Write what you know - ish

 The thing about being a science fiction author is that you have to invent the whole world of your story,  and that makes a nonsense of that old advice ‘write what you know”.  If we only stuck to what we actually knew there would be no science fiction.  And, as another writer pithily commented, there’d be a lot of crime writers in jail.

So we have to make everything up in a science fiction setting.  Sort of.  Yes, I did have to make up the layout of my orbital shipyard for the novel I’ve just finished editing.  But here’s the thing: if my main characters are human, that dictates a lot of the setting.

Before I re-wrote that novel I planned out the shipyard.  It has three huge rings of different sizes, anchored to a central cylinder. Each one of those rings has six levels, so that gave me eighteen levels to map out.

There are some things which would be needed on every level.  As the shipyard is in orbit in space, the first requirements would be creating and topping-up atmosphere for the inhabitants to breathe.  So every level is going to need atmosphere storage facilities and machinery to pump it around. 

Moving around people is another thing I had to sort out.  I decided on two systems - one travelling internally, which results in quite lengthy journeys, and an external  system taking an Autoshuttle around the outside of the ‘yard. 

That got me thinking about how crowded the shipyard would be, and in turn made me work out the details of how ships were built.  I imagine building a starship would be similar to the process of building a large ship or submarine.  You might lay down the whole keel first, or build the ship in large sections which are then joined together.  I also have organic ships, and in the original manuscript I described growth facilities for them.  I haven’t added the details of them in the rewrite, as it doesn’t feature in the narrative.

The humans on the shipyard will need places to eat and sleep, and they’ll have recreation time too, so will need movie theatres and other places to pass their leisure hours.  But humans aren’t the only species on the ‘yard, and one of the alien races there are large arachnids.  I needed a way for those spiders to communicate with the other races, who all use spoken language.  Cue their own handspeak, a sign language everyone knows. But a large place like a shipyard needs public signage for all species too, so I added rolling vid displays to the signs which instruct people what to do.

Then there are the hundreds of Autoshuttle pods dodging the hundreds of construction drones as they zip around the ‘yard.  I decided they would be guided by AIs, and be responsible for their own navigation, on a see-and-avoid basis. 

There are offices and security stations, and power plants, and many other things on the ‘yard.  Constructing this entire world allowed me to make up a lot of things, but it still had to be constrained by known science.  It was a case of write what you know - ish.