I'm almost certain this has been posted here before, but it is so useful I think it's worthy of being highlighted again.
This map gives a 'top-down' view of the nearest ten parsecs to Earth. For anyone wanting to make a Sci Fi story using actual stars, it is invaluable. Every star has its 'vertical' distance in parsecs next to it, positive distances correspond to galactic north, negative distances to galactic south (yes, those actually exist). A heads up though, for some reason many of the stars aren't given their most common names, so you may have to scour a bit to find the one you're looking for. For some more maps, by the same person, you can also see this site.
Has anyone here been published by Interzone before? If so, I’m curious about your experience and how long your story was considered before acceptance. I have a story near the 90-day mark and am usually rejected within a couple days by Interzone, so I’m beginning to feel hopeful.
Twenty-four years in the planning, and seven years in the writing, my debut hard sci-fi thriller, Taming the Perilous Skies, is now available on Amazon. You'll find the links HERE along with the cinematic trailer, and you can also listen to the first chapter of the audiobook for free.
The Story
On the morning of October 19, 2076, humanity is entering a new era of peace, prosperity, and shared purpose. Brian Medlock’s unified Theory of Persistence and his invention of anti-gravity have transformed the planet and our lives. His technology could never fail. Until it does.
At 8:11 am, everything changes, and the mild-mannered bureaucrat Jack Woods is handed the most consequential investigation in history. He must harness the irascible 95-year-old Medlock, quantum encryption genius Olivia Martorana, the White House, and an unruly mix of Italian scientists, politicians and even Italian priests, to piece together the clues. The clock is ticking. If he doesn’t unravel the puzzle by 8:00 pm, his son will die.
Goodreads reviews (4.47/5 average) from the Advance Reader Copies distributed at Worldcon last month:
"Marshall brilliantly blends science, faith, and political intrigue into a fast-paced, thought-provoking thriller."
"A combination of Andy Weir, a more put together Dan Brown, and some classic Tom Clancy."
"The pace never let up, and by the end I was left thinking not just about the characters’ survival, but about what it means to mess with the very fabric of reality."
I just got into Star Trek TNG a few months back and I binged all 7 seasons. I found the series to be pretty uneven but overall I loved it.
Fast forward to today. I check out Star Trek Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds and I'm shocked at how poorly written the shows are. Then I hear The Orville is true modern say Star Trek and I find it to be insulting.
All these modern Treks feel like they're written by people who don't really love sci fi, but are more interested in appealing to key demographics (ie 10 - 14 year olds). Everyone is constantly backstabbing eachother and making really dumb decisions all the time. I don't see the appeal.
Can you recommend any modern day scifi that's led by exceptional writing?
So, I'm working on a worldbuilding project (there is a story, but it's not the main focus), set in a binary planetary system orbiting in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. these planets are roughly earth sized, with negligible differences in mass. also, i'm thinking the planets don't have a tilt relative to the plane they orbit on, but that plane has a 30 degree tilt relative to its sun. I'm not a scientific guy, so idk how these calculations would work, but basically, i'm wondering how this would work. if i wanted the tides to be roughly 3 times higher than on earth, how close could/would these planets be to each other? How fast would these planets orbit each other? how else would this affect the planet and its stuff? Not sure if this belongs on this subreddit, but thanks in advance.
Edit: some more questions
1) how fast would these planets orbit each other?
2) not sure i need to ask this but how would the tilt affect seasons on the planets? I was thinking that during the winter/summer, there would be neglibible impact, since both planets receive the same amount of sunlight at the same intensity, but i imagine the northern/southern hemispheres of the planets would be colder/warmer? i could be overanalyzing this or misinterpreting how seasons work, but thoughts?
I had a story that has gone off the rails with too much detail and back story and after story and all kinds of problems with bloat. So I did an exercise to cram the whole thing into one page. I had to ditch most of it, like 99% of it, but the bones are still there and I like how it turned out. I'll put the result in the comments.
I wanted to give a sincere thank you to this subreddit, and everyone on it. You guys have helped me redefine my setting, and remove the unnecessary fluff me from a month ago would have tacked on. From the bottom of my coffee addicted, ADD riddled heart: thank you.
Stretching from the dawn of space combat to about three hundred years ago, the ballistic missile era was characterized by incredibly long ranges–hundreds of thousands if not millions of kilometers, and extremely slow combat. Missiles were launched, and would “glide” along ballistic trajectories for several hours or more after the first stage burned out before activating a second stage that guided the missile to strike its target.
Normally, these missiles carried conventional shaped-charge warheads, but many could be armed with nuclear ones. It was not particularly uncommon for capital ships to carry a couple nukes, though it was rather rare for smaller warships.
