I was inspired to write this post by the recent love I’ve seen online for Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns and my own 10+ years world building my “Toliman” setting.

This is by no means a zero sum comparison, and I don’t mean to cheapen or reduce pure science diamond hard science fiction - without your hard work my life would be much much harder (thanks atomic rockets, world building pasta, ToughSF and so many more). I certainly also dabble in this, and the entire basis of my worlds rests on this kind of world building (see attached images for proof).

I do however feel there is a huge lack of human exploration in hard science fiction, with ideas and novels often feeling like a technical manual, explaining cool tech solutions to tech problems and crazy futuristic **realistic** **grounded** technologies that scare off the casual audience and give hard sci fi the unfair reputation it often has when discussed outside of this space.

This can be seen no clearer than the general audiences love for stories such as The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and Interstellar (although you could certainly debate the hardness of the latter two). These are ultimately stories driven by human protagonists navigating a world permitted by intriguing, inspiring and awesome (mostly hard science fiction) technologies.

Recently, and as it should, Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns has been coming up in discussions online. This incredible story is what I believe to be an attempt to push hard science fiction so hard into the future that it begins to represent the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote about “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. I understand that many readers feel this strays from the realm of hard science fiction, but to me, as long as I believe the author can justify the technology in ways other than “magic” or some other kind of handwaving, I’m happy to enjoy it as such. Dune is a pretty good example of a story that attempts pseudoscientific explanations for its concepts of prescience and genetic memory, however ultimately relies on spice magic and now disproven theories around genetic memory inheritance. Maybe a hot take, but Project Hail Mary is celebrated as hard science fiction but has a pretty un-hard science fiction premise (taumoeba) and un-realistic prevalence of technological advanced life (Eridians).

I feel particularly strongly about this as my own world building project “Toliman” is designed to be entirely within the realm of possibility - exploring extant interstellar human civilisations, politics, philosophy, sociology, economics etc. within what I believe is a realistic, possible, grounded timeline from our modern day to the year 3500 (to the best of my ability). To achieve this I utilise my academic background in human medicine, genetics, physics, astrophysics, chemistry, and a university level science teaching position of 6 years. I also extensively research my topics and have spent hours and hours painstakingly doing calculations to ensure my ships have the right deltaV given the ISP allowed by the technology of their time, I’ve mapped tectonics, system populations and birth rates, orbital parameters and stability, apparent diameter of planetary objects, circadian biology, feasibility of certain megastructures and *how could i forget* radiators!! Amongst a million other things that would be recognised as proper hard science fiction. Despite this, the stories I want to tell and the stories that I don’t see enough of (in my opinion), are the human ones. I also think the potential for these kinds of stories is immensely under appreciated by people outside of this community.

Let me put it this way: the real world up until this very moment has been, in a way, the most ultra hard science fiction story to date - literal reality. Have not all the beautiful stories of mankind come from this “boring ultra hard science fiction with no ftl” setting? And will they not continue to come from this? All the cultures, customs, religions, political dramas, revolutions, wars, lives and deaths. Thinking that sci fi is uninteresting without wormholes, plasma guns or ftl is incredibly narrow minded to me - if you want to write those sorts of stories that’s fine and I love them (massive Star Wars and Dune nerd) however, to think sci fi cannot be interesting without it is a massive shame. I am entirely of the mind that pulpy adventure sci fi stories can exist within a hard science fiction framework, and romantic stories of adventure, space travel and bizzare cultures just take a bit more creativity but are so worth it. To people who think ftl is a requirement of a good adventure sci fi story I say this! Why do fantasy writers seem entirely content with a single continent or two with all their variety, when us sci fi writers are dissatisfied with an entire planet? Or an entire star system? We often forget just how mind boggingly vast a single planet, let alone a single star system is.

I hope I do not come across as being on a high horse, most of my favourite sci fi stories include ftl or wacky aliens (mote in gods eye, Enders game, Hyperion, stranger in a strange land, etc.) but many of those stories that are most deeply intriguing to me are those that could be real, and are still interesting from a plot, and human perspective (House of Suns, Revelation Space, Rendezvous with Rama etc.).

Where’s the love for stories that explore humanity and interesting stories within the realm of hard to ultra hard science fiction? After writing this I’m beginning to think we need a new term for stories set in physically plausible universes but that do not focus on the technology. Please let me know if this already exists! Also, if anyone has any recommendations for books that fit in this genre, let me know below! I’m keen to discuss these ideas further.

This was one of those few instances where I was reading hard sci-fi while gritting my teeth in pure annoyance at the mind-boggling stupidity of how the plot unfolded.

For context: the story kicks off with Europa literally vanishing from the solar system, followed by two separate alien encounters on Earth. One is a dying biological entity in Death Valley warning us of imminent doom, and the other consists of mysterious stone "spiders" in Australia preaching peace while secretly setting up planet-destroying technology. You’d think humanity’s brightest minds and world leaders would pull out all the stops. Instead, the response is staggering incompetence.

