Marvelous Things Deleted Scenes
A Deeper Look at the World of the Book
(More things coming soon)
This scene was in the first draft, originally penned as Chapter Sixteen of part one. The intention of the scene was to give one last scene between Dale and Robin before she entered hibernation. For pacing reasons and for uncertainty about using the 'Oz' motif to get into their mindsets, I ended up dropping the chapter and taking a few parts of it and the main idea and interspersing them in earlier chapters.
16.
That night they eat pasta, with freshly harvested protein, hand-ground by Robin herself. Dale went way back for the film, somehow remembering an off-hand comment Robin had made one day during training. When the credits began, in glorious twentieth-century black and white, a full-fledged squeal almost escaped the generally reserved Captain Robin Turner. "The Wizard of Oz," she says, her voice practically childlike, "I used to watch this all the time with my mom. Every Holiday season."
"I thought I heard you say that once. I just kinda figured you might like to see this before you started riding the dream train,” He played with his fork a second, "You know, happy endings and all."
"Thank you, Dale," she says, emotion tinting her voice, "That was very thoughtful. I can't believe you remembered that. When were we talking about it?"
"Shit," he answers, twirling his fork in the noodles and thick sauce, "I have no idea. It was really somewhere between a memory and a blind guess. I saw it in the catalog and..." He stops suddenly. They meet eyes and both avert quickly, but then they come back together for an endless handful of seconds. They both turn back to the monitor, drawn there by the whirring roar of poor Dorothy's house as it is pulled mercilessly from the ground and together they quietly finish their meals, watching with a child's rapture as the house lands upon an evil witch, as the Technicolor yellow brick road winds before the intrepid travelers, both coming close to shedding a heartfelt tear as they were reminded that there really is, nor ever been, a place quite like home.
16.
That night they eat pasta, with freshly harvested protein, hand-ground by Robin herself. Dale went way back for the film, somehow remembering an off-hand comment Robin had made one day during training. When the credits began, in glorious twentieth-century black and white, a full-fledged squeal almost escaped the generally reserved Captain Robin Turner. "The Wizard of Oz," she says, her voice practically childlike, "I used to watch this all the time with my mom. Every Holiday season."
"I thought I heard you say that once. I just kinda figured you might like to see this before you started riding the dream train,” He played with his fork a second, "You know, happy endings and all."
"Thank you, Dale," she says, emotion tinting her voice, "That was very thoughtful. I can't believe you remembered that. When were we talking about it?"
"Shit," he answers, twirling his fork in the noodles and thick sauce, "I have no idea. It was really somewhere between a memory and a blind guess. I saw it in the catalog and..." He stops suddenly. They meet eyes and both avert quickly, but then they come back together for an endless handful of seconds. They both turn back to the monitor, drawn there by the whirring roar of poor Dorothy's house as it is pulled mercilessly from the ground and together they quietly finish their meals, watching with a child's rapture as the house lands upon an evil witch, as the Technicolor yellow brick road winds before the intrepid travelers, both coming close to shedding a heartfelt tear as they were reminded that there really is, nor ever been, a place quite like home.
Here is a cut piece from Part One. This is from Dale's rumination on the past troubles of the Advanced Exploration Missions. Notably, he was recalling the psychological problems of repetitive exposure to the hibernation pods and the mental trials of extended isolation. In the final draft, I mostly just talked about the UFS Darious and its unreliable data. In the first draft, it was the UFS Heidtman I mostly spoke of and the Darious was a secondary example. I ended up dropping it only for pacing issues and combined the bulk of relevant information into the one description of the Darious.
He finishes shaving, and as he has already shit and showered, all that remains to do before he meets Robin in the control room is to finish dressing. He takes one last look into the mirror before flicking the switch, shutting off the reflective digital surface that the Program deemed safe and secure under the “duress” of these prolonged missions. Dale had read about the so-called 'Heidtman Incident' in several news magazines and journals, and of the surrounding controversies and fall-outs that almost forced the closure of the Program's entire Advanced Exploration Missions sector the before it had a chance to really get established. One of the crew aboard the Heidtman, a first generation AEM vessel, had apparently taken her entire crew's lives, as well as her own, with long shards from a broken mirror. One shard for each of the four hibernating throats and one more for her own. The ship drifted on course for several months before a short circuit in the air- recirculation unit began a series of events that led to Mission Control back on Jupiter Base Terra-3 to force the ship to self-destruct. Unreliable data was the reason they gave. There is no sense in accumulating unreliable data.
The woman had reportedly gone mad, smashing her mirror in some fit before murdering her comrades while they slept the years away in their suspension pods. The Program's investigators ended up where they often did in those days of trial and error, with the diagnosis of psychosis and depression brought on by a combination of prolonged isolation and prolonged Chrysalis hibernation, a procedure still relatively in its functional infancy during those early AEMs. Major changes were called for, and basically met, concerning the psychological and physiological strains and environment of the crew on such long missions, missions that effectively sent the persons involved on a one-way course away from Earth, only to be seen and heard from again as bits and bytes, as binary images on liquid screens.
