In this longer blog post, I hope to take you through a journey of thinking about alternative applications for the speculative technologies in your sci-fi worldbuilding. There are already a lot of articles out there on the internet about the different types of faster-than-light (FTL) drive tech that have been used throughout science fiction. It’s a deep well you can draw from. There’s your warp drives, wormholes, hyperdrives, jump drives, even infinite improbability drives! And all of these have different flavours—such as the Federation’s dilithium-based matter/antimatter engine vs the Romulan singularity-based one… or others such as jump-gates, stargates, slipstream, and frame-shift drives—the list goes on and on.

When I first started my writing journey two years ago (or ten years ago, depending on how you count it), I thought it was a simple case of coming up with a vague plot and writing down the vivid scenes that popped into my head. Of course, after I actually made a start I realised there was a lot more to it than that, especially when it came to worldbuilding. So here’s five things I’ve learned along the way: