In September of 2007, I started this blog
with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how
little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak
at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and
Illustrators. Since then, I have shared (with their permission) and applied the
writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran,
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda. Together
they write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors,
publishers, columnists, and teachers. Since then, I figured I’ve got enough
publications now that I can share some of the things I did “right” and I’m busy
sharing that with you.
While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make
enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all of the
professional writers above...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what
I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a
point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote
above will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and
sales! As always, your comments are welcome!
HEIRS has got to be
the single greatest exercise in writing persistence in my long and varied writing career (see
“Writing and Air Quotes” for a discussion of my writing career: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2016/02/writing-advice-31-writing-and-air-quotes.html).
So picking up where
I left off: “Next time, I’ll look at why
I think leaping from Earth directly to ‘interstellar space exploration’ is a
BAD idea – and the basis of why I created the SOLAR EXPLORER…”
OK – it’s “next
time”!
We are nothing if
not an optimistic species.
If you look at the
vast bulk of science fiction, it assumes that we’ve already planted colonies on
Mars and started mining the asteroids, and conquered poverty, war, religion,
and all the other foibles of Humanity.
It assumes we’ll
just build starships and leave Earth…BAM!
It assumes that we’ll
go into space again…
The clear and
incontrovertible fact is that we aren’t going into space in any meaningful way today. We’re not going to
the Moon. We’re not expanding the space station. THE EXPANSE is not going to
reach us any time soon. GRAVITY isn’t even a possibility because…well, I’m sure
there are lots of reasons, but being incredibly ego-centric is probably the
main reason.
Your average people
can’t get out of their own lives far enough to think more than one Super Bowl
into the future. Oh, that’s the ones that have enough cash to live a
comfortable life. The rest of the planetary population is starving while
political bigots mouth platitudes designed to make their personal lives more
comfortable and few, if any, seek to make life better for the people they
intend to rule.
Ah – but we’re going
to leap from the surface of the Earth and go to the stars in one magical fell
swoop, right?
OK – so I’m not really
so pessimistic as I sound above. I believe that Humanity will grow into a
presence in space, even though that doesn’t include a colony on the Moon in
1999; or Bowie Base Mars in 2059. We’ll get there.
BUT…we aren’t going
to leap to something like the Phoenix that arises out of World War III and
causes us to meet the Vulcans.
I think it’s going
to be long, hard steps into distance travel into space. I don’t think anyone is
crazy enough to say, “OK, Alpha Centauri has an Earth-like planet orbiting it!
Let’s make a generation colony ship and send it RIGHT NOW!!!”
My thought is that
we’ll try a short trip first; a trip through the Solar System that stops at
every planet and spends an entire year orbiting each one, supported by a crew
of 3000 scientists and their families, facilities, laboratories, factories, and
a base to support constantly changing technology. That’s what the SOLAR
EXPLORER is in HOTSS: EoE; it’s a first attempt to run a long-term artificial
ecology in space. It’s also got a safety net. Earth is close enough to bail out
to if things go massively wrong. Supplies can be sent, technology, even rescue
ships can be launched (Will they be sent? Hmmm…that’s another story entirely!
Michael F. Flynn is the writer who most carefully explored the leap from Earth
into space in his iconic FIRESTAR books (Firestar,
Rogue Star, Lodestar, Falling Star). He goes from an alternate future that
intersects with our real development of the Space Shuttle (1981-2011) but then
wildly diverges…with appropriate threats from outer space – and maps out our
eventual discovery that there may be hostile aliens “out there”.
At any rate, SOLAREX
is a practice run through the Solar System for the sole purpose of testing and
developing technology for long-distance space exploration without the necessity
of breaking the apparent limit to speed in the universe. Which brings me to my
last point: I have broken one law of physics, I think. SOLAREX makes the trip
from planet to planet using a “controlled fall” into a microscopic black hole
the ship creates with a modified supercollider and manipulated magnetic bottle
held out in front of the ship. They can accelerate and decelerate quickly and
then push their speed as close to “c” as they want to. This makes a journey
from Earth to the Kuiper Belt a matter of hours rather than years. Plus, they
can also use gravity assist as they’ll be doing in book 2 of HOTSS, Zechariah of
Venus (one third done right now).
The series will be spiced
of course, with an alien, prehistoric memory chip that will inhabit an
increasingly complex set of robots and…hmmm. I suppose I shouldn’t spill the
beans just yet!
I’m not sure there’s
much else to look at in the development of the books, but we’ll see.
If you want to read
the set in order and haven’t done so already:
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