Here’s something to think about on Inspiration Thursday
There are number of SF stories set on ships travelling between the stars.
Such stories should be quite different to those that take place on Earth. This is not because the action takes place on a spaceship. A good story will deal with the interaction of the characters within the ship. The fact that there is nothing outside but vacuum is irrelevant. If it’s an isolated environment the writer is after, then they could have set the tale in a hut in the middle of the Antarctic or on board an ocean going ship.
What makes such story SF is the physics. On Earth a vehicle that isn’t being powered will come to a halt. There are exceptions, you can roll a car down a hill, but as a general rule, if you take your foot off the accelerator the vehicle will coast to a halt. If the engines on your aeroplane cut out you better hope that the pilot can glide to a runway before friction robs the plane of momentum.
It’s different in space. Turn off the engines and a ship will continue to coast almost indefinitely. A journey between the stars would involve accelerating for the first half of the journey and then turning the ship around to decelerate for the second half. Make the turnover too late and you won’t stop in time, you’ll shoot past your destination.
This is counter intuitive, it’s not the way things work on Earth. Give your spaceship a hyperdrive (something I’ve done myself) and you don’t have to think about such things, you can look at other stories.
But just imagine you were on a spaceship that took ten years to reach its destination. Five years speeding up, five years slowing down. Just imagine the characters you could have on that ship. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Al Reynolds did a great job with this scenario in his Revelation Space series.
I find these journeys a metaphor for life, I wrote about just that in Midway.
Some people spend the first half of their life accelerating up to speed and then slow to a graceful halt in the second half. Some people never learn to stop: they see their destination pass them by as they struggle to change direction and try and catch hold of it. And some people barely start at all.
Something for you to think about on Inspiration Thursday
Tony Ballantyne 