Just a quick post to report that I have, indeed, started work on a new original novel (working title is Twice-Crowned), set largely in classical Athens, with Alexandra and Memnon as lead characters. A little over two thousand words down so far in
The first book I ever had published under my byline was GURPS Greece, a sourcebook on Heroic Age and classical Greek history for Steve Jackson Games . . . first released, good Lord, over twenty years ago (first printing in 1995).
I did a lot of research and reading for that project, which turned a passing interest in ancient Hellenic civilization into a life-long passion. Afterward I moved on to other projects for SJG – that was about when the GURPS Traveller license began, for which I eventually wrote and edited a pile of books. Yet that first book stuck with me, and gave me a concept that I’ve had in the back of my mind ever since.
One result was my first attempt to write an original novel (as an adult, anyway – I did manage to complete one novel as a pre-teenager that will mercifully never escape my dead files). That attempt failed dismally, when I realized that I had an opening and a conclusion and no idea whatsoever what to do in between. So I set the idea on a back shelf and let it gather dust for a couple of decades.
Now, partially because of the time I’ve spent playing the most recent Assassin’s Creed game, I’ve found myself reviving that old idea. Lo and behold, I think all the reading and experience I’ve had since then has given me the ability to approach that story once again. I’ve been working on that notion off and on for the past few weeks, and I think it’s mature enough that I can discuss it here.
It all started with a character, and a setting. The character was a sixteen-year-old girl, heir to the throne of a pseudo-Minoan city-state, who was forced into exile when an older sister proved a little more ruthless than anyone expected. The setting was classical-era Hellas, specifically in the middle phases of the great (Second) Peloponnesian War.
This is alternate-historical fantasy, to be sure. There were no significant Minoan survivals in the classical era of our own history, and I had in mind to bring in a few supernatural elements. My protagonist Alexandra is “goddess-touched,” an oracle who is able to see and command elements of the spirit world. She’s also a petite teenager who would be helpless in a straight-up fight, so she has to think her way out of trouble and make allies before she confronts her enemies.
The first point of divergence here is in the late Bronze Age. After the final collapse of Minoan Crete, I have a small group of survivors who manage to escape from the Mycenaean invaders by sea. They end up in the west, settling on a small island off the coast of what we know as Sicily. There they create the nucleus of a new civilization: Minoan in inspiration, strengthened by the arrival of archaic Greek refugees and colonists, interacting with the barbarian tribes of Sicily and southern Italy. Their capital city is called Danassos, meaning something like “the place of the Goddess,” and it substitutes for the city we know as Syracuse.
The second point of divergence is right around the time of the Persian invasions of Hellas. The presence of Danassos off in the west doesn’t make much difference to events in mainland Greece for a long time. After the Persian Wars, though, interaction between Danassos and Hellas begins to send events slightly off-kilter. There is still a series of Peloponnesian Wars, some of the events echo what happened in the real history, and most of the same people are involved.
Still, by about 420 BCE things are starting to look quite different. That’s when Alexandra gets curb-stomped in her first fight for the Danassan throne, and has to flee into exile. She and a single loyal soldier end up in Athens, where they struggle for a while before they begin to make allies . . . some of whom will be quite familiar to the reader.
How Alexandra gets through that situation, and returns to Danassos to kick her usurping sister back off the throne, should be enough for a complete novel. It’s a novel I think I know how to write, too, now that I’ve spent the last twenty years studying the period in detail. Better yet, the last few weeks have given me enough ideas for a second novel, and maybe the ghost of an opening for a third.
More about that as things develop. In the meantime, the stories I’ve partially developed in a Bronze Age setting could be considered a loose set of prequels here. I’ve already published one of those, and this might give me the motivation I need to finish others.
I will admit, one of my worst handicaps as a writer is that left to myself, I have a hard time finishing one project before I wander off to nibble at another. Let’s see if I can stick to this one long enough to get some stories out the door.
It’s been a quiet month. I’m slowly emerging from the utter shutdown of creative effort that sometimes comes when a really good new video game comes out (see my review of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey from a couple of weeks ago). Now that I’m about finished with that distraction for the time being, I’m getting back into some world-building work and writing.
One effect of this recent immersion into all things Greek has been the possible revival of a very old project. Close to twenty years ago, my first attempt at writing an original novel stalled out when I ran out of plot about 30% of the way in. That novel was, by an odd not-quite-coincidence, an alternate-historical fantasy piece set in the classical Hellenic period. In the last few weeks I’ve realized that I may actually have what I need to get through that old blockage – maybe I can finally write that novel after all. Still thinking about that and gathering some notes.
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten back to assembling setting notes for the Human Destiny stories, and may be publishing revised versions of some of those notes here soon. I’m also re-reading the draft novella In the House of War with an eye toward rewriting and publishing that.
So, in general, things are moving again.
Very good progress, over the last few days, on a draft map of Khedai Hegemony space. Rather than post the unfinished map here, I’ll give you a link to the item in my Scraps folder on Deviant Art. I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in this project to have a look.
