tropes and cliches – Page 4 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

T is for Terraforming

[NOTE: this post is a reprint of an earlier post from the Trope Tuesday series, which you can find here.]

One of the problems with interplanetary colonization is that Earth-like worlds are fairly rare (though possibly not as rare as we once thought). In our own solar system, the only other world that comes anywhere close (Mars) is a radiation-blasted desert with only the barest hint of an atmosphere and a surface temperature colder than Antarctica. To get around this problem, you can do one of two things: build an artificial enclosed environment to house the colony, or change the world itself to make it more Earthlike–in other words, terraform it.

The actual science of terraforming is ~~way over my head~~ far too complex to do it justice in this post. Instead, I’ll just point you to the Terraforming Wikipedia page as a starting point and focus on how the concept is used as a story trope.

According to tvtropes and Wikipedia, the term came from a 1942 novella by Jack Williamson titled “Collision Orbit.” The concept of changing the environment of an entire planet actually goes back much further, with H.G. Wells subverting the trope in War of the Worlds (instead of humans terraforming other worlds, the hostile Martians try to xenoform Earth to make it habitable for them). Before the U.S. and U.S.S.R. put probes on the surface of Mars and Venus, it was fairly common for writers to speculate that those planets were able to support human life, at least on a basic, rudimentary level. Once the science showed that that isn’t actually the case, terraforming as a story trope really began to take off.

Today, this trope occurs commonly across all ranges of the Mohs scale. Soft sci-fi stories (such as Firefly) use it as an excuse to have planets that look and feel like Earth. Hard sci-fi stories (such as Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) use it as a fundamental premise, or to pose questions like “what is the ultimate destiny of human evolution?” or “how important is it to our species’ survival that we spread out beyond Earth?” Although it’s not something that we as a species have (yet) done, our present science seems to place it well within the range of the plausible, and that means that makes it fair game for any kind of science fiction.

In order to be believable, however, any significant terraforming project requires two things: resources and time. LOTS of time. We’re talking on the order of centuries and millenia here. Because of that, stories that use this trope generally fall into the following categories:

The terraforming happened a long time ago and is part of the world’s ancient (or near ancient) history.
The terraforming is on-going and directly impacts almost every element of the world’s culture and setting.
The terraforming has failed in some way, which may (or may not) make it a key element in the story conflict.

As with generation ships, the scope of this trope spans more than just the interests of a single character–it deals with the ultimate destiny of entire cultures and civilizations. In hard sci-fi stories, the planet that’s being terraformed may actually become more of a character in itself than the individual people who are terraforming it. Unless they have some form of immortality, they have little hope of ever seeing the ultimate end of it.

Of course, that almost makes the project more of a religion to the colonists than a science, with all sorts of interesting philosophical and story implications.

Why is this trope so widespread in science fiction? I can think of a few potential reasons. First, it hits on some of the key issues that lie at the very heart of the genre, such as the ultimate destiny of humanity and the ethical issues surrounding our ability to play God through the wonders of science. Also, it captures the imagination in a way that few other tropes can equal. Because the scope of any terraforming project is so vast, the implications touch on almost every key element of the story, including setting, character, and conflict.

But on an even more fundamental level, it hits on one of the key elements of any fantasy magic system: limitations. We can’t live on an alien world because the conditions are too hostile, but we can’t just wave our hands to make it Earth-like either. We have to undergo a painstaking, laborious process that could unravel at any point and throw everything we’ve worked for into chaos. We have to dedicate our whole lives to the project for dozens of generations before it will ever pay off. There are no shortcuts–none that won’t strain our readers’ suspension of disbelief, anyway. But if it all works out, then we will have created a new Earth–and how is that not magic?

Needless to say, I’m a big fan of this trope. I’ve used it in just about every science fiction story I’ve written, though I probably play with it the most in Star Wanderers. The main character of that story comes from a world where a terraformation project failed, having severe religious implications that drive the whole series. Sacrifice is largely set in orbit around a world that is midway through the terraforming process. Elswhere in the Gaia Nova universe, people build domes just as often to keep humanity from screwing over a terraformed world as they do to provide room to live on one that isn’t. After all this, though, I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this trope. You can definitely expect to see it in my work in the future.

S is for Space Station

downbelow_station Planets are not the only setting for science fiction stories–space stations are common as well. From the Death Star (“that’s no moon…”) to Downbelow Station, the Venus Equilateral to ISPV 7 to the Battle School in Ender’s Game, space stations are a major staple of any space-centered science fiction.

The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. Before we can go to the planets and the stars, we need to have a permanent presence outside of this massive gravity well we call Earth. The easiest and most logical place to expand first is to orbit, where supplies can be ferried up without too much difficulty and astronauts can escape in case of an emergency. Indeed, with the International Space Station, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now.

