Category Archives: A Writing Life

118. Jandrax redux

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I originally wrote this when I had barely begun blogging, to introduce myself and one of my novels. I am presenting it again because no one was listening back then, and because Jandrax is now available to be read in its entirety, over in Serial.

Jandrax

Here is a story so old that I have no idea where it originated. A group of Irishmen were sitting in a bar, solving the world’s problems. One of them asked the rest, “If a cataclysm were to destroy all the poets in Ireland, how many generations would it take to replace them?” One of the others simply held up his hand with a single finger raised. (If you know the origin of this, let me know.)

You will note that this is not an ethnic joke, but a comment on how the Irish view themselves. It is also true – and not only about Irish poets, but about any of those human traits that lie latent in all of us until circumstances call them forth.

That includes the capacity for religious controversy.

Before Martin Luther made his opinions stick, there was a long history of dissent within the Catholic Church. Dissenters were called heretics, and they were usually burned at the stake. Look up Jan Hus (AKA John Huss). Once Luther opened the floodgates, here came Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, and good old Henry VIII with his political and personal agenda.

Quakers, Shakers, Anabaptists, Methodists – you get the picture. As someone once misquoted scripture, “Wherever two or three of ye are gathered together, there will be a fight.”

When I needed a religion for my first science fiction novel Jandrax – available battered and cheap in used bookstores everywhere – (And now available over in Serial.) I came upon Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. I read the introduction, saw the notion of the monomyth, and the entire religion I needed exploded in my mind, complete in a heartbeat. I closed the book and never went back to it, not wanting to dilute the purity of that flash of inspiration.

Some hundreds of years in the future, Louis Dumezil, a scholar with a self-imposed mission of peace, collates all the world’s religions, winnowing out the common core, and setting it down in his Monomythos. His hope is that a common religion for all men, carved out of mankind’s various faiths, will bring an end to sectarian fighting. Fat chance. In fact, Dumezil unwittingly sabotages his own work by coming out with later, updated editions of his Monomythos.

You can guess the result. His initial success at setting up a pan-human religion based on the Monomythos breaks down into warring sects killing each other over which Monomythos is the correct one.

In Jandrax, the title character is a disillusioned former zealot who lost his religion in the sectarian fighting on Hallam’s world, and now finds himself marooned on an unexplored planet with a shipload of purists.

117. Seven and a Half Months

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On September 2, 1975, I had a year to spare and an itch to see if I could write a novel. As is common with first novels, it never sold.

On September 2, 2015, forty years later, I wrote a blog entry about the experience. It was the third entry on a new blog, so nobody read it.

Today, things are better. This twin blog site has been in place for seven plus months, with a total of just under 300 posts. My new novel Cyan will be out soon from EDGE.

Today over in Serial, I am beginning the serialization of my novel Jandrax, which was published by Ballantine in 1978. It is still available in used bookstores, and I hope that a new generation of readers will discover it.

The rest of this week in A Writing Life will be taken up by talk about Jandrax, but first I would like to rerun the post that tells how I started writing, forty and a half years ago.

It Was Forty Years Ago Today
first posted Sep. 2. 2015

I feel guilty of bait and switch. This post isn’t about the Beatles, or Sgt. Pepper, or the Summer of Love. It actually was forty years ago today that I first sat down to see if I could write a novel.

Would-be writers should take note. This was a controlled experiment. I wasn’t writing from the depth of my soul, nor writing the books that had been burning a hole in my brain for years. That came later. This was simply to answer a single question – could I sit down every day and write, or would my well run dry after the first week.

September 2, 1975 was the day after Labor Day that year, and I was at loose ends. My wife and I were had just rented a tiny house in the poorest part of town; she had a new job as a picture framer. She proved to be very good at it, and ended up managing the gallery for most of the next decade. If my writing experiment hadn’t worked, I would have gone to graduate school the next fall.

Writing a science fiction novel or a fantasy novel would have called for a lot of time spent in world building. That wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to know. A historical novel would have called for even more research, and a detective novel would have called for crafting a complex puzzle. I wasn’t worried about any of those skills. I just wanted to know – could I write word after word after word, day after day, week after week.

I needed a no-research story, so I decided to send my protagonist on a deer hunt, where he would get lost. I would set it in autumn, in a part of the Sierras I could drive to in a day if I needed to be on the scene. I would roll in a storm, with low hanging clouds so he couldn’t find north and couldn’t send up smoke. I intended to let him get out on his own. Over the weeks I piled misery after misery on the poor guy’s head.

