The rules of the galaxy

 This week I'm working on my chapter plan for a completely new novel.  Unlike the last two novels I've worked on, this one will have a substantial chunk of the action set in space.  And that means I have to set out my rules for the galaxy.

At this stage of our scientific knowledge we still don't know for definite whether faster than light travel will ever be practically possible.  But if I want to write a story where my characters go from one end of the galaxy to the other then I need some way of getting them around which doesn't take lifetimes.  That generally means inventing some kind of faster than light travel mechanism.

Writers do this in several ways.  Generally we send our starships hurtling through some other dimension which shortens journey times to weeks or months.  We have different names for this imagined other realm: hyperspace, unspace, the higher dimensions.  Whatever we call it, we envisage a starship jumping from normal space through some kind of threshold into that mysterious other dimension.

Scientists talk of wormholes through space, and some have speculated that we may be able to use them for fast transport around the galaxy, so we writers are not entirely talking nonsense when we send a starship out on a hyperspace jump.

The Alcubierre drive is a possible warp drive proposed by the theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre.  The idea is that the space in front of a starship contracts, and the space behind it expands, so that it moves along on a wave.  It's an attempt to find a way around the real rule of the galaxy that objects can't accelerate to the speed of light in normal space.  This limit is very inconvenient if you want to go anywhere else in the galaxy, so using the Alcubierre drive we can 'cheat' in a way.  Our spacecraft isn't going faster than light, it's stationary in the middle of a bubble.  It's the space around it that's moving.  The theory is s wonderful example of what happens when creativity and hard science meld together.

Other rules of the galaxy are absolutes, however.  If I have humans in my story, they have to have a suitable atmosphere to breathe.  That often means they're on planets which look a lot like Earth.  We know that rocky planets are common in other solar systems, so it isn't unreasonable to expect a fair proportion of them to have breathable atmospheres.  And some of those atmospheres will be suitable for humans.

Likewise, if characters are on a planet, then I know there will be gravity holding them down.  And if that planet is in a normal orbit around it's star, and turning on its axis, it will have sunrises and sunsets.

Sometimes the rules of the galaxy can be restrictive, but sometimes those rules can challenge the writer and shape the story they tell to produce something truly novel.