Off Topic

This is a quick aside from the deep Linux nerdiness, but it does tie into technology.

My second book Sparks of Hope is out now. It was much harder to write than the first book Sparks of Ice   The reason I started writing my own books is that I wanted to experience better stories, stories that did not fall into common tropes, or that cheaped out.   I thought “how hard can it be”, turns out writing books is really easy. HOWEVER, editing your story, making it flow and be readable to anyone except yourself is a HUGE pain in the ass.   When you write a story, you know who the characters are, you are invested and feel for them. The difficult part for me was trying to bring that across to the reader.   It’s never quite as good for the reader as it is for yourself, the characters will probably never be as important or relatable to anyone else, but if I like it and put effort into making it readable, hopefully someone will enjoy it.   The decision to write for a small “niche” audience was very much on purpose, specifically because so many books fall into the same tropes. If you can relate to them I guess they work. But to some of us these tropes are instant mood killers.   One of the biggest problems I had with a lot of sci-fi books was how “American” many of them felt. So many of the main characters have backgrounds or flashbacks to “a small farm in Virginia” or some other such setting.   I don’t mind it in a single story, but when it happens over and over it takes you out of it. It becomes a cliché, and I feel authors should work harder to counter it.   If it is where you grew up and you are using it as a shortcut because you are unimaginative then that’s a choice, but if that is not your lived experience then give your characters different backgrounds.

Another issue I kept running into was the balance between storytelling and realism.

A lot of space adventure books do not seem particularly interested in the science. Space becomes little more than an ocean with different scenery. Ships bank like aircraft, planets are a quick backdrop, and distances only matter when the plot needs them to matter.

On the other hand, some authors go so far in the opposite direction that the story disappears under the technical details. You end up reading pages explaining the exact operation of a reactor, drive system, sensor array, or docking procedure. The information is not necessarily wrong, but it often isn’t important either.

Personally, I find both approaches frustrating.

Ignoring the science entirely can break immersion. If the setting presents itself as believable, then the world should at least follow its own rules. At the same time, a novel is not an engineering manual. Most readers do not need fifty pages explaining how a coolant pump works before something interesting happens.

The approach I tried to take was to respect the science where it matters, and make sure all the background calculations are correct, BUT i am not going to show you the working out or tell you WHY it’s correct. I have done the math, it is correct enough to be fasible even if you are an expert, and hopefully that is enough to keep you invested.

If communication delays create a problem, then they should exist. If acceleration limits affect what characters can do, then they should be acknowledged. If a spacecraft is damaged, there should be consequences. But the reader does not necessarily need a full schematic of the ship to understand why any of that matters.

I think good worldbuilding is often invisible. The reader should feel that the author has thought about the details without being forced to sit through all of them. Much like in real life, most systems only become interesting when they fail.

That philosophy influenced a lot of the decisions I made while writing. I wanted the universe to feel grounded enough that the challenges were believable, but never so obsessed with realism that it forgot to be a story.

At the end of the day, the characters drive the plot. The technology exists to create opportunities, obstacles, and consequences.

Gaming

I started making my own game for a lot of the same reasons that caused me to write, and an interesting side effect is that I have gotten more and more annoyed with poor game design.

This is something I think most of us are familiar with. The more you know about a subject, and the more invested you are in it, the more small problems start to nag at you.

My game development is currently on the back burner. GODOT is good, but there are several features that are not exactly easy for a first-timer to use. It is a game engine, and it gives you a lot of options, but that also means small problems can take a long time to solve.

For me, some of the things I don’t really care about and just want a quick fix for can require days of investment to learn properly. But that’s the tradeoff when you choose a professional tool.