Alpha 5 – Lights In The Sky

Modern unicorns part one: Martian Colonisation

By C Stevens | 5th January 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

Have you noticed how the Tech Billionaires (aka the Robber Barons de nos jours) have adopted some of the presentational strategies of the New Right Populists? Specifically, they overpromise, an example being SpaceX’s recent assertion that they will have a Martian colony (or at least the groundwork for such a thing) in place by 2024!

Further examination of other less hi-profile pronouncements reveals that the true timetable is sometime in the 2030’s, but the high-profile announcement has done its job by creating a buzz around the whole endeavour, attracting the attention of tabloid and social media, and making said Tech Billionaire look potent and sexy.

We may well be closer to having the technical capability for sending this kind of probe to Mars, however I did read that the sheer mass of the thing means that getting into orbit, and off to the Red Planet with the necessary velocity, is currently not possible.

Furthermore, the real problems come later: achieving re-entry for such a large vehicle (even though we’re only talking about a lander) through the virtually non-existent Martian atmosphere will be Hellishly-difficult. Remember, at least half of Martian landings of unmanned vehicles have been unsuccessful, we only recall the successes. Splattering a probe across the Martian landscape may be unfortunate if it’s unmanned, but if it contains 4-6 brave astro/cosmonauts, the fallout will be much more serious.

But the first challenging issue will be getting those 4-6 brave astronauts there alive and in any fit condition to do useful work. It takes (with current technology) six months to get to Mars, that’s six months in microgravity which is really harmful to human physiology, six months confined in a space no bigger than a long-wheelbase Ford Transit van, exposed to potentially deadly radiation (not just solar flares which are a low probability risk, but cosmic rays which are ever present!).

It’s estimated that the astronauts will receive 70% of their safe lifetime dosage just getting to Mars, not to mention all the other health problems they will arrive in Martian orbit with, and then they’ve got re-entry to face!

I recently read this online article with an accompanying promotional video about an award-winning design for a Martian city, cunningly cut into the walls of a suitable cliff, so that the human (and animal) inhabitants, and the various trees and shrubs, have access to Martian daylight, while being protected by the rock above them from all that nasty U/V radiation and pesky cosmic rays.

The settlement looked very swish, but the article glossed-over the whole issue of who’s going to construct it. Now in my SF saga, Lights in the sky, the Alpha Probe has all those convenient self-aware humanoid robots to do the heavy lifting, and Alpha 5 is a considerably less hostile analogue of the Red Planet. But building this putative Martian city will require the early colonists to leave the sanctuary of the subarean caverns and be out on the Martian surface. Now the Martian surface is a very hostile environment; the atmosphere is tenuous at best, contains no oxygen (and virtually no water vapour), the place is cold, and the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field means anything (or anybody) out there is bombarded by harmful radiation. So human operators, directing and operating the digging and construction equipment, will be at considerable risk and only able to work for short periods of time.

As I read through the article, I clocked some of the small print. The people living in this city of the future would be obliged to pay 300,000 Euros for a one-way ticket to Mars, and would then need to give 60-80% of their time (during their waking hours, presumably) working for the colony.

I thought about it and I realised there’s a word for this, and a colonial precedent; it’s called indentured servitude, and it was used by the British in Jamaica and Virginia to recruit a workforce for their sugar and tobacco plantations. It worked like this; get a load of destitute people from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales (not hard to find in seventeenth century Britain) and pack them off to the West Indies or to Virginia on twenty year contracts. Historical sidebar: this practice is the reason there are Welsh-speaking people in Jamaica to this day.

But this model, while initially effective, only really worked in the short term. Two things did for it:

much of the enormous profit made from sugar and tobacco was reinvested back in Britain, and the resultant industrial revolution provided enough work for the landless and destitute former peasants, who no longer had to risk twenty years in a mosquito-ridden Hellhole to avoid starvation.
word had got back from the New World about how bad conditions actually were, and how surviving five years was good going, while seeing out all twenty of your indenture highly unlikely.

