Seveneves

Acknowledgments

THE PREMISE OF THIS BOOK CAME TO ME CIRCA 2006, WHEN I WAS working part-time at Blue Origin and became interested in the problem of space debris in low Earth orbit. Researchers in that field had raised concerns over the possibility of a chain reaction smash-up that might create so many fragments of orbiting shrapnel as to render space flight practically impossible. My studies in that area turned out to be of little direct relevance to the company, but the novelist in me scented an idea for a book. During the same period I had also become aware of the immense amount of usable matter present in near-Earth asteroids. Thus by late 2006 I had come up with the basic premise of Seveneves. So the first acknowledgment goes to Blue Origin, which was founded circa 2000 by Jeff Bezos under the name Blue Operations LLC and where I had many interesting early conversations with him and other people involved with the company, including Jaime Taaffe, Maria Kaldis, Danny Hillis, George Dyson, and Keith Rosema. It was from Keith that I first heard the idea for the multilayered emergency shelter bubble that appears in this book under the name of Luk. Some of the Baikonur material is very freely adapted from the reminiscences and photographs of George Dyson, Esther Dyson, and Charles Simonyi.

Hugh and Heather Matheson provided background on mining — the industry, the culture, and the lifestyle — which helped me in creating Dinah. If I have stretched truths in my treatment of the MacQuaries’ mine in Alaska and their use of ham radio, it is my fault and not theirs. For the record, Hugh recommended that Rufus’s operation be situated in the Homestake Mine near Lead, South Dakota, or in the Coeur d’Alene Mining District, Idaho, but I put it in Alaska anyway, to get it farther from the equatorial zone.

Chris Lewicki and the staff of Planetary Resources supplied valuable suggestions during an informal visit that I made to their offices in November 2013. Numerous members of their engineering staff were more than generous with their time on that occasion. (Later Chris mentioned to me that he and other members of the company had been pleasantly surprised to learn that someone was producing science fiction in which the asteroid mining company was, for once, the good guys.)

Marco Kaltofen helped me flesh out the technical details of Ymir’s “steampunk” propulsion system and read over the relevant sections of the first draft with a careful eye. Seamus Blackley also supplied useful input during this phase. Having invoked those people’s good names, I’ll reiterate that if I’ve taken liberties — accidentally or on purpose — with scientific fact, it should be blamed on me and not on them.

Tola Marts and Tim Lloyd helped sketch out and visualize some of the details of the space hardware described in the book, a project that is still ongoing. Readers may be comforted to know that, thanks to Tola, various aspects of the Eye and the associated tether systems have been designed with appropriate engineering safety factors.

Kris Pister’s work on small swarming robots, which I have been following on and off for several years, was formative in the discussion of Nats.

Karen Laur and Aaron Leiby contributed time and effort to envisioning a game based on TerReForm, and though those efforts were stymied by the usual difficulties in obtaining capital, they did help sharpen my thinking about various aspects of the story. As part of a different prospective game project, Tim Miller of Blur Studio, with input from Jascha Little, Zoe Stephenson, Russel Howe, and Jo Balme, came up with ideas and concept art (produced by Chuck Wojtkiewicz, Sean McNally, Tom Zhao, and Joshua Shaw of Blur) for a number of different robots. Ed Allard devoted many hours of his time to prototyping the same game. Again, this work hasn’t led to an actual game yet, but it had the side effect of helping me put flesh on the bones of the story. Thanks also to James Gwertzman for introducing me to Ed and for his advice and feedback on this front.

Ben Hawker of Weta Workshop read the manuscript and pointed out that Cradle would be rusty, a detail that had somehow escaped me; hasty last-minute alterations ensued.

Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan, by dint of their connection with the Long Now Foundation’s Revive and Restore Initiative, had much useful background to supply on the genetic challenges associated with reviving species from small breeding populations.

While the first two parts of the story are a tale of straight-up global disaster and hastily improvised technology, I always viewed the third part of it as an opportunity to showcase many of the more positive ideas that have emerged, over the last century, from the global community of people interested in space exploration. Many of the big hardware ideas in the latter part of the book have been kicking around in the literature for decades and will be recognized as old friends by longtime readers of hard science fiction.

Particular recognition and thanks are owed to Rob Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited. Following in the footsteps of the late Robert L. Forward, Rob has worked on a number of ideas in the realm of “big space machines.” One of these is the Hoytether, a hugely scaled-up version of which has found its way into this book as the basic design scheme of the tether connecting the Eye to Cradle. Another is the Remora Remover, which, in principle, is the same device as the Lamprey. Rob is also coauthor of a 2000 study on high-altitude rotating tethers, based on early work by Forward and others, that serves as the basis for the glider-to-orbit transfer described in the opening pages of the third part of this book. He deserves credit for all of those contributions as well as thanks for having given the manuscript a close read.

The first phase of Kath Two’s journey, from ground to hanger, is inspired by conversations that I have had with Chris Young and Kevin Finke about current trends in the technology of gliders. It is from talking to them, flying with them, and following leads provided by them that I came to understand the fact that the atmosphere contains all the energy we need to fly, and that the only thing preventing us from implementing something like Kath Two’s glider is commitment of resources to development of sensors and software — perhaps combined with a few improvements in the treatment of motion sickness.

Arthur Champernowne read an early draft and raised questions about the dynamic stability of the Eye-Cradle tether, which I have, with due respect, elected to ignore completely — but technically sophisticated readers might like to know that it would exhibit all manner of interesting wiggles whose management I have decided to postpone for later work. In the version that Arthur read, the flivver carrying Kath Two made its final insertion to geosynchronous orbit using a plain old-fashioned rocket burn. Arthur objected to that, not on technical but on aesthetic grounds. This finally pushed me over the brink into using an idea I had been carrying around in the back of my head for a while: having the flivver rendezvous with the end of a cracking whip. The scientific literature on this topic, though sparse, dates back to the Victorian era. The earliest technical reference that I have been able to find on the physics of moving chains is a paper by John Aitken during the 1870s, though he attributes some of its content to his friends the Thomson brothers, William (later Lord Kelvin) and James. Aitken’s work lay fallow until the 1920s, when it was picked up and used by M. Z. Carriére in a paper about the physics of whips. Subsequent work published by W. Kucharski (1940) and R. Grammel and K. Zoller (1949) filled out the picture. It is an interesting, underexplored topic in classical physics. I talked about it in a sparsely attended lecture at the Oxford Union in June of 2014, and have intentions of publishing more about it, but nothing definite as of this writing (December 2014).

Finally, I would like to express gratitude to my agents, Liz Darhansoff of Darhansoff & Verrill and Richard Green of ICM Partners, and my editor, Jen Brehl, for displaying adaptability as I devoted seven years to trying to figure out just what exactly I wanted to do with this idea.