Purple Crypt
I’ve been working through a lot of issues in my plot line for the project Purple Crypt. In case you’ve missed earlier mentions, it’s a code title to hide the plot in the unlikely case someone wants to steal my idea. The series will cover about ten thousands years of a galactic civilization.
That’s a lot of technological innovation and cultural development that has to make sense. I’ve been watching a podcast which discusses some of the challenges associated with interplanetary and interstellar colonization, and Isaac has given me a lot of insight about what I’ll need to cover in my stories.
The biggest one for me is this: Once you get a significant industrial base in orbit or beyond, why would you want to colonize in another gravity well? You’ve already mastered building and maintaining space habitats, in theory, so why climb down into a hole? It’s cheaper to move around in space than to get there to begin with.
Come to think about it, there’s a book about that, too.
So what I’ve been doing recently is laying out the basic timeline and putting in the lifespans of the major characters. I’m also looking ahead to interstellar communities, and what conflict they might have with neighbors.
One of the things in the podcast linked above is the concept of post-scarcity civilizations. Once a planet has everything it needs (or can make it in rapid order), why would it fight the neighboring kingdom?
As I mentioned in my last post, the biggest reason will probably be ego. “I want you under my thumb, and I want you to live the way I say. So there.” The reasoning will be a little more nuanced, but that’s the basic idea.
I’ll keep updating as I make decisions, but Purple Crypt has been in the “think about it” stage for a long time. My guess is that the “write it out” stage will be long, too.
Hopefully not as long as the “think” stage, or I’ll be long dead before Book One gets done.

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