He finishes shaving, and as he has already shit and showered, all that remains to do before he meets Robin in the control room is to finish dressing. He takes one last look into the mirror before flicking the switch, shutting off the reflective digital surface that the Program deemed safe and secure under the “duress” of these prolonged missions. Dale had read about the so-called 'Heidtman Incident' in several news magazines and journals, and of the surrounding controversies and fall-outs that almost forced the closure of the Program's entire Advanced Exploration Missions sector the before it had a chance to really get established. One of the crew aboard the Heidtman, a first generation AEM vessel, had apparently taken her entire crew's lives, as well as her own, with long shards from a broken mirror. One shard for each of the four hibernating throats and one more for her own. The ship drifted on course for several months before a short circuit in the air- recirculation unit began a series of events that led to Mission Control back on Jupiter Base Terra-3 to force the ship to self-destruct. Unreliable data was the reason they gave. There is no sense in accumulating unreliable data.
The woman had reportedly gone mad, smashing her mirror in some fit before murdering her comrades while they slept the years away in their suspension pods. The Program's investigators ended up where they often did in those days of trial and error, with the diagnosis of psychosis and depression brought on by a combination of prolonged isolation and prolonged Chrysalis hibernation, a procedure still relatively in its functional infancy during those early AEMs. Major changes were called for, and basically met, concerning the psychological and physiological strains and environment of the crew on such long missions, missions that effectively sent the persons involved on a one-way course away from Earth, only to be seen and heard from again as bits and bytes, as binary images on liquid screens.
This cut scene bounced all over the book. Originally it was in Part One, then for pacing reasons I moved it to Part Two and then for pacing reasons I cut it form the book in the final draft. I really liked this bit, as early on in the writing process of Marvelous Things I envisioned equal parts philosophical thesis and speculative history with somehow a little story thrown in the mix when all was said and done. After a big re-draft and re-formatting of the story in the second and third drafts (originally it came in three parts, in the final draft only two parts) I found a tighter paced action story bogged down by too much backstory. So this part had to go. However, I do see this particular history as being the same history that many of my sic-fi stories take place in and is the beginning of a larger shared universe I am working on constructing.
Dale wanders to the window, numbing the time by gazing at the nebula, indulging in his hypnotic defense mechanism. My only witness, this star in utero, he thinks, melancholy making him feel poetic and shamelessly dramatic. He adjusts his stare, looking into the reflection of his eyes upon the windowpane. He doesn’t blink.
The majesty framed within the small cabin window brings to his mind the videos and images of the 2044 nuclear exchange between American and Saudi/Soviet forces he had seen as a child. Seven bombs had been released, and seven were all that were needed to finally wake the people of Earth up. Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and New York were annihilated, as was the better part of the Arabic Peninsula, Moscow, Turkey, Israel, and the British Isles. Five billion people were killed before the echoes of the explosions had left the air. Another other two billion died within the next few weeks, and hundreds of millions more perished in the months and years that followed, the slow but steady after-effects of the new toxic ecology. The colors, the reds and oranges of the wounded sky, captured forever in digital brilliance, fascinated his young mind and, until now, until this blooming spasm of a collapsing star, he had seen nothing that more horridly lovely than those pictures of devastation.
The League of Unified Nations was born from these ashes. Nuclear programs were eliminated as social and nutritional force had finally won the war over economic and brute force as the primary methods of State coercion. The LUN focused on the long-term future of the population, a future perhaps short and brutish without the intervention of radical new technologies and a focus on deep space exploration capabilities and resources. Earth is unpredictable now, they claimed, and the moon is nearing capacity, so to insure the continuation of the human species and to improve the lives of existing generations and their offspring, the League’s Standards and Recommendations Committee had unanimously incepted the AEM program, and injected themselves into the problems concerning justice on the global scale. One government for one planet, the LUN as sole means to maintaining and organizing the large scale cultural operations of a fractured, but still acting, human race.
Dale wanders to the window, numbing the time by gazing at the nebula, indulging in his hypnotic defense mechanism. My only witness, this star in utero, he thinks, melancholy making him feel poetic and shamelessly dramatic. He adjusts his stare, looking into the reflection of his eyes upon the windowpane. He doesn’t blink.
The majesty framed within the small cabin window brings to his mind the videos and images of the 2044 nuclear exchange between American and Saudi/Soviet forces he had seen as a child. Seven bombs had been released, and seven were all that were needed to finally wake the people of Earth up. Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and New York were annihilated, as was the better part of the Arabic Peninsula, Moscow, Turkey, Israel, and the British Isles. Five billion people were killed before the echoes of the explosions had left the air. Another other two billion died within the next few weeks, and hundreds of millions more perished in the months and years that followed, the slow but steady after-effects of the new toxic ecology. The colors, the reds and oranges of the wounded sky, captured forever in digital brilliance, fascinated his young mind and, until now, until this blooming spasm of a collapsing star, he had seen nothing that more horridly lovely than those pictures of devastation.
The League of Unified Nations was born from these ashes. Nuclear programs were eliminated as social and nutritional force had finally won the war over economic and brute force as the primary methods of State coercion. The LUN focused on the long-term future of the population, a future perhaps short and brutish without the intervention of radical new technologies and a focus on deep space exploration capabilities and resources. Earth is unpredictable now, they claimed, and the moon is nearing capacity, so to insure the continuation of the human species and to improve the lives of existing generations and their offspring, the League’s Standards and Recommendations Committee had unanimously incepted the AEM program, and injected themselves into the problems concerning justice on the global scale. One government for one planet, the LUN as sole means to maintaining and organizing the large scale cultural operations of a fractured, but still acting, human race.