Probably a few more days to work on the map itself, and then I may also be able to put together a gazetteer for Hegemony space. I’m beginning to think this may work as a high-space-opera GURPS setting, among other things. Most importantly, of course, the exercise of finally mapping all of this out is giving me lots of ideas for Human Destiny stories . . .
Sometimes, an idea for a story gets into my head, and wedges itself in there so tightly that I know there’s nothing to be done but to write the thing. Given how many hours I’ve spent over the past week playing Middle-earth: Shadow of War for the first time, it was probably inevitable that I would get the urge to write some fan-fiction for it. At least this time, it wasn’t a whole novel’s worth (or a whole series of novels’ worth).
The story is available on FanFiction.Net: Last of the Nine. It tells the story of a brief meeting between Talion, the protagonist of the Shadow games, and a disguised Ranger of the North. The idea was rather irresistible, given that if we accept the departures from Tolkien lore that the game has already committed, something like this story almost has to have happened just offstage . . .
Okay, now that the imp has been exorcised, and I’m almost finished with my play-through of the game as well, maybe I can get back to my galactic modeling and preparation for the next Human Destiny stories.
Just a quick note, since it’s been a few days since I’ve posted anything here. Been rather distracted by finally picking up the video game Shadow of War, which is iffy from the standpoint of a Tolkien scholar but quite entertaining from a gameplay perspective.
I was about ready to wrap up my modeling of galactic history and drill down to the structure of the Khedai Hegemony (the interstellar polity that conquers and rules Earth in my Human Destiny setting). Then I had a sudden realization that caused me to re-think a lot of the chain of reasoning. To wit: stars move.
Okay, yes, that isn’t a great revelation. We all know that stars have proper motion in the sky; over long periods of time the configuration of stars around Sol (for example) will change dramatically. What I realized is that the time-scale on which this is significant is well within the periods of time I was working with for the Human Destiny setting. Interstellar civilizations can’t be treated as nice, compact, spherical volumes of space – not if they last long enough that their colony worlds are going to scatter across dozens or even hundreds of light-years.
So I’ve made a few tweaks to the chain of logic, and in the process have improved it somewhat. I can now model different interstellar civilizations based on the strategy they select as to which new cultures they choose to “uplift” into the galactic community. I also now have a solid chain of reasoning that indicates why any given interstellar culture might have neighbors, to serve as enemies or at least competitors. I believe I’m now in a position to publish my revised model here, and work on a larger-scale map of the entire Hegemony that I can use as reference when writing stories. Look for that over the next few days, so long as I can tear myself away from mowing through hordes of Sauron’s orcs.
Still slogging along through the HIPPARCOS catalog – every day, I work through a dozen or so stars (and find myself wishing I had just written a C program for this already). At the moment I seem to have gotten through 276 entries in the database, out of a total of 327 reaching to the ten-parsec radius. Out of those stars, 23 have at least one planet with a complex biosphere, and at least a few systems have two each. It’s looking like a trend of about one in ten to twelve stars will have a more-or-less-Earthlike. I’m not bothering to count the “pre-garden” worlds, with liquid-water oceans but too young to have developed a post-Cambrian biosphere. There are quite a few of those.
Today I sat down for a few hours and started drawing a map of nearby space, including all stars of K class and above, and those few M-class stars that have Earthlike worlds. I’m using the same techniques that I once applied to this map of the solar neighborhood, and I imagine the end result will look similar.
I’m using a galactic coordinate system this time, rather than the usual equatorial coordinates, so a lot of stars will look like they’re in the wrong place if you’re accustomed to the maps from (e.g.) the 2300 AD or Universe tabletop games. I’m planning to include the appropriate coordinate transform in the Architect of Worlds draft, when I get around to writing the “using real astronomical data” section.
I’m also marking down tentative names for Earthlike worlds, instead of an abstract “resource value.” My vision for the Human Destiny setting has evolved quite a bit over the past few years. Today I’m assuming that the dominant interstellar civilizations won’t spend all that much time or effort exploiting star systems that don’t host complex biospheres. So the systems of greatest interest are going to be the ones that humans (eventually) settle.
If anyone’s interested in glancing at the work in progress, here’s a link to the appropriate entry in my Scraps folder. Only about twenty or so stars placed so far, or a little under one-third of the way through my data set. This is slow work, but it’s starting to come together.
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a revision to my old notes about the density and structure of interstellar civilizations. Here’s a link to an article I wrote a few years ago, which lays out an argument about the limits to an interstellar civilization’s growth. (That article is also one of my few contributions to Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets website, in fact.) The Human Destiny setting incorporates that notion into its basic assumptions. I’ll probably publish those notes here within a few days.
Still working through my data pull from the HIPPARCOS data set. I haven’t found any more planetary systems that the draft Architect of Worlds model simply won’t fit, although the famous Gliese 667 C system came close.
One thing I have discovered is that my assumption about red dwarf stars seems to have been premature. A little further research tells me that the photosynthesis problem isn’t an absolute deal-breaker. The problem isn’t that photosynthesis is impossible under red-dwarf starlight, it’s that an early photosynthetic organism would have to adapt to long periods of visible-light scarcity, punctuated by the nasty stellar flares young red dwarfs tend to generate. One might imagine mats or colonies of photosynthetic microbes that drift to the surface of a planet’s ocean to take in the sunlight, then submerge to ride it out when flare weather sets in. Eventually, most red dwarf stars seem to settle in and stop producing major flares, so if their planets can give rise to life at all, evolution to complex biospheres seems at least possible.