The next was entirely predictable in its awfulness; replace the reluctant indentured servant with African slaves who had no choice. I wonder who the Tech Billionaires will turn to when their supply of willing colonists dries up?

The Author January 2021

Escaping unpleasant realities

By C. E. Stevens | 4th September 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

This strangest of years continues its tortured course, and we all remain in limbo, asking ourselves when the grownups in the room are going to step up and start running things again…
And this question is getting quite pressing; I personally don’t think the United States will survive another four years of the current administration without serious political violence, and the only parties who will benefit from this are China and Russia.
Europe will survive our departure, but I don’t think we’ll be so lucky; mass unemployment and national bankruptcy are looking likely, the break-up of the United Kingdom and the collapse of our political institutions are both outside possibilities.
And the pandemic looms over everything, putting all of our futures on hold…
Unsurprisingly, I spend as much time as possible in my fictional world, the real world being so unutterably bleak.
In the world of Lights in the sky, Marta, with the help of her allies João Azevedo and Globo Television and the support of her agent cum manager, Salvador Perez, has been able to take control of her life and continue her process of self-actualisation.
By buying her estate in Minas Gerais, she is also able for the first time to build a life separate from São Paulo, the Show and the Alpha Mission. She also accepts Salvador as her new lover.
At the same time, she fulfills her long-term ambition of becoming the anchor of the Alpha Mission Hour and effectively becoming the Earthly representative of the Children on Alpha. Ironically, it is an unintended consequence of the death of her friend and companion, Sophie Valente, that facilitates this.
All this comes at a price as she becomes distanced from those who formerly were her friends.
The Author September 2020

Not the end, then?

By C. E. Stevens | 5th August 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes you convince yourself that you’ve reached the end of something only to find you haven’t. This has happened several times with Lights in the sky, which started life as a short story, submitted (unsuccessfully) to Analog magazine, became a novel, grew into a trilogy and over the past few years has become a septet…
Well, it’s happened again…
I was always conscious that I needed to tell the story of various minor (and not so minor) characters introduced at various points during the series arc, and have found many ingenious ways of doing this. The story of Klara, the original self-aware automaton, and thus the prototype for all the nursemaids on Alpha 5, was to have been accommodated as a parallel narrative within …when you wish upon a star, which otherwise concerns itself with the story of the original Marta on Earth.
I’d written five ‘interludes’, telling Klara’s story from inception in the Alpha Mission laboratory of Dr Helen Choi, right through to her demise at the hands of a marauding band of Camposetta irregulars, more than half a century later. But when it came to it, this felt unsatisfactory, an unnecessarily perfunctory end for a much-loved character, however shocking in its brutal suddenness it might have been.
The solution was obvious; Klara will get her own book and so her future existence, beyond the confines of …when you wish upon a star, can be fully explored.
As usual the source material for the character’s future arc is to be found in the character’s thoughts, beliefs and actions. Without wishing to give anything away about a work in progress, it will become clear that her subsequent actions are entirely consistent with what we already know about her in the four chapters that currently exist.
The provisional title of the eighth book in the series is Klara, but this may change, and work on it will commence in earnest once the current novel is completed
Back in the increasingly surrealistic ‘real world’, it is clear neither Brexit nor the Pandemic will be resolved soon. We exist in the same curious but fevered state, swinging between fearing the worst, while seizing on the smallest crumb of comfort in the media that reassures us that things might not be quite as bad as anticipated.
As ever, COVID-19 is the great unknown; we just don’t know nearly enough about the virus that causes it to predict its long-term effects on our society, economy and personal well-being. We don’t even know for sure how many people have been infected, as the vast majority of cases appear to be asymptomatic, which makes a reliable estimate of the death rate from Coronavirus extremely difficult. We have no idea when (or if) it will mutate and whether this will make it more or less dangerous, though evidence from previous pandemics would appear to suggest that the ‘second wave’ will be worse than the first. Whether being asymptomatic the first time round will protect people from future infection, is again unknown, as is whether any of the dozens of potential vaccines currently being developed around the world will even be partially-effective.
This uncertainty is corrosive of our institutions whether they be commercial, political, artistic or sporting, and the long term implications of all of this can only emerge over time.
Brexit, by contrast, is more straightforward, as it becomes clearer by the day how damaging, short-sighted, irrational and essentially masochistic this whole enterprise is. I note that highly skilled and qualified people are already voting with their feet and choosing to relocate to countries within the Eurozone. They will presumably be followed by the flight of capital, as the wealthy (who are, of course, in possession of more than one passport) begin to remove themselves and their wealth from poor old Blighty, once the shit really begins to hit the fan. Ironically, the Brexit-supporting amongst them may be forced by deteriorating conditions in the United States, to relocate to Europe, of all places, where they will presumably continue to either, assure the rest of us that everything is going swimmingly, or blame us for the fact that it’s not. To quote an anonymous ballad sung by British soldiers in the Great War,

