Blasters of Forever by Cora Buhlert

Release date: May 1, 2018

Subgenre: Superheroes, Time Travel

About Blasters of Forever: 

 

1985: Screenwriter Simon St. John makes his living writing toy tie-in cartoons and dreams of finally getting his screenplay "People on a Bridge" produced.

But one night, when Simon has just come up with his latest creation, a group of time travelling cops known as the Blasters of Forever, a portal opens inside his living room. Out of the portal hop none others than the Blasters of Forever or at any rate, people who look very much like them.

The Blasters explain that they are from the future, where Simon is considered not just one of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century, but also the inspiration for the time travel program that eventually led to the formation of the Blasters of Forever.

However, not just the Blasters of Forever are real. The villainous Doctor Chronos, sworn enemy of the Blasters of Forever, is real as well. And so is his cadre of time travelling assassins.

This is a short story of 5500 words or approximately 20 print pages.

 

Excerpt:

 

They burst out of the swirling time vortex to a fanfare of electronic music. The Blasters of Forever.
They were remarkable, sensational, awesome. More awesome than the Magnadragons, more awesome Dana Star and the Dynonoids, more awesome even than Ace Thunder and the Ultrasaurs and those had all been pretty damn awesome indeed. The Blasters of Forever, however, were the most awesome thing ever in the world of toy tie-in cartoons.
They were… plastic. Injection moulded ABS, painted in bright Day-Glo colours, studded with iridescent plastic gems and partly coated with metallic paint that was the latest nano-micro-whatever technology, semi-experimental and pretty damn expensive.
They were truly awesome. Or at least they were supposed to be. Because when Simon lifted them one by one out of the box, the big cardboard box labelled “Design Prototypes! No Unauthorized Handling!”, they looked considerably less than awesome. In fact, they looked like cheap junk. Cheap junk made by forced labour in a squalid factory somewhere in the Far East. And Simon was in charge of turning them into the most awesome thing ever, this year’s must-have Christmas toy.
Simon was good at this, good at turning cheap junk into the most fucking awesome thing ever. He’d started out with Billy Galactic and the Magicdogs, a line of stupid stuffed toy dogs that were, well, magic. All right, so they toy dogs weren’t magic at all, though they had voice chips that said things like “Abracadabra” and “Simsalabim” and broke down after roughly five hundred activations. A lively kid could go through those in two weeks.
Everybody had known that the Magicdogs were kind of naff, even the manufacturer. But Simon had come up with a story about magical dogs from outer space, stranded in an earthly dog pound and fighting crime, the sort of petty crime that didn’t freak out the censors, of course. The resulting cartoon, drawn somewhere in the Far East in an assembly line studio that was probably right next to the toy factory and offered only marginally better working conditions, had been a hit. It hadn’t quite catapulted the Magicdogs into the top 5 of Christmas toys, but it had sold more stuffed toy dogs with voice chips than anybody ever expected. Not bad for a toy everyone in the know had expected to tank.
From then on Simon played in the big leagues. The Magnadragons had been next. They were plastic dragons who changed colour when exposed to hot water. The colour-changing thing had been the hottest toy gimmick three years ago. Everyone had been doing it, even Barbie. The story that Simon had come up with was about prehistoric dragons living inside a volcano, trapped by hot magma (he’d initially misread “magna” as “magma” and by the time he realised his mistake, it was too late to change it), only to emerge in our time and fight crime.
Next came Dana Star And The Dynonoids, one of the rare action toy lines aimed at girls. They were cheap plastic dolls with garish neon-coloured hair and some kind of electric light-up action. Once Simon was done with them, Dana Star was a princess from outer space. When her evil twin Dee Dee Star usurped Dana’s throne, Dana fled to Earth with her girl pals the Dynonoids, who just happened to be cyborgs with special powers, since cyborgisation with a teen rite of passage in Dana’s world, just as a nose job for overprivileged girls was in ours. On Earth, they posed as a pop band. And fought crime, of course.
Dana Star And The Dynonoids had been a huge hit, even in the notoriously difficult girls’ action figure market. And Dana’s success had landed Simon his biggest job to date, Ace Thunder and the Ultrasaurs, last year’s must-have Christmas toy. The Ultrasaurs were dinosaurs that could transform into vehicles for reasons best known to themselves. A total Transformers rip-off, but the manufacturer had faith in the product. And they had hired Simon to come up with the story that would sell it to the public. And oh, what a story it was!
