A few months back I set out to see whether you can write about giant robots in long-form verse.

Still not sure I know the answer, but you can now grab the first book of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright on itch.io.

Ah, that's a great question! 'Fold space' as a phrase for some kind of FTL has a long history, back to Dune and I imagine probably before that. But most of the details I came up with.

Fold is a helpful and old monosyllable with at least three distinct etymologies in English: a fold in a sheet, returning to the fold, and fold-as-earth/Earth. I wanted to call Book I 'Burning X-space' because there's an early episode of Ideon called, in the English translation we have, 'Burning Null Space'.

I hoped the FTL journeying might hold more interest than just zipping around instantly in hyperspace; perhaps there're ways to do that, but they're definitely not routine or widespread, and would probably involve a chthonic. An influence at play there was the Crest/Banner of the Stars books: I didn't borrow details from them, but I was inspired by Morioka's effort in those to have FTL be a combat context with its own hazards and rules.

I wanted the combat within an FTL context to be more naval than combat in normal space is (will be), and 'fold' suggests undulation, so I figured if they were fighting across great sweeping peaks and troughs, larger than you'd get in a terrestrial ocean, that'd be quasi-naval but would also bring some fun strangeness along with it. The Fold must be some kind of thin, weird, flat thing beyond our reality that maps, in unhelpfully obtuse and hard-to-sense ways, onto our three-dimensional universe.

The thought that tying the Fold to reality temporarily might be called stitching, though it involves tearing, came naturally from the cloth sense of fold.

If the spaceships are designed to float on something during FTL travel, that answers the question of what you do with any spaceships that descend to a planet with bodies of water on it.