Chapter Thirty-Eight

World Creation in Science Fiction

Establishing the Rules for Hyperspace, Time Travel, and More

Orson Scott Card

World creation sounds like a marvelous free-for-all, in which you come up with all kinds of ideas; ask, “Why?” and “How?” and “What result?” a lot; and when there’s a really big pile of good stuff, you sit down and write.

I wish it were that easy. But that big pile of neat ideas is just that—a pile, shapeless, chaotic. Before you can tell a meaningful story, you have to hone and sharpen your understanding of the world, and that begins with the fundamental rules, the natural laws.

Remember: Because speculative fiction always differs from the knowable world, the reader is uncertain about what can and can’t happen in the story until the writer has spelled out the rules. And you, as a writer, can’t be certain of anything until you know the rules as well.

RULES OF STARFLIGHT

Take space travel, for instance. Why would a story need space travel at all?

One reason might be simply that you want a landscape completely different from Earth. Another might be that you want your story to take place in a developing society, a frontier that is so far away from settled places that your characters can’t call for help and expect it to come anytime soon.

But let’s say your reason is even more basic. Your story centers on an alien society that you have thoroughly developed. The aliens live in an environment that is pretty much Earthlike, so that either species can live in the other’s habitat. But the aliens are strange enough that there’s no way they could have evolved on Earth. So you have to put them on another planet.

Other planets in our solar system just won’t do. Despite speculation in earlier years, the Voyager II photographs seem to confirm that not only is there no planet or moon remotely suitable for Earthlike life, there isn’t much chance of any kind of life at all. So your aliens are going to have to inhabit a planet in another star system.

Why must you decide all these things, when your story begins after the voyage is over? First, because the characters who did the traveling—human or alien—have just finished the voyage, and their relationship with each other and their attitude toward this new world and toward authorities on the old one will be largely shaped by what the voyage back entails.

If another ship can’t come for months, if the whole voyage was at risk of death and some did die, and if there’s only a sixty-forty chance of getting back home alive, then the voyagers will be determined to survive on the new planet, and will be grimly aware that if they don’t make things work, their lives may end. They also won’t take faraway authorities on their home planet half so seriously.

But if they reached the planet by taking a six-hour flight, and traffic between this world and the home planet will be easy and frequent, they have much less at stake, and their attitude will be far more casual. Furthermore, homeworld authorities will be much more involved, and reinforcements or replacements will be easy to obtain.

Why must you establish clearly what the rules of space travel are? So that the reader understands why the characters are getting so upset—or why they’re not getting terribly upset—when things go wrong. So that the reader knows just what’s at stake.

And—not a trivial consideration—so that the experienced science fiction reader will recognize your proper use of a standard device and feel confident that the story is being written by somebody who knows how this is done. Even if you plan to rebel and use nonstandard devices, you still must address the same issues; the effect on the reader is still reassuring.

THE PROBLEM OF INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT

The problem of interstellar flight is twofold: the speed of light, and the ratio of fuel mass to fuel energy.

Let’s look at the speed of light first. According to Einstein’s theory, lightspeed is the absolute ceiling on the speed of any motion in the universe. Nothing can go faster than light. Furthermore, anything that actually goes the speed of light becomes energy. So you can’t get from one star system to another any faster than a bit more than one year per light-year of distance between them. To get from Earth to a star system thirty light-years away would take, say, thirty-one years. Your human characters, who were in their twenties when they left, are now in their fifties.

What are the strategies for getting around the lightspeed barrier?

Hyperspace

Though this goes by many different names, the idea is as old as the 1940s at least, and there’s really no reason to make up a new term, since if hyperspace is ever found to exist it will almost certainly be called hyperspace (just like when robots were finally created, they were called robots because science fiction writers had been calling artificial mechanical men by that name ever since Czech writer Karl Capek coined the term in his play RUR back in the 1930s). You can call it hyperspace—in fact, you probably should call it hyperspace, since most of your readers will be familiar with that term and will recognize it instantly.

Hyperspace is based on the idea that space, which seems three-dimensional to us, is really four-dimensional (or more!); and that in another dimension, our space is folded and curved so that locations that seem far apart to us are really quite close together, provided you can find a way to get out of our three-dimensional space, pass through hyper-dimensional space, and then come back out at the point you desire.

This passage through hyperspace is usually called “the jump,” and there are many different rules associated with it. Isaac Asimov wrote a robot story in which the jump to hyperspace caused human beings to temporarily cease to exist, a sort of mini-death that drove a robot pilot mad as it was trying to take humans through the jump.

Timothy Zahn’s “Cascade Point” and other stories set in that same universe propose that at the moment of the jump, there is an infinite array of possible points of emergence, in most of which you die; but since you only remember the jumps you survive, you’re never aware of the universes in which you are dead.

