Dream
I had this really interesting science fictiony dream just now, and I want to write it down before I forget. I'm currently reading Lois McMaster Bujold's new book, Cryoburn, and the dream picked up elements from that, from her Falling Free and from a YA SF novel called City of Ember by an author whose name I forget right now.
In the dream there was this society. They were on some kind of a ship, or floating pod, or something. There wasn't any gravity (that's the Falling Free aspect). The society was a small group of people taking care of a large group of cryo-preserved people (that's the Cryoburn aspect). The society had been doing this so long that they forgot that they had been supposed to eventually wake up the frozen people. The idea was something like that the small group of awake people would reproduce for a few generations, until they got to the planet they were going to, or the Earth became habitable again, or whatever it was (in the dream it was very clear, but I now forget). Only, as I said before, they forgot. Something happened, some kind of crisis I guess, maybe whatever it was that made them lose their gravity. (This is like City of Ember and at least half a dozen other things, Pern among them.) Tending the cryo-preserved people was, for them, sort of a quaint, semi-religious custom that they did because their ancestors had considered it very important, but they weren't sure why and many people only bothered with it on Christmas and Easter. (Not literally, you know, but the equivalents.) They had a few artifacts of previous life on Earth, which they didn't really understand--there was something about a ceiling fan, which of course would be useless in zero gravity; they used it for...voting, or something? Somehow? That's slipping away.
Anyway, another of these artifacts was a painting of a girl in white talking to some old people in beds. Probably a nurse, right, but they had no idea. for some reason they weren't used to old people; that part doesn't make sense.. Now, the cryo-preservation chambers started to fail, and the preserved people--now very old, because (like the preservation chamber in Stargate Atlantis that time-travelling Elizabeth used) they only drastically slowed aging, rather than stopping it--were being woken up. So in this society, their idea of what they ought to do about this was put them all in beds--they had to strap them in, because of the no-gravity thing--and have a girl in a white dress flit around and visit them. Which is what they did.
Eventually, the girl in the white dress started listening to what the old people had to say. Their memories were a little messed up from being frozen for thousands of years, but eventually they pieced together what was supposed to have happened and (this part is pretty much a straight rip-off of City of Ember, so if I wrote the story it would have to be different somehow) and the girl convinced some of her society to pay attention and carry out the ancestors' original plan.
The dream included a few images of what happened afterwards, but I've lost them, except for one thing where the mothers of toddlers were baffled by how they were supposed to manage in gravity--they were used to just tethering the tots to them or to some solid object with a harness, and then the kids could float around and amuse themselves. They were frankly disbelieving when the revived people tried to explain about playpens and bouncy seats and so on. (In the dream all of these people went seamlessly from being in zero-g to gravity, which is not realistic, so that's another thing I'd have to change if I wrote the story. Probably get rid of the zero-g thing entirely, because that never really made sense.)
In the dream there was this society. They were on some kind of a ship, or floating pod, or something. There wasn't any gravity (that's the Falling Free aspect). The society was a small group of people taking care of a large group of cryo-preserved people (that's the Cryoburn aspect). The society had been doing this so long that they forgot that they had been supposed to eventually wake up the frozen people. The idea was something like that the small group of awake people would reproduce for a few generations, until they got to the planet they were going to, or the Earth became habitable again, or whatever it was (in the dream it was very clear, but I now forget). Only, as I said before, they forgot. Something happened, some kind of crisis I guess, maybe whatever it was that made them lose their gravity. (This is like City of Ember and at least half a dozen other things, Pern among them.) Tending the cryo-preserved people was, for them, sort of a quaint, semi-religious custom that they did because their ancestors had considered it very important, but they weren't sure why and many people only bothered with it on Christmas and Easter. (Not literally, you know, but the equivalents.) They had a few artifacts of previous life on Earth, which they didn't really understand--there was something about a ceiling fan, which of course would be useless in zero gravity; they used it for...voting, or something? Somehow? That's slipping away.
Anyway, another of these artifacts was a painting of a girl in white talking to some old people in beds. Probably a nurse, right, but they had no idea. for some reason they weren't used to old people; that part doesn't make sense.. Now, the cryo-preservation chambers started to fail, and the preserved people--now very old, because (like the preservation chamber in Stargate Atlantis that time-travelling Elizabeth used) they only drastically slowed aging, rather than stopping it--were being woken up. So in this society, their idea of what they ought to do about this was put them all in beds--they had to strap them in, because of the no-gravity thing--and have a girl in a white dress flit around and visit them. Which is what they did.
Eventually, the girl in the white dress started listening to what the old people had to say. Their memories were a little messed up from being frozen for thousands of years, but eventually they pieced together what was supposed to have happened and (this part is pretty much a straight rip-off of City of Ember, so if I wrote the story it would have to be different somehow) and the girl convinced some of her society to pay attention and carry out the ancestors' original plan.
The dream included a few images of what happened afterwards, but I've lost them, except for one thing where the mothers of toddlers were baffled by how they were supposed to manage in gravity--they were used to just tethering the tots to them or to some solid object with a harness, and then the kids could float around and amuse themselves. They were frankly disbelieving when the revived people tried to explain about playpens and bouncy seats and so on. (In the dream all of these people went seamlessly from being in zero-g to gravity, which is not realistic, so that's another thing I'd have to change if I wrote the story. Probably get rid of the zero-g thing entirely, because that never really made sense.)