Mapping the future

I'm writing a brand new novel this week, titled Renaissance, and I'm finding my way around the story's universe as I go.  The thing about writing SF is that you have to invent everything about that world.  Everything from the colour of the star, the colour of the grass beneath your characters' feet, to the transport systems.

Sometimes a brief description of a place isn't enough.  If it's a key setting in the book, then I probably need to draw a map of it.  My maps range from the layout of an individual room on a starship to the design of an orbital shipyard. Then there are the large-scale maps, the ones that record the locations of solar systems and their associated space stations in Human space.

For my novel Starfire I constructed two star maps, one showing Human space, and the other Halinn space.  When I'm sending a starship on a long journey, it's essential to have a record of what stations that ship calls at, and in what order.

On the smaller end of the scale, I made a map of one room for Renaissance.  But that room is huge, and is at the heart of what the ship does.  It recycles space junk, so I needed to think through how that process would work in space.  Once I'd worked out how to dismantle the junk, and get it aboard the ship without evacuating all the ship's atmosphere, I then had to work out how to process it.  And that's where the map of the Belt Room came in.

I started with the idea of a huge conveyor belt running right through the room.  Footage I'd seen on TV of a recycling facility was my starting point. I then added chutes for the separated and identified materials to go in.  Which led me to ask where the chutes went.  The answer was to the deck below, for reprocessing the materials into pure forms.

This map dictates what the characters do.  I added Belt Rats, sorters, along the length of the belt, who identify tangled messes of debris that the overhead belt scanners can't.  I then figured out that they'd have the throw the identified bits into the right chute.  So I invented a language of hand signals to warn other Rats of incoming pieces. 

Maps are useful not only for record-keeping, but they can also feed into description of setting, making it denser and richer.  Now I need to go back and make maps of the ship's other decks.