Other versions of hyperspace require you to be near a large star in order to make the jump, or to be a safe distance away from large gravity source, or the jump gets distorted. In some stories, Heinlein allows an infinite number of possible jumps, with your emergence depending on the elaborately careful calculations of your velocity and trajectory leading to the jump. Others, like Frederik Pohl with his Heechee novels, have written stories allowing only a limited number of gateways through space, each leading consistently to its own destination—which, until all the gateways are mapped, might as easily be an inhabited world or the edge of a black hole.

And some versions of hyperspace don’t even require a spaceship. They place “doorways” or “gates” or “tunnels” on or near a planet’s surface, and if you simply walk though the right spot, going in the correct direction, you end up on—or near—the surface of another planet!

Another version of this, often used by Larry Niven, is that such doorways are not natural but are machines that create passages through hyperspace. And in one variation of this, hyperspace isn’t used at all. You get into a device that looks a bit like an old-fashioned phone booth, it analyzes your body, breaks it down into its constituent parts, and then transmits an image of it at lightspeed to a booth on another planet (or elsewhere on Earth) that carefully reconstructs you. In either case, booths can send you only to other booths, so that somebody has to make the long journey to other planets at sub-lightspeed first in order to assemble the booth that will allow others to follow them instantaneously.

The advantage of hyperspace in all its variations is that it allows relatively quick, cheap passage between worlds. How quick and how cheap is up to you. Think of it as being like voyages between the New World and the Old World. In 1550, the voyage was uncertain; some passengers and crew on every voyage died before they reached land, and some ships disappeared without a trace. By the mid-1800s, the voyage was much faster and death far less likely, though the trip was still miserable. In the age of steam, there were still wrecks and losses, but the voyage was cut down to a week or two. Today, it can take only a few hours. You can have starflight using hyperspace that functions at any one of these danger levels. It’s as safe and fast as the Concorde—or it’s as dangerous and slow and uncertain as a caravel navigating with a quadrant and an unreliable clock.

Generation Ships

You’ve decided you don’t want to use hyperspace, either because it strikes you as nonsense science or because you don’t want all that coming and going on your new planet. Another alternative is to send a ship at sub-lightspeed and let the voyage take as long as it takes.

Without getting into the science of it (primarily because I don’t understand it in any kind of detail myself), the problem with sub-light voyages is that they take a long time. And you have to carry all your fuel with you. The good news is that you can coast most of the way—there’s little friction in space, and once you reach a certain speed, you should continue traveling at that speed in the same direction until something happens to turn you or slow you down. So most of the voyage needs no fuel at all.

The bad news is that your fuel is part of the mass that your fuel has to lift. There comes a point when the fuel needed to further accelerate any more will add enough weight that you either can’t lift it or can’t design a sturdy enough ship to hold it. Furthermore, because it takes just as much fuel to slow you down at the end of your voyage, you have to save exactly half your fuel for the slowdown, plus any fuel required for maneuvering into orbit. That means that the fuel must be able to accelerate more than twice its own mass. Worse yet, if there isn’t any more fuel at your destination, you’re either not coming home again or you’re going to have to carry more than four times the fuel needed to accelerate you to your traveling speed.

So that you don’t waste fuel trying to lift a huge ship out of the gravity well of a planet like Earth, such ships are usually assumed to have been built out in space and launched from a point as far as possible from the Sun. Thus, when they arrive at the new world, they put their huge ship into orbit and use landing vehicles or launches or (nowadays) shuttles to get down to the planet’s surface.

Using the technology I’ve just described, you’ll be lucky to get to 10 percent of lightspeed. That’s pretty fast—about sixty-seven million miles an hour—but at that rate, it will take your ship more than three hundred years to get to a star system thirty light-years away. And that doesn’t even allow for acceleration time!

That’s why such ships are called “generation ships.” Assuming that the ship is a completely self-contained environment, with plants to constantly refresh the atmosphere and grow food, a whole human society lives aboard the ship. People are born, grow old, and die, and the elements of their bodies are processed and returned to the ecosystem within the ship. This idea has been well explored in many stories—particularly stories about ships where the people have forgotten their origin, forgotten even that the ship is a ship—but it has a lot of life left in it.

The problem with this (besides the fact that a completely self-contained ecosystem would be almost impossible to create) is that none of the people who reach the new world have any direct memories of their home planet. Their whole history for generations has been inside a ship—why would they even want to go out onto a planet’s surface? The fact of living inside a ship for so long is so powerful that it almost takes over the story. If your story is about that, like Rebecca Brown Ore’s brilliant debut story, “Projectile Weapons and Wild Alien Water,” then that’s fine—but if your story is about something else, a generation ship is hard to get over.

