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Hey, space-friends!
I have a novel idea slowly, slowly percolating in my brain: I know who the main character* is but not her name. I know how the setting feels but not its details or mechanics. I know how some of the side-characters are related but not how they influence the story (because "Plot? What plot? We ain't got no 'plots' here, no sir!" is still my main story-failing).
I realized while writing A Star to Steer Her By that I want to write something sci-fi rather than fantasy because it's much, much easier for me to do believable character humor in a futuristic setting. That brings up the question of what level and kind of 'sci' goes into the 'fi'.
In that arbitrary back-brain way, my imagination is dead set on:
A) A group of space-stations/asteroid-stations/closed-planet-side-terraforming-colonies which are in close proximity to each other -- at least regularly (I.E, it may be that the orbital period of the asteroid belt is such that the nearest planet-orbiting space-station is 'close' only every one and a half years; at other times travel is next to impossible This wrinkle isn't nessecary, it's just a possibility -- they could all be moons and satelites of one gas giant, for instance).
B) All of these stations should be closer to each other than they are to earth. A kind of station-solidarity and shared spacer/colonist culture is nessecary to the fragments of character story I have so far.
C) Between 20 and 40 years ago, the colonies rebelled and lost, so they must be 1) self supporting (or they wouldn't have dared rebel) and 2) close enough to get troops to in a reasonable amount of time (otherwise you have that whole 'England is busy and can't cross the Atlantic quick enough, poof, successful revolution' thing going on).
I'm trying to build from those criteria. Of course, it's astronomic distances, and 'near' or 'far' depends on your method of travel.
Sol's asteroid belt, mars, the moons of Jupiter (or some combination thereof) could work for this, but I'd have a lot less wiggle room for my imagination and it would hasten the inevitable day when my world was jossed by reality. :P If I pick something farther away, people won't figure out how wrong I am for years!**
As I write this I keep thinking of all the ways interstellar travel could be integral to the (non-existent) plot, and one of them would work well for Sol -- namely, imagine a colony was formed by sacrifice and hard living, at what was then months or years of travel from the home planet -- and then there was a technological breakthrough that left the original hard-won colony a total backwater, while new garden planets were showered with attention. That could be pretty interesting.
If I can figure out a rough method(s) of travel I can narrow down (or open up) where it takes place and also get a better handle on when. Or, I can figure out where I want it to take place and extrapolate/develop travel tech from there.
Off the top of my head, fictional space-flight seems to fall into three rough categories. If anyone can think of more categories OR really interesting examples, I'd love to hear them! I'm in the 'collecting scraps for the creativity compost' stage, so I want as many inputs as possible.
Wormholes -- travel is near instantaneous, but only between select points. For the purpose of how they affect travel, Mass Effect's relays are constructed wormholes. Not my favorite idea, but I could work with it -- there could be interesting permutations regarding who has control of the jump point, and it would work well into the possible backwater story.
Warp Speed/Hyper Space Ridiculously fast/easy/cheap travel a la Star Trek or Star Wars is unappealing to me. The presumed speed of Mass Effect's more conventional FTL drive (roughly 100-200 x c, I think?) is reasonable for storytelling purposes, but I'm under the impression it breaks several laws of physics***, and my theoretical physics knowledge isnot that good non-existent, so I don't even know where to start coming up with a plausible/entertaining bit of phlebotinum.
Perhaps "FTL and/or fractional c travel that obeys time dilation effects" should be its own category. Here's a handy page on math for sci-fi writers for help figuring that out. :P
Fancier version of conventional tech This pretty much only works if I place the colonies in the Sol system, since it generally assumes that even hitting an integer percentage of c is out of the question. For reference, it took Spirit 7 months to reach Mars.
Did I mention this will be soft-sci-fi, not focused on this stuff at all? It will, but I need to work out at least some framework or my brain will never hear the end of it.
*There will possibly be more than one PoV character because I'm enjoying writing that way, but it started with her.
**Longer, if NASA keeps getting its funding slashed!
***The other methods fly in the face of special relativity, too, but they come with built-in phlebotinum, usually involving travel in extra dimensions (warp drives and Vorkosiverse necklin rods both 'fold' space, iirc, though the latter requires a wormhole which is itself a folded-space tesseracty thing).
