World-building

One of the fun parts of writing any fiction is world-building, especially in Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can go as wild as you want, like the Discworld series and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. On the other end of that spectrum, you can weave a story that sticks close to the real world, with many books from Arthur C. Clark as an example. This latter style is called Hard Science Fiction. It starts by having a world that sticks to a stable set of rules, each as close to real science as possible.

Being an engineer by trade, I like my books to be on the more realistic side of this scale. The stories play out in the real world, in the real Solar System. Technology is as realistic as possible. In this post, I'll introduce some of the rules behind the world.

One of the main reasons why I want to stick to realism is because I don't want to spend too much time in the stories to discuss technology. Much of it has to be common knowledge to the main characters and due to the first-person-present-tense writing style, there is little room to fully discuss the tech. My stories must be about human experience, development, and growth, with future technology as the context with which the protagonists have to deal.

This brings me to the first rule of the world. Human life is the driving factor of the stories, therefore there is no alien interaction, nor strong AI, which takes center stage. To accomplish this, I've introduced a partial apocalypse, a large massacre in which an AI has killed a large part of the population, and more specifically a significant part of the scientific community. This story device led to multiple important results:  A technological slowdown, a clear move of society to the outer planets, and a deep distrust of AI and therefore a return to a human-centric future. Computers are kept small, relatively simple control systems, and the level of connectivity strongly reduced. There are laws that govern these technological limits, called the Mercury Limit.

The scientific and technological slowdown is also important. This solves a problem I was faced with, where I want humanity to be spread-out through a significant portion of the Solar System, while still using a recognizable technology level. I'm aiming for a similar vibe as some of the older Science Fiction works, especially the old works by Isaac Asimov, those predating his seminal AI work. In those books, the lack of AI was the result of not yet knowing what could be possible. In my case, I've reached this by banning AI with a reason.

Outer space is a hard environment to live in. Much of the technology development will have been focused on keeping people alive. Life-support systems, both at a large scale, and at a small, personal scale, take center stage. That has to be reflected in the books as well, even as this subject will encompass more fictional tech than other subjects. Much of this technology has been developed before the Mercury Massacre, with the loss of science making sure it would take another hundred years before significant new progress is made.

On the subject of survivability in space, there is another choice: humanity can somehow adapt to living in much lower gravity fields. I assume that human life and reproduction can still work down to 10% of Earth's gravity. This allows life on the larger moons and smaller planets in the Solar System. Permanent settlement of Mars and the moon are clearly without problem in this regard. However, people that have grown up at less than about 33% Earth weight can't easily adapt back to full Earth gravity. With very specific training, for a long time, they are still able to regain enough muscle strength and heart pressure, but in the normal case, Earth (and Venus) becomes a no-go zone.

There are two scientific subjects where I've introduced a real deviation of what I believe is possible in real life: Direct manipulation of spacetime to locally modify gravity, and material sciences allowing cloth to be stronger and change shape.

Regarding the material science, this provides the possibility to create spacesuits that can be activated and deactivated at will. Throughout the books I've called these suits, Jumpsuits, referring to their normal shape and the speed at which they can activate. Basically, they are full-body suits, with a high-tech life-support system build into an integrated backpack. Upon activation, a piece of transparent cloth moves up from this backpack and forms a dome over the head of the person, closing at the neck like a helmet. Such a feat is far beyond our current technology level regarding shape-memory materials.

The subject of spacetime manipulation is the largest deviation of real science. The idea behind it is that we somehow found out how to locally warp spacetime electrically. The first application of this technology is the Grav push disk. This is a large disk of a few atoms wide, which is spun at near lightspeed in a magnetic field. By vibrating this disk an asymmetrical force can be applied, accelerating the whole disk and the connected vehicle, through space. It offers electrical propulsion, which allows ships to continuously accelerate. This fundamentally changes spaceflight, reducing distances from months travel to several days, especially for smaller, lighter ships. Later applications of this technology are the development of faster-than-light travel and the introduction of moon size artificial gravity fields.

It's important to note that Grav push disks can't accelerate ships by more than around 35% of Earths gravity at most, and this can only work for small ships with relatively large disks. (Or some of the better military ships, which are strongly overpowered) This does mean that such ships can only launch from smaller bodies, with Mars being the largest planet where such engines can still be used. 

The Taggart Advanced Drive Technologies books are about a human future. Technological advances are meant to support this future. I hope that with these few rules I've managed to paint a convincing, consistent, and interesting environment for my stories to thrive in.