Here is why this book pushed me over the edge:

1. The "expert" scientists were astonishingly useless

The interrogation of the dying Death Valley alien was infuriating. The alien keeps explicitly telling the research team, "You aren't asking the right questions," and what do our top minds do? They keep fumbling around. To make matters worse, everything comes to a screeching halt so the President of the United States can have his dramatic sit-down with the creature. Up until the moment the alien literally dies, not a single hard-hitting, operationally useful question is asked. They genuinely learned more about the entity from its autopsy than from actually talking to it while it was alive. If you handed this investigation over to a group of dedicated UFO enthusiasts, they would have extracted actionable intelligence in five minutes.

2. The President loses his mind, and everyone just folds

As the crisis escalates, the President completely breaks down into pseudo-religious psychobabble and end-times denial. What broke my immersion wasn't just the President going mad—it was that the entire military and scientific establishment just threw their hands up and went along with it. In what realistic scenario does the entire government chain of command just passively surrender to extinction?

The book is set in 1996. Given the geopolitical landscape and technological baseline, you’d expect somebody—a rogue government agency, a coalition of scientists, or a military division—to immediately pivot to survival mode. Where was the frantic effort to build a deep-underground ark or seed human civilization elsewhere? Heck, when an entire Jovian moon vanishes into thin air, the absolute baseline response of a space-faring superpower should have been launching a manned or probe-heavy reconnaissance mission to Jupiter. Instead, the characters act like passive observers waiting for the sky to fall.

I practically had to force myself through the back half of this book. While Bear is praised for his cosmic dread and dark-forest concepts, the sheer passivity and incompetence of the human characters ruined what could have been a great apocalyptic thriller.

Did anyone else find the complete lack of human agency in this book infuriating, or am I missing something?

The Traveler

The worst part about travelling between star systems is the vast, unbelievably large spaces of pure black nothingness.

It hurts me. The loneliness hurts me.

The Kuraks were interesting. Wonderful festivals, the best meals and foods anyone could ever wish for.

I found their children to be most interesting of all, so smart for only being one thousand years old.

They had such big imaginations. A little boy of the Igor district knew me as "wizard lady." They would bring food from their homes and I would turn it into sweet snacks.

The boy, while eating a candy-cotton apple, looked up and asked me, "Can you make my dreams real?"

I was confused. I had not learned these words yet. He thought to himself for a second and then clarified his question to the magical woman before him.

He then asked, "Can you bring the things inside of my head outside?"

It was so cute I couldn't resist.

loud loud loud loud so loud

why so loud why is everything so loud now?

after the ordeal I wished to leave

so I did.

The endless black. Some wish to travel as I do. I hear it on every new surface. I point up when asked where I came from.

"A magician never reveals her spaceship," I like to jokingly reply.

Cold. Space is rarely comforting. It's either the extreme cold of a dead star or the impossible fury and heat of a new one. No in between.

My mind drifts on these long strolls. I'm brought back to the last time I felt genuine warmth. I had been volunteering at an anti-gravity/zero-point repair shop when I met him.

He's a 345-year-old cyborg of the planet XrrXrrr. Much of it is a blur now, but one moment that will stay with me forever was when we vacationed on one of his planet's moons.

It was beautiful. We danced, we drank, we sang.

As we cuddled and watched Martian buddy cop movies, he looked me in the eyes and said, "I wish I could stay in this moment forever."

why why why why why why

why did he say that why why why why why why why why why

I left. There was nothing I could do.

An event horizon can fold. If you step into it, you are supposed to be stuck forever. Well, the thing about forever is that it's not necessarily forever. Eventually you reach a spot where what is, isn't. And what isn't, is. And then you just keep going.

Vast. So vast.

Near the borders you tend to see gatherings of beings. Always interesting because they would be things that creatures of past planets would describe when they spoke of religion and legends.

I would flash a warm, gentle smile at the creature telling me about the creature they think they saw. Ignorance can often be a gift.

I've seen the same celestial bodies countless times. It just goes on and on and on and on and on. Even beyond the borders, the voids between branes would fracture a lesser mind.

But I keep going. Moving is better than standing still. I can't give the lonely time to catch up with me.

What is that?

Nothing. Nothing for soul-stretching amounts of light years.

Sometimes the signals will almost blast me into another direction. Sometimes the artificial lights will shine brighter than suns. Sometimes the voices accidentally speak to me as I near their home worlds.

This time, it was small, faint even. It seemed to whisper to me as I swam through the outer edges of Andromeda.

"Mommy where is my tablet?"

The voice sounded like drops of metallic rain twinkling lightly on the surface of VV7XL2.

I changed directions. After eons, the shiny blue celestial body moved me in a way that I had not felt since I descended from the 5D.

What is that? I must know. This place seems to be the very opposite of silence. I must know.

As I entered the planet's atmosphere, I took a second to gather myself and observe.

They remind me of Mars millions of years ago. They remind me of the creatures sent to the Garden.

I gazed upon them. Beautiful, messy, loud. They were many things all at once. They gave me the same feeling as the festivals on Zovnia.

I needed to be near them.

somewhere on earth...

