Hard SF Space Opera: The Story Part

We now continue with the process of creating a Space Opera setting that doesn't completely insult the intelligence of all the physicists out there.

In our last post, we discussed my rule of science fiction, which states that the harder the SF is, the more the story is influenced by realistic technology and the limits of natural law. That being said, in order to capture the romance of no-medieval grandeur and adventure you have to include tropes associated with medieval grandeur. And decide what you mean by “medieval”. And “grandeur”.

You have to start from scratch, in other words.

I'm going to get a wee bit meta for a moment, as one of the discussions I'm having to make involves selecting a type of rule system I want this setting to be powered by. Even if I was just planning on writing fiction, I may have included this step, as it can give me a consistent framework for designing spacecraft, planets and systems, and all sorts of incidentals. This can be more important than you think; consistency, after all, is just as important to good SF as realism. People are usually more forgiving of bending the laws of physics, especially when it gives them FTL and whatnot, but if that FTL moves “at the speed of plot” then you're going to get emails...

Weapon of choice.

Anyway. I've chosen the rules for the Traveller RPG, by Mongoose Games, as my framework. Despite being a hardcore D6 fan from back in the day, and more recently a publisher of White Star/OSR material, I chose Traveller for good reasons. First, The design sequences, for planets, starships and trade, are some of the best for an RPG. In this case, “best” means, “detailed enough to get the job done, strict enough to provide consistency, and simple enough that I don't have to spend days making the damn ships' stats”. Another reason I chose Traveller is because the games' official setting, the Third Imperium, is well thought out and specifically designed to create a certain “feel” for the universe while maintaining consistency. That's important – by studying the nuts and bolts of the Imperium, I can get a feel for how to develop my setting with the balance of structure and romance I'm looking for. Now, the reason I chose the Mongoose edition of Traveller is in fact because I want to release this setting as a game, and the Mongoose edition of the game is OGL. I would actually, had I my druthers, use the orginial, as-old-as-I-am Classic edition, because it more closely captures the feel I'm looking for, but I can't publish for that.

Having selected that rules system, I can now move on to the more literary inspirations I would love to incorporate into my new Space Opera setting. Not all of my literary inspirations are actually literary, of course, but, well...you know. Anyway, here are a just a few of the works that have elements I would like to add to my setting:

Bad.  Ass.

• The Third Imperium: I mentioned this one once before, but to go into detail, I like how the FTL technology was made to create an empire that had a lot of lawless frontier but could field massive numbers of well-disciplined fleets.
• Space Skimmer: This empire runs on pragmatism and the free flow of information. Or did, until it collapsed. Space Skimmer explores ideas such as the “ungovernable galaxy” and pantropy.
• Space Viking: H. Beam Piper's opus starts with a desire for revenge and ends with rebuilding interstellar civilization. Its got a lot of good fluff, on uplifting primitive civilizations back up to space faring levels.
• Star Wars: Well, duh. But not like you think; when it comes to world building a galactic empire, the supplemental information about logistics, the ratio of barren, strip-mines systems verses populated ones, and the actual size of sectors in space make for fascinating reading. Works like the Essential Atlas, the Essential Guide to Warfare, and the website Star Wars Technical Commentaries provided much inspiration.
• Dune: Again, not for the reasons you may think. The organization of the Padasha Empire – a tripod with the Great Houses and Emperor, the Spacing Guild, and CHOAM all in balance against one another is what is useful to my work. And the idea of a monopoly on interstellar travel.

There are also a lot of real-world historical backgrounds that I want to explore, partly for the added realism they can offer my setting, partly because I've been fascinated by the ideas for awhile:

• The Punic Wars: The first clash of the Whale vs the Elephant. Which is ironic, considering Hannibal's trek across the Alps.
• The Norman Invasion: Basically its the first development of Feudalism in the British Isles, and it was fairly well documented. Gold.
• Life in Chaucer’s EnglantoThis is a book I got that goes into extreme detail on life in...Chaucer’s England. It even lists the approximate numbers of nobles in England prior to the Plague. Its a good spring board for building up my own aristocracy.

My list of inspirations for my Space Opera setting looks, at first blush, pretty white. I suppose its understandable – I'm pretty white, when you get down too it. On one hand, I've got a wealth of information already in my library that is very Euro-centric, and I understand it and am comfortable with it. On the other, if I'm not careful, my setting may look like retro 1920s SF where the future looks bleached. One of the main reasons my setting has such a western European bias is (apart from my fictional inspiration having such a bias) that I'd like to include a Monolithic Church-type organization that has helped preserve the more counter-intuitive knowledge needed to resurrect space travel. Such an organization, with its potential monopoly on space tech if not space travel, offers intriguing story ideas.