In science fiction, of course, space stations go much further than they do in real life. They’re often giant orbital cities, with thousands of people living and working there permanently. Often, they feature some sort of rotating toroidal structure in order to simulate gravity. If there are settlements on the planet below, the station often serves as a major hub for commerce, serving as a waypoint for interstellar merchants and wholesalers who ferry their wares up to orbit. And if the planet is still being colonized, then the space station often serves as an important umbilical to the outside universe.

They can also have strategic value in the event of a war. Battleships need to be serviced too, after all, and a station’s position in orbit can provide an excellent platform from which to bombard or lay siege to the planet. Alternately, outposts at more distant locations like the Lagrange points can serve as a staging ground for future attacks–a sort of astronomical “high ground,” if you will. If nothing else, abandoned stations may contain supply caches that can aid a fleeing starship, or provide shelter behind enemy lines, as was the case with the first Halo game.

Stations can come in all sorts of different flavors, from the puny to the magnificent. The most eye-popping station of all is probably the Ringworld from Larry Niven’s series of the same name. As the name would imply, the station is a giant ring–so huge, its circumference is the orbit of a habitable planet, with the sun at its center! Gravity is provided by rotation, and night and day by giant orbiting panels that block out the sun at regular intervals.

My favorite stations, though, are the more realistic ones–the ones that I can imagine myself living on someday. That was one of the things I enjoyed about Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh–her depiction of human expansion into space is eminently believable, and her stations are a natural extension of that. I also really enjoyed her focus on the social dynamics of living on a giant station, and what it would be like to live in such a society.

The Battle School from Ender’s Game is another huge favorite of mine. One of the advantages of building a structure in space is that gravity becomes malleable, so that some parts of the structure can simulate Earth-surface gravity while others leave people completely weightless. The Battle School uses that to its advantage, with the main training room a zero-g laser tag battle arena, where the students have to learn how to stop thinking in terms of the planar dimensions, where “up” and “down” have any meaning. It’s really quite fascinating.

It should come as no surprise that space stations pepper my own works. They’re especially common in the Star Wanderers series, where few worlds have been terraformed and orbital platforms make up the majority of human living space (at least in the Outworlds). In Sholpan and Bringing Stella Home, James, Ben, and Stella are all from a space station–a distinction that is especially useful for Stella, since her Hameji captors despise the “planetborn.” Genesis Earth takes that a step further, as spaceborn Michael and Terra have never been to the surface of a planet before until midway through the novel. Just as going into space is paradigm shifting for us, the experience of walking on a planet proves just as transformative for them.

P is for Planets

Gliese 581 by ~arisechicken117 on deviantART

One of the best things about a good science fiction story is that it can take you to another world–literally! Well, not in the sense of actually physically taking you there, but if you want to experience the thrills of an alien world from the safety of your favorite chair, the best way to do it is to immerse yourself in a good space adventure story.

Planets are to science fiction what islands and continents are to fantasy. It’s possible to tell a story where no one ever sets foot on one, but then you’ve basically got a sea story (since space is an ocean, at least in most space opera). Even then, your characters are probably going to put into port from time to time, if for nothing else than a change of scenery to make things interesting. And if there’s anything science fiction interesting, it’s the wide variety of possible planet types.

For example, what would a planet be like if it were covered completely by water? If the world-ocean was so deep that there was no visible land? Assuming that the planet orbits within its sun’s habitable zone, where the temperature ranges allow water to exist as a liquid, then you would have a pretty interesting place. What would the hurricanes be like? A lot more intense than the ones here on Earth, that’s for sure.

Then again, suppose that the planet was a bit closer to its sun, and most of that water existed in the atmosphere as a gas. You’d have some pretty intense atmospheric pressures on the surface, but the density of the atmosphere would make it much easier to keep airships and flying castles aloft. In fact, that might be the most practical way to settle that kind of a world.

In our own solar system, there is an incredible amount of variety. On Mars, for example, glaciers of dry ice cover the southern pole, while the sun sets blue in a normally dirty brown sky. The tallest mountain actually summits above the atmosphere, and every few years, dust storms cover the whole world. And believe it or not, Mars is a lot more similar to Earth than anything else in our solar system.

On Titan, rivers of liquid methane flow down mountains of water ice, while black carbon dunes drift across a desert shrouded in orange haze. While the sun rises and sets with predictable regularity, the planet Saturn is suspended at the same point on the horizon and dominates a large portion of the sky. Don’t expect to see any rings, though–Titan orbits along Saturn’s ring plane, so the rings are mostly invisible.

Europa, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, is also dominated by its host planet. Water ice covers the surface, but deep, deep below, there’s a massive liquid ocean that has never seen the light of the sun. What sort of monsters lurk in those depths–an ocean buried beneath a world?

Jupiter itself is pretty intense. A gas giant world with swirling bands of planet-sized clouds, it hosts a monstrous hurricane large enough to swallow at least two Earths. This vortex has been churning across the planet for over 150 years, and possibly as much as 350. I still remember the chills I got when I read 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the scientists’ probe dropped through the haze to a cloud deck as massive as one of our continents here on Earth.

Gas giant planets can be really interesting. They aren’t human habitable, since the gravity and pressure are so intense that anything man-made would be crushed before it could hit the surface, but those same forces can lead to some other interesting things. For example, at the lower levels, you may find storms that rain diamonds. Go further still, and you find an intense magnetic core that’s just on the verge of being able to sustain nuclear fusion. Detonate enough nuclear material down there, like they did in a short story from the Halo universe, and you can turn the planet into a star.

And that’s just our solar system. What about the hundreds of exoplanets that astronomers are now discovering? The first one to be confirmed, believe it or not, was orbiting of all things a pulsar! Imagine that–instead of the life-giving rays of a sun, the planet is bathed in highly lethal X-rays and gamma rays.

Of course, there are plenty of planets orbiting stars like our sun, but most of the ones discovered so far are hot Jupiters–gas giant worlds that orbit so close to their sun that the years are measured in hours. Some of these planets are so close that the sun is actually blasting the atmosphere away. We haven’t discovered the rocky core of a gas giant world that’s been destroyed in this manner, but theoretically it could exist.

Or what about the planets with highly elliptical orbits that traverse the habitable zone of their stars? Imagine: a world where the winters are so cold that the oceans freeze solid. After several of our Earth years, the spring brings a massive thaw. For a few short months the weather is actually quite balmy. Then, as spring turns to summer, the heat grows more and more intense, until the oceans begin to boil! When the summer reaches its zenith, the planet is nothing but a scorched desert wasteland. Soon, though, the autumn cool brings back the rains, with storms so intense that they refill the oceans in just a matter of months! Then, the deep freeze of winter begins, and the world returns to its long icy tomb.

One of my favorites, though, is the ribbon world that Asimov predicted in some of his stories. Worlds like this occur most commonly at class M red dwarf stars, which are so cool compared to our sun that planets within the habitable zone are tidally locked. This means that the sun neither rises nor sets, but remains stationary in the sky. The day side is burning hot, with either a barren desert wasteland or a giant hurricane large enough to cover most of the hemisphere. The night side, on the other hand, is so cold that all the water is completely frozen. The only habitable parts of the planet exist in a ribbon-like swath where the sun is just on the other side of the horizon, casting the land in perpetual twilight.

Believe it or not, we’ve actually discovered a planet like this in the Gliese system. Gliese 581g, or “Zarmina’s World” as the lead astronomer dubbed it, was discovered back in 2010. I was so excited by the discovery that I dedicated a blog post to it. Since then, the findings have not yet been confirmed, so it isn’t safe to call it a planet for sure, but if/when it ever is confirmed, it may be one of the first truly Earth-like planets to be discovered (at least, as Earth-like as a ribbon world can be).

In much of science fiction, there’s a tendency to make planets single biome only. Thus, you have your desert planets (Arrakis, Tatooine, Gunsmoke), your ice planets (Hoth, Gethen), your ocean planets (Calamari, Aqua), your jungle/forest planets (Dagobah, Lusitania, Kashyyyk), and even planets that are nothing but giant cities (Trantor, Coruscant). Some of the more recent series like Halo try to avert this, but even today it’s still fairly common.

If there’s anything that modern astronomy is showing us, though, it’s that the variety of planets and worlds out there is beyond anything we could possibly imagine. This is why I get a bit irked when an otherwise excellent series like Firefly makes out every planet to be like Wyoming. What about Gliese 581g? Kepler 22b? GJ 1214b? Kepler 16b?

As more exoplanets are discovered, I can’t help but believe that science fiction is going to experience a paradigm shift. What was once purely the realm of imagination is now being confirmed as reality. Alien worlds exist–alien Earths, even. And just as our conception of Mars changed from the Sword & Planet tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars to the hard sf epics of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, so will our conception of other alien worlds.

I’ve got a lot of different planets in my own books, some borrowing a lot from the recent exoplanet discoveries, others leaning closer to the single biome worlds of classic space opera. In Desert Stars, Gaia Nova is kind of a cross between Arrakis and Trantor, with giant domed arcologies covering half the planet’s surface while the rest is mostly desert and wasteland. In Bringing Stella Home, Kardunash IV is (or rather, was) an Earth-like world, with forests, mountains, and oceans. In Stars of Blood and Glory, New Rigel is a straight up ocean world, while Ebitha from Star Wanderers is an ocean world tidally locked to its dwarf M class sun. I haven’t yet played with the elliptical planet, but I probably will someday.

