It had always been in the back of my mind to have 'Thicker Than Water' (and the earlier 'Black Rain') be part of a single fictional universe. That - the mysterious alien vessel patrolling the Solar system - was there right from the start, but more as a clue to why Earth had abandoned its space colonies, and as the reason for the Tethysians protection of the sea of fullerenes. Which then allowed me to bring the alien sentinel more into the story.
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For the new version, I had the three of them escape successfully. The story ended with her being unable to prevent his execution - as he was pushed out of an airlock without a spacesuit. In the original version, Gina decides to help her brother to escape, but when she returns to his cell he has already been taken away. I also changed the plot slightly when I rewrote the story. Sometimes research just gifts you things you'd be a fool to refuse or ignore. When I stumbled across Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, it occurred to me that a carousel could be torus-shaped. In the original version of the story, the settlement on Tethys was also a carousel - a ring which rotated at a speed sufficient to provide some gravity - but it was unnamed. There are a few other scattered "clues" as well - such as "as if from some oracular distance" in the opening paragraph. And two unnamed characters, a herald and a herdsman, became Messenger and Shepard. Orestes and Pylades I shortened to Orris and Pyle. Iphigenia, priestess of Aphrodite, is of course Gina Priest. The king of Tauris is Thoas, but I decided to use King instead. And I named all my characters for the characters in the play. I borrowed the odd phrase from the Potter translation (which provides the lines from the play which preface the story). So why shouldn't 'Thicker Than Water' have one? And since NASA had posted a MP3 of the radio noises generated by Saturn, why not use the ringed gas giant as my "chorus"? Hence the numerous mentions of Saturn's radio-noise in the story. Greek plays, of course, have Greek choruses. He actually wrote a play, Iphigenia in Tauris, based on Iphigenia's story. While reminding myself of Iphigenia's story, I came across mention of Euripides, an ancient Greek playwright. Last year, I dug out the manuscript, read through it, and decided it was worth having another go. Then it sat in the "bottom drawer" for over a decade. I wrote the story, and even submitted it to a magazine or two. It all slotted very neatly together - and this is actually mentioned in passing in 'Thicker Than Water'. So, instead of Aphrodite's statue, I'd have Orestes and Pylades, natives of Titan, travelling to Tethys to steal fullerenes in order to re-seed their superconductor cultures. In that story, the settlement's manufactory was destroyed by a blow-in of Titan's noxious atmosphere, and the superconductor cultures were poisoned. This idea came partly from another story, 'Black Rain' (available in Set It In Space And Stick A Robot In It ), which is set on Titan, and takes place in an earlier version of the universe of 'Thicker Than Water'.
OFFWORLD TRADING COMPANY SUPERCONDUCTOR PATCH
I decided that the dark patch was buckminsterfullerenes - carbon molecules in the shape of spheres or tubes, which were thought to be artificial but do occur very rarely in nature. The book's a bit out-of-date now, but I have the Web instead. I'd also found a mention of a mysterious dark patch on Tethys in a planetology textbook I'd bought for reference - Exploring the Planets by Eric H Christiansen and Kenneth W Hamblin (1995). It was back in the early 1990s, so it wasn't on the Web.
![offworld trading company superconductor offworld trading company superconductor](https://img.youtube.com/vi/Xh167hobucQ/0.jpg)
I forget where I originally came across Iphigenia's story. With the statue of Aphrodite they had stolen. So she lied to the Taurians, and returned to Athens to join her long-lost family. She learned they were her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades.
![offworld trading company superconductor offworld trading company superconductor](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/O90Khm69Bow/hqdefault.jpg)
A pair of Athenians then raided the temple while Iphigenia was present. She was abducted as a child and taken to Tauris, where she grew up and became a priestess of Aphrodite. The plot of 'Thicker Than Water' is based on the story of Iphigenia from ancient Greece. You might want to read the story before you continue reading this. After another officer disobeys her orders and tortures the raiders, Gina decides to help the Titans escape and return with them to to her long-lost mother and father. She learns she was abducted from Titan at a very young age. Gina is shocked to discover that one of the raiders is her brother. When two raiders from another moon, Titan, attempt to steal some of the fullerenes found on Tethys, they are captured. Major Gina Priest lives on Tethys, a moon of Saturn. It was originally published in Jupiter sf magazine, issue 23, in January 2009. The second of the two stories I've put up on this blog is 'Thicker Than Water', a hard sf story set on a moon of Saturn.