Campaign Toybox
But what if it was?
Most science fiction about space travel takes its keys from other stories about travel. Space vessels are called ships (or boats in Firefly), and their journeys are compared to sea travel. Roddenberry was particularly influenced by the Hornblower books for Star Trek – not to mention the TV show Wagon Train, riffing off the covered wagon. The Jetsons and Futurama have spaceships acting just like modern day traffic. Futurama also gave us space-rail riding hobos, space truckers and even space VW-vans. But sometimes it’s a bit too easy to just make space travel like another kind of travel, and it means you often end up just telling the same old stories but with space: Lifepod was just a remake of Lifeboat, Forbidden Planet was just the Tempest, Enemy Mine was Hell in the Pacific (and Avatar was Dances With Wolves, but that’s another issue).
But throw things off kilter and you can get something very new in your space stories. One of the really cool things about the Warhammer 40K universe is that travelling in space isn’t at all like sailing a ship, it’s like conducting a psychic battle in a gothic cathedral stuck halfway in hell. One thing that set Star Trek apart was it made space travel like going in an elevator (beaming). And HoL has space travel made possible by giant slugs having kinky sex. It doesn’t always have to make sense straight away, but if you start with space travel being something different, you can often end up with a really different setting. Here then, are twenty six different things that travelling through space might be like.
A is for Abseiling
In fact, real space travel is kind of like abseiling. Space is full of gravity wells and getting out of them is really power intensive. But getting back down again is – if you disregard atmosphere – really easy. In fact, the problem is it’s too easy to get down. The hard part in getting down is staying alive. Playing this up a bit more might provoke some new angles. Although most sf keeps take-offs taxing and crash-landings bad, most of the time the stories posit a lot less reliance on our current rocket technology. But if getting up was really, really hard, and slow, and expensive, and if coming down was some kind of adrenalin pumping extreme sport, that would change a lot who went up and who went down. Most people would stay up, living in space, and those who explored new planets would likely be thrill-seekers in Colorado boots. Or military guys rappelling from space-copters. I think you’ll agree that rappelling from orbit is pretty freaking awesome, and we’re only on our first letter.
B is for Bullfighting
This is not unlike the 40K model, where they drift into the terrifying hell-dimensions just enough to get pushed forward in time and space. Bullfighting is like that: you want to stand just close enough to give the bull a decent shot at ripping out your pancreas, but not so close enough you can’t get away when he tries it. If space travel was about finding that kind of sweet-spot, the rocket-jockeys might be even more flashy about their prowess, and it would be as much an art as a science. Most ships would creep forward by inches, and only one or two pilots in a generation would be able to reach truly fantastic speeds. Such pilots would be feted above all, and soon become spoilt rich celebrities too fat to find the sweet spot any more. For extra insanity, what if it was a real creature the pilots were dancing with, some kind of warp-space bull-alien that you can get just angry enough to cause space travel, but not enough to kill you and all your crew? What would such a species look like, and could it be harnessed for other purposes?
C is for Cartography
The map is the territory, almost literally. Thanks to high powered computing, once humans perform the necessary measures and calculations of a new area and enter it into the great navigation database, everyone can now get to the place in almost no time. So the real measure of distance is whether something has been discovered or not: and as soon as something is discovered, it can be settled and developed in just a few weeks. Outlying planets can go from untouched edens to condos and tourists in a month or two. But finding new things is extremely difficult because it involves leaping into unmapped sections, where the travel systems break down and you have to go by feel, praying you are inching towards something navigable. Now it’s the navigators who control exploration and expansion and thus it is they who get the feting and the primacy in the culture. Again it could be more an art than a science, either way intelligence and art skills will make you a hero, not reflexes, endurance or courage. It also totally changes warfare because reconnaissance is now the same as transport. Follow it along, who knows where it goes.
