PJ’s Blog

Well, that was fun!

All in all a fascinating experience, everyone came up with interesting settings, but now the hard part starts for many of us: writing exciting stories that take place into those worlds…

And that all comes down to storytelling, of course, a skill very different from world building. Building an original world is already hard, but building an original story, that’s a tough one. A quote attributed to Jorge Luis Borges (rightly or not) says that there are only four stories to be told: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and a journey. Every story falls within those conveniently wide categories.

Which one will your story be? Mine will definitely be under the “Journey” category, with a dash of power and a slice of love trhouwn in for good measure…

I look forward to read the stories we get from all our worlds…

As I explained before, the settlement on Lalande is composed of 17 distinct copies of the original moon base. Each holds a university and research center which, on the moon, was called simply the Aldrin Academy.

Now the 17 Academies are just called “The Academy” when referring to the local version, or “Academy XII”, for instance, to refer to the one that can be found in moon base XII. All academies are independent and distinct, and have a separate administration. This is a strict requirement that came into force after the troubles caused by the Guild of the Old Earth.

The Academies are in a constant state of friendly competition, on education and research, but also on the sports side, and the Academy Leagues of many sports are closely followed by many citizens of the moon bases. Sometimes friendly competitions flare up, but rarely to the point of violence. Students and professors participate in conferences on various topics and in exchange programs between the academies.

The Academies cover all topics relevant to life on Lalande: engineering, medicine, teaching, law and politics as well as of course a large part of research on the Aliens. Despite almost non-existent success in communicating with the aliens or interfacing with their technology, a general portrait of the biology of the Aliens and of their crop species have been drawn up. Scientists know how the Aliens work, biologically, but are still at a loss to be able to understand their behavior. They still seem highly intelligent, even after 300 years of unsuccessful communication attempts, and humans have managed to tap some of the technology of the aliens to bring some advances in energy use and production, in medicine, and in part in space travel.

Character creation is just as arduous, if not even more, than world creation. Once the walls and the decor are in place, the actors have to be cast, rehersals have to be made, costumes have to be sown, flesh and blood must be conjured out of the words in order to make the characters more than unidimensional caricatures of past clichés.

The main character I have in mind for this story is in part a walking cliché: a somewhat recluse scientist, called by destiny to become the unlikely hero that will save mankind. However, by placing him as the narrator, and having him be painfully aware of the absurdity of his position, I hope to be able to flesh him out a little more, and to connect a bit more to the reader. I am aware that this is in itself somewhat if a gimicky cliché by itself, but I’ll run with it, and see if it goes anywhere…

The two main storylines of the book are separated by three hundred years, so the cast of both storylines has to be distinct and completely separate. This limits the number of characters I can introduce and use in each story, otherwise it’s just going to become a jumble of characters that’s gonna be too confusing for the reader to follow.

So the part of the story set in the 30th century will be told through the eyes of the narrator, who is personally involved in the events. The part of the story set in the 27th century will be told by the same narrator, telling the story of what happened through his expertise as an historian. This means that the 27th century storyline can be a series of short “historical” stories of specific important episodes, but it could also be the story of one character, as told by the narrator.

I’m still not sure which way to go…

Among the colonists of Lalande, once the long trip was over and that they were settled in their Moon base “habitat”, a group formed that was advocating a return to Earth as soon as possible in order to share the technologies they could salvage from the Alien world. The group called themselves the Guild of the Old Earth, and rose to power quickly among the colonists.

As years passed, it became evident that communication with the aliens was all but impossible, and that the technologies they used were very closely linked to their distributed computing biology, and was hardly understandable, and even less applicable, by humans. The Guild held true to it’s aim, however, and became a major driving force behind the university research centers, trying to crack the communication barrier with the aliens and to understand their technologies, in order to stage a return to earth and a transfer of technologies for the benefit of all mankind.

As the colony grew, and new moon bases were built by the aliens, multiplying the university centers, diverging opinions started to form. Some wanted to sever the ties with earth completely, some wanted to use the alien technologies they were deciphering to rule the solar system and a third group wanted to keep true to the original aim of the Guild: using the Alien technologies for the benefit of all.

What stared as diverging academic opinions became bitter disputes, and almost degenerated into civil war as the Guild was split into three factions. Moon base copies were isolated, each under one of the factions of the Guild, and armed conflict was averted when the Council of Mayors dissolved the Guild and reuniting the Moon bases.

