Thank you for reading Intergalactic.

This is the end of the story, but not yet of the book. I will be publishing a number of chapters as an appendix that are more a reference or in-depth description in an encyclopedic format rather than a narration.

Since the last part of the story was written during a Royal Road Writeathon, they did not get as much polish and editing as previous chapters, and it is likely that I will revisit them for editing later on.

What is Unmoored and why?

The main concept behind the Unmoored Universe, of which this story is the first part, is the idea to explore a science fiction setting in which humanity is not the dominant species of the universe, the ones with the coolest toys and best diplomacy and strongest military. The empire that dominates all, with aliens an afterthought or a collection of human actors in cheap costumes.

Instead, I wanted to explore a possible universe - still through the eyes of humans - in which the opposite is true. Humans are a fringe species. Powerless, technologically underdeveloped, utterly unimportant to galactic politics and largely ignored by other aliens. This idea creates a challenge: Even if aliens have technology more advanced than ours, we would put efforts into researching and replicating it. The history of Earth shows that technological advances are rarely contained. If it works and provides an advantage, sooner or later others will copy it.

So the universe had to have an intrinsic quality that humans are lacking. That was the seed out of which the concept of higher-dimensional aliens grew. Once the idea that other beings might experience more dimensions than we do arose, the one that there are multiple layers of that, i.e. some aliens experiencing yet more dimensions than others, is a natural follow-up.

This first story allows me to not go into too much technical details. From the perspective of humans, the exact number of additional dimensions is not as important as it would be between those aliens experiencing them and those that don't. So I could introduce the concept gradually. I intend to explore it more in future stories.

The idea of intrinsically superior aliens also logically leads to piracy. If we cannot copy this technology, but we really, really want to have it, the two options are trading or stealing. And if you know anything about human nature, you'll realize that very obviously, humans would decide for... both of those. So there is an element of trade and an element of piracy. While this story focusses more on the piracy, I hope that I have given enough hints that trade is also happening. Just elsewhere, with different people.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

There is one other aspect of the story that was important to me: Consistency and believability. Characters' actions should be reasonable and understandeable, and mistakes should in most cases be the consequences of incomplete or false information, personal ambition getting the better of someone, or decisions made under pressure. I've tried hard to not make my characters do things that make no sense "so that the rest of the plot can happen" (hats off to Critical Drinker).

And in a similar vein, I have avoided plot armour as best as I could. Characters can die when they get into deadly situations. And when barely surviving something, characters don't change their shirt, brush off the dirt and go again. Instead, serious and life-changing injuries happen. This is something else that I miss from most stories, especially movies. There is so little nuance in consequences. Either a character is killed off and disappears from the story, or two scenes after being beaten to a bloody pulp they're up and running again. For me, plot armour not just means surviving unsurvivable situations, but also coming out of everything with only superficial injuries that have no impact on the rest of the story.

This is an active exploration for me, which is one reason most of these happened either before the story off-screen (Red's eye, Grubs' arm) or near the end of the story. The other reason is that the story naturally lend itself towards more physical danger near the end. But these injuries and deaths have a considerable impact on the story. Valarie's experience provides the breaking point for the crew of the Rusty Bolt. The numerous deaths on Binary Bloom contribute to Nico's moral fall. Yezz's death is not just the earliest but also the one with the most immediate consequences. It takes one of the most important pieces of information - the full nature of the hypercore prototype - out of reach of all the main characters. She dies with a secret and much could have been avoided had she had an opportunity to pass that secret on.

And finally, I wanted to create a story that is part of a larger universe. I hope that it becomes clear that there are more stories in this universe, both before and after Intergalactic. Not in the sense of "wait for the sequel", but in the sense of a living, breathing, ongoing world where not everything revolves around the events of this particular story, and the world doesn't end when the story ends but will go on, with different events, some tied to those told in this story and some not.

And really, really finally, I hope that the story has entertained you, that maybe here and there it has given you an interesting thought, and you enjoyed reading it.

Whether you did or didn't, I would be thrilled to read your reviews or comments.

-- Tom