More on the Raygun Romance

Yesterday, I announced that I was getting ready to publish a “Raygun Romance” featuring a damsel who frequently requires rescue. I am publishing this on the new Kindle Vella platform for serialized stories, which has not yet been released to the general public (and I don’t know when that will be.)

However, I have more details to share.

For the backstory, I steal Brian Niemeier’s conceit regarding the Combat Frame Xseed series. As with his series, the backstory of my Raygun Romance begins in the Current Year, with no major alterations to history as we understand it. Like him, I throw a curveball that sets the future history on a unique path. His is the tech oligarchy colonizing outer space, while mine is the tech oligarchy creating an “automated governance system” that is meant to make political administration as bias-free as possible. Using its full-spectrum dominance of land, sea, air, space, and especially information, it brings the entire planet under its dominion.

Only to be destroyed by an army of Christian crusaders from Texas.

The actual plot of my story begins many centuries after this conflict, in a world where most forms of artificial intelligence are regarded as downright evil.

It’s actually pretty fun to conceive of one’s story as a continuation of our real history. You get to extrapolate where certain social developments lead, as well as dream up new ones. There’s also the idea that “the more things change, the more things stay the same,” where a current sociopolitical conflict takes on a new meaning in your speculative future, though one must be careful not to merely rehash what’s going on now.

Will I be wrong about the particulars? Certainly. (Niemeier will be too.) But I feel that this sort of speculation gives the imaginative world a connection to reality without being subsumed by it. It’s fun to think about what the world outside your window will look like hundreds of years from now.

The other thing this story has is a certain technological development: personal deflector shields. Everyone attaches these to their clothing; they’re as common as smartphones are in the real world. Because of this revolutionary tech, traffic fatalities are negligible and people generally take more physical risks. These have forced firearms to move away from gunpowder and towards magnetic acceleration to achieve the necessary muzzle speeds to break through. This also has made most guns semi-automatic, as a fully-automatic firearm made with railgun technology would warp the barrel.

Deflectors also mean that tactical gear is largely obsolete, making scantily-clad female fighters feasible in the story’s world. Out-of-universe, this is the main reason the tech exists: I was simply tired of shows and games that stuck their ladies in ugly outfits for the sake of realism, but I also needed a way to throw the gear out without looking ridiculous since tactical gear does have a practical purpose in real life. How would the story be fun if I had my main character in some future iteration of the Army Combat Uniform? Shove off with that crap. The ladies of my story are going to be a treat for the eyes. Dowdy McShirtjeans and her friend Frumpy Cargopants need not apply.

That’s what’s going on with my Raygun Romance. As soon as Kindle Vella is available, I’ll make sure every one of you knows you can start reading.