[Image: one of the alternatives the Bing AI image-generation program offered me when prompted, “a single stained glass window pane showing the lobby of a spaceship.” Which may not make much (if any) sense to you, unless you’re familiar with the context of my novel-in-progress called 23kpc. If you’re not familiar with that context, I direct your attention to the weekly installments archived over on Substack.]

23kpc’s action takes place aboard the ISS Tascheter, a onetime asteroid retrofitted as a star-cruising luxury liner — headed to an unspecified destination on the far side of the Milky Way galaxy. (“Tascheter” was in ancient Persia the name of the star more recently called Aldebaran; the ISS Tascheter, however, is not headed in Aldebaran’s direction.) The Tascheter is one of about twenty such asteroids-cum-starcruisers which our protagonists know about, all launched over the course of a couple decades as a means of carrying human civilization (such as it is) away from Earth and to distant stars.

The ship has already been in transit for decades, perhaps a century or more. The “23kpc” of the story’s title refers to the distance the ship is expected to travel: twenty-three kiloparsecs, roughly three-quarters of the way in a straight line across the galaxy. (The actual course will not be a straight line, however — more like a smooth arc.)

The Tascheter is, roughly speaking, a mile-wide (i.e., 1.6 kilometers) sphere, divided into many decks of various purposes: residential decks of staterooms, obviously, but also “neighborhood” decks resembling those back on Earth. (A neighborhood deck might be devoted to art and cultural experiences, for instance, or to restaurants and entertainment, and so on, or to schools and libraries, and might include parks.) There are also decks devoted to the ship’s functioning: letterdecks, like E (for “Engineering”) deck, and the mines which provide the Tascheter’s fuel and other raw materials. For a very rough approximation of how this would look, see this stylized 1950s-era image (which headed the first post in the 23kpc series).

The total population of the ship numbers around 100,000. People die and are born at the same rate as back on Earth, so the population varies very little over time. (The population sees very occasional additions and subtractions when the Tascheter nears an inhabited planet.)

Passengers and crew survive the long interstellar journey, while still living “normal” lives, by one of two ways: dorming or rebooting.

The dorming population periodically hibernates in “dorming cylinders” in their staterooms, in a sort of suspended animation, for weeks or months or even longer at a time. Their perception of the experience is that they’ve simply slept a regular night. (And between dorming sessions, of course, they do follow regular circadian waking-and-sleeping routines.) The dormers are broken up into many separate cycles of people on a given schedule, so you always “go to sleep” and “wake up” with the same people you knew from the start of the cruise.
Reboots are clones, not dorming at all. Instead, when they tire of existence and on no particular schedule, they simply, well, start living all over again in a brand-new body. Their minds and memories likewise reset to the state they were in at the time of their cloning. For obvious reasons, reboots tend to be less patient, even flightier than dormers. While they may develop deep friendships and even loves during the cruise, when they “wake up” post-reboot their emotional and cognitive slates are all back on page 1, so to speak.

Main characters:

Guy and Missy Landis: private investigators even when they were back on Earth — and our protagonists. (Guy, in fact, is the narrator.) We don’t know much about Guy’s background; in general, though, if you know the premise of the old The Thin Man films, you should be comfortable without much more information about him. (In particular, the author hopes you can hear William Powell speaking much of Guy’s dialogue.) But we do know that Missy’s family is ridiculously wealthy — in fact, the family’s company fitted out the Tascheter (after first mining much of its interior for precious metals). “Wealth” doesn’t mean much on a cruise like this, but Missy is held in high regard, especially among the crew, because of her family history.
Durwood: Guy and Missy’s “Pooch” — a spaniel-sized, furry, electromechanical companion. Pooches serve the same emotional purposes for humans on the Tascheter as their real live counterparts did on Earth. (Again referring to The Thin Man: think of the dog Asta.) But Pooches have some other useful and decidedly non-canine abilities as well — levitation, for instance — and of course, they don’t need to be fed (just recharged), watered, or, well, cleaned up after. Only dorming passengers have Pooches, and, while any of its associated humans are dorming, a Pooch occupies a dumbwaiter in the suite. (From there, it can be taken to a maintenance deck for refurbishing as needed.)
Matthew (Matty) Toricelli: the purser on Guy and Missy’s residential deck, and probably their best friend. Pursers are among the most important crew aboard who are in regular contact with passengers: each knows a lot about the people on their deck and how the ship functions — and what they don’t know, they can almost always more easily learn than can regular passengers. Matty is thus not just a good friend, but a valuable resource in their investigation. He is not a fan of Pooches, who can sometimes introduce… disorder to shipboard routines.

Secondary (recurring) characters:

Daina and Idris Cheruiyot: spacegoing diplomats/trade ambassadors/whatever. They’re actually employed not by one or more governments but by a company, sort of, called EnvoixRY — a subsidiary of the company which built and launched the Tascheter and its siblings. D&I (as everyone calls them collectively) are very elegant, always well-dressed, attractive in pretty much any way that humans can be considered attractive — and (because of their work) very well-informed about things not just aboard the ship, but around the galaxy. They’re also exempt from the dorm-cycling/rebooting schedules of the other passengers and the crew.
Mercy Bacall: Guy and Missy’s next-door neighbor and friend, a rebooter with a taste for — oh, say — evening cocktails and whatever might follow. Although free to reboot whenever and however often she’d like, Mercy always likes to be awake for Guy, Missy’s, and Matty’s dorm cycle: their adventures are just too, y’know, interesting to be missed. As a reboot, especially a gossipy and well-connected one with a preference for certain dorm-cycling companions, Mercy is also a meticulously organized record-keeper of things which happen and the people they happen to.

Others of note:

Roughly in order of appearance (list added to as they show up or are otherwise introduced):

Tyler Morton: a propulsion engineer on the ship, whose disappearance sets the plot in motion
Aloysius (Al) Morton: Tyler’s brother, a friend of Matty’s, and proprietor of a restaurant named Jellyroll in a French Quarter-style neighborhood called SloGo
Warden (Butch) Dalthrop: deck chief in the level of the ship’s mine where Tyler Morton’’s spacesuited body was found
Jilly Eckles: rebooting actress and love interest (before he disappeared) to Tyler Morton
Orono Jones: Tyler Morton’s supervisor in Engineering, although a communications engineer rather than a specialist in propulsion
Bel Za: deck chief on the Engineering deck and an acquaintance of Matty’s

About Decopunk:

From Wikipedia:

Decopunk is a recent subset of dieselpunk, centered around the art deco and Streamline Moderne art styles. Other influences include the 1927 film Metropolis as well as the environment of American cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston around the period between the 1920s and 1950s.

Steampunk author Sara M. Harvey made the distinction that decopunk is “shinier than dieselpunk;” more specifically, dieselpunk is “a gritty version of steampunk set in the 1920s–1950s” (i.e., the war eras), whereas decopunk “is the sleek, shiny very art deco version; same time period, but everything is chrome!”

Feel free to imagine the ISS Tascheter’s interior decorated accordingly. For what it’s worth, the author himself pictures the passageways, staterooms, and common areas lined with gleaming torchieres, sleek drapery, stained-glass accents, comfortable but very angular furniture, and wall art à la Erté, Tiffany, and Barbier — something like, say, the interior of a luxury hotel in the mid-1930s.

’23kpc’: A Reader’s Guide

Table of Contents:

The time:

The setting:

Main characters:

Secondary (recurring) characters:

Others of note:

About Decopunk: