Adventure Beyond the Stars – Written for Readers Who Want More

Author: Malcom

  • Aether

    Aether

    Luminiferous aether

    Luminiferous Aether, or Aether for short in this setting, was supposed to be the medium that light waves propagated through. It made sense that in the same way sounds waves propagated through air (or other media), and water waves propagated through water, light waves propagated through some medium that we had yet to identify. In real life, this idea didn’t have strong experimental evidence against it until 1887 when Albert A. Michaelson and Edward W. Morley ran their famous experiment. Like a well-crafted experiment, it was set up so that the results would fairly conclusively either support the existence of Aether, or not support it. Of course in this world, Michaelson and Morley discovered a difference in the relative speed of two beams of light travelling at right angles to each other.

    Aetheric Propulsion

    As an outgrowth of there being aether, this world has two inventors who have discovered two different methods of aetheric propulsion. Basically this allows for steampunk spacecraft. There is no way steam engines, even if extremely advance, could provide motive force in space. And it isn’t any fun to require months or years to travel between planets. By making aetheric propulsion machines (without a lot of detail), I can have them provide any needed capability to allow late 19th century technology to safely traverse the void between worlds.

    The Inventors

    When coming up with who would invent aetheric propulsion, I looked at actual inventors of the time. Edison was an obvious choice. The Wizard of Menlo Park could have easily added an Aetheric Impeller to his vast array of inventions. Once I had him invent the first method of aetheric propulsion, a rival inventor was equally obvious.

    Nikola Tesla was an absolute genius, and about as different from Edison as he could be. Edison was self-taught, and basically battered at a problem, trying one idea after another, until he figured out something that worked. Tesla was a university trained engineer/physicist who could (and did) calculus in his head. His approach was to consider a problem in minute detail for long enough that, often, the plan for a complete, or near complete, mechanism would spring to his mind, only requiring the calculations and possibly minor tweaking to turn into a blueprint suitable for manufacturing.

    With those two as the inventors, a “Battle of the Aetheric Propellors” similar to the historical “Battle of the Currents” was an obvious next step. This is why Walter and Nikola are brought together by George Westinghouse, whose company lead the way in building the machines for alternating current electrical infrastructure, while Nikola was working for him.

  • Alternate History

    Alternate History

    A fundamental part of my worldbuilding is that these stories are set in an alternate Victorian era. I try to use actual history and historical people as much as possible. When something I’ve changed makes a historical person or event untenable as they actually were, I try to change things in a way that makes as much sense as possible, and, mostly, allow the alternate history to drive the story. If I really want the story to go in a particular direction, I’ll tend to go back and modify things in the “past” (from the point of view of that story) so that my desired story direction makes logical sense.

  • Victorian Interplanetary

    Victorian Interplanetary

    Telling Stories Again

    I’ve decided not only to start telling stories again, but to do it in my own setting instead of a fan fiction/crossover in someone else’s world. I won’t throw away the notes and ideas for the Harry Potter/Jack Ryan crossover, but I’m too excited by the potential stories in the Victorian Interplanetary setting instead.

    There are several premises I’m using to inform the worldbuilding on this, and I am trying to do enough worldbuilding that I don’t write myself into a corner. I think that is kind of what happened with J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. She did only enough world building to serve the story line at that time. I perfectly understand why. When she started out, she was scratching out time to write while trying to make a living – not conducive to spending a lot of time worldbuilding, especially if you are new to the idea.

    On the other hand, I’ve done worldbuilding for numerous RPG campaigns in several different genres, and built on the RPG campaign worldbuilding, whether well done or not, for several others. I’ve also played in numerous campaigns that others gamemastered. Some of them had good worldbuilding, some had horrible worldbuilding, some took decent published worldbuilding and built on it, some took decent published worldbuilding and broke it anyway. I’ve even seen gamemasters that took a campaign with decent worldbuilding that they then threw out any pieces that didn’t fit, and made something better.

    All that to say, I’m going to try to put together a setting with good worldbuilding. Worldbuilding that supports the story I’m working on, while minimizing the constraints on other stories that might be told later (sequel, prequel, or taking place at the same time in another part of the solar system). We’ll see where that goes…

    Enough about what I’m trying to do. The next few posts include some of the elements of the worldbuilding in this setting.