This week’s video, in continuing with the theme of planning and pre-writing your novel, goes over some prewriting mistakes to AVOID. Here’s the link to the video itself:
I mention in passing in the video a mistake I made while prewriting a space opera. That space opera was Stars of Steels and Iron. I wanted to talk more in depth about that mistake because it’s a fascinating case study in how things can go wrong.
For some reason, I’d started with PLACE. Because in a space opera, that makes sense? (It does not, in fact, make sense). As someone with their roots in fantasy, I decided the next thing I needed was a map. Because maps are awesome, right? So, I started digging into it. And lo and behold I found in the depths of wikipedia the perfect system to set this story: 16 Cygni. Yep, that’s right suckers I even know the EXACT SOLAR SYSTEM it takes place in. So I started sketching it out. I don’t seem to have the One Note notebook that had that pre-writing in it anymore, but roughly recreated it was something like this:
This is what I started with, based off that Wikipedia article.
Which lead to a natural question: how far apart are these star systems? 860 AU is 150,000,000 kilometers; it’s the distance from the Earth to the sun ish, ~ about 8 minutes and 20 seconds of travel time at the speed of light (thanks undergraduate physics!). So a little unit conversion gives us 860 Au times 500 seconds per Au times 1 minute per 60 seconds is… 7,166 seconds or 120 hours ish or about 5 days.
Of course, that’s 5 days *at the speed of light*. I don’t like the idea of being able to travel at the speed of light and I certainly don’t want to get into relativity nonsense. We’ll ignore the relativity side of things, but what fraction of c can my space-ships fly at? So I spent some time figuring out what speed of light fraction they traveled at, and scaled it such that the distance between Cygnus A and Cygnus B was something like two months or something like that. The idea was that it would take awhile to travel – you couldn’t just set out on any old ship and space-trip to see the other star – but it’s something that a prepared vessel could do all the time.
Alright we have distances between our stars. But wait, the distance between the two furthest stars might be 860 Au, but what about PLANETS between those stars? I’m pretty sure there’s a planet generator somewhere, or I could create one. That would take just a bit of Python code and some tables of planet masses and I’m pretty sure there’s a rule to how planets are spaced – ah, yes, there is so I could start applying that to model my planets around each of the stars.
But… wait a second. If Cygnus b (the planet – lower case is planets) is on the far side of Cygnus B (the star), then it will be significantly further than 860 Au. And even when you start talking about hypothetical planets between Cygnus A and Cygnus C, they’re not that far apart, how long would travel time be between them?
But wait, since they’re orbiting the stars it will really depend on the timeline because the distance between them will be changing all the time based upon the orbital period. And I have to be consistent!
A Hard Truth
Literally nobody cares.
(I mean, okay, somewhere there will be a reader who probably will. Never underestimate the enthusiasm of the internet. )
My point is this does not impact the story. In the entire 95k manuscript there might be at most two sentences that could maybe potentially allow you to deduce that it takes place in the Cygnus system. These planets don’t exist. They’re not real. They don’t actually have orbital periods. And, sure, if the orbital mechanics were important to the story, it could make sense to dive into it. But this is a novel about GIANT ROBOTS for chrissake, it’s not exactly overflowing with realism.
Pre-writing is great! So is world building! But it is extremely important that, as you dive into the fascinating subsystems, you don’t lose sight of the overall robot novel. If it’s not serving your story? Stop. Take a deep breath. And just get back to the story.
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