17 planets
the saga
On this page you will find the "backstage" of the Saga of the 17 Planets which will be made up of five books.
For all three topics of this section the intention is to elaborate further over three separate pages soon. Do keep an eye on my site, there is more to come.
influences
What you see in the background are some of the books, films and Anime that have inspired me, directly or indirectly, to create my book.
To mention just a few, among the fundamental books for my education as well as milestones of science fiction are the Asimov’s Foundation Cycle, Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury, Herbert’s Dune. Then there are movies and television series taken from books that have thrilled me, like Blade Runner taken from Do android dream of electric Sheeps? by Dick, Altered Carbon by Morgan and Divergent by Roth.
Other important films were Star Wars, Contact, MCU and (as a basis to create the protagonist, for example) Lara Croft, Terminator, Lucy.
Anime that I followed in adolescence and stuck with me are Lady Oscar, Captain Harlock, Goldrake.
Before starting to write my book, I did a lot of research on most of the topics. My research was focused on technologies that may be available in the future (I’ll talk about this in the next section); the anthropological evolution of human beings and language; astrophysics of extra-solar planets. I also carefully chose most of the names of places, characters and other names you will see in the book.
To give you an example, it is genetically credible that somatic traits and skin colour will merge more and more until they become uniform, despite the fact that latent characters that occur randomly may remain (for example albinism).
As for physics and astrophysics, I have based myself on the principles known so far with a pinch of poetic license. For example, I made an assumption about dark matter as a set of micro black holes that, in large quantities, can distort space and time and it can be used for transportation from one point of the universe to another. It’s a long shot, but nobody really knows what it is yet.
Research work
As I mentioned in the previous section, I have also done a lot of research in the field of new technologies.
A clear example is the collection of energy. What I describe is a civilization of grade K II, according to the Kardashev scale of civilization. This means that the energy the community of humans who inhabit the 17 Planets uses comes from exploiting the energy of a star. To do this they make use of an evolution of the Dyson project that involves building a sphere all around a star in order to absorb its energy.
Another device around which the story almost entirely revolves is the Ajna which is “[…]a set of biotechnological filaments that branched out inside the brain and originated from a metal triangle called Mother of the Ajna, barely visible between the eyebrows. Thanks to the Ajna, they had eliminated any type of bacterial or viral disease and any kind of cancer, memory degeneration, mental illness and more.” In this case, I didn’t need to do much research because I learned about the brain in depth at university for my Psychology degree.