The Scale of Science Fiction

Warning: Wall of text ahead!

Something that's been on my mind concerning stories set in space.

Many science fiction stories take place in a galaxy, our own galaxy or some fictional one. A lot of my favorite science fiction franchises take place on a galaxy scale with FTL travel and space opera tropes.

However, galaxies are unfathomably huge (Nah dip, Sherlock.) Maybe a little too big. I'm talking about a setting's depth.

If one has a story that takes place over various parts of a galaxy, the characters will probably only visit a handful of planets, and a handful of locales in those planets. These worlds tend to be simplified to some trait such as "the desert planet," "the ocean planet," or "the planet that is entirely covered in a urban city."

On the other hand, our own earth has a variety of climates, geography, ecosystems and cultures. I get it, there probably isn't going to be as much genetic or cultural diversity on a desert planet compared to earth.

With an interplanetary setting (either our own solar system, or an alien star system), there is still the unfathomable size, but it may have a lot more depth compared to, say, a galactic empire. There is still plenty of stuff you can do in a single star system.

I'm not saying a galaxy setting can't have depth, but the ones that do are usually long running franchises that had lots of creative minds working on them and expanding their settings gradually. I'm saying it might be a bit too much for a single author or a single book series.

Do you agree or disagree?

 

You call that a wall of text! Bah!

Usually interplanetary or intergalactic stories are actually Westerns or some other genre transposed to a setting where planets replace continents. Most of Andre Norton's sci-fi stories are essentially Westerns, they take place on often wild frontier planets with a few settlements and the youth who is on the run for his coming-of-age tale has to plunge out away from the settlements and into the deeps of alien wilderness, and the indigenous beings that live on said planets often resemble various types of indigenous peoples here on Earth.

And yes, a continent generally has a pretty wide variety of terrain and climates. But then space opera tends to be very simple, and there's a need for a great deal of exposition about the sci-fi elements, so I think they often compromise by simplifying each planet to more like a small island. Plus of course, the stories tend to be symbolic (think Star Trek) and it makes sense for symbolic tales, like mythology or fairy tales, to simplify settings and civilizations etc.

Oh, and welcome aboard the USS Writing Forum! Next stop Andromeda!

 

I disagree. I disagree because I look at a book such as Dune and that's an entire galaxy, but it takes place in a single book (I know it's a series, I'm just saying you could probably read just Dune and be fine). The entire galaxy relies on the spice, which is how that galaxy is tied in to Arrakis. I may be completely misunderstanding the question, but this is my answer to it all the same.

 

I mean settings in which the characters traverse the galaxy regularly and visit various planets over the course of the story, rather than the story being confined to one planet.

 

Fiction dosen't have any limitations . Location is an important part of most stories . The Game of Thrones is not set on Earth , and has many difrent location . If each location was a difrent planet the story would not be a better story. If your story is about people traveling about a lot . It it would probably a bit dull.

 

Ok, I see now that this is the heart of the point you're making. The problem I see is, assuming you're basing it on our actual solar system rather than a highly fictionalized version of it, each planet or moon actually is incredibly simple. Almost a single terrain/climate, aside from Earth which has a vast wealth of climates spread all across its surface. I mean, unless you're talking about the variety of swirls of gas in Jupiter and Saturn. Maybe you're talking about a fictional future where some of them have been terraformed? They're pretty much all barren deserts of stone and ice now, aside from the gas giants.

Or am I still misunderstanding your point? Are you not talking about diversity of terrain?

Edit:
If you're talking about having to travel so far but only visiting a handful of planets, each with its own specialized climate, this actually conforms very closely to life here on Earth (which is usually the basis for fiction, whether it be literary, genre or otherwise). There's an immense amount of diversity in terrain and in setting all around us, but as individuals we have a tendency to drive right through/past huge swaths of it, only seeing it outside the window in passing, until we reach our destination, which might be one day a part of a big nearby city, the next a house in the middle of empty fields or deep woods, and the next an apartment building where a friend lives. We may visit these particular settings over and over, and though we think along the way 'Man, I'd love to stop one day and visit that place I keep driving past that looks so amazing', often we don't.

Somehow I still think I don't understand your point.

 

If you go for quality and keep going, quantity comes with time whether you want it or not, because there's always another scene that requires a certain place to be filled. Pushing for quantity from the very beginning will get you stuck with the first races you had in mind without room for the better ideas that you will get later. Stargate Atlantis only needed Wraiths and Asgards to make an interesting plot, and felt much deeper than Stargate SG-1 where new races were thrown in for almost every new episode with poor introductions.

