Long days and twisting time lines.

Well here it is Wednesday night and I haven’t been on for a few days.  I love my weekends, they are family time for me. Also a time when I can muse and mull over ideas I have about my stories. I take a note book and a pen everywhere I go and if an idea or story point or even if a bit of dialogue pops into my mind I jot it down for later reference, although if you ask Lisa I tend to mull them over far too much.

Since I am currently working out a science fiction story I have been doing a lot of research to clarify my understanding of time dilation and the Lorentz factor as well as gaining a better grasp of relativity.

I know that many writers tend to skirt the time dilation factor in their stories, it helps make their “galactic empire” feel cohesive as the characters can zip from planet to planet or even to event with little disruption of the story. But these stories are lacking the realities of time dilation and the vast distances in the galaxy, much less the universe.

Joe Haldeman in his “The Forever War” dealt with this as the main character and his fellow soldiers age years during their travels to engage the enemies, the world they left behind ages decades, even centuries.

Being one of my favorite stories, I reread it this summer and this actually is what started me down the path of my current story and my developing a sci-fi universe that ties into my fantasy universe. How time dilation may work with the tech civilization returning to their home world after thousands of years to find magic has replaced science.

Because I am fusing them into a cohesive setting it made me reexamine my fantasy universe with much more critical eyes, and I know the fantasy genre generally shrugs off the physical laws of reality as we know them. However since I am expanding my Aesr multiverse to make it a true multiverse, everything must abide by some consistent logic; all fantasy worlds must have some consistency to them the same way a science based world does. Looking through the notes on my world I see that I made assumptions about my world/universe that are simply incorrect.

The challenge now is to blend my fantasy elements with my expanding understanding of the scientific universe while not diminishing the magical nature of the fantasy based worlds. With a chuckle I see I circled the idea of how one of my tech characters has to explain to a fantasy character that the lights in the sky that they believe to be the souls of the dead are really blazing stars like the one seen during the day that heats the world, and that some of them have worlds of their own along with living beings on them.

The fantasy character smiles and explains that with magic anything, even worlds in the sky, are possible.