Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.
Don’t forget to click the link to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.
What is one of your favourite settings from your books?
My apologies in advance for the shorter-than-usual post. I’m knee deep in what used to be called NaNoWriMo. With a week to go, I’m on track to finish.
I’m a world-builder. I take an idea and create a universe for it to unfold in. It might be a planet (or several), or a single location. It could be tomorrow, ten thousand years from now or in an alternative dimension, where things are done differently.
It might even be a combination of times and places.
But they all have one thing in common: they started life as a blank sheet and a picture in my mind’s eye.
I’ve enjoyed creating places like the Domes of Reevis, the sinister Caves on Quister-Alu and the Steampunk world of Norlandia, complete with its own Dragons.
Those are just a few of the worlds that have come from some obscure corner of my mind.
My all-time favourite is Oscar Station. It’s the mining outpost, located just off the outermost ring of Saturn, that features in my Andorra Pett series of Sci-fi Crime Mysteries.
Oscar Station (named after my Grandson) originally started life as a setting in two Sci-fi short stories. One, The Orbital Livestock Company, featured a farm in space, the other, Ring Miner, was about a day in the life of the people mining asteroids for valuable ores. I put the two ideas together and used the result as the location for Andorra’s first adventure.
Designing a closed environment and making it all seem plausible was a fun challenge. There’s a lot of today’s technology that can be utilised, as well as the real-life, documented experiences of astronauts, past and present.
Obviously, some of the things that make the space station tick need a little Rubber Science and a suspension of disbelief. The thing I’ve found is that, if most of the world-building is based on real science, readers will accept everything else as authentic without too much fuss.
As a location for a murder mystery, Oscar Station was perfect, a small enclosed world, full of intrigue and danger. It was home to a selection of people with diverse skills, needs and motives.
They became victims or suspects and provided the chance for a fish out of water like Andorra to prove her worth by solving a mystery.
It also gave me the chance to invent or adapt some great technology for her and the rest of the inhabitants to use as they lived their lives. Things like the mining machinery, the station itself and the farm add to the overall atmosphere and have a function in the tale. And they’re all possible or plausible, using the things we have today as a base.
More than that, Oscar Station provided a springboard for Andorra’s continuing exploration of the Solar System, and all the nefarious practices she could handle in her subsequent adventures.
What do you think about this week’s subject?
Let me know by leaving me a comment.
While you’re here, please click the InLinkz link to check out what my fellow writers have to say about this week’s topic.
I’ll be back with another post on Thursday, see you then. Meanwhile, have a great week.
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