There was a palaeontologist (though Simon hadn’t been allowed to use that term — too difficult for the kiddies), the implausibly named Ace Thunder. He had a time machine — didn’t all palaeontologists? — and travelled back in time to study dinosaurs. But the evil Dr. Cyberpunk (Simon was still proud of that little in-joke) also travelled back in time to turn dinosaurs into ruthless cybernetic killing machines, because… well, that’s just what villains did, wasn’t it? Come up with really convoluted and idiotic plans to conquer the world. However, the heroic Ace Thunder saved some dinosaurs from Dr. Cyberpunk’s psychic enslavement and took them back with him to the future, where Ace Thunder and his Ultrasaurs battled Dr Cyberpunk and his Cybersaurs. It was all total bunk, of course, but no one cared about such little matters such as logic and scientific accuracy in what was in essence an extended toy commercial.
Ace Thunder was still selling well and in fact, he and Dr. Cyberpunk both had just returned to the Jurassic age to convert more dinosaurs into Ultra- and Cybersaurs, so the manufacturer could sell even more toys. But that was no longer Simon’s concern. Once the basic background story was in place, his job was done.
Now on to the Blasters of Forever, his mission for this year’s Christmas season. They were obviously time travellers, the silly name suggested as much. Of course, time travel has also featured prominently in Ace Thunder, which might be a problem. But on the other hand, cyborgisation had featured prominently in both Ace Thunder and Dana Star and no one had batted an eyelash at that. Dinosaurs and teen pop stars were sufficiently different, so no one cared that they both happened to be cyborgs.
Next question was, what did the Blasters of Forever actually do? The toys, that was, not the characters. Because whatever stupid feature the toys had — and they were almost all stupid — it had to be incorporated into the storyline. So Simon picked up the prototypes, began to play around with them a little, then thought the better of it. After all, the last thing he wanted to do was accidentally break one of the prototypes while trying to figure out what it could do. And the damn things were always so damn breakable. During his second assignment, he’d dumped one of the Magnadragons into a pot of scalding hot water and permanently messed up the colour changing mechanism into an ugly, mottled grey. And last year, he’d accidentally broken one of the Ultrasaurs halfway through the transformation into a Lamborghini. The manufacturer hadn’t been too angry, at least Simon’s clumsiness had pointed out a fatal design flaw, that might’ve led to lawsuits and kids swallowing things, if not corrected. But it had still been a costly mistake.
So he reached for the documentation that accompanied the prototypes instead. This wasn’t the sort of colourful booklets that accompanied the mass-produced toys. No this was a sheaf of loose papers, badly typed and badly xeroxed. There were design drawings, too, that might have depicted anything from a toy figure to the top secret plans for an underground nuclear facility. And finally patent applications, documenting in excruciating detail what exactly this particular piece of toy innovation could do.
It seemed they’d come up with something new for the Blasters of Forever. They were equipped with little lamps that lit up and a loudspeaker that emitted a ZAP sound. Nothing new there, Dana Star and her Dynanoids had been able to do that two years ago. But what was new about the Blasters of Forever was that the little lamp and the loudspeaker were activated by an infrared signal that was triggered when a kid hit the sensor on the figure’s chest with an infrared toy gun. The toy gun was helpfully included in the shipment as well, on the very bottom of the big cardboard box. It was a wicked looking thing of black and gold plastic that made wicked sounding noises when the trigger was pressed. The infrared mechanism that activated the tiny lamps on the figures was also surprisingly useful for switching the TV on and off — and so much cooler than the regular remote control.
When the toys went into serial production, the enclosed documentation said, every figure would also include a target disc the kids could pin to their closes to play tag with the infrared guns, should they ever get bored shooting at action figures. All of which, Simon had to admit, sounded like a really cool idea. And one that was sure to be controversial with parents, educators and the usual killjoys.
Okay. How to counter them and hopefully pre-empt any criticism they might possibly have? Hmm, shooting at action figures they would probably tolerate, after all they had tolerated it before. But shooting at other kids, even if it was just shooting with glorified remote controls at sensor discs pinned to their clothes? No way. That was glorifying violence, glorifying killing, glorifying war. Unless…
It wasn’t really killing, of course. No, the Blasters of Forever were pacifists. All toy tie-in cartoon characters were, even the bad guys. And when the Blasters of Forever zapped someone with their impressive looking blaster pistols, they didn’t kill them. No, they just… sent them back to the future, whence they all came, to stand trial for their crimes.
Yes, that was it! The Blasters of Forever were future cops, travelling through time to track down criminals hiding out in the distant past to evade the law. Of course, the criminals would be fairly non-violent folks, the sort that never did worse than robbing banks and maybe occasionally indulging in a little kidnapping and blackmail. Nothing so violent and gory that it would wake up the guardians of decency — and how tempted Simon was to at least once tag one of his supervillain groups with that name.

