Delighted to announce that my latest book, Line of Descent, is to be published on November 17! I am really excited about it, not least because the publisher let me keep the title. As regular readers will know, that is not a given for yours truly! 😆 There was some discussion about it because Line of Descent is apparently the title of a Bollywood movie starring Brendan Fraser (I have so many questions!) and there was a concern about search engines. In the end, though, everyone agreed that Line of Descent was the best title and that readers are plenty smart enough to tell the difference between Brendan Fraser and my good self.
I’m going to throw the back-cover description up on the Home page, so I won’t do that here. But what I’ve written is political sci-fi set aboard a generation ship in deep space, with a mix of terrorism, power plays, and a murder, the latter forming the lens through which the rest of the story is told.
As some of you may have figured out, I have a thing for generation ships. There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, I just think they’re cool—at least when they’re city-sized like mine. It’s like writing a story set in London or New York, except with noir corridors, family-driven politics, and the occasional absence of gravity.
Secondly, though, I can’t quite shake myself of the (possibly retro) view that science fiction should, at some level, be about science. That it should offer a glimpse of a plausible future. A future plausible enough, perhaps, to encourage a younger reader somewhere to grow to adulthood and make it happen. Which brings me to this: space travel is hard. Right now, we are struggling to land humans on the moon. Genuine interplanetary flight, to Mars and beyond, is at least ten times harder. As for interstellar travel, I shudder to think how many zeroes one would have to add to the ten to encompass the level of progress needed to do that. We can presently get to the moon in about three days and hope to reach Mars in roughly a year. The nearest star? Many thousands of years. In every sense of the words, we have a long way to go.
In SF, though, we mostly ignore this with our warp drives, dimension hopping, and star gates. Alpha Centauri? Poof! Easy as pie. Let the story begin. And, let’s face it, the stories are great!
Physics, unfortunately, refuses to play ball. We know beyond doubt that anything with mass (like us) is incapable of reaching the speed of light, never mind going beyond it. That is just a fact. Not quite a fact is the likelihood that, when it comes to interstellar travel, we are unlikely to achieve speeds beyond a modest fraction of the speed of light. We can hope to get interstellar travel down from the thousands of years to the hundreds, maybe the tens, but poof-easy-as-pie is never going to happen.
But we can get there! I genuinely believe that. But to do it, I can only think of three ways: learn to live a really long time (and not get bored), master suspended animation, or build a generation ship.
I can’t build a generation ship (obvs!), my generation can’t build a generation ship, but there’s no reason in principle why one can’t be built. And so long as we write enough stories about them, I am confident that someone, somewhere, will make it happen.
What are you waiting for?