To this day the Guild is outlawed, but rumors of secret societies surface once in a while, and the three factions are still reflected in the opinions of populations and academicians.

The human colonists plan a return trip to Earth, three centuries after the departure. After studying the Alien technologies they have managed to reverse-engineer some of the essential systems, mainly the engines. The return ship, called the “Prometheus”, is much smaller than the Alien ship that took to colonists to Lalande. It has room for the 800 members of the expedition who have private or family cabins. The length of the voyage back means that families are expected to form and break during the course of the voyage, and kids will be born on the way.

The ship thus has a full-blown clinic, a daycare and school center, in addition to the space needed to grow the food for the whole crew. The majority of the volume of the ship is occupied at launch by fuel and the engines, but as fuel tanks are emptied, they are to be “reclaimed” for human occupation.

The pride of the Prometheus is the Nova engine. Adapted from Alien technology, it is one step further than simple fusion drives, using extremely high pressures to push the nuclear reaction further, creating Iron from Hydrogen, and simulating the energy release of a supernova explosion, further pushing nucleosynthesis and creating heavier elements, on the one hand, and releasing phenomenal amounts of energy. The technology for this is highly secretive and only a handful of crew members know how to work the engines.

The high tech engine is the inspiration for the name of the ship: just as Prometheus brought fire to humanity, thus the ship is bringing back the Nova engine to mankind.

From the first contact the the Aliens, back in 2654, humans have realized that they were very little like the aliens they had imagined. They seemed highly intelligent, since they obviously had very advanced technology and were able to travel at great speeds between stars, but they didn’t exhibit any exterior sign of communication, either between them or towards the humans.

The complete radio silence of their ship on approach and their lack of response to all attempts to communicate with them seemed to indicate the same lack on communication capability the hypoteses of the scientists were varied, but the one that got the most attention was that the aliens were some kind of advanced animal, shaped purely by evolution, which evolved their advanced technologies over long periods of time (they could, given the age of the universe had a headstart of many billions of years over Earth life). However, the construction of an exact working replica of the nearest moon base inside their ship hinted at something else. They were clearly adaptable, capable of creation, but the apparent lack of communication didn’t match the concepts that mankind considered essential for the development of an advanced civilization.

Over time, humans studied the aliens they were in contact with very closely: they were very docile, and lent themselves to all examinations very candidly. What was discovered was a little disconcerting. The aliens did not indeed communicate through ideas and concepts, which means that they were incapable of holding a conversation, for instance, the were all connected together through a network of electrical impulses. Their prodigious intelligence came from the fact that each individual was part of a distributed computing network, in a way. Computer metaphors for living brains are far from ideal, but where the human brain was designed as a central processing unit dealing with only the inputs and outputs of it’s local system, the Aliens were designed as the myriad of processing units inside a super computer.

So, taking that metaphor, humans tried to find the terminal and the language they could use to tap into the Alien living network, and try to communicate to the higher, hive mind. But the computer metaphor didn’t hold, unfortunately. The Aliens were connected in the same way the neurons in the human brain are connected. It’s the whole system that gives the whole it’s emergent properties of intelligence and consciousness.

But humans persevered in trying to communicate with the aliens, which were evidently very interested in the welfare of the human colonists, since they constructed the replica moon bases and supplied it with ample energy. In the base’s forth copy, the aliens built an odd structure, a pedestal with a bundle of hundreds of bio-metal wires coming out of it. Engineers, computer experts, biophysicians, psychologists have all tried to work out a way to understand the connection and to build a human interface for the Alien system.

To this day, that system hasn’t yet been developed, and at each new copy of the moon base the aliens construct the same connector.

The humans are free to exit the moon bases, and the aliens sometimes come into the human colony, but interactions are never more than brief spurts of attention from the aliens. There has been a long debate on the aim of the Aliens when they brought the human colony to Lalande, was the colony some sort of experiment? Were they being kept for amusement, as animals in a zoo? Did the alien hive mind have some sort of greater plan for them? This idea of the greater plan of the hive mind rang true to many, and cults pop up from time to time who preach the benevolence and mysteries of the hive mind.

Many questions remain, but the most pressing is this: is there a hive mind? Is there a higher consciousness in the Aliens, trying to communicate with the humans?