Cryo-Travel

Another alternative is to have the crew travel for all those years in a state of suspended animation—either frozen or otherwise kept viable until the ship itself, or a skeleton crew, wakens the sleepers at the voyage’s end. This has the advantage of not requiring living space and supplies for so many people for so many years, and it still achieves the result of making frequent voyages between the new world and the home planet unthinkable—or at least impractical.

The drawback is that if suspended animation is possible at all in your future universe, then you have to let it be used for anything it’s needed for. Characters who get sick or critically injured or even killed must be rushed back to the ship and popped into a suspended animation chamber until a cure or repair can be worked out. Also, there are bound to be people who try to abuse the system to prolong their lives beyond the normal span of years. You can’t have a technology exist for one purpose and then ignore it for another—not unless you want to earn the scorn of your more critical and vocal readers.

A variation on cryo-travel is to send colony ships that contain no human beings at all but rather frozen human embryos; when the ship’s computer determines that the starship has reached a habitable planet, some of the embryos are revived and raised to adulthood by computers or robots inside the ship. They come to the new planet as virtually new creations, having known neither parents nor any human society except the one they form. Obviously, this is a one-way trip with no hope of later visits or help from the home planet, since no one on the home world will know whether the colony ship happened to find a habitable planet, let alone where.

Ramdrives

Long before the personal computer culture taught us to use the term RAM drive for a virtual disk in volatile memory, science fiction readers were introduced to the ramscoop stardrive, or ramdrive, that solved part of the fuel problem. Instead of carrying enough fuel to handle all of a ship’s acceleration, a ramship would use conventional fuel to get up to a certain speed, then deploy a huge network, like a funnel, in front of it to scoop up the loose matter that is everywhere in space. This matter would then be used as fuel so that acceleration could continue without having to carry all the fuel along.

There are theoretical problems—the efficient use of the loose interstellar “dust,” some structure for the net that isn’t so heavy that the matter it collects can’t provide enough energy to accelerate it, the fact that at velocities far below lightspeed the interstellar dust stops being harmless and starts being extremely dangerous and explosive debris that harms any ship traveling that fast. But the ramdrive is fun and semiplausible, and it allows you to have a starship that isn’t the size of your average asteroid.

Time Dilation

Time dilation space travel is a sort of middle path. With this set of rules, your starship can travel at a speed so close to the speed of light (say, 99.999 percent of lightspeed) that, while you don’t turn into pure energy, you get from point A to point B at almost the speed of light. Relativity theory suggests that time aboard an object traveling at that speed would be compressed, so that while an outside observer might think thirty years had passed, people on the ship would only have lived through a few hours or days or weeks.

This allows you to get people from world to world without generation ships or cryo-travel. The travelers who reach the new planet have clear memories of their home world. But they won’t be particularly eager to get back because, while to them it has only been a few weeks since they left home, back there it has been thirty years. Anybody they left behind has aged a whole generation or died. For all intents and purposes, it’s still a one-way voyage—but one that allows the travelers to arrive with their society intact, relatively unchanged by the voyage.

Still, the characters will have been cut off from anyone they knew and loved. This suggests that either the travelers will be going through some degree of grief or they will have had no close friends or family on their previous world; in either case, this will have a lot to do with how you characterize them.

And feign ignorance about the fact that, when traveling at such a high percentage of lightspeed, space dust would strike them like intense gamma radiation. Just say that they use a half-mile-thick layer of crushed asteroid as shielding, or that they have a force field that shields them from the radiation. Or don’t say anything at all—time dilation stories are such a staple in science fiction that you really don’t have to apologize for them anymore.

The Ansible

I first ran across this variation on time dilation in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and found it one of the most useful devices in space travel. In essence, the ansible is a device that allows you to communicate instantaneously, regardless of distance. Thus travelers can go on one-way time dilation voyages, yet still report to and receive instructions from people on the home planet.

This is enormously convenient if you want to have a fairly unified interstellar society and yet don’t want people hopping from planet to planet the way some people commute by air from Boston to New York. A space voyage remains an irrevocable decision, cutting you off from everyone you leave behind, yet the whole interstellar society can share literature, politics, news—anything can be transmitted by ansible. It’s as if the Pilgrims could have communicated with England by radio but still had to do all their traveling in small, dangerous, unhealthy wooden ships.

As science, of course, this is pure nonsense—yet it is so useful that many of us have used some variation on it. After all, we’re not trying to predict the future, only to tell a story in a strange place!

Warp Speed

I haven’t even touched on the silliest of space travel rules—the one used in the Star Trek universe, where the speed of light is no more a barrier than the speed of sound, and you only have to persuade Scotty in the engine room to really step on the gas to get to four, eight, ten times the speed of light. This sort of stardrive shows such contempt for science that it’s best to reserve it for light adventures or comic stories—or, of course, Star Trek novelizations.

