I’ve briefly looked it up and it’s interesting. You’ve obviously focused a lot on world-building, so kudos to that.
And I’m still building. I neglected some numbers in the rocket design, and now it looks like I have to rebuild the whole idea from scratch.
What I’m not seeing is an interesting developement: there are many directions the plot could go, but you need to choose one and explore that.
I can see that. To me, the most interesting idea so far is that when the risk of gathering new information is that high, the correct decision to be made may be to act to eliminate a potential threat without knowing whether or not that threat really exists. My current intuition is that I’m probably going to build the story around that choice, and the consequences thereof. (Hopefully without falling into the same sorts of story-issues that cropped up in “The Cold Equations”.)
Will there be any kind of conflict?
At the moment, my memories of high-school English classes say that the conflicts will primarily be “Man vs Nature” (eg, pulling a ‘The Martian’ to build infrastructure faster than it can glitch out) and “Man vs Self” (“Space madness!”), with some “Man vs Man” showing up later as diverging copies’ goals diverge.
How do you plan the story to end?
I think I’ll keep things hopeful, and finish up with a successful launch to/arrival at Tau Ceti.
I neglected some numbers in the rocket design, and now it looks like I have to rebuild the whole idea from scratch.
Ehrm… I think you should devote the main chunck of effort to develope the story and then derive the technical data you need. Very little of that world building stuff will actually go onto the page (if you want some reader, that is).
I’ve settled reasonably firmly on the questions I want to focus on—how to make decisions when gathering useful information to help make those decisions carries a risk of an immense cost, especially when the stakes are meaningful enough to be significant—and I’ve just finished working out the technical details of what my protagonist will have been doing up to the point where he can’t put off making those decisions any longer.
I have a rule-of-thumb for science-fiction, in that knowing what a character /can’t/ do is more important than knowing what they /can/, so by having worked out all the technical stuff up to that point, I now have a firm grasp of the limits my protagonist will be under when he has to deal with those choices. If I’m doing things right, the next part of the design process is going to be less focused on the technology, and more on decision theory, AI risk, existential risk, the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter, and all that good, juicy stuff.
And I’m still building. I neglected some numbers in the rocket design, and now it looks like I have to rebuild the whole idea from scratch.
I can see that. To me, the most interesting idea so far is that when the risk of gathering new information is that high, the correct decision to be made may be to act to eliminate a potential threat without knowing whether or not that threat really exists. My current intuition is that I’m probably going to build the story around that choice, and the consequences thereof. (Hopefully without falling into the same sorts of story-issues that cropped up in “The Cold Equations”.)
At the moment, my memories of high-school English classes say that the conflicts will primarily be “Man vs Nature” (eg, pulling a ‘The Martian’ to build infrastructure faster than it can glitch out) and “Man vs Self” (“Space madness!”), with some “Man vs Man” showing up later as diverging copies’ goals diverge.
I think I’ll keep things hopeful, and finish up with a successful launch to/arrival at Tau Ceti.
Ehrm… I think you should devote the main chunck of effort to develope the story and then derive the technical data you need. Very little of that world building stuff will actually go onto the page (if you want some reader, that is).
I’ve settled reasonably firmly on the questions I want to focus on—how to make decisions when gathering useful information to help make those decisions carries a risk of an immense cost, especially when the stakes are meaningful enough to be significant—and I’ve just finished working out the technical details of what my protagonist will have been doing up to the point where he can’t put off making those decisions any longer.
I have a rule-of-thumb for science-fiction, in that knowing what a character /can’t/ do is more important than knowing what they /can/, so by having worked out all the technical stuff up to that point, I now have a firm grasp of the limits my protagonist will be under when he has to deal with those choices. If I’m doing things right, the next part of the design process is going to be less focused on the technology, and more on decision theory, AI risk, existential risk, the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter, and all that good, juicy stuff.
I’ll await the next iteration for further comments, then. Be sure to post it here!