One of the things I love most about a good science fiction story is that it takes me out of this world. With all the incredible new discoveries that astronomers are making, that aspect of the genre is only bound to get better. They’ve certainly enriched my own work, and will doubtless continue to do so in the future.

M is for Merchanter

If space is an ocean and interstellar colonization is happening on a grand scale, then it should come as no surprise that so many starship captains are intrepid merchants, traveling the galaxy in pursuit of a good business deal. Whether they’re doing it legally as entrepreneurs or illegally as smugglers, you can find these guys in almost any space opera, from Star Wars and Star Trek to Firefly and Foundation.

Ever since Marco Polo and Sindbad the Sailor, intrepid merchants have played a major role throughout history. The brave adventurers who travels to exotic locales to bring you all the best deals, these are often the guys at the forefront of exploration and expansion. After all, Columbus sailed the ocean blue to find a better trade route to India–discovering a new world was just a side benefit. The British Empire had its origins in mercantilism, forming the empire to protect their trade routes (and later, to secure markets and resources for their industrialized economy).

Unlike their real-world counterparts, however, space merchanters have a lot more challenges to contend with than sandstorms and bandits. Science fictional universes are teeming with all sorts of exotic dangers, from black holes and solar flares to space pirates and strange alien races. Unless FTL communication is in force, the immensity of space often makes it impossible to know exactly what to expect on your next FTL jump. And then there’s all the normal space stuff, like busted airlocks and critical failures in the oxygen recyclers.

The best stories, though, are the ones that world build their merchanters to the point where they form their own distinct society. This may overlap with the proud merchant race, though IMO it works best when it’s more than just a hat that everyone wears. The merchanters from C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe are a great example, where the entire society has restructured itself around the nomadic spacefaring lifestyle. Another is Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, where the free traders have developed a strict social hierarchy that defines everyone’s role in running the spaceships.

Since space-centered science fiction largely grew up in the Cold War era, I wonder how much of this trope stems out of the clash between communism and capitalism. The original Star Trek certainly shows a lot of Cold War influences, with the Klingons originally playing proxy for the Russians. Is the genre’s fascination with the adventurous space merchant somehow an outgrowth of that world-shaping conflict? And if so, how do the stories differ on the Soviet side? It makes me wish I could read Russian, since the Soviets certainly had their own fascination with science fiction and space opera.

In my own work, this trope plays a central role. Most of the major characters in my stories are merchants of one stripe or another. James McCoy from Bringing Stella Home is the son of a merchanter, and comes from a mining colony where interplanetary trade drives the local economy (setting up the conflict for Heart of the Nebula after the Hameji take over).

But the trope takes special prominence in my Star Wanderers novellas, which was largely a reaction to C.J. Cherryh and Heinlein. I wanted to create a spacefaring society on the starbound frontier that revolved not only around trade and colonization, but much more personal struggles like finding love and fighting loneliness. In that sense, the stories are a lot more like Merchanter’s Luck than Downbelow Station–more about the lives of individual characters than the grand sweep of galactic history.

Either way, I’m a big fan of this trope. If you’ve got any examples from your favorite books, please share! Wish-fulfillment is a huge part of any fictional genre, and science fiction is no exception. If I could leave it all behind to become a merchant to the stars, you can bet I’d do it in an instant!

L is for Lost Colony

worthingsaga As we discussed in I is for Interstellar, space colonization is a major theme of science fiction, especially space opera. Of course, things don’t always go smoothly. Space is a really, really, really big place, and sometimes, due to war or famine or simple bureaucratic mismanagement, colonies get cut off from the rest of galactic civilization. They become lost colonies.

Some of my favorite stories are about lost colonies: either how they became cut off, or how they reintegrate after so many thousands of years. In many of these stories, the technology of these colonies has regressed, sometimes to the point where the descendents may not even know that their ancestors came from the stars. When contact is finally made, the envoys from the galactic federation may seem like gods or wizards.

Because of this technological disconnect, stories about lost colonies often straddle the line between science fiction and fantasy. After all, Clarke’s third law states:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Of course, the line between science fiction and fantasy has always been a fuzzy one. Hundreds of attempts have been made to define it, but they all fall short. In the end, it often breaks down to certain recurring tropes, like dragons and wizards versus ray guns and rockets, but even that doesn’t always work.

For example, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern is technically about a lost colony far into the future, but it’s got dragons and castles and other tropes that belong squarely in fantasy. Then again, the dragonriders have to fight alien worms who invade every few dozen years from a planet with a highly elliptical orbit, so there’s still a strong science fiction basis undergirding the whole thing.

And that’s just Dragonriders of Pern. What about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, or C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy? Trigun is more western than fantasy, but it’s also full of sci-fi tropes like giant sand-crawling monster ships and a weird post-apocalyptic backstory. And then there’s all the Japanese RPGs that combine magic with mechas, with Xenogears as one of the best examples. For a distinct Middle Eastern flavor, look no further than Stargate.