I have a novel idea slowly, slowly percolating in my brain: I know who the main character* is but not her name. I know how the setting feels but not its details or mechanics. I know how some of the side-characters are related but not how they influence the story (because "Plot? What plot? We ain't got no 'plots' here, no sir!" is still my main story-failing).
I realized while writing A Star to Steer Her By that I want to write something sci-fi rather than fantasy because it's much, much easier for me to do believable character humor in a futuristic setting. That brings up the question of what level and kind of 'sci' goes into the 'fi'.
In that arbitrary back-brain way, my imagination is dead set on:
A) A group of space-stations/asteroid-stations/closed-planet-side-terraforming-colonies which are in close proximity to each other -- at least regularly (I.E, it may be that the orbital period of the asteroid belt is such that the nearest planet-orbiting space-station is 'close' only every one and a half years; at other times travel is next to impossible This wrinkle isn't nessecary, it's just a possibility -- they could all be moons and satelites of one gas giant, for instance).
B) All of these stations should be closer to each other than they are to earth. A kind of station-solidarity and shared spacer/colonist culture is nessecary to the fragments of character story I have so far.
C) Between 20 and 40 years ago, the colonies rebelled and lost, so they must be 1) self supporting (or they wouldn't have dared rebel) and 2) close enough to get troops to in a reasonable amount of time (otherwise you have that whole 'England is busy and can't cross the Atlantic quick enough, poof, successful revolution' thing going on).
I'm trying to build from those criteria. Of course, it's astronomic distances, and 'near' or 'far' depends on your method of travel.
Sol's asteroid belt, mars, the moons of Jupiter (or some combination thereof) could work for this, but I'd have a lot less wiggle room for my imagination and it would hasten the inevitable day when my world was jossed by reality. :P If I pick something farther away, people won't figure out how wrong I am for years!**
As I write this I keep thinking of all the ways interstellar travel could be integral to the (non-existent) plot, and one of them would work well for Sol -- namely, imagine a colony was formed by sacrifice and hard living, at what was then months or years of travel from the home planet -- and then there was a technological breakthrough that left the original hard-won colony a total backwater, while new garden planets were showered with attention. That could be pretty interesting.
If I can figure out a rough method(s) of travel I can narrow down (or open up) where it takes place and also get a better handle on when. Or, I can figure out where I want it to take place and extrapolate/develop travel tech from there.
Off the top of my head, fictional space-flight seems to fall into three rough categories. If anyone can think of more categories OR really interesting examples, I'd love to hear them! I'm in the 'collecting scraps for the creativity compost' stage, so I want as many inputs as possible.
Wormholes -- travel is near instantaneous, but only between select points. For the purpose of how they affect travel, Mass Effect's relays are constructed wormholes. Not my favorite idea, but I could work with it -- there could be interesting permutations regarding who has control of the jump point, and it would work well into the possible backwater story.
Warp Speed/Hyper Space Ridiculously fast/easy/cheap travel a la Star Trek or Star Wars is unappealing to me. The presumed speed of Mass Effect's more conventional FTL drive (roughly 100-200 x c, I think?) is reasonable for storytelling purposes, but I'm under the impression it breaks several laws of physics***, and my theoretical physics knowledge is
Perhaps "FTL and/or fractional c travel that obeys time dilation effects" should be its own category. Here's a handy page on math for sci-fi writers for help figuring that out. :P
Fancier version of conventional tech This pretty much only works if I place the colonies in the Sol system, since it generally assumes that even hitting an integer percentage of c is out of the question. For reference, it took Spirit 7 months to reach Mars.
Did I mention this will be soft-sci-fi, not focused on this stuff at all? It will, but I need to work out at least some framework or my brain will never hear the end of it.
*There will possibly be more than one PoV character because I'm enjoying writing that way, but it started with her.
**Longer, if NASA keeps getting its funding slashed!
***The other methods fly in the face of special relativity, too, but they come with built-in phlebotinum, usually involving travel in extra dimensions (warp drives and Vorkosiverse necklin rods both 'fold' space, iirc, though the latter requires a wormhole which is itself a folded-space tesseracty thing).