 

Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Apple iTunes | Google Play | Smashwords | Scribd | Playster | DriveThru | 24symbols

 

About Cora Buhlert:

Cora Buhlert was born and bred in North Germany, where she still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently working towards her PhD. 

Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of standalone stories in multiple genres. When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher.

 

Website | Mailing list | Twitter | Google+ | Instagram | Pinterest | YouTube | Mastodon

 

Guest post by A.E. Williams: How Spaceflight and The Challenges Therein Have Been Addressed in Science Fiction

A.E. Williams has kindly agreed to write a regular column for the Speculative Fiction Showcase, based on his wealth of experience, and fascination with space travel both real and fictional.

 

The very first science-fiction story that is popularly recognized as having anything to do with the concept of modern space travel is probably Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”. In this tale, the adventurers travel to the Earth’s Moon in a modified cannon shell – it is pointed at the Moon and fired, with much fanfare, from Tampa, Florida.

Oddly enough, Verne predicted much of the issues with which manned space explorers would need to contend.

With the exception of the fatal effects of the immense shock from an instantaneous acceleration to escape / orbital velocities, Verne’s idea was sound. In fact, NASA and Iraq had programs to launch satellites using cannons as recently as 1990[1]. Of course, these satellites would have had few moving parts; live payloads were out of the question.

But, Verne’s vision sparked the idea of men traveling across space to other planets.

Since that time, there have been thousands of different tales of space adventure. Science fiction has brought us every manner of device and apparatus to move people from one end of the galaxy (nay, the Universe!) to the other.

Some of these schemes were ridiculous, and played for satirical purposes, or were parodies of actual ideas.[2]

What I’d like to explore in this article, however, is how the very real problems of manned space travel were ‘solved’ to some extent by the speculative fiction authors who became very clever in just how we should proceed to move into space.

Let’s start with a few of the more famous modes of space travel:

Rockets –

Rockets follow the simplistic physical laws of ballistics, and sustained propulsion of a cylindrical tube filled with air, food, water and people has actually happened! 

In science fiction, post-Verne, there are many places where the possible issues were enumerated and addressed.

Arthur C. Clarke’s writings, including ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, Robert Heinlein’s stories, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith and many Golden Age authors took serious engineering minds and bent them to the task of answering thorny questions such as what actually happens to the human body in space, the effects of temperature, pressure and radiation on living entities, and the stresses of acceleration and deceleration.[3]

The mechanical engineering problems surrounding structures and forces were incorporated into many of the best hard science fiction of the times. The authors were serious in considering what actually might occur during these flights of fancy, and came up with ingenious ideas.

