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Posted at 2020-08-20
This very text you are reading now is hosted at tanelorn.city, server oriented at writers. While having a gemlog sure qualifies as ‘writing’, I suspect it's not what ~matthew meant.
Actually, I did attempts at writing sci-fi! I'll tell about below.
This was a story about a world located inside three giant cubes and metal elevator-bridges connecting them. The whole thing (called Tricube for obvious reasons) was located inside a giant cave somewhere on Mars. I actually found a place on Mars's map where such cave could exist! I don't remember where exactly this place is.
The Tricube was built for an experiment: what would happen if we leave some people in a closed space for some time? The experiment was proceeding smoothly but was eventually forgotten because of events happening on the Mars. The Tricube society was self-sustained and could continue living for a long time by themselves.
The hero of the story was living a happy Tricube life but eventually suspected that, perhaps, there is a life outside the walls of the cubes (yes, the Tricubians had forgotten about other people). I don't really remember what was planned but I suspect Tricubians were supposed to leave their cubes and explore the outside world of terraformed Mars.
But what Mars was actually like?
This story was unveiling in the same world as Tricube. Revo, a programmer from Mars, eventually became bored with sterile and safe life on Mars. He wanted something to happen. That's why he left Memphis, the city where he lived, for the mysterious life of Earth. London, specifically. He chose London for some reason. I think it was related to spaceflight prices.
I wanted to convey a cryptic feeling along with the story so I decided to play with the text itself. Lengths (in characters) of every paragraph were mapped to prime numbers! So, the first paragraphs were like that:
2 Наступило будущее.
3 500 год ОФВ.
5 Жил человек по имени Рево.
7 Как и все, он жил в достатке.
It translates like that:
2 The future has come.
3 It's year 500 PFV (Post Fina Venko).
5 There lived a man named Revo.
7 He was living a prosperous life, just like everyone.
I have written the story at least up to 127 words in a paragraph. There are some unsorted paragraphs as well. Also, it's quite likely that I continued the story somewhere else and lost it.
I think I developed a good world. It had a nice surreal touch. For example, have you heard of the London Underground? It developed so hard in my world that it became like a different city on its own! There were lost stations, secret passages, wrong maps, trains going in random directions, own timezones!
There was also a self-insert character. I think he was named Mr Spaniolett. I'm not sure because I just can't find any references of him in the manuscript I have found. There must be different versions of the story! Anyway, Mr Spaniolett has accomplished what I, his prototype, haven't done yet. He has build a giant concrete pyramid! Oh boy, I wish I had a pyramid like that! The pyramid is so monumental, epic and exciting!
This one is not sci-fi, it's more of a fantasy story. I was writing it before the two aforementioned stories. Only prologue and chapter 1 were finished but the book had some audience. My aunt really liked it! If you are interested, you can read the book if you know Russian and manage to find it on the web. It's somewhere there but I'm not going to tell you its URL.
I'm thinking about publishing all these stories in a convenient format. The problem is that they were written when I was quite young and stupid (not like much changed tho) and I'm kinda embarrassed by them. Also, they are in Russian (because of course they are!); it seems like not many people around here know Russian.
There are many more worlds I have attempted to develop (none of them are finished, just like the three above). A recent one is called Serpenta (because its inhabitants believed they were living on a giant serpent) and seems to be good. I also want to return to Revo.
What language should I use? English would make the stories more accessible to geminauts; Russian would make it easier for me to write; Esperanto would make me ideologically happy.