The Sojourn

Creating the Tantalus Cluster

Added 2020-10-22 19:00:03 +0000 UTC

Hello Patrons!

The original idea for the Tantalus Cluster came to me long before the collection of ideas now called The Sojourn ever actually had that name. It was a thought I'd had whilst looking at an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC-1300, a barred-spiral galaxy about 64,000,000 LY away from our own.

I was looking at some of the tiny flecks of light beyond the trailing ends of the galaxy's arms, and couldn't help but think how unfortunate it would be for a spacefaring civilisation to develop on one of those isolated dots. Technically a part of the Galaxy but surrounded on all sides by the intergalactic void.

I've always liked the idea of using unique astronomical environments like this as the basis for a setting. I feel that the mainstream science fiction genre does surprisingly little to take advantage of astronomy when designing obstacles and locations.

While plenty of asteroid belts and nebulae can be seen in basically any SF series, more unusual and exciting phenomena like Pulsars, Magnetars and unique galactic structures are rarely taken advantage of. I've endeavoured to address that in The Sojourn and you'll see more evidence of this moving forward.

The small and isolated nature of Tantalus also allowed me to try and fit as much diversity and range into a single star cluster as possible. The galaxy-spanning settings of Star Wars, Star Trek and Stargate often tend to leave individual systems and planets feeling not nearly as vast and interesting as they truly are.

It's my hope that Tantalus feels like a real place and that our audience can share the sense of displacement from home that the members of the Avalon Expedition are feeling.