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Published: 2020-06-16 02:56:28 +0000 UTC; Views: 13083; Favourites: 49; Downloads: 0
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The Map of the known galaxy in the made-up sci-fi world. A guide to where the species and beings listen in the data archive live, and where they go. Here to provide a little weight (ironically, in space!) to the beings depicted, and to specify where they are in relation to one another. Geography has always been important to me, I've always been fascinated by it in real, but specifically in relation to foreign policy, how the geographical space of nations, and where certain energy reserves around the world are, affect their behaviour, their policy.The Suez canal looked from space, is just a slither of space between Egypt and the Middle East. Due to the building of the Suez Canal it became the "swing door of the British Empire" as Anthony Eden put it (Kyle, Keith, Suez, p. 7), a crucial area of the earth, not itself important until capital and empire transformed it into a zone of vital geopolitical influence (indeed attempts to build a canal before then were considered from everyone such as the Egyptian kingdoms to the Republic of Venice, but to no avail) from which oil and resources could be exported and imported from the Middle East and India, through the Mediterranean and back to Britain. It was vital for trade routes, and it is little wonder, from an imperialist perspective, the British went to war over it in the Suez debacle. A similar kind of logic are behind things like the Panama Canal. Russia, being so massively land-locked, has always struggled to build up a huge naval presence, as without places like Ukraine it has no warm water ports (the invasion of Japan in 1905 was based on this very issue). However, it's enormous geographical relation to China, and its massive land presence, made it prime to further it's influence in Asia and East Asia during the late 19th century, which terrified the British, as they knew its advantage lay in that and that it could lead to interference into India (Clarke, Christopher, The Sleepwalkers, pp.137-38). Britain, by contrast, up until the creation of the aeroplane had an overwhelming geographical advantage in being an island, the costs of trying to invade from the coast are exceedingly hard, dependent on a good navy and good weather (as the Spanish discovered in Elizabethan times, and Napoleon later on at Trafalgar). Britain's navel supremacy meant it was untouched by most of main-land Europe in the nineteenth century, only getting hot with Germany over worries about its supremacy in the English Channel. Its empire was precisely a matter of the awe-inspiring power of its navy (see Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Naval Supremacy for this and on Russia). There is a case to be made that China would not have been so interesting to Western powers if it had not been for the string of coal-deposits on its eastern border found by a German geologist (www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0804792844… ). Indeed, it is hard to imagine the Middle East being so important for so many powers if it did not have vast reserves of petroleum underneath it (it is the reason for British involvement there, including the aerial bombardment of Iraq in the 20s (see Timothy Mitchell's book Carbon Democracy and Governing From the Skies by Thomas Hippler, Stalin's attempt to enter into Iran after the war, the coup in Iran in the 50s, the Saudi-American alliance was founded on it, obviously Iraq War etc.). A vast body of literature exists on the relationship between energy reserves and foreign policy, especially oil, but also in coal (to cite but two; www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1137576413… , www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1421417065… ). Coal specifically, initially found by Britain, the geological deposits in the north-east powering the ships of the empire (as Andreas Malm had demonstrated in great detail in Fossil Capital). The shift to oil gave British ships a superiority over German ones, which may explain their attempt to get into Mesopotamia (now Iraq) with the Berlin–Baghdad railway. Hitler also came up against natural and geographical limits, as Adam Tooze had shown in painstaking detail in his Wages of Destruction. He had geospatial considerations behind his insane, genocidal conspiratorial anti-semetic worldview. Hitler's ambitions, no matter how vivid, were always undermined by the sheer underdeveloped nature of the Germany economy in comparison to other major economies, and his relentless drive eastwards is partly to make up for the lack of raw materials and natural resources, which he could never do, and endlessly stymied Hitler's plans (oil for example was always hard for the Nazis to obtain, having to eventually had to artificially synthesise it in Politz, whereas Stalin had the huge oil fields in the Caucasus to keep him going). Geography, and material resources, matter, more than ideology or culture ever could. The relationship happens in reverse too, Russia and China and a variety of smaller states have been able to put military bases in the Artic due to the rapid melting occurring there, now largely becoming a zone of lucrative resource extraction and military importance (foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/01/c… , www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2… , www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europ… ). Human's activity to the world had physically changed the geography of the planet, of which humans are then able to exploit and use to their advantage, the two bouncing off one another in a dialectical relationship. The Marxist academic David Harvey often talks about the spatial fix to capitalism, how capitalism will endlessly try and find new sites of profit making by shaping and reshaping the globe to its advantage. I think foreign policy, in states, works in a similar way, in that they have a relentless obsession with trying to eliminate constraints of space and time to try and achieve superiority for their particularly state.
