#oneaday Day 184: Daily Inkling - Among the Stars

[I recently decided to become a Patron of Normal Happenings, since Matthew there has been a consistently supportive and positive voice in the blogging community at large, and has always been very kind to me. This post is inspired by one of his regular "Daily Inklings" posts, which are simple writing prompts designed to provide the stimulus for the reader's own creative work.]

As a kid, I dreamed of the stars. I found the idea of outer space, alien planets and the exploration of things far beyond our humdrum everyday world to be fascinating.

I knew that this was just pure fantasy, however; I knew that space travel in the modern day and age was expensive, physically demanding, extremely dangerous and you didn't even end up going anywhere interesting. I never really had the childish ambition to "become an astronaut" because I knew from an early age that it was something that only a select few could do — and probably a select few Americans at that. As a nerdy, clumsy, physically inept young British boy, I knew that I was never going to get there.

It didn't stop me dreaming, however. I enjoyed reading non-fiction books about space and other planets. I loved science-fiction stories, whether they were TV shows, movies or novels. I remember being very proud that I read some of Isaac Asimov's novels as a kid, because they always looked and felt like "grown-up books"; they were the stuff my parents read.

And, of course, I loved using the computer to indulge this fantasy, whether it was through the structured play of an actual game set in space, or something more creative.

In the former instance, I particularly appreciated any game that allowed me to fly a spaceship from a first-person perspective or at the very least provided a convincing "simulation". I loved Star Raiders and its sequel on the Atari 8-bit; on the ST, meanwhile, I had a lot of time for titles like Starglider II, Enterprise, Starflight and Space Rogue, all of which gave me the feeling of being in command of my own ship and travelling to far-flung, exotic locales to… well, usually to pick up minerals rather than anything more interesting, but digging up rocks is infinitely more enjoyable on an alien planet than in the British countryside, as lovely as the latter can be sometimes.

In the latter case, I was strongly drawn to Jeff Minter's ColourSpace "light synthesiser" on the Atari ST. For the unfamiliar, this was a piece of software designed to allow you to play with light and colour. Moving the mouse around and clicking the button would create various coloured effects, and there were numerous controls you could fiddle with to change the patterns that were generated, the colours that were used and various increasingly psychedelic features.

One of the things I loved about ColourSpace was that it included not only the ability to simulate a starfield, but also a background image that resembled a starship cockpit. I would spend hours at a time playing with this combination of things coupled with the various light-synthesis options, playing out a narrative in my head that usually ended with the catastrophic destruction of my spacecraft. (The various colour-cycling options that ColourSpace provided were eminently suitable for simulating the cockpit flashing with hundreds of warning lights!)

There was no "objective" here, no end goal and, looking back on it, the fact it usually ended with my "death" was a bit bleak, but I loved it. I loved this means of expressing myself, and I feel like the fact it was specifically in space rather than just against a black backdrop was a key part of the whole experience.

Hmm. May have to dig out that ColourSpace disk this evening and see if it still has the same magic…