The Mirrored Road into the Interior

Oi vey. I've got a couple of sets of stories that I want to write. Today I'm going to bitch about the ones in the future history that I'm trying to work out.

So for a future history, I didn't want to start too close to now. My first story is about 200 years from now, about 50 years after the serious approach to going to space begins. (And if I live long enough to have to eat crow over that, so be it. You won't hear too many complaints from me.)

First story is actually a concepts I found interesting piece that I happened to set in the "early" part of the history. Other than some editing that I'll get to any day now, it is done. It is also at least a century earlier than the next story. After the catapult story, I don't have much I want to write about for the next couple hundred years. I've got lots of setting and not a lot of interesting, though I do have a couple of ideas that aren't too strongly bound to a particular time that I might slide in to illustrate some of the events that I mention in later stories. The next set in stoneish (my timeline shifts but relitive orders of events mostly stick) story is one of the sets.
For the science fiction I have written so far, I mostly see a particular scene and then go back for the story. The Prior Family started as exactly that. In fact, the first Prior story I ever typed even the first word of is the Fourth or possibly fifth Samuel Prior story and it started with the image of a a wounded man eating dinner in microgravity and a later chase scene with him running from thugs through the environmental systems of the station. Which leads to story three (which I've yet to write a word of) where he mistakes a government doctor for a corporate assassin, detains her, threatens her, and eventually (either lets her go or gets picked up by the good guys) and she gets drafted into the section he works for. Therin to make his life quite difficult what with her ability to scrub him from a mission for mental instability. This all grew out of a throw away line that may not even be in the current draft of the first story to be consigned to the hdd.) Of course, that lead to the very first Samuel Prior story (which opens with a dream that shows that he really is getting better from a fairly broken past) where he has to deal with members of a Theocracy down dirtside. I need to talk to more LDSers for that one. The dream sequence was hard to write because it was about mostly bad people doing mostly bad things to eachother and to innocents. Sam struggles with being something better than Bad People for most of the rest of his life.) I've got four or five more stories after the one I first started writing, mostly about his later life, his wife and kids and his eventual (and tragically early for the era) death.

There are other Prior family stories in the pipelines, and even part of the Fall of Man series will involve the Priors trying to hold the center. (The hero of the Fall of Man Cycle won't be that particular power group, though worlds with signifigant Prior presences will come out of the silent years with a much smaller chance of being corpse worlds.)

Then there's the Illustrated series. Right after the collapse of the United Worlds and the Rise of the first Empire, there is a story that I originally wanted to do as an illusttrated thing, but my drawing won't get to that point in this lifetime. The first one is set 5 years after the First Emperor of Humanity took the collapsing forces of the United Worlds Council and forged the Terran Empire. It deals with a Prior drummed out of the service for refusing to follow orders (and only not executed because of who her family is) and her life as the captain of Arabella's Needle, a fast trade/scout ship owned by her Grandmother Arabella. This story ends with the first thrust in the last Sarthaki War in a mostly abandoned system nearly 400 LY from the nearest inhabited world. (Though the worlds under Aldoni guidence number above 10,000, most of the galaxy is essentially uninhabited.)
The second story (and source of a lot of groaning about how I haven't even really started the story that is essential for this one to work) is set between 20 and 400 years later and follows one of my absolute favorite characters (who makes me wish I could draw half as well as I need to make this one work.)

And now we come to the one that I am really bitching about. This one is another one on the Fall of Man board, though it will focus (sort of) on the Fall of the Aldoni and the actions of a fairly illegal entity. It is set not too many years after the end of 2.

I've also got a short story (that one reader has told me has a completely unrealistic protagonist, but she is a Prior from the height of the family's power. It is kind of icky that that doesn't stand alone though) in the series of stories that will include the Emperor's announcement of the Fall of Man (and Alien) already mostly done. It doesn't have a happy ending.