I say all this because I always felt, in some way, that science fiction, especially world-building, should have a strong physical basis to it. In some ways this is stupid, as the nature of space means the conventional bounds of space are irrelevant. And yet I like to get a feel of the areas they are in, a sense of where things are. I don't want my species to just pop around willy-nilly, there has to be an extent in which they are limited by the areas of space they are in. Wormholes provide a good way round these constraints, as one can eliminate the constraints of space through hyperspace. But these are dependent on where they are in the galaxy, and if a space power does not have one near by, then the ability to engage in easy travel is limited, relying on conventional a-z space travel, which can much longer. Space travel should also be dependent on the ability of ships capabilities. This section of the galaxy is discovered over several centuries, and yet the north of the galaxy remains completely unknown. Even at this level of technology, which hyperspace travel and the ability to crush the areas of space into smaller chunks to enable quicker travel, with fusion generators, it would still take years to do a full survey of all of the galaxy, and fuel and technological constraints are still an issue. Wormworld, over in the north of the southern part of the galaxy, for example, has become a key sit for trade precisely because of the number of wormholes that link to it. During the War of a Thousand Worlds however, Wormworld became a place powers vied over for control, as whoever controlled it would be able to position ships anyway. Empires too, have to consider material resources to power their empires and power blocs. Lack of planets with sizeable ship-building and metallurgic capabilities, or just the ability to mine the raw materials for space ships and technologies (think of today in the Congo with cobalt) will severely halt the ability to increase your empire. Argointe, a kind of orange rock that burns about a thousand times for powerfully than coal, is vital source to the Stone Men, and Argonoforina had become a huge planet of contention for them (the corporation that owns and runs the planet, Omnicorp, is enormously powerful, and the miners there are nearly all Stone Men). The Stone Men for their part have always chafed under the belief that their colonies are of poor quality to that of Humanity, and vice versa, during the last war, one of the Empress Nymphella's reasons for invading the Stone Men's Empire and hitting it so hard was the (mistaken) belief that their colonies towards the far east held untold treasures needed for Humanity's full-scale conquest of the galaxy. The Ixtikli, known for their technological and scientific abilities, hold the planets to their east in equal ferocity, as there is the site of the natural resources enabling to engage in technological wonders (without which their graphene base ships and exo-skeleton based armour would be significantly poorer. The Red Veins network too, is a specific section of space where cargo ships go, which has become a smuggling network for the drug gangs on Wormworld, called so because of the red coloured ships that patrol that area of space, using Wormworld as a base to load the drugs before going into Proxima Centauri to distribute the drug there and to the rest of the Human dominion planets before heading through the wormhole back again (think of something like the routes to the French Connection used to traffic heroin).
I also like to give geographical names and terms to areas of space, anachronistic as it is, to replicate the feeling of travelling around unknown and new lands, specifically nautical terms (black holes like the Black Hole of Hafgufa and the ones that were created by humanity's Black Hole Bombs in the far south are like sinkholes and whirlpools, dangerous natural objects that should be avoided by travellers). Pirates and ship-bearing peoples (sailors and merchants and the like) are also fond of using nautical terms, like describing the cosmos as a whole as The Black Seas or the Solar Seas in reference to the solar energy some ships crave for power. The Golden Triangle, slap bang in the middle of the zones of influence of Humanity, the Ixtikli and the Stone Men, were a gold mine for pirates Astro Jim in the Golden Age of Space Piracy, as the plunder that could be acquired from different ships were immense (think of it like the areas around Jamaica, Cuba and the tip of North Africa where pirates would roam in the Seventeenth century). Terms like the Hexapoda Straights and The Valley of Dying Stars are also used to convey a sense of specific concrete locations (the Hexapoda Straights because it is a stretch of space bent around the curve above the Sagittarius Straights primarily populated by a diaspora of insect populations, and the Valley of Dying Stars to convey an area of space totally bereft of life and utterly ruined, a "valley" dipped into the surface of the earth containing nothing but a chasm of darkness - a perfect area for the Dark Great Old One Nyarlethotep to be imprisoned, wasted utterly by his presence and the wars birthed there (this is not my term but one of T.S. Elliott, in the Hollow Men).
