Case I of First Contact The first door is detection. We hear them, or we find something they left. Leakage. Beacons. Artifacts. And the scientific limits that decide whether any […]
Case I of First Contact
Category: Science of Stories
First Contact Revisited
First Contact Revisited The five ways a story can meet the other. A map I still use. Science of stories: Fermi, Kardashev, Drake, and the light-speed bubble that always leaves […]
A Path to the Stars
A chain of fifty permanent stations spaced a few light-weeks apart would turn the 4.25-light-year trip to Proxima Centauri into a maintained corridor rather than a centuries-long one-shot voyage. Short-haul […]
Hard Tech & Science – Lunar Night Survival
Wednesday: Hard Tech & Science – Lunar Night Survival The long lunar night is no gentle twilight. When the Sun drops below the horizon at Conrad Station, it stays gone […]
Frontier Foundations – The First Days at Conrad Station
The story reveals how the builders built the original habitats and why they still creak today. When people think of Conrad Station today, they picture a bustling frontier outpost with […]
57 Years Ago: Apollo 11 and the First Footsteps on Another World
On July 20, 1969, humanity took its first steps onto another world. Neil Armstrong’s bootprint in the lunar regolith marked not just a technological triumph, but the moment our species […]
Conrad Station — The Hub of Fabulae Lunae
In the harsh lunar dawn of Year +17, Conrad Station was little more than a stubborn cluster of metal cylinders clinging to the gray regolith. Built from a handful of […]
Building Alien Worlds with Scientific Rigor: Introducing the DKF Framework for Science Fiction
Welcome, sci-fi enthusiasts and aspiring world-builders! As a hard science fiction writer, I’ve always believed that the heart of an interesting story lies in blending imagination with scientific precision. When […]
Case I of First Contact, an Article by Torn MacAlester
This article is the first follow-on to a series on first contact. This is part of a series of articles about science fiction world building: From the moment […]
Worldbuilding for Science Fiction 8 Apr 2025
In the sub-genre of hard science fiction, an attempt is made to ensure that the science in the story is somewhat correct. One issue that I have been following is […]