1990. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Humphrey sat and pondered. He wrote a blog; frequent stories and things. It was time perhaps for a good old-fashioned murder.

Humphrey had devised many a murder over the years. He had poisoned and stabbed, shot with pistol and rifle, organized fatal accidents. There had been drownings and sunstrokes and coronaries. If Humphrey concocted a storybook death, even from natural causes, it could be construed as murder. He didn’t have to kill characters off. But snuff characters out he did, and often with glee.

The only problem was that things were becoming run-of-the-mill; so humdrum; rather ho-hum. Are there any original ways left to murder? Is there still such a things as a creative homicide?

In the meantime, Humphrey was on another mission. Occasionally his stories degenerated into Science Fiction. Today he was in a space craft – a mother ship that was headed for the moon. When they got there, Nancy would land on the surface of the moon in the special moon lander. She would be the first woman to walk on the moon.

“It’s very important,” said Nancy.

“I don’t think it’s important at all,” said Humphrey. “Science is science.”

They had a big argument, but agreed to a semi-placid relationship while their scientific experiments were carried out. Nancy went off on her little moon lander and history was made! Wonderful! The first woman in history to set foot on non-Earth soil!

“I shall do my best to make her name forever remembered,” thought Humphrey. He turned the mother ship towards home and took off.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

1966. The whimsies of tourism

(This is the fifth of seven days of Science Faction).

The twenty-four Doglocians had paid good money to travel from their home planet to Planet Earth. The voyage, travelling at the speed of light through a Worm-warp, would arrive at Earth after ninety days. But things went wrong on the voyage.

“It never rains but it pours,” said Okrogowia, the captain of the Doglocian space craft. It was an old Doglocian cliché, but true nonetheless.

They had wanted to arrive on Earth to see the Fall foliage. That’s what the trip had been billed as: Travel to Earth, celebrate upon arrival, and see the most spectacular autumn colours in the cosmos! But with the Worm-warp warping in the wrong direction (something it did roughly once every one hundred years or so) they had ended up shooting off on a tangent. It took days of catching one Worm-warp after another to get back on course. By now it was estimated that the voyage was going to be six weeks late.

And then something spectacular occurred. The Worm-warp warped wondrously and the Doglocian craft skedaddled faster than imagined. The lost six weeks were made up in a matter of minutes. It was the 12th of October 2020 in Earth dates.

“We made it!” announced Captain Okrogowia.

“We made it! We made it! Now we can celebrate!” danced the twenty-four passengers. And indeed they had made it on time!

They had made it on the very day they had wished their adventure to start: Canadian Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends!

1964. Technological wizardry

(This is the third of seven days of Science Faction).

Alton and Warren were friends. They were also note-worthy scientists who worked at the famous Aeronautical Research Centre. Both men held strong views about UFOs and aliens. They advertised an evening to be held in the local school hall and titled “The truth about space aliens”. Had intergalactic craft been photographed and espied? Had people seen cosmic aliens?

The school hall was packed. At last the truth would be out. Alton began.

“UFOs are a hoax and I’ll tell you why. Here you have unidentified space craft that would have had to have travelled hundreds, possibly thousands, of light years through space to arrive here. I don’t doubt the possibility of such space travel being one day possible, so I am not ruling out that alien beings can’t do this.”

“Secondly, these space craft have been seen and in some cases videoed. The craft can dart almost instantaneously from one part of the sky to another. Again, I have no doubt that such technology could one day be available to us poor Earthlings,”

“But what gets me is this.” Warren continued the narrative. “And I’ll put it up here on the audio-visual screen. Don’t tell me that an alien civilization with the technology to travel hundreds of light years through space and to dart instantaneously through our sky upon arrival can be videoed because they haven’t yet developed our stealth technology! It’s a nonsense! The whole alien-UFO thing is a hoax. It’s baloney!”

Suddenly two strange men appeared on stage from nowhere. They each were carrying what appeared to be a Christmas candy cane. They zapped Alton and Warren into little piles of what looked like fluff under the bed (which had this happened in America the little piles would have been called Dust Bunnies). The two strange men then disappeared. Into nowhere. Into absolute nowhere.

A message appeared on the audio-visual screen: NO STEALTH TECHNOLOGY? YEAH RIGHT!

