'Fate Has Ordained' Retrospect · 5:41pm Nov 25th, 2023
Another day, another pony fic retrospect. Honestly? Not as much to say this time around. I'm pleasantly surprised it rocketed to my most popular fic with a whopping 300 views and 30 ratings (If only it made feature box, oh well, maybe next time.) Personally I'd prefer 'Frozen Voyage' get a little more love, check that one out if you haven't already.
So. The Safire memo. Way back in ye olde days of 1969, the United States became the first to drop people on the surface of the Moon, we all know the story. Thing is, despite all the preparations and testing and planning, there was still the off chance something could go wrong, perhaps catastrophically. This was new ground, nobody quite knew what was going to happen. As a precaution, William 'Bill' Safire drafted a memo to President Nixon containing primarily a speech honoring the lives and sacrifices of the astronauts with some hopeful words for humanity, as well as some brief instructions on what to do next.
Thankfully that never happened. It's hard to imagine how different things would be now if it did. The memo contains the questionable inference of NASA cutting off communication with the astronauts, which would leave them completely alone with nobody to talk to but themselves and the knowledge that they are about to slowly suffocate to death.
After being reminded of the memo's existence a few months back I was struck with inspiration to do my own pony-themed take on it. I burned through most of it, took a long break, and then powered through the rest in time for Halloween. As mentioned in the author's notes, it's self edited, so there's some roughness around the edges, but I think it came together pretty well. (Besides finding out the hard way I had switched a character's gender mid-story, that was an embarrassing revelation.) The only thing I feel deserves comment is the speech at the end. The intent from the beginning was to parody it. Word for word at first, then twisting it to make it more unique. It required a little discipline to not think too hard about the fact I was ponifying a real speech (although does it count if it was never actually read?), and I feel if I reread the end result I still wouldn't be satisfied, but I believe it served its purpose quite well.
Beyond that I haven't much to say, it's a shorter fic so this blog will naturally be shorter as well. Only other thing I feel is worth mentioning is that I had originally intended to have the astronauts get out of the lander and try to fix the problem only to find out they couldn't. While doing some research though, I found out the Lunar Module engine was meant to be so simple and straightforward, that if it didn't work there wouldn't be anything they could do to fix it. Thank you reality for doing my job for me.
No telling on when I'll put pen to paper again, but I intend to continue writing horse words. Till then, I'll see you!
frozen voyage is so good, cant believe it almost didn't even get 10 votes