It’s the same the whole world over.
It’s the poor wot get’s the blame,
It’s the rich wot get’s the gravy,
Ain’t it all a bleeding shame?

The transformation of Kent into one huge lorry park, the end of most foreign travel, and shortages of food and essential medicines in the New Year are likely to be only the start…
But, of course, things may all turn out for the better…

The Author August 2020

The flight from current realities

By C. E. Stevens | 17th November 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Modern cultural and political discourse appears to embody not merely a retreat into various forms of irrationality, but also a retreat into solipsism (and for many narcissism!). I confess that I’m guilty of the sin of solipsism; what is Lights in the sky if not a retreat from the unpleasant realities of the world that we find ourselves in? and I’m obviously not alone in seeking a refuge from an alarming and increasingly dangerous world.
Part of the novel form’s appeal is the degree of control it gives to the writer; without a director or stage manager, or a cast of actors to interpret your work, you are effectively God. What you as the author decree goes in the world you have created. This is especially true of the fields of fantastic literature and science fiction, where you literally create a new world in many cases, and I’m sure it’s no accident that these genres attracted a whole host of extreme personalities (Edgar Rice Burroughs, HP Lovecraft and Philip K Dick spring to mind, but there are others).
However the solipsism previously on offer to the novelist, the poet and the fabled lonely artist working in their garrett is now on offer to everyone. The online world and smartphone culture enables people to conduct large parts of their everyday business without having to directly interact with other people. People can conduct elaborate ‘friendships’ with people they will never meet, and, in the case of online celebrities, who remain completely unaware of their existence. It is possible (via gaming) to escape into virtual worlds of mind-boggling complexity and become utterly divorced from the world outside. I was slightly alarmed (but not surprised) to learn of a strain of scientific and philosophical thought that advocates perpetuating the human species (or maybe just themselves, I’m not quite sure!) within conveniently-wrought AI, enabling these lucky people to inhabit their private worlds (presumably) for all eternity.
There are obviously cultish aspects to all of the above beliefs and practices (and, I would argue, aspects of the transcendentalist and monastic religious experience), but for the would-be solipsist they offer yet another series of alternative realities where the individual is in sole control.
Of course out in the ‘real world’, it also offers that other breed of narcissists, the populists of the New Right, carte blanche to continue to mould the physical world in their own image; safe in the knowledge that the fractured solipsism of contemporary culture makes it unlikely that a sufficient number of potential opponents will ever be able to effectively organise against them.
Of course, a lot of this is symptomatic of a current reality where things are now ‘looking so grim that you have to wear shades’ (to misquote a minor alt-pop hit of the 90’s), and I’m drawn to Douglas Adams’ wonderful notion that the renegade President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, would sport sunglasses that automatically obscure his vision whenever danger threatens.
Strikes me we’ve now all been issued with this particularly-useful piece of kit,
‘…impending global catastrophe, what do I care? I’m going to lose myself in whichever role-playing and world-building online game is flavour of the month! See you on the other side, or not!’
So what about your latest novel? I hear you all ask…
Well, chapter six is now complete, and Marta da Guia is now on the cusp of adolescence. I have reintroduced a familiar character, Klara, the emotional automaton (and prototype of the nursemaids on Alpha five) invented by Dr Helen Choi. Klara’s role will be that of the Greek Chorus I talked about in previous blogs, commenting on the action, and on the changes taking place in the wider world.
However this volume is inevitably (with apologies to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez) a Chronicle of a Death Foretold, we know how this story is going to end, and it’s not good…
This narrative appears to me completely appropriate in our current times…
The Author November 2019

