Today I’m starting to publish a story here. It will be a (hopefully daily) series of posts that are a screenplay of sorts, though in the interest of screen-space it will not be in proper screenplay format. This is a sort-of movie script. It is somewhere between a proper movie and a movie-of-the-week or a series, or maybe a novel. Read it like you are seeing it on the big screen. It’s a space-western, in the Firefly genre. The story proper takes place circa 2655. FTL travel was discovered in the late 21st C, but not FLT communication, so star systems are still connected similarly to the 18th century days of sail, with message-drones and ships carrying data and people between stars, often taking days, weeks, or even months for flights.Explorers might be out of touch for months. Many star systems and planets have been explored, and some have been partially terraformed. A “local” supernova disrupted subspace so much, though, that FTL was shut down for several centuries, and each terraformed planet (and planets that were still very much “in process”) and colony had to survive (or not) on its own. This was known as “the long dark” or “the big blackout”, as well as by several other names. This takes place after things have quieted down a bit, and “the stars are coming back,” meaning FTL travel is once again possible in some places. But, FTL sub-space is like a stormy ocean, and “swirls” in it can make FTL flights faster, or slower, than normal, or even shut them down altogether.

Cultural note: the dominate cultures out among the stars are the descendants from former British Colonies, but there are scattered colonies from various other places as well.

If anyone in the movie industry sees its potential and wants to turn it into something “real”, I’d be more than happy to talk to them. Feedback from readers welcome, be it positive or negative.

OK, here we go:

The Stars Came Back, Part 001, Intro

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