Bright and Distant Future

Tags

Background, Fused, Sci-Fi, Short stories

From the perspective of its passengers, the shuttle platform drifts serenely, the universe rotating gently around it. From a purely physical perspective in the local reference frame of Earth’s centre of mass, it orbits at hundreds of kilometres an hour, adding even more speed to that in order to switch to a more distant orbit, precisely timed to draw near to – but not to intercept – another hurtling space object.

The ship, which comes into view like a leviathan from the deep as the shuttle rotates, shines silver in the light of the Sun, eight light-minutes away and radiating into space the energy that gives life to Earth and powers the civilisation upon it. The watchers let out their breaths in a collective sigh of amazement and awe, even those who have seen it before. From their angle, it faces to their left, a vast and vertical gently conical disc with four flattish domes and a stubby spire protruding from the back of it, a bulge at the tip the mighty engine assembly that will one day propel it into outer space on a long journey between the stars. Supposedly, the short fins around the engines are there to help radiate excess heat, but everyone knows they’re more aesthetic than anything else. This monumental, colossal project has taken the devoted attention of the entire Solar System for a human lifetime, and every care has been lavished upon it. Books have been written about it; countless dreams are dreamt about it. For this is the eternal it: a quest into the unknown, seeking a brave new world with no guarantee that the explorers or their descendants will ever come home again. And despite the dangers of a one-way mission through the blackness of space, even with a target precisely identified at its end, more than ten times the number of people the mighty ship can support have applied to travel aboard it. Selection processes have been employed to whittle them down, taking only the brightest and the best in their respective fields, and those with the psychological makeup to help them enjoy, rather than grow to resent, the home that will be theirs for the rest of their lives. From the talented engineer to the optimistic and willing street sweeper, every place on the ship has been assessed and filled.

For the first generation, the ship will have a command crew, the ship’s computer programmed to respond to the nanites in their blood. Augmented in order to interact and interface with it most effectively, the command crew will guide their miniature world through the first years of its mission, reacting flexibly to problems as they arise while the governmental system that will ultimately take over from them grows into maturity. Even if the small number of crew wished to hold onto power, they wouldn’t be able. Too small to form a viable gene pool amongst themselves, their descendants’ stock of nanites will be diluted by outbreeding, giving no-one preferential access to or control over the ship that will bear them onwards for generations more. Only occasionally will chance recombination throw up an individual the ship will recognise as a valid crewmember, a sort of final safeguard in case the carefully-framed society were to somehow collapse. It’s this command crew who look out over their new home now.

“She’s beautiful,” the captain observes on a gentle sigh. “I thought I’d get over it, but I never do.”

They all know the magnitude of the task before them, and they embrace it. In a week, they will board the mighty ship for the last time, and never again leave. In six months, the ship itself will leave, boosting its speed with a slingshot course out of the Solar System and accelerating. The gently conical disc at the front will come into its own then: a vast ramscoop, further augmented by an electromagnetic field, that will draw fuel from the depths of space itself to power the ship’s primary and backup fusion reactors. Travelling between the stars, in a sense the tiny ship will carry its own with it, generating light and heat and power through the same processes that drive the sun itself.

There are a thousand million things that could go wrong on their journey, particularly during the tiny fraction of it the crew will live for, when everything is new and nothing entirely tested, because there are no adequate tests for a generations-long mission save the mission itself. Yet, as they gaze at their future hanging in space before them, it is not fear, but awe and honour that they feel at bearing this responsibility and taking humanity to the distant stars.

Five-Dimensional Fantasy

Tags

Background, Books, Fantastic Multiverse

Or more dimensions, but I need at least five. (Various different real theories and hypotheses about the nature of the real universe also posit a varying number of extra dimensions. Which I accidentally typed dimensino, which should totally be some sort of ultra-weird fundamental particle that transcends the familiar boundaries of space-time. But I digress. Real theories tend to require a rather different number of extra dimensions than just one. They’re also a bit too complicated for a blog post I can write in the space of an evening. Maybe when I have more time: I’d like to understand a bit more about that area myself, and if I do the studying I might as well share it!)

As the header for this blog indicates, everything I write takes place within a kind of overarching structure. A multiverse, if you will. By definition, all things are contained within it: every possibility, however minuscule, is realised… somewhere. (Also every crossover, however ridiculous.) Space-time of course makes up the familiar four dimensions, and then I need at least one more coordinate.

You’re unlikely to ever see it. The existence or non-existence of the greater multiverse outside the bounds of whichever setting I’m writing in is usually about as relevant to it as the precise mass of a Sun-like star on the opposite side of the galaxy is to us. Not impossible to notice, under the exact correct conditions, but highly unlikely. Nonetheless, it exists, if only in my mind, and I might as well let a little of it out now and again.