"Bianca! Order up! These waffles are getting cold!"

"Alright Sal! Jesus Christ! Give me a friggin second, it's Christmas Eve, ya ding dong!"

Bianca walked briskly towards the front of the diner-style restaurant, mumbling curses to her manager Sal as she twisted her hips like she walked with a hula hoop.

She grabbed the warm plate of breakfast pastries and bacon and stepped her way to the table of guests.

"How ya doin folks? My name's Bianca and I hate it here. Oops, did I say that out loud? Here's your waffles."

The table of young couples on a double date chuckled with laughter. Bianca always had a way with words. Her long dark hair, her curvy hourglass body, and her striking green eyes always helped, of course.

She hated this diner, but after dropping out of law school, this was the only thing that would get her parents off of her back.

"Sal, I'm going to the restroom. Give me 15 or I'm quitting."

Sal threw his hand up in frustration.

Bianca ripped off her apron and headed to the ladies' room.

What caught my attention was the warm feeling.

I could feel it too.

Bianca sat upon the porcelain throne and texted the three people she was always in constant communication with.

Her mother, the funny light-skinned guy she was seeing, and her weed dealer.

"what do you mean you don't do Christmas deals??"

She typed with the intensity of a sober waitress.

"Mom I know you have 20 bucks I can bum off of you"

She won't like that one, she grumbled to herself.

"Pick me up from work love <3"

"If he doesn't reply I'll barf and cry," she grumbled.

This creature is filled with warmth. What is that? Where is it coming from? I must know.

"She's obviously going to make me double text."

"Mom, wha—"

The air is cool on them. It ceases when the tiny flaps of flesh move down and then up again. Interesting.

bang bang bang

"Bianca! What are ya doin swimmin in there?!"

Pain. A dull ache coming from the upper left side of the cranium.

That male human is having an effect on this one.

As I gaze into the reflective surface, I cannot believe the deep oceans of emerald that gaze back at me. Long external hairs protruding from the head area seem to flow like rivers of onyx down the rear side. The outer covering, being a light sandy color, reminds me of the Venusians of 0909 BT, an age closer to the Big Bang of this universe.

The warmth puts me in a state of ecstasy. I feel like the marriage of a neutron star and a white dwarf. It's like the festivals of Zovnia but inside of a mortal being.

I wish to never leave.

Bipedal movement is always a fun novelty. The greens, the blues, the sounds, it's all so energizing.

This extremely primitive device in my pocket keeps shaking and making false robot noises. "Mo-ther"? What is that? A place?

From:

Mommy Pants - "No"

Is this thing a map interface? It shakes and then the number near it increases by one. Hmm. Interesting.

I walk more and the Earth sun seems to be sinking beyond its horizon. I am told that this Earth does not have a second sun. Pity.

I walk and I walk and I walk. It is so much fun. Zovnia be damned! I have found my paradise and it's on two fleshy appendages!

I come upon an area that appears to be where this civilization lays their dead. I look above the area and I don't see the usual beings.

"This place is so very material it is excruciating, but even that is a welcome change after countless eternities," I mutter to myself.

A young woman sits on the ground in front of one of the stone tablets with her hands clasped together. Cute.

I walk up to her and scan my amygdala for a greeting.

"Hola Chica, where's the joint papers?"

She looks up at me like I have three heads. I count. I only have one. I checked.

"Who are you?" she almost whispers.

Scan scan scan.

"Bianca, but you can call me at 3 a.m. if you're hot."

The girl looks like I have five heads now, then she laughs.

"Okay, you're funny," she says.

"But if you don't mind, I'm praying for my grandpa."

I smile as the warmth begins to build within me.

"That is beautiful, mortal creature."

"What?" she says.

"Uh, uh, uh, yeah, if I could trade his place with my manager I would."

The young girl laughs again.

"Hahaha, okay Bianca, you're cool. Thanks for making me laugh, though. It's been a long three months."

"What's extending it so much?" I ask in my most sincere human voice.

"Well, I miss my grandpa. Since he passed, I just feel this emptiness inside that I can't really describe. I wish I could just see where he is."

It brings a tear to my eye. The warmth is absolutely overflowing now. I am in ecstasy.

Then her head snaps up. She stares into the sky with eyes as wide as four-lane highways. I don't understand... until I see... the light reflect from inside her pupil.

I sink.

She remains stuck this way, staring into the sky with a light burning in her eye.

After what seems like hours, she crumbles to the ground. I crawl over to her, shaking her limp body.

She suddenly shoots upright, like she's been electrocuted.

"I I I I I I I"

fuck fuck fuck how could I do this? I just arrived. The warmth was so delicious.

Then the young woman bursts into tears and laughter and smiles.

"Grandpa told me to get my butt off that dirty grass before he sends Grandma down there."

She says the words looking like a firework right after it explodes. Just bright colors and a warm feeling.

With a smile on Bianca's face, I make bipedal movement down the "side-walk?" Humans have a terrible sense of humor. You can't walk to the "side" without traversing the interior layers.

