Tag Archives: science-fiction

Spaceship Turnover

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

Sunday at the Village Vanguard

Here’s a quick question. Which was Charles Dickens time travel story?

Got it? It was, of course, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge travelled back and forwards in time from the beginning to the end of his life.

If you didn’t get the answer it’s because I was deliberately misleading when asking the question. Time travel makes people think of science fiction, and A Christmas Carol isn’t science fiction (here’s a small taste of why not). And besides, Dickens didn’t write SF

I’m not a fan of time travel stories, I’ve only written one that I can remember (“The Blue Magnolia” – originally published in The Third Alternative 22), although admittedly I do play around with the concept in my current Fair Exchange stories

But no one will ever travel in time. I can prove it.

Go to Spotify or Apple Music, or possibly your record collection, and find the album Sunday at the Village Vanguard by the Bill Evans Trio.

Sunday at the Village Vanguard is reckoned to be one of the best live jazz recordings ever, and I agree. I love Bill Evans. If I had a time machine then this would definitely be on my must-see list.

Listen to the track “Alice in Wonderland”. You can hear the crowd talking throughout most of this album, but it’s particularly noticeable on this track during Scott LeFaro’s bass solo. If I was at this concert I would know that LeFaro was going to be killed in a car accident in eleven days time. I would want to tell the people around me to be quiet. And not just me, all the other Bill Evans fans who had traveled back in time would do the same. In fact, there would be so many of us that the regular crowd wouldn’t have got in.

So there you are. The fact you can hear the chatter shows there is no time travel.

Actually, the SF writer in me can’t let the above passage go unchallenged. If all of us Bill Evans Trio fans were listening in silence, I suspect the performance would have been very different. We’d have changed the performance just by observing it. That’s the trouble with time travel stories, you can’t pin them down. They keep wriggling into different shapes as you write them.

I read recently that people enjoy things more in memory than they do in the moment. I don’t know if this is such a bad thing. Who knows what those fans were talking about in the recording? The trouble they had getting there? Their worries about work the next day?

It’s nice to imagine them looking back later on and just remembering the good parts of the gig. As Joni Mitchell said, You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

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