It’s no coincidence that all of these stories feature a lost colony of one kind or another. When the characters don’t know that they’re living in a science fictional universe, it’s very easy to throw in tropes from other genres. By no means is it required–Battlestar Galactica and Dune are evidence enough of that–but they certainly present the opportunity to do so. After all, lost colony stories basically present a hiccup in humanity’s march of progress, breaking the essential science fiction narrative for all sorts of interesting side stories and tangents.

One perennial favorite of science fiction writers is to suggest that Earth itself is a lost colony from some other galactic civilization. That forms the entire premise behind Battlestar Galactica: the original twelve colonies have been destroyed in the human-cylon wars, and the last few survivors are searching for the legendary thirteenth colony of Earth, hoping to find some sort of refuge. Apparently, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle also plays with this trope, though she’s never very explicit with her world building. It can be a bit tricky to twist the lost colony trope in this manner, but if pulled off right it can really make you sit back and go “whoa.”

My personal favorite is probably Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga, about a colony of telepaths that breaks off from a collapsing galactic empire and actually becomes more advanced than the rest of humanity. When Jason Worthing and Justice re-establish contact, the descendents of the galactics are basically pre-industrial subsistence farmers who view them as gods–which, in a certain sense, they almost are.

It’s a great story that really entranced me, not just for the science fictional elements but also for the distinct fantasy flavor. Orson Scott Card’s handling of viewpoint in that book is truly masterful, so that I felt as if I were viewing everything through the eyes of his characters. Since the farmers don’t know anything about their spacefaring ancestors, all the parts from their point of view feel like a completely different story. It was really great.

My first novel was actually a lost colony story, combined with a first contact. I trunked it a long time ago, but many of the earliest posts on this blog are all about my experience writing it. As for my other books, Desert Stars contains elements of this, though the lost colony in question is actually a nomadic desert society that lives on the capital planet of the galactic empire, just outside of the domes where all the more civilized folk live. Heart of the Nebula is basically about a society that puts itself in exile in order to escape the privations of the Hameji. And in… no, I’d better not spoil it. 😉

The lost colony isn’t one of the flashier or more prominent tropes of science fiction, but it’s definitely one of my favorites. It’s a great way to add depth and intrigue, as well as bend genres. For that reason, I think this trope does a lot to keep science fiction fresh.

I is for Interstellar

Right after I went through my Dinosaur phase, I saw Star Wars IV: A New Hope for the first time. Instantly, all that childlike excitement and exuberance was transferred from paleontology to astronomy. We had a series of about twenty astronomy books in my elementary school’s LRC (Asimov’s astronomy series, I believe–the ones with the gray dust jackets), and in about a year I’d read them all.

Star Wars was fun, but what was really fascinating was learning about the stars. When I started to grasp the scale of our galaxy–that if our solar system was the size of a milk carton, the Milky Way would be the size of North America–my mind was totally blown. Quasars, pulsars, black holes, white dwarfs, red giants–it was so amazing! And then, when I started thinking about all the other worlds out there, and what it would be like to visit them–that’s when I became a science fiction fan for life.

It goes without saying that you can’t have space opera without setting the story somewhere in space. But the best space opera goes much further than that–it’s about space as the final frontier, and humanity’s ultimate destiny among the stars. After all, if we as a species stay put on this pale blue dot, sooner or later we’ll kill ourselves off or suffer another mass extinction event that wipes us all out like the Dinosaurs.

For that reason, classic space opera often takes undertones of manifest destiny, except on a galactic scale. The stars are not just interesting places to visit, they’re absolutely crucial to our survival, and no matter what alien dangers await us, we will face them boldly and either conquer or be conquered.

Of course, not all space opera stories take place during the exploration and colonization phase of human interstellar expansion. Plenty of stories take place thousands of years later, once humanity has comfortably established itself among the stars. Even so, there are still more than enough wonders remaining to be explored–if not for the characters, then for the readership. The vastness of space is so great that there really is no end to it, and the possibilities are only bounded by the writer’s imagination.

One of my favorite space opera computer games is Star Control II, also know as the Ur-Quan Masters. In the game, you’re the captain of a giant starship built with alien precursor technology. The races of the Federation, including humanity, have been defeated and enslaved by an aggressive warrior race known as the Ur-Quan. You must travel from star to star, gathering resources to upgrade your starship and convincing the other alien races to join the new alliance.

