Background on how I am building my Sci-fi universe
If you have read some of my articles, you might know that I have been working during the last 2 decades intermittently on my own sci-fi Universe.
You might even know that I am currently working on a trilogy of movie scripts when I am some time available.
There are two main philosophies when writing a long term saga: the architect and the gardener.
GRRM, the author of A Song of ice and Fire (commonly known as Game of Throne), describes himself as a gardener.
He planted a "seed", which consists of his characters, his universe, his rules and his background information and slowly lets his story come to life almost on it's own.
This is a fantastic approach because it let's each character live their own lives. It also allows the author to refine his future ending as new details are built.
Sadly, it also means that it is hard to ensure that the ending truly fits with the story because a new development might steer the story in an unexpected direction which wasn't seeded properly.
I, myself, always wanted to be an architect. I remember a conversion with other aspiring authors in college in which I described my style as fiction realism (before being blasted because the term already existed to mean something else).
My vision came from Star Wars and Star Trek where in every story, new planets and new technologies were invented to fit with the current story.
In "A New Hope", we don't hear about Hoth, Cloud City, Dagobah or any of the other new locations from other movies. We don't get any sense that they exist and every new story brings possibly dozens of new worlds.
In Star Trek, almost every week bring a new planet of the week we will not hear about in the future.
To constrast, In Lord of the Rings on the other hand, we have a map from the first book giving us an idea of what is in the world even if we do not have the complete details. We at least have a boundary, an general overview.
That's how I built my universe. The list of inhabited planets has been decided over 15 years ago as well as the major pivot points, including the story line for the 3rd movie of my trilogy.
Everything else was build with that ending in mind, including pieces of dialogue planned in the romantic comedy prequel set in the 1990s, or 900 years before the end of the trilogy.
I, clearly, am an architect when it comes to my universe. I know the ending, I know the layout and I only need to fill in the details.
In fact, I plan to soon release the list of the colonies along with a summary description, if only to prove my point.
Sadly, this means less flexibility. I have a few ideas I have to reject because they do not fit the framework, but it doesn't prevent me from creating future stories in a different universe.