Balancing Science and Narrative in The Sojourn

Hello Patrons!

Gabriel here!

A little bit of a change this time - instead of being written by Dan, today’s behind-the-scenes post will be written by me, The Sojourn’s Science Advisor and Associate Producer, and I’ll be going a little into the process behind my job and how it applies to Sojourn.

While Sojourn was never intended to be a hard sci-fi work, Dan has always believed that Science Fiction is at its best when it illustrates to a reasonable degree of accuracy the world upon which we live, something he went into during our first Cast Adrift episode (1:26 onwards), and while we do take liberties in The Sojourn, we generally strive to err on the side of believability.

The way our process normally goes begins with the discussion of possibilities and spinning ideas freely, first thinking of what is narratively adequate or necessary to the story we want to tell and its themes. After that, we consider what that element might entail on our world - does it conform to established worldbuilding? What are the ramifications for its inclusion? This is a highly iterative process, where we will often change and tweak the idea and work out in what ways it would (or not) fit within the fictional world and conform to real science. This is the longest part of the process, but the one I personally find the most rewarding. The moment an idea just “clicks” and everything then falls into place is just exhilarating!

As to better illustrate how this process goes, we can use an actual example from Volume 1, specifically Inclement Weather. We knew from the start what Inclement Weather was going to be about; quoting directly from our early internal development docs: “Cass leads a mission to recover a crucial gate component from a wrecked ship while she struggles with the consequences of her refusal of the Adjutant position.” To be able to tell this story then, we needed a wrecked ship, and one with the Drift Gate component at that. From a narrative standpoint, we also wanted the environment to be the story’s main antagonist, the one driving the tension. With all this in mind, we then set about to work.

We knew that we’d need the ship to be a Gatehauler - big ships capable of carrying the disassembled parts of a Drift Gate between systems - and we knew that something would have to have happened to it. Dan suggested that during transit into CDC-41-G, the Gatehauler might have collided catastrophically with the Icesteroid* field but, from a narrative standpoint, this wouldn’t allow for a good ticking-clock story element and, from a scientific (or really, common sense) standpoint, it’s unlikely that a ship would be able to survive a transrelativistic impact with another object.
*(Not a real term, but one too amusing not to use.)

We did like this idea though, so we set about iterating it - the next step. What if instead of colliding with the Icesteroid field, the ship had already decelerated from transrelativistic speeds, but done so right in front of a gas giant’s rings? That would definitely work, and what’s more - if the vectors were just right, the Gatehauler could have been caught into a highly elliptical orbit around said gas giant that had it cross the rings at least once every complete orbit - we had our Ticking-Clock now.

Great, but what are the implications of this? For one, the Gatehauler must be in terrible shape after plummeting through the rings at least a couple of times, so most of the crew is certainly dead. This can present a problem though - we know we want our main characters to survive, so there must be some way for them to protect themselves from the onslaught, but if there is such a way, why didn’t the crew of the Gatehauler use it? We spent quite a bit of time thinking about this potential thorn, but eventually Dan put forward the idea that maybe this ship had reinforced holds for the cargo our protagonists could hide in? And from there, the “click” moment happened.

We already had it in our established lore (at least internally) that Gatehaulers were repurposed Ribeirite bulk haulers, and given the properties of Drift, it made sense to carry it in heavily insulated holds to prevent any potential electric currents playing havoc with it. The holds are now largely unused, so the protagonists could make a run for it and hide there. Good, then why didn’t the Gatehauler crew think of doing the same? Simple, they never had the time before meeting their unfortunate fates.

Despite being relatively brief, I hope this has helped you get a sense of what our process normally goes like, even if just at a surface level. There’s lots more we could potentially delve into in the future, but for now, Fair Winds!

- Gab