Won a Short Story Competition!

Won a competition run by Lexicons, a body that promotes Science Fiction and Fantasy writing in Sri Lanka. The contest is once a quarter. Last time I got my ass handed to me, but this time things went better.

Full disclosure: my wife runs Lexicons. She's not one of the judges though, and the submissions have their names removed.

Here's the story:
http://lexiconwordart.blogspot.com/2014/11/project-scrybe-iii-winning-entry.html

Astronomy at 550 AU
I wrote this story mainly explore a neat idea I bumped into recently. Gravity warps space, and so bends the path of light. Light passing around a body will converge at a point. This is a good place to put a telescope. We already use gravitational lensing, it's nothing new.

Light passing near the sun, converges 550 AU away. What if we placed a telescope, there? It's a tremendous distance (about 10 times Pluto's distance), but the sun itself would act as a lens. Such a telescope would be staggeringly powerful. Not only could it identify the gases atmospheres of Earth-like worlds, but even show us their surfaces!

The idea was pioneered by Von Eshelman at Stanford. Physicist Claudio Maccone is probably its biggest champion. He's suggested a mission to 550 AU, named FOCAL. For more information about him and FOCAL, there is an excellent link here.

Gravitational Lensing. Credit: Martin Kornmesser & Lars Lindberg Christensen

Making the Solar System feel Huge
I also experimented with creating a sense of deep space and deep time. Deep time is quite straight forward - names get strange and you add a few centuries here and there. There's a bit of extrapolating ahead (have the Jovians been terraformed? What's the post-Singularity like?), but nothing too taxing. Most of it, you won't use.

Deep space was tougher - I was dealing with just our solar system. Generally, we treat it as it were relatively small (and it is). However, we don't think much about how truly distant the planets are they from each other.

Then, there are Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. How often do we consider them, when we think about the solar system? How many people even know about them? Even within the Oort Cloud, bodies are (on average) as distant from each other, as the Earth is from the Sun.

There's plenty of space in the solar system to found nations and set up empires. In "The Wardens," I tried to convey this.

Parting Thoughts
I don't think I'll revisit the world in "The Wardens," but it was fun to write a short story again. I used to do a fair bit when I was younger, and I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed it.

Navin Weeraratne