By far, the best part about that game is the starmap. It’s HUGE! More worlds than anyone can possibly visit in any one playthrough, or five, or even ten. And each alien race has its own history, its own culture, its own set of goals and objectives–and oftentimes, most of these goals have very little to do with the actual conflict of the game. In fact, there are some races like the Arilou which don’t even seem to know that there’s a war going on. They’re much more interested in something frightening and mysterious from another dimension that they never quite explained, but that may involve the Orz somehow…

With each new world that you discover, you learn that the galaxy has a very, very, very long history. So long, in fact, that the human race has only really existed for a blip in time. The other races are involved in their own disputes, and many of these go back to the times when our ancestors were swinging through the trees somewhere in central Africa. But whether or not we want to be a part of it, we’re involved, simply by virtue of where our star happens to be located.

The best space opera isn’t just about our world: it’s about our place in a much wider universe. Whether it’s a serious tale about humanity’s ultimate destiny, or an action-packed intergalactic romp, there’s always that sense of something greater than us–that same sense of wonder that gripped me as a boy when I first started to learn about the stars.

Image by nyrath at Project Rho. I highly recommend checking out his excellent starmaps!

H is for Hologram

In real life, the term “hologram” means something fairly specific. But in science fiction, it can mean a number of different things.

For example, in Star Wars it’s basically a three dimensional video recording projected on a flat surface. In Halo, it’s the visual form that the AI character Cortana takes when she wants to interact with the Master Chief. And in Star Trek, the holograms actually have a degree of physical substance, so that in some episodes they go rogue and try to take over the ship.

The basic underlying idea, though, is the same: blurring the line between the virtual world and the real world through a virtual projection that we can interact with. And in that sense, this is actually an area where science fact is fast catching up with science fiction.

Some sub-genres, such as cyberpunk, focus almost solely on the tension between the real and the virtual. Often set in a near-future world, cyberpunk stories often feature a crapsack future, from which the only meaningful escape is a virtual reality. But the thing about virtual realities is that they can be reprogrammed in such a way as to give the ones controlling it almost absolute power over the lives of the people inside. For that reason, the main characters are often hackers, struggling against the corporate evil overlords.

But holograms aren’t restricted to cyberpunk. They’re quite common in space opera, too, and not just because they’re cool. For one thing, they can be really useful for training simulations (which often leads to holodeck malfunctions, courtesy of the rule of drama). They can also be useful as disguises or decoys, especially in the Halo series.

But perhaps the most memorable holograms are the ones who develop a close relationship with their real-world human counterparts. This may include romance, which, combined with the existential angst that typically surrounds androids, robots, and cyborgs, makes for some very interesting tension. A good example of this is Cortana from the Halo series, an alien AI who took on a younger form of her human handler, Doctor Halsey, and then developed a very close relationship with her Spartan bodyguard, the Master Chief. It never actually went anywhere (at least in the main series arc), but it certainly made for an interesting story.

Jane from the Ender’s Game series would probably be my favorite hologram, though she’s more of a shapeshifting AI who can take many different forms, depending on what suits her. Cortana is definitely up there too. I haven’t used this trope much in my own fiction yet, but I’m playing with it in Heart of the Nebula, a currently unpublished direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home. Not sure exactly where I want to take it yet, but it should be interesting.

G is for Gravity

cmdr_hadfield_juggling — Commander Hadfield planning a zero-g easter egg hunt earlier this month on the ISS.

Possibly one of the most defining aspects of space is the sensation of free fall. Of course, gravity exists in space, the same as it does everywhere else in the universe (probably), but in space we feel its effects differently because we aren’t close enough to a body of sufficient mass to feel a strong pull. That, and our spaceship itself is also in free fall, so if that’s our frame of reference we feel no weight because there’s nothing for weight to push back on … but that’s a concept probably best left for O is for Orbit.

The thing is, as fun as weightlessness can be, in the long-term it can have some negative health effects, such as deterioration of bone and muscles, weakening of the immune system, etc. The effects of micro gravity on human fertility are not very well-studied, but there’s some speculation that conception and gestation would be impossible, since embryos need gravity in order to implant properly. Humans are adapted to live on the surface of Earth, and that means living with a constant 10 m/s² or so of gravitational acceleration.

For future space colonies and spacefaring civilizations, this means we need to find a way to simulate the effects of gravity in a micro-gravity environment. There are a few common ways to deal with this problem:

Artificial Gravity — Applied phlebotinum that creates a field within which the gravity is normal. A necessary weasel hand wave that you’ll see most often in soft sci-fi and space opera, where the plot and characters are more important than the science.
Centrifugal Gravity — The illusion of gravity created by spinning a can-like spaceship or space station in a circle, pressing the humans against the inside wall. You’ll see this in both hard and soft sci-fi. Scale it up, and you get Ringworld Planets.
Powerful Starship Drive — If your starship drive is powerful enough, it can accelerate you at 10 m/s², effectively creating the sensation of gravity. Your starship will be like a flying skyscraper, where “down” is in the direction of the engines. At this rate of acceleration, you should reach 99.9% the speed of light in about a year, which opens up all sorts of possibilities for relativistic space travel (provided you have a sufficiently massive energy source to sustain that reaction). Just be sure to give yourself the same amount of time to decelerate, otherwise bad things may happen.
Baby Planet — An asteroid no larger than a small asteroid that still, for some reason, has normal Earth-like gravity. Think Le Petit Prince. Not nearly as common as the other three, but the existence of gravitational waves means that it may be possible (or at least plausible) to create gravity generators that work this way.
Roll with it — Yeah, so everything is weightless in space. So what? Deal.