GPS? Cell phone? Don’t be silly; this was 1975, when lost meant lost.

That was the setup. Here is the payoff – I wrote the novel. There is nothing exciting to say about sitting down every day and pounding the keys of a typewriter. (1975, remember; no computers.)

There were no exciting stories to tell my wife at the end of the day, but inside my head I was having a ball. Getting lost in the woods and finding my own way out was infinitely exciting, and every night I could go to my comfortable bed while my protagonist tried to sleep on the frozen ground. I was hooked. I never went back for my Ph.D..

I did go back a few years later for a second BA and MA in History, while I was writing, but that’s only because I love learning almost as much as I love novels. It had nothing to do with career plans.

The novel, Spirit Deer, was only 141 pages, far too short to publish. It turned out better than I had expected, and its core story was not age specific. A few years ago I got rid of Tim’s wife, his best friend, the forest ranger, the old hunter, and even Tim’s last name, and turned Spirit Deer into a young adult novel. It’s looking for a home. If it finds one, I’ll let you know.

116. Spacecraft Threatened by Bears

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200px-Voskhod_spacecraft_diagramYes, I agree; it’s a snarky title. It’s also accurate, believe it or not.

I had the great good fortune of living through the early days of manned space flight. I was nine years old when the Russians orbited the first satellite, and the early manned flights came when I was in high school. I watched every American launch with fascination and envy, but the Russian launches were shrouded in secrecy. I knew only the bare minimum that all Americans knew. I’m not sure the president knew much more.

During those early days, nothing was routine. Every mission was dangerous. They still are, of course, but not so much as then. American failures were there for all the world to see, while the Soviets kept their’s secret. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, information about the early Russian space program became generally available, but by then few people cared. I did, and I sought out the stories.

Today is the fifty-first anniversary of the first space walk – by the USSR. I would have brought it to you on the fiftieth anniversary, but I wasn’t blogging yet. Voskhod 2 was a triumph, and also a flight which went spectacularly awry.

Voskhod 2
March 18-19, 1965

The first six manned Soviet spaceflights were aboard Vostok craft. Gagarin became the first man in space on Vostok 1, Tereshkova became the first woman in space on Vostok 6. I plan to talk about them on their anniversaries, in April and June.

Vostok astronauts wore space suits throughout their flights and landed by personal parachute separate from the descent module. Before the second generation Soyuz spacecraft came on line, the Soviets launched two additional manned missions on modified Vostoks called Voskhod.

On Voskhod, a backup solid fuel retrorocket was added to the spherical descent module, another additional rocket softened the landing so that the cosmonauts could remain within the descent module, and the ejection seat was no longer used. This allowed Voskhod 1 to carry three astronauts where Vostok had carried only one.

Voskhod 1 cosmonauts flew without space suits, as did early Soyuz missions. Voskhod 2 cosmonauts Belyayev and Leonov wore space suits because they were scheduled for the first space walk. Their craft also carried an inflatable airlock.

American space walks first took place during the Gemini program (see post 87). That craft had two hatches but no airlock; both astronauts were in vacuum during the entire spacewalk.

On Voskhod 2, Leonov crawled into the airlock, sealed the inner door and opened the outer one. Belyayev remained in the pressurized descent module.

For ten minutes, Leonov remained within the airlock but exposed to the vacuum of space, then he slipped free and floated on a tether for another ten minutes. He was called back in to terminate his space walk, and his difficulties began.

(Or perhaps they had already begun. Some sources state that he “experienced a disorienting euphoria” during the space walk and other sources state that he suffered bends-like symptoms after the space walk was over; I haven’t been able to confirm these statements.)

It is certain that he had extreme difficulty reentering the airlock. His space suit had over inflated; the boots and gloves had slipped beyond his toes and fingertips, and his suit had increased in girth. He had to vent part of his rapidly depleting oxygen in order to bring his suit down in size, and even then had to enter the airlock head first, instead of feet first as planned. Once inside the airlock, he had extreme difficulty contorting his body to close the outer door. All the time, his body was heating up dangerously. Since he was surrounded by vacuum, there was nothing to carry away the heat his body was generating.

