I wrote about hibernation elsewhere in this thread: it may not work, and if it does, it will still be a form of living, so will entail etiology and eventual death, just delayed. Plus the problem of our micro biome not getting slowed to the same degree we are (a problem first pointed out by Carter Scholz, I recommend…

Thanks for these questions, hope my late answers will appear. 1) I read as much as I can and then go by feel, in terms of future science turning into future tech. Dark matter seems to be invisible matter, and I don’t see how that could help propulsion; dark energy (these names are not really very descriptive of the…

Yes, I think this would be a truly interesting story. But I do think that I forestalled myself a little, by giving as much of the story as I did in 2312. That novel probably caught all that would be most interesting and exciting for me in the Venus terraforming situation, in a kind of short story within the novel…

Thanks for this.

Thanks for having me, Ria.

Thanks for this, in fact, I have recently compressed the 40-50-60 trilogy by about 15% so it could fit in a single volume, and that will be out in November from HarperCollinsUK and Random House, to be called GREEN EARTH. I’m glad you liked the original version but I think this streamlined version is even better.…

1) Closed ecological systems will all have metabolic rifts and various kinds of clogs in the flows, chemical and physical. So it would depend on the size of the system, how long such a thing could go on, and the smaller, the shorter. So larger would be better, yes, but the larger the ecology, the more power needed…

It wasn’t a fast prion. One character suggested that (I kind of wish he hadn’t) and then it is made clear by others that this is just a name, they don’t really know what it is.

I think biology is way harder than mechanics. I know what you mean about hibernation, I’ve seen the studies, but I don’t think it’s going to be easy to make it work for a very long time. The problem is, liberating people are still alive, and therefore aging. They will age slower, hopefully, but they will age. So the…

Thanks for this. 1) If we could go, I think it would be a good thing to do. I’m just thinking that the distances are too great, the times are too long, we are looking more and more like planetary expressions, life as a planetary expression. I’m still very interested in inhabiting Mars, but this may take thousands of…

Thanks for this. I usually try to make all my characters believable to themselves, if you see what I mean; they have their reasons for doing what they do, they can self-justify. I think most people can. Then if I give a good spread of characters with different views, the novel has to be more than just one ideology. I…

I think some of the stayers suggest this idea of coming to some kind of adaptation to Aurora’s indigenous pathogens. Maybe some of them will eventually make that attempt. But I think they were working in a timeframe limited by the problems building up in their life support system, and they were not a full civilization…

It’s the situation itself. Having chosen to write about an attempt to get to the stars, I tried to play it realistically, and that made it more pessimistic. Inhabiting Mars is easier, inhabiting the solar system is easier, because in both cases we can return to Earth and get our sabbatical, as they call it in 2312.…

I know what you mean here, but a planet with an unknown pathogen on it, very small, not a prion though one character speculates that for a while, but it’s clarified later they just don’t know, and they end up calling it the alien, the bug, the thing, the whatever: well, that’s a stopper. You can’t sterilize a whole…

Thank you, appreciate this, and hope you enjoy it to the end.

Both are hard, but I think imagining humanity greatly changed in its basic character would be harder for me. I don’t think there will ever be a Singularity as it’s usually now defined, so I think that as long as we are social primates with mostly the same genome as we evolved with, we will have commonalities with our…

As I said above, the book’s characters don’t know and so I don’t know. They’re on a rocky planet like Mars but with 1.23 g, and they only have the other part of the starship to live in, so their chances are very poor. The attempt to return was the better option in terms of survivability.

I thought about that, but in the end I decided that my viewpoint characters were so overwhelmed by their own situation that what happened back around Tau Ceti wasn’t going to be on their radar. Also, I wanted to suggest that things back around Tau Ceti might have gone very badly, and they weren’t hearing anything…

No, I think of all my books as being independent, but as I said above, I borrow from myself quite a bit. And I like to repeat names, as many have pointed out. It’s just a matter of patterns repeating, but I mostly want to be free to change my histories to fit the needs of the new project.

I think of all my novels as being different futures, and the chronologies and what happens are always a little different. That said, I borrow ideas from older works of mine all the time, I like certain ideas and think that others are plausible and likely to happen, granting certain premises. So I don’t think I could…