Another problem related to gravity is rapid deceleration. Unless you don’t mind splattering everyone in your starship all over the walls and ceilings, you can’t go from zero to near-light speeds (or vice versa) without some way to counteract the sharp change in momentum. Space opera and soft sci-fi gets around this by using inertial dampers–basically, magical devices that give the starship a nice, soft ride (unless you want the bridge to explode, of course). As you might expect, stories on the harder side of sci-fi tend to play around with this a lot more.

My first exposure to artificial gravity came when I read a comic book version of The Norby Chronicles by Isaac Asimov. The characters had a device that would basically allow them to levitate, and I thought that was so cool. It wasn’t until I read the Corellia Trilogy by Roger Allen McBride that I realized that every starship in the Star Wars universe had a machine that could manipulate gravity like this. At one point, the artificial gravity generators on one of the ships failed. My mind was blown, and I’ve never looked at gravity the same since.

I tend to write stories where the characters and plot are more central than the science, so I’ll often just fall back on the standard artificial gravity field like most space opera. During combat maneuvers, though, things get a bit more tricky, with dampers on the bridge that mitigate (but don’t erase) the worst effects of rapid deceleration, and special coffin-like chambers for the crew below decks to keep them from getting splattered. In my Star Wanderers series, I also use centrifugal gravity for the larger space stations, since I figure the energy costs of artificial gravity tend to scale up.

In short, science fiction stories that address the problem of gravity in a real and thoughtful way tend to be a lot more believable and immersive, even if the solution to the problem is basically magic. As with anything in science fiction, there are so many imaginative ways of dealing with the problem that it’s actually more of an opportunity than anything else.

F is for Faster Than Light

Remember that moment in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon went into hyperspace? When Harrison Ford shouted “go strap yourselves in, I’m going to make the jump to light speed,” and the sky lit up as the stars streaked by? That was my first introduction to faster-than-light (FTL) travel, and I haven’t looked back since.

FTL is a major recurring trope in space opera, and not just because of how cool it is. If you’re going to have a galactic empire, you need some way to get around that empire–or at least some way to transmit information without too much difficulty. The distance between star systems is measured not in miles or kilometers, but light years–that is, the distance that a particle of light can travel in one year. Considering how the nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is ~4.24 ly away, you can see the need for some sort of magical technology to bridge the distance.

FTL travel comes in four basic flavors:

Warp Drives — The ship breaks the speed of light as easily as our modern fighter jets break the speed of sound. Impossible to justify, except through hand-waving. The most prominent example of this is Star Trek.
Jump Drives — The ship disappears from its current position and reappears somewhere else. Also requires hand-waving, but is at least a little easier to justify. Battlestar Galactica is a good example of this, as is Schlock Mercenary.
Hyperspace Drives — The ship enters an alternate dimension which allows it to travel faster through our own. The alternate dimension is called ____space, usually “hyper” but also “quasi,” “x,” etc. Star Wars is the classic example, though Star Control II took things a step further by having a hyperspace dimension within hyperspace.
Wormgate Network — The ship (or maybe just the passengers) enters a portal which transports it to a portal somewhere else. A network of these portals allows travel throughout the galaxy. Stargate and Babylon 5 use this method.

An alternate way to do it is to make FTL travel impossible, but hold the galactic empire together through FTL communication. This technology, known as the ansible, features prominently in Ursula K. Le Guin’s books and the Ender’s Game universe. It has some really interesting implications: for example, even though planets can communicate instantaneously with each other, it takes almost 40 or 50 years to go from one to another, but at near-light speeds, it feels as if only a few months have gone by. Thus, if you’re going to travel to another world, you have to leave everything behind, including your family and loved ones. By traveling from world to world, you can skip entire generations, spreading your natural lifespan across thousands of years of normal time.

In writing FTL, one thing you have to be really careful about is to keep in mind ways in which the system can be abused. For example, if jump drive technology makes it possible to instantaneously transport anything anywhere in the universe, then you can bet that someone is going to send a bomb into the White House (or whatever the equivalent is in your fictional universe). Thus, the invention of unrestricted jump drive technology will lead to a very short and brutal war.