Once air pressure had been restored in the airlock, Belyayev opened the inner door and Leonov was safe. For the moment. As he said in an article for Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine in 2005, “the difficulties I experienced reentering the spacecraft were just the start of a series of dire emergencies that almost cost us our lives.”

The mission had achieved it’s goal and it was time to return, but just before the scheduled time for firing retro rockets the cosmonauts discovered that their automatic guidance system was malfunctioning. It took time to prepare for manual entry, so they had to wait one orbit, which would make them miss their return point by a thousand miles. Most of that orbit they were out of radio communications. When communications were restored, ground control asked them where they had landed, not knowing of their difficulties.

Their orbit was set, but the time they would fire their retro rockets would determine where on that orbit they would land. They chose a target just past the Urals. Using the clumsy and difficult manual backup equipment, they achieved the correct attitude and fired the retro rockets in the conical rear portion of the craft called the orbital module. The orbital and landing modules were supposed to separate ten seconds after retrofire. They didn’t.

The two cosmonauts knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. Instead of the steady press of force against their backs as they decelerated, they found themselves whipped about by confused forces that exceeded ten gravities. A communication cable between the two modules had failed to release, and now both modules were spinning about each other, tethered by the cable.

Finally, about 60 miles up, the cable burned through and the cosmonauts were freed. The drogue chute deployed, and then the main chute. All was peaceful and in order – briefly. Then it became dark as they dropped below cloud cover, the final rocket fired to slow them to landing speed, and they landed in 6 feet of snow.

They were 1200 miles beyond their intended landing point.

They blew the explosive bolts to release the hatch. It didn’t open. They had landed in the middle of a forest and the hatch was held shut by a tree. By yanking violently they dislodged it and it fell away, lost in the snow.

They made their way out of the spacecraft and waded through snow to a small clearing. Bikonur had not heard their landing signal, but a passing cargo plane had. It circled, and was soon joined by other planes and helicopters, but none of them could land in the rough taiga. Pilots threw a bottle of cognac; it broke. They threw warm clothing which got caught in the trees, but at least two pairs of wolfskin boots made it to the ground.

The light was failing. The cosmonauts returned to their landing module for shelter. Leonov was walking in calf deep sweat still trapped in his space suit from his space walk. Both cosmonauts stripped, removed the liners from their space suits and wring them as dry as possible, then put the on again along with the wolf skin boots and abandoned the useless space suits. The crawled into the landing module for the night, well aware that the taiga was filled with bears and wolves, and that this was mating season, when they were most aggressive.

The hatch was out of reach. The lights failed, but the circulation fan ran all night. The temperature dropped to 22 below zero.

A rescue party arrived on skis the next morning; they chopped trees to build a small log cabin and a big fire. The cosmonauts spent a second night, then skied out to where a second, larger party had chopped down enough trees for a helicopter to land.

I guess they made ‘em tough in those days. i suspect they still do.

115. St. Patrick’s Day With Juan O’Malley

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full title
Juan Angus Georg Angelo O’Malley celebrates St. Patrick’s Day
by drinking tequila and while wearing lederhosen under his kilt.

It is cliche to say that we are a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of holidays celebrating our immigrant origins – Cinco de Mayo, Octoberfest, Tartan Day, Chinese New Year, and of course, St. Patrick’s Day.

The middle school where I taught for nearly three decades was not racially diverse. We had an occasional student of East Indian heritage, a very occasional black student, but the rest of the students were divided roughly equally between Mexicans (mostly Catholic) and Anglos (mostly Mormon).

I didn’t say Mexican-Americans. The phrase seems politically correct, but it lumps some very different groups together, and not all of them like the name. There were students of Mexican heritage whose ancestors had been in California longer than I had, students whose ancestors were here before the 49ers, students who were children of recent citizens, students who were children of field workers with visas, and students who had just come over the border illegally. Some were Mexican, some were Mexican-American, and some were more American than the DAR.

The newcomers had an understandably harder attitude. A few of my students wore a T-shirt with a message that said it all:

Not Mexican-American
Not Hispanic
Not Chicano
MEXICAN!

As you might guess, Cinco de Mayo was a tense holiday for the teaching staff, but St. Patrick’s Day was neutral. I took sneaky advantage of that to tell a double story.

