 |
| Bruce Rolff |
Introduction
The Future Chron Universe was my first "universe." A universe in my writing is a group of stories sharing the same history, science, technology, and sometimes characters. The history and science/technology build from story to story in a logical sequence. The science in this universe starts from lightly extrapolated (robots, self-driving cars, AI, fusion spaceships) of the near future to highly extrapolated science (wormhole travel, time manipulation, ASI (Artificial Super-Intelligence)) as the centuries pass.
In Future Chron, the development of the wormhole drive dominates the technology (The Wormhole Series), although it wasn't invented until 300 years after the chronology starts in the 2030s. The wormhole drive permitted spaceships to "jump" several light-years, which allowed for many star systems to be reached. The drive creates a wormhole tunnel by finding microscopic wormhole mouths in the quantum foam of spacetime and expanding, through the injection of negative mass energy, the mouth and wormhole from end-to-end.
Later, the spin-two drive (Spin-Two Series) was developed from the wormhole device technology. It took advantage of pre-existing quantum links, which are suggested by loop quantum gravity, that make up the fabric of spacetime. These links, which date from the beginning of the universe, may be local, but thanks to cosmic inflation many are also non-local and connect quanta volumes of spacetime across hundreds or even thousands of light-years. The negative energy generation capability of the spin-two drive opens the pre-existing links and allows spaceship travel across galaxies.
One hundred years after the spin-two drive was developed, it was found that if a "bubble" of negative mass-energy were spun up, the hollowed-out interior would begin to exclude the quantum fields of spacetime until the temporal field dominates inside the bubble and time can be slowed or sped up internally (Time Series).
While developing the extrapolated science was fun, the overall motivation across the 33 stories of Future Chron was the love and pursuit of freedom. Freedom to speak, freedom to act, freedom to think, inspires the characters across the entire 800 years of time and 800,000 words of story-telling. Time and again the desire to live free requires movement, off Earth, out of the Solar System, and across the galaxy.
Below, I'll start with the chronology of Future Chron and cover the different series that make up the universe. I'll also indicate the reading order and when a story is available on this website, I'll give the link.
Chronology
Before I began the stories in the Future Chron Universe I prepared a chronology. This is not to be taken as a prediction of our future, but as a history of Future Chron, though of course, it is a future history which uses a lot of Earth history.
Anyway, it was written sometime in 2014, the year before I started writing. The first two stories were finished at the end of 2016. Looking at 2026, the year this was written, I see that I had men on the Moon and robots causing unemployment. Of course, men are not on the Moon, though they just went around it, and humanoid robots are just beginning to move into industry, but if we include all AI, the job losses have begun. Never mind, as I said, it's not about this world but the Future Chron world. You can find the chronology here: Future Chron Chronology.
Art & Science of Future Chron
For me, one of the more fun things about writing science fiction stories is the opportunity to develop the future science and technology to support the narrative. This usually starts with reading a new science paper online or a popular explanation of the new science online or in a magazine. Often, I will start a story to explicate that science. I will extrapolate in the story with the goal of making the science or technology fascinating and plausible.
No matter how far I extrapolate I always try to keep it consistent. I try not to just invent a technology from nothing, but try to develop it and extend it in a natural, logical manner.
Across the whole of the Future Chron Universe, I postulated quite a bit of future science and technology. I kept notes and presented many of these notes, polished for publication, in the stories. But sometimes the development of the science was in the narrative and not in a separate file. I eventually wanted to assemble all these notes into one book or file and the link below is the result, so far.
From The Earth Series
Wormhole Series
Open Space Series
Spin-Two Series
Time Series
No comments:
Post a Comment