All-Patron Reward (May): Stuff I'm NOT Doing, and Why #1

This is the first in a short series of posts describing stories that I *was* working on at one point, and did more or less work on, but that ultimately aren't going to be finished or published, and explaining why that won't happen -- and what I still might use, or have used, from them!

Stuff I'm Not Doing 1: The Juggernaut Trilogy

Origin/Description

In the late 1970s, I started writing a series of three novels centering around The Juggernaut, a cybernetic supertank. While I encountered Steve Jackson Games' OGRE shortly after I began work on it, I hadn't realized how thoroughly covered this ground was at the time (Keith Laumer having invented the Bolo automated war machine in about 1960). 

Volume 1: The Juggernaut

I developed a sociopolitical background for the series (hopelessly naïve and simplistic by my own current standards, meaning cringeworthy from pretty much any point of view), where the main world powers were the NAA (North American Alliance, which was a combination of the USA, Canada, and Mexico, with some allied states) and the Mossovs (the Moslem-Soviet Coalition, result of an unexpected synergy/mutation of the two conflicting sets of beliefs on the intersecting borders of the USSR and the various Islamic countries. The Juggernaut was a last-ditch superweapon built by the Mossovs, an attempt to make something so ridiculously unstoppable that it would be itself sufficient to bring the NAA to its knees, or at least to the bargaining table with more likelihood of useful concessions. 

At first it seemed to work – the Juggernaut ripped through every force sent to stop it and survived even massive bombardment, demonstrating an ability to learn and adapt to tactics that surprised even its creators, as well as an extensive self-repair capability. It thundered almost unimpeded through the Alaskan Line, rumbled its titanic way down the coast, and then cut a swath of destruction across the continental US, heading straight for Washington, DC before being stopped by a desperation tactic that essentially managed to channel an EMP straight down into its core through its sensor mast. The almost indestructible thing was eventually dragged to a custom-made barge and then sunk in the deep ocean.

But it wasn't quite dead.

Volume 2: The Juggernaut Returns

The Juggernaut awakened, twenty thousand feet beneath the sea, and began rebuilding itself – improving on its own capabilities – to carry out its mission. Unfortunately, the programming for the mission had become corrupted by the EMP, and instead of limiting its hostility to the NAA, it now believed the entire human species was the enemy. When it emerged again, almost fifty years later, it was into a world which was at relative peace, with nothing like the immense military forces that had existed before, and so it was even less impeded then previously. Ultimately, it was stopped only when confronted by a single person that it recognized as being the same person – apparently unchanged – as the one that had taken it down the first time. A conversation ensued in which the Juggernaut was led to analyze its own origin and orders and recognize the inherent contradiction in the concept of a bunch of human beings creating something to kill them all. It came to the conclusion that its proper function was to destroy threats to humanity… and that it was, itself, a potential threat. This time it deliberately sank itself, to the bottom of the Marianas Trench; out of reach of any ordinary human efforts, but still able to function.

Volume 3: The Forgotten Weapon

I did very little writing on this one, as I had started other stories which were demanding more of my time. The basic outline I had of it was that many centuries later, humanity's explorations into the universe have brought it into contact with many other species. Eventually they encounter a hostile alien force, the Aranochians, of such power that it is defeating all the other forces it encounters, both human and allied alien. The humans put up a tremendous defense but they are outnumbered and their technology is not quite the equal of their opposition. Still, their defense is sufficiently annoying that the Aranochians decide to cut off the serpent's head and send a major assault force driving straight towards Earth (rather like the Minbari forces in Babylon 5's backstory). Humanity puts up a desperate last stand but appear to be absolutely doomed…

… when a tremendous bulge appears in the Pacific Ocean, as something gargantuan is rising to the surface. 

The Juggernaut, vastly larger than it began, rises above the planet – having spent all the centuries monitoring scientific progress and upgrading itself, using the resources available in the Trench – and proceeds to start blasting its unstoppable way through the Aranochian assault forces. Though the Aranochians do have weapons capable of damaging the Juggernaut, it is so much larger and inexplicably more powerful than anything they have ever encountered that they are forced to withdraw in consternation. The Earth is saved… for now.

Why I'm Not Doing It (and What I'll Steal From It)

The "why" is probably pretty obvious. Not only was the sociopolitical concept weak and politically clumsy at best, it's totally outdated now. The USSR collapsed under its own weight a bit more than ten years after I started working on Juggernaut. It was a pretty simplistic set of stories, with a lot of clichés at the heart of the works that would be really difficult to make work now; heck, the "lone man confronts supertank" was also already done by Keith Laumer, though I didn't read that story until a couple decades later. It doesn't fit anywhere in any of my other writing universes, either, so there's no particular reason to try to salvage it. The Juggernaut will remain submerged in the deep sea of what could have been.

A few elements of Juggernaut have survived, however. As the Juggernaut was required by the nature of the plot to be able to survive anything, up to and including nuclear blasts, without being utterly destroyed, I had to devise a material that just might manage that feat. Steve Jackson had created "Biphase Carbide" (BPC) armor. I needed something of my own, and what I created was Coherent Quark Composite (CQC), a carefully engineered interconnected latticework of Quarks held in place by the strong nuclear force. A physicist friend of mine rather liked the idea and said that it was one of the most convincing ideas for the classic "unobtainium" he'd ever seen. So many years later, when I was trying to figure out what a nigh-omnipotent supercomputer might make things out of, I remembered the Juggernaut… and The Arena inherited its armor.

A few other things survived. The immortal super-agent that defeated the Juggernaut twice – once with a weapon, once with words – was the first attempt to depict the character that I originally just called TIM (for The Immortal Man) and eventually became the legendary Eternal King of Atlantaea, Torline. The Aranochians, classic tentacled monstrosities, had their basic appearance preserved and reused in my Demons of the Past trilogy, as the Mydrwyll.

The Juggernaut itself, however, is not to be. But still sometimes I, personally, remember the image I had of the Forgotten Weapon emerging from the ocean, centuries after it vanished, and feel the chill of awe I had when first I thought of that scene…