Saturday, July 28, 2018

My Life as a Writer: Creating a Feudal Future w/ "The Star Knight Saga"

Friend of the blog Rawle Nyanzi took the time to mark out one key difference between what I'm doing with Star Knight and what most Space Opera stories assume in their settings. Another friend of the blog, Jeffro Johnson, focuses on this key point:

Galactic Christendom turns that idea on its head. Instead of a humanity governed largely by Enlightenment liberalism or its socialist variant, we have a humanity governed by the ideals of Christianity. They’re not even united politically; just as the different factions in Gundam nonetheless share core Enlightenment beliefs that disregard religion or nation, the different kingdoms in Galactic Christendom all share a belief in the Christian God and His morality. Thus Galactic Christendom presents a truly unique take on the space opera genre, one that goes against the prevailing trend in sci-fi and presents a perspective underrepresented in the genre today.

It's the same approach J.R.R. Tolkien took to Middle-Earth: it is presumed, and therefore does not need to be didactically explained to the reader. No one likes to be preached at, so I don't. I merely took a real-world historical example (Medieval Europe, when and where historical Christendom arose) and use that as the example I built upon to create Galactic Christendom.

There's a sound reason for how and why this came to pass, but that's Ancient History for my story and doesn't get discussed. I despise "As you know, Bob..." infodumps, especially if they are not relevant to the story at hand, so I don't do it- you, my audience, deserve to have your intelligence respected. You want to be entertained, so that's what I do; I posted an excerpt at the Study yesterday if you want to see for yourself that I mean business when I say I'm here to entertain you first and foremost.

As of this post, the Indiegogo campaign to complete Book One is at 35% towards its goal. We're on Day Three and we're already over a quarter of the way to meeting that initial goal. That's fantastic, and I hope more of you decide to book your passage to the far future of the 4th Millenium soon; I'd love to have you along for the journey. The sooner we meet that initial goal, the sooner we can really get this going with the Stretch Goals- and the new Perk that unlocks when we hit $1K. (The campaign page is here.)

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