Thus: welcome to the Void! This non-space, this place that is not a place, this non-time outside of time, is what you get between an infinite number of things that coexist. It is, and it is not. It isn’t, except that it is. It’s unreal, and yet…

In other words, it’s pretty much accidentally designed to either (a) make your brain bleed, or (b) make you decide I’m an idiot. The concise, inaccurate version is this: all realities operate according to the familiar four-dimensional laws of space and time. The Void is that strange “place” where none of that applies. It’s formless, save where form is applied and maintained by the power of the mind, a sort of global imagination, if you will. It has effects in reality, or perhaps it doesn’t, or both are true, from a certain point of view.

And in the Void, there are Powers. I generally divide them into ten, but you could break them up into one, or two, or twelve, or none, or infinity. From a certain point of view. Each Power might be seen as an ultimate quality, or an ideal, or a motive force. Each Power might be a person taken to an extreme. In each person you can find the influence of every Power, because those are the conflicting forces within every living being. Are they there? Aren’t they? From a certain point of view…

The Powers command Travellers, or maybe they don’t: people who by accident or design stumble from one universe to the next, changing things as they go. But of course this happens, because when anything that is possible must happen somewhere by definition, then at some point it will, and has, and shall have. Was it deliberate action? Or an accident? Or both… from a certain point of view?

Is this stuff canon? Well… by my own definition, not really! A couple of little bits are, here and there, and when the correct books are out I challenge you to spot them, but by and large, this framework upon which I hang my metaphorical hat and build all manner of bizarre houses has no clear appearance in that-which-is-published and is therefore, at best, semi-canon. Take it with a grain of salt as big as your head: my word is that of a very fallible god whose mind changes as frequently as the British weather. (That said, the overarching multiverse has stood the test of time admirably. Possibly because the Void is timeless… or not.)

P.S. Sorry about the lack of the Fused! There are currently only three paragraphs in the next chapter right now, so I really couldn’t post it…

Getting Back Aboard

Tags

Background, Books, Canon, Fused, Sci-Fi

It’s been a while since I was last aboard the Ship. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I figured I’d go over how it all goes together, and then I figured I might as well share it with you guys. Bits of it, anyway!

Gods and Demons in Before the Sun Fades

Tags

Background, Before the Sun Fades, Canon, Fantasy

The world of Before the Sun Fades is a complicated place, filled with strange beings of all sorts. In one country, one religion may be followed; in another, something completely different — and yet, as Rakariel is all too aware, all are true. The key is belief: belief grants power; worship feeds a continual influx of power that might have been the worshipper’s, had they not gifted it to those they worshipped. Humans, individually, may be spiritually relatively weak in terms of the power they can exert unaided — but in concert, the power they can grant is great indeed.

The more who believe in any given god, the greater that god’s power becomes. Indeed, in the end, it can alter almost anything. Lower-rank gods often take imposing physical forms to intervene in world events, channelling their spiritual power through a piece of the material realm. Where belief is strong, these avatars are strong, but where it is weak, they quickly fade away.

In a religious war, the gods may do battle, either on their own plane of being or joining forces with their followers on the material plane. However, most of the time they prefer to posture, attempting to force one another to back down through manipulation rather than outright violence. The death of a god is a rare event that sends ripples through the surrounding pantheons: the domain of the god must be claimed swiftly, much of its power likely already absorbed by the enemy that slew it. Any afterlife depending on such a god, if not absorbed by the killer, begins to fade and weaken.

Afterlives, where present, depend on the god and pantheon. A god may devote part of its energy to maintaining a spiritual realm that its followers may inhabit after their physical death. These realms are entirely dependent on the whim of the god or gods creating them, as is the state of the spirits residing within. Gods may even consume their afterlives’ resident spirits for a boost in power, although this practice is little-known and less spoken of.

If freed from an afterlife, or never permitted to enter one, a human spirit will grow weaker over time until it fades away to nothing. Some enter the cycle of reincarnation, divesting themselves of the majority of their conscious identity in order to live again in the physical realm. This is a somewhat dangerous task if not aided by a god or other being of spiritual power, as a developing body without a fully-fledged spirit is a tempting target, and is likely to be protected by the deities of the parents. Other spirits remain as wraiths: some benevolent and often granted enough strength to continue their existence by those who know of them; others as mad, dangerous beings that suck the life from any unfortunate enough to enter their domain. Any spirit may become a god; any god may become a spirit, depending on the amount of strength they are able to obtain.

