Привет, space comrades! It’s your old pal Wave here, crawling out from my hole to join the waking world. Thought it might be good to start a little post series of my own, going over some of the nuts and bolts of The Space Between’s story, characters, lore, what-have-you. And I wanna start with a big one:
Where The Fuck Are We?
The Space Between, for clarity’s sake, does not take place in the Milky Way. Not even remotely close. It takes place millions of light years away, isolated in its own little pocket of space. As such there are exactly zero humans that will be appearing. This was, personally, a conscious decision and based on something I’d read before where people had stated that they were unable to relate to characters that weren’t human. Which I called bullshit on. And so far, I’ve been proven correct.
Despite being physically distant, we did want there to be relatable aspects to the setting, and what is more relatable than living in a late capitalistic corporate society stretched beyond its means? The galaxy in TSB is dystopic in a very modern sense: with all of the technology and advances that are around, basic greed and inefficiencies are still enough to stop any amount of meaningful societal progress from being made. And with the attempt at regulating an entire galaxy, you create a very wide net with very large holes. A great example are the warpgates and waystations. In a society that is able to discover warp travel to go between stars in a matter of hours, there still needs to be infrastructure: you build the first gate, and then you have to be able to build the next gate at the location you want it. This takes time, effort, and resources, all things that in a capital-focused economy require massive funds. Then you also need stations nearby for rest and repairs, which can then be filled with places to spend money, which helps continuing to fund the project. And the wheel turns.
(Ch. 3 Pg. 51)
I feel like most people want to be optimistic about the furthering of technological progress. It is unfortunate that everything seems to come with a caveat. Cars have made private transportation easier than we could ever imagine, but now the travel infrastructure has become so focused on building around it that we don’t have walkable cities. Smartphones and the internet allow for near-instant communication around the world, but has also come at the cost of built-in surveillance networks and the mere concept of data brokers. Automation in workplaces should be making our lives easier, but instead it is simply causing massive amounts of waste and creating a work culture where you have to hope some hack in the Silicone Valley doesn’t come up with a way to take away your means of survival. All of these are concepts at the heart of TSB: the advancements we make are only as good as the people advancing them.
There’s still junk food for chrissake’s.
-Wave