So, rather than forbid red dwarfs from having garden worlds at all, I’ve decided to impose a penalty, requiring them to take a lot longer to develop complex biospheres. Even so, since red dwarfs burn so steadily over many billions of years, an ocean planet has plenty of time to work on the problem. Red dwarfs that are at least as old as Sol, certainly the ones that are a few billion years older, are possible candidates.
I worked out a set of criteria to determine whether I should work out a red dwarf star’s planetary system at all: at least as old as Sol, bright enough that the habitable zone falls out where the inner planets are likely to orbit, and with metallicity high enough to permit terrestrial planets at least one-quarter as massive as Earth. I’d say maybe one out of three red dwarfs in the solar neighborhood have fit the criteria well enough for me to break out the calculator, spreadsheet, and dice.
Now another facet of the new model comes into play. The draft model often generates systems of planets whose orbits are more tightly packed than one would expect, just looking at our own system. Which in turn significantly increases the probability that at least one planet will sit in the liquid-water habitable zone. In fact, sometimes I’m getting two planets in the zone in the same system. That’s not a result that the GURPS Space 4/e model would have produced very often, if ever.
The upshot is that although any given red dwarf is unlikely to host a garden world, there are so many red dwarfs that I’m getting a significant number of them. Lots of “eyeball planets” out there, it seems; possibly as many as the more Earth-like worlds with reasonable day-night cycles.
So far, I’ve worked out planetary systems to about 25 light-years from Sol, including all the K-class and hotter stars, now also including all the red dwarfs that seem to be plausible hosts for garden worlds. 168 lines in the HIPPARCOS database, although a handful of those aren’t actual stars, and 16 stars that have complex biospheres present. Looks like roughly one out of ten stars is giving me at least one garden world. More than I expected, actually, but it’s a result I can live with.
Most of my effort over the last few days has been directed toward two tasks. First, continuing to test the Architect of Worlds model for planetary systems by generating collections of worlds for stars close to Sol. Second, using those results to motivate the first definitions for the next stage of the design sequence: determining the physical properties of an individual world.
The first is going as well as can be expected. So far, I’ve only found one star system that I flatly can’t model properly (the HR 8832 system, about 21 light-years from here, which is believed to have an even stranger collection of super-Earths and close-in gas giants than usual). Otherwise, I’m getting a very plausible set of planetary systems, a significant improvement over the results I would have gotten from the old GURPS Space 4/e design sequence.
As far as the second task goes, I’ve had something of a breakthrough: I’ve found a model I can live with to help the user decide whether a given planet is tide-locked to its primary star or not. It’s a horrible kludge – but the question of how long it takes a planet to tide-lock is very complex, and there’s no consensus in the literature about it. If a planet could be modeled as a uniform and perfectly elastic body, the math simplifies pretty well, but planets just aren’t like that. The equation I’ve come up with seems at least plausible, in the forty or so star systems for which I’ve generated data so far.
Right now, I’m wrestling with how to decide whether a given planet (or moon) has a substantial atmosphere or not, and whether it has oceans or not.
In GURPS Space 4/e, I kind of took a backwards approach – I had the user decide which of several categories a world fell into, and then he generated the world’s mass, density, and so on to fit. I think that was slightly more useful for the gaming context, but the math was kind of annoying (not least because SJG editorial policy forbade me from using SI units, so I tried scaling everything to Earth and the Sun, with weird outcomes). The math is a bit more straightforward doing it the other way – define a planet’s mass and density, then figure out what its surface environment will be like.
Of course, now I have to wrestle with questions like why Mars has almost no atmosphere despite being massive enough to retain molecular nitrogen and carbon dioxide (and it can’t just be because Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, because Venus doesn’t either, and it has a very thick atmosphere). Or, say, why Titan has a substantial atmosphere when the almost identical Ganymede has none.
Slowly, a classification scheme is emerging, but it will probably be a few more days before I’m happy with it.
Meanwhile, the upcoming week is going to be unusually busy at the office. I’m teaching one course, taking a second course, and facing impending deadlines on writing two more courses after that. Generally, my life is not quite that full! I may or may not have a lot of time to play with my worldbuilding over the next few days. We’ll see how things go.
With the release of “Pilgrimage” I was thinking that my next major project would involve getting the next Aminata Ndoye story (“In the House of War,” a roughly 20,000-word novella) polished up and out the door.
Going back and reviewing the most recent version of that story, though, I think I may need to do some world-building work first. I’ve done a fair amount of research since I first wrote that story, and my ideas about how interstellar civilization is structured have evolved a bit.
So, new plan of action:
Looks as if my fantasy novel, The Curse of Steel, will be going on the back-burner for a while. That’s okay. I’ve learned the hard way to let my muse go where it wants to go at the moment. At least I’ll be making progress on Architect of Worlds, and I should be able to get another Human Destiny story out the door at the end.