Inventing hyperspace

After I unleashed Book I of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright, a reader got in touch to ask how I came up with both the name and the details of the Fold, the story's equivalent of hyperspace travel, and whether I'd borrowed them from elsewhere. People liked my tweets about it, so I thought I might as well write them up here. Since I'm writing a book, I suppose this counts as something like 'game design'?

Folding space as a phrase for some kind of faster-than-light (FTL) travel has a long history, back to Heinlein and I imagine probably before that. I've not read Heinlein, and I must have first met the idea of folding space when I read Dune back in my teens—longer ago than I care to think, now. But most of the details of the Fold's workings I came up with, and I can talk through how. Though a small twist will occur at the end.

The word fold is old and short, two qualities I seek: see my use of words such as bale, foe, bane, and indeed all the parts of all the Taru characters' names, including Kin-Bright. Fold is several words in a trenchcoat, with at least three distinct etymologies in English: a fold in a sheet, returning to the fold, and fold-as-earth/Earth—this last sees the least use nowadays. I wanted to call Book I 'Burning [monosyllable]-Space' because I've long liked the title of Space Runaway Ideon's ninth episode 'Burning Null Space' (in the English translation we have).

I hoped I might make the FTL journeying more interesting than just instant point-to-point jumps. On this point I was thinking of Morioka Hiroyuki's Crest/Banner of the Stars books: I didn't borrow details from them, but I was inspired by Morioka's effort in those to have FTL be a combat context with its own hazards and oddities.

I wanted the combat within hyperspace to seem more naval than combat in normal space is (will be), and fold suggests undulation. I figured, therefore, that if the armours fought across great sweeping peaks and troughs, larger than you'd get in a terrestrial ocean, then that'd feel quasi-naval but would also bring some fun strangeness along with it. The Fold must be some kind of thin, weird, flat thing beyond our reality that maps, in unhelpfully obtuse and hard-to-sense ways, onto our three-dimensional universe.

The thought that tying the Fold to reality temporarily might be called stitching, though it involves tearing, came naturally from the cloth sense of fold. And, finally, if the larger spaceships are designed to float on something wave-like during FTL travel, that answers the question of what you do with any spaceships that descend to a planet with bodies of water on it.

The twist is that I'm not sure I believe in 'worldbuilding', and feel sheepish when caught doing it. There is no world in CWKB, really, just a lot of word-craft, and many of my choices start with something sounding good, like fold being short, old, and philologically satisfying. Similarly, Book I features a margrave in the backround because I love the word margrave.

Here one could after all draw out an analogy with some aspects of game design. The metrical systems I choose rule some tools out. The metrical systems also predispose me towards certain kinds of word, in some cases certain kinds of word in certain specific position: often in the five-beat line, two-syllable words with natural lexical stress on the second syllable—divine, assault, create, begin, outside, sojourn—come in very handy at the line-ending, for instance. The alliterative-verse passages impose even tighter restraints, with every line demanding three alliterating open-class words. On top of these hard limits, my efforts to hammer out particular tones and echoes then give me preferences, rather than hard rules, that push me towards certain words for things

I'm afraid that, under the hood, some of what seems like imaginative detail stems from (1) how good words or phrases sound in the mouth and (2) what my chosen systems will let me do.

The cover image for this blog post is a detail from London, British Library, Royal MS 20.D.i, f. 154r, a mid-fourteenth-century miniature depicting Troy by an anonymous artist; the image has generously been made available under a CC-BY license by the British Library. The whole manuscript has been digitised, if anyone's curious, and the full miniature can be found here.