Space Time and Writing
So one of the things I really wanted to do with the Punk Series was make sure it was a scientifically and historically accurate as it could be (within reason of it basically being an alternative history for our very origins). This means I have to research lots of different subjects and even sometimes do some calculations – for instants one of the super structures I wanted to build in the series in the deep future would have taken more matter than is contained in the Universe!
This has provided me with a challenge and something to solve – I want the structure – how can it still exist?
Within the challenges set me for the current work in progress – a collection of stories centred on Mars I have had to look into various things like types of space travel/ship design, terraforming and geology of Mars and the evolution of dolphins to check that they would fit into the story line and if not how I could make it so that they did fit with out breaking continuity. One of the things that quickly became apparent is that you are dealing with a different magnitude of time.
Space Time is often bandied about in physics and science fiction and is wrapped up with gravitational anomalies and what not – that is not quiet the Space Time I am referring to here – rather I am borrowing a concept from my geologic training – Deep Time.
Earth’s history is a long one – way longer than the average humane or possibly any human can get their beds around – we have existed for hardly any of our planets history – a fact I play around heavily with for the books. So to deal with this Earth Scientists talk of deep time – it is rock time – it is time not on a human scale which is typically tens of years – if we stretch ourselves we manage hundreds and if we try really damn hard we start edging to the thousands but by millions of years we are struggling with the visualisations and it becomes mixed and matched with the thousands!
Now many of the characters in the Punk’s Universe are rather long lived but even so a lot of the space travel is still beyond a life time. And even within the solar system I have to be careful about travel times and communication lags and think of ways they would deal with these – as it turns out these are also awesome plot devices rather than hindrances but I have to keep track of who’s who and how long they are expecting to live and if they are the first to live that long because that drastically alters their perception of time. Think on the child asked to sit still for ten minutes which is for them an unreasonably long amount of time – it is a huge chunk of all the time they have ever experienced!
With the space colony stories – ie not ones just based on a planet other than Earth – these distinctions and changes of time perception as well as just the shear amount of time subjective to us as the reader’s perception is very important.
Posted: Sunday, October 7th, 2018 @ 7:45 am
Categories: World Building.
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