My new epic sci-fi novel, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, is the tale of an invading ET virus and its effects on human society and space exploration.  That’s a strange combo (it’s sci-fi, after all), but the space exploration isn’t interstellar this time like it was in “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”  It’s restricted to our solar system, to Mars and beyond.  Being a wee bit more local, many of the events are in the realm of the possible.  Most of the action is current day only because of the virus, though.  I don’t expect to see a Mars colony in my lifetime.  But exploration of our solar system will occur.  Of course, it’s already occurring with robot probes carrying specialized payloads.  That process is speeded up by the virus in the novel.

I’ve always been an avid reader and exhausted all the sci-fi in my public library by the time I entered high school.  I’ve read about Mars colonies since those halcyon days, although I’ve always thought that the space opera adventures were a bit too optimistic.  But I used recent reports as references for my novel, some optimistic and others pessimistic, to complement my imaginative musings.  Among these are: Bruce Bower, “Extreme Teams,” Science News, 11/29/2014; and the NY Times special issue on Mars, 12/9/2014: “On Mars,” by Kenneth Chang; “A One-Way Trip? Many Would Sign Up”; “Looking to a Neighbor for Help,” by Dennis Overbye; “Covering Mars Opened a New World,” by John Noble Wilford; and “Rover Finds Stronger Potential for Life,” by Marc Kaufman.  Other recent findings (about water in the solar system, for example), mostly in Science News, were also used.

New data and theories come in faster than I can write ebooks, so I expect some of the ideas I use from these articles already make my fiction out-of-date.  Extrapolations of those data and theories are mine, of course, and I assume all responsibility for errors.  That’s the double-edged sword for all writers of fiction who throw in facts about the real world into their prose—from historic or biographical fiction to sci-fi thrillers.  Sci-fi is special in this sense.  It’s almost always an extrapolation of current science, becoming more so the farther back in the past or the farther forward in the future that it goes.  Scientists are taught about the dangers of extrapolation (or should be); even investors know that (one should think twice about extrapolating an upward trend on the stock market these days).

Venus is an inhospitable place, so our Moon and Mars are the closest candidates for more manned missions in the future.  As some of the articles warn, and it plays out in my novel, going to Mars won’t be a picnic; going beyond that to establish a colony would be a significant undertaking.  It can only be done through international collaboration.  In my novel, I conjecture events that will drive us to speed up that process, but that only heightens the danger.  Establishing a colony on Mars is akin to creating a self-sustaining settlement near the South Pole; the polar environment would be benign compared to Mars, though.  Maybe self-sustaining is too much to hope for, and something like the rotating shifts on the ISS, only with more people, is the only possibility.  But one can dream.

Life in the solar system beyond Earth seems to depend on water, so it’s encouraging that probes have detected water elsewhere.  There’s evidence that Mars was once covered by oceans, and there might be water beneath that Martian soil.  We’ve detected water on satellites like Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of Saturn, so maybe thirsty spacefarers won’t need to carry that much with them when exploring near-Earth space.  (A scientific mission to that moon is featured in my novel.)  California’s Gov. Moonbeam might wonder if future politicos will run into problems associated with pitting agribusiness against personal use, though, if human settlements in the solar system start growing their own food and raising their own livestock, something they will need to do to be self-sustaining, but the Israelis and people in other arid environments (less so in the San Joaquin Valley!) have shown that crops can be grown with little water (maybe Mars colonists will be vegan).

If the exploration of our solar system remains exclusive to robot probes, fictional accounts will start to lose interest.  Even in sci-fi, the human factor is essential.  The reader will always care more about characters who are real people, or interesting ETs, thinking beings with internal worries and external societies.  It’s hard to empathize with a robot.  Movies like Bicentennial Man, Terminator, Short Circuit, Blade Runner, Chappie, and many sci-fi novels about androids and robots owe their success to the humanity of the artificial lifeforms, not their machine-ness.  The greatest sci-fi writer of robot stories, Isaac Asimov, began early with Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, two sci-fi mysteries (yes, mysteries!) featuring that inimitable android detective, Daneel Olivaw.  Let’s hope humans go into space beyond LEO once again, to Mars and beyond, so we can tell stories about real humans in space.

[Quip #1: “My spacecat scolded me like an angry parrot,” said Dr. Gretchen McCoy.]

In elibris libertas….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2015 at 4:00 am and is filed under Science, Technology, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.