Nascent and perhaps never to be finished, but relevant with respect to Too Human was a project I played with a couple of years back reimagining Norse mythology through a sci-fi lense. It was begun as a project for NaNoWriMo. I figured that aping Norse mythology might make it easier to write and more likely to finish, but I got caught up in research and world building and never quite came up with a story path that I was comfortable with, partly because I was certain I didn't want to tell a Ragnarok account and partly because with all the world building I was more interested in finding some sort of exploratory reason to wander throughout the concept, but I'll come back to that.

The only piece that I actually "finished" is the brief "future Wikipedia page" Creation Myth, which I never could decide if it was more fitting as introduction or appendix to a novel. It sets things up pretty simply as a norse-influenced colonization effort, admittedly similar to the backstory of Pern amongst other works. The general idea was that with a whole solar system to play with each of the worlds of Norse mythology gets its own planet. Ymir, the great giant, is the colony ship and Audhumla (Ymir's cow) it's mind vault and gene bank. I believe the idea was that the old frost giants were the cryo-stasis "old crew" of the ship and the new gods the rebellious first restorations/creations of Ymir's mind vault.

One of my favorite conceptions of the project was the use of Yggdrasil, the great world tree, as a solar system spanning space elevator complex, "rooted" in the outer planets and asteroid fields (drawing materials from them) and "grown" towards the solar system's sun to collect energy. I'm not the first to play with the idea of a system wide mesh connecting planets, running energy and moving people and materials and energy, but I find it a very fitting use for Norse mythology's tree that binds the worlds.

The closest I came near to a story to tell within this framework was the ascendance of a lowly "power engineer" to, potentially, godhood. The idea was that some service man from Midgaard (an earth-like planet I figured might have, say, 1950s-ish level of technology, with the threat of Ragnarok an interesting stand-in for the Cold War) that worked on the Yggdrasil lines accidentally discovers or is lead to the Bifrost (rainbow) bridge of Yggdrasil between Midgaard and Asgard. From there use excuses to get him to visit the other worlds and their crazy denizens (I figured things like elves made cool sense as genetically engineered adaptations to other planetary environments). I think my goal was to subvert the Ragnarok story by having this engineer, using even just his "rudimentary" knowledge of the stuff, break into the aesir and fix a few inherent engineering flaws (in perhaps Audhumla) that led to a ridiculous Ragnarok cycle.

That's about all that I can recall off the top of my head and in skimming my notes on the subject, tis the passing of time and it's unfortunate I didn't post more of the meta-plan at the time. As a final bonus I refound The Bingo Hall Murders, or Beware, Old Lady! while looking through my archives for this post and thought it fun enough to warrant a mention.