Heinlein went so far as to show how the Moon could be used as a launch pad for Earth-bound missiles made of mined moon rocks, and how they could be used as serious weaponry against the Mother Planet. His calculations were intended to show the scientific rationale about gravity wells, but he inadvertently illustrated one of the biggest issues facing spaceships, which is how to avoid debris while traveling around.

But it also showed the feasibility of using the Moon as a base of operations for advanced space missions.

‘Destination Moon’ was a film that used Heinlein’s musings to bring some verisimilitude to the silver screen. It showed how action / reaction would work in zero gee environments, as is shown when one of the key characters uses a fire extinguisher to fly around the room.

Other ‘Invasion’ films utilized stock footage of V2 and Redstone launches to convince audiences that these were actually alien craft, or were threats to other planets.

To say that the fictional creatures from other worlds were not much amused by our antics is putting it lightly.

The 1950’s and ‘60’s presented us with alien onslaughts on all sides, from the novel “Starship Troopers” to the flying saucers in the films “The Thing from Another World”, “Mars Attacks!” and  “Earth vs the Flying Saucers”.

A strange variation of this was “The Day the Earth Stood Still” wherein Klaatu, a traveler from another galaxy (!) comes to Earth to warn us of our hubris at combining nuclear bombs and rockets. His vehicle, a true flying saucer, was discussed in detail during some exposition in the film with the top mind of that Earth.

The relativistic effects of Einstein’s new theories on Faster-Than-Light travel may have made viewers heads spin, but the dialog was grounded in scientific roots.

These stories and approaches still mainly glossed over the incredible distances involved. Even “Forbidden Planet”, with its revolutionary saucer-ship didn’t really clearly depict the time and space parameters that we now are just beginning to understand.

To get around the problem of the actual flight-times becoming lethal, the concepts of ‘Generation’ ships were introduced. These were miniature worlds, entire ecosystems with populations that traversed the blackness at a relatively slow speed, but taking millennia to get to their final destinations.

Again, Heinlein, in “Universe” set the bar very high. The story took place on a giant spherical ship where the radiation shielding had partially failed. Mutated beings mixed it up with the normals, while the ship headed endlessly into deep space, its original purpose lost to the ravages of time.

Keir Dullea, of ‘2001’ fame, explored this more fully in the television series “The Star Lost”. Bruce Dern touched upon the idea of isolated ecosystems orbiting in space in “Silent Running”,  Niven and Pournelle spoke of Ringworlds, and good old dependable A.C. Clarke’s “Rama” capped off the idea until the advent of ‘The Borg’ reignited it. [4]

Because it was taking so MUCH time to get from point A to point B in these stories, the science fiction authors next needed to come up with ways to speed things up a bit.

Enter Faster-Than-Light travel, or FTL.

Now, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith had handled this quite well in the “Skylark of Space” and “Grey Lensman” space operas, by simply annihilating copper bars atomically, releasing all of their innate power into machines that manipulated bands or frequencies of this energy. Much like radio, television and microwaves today are used for many purposes from heating food to allowing us to read words on fluorescing screens, the heroes of these adventures took all of it in stride. 

Their facile use of these technologies involved a bit of ‘hand-waving’, such as electronic teaching machines and the like, but in the final analysis they were allowed to succeed in ignoring inertia and momentum mainly because the author simply chose a deux ex machina approach to the problem.

For an instance, let’s think about how we actually assure that our passengers will survive the long, arduous flight from one planet to another. (Interstellar travel is another breed of cat entirely, but for now, let’s take baby steps.)

Wing Commander, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and many other universes consider traditional naval vessels as models to be imitated, both in the construction of the space ships, and in how they are crewed. Think of space submarines, battleships and aircraft carriers – these are the basic craft used to convey people from planet to planet. They use impulse engines for shorter distances, and warp drives for the inevitable FTL travel. 

