Tag: worldbuilding

During the early history of “speculative fiction”, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs postulated that all or most of the inner planets were, more or less, hospitable to life. Mars was a desert world, long dying for lack of water. Venus was a jungle world, its cloud-covered face hiding jungles that often housed dinosaurs. It was even speculated that a fifth planet, Vulcan, once lay between Mars and Jupiter. Since this makes for a much richer storytelling setting, and the stories are set in the late 19th century, this is true for my inner planets as well

Mercury’s World River

Mercury is tidally locked to the Sun, but that doesn’t keep it from having water, atmosphere, and life. A constant, cold to cool wind from the cold side blows along the surface with an equally constant hot to warm wind aloft returning the air from the hot side. A deep, broad valley circles the twilight zone between them.

Jungles of Venus

The clouds of Venus are water clouds and the surface is a hot, muggy jungle. Saurian leviathans rule the air, land and sea, making exploration difficult – and that is before considering the bloodthirsty lizard people

Earth, With Bonuses

Our own planet is, mostly, the same. But with all the cool things on other worlds, there have to be mysterious islands, lost civilizations, evidence of ancient bases from peoples of the other planets, and other story elements still to be found. Who knows, maybe a voyage to the center of the Earth is possible…

Moon – Scars of Conflict

Not all of those craters on the moon were from natural meteorite impacts. Thousands of years ago, there was a War in Heaven that almost destroyed the numerous moon bases and instillations. Almost…

Mars And The Elves

Mars has canals. Mars also has the mightiest volcanoes in the solar system. And the people of Mars, both those living in the baroque civilizations of the canal queendoms, and the raiders who venerate the millennia-old trans-atmospheric fighters on static display, are human – except for the pointed ears…

Lost Vulcan

The Asteroid Belt is has about 20 times the mass of the belt in real life. It is also far less evenly spaced, most of the asteroids being in the quadrant centered on the ancient moon Ceres. But the closer one comes to the heart of the Vulcan debris field, the more… haunted it becomes.

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.

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.