This actually happened in Schlock Mercenary, and the solution was Terraport Area Denial (TAD) zones, or broad areas of space where a force field prevents anyone from either jumping in or out. Thus, anyone who wants to visit a planet in a TAD zone has to jump to the edge of the field and travel the rest of the way at sublight speeds.

FTL isn’t always appropriate for a science fiction story. If the story is supposed to lean more toward hard sf, then it’s probably better to stick with our current understanding of the rules of physics, which state that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Still, with things like quantum entanglement and other recent discoveries, if you know the science well enough, even the speed of light might not be an upper limit. But for the rest of us mortals, FTL is basically just magic–a sufficiently explained magic, perhaps, but magic nonetheless.

Personally, I’m a fan of the jump drive form of FTL. That’s the one I use the most in my own books. The cost is that the further distance you try to jump, the harder it is to pinpoint exactly where you’ll end up. To overcome this, you can use jump beacons to draw out anyone trying to jump into your particular sector and have them exit jumpspace next to the beacon. This comes in handy in combat, when the enemy tries to jump a nuke onto your ship.

In the later Gaia Nova books, FTL is facilitated by jump stations spread out in a line across space, with reactors powerful enough to jump ships rapidly to the next point along the line. In the earlier Star Wanderers books, that technology hasn’t been invented yet, so there’s still an Outworld frontier.

It gets kind of complicated, but it’s lots and lots of fun to world build. For example, how does a particular change in the FTL tech alter the galactic balance of power? When settlers try to colonize a new system, what do they establish first–starlanes, jump beacons, Lagrange outposts, or what? As with any magic, changing one thing affects everything else, which also affects everything else, which … yeah, you get the picture.

E is for Empire

Almost every far future science fiction story has a galactic empire of some kind. From Dune to Foundation, from Star Wars to Firefly, there’s always someone trying to rule the galaxy, often in a way that makes life difficult for the protagonists.

Why? Rule of drama, of course, but also because it gives the story a truly epic scope. Just as the classics such as Homer’s Iliad and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are as much about entire civilizations as they are about the people characters within them, so it is with science fiction, especially space opera. Combine that with science fiction’s forward-thinking nature, and you have the potential for some truly amazing stories about humanity’s destiny among the stars.

But why empire? Because even if we make it out to the stars, we’ll probably still take with us all of the baggage that makes us human. Science fiction may be forward looking, but history repeats itself, and you can’t have a clear view of the future without understanding and acknowledging the past.

Not all galactic empires are evil, but most of them are. We shouldn’t have to look further than the real-world history of Imperialism to see why. Oppression, exploitation, slavery, genocide–all of these have been done in the name of Empire, and many more evils besides. Even benevolent hegemonic powers (such as, I would argue, the United States of America) often end up doing great harm, either through action or inaction.

Of course, all of this makes for some really great stories. When Asimov wrote his Foundation series, he quite literally based it on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. When Frank Herbert wrote Dune, he drew extensively from his background as an orientalist and based the overworld story on the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Star Wars is based loosely on the collapse of the Roman Republic, and Firefly echoes many of the old Western tales of former Confederate soldiers heading west after the US Civil War.

It’s worth pointing out that the Galactic Empire is by no means the only form of political organization in space opera. There are actually several, including:

The Federation — A loose organization of stars and planets that usually exists to foster cooperation and mutual peace between galactic civilizations. Rarely evil, but can be crippled by red tape.
The Republic — A more centralized version of the Federation, typically. Exercises more control over its citizens, but not in an oppressive way. Usually features some form of representative government.
The Alliance — A team of political underdogs united to overthrow the Empire and establish a more just form of government in its place. If they win, they usually become the Republic or the Federation.
The Kingdom — A smaller government within the larger political system, often struggling for survival against more powerful forces. Not always democratic, but is often good, at least to its own citizens.
The Hegemonic Empire — Like the Empire, but rules primarily through soft power, ie co-opting their enemies rather than crushing them. May overlap with the Republic or the Federation.
The People’s Republic of Tyranny — The Empire pretending to be the Federation.
The Vestigial Empire — What the Empire becomes when it’s been defeated but not yet destroyed. Still oppressive and evil, but rules a smaller territory and struggles for relevance and survival.
The Remnant — An element from the Alliance that’s gone rogue. The war may be over, but these guys are still fighting it, even if they’ve lost sight of what they’re fighting for.
The Horde — A highly aggressive and expansionist warlord state. By far the most violent and brutal of any political organization, it seeks to conquer and subjugate the entire galaxy.

As a political science major, all these forms of government really fascinate me. I’ve played with quite a few of them, especially the Horde (Bringing Stella Home), the Empire (Desert Stars), the Hegemonic Empire (Star Wanderers), the Kingdom (Stars of Blood and Glory), and the Remnant (also Stars of Blood and Glory). You can definitely expect to see me play with them again in the future.