By Kerim Tapkan
Kerim Tapkan is the author of the P.X Trilogy which takes place in the expansive universe he created. In this article, he discusses the creative process involved with building his well-developed cosmic setting, and you can explore it in further detail at px-universe.com.
Buy Book 1 in the P.X Trilogy No Man’s Space: Kindle | Paperback | Hardback
Writing a novel involves deciding how much of a world a reader needs to see. A character enters a room carrying years of experience, although the scene may reveal only a few minutes of their life. A spacecraft arrives with a history of design decisions, previous missions, and people who once served aboard it. A civilization makes a choice shaped by events that happened long before the opening chapter.
While writing P.X: No Man’s Space, I became increasingly interested in those lives and histories beyond the immediate story. Following them was enjoyable in itself. It also changed how I understood the characters when I returned to the novel. A decision could acquire a different weight once I knew what someone had already lost, or what they had spent years refusing to face.
The novel became the opening book of a planned trilogy. Around it, another body of work began taking shape: companion stories, historical records, and a place where readers could explore the people and civilizations they encountered along the way.
The challenge was deciding what each addition could contribute, and where it belonged.
At the center of No Man’s Space is Kai Carson. I wanted him to be an everyday person with the burdens that many of us carry: work, family responsibilities, worries about the future, and relationships that require attention even when we have little left to give. He has an established life before the larger events reach him, and that life matters.
He also lives with a mechanical heart valve after surviving an aortic rupture. That medical history is part of the life he brings into the story, adding physical vulnerability to the responsibilities and worries he already carries. As his circumstances become extraordinary, his body remains something he cannot take for granted.
Making him a naval architect gave him a profession I understand, along with a particular way of approaching problems. But professional competence has limits. Being capable in your working life does not prepare you for every crisis, resolve your family difficulties, or make you certain of your choices. I wanted those limits to remain visible as his circumstances grew more extraordinary.
That human scale matters to me. An interstellar conflict can be described through territories, fleets, and competing powers, but its significance changes when someone has to decide what to tell their son, whom to trust, or how much danger to bring into another person’s life. The larger setting becomes meaningful through those decisions. Kai carries his ordinary concerns into unfamiliar circumstances, where the consequences of a mistake become much greater.
Behind those scenes sits a considerable amount of preparation. I have developed extensive details for spacecraft, characters, species, civilizations, languages, and technologies. Many of these elements have something approaching their own specifications: capabilities and limitations, physical characteristics, histories, operating requirements, and relationships with other parts of the setting.
There is a familiar parallel with real vessels and equipment. A technical specification may describe a system in considerable depth, while the person using it encounters only the functions relevant to the task at hand. The rest still exists. It determines what the system can do, how it responds under pressure, and what happens when something fails.
Writing a scene requires a similar selectivity. I may know much more about a spacecraft or a species than the reader needs at that moment. I reveal what matters to the action, the atmosphere, or the person experiencing it. A detail might emerge through a practical difficulty, a misunderstood phrase, or a choice that another character finds surprising.
The preparation helps me make those decisions consistently. It also means that unused material can remain available until a different story has a reason to bring it forward.
The companion fiction gave me somewhere to follow those other stories.
Under the broader title The Chronicles of P.X, I have planned three series with different positions around the trilogy: P.X Untold, P.X Unforgotten, and P.X Unlimited. Their organizing principle is simple: before, between, and beyond.
P.X Untold looks back to defining events before the first novel. Its planned twelve standalone works explore different lives through different genres, settings, and narrative approaches. Part of the appeal is the opportunity to stretch as a writer. A person’s hidden history might ask for the intimacy of literary fiction, while another life demands a very different pace and atmosphere.
Their lengths can vary too. The Abstention, the first published work in the series, is a novella. The next installment I am currently writing is growing toward the length of a short novel. The form needs enough room for the particular life and conflict it follows. Sharing a universe gives these works connections while allowing each its own rhythm and scale.
The Abstention follows Conrad Laurent in a historical setting far removed from the spacecraft and interstellar politics of the main novel. He has built his life around reason, law, and restraint. Those principles become harder to live by when he applies them to his marriage, his fear of fatherhood, and the future he keeps postponing.
A mysterious invitation draws him toward a hidden gathering beneath Paris, but the story’s pressure is deeply personal. It concerns choice, consequence, and the comforting belief that refusing to act allows the world to remain unchanged.
For me, that is one of the pleasures of a shared universe. It can hold both an enormous conflict and a private crisis. Each can be approached in the form that serves it best. Someone may enter P.X through a historical literary novella and later discover how it belongs to a much larger setting. A reader coming from the main novel may recognize connections that give the same work another layer.
