I interviewed with the Qwillery for the release of Interstellar Mage, the first book in the Starship’s Mage spinoff trilogy Red Falcon. The Qwillery team blogs about a wide swath of speculative fiction books, and had some questions for me about my research process and more.
The Qwillery: What sort of research did you do for Interstellar Mage?
Glynn: A lot of my technical and scientific research for this setting is already done and written up in assorted setting bible documents.
One of the things I had to codify for Interstellar Mage though was freight rates and scale. Given the scale of interstellar shipping in the setting—starship captains rarely deal in less than a standard 10,000 ton shipping container—the numbers get odd when you break them down to a per-ton level.
For the cost of getting about ten tons of cargo from China to the United States today, you could get a 10,000 ton shipping container from Earth orbit to orbit of the Alpha Centauri colonies.
Of course, getting it into and down from orbit is an entirely different story!