After about 8 years in development limbo, my WIP is on the verge of being done. There’s more to do after the last chapter is written, editing and the like, but I can smell the finish line. This is one of the hardest parts of writing, pulling off the big finish! In any case, I wanted to share some more details of the story and the artwork I generated to set some of the scenes. So here are some choice pics and the story they help frame…
The Transverse is a generation ship bound for Delta Pavonis, a Sun-like star located about 20 light-years from the Sun. The ship is equipped with an anti-matter propulsion system, which allows the ship to achieve a maximum speed of 10% the speed of light. This means the total journey will take about 250 years, including acceleration and deceleration burns. It is protected from cosmic rays and small debris objects by a magnetic field projected from the front end.
The ship has two counter rotating sections to simulate artificial gravity. The fore section is the Habitat Section, where the crew that is currently on rotation live and work. During acceleration and deceleration, the crew migrates to the rear wall of the Habitation Section, where the burst of velocity will simulate a full-g.
During the transit, the crew of the Transverse rotates, with one-third of the crew in a wakeful state. These people maintain the ship, tending to the farmlands, and steer the ship. The Engineers who oversee technical operations and serve as the de facto leaders of the mission also rotate, with three on while the remaining six are in cryosleep. The name of the individual shown here is taken from the story, and Xanadu Tepe is his birthplace – a settlement on Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
The inside of the Habitation Section simulates every climate on Earth, with landmasses that simulate entire continents separated by oceans and waterways. The entire volume is heated and lit by the “Sunband,” a flowing beam of photons designed to provide enough heat and light to maintain the climate in different regions. From one end of the Section towards the “equator,” the climates are arranged as Tundra, Boreal Forest, Grassland, Tropical, Desert. From the equator to the other end of the Section, the same climates are arranged in reverse.
The ship is powered by a Singularity Drive: a tiny black hole kept stable within a magnetic confinement chamber. This hole is created by gamma-ray laser arrays, positioned around the interior of the chamber, which fire simultaneously onto a single point. This causes mass to accumulate onto this tiny point until the Chandrasekhar limit is reached – the point where its achieves infinite density and undergoes gravitational collapse to form a black hole.
Matter is then fed into the chamber over time, which falls into an accretion disk that is sped up to near the speed of light. When the matter is eventually fed onto the face of the black hole (aka. accreted), its broken down to the subatomic level. Both of these processes release a tremendous amount of radiation that is harnessed to generate a steady and abundant supply of electricity.
The Delta Pavonis system, which the crew of the Transverse have named Tōnatiuh (the Aztec Sun god). The third planet from the star, their habitable planet that is their destination, they’ve named Çatalhöyük, after the Neolithic settlement located in southern Turkey that existed from the ca. 7500 to 5600 BCE.
The other planets, in order from the star, include the molten world Zebaki, the “steam world” iKhwezil, the cold and desiccated Molokh, the gas giants Ararat, Kǒngquè, Sakwa, and the ice planet Lowell – or by the acronym ZICMAKSL. Sure, it sounds clunky, but it’s no more difficult than MVEMJSUNP, right? These names are all derived from different cultures:
- Zebaki: the Swahili word for “mercury.”
- IKhwezil: the Xhosa/Zulu name for Venus.
- Molokh: the Arabic name for Mars.
- Ararat: named after Mount Ararat in Turkey, the highest peak in the country and the place where legend says Noah’s Ark landed after 40 days of floods.
- Kǒngquè: The Chinese name for “peacock,” owing to the planet’s cobalt blue atmosphere.
- Sakwa: The Hopi word for “blue,” and also the name for turquoise, again because of the planet’s blue color.
- Lowell: Named in honor of Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who predicted the existence of Pluto, and for whom the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto.
No indication yet on when the book will be released, but I’m just a few chapters shy. All that remains is to check in my beta readers and educators. Those good folks know who they are, and they should expect to get chapters soon! All images were generated with ImagineArt.
Stories by Williams 