Demons, despite the difference in perception, are actually entirely identical to gods. Some demons, such as that fought by Rakariel in her past, are in fact fallen gods whose people were conquered and whose belief system was subdued. These angry, dangerous remnants are made even worse by the fact that many then continue to believe in the new religion’s propaganda of their negative forms, warping their justifiable anger at their usurpation into something truly evil. Some gods have not only created their own nemeses this way, but even on rare occasion been struck down by them. While it is possible to redeem any “fallen” god, it is not an easy task, for either an entire populace must be convinced to believe better of them while they are yet beings of horror, or else their nature must be altered swiftly using a massive focus of power.

Ashi and Arien

Tags

Ashi & Arien, Background, Characters, Fantasy

As promised, an actual character post! Here are two of my older ones… though not, I think, as old as Wildcat. (Arien possibly gives her a run for her money, but I think she’s older.) They live in the same universe as Rakariel of Before the Sun Fades, a world of magic, gods, and destinies.

Arien and Ashi are not your usual travelling companions. For a start, one of them’s a demigod, and the other is technically dead. One is on the run from his own powers and those bent on killing or using him; the other is searching for the person or people who slaughtered her monastic warrior order. One can’t stand to lose one of the few friends he has; one resents the unintended magic that keeps her something resembling alive.

It was luck that saw Ashi escape the death of her people. Hiring their skills out to those they judged to be on the side of good was the way that they supported their lives in the remote mountain environment that was their home. Ashi was away when the attack happened, and returned home weeks later to find nothing but carnage. She set out to discover who or what had been behind it, as, one by one, other survivors like her who were scattered across the lands were picked off.

To support herself along the way, she continued to hire out her skills, often in places and over matters that would once have been beneath her notice. In a small country town, she was paid to act as a member of the local watch and help solve the mystery of several disappearances. Questioned by her when he passed through, Arien stopped there to lend his skills as a ranger to her cause — and it was good that he did. The disappearances were part of a complex trap, one set to lure in and kill the last of the Daienne — and it succeeded.

Arien was there at her death. Helpless to save her, he couldn’t stand to lose someone he’d come to call a friend. In that dire situation, his dormant, untrained powers awoke, performing his will. Moments before her spirit was lost to the mortal realm forever, it was bound to her broken body, and to him.

Her wounds healed by his power, Ashi breathes and eats and walks the mortal world, but as long as she is bound to Arien, she can neither die nor truly live. She cannot go too far from him, and when she is hurt, his strength is drained to heal her. Unless the clumsy bond created by Arien’s uncontrolled power can be remade, she will never again be independent of him.

Spaceship Design

Tags

Art, Background, Books, Fused, Reasoning, Sci-Fi, Writing process

Returning to the subject of The Fused, my Ship hasn’t yet been fully drawn, but I thought I’d spare a moment or five to talk about Ship design. (It actually has a name, somewhere. Nobody remembers it, though, except probably the Ship itself.)

When I started out writing The Fused, I had a small collection of images lifted directly from a dream I had. The Ship itself wasn’t so much something that was fully envisaged, as simply the location where all the events took place: in effect, Lindsi’s world. As a result, over the course of writing the story, it’s been through a few morphs before settling into this final shape. (I’m still nailing down a couple of the proportions, but basically, the shape is solid.)

In the first vague conception, the Ship was much more stereotypical: vaguely ovoid, with the four Habitat Domes embedded along the sides, the pointier end pointed forwards and engines set into the rear. Main Corridor 1 was, under this conception, almost literally the backbone of the Ship. Then I started to think about it, and this presented a few problems.

• Either some of the Domes had no view of space (and I’ve already specified that they all do), or the Ship needed gravity of different orientations in different locations.
• Differently oriented gravity would make for some very confusing junctions.
• The preferential “up” for the core of the Ship was unrelated to anything else, whether the gravity fields changed with location or not. It would be an entirely arbitrary choice.

Deciding that the Ship’s designers hadn’t wanted to faff about with multi-directional gravity, I then needed all the Domes to, essentially, be on a plane, or they wouldn’t all get to see the stars. The Ship went through a very brief period of being imagined as sort of stingray-shaped. However, that again gave it an entirely arbitrary choice of “up”, and simply didn’t seem like the most simple or resource-light solution given that it was built in space, and thus in freefall.

At around that point, I also realised that this Ship needed fuel. It’s a generations-long mission with no guarantee that its destination will be viable (it does have a destination, although again, people aboard don’t really know that), and while I did give it fusion power, even fusion isn’t free. You get through a lot of hydrogen that way… and everything on the Ship had to depend on the main fusion reactor, plus its auxiliaries. Everything. Up to and including any atomic synthesis systems they might have for creating the heavier elements that their fusion reactor won’t give them. With the best will in the world, the Ship will not be a closed system. They lose energy (radiatively, in the visible and the infrared), and they lose matter both when they use the attitude thrusters or the powerful main drive (used for accelerating and decelerating to/from interstellar travel speeds, which are still a lot less than the speed of light), and when they simply throw away waste they can’t recycle any more. Simply in order to balance the mass-energy equation (and therefore avoid carrying an entire journey’s worth of fuel), the Ship needed some kind of matter intake.

