Starships

A little bit about the starships in the Brandon Sparks Universe – Joshua Fuld

When speaking with Star Wars fans, I sometimes get the impression that they are more passionate about the Millennium Falcon than they are the human characters. The same can be said about how beloved the Enterprise is by Star Trek fans. There is something about a starship that draws you to it. It has a certain indefinable magnetism that makes you want to get behind the controls and go as fast as you can!

From the outset, starships and their specific abilities were created to fit a situation in the story. For example, General Zarafat’s entire armada was designed to hunt down other starships and therefore possesses the qualities necessary to do so; speed and excellent tracking abilities. This comes in handy as he spends a large portion of the Brandon Sparks and the Hidden Sun pursuing Brandon. Another important decision was to give very simple and straightforward descriptions of the starships so that they would be easily recognizable. If we continue with the example of the Ptevos starships, their half-moon shape was an easy way to convey a specific image to the reader in a few words.

While there are no starships in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I had been reading the novels at the time I was first dreaming of Brandon and his journey across the universe. Frodo’s amazing adventure played an important role in inspiring me to write the series. I learned a lot from those books but the small thing that always bothered me about the novels are the similar names Tolkien gives to different character. I confess, when it comes to reading books my attention span is not the best, and characters that have very similar names to one another tends to pull me out of the story. With this in mind, I decided to differentiate character names, weapons and especially starships from one another. Not only starship names but their abilities as well. I wanted each species to have their own unique starship technology. If Brandon was in a firefight with the Skelks, the reader would know it, and if the Ptevos jumped in, the reader would know that as well and be able to follow along without having to stop and go back a few pages to figure out who is fighting who.