"CURL"

CURL is the next of my projects, still waiting to see the light, but this is one in which I have actually worked on recently and it will be probably the one I finish first because unlike my other "projects", this one is one I know how it's gonna end; from the writer's perspective this is the best way to complete a work fast. Not knowing how your story is going to end puts you a little in the place of the reader, which is good, but sometimes leads to too much improv, at least in my case. Otherwise, directing your story towards what you have in mind is easier when you actually have something in mind to lead it to.

The inspiration of CURL is manifold. In fact, the underlining idea actually inspired another story I wrote some years ago called DELAY. It was more specifically a "fanfic" (or "fan-fiction", a short story based on characters created by another artist); for decades I've been a huge fan of Chris Carter's "The X-Files", so fan that I actually started to write my own episodes and publish them in fans forums. DELAY tells the story of an electromagnetic anomaly that sucks up an airliner of which one of the main characters is a passenger of. On board, the crew starts experiencing weird phenomena with time. In the end( I'll give it away) the characters come to the conclusion that the airplane is trapped in a gravitational ripple with the shape of a Moebius band. DELAY in time is inspired by an Argentinean movie called "Moebius", about a train car (not an airplane) lost in a Moebius band. The Moebius band itself is an interesting mathematical object with eccentric properties known as the one-sided strip.

The second (and main) source of inspiration of CURL is "Star Trek - The Next Generation"; a particular episode caused an impression on me many years ago and, in essence, CURL is some sort of a 'remake', with my own spin of it. "Star Trek" was my favorite series in the '90s and as a 90-er, I was more fond of the Piccard version rather than the Shatner's. I remember they used to air it Sundays right before noon and I confess that their stories were very good. I, however, am not a die-hard fan (not as much as  of "The X-Files", which I know to the last detail). In any case, the episode in question portrayed the Enterprise rescuing a small vessel drifting off course nearby a supernova or a black hole. The crew discovers pretty soon that the vessel is a scape pod belonging to a ship of the Federation. Soon after they find out it belongs to the Enterprise itself. Moreover,  on board of the vessel there is no other but Cpt. Piccard himself! But how come? Enterprise's Cpt. Piccard is at the bridge, at the helm of the ship! Where this other one came from? As the episode progresses, we learn that the scape pod is the twin version of a scape pod in the hangars of the Enterprise and the recovered vessel and its passenger are future versions that have traveled back in time using the black hole. But the alternate Piccard is hurt and according to the twin vessel's computer log, something really bad happened to Enterprise, something so bad that the only survivor was Piccard who traveled back in time to warn the crew of the upcoming disaster.

The story itself is very "Star Trek"-ish as one can realize; but it involves one of my favorite sci-fi topics: time travel; as well, it involves my favorite time travel issue: paradoxes and timeloops. 

Indeed, Piccard and the crew of the Enterprise are trapped in a timeloop: the spaceship was going to inevitably be destroyed by the black whole, Piccard was going to survive escaping in the escape pod and return on time only to be rescued by an early version of the crew itself who would again fail to fall under the power of the black whole over and over and over ad infinitum. 


This poses an interesting landscape into time travel itself one of whose main problems is established by the so-called "Grandfather's paradox", in which a time-traveler goes back in time and kills his own grandfather creating in consequence a major paradox. Serious scientist have proposed a solution to the paradox and called it "The mother's paradox" and in certain way CURL is an attempt to dumb down such solution. The premise of the story is simple: how would you defeat someone in possession of a time machine? This is actually a question raised by Stephen Hawking himself in one of his books. The answer is...

You will have to read CURL to find that out. 

Some few years ago, I created a video trailer for this story that more or less is a representative of what I have in mind. Here's the link:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC-GmYPiFCs

I hope you like it.