With all serious coursework out of the way, it's remarkable how quickly I turned back to writing for my own amusement.

I decided to work a bit on that Gnostic exegesis of "The Vimana Incident" but it's turning into something more like an omnibus commentary on the work and my intentions behind it, including all of the general cultural commentary. While it's loaded with spoilers for the most part, here's a spoiler-free sample of just how off the topic of Gnosticism it's gotten:

In the scene where we see the disinfection, health scan, and creation of the nano-suit with Captain Hawthorne, I thought it would be fun to subvert the trope of future technology being easy, convenient, and painless and make the whole thing a profoundly unpleasant ordeal, especially the nano-scan. This is a direct attack on the Gene Roddenberry school of science fiction which seems to always show the tech on starships as having an extreme "wow factor" informed by the glowing optimism of a GM motorama film, that by its nature makes all the technology in a story appealing to the aspirational consumer. Since I'm not writing copy for an ad agency, I wanted to make the tech on the Vimana reflect the ambiguous reality of technology as something that, while useful, often comes with a thousand and one unpleasantries. This is for everyone who has ever chucked a smart phone a thousand times more powerful than the computers that controlled Apollo 11 against a wall in frustration.

Additionally, I'm going to hang onto this once it's done and compile it with a similar commentary about "The Linen Butterfly."

Because this isn't the sort of thing I expect anyone to pay money for, I'll have this work available as a .pdf I can e-mail to whoever wants it. Honestly, I'm getting a kick out of writing it so it's no trouble for me.