1963. Snap shot on Mars

(This is the second of seven days of Science Faction).

It wasn’t the first time that humans had landed and wandered around Mars. Each time – I believe it was seven – a new landing site had been selected to measure and collect and ascertain.

It was during the eighth Mars landing that Astronauts Eugenia and Estelle got the fright of their lives. They immediately beamed back photographs to Earth. There, in the sandy soil, were fresh footprints. In fact there were footprints of several creatures. The creatures were clearly quadrupeds and each foot had seventeen toes. Eugenia and Estelle followed the prints. When they turned a sudden rocky corner, there it was! Sitting on the sand was an octagonal space craft. No creatures were to be seen. The space craft was about the size of an average house.

The astronauts didn’t know whether they should approach or not. Was it dangerous? Surely the space aliens would have seen the Earthlings’ landing machine, and if they didn’t want to be seen they would have immediately taken off. Obviously, in this case, they wanted to make contact. Eugenia and Estelle slowly approached. It was naturally nerve-wracking.

There was still no sign of life. Suddenly Eugenia whispered. “Don’t look now but I think we’re been followed.” Their steps froze. They began to feel cold in their space suits. Estelle held up a small camera and pointed it behind her, to send the moment back to earth. No sooner had she held the camera up and pointed it behind her then it disintegrated in her hand.

A fuzzy image of shapes, out of focus and too dark to distinguish anything, was the last picture received on Earth. Extensive digital enhancement revealed what some thought looked like a vase of grey dead flowers and others imagined a scattered cloud formation on a stormy night. Astronauts Eugenia and Estelle were never heard of again. When yet another craft to Mars landed at the same site, the old craft was nowhere to be seen. It had been taken away.

1743. Life on Earth

Shirley and Winsbury Spark were among the twenty-four Earthling couples selected to populate the recently discovered exoplanet that Earthling Scientists had dubbed Planet Hillda – because it was hilly. It was lush with vegetation and animal life, although not a plant nor animal bore any resemblance to anything on Earth. Gravity and the ratio of atmosphere gases were also much the same as on Earth.

The hardest thing to adapt to was the fact that a day was only twenty-two and a quarter hours. Shirley and Winsbury tried dividing the day into twenty-four equal parts, with sixty shortened minutes each with sixty shortened seconds. The year was also shorter so that caused confusion as to when to celebrate Christmas and Easter and Independence Day and other important dates.

Thank goodness sponsors on Earth were able to send a few frozen turkeys over with a supply of pumpkins and cranberries so that Thanksgiving might be celebrated properly. They were promised fertile turkey eggs once an incubator had been set up, so frozen turkey wouldn’t be on the list the following year.

There were other wildlife that arrived from Earth in dribs and drabs; horses, sheep, cattle, goats, and chickens. In order for these introduced creatures to survive, the blood-thirsty Gronberger, a native creature of the planet, had to be wiped out, along with a good number of other species.

Shirley’s pride and joy was her vegetable garden. So far it had produced carrots, Swiss chard, and radishes. It was hoped to provide more variety once further seeds had arrived from earth.

All in all it was a promising start to life on Planet Hillda. Winsbury predicted that within a generation life should be pretty much like on Planet Earth. But, added Shirley, if you come you have to be adaptable. No good coming here and thinking that Earth can’t be successfully replicated.

1119. An astronomical migration

(During the next few days we shall be commemorating Science Fiction Day with a Science Fiction story. Science Fiction Day is celebrated each year on Isaac Asimov’s birthday: January 2nd. Ok ok – haven’t you heard of a Time Warp? Of course, there’s music and poetry to come next – before the second Science Fiction story!)

It was the first major interstellar migration. The one hundred and fifty people leaving Planet Earth knew that they themselves wouldn’t get there. They would live to a ripe old age, die in space, and be reverently tossed out the space craft to float indefinitely in the never-never.

In fact, none of the next generations would make it either. But the fifth and sixth generations would arrive and begin the exciting venture of “populating the universe”. They called their destined planet “Ýntsodar” which is “Radostný” in Slovak spelt backwards! The excitement of arrival! Only three more earth-long days of travel left!

And arrive they did. The conditions on the planet were perfect for human existence. Unfortunately, by now the population was so inbred that the migration experiment collapsed.