New novel or displacement activity?

By C. E. Stevens | 10th September 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

As I intimated in my last blog, Lights in the sky is not over, as I’ve now started the seventh novel, with the title I trailed last time, …when you wish upon a star, which was just too good to pass up really!
The downside being I’m again putting off trying to market my growing ouvre to agents and publishers, in favour of doing what I really want to do, which is to write more fiction and spend more time in the comforting fictional world I’ve created, as opposed to an increasingly scary real world. There’s also an element of selfishness in this. While I remain obscure and largely unread, the world of Lights in the sky remains mine, and mine alone. I have no agent to make suggestions, no commissioning editor to suggest revisions, no readership to make demands. It gratified me, when reading the obituary of the great Toni Morrison, to learn that she’d kept the manuscript of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, for years before eventually submitting it, even though she worked in publishing. She subsequently explained that she’d wanted to keep the novel private, recognising that once it went out into the world it would no longer be entirely hers. And I can understand that; a fictional world is a precious and intensely personal thing, and being published (and acquiring a readership) entails letting go of part of yourself.
Anyway, back to the work in hand…
As usual, writing a new installment in the series entails a lot of research in order to develop new characters with convincing backstories, and develop tangible locations where the action of the novel can take place, what in cinema is referred to as mise en scene. Some of this research is via my usual sources (step forward and take a bow, Wikipedia, and Google Maps), but a lot of it consists of rereading and research within the existing books of the series. I find that although Marta da Guia is an established character who appears (at various points in her life) in at least three of the novels, there’s an awful lot that we don’t know about her. This is of course the reason for the book, she’s pivotal to Lights in the sky, without her neither of the other two Martas (the main characters in our series) would exist at all. But she has hitherto remained on the periphery, a supporting character, never the main event, bar the twelfth chapter of the first novel.
All this will now change…
I have also decided to incorporate the stories of the other two characters I referenced last month into this novel, rather than condemning them to short story purdah. It makes sense really: Ester Almeida will become a pivotal figure within the Camposetta movement that will eventually destroy the Alpha Mission and Miss da Guia’s world. She will do this via her position as the leader of the Camposetta’s political wing, Partido dos trabalhadores do campo. Clara will not be centre stage, in fact she will eventually go into hiding, but her purpose will be to dramatise how the developing crisis destabilises the lives of ordinary people, as the certainties that have underpinned their existence are steadily eroded.
Finally, I have decided to make Miss da Guia’s biological parents (who never actually meet their child, or each other) significant characters in their own right, more so than Marta’s Alpha Mission-appointed foster parents, and the various educationalists and functionaries that will surround her. By remaining detached, I hope they will be able to take on the role of a Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it proceeds with the grinding inevitability of all history.
So that’s the plan, but there’s so much more to be done, and so much more to come…
As a sidebar to the above, I’ve found a number of really good YouTube channels in the last couple of days, writing specifically about SF movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar, and my personal favourite, the peerless Arrival.
Their various analyses (especially those on the nature of language, presented in two programmes on Arrival) got me thinking, and I came up with the following notions, which may not be original, but aren’t based on anything I’ve ever read.
Around five and a half thousand years ago we went through a pivotal moment in the development of human society, specifically the jump from a purely oral culture to a written one. This gradually percolated downwards from a learned elite to eventually encompass the bulk of humanity, and in the process profoundly altered the way people think, effectively rewiring our brains.
And now I think this is happening again, with a jump from a written culture to one mediated by Artificial Intelligence. This has already significantly altered the way many of us behave, and the process of rewiring human consciousness appears to be happening all over again. But this time with frightening speed, and with profound and unknowable consequences for us all.
’til next time
The Author September 2019