This is one of the most challenging settings of my story, because I cannot just extrapolate from today, but let’s see what I can do with it:

The Alien world is a large rocky planet orbiting the red dwarf star Lalande 21185. It is a bit larger than the Earth, but much denser, with a lot of iron, which means that gravity at it’s surface is roughly twice that of Earth. It is on a very close orbit, so the gravitational forces from the star submit the planet to very strong tidal forces, keeping the planet highly geologically active. The planet has a strong magnetic field that emanates from it’s central iron core dynamo, much like Earth’s.

The Aliens have dug an extensive network of tunnels and underground chambers where they cultivate the organisms that they use as food. A large part of the life of the Aliens is spent colonizing new worlds similar to this one: rocky worlds orbiting red dwarves, which entails a lot of space travel, hopping from one system to the other. They construct their ships on the surface of the planets, in cavities that are gradually dug out for materials. Once the ships are finished, they are sitting on top of rock spires in the middle of craters.

The human colonists arrive on the planet in the Alien ship, and the Aliens construct a replica of the Moon base where the humans come from. They thus have all the services and resources that they had on the moon in a base occupied by 10 000 people. The Alien replicas are functionally the same as the originals, so maintenance and repair of systems can be carried out by the humans.

The Aliens area highly decentralized yet organized society, and things are done as needed. When resources grow thin, they move deeper, or expand their network, abandoning the unproductive tunnels behind them. It takes millions of years to strip mine a planet, but as a planet’s resources are exhausted, additional ships are built, and the Aliens move on to another red dwarf. They have been going through the same pattern for the last few billion years, and are very efficient at it.

The human colony on Lalande has grown a lot in the almost three centuries that it has been occupying the planet. The Aliens have been keeping a close watch on the growth of the colony, and when the colony becomes too crowded, the Aliens construct another copy of the moon base for the human colony to expand in. The Lalande Colony now occupies 18 distinct copies of the original moon base. Human society on Lalande is a highly eclectic group of people, governed through an elected council. The tradition that developed was that each new copy of the base would get an elected council and a mayor, and that the mayor or each copy would sit on a high council which would take the general decisions.

Since the original moon base had a university, a sports center, cinemas, shopping district, etc, there are now 18 copies of all of these things. The colonists have kept the original design and destination of most installations, which makes for lively sports leagues, and healthy competition between universities. Some services were not available at the original moon base, many manufactured products for instance were imported from Earth or from the larger Moon Cities. The inhabitants have developed methods to obtain clothes, cultivate food, etc. The lack of some luxuries make for a rather spartan lifestyle compared to life on the Moon, but all basic necessities are available to all.

More on the Human/Alien interactions another day.

I’ll take a break for a few seconds from the world building and explore the concept of fantasy and science-fiction… Out of the more than a dozen people who are participating in this little world building project, many are building a Fantasy setting, and only some of us are building a sci-fi setting. And there seems to be a very clear cut cleaving between the two.

Some of my biggest influences come from fantasy, even if I mostly write sci-fi. I find that the cross-pollination between the genres leads to very interesting concepts. One of my projects is exploring those juxtapositions.

This is the result of one such juxtapositions:

Most of you will recognize the script of the One Ring, from Tolkien’s work. It says:

Mazauk kulat ziimarum. Maaduur kulat snagaum. Nirtumob iistal kulat durbum.

Which is Black Speech, the Language of evil and Darkness…

Translated, it says:
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Which of course you recognize from Orwell’s 1984…

And the other way around we can get the Ring inscription in Newspeak, which could go something like:

One fingband to love all crimethinkers in unlight.

The Tolkien/Orwell merge is something I find very interesting, and I’m actually thinking about getting the Black Speech text as a tattoo at some point. So there you go, an humble attempt at bridging the genre gap…

Terran Republic

One of the two main powers of the solar system in 2979, The Terran Republic is the seat of the historical power. It is comprised of the inner planets, the asteroid belt, as well as the Jovian and Saturnian systems. It is ruled by an elected president who serves 10-year terms. The population of the Republic is a little over 50 billion people, with 15 billion on Earth alone, and 10 billion on the moon, where a large part of the Earth population took refuge after the Comet impact.

