When I wrote my epic fantasy, The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom, I described how I created the world in which the story took place. It is essential for any piece of imaginative fiction that such a world should possess a kernel of realism at its heart. The same holds true for science fictions stories too. Although most of the action takes place on the planet of Iolos some characters do journey to other places, a space station, a moon, and travelling onboard space craft for example. There is a need to make such environments both exotic and realistic. For me this is one of the attractions of writing in this particular genre.

I can accept that in movies and television programmes that there is precious little time to explain how many of the tropes that we find in science fiction come into existence, but a book does not suffer from such restraints. I already knew that space travel would exist but not what form it would take. I considered faster than light travel (FTL), both warp drive and hyperspace, but decided against them. Instead, I decided on using wormholes. I had this idea that it was more viable to create portals, each on a different planet or the moon of a planet, that could connect to each other through the creation of a stable but temporary wormhole. The distance between the two portals would be irrelevant once the wormhole was created, although passage through it would be achieved as fast as possible due to the fact that wormhole would always be in a state of imminent collapse so there would be a time limit on its existence. However, the wormhole could be recreated as many times as necessary although the power required would be considerable. Due to that last consideration I am edging towards locating the portals on moons or space stations.

There are spaceships in my new galactic civilisation, but they are not capable of FTL. Most of them are limited to travelling through the star systems where they are based, but there is one craft, a starship, that is capable of travelling to any point in the galaxy. It is a very large vessel capable of creating its own wormhole through spacetime. Due to the resources invested in building such a vessel starships are rated as highly valuable assets. They can be used to transport fleets and armies from one end of the galaxy to another, but they are usually kept well away from the frontline. No commander wants to see their starship destroyed, for one thing it would mean that they were effectively stranded, for another it would be a hefty bill to pay in replacing the vessel.

Another aspect of the starship, and one that also limits their numbers, is that they are navigated by a disembodied human brain that is connected to a positronic brain, a merger of human and artificial intelligence. Only this partnership has proven capable of successfully navigating these huge ships throughout the galaxy, but it also raises other problems; are the navigators human or robots or both?