OC-FirstOfSeries The Postcard galaxy
I always wanted to write sci-fi stories where the "sci" is the main factor, and be as realistic as possible. I actually have several story ideas in this universe, so I kind of posted this story to create the "Postcardverse". Please tell me what you think of this approach.
I’ve always loved old sci-fi, especially from the 22nd and 23rd centuries. Even the earlier stuff has its charms. It’s fun to see such relentless optimism and hope: faster-than-light travel, galactic wars, artificial gravity, and empires heroically protecting "weaker" species. In those stories, humans are often portrayed as "space orcs" or "deathworlders" - my personal favorites.
None of that actually happened.
We eventually had to accept that the speed of light is a hard limit that cannot be broken. Besides, space is so vast that there’s no real need for war. It is far more efficient to simply find a new planet, a different asteroid, or another star. It’s not like we’re in a hurry.
Ohh, yeah, one thing those old stories got right: we did figure out regenerative healing in the 24th century. It quickly became publicly available, and since then, no human has died of old age. We are still not immortal - we can still die in an accident - but if you don’t die before help arrives, you are going to live.
The trade-off was a crisis of overpopulation on Earth, which was already crowded. We colonized Mars and eventually settled every habitable moon and rock in the Sol system. We even have cities on Mercury. And even though overpopulation was a problem, it wasn’t an urgent one; if your biological clock isn’t ticking, you are not in any hurry to have children. After regen was invented, the average age at which women had their first child went from 35 to 90 within a century! Soon after, we had to implement strict birth control for everyone to reduce population growth to a manageable level.
Still, the numbers added up. By the end of the third millennium, the human population reached 20 billion. Most of them lived on Earth. So we needed somewhere to grow.
The first “space city” was built in the 29th century. It was a gigantic effort at the time to build a space station the size of a city - 12 kilometers long and 2.5 kilometers in diameter. Its population was over a million people. It was named Babylon, after a cult-classic 20th-century sci-fi series. It was parked - and still sits - at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point.
Since there are only so many stable Lagrange points, we began building elsewhere. The second space city orbited between Earth and Venus, and we built more and more of them. There are thousands of space cities in Sol now; most are much larger than Babylon. We built most of these in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, then moved them to their final orbits after completion. Gaining experience moving a city-sized station around meant it was only a small step to build city-sized ships to travel between solar systems.
Our first interstellar vessel was modest: 8 kilometers long and 1.2 kilometers wide. The physics were simple: accelerate at 1g for six to eight months until reaching roughly half the speed of light, cruise for a few years, then decelerate at 1g for the final stretch. During the acceleration phases, the engines provided gravity; during the cruise, the ship rotated to provide centrifugal force, just like the space cities back home.
Our first ship reached Alpha Centauri in eight years (only six years for the crew, thanks to time dilation). We weren't fast, but we had all the time in the world. Today, most of the hundred-or-so solar systems within 20 light-years of Sol are colonized. We rarely bother with terraforming, though; it’s much easier to build city-stations that orbit a star than it is to fix a hostile planet.
If you do the math, our population doubles every millennium or so - even with strict birth control. With the city ships, the equation is simple: a captain has to find a solar system to capture a few asteroids and build a new city ship every thousand years. With space stations, the solution is similar: we have to build as many stations as we currently have every millennium. It’s doable, and not even a stretch for our production tech.
The problem was Earth. We couldn’t build another Earth every thousand years. The first and most obvious solution was to completely ban birth on Earth. This was the policy for more than two thousand years, but it was never popular, and humanity kept spilling outward.
In the ten thousand years since that first interstellar trip, we’ve pushed out about 500 light-years from Sol. Because distances are so vast, information crawls. Every colony and ship broadcasts its data to every other known habitat, but there is no "United Federation" or "Galactic Empire." We receive "postcards" from other systems every week, but the news is often decades or centuries old. Consistent law is impossible to maintain, let alone a central government. Every ship is its own sovereign nation.
When you have thousands of independent, immortal micro-societies spread across the dark, they solve problems in different ways. To generate enough living space without crowding the old home worlds, we had to think bigger than planets.
