Duke of Piraxis - SciFi draft on wattpad

Over the last couple of weeks I outlined a science fiction story with the working title Duke of Piraxis. It’s about a new colony in the early days of human deep space travel. Despite the name Duke of Piraxis doesn’t feature nobility. The Chief Executive is called Duke. They decided to call the colony Piraxis. Hence Duke of Piraxis as he’s the primary point of view in what I’ve written so far.

Inspiration for Duke of Piraxis

So what inspired me to write the story was a TV programme where Michael Portillo visited Romania. At the beginning of the 20th century the Romanians got themselves a King. They built railways all over the country and also a fantastic palace. It made me think of some of the fantasy steampunk stories. Then I thought, maybe it could be a regression colony in space.

From there I started some world building to flesh out the early days of the colony, what the plan was and why they lost contact with Earth. That lead to me writing some key entries in the Board meetings from the first year of the colony. Most of these are published on wattpad. I put them there as a backup. Letting you read and comment on them is a bonus, hopefully for you as well as me!

Blurb

Deep space travel is both expensive and dangerous. Most ships arrive where they want to go without a problem, but every now and then one simply disappears.

Humans are starting to branch out, the search for earth like planets has shown hundreds of potentials. With the invention of hyperspace travel it became possible to visit them. 32 years ago a survey ship visited ‘First Landing’ and discovered that it was sufficiently earth like to be colonisable. This was a surprise, because it was virtually identical to earth in the late triassic period (although with different land masses). Surface sampling, and later analysis, showed that there was DNA based life on the same basis as earth. In fact there appeared to be a common point of divergence around 50,000 years ago given mutation rates (despite the flora and fauna being what had been on earth around 200 million years previously, they looked like they’d been put there about 50k years earlier). A rapid programme of exploration followed, finding similar situations and consistent evidence of common genetic ancestry around 50,000 years earlier. Not all planets were in the triassic period, others were closer than that. In many dinosaurs still survived, None of them had what passed for intelligent life on them, or if it was there it was well hidden.

Piraxis is the 13th colony, and not everything proceeds as planned…

Reading Duke of Piraxis

Before you read Duke of Piraxis I need to remind you that it is a first draft. First drafts are always rubbish and need changed. Mostly it is me telling myself the story through the dialogue from the board. It reads like a script with very few directions and almost no descriptions. When the time is right I will go back through and write each of the events as scenes with multiple characters that show what happens. But that won’t be soon. I’ll probably also change the title before it gets anywhere near publication.

Here’s the link to Duke of Piraxis. Let me know what you think please.

https://www.wattpad.com/story/85338617-duke-of-piraxis

I’m going to have to park Duke of Piraxis soon. I need to get on with studying. However it was a fun exercise and I might well come back to it at some point and write the story in more detail.

PS If you like reading Science Fiction stories you might also like my five star reviewed Crisis Point, you can get it from Amazon, iTunes, and a host of other ebook sellers for 99p (or the equivalent in your local currency).