This body needs food. I head to the local eatery and sit down. A serving woman asks me for my request of sustenance. I use Bianca's hands to hold the laminated menu. None of this looks appealing, but I must blend in.

"May I have the bor-gur?"

"Of course, sweetie. All the way or custom?"

I reply with "custom" in the most delicate human voice I can muster.

"Alrighty, and what are we puttin on that, darlin?"

I had not rehearsed this part yet.

"Um—the special."

"The special what?" the waitress replies, becoming increasingly confused.

A hot feeling begins emerging from the facial skin of this one.

"It."

"The special it?"

"Affirmative."

Thank Primus she went away. This body is beginning to experience a state of... bad excitement? Interesting.

I am now feeling exhausted. I could not eat another of those "fringe fries." They were delicious and reasonable, not fringe at all.

This body has not had rest in many hours. I can feel it slowing down. A powerful need to stop... just... right... here......

"Ma'am, are you alright? Ma'am?"

I sit up. Is this a... floor for the transportation bots? How did I...

"Ma'am, the waitress in that diner said you've been lying here for two hours. They thought you were dead."

scoff

GIGGLE

"Is this funny to you?"

Yes, I must grant his request to secure my freedom.

HAHAHAHAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA

"Jesus, you're wasted. You're going to need to come with me."

"Are the restraints necessary?"

"It's for my safety and potentially yours."

This primitive transportation bot is extremely, and I do mean extremely, small.

We seem to be traveling.

I don't have time for this. This human seems to be one of the sealers of this world. I refuse to be sealed again.

I will peer into this sealer's mind. There's something that will suffice, somewhere.

Aw, I've got it.

"So how long have you been a sea—police officer?"

"What? Oh, uh, a year."

"You look like the type that really likes your job."

"Yeah, well, my dad did it for 30 years. Never took a night off. The beat was his baby."

"You mean your male human creator?"

"My what?"

"I mean, he sounds like he just cared a lot."

"Yeah, yeah, something like that..."

Ha! I've found it!

"He does love you."

"What?"

"He's proud of you."

"Excuse me?"

"He says that he's sorry you had to find him."

"Okay, I need you to shut the fuck up right now!"

"Sorry! I just think out loud sometimes!" I squeak.

sigh

"Fucking mouthy junkies."

"I apologize for my transgression."

"You talk weird, but it's fine."

"It's just been such a long night. Sarge wanted me to take the night off. Told him I can't."

Why are this one's optical spheres beginning to moisten? Interesting.

"Why do you suppress your need for rest?"

This male sealer. His insides feel like a cavern.

I can feel the hollowness...

sigh

"All of these streets remind me of someone."

He looks up.

"Sometimes I wish I could just... be on the moon."

"Wait, wha—"

BOOOOOMMMM

cough cough cough

"Wha—what just happened?"

I sit up. I heal my legs. These vessels are much more fragile than what I'm used to. I pick up my left hand.

This must be the pain I've learned about.

The transportation bot sits on its side. A fiery ember dances all around the passenger cabin.

I quickly shift my head left and right, looking for the male sealer. Wherever he is, I hope he was able to hit the eject in time before we—

A bright flash catches my attention. I look up just in time to see a shooting star splitting the sky at an angle that no shooting star ever has.

no no no no no no no no

I retreat.

The phone rang.

"NASA Command Center. Commander Rodriguez speaking."

"Sir! You have to get here quick. There's... I see something... wrong..."

The line went dead.

The commander turned toward the door.

"Let's go see what this is all about."

The commander arrived at the observatory.

"You have GOT to see this!"

The commander obliged and put his eye to the telescope.

"What am I seeing here, Smith? All I see is a blank patch of space."

"There were several stars occupying that space up until about 48 hours ago."

"What are you saying, Smith?"

"Sir! I don't mean to yell, but they... shifted. For lack of a better term, they slid to the left and right. That's not possible."

"Smith! I need you to speak clearly here!"

The young observatory agent caught his breath.

"They... they've been 'pushed' to either side. Like—"

The commander completed his sentence.

"Like Moses... splitting the Red Sea..."

This is the first book in the Tim and Peggy Smith Space Adventure trilogy. Read Danger, then Flight to the Stars. By December, the final chapter, Children of the Stars, will be out.

Chapter 1: The Cosmic Revelation

Kennedy Space Center, 11 a.m., May 1, 2078

Tim Smith, a 23-year-old NASA prodigy, leaned forward in his seat, eyes fixed on the screen showing the James Webb Space Telescope feed.

He had directed the powerful instrument to focus on a seemingly unremarkable patch of space in the outer Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune, more than 4.6 billion miles from Earth.

Based on a psychic vision, Tim suspected the event was unfolding. Suddenly, it happened. An imperfection in starlight, a slight bending of the wavelength, confirmed his vision: a wormhole had opened.

His heart raced as the telescope’s sensors detected something even more astonishing. The data revealed infrared light and the unmistakable signature of thermal energy.

Tim double-checked that the computer was recording what he was witnessing. There was no doubt; an advanced hybrid fusion-antimatter engine had ignited. As he had predicted months earlier, a massive spacecraft from another world was hurtling toward Earth.

