Space

Is your Sci-Fi Setting Real Enough? Part 2

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Yesterday, I left off encouraging you to improve your world-building by seeing my listicle on the subject. Today, however, I want to continue to drive home a few points.

Individualism in Short Form

Something that I have done, and I have read other authors successfully doing as well, is taking a moment to realize your world on a deeper level in between story beats. What do I mean by this? Well, look at Brandon Sanderson’s “Skyward” series. I will admit I have only read the first book so far, but there in the first book he does what I want to suggest you do. In between the acts, in his three act book, he breaks POV and moves the story to someone else, someone we later find is still connected to the main character, but still a different POV. In this POV we learn several things about the world implicitly and it gives us very real, very human characters outside the head of the main character. It reminds us, “Hey look over here at this other thing that is still happening in this very real world!” Try that!

As I mention in my listicle on world building writing short stories is huge for any world and it is a wonderful way to ensure that this creation of yours feels alive. Why not take a moment and write what it’s like for a planetary senate to convene? Do they all connect to a holo-server and beam themselves to a forum from the sectors over which they preside? Are they all contacted and asked to beam themselves half-way across the planet for a special session?

Caste Struggles

Look at any Sci-Fi setting you adore, Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, Skyward, or insert your Sci-Fi of choice. In all of these you will find a deeper issue behind the epic space battles and existential threats. In Star Wars you have a very traditional economic caste struggle between the rich and powerful elites and the regular everyday citizens. I have not seen it, but I am told that the show “Andor” on Disney+, is a great example of everything I have been talking about. They dive deep into personal motivations while still giving us the epic landscapes and space battles that Star Wars is known for. In Warhammer 40k (limiting the scope for this discussion to just the humans) there is a struggle between the Imperium and Chaos. Humans split into two factions which only serves to highten the tension between Humanity and its impending doom. In Skyward there are the citizens of the undercity, the place where humanity is forced to hide to avoid being bombed into oblivion by an ominous alien threat, and the pilots of the Defiant Defense Force or DDF.

Closing thoughts…

Did I stress you out? Did I give you delusions of grandeur? Or did I inspire you to something you feel is too daunting to tackle? Well, good! Writing a world of Fantastic Speculation is not going to be an easy task and you need to realize that we in order to succeed in this space you have to shoot for the moon and hit the stars.

Go now and realize your grand designs! Write that epic story, pain that epic landscape, or whatever it is you do, but go now and do it! Per Audacia ad astra.

Is your Sci-Fi Setting Real Enough?

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From Star Wars to Warhammer 40k and from Dune to Starship Troopers, something sticks out. Planetary Governments. More often than not, the politics behind the cool sword fights and bureaucracy behind the epic space battles get overlooked. This is because the interior design of a senator’s office is much less attention-grabbing than the trenches of an alien battlefield. Truthfully, however, the inner workings of a political movement and how it infects a populace could be great fodder for a story.

The idea of Sub-genres is what comes up here. Science Fiction, and speculative fiction more broadly, is usually hosted in the same aisles in bookstores. We, as readers and creators in the space, understand there is more nuance than that, however. We understand that some Sci-Fi stories will be about political intrigue on a galactic scale, while others will be war chronicles of fighting men and women doing heroic deeds on their far-flung battlefields. Even still, there are space operas that contain much of both of the aforementioned categories. If you dig down deep enough, however, you will find politics on the battlefields and battles raging in the space senate.

As the author, we get to decide how much of each is shown to the reader and why. That is the balance that I am here to talk about today. If you lack politics, it becomes mindless action page turners with little to no character. If you forget action, your story can get bogged down with speeches and exposition that lose readers. A realistic world has both.

The place where I often roll my eyes the hardest is when a book or franchise says, “Oh yes, this entire planet with billions of people is ruled by one government with no dissent.” That is just a plain lie that we are expected to just accept as readers. It’s a lie that you should avoid trying to feed your readers. How you do that is up to you. If world-building is not your strong suit, then I would definitely check out my other posts about that. Like this one! There is so much more to talk about here, but I am out of time today. Look for part two of this tomorrow. In the meantime, let me know ways you have made your sci-fi worlds more real in the comments below, and subscribe so you never miss a blog.

