Lots of fantasy/sci-fi writers here. I prefer stories about human relationships but of course that is not mutually exclusive. I think of Space as a highway. There's nothing in Space just destinations. The planets you land on are filled with people having relationships with people. Kinda like driving from Chicago to St. Louis. Boring highway. Space is the highway, the planets are where the action is.
If you wondered what I meant it's this. If you write about an exploration to Jupiter you are really writing about what happens when Aunt Alice, Uncle Dave, and the kids take a trip from St. Louis to Chicago.
Space is huge, and has interesting things that we still don't fully understand in many ways. Also it has the biggest natural liquor nebula to ever exist. So one might say the universe is a host to a banging party.
Except if your car breaks down half-way to Chicago, you don't face a high risk of death. You call a tow truck and wait. In space, you send out your distress call, and maybe someone receives it in a few hours, and maybe in a few weeks, if they can find you (space is really really big) they rescue you. If you haven't run out of air, frozen to death, or been killed by smugglers who want your ship (which for a time was a not-unknown fate for boat owners off the coast of Baja California). And Chicago isn't constantly moving with respect to St. Louis, so that postponing the trip by a day makes it impossible. Orbital mechanics are a merciless bastard - miss the timing on a course-correction, and you may not have enough fuel to get to Jupiter -- or anywhere else, either. So, outside of space fantasy (I consider anything with faster than light travel to be space fantasy), journeying through space isn't like a crossing the US at all. It's more like crossing the Atlantic back in the age of sail, and there's plenty of "action" that can happen during the trip.
Except for Alien. Almost all of the action happened in space, thousands of miles from anything. Though I do like thinking of space epics like futuristic road trip movies.
That's why I love writing comedy. Take advantage of these similarities. My first novel is set in Boston. The second novel includes a planet where the aliens are similar to Bostonians.
Intergalactic space tip #47: If your spaceship breaks down, remember to change the AA battery located in the lower fourth quadrant.
Space is all that. At some point, we will recognize that just to travel in space, you need to live in space. There will be no need for destinations, other than nebulas for hydrogen. We will just be making notes about all the stuff we pass by, on the way to the next nebula.
I sent out the beacon distress signal four days ago, and finally someone responded! "Hi, welcome to Bumrrito's, can I take your order?" Hell, if I'm going to die, I'll at least go out in a literal shitstorm of glory. "Yeah, I'll take three triple-decker cheesy burritos with some fire sauce on it. Soft shell, obviously."
The thing about space is that it’s huge in both distance and time. Humans are very bad at extrapolating very far. Most humans imagine advanced aliens flying around in ships full of laser weapons and force fields. I imagine species who have uploaded their minds to immortal machines and have gone through a billion years of self improvement from there. You wouldn’t so much as run across another ship but pass through a huge network of systems that watch and react to you like something out of Lovecraft. It’s everywhere, invisible, and more powerful than any ancient god you could imagine. Humans have been steadily advancing for about 12000 years, we could probably vaguely imagine Earth a thousand years from now. But not a million, hundred million, billion... Dune is another example where the setting is really tied to the action. It’s not a series of events that happen on a planet, the planets ecology itself plays a huge role in the story.
No, it mostly happened in the ship. I can't think of one just now but there have been movies that took place with people just in cars or bigger vehicles, but they had to get out sometime to run somewhere. Even in Alien they took a spacewalk. Thought of one: Cujo
Ever drove the Australian outback? It's kinda old but I just saw an Australian movie called Wolf Creek. The credits said based on a true story but I hope they were stretching the truth.
Do you watch Saturday Night Live? There's this ongoing bit where people find themselves in traffic court in Maine, but the Judge, Baliff, and Court Reporter all act like it's in "N'orleans" and have New Orleans, Louisiana accents. Funny! The bit is called "Maine Justice"
I wholeheartedly agree. I will correct you on one point though . . . so far as we know, we're alone in the universe. In fact it's only the one planet where the action is, and we don't seem to appreciate the majesty of it.
I rode a camel across the outback once. Not across all of it, of course. It doesn't seem comparable to space, to me. Wolf Creek (2005): "Three backpackers stranded in the Australian outback are plunged in a hellish nightmare of insufferable torture by a sadistic psychopathic local." -- IMDb. That doesn't sound comparable to space, either.
People really don't, even can't, wrap their heads around how empty space is. Even intra-system space is incomprehensibly vast and empty, but interstellar space is so much emptier. Think of a speck of sand in Utah and another one in Sydney. Remove the planet, and imagine you are a microbe on one of those sand grains, and your nearest neighbor is on the other. And you still aren't even close to comprehending the space between "neighboring" stars. Try not to be humbled contemplating it.
We haven't seen any signs of intelligent life in a month. We're on the brink of death. "What's that up ahead? Oh my god, we're saved!" "Hello, travelers, welcome to our land. Have you heard of the tale of our beloved Joseph Smith?" The search continues.
Don't like my analogy of space is a highway, huh? Wolf Creek scared me about the Outback. They never saw any passing cars in hours or hours so this guy just played with them on the highway out there.
Well any of the travels during the old west days must have seemed like an endless journey to them. That's why the Mormons settled in Utah, no one around to bother them.
I thought the Mormons settled in Utah because John Smith had a fever dream hallucination of the giant angel Moroni coming down from the heavens, pointing at the mountains, and telling him to go there.
It's just a bad analogy. Highways are linear, fixed, designed and made by people for people, built for safety, and relatively small. Space is 3-dimensional, constantly changing, unsafe if not outright deadly, natural, and incomprehensibly huge. For example, one of the objections people have to trying to colonize Mars is that we don't know how to shield the people in the ships from the radiation they'll encounter once they are outside the Earth's magnetosphere, and they'll get a lethal dose during the trip. This tends not to happen on U.S. highways, but maybe around Chernobyl ? Space is far more like the ocean than like a highway, but even the ocean doesn't quite capture it. The North Atlantic in the time of the Greeks might be a better analogy.