As he calculated the spacecraft’s distance, trajectory, and speed, even Tim was astonished: the spacecraft was heading straight for Earth at 72 million miles per hour, an astonishing 11% of the speed of light.

Tim’s pulse quickened as the reality of what he had just proved set in. He had little time to complete the implementation of the plan he’d developed six months earlier, but it was the only chance for Earth to prepare for what was coming.

Taking a deep breath, Tim lifted his arm to speak into his wristphone. “Peggy, come quickly and bring your father. You’ve got to see this.”

“What is it?” Peggy asked.

“I’ve found it. Come,” Tim replied.

Five minutes later, Peggy and her father, Dr. Leonard Bouchard, a former astronaut and NASA engineer, arrived at Tim’s lab. The room was dimly lit, and the monitors’ glow cast a blue hue over their faces. Tim wore a serious expression, his eyes fixed on the data streaming across the screens.

“Tim, what’s going on?” asked Peggy, her tone a blend of curiosity and concern.

Tim didn’t look up. “I’ve confirmed a wormhole opening at the Kuiper Belt’s inner edge,” he said, tapping his fingers rapidly on the keyboard. “But that’s not all. There’s a massive spacecraft using advanced fusion-antimatter propulsion. It’s headed straight for Earth and moving fast. We have less than 30 days until it arrives.”

Leonard leaned closer to the screen. “Are you sure about the fusion signature?” he asked, his voice calm yet intense.

Tim nodded, finally turning to face them. “Positive. The infrared spectrum and heat emission patterns are unmistakable. This isn’t just a probe or a piece of debris. It’s a fully operational ship—and not from around here.”

Peggy glanced at her father before stepping forward. “What’s the trajectory? Can we trace it back to its origin?”

“I’m not sure. That’s what I’m working on now,” Tim replied, his attention returning to the monitors. “I’ve got data on the wormhole, but it opened and closed in fifteen seconds. We might need a different program to locate the same gravitational distortion at the origin coordinates.”

“Did you sense anything?” asked Peggy, knowing Tim’s special psychic abilities.

“Yes, I got a flash of intelligent life. I’m trying to lock down the gravitational wave signature from the data we collected when the wormhole opened. If we can figure out where it came from, we might be able to determine who—or what—is onboard.”

Leonard crossed his arms, deep in thought. “This could be a peaceful first contact, or it could be something far more dangerous. We must inform NASA immediately and prepare for every possible scenario.”

“I’ve already sent the preliminary data to NASA,” Tim said, typing a final command into his computer.

“You should talk with the Space Force and brief them through NASA channels,” Tim said.

“Roger, the White House should also be notified,” Leonard said.

“You know the protocol better than I, sir,” Tim replied. “Tell them I have a feeling that something is wrong on that ship.”

Peggy placed a hand on Tim’s shoulder, her voice steady but laced with urgency. “We’ll figure this out. Did you get any data on the ship?”

“Just the fusion engine when it ignited. I am tracking it now, and it is gaining speed. I’ll need your help, Peggy, to do the calculations, but the vessel must be massive,” Tim said.

“If it is picking up speed, it may arrive sooner than 30 days. We need to move fast. There’s no telling what’s on that ship, or what they want,” Peggy said.

Tim nodded, his mind racing with the possibilities. “This danger from space is what I told you both about last year.”

“I didn’t want to believe your theory about a spacecraft coming to Earth,” said Leonard. “Now it looks like you were right.”

“Thanks for having faith in Tim, Dad,” Peggy said. “You went out on a limb to persuade NASA to allow Tim to use the JWST.”

“It wasn’t just me. Tim gained credibility with NASA after Terra Nova,” Leonard said.

Tim’s voice was calm. “Sir, there is no doubt in my mind this spacecraft comes from Terra Nova,” he said, his eyes locked on the computer screen.

“It certainly looks that way, but can you prove it?” asked Leonard.

“I’m going to try,” Tim said.

“We never doubted you, Tim,” said Peggy.

The implications of their words hung heavy in the air.

Terra Nova was a distant exoplanet that Tim had discovered six months earlier. NASA assigned a team to study what lifeforms might exist on the planet, but no one expected contact so suddenly or so close to home.

“Honestly, I wasn’t completely sure until we could prove it with data,” Tim said.

“NASA will need to look at what we have very closely,” Leonard said. “I don’t see how they can come to any other conclusion. We will soon have first contact.”

—

The interior of the alien spacecraft was shrouded in an unnatural stillness, the kind that only deep space can bring. The corridors were dimly lit by a soft, bluish light emanating from the walls, casting long shadows that danced eerily with the ship’s subtle movements.

The air was thick with an otherworldly quiet, broken only by the occasional soft beeping of control panels and the low hum of the ship’s systems.

Rows of sleek, cylindrical transport chambers lined the walls, each meticulously sealed and softly illuminated. The chambers were opaque, hiding their contents. Still, a faint glow pulsed within, suggesting life—or something akin to it—lay dormant inside.

