Travel

[Image courtesy of aas587 on Dribbble]

I’ve noticed that several of my stories contain travel in one way or another, many of them to alternate realities and different galaxies and universes. It’s something I’d been fascinated by since I started the Mendaihu Universe back in the day. Sometimes the travel is metaphysical: the ‘stepping into Light’ of the trilogy is essentially the inversion of astral travel. Sometimes it’s magical, like the weave in In My Blue World, where special blades cut the lattice between universes and create a temporary connection. And in Queen Ophelia’s War, it’s good old fashioned fantasy magic powers weaving a connection between established portals. [You could say even Diwa & Kaffi focuses on travel, considering tintrite flight is a major theme.]

As for Theadia…? Well, I’m finally going for the gold and using the time-honored hard-sf subspace portal. And this time it’s not just a useful function within the story, it’s an important part of the story in and of itself: part of the conflict does indeed involve travel infrastructure! Because I AM A HUGE NERD. [Well, obviously it’s a lot more than that but I’m trying not to give too much away.] I’ll admit that I’m not going too deep into the physics and the theoreticals of space travel, because that way lies madness. I’m just going deep enough to make it believable, complete with red tape, mismanagement and all that ugly bureaucratic nonsense.

All I’ll say is this: when your giant and well-loved station uses a popular and heavily used subspace gate hub, orbits around its own cozy little ball of dirt that didn’t need terraforming and is a beloved tourist destination, and is celebrating its fiftieth year of independence from its former owners who still aren’t too happy about that, there’s going to be a lot of moving parts that are going to need people who know what they’re doing. Especially when said former owners have been thinking about taking it back by force.