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.

“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.”

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?

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.