Pardon an aside: I got away with a lot because I liked middle school kids and I was a good science teacher. Most good science teachers escape to High School at the first opportunity. My kids always scored high on the science portion of standardized tests because I taught what was in the book first, then added what else I thought was needed. One year our seventh grade science teacher was an incompetent who was invited not to return. The following year I shoehorned four weeks of biology into my physical science class so his students would not reach high school without basic knowledge. For a few insane years, math teachers were forbidden to remediate; I squeezed remedial math into my science class. In the physics of motion chapter, I always taught the space program, including a brief history of the cold war so they would know why we went to the moon.

And I always taught the Irish immigrant story on St. Patrick’s Day.

It is a moving story, which eighth graders are old enough to appreciate. Potatoes from the new world were perfect for Irish soil; where a crop of oats had supported four people, a crop of potatoes would support eight; when previously hungry people were no longer hungry, they had more babies. Then the potato blight struck, and there was no going back to oats because the population had grown.

The land was largely owned by the English. They continued to export grain throughout the famine. Vast numbers of Irish starved. Those who could raise the money took ship for America.

The passage was hard. Ten percent of those who left Ireland died on the way. Their quarters were cramped, filthy, and unhealthy. Eighth graders both love and hate this part of the story; they have a very human capacity to be simultaneously moved and grossed out. I would walk about the room, measuring out the cubicles with hand movements, mimicking the heaving of the ship in a storm, telling of the bilge seeping up from below, pointing out the sound and smell of vomiting from seasickness, and reminding them that the cedar bucket behind that blanket at the end of the central aisle-way would fill to overflowing with human waste on the bad days when the hatches had to remain battened down.

Then I would quote a passage from a letter sent back to Ireland by an immigrant, who described the passage then said, “But I would endure all that ten times over, rather than see my children hungry.”

Once in the United States, things were still hard. The Americans who were already here didn’t want them. They could only obtain the jobs no one else wanted. Many were Gaelic speakers and did not speak English. They were segregated into the poorest part of the cities. They were disrespected.

They bettered themselves, generation by generation. They learned American democracy, and elected their own kind to office. They learned American capitalism and many became rich. Eventually, they elected one of their own, John F. Kennedy, to be president.

Along the way, they began to celebrate themselves. St. Patrick Day parades are an American invention. They have only recently begun to be celebrated back in Ireland, but they have been important in America for more than a century.

*****

You have to talk fast to get all that into forty minutes and still have time for the payoff, because the story is a lead-in to a realization, which is elicited by questions.

Who else came to America from elsewhere? (Mexicans is the answer you get, but you have to point out that the same could be said about Italians or Jews or Viet Namese or almost any immigrant group.) Who else didn’t speak the language? Who else was treated badly by the one’s who came before?

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t about shamrocks and leprechauns. Its about Irish pride. Its about saying, “I’m as good as anyone.” It can even say, “I’m here – deal with it.” St. Patrick’s Day is American, not Irish, because America is where the Irish had to speak up for themselves.

Cinco de Mayo is an American holiday. It is not widely celebrated in Mexico. Just as St. Patrick’s Day is Irish Pride Day, Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Pride Day.

It is a message I got across most years, but no one would have listened if I had not first captured their emotions with the story of a politically neutral and sympathetic people with whom both Anglo and Mexican students could identify.

Filler

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No post today. This week will have posts Mon., Tue., Thur., and Friday, because Friday is an anniversary. You’ll have do come back then to find out what it is an anniversary of.

Egregious auto grammar check!  Thou shouldst return upon the aforesaid Friday, to find out of what it is an anniversary.

114. Einstein Got It Wrong

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As I said in the first post of this blog, way back in August, we are the last generation of writers who will have the privilege of putting the planets which suit our stories around nearby stars. It’s already too late for our solar system. Heinlein could not write Stranger In a Strange Land today; in fact, he eventually had to shift it to another timeline where Martians with their canals and cities still exist.

Answer this: if you read stories from the 60s and 70s, how many of them were set on planets around Alpha Centauri? Dozens, at least. Soon scientists will know what Alpha Centauri’s actual planets look like, and that party will be over.

The slowing of time at relativistic speeds – Heinlein got a lot of mileage out of that in Time For the Stars, as have many other authors. But not so much lately; these days, everything seems to move at warp speed.

The next real-world century will be exciting, but science fiction has largely moved on to the far future. Cyan, due out soon as an e-book from EDGE, explores that near future.

