So far, I’ve talked about the idea for my short story and the characters that I’d like to include in it. Now, let’s talk about where things will happen. Saying “On a spaceship” or “on another planet” is like saying “in a room”. That’s a description that is almost certainly technically correct but totally useless.
I say “almost certainly” because sometimes you really don’t need much more than a few adjectives to flesh it out. “In a seedy motel room” conjures up a very different image from “in a penthouse suite”. So one reason for working on our background is to help set the scene and establish a mood. Three witches meeting on a blasted heath is quite different from three witches meeting at the village bakery for tea.
If you go back to the previous articles, I’ve already sketched out some ideas. Or, at least, implied them. A quick rundown:
It’s a far future story. The story is science fiction, set in the far future. How far? It probably doesn’t really matter. I know the setting has spaceships. They’re common enough that there have our equivalent of shipping firms and independent long-haul contractors. They’re no doubt expensive, but not insurmountably so because out Captain owns one and makes a living off of it, as does his crew.
There’s no strange tech. The fact that the captain needs a crew, even a skeleton crew, means that there are no robots, cyborgs, replicants, ship-wide AIs, or other weirdness. They don’t blip from place to place. There’s no matter replicators, photon guns or anything else weird. The only “strange” technology that is involved will be (a) the ship & drive that gets them from place to place, and (b) the alien MacGuffin they encounter
The universe is eerie. I’ve already used terms like “eerie” and “strange”. “Eerie” implies missing people. Not just absent people, mind you. A desert is not necessarily eerie; but a deserted town is. I need a universe that was once populated but is now strangely empty. Abandoned. Let’s say that there’s just enough information that everyone knows there used to be Someone Out There, and then they disappeared, leaving behind dead planets and the occasional artifact. Why did that happen? Who knows! For the purpose of the story, it just did.
Communication is difficult. The fact that they pick up a distress signal means that things can and do go wrong. The fact that nobody else has picked it up means that there’s what we would consider normal communications limitations. So whatever the captain and crew decide to do, they won’t be able to phone home and make sure someone knows what they’re doing and where they’re going. So no instant messaging across the galaxy-wide Subspace Interweb.
Travel is slow. I want a situation where this crew encounters something out of the ordinary in a place far from help. It’s off the beaten path. They’re going to head that way because they have to for some reason, not because they want to. If travel is fast, anyone could zip over a few light years and drop in on their neighbors. No, I want a situation where it takes time and effort to move from star to star. Even more to the point, I would really like a "kind of “cabin fever” type of atmosphere to start things off. So I’m thinking more “old sailing ship” speeds, or perhaps even slower.
People are people. Everyone I’ve sketched out in the story is a human being. More to the point, they’re relatively normal human beings. Not artificial intelligences, not hard-light constructs, clones, replicants, solid dreams, or something other than normal, baseline humans. Aliens might be around (more on that in a bit) but for this story, at least, we’re focused on some completely relatable human beings. Also - I’m looking for more of a Ray Bradbury or Clifford Simak feel to the story, not a survival tale like “The Martian”. So for purely for narrative reasons, I want my characters walking around on an alien planet without spacesuits.
Except when they’re not. What’s a SF story without aliens, though? I’ve got to work them in somewhere. Spaceship and aliens, that’s how you know it’s a SF story, right? So I’ll say that aliens are around. They aren’t so rare that people never see them, but they’re not common. So let’s postulate that they’re often hard to communicate or work with for some reason. Each race keeps to themselves, more or less, unless they have some reason to interact.
Now, if you look back on that, you’ll notice something interesting.
I don't actually describe any of the places in the story.
There’s the ship, obviously. We’ll probably have something happening on the bridge. There may be something happening elsewhere on the ship. Even without an explicit description, though, you can get a picture of what it must be like, based on the background details above. Worn-out but not broken down. Rivets and exposed piping - this is a working ship, not a luxury liner. We might see the bridge, maybe the mess and a cabin. Not much need for anything else.
Then there’s the planet. Eerie. Once populated, now abandoned. I like the imagery of sand and dust. An ancient, dead world. One where even the hardest stone and metal have been ground to dust by time. And yet - somewhere on this dead world is the MacGuffin, something that will draw our crew in and shake up their world.
Tune in next time and I’ll try to pull it all together to come up with a synopsis for the story and turn it into an outline.