A sense of scale

[Mayabird]

A galaxy, heck, a planet is a very big place, but a lot of authors and writers don't seem to understand that. Some sci-fi universes just feel bigger than others. For instance, I've never had this deep-down feeling that the Star Wars or Star Trek 'verses were all that big. It usually felt like they were just jumping from city to city in one country, or for empires of other species, just going to another country.

Meanwhile, the Dune 'verse, even though most of the action took place on one world, felt enormous, epic, like major things were going on in a very, very, mind-bogglingly large empire. It's the way a galactic empire should feel - huge.


What I'm wondering is, what leads to these perceptions about implied size? How does one go about creating a proper sense of scale? Are there any other sci-fi 'verses that do a good job of creating that sense?

[Admiral Valdemar]

I feel for epic nature (and epic win and lulz), you can't beat something like the Night's Dawn and Revelation Space trilogies, the latter even spanning a good chunk of time too thanks to no FTL.

Anything that doesn't approach space exploration like one would a trip to the local shop tends to feel much better in that respect. I feel a lot of stories with only a handful of systems give a more accurate scaling of the vastness of space than one that goes on about crossing three galaxies as a weekend adventure.

[NecronLord]

There's lots of books. But the only TV that has the right sense of scale, I think, is Doctor Who, with 'ten million ships on fire' and multi-galaxy empires rising and falling. Of course, as it's a time travel show, sometimes it has a very small scale indeed.

[Imperial Overlord]

Dune always felt small to me. There's a handful of major planets and a single arid planet provides enough troops to conduct a civilization wide Jihad and another hellworld provides the Emperor with the elite troops that forms the backbone of his power.

Puny.

TOS Trek was never supposed to feel titanic. There was the home worlds of the Federation, the younger and older colonies, and the borders of the civilization. The Enterprise was at the boarders of a young, and on the galactic scale, small civilization with vast unexplored regions around it.

Star Wars always felt big but the speed of their FTL and the constant returning to Tattooine acted against that feeling. Other minimalist stupidity has works against it, but then you have Death Star building and other large scale works that demand titanic amounts of resources.

40K feels big. Whole systems can be doomed or conquered and barely effect the overall balance of power (matters to the locals though). The FTL is fast, but it still takes a long time to travel great distances. There are titanic bureaucracies and minor planets lost in the shuffle. Armies of countless billions. A thousand chapters of space marines spread too thin across human space.

Big.

[Zixinus]

The reason why many authors thing of planets as next door neighbours is the "space is like the sea" analogy brainbug.

If you want to show how big an interstellar civilization is, do it by slowing down the FTL a noch. Then there is the inherit bureaucracy of running it. The bigger that is, the bigger the empire. Then there is the military, inspectors, etc. ...

To show vastness, show the sheer complexity and problematic system of managing an interstellar empire/republic/whatever.



Thing is, if you can cross the galaxy in the matter of week, then various planets are pretty much next-door neighbours.

What can you help improve that is to point at the military size and various infrastructure of the planet.

Some help: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ac.html

[Bounty]

Subjectively, from a writing point of view, I think a universe's scale depends largely on an author's ability to make it feel like a living, breathing culture and not just a collection of plants with ships flitting between them.

Dune has snippets of information about a whole load of subjects and events strewn through the dialogue. You hear about planets, cities, products, battles and people in maybe one off-the-cuff remark, there are references to musical styles and philosophies, languages and foodstuffs - and filling these in is left to the readers' imagination. Star wars got this right too, initially; you couldn't help but wonder what the story behind all the weird and wonderful aliens in the cantina was, and it made the SW universe feel really big and alive. Stuff was happening and people were having their own adventures independent of the main characters.

Then, of course, Lucas and the other writers had to muck it up by giving everyone and their dog a backstory that tied into everything else, making the SW 'verse feel more cramped than a portaloo.

Maybe that happened to Dune, too; I never read the later books. Trek skirted this in TNG and than dove in head-first during ENT; the more you learn about "early history" the smaller the universe feels.

[Darth Onasi]

Of course slowing FTL down doesn't work on it's own, Star Trek FTL is usually quite slow but it's never felt like the universe was a big place to me there. Probably thanks to all the monoculture planets, human "aliens" in every star system and the fact that every single human character in the show regards Earth as home.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Dune always felt more old than big to me, even with all the "Known Universe" allusions. Stuff like the Dune Gazetteer suggests that the Empire might have only encompassed a few thousand light years, if the names Herbert used corresponded to their respective real-life stars.

I agree with Bounty concerning how a fictional setting can seem large or small depending on how its fleshed out, whether it's historically or territorially; one universe with an ancient sense of history can seem just as large as another which implies a tremendous amount of territory.