*****

Standard Year 594
Anno Domini 2086
from the Log of the Starship Darwin,
en route to Procyon system,
S.Y. 594, Day 167 (corrected),
entry by Stephan Andrax, Captain

Einstein got it wrong.  He took Newton’s tidy world and turned it inside out, ousted common sense from physics, and gave us the bomb, bent light, and all the rest.  So what?

The speed of light is not the central fact of the universe.  I am.  Not, “I, Stephan Andrax, am the center of the universe.”  The I which speaks when any one of us utters an ultimate truth . . .

I hunger.

I hurt.

I love.

I am.

That I is the center. Everything else is fantasy.

There are two chronometers on the bulkhead. One forges forward at the speed of Everyday, ticking off seconds and minutes and hours and days that make sense to the body and soul. The other races. Seconds flitter by. A new day is born every three hours and twenty-two minutes. Einstein told us this would happen, a century and a half ago; when an object approaches the speed of light, time slows down.

Beside the chronometers is a viewport and beyond it are dopplered stars which sweep through my field of vision as the ship spins. We are nearly six years into our journey. Half way through our journey. Yet, for me, only a year and a half have passed.

And through all the years and hours of our journey, the smaller, fleeter chronometer will rush ahead at Earthtime while our time is slowed. All those I knew and loved, except my companions here on the Darwin, are aging seven times faster than I am. When we return, my agemates could be my parents, and my parents will be dead.

The mind perceives what the heart cannot comprehend.

113. Gray Days

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The internet has its faults; you have to be careful since Albert Einstein and Alfred E. Newman could both be setting up websites.

My favorite use of this technology is refreshing my memory on things I already know from a lifetime of inhabiting libraries. The second best thing is stumbling onto questions I didn’t even think to ask.

Not everyone likes that, as an imaginary street person once told me.

These gray people of the street are with us always. We know that some of them are there from hunger, from drugs, or from mental incapacities of various kinds, but others are there for personal reasons we will never understand. I have no difficulty imagining myself among them, had life treated me differently, or had I made other choices.

Come and meet an imaginary friend who doesn’t want our sympathy and doesn’t want us to understand him. He just wants us to drop a coin as we go by.

Gray Days

I had a wife,
I had a child,
I had a job,
I had a house,
I had my friends
and recreations,
And all those things
that made the noise
that filled my head
until I could not think;
And all those things
that crowded me
until I could not breathe.

No more.

Now I sit, gray days, on concrete steps.
When it rains, I go inside.
Passing among the purposeful,
Who bustle, peer, and mutter their impatience;
Among the masters and the fools,
Encased in pasteboard and in cloth.
Bound up; neatly stacked;
Cataloged and categoried.
With icons blazoned on the spine
So the hurried never find
Anything they didn’t want to know.

Once I wrote;

Once I spoke to the multitude.
My name was here
Between Dickinson and Dickens.
My life between two covers.

No more.

I saw my work for sale,
Twenty-five cents, obsolete.
It stood unbought upon the shelf
With tattered War and Peace and Valley of the Dolls.

No matter.

I like it best on gray days, when I can sit
Silent on the steps.
My can proclaims my purpose –
“Give me coin!”
And who, in this great, striving city,
Could ever question me on this,
My silent industry.
All day long the coins rain down;
Nickels, pennies, dimes –
Hardly enough to keep a mouse alive.

No matter.

I did not come to find my fortune,
Only solitude.
And I have found it.
Every face that passes meets my eye;
Furtive, quick,
And quickly looks away.
It is enough.
It’s all I want, and nearly all that I could stand.
Nearly more than I can stand.

Harried woman, children clinging to your skirt,
I understand.
Hurried man, full of worry, I understand.
You have a million dollars paper,
and not one thing to call you own.

I have enough for supper.

112. You Can’t Be Serious!

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If you were to take your time machine back to the years when I taught middle school and drop in at the teacher’s lounge, you would find me full of jokes, puns, and snappy responses. Honest – ask anyone. Somehow, for me, that humor doesn’t seem to translate to my novels.

Nevertheless, you can’t work with language for decades without becoming attuned to irony and word play, and over the years I’ve heard some dandies.

