How all of these ideas find their way into SEVENEVES can't be revealed here without completely spoiling the story. Just another reason we don't have to develop faster-than-light drive. In some cases, as in Star Trek, these are so similar to us that we can even breed with them! The subtext seems to be that the aliens are us we are the aliens. But the aliens that have stuck with us in popular culture have been English-speaking humanoids. Science fiction writers have dreamed up many kinds of aliens, some of them fantastically imaginative, some so profoundly different from us as to be nearly incomprehensible. The third element that made its way into the story is the concept of aliens. The same level of effort expended on or near Earth, however, gives vast scope for possible adventures.

If we managed to travel to a 'nearby' star-a preposterously difficult undertaking-we probably wouldn't find much.

We're not leaving the solar system any time soon. While many fine science fiction books have made use of such ideas, my own bias is that interstellar travel is probably overrated. Having been raised on the idea of 'Space, the Final Frontier,' I was both appalled and fascinated by the possibility that it might instead become an impenetrable ceiling only a hundred or so miles above our heads.Īs I began thinking about how to develop that into a story, I made up my mind that I would keep it close to Earth-or at least, within the solar system-and that I would avoid the use of faster-than-light propulsion systems or other technologies for which there is no known physical basis. Some researchers had begun to express concern over the possibility that a collision between two pieces of debris might spawn a large number of fragments, thereby increasing the probability of further collisions and further fragments, producing a chain reaction that might put so much debris into low earth orbit as to create a barrier to future space exploration. The kernel around which the story nucleated was the space debris problem, which I had been reading about, both as a potential obstacle to the company's efforts and as a possible opportunity to do something useful in space by looking for ways to remediate it. SEVENEVES is a very old project I first started thinking about it when I was working at Blue Origin, probably circa 2004.

Seven eves book