Fingers on the Firmament
This space-fantasy project is one of my “white whale” concepts, one that I’ve been working on for years (my earliest notes are from around 2002-2003, I think), but I can never quite pull it together in a way that I’m satisfied with.
The premise of Fingers on the Firmament is that you can reach out and literally touch the stars, pulling yourself to them across the vast distances of space in-between. But that also makes it incredibly easy to get lost in all that space and never be able to find another human being, much less the way home. Consequently, it’s about small human communities trying to cooperate and survive living together in space without losing all contact forever.
The 2013 draft linked here is the most recent of a long series of attempts at realizing this project. It’s not quite right yet, but it’s the closest I’ve come so far.