[Ziggy Stardust]

If you want a good example of a sci-fi author making his world seem larger than the scope of the main narrative, try the classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. It takes place entirely in a small area in the southwest of a post-apocalyptic United States, but the way Walter Miller, Jr. hints at the society at large is simply brilliant. If an author used a similar style set in an interplanetary story, it would really make the universe seem big.

[Junghalli]

To a certain extent the scale problem is inevitable. It's simply impossible to do justice to something that big in a few hundred pages of text or a few hours of screen time.

Let's try a thought experiment. Imagine if you had to write an SF book with the action encompassing multiple planets and one of those planets is our Earth. Your hero makes a brief stopover here, and you've got about five chapters to describe Earth and bring it alive for your readers. Assume your readers know nothing about what Earth is like, and their only impressions of it will be from what you write. Also keep in mind that you're writing a story and you're here first to advance the plot, not gawk at the scenery; your readers will have a limited patience for infodumps, especially tangenitally relevant ones.

It will probably end up feeling smaller than it actually is.

It's compounded by the fact SF writers are making these worlds up in their heads, and the human brain really has trouble wrapping itself around something as huge as a whole planet.

Trying to accurately give an impression of the vastness of space has a similar problem. Our little minds have serious problems trying to comprehend how huge something the size of a light year really is.

I agree with Admiral Valdemar on this. Anything that portrays travelling between planets/stars as something more significant than a day trip is better at making the universe seem "big".

[Batman]

Why is making the universe seem vast relevant anyway? What's wrong with Wars depicting a trip halfway across the galaxy as something akin to a weekend holiday here when that's exactly what it is, to them?
VAST is a relative term. When you have the means to get about your universe in reasonable timeframes, it's bound to not look all that huge from the POV of the people living in it. Wether you go from NY to Berlin or from Tattooine to Coruscant in a few hours doesn't make much of a difference. The universe may be physically much larger, but to the people living in it, it won't seem that way.

[General Zod]

Why is making the universe seem vast relevant anyway? What's wrong with Wars depicting a trip halfway across the galaxy as something akin to a weekend holiday here when that's exactly what it is, to them?
VAST is a relative term. When you have the means to get about your universe in reasonable timeframes, it's bound to not look all that huge from the POV of the people living in it. Wether you go from NY to Berlin or from Tattooine to Coruscant in a few hours doesn't make much of a difference. The universe may be physically much larger, but to the people living in it, it won't seem that way.

It's relevant depending on what the writer is trying to portray. A powerful galaxy-spanning empire should appear vast and endless, but when the writer has the effect of making it seem like everything's just down the street. . . .well, it doesn't quite give the same impression and tends tomake the mood not work so well.

[Batman]

Why is making the universe seem vast relevant anyway? What's wrong with Wars depicting a trip halfway across the galaxy as something akin to a weekend holiday here when that's exactly what it is, to them?
VAST is a relative term. When you have the means to get about your universe in reasonable timeframes, it's bound to not look all that huge from the POV of the people living in it. Wether you go from NY to Berlin or from Tattooine to Coruscant in a few hours doesn't make much of a difference. The universe may be physically much larger, but to the people living in it, it won't seem that way.

It's relevant depending on what the writer is trying to portray. A powerful galaxy-spanning empire should appear vast and endless, but when the writer has the effect of making it seem like everything's just down the street. . . .well, it doesn't quite give the same impression and tends to make the mood not work so well.

I beg to disagree. To a galaxy-spanning empire with Wars technology, everything IS just down the street more or less.

[Sam Or I]

An interesting side note, I felt the Fire Fly verse felt much larger than a single system. (I know they explain it with multiple stars, but still it just felt to vast.)

[Patrick Degan]

The "size" of any SF universe is entirely arbitrary. What we're actually talking about is a sense that your heroes are isolated from convenient help and therefore have to rely entirely upon their own resources to solve a problem. Star Trek TOS actually did this quite well by focusing upon the Enterprise and her crew and rarely had them in contact with the central Federation. The second pilot has them out at galaxy's edge, beyond their known territory and completely cut off from base. Same for the third season episode "The Tholian Web" when the captain's log reports that the Enterprise is "in uncharted territory" and we start seeing the ship in a region of space where unexpected and weird things are taking place and they have no contact even with the nearest starbase, wherever that may be. Doctor Who has had the TARDIS wind up in places where there is just about no contact with anybody to be had, up to and including the year 100 trillion, and where the Doctor and his companion(s) are about as far out as you can get and whoever they manage to run into is all there is.

