Approaching Cyan

Cyan is the name of a novel and the name of a planet.

I’ve been writing science fiction for fifty years, but I’ve been reading it even longer. When I began, NASA didn’t exist and the word astronaut hadn’t been coined. I was ten years old.

In the science fiction novels that filled my childhood, I rode on a thousand spaceships or starships to explore a thousand planets, but there was one novel I could never find. I never read of the discovery, exploration, and colonization of a planet — all the phases of what would actually occur — under one cover.

I really wanted to read that book. Eventually, I had to write it myself.

The kind of science fiction I prefer — and write — is based on reality, humanity, and scientific accuracy. The key question I continually ask myself is, what is likely to actually happen when the day comes. And the day that interests me most is something past tomorrow, but not too far past.

I can imagine 2050, but it really doesn’t interest me. It will look too much like today. I prefer to look forward a hundred years or so.

The novel Cyan opens in 2086, which seems a contradiction to what I just said, but I began writing it about 1980. It just took a long time to complete.

I also had to keep changing the year dates on what I was writing. Real world manned space exploration had slowed to a crawl. Who could have predicted in 1972 when the last astronaut left the moon, that fifty-three years later no more humans would have gone beyond low Earth orbit? Certainly no science fiction writer would choose to imagine that.

So what planet would I want to colonize? Mars? Of course not. Half the fun of science fiction is world building, and Mars is far too well known to be of interest. It would have to be a planet around another star, and if it was to be colonized in the next hundred years or so, it would have to be nearby, at least in stellar terms.

Actually, any extra-solar colonization in the next hundred years requires a major stretch of the imagination, but science fiction writers are in the imagination business.

So what are out near neighbors in the galaxy? Here is a list:

Sol, our sun, as a starting place.

Alpha Centauri, about 4.3 light years away.

Sirius, about 8.6 light years away.

Epsilon Eridani, about 10.5 light years away.

Procyon, about 11.4 light years away.

Epsilon Indi, about 11.8 light years away.

Tau Ceti, also about 11.8 light years away, in another direction.

Other than specks and oddballs, that is the full list of star systems within five parsecs of us. I will add two more, just beyond five parsecs, because they were part of Gordon Dickson’s writings in his Dorsai novels. You’ve read them, right?

Formalhaut, about 16.6 light years away.

Altair, about 16.7 light years away.

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Click here (or type in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars ) for a Wikipedia article that will list 56 of the nearest stars, including some very small ones, and tell you more than you ever wanted to know about them.

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Jandrax, my first published novel, was a lost colony story. The FTL ship Lydia malfunctioned during a jump, stranding colonists and crew so far out that they would never return.

The novel Cyan would be a prequel, taking  place hundreds of years earlier in the same imagined universe. It was intended from the first to be one of a group of novels, so I wasn’t just choosing a star and planet for a single story, but deciding what to do with the whole nearby neighborhood.

It seemed during my youth that every author of a novel about early extra-solar exploration landed on Alpha Centauri. I didn’t want that, so I made the planets of that star system barely habitable. Alpha Centauri lives in the backstory, but I don’t plan a novel about it.

Sirius, on the other hand, is 23 times as luminous as the sun. It struck me as a perfect place to put a colony of humans who were quite satisfied to live in space habitats, with no desire to take up planetary life. That became the setting for Dreamsinger, a novel which I have been sparring with for several years now. I offer no predictions about when it will be completed.

As the novel Cyan opens, limited colonization of the planet Cinder, around Alpha Centauri B, is underway. Explorers have not yet returned from Sirius. When they do, half way through Cyan, they will tell of a system unfit for colonization. Later, a group of dissidents will prove them wrong, leading to Dreamsinger.

There are three starships waiting to leave Earth. One is the Darwin, scheduled for Procyon and the as yet unknown planet Cyan. The other two will head out to Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti where they find prime, Earth-like planets.

Writing a story about the exploration and colonization of a prime planet would be a dead end for me. Something not related to the actual colonization would be needed to jazz up the story, and that was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Cyan, on the other had, had plenty of challenges on its own. It was — and was designed to be — a place to tell a story about how exploration and colonization might actually take place.

I’ll tell you more about Cyan next week, but if you don’t feel like waiting, just go to Amazon and type in Syd Logsdon Cyan and you can buy the novel today, as an ebook or as print on demand.

more about Cyan next week