Interstellar World Building

March 15th, 2010

I’ve discussed some world building before, and this has traditionally been an important topic in science fiction and fantasy.   I want to get a little more specific where it comes to space-based interstellar science fiction.

These days I think it’s becoming necessary to be very specific in any human-based, Earth-oriented future to use real astronomy and real star maps and real stars.   You should know how far apart stars are, their stellar types and lifetimes and other assorted details, the life zones of these stars, if there are things known about planets, etc.   This is an intimidating amount of knowledge for anyone other than a professional astronomer, although that’s changing.   It’s getting much easier for non-scientists to get a hold of star maps and build an interstellar empire based on the local solar neighborhood.

Marshall Ryan Maresca has an interesting post on interstellar worldbuilding that’s worth a read.   In particular I am intrigued by cheap or free software that’s available to do some of this stuff, and he recommends one called ChView:

One tool I use, besides an enormous Excel spreadsheet, is a program called ChView, which is a fascinating– if slightly frustrating– program. For a piece of free-on-the-internet software, it’s really good at visualizing interstellar maps. But it isn’t quite everything I’d want it to be. That’s all right, the person who wrote the program wasn’t doing it for me, and I think it’s great. Check it out.

There are others out there.   There’s Celestia and its add-ons.   There’s Sol Station.   Anyone use these?   Comments or criticisms?   Recommendations for others?

I can do this stuff the old-fashioned way, but I’m more than game to make it easy on myself, too!

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