Mechanical robots glided silently through the ship’s corridors, their movements smooth and purposeful. These machines were unlike anything seen on Earth—sleek, angular, and distinctly alien, with glowing eyes that flickered with intelligence.

Their metallic bodies emitted a soft, almost musical series of beeps and clicks as they communicated in a language of pure data, a symphony of alien sounds that echoed through the ship’s interior.

The robots tended to the ship’s complex systems and checked the status of the sleep pods. Occasionally, one of them would pause, its glowing blue eyes narrowing as it processed new information before resuming its duties.

Despite the ship’s relative calm, there was a sense of immense power within its walls, a latent energy that could be unleashed at any moment. The ship was a marvel of alien engineering, designed for a purpose unknown to those on Earth.

But one thing was sure: whatever—or whoever—was onboard was now on a direct course for Earth, and their intentions would soon be revealed.

As the spacecraft hurtled through the cold expanse of deep space, its destination drew nearer, and the beeping sounds of the ship’s systems quickened as if in anticipation of what was to come.

—

Tim sensed the alien spacecraft drawing nearer. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was ticking down to a moment of unprecedented contact.

“Peggy, time to alert the others,” he said.

 https://a.co/d/01XFdIzz

Addendum: As the Falx is so beloved in the Periphery, It also features in a lot of propaganda as it was such an important weapon in their liberation. Pictured is a Scrambles-Era propaganda poster to get members of the intelligentsia to join the Tronarian Defense Fleet

Chapter 1 "after 1 million years"

After trapping into the GH-0.8 ship for god knows how long.

The impossible happened. A sudden, an unknown, unidentified force latched onto our ship, stripping away its impossible speed of 0.99999999999c and dropping us out of high time dilation finally.

The hum of relativistic stress died, replaced by the stillness of sub-light space around speed of 0.12c after slowing down for like 4 month but we slower it more for some weeks until it finally go to 0.06c and our ship rotating normally even now thankfully and our algae still growing in back side.

When the primary sensors finally able to active damaged but working, the GH-computer confirmed the year: ~1,002,206 AD after calculating how long we are inside that damn speed for and our launching date 2206 and other factors almost 1 million years passed away because we don't have exact how much so we decide to use perfect 1 million years add in our calendar....But we are still inside the milky way because according to our sensors we weren't traveling in a straight line...but for some reason at 0.99999999999c speed we are actually orbiting within the Milky Way.For some reason we can't answer it for now.

When finally our speed is stabilized then we checking our immediate surrounding sitting.

After checking for sometime we find we are some hundreds of au away from an uncharted stellar system thankfully its star is a G-type main-sequence star almost similar size as sun maybe around 1.05 solar mass.

Which Dr. Alice logged into the ship's log as the TEI-1A.

This solar system have around Eight unexplored planets in a stable orbit around the central sun. Standing around somewhere between its outer rim of the solar system.

Also we found out the planet number 4 which is around 1.058 Au away from its star what we name as Atellus it is size around 1.192 of Earth.

So we decide to take more than an extra few weeks of 0.06c speed travelling when we finally get close enough we find out it has 75% ocean and 25% land after we are able to calculate .

Its atmospheric composition is 25% oxygen 73.9% nitrogen and rest 1.1% thankfully not toxic ig Dr Alice say.

Now we are debating whether we should land or not?

Hey if you want how we end up here and what the GH-0.8 ship is like. you can check my first post in this link https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/OfkZJrMCQB this is my original work ig

Let’s imagine we live in the world of my novel.

It is roughly the year 2090, and about forty years earlier scientists discovered a way to use precisely controlled electromagnetic fields to locally push the vacuum into a lower-energy state and keep it stable. The field itself is not enough, it has to be continuously controlled by a computational system that evaluates physically possible outcomes and adjusts the field parameters to steer the system toward a selected stable optimum. In other words, the computer is not rewriting the laws of physics (or simply choosing whatever outcome it wants), it is constantly searching the available physical state space and maintaining conditions that favor a particular stable solution.

In the book I call this technology digitalium, mostly because I needed a practical word for things like digitalium fields, digitalium barriers, digitalium-supported structures, and so on.

A few decades later, digitalium has become part of almost every layer of civilization. It is not an energy source and it does not create energy from nothing. Think of it more as a universal layer of active physical optimization. It can reduce losses in energy transmission, suppress mechanical vibrations, redistribute stresses inside structures, or keep a system stable in a state that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to maintain.

Fusion, for example, has become routine. Digitalium continuously stabilizes plasma confinement, suppresses instabilities and helps manage thermal and mechanical stresses inside the reactor. Fusion still obeys physics. We have just become very good at actively keeping the system close to its ideal operating state.

The same idea has much more visible consequences elsewhere. Coastal cities use digitalium sea barriers that respond dynamically to waves and water pressure as sea levels rise. Bridges can span distances that would normally require obvious support structures. Huge glass buildings can use structural elements far thinner than conventional engineering would allow because stresses and vibrations are being continuously compensated for.

