Futuristic Vehicles by Diane Burton

When I grew up in the Detroit-area, every adult I knew worked in the auto industry. They either made cars or made the parts for the cars. Maybe that’s why Detroiters love their cars. I sure do. I love the sleekness of the Corvette, but practicality (and budget) dictates a Chevy.

So when I began writing futuristic novels one of the things I had to figure out was transportation. What kind of vehicle would my heroine have? I need to consider her temperament and her job. In my science fiction romance The Pilot, my heroine is very proud and won’t take charity. As a runaway teen, she indentured herself to a mechanic to survive. After her servitude was finished, she continued to work for him until she could pay for a broken-down cargo hauler, repairing it on her own time. Her ship isn’t glamorous, but it’s functional. On the other hand, the hero came from a wealthy family. His ship is a sleek, top-of-the-line “muscle” ship.

Describing futuristic vehicles takes a bit of imagination. Sure, you can use what you’ve seen in movies or what you’ve read in other sci-fi books. But you don’t want to just copy. You want to make those vehicles your own.

Start with your setting. Does your story take place entirely in space or on land? Or a combination? What’s the culture? Is this a sophisticated society that has a long history of space mobility or one where space travel is in its infancy? If your story takes place on land, consider the same questions.

Consider function. What’s the purpose of the vehicle, besides getting from one place to another? Does the vehicle carry passengers or freight? Is it used for exploration? Or is it a military vehicle? How many people can the ship carry? Does it carry armament? Does it have Faster Than Light (FTL) drive?

My imagination only goes so far so I have to look for pictures that will give me a jumping off point. For each book, I Google stock photo sites or search on Pinterest for spaceships. Thanks to Linnea Sinclair’s yahoogroup, here are some

 

Sites for starship schematics:

Star Trek Voyager Schematics
 

Klingon Bird of Prey

Star Trek Ship blueprints

 

Once you have the particulars of your ship in mind, it helps to sketch it out. You need to be as familiar with the vehicle as the characters who ride in it. As with many things in your story, you—the author—must know more than the reader. Just as you wouldn’t “dump” the hero’s backstory in the first chapter, you don’t want to bore the reader with a detailed description of the vehicle. Use a light hand and treat the vehicle the way you would a car, motorcycle, or airplane. The reader will get the picture through the characters’ eyes and actions.

Happy travels!

Diane Burton combines her love of mystery, adventure, science fiction and romance into writing romantic fiction. Besides the science fiction romance Switched series, she is the author of The Pilot, the first book in a series about strong women on the frontier of space. One Red Shoe is her first romantic suspense. Diane and her husband live in Michigan. They have two children and two grandchildren.

For more info and excerpts from her books

visit Diane’s WEBSITE

 

“What could they possibly see in each other?”

Interspecies Love for FF&P by Pamela Jaye Smith  

Interspecies Love is an excellent story device through which to make observations on and suggestions for the way we humans treat each other, both as individuals and as societies, nations, and races. It is also a clever way to portray the more animal-like or just plain weird aspects of our human nature.

With so much romance, love, lust, and just plain sex going on between humans and vampires, humans and werewolves, humans and zombies, humans and who-knows-what let us first define Interspecies Love.  

If the human is mating with anyone that is now or ever was an actual human who has been compromised by a DNA override such as a curse, a bite, the phase of the moon, that is not Interspecies.

Some creatures are on the borderline between human and non-human, such as fairies, elves, and gnomes, depending on the mythology and the story. In mythology there are myriad examples of humans mating with animals, angels, and deities. A modern version is Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire wherein an angel falls in love with a human and gives up his angelic form to be with her. 

Examples in Myth and Legend

Sphinxes, griffins, centaurs, gorgons, Anubis and other such Egyptian gods, mermaids.... With so many part human/part animal creatures in the myths of the world one begins to wonder if there might not have been some facts behind the stories. Is it racial memory, the preservation of deep history in myth, the fanciful telling of science experiments gone bad? Or perhaps a misunderstanding of the complexity of evolution and the branching of the tree of life from single-cell forms to today’s humans? Many very interesting, fun, exciting, inspiring, or scary stories center around some mix of humans and other species. 

