One of the benefits of writing science fiction, as with all speculative fiction, is the freedom you have to break rules of convention that would confine you, if you were writing of the real world. One of the drawbacks is that there are some rules that can only be broken after they’ve been thoroughly throught through. And there are some rules you just have to adhere to.
In The Ship of the Unforgotten, I decided early on that 500 years of travel time for the Rose Dawn was a rough estimate at best, and that I’d likely have to rewrite that piece after doing some research on how long interstellar flights would actually take using a variety of propulsion systems. In light of how the story has gone so far, I’m thinking 500 years might be too short, but I don’t want to get it up too much longer. If I do, it’ll risk a collision with the time frame of the farther-future sci-fi stories I’ve written (and am working on.) This is intended as a sort of prelude or to them.
The other stories:
The nice thing is that while there is a risk of timeline collision, there is a lot of play, as by the time those other stories take place, Earth has long since been lost and become depopulated.
So now I suppose I need to figure out just exactly where the UTS Rose Dawn and the UTS Eden River were headed, how long it would have taken each of them, and then I’ll be able to adjust bits of the story as need be.