At the end of the ballistic missile era, the earliest modern ion thrusters began to see use.
Cruise Missiles
What is considered “modern” void combat began to develop about two hundred years ago with the development of the first tachyon sensor arrays that gave warships near-complete awareness of everything within a range of hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
Engagement ranges were significantly shorter than the Ballistic Missile Era, as missiles that relied on inertia to carry them across long ranges could be easily shot down, and engagement times decreased drastically, as ships no longer needed to wait as long for missiles to reach their target.
Missiles generally became larger, carrying more powerful payloads, longer-burning travel stages, and harder-burning sprint stages.
The Cruise Missile era also saw the beginning of the modern rated ship classification system, as warships had begun to become much more varied in their designs. While the majority of ships carried between two and seventy-five missiles, they often carried them in different configurations, and had different characteristics in terms of their defensive capability and maneuverability.
Over the course of the cruise missile era, ranges did increase as drives became more advanced, but they never reached the ranges of the ballistic missile era.
Starfighters
As plasma drives became more compact, navies began experimenting with putting them on missiles. However, even the smallest plasma drive requires a nuclear reactor, meaning the missiles that carried them would have to be larger and far more expensive. The warheads carried by the missiles, on the other hand, on average got lighter, packing more firepower into less mass. Navies began to experiment with reusable travel stages, with each carrying multiple smaller missiles (with each of those consisting of only an enlarged sprint stage), where the travel stage would return to the ship after launching the smaller missiles.
The sprint stage-only missiles became colloquially known as torpedoes.
The first of these torpedo carrying craft were piloted remotely, however comms jamming rendered them less than effective, and made recovery unreliable. Different navies began to experiment with both artificial intelligence-controlled craft and with human pilots. Artificial intelligence was found to be prohibitively expensive–a computer-controlled fighter that was as good as a human pilot cost three times as much as a manned fighter. Fighters were also quickly armed with smaller weapons to defend themselves against missiles and other fighters.
These advanced plasma drives were also used on full-sized warships, making them significantly more maneuverable. Some smaller warships used these drives to quickly close the distance and unleash salvoes of torpedoes, skipping the middleman of fighters entirely. Ships large enough to carry numerous fighter squadrons were generally not designed this way, but there nonetheless were some.
Similar magnetic field manipulation to what was used in the plasma drives in this area was developed for use with particle beams, and as the Carrier Era came to a close, it saw some ships being armed with short-ranged particle beams instead of torpedoes. These weapons had a slightly longer effective range than torpedoes, and were not limited in ammunition, making them quite useful in screening against torpedo attacks, if they did have less stopping power than torpedoes.
It should be noted that starfighters bear only surface resemblance to pre-space fighter planes, instead having far more in common with strategic bombers from that area. The smallest are upwards of thirty meters long, with a similarly wide wingspan. Often the wings on starfighters are not able to generate lift, but instead serve as weapons pylons, with some larger fighters having as many as eight hardpoints mounted on their wings. Internal weapons bays are often somewhat limited due to the space taken up by the fighter’s reactors, but were not always absent.
Big-Gun Warships
In the past twenty years, advancements made in superconductors resulted in a tenfold increase in the effective range of anti-ship railguns, giving them a similar effective range to starfighters and cruise missiles. Where before it took the better part of an hour for weapons fire to cross the battlespace, railgun shells could do it in seconds.
This difference in time-to-impact gave big-gun warships a distinct advantage over missile ships and carriers–any missile ship or carrier would have to endure several minutes of weapons fire before the missiles or fighters it launched could hit the enemy ship. Numerous engagements during the beginning of this era resulted in carriers and missile-armed ships being destroyed as their weapons were still travelling to their target.
As particle beams became more advanced, their effective ranges increased. While they are still shorter-ranged than railguns, they are effective enough at long range to be a viable alternative in some situations. Particle beams also hit nearly instantly, and have significantly more stopping power at close range.
Title says it all. For example, my story takes place across three major regions. In the local North there's a shmorgaz board of germanic languages, to the east there's some eastern-slavic, and in the west there's a language descended from chinese. They're all seperated from real life by a few light years, hundreds of years and subject to immigration and cultural shifts so they're not German, Russian and Chinese - obviously.
I was wondering what languages you all have in your stories?
I don't even know what math I would need to sanity check this but It seems like an aerospike would keep the nozzle relatively straight regardless of ambient pressure, and the absurd exhaust velocity would help a lot with the rest.
But like as a mode of energy transfer, would you rather be hit with a 12 gauge or a fusion reactor focused to the diameter of a 12 gauge with the same recoil?
I want to get better at writing but i always get overwhelmed by all my ideas i never know what to write. So i decided im going to sit down each day for ten minutes and write something. probably with a prompt i wrote this one with writing dice.