 

Greek king god Zeus was a rampant womanizer of mortal females, immortal females, and half-mix females. Seduction was often easy because, well, he was king of the gods. Often though the mortal girls knew about his goddess-wife Hera’s jealous rages and preferred not to be turned into a cow so Zeus disguised himself for many of his affairs. As a bull, he kidnapped young Europa. As a swan, he seduced Leda, who bore him Pullox and Helen (later of Troy). 

In a similar case of bird-to-human mating Christianity portrays the divine Holy Spirit as a dove, visiting the mortal virgin Mary – the result being Jesus. 

Joseph Campbell tells the tale of a native American princess who marries a buffalo god to help save her people.    

Examples in Media

 His Monkey Wife  by John Collier is an amusing and pointed allegory for miscegenation. In this book an Englishman comes back from Africa with an astonishingly literate female chimpanzee who is in love with him. [Collier also wrote the screenplay for The African Queen.] Rudyard Kipling’s short story Bimi features a male orangutan who is dangerously jealous of his human master’s new wife.  

Avatar is an excellent example of technologically advanced cultures taking advantage of other beings seen as “less than”. There is Interspecies romantic Love between Jake and Neytiri and a generalized respect and love by the human scientist Grace for the Na’vi. 

In The Little Mermaid fairy tale a fish-girl gives up her voice in order to get legs and be able to walk on land and marry the prince.  

The first Alien film shows female human crew-member Lambert being brutally and fatally raped by the Alien. Earlier, the male crewman Kane was orally raped and in the grossest case of interspecies breeding ever, gives birth to the new alien as it bursts out of his chest. 

Symbols

Mixed creatures such as centaurs, sphinxes, mermaids, etc. 

Two very different versions of the same thing in juxtaposition...eyes, hands, sex organs, etc. 

In Avatar the helicopters and the flying dragons represent the differences between the race of humans and the Na’vi. Clothing or lack thereof can also represent differences. 

In Your Stories  

Compare and contrast – how are their heads/limbs/mouths/sex organs alike or different? Make the descriptions either wondrous or horrifying, depending on the nature of the impending relationship between the human and the alien.

Be clear about the purpose of the point of contact. In Star Trek Captain Kirk going after alien chicks reveals his character and creates character arcs. In Alien the ‘mating’ is a story arc and drives the plot forward. 

Give us the actual mating act, as with Leda and the swan [Zeus] in the poem by William Butler Yeats http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/leda-and-the-swan/.  

Show the differences before you get them together. In Galaxy Quest the aliens forget to turn on their Appearance Generators so the earthlings see them in their true form of tall upright octopi not even faintly resembling humans.  

If positive results -- A stronger bond to something higher and different. 

If negative results – unfortunate, dreadful, or deadly. 

Interspecies Love is a really rich situation you can use to make all sorts of statements and send all sorts of messages in your FF&P stories while greatly entertaining us in either heart-warming or terrifying ways. 

More about the Author 

 

Pamela Jaye Smith is a mythologist, writer, international story consultant and speaker, and award-winning producer-director. She authored THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE, INNER DRIVES, SYMBOLS-IMAGES-CODES, andBEYOND THE HERO’S JOURNEY. Pamela has taught writing at Romance Writers of America and Savvy Authors on-line, spoke at RWA Scriptscene 2012 Convention, UCLA Extension, RAI-TV Rome, Nat'l Film Institute of Denmark, LA Webfest, Marseille Webfest, and many more. Other clients and credits include Microsoft, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and the US Army. Pamela Jaye is founder of MYTHWORKSand co-founder of Mythic Challengesand Alpha Babe Academy.

© 2012 SHOW ME THE LOVE!  book by Pamela Jaye Smith  & Monty Hayes McMillan

www.mythworks.net  www.alphababeacademy.com 

I hope you will join my class on

BEYOND THE HERO'S JOURNEY

Hosted by

Fantasy-Futuristic& Paranormal Romance Writers

This 4 Week class starts March 4, 2013

For more information click HERE