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Wednesday 12 August 2015

Carried Away! A Doctor Who Challenge

My middle son woke me the other morning with the exciting news that he'd had a Doctor Who dream. He thought it would be a great idea for an episode. 

Parenting: I'm doing it right.

My son's a cartoonist by hobby (he's 12), and always complaining he has no ideas. I suggested that rather than telling me his dream, he write it up. So he did:




Not bad! I love the wee face looking out of the capsule at the bottom of page two, and I love the stubble on the face of the astronaut who's removed his helmet.

My son and I spent some time discussing what it was about the graphic form that got his creative juices flowing. I tell stories strictly with words, I told him. So he said: "You should tell my story in words."

So I did:



Don’t look down.
A simple tip. It was never actually shared with newbies when they came up to the Hub, though.
Ha ha.
Eric double-checked his tether, first visually and then with a sharp tug on the line. Above him, Rasher was making sure the welder was properly connected. At their feet, the cylinder of the Hub slid slowly into shadow as Earth's terminus rolled Europe into night. Rasher's headlamp came on.
Eric had managed not to hurl into his faceplate that first time, a fact he was quietly proud of. His stomach sure had spun, though, and there had been a real bad moment when the thin line of the elevator cable had seemed to grab him and spin him in a god-awful game of crack-the-whip. He hadn't had a moment like that since his first EVA, way back in '27. He'd been 2nd engineer on an old NASA reclaimed shuttle back then, farting along at 28 000k reclaiming scrap from a long-defunct satellites. Rocket man. Yeah, right. Garbage man, more like.
Truth was, most of space work these days was about as glamorous as cleaning toilets. The bravest thing a rocket man ever did was strap himself to a 10 megaton bomb and hope it would lift him out of the motherwell rather than blowing him to kingdom come. Once in orbit, the most exciting part of any shift was grabbing another piece of old junk, stripping it, and packaging it for a Controlled drop into the Pacific Zone.
Once the Hub came on line in a few weeks, though, an easy ninety minute lift to 36 000k would make you spacer. Not that that would mean anything. Not anymore.
Eric's suit radio beeped at him. He hit the toggle with his chin. "It's micrometeor damage for sure," Rasher told him. "Nothing too major, though. Shouldn't take long to repair it."
Eric pushed himself up to have a look for himself. Alarms had gone off in the Control room of the Hub that morning. The computer had lost its information feed from the counterweight at the end of the cable. There was no danger -- the counterweight was more a backup of a backup of a backup, overkill if you asked pretty much ANY worker on the crew that had been building the damned elevator for the past twenty years. But the engineers had recommended it, the politicians had insisted on it, and the people who would someday (it was fervently hoped) pay good money for the privilege of riding a 36 000 km high elevator... well, who cared what they thought anyway? As far as most of them understood, one end of the cable was tethered to Earth’s equator, and the other was tacked to God's bedroom ceiling.
Eric had a look at the damaged Control panel and agreed with Rasher that they had probably taken a hit from a microasteroid. There was scarring around the shielding, one corner was curled up, and there was blackening where the power had shorted out. "It might just need a reset," Eric said. "They tried that in Control, right?"
"Apparently not," Rasher said. Rasher was an old-timer, a dust-walker: thirty years in space and three moon-walk pips on his sleeve. What opinion he had of the officers in Control was kept pretty low.
"We can do that from here," Eric said. He punched a panel and it swung open. Lights flashed panic-strickenly. "Settle down," he said. He entered the code. Hit 'send'.
"That doesn't look good," Rasher said.
The yellow warning lights had all gone red. "Damn," Eric said.
"Control," Rasher radioed, "you got any information for us? We're red across the board, repeat, red across the board."
"Copy that, EVA," Captain Neubauer said. "Running diagnostic. Stand by."
"Standing by," Rasher said. "You going to Babs' Going Away party tonight?" he asked Eric.
"Yep," Eric said. Babs was finishing a 6-month stint on the Hub, shipping down tomorrow. "I’ve been cooking up something a little special, in fact." Eric grinned at Rasher's groan. Something special was what happened when Eric’s homemade 80 proof met the human bloodstream at zero-g and low pressure.
"I'll stick to Hub grog, I think. Hey, did you see that?" Rasher was pointing up the cable, at the heavy knob of the counterweight 500 metres 'above' them at the end of the cable. Except the counterweight wasn't there.
"That's not possible," Rasher said. "Control, come in." There was no answer. "Control, this is EVA. Come in."
Eric traced the cable with his eyes, from the 'roof' of the Hub, where the cable emerged, to its terminus, where the counterweight was supposed to be. "It's not in shadow," Eric muttered, "it's just plain gone!"
"Control, this is EVA," Rasher said. "Come in."
Eric switched to another channel, tried Control. There was no answer on that channel, nor on any of the others. Control had gone dark.
"Something's gone wrong," Rasher said. "Abandon EVA. We're heading back to the Hub. Protocol 4."
Protocol 4 was emergency protocol. Eric moved decisively. He took his second tether and clipped it on, handed the free end to Rasher. Waited for Rasher to take it.
Rasher didn't.
"Rasher?"
Rasher, facing the opposite direction, saw exactly what swallowed them, the Hub, and two kilometres of cable. All Eric saw was darkness and the sudden blinking out of the stars. Then gravity found the Hub and pulled it down with a crash. Eric hit the roof of the Hub, sliding until his tether caught hold, leaving him suspended upside down 20 metres from the floor.
"There's gravity!" Rasher exclaimed in his radio. "There's air! What the heck?"
Lights came up, illuminating the floor, the walls and ceiling of an enormous hanger. To one side, huge bay doors had sealed, shutting the Hub, its crew, and Eric and Rasher inside... Inside what? A huge spaceship, Eric reasoned. What else could it be? But whose ship? Who had something this big in orbit? Not the Americans, certainly. The Chinese?
Opposite the hanger doors, a much smaller door slid open. It appeared they were about to find out who owned the spaceship. Eric focused on the doorway. A figure appeared. It was difficult to make out. The blood was rushing to his head and blurring his vision. Eric squinted. Who was it? He blinked. What the heck was it?
He screamed.

I confess I much prefer my son's version to mine. He said it was cool the way I could get into the head and background of the character. I said it was neat how easy it was for him to switch between POV in his version.
What do you prefer? Graphic novels or written novels? Can a story that is a graphic novel succeed as a written novel? Have you read or written any books that are a mixture of both? Any recommendations?