What is Titan Garden?
Titan Garden is a story about a universe. Started as a way to write little vignettes for fun, Titan Garden is an attempt to build a world by filling it with people and connecting all those people together. Set in the year 2389, the world of Titan Garden is one where technology is boxy and faceted, built on switches and dials and cables and buttons. Faster-than-light travel doesn't exist; like the seas of old, the vastness of space requires time and care to traverse, and dangers await between one port and the next. People come in many forms, and hail from many of the Sol system's inhabited worlds. They take to the stars for many reasons, often to find trouble but sometimes to escape it, but there's a place for everyone in Sol's orbit. The stories here view the vastness of the universe through the lens of the Red Raven Towing & Salvage Company, a crew of thieves who tow distressed ships to safety and explore the lost wrecks of ships who didn't quite make it.
How does this work?
This project is a kind of network of short stories that build upon each other, you can read it like normal by picking an article, clicking and scrolling and moving on to the next. Keyboard users can use the arrow keys to navigate vignettes, scrolling up and down with arrow keys and using the left and right keys to move between entries. All the entries are grouped into sections or arcs, you can expand the folder at the top of an entry to see the other stories in that group, or click the folder tabs to move to the previous or next arc. You can use the Filter option to pick out characters based on a couple characteristics, or change the site's color palette in the Settings menu. This project is a collaboration of both of our skillsets here at Lucky Raven; there's a lot of other fun things to find on the site, click around and see what's there to be discovered.
New stories go up about once a weekish, unless we need to focus on something else, and we're looking to add new features here or there as time allows. Be sure to check back for more entries, or follow https://luckyraven.cc for live update tracking of all our creative projects!
Where should I start?
While it's sort of book-shaped, Titan Garden isn't really a novel or a comic, it's some new kind of other thing. The stories here are mostly all self-contained little vignettes introducing a person or a place, expanding on them and tying them to other stories that have already been written to build out the spiderweb of the universe. It's both linear and non-linear- you can poke around and read entries in any order, but later entries will often reference earlier entries, and people get mentioned in other people's writing. The characters here are presented in a kind of chronological order, so beginning with Red Raven and working your way down is a good way to do it.
"People of the Sol System" is a section presenting the twenty or so kinds of starfarer native to this universe. If you want to learn more about where they're from or how they work, those sections are very big and very dense. If you save them for later, you can learn a lot about the different species just reading through character stories, but if you want to really dig in and read about the homeworlds of Sol this is the section for you. We felt like putting this note here so you don't start at the top, hit that wall and get stuck in it. There's a lot of writing in those articles.
Is there a place for my story here?
One of the core ideas of Titan Garden is it's a big open universe, there's a place for everyone here. By presenting a world in this way, we hope readers can find their own stories and their own place within the Sol system. We'd like to present the setting in a way that would work as a tabletop game, so you're very much welcome to make your own starfarers and tell their stories sailing the celestial seas. Titan Garden is a story about a universe, and that includes you as much as it does us. This is kind of a new thing, so be sure to come visit us on Discord and let us know what you think.
Good luck, starfarer! And remember: dress warmly. It's cold up there.