E________, first draft: 67,400 words
The day job has brought me to London, which has been . . . interesting. I should have known that when my employers told me they were going to fly me over business class there would be a price to pay. Suffice to say, on the eve of returning home, I am completely exhausted.
It did, however give me a front row seat to Britain’s hottest day, ever. Temperatures in parts of England, including London, reached more than 40C/104F. Even in the States, this is hot. But most Americans have access to air conditioning, the British do not. Also, US infrastructure, however rickety it may be, is designed for hot weather. Britain, on the other hand, burst into flames, as if a giant with a magnifying glass had turned the sun into an orbital weapons platform. London had more call outs for its fire brigade than at any time since World War II (when, one presumes, German bombers were the cause of the trouble). Instead of a normal day’s work of 350 calls, the fire brigade handled something north of 2600. The tarmac at Luton airport, er, melted, preventing planes from taking off or landing. It was an apocalypse in miniature, courtesy of global warming.
Which brings me to the subject of evil clone armies. While, last summer, I scared myself witless reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, a near-future thriller set in a world desiccated by global warming, I tend to gravitate to far-future space operas, where clone armies and their ilk threaten to plunge entire galaxies into millennia of misery. Unless, of course, our plucky band of heroes can save the day. Which, though it may surprise you, doesn’t always happen.
I was asked not too long ago why I enjoy space operas so much. After all, they can be pretty freakin’ dark (millennia of misery, remember) and I am not, by nature, a downbeat person. I think the answer is that, for me at least, all space operas, no matter how grim, are basically exercises in positive thinking. Because in order for a space opera to happen, we have to get into space, which means that we have to have survived long enough to figure out the awesome technology, not blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons and, most importantly of all, survive climate change. If, in the far far future, we find ourselves facing off against a clone menace of galactic proportions, it means we got an awful lot of stuff right in the meantime. Yay, us!
So, come on clones! What are you waiting for?