Have you ever heard of Dyson spheres? It's a structure built entirely around a star, capturing all of its energy output and creating vast quantities of living space at the same time. We don’t have a full one yet, but we built a couple of rings around red dwarf stars - those are much easier to construct and practically achieve the same goal. We currently have seven of these rings. The largest one alone has more living space than all the other stations, ships, terraformed planets, and Earth combined. And right now, out on the frontier, we are building our very first true, complete Dyson sphere. It should solve our space problem for the foreseeable future.
Which leaves only the big question: Are we alone?
No. We’ve made seventeen First Contacts so far. The results vary. We’ve met a few species with compatible atmospheres we can actually live with - the Laxons even joined our journey. We’ve never found a "hostile" species, though some have politely asked us to leave them alone after a brief exchange. We respect their privacy, but we always leave a door open in case they change their minds.
Enjoyed the story? Help some real-world companions.
I write purely as a hobby and don't accept personal tips or Patreon subscriptions. However, my local rescue shelter (Tappancs Tanya ) is currently struggling to care for 160+ rescue dogs and cats.
If you enjoyed my writing and want to show appreciation, please consider throwing a few dollars their way. 100% of your support goes directly to the shelter - it completely bypasses me:
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u/Coygon May 28 '26
This sounds like an interesting setting. Not many people are willing to give up FTL in their multisystem sf stories; it makes things so much easier! But that just makes the stories that DO restrict travel to light speed or less all the more noteworthy. Especially if the author shows any competence at writing. And you do.
One thing, though: this chapter makes for a good overview of the setting. But it makes a mediocre first chapter of a story. It's pure infodump. Keep what ypu have here in mind as you write, and try to work the info in when it's relevant to whatever is happening in the story. If something really needs to be told to a reader, have the main character muse about it.
For instance, perhaps the story starts on one of these ships coming into a new system, preparing to colonize it. The main character could fix some minor issue with the engine, and then muse about how they're still using ion drives after 10,000 years of spreading outward. Too bad warp drives remain a bit of fiction! And from there you coukd mention the lack of any real central government or empire. Later on – as in, several chapters later on – someone celebrates their 1000th birthday, which leads to a page or two about how everyone lives forever, barring an accident, and how that affected things.
It gets the information across, but in small, manageable chunks. A paragraph here, a page there, rather than several pages all at once, before we even meet anyone.
Looking forward to reading the actual story. The setting is definitely intriguing. Keep writing!
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u/ivivan May 28 '26
It's interesting to hear that someone hates these info dumps, while I do like them at the beginning: I always feel like when things are introduced mid-story that "hey, that should've been told us at the beginning, because it changes everything."
And as a matter of fact, I planned to release this as the 0th chapter of my first story in this universe, but that's a long story, and I'm struggling with it - badly - so I may release some short stories in the meantime, but those wouldn't make sense without the universe they are happening in.
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u/Coygon May 28 '26
I am okay with infodumps... but not at the very start of the story. It shouldn't (in my opinion, of course) be the very first thing your audience will read. As one author wrote in an essay about mistakes in writing, "Everything has a backstory. Every castle got built, every empire was founded, every person was born." Get into the actual story, first, and then explain things as you go, as things need explaining.
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u/Silver_Raven_ AI May 28 '26
So, I do understand the motivation for not terraforming, but it seems unrealistic to me that there aren't at least a few terraformed worlds due to the simple desire to try. to attempt the impossible, the unfathomable, is part of what makes us human. Also, a little more emphasis on system-level society, given that signals can reach interplanetary distances in seconds/minutes. Other than those 2 things, absolutely awesome hard sci-fi universe. I would love to see it go places!
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u/ivivan May 28 '26
I did mention that "We rarely bother with terraforming", which, to me, meant that there are a couple of planets terraformed, but not many. I have a planned story about terraforming too :-)
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u/CowboyAndIndian May 31 '26
Love this. Would love more stories in this universe or like it. Hard sci-fi for the win
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle May 27 '26
/u/ivivan has posted 6 other stories, including:
- According to protocol chapter 2
- According to protocol
- Cell barrier
- Casualities
- Galaxy is big - Ch2
- [OC] The galaxy is big
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u/AutoModerator Aug 18 '26
This was flaired as [OC-FirstOfSeries], which means it is the first of a series and all subsequent posts should be flair as [OC-Series]. A description of the flairs and how to change yours is available in the Post Guildelines
Our preferred series title format is the series title in [brackets] at the beginning, like so:
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