Housekeeping

By C. E. Stevens | 29th August 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Housekeeping
Lights in the sky is many things: it’s a vast sprawling meta-novel of ideas and scientific, philosophical, societal, economic and theological speculations; its a series of picaresques; it’s a postmodernist tribute to my sources and influences; it’s a romance, an adventure story, a coming of age novel; it’s a mystery story with the author as detective; it’s all these things and more…
It’s also now finished…
Perhaps I should qualify this; the main narrative is complete, on both on Earth and on Alpha 5, we now know what happens to all of the protagonists, and have a fair idea of what comes next. We have followed our characters (for the most part) from birth to death, and the central enigma behind the world of the series has been laid bare.
However there are a number of other stories within this vast concept (six novels, 2314 pages, and nearly seven hundred thousand words) referenced or alluded to in passing, that I feel deserve to be told, either in short story form, or in additional novels. I’ve already started this process and written a number of short stories, which I intend to collect together at some point, perhaps under the title Tales from the Collapse.
But one or two of these stories would appear to merit a longer treatment. An obvious candidate is the story of the original Marta, Miss da Guia, from her strange conception as part of the breeding programme undertaken by the Alpha Mission, through her unusual childhood in Sao Paulo, her short-lived media stardom, and her brutal and untimely death…
I’ve just remembered that I have title for this putative novel, ‘When You Wish upon a Star’, which plays with various layers of meaning; The Journey to the Stars undertaken by the Alpha Mission carries the hopes of millions marooned on an apparently-dying world, Miss da Guia is a media star worshipped by those millions, and she is following her own star…
Given that the title I have arrived at neatly pitches the novel, I think it’s now highly likely that I will write it.
The other candidate a further volume is the fate of Clara and all the other automatons unlucky enough to have remained on Earth after the departure of the Probe in 2048. The leftover girl hints at the likely fate of such entities towards the end of the novel; Clara has been rejected by her creator Dr Helen Choi, who now sees the robot as the product of her pursuit of false scientific gods, of literally being in error, in Christian terms. By definition Clara is thus demonic, and shares the fate of the Creature rejected by his creator, Victor Frankenstein, in Mary Shelley’s famous novel.
We have also been given a glimpse of the forces of reaction ranged against the Alpha Mission and all its works in the person of the ‘Mayor of Ibara City’, the formidable Ester Almeida, and we know things aren’t going to end well.
I often think that the dichotomy within the series between ‘the scientific vision’ as exemplified by the Alpha Mission, and ‘the spiritual vision’ personified by the Camposettas and their adherents (including eventually Dr Choi), is essentially a dramatisation of a battle that I’ve fought within myself my whole life. A struggle between a belief in science (and its delinquent offspring, technology), and a countervailing attachment to the natural world, primitive socialism, and a non-specific form of spirituality, most akin to Buddhism.
Seen in these terms, Lights in the sky becomes an actualization of this inner debate…
The Author August 2019

A secondary world?

By C. E. Stevens | 10th May 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

A secondary world?

