Your car wants to feel pretty. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This morning’s Monday Challenge is brought to you by my neighbour Kat, who is currently parked on my couch due to being locked out of her apartment this morning.
We got to talking about vehicles* in fiction, as you do at nine AM on a Monday. She mentioned the Impala in Supernatural, which is a character in it’s own right. And I thought of Bella’s truck from Twilight, which had more personality than she did. Vehicles—or other modes of transportation—can take on their own persona. Horses, motorcycles, cars, trucks….basically, any thing that you can use to move your ass from one place to another aside from your own legs can eventually become more than just a thing. More than an assemblage of metal and plastic and fuel and little fuzzy dice and empty gum wrappers. My car is named Marcus. Over the weekend, a friend asked me why, and all I could say was, “Because that’s his name.” Which, of course, is shorthand for, “Because I’m a crazy person.”
Anyway.
The relationship we have with our primary mode of transportation bleeds over into speculative fiction. From evil cars like Stephen King’s Christine to the AI equipped star ship of Andromeda, who actually had a holographic avatar, these things are more that just a means of getting from place to place. And fantasy novels are rife with the notion of intelligent, talking steeds, from horses to dragons.**
Saddle up, word-herders. It’s time to ride into the Monday Challenge! Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to write me a method of transportation that has character. A horse, a car, a monster truck, a sentient rocket ship, anything. Something that is more than an assemblage of its parts, mechanically produced or otherwise.
I’m going to go clean Marcus and tell him I love him.
*She claims not to like cars, but has about a million seasons of Top Gear on her DVD shelf. Hm.
**Though, if I could think and talk for myself, I wouldn’t let some dippy knight sit on me.
Bare Knuckle Writer 