I am announcing two new projects!

Putting the "Galaxy" in "Fantasy Galaxy": an interactive star map of science fiction

This project aims to provide interactable maps of several galaxies and star systems found in fantasy and science fiction. I have the following design objectives:

• Support for both 2D and 3D. While 2D maps are usually the most useful and easily parseable, I aim to provide a few 3D maps when relevant (e.g., a 3D map of the stars near our solar system can be useful when discussing, say, the distance travelled in Project Hail Mary).

• Support for multiple levels of zoom. Different settings operate at different scales: The Expanse relies mostly on the solar system, while Dune relies on a few nearby stars (the local bubble). Others, like Mass Effect, span the entire galaxy, and even others, like Stargate, span multiple galaxies.

• Reliance on a ground-truth database of stars (e.g., the HYG database). The first map created for the project is be a map of the stars closest to Earth, within a few hundred parsecs. This provides a baseline for building different maps, and may even allow for combining different settings on the same map (ever wondered, for instance, how far Arrakis is from Qo'noS?)

• I am currently working on supporting the following settings and views (in alphabetical order, not reflective of priority):

  • Dune (local bubble)

  • The Expanse (Solar system)

  • Firefly (5-sun system, local bubble)

  • Mass Effect (galaxy, local group)

  • Star Trek (galaxy, local bubble)

  • Starfield (local bubble)

  • Stargate (local group)

  • Warhammer 40k (galaxy)

  • Miscellaneous smaller stories (e.g., Project Hail Mary, Avatar, 3-body Problem)

If these go well, I plan on open-sourcing the project and trying to get some community involvement towards mapping a few other settings.

But what about Star Wars? While this project relies on real-world Milky Way data, I think I should be able to leverage the same technology for a Star Wars galaxy map. Mapping the Star Wars galaxy is a lifelong passion project of mine, and while there are many excellent official maps out there, as well as sector locations for the overwhelming majority of planets, I don't think anyone has tried to combine them all into one cohesive, searchable map.

This project is the culmination of my personal interests, and I hope to do them justice. The latest space craze precipitated by the Artemis II mission reignited my passion for astronomy and science fiction, and I took great inspiration from "The Overview Effect" YouTube channel, who does some excellent 3D visualizations of these things.

This is my current priority, and it is being continuously developed and made available here.

A database of fantasy worlds

This is a project, started all the way back in 2018, that aims to document every secondary-world fantasy planet ever created (i.e., every planet that isn't Earth or part of a Milky Way setting). The objective is to provide a searchable database of worlds, arranged in terms of the pieces of media they appear in (e.g., books, movies, TV shows, video games), as well as some in-world information regarding number of moons or the length of a day, if available. A secondary objective is to provide a map of each world, provided one exists, in a visual gallery. The database currently has around 500 entries, and an early version will be made available in the next few months.

Check it out here.