The Scientific Setting of The Chasm of Color (New Release Imminent!)

The front cover for The Chasm of Color. Photo is edited from one by Matt Donders, via Unsplash.

The Chasm of Color is almost done! I made my final pass through the story today, and I've brought it up over 15k words with some additional character details and interesting thoughts and reactions (I hope). That makes it technically a "novelette," somewhere between a short story and a novella.

One of the fun things about writing this one was that, every time I wanted to refer to a scientific principle or discovery, I had to check and see if it had occurred before the story... since the story takes place over the span from 1887 through 1889, I had to be careful with a lot of things, and avoid assumptions.

Here's a list of the things I had to check:

• Michelson-Morley paper, part of the November 1887 issue of the American Journal of Science
• Balmer series, 1885
• Artificial crystal growth (corundum), 1837
• The discovery and isolation of putrescine, 1885
• The first observation of mitosis, 1879
• The first light bulb, patented 1880
• Electric current measurement devices and the galvanometer, 1836
• The four-stroke gasoline engine, 1876
• The term "white noise" had to be invented by the main character, since earliest significant use of the term in the real world was in 1943, according to the Oxford English Dictionary
• The word "skeletonized" is also surprisingly old--the OED says it was first used in the way I use it all the way back in 1644!

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