Hello, and welcome to the Book of the Wonders of the Galaxy. This is the start of what I’m planning to be a year-long writing project inspired by The Travels of Marco Polo, except in space, in a fictional future when humanity has begun to expand to the stars. You can expect this series of writings to read a bit like a travel guide, and a bit like a textbook – heavy on descriptions and explanations, and light on action. Hopefully the mention of “textbook” doesn’t put you off, as my goals are firstly to spark the reader’s imagination, secondly to entertain, and thirdly to make some commentary about human nature and cultures. I intend for this to be science fiction, and I aim to abide by the laws of physics, as I believe that the universe is plenty wonderful without having to resort to fantasy and miracles.
If all goes to plan, I will be posting chapters on a weekly schedule throughout 2016. I hope you are as entertained by my upcoming writings as I already am in doing my preliminary preparations for this project. For the sake of clarity, the fiction begins in the next post, the “Introduction”, and any posts that are not meant to be a part of the story will be clearly identified as such.
– Simon Chun Kwan Chui.
The above was written before I began writing the Book of the Wonders of the Galaxy. Now that the book is complete, I find myself better able to articulate what I was hoping to do and why I did it.
First of all, I believe in learning. New knowledge will let us do things we currently can’t do. New knowledge will let us solve problems we currently can’t solve. If we want our tomorrows to be better than our yesterdays, then we must spend today learning. Nothing gets better without change, and nothing changes without some discovery or invention. New ideas unlock new possibilities, they allow us to think differently and do differently, and in that difference there is the chance to make the world better. So, you’ll find that I try to put a lot of ideas into the things I write, because I want to introduce you to a lot of ideas. I try to make these ideas interesting, captivating, I try to spark your imagination, because I want you to want to learn more. I want to persuade you to pursue new ideas, and when you do I want you to discover delightful and wonderful things. I want everyone to fall in love with learning, so that we all actively go seek new knowledge. Then I want us to use the things we learn to make the world better. I want you to help me build that better tomorrow.
Second, I think everything is connected. I don’t mean this in a purely philosophical or metaphysical way – although ideas are certainly interconnected – but that everything physically exists in the same universe, and they all affect each other. From the big bang until the end of time, the whole of the universe is one continuous pattern – it is enormous and complex beyond our ability to perceive, yet we are all bound by the same physics, made of the same chemistry, move in the same space-time. In our quest to learn and to understand, we often pull things apart to examine each part separately. This reduces complexity by isolating each piece of the puzzle, and the separate pieces are indeed easier to understand. The problem with this is that knowing each piece in isolation doesn’t necessarily mean you understand what the thing does once you put it back together. School is often like this, from elementary school all the way to university, you’ll often find classes each teaching one subject, one piece of the puzzle, but it is rare to find anyone who’ll speak across different topics. Sometimes people never figure out how those pieces fit together, so they never find out the true value of the things they have learned. In this book, I want to show you some of the ways the pieces fit together. As you read each chapter of this book, you’ll often see descriptions flow seamlessly between climate, geography, biology, culture, economics, technology, and other topics. I want people to get used to seeing everything as interconnected, because in truth they are. Things make more sense when you see how everything affects everything else.
Third, to get the most out of this book, you’ll have to read a lot of other things. I think you should look up every unfamiliar word and concept, especially the names of the planets. I’ve already said that I want people to learn, and I really do mean learning a lot more than just what I’ve put in this book. I want you not to be satisfied only with what you find here, and I want you to seek further knowledge for yourself. I’ve tried to make my stories wondrous, but the truth is that the world is far more wondrous than any story I can write, and I hope to tempt you into seeking it out. There are things in this book that aren’t fully explained, even though they are very interesting, so you’ll have to make the effort to find out about them for yourself. There is great beauty in the world, waiting for you to find it, and it’s not only in the places you expect, so look everywhere. Have I said that I want you to fall in love with learning? Love is a bit like an addiction – I want you to feel compelled to learn, and I want you to feel a strange emptiness if you spend too long without learning something new. The more you learn, the more you’ll find that new possibilities open up for you, the more you find your capabilities expand and proliferate.
There. That’s what I want. It’s always a risk to want, because once you want something, you can fail. I could have said, “I’m just writing a book with no particular purpose”, and if I had said that, then I would have already succeeded. Small ambitions, easy victories. But, no, I want much more than that. I want people to want to learn, because it is only in new ideas and new knowledge that there is the opportunity to make the world better than it is now.
– Simon Chun Kwan Chui
Book of the Wonders of the Galaxy 