Centuries of war have transformed the worlds, but the people have not changed. The Martians are still proud of their heritage and their culture, even if they lost their independence in the War. The Jovians and the Saturnians have kept their identity, even under the Terran military regime. The government of the Republic is centralized on Earth, at the seat of the old League of Worlds in Sumatra. Bureaucracy has taken over everything, and the mass of people and information to manage means that administrations are very inefficient. After two centuries, actual power and services to the people have trickled back down to the regional planetary governments.

Daily life in the Republic is not much different now that it was before the war, and technological progress has had mostly military applications: faster ships, more powerful weapons, more efficient communication systems. On regular routes, travel times between worlds has been cut in half since the 27th century, and express services, private ships and military crafts can reach speeds four times as fast, with the discomfort of smaller living spaces and increased gravity due to acceleration/deceleration.

The controlling body on Earth is no longer the Media, but the Military, and they in turn control the media. Content has changed since the peak of the Media’s power in the 27th century, and most of the content available in the 30th century is smutty, innate, tasteless junk, or thinly veiled propaganda for the Republic. State Religion is the New Temple of Jerusalem, and other religions are tolerated, but not encouraged, and public office and positions of power withing the military are only attainable by New Templars.

The Kuiper Alliance

The Kuiper Alliance is the other main power in the system: a loose association of all the worlds of the outer solar system. Even with the better means of transportation, distances between worlds can be massive, and many people never leave their world. Those who do travel for months to get anywhere, which in hardly a basis for a solid and coherent government.

The seat of the Alliance is on the southern hemisphere of Yggrdasil, and the population of all the outer worlds now adds to roughly 40 billion, with 5 billion on Yggdrasil itself. The diversity of cultures, religions, political systems that was the hallmark of the Kuiper worlds before the War is still present, and the Alliance is very adamant in keeping that diversity alive. Of course this means that among it’s population are extremist groups which want to adopt a stronger stance towards the Republic, but the Stalemate holds, for the most part, even if minor conflicts arise from time to time.

Each world is ruled as it’s inhabitants see fit, but since the war, most are controlled by military dictatorships, feudal-type monarchies, ruthless warlords, anarchists and religious fanatics. The only thing that holds the Alliance together in any form is the threat from the Terran Republic. The Council of the Alliance is overseen by the High King of Yggdrasil, direct descendant of the old European Royal Families.

The Neutral Worlds

Uranus, Neptune, their Moons and Asteroids are the only worlds that never got implicated into the war, and try their best to stay out of harm’s way. Man battles have been fought in their space, and ship salvage and building has become over the decades quite a specialty of the Neutral Worlds. They furnish both sides with ships and weapons, and are left alone for the service. They are prosperous and peaceful themselves, Triton is one of the richest worlds of the System.

The idea here is to have no clear cut good or evil, just people fighting for their homes…

After a century of bloody warfare, both sides are growing desperate. The Kuiperans, out on the edge of the Oort comet cloud, devise a devastating plan: striking the Earth with a comet. They rig a comet with engines, and divert it’s course towards the inner solar system. They set it on a course that would miss earth at both crossings of the Earth’s orbit, but a strategic burn at the right time near perihelion diverts the comet just enough so it would hit the earth straight on. With the bulk of Earth’s long range nuclear missiles deployed near Jupiter and Saturn’s orbits, they cannot react with sufficient force to annihilate the large comet. Earth forces manage to intercept the comet with several low-power nuclear warheads, reducing it’s mass with two thirds, and vaporizing a good portion of it’s nucleus, they are unable to destroy the engines, and the necessary firepower to damage the comet further did not have time to reach it’s target…

On May 28th 2784, the remains of the comet hit earth. The largest chunk, a 40km diameter monster that contained the fusion engines, hit in the Sahara desert. The direct devastation caused by the impact was incalculable. More than half of the Earth’s population died as a direct effect of the impact, mainly from the devastating earthquake that collapsed many of the worlds’ sturdiest infrastructures.

As retaliation, Earth sent his most powerful, fastest and stealthiest missiles to five of the small Kuiper worlds. The force deployed was sufficient to annihilate those worlds, not just human installations at the surface, but actually break the dwarf planets in smaller rocks.

Each side was outraged at the horrors commited by the other side, but could not risk another similar strike. Gunships and fighters stopped the battles, a ceasefire treaty was singed on Titan, and each side went behind their lines, biding their time.

The Stalemate was reached…