"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center." - Kurt Vonnegut

The Edges of the Universe

We’ve discussed various ‘rules’ and ‘boundaries’ in more general terms up to now, but as we’re writing Science Fiction there are some things you really need to make sure you have clear in your own mind before you start throwing words at your idea. Things like Zombies, Space travel, Time travel, the End of the World, Cyberpunk, and other sub-genres / SciFi subjects all have rules or ‘edges’ that need to be established and stuck to in your story.

Even in the world of pure Fantasy or Sci-Fantasy crossover, there have to be rules or you can just have an all powerful Mage wave a hand and destroy all your spaceships and proclaim himself Emperor of all things for all time. That would make for a short story, but not a very good one.

In this piece, I’m going to focus on the idea of space travel and examine some common ways that Science Fiction deals with the extremely challenging matter of traveling across something as endless and empty as space. What follows is meant to illustrate how you can use actual science to help you with defining rules and edges in your writing. Embracing science in this way helps your story fit more cleanly into what people already know and accept of the world, as well as into the rules of other Science Fiction. However, if you feel like throwing science to the breeze, and having your characters travel around by magical, interstellar railroads, you are entirely welcome to come up with anything you like.

Do I really Need all These Rules?

Yes. And No. It depends whether you want your readers on board with you, or just wandering along behind saying “uh, yeah, but I don’t quite get why…”. As with all the history of the world you’ve created and the character back stories, you don’t need to have all this information in the story itself. However, if you as the writer know how things work, then so will your reader. All you need to do is drop in the occasional hint like “the ship’s computer dropped them out of hyperspace far enough away from the system that the gravitational pull of the planets…” or “dimensional gates always gave him a headache” or similar.

But it’s not just space travel that has rules. Each of the subgenres of Science Fiction has different edges / boundaries that you need to be aware of, even if you decide to break some of them. We’ll discuss the various subgenres of SciFi a little later on, as first we need to make sure you have your History, your language and your scenery set up, but we’ll do that once you’ve had a coffee.

Getting from Alpha Centuri to Betelgeuse

If the characters in your story are going to be traveling between the stars, you need to ask yourself how your colonists are going to get from A to B, or from Sol to Betelgeuse? Whatever you do, I’d recommend not using Warp Drive. Yes, we know it worked for Star Trek, but it really isn’t a great example to use when you have wonderful things like bussard ramjets, generation ships, suspended animation, and hyperspace / space folding to explore.

Each of these has its own limitations, often established by current scientific thought / theory. This doesn’t mean you can’t invent your own methods of transport, but it does mean that you will need to set up believable rules and limitations for whatever you come up with.

Pushing the big green button with “GO” on it isn’t quite enough in Science Fiction, unless of course you’re writing comedy. Even if you are writing comedy, most writers take a great deal of time to highlight the wonderful ludicrousness of their travel method. For example, the late, great, Douglas Adams’ ‘infinite improbability drive,’ which, despite being comedy gold and utterly unworkable (maybe), still gets explained in glorious comedic detail. Adams also establishes rules for its use, including detailed descriptions of the side effects of its use, which occasionally involved whales, bowls of petunias and a million gallon vat of custard. So, before you take a trip across the star studded skies, think about whether you’ve packed your flask of coffee and whether it’s going to be cold by the time you get there.

Star Trekking Across the Universe

Even if your story doesn’t involve space travel, it’s something you need to give some thought. If your story is set on another world, and humans are involved, how did they get there? Are you really not going to mention it? Sure, you could probably get away with it, but if you come up with an explanation like “they were kidnapped by aliens,” you won’t get away with it because you’ll need to explain how the aliens traverse the ‘verse.

So, give it some thought, even if it doesn’t play a major part in your story.

And this is where you need to start thinking about science.

According to a chap called Einstein, light speed is the top speed of any motion in the universe. Nothing can go faster than light, and anything that achieves the speed of light actually becomes energy. So, if you decided to travel to a star system that was 25 light years away, it would take at the very least just over 25 years to get there. So, you leave Earth as a teenager and get to where you’re going in middle age. So there are various speeds you can trek across the vast distances between the stars, but we’ll start with the equivalent of a space travelling snail.