Some of the things brushed aside or hand-waved away include inertia, momentum, friction, impacts with space debris, and relativistic effects. Deflector fields, shields or other devices clear a path in front of any FTL spacecraft in ways that defy physics.

Think about it this way – you are driving your car down a highway, and an animal jumps out of a forest line just ahead of you. How you react to this hazard depends on many factors. 

First is your vessel. Is it small, like an Audi R8, or large, like a tractor-trailer?

How fast are you going? Are you accelerating or decelerating?

Is the animal small, like a cat, or large, like a moose?[5]

Now, the amount of damage to your vessel depends on the mass of the animal, the velocity at which you contact it, and the directions both of you are traveling.

Without getting into too much gory detail, this is the problem facing every satellite, missile, and space craft ever created.

When in flight, one does not merely change direction and swerve to avoid an obstacle. Oh, no – what one does is disintegrate that obstacle, or push it out of YOUR path.

As the speed is increased to escape velocity and beyond, even the tiniest flake of paint becomes a real danger. The film “Gravity” got much of this correct, as did “Pitch Black”.

Many other science fiction novels warn of spacesuit punctures from micro meteors, and other wear and tear that would occur.

So, science fiction authors sort of ignore the problem as having been solved by magnetic or other energy beams that push this stuff aside. You can see the issue here – in order to do so, these deflectors must travel ahead of the ship.

A recent Vsauce episode addresses the problem of light being emitted from an FTL ship, but that only spoke to photons – massless particles that can’t really move anything aside.

How can something be projected in front of the ship, with enough force to move debris, yet also not enough force to obliterate it? Think about this for a moment.

As your starship enters a solar system, at tremendous speed, and is decelerating, it encounters a satellite. What happens next?

This brings up the parallel problem of how navigation is supposed to work. Even if there is some huge AI computer that has a fourth-dimensional space map, this super-GPS[6] must be able to be updated instantaneously to accommodate the space and TIME changes that are occurring as the ship enters a given space-time co-ordinates.

Remember, for FTL travel, the time around the ship changes with respect to a frame of reference. [7]

This causes some interesting effects as well, and was the subject of much scrutiny when the recent film “Gravity” hit the theatres.

In PART TWO of this article, we will look at some other examples of science fiction authors intriguing efforts to predict how future manned space flight would unfold.

Get ready to dive deep into even more about FTL Travel – using “Star Trek”, “Star Wars”, “Interstellar”as examples. We will delve into  Hyperspace, Wormholes, black holes, etc.

And let’s not forget the really out-there concepts of space flight:

Other Space – Travel outside of relativistic space!

 The Aether – EE Doc Smith’s ideas on space travel!

Dune’s Spice Ships, ‘folding space’ 

… and other weird ideas!

See you next time[8]!

NEXT UP:

April - An Exploration of the Physics Behind Faster Than Light Travel.

May - Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences, Trans-Humans, the Singularity and the Merging of Humans and Machine.

June - The Physics of Science Fiction Weapons.

July - The Reality of Living in an Undersea City.

A.E. Williams  March 07, 2015

---

[1]
                        [1] Source: http://www.astronautix.com/articles/abroject.htm
 

[2]
                        [2] Most of Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is about how one could travel the length and breadth of the known Universe, in time, space and hyperspace by the use of the clever ‘electronic thumb’.

[3]
                        [3] An interesting article could be written concerning gender roles and how they were presented by these authors. I may do one in the future! The general consensus seemed to be that women and men were equally subject to the laws of physics, though.

[4]
                        [4] The Generation ship is actually an idea stolen from our own human experience – we travel on such a device, every day we are alive. Think about it – a closed spacecraft that takes millions of years to travel the Universe. Food, water, life are all balanced – carefully taking billions of changes into consideration. The Earth is a star ship, but we don’t really notice, since we are always imagining new and improved ways to do things.
 

[5]
                        [5] A moose once bit my sister. No, really!