The solar system can be made to be a "vast" area if the same sense is established: that your characters are totally alone and have no one and nothing to turn to other than themselves and the tools they've got at hand. Both 2001 and 2010 do this rather effectively, and we're not even getting any further out than Jupiter.

[Singular Intellect]

What I think would make an interesting sense of scale would be modern day Earth being confronted with a overwhelmingly superior foe in technology, numbers, industrial capacity, complexity, etc. Basically a force of civilization that crunches Earth like an insignificant insect for whatever specific goal. And humans in the know eventually finding out that this incomprehensible vast civilization that is capable of deploying millions of massive craft and trillions of troops is so pitifully small next to the actual heavy weight powers in existence that it doesnt even register on their scope.

[Darth Ruinus]

What up with you guys and you "Fast FTL makes the universe small?"

So, if I write a story were a ship went from the Milky Way galaxy to the Andromeda galaxy in an hour, because the FTL is fast that makes the distances smaller somehow? So I suppose that the Federation space is more vast than the Empire's because it takes alot more time for them to get there right?

Besides what some people have already said, such as having different cultures, tastes etc etc, a universe seems vast to me if there are ridiculous amounts of numbers.

Example:

"He's hiding in the Sophia System."

"Ok, we'll find him."

Doesn't seem vast to me.

However:

"He's hiding in the Sophia System."

"Oh that narrows it down does it? There are only 9 planets in that system, and 8 of them are inhabited, with each of them having almost a trillion people each, with thousands of cities, many many more houses and back alleys he can hide in.

Hey, lets not forget the fact that he can easily be hiding in the countrysides of each planet, or that he could have rented a small ship and be floating around somewhere in the hundreds of millions of km of space out there!

He's in the Sophia System, that narrows it down lots."

Is pretty crazy big for me. If the writer is good enough, then even finding a clue as to this guy's whereabouts can be hard and take a good portion of the story, or something like that.

And SW seems pretty vast to me:

In a sector of the galaxy Boba Fett had never heard of, a star went nova; it murdered a world and an entire sentient species. It aroused less comment than had the destruction of Alderaan, only a decade prior; the galaxy at large barely noticed the tragedy, and Fett never heard about it. In a galaxy with over four hundred billion stars, over twenty million intelligent species, such things are bound to happen.

[Murazor]

Foundation does it rather well, even if worlds such as Terminus and Trantor are particularly important for obvious reasons. In TV (SW excluded), I think that the show that better portrays the scope of an interstellar community is Babylon 5 (even if the "universe" is relatively limited in scope in comparison with shows like Stargate), but I might be biased.

[Cykeisme]

What up with you guys and you "Fast FTL makes the universe small?"

So, if I write a story were a ship went from the Milky Way galaxy to the Andromeda galaxy in an hour, because the FTL is fast that makes the distances smaller somehow? So I suppose that the Federation space is more vast than the Empire's because it takes alot more time for them to get there right?

Oh come on, are you really taking it literally and ridiculing those statements?

It's like saying that cheap air travel has made the world smaller.
You don't jump on people and tell them that the Earth still has the same diameter and surface area, do you?

[Nephtys]

Dune /is/ small. Why? Because every planet is really one modest sized city and some countryside (maybe). Kaitain? It's the Palace. Period. Caladan? The capital city and the Castle. Geidi Prime? Harko city. Arrakis? Again, one city of importance, plus some desert.

This is only made worse by the Prequels, where a force of sword-armed Atreides troops captures a single city on planet IX, thus ensuring planetary domination of a single world, which has utterly massive impact on the galactic economy, and is the single leading producer of interstellar spacecraft. All conquered in one. City.

---

Distance doesn't matter. Quantity of stuff inside does. Again, with Darth Ruinus's previous comment. Think about how Star Wars handles finding someone on Tatooine. Then think about how the US Army tries finding one guy in Afganistan. That's a big change of scale... which one is portrayed as harder?

[speaker-to-trolls]

It is easier to give a sense of the scale in a universe if travel time is longer or travel is more difficult, the reason being that the inhabitants will be more aware of it. Most people in developed nations today are probably not as aware of the scale of the world as their ancestors in, say, the sixteen hundreds were, because it's realitvely easy to get a plane to any other part of the world and to find accurate (enough) information about it before you do. Our ancestors took a long time to get to places like America or China and the information they had to go on was often an unreliable mix of facts, rumours and pure myths, the world must have seemed a lot bigger to them.

Basically I think the key to providing a sense of scale is not to include too much in one shot, if it's too easy to encapsulate the entire Galactic Empire then people won't be able to get it into their heads how enormous it is. If you show just the important bits with relation to the story and allude to the fact that there are countless other places just as complicated as these then you're closer to giving a true sense of scale.

