https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoricalWhatIf/comments/dt9zgx/what_if_the_vikings_could_traverse_the_north_pole/f6wccec?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

Before you get started:

Hi.

This is a draft of a novel I've been puttering with for a long time. I welcome your feedback, applause, mockery, so forth. I'll be posting new sections on a regular basis.

As we go forward, keep an eye on this post: I'll edit this intro with any news or changes.

Last edit: July 28 2019

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It starts in space. Dark, and cold, and silent. The stars do not twinkle. Their pinprick burns make your eyes throb, until your helmet dims them. You’re tilting now, and this is the moment you realize you are standing on nothing. You take in a sharp, deep breath, the air cold and rich with oxygen. Your head spins, and then you feel the nudge of tiny jets counteracting your flailing.

A deep red glow forms below you. You can only crane your head so far forward.

“Mars,” says the voice, a deep familiar baritone that rumbles in your head and vibrates your whole body.

The red glow is brighter now, brighter, a glowing arc that moves up (no, you’re rotating down) to fill your entire field of vision. Suddenly, you realize you’re seeing seas of lava, black dots here and there, the surface of an entire planet roiling and shimmering.

“The Noachian Era—Mars's Age of Fire—lasted over half a billion years,” the voice tells you. The surface begins to cool, the fierce red that made your eyes ache fading. Meteorites splash down, small and large, and the planet twinkles and glows as they plunge and strike. Volcanoes begin to build here and there, and you come in closer to see one in particular. Olympus Mons, still young, still small. The long millennia speed by, and you watch the volcano pump out ash and fire, the lava spreading out to cover a vast cone the size of Arizona. The ash settles out, and a haze builds over the planet. In the haze, mists and then clouds begin to form. You dip down into the haze, and suddenly you can hear and feel the dark deep purr of the mountain. The deep blue sky darkens with thunderclouds twenty miles high. You hear the winds whistle past, and the pelting of long rain, and the crack of thunder as lightning claws the ground.

You pull back up now, to see the volcano quieting. You see the white cap of the young volcano, the brown sand beneath it, and the deep blue sea that covers a third of the planet. You feel a pulse, the planet’s magnetic field churning away beneath all of this, and as you float up you can see the field strobing around the planet’s atmosphere. A vast body rolls past us, tugging you in its wake, and strikes the planet’s southern hemisphere. A flash of light, an incomprehensible spout of the planet’s molten guts, and the oceans boil away into a muddy grey haze. Slowly, the haze whitens, the glow of the strike fading, and as the clouds dissipate we see the oceans return to the surface. But the strobing hum of the magnetic field has been silenced.

"This the Utopia Plains strike, 3.9 billion years ago," says the voice quietly. "That asteroid just struck the mantle of Mars, warming it, and disrupting the currents that moved liquid iron through the planet's interior. Mars isn't generating a magnetic field anymore. And that means what you are about to see... is doomed."

I have a few ideas I'm mulling for my next project. Wanted to get your opinions. What would you be most interested in? No guarantees. This isn't a democracy! Clean your room!

1. Making a novella or novel out of this story. It's a little out there.

2. A sequel to Acadia.

3. Short fiction set in the Acadia universe.

4. A retelling of Gilgamesh. It's a surprisingly deep and emotionally resonant myth, but not super-marketable.

5. A story about a Cold War confrontation over a stone-age Mars, but I'm afraid it overlaps too much with Harry Turtledove's A World of Difference, which I discovered after writing this.

6. None of the above.

Thanks for checking out the sub for my writing! (Sorry, but some of the older stories here have apparently vanished into a locked subreddit.)

You can also check out the subreddit dedicated to my new book, Acadia, at /r/acadia!

You can preorder the book at this link. Your copy will ship before the public launch on February 17!

Please see the excerpts in the sidebar there. If you like them, please buy the book, which contains all of those excerpts plus another 50,000 free bonus words.

If you'd like to see other outposts of my online empire, please check out:

• /r/acadia
• /r/romesweetrome
• www.prufrock451.com

Again, thank you.