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Where did I put my roller skates?
Alternating between reading Bujold fic and Winter Olympics RPS has me wanting a story about elite-level Zero-Gravity Athletics competition. The Extra-Atmospheric Olympic Committees require that ZG athletes spend at least thirty percent of their time in more than .5g, which is of course the source of much shenanigans, angst and H/C.
Also, I think one of the main characters of the story started their career as an Abolympic competitor (that's a sort of "special" competition limited to people who use no or only minor biomodifications, chemical enhancements or technological augmentation; the real competitors think of it as kind of the cute little sibling, but it has a rabid following of its own, 'rabid' often being the operative term). As a result of a major practice injury last season, said character was disqualified from the Abolympics, and made the unusual choice of moving to standard competition rather than retiring, and is having a lot of trouble fitting in. Being kind of an asshole isn't helping. The other main character is one of the only elite-level XA athletes to have grown up on an actual planet and gets a lot of crap about it (incluing constant suspicion that XA judges are biased against planetaries), but refuses to be anything but sparkly and peppy and is the favorite of nearly all the planetary fans who follow XA sport. Character also actually enjoys having to spend time in grav (despite having the same ostopenia and asthenia adaptation difficulties that are common to ZG athletes), and whenever there's a competition near a settled planet is constantly trying to get fellow athletes to go snowboarding and ice-skating.
...that would actually slot right in to my existing space opera universe. And the established FTL physics I have there would add the extra layer that anyone competing in intersystem leagues would have chosen to accept the temporal isolation that comes with regular relativistic accelaration... The Galactic Olympics are held every four years standardized time, but most of the athletes on the competition circuit would've only aged about two-three years in that time - and another regulation is that they are *required* to have at least 18 months subjective time between Olympic entries.
>_< I am going to spend the next few days writing this story in my head, I can tell. LIKE I NEEDED ANOTHER STORY TO WRITE. Somebody else offer to pick up the bunny, please, so I don't have to??
Also, I think one of the main characters of the story started their career as an Abolympic competitor (that's a sort of "special" competition limited to people who use no or only minor biomodifications, chemical enhancements or technological augmentation; the real competitors think of it as kind of the cute little sibling, but it has a rabid following of its own, 'rabid' often being the operative term). As a result of a major practice injury last season, said character was disqualified from the Abolympics, and made the unusual choice of moving to standard competition rather than retiring, and is having a lot of trouble fitting in. Being kind of an asshole isn't helping. The other main character is one of the only elite-level XA athletes to have grown up on an actual planet and gets a lot of crap about it (incluing constant suspicion that XA judges are biased against planetaries), but refuses to be anything but sparkly and peppy and is the favorite of nearly all the planetary fans who follow XA sport. Character also actually enjoys having to spend time in grav (despite having the same ostopenia and asthenia adaptation difficulties that are common to ZG athletes), and whenever there's a competition near a settled planet is constantly trying to get fellow athletes to go snowboarding and ice-skating.
...that would actually slot right in to my existing space opera universe. And the established FTL physics I have there would add the extra layer that anyone competing in intersystem leagues would have chosen to accept the temporal isolation that comes with regular relativistic accelaration... The Galactic Olympics are held every four years standardized time, but most of the athletes on the competition circuit would've only aged about two-three years in that time - and another regulation is that they are *required* to have at least 18 months subjective time between Olympic entries.
>_< I am going to spend the next few days writing this story in my head, I can tell. LIKE I NEEDED ANOTHER STORY TO WRITE. Somebody else offer to pick up the bunny, please, so I don't have to??
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I mean, um, sorry I can't pick up that particular bunny…
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What would you call the sport that is just one people spinning and flying around in a zero-gravity space in beautiful ways? Part figure skating, part gymnastics, and part flying trapeze, only if they *actually* didn't have to worry about gravity instead of only looking like it. SF books tend to just talk about zero-gravity dance (and treat it as an art rather than a sport), but it seems like the actual techniques would be based more on other sports...
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It sounds like the far-future equivalent of ice dancing, which is far more difficult than it sounds from the name. Gravity tumbling?
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(I suspect there is an ice-dancing/synchronized swimming equivalent, which is all about grace and artistry and coordination, and a figures/gymnastics equivalent, which is all about complicated triple-axis spins and maximum acceleration/deceleration/torque. Also, can't decide if the standard arena is an empty space or has some sort of interior framework or if those are two different sports.)
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No, I am really not an RPS person, but I has a weakness, apparently.
I want this space opera X games, yes. You should go write that. I am too busy writing this technical report this week.
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I didn't actually watch the games (I can enjoy watching just for the art of it, but the last few times the US commentators have been *so annoying* I didn't even bother this time round.) But apparently American figure skater Johnny Weir is sufficiently sparkly and woobie that there are suddenly a lot more people than usual paying attention to figure skating RPS? So it's been showing up on the delicious rps tag feed, which is where I've been finding it.
Also there is
(Sadly there has not been the outpouring of Stephen Colbert/Winter Olympics fic that by any rights there ought to have been.)
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I did like watching the speed skating, though. And the women's ski thing where four of them raced at once over a bunch of jumps, although a lot of that was rooting for a French woman who's my age and has a daughter a little bit older than Herself. I approve of thirtysomething mommies who're still totally kicking ass in a physical sense. *grin*
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Age is one of the things that really interests me when I go on my occasional sports-fiction benders! Especially with the Olympics, where you have some sports where 18-year-olds are retirement age (and have the worn-out bodies to earn it) and other sports at the same Olympics where grandparents can still medal.
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It's so very on hold, though ...
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I actually just went through the science fiction, sports tagmash at LibraryThing and there's almost no novels on there that actually take place in interstellar societies, which is sort of surprising, though I guess I knew that professional sports is one of the things that often gets completely ignored in SF worldbuilding. Though there are some anthologies that look interesting. My two SF encyclopedias didn't add anything either; one of them didn't even have an entry for games or sports.
(The only zero-g or neutral buoyancy contests I can think of in published SF are zero-g ballet as background in a couple of stories, Ender's "the enemy's gate is down", Heinlein's flying on the Moon, and the pistol duels in Lucky Starr. Surely that can't be it.)
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(The only Spider Robinson I've gotten around to is Callahan's, which I liked, at least until it started being all Frank-Miller-y with the whores obsession.)
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(By the way, what Bujold fic were you reading?)
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