Communication merges culture
With our own discovery of quantum entanglement for communicating with satellites over infinite distance without any delay, many of the classic sci-fi technologies for communication and encryption have already been obsoleted by what's used in space today. This will affect their cultural identity based on which planets are allowed into their internet and trade unions. Then the Gelgameks can send you cheesy WWJD memes and troll forums with religious rants.

Faster-than-light is not so convenient according to relativity theory
It's likely that quantum physics reveal how to open worm-holes to almost any location within only a few thousand years after discovering space travel. Opening up a portal for the mover trucks with your furniture sounds a lot cheaper and easier than leaving your things behind, walking into a crammed sweaty space elevator leading to the ion-propulsion spaceship with circulated air and barely enough room for your knees. Once you get there after a seemingly short jump giving you whiplash, all the candy brands you liked at the airport have been discontinued due to relativity creating a time bubble around the space ship. It only feels like you're moving faster than light from inside the bubble. From the outside, you are still traveling below the speed of light.

 

Ah ok, you're talking about depth versus breadth.

And you're concentrating on emotional or dramatic depth, which of course is the kind that matters most to what writers do.

People often talk about the vast expanse of space and the endless nature of eternal time, often when they're depressed, or soemtimes in a more philosophical way, but if thought of emotionally (dramatically) it does tend to bring depression. That's because the cosmic scale has nothing to do with the human scale. What I mean by human scale is things that directly affect us. All the vast distance between stars and galaxies is certainly real, and would affect travelers who have to navigate it, but all of this is very conceptual and still too abstract to affect readers directly, or for them to relate to.

Example, in a movie or a story you can show how devastating a war is by showing cities in ruin, masses of soldiers and armored vehicles crawling all over landscape after landscape, or you can show one small group of people and how their situation keeps getting more desperate. You can move between these 2 scales, though personally I would keep the vast perspective brief.

At the Nuremberg trials it was discovered that a jury responds far more powerfully to actual testimony from one person who spent time in a prison camp than to statistics of how many victims there were, even including descriptions of the atrocities committed. It's because statistics are abstract, whereas seeing and hearing the emotion rise up in a person who experienced atrocity is powerfully moving at a human scale. Personalize ideas if you want to grab the readers.

 

Well both Star Wars and WH40K have huge series that cover entire galaxy size settings.
So yes it can be done, but they tend to have multiple authors which can kinda screw with
some of the specifics and continuity between amongst one another as they don't always
know the full story line up to where they are writing the next bit in the larger collective.

I think it falls more upon the author who is writing the story(s), and how they treat
each individual planet. Though I think it is a bit lazy to treat an entire planet as a
single biom and 'country', though in some like Mars for instance are kinda singular
in terms of being a vast desert with tiny polar ice caps. Even then it still has mountain
ranges and canyons. Something as simple as differences in social and politics can create
nation states all over the planet, even cultural differences could crop up as a result of
those types of diverse concepts.
Even a planet that is covered in massive mining and manufacturing centers that span
the globe will have their own little nuances in how they operate and will have a diverse
range of products produced by each sector. Even so far as to manufacture similar goods
that will denote the cultural ideal and standards for them, making them unique in quality
and appearance.

One thing I would like to see more in Sci-fi, would be the resurgence of super structures
(not to be confused with the standard massive ships), like O'neil cylinders, shell worlds,
Dyson Swarms, Orbital rings, and Matrioshka Brains. Something to show the dynamic
range and abilities of vast civilizations or empires.

Just a few thoughts on the question of scale.

 

In my work I've gone a tad mad. I'm having over thirty galaxies for humanity and her allies. And humanity isn't even the largest faction in the universe, there will be factions with over a thousand galaxies(maybe even larger ones somewhere in the far away space of the grand universe?). There will be societies that have everything, and societies with barely anything. Some will build structures the size of star systems or many times larger. There will be instantaneous travel for some, and slow travel for others. It will be an unfair universe.

Perhaps I have taken on something of a scale that is impossible to work with? Time will tell.

I focus on the characters that live in that universe and their story, through them, I explore some of the many worlds. Planets will have different biomes and continents. Will I explore every biome of a select planet? Not always, but they will be there.
In one scene for example, a character is standing on a ship's external observation platform, observing a planet with three differently coloured continents, but when they visit, they only visit one of them. There will also be artificial structures of incredible size with great biological and cultural diversity.

Why do I have this scale? Because I want to bring the reader into a false safety that nothing could threaten anything so large, yet size will ultimately not matter. Nothing lasts forever, all things can be destroyed in one way or another. I also have this scale because I thought it would be interesting to work with. I like the idea of an "immortal" state.