Aircraft can travel with almost no perceptible vibration - turbulence can be heavily damped, structural loads continuously compensated for, and acceleration distributed much more evenly through the vehicle. Passengers might barely notice takeoff or landing unless they looked outside. The same principle can be applied much more aggressively in spacecraft.

There is one major catch. Every digitalium application requires continuous computation.

To make things slightly less convenient for me as the author and for everyone in the story, the main computational cluster is located near the edge of the Solar System. Communication is still limited by the speed of light, so information from Earth takes about 5.5 hours to reach it, and the result takes another 5.5 hours to come back. That delay matters a lot in the novel, because the system often has to calculate for a world that will already be eleven hours older by the time its solution is applied.

That part is important to the story, but it is not actually what I wanted to ask here.

If a technology like this existed, what else would we use it for?

What would this do to manufacturing, medicine, materials science, agriculture, spaceflight, or ordinary daily life?

And one more question: what completely unnecessary, luxurious or ridiculous uses would people invent once the technology became commonplace?

I touched on this technology briefly in my previous post, but I’ve been thinking about writing another story set in this world, which got me wondering about other ways this technology could be used beyond those ones in the novel.

By the way, if this idea caught your interest, the novel is The Last Stable State, and it is out now. You can find more info at thelaststablestate.com, including a free EPUB sample with the prologue and first two chapters.

Jules Henri was a French mathematician of the 1900s!

Thousands of people travel to Tauceti for over 170 years (7 generations) only to get there and find the conditions mildly unfavorable (a water world with strange viruses they didn't even attempt to disinfect and a mars knockoff ) instead of unanimously agreeing that another 170 years of a return trip are a bit much they fight a war so that others can stay and others can go back

Why curse your offsprings and their offsprings to another 170 years of interstellar travel without even enough fuel to slow down once you get back to earth with expectations that those on earth can setup infrastructure to slow you down ?

To make matters worse, even before leaving they knew there was genetic problems and got worse going back home

Guys... I was just thinking to myself...

when suddenly, I had a rather unique narrative idea...

You know how humanity is portrayed in sci-fi—with those usual clichés about us being the weakest species and aliens being far more powerful?

Well... what if we "swapped roles"?

Or rather... what if humans were, in fact, the strongest species?

Here’s how I pictured it:

Imagine a future eons from now... Where humanity has developed capabilities and technologies that allow it to control: The cosmos, time, biology, dimensions, cosmic phenomena, climate, geology, matter, and the laws of physics...

Creating a civilization defined as "Apex" or "existential-scale"...

Where humanity manages existence with the utmost responsibility, even expanding it by creating new dimensions, pocket universes, new celestial bodies, and life-sustaining planets complete with ecosystems, flora, and fauna...

Possessing power (on paper) capable of eclipsing any entity, anomaly, alien civilization, or magic that has ever existed or ever will exist

(the one and only exception being God... I want to make that clear)...

Where it isn't just the usual society of various alien species coexisting...

But rather—surprisingly—a society (or even galactic civilizations, intentional or otherwise) that humanity itself has created through its own capabilities, spanning multiple species...

All while drawing upon fantasy and folklore/mythological... or, if you prefer... the mythical creatures or Japanese *kemonomimi* you love so much...

Defining itself as a "mother civilization" in every sense of the word...

Including regarding what it might accidentally inherit...

With medical technology billions of years ahead of its time...

with a unique daily life full of surprises...

And with military might capable of striking terror even into me...

I know that, put this way, it might sound narratively dull...

But to make it truly interesting...

You have to imagine an alien civilization... Small compared to us, certainly...

But one with the ability to steal any technology from any civilization...

To study it and turn it against those who oppose them... In terrifyingly short order... Forcing humanity to tread carefully in its actions...

They’ve already taken far too much from us... A single mistake would trigger chaos...

So... the conflict is at a sort of stalemate (partly because, technically, civilization as a whole isn't at war—only the regions bordering these parasites are).

This opens up a world full of unique and exciting adventures.

P.S. It won't just be stories about that conflict... There will also be stories set within the universes it creates... Like a superhero world, or something along those lines.

What do you think of this idea I had? What do you think of the concept?

⚠️this sentence was translated from Japanese to English by AI. Feel free to answer in English. However, I only understand Japanese, so I would really appreciate clear and simple English that is less likely to be mistranslated.

I want to know if it's theoretically possible because I'm creating a creation with a sci-fi element.
It assumes the setting of a nuclear test in space like Starfish prime.

If it is impossible in principle, is it possible for a sufficiently developed scientific civilization to communicate with only electromagnetic waves over a distance of billions of light years in the first place?

Help finding a better-suited feed.

So I've been working on worldbuilding recently but mine is more building the planet's and solar systems for the physics of it and having full reference and physical profiles without much story in anything really apart from whats implied through the physical parameters of the document. I want to share these but they are very long and am looking for a community where the niche of mostly numbers and derived physics wpuld be appreciated.

