I’ve started a new novel.
Well, more accurately, I’m picking up a novel I started a couple of years back. It’s set over 1000 years in the future. Humans have expanded into interstellar space using something called “ghostships.”
No, they aren’t using supernatural beings to fly their spaceships. Quantum mechanics is one of the most test theories in all of physics, and it’s accurate to an incredible degree. But there are still things we don’t fully understand about it. Most particularly, the other most-tested theory, general relativity, and quantum mechanics are incompatible.
But people are working on it. One way they are working on it is via something called “ghost condensates.” Roughly speaking, these are extra terms added in to quantum mechanical calculations to make things balance out. Almost everyone thinks they are just a mathematical construct with no real physical meaning. That’s what Einstein thought about black holes, and you know how that wound up.
So it turns out that if you assume the ghost condensates represent something real, then faster-than-light travel, among other things, becomes possible. So, for the fictional future in my new novel, I’m supposing that these ghost condensates turn out to be real things, to everyone’s surprise. They lead to the development of a “ghost condensate shunt” that lets them produce a drive that exceeds the speed of light.
Of course, they call these gizmos ghostships, and FTL drive a ghostdrive.
Another possible FTL drive involves some ideas of a Mexican physicist named Miguel Alcubierre. His drive relies on the observed fact that while relativity says you can’t move through spacetime faster than light, spacetime itself can expand or contract at supra-luminal speeds. It’s “observed,” since the early universe expanded faster than light during the inflation period of the Big Bang. The problem with Alcubierre’s idea is that you can’t navigate the kind of ship he envisioned, so I settled on ghost ships.
I also spent time imagining what the next thousand years might look like. I’m pretty sure it won’t include continuous progress, so I stuck a “Great Disintegration” in the middle period, where the secret of the ghostships and hence interstellar travel was lost. The novel is in a period of rebirth, where humans are starting to recover from a dark age.
The novel is set on a planet that was once a mining outpost. It was abandoned during the Great Disintegration, stared up again, then shut down once more. Now it’s owned by the ruling dynasty on a planet named Elsinor (haha). There’s a hitch, though. The “empire” (whatever that is) requires that the planet be continuously occupied by at least one person, or they will lose their title.
This sets up a locked room mystery. The new “resident,” the person whose presence maintains the ruler’s title to the planet, shows up for his ten-year term. But when he lands, he finds his predecessor murdered. The problem, of course, is that there is no one else on the planet who could have done it!
So, we’ve got a locked room mystery.
I also spent quite a bit of time inventing the mining planet, including drawing a pretty detailed map. that was kind of fun, and it’s helping as I write the novel.
As the story develops, I’ll probably add stuff here.
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