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Finally had time during some flights and family travel to work on a short SF story I've been trying to write for a while.
First time attempting something like this so hopefully it turned out decently :)
"Holding The Bag"
Some commentary:
The protagonist is named after Lynn Conway and Arthur C. Clarke. Whether she's trans like her namesake is deliberately open to interpretation, you can only fit so much character development in a 3400 word story and being cis myself I didn't feel I could do a good job especially in the compressed format, although that was somewhat my original headcanon of the character.
I was involved in a minor collision heading down the hill on Hoosick Street (as a passenger) while an RPI grad student, T-boning a pickup that pulled out right in front of us without looking. We were in a car rather than cycling and nobody was hurt but it got me thinking about the opening of the story. The real incident happened further down the hill across from a gas station but the Price Chopper parking lot was a better location for a field lab, and also made more sense to be on the route for someone traveling from an apartment with no bus service towards campus. I envisioned Lynn and Abe living somewhere outside the urban core, maybe out towards Wynantskill.
Old Betsy is named after my dad's first car, a hand-me-down from his older brother. The blue Tercel with the duct taped tail light was a later vehicle he had when I was growing up but that one never had a name.
I'm surprised more SF hasn't included incidentally furry characters. Abe being furry isn't even explicitly mentioned in the story much less relevant to the plot, although the fox shirt certainly implies it.
But if your cast of characters is full of scientists and tech nerds it would be surprising if there *wasn't* a furry or two among them.
@azonenberg I liked it. The end felt a bit anticlimactic, but I’m not into D&D, so I probably missed the finer points of it.
After the discovery of the shelves, I expected an HHGTTG style ending where the cubes turned out to be warehouses that an intergalactic version of Amazon plopped down, in preparation of entering the local market for same minute delivery.
@adistuder It's not specifically about D&D. I was just thinking about all of the various fictional storage containers that are improbably small on the outside, ranging from a Minecraft inventory to the TARDIS to a Bag of Holding, and it got me wondering about where all that stuff goes.
This was the result.
@azonenberg thought it was well written. Nothing in it took me out of the story, although I did notice one grammatical error (look for “weaken”).
Definitely an interesting idea, well executed.
@azonenberg ok that was really good and clever, now I'm just wondering why it's a cube rather than a sphere!!
@technobaboo I was on the fence about that but decided that a cube would be more useful for storage so whatever species created it would probably try to find a way to build it that way.
@azonenberg I liked it. The ending is a bit suspenseful, like this is just the first chapter of a longer story.
@taral yeah there's a lot you could do with the concept. Viewpoint in the other universe, our universe trying to stop it, average people trying to live knowing they could get smooshed by an interdimensional basement at any time with no warning, etc.
But i didn't have the spoons to make a full novel out of it.