[6]
                        [6] Galactic Positioning System

[7]
                        [7] “Interstellar” does a fair job of depicting this, as does “2001:A Space Odyssey” to some extent.
 

[8]
                        [8] Get it?

Speculative Fiction Links of the Week for October 30, 2014

  Here is an early edition of our weekly round-up of interesting links about speculative fiction from around the web:

Speculative fiction in general:

• At Moviepilot, Matthew Surprenant looks at what each decade's horror films say about the social and cultural preoccupations of the time.
• The Daily Beast has a great essay by Arthur Chu on GamerGate, Disco Demolition and the roots of reactionary rage.
• Jim C. Hines talks about GamerGate and diversity.
• At The Galaxy Express, Heather Massey wonders whether science fiction romance is becoming a code for taboo erotica in some places. 
• Gail Z. Martin talks about female characters in Steampunk.
• Kyoko M. shares the second part of her top 18 most hateable villains. Some interesting choices there.
• At Book Riot, Josh Corman defends superhero and other genre movies.

Writing, publishing and marketing:

• Charlie Jane Anders explains how to create a killer opening for a science fiction story.
• Justin McLachlan shares 25 science fiction writing prompts.
• Tammy Salyer talks about the problem of maintaining internal consistency in speculative fiction.
• Mark Feggeler shares a pep talk for slow writers. 
• William D. Richards introduces his character Nem Aster.
• Jeffrey Aaron Miller talks about the setting and background of his novel Shadows of Tockland.
• Joe Vasicek shares the most unmarketable story idea ever conceived.
• Michael Patrick Hicks discusses the old adage "Writing is Rewriting".
• Elena Linville shares 10 useful links to stay motivated during NaNoWriMo.
• Mel Finefrock shares eight useful tops for editing your book.
  

Interviews:

• Heather Massey interviews Jody Wallace.
• Michael Brookes interviews Kelly Cozy.

Reviews:

• SF Signal reviews Pennsylvania by Michael Bunker.
• The New Yorker offers an appreciation of Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. 
• Michael Patrick Hicks reviews The Last Mile by Tim Waggoner. 
• Elena Linville reviews The London Project by Mark J. Maxwell. 
• Judy Goodwin reviews The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson.
• Brian Olsen shares ten thoughts on the controversial Disney film Song of the South.
• Jodi McAlister discusses the TV adaptation of Outlander and particularly the way the show caters to the female gaze.
• C.P.D. Harris shares his impressions of the TV show Gotham.
  

Crowdfunding:

• Strange Horizons are holding their 2014 fund drive.
• The "We Need Diverse Books" project is looking for funding. 
• Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things is looking for backers. 
• The 2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, an anthology of middle grade science fiction edited by Corie and Sean Weaver, is looking for funding.
• Doctor Puppet, a group that makes lovely stop-motion animated Doctor Who fan videos, need funding for their 2014 Christmas special.
• A highschool theatre group in Maiden, North Carolina, had their production of the play Almost, Maine cancelled by their principal because it was feared a gay scene would upset the more conservative inhabitants of the town. Now the theatre group is looking for funding to allow them to put on the production without school support. Excess funds will be donated to a project for LGBTQ youth in the area.  

Con reports:

• Cheryl Morgan shares her experiences at BristolCon 2014.

Science and technology:

• An unmanned Antares rocket carrying supplies for the International Space Station exploded mere seconds after launch for reasons still unknown.
• Katy Greene explains why an all-women mission to Mars might be a better solution than an all-male or mixed gender crew.
• A satellite mock-up was destroyed in a test chamber to study the effects of space junk collisions.
  

Odds and ends: 

• Marvel announces upcoming superhero movies until 2019. 
• Watch a clip from Avengers: Age of Ultron.
• Air New Zealand has made a hilariour Hobbit inspired flight safety video.
• The BBC wonders whether real life Jedi have created a new religion.
• Darth Vader was banned from voting in the Ukraine parliamentary elections. 
• This knit Cthulhu mask makes for one very cool Halloween costume.