*****

In 1965 I was a high school intern at a medical facility. One of the physicians working there was Dr. Sexauer. I saw his nametag, so I can guarantee that he was real, and I fully believe the story that I was told about a brief phone conversation:

Caller: “Hello, do you have a Sexauer there?”

Respondent: “Hell, no, we don’t even have time for a coffee break.”

*****

One of my college roommates was brilliant, and proud of it. His girlfriend was college material, but ditzy. It was the late sixties; most girls chose to seem ditzy.

They were walking at night near the Red Cedar river, which smelled anything but sweet in that era. He challenged her to make up a sentence using the word odoriferous. Without hesitation, and without losing her ditzy persona, she said, “Oh, de rifer is so pretty tonight.”

*****

A friend was talking about how often she procrastinated. I told her, “I was going to procrastinate once, but I kept putting it off.” She was half way through telling me what procrastinate means, when she realized she’d been had.

*****

When I had just begun to write, I was also a Red Cross volunteer. The local chapter director Jim Curley was fearlessly quick witted and a friend of mine. I was in his office one day, talking over Red Cross business and leaning way too far back in my chair, when I went over and hit the floor hard.

Jim leaped to his feet and rushed around the desk. Before I could assure him that I wasn’t hurt, he shouted in a voice that could be heard throughout the building, “And if you ever say that to me again, I’ll knock you down again!”

*****

At Westercon (Western Regional Science Fiction Convention) 33 in Los Angeles I sat in the audience of a spirited, but deeply nerdy debate on the use of language in fantasy. The notion of archaic language came up, and someone said that it should only be used as a spice in regular English. Spice morphed into general food terms, and the metaphor had become almost embarrassingly labored when one member of the audience stood up and said:

“Are you trying to tell us that we can have archaic and eat it too?”

*****

Yes, they all really happened. No joke.

111. Our Neighborhood in Fiction

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Gordon Dickson’s list of works is huge, but for some of us they all boil down to the Childe Cycle, known to us mortals as the Dorsai books. At some future date I plan a series of posts in appreciation of them, but for now the issue is his use of the local stellar neighborhood.

Dickson provided us with fifteen extrasolar planets circling seven nearby stars. His primary interest wasn’t in planet building, but he had an ability to paint a planet with a broad brush, then close in and give telling details about those local scenes where the action was taking place. It worked; it was just enough world building to carry each story forward.

Since the Childe Cycle consumed twelve novels over forty-seven years, there was plenty of time to visit each world at some time during the series. Some of the worlds, the Dorsai world in particular, were instrumental in shaping the character of the actors, but for the most part, Dickson’s focus was on a larger issue.

Even though the Childe Cycle featured a form of FTL almost from the first, Dickson’s characters never ventured beyond the local neighborhood. The overarching story he was telling concerned man’s early venturing into space, which led to the formation of three splinter cultures, and the semi-mystical forces which were attempting to reintegrate them into the mainstream.

(Yes, Dorsai Irregulars, I know that is an inadequate rendering, but you try putting fifty years of another man’s sophisticated thoughts into one sentence.)

The Friendlies (religious fanatics or men of faith, depending on who was writing the description, and not really that friendly at all) inhabited the planets Harmony and Association under Epsilon Eridani. The Exotics (scientists of the mind, following a believable mash-up of psychology and zen) inhabited Mara and Kultis under Procyon. Dorsai, the warrior world, lay under Fomalhaut. Incidentally, the phrase under (a star’s name) was one Dickson used often. I find it charming, and presume he was exporting to the stars the notion that there is “nothing new under the sun”.

The rest of his planets were well thought out and inhabited by humans who were not of one of the splinter cultures.

Wikipedia has a nice summary of the Childe Cycle, including a full list of Dickson’s planets. Better still go to your used bookstore and start reading.

*****

At the risk of arrogance – a risk any author is always willing to take – I’ll add my own fictional view of the local neighborhood.

My first science fiction novel, Jandrax, used a sabotaged FTL drive to set things in motion, stranding a group of colonists on an unknown planet. The only thing they – or I –  knew about their location was that it was far beyond the limits of exploration, and that none of them were ever going to return.

Cyan was going to be different. I wanted it to exploit the plot possibilities of relativistic flight, and to be a part of the exploration of the local neighborhood. I worked out this backstory as I wrote:

Early in this century, science makes a discovery that allows total conversion of matter to energy, providing the power to reach the stars at relativistic speeds. A multi-ship expedition to Alpha Centauri finds that the planet around Alpha Centauri A which should have been in the habitable zone, actually has an orbit so erratic that it is alternatively fried and frozen. However there is a barely habitable planet circling Alpha Centauri B. They name it Cinder and begin limited colonization.