I viewed a rather ancient, but nevertheless interesting, documentary on JRR Tolkien on YouTube recently. The documentary was made well before Peter Jackson’s filming of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and concentrated on the books, with keynote contributions from Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher…
Christopher Tolkien discussed his father’s concept of Middle Earth as a ‘secondary world’, that is to say an alternate reality that works by different rules, a notion that (amazingly) I was unfamiliar with; and the more he talked, the more it occurred to me that Lights in the sky, is in many regards, an example of this.
So I did some research on the concept and concluded that, although I’ve tended to think of myself as a writer of ‘realistic SF’, there are many of the elements of a secondary world in the series, particularly in the three novels set on Alpha 5. So without knowing it, I have (in some ways) been writing a work of high fantasy.
Now it’s important to keep a sense of proportion here. I have taken considerable care to make LITS as plausible and scientifically credible as possible, and what I have just said in no way invalidates any of that. But the series is many things not just one, and incorporates various literary tropes. At the end of the day it is also a work of the imagination.
Different books within the sextet are fantastic to a greater or lesser degree; After the Flood is definitely the volume with the most tenuous connexion to high fantasy, but both the books that feature Marta Camacho have long passages that dive headlong into the genre. In particular Ms Camacho’s journey down the Amazon River on her raft, following her departure from the riverboat Fitzcarraldo, which is deliberately presented in dreamlike terms.
But it’s the original trilogy that cleaves most closely to the idea of a secondary world. We have a series of novels that takes the form of a bildungsroman. The protagonist is a child when the action opens, but grows into adulthood, and comes into powers and skills beyond those of ordinary person back on Earth, although in my world these have a technological source. Marta Fernandes is also to all intents and purposes an orphan. The theme of good versus is central to the series, but the question of who is good? and who who is evil? is often indeterminate, and is left unresolved until the end of the series. This is where I mostly part company with most fantasy writers, as in my world relativism is part of the underlying philosophy. Thus the Alphanians are presented at different times (and in different ways) as both an apparent threat to the eventual triumph of good, and as its most effective proponents. The same can be said (to a lesser degree) about the Artificial Intelligence fronted by Nurse Six Gee.
The World of the series is revealed to be illusory, in the sense that the World is not as it appears to be, by a series paradigm shifts in the first three novels. A similar process is now taking place in the denouement of Maya, which I am currently writing. And at the end of the day there are beings within this cosmos whose powers are to all intents and purposes Godlike, and therefore (as far as the human actors are concerned) magical…
The Author May 2019

Saying goodbye

By C. E. Stevens | 4th May 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Saying goodbye

I left the majestic world of Alpha 5 once again, half an hour ago…
Perhaps I should explain; I have just finished the latest edit of the original Lights in the sky trilogy, and this gave me a chance to reassess my magnum opus. Each book has its strong points, its favourite moments, but I was reminded that the last volume, The Lost Colony, is the best of all. The last two chapters in particular are both gut-wrenching and unbelievably sad, as I say goodbye to the characters (both human and non-human) that I’ve lived with and loved. Of course, I will read these books again, but each time I return I will know that the story is complete, the lives of the characters have run their course, their entry on the slate of probability decided.
The reason for doing this edit was threefold: I had reached a natural pause in my writing of the last book in the series, Maya, secondly I knew that I would need to ensure that the ending of the series as a whole was consistent with the conclusion of the original trilogy, and this required me to re-read this (and re-reading naturally leads to re-editing!), and a third reason has emerged, I now realise that I will need to up my game if the series as a whole is to get the finale it deserves.
The appeal of the series is not merely emotional. The final chapters of the original trilogy contain a great of cosmological and philosophical speculation, and the task in finishing Maya is to be true to what has been revealed so far, and (if possible) build on these revelations. Each volume of the original series ends with a paradigm shift, where the nature of the world is shown to be at variance with what the protagonists (and the reader) had previously believed.
My challenge in finishing the series will be to pull off a similar trick at the close of the sextet as a whole. I know this will be difficult and so far the new paradigm has not emerged. But I have faith; in writing the series so far I have often felt the unseen hand on my shoulder guiding me towards the direction I need to go.
This is not intended to be a mystical explanation for the roots of my creativity, merely a restatement of the commonplace that a work of art (and this is especially true of an extended work of fiction) takes on a life of its own, and eventually starts to make its own demands.
I need now to listen and be in a position respond when these manifest themselves…
The Author May 2019