In fact, unless you’re actually writing a Star Trek novel (which means you must already have a contract with the publisher licensed by Paramount Pictures) or are deliberately trying to be funny, never refer to “warp speed” in your fiction. It’s not only bad science; it also pegs you instantly as a writer who knows science fiction only through Star Trek. Beware of anything that makes non-Trekkie readers think of Star Trek. That’s the equivalent of applying for a position as a physics professor with a résumé that lists your training as “Watched every episode of Mr. Wizard.” You may actually know something, but it’ll be hard to get anyone to take you seriously long enough to find out.

WHAT THE RULES CAN DO FOR YOU

All this attention to space travel, and your story doesn’t have a single scene aboard a ship! Do you really have to go through all this?

Yes—in your head, or perhaps in your outline. Just enough time to make your decisions about the rules and then ensure that your whole story doesn’t violate them. But your reader doesn’t have to go through all that with you. Once you’ve decided that you’re using a difficult, dangerous hyperspace where the emergence points can shift by parsecs without warning, then all you have to do is drop some reference into the story—perhaps a single sentence, like this:

That’s it. That’s all. No more discussion about the mechanics of starflight. But your readers will understand why none of the travelers are eager to leave the planet, and why it’ll be quite a while before another ship comes. And now, with the rules established, you’re free to do things like have your viewpoint character think of someone else this way:

Maybe this relationship will be important in your story; maybe it won’t. But if you didn’t know that people puke a lot after the hyperspace jump, if you hadn’t worked out the rules in advance, then you couldn’t have given Annie this memory and this aspect to her relationship with Booker. The rules you establish don’t limit you; they open up possibilities.

Know the rules, and the rules will make you free.

TIME TRAVEL

You have to go through the same process with time travel. Without going into the same detail, let me just list some of the possible variations on time travel.

1. If you go back in time, you can make any changes you want in the past and you’ll continue to exist, because the very act of traveling in time takes you outside timestream and removes you from the effects of changes in history. (See Asimov’s The End of Eternity.)
2. If you go back in time, you can make changes that destroy your own society—so time travel is a closely guarded secret, and those who travel in time are only the most skilled and trusted people. Perhaps they are sent to rescue great works of art that have been lost for centuries. Or perhaps, as in John Varley’s classic “Air Raid” (published under the pseudonym Herb Boehm), these time travelers rescue people from airplanes that are about to crash or ships that are about to go down with no survivors, and then force these healthy people to colonize planets and save humanity from extinction in a hideously polluted future.
3. If you go back in time far enough, any changes you make won’t have major effects in your own time, because history has a kind of inertia and tends to get itself back on track. So if you kill Napoleon as a baby, France still has an early nineteenth-century empire and a protracted war with England, and by 1900 everything is right back where it would have been.
4. If you go back in time, you are only able to make changes that have no long-term effects, since any universe in which you change your own future could not exist.
5. When you go back in time, you’re invisible and unable to affect anything. But you can watch—so there’s quite a tourist business.
6. Time travel consists of going back into the mind of somebody living in the past, seeing events through his eyes. He doesn’t know you’re there. (But, in Carter Scholz’s brilliant short story “The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven and Other Lost Songs,” the presence of time-traveling observers in Beethoven’s mind drove him mad and eventually killed him, stopping him from writing his greatest works. The time travelers never realized what they were doing, however, because with history altered, they “knew” that Beethoven had never written any such symphonies after all.)
7. Time travel consists of going back into your own mind at an earlier stage in your life, able to observe but not to act. Or, in a variation, you can act, but then your youthful self will have no memory of what you did while your future self was in control. I used that one in a love story called “Clap Hands and Sing.”
8. Time travel consists of observation only, like watching a hologram or a movie. You aren’t actually there, and perhaps you aren’t altogether sure that what you’re seeing is the real past. Maybe it’s never the same way twice! (I actually don’t remember seeing a story about that—feel free to use that set of rules and see what develops.)
9. Your body remains inside the time-travel device, but a semi-real body is assembled for you in the past; your consciousness remains with that simulacrum until it dies or fades, whereupon you wake up and emerge from the machine. In a story called “Closing the Timelid,” I had a group of thrillseekers using such a machine to go through repeated deaths by making their simulacra commit suicide.

Do you get the idea? Each one of these sets of rules opens up a whole new range of story possibilities—and trust me, there are hundreds of variations that nobody’s tried yet, and that have many, many stories left in them.

Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools. His most recent series, the young adult Pathfinder series (Pathfinder, Ruins, Visitors) and the fantasy Mithermages series (Lost Gate, Gate Thief, Gatefather) are taking readers in new directions. Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy, historical novels, the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker, poetry, and many plays and scripts.