Since the crash of Russia's Luna 25 craft and the landing of India's Chadrayaan 3 craft all the way out at the moon, I've been thinking about how we think and write about unmanned spacecraft a lot.
There's a really common habit of personifying spacecraft (as well as just about every other object) which is in no way a negative - we're really good at doing that, so it makes sense. You see it a lot in science fiction, where spacecraft are actually alive, and also in lots of writing where they aren't.
There's a great NASA video about the end of the Cassini mission, where they had the probe fall into Saturn and burn up in the atmosphere to avoid it potentially contaminating any of the Saturnian moons, and I watch that, and I tear up! You feel for that little (well, not that little) craft. NASA also have twitter accounts that write from the perspective of their Mars rovers and various other vehicles (as an aside, I've had conversations with people who seem to actually believe the NASA vehicles are sentient, but that's a bit of a different issue.).
Anyway. I could go off on an endless tangent. Which is actually okay because that's what this is for. BUT.
I'm really interested in the opposite. Consider an unmanned lunar lander, making its way to the surface. It's not in orbit, it's on a technically-slow-for-space-but-actually-really-fast plummet towards rock. But its engines will fire, its altitude-measuring laser keeping things in check.
All of a sudden, there's a malfunction. A computer goes haywire, and the craft loses vital seconds in controlling its descent. Frantic signals bring the error under control, but now thrusters fire wildly and you can imagine sparks inside its tinfoil casing. It thrashes to correct direction, panicked circuits, attitude adjustment engines pushing this way and that. But all too late, for the craft slams hard into rock and is smashed to bits against lunar regolith.
Impressions of human emotion make for one hell of a story, but I'm also interested in how effective describing the same scene with cold, clinical and emotionless language is, because space is, in some places, actually very cold, and also arguably emotionless.
There's far more desperation and loneliness in describing the scene in this way, which is not always going to work for every scene, but... this was never me thinking about fiction, really, but more because when I thought about describing this as clinically as possible, I thought it was a bit chilling. You're so far from any human, and completely removing any emotion from the scene really hammers that home. Like, imagine you're watching the crash happen just by reading the pure maths of two gravitational fields getting pulled closer and closer together. If you could be an emotionless observer out there, watching one of these craft descend towards the surface, entirely disconnected from the human element on the distant Earth in the sky, it would be horribly strange compared to how we normally imagine spaceflight. Just physics playing out. No control room with baited breath, all that tension. Just rock, metal and void.
It would come curving out of orbit completely silently. It would move towards the surface guided almost entirely by gravity. Whatever goes wrong would be completely invisible, and engines would begin working at too late a moment and too slow a pace to stop the craft before its parabola makes contact with the ground. Electricity would fire in cold circuits despite the impossibility of the scenario. The computer can achieve a failure state, but isn't capable of understanding that, or anything. It's really just a very complex electronic abacus. It's just programmed to keep the craft within a certain window of various parameters. There is no cognition as the ground approaches. A number counts down, and is probably cut off before it reaches zero. The craft collides so fast with the lunar surface that its structural integrity entirely fails and it becomes a patch of complex minerals scatteresdd across the lunar surface.
Thinking of this another way... there's the old thing about "If a tree falls but there's no one around to hear it..." blah blah blah. But how far away can your narrator get from humanity before describing that tree-falling scene becomes an impossibility? I think, again, eventually your language just has to break down to pure mathematics describing bark snapping and foliage getting crushed. But presumably somewhere just before words become numbers, there's a completely clinical description of that scene. And if that's true, how is sound described? "There is a snapping sound" is totally subjective. I guess it has to be "the air vibrates with the movement of the tree". Gross.
Anyway, what am I even going on about at this point?
Been redoing the website so it's easier to deal with visually. This means, of course, that I have to make it complex in some other way, which means adding a blog and archive alongside everything else. This is the blog, obviously, which is hopefully where I'm going to post whatever random thing engages me every day.
The archive is an idea I had in reaction to the whole internet going tits up, because all the big sites where we bookmark, save, retweet, reblog, whatever, are constantly on the verge of being unusable. So I figured it'd be a good idea to make copies of cool stuff I find on my own hard drive and showcase them there. We'll see how long I can be bothered. That goes for the blog too, admittedly.
Having a blog on this site, rather than one of the blog-providing services out there appeals to me because I can just do whatever I want. Speaking of things going tits up, twitter introduced italicised and bold text, but only for twitter blue users. Sod that, I can do it for free like this any time I want.