Be careful what you wish for
Lights in the Sky began as a series anticipating an environmental catastrophe known as ‘The Collapse’, which leads to a general breakdown of science, civil society and nation states, resulting in the reduction of Earth’s human population to roughly one third of what it is today. I pushed my environmental catastrophe back to the beginning of the twenty second century (something which looks naively optimistic from our standpoint in 2022), I also invented a grand project, the Alpha Mission which is able to send a Probe to our nearest neighbour in interstellar space, the Alpha Centauri system. Conveniently, (for this is fiction, after all) the Probe finds the perfect Earth-like planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri A, one of the three stars that make up the system, effects a landfall and uses its autonomic resources to build a base. The artificial intelligence which controls the Mission is then able to bring its human colonists into existence.
Now before you accuse me of bandwagon jumping, I wrote the original short story that opens the series (then called Light-out) somewhere between the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013. I know this because I submitted the first draft of the story (without success) to Analog Science Fact and Fiction magazine on 20th April 2013. Many of the themes and concerns explored in the subsequent series of novels were not well known outside of SF circles, nor were they part of general public discourse at this point in our history. Few, for example, had heard of Elon Musk or SpaceX, that came later.
The Lights in the Sky series now stretches to seven completed novels, number eight (now retitled, hopefully for the last time, The Robot’s Progress) is nearing completion, and number nine (currently called Earthrise) is already underway.
I didn’t get everything right; for example, I didn’t anticipate a worldwide pandemic striking the planet in 2019/20; and, as mentioned previously, I have my breakdown of civilisation occurring at the beginning of the next century, when the middle of this one is now looking favourite. I was also unaware of the impact our rapidly diminishing groundwater reserves will have on the capacity of the world to feed its current population, let alone what is predicted.
But by and large, I think I did pretty well…
The notion that we should be seriously seeking a lifeboat for humanity in the form of a colony on a habitable world elsewhere, while a commonplace in SF circles, was not yet part of the zeitgeist. My version of the future sees a vast shadowy international body (the Alpha Project), funded by various governments, doing the heavy lifting, mainly because I had not anticipated the rise of commercial space exploration funded by billionaires.
I also shifted the location of our species’ lifeboat much further out. My technological solutions for getting my probe and its precious cargo to Alpha Centauri are not examples of ‘imaginary science’ in the tradition of Star Trek, but projections of existing technologies. Again, few people outside of research laboratories or the hard-core SF readership were talking about light sails as a means of crossing the interstellar gulf, now it has become a commonplace.
All of the above is extremely gratifying, as one of the usual motivations for writing in the genre is to engage in prediction. But I would also hasten to point out that this series is far more than an exercise in futurology, as story, character development, and philosophical discourse are at least as important, if not more so.
But don’t take my word for it; the first completed novel in the series, A Children’s Crusade, is published on this website, along with extracts from later novels in the series.
So why the caveat?
Well, I don’t really want to be right about these things. Anticipating a future where billions of people will die well before their time is not a comfortable thought, and as this once remote possibility looms ever larger, the old saw ‘be careful what you wish for’, starts to appear uncomfortably apposite.
The Author January 2022