Hope to finish before I die.

 

There's no reason though why a terraformed Mars or Venus would have a single climate. In fact, it's very unlikely - like Earth, higher lattitudes on the planet will be colder. And given that Venus rotates so slowly, the "night" side of the planet is going to be considerably different from the "day" side.

 

You left off the parts immediately before and after:

 

I love Star Wars, but A New Hope would have benefited immensely from just one shot of Leia shedding tears after Alderaan was blown up. No need for waterworks, I know she had to keep it together to prevent the situation from getting even worse, but still. We're talking about an atrocity magnitudes worse than the Holocaust.

 

I almost want to say she saw a very abstract image of a planet blowing up, and she knew it was her planet, but seeing it at such a vast scale rather than seeing people suffering and dying would tend to distance you from the atrocity (which the filmmakers probably did for a very good reason, don't want to emotionally destroy the audience at that point).

That said, I clearly remember the day of 9-11 2001 when I woke up and all I saw on every channel were the same images of 2 towers with smoke rolling off. There was commentary of course, but I didn't get a clear understanding of what was going on for some time, until the channel I was watching rolled back and explained what had happened, at which point I burst out in tears. Before that it was more of a surreal image that I coudn't understand. But she did know it was her planet

 

I suppose the threat to this particular universe could work just as well with one galaxy or ten, but I decided that heck, if I'm going large scale, might as well pump up the numbers. Will be fun to work with. It will also open up for a near limitless amount of add-on content as well, heh.

 

Can't the same be asked today? Or in many years if we developed endless/limitless virtual reality? There may always be those who seek to live in the real world, and whose ambitions reach far beyond their own backyard. I don't have a better answer than that.

 

To be the first to brag about breaking the Guinness Book Of Universe Records
for most amount of time spent twiddling ones thumbs?

 

Sorry, but I almost immediately switch off whenever someone mentions "intergalactic." While I believe that the speed of light is a hard limit and even "interstellar" will never be anything but fiction, I'm willing to suspend that disbelief pretty readily for a good story (or even a mediocre one). But the thing is, travel has to have a cost. Whether you're eating pemmican and cornmeal and wearing through the soles of your boots or burning gasoline and wearing the tread off your tires or using rolled aluminized rubber to give you the thrust to get two men and a dune buggy to the nearest natural satellite you've got to have fuel of some sort commensurate to the distance to be traveled in the time allotted. "Wormholes" are a huge handwave that assume you can make one expenditure of energy to create them (however that works) and the thing just stays open unattended forever. How? I don't need a rigorous scientific explanation because I don't think one is possible, but even Star Trek had those dilithium crystals that needed to be replaced time to time.

Also, how does one "aim" the other end of a wormhole across even interstellar, let alone intergalactic space? One of my favorite treatments of that issue (and one that I've lifted and adapted for a work on pause) is The Algebraist. The only beings in the galactic civilization that had the ability to create wormholes were part of the civ's central government, and wormholes had to be created in pairs. One of them would remain where it was created while the other was loaded aboard a "fast" sublight ship, taken to the destination system as cargo, and then "installed" in a gravitationally flat bit of space. If something sufficiently massive passed too close to the wormhole the whole link would go "pop!" and wink out of existence, then you'd have to wait another hundred years in Disconnect until your new wormhole link showed up.

Sorry, bit of a rant, but I think modern humans just don't understand the scale of anything anymore. I moved to a new city once, was way short on funds, so rather than take public transportation I walked everywhere. Forty-five minutes to the south edge of the city center from where I lived on the south edge of city limits. 34 km to the next major city is a seven hour walk or thirty-one minutes on the train. From the Earth to the Moon took Apollo 11 seventy-five hours. Voyager 1 took 35 years to get to the edge of the solar system. Not saying that these are the fastest things possible or were even designed for speed, but when we think that space is big we forget how big our own backyards are.

 

Science geek hat on. Our local cluster contains nearly 100 galaxies, but only 2 are of the order of 100+ billion - the Milky Way and Andromeda. The third largest, Triangulum., contains around 40 billion. The rest only contain a "few" billion. So in a realistic scenario, the total number of stars is unlikely to be much more than double that of a single Milky Way-sized galaxy.

That equates to "under" a trillion stars. Tiny!

 

I think this image gives a very good image of the scale of the universe. It's an illustration of the largest stars. Now imagine this applied on a galactic scale.



My mind stops working when I think of something like the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It is 10 BILLION light years wide and contains 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 (20 quintillion) solar masses.

 

I love that graphic, I've used a similar video illustration for ages when warranted in my classes.

 

Googled. Nope, gray smoke from ears.