Suspended Animation

Assuming for a moment we’ve got past the problem of building the spaceship that’ll be travelling between the stars - how it’ll function, whether it’s fully automated, or partially crewed - if you’re taking a more science-based approach to your writing, you should assume that it’s unlikely that the ship will actually manage to get to near light speed velocities. If your characters are traveling any great distance, it’s going to take them wee while to get there. Putting your crew / group / settlers into some form of suspended animation / cryo-sleep is one way of getting them to their destination without the need for too many supplies or difficult crew interactions.

Another variation on this theme is to send frozen human embryos which are ‘born’, raised, and develop on the ship just in time to hit planetfall when they’ve reached maturity. This idea is a combination of the artificial sleep model and the Generation Ship model, which we will cover next.

Generation Ships

This scenario also assumes that it will take many many years to reach the destination and that several generations of star-going human will live and die without ever setting foot on a planet.

If you choose to rely on Generation Ships to get your characters to their destination, or some combination of Generation Ships and hibernation-based transport, it comes with certain compromises. You will limit your intrepid adventurers to pretty much one journey as they will either have to try and refuel to return, or simply accept that given the time taken to get there it’s a one-way trip, and that, once they’ve arrived at their goal, they have no choice but to survive and make the new planet theirs (if indeed they even land on a planet, but that’s another story).

However, if you decide some sort of faster than light drive / travel isn’t for you, you need another way to power your slow but steady space vessel.

The Ramscoop

The Ramscoop, which is also known as the Ramdrive / Bussard Ramdrive after its inventor (in 1960 - this is why we love SciFi!), is a method of propulsion that frees you from having to carry with you all the fuel you require to speed up and slow down.

As an alternative to loads of fuel, you use one propulsion method to get up to speed, then switch to the ramjet for the bulk of the remainder of your journey. Bussard’s original proposition employed a ramjet variant of a fusion rocket capable of reasonable interstellar spaceflight. The ramjet uses electromagnetic fields (ranging from kilometers to many thousands of kilometers in diameter) as a ‘scoop’ (or funnel) to collect and compress hydrogen from interstellar space as it travels. High speeds force the reactive mass into a progressively constricted magnetic field, compressing it until thermonuclear fusion occurs. The magnetic field then directs the energy as rocket exhaust thus accelerating the vessel.

Clear as mud and as simple as nuclear physics. But it’s an interesting premise nonetheless and one used by many SciFi notables, such as Pohl and Niven.

Time, Relativity and Communication

Assuming you’ve traded your snail in for something slightly quicker at this point, travelling at near light speed has time dilation effects. So, time aboard the vessel travelling at near light speed would be compressed. This would mean that while several weeks or months had passed onboard the ship, decades would’ve passed outside.

While this technology negates the requirement for suspended animation or generation ships, and your travellers get to where they’re going relatively quickly, time dilation can have unfortunate consequences.For example, If your travellers were to instantly return home from their destination, they may have lost only six months, but their children could be grandparents.

This premise also assumes that the ship itself would be able to deal with travelling at such high speeds whilst being hit by space debris without going boom on the way.

Communication at this sort of speed is also an issue. However, Ursula Le Guin suggested a solution for this in the form of the Ansible. In Le Guin’s fabulous universe, the Ansible allows instant communication regardless of distance. This means that your travellers can voyage and yet still be in touch with their home planet or other ships / civilisations.

The ansible is a machine capable of instantaneous communication across any distance. Typically it is depicted as a small box with some combination of microphone, speaker, keyboard and display. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance whatsoever with no delay. The name ansible is used predominantly by Le Guin, but Orson Scott Card also utilises the terminology and it even appears in Ender’s Game briefly.

Similar devices are present in the works of numerous others. For example Anne McCaffrey's posited a device powered by rare "Black Crystal" from the planet Ballybran. Black Crystals cut from the same mineral deposit could be "tuned" to sympathetically vibrate with each other instantly, even osver interstellar distances. Similarly, Gregory Keyes’ "aetherschreibers" use two halves of a single "chime" to communicate, aided by scientific alchemy.

Other communication methods in science fiction use paired wormholes traversed by communication laser, and Robert L. Forward takes the idea one step further by using a living wormhole resembling a fourth-dimensional sea anemone to cover the distance between a spaceship and a satellite on the home planet.

There are several other methods in the sphere of science fiction, but the main difference in most other models is that Le Guin's ansible was said to communicate "instantaneously", but other authors have adopted the name for devices capable only of finite-speed communication, although still faster than light.

Ultimately it depends on how you have your universe set up and whether you need/want to include this sort of communication. Or you can of course invent your own futuristic chat room.