Beyond the Endless Sky

Worldbuilding Edit

I wondered if this particular edit was going to be the smallest, or the largest.

The thing is, I like worldbuilding. My first response to hearing the optimist's creed 'we live in the best of all possible worlds' was 'hold my extra paper'. Not only do you get to create something out of nothing, but if you have a philosophical bend you get to use it to examine your reality from a new angle.

None of this was what I intended when I made up the world along with the story during NaNoWriMo. So at the time, the world barely existed beyond what Clarissa could see at the time. What we had was a bubble of air roughly the size of Neptune, held together in a roughly spherical nebula by moon-sized islands. And not our moon, that thing's huge.

Basically, the project was begun by deciding on a few parameters. And the goals were basically 'write a novel in a month', and 'get a short story to those guys at Tevun-Krus' (Wattpad's longest running sci-fi ezine, worth a look if you have some time) who were doing an issue on something called 'skypunk'.

So the plan was to write something roughly resembling a hard science-fiction skypunk version of Firefly. Basically, cram some of the respect the Expanse pays to physics by not having artificial gravity, and put that in airships with islands that are basically meteors and tiny moons surrounded in green vegetation with an atmosphere.

Now the plot for the story actually came about by treating the world as hard science fiction. You see, the idea of a nebula of semi-breathable air isn't physically impossible. And it being both really big and having more than one centre point of gravity also wasn't impossible. But the whole reason earth has an atmosphere is it has a magnetosphere that protects all that air from solar winds, or else we'd have barely a skiff of slightly airy dust like Mars does. So in order for this world to exist, it needs an artificial magnetosphere. And that means it needs people to keep it running, and a power source.

And that's where ferrying a box full of antimatter across the sky to power a massive electromagnet came from. In this case, worldbuilding created the plot.

But the challenge of world building is that if the world isn't cemented when the story is written, the world changes without the book. And that has definitely happened.

I'm actually impressed by how much of it stuck. Point one was pretty easy, though. It's not like anything dramatic has happened in physics to make me reassess gravity or how dangerous antimatter could be.

The idea of the Endless Sky being Canada wasn't wholly unexpected.

You see, Canada is weird. And a lot of that is by design. Canada was born from a deliberate effort by a political party (much more loosely associated, compared to what parties are like today) called the Reformers to avoid allowing Lower Canada (the original name of Quebec) to be subsumed by Upper Canada (Eventually Ontario), while keeping both from being subsumed by British administration. The Reformers were an alliance of both English and French, Catholic and Protestant, meant to give themselves responsible government that was accountable principally to them.