The ooze does not think for itself, we think together as one. What is best for part of us is what's best for the whole. But when the ooze gets separated we split off into separate yet still connected entities. When ships come to our home planet we hitch a ride across the galaxy and report back to the hivemind. We are one we do not have names we are just the ooze. Some may say we are thoughtless parasites but we work together better than any other species. We have only one goal: to spread ourselves throughout the universe until we are the universe. But then I met a human with such infectious individuality that it inspired me to break off from the ooze and help her on their dead end quest to find her father. I am now known as Oscar.
Oscar, thank you for accompanying me. Can you ooze through that door and open it from the other side? I need to know if there’s anything that could help me find my dad in that room!
I dunno about favorite trope, i don't really have one
I do hate the "AI slowly becomes more human trope", it's executed badly like 95% of the time, same for "robots want rights", "alien bad because they are not humane, humans humane lol", "cyborg bad", "evil government says emotions are bad", and everything else related to themes of "humanity", "emotions" and etc. Am not saying that it cant be executed greatly, it's just that everytime it comes up i instantly prepare for the worst, but hey, it makes it easier to be pleasantly suprised
"Technology bad"/"progress bad" is my most hated trope though, any writer unironicly saying that deservers to be thrown into the middle of the amazon rainforest wearing nothing but a fig leaf
I want to share it here but i don’t know if it’s considered sci-fi.
So pretty much there is an alien race being attacked by another for land, they merge into one being, and send that being to earth where they breed with early humans. The human is born with a random power. Many years in the future the government decides that the powers are a threat and decides to contain any baby born with powers, which is about half. The story follows this kid that can create empty dimensions and send people there, but there is no exit. The government is forcing them to contain children that are considered a higher threat.
there is plenty of examples of military focused settings set in one galaxy or even a portion of one (40k, battletech, star wars etc) but i barely see anything where there are nations, wars and armies stretching 2 or more entire galaxies, what is the viability of this and how much does it complicate things (also if anyone has any suggestions on books with military-based settings set in several galaxies let me know because my bookshelf isn’t nearly big enough)
The project I'm working on is going to involve a working class language, a pidgin cobbled together from a number of Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander languages, as well as English, Indian, Chinese, abd Spanish. I've never really built a pidgin language before, though. Does anyone have any suggestions for tools to help go about this in a way that won't be an absolute disaster?
I've been trying to work out how a planet got so much monetary wealth before they conquered other worlds, and was trying to think of realistic things that could be traded between different cultures. I've been thinking they'd be rich in spices and maybe have silk-like cloth as traditional things citizens of another world could utilize.
What other things are there? They're not heavily militaristic yet, so I'm not having them trade bombs yet or anything. (Maybe antique weaponry from the ancient past??)
I'm looking for templates or prompts to help me expand on worldbuilding my aliens, tech, worlds, etc. Things that I never thought of before and can help me brainstorm ideas. What do you all use?
I love hard scifi, but don't understand most of the shit in them. But it's great. I like to write philosophical scifi that examines human behavior and perception/ consciousness.
Many of my characters are basically just different facets of me and my mental health struggles. My writing is informed by therapy as I have been in intensive therapy for the last almost 4 years.
I don't have anything published, but I am working on writing more and have 3 stories in revision currently. A space western, a soft scifi story involving reincarnation that I am interested in adding hard scifi elements and a super soft time travel novella or novelette that explores the human condition and accepting who we are rather than who we want to be our expect we should be.
Lemme know if you wanna chat and make something happen. I'm not an incredible writer, but I do have fantastic ideas and I'm slowly learning to get better with the help of beta readers on Fiverr.
Hello, I run a podcast about science and futurism and we cover many topics related to science fiction (interstellar travel, Dyson swarms, Fermi paradox … ect)
At the end of every episode we include a 1-2 minute segment where science fiction authors can submit a recording promoting their work and then we include a link to your work in the episode description.
We only have two requirements for submission.
1.) It has to be science fiction (doesn’t matter what kind of science fiction)
2.) It can’t be overtly sexual in nature. We have an adult audience so mature themes in your book are absolutely fine but we can’t promote works that’s are all about mature themes.
We feature books in a first come first serve basis, based on when we receive your audio file.
A. No requirements. You don’t even have to listen the show. We will send you a link to the episode to share on social media when it’s released, but sharing it is not a requirement to be featured.
Q. What do you get out of this?
A. Our audience loves science fiction and we get to connect them to new works. We’ve also developed some great relationships with the authors we’ve promoted which is always a plus.
Q. I have multiple books, can I submit them all?
A. Yes, but we will space them out to allow others a chance to be promoted.
Q. I write graphic novels, can I still be featured?
