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“The idea came to me like a bolt of lightning. I’d been researching technological singularity, and started to wonder, what would happen to us, if we all uploaded at the same time? Would the density of our consciousness create a gravitational singularity, and if so, would we be hastening our own end, rather than avoiding it?”
Welcome to issue five of Lightspeed! On tap this month… Fiction: “Hindsight” by Sarah Langan, “Tight Little Stitches on a Dead Man’s Back” by Joe R. Lansdale, “The Taste of Starlight” by John R. Fultz, “Beachworld” by Stephen King. Nonfiction: “When Universes Collide” by Dr. Pamela Gay, “Feature Interview: Marc Laidlaw” by Matt London, “Considering Cryonics” by Gregory Benford, “Five Planets that Will Kill You Dead” by Genevieve Valentine.
“Before writing Old Man’s War, I went into a bookstore to see what kind of science fiction was selling; I saw more military SF than anything else, so I decided that’s what I should probably write if I wanted to sell a book. This sounds mercenary to some, but more charitably it was market research. I wanted to sell a book, so I was pretty dispassionate about what book that should be. Now, having chosen military science fiction to write, I made sure it was a book I myself would want to read—market research is fine and good but if you’re not writing something you’d actually want to read, then that book’s probably not going to be something anyone else would want to read either.”
In “Travelers,” Robert Silverberg has created a future where travel between planets is the entirety of many people’s lives, people no more rooted in place than a zephyr or tornado. Without restrictions like health issues, life span or economics, the humans in this future can enjoy jaunting across galaxies the way twenty-first century oil barons enjoy island-hopping in the Caribbean. It can be a hedonistic lifestyle—or it can be a way to expand one’s horizons, ever-deepening one’s understanding of humanity through exposure to The Other: other people, other cultures, other worlds.
Humans are sexual beings, but though the human urge to merge is rooted in our biological imperative to procreate, nowadays we do it, well, mostly just for fun. And if the aliens we encounter aren’t made of gaseous clouds or bacterial sludge, and provided they have a reasonably similar physiology to ours, it seems pretty safe to assume that they’re probably just like us: total tramps.
“I think empathy is crucial to being human and one of the skills that we don’t teach, but should. I am always, sadly, amazed at our ability to rationalize treating other living beings with discourtesy and our willingness to accept things like the deceptively named term “collateral damage” in warfare.”
We want engines to get us into space and take us to the stars. Of course, as many note, we aren’t quite where we want to be yet. But there is hope. At the moment, spaceship engines can be classed into three categories: rockets, sails, and “other,” and each works in their own, individual way. Rockets work by pushing something out the rear; reaction equaling action, you go in the other direction. With sails, something external pushes. And in the “other” category are things like “space drives” and ramjets.
A few years back I was working on a project to look at the feasibility of interstellar probes. I arrived at this conclusion: the real key to any sort of a probe that could reach nearby stars using propulsion technologies which we could plausibly see in the near future was that the probe itself had to be as small as it could possibly be. That led me to a lot of thinking on the order of how small could you really go. How sophisticated could you actually make a small spaceship?
Ray guns! Death rays! The terms conjure images of the golden era of space adventurers—Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon. But in truth, future weapons have been a crucial aspect of science fiction since H. G. Wells armed his Martian invaders in War of the Worlds with heat rays that ignited everything in their path.
I ended up first with Arighan’s Flower, because I figured wiping out whole ancestral lines would be a pretty big threat. I also knew from the beginning that I wanted the gun to be one of a set. … One of my beta readers actually wanted this story to be about five times as long as it is right now, and to follow that kind of structure, detailing Shiron’s adventures with each gun. Quite probably it would have been a good story, but it wouldn’t have been the story I wanted to tell.
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