Interstellar Dragons, Part 1

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A Short Story by A.B. Timothy

Matthew sat in his cockpit when the nails began scraping another chalkboard. Whilst he had been traveling faster than light, there was no problem, but now that he had slowed to a total stop orbiting the Dragons’ world with his flight, he was keeled over in the pain of ear-splitting screams. Before it was just a background, headache-inducing buzz, here he could make out actual screams of rage, and… they were getting closer? “They’re coming, prepare for combat, Joyriders, open wings, bombers, divert shield energy to cannons.” He called out the commands to his squad, proving that, even in the midst of the sheer agony, he could do this. Those commanders would be proud to have chosen him, not ashamed. Just as he predicted, the screams of anger roared to a new volume—no, volume was the wrong word, intensity? That was closer—at the same time, the squad started receiving proximity klaxons in their headsets. Sarah, Jonathan, and Fred all scrambled and began fighting for their lives. Fred called in the midst of it all, “How did they find us? Our cloaks are still up!” No one had an answer for him, except, perhaps, Matthew.

The young pilot pressed a button on his command module and hurled the remains of his breakfast into a blue plastic bag, before it was sealed shut and locked in the refuse container on his little flier. “Captain, look alive!” Matthew forced up his head, took the throttle in his hands, and steeled himself. He used every ounce of fortitude he could muster and threw the throttle forward in an attempt to join the fray. The engine roared with a mighty fire as it powered up to zoom forward.

“I’m-” Matthew began to say before he cut off alongside his engines. Something was very wrong. “Mayday!” He called, “Mayday, Fred! Circle-back Protocol! Take them and get out of here now!” Matthew was running through the ingrained ship-reboot protocols whilst he spoke.

He began to panic as he watched from his cockpit, his friends fold into the fray. Slithering beasts of immense proportions clashed with Y-shaped ships only half their size that they could not see. The pilots could not possibly win this, and it was his fault. Matthew’s connection to the dragons had been what warned them of his arrival. Their only chance was a plan that was compromised when they fell out of the hyperstream. One of his ship’s three engines flared to life, and he knew he had to do what he could. Flying through the invisible dogfight, he barrel-rolled and launched three dozen flares, at the same time deactivating his cloaking device. “Come and get some, you space-whales!” He cried.

“Welcome to the fight, sir!” Fred called triumphantly.

Matthew barely had time to respond amidst the hell of flame and acid he was flying through. “Circle-back Protocol! Fred, that was an order. Get out of here!” His distraction had worked, though. The sudden emergence of a visible target and the challenging flares had called most of the beasts and their riders from Matthew’s crew and onto him. More furious telepathic voices joined the song of rage, actively burning around the young man, and he shook his head. “Please! Live!”

The pilot pulled and twisted his stick, completing maneuvers he learned in basic. The maneuvers might have been basic, but the pilot behind them was anything but. The dragons converged and swarmed him like a host of bees defending their nest from a hornet; this hornet, however, had fangs, claws, and a stinger. Every psyonic voice he silenced was replaced by two more as he held his ship’s trigger. His viewport became black with reptilian blood as more and more died.

Matthew looked at his instruments. On the radar, he watched as the signals of his flight zipped into the hyperstream back in the direction they came. He was so engulfed by satisfaction that he almost did not react when the first claws pierced his hull. The claxons were background noise, the screams in his mind enveloped nearly every thought, and the air was sucked out of the cockpit. The last two thoughts he remembered having were that they got away and that they were safe.

The stars rose from the horde of dragons as he was vacuumed into space and above the mass that was ripping apart his ship. One voice in his mind rose above the rest. It spoke with words he could understand. “Rest now, warrior, prepare for what comes next.” As the words were finished, his entire world was engulfed by the void.

The Unwanted Mars

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A Short Story by A.B. Timothy

Mary Johnson looked down on the glowing red globe beneath her ship. Mars was to be her new home; she would die there. Several years prior, when the New Party took power back on Earth in the late twenty-second century, Mary, then called Maria, had been given an ultimatum: Join or Die.

New Party morale monitors had raided her small hotel room, a place on the Sonoran forest’s floor that had been abandoned by all of the North American cities which had risen to reside on the clouds, in ‘Sky’. This moldy apartment had housed her and several dozen other “Unwanteds”. The monitors broke the window and threw in gas canisters to choke the consciousness from those who may have resisted in the room.

