Sci-Fi Too Dense?

Sanity(?) Among the Nutso

With the Prez campaign going the way it is... at least from The Right... the "celebrity" angle with Britney and Paris, the "Tire Pressure Gauge," gambit, etc., it seems a moment for something completely different.

A personal admission, confession, whatever... One of my hobbies is writing science fiction. As we said in the good old days (see below), "far out." In this case way far out, as in the other side of our galaxy.

In this instance I am trying to describe something really big. I mean BIG. It's a writing challenge to do that and not use "vast, gigantic, immense, humongous" et al over and over.

So my questions to you, occasional reader, are (1.) Do you get the sense of "really big" from this, and (2.) Is this little sketch even comprehensible (a.) ... if you are a sci-fi fan, or (b.) if you are not.

Here 'tis:

Depot

Circling a quiet white dwarf in a leisurely orbit of 30 parsecs radius a collection of Satan’s pirate booty occupied several billion cubic kilometers of space in an orderly, linear entrainment. Ingots of pure metals, hundreds of kilometers long, extruded from refineries processing suspended mountains of ores and scrap that looked like nothing so much as vast floating slag heaps. The surplus energies of the purification processes blasted into the surrounding space as thundering infrareds and screeching ultraviolets.

Evenly spaced along the arc of orbiting mass were planetoid-sized spheres of water, like luminescent pearls refracting the spectra of the distant white star and shards of radiation from the metal refineries. Inside the spheres thousands of processing devices swam like microbes on cilia thrust, filtering out organic and inorganic debris, leaving trails of ultra-pure water. Outside the spheres glimmered force field-augmented films restraining molecules of water from escaping into space. Occasionally one of the filtering devices punched through the surface tension and the restraining films to regurgitate its compacted debris into waiting container ships.

Far along the orbital path, both fore and aft of the salvage process were ten-thousand-meter-long space dry docks, manufacturing fighting and container ships for Satan’s galaxy eating squadrons. Elemental ingots were alloyed within the dry docks and stretched into frames and skins of the outsized vessels. Weapons and drives, navigational and computational skeins were woven from semi- and super-conducting refabrications of the refined raw materials. The limitless fleets of Satan grew in consolidation depots like this one scattered over the expanding perimeters of its conquest.

White dwarf (What did you expect?)

You are very patient. If you care to comment, just do it. Good, bad, indifferent, bemused, confused... whatever.

Be well and prosper.