The two later series remain planned work. P.X Unforgotten will explore the interval between Books One and Two, following the experiences that shape people and factions during that period. A shared event may appear very different depending on who survives it and what it costs them. P.X Unlimited will extend beyond the third book, leaving room for stories after the trilogy’s central narrative has concluded.
These different windows depend on a world whose details connect.
My professional background in naval architecture has influenced that part of the process. Working with vessels teaches you to follow consequences. Changing one requirement can affect space, power, structure, operations, and the people who have to live with the result. I find myself asking similar questions in fiction.
Arcanis Prime provides a good example. In developing the planet, I placed its three moons in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance. Their regular tidal rhythm became a feature of the environment. Within the fictional ecology, that rhythm informed the vibration-sensitive Chordwood forests. Following the implications further led to resonance-aware architecture aboard Arcanian ships.
A choice about moons had begun influencing the spaces people built. It gave an aspect of the planet’s biology a relationship with its sky, then carried that relationship into the technology of a civilization that had grown up there.
Another chain started with the planet’s calendar and orbit. Those choices shaped seasonal light, which informed the regenerative biology of its inhabitants. Once I established their recovery requirements, those requirements affected watchkeeping, endurance, medical monitoring, and accommodation aboard their vessels. On the Lyrava, regenerative sleep became shared infrastructure, with chambers adapting to different occupants.
Under wartime conditions, recovery becomes an operational concern. Shorter rest periods carry a cost that must be managed. A crew’s biology influences what its vessel can sustain, and the pressures placed on that vessel influence the lives aboard it.
I explored this process in my article Engineering the Imagined. The speculative biology remains an invention, but committing to it creates obligations elsewhere in the world. A writer can choose an unfamiliar rule and then follow its implications with care.
I enjoy how far that process can travel. A question about an orbit may eventually change a crew member’s working day. It helps me imagine a civilization as somewhere people could actually live, with routines and practical difficulties alongside its extraordinary technologies.
Readers have different appetites for that depth. Some want to stay close to the characters and follow the next novel. Others pause over a civilization’s name or a reference to an earlier conflict and want to investigate.
The P.X website gives that curiosity somewhere to go. WikiP.Xia gathers profiles of characters, places, species, civilizations, and spacecraft. Visual material offers another way to encounter the settings and inhabitants. The aim is to make the wider world accessible in manageable pieces, so a reader can follow whichever detail caught their attention.
Annex IV: The Snorvix Codex, Volume I takes a different approach. Presented through an archivist’s records and commentary, it allows the background itself to become part of the fiction. There is a particular pleasure in encountering a universe through material that appears to belong to it: an account, a record, a description preserved by someone with their own perspective.
The plan is for each novel in the trilogy to have its own Annex IV. The archival companion will therefore develop alongside the main narrative, offering further material connected to each part of the story. That gives the records a continuing place in the structure of P.X, with room to expand as the trilogy does.
These forms offer different relationships with the same setting. A novella places the reader inside someone’s experience. An archive invites them to examine what has been recorded about that world. A reference entry lets them pursue a particular question. Returning to the main novel afterward may bring an additional layer of recognition.
I want that exploration to remain a pleasure readers choose. The novels must carry their own stories. The surrounding material offers opportunities to linger with a person, place, or idea that interests them.
The project is still developing. I am writing the second novel and working on further companion fiction. There are smaller experiments too, including an early version of Star Pilot IV, a simple game connected to the Quarter Deck arcade in the story, which I hope to expand later.
The books remain the center of that work. They give the universe its people, its conflicts, and the reasons to care about either.
What keeps drawing me back is the sense that following one life brings another into view. A passing reference raises a question. A character’s earlier decision suggests a story. A detail I introduced to solve one problem opens an unexpected possibility elsewhere.
There will always be choices about which of those paths to follow. That is part of the pleasure of building P.X: returning to a world I know, and finding that there is still someone in it whose story I want to tell.
About the author:
Kerim Tapkan is an Istanbul-based naval architect, senior project manager, and science-fiction author with more than twenty-five years of experience in large custom yacht construction and refit. He is the creator of P.X, an interconnected fictional universe introduced in P.X: No Man’s Space, the opening novel of a planned trilogy. His companion fiction includes The Abstention, the first published work in P.X Untold. His article “Engineering the Imagined” appeared in SNAME’s Marine Technology magazine in October 2026. Explore the books, companion stories, and archives at px-universe.com.
But Book 1 in the P.X Trilogy No Man’s Space: Kindle | Paperback | Hardback
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