Verdant Pioneers—Comments by the author
Couldn’t leave well enough alone
I was humbled by the comments I received upon releasing Verdant Skies, not the least because I’d put a lot of effort into making it simultaneously the most believable and the most incredible of any of my stories to date. Apparently, my readers agreed, and ran with it. (If you’ve read it, and you haven’t told all of your friends how incredible it is… shame on you! Get busy. If you have told all your friends… go find more friends!)
When I wrote it, I had no intention of writing a sequel; I thought it was perfectly formed and finished as it was. Needless to say, a number of readers disagreed, and it became my second most popular sequel-request (after the Kestral stories).
Kudos go out to Neil Marr of BeWrite Books for turning me on to the wonderful (and very real) word “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” and its definition. When I heard it, I told him via Facebook that I’d try to work it into the story (good thing I’d already added a medical researcher to the cast of characters). He replied: “If you can, Steven, I'll send you a signed bottle of The Famous Grouse whisky. Or maybe you could send me one.” We’ll see who gets drunk first.
Part of the reason I didn’t want to write a sequel to Verdant Skies was, I didn’t want to turn it into a sort of Space:1999, where the intrepid but otherwise helpless residents of Verdant would be subjected to regularly meeting predictable alien races, battling their way out of mischief, and translating off to another episode. I knew there were readers out there who indeed wanted to see them meet alien races, and to engage in surrealistic battles ala Star Wars. But that just wasn’t what I’d envisioned for these characters or this universe. This was supposed to be a very realistic scenario (as much as travel to other worlds can possibly be, at any rate), and I didn’t see intelligent aliens and “take me to your leader” to be a part of that scenario. I’d found a way out of it by creating the Kestral universe, and I wasn’t going to make this a part of that.
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The quantum translation process by which the satellite Verdant “translates” from place to place is based on a combination of existing theories, correlated and cooked into a stew by myself, to satisfy one of my sci-fi pet peeves: Faster-than-light travel to the stars, of which no description I’ve ever read has been satisfying. I searched for years to develop a theoretical way of accomplishing star travel that would at least seem realistically possible, given the limits of existing and projected technology, and assuming we would never be able to store and manipulate the stellar-scale energies that other methods required to work. I tried to provide enough of a description of the process to satisfy anyone who hadn’t read Verdant Skies (shame on you!); but for anyone who really needs more, see that novel for further details on the process, including the references I’ve used to construct my theory. At any rate, the Verdant Drive was a vehicle, but by no means the meat of the story, so I decided I didn’t need to dwell on it overmuch in this story.
Of the planetary systems mentioned in the story—Fomalhaut, Glisa 581, 55 Canri, and Gliese—each of them are actual star systems, and according to the latest data, are expected to have planets in the “goldilocks” zone of liquid water that is required for Life As We Know It. It would make sense that Verdant would want to search those systems for similar chemicals and compounds, as they might expect planetary development in that zone to be similar to that in our Solar System. What we would find when we get there is still anybody’s guess, since our best telescopes and scanners can barely confirm that planetary bodies are there, much less their actual state. But it seemed a good place to start a galactic adventure. Writers have postulated planets around many of the most and least prominent stars in our skies, using random guesswork and wishful thinking. My choices were based on slightly more real data to back them up… but beyond that, rest assured, they are just as fanciful as anyone else’s guesses.
And surprise: I left this story much as I left Verdant Skies… complete, but with a possibility of stories yet to come. And for the record, I have no intention of writing any of them. But then… I had no intention of writing this one…
Steven Lyle Jordan
April 2011
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