Every novel of my childhood found an Earth-like planet around Alpha Centauri A; I had to break the pattern.

The second expedition, to Sirius, finds an Earth sized planet in a reasonable orbit for life, but this time the planet Stormking has a Uranian inclination. There is life, but it is basically uninhabitable. This sets up a future novel with an orbiting civilization made up of refugees from the inhabitants of Earth’s asteroid belt. They have chosen Sirius because it doesn’t have a habitable planet. They use Stormking as a prison, which set up the moral basis of the plot.

Three third-generations starships are built in orbit. The first two set out, one for Epsilon Eridani and one for Tau Ceti. A year later, the third set out for Procyon. This is the voyage which is the focus of the novel Cyan. When the explorers return to Earth, they find that the other two expeditions have both found prime planets, Haven and Elysium. Preparations to colonize them are taking all Earth’s resources; Cyan is not to be colonized, which sets up the events of the second half of the novel.

The starship which carried explorers to Cyan now goes on with a new crew to explore Epsilon Indi, before events which I can’t (spoiler alert) tell you about bring this stage of human exploration to a close.

Check out Cyan, due for release in a month or so, for details.

110. Our Stellar Neighborhood (post 2)

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In the science fiction books of my youth, no one ever mentioned heading out into the universe already knowing what planets would be circling the stars they would visit. Even when I began Cyan, no one was thinking like that, so the first thing my explorers do is to map Procyon’s solar system and discover the eponymous planet which they will explore.

Alpha Centauri A is a near twin of our sun, as well as the closest to us. It used to be logical to assume that we will visit there first. That is no longer true. By the time we find the breakthroughs that will allow even relativistic speeds, we will probably have a full inventory of the nearby cosmos, and our first star journeys are likely to be to relatively well known destinations.

I really hate that. What fun would Columbus have had, if he had seen the National Geographic special first?

Where were we? Ah, the neighborhood.

Ignoring the various stellar specks out there, these are the stars we might have interest in, in order of closeness to Earth.

Alpha Centauri – luminosity 1.0 – 4.4 light years from Earth – already covered yesterday.

Sirius – luminosity 23.0 – 8.6 light years from Earth – is the brightest star in the night sky, as seen from Earth, due both to its inherent brightness and to its closeness to us. Sirius is a binary star. Sirius A is extremely bright and hot; Sirius B is a white dwarf.

Epsilon Eridani – luminosity 0.25 -10.5 light years from Earth – is the closest star which has a reasonably well confirmed planet, a giant thought to be about 3.4 AUs out. An AU (astronomical unit) is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, making it ideal for a quick mental picture of distance. The presence of a giant planet at that distance leaves us free to postulate smaller, more human-friendly planets closer in.

Procyon – luminosity 5.8 – 11.4 light years from Earth – is another binary. Procyon A is hot and white (but nowhere nearly as bright at Sirius) with an even fainter white dwarf companion, Procyon B.

Epsilon Indi – luminosity 0.12 – 11.8 light years from Earth – has three-fourths the mass of the sun and a much lower luminosity. Any human-habitable planets would be close in, with a very short year. If it has a decent tilt, its seasons could go by quite rapidly, leading to interesting story possibilities.

Tau Ceti – luminosity 0.36 (newer figures suggest .55) – 11.8 light years from Earth – Tau Ceti is a slightly smaller Sol type star. It is the nearest single star to so resemble our sun.

When I worked out the backstory for Cyan, I only considered stars within 5 parsecs; I will add two more to this list because Gordon Dickson used them in his version of the neighborhood, which we will see in tomorrow’s post.

Altair – luminosity 11 – 16.7 light years from Earth – is a slightly variable blue white star with a rapid rotation (about 9 hours, compared to the sun’s 25 days) which gives a pronounced equatorial bulge.

Fomalhaut – luminosity 16.6 – 25 light years from Earth – is also blue-white with one known planet called Dagon. The size, nature and composition of Dagon is highly controversial, but it seems to be visible to the Hubble telescope only because it is surrounded by a dust cloud many times larger in diameter than the planet itself.