A while back, a little more than a year ago, actually, I started accreting the makings of a story set on Venus. I generally let ideas lie unmolested in the dark recesses of my mind, fermenting at their own pace until they decide they are ripe for a story. Sometime over the last few days--spurred on by my time at Apollocon, no doubt--something clicked and the relevant pieces fell into place. Suddenly, I had a clear story outline in my head.
Which means, more or less, that all the Venus research I've been putting off has suddenly become my obsession. It didn't take too long to figure out that much of the content of Venus II is way over my head. There's still useful information I can wrap my feeble intellect around, fortunately, and the interactive Quicktime Venus globe that comes on the accompanying CD-Rom is fun to play with. Much to my relief, The Planet Venus has proven to be much more my speed, and I'm finding much of the factual detail about the planet that I need to make my story seem real-like and stuff. And for the really obsessed planetary science enthusiast, I can't recommend the NASA Astrophysics Data System abstract service highly enough. Most of the entries are, naturally enough, merely abstracts of articles, but there are some full-blown journal articles archived on the site, or links to online articles on other sites. Some Russian research is even translated. I've been treating myself over the past couple of days to page-turning articles such as Implications of preliminary Vega balloon results for the Venus atmosphere dynamics" and "Thermal structure of the Venus atmosphere in the middle cloud layer." And I'm not being facetious--this stuff is interesting.
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