A quick hello for any visiting reader from David Worton, also signing by my initials as DMFW and the author of this corner of the internet.
Welcome to the Bubble, my first home "world" on World Anvil. World Anvil is a service providing editing tools to help writers, artists & role playing game masters assemble and present imaginative content in a wiki style. You can find much more about the theory and practice on their home page, so I won't repeat that here.
My primary interest in World Anvil, is simply as a means to draw together some existing stories and art work in a way which makes it easier and more interesting to showcase without requiring the technical effort associated with hand rolling my own dedicated web site. Over the years I've written several stories in the science fiction and fantasy genres, some in related sets and others stand alone, and I've also used digital art software to make a number of associated (and other) illustrations. I had a fair amount of content in various media, from word documents to excel spreadsheets and image files, sitting around in cloud storage waiting for a way to open it up to other readers. Some of the written material is quite old and was posted on a very early web site in the form of downloadable office files which I later converted to PDF format. Some art has been published under my renderosity account. What I've been looking for, is a nice way to pull them together in a more modern and better linked framework. When I learned about World Anvil, I thought it might work very well for me. Tools such as the timeline feature, are a great way to represent a spreadsheet "future history" and link it in to stories and articles in a common universe, allowing background information to be easily reviewed.
The "world" in which you now find yourself is only one part of the content I've posted on World Anvil. It started as an experimental trial to see the strengths and weaknesses of the platform towards the end of 2019. During the lockdowns that followed, it was an ideal background project for me to tinker with and I've had a lot of fun building it.
The universe of the Bubble is a shared background history for eight stories and a small selection of art works. The earliest images which pre-date the creation of this site were created with some landscape rendering software called Terragen. I have used a more modern version of Terragen to add to this material and also made some of the newer artwork with software called Vue (in which the cover image for the site was created), Poser and also DAZ Studio (just for the odd one or two). A very nice, relatively lightweight little piece of software called Wonderdraft has been used to create maps.
About the Stories
The Bubble has a relatively traditional science fiction flavour, where much of my other content is a little more fantasy themed, although I like to write in the borderlands between these domains and it suits me to blur the distinctions. Most of the writers I devoured when I was growing up had their own future histories, the timeline being, I'd contend, as important in science fiction as the map is to the fantasy genre. I'm thinking of authors like Robert Heinlein with perhaps one of the earliest future histories, Poul Anderson and his chronology of Technic Civilization, Larry Niven with the tales of Known Space, Bob Shaw with Other Days Other Eyes, Ray Bradbury with the Martian Chronicles and many others. The Bubble owes something to all of these authors and is my humble attempt to do something similar.
These stories were mainly written in the late 1980s and 1990s. The first two (in timeline order) are adoptions. I didn't originally envisage them as belonging to this series but I've decided to include them with the others because they fit quite well with only some relatively minor changes to accommodate them. The remaining six, for some strange reason have been composed backwards in reverse chronological order, with
The Museum (set latest) being finished in 1989 whilst
Nine Meditations In The Temple Of Chromatic Enlightenment (set earliest), despite sitting around in deep freeze for a very long time has only just been completed, the impetus to get on and finish it coming from the creation of this site. To be honest, if it hadn't been for lockdown I don't think it would have ever been completed.
You can read the stories in any order, either exploring through the main timeline of
Galactic History, or by diving straight in to the Stories category in the left hand Codex navigation panel. At the top of each story I show the date when it was first "completed" and the word count to give you an idea of how long it might take to read. None of the stories have been significantly changed since I first wrote them but I have reserved the right to make minor editing changes here and there, sometimes to better align them with new art work, sometimes to improve their fit into the greater history that has been put together later and occasionally but more rarely to fine tune the odd sentence. In all essential details, however, they are a creation fundamentally completed on the date shown at the head of each story.
Each one also has its own dedicated timeline, which shows both the wider events impacting on the narrative, and some of the more narrowly focused incidents that are of significance only in the context of the story itself. You will find this at the bottom of the story page, where it is hidden until you click on the "timeline" button.
Most of the stories are fairly short but I should warn any reader that the Nine Meditations is a much longer piece than the others.
About the Art
The art used here is a mixture of some relatively simple and old work dating back to the early 2000's and my first exposure to Terragen plus a number of much newer pieces created specially for this site. I also decided to use Terragen for most of these and it's been an interesting learning curve picking that software back up again, dusting off my old knowledge and trying to get better by fighting with the current release. I've become more used to working with Vue in the interim. Terragen never was such a user friendly beast and it hasn't got any less intimidating whilst I've been away ignoring it, but it is fun to play with and in more skilled hands it can produce stunning results. Character portraits are mostly created using the fascinating and addictive Art Breeder web site which is a very recent discovery for me, harnessing AI to do a lot of the work of generating facial (and other) images.
Which came first, the words or the pictures? In the universe of the Bubble the words almost always came first with only one trivial exception (Theramiston II). Apart from that one, even the earliest art work shown here was illustrating places that already had a slot in an existing timeline or story. More recently, I've not always followed that pattern and I've let pictures come first and maybe inspire at least fragments of writing. You'll see this on my second world (linked at the bottom of this page).
What Next?
Now that I have a nice place for hosting the Bubble universe, I may be inspired to add more material for it, either in the form of new stories or new art work. Of greater interest to me in the short term is to develop a second more loosely connected and more fantastical universe as a new "world". It will contain more images (mainly made with Vue) and less written content, although there is still a fair bit of that, and it showcases areas where I have been mostly working creatively over recent years, before I was diverted into revisiting and tidying up the older Bubble content here.
My second world is called
the Discontinuum and you can access it through the link in this sentence.
Then there just remains the question of what to do with other stand alone stories I didn't transfer into either world and art that doesn't fit anywhere else. World Anvil may not be the most suitable way to publish that content. I will have to think...
If anyone has half as much fun exploring the Bubble as I've had putting together its history then I'll be more than happy. Read what you want, enjoy what you like and feel free to pay a visit to
the Discontinuum to read more of my stories and see more of my art.
DMFW (Updated with Discontinuum links on 15/12/2022)
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