Space is big, and it’s pretty empty. But it isn’t entirely empty. There’s debris and things floating around out there, remnants of all kinds of past events… but more than anything else, there’s an extremely tenuous interstellar gas and dust: mostly hydrogen, but with other elements mixed in. The easiest thing by far to do would be to simply slurp up the interstellar medium and feed it to the reactor. And to do that, you need a ramscoop. A big one. (Essentially, a large funnel.)

So suddenly, all envisionings of the Ship needed to include a ramscoop. Which, mounted on the front of either of the two designs, began yet again to look a bit silly… and to be a decided waste of construction materials. The back of the scoop was just so much wasted space.

And at that point, it occurred to me that all I needed to do was make the ramscoop bigger. The Ship didn’t need to be going “forwards” by its own internal gravity, there’s no preferred orientation in space except that your main thrust has to point in the direction opposite the one you want to move. If I made the ramscoop big enough, it could actually be almost the entire body of the Ship, with the Habitat Domes all safely on the back of it — where they’d have an excellent view of the stars, be protected from forward radiation by layers upon layers of spaceship, and need no gravitational alteration at all. The main reactor (and auxiliary reactors) and main engine just needed a mounting, and since the Ship now has to fly “down”, in the direction the mouth of the ramscoop points, the logical answer seemed to be to stick a spire in the middle of it, essentially a big stick with the engine and reactor at the top. This kept the engine some distance away from the Domes in case anything went wrong, and had the double bonus of looking pretty and incorporating the concept of a spire, which appeared in my dream as inside the Habitat Dome and was originally shelved as it simply wouldn’t fit very well.

So that’s how the Ship got to the shape it is today. It’s essentially an almost flat cone with a spire at the point, at the top of which is a lump containing the engines and suchlike. The front, or “bottom” given that the artificial gravity points in the direction of flight, is fairly featureless: other than the observation stations on the rim, it’s pretty much impossible to look ahead with the naked eye. A variety of protrusions around the edge house forward-looking sensor arrays, and it’s likely that the Ship also has drones in formation with it, further away so their instruments can get an unimpeded view — without much in the way of friction, anything the Ship deploys needs no thrust to continue moving along with the same speed and course as its parent. The back of the scoop is full of interesting features, most prominently the four domes, like giant bubbles. In the exact centre, the spire on which the engine and reactor are mounted sticks up, another set of whiskery protrusions here monitoring the Ship itself.

And that, as they say, is that. Now to finish drawing the thing, and roughly to scale at that…

The Powers That Be

Tags

Background

Not actually a post about spying. Although if the spies are reading it, they can go get stuffed. (I’m still seriously mad, but this is, after all, a blog intended purely for and about writing.)

No. This is the back-back-backdrop, the space against which the universe pinwheels. This is the space between the space between the stars… and no, that was not a typo. This, in short, is the Void.

It goes by many names, perhaps nearly as many as there are people to name it. It defies description; it can’t be pinned down. It doesn’t exist in normal space, but outside of it. The Void is, if you like, the space between the universes, infinitely large and infinitely small, a place where time and space have no meaning. It’s as real as it is a metaphor, its people are transient and permanent and depart a thousand times without ever really leaving, for without time there’s no such thing as never. It’s a meeting place, a nexus, a convergence. It’s a rest and a refuge, a staging point, eternal and everchanging, shaped only by the mind of the observer — and there are a great many observers.

Shipboard Life in Space

Tags

Ask away!, Background, Books, Fused, Sci-Fi

The Fused (as regular readers no doubt already know!) takes place aboard a generation ship known only as the Ship, a massive spacecraft on a colonising mission, flying endlessly through space over the course of a hundred or more human lifetimes. It’s a complete and almost self-contained little world, taking in its energy by scooping up loose hydrogen from interstellar space, radiating waste heat and a little light, its systems dedicated to the preservation of onboard life. Four habitat domes (officially A, B, C, and D; unofficially named Airion, Brandia, Celestia, and Duras) provide living and recreational space for the colonists and crew, the main body of the ship dedicated to all necessary systems, an immense ramscoop blotting out the forward/’downward’ view, but scattered with its own constellations of running lights and signals, ‘glassed’ ceilings of networked corridors. (They are not, in fact, made of glass.) The ramscoop provides the main structure of the Ship, its entire forward face dedicated to collecting interstellar hydrogen. The domes are positioned around the reverse side, equidistant from one another, and the engine assemblage projects like an immense tower from the centre, midway between them all. For much of its journey, things have worked out more or less as they were originally designed to, and various loose historical definitions of roles aboard the Ship follow below.