanks @tactwo.bsky.social , glad you found it interesting.
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Get those astronauts into the gym!
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Oh wow, what an amazing piece of research! If I'm reading it right, they think they can target a particular window to improve bone density after space flight? Because that's extremely cool.
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You can now add Sunward Sky to your TBR on Goodreads! The release date is next year, February 15.
www.goodreads.com/book/show/21...
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It was an interesting experience! I'm not sure I'd do it that way again though haha.
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I work so I can buy more books so I can read so I can learn so I can work so I can buy more books so I-
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Special edition is on the right, standard on the left. Standard also in smaller format.
There will only ever be 100 copies of the special edition, so it's a limited run
This story started as a podcast, and the special edition has a foreword where I talk about the writing process and influences.
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You can add on Goodreads if you like! Also available for pre-order on kindle for the standard edition.
Or if you wanna get a special edition we can probably work something out 🙂
www.goodreads.com/book/show/21...
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25ish word pitch: In a world where space travel has become a dangerous low wage job that results in degenerative illness, a medical researcher risks her life by travelling to space to understand what happens to the crew, only to stumble into a conspiracy she wasn't prepared for.