D is for Deliverance
Because nothing’s scarier than space rednecks. The horror of Deliverance is that simply by driving a few hours up into the mountains, four city folk find themselves removed from their normal suburban civilisation and thrown into a savage landscape of kill or be killed like something out of Lord of the Flies. The easy option is to put the rednecks on a planet, ala Firefly, with the sleek sophisticated civilisation in the silver-sky-ships far above. But Firefly also offers the opposite, in Reavers: let space be the savage frontier, where only wild hermits and “mountain men” can survive and a whole new rule of law exists. Yes, Earth and Mars may be transhuman paradises but if you want to travel between them you have to drive through the black, and if you run out of gas or take the wrong back road the folk out there might not be friendly. And don’t try to call for the sheriff, because he’s the brother of the guy who is currently making you squeal like a pig.
E is for Ego-Surfing
Possibly the biggest issue with making beaming in Star Trek a reality is one of data storage. Tracking the exact position (and velocity, ho-hum) of all a person’s atoms would require enormous amounts of numbers. Now imagine flinging those numbers hundreds of light-years across a galaxy. Yes, it’s (relatively) quick and requires no space-ships at all but there’s an issue of storage and there’s an issue of signal corruption. Over the distance, noise creeps into the message, and when they rebuild you at the other end, you’re not quite right. However, they can always use corrective statistical modelling to rebuild the noise towards a norm, a template of what you should be. And the better the template, the more reliable the travel. But the template comes from where your identity is stored – and that’s on the internet. In other words, the more famous you are, the more you blog and upload your thoughts, ideas and image, and the more hits you get on a search engine, the farther you can travel. The bigger a celebrity you are, the faster you go. A lot of post-scarcity SF deals with this kind of social prestige as a measure of who gets the best quality food or shelter but not usually as a measure of how far and fast you can travel (Indeed, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom goes the other way: if you travel far, you get more social prestige). Turning these post-scarcity masters of fame into explorers of the unknown provides a whole new twist on both exploration and transhumanism.
F is for Farming
What if space travel really was like dusting crops? Or at least rotating them? Let the model be agrarian medieval Europe: let planets be the huge walled cities and castles with a very alien society to those outside them and let the in-between be endless fields and fallows where dark matter is harvested and space-pigs bred. Rich folk try to get through space as quickly as possible, rattling past on coach lines, but it’s inefficient and smelly and travel is rare – except for farmers going to and from the markets in orbit around the town-planets. If you want to go somewhere in particular, you better wait for a wagon full of nebula-beans that happens to be going your way, although Gaffer Jovan will charge you a penny or two for slowing down his starhorse. Of course you could gallop right across the fields – if you want to destroy vast amounts of dark-matter crop, leaving your home low on energy and the peasants very cross indeed, and you need the peasants on your side when you next go to war. Reskinning writ large don’t always make sense in the finer details but it doesn’t have to make sense - it just has to be awesome.
G is for Going to Work
This is a fairly obvious one, which is why it turns up a lot (most notably in Futurama): let space travel be car travel, particularly the grind of the daily commute. Specialization is the way of the future, after all, even for planets. Earth has been reterraformed back to a residential planet, with most people working in the Jupiter Commericial Planeplex or the Asteroid Industry Belt – which means getting between them morning and night (or at the weekend, for long-term stays) is traffic hell. Of course, traffic doesn’t make for a thrilling plot on its own but it can be a good place to start something interesting (think of films like Falling Down and Changing Lanes) and it makes an excellent backdrop for a car-chase (Ronin, The Bourne Identity, Die Hard With a Vengeance) or foot chase (Lethal Weapon, The International, Vantage Point).
