... 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. ( ... 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 ...
Tags: warp drive | space travel | constant acceleration | technofiction writing tips | STL travel | science fiction |

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... Empire or any equivalent. Think about it: What does it mean to rule a distant star system when it takes ten, twenty, a hundred years to just send a simple "Hello? How are things going today?" message and get a reply? So if you take on the challenge of STL space travel, you end up with very different stories, and that can make them groundbreaking -- you will be writing in a style that few other people are currently embracing. The other advantage is that what you are writing about doesn't have to be fantasy. You can be writing some real science ... also learned through advancing planetary science that Mars, Venus and the other solar system planets were not alien civilized life-friendly. In response to this better understanding, first contact stories were displaced from the center of SF mainstream, by more introspective ideas such as cyberpunk and VR adventuring. Popular space travel stories transformed from first contact stories into warp-drive equipped space opera stories of which the Star Trek and Star Wars formats became iconic. But first contact stories are not dead. They are still very fun to read and write. One popular example of contemporary first contact stories is the ...
Tags: first contact | first contact stories | aliens | science fiction | Technofiction | hard science fiction |