This week: Getting Around Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Transportation is the center of the world! It is the glue of our daily lives. When it goes well, we don't see it. When it goes wrong, it negatively colors our day, makes us feel angry and impotent, curtails our possibilities.
—Robin Chase
We want transportation as reliable as running water.
—Travis Kalanick
I said that if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They'd be like, 'What?'
—Neil deGrasse Tyson |
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A recent trip got me thinking about transportation again.
How your characters get around can be just as important to the story as the other things they do. Many a story, fantasy or otherwise, is even set on a mode of transportation: a ship, a train, or even a starship, for example.
What they use for transportation depends on several factors, not least of which is available technology and materials. We think of the wheel, for example, as having been invented by pre-agricultural humans, with the stereotypical caveman chipping away at a rock image. And the idea of carving out a disc for some uses probably is ancient. But in terms of transport, what matters isn't a single wheel, but the idea of putting them on an axle, thus enabling inventions such as carts and chariots... and that probably didn't happen until about six thousand years ago, well into agricultural times.
Similarly, railroads didn't really take off until the invention of the steam engine, which also revolutionized ocean and river travel. Balloons required advances in shell material. Helicopters needed both high-RPM engines and sturdy materials.
This sort of thing matters most if you're going for historical accuracy, but since this is the Fantasy newsletter, we also have to consider transportation on imaginary worlds, alternative histories, and possibly futuristic settings.
In general, then, any mode of transportation needs, first, a power source. This could be a living creature or creatures, such as a horse or the rowers in a ship's galley. Wind is another ancient one, as with a sailboat. As I noted above, the invention of the steam engine, and later, internal combustion, changed the way people and cargo got around. Other possibilities include nuclear (fission or fusion), solar (using that convenient nearby fusion generator in the sky), or electricity (though the original power needs to come from somewhere). Many others are possible in imagination, like the matter/antimatter engines in Star Trek.
Sure, it's possible to handwave the power source, as in "The ship is powered by magic crystals," or "This alien power source utilizes zero-point energy." Depending on the story, one might get away with that, but unlimited, inexhaustible power isn't always going to fly (pun intended) in a story that's going for some sort of realism or internal consistency. All power sources have drawbacks: wind can fail; living creatures tire and require food; engines require some sort of fuel. That sort of thing. And every known mode of transport has speed and/or distance limitations.
Still, it can be fun and engaging to include unexpected or anachronistic transportation devices in a story. Dragon-riders swooping around airships, for example. A high-speed train across mule-plowed farmland. Things of that sort.
But without some sort of transportation, your characters may find themselves going nowhere. |
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Fantasy: January 10, 2024 Issue [#12359]
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