Must have had a good night’s sleep t’other night as two stories popped into my head yesterday. One of them I am going to work on — about 2000 words so far — and other I will post up here, free gratis. I don’t think I could do it very well.
It’s good a bit of sci-fi/space opera to it, but that’s just the setting. The premise is that someone plans to use an asteroid to destroy life on earth. The story, as it came to me, was the someone — a space tourist or researcher — takes a small vessel from an orbiting station and heads out to the asteroid belt with the means to send one toward the earth. In Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything, he explained that an asteroid or meteor one mile in diameter would cause sufficient destruction to wipe out life as we know it. One mile. The earth is 7,926 miles in diameter. Yikes.
His motivation? Dunno. A couple of options:
- He’s a total whackjob who wants to wipe out the whole planet because he can. Not very interesting. Some kind of dangerous millenarian?
- He’s a partial whackjob who wants to wipe out those who are unprepared, a kind of fitness test that only his friends (who know this is coming) and people in certain locales will be able to pass. So space travelers (like him, if he survives), anyone on the moon, maybe people at the south pole, etc. would survive.
I don’t know: that’s just how it came to me. Not the kind of book I would read, so it would be hard to write convincingly.