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Status Report (21 August 2018)

Status Report (21 August 2018)

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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.

Status Report (13 July 2018)

Status Report (13 July 2018)

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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:

  • First item will be to revise and improve the planetary-system design sequence for Architect of Worlds. I’ll be publishing the revised material here over the next week or so.
  • Then I’m going to re-work my current map of the interstellar neighborhood (and the associated database of nearby planetary systems). Along the way I’m going to double-check my computations from about 2014-2015 about the galactic density of habitable planets, sentient life, high-tech civilizations, and so on. It’s possible that my new design sequences will give rise to a somewhat different set of assumptions.
  • I may also do at least a sketch map of the local galactic spiral arm, just to give me a better idea of the “terrain” in khedai space.
  • Once I have all that done, I should be able to revise “In the House of War” for publication, and I might have a clearer picture to support further stories in the setting too.

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.

“Pilgrimage” Now Available

“Pilgrimage” Now Available

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After a long delay, the first story in my “Human Destiny” setting is now available as an e-book on Amazon:

“Pilgrimage” is a 14700-word novelette, telling the story of how sixteen-year-old Aminata Ndoye first came to the attention of the alien interstellar empire that rules Earth. After Aminata is granted an unexpected degree of privilege by the imperial government, she is unsure as to whether to accept – unsure as to whether she can trust the aliens at all. She embarks on a journey of discovery, and what she learns may determine the path of her life . . . but first she has to survive the experience.

I first wrote “Pilgrimage” a couple of years ago, while taking an online seminar on the art of writing from diverse perspectives. The character of Aminata Ndoye had been in the back of my mind for a while – at the time, I had already written a novella about her and was shopping it around to markets – but I was inspired to write her “origin story” as an exercise for the seminar. Since then the story has seen quite a bit of revision, and I’ve decided to quit sitting on it and get it published.

Next up is the novella, which I hope to have available sometime next week, and then it’s on to a new story based on my world-building project from last month.

Aminata Ndoye – A First Look

Aminata Ndoye – A First Look

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Pivoting from the project I worked on through most of June, I’ve decided to spend July getting some stories self-published. Specifically, the first two or three of the stories I’ve written in my “Human Destiny” universe.

This is a setting in which humanity is conquered in the mid-21st century by an interstellar empire called the Khedai Hegemony. The Hegemony then proceeds to govern Earth with a surprising degree of detached benevolence, providing peace, long life, prosperity, and more individual freedom than most humans have ever enjoyed under human rule. The cost, of course, is humanity’s control over its own fate.

Two hundred years later, and much to everyone’s surprise, the Hegemony opens the door to permit a few exceptional humans to serve as officers in the “interstellar service,” a starship fleet with combined roles of exploration, contact, and enforcement of law and policy. Kind of like Star Trek‘s Starfleet, if that was run by non-humans, and if it very much did not have a Prime Directive of non-interference.

One of the first humans to earn a commission in the interstellar service is Aminata Ndoye, a woman who grew up in what we would think of as Senegal. Eventually she reaches command rank in the service, many thousands of years before anyone expected a human to do so. From there she plays a part in establishing humanity’s long-term role in the galaxy: the human destiny.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve already written two stories about Aminata, and my work through June has given me a fair amount of inspiration for a third. So I’ve decided to stop sitting on these stories and start self-publishing them. Which means I need to be thinking about cover images. So, over this weekend, I broke out my favorite 3D-modeling tools and started putting together a cover image for the first story. That work isn’t finished, but I have a pretty good start, a head-shot of Aminata herself as a young woman, just starting out on her career.

Here she is:

This image fits a scene late in the story, in which Aminata dresses up very formally (including the hijab which Senegalese women rarely wear) before a visit to the local Hegemony governor, an encounter which sets her on the path that eventually leads her to the stars.

A bit more work and I should have a complete book cover. One more editing pass through the story itself, and I’ll transpose that into e-book format for publication. With any luck, that story will be up on Amazon by the end of this week.