Anyway. I have some strategies for countering the trend toward “King Arthur in SPAAAAACE!!!” that I hope will work. For one thing, I have no interest in using Euro-centric terminology to describe my nobles, setting or what have you. To the extent that is possible, I want to give the impression of convergent evolution, not copying the mythic past. Another thing I plan on doing is making not one new empire, but many. There will be many opportunities to include different cultural influences that can be felt and explored. This is especially important to me because there are a couple of central themes that one can build a space faring civilization around, and they all need and deserve equal time. Finally, I'm going to try my best to avoid implying, as much as possible, that one culturally inspired polity is “good” and a different culturally inspired polity is “bad”. In my opinion, all governments are morally ambiguous to a certain degree, do things both shameful and noble, and generally get on the nerves of the average citizen.

And what's the point of designing a bitching space fleet if you don't have another equally bitching fleet to fight against?

Next time RocketFans, we'll tackle the opposite side of the story – technology equation. That'll be sometime next week, probably.

Also coming out soon is another pair of White Star products! Some of you (especially my Patreons) will remember my first forays into Space Opera products: the Monarch Courier and Starwell tanker. These two ships are soon to be available with all new White Star stats! Each PDF has full deckplans, detailed descriptions, and adventure seeds available, so those of you White Star fans that haven't gotten a chance to use my starship products before should be in for a treat.

But that's next week. Until then, enjoy!

Hard SF Space Opera?

I fully realize that it has been quite sometime since my last post.

You may think by the title of this post that all the work I've done lately on star fighters and pulp aliens have made me finally cross over to the Soft Side of the Fiction and abandon my Hard SF pretensions once and for all. I admit, the upcoming premier of a new Star Wars movie does have me pretty exited, but I assure you, I'm not going totally off the shallow end of the Mohs Scale anytime soon. I've actually tried, as in writing for D6 Star Wars, to do something more science fantasy than SF, and I just can't do it. I mean, the entire reason I got into Hard SF in the first place is because I notice the inconsistencies of mainstream sci-fi and couldn't stop from formulating my own theories. So why, if I'm going to challenge the basic assumptions of a universe, don't I just make up I own? You may have noticed my doing just that once or twice, but until now, I've been reluctant to make up my own Space Opera universe.

The reasons for this are many. First of all, I wanna make the tech as real as possible, but also preserve a few of the more sentimentally persistent tropes of Space Opera. You may remember my opinion on the relationship of technology and story, also known (to me, anyway) as Ray's Rule of Hard Science Fiction:

“Soft Science Fiction tries to make technology fit the imagination, and Hard Science Fiction tries to imagine what fits the technology.”

The Conjuction setting, my most successful foray into world building to date (in my opinion, anyway) is built around this principle. Every part of the universe, beyond a couple of arbitrary assumptions, is purely an extrapolation of the available technology and its implication. I have big things planned for Conjunction, big enough that I want to get some more writing under my belt before I attempt them.

The problem with most Space Opera, is that it is all story, with the technology kind of pasted around the edges to make for VFX eye-candy/cool descriptions. I can't work like that. Even when doing fancy starships for White Star and D6, I have at the very least the rules of those respective games available to guide me. That is one of the reasons that I haven't done any more work with the Diaspora RPG; The FATE rules system is too open-ended and free form for me. You may remember that I was trying to work within the Diaspora framework to make a Star Wars homage – that's why I haven't gone further.

Well, one of the reasons. Despite the fantastic work the Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven did with A Mote in God's Eye, it just doesn't feel like Space Opera to me without Anti/Paragravity. Fortunately, Winchell Chung's Atomic Rockets website as come to my rescue again, giving me the missing piece of the puzzle I needed to make a Space Opera setting of my own that didn't rely on pure magic.

So that's what I'm gonna do. I am going to sketch out my version of a classic Space Opera setting that does not violate my own rules for Hard SF too terribly badly. We'll start out with my basic goals for my setting, and then tackle the problems with making them happen in a plausible fashion one by one. Naturally, I've been doing some of the preliminary work, and even started developing (surprise!) some spacecraft. So stay tuned, RocketFans!