Click here for full resolution. This is my new oil-on-canvas piece, depicting the sun setting on a city floating in the clouds on some alien world. The two spheres contain lighter-than-air lifting gases; on a world with denser air like Venus they could contain airy … Continue readingSunset Flight to Cloud City
Space stations, spaceships, and starships are fundamental to space opera and many other subgenres of science fiction; vehicles and vehicular communities traveling through space feature heavily in these worlds and stories set in them, for the simple reason that any travel between points in outer … Continue readingWorldbuilding Space Megastructures: Beyond Dyson Spheres
The idea of college ships as an incremental pathway to seasteading was explored in a previous post. While the idea of pursuing higher education, formally or informally, at sea, roaming between ports in a built-in study-abroad program, is compelling enough, there are more distinctive visions … Continue readingA Social Vision for College Ships
Imaginations have long been captivated by the idea of a manned mission to Mars; colonization, in the form of permanent settlement of Mars, is the logical next step that has also held sway over the minds of men. Yet for all the attention (rightly) given … Continue readingRoad Trains of Mars
The idea of alien life or human colonies on Venus is one as old as scientific speculation and science fiction; the bright cloudy shroud over the surface made Venus for centuries much more mysterious than the other (relatively) Earth-like planet in the inner solar system, … Continue readingWorldbuilding Cloud Cities on Venus
Seasteading, a topic popular in futurist and libertarian circles, is simply the construction of settlements on the high seas capable of sustaining permanent populations. While floating cities dominate futuristic concepts of high-seas settlement, there are many other kinds of communities that would benefit from seafaring, … Continue readingCollege Ships: A Pathway to Seasteading
Much ink, digital and otherwise, is spilled among both real-life historians and fictional worldbuilders on the rise and fall of civilizations, but somewhat less ink is spent on drilling down to the basics of civilization, namely the resource base. This includes things such as building … Continue readingAn Alternate History of Cascadia
Although humans are Earth’s only sapient species, the range of intelligence among animals is quite diverse. For a long time many assumed primates, the clade closest to humans, outclassed all others in intelligence. Now, however, it is much more widely known that several other species … Continue readingWorldbuilding Avian Intelligence
When worldbuilding speculative fiction settings, all manner of planets are considered, from ocean planets to desert planets and everything in between, but one class of planet that you don’t hear much about is the high obliquity planet. This is somewhat surprising, considering that we have … Continue readingWorldbuilding Seasons on Planets with High Axial Tilts
When worldbuilding a science fiction or especially space opera setting, spaceships, starships, and the like are almost inevitably of great importance. In a visual medium the look of the ships can communicate a lot, the contrast between Padmé Amidala’s garage and Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon … Continue readingThe Shapes of Spaceships