H is for Halo
Not necessarily Halo specifically but the idea of a computer game. Everyone loves the central conceit of The Last Starfighter, where being good at an arcade game qualifies you to do it for real. It’s a great film but the idea could go even further: what if this was common knowledge? What if all the twitch gamers playing Halo and Team Fortress and the like are in fact competing not just for bragging rights about their frags but the right to join the fleet and pilot their own ship. This would throw computer games out of the basement and into the national spotlight, especially if space pilots are heroes in a war setting. Game companies would be co-opted by the military and great coders would be encouraged to make things as close to real combat as possible – but they would still be games and their players would still be gamers, as we know and love them. It might prove Jack Thompson right about games training killers, but there’s also something awesome about blowing up the Death Star to a chorus of “PWNED!”|
I is for Insanity
What’s scary about Call of Cthulhu is that going mad isn’t a sign of a disconnection from reality but rather comprehending it for what it truly is. If the angles of space truly were mind-breakingly alien and non-euclidean it might be only those who were insane who could traverse it. This could be played two ways: they need to be loopy before they can even take off or whether space travel slowly turns their brains to porridge; the latter is more traditional but the former could be huge amounts of fun. Imagine the space navy recruiting from asylums, with every ship staffed with expert psychologists (and extra straightjackets) to keep the pilots from going too far off the rails. Adventures of a ship full of sufferers of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders and addictions would make for one hell of a wild ride even before you leave the spacedock. If all the aliens are crazy too, it gets even more fun.
J is for the Jetsons
Not the spaceships that fold up into briefcases, but the other omnipresent piece of Jetson tech: the moving walkway. What if space travel was almost entirely pedestrian? Why build a space elevator when a pathway would work just as well? You simply point the gravity the right way and keep your population in shape by making them earn their orbits by running there (sure the walkway is moving too, but that’s about half the speed you’d go if you walked as well). Granted, your average atmosphere is something like 500 kilometres long, which might take you weeks to walk. And walking to Mars, a distance of something like 80 million kilometres will take you more than ten thousand years. But SF authors have dealt with distance with plenty of macguffins like warp speed; warp jogging is an interesting premise indeed. Set your game on a world full of speedsters who can run at Mach 1 and speed the walkways up the same amount and you’ll have people walking to Mars in about 4 years. And who knows what you might see along the way…
K is for K2
K2 is the mountaineering designator for the second-highest mountain in the world, an ascent considered by most climbers to be even tougher than Everest. Hardly anyone has climbed it, because, like Everest, doing so requires being an absolute specialist with extreme dedication and endurance. And like Everest, almost as many have died trying to scale it as have made it to the top. Space travel is already something like this in our time: a process reserved for a very few, breaking records and making news. But it isn’t something you do so alone. If Neil Armstrong had been one crazy guy with a dream and a Sherpa, getting to the moon would have been even more impressive – although it might have got a lot less press. Another idea is to make it literally climbing to the heavens: perhaps a hundred years ago there was a space elevator, and it’s now a derelict shell, half collapsed and extremely dangerous. Only the best climbers will get off world, away from the desolate ruin earth has become. Many die on the way up – will your team make it?
L is for Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo designed a whole lot of things before their time: the hand-grenade, the tank, the flying machine…it’s a tiny jump to say he also speculated on the possibility of space travel. (Indeed, his analogue in the Discworld novels, Leonard of Quirm, did just that in The Last Hero.) The only question then is when his wonderful mysteries are uncovered and made to work. Does he usher in a Renaissance space age? Or are his designs (and the conspiracy to suppress them) only discovered by an expert in symbology and a sexy detective hundreds of years later? You can also switch this around and make us the da Vincis. In five hundred years time, when humanity is finally beginning to go into space, they discover some drawings of moon shuttles by someone called Nasa – designs that could actually have been made to work, even if they look nothing like the modern technology…
M is for Mullets
For those who missed the eighties and even much of the nineties, a mullet is a hair cut: short on the top, long at the back. Famously sported by several TV heroes and rockstars, they are now a universal sign of the antiquated and out of fashion. Everyone agrees that they should not be worn now and shouldn’t have been worn then, although some fashion rebels still insist on wearing them. The question then is, why would space travel fall so far out of fashion? Danger alone wouldn’t do it, or expense: humanity is frequently driven to overcome such things. Maybe there just isn’t anything out there we find interesting: just empty rocks, and we don’t even need minerals any more, because we get our energy from something much more simple and renewable. So now space is left for rednecks and weekend warriors who still cling to the idea that it’s “cool”. That’s not enough for a setting on its own, but like Going to Work above, it’s a nice backdrop for a mystery or chase: think CSI where they plumb a new subculture each week.
Next month: Sex, dogs and racquet ball...