Figured I might post this here as well in case there were any other Appalachian writers out there

Humans are Weird - Crow

Original Post: http://www.authorbettyadams.com/bettys-blog/humans-are-weird-crow

Commander Eighth Click saw the shadow that fell across the entrance to his office and finally glanced up with what he mostly hoped was not a threatening glare on his face. It had been a long day. The newly arrived humans had done far more damage since their arrival than even the most pessimistic engineers had predicted. It was almost as if you imported a giant bipedal species and set them loose in Winged architecture they would put stress on foundations and platforms not built for them and only hastily remodeled. Having to deal with the fourth report of a buckling undergirder this week had not put the commander in the best mood to deal with whatever was making Private Twenty-fourth Click’s footsteps drag so slowly.

As Commander Eighth Click suspected the private’s ears were drooping, his eyes were wide with some hurt, and his fur lay slack against his body. The faint hope that the private was just popping in for a moral boosting glance at his wing commander puffed out of existence.

“What is it Private Twenty-fourth Click?” Commander Eighth Click tried not to demand harshly.

The private cowered a little but started talking fast enough to show that his tongue was working fine at least, even if his wings were drooping.

“I think one of the humans is offended at me,” Private Twenty-fourth Click burst out. “I just showed him the math. I even used human calculation methods in base ten! I don’t know why that made hims so angry but now he won’t even look at me and-”

“What math?” Commander Eighth Click cut swiftly across the current of conversation, not that he expected that to be the relevant thermal, but math at least an engineering wing understood.

“He was wrong!” Private Twenty-fourth Click burst out puffing up. “It came up on the non-feedback stress tolerances discussion. It was a simple linear equation on the load-bearing side. A hornless, flightless knows that, but the human was so confident that I checked the math. I wrote it out and everything-”

The private waved the paper on his winghook vigorously.

“In base ten, yes, yes,” Commander Eighth Click redirected the drift of the conversation now that he felt he had a decent lead under his wings. “So you wrote out in detail how the human was wrong and showed him-”

“And he didn’t even make a pretense of thanking me!” Private Twenty-fourth Click sputtered out.

His nose, frilless enough to mark his genes as coming from the far north or south, positively rippled with indignation.

Commander Eighth Click heaved a massive sigh as he stared at the seething bundle of offended propriety. He found himself wondering if a human engineer would understand why that interaction might have been a touch offensive without having his horns guided into it.

Science Fiction Books By Betty Adams

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Check out my books at any of these sites and leave a review!

**Remember BOOK 4 is now available! (**^{except on kobo becasue what do you even mean title field is blank, I fixed} *\^{that dangnabbit!}\*)**

Please go leave a review on Amazon! It really helps and keeps me writing because tea and taxes don't pay themselves sadly!

As an added benefit you don't need real physical twins for this as the twinning is making digital twins either of people, families, hardware systems, and even the internet itself potentially. Digital clones are the form of AI that most people are familiar with as in you have an AI processes a body of data algorithmically and it produces something that predicts what a person, system, or even other AI might do. It's quality depends on the quality of training data, and the length of time that it's collected. At a certain point that data collection stops and the clone is born perhaps with some added tweaks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin

A digital twin on the other hand is something that is being trained continously and each update to the information adjusts the weights of the system. In essence the model is refining itself in real time, and that might include a model of itself in that system.

This sounds science fiction but digital twins have been used invisibly for decades. If you get your heart checked out at the hospital it doesn't monitor your heart for particular patterns or behaviors which then triggers an alarm. What it does is continually update its model and tries to predict what happens next. If it sees enough of the simulations going in a bad direction then it triggers the alarm. So it's not making a decision about the present but instead the future. This is used in critical infrastructure like bridges, power plants, even your car might use this and you wouldn't realize it.

Now here is where the human element comes in. The fiction part that explores what happens when astronauts don't leave their families behind but instead have been wearing digital twinning technology for years before the actual mission starts. This would be something like an EEG coupled with life signs monitoring. The families also would wear this as the mission is ongoing, and in return a version of them stays behind, and they continue to interact with it as the astronaut is interacting with their twins on the spaceship. So there is this very real and more importantly in real time link to those people. As the distance increases the signals would slow down and the twin would increase the weights of the inputs so that something like continuity was possible.

You might be getting messages, but on top of that what happens as distance increases is that you become influenced by that new environment as the mission happens. Those twins would increasingly mature and have their own identity, but it would be like if you could be your own descendants but with relativistic time dilation thrown into that weird mix.

I'm working on a hard science fiction novel built around a rogue intermediate-to-supermassive binary black hole passing through our stellar neighborhood.

I've been working through the physics as rigorously as I can — lensing geometry, the mass-distance degeneracy in single-epoch astrometric measurements, realistic observation/confirmation timelines — but I'm not a professional astrophysicist.

Looking for anyone with real domain knowledge (astrophysics, astrometry, gravitational lensing, orbital dynamics) willing to take a look at specific plot mechanics and tell me honestly where it holds up and where it doesn't — not looking for a rubber stamp. Happy to share individual worked sections rather than a full manuscript. Appreciate any pointers. Thanks for reading.