u/nomuse22

A bimodal globular cluster; Pop II stars, enough metallicity to support two-plus generations of colonies moving out from the first worlds settled, but marked with a Pleiades-like asterism of hot blue stars.

And that's where it stops being normal. Among those young stars is an exotic star, possibly a quark star (that Astronomy 101 class I took was long ago) that is doing peculiar things. I like the H.G. Wells of breaking one big thing then trying to play it straight after, and this is a big one.

This thing, Oberon, is causing clumping of dark matter (which it shouldn't ever do, at least from what little physics I know). What in-story are called solitons are forming, mutter mutter Robert Penrose, Twistor theory, which rip space. (And either hauling in interstellar gases and keeping the cluster from aging normally, or maybe fresh hydrogen is magically popping in around this stellar... thing.)

And let's pass over the mechanisms but basically mini transient wormholes are forming (when enough solitons clump in the same spot), making most of the impossible things of a space opera setting possible. Panspermia, and let's please ignore the math on that and just accept enough spores get through the holes from one supportive biome to another that you can have the forests of British Columbia on hundreds of planets. And they clump along a dendritic network spreading from the original hole, making space lanes you can FTL down if you have whatever combination of huge amounts of electrical power and a little bit of expensive exotic matter in your engine room.

So that's the ridiculously Earth-like planets, and the handy FTL which also passes down plot-convenient highways with equally convenient choke-points.

And, thematically, it means potentially dangerous things are happening to space time, coming out of this eldritch dark star thing. Plus a nice group of stars in the night sky everyone can look at and name the setting after.

I ain't writing hard SF. Modern space opera, Hornblower-esque with an early career (merchant) navy officer doing their thing out on the frontier, mining towns and pirates and all. But my protagonist is Engineer track, with "power gang" experience ship-board, and a dangerous talent of weaponizing the physics of the setting, so I do have to nail some of it down... at least well enough to set up the inevitable explosions.

They came for bullet points and I said nothing. But now they have come for Not/but and it may be too late to resist.

Seriously, "We choose to go to the Moon," "...ask not what your country can do for you," (yeah, JFK had a lot of them), "This is the way the world ends...?"

Anyhow, I'm working on a book description and that construction would be perfect to set up the conflict for the prospective reader. Am I that afraid someone will apply the latest litmus test and reject the book?

We know that maps in the front or back comes and goes as a trend for fantasy, and to a lesser extent, SF. I've seen SF that had not just the star/hypergate map, but detail map of a planetary setting.

I think I've seen a thriller or two with a map of some specific (and usually fictional) locale, like the caves of Death Island or something. And perhaps something in a Tom Clancy style techno-thriller where the focus is exactly where the radiosondes are and what's the patrol area of Seventh Fleet.

But these days, even with the access to information so improved, I feel the understanding of geography may be less. Not just for exotic locations, but for things like where the big tourist stops in Paris are relative to each other, or what it means when your Manhattan-based characters enter the Holland Tunnel.

Is this a thing worth thinking about when prepping the upload for a mystery, adventure, urban fantasy, near-past setting (San Francisco in the 60s), etc? Just a silly side thought or something that might look cool for the right book?

I'm compiling a novel. Standard chapters and scenes (with divider). But I have some inline text -- think apocalypse logs -- in two chapters. I only want to suppress paragraph indent at the start of the chapter, not through each italic section.

What's the simplest way to do this?