Technofiction Writing Tips - Part 2 of 4 - Space Travel Without Warp Drive

Writing space travel stories without using the warp drive plot device to speed the story along... is a real challenge!

It can be done, but you as a writer have to restructure your story-making a lot.

The first thing that you have to change is the time and distance scale of your story: if you don't have warp drive, interstellar things are going to happen over generations, not minutes. If you have warp drive in your story, everywhere is a suburb of Los Angeles because you can get to-and-from LA in minutes to hours. In STL stories that's not true: star systems are really far apart! It takes years to decades to go from one to another.

So what changes in your story telling?

Here are a few basic changes:

o The fastest way to travel between stars with STL drives is a constant acceleration drive -- basically the propulsion stays running for the whole trip. During the first half of the journey it accelerates and during the second half it brakes, so you arrive at the destination standing still, not zooming by at something close to the speed of light. (Note: we still don't know how to pull this off, it takes too much fuel, so right now this is still as much science fiction as shooting people into space with cannons was in 1900. But it doesn't violate laws of physics the way warp drive does.)

If you're not going to use constant acceleration, if you're sticking with boost-and-coast, the technology that is real today, plan on using some form of suspended animation or grow-when-you-arrive. An interstellar trip is going to take centuries to millennia.

o If your journey is constant acceleration, the people on the space craft will spend most of the journey traveling close to the speed of light -- relativistic speeds. This means that travelers' clocks will be ticking a lot slower than planetary clocks... when viewed from the planets. The travelers in their ships will see their clocks ticking just fine, but the journey time will seem a whole lot less to them. This difference is important. It means that travelers will experience journeys that take years or decades while their planetary brethren will see them taking journeys that last decades or centuries.

One example: a journey to the Milky Way core in a 1G constant acceleration ship will look like it takes 30,000 years to a person on Earth watching (it's 30,000 light years away), but it will feel like it takes only take 340 years to the person on the star ship. That's still a long time, but you could expect your great grand kids to step off the ship, not some completely new species. (If you travel to Alpha Centauri the journey will take 5 years planetary time and 4 years ship time.)

The implications of these long journey times, and the difference between what travelers and planetaries experience are:

o The travelers are a separate society from the various planetaries they travel between. There is no "going home" for travelers, their ship is home.

o There is no such thing as a Federation of Stars or a Galactic Empire. The travel times are too long, and the star travelers will not be interested in supporting any sort of empire. Take Alpha Centauri as an example again. That's the closest star system to our solar system, and if you, Emperor, radio Alpha from Earth and say, "What's happening today?" You'll get your answer back eight years later. Umm... that makes it real hard to stay on top of the situation there!

o Things will be very different in each star system, and they will be very different each time a star ship returns to the system. Star travelers will always be guessing about what the star system they are entering will be like -- even those they visit regularly.

These are some of the basic parameters of story telling in a world with only STL drive. How can you structure interesting stories with these parameters?

o The arriving and departing will be the interesting times, and there is going to be culture shock with each arrival, on both the planet and the ship.

o The arrival will take months. It will not be a surprise for either party. The arriving ship's exhaust will look like a new strange star in the planetary sky for about a year before the ship arrives.

o Your stories will unfold over years. Be prepared to work up an ensemble of characters that span generations. In the same vein, you will have to abandon that famous sense-of-urgency plot device, "We need to do something right now, or the universe will end!" You will need to work up other compelling reasons for the story to advance, or work up stories that are interesting without being time-urgent.

These are some characteristics of stories in an STL universe. They will come out very differently from stories in an FTL universe, and for that reason they can be very interesting. If you want more information on STL story making check out the non-fiction section of Tales of Technofiction on White World ( http://www.technofictionland.com )

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