Conspiracy theory

By C. E. Stevens | 5th March 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry supplemental twenty four: Conspiracy theory
The final part of Lights in the sky ( and hence of the whole series) centres around a conspiracy theory; the biggest conspiracy theory of all, in fact, that the world, and by extension the whole Universe may not be as we imagine it. That the whole world is actually much younger than we imagine it (in direct opposition to Rupert Giles’ theory that it is, in fact, much older!). That it was actually created by unknown beings for unknown purposes and that consequently we are all property and experimental subjects. If you are thinking so far, so Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s important to realise that Douglas Adams was drawing on an older tradition within SF. This is also a serious book rather than a lighthearted satirical comedy, and my intention is to explore the nature of faith (obviously I’m riffing on Creationism here!), and the psychology of believers.
To the vanishingly small number of people who have read the original Lights in the sky trilogy, this development comes as no surprise as it was already revealed to the Children on Alpha 5.
I started to think (dangerous, I know, in these times!) what if the old stories were actually in some sense true? Not literally, as they have been subject to imperfect transmission, distortion and reinterpretation over the centuries. But that they contain essential truths about the nature of existence that science has been missing.
Now I’m aware that there’s a danger that putative readers will also take what I have written literally, employing the same mindset that takes the Bible (essentially a series of creation myths, parables, and folk tales) literally.
If you think that’s unlikely you’re right, mainly because it’s unlikely that my stories will ever reach a wide enough audience. However the history of the twentieth century teaches us that the most bizarre and far-fetched of notions can become the subject and focus of fanatical belief.
So readers should remember that this is a work of fiction, set in an imaginary world, for the purposes of entertainment and to provoke philosophical debate.
The Author 5th March 2019

Blog entry supplemental twelve: New Earth and other fables

By C Stevens | 16th September 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

I eventually got round to watching The Search for a New Earth…

Hearteningly I had anticipated most of the issues and challenges outlined in the programme in my similarly-themed tetralogy Lights in the Sky…

What I hadn’t anticipated were: plasma rockets as a means of space propulsion rather more efficient than chemical rockets (I may substitute these in the relevant chapter, as it would only be a modest change), Proxima b as the Earth-like planetary destination, and artificially-induced hibernation as a means of dealing with the length of time needed to traverse the distance between here and the Centauran system…

But overall, not bad!

I enjoyed the programme (…at least at first!), but after a while it began to strain credulity, featuring as it did; postage stamp-sized space probes capable of reaching another star system (and beaming back data!), hibernating bears immune to radiation sickness, and hibernation-inducing serum obtained from hamsters, for Christ’s sake! And I began to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t some kind of late April Fool’s joke! Then I remembered the original Tomorrow’s World (my favourite television programme growing up!), anchored as it was by overly-enthusiastic, manically-grinning presenters, and showcasing (on a weekly basis) ground-breaking technological developments that were never heard of again!

But seriously folks, there were a couple of important issues that weren’t raised by the programme. Firstly, any manned mission to Proxima b would appear to be asking the putative crew members to spend twenty years of their lives in hibernation, time they would presumably never get back! The question of whether being in hibernation would slow the ageing process was never discussed, but it doesn’t seem to do so in the case of bears (or indeed, hamsters!).

Secondly, we have the elephant in the room! The Proxima expedition (like my Alpha Mission!), would do nothing for the billions left back on Earth, presumably to die miserably in the impending ecological catastrophe! Eventually, a significant number of those billions would realise this and start to seriously oppose these plans, asking (quite reasonably) why the effort and the (billions of) dollars going into an expedition to the stars aren’t being spent sorting out the problems here on Earth!

I was also re-assured by the rather precarious prospect offered to any settlement on the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, with its one face permanently turned towards its primary (and being baked by its rays), while the other remains in deep freeze, and with only a thin strip of supposedly habitable planet between the two! I decided that, on reflection, I much preferred my world, Alpha 5, as the fictional destination for my explorers cum colonists…

Imaginary worlds need to be better than the one we live in, or why else would we invent them?

C.E. Stevens September 2017

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