I also like politics, and I like to give my worlds a keen spatial-political dynamic, the positioning of empires and planets, and where they are affecting where and when they feel they can proceed. For instance, the Frontierslands are so far out from Human central that they have basically no connection to humanity, and Wormworld is a huge trading port for the planets located below it. Yet the far east of the galaxy is mostly a desert, a site where humanity once had a huge presence (Gaiasland being a notable example, although it was always independent of humanity, founded by separatist religious extremists in an attempt to found a new land "purified" of the sin and degeneracy they associated with the central Terran Golden Dawn Empire). Humanity lost all of their colonies to the east and the west under conditions of the Treaty of Torkath, and the east has fallen into piracy and disrepute. The Ixtikli and the Stone Men squabble endlessly over the tense borders of their respective areas of space, and the Ixtikli in particularity would love to absorb the former colonies of humanity in the New Human Alliance into their Prosperity Zone, integrate their economies through a kind of Marshall Plan and NATO equivalent and use them as a buffer zone of planets to smash the Stone Men Empire. The Stone Men Empire, by contrast, terrified by that very prospect realise their area of space has very few options for allies, and have ships out towards near Wormworld to investigate ally making with the planets of Phroomax, Qafflaff, Helios IV, and further north meet with the Ciosorian grasshopper mercenaries in order to try, in the event of war, smash the Ixtikli from both sides (as happened to humanity during the last wars, as despite their earlier victories relentlessly ploughing eastwards and northwards, eventually the combined Ixtikli-Stone Men might were able to repel them back to the inner rims of their empire all the way to the brutal Siege of Proxmia Centuari, while the alliance of ships and forces in the west were able to do the same. Nymphella, at the height of her insanity, insisted on wasting troops and ships by ploughing eastwards in a full-scale genocidal campaign, despite haemorrhaging massively in the west).
But basically, her is the world the drawings under "Cosmic Tales" go under. It is a work in progress, obviously, as new worlds and planets are added constantly as I daydream endlessly. The whole section to the north of the galaxy is a complete unknown, for the reason of adding a mysterious areas of space from which few travellers go to and even fewer return to say what is there. I like to imagine the ecosystems and life forms there and completely and totally different to anything down south, and the two sections have managed to develop in complete isolation with one another, neither of them knowing or caring much about the others existence (think of China and East Asia compared to all of Europe in the Medieval Ages, or all of South America until about the Seventeenth Century). I think a lack of genetic diversity and life however might be due to the presence of the massive and genocidal presence of the Xirox-Xi's ginormous territory of space, unknown about for centuries until the Rok-Morror Crisis and threatened the whole of the remaining Ivory Wheel (although subsequently that area of space no longer is housed to them as they were deleted from time and space by the actions of the Gilisead Priesthood of Temporal Arbiters - see www.deviantart.com/kinguglysqu… for the backstory on that). It's really a "here be dragons" area. That's the official reason. The real reason it's empty is because I can't be bothered to think of any more things. It's enough to try and populate one whole area of space with stuff, to try and fill a whole galaxy is beyond my imagination.
This Map is from about Space Year 3017, after the territorial changes enacted after the Treaty of Torkath of 2999.
Descriptions of the separate parts will be done in chunks to ensure it is not overloaded with information.
Update 09/08/20: Lots of little details have been changed/altered since last posted.
In many ways, looking back at this it is a remarkably shoddy thing. The whole red cross with "SUN" on it is awkward and stupid, and I wish I had chosen a blank one (it was mostly used just to give me some kind of perspective on where humanity would be in relation to the rest of the galaxy, and thus reorient the politics around it. The underlining of the letters is bad to look at, something I should have altered when writing them. So this is abit slapdash, apologies. The separate bits of the map, blown up larger have more detail and look better, and I will upload them at some date with information.
Update 7/07/21: This really needs updating. Whole areas of this are completely changed now. The Frontiersworld is on the other side of the galaxy for one thing. May reupload a whole new one if I can be bothered (they are pretty tedious things to make).
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Comments: 3
Fourthdimensionalart [2021-09-25 17:08:33 +0000 UTC]
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KingUglySquirrel In reply to Fourthdimensionalart [2021-10-01 13:43:38 +0000 UTC]
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miysterywrighter2222 In reply to KingUglySquirrel [2025-06-15 14:38:37 +0000 UTC]
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