Behind The Scenes

• List of nearest stars, but not what is close to them
• SolStation.com allows you to determine which stars are close to a given star - i.e., it is not Sol centric.
• Stars and planetary systems in fiction lets you know how other authors have used the systems.

I was trying to decide where the first interstellar probe would be going in this fiction and also trying to get a handle on a timeline.

Epsilon Eridani has planets, at least as far as we know. Tau Ceti is likely to have asteroid belts. And Epsilon Eridani is about 5.5 ly from Tau Ceti.

As far as a timeline, Project Daedalus proposed 50 years to get to Barnard’s Star (5.9 light years away). And Project Longshot would take 100 years to go to Alpha Centauri, at 4.39 light years. Both craft with technology currently not available.

So the impact on the timeline is that I’m envisioning that the next 100 years or so would see the exploration and development of the Solar system. At some point, the first exploration ships would go out to Alpha Centauri. I’m going to speculate a journey of 20 years. And the first ship would be an asteroid. Note that the production facilities would have to be able to be regeared from time to time to take advantage of discoveries.

In the meantime, other asteroids would be sent out - some with longer flight times. I.e., the one to Tau Ceti would be close to 60 years and the one to Epsilon Eridani would be closer to what, 50 years.

These would be the first generational ships and whole families would be sent - by this I mean adult siblings. In some cases the crew might be from the same station or nationality. In others they would be a hodge-podge.

In some, additional ships would be sent out in 5 year intervals.

After a time, a primitive form of suspended animation would be available, and cordwood crews would be sent as well as the generational crew.

Cloning and nanotech learning would be discovered. Hmm, this could be the basis of one of the experimental asteroid ships.

Title says it all. I got in all of the notes and I now have a good grasp on where some of  the ideas fit and where some do not.

I have several one line story pitches, but no clue as to where to go. I seem to have a detailed culture, economic battle ground, etc in my mind,  but no characters. Hmm, maybe that is what I need, a character in a background.

Or I could do a timeline?

I’ve decided to start using my MacBook Air to do all of my writing.

It goes with me wherever I go and it has shells for me to run my perl scripts, to scp my stuff upto Serialized Science Fiction, etc. I probably will use it differently than most people attempting to write would if they had it.

I need to find out how to use a command line spell tool on it.

Also, in the back of my mind is the thought that the Sol system does not have a slingshot. So to trade with Earth, you need to first travel a short distance to another system.

The implications are huge:

• The Earth could be very isolationist, much like America in the first half of the 21st Century.
• I want a sense of remoteness to build up the development of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.
• There could be three trade factions
  1. Corporate - upspin
  2. Clan - downspin
  3. Government - Earth to nearest slingshot

The real impact is that communication would be on the order of years and not months.

When man first starts exploring other stars, it will take decades to get started. A good story would be the impact of the discovery of slingshots on colonial governments. Where mandates used to be ignored because they were very out of date, they suddenly start becoming very pertinent. If ignored, your replacement might arrive in a few months.

This would force expansion to further sites along the slingshots. Each slingshot would take a rebellious sole further away from Earth. Get far enough away and you might be back in the years. Of course, what happens when you think you are far enough away and the next link takes you back in a loop to the Earth link? :->

Or it might force you to go further down systems which are not connected via the slingshots.

I.e., the first expansion would be out towards nearby systems. The slingshots would not follow those paths. So we would see the development of newer stations with closer ties to the Earth. These would be the corporate traders.

And the earlier expansion could see the rise of the trader clans.

A slingshot is the act of using a Congruency Hole to travel from one system to another.

The twist to a using a slingshot (congruency hole is the technical term and slingshot is the popular usage) is that unlike a jump point, it can take you to two fixed destinations instead of just one.

Each slingshot has two directions, upspin and downspin. By approaching it via the upspin side (whatever that means, I’ll have to flesh it out), your journey will go to system A. If you use the downspin side, your journey will be to system B.

Furthermore, if at system A you then take the downspin cycle, you will end up back at your original destination.

So every time you find a slingshot, you know you have two new systems to explore.

How many slingshots per system?

So a title just came to me, Pandora’s Boxes. I was on my way to bed and realized it wouldn’t keep until the morning.

The premise of the research ships is that they are sent out into space to explore. But the project is secretly funded to conduct dangerous and unethical research. As these floating derelicts are found, you don’t know what to expect. There may be a buried treasure nugget of discovery which will make your fortunes. Or it may be a horrible death which awaits you.

Each one is a Pandora’s box.

So I just re-read the Antares Dawn and Antares Passage by Michael McCollum and to my dismay I realized my idea of having an event disrupt the transit points between systems. Only in the case of Antares, it is a supernova, and in my universe, it would be the work of a civilization.

Oh, I need to also add Rick Cook’s Limbo System as another influence. He writes about the strife that occurs when an FTL civilization with no data on where to go meets a sub-light civilization with all of the navigational data needed.