[Adrian Laguna]

Dune /is/ small. Why? Because every planet is really one modest sized city and some countryside (maybe). Kaitain? It's the Palace. Period. Caladan? The capital city and the Castle. Geidi Prime? Harko city. Arrakis? Again, one city of importance, plus some desert.

There's also the fact that an army of 300,000 men is considered mindbogglingly huge. In reality, an area the size of Spain can easily swallow up that many men, just ask Napoleon.

[Darth Ruinus]

Oh come on, are you really taking it literally and ridiculing those statements?

It's like saying that cheap air travel has made the world smaller.
You don't jump on people and tell them that the Earth still has the same diameter and surface area, do you?

No I dont. I am having trouble comprehending the idea that fast FTL makes a universe seem less "vast."

"Star Wars always felt big but the speed of their FTL and the constant returning to Tattooine acted against that feeling.

If you want to show how big an interstellar civilization is, do it by slowing down the FTL a noch.

It is easier to give a sense of the scale in a universe if travel time is longer or travel is more difficult

Why does slow FTL make the universe more "vast"?

Wouldnt fast FTL do the same? A civilization with extremely fast FTL (like SW) would have much MORE knowledge of FTL travel, probably have better reactors or energy sources to do so, which implies much MORE history and knowledge, as someone had to discover new techniques to make the FTL faster, new energy sources, applications to that. That in turn implies a higher knowledge of science, which had to have been developed along a long period of time (Unless in that universe people develop FTL travel willy-nilly)

What makes a universe vast is the stuff that is in it, or the amounts of stuff that is alluded to, not the speed of their ships. It also helps if planets are depicted like real worlds. Where a planet in a system can have its own versions of "Little Tokyo" or whatever, where different races hang out, and then even smaller areas where different cultures within those races hang out, or different language groups, religious groups whatever.

It really sucks ass when they say:

"Oh you are a P'hlaz right? That must mean you speak P'hlazi and beleive in H'gar right?"

Its always better and implies more scale when its

"Oh you are a P'hlaz right? That must mean you speak P'hlazi and beleive in H'gar right?"

"No dumbass, there are several thousand cultures in the P'hlaz race, and probably even more languages and religions. We aren't monoculture.

Sorry for all the quote boxes.

[Imperial Overlord]

[

No I dont. I am having trouble comprehending the idea that fast FTL makes a universe seem less "vast."

It's simple. If one can easily travel from one side of the galaxy to another, all planets are close by. From the galactic rim, it is easy to reach the galactic core so sense of scale is different. That the civilization spans the whole galaxy isn't really relevant for anything. I'm just hopping from one planet to another.

Imagine traveling across North America by car and airplane. Now imagine traveling it only on foot. By plane I can go from Vancouver to L.A. in a day, napping for most of the trip. I really don't deal with anything between point A and point B. By foot its a whole different ball of wax.

[Darth Ruinus]

It's simple. If one can easily travel from one side of the galaxy to another, all planets are close by. From the galactic rim, it is easy to reach the galactic core so sense of scale is different. That the civilization spans the whole galaxy isn't really relevant for anything. I'm just hopping from one planet to another.

And?

So what if you can just "hop from one planet to another"? A civilization with super fast FTL would probably have lots and lots of settled planets. You can go to the other billions or trillions of planets around the galaxy, or all the space habitats, or asteroid habitats. Or you can hop on over to the next galaxy and see their billions of planets with their sextillions of people. Or study all the different languages or cultures that the galaxy has. The fast FTL would only make the world bigger, in that it connects thousands or millions or billions or whatever number of cultures and allows someone to see just how truly VAST their own little galaxy is.

Imagine traveling across North America by car and airplane. Now imagine traveling it only on foot. By plane I can go from Vancouver to L.A. in a day, napping for most of the trip. I really don't deal with anything between point A and point B. By foot its a whole different ball of wax.

Except that you can do that if you were in your car. You could stop the car and go into that little restaurant in Los Angeles in downtown, just like if you were walking there. Except you get there faster.

And the plane analogy seems to fail, since in SW (Im using SW as an example, because I know more about it than other sci-fis) you can literally look at the fucking galaxy map, and then you have to rack your mind with:

Goddamn, WHERE DO I GO? I am just looking for some good food, and there are almost a million restaurants on this one planet ALONE. But there are also more on the next one, and the next one, and the next one. There are millions of these restaurants across all the billions of worlds, how do I chose which one to go to?

The speed of FTL is irrelevant (except that maybe fast FTL might open up more worlds, people, cultures, etc etc to look at) what matters is the amounts of stuff in there.