She remembered watching her brother try to stand despite the gas, but his chest was riddled with holes before he could even take a step. She lost consciousness as the men in black uniforms kicked the doors down and began to poke at bodies.

In a blink, she had gone from the floor of a moldy hotel room to a pristine white room. The room was so white and her clothes so bleached that the only reason she knew she was still on this side of the grave was her black hair, which she had caught a look at as she had woken up. Through an unseen doorway, a woman in her forties had walked in and sat on something across from Mary. The woman’s clothes, which stretched from neck to toe, were so white that she appeared to be a floating head. Her skin was as dark as night, and it made for a disturbing contrast.

“Maria Velasquez.” The woman tilted her head and looked into the eyes of Mary. Her eyes were a dark brown. “Your name is not pure enough.” She said as if this would have been plainly obvious to even a child. “Choose another family name.”

The woman placed a sheet of large printed black text names on the table between them. The table’s existence shocked Mary as there was no differentiation of light or shadow to distinguish the four legs, or the plane from the surrounding room. After the brief shock wore off, Mary leaned in and looked at the papers. On the list were four options. “Red, Johnson, White, Henry.”

“Henry isn’t even a last name.” Mary was surprised when the thought she had made privately was produced aloud for herself and the woman to hear. When she looked up, confused, and watched the woman speak, Mary realized her lips never moved.

“The mind speaks, and the words are formed. We do not move our lips in Sky. We have no use for them.” She did not move her lips into a smile but somehow gave off the warmth a smile would have otherwise produced. “I didn’t think you would know the name Henry. Most Unwanteds don’t care to even know our great history. North American Literature has a strong tradition that dates back centuries, even before the unification of the twenty-first century. Not that your kind would ever care. I am surprised you can even pronounce it.” She seemed to catch herself and stop. “There I go rambling again,” the thought-sound projector produced a low giggle. “Now pick, please, we do not have all day.”

“Johnson.” Mary pointed at the name and nodded. She had heard stories like the one she was living right then. Most of the unwanteds that she knew in their small enclaves just called these stories propaganda, lies, or fiction. No one had ever heard of an Unwanted going into a University and coming out alive.

“That is true,” the woman said, responding to the words Mary had thought. “And yes, you are in a University, good job. But we do not kill the Unwanted, no, that would be a waste. We merely train them. Teach them how to be Wanted, this is what we do.” The woman took the text prompt away and stood from whatever she had sat on. Mary felt like her eyes were burning, and pulled her hair in front of her eyes as the woman walked out of the room.

“Don’t worry.” The woman’s thought-voice permeated the room. “Soon the light will be your friend.”

Mary had not resisted. In her heart, she knew this was the end. Why resist the end? Every day in that neverdim room was a day closer to the death of Maria Velasquez and the birth of Mary Johnson. Her guard never offered a name in thought or in writing, so Mary only knew her as “the woman”.

After only several months, the woman told Maria that she had progressed much faster than her friends.

“Tell me something, Mary,” the woman said. “Do you want to be Wanted?”

“Of course, miss,” Mary had answered. “I’ve wanted that since I was a child. Ever since the Unification wars, my family has-” the woman held up a hand, and this silenced Mary.

“I do not need, nor did I ask for, your story. Now tell me: Do you want to be Wanted?” the woman repeated her question.

“Yes,” Mary remembered having to fight to keep more thoughts from entering her mind.

“What are you willing to do to be Wanted?” the woman asked.

“Anything.”

“Anything? Even abandon Sky and go to a new planet for the glory of Sky, her people, and to become Wanted?” the woman asked.

“Anything, miss,” Mary answered.

“Well, you are not the first, and you will not be the last. We have use of those who want to be Wanted. Servitude for seven years. Then, freedom. Service to the glory of Sky under a new Sky.” The woman made the idea seem like a pitch—

“It is,” the woman clarified. “So, what do you say, Mary?”

With the death of Maria Velasquez, Mary Johnson ascended through the clouds of Sky to a place far above it. She looked out of the porthole window in her accommodations aboard the N.P.S. New Horizons, and Mary saw Mars. The world where Unwanted became Wanted.