In fiction, holes in space between two systems are called:

• Gates
  • Jumpgates
  • Stargates
  • Wormgate
• Wormholes
• Portals
• Subspace tunnels
• Boom tubes
• Fold space

In looking through my notes, I see I’ve used the acronym of CH. I scoured my notes trying to figure out what it stood for and found I started calling them slingshots.

I also found that I called the natives Grubbers and at one point Belters.

Okay, a CH is a congruency hole. Unlike a jumpgate, it evidently does not allow instantaneous transit between the two points.

Every explored system has an asteroid belt. Congruency Holes can be captured and used to push ships off at sub-FTL speeds.

There is a clear intent to use time dilation as the hardship that explorers have to endure as they try to make their fortunes. As such, the Congruency Holes are but one of the rates of interstellar travel:

4 different speeds of interstellar travel:

• standard - really slow (crew frozen)
• sub-FTL - time dilation is huge
• slingshot - time dilation is on the order of months
• FTL - no time dilation, but only the Phoenix has it

These two passages from my notes are but a day apart. They clearly show how my understanding of this universe was changing. The sub-FTL concept was no longer tied to the CH (or slingshot as it is now referred to) .

We also see the use of Phoenix as a starship. Cherryh also uses this name - yet another need for differentiation. Hmm, a good tie in would be Phoenix, a whaler. The name didn’t come from Cherryh’s usage, but I can’t prove that right now. For some reason I was thinking of the Morrow Project game, but I could be associating that with Keith Laumer’s short story “The Night Of The Trolls”, which was rewritten as The Stars Must Wait. After a civilization collapses, the hero wakes up from a test of cold sleep technology for starship travel. His ship was called the Prometheus.

In January 2005, we vacationed in Maui. In Lahaina, there is a mall called Whaler’s Village. It has a small museum - the Whalers Village Museum - which provides a pretty bleak overview of a whaler’s life.

I’ve taken notes from that trip and a couple of others. I was struck by how easily we could change a whaling ship to a space ship, a native to a lost colony, etc.

I’m going to tie in a separate story arc, that of generational ships cast out as living research outposts.

I’ll call out some obvious influences on this new universe:

• Time for the Stars, Robert Heinlein - Generational Ships
• Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert Heinlein - Free Trader - clans, matriarchal culture
• Alliance-Union universe, C. J. Cherryh - merchanter families, economic warfare
• Foreigner universe, C. J. Cherryh - stranded FTL ship
• Antares Dawn, Michael McCollum - Disrupted gates and divergent cultural development (Note it looks like I missed Antares Victory being published and I have some further reading to do.)
• The Lost Fleet, Jack Campbell (really John G. Hemry) - Jump gates (Note this work postdates my notes but will predate any real writing)

I’ll try to dig up other influences as I come across them.

And I have to mention that one of the biggest hurdles I have, it is attached to my notebook with a yellow sticky note, is how do I differentiate my story from Cherryh’s Foreigner. (Note I’ve got this same problem with another plot outline, which is in my head, and Wen Spencer’s stranded alien race in the Ukiah Oregon series.)

My story may end up not looking at all like Foreigner, but clearly my notes are directly concerned with it.

It will be fun resolving that and tying my notes to this expose.

I started a webcomic today - Scoundrals on Inner Dialog Workshop. Since I can’t draw, the idea is to use cut and paste head shots and work on dialog. I find dialog hard because of the whole ‘he said’ thing. I did an exercise back in my high school creative writing class where I treated the dialog ‘terms’ as a volleyball game- ‘he parried’, ’she spiked’, etc. It really helped open the process up for me.

I came up with 3 characters and I didn’t have names, instead I had professions. The first is Preacher - he is a killer cricket who happens to be a vampire. I like that his eyes look like a mask. I’ve been doodling him for some time, especially if I’m in meetings. The second is TV chef - he has immaculate hair and an really nice fisherman’s sweater. The third is a hand that comes off of the wall to interact with other characters.

The premise of Scoundrals is that it is a monster world and they are just normal denizens of it. For right now, it is their professions which set them off as Scoundrals. I just don’t know how a TV chef can be considered sleazy. :-> I’m working on it though…

I created what was the start of the cast page and needed some labels. I don’t have names because they are easy, because the character tells me what is their name. I can’t just drop a ‘Jim’ or a ‘Bob’ on them.

The first two were easy to label, I just used their profession. The last was hard. For some reason, I saved the scan in a file called ‘4thfist’. When copying it up to the server, the name came to me, ‘4thhand’. It brings to mind second hand, but goes beyond that. And, as the hand is coming from the panel border, it really is all about Breaking the Fourth Wall.

And in the truck, I happened to catch a cover of The Waitresses “Christmass Wrapping” - it was by Save Ferris.

So, I’m thinking that the TV Chef will be called Ferris. Still have to let it stew for a bit.

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