the Kora borehole and fiction
The Kora superdeep borehole is the stuff of the disasterously bad disaster movies that I so love to watch. Between 1970 and 1989, Soviet scientists decided to see how deep they could drill into the Earth. In the end, they created a hole 12,262 metres deep and 23 cm in diameter.
I’m sure there’s a movie, either made or in production or tucked away in someone’s drawer, lost to the world, about the reckless older scientist who demands to keep drilling for the advancement of his own research; the young acolyte who realizes his mentor is indeed reckless and that disaster is about to befall the planet and tries to stop him; and the Earth-ending disaster that is only narrowly averted by heroic actions and a change of heart from the older scientist.
But that movie is something for another day. The reason I’ve brought it up is that the Kora borehole reminds me of something else as well: the difficulties of drilling deep. I don’t know what problems the drilling team encountered during their 20 year project, but I’m sure there were some.
So how does this relate to fiction? I have stories that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to write. I have stories and scenes and the outlines of ideas that come from the dark corners of my imagination. And one of the things I’ve learned is that my imagination has some dark corners indeed.
So what can I do with these dark stories? There is a part of me that doesn’t want to write them down, to take them from being unformed figments of my imagination to the reality of being words on paper. There is a part of me, I’ll admit, that doesn’t want to admit that my imagination can be as dark as my imagination has demonstrated it can be. And I’m not entirely sure of what to do.
But I suspect I know what will happen. I will at some point write them down, and I might then try to find a place to send them. I suspect that I am not alone in this exploration of the dark corners of imagination, and I suspect that with a bit of poking around, I’ll be able to find a group with whom I can share these stories. And we’ll just have to go from there.
multijimbo 
I married a friendly, smiling, sweet, polite British writer. I read his novels before I married him, and some are so disturbing, from the dark actions his character perform, that I couldn’t read them before bedtime. They were also excellent.
Even Harry Potter novels have dark content. Don’t be afraid to be dark, yourself. Use a pen name, if you don’t want your family to look at you funny. But write your demons. I won’t read them before bedtime, but I’ll read them.
[…] on from the Kora borehole and fiction, and looking back on some of the (many) half finished stories littering (both literally and […]
the origins of a quest for the scientifically accurate disaster movie 1 | multijimbo said this on 22 July 2017 at 16:08 |