Tell me about your first novel. What were you trying to accomplish with it?
In many ways, *Unbounded* is a typical space exploration story, but in others it is quite different. This novel is basically a reaction against the Space Opera genre; it's a kind of criticism of *Star Trek* and its imitators. To be clear, I am a *Star Trek* fan, but we have to take it for what it is, which is sociological SF, not Hard SF. Also, I have nothing against any particular genre, so long as the story is interesting.
Then why would you react against Space Opera? What's wrong with it?
Nothing, if that is what you want. But I wanted to see if space exploration stories could be told with a little more realism--in the back of the book, you will find a bibliography of some of the sources I used for my research. The Space Opera genre is characterized by vast scope and high stakes, fictional technology, and an overall epic and melodramatic feel. I wanted to eschew all this, as I started with the premise of writing a book of scientific fiction rather than fictional science. So, the scope is restricted to one ship and one crew; most of the crew are in the background, as I wanted to put few characters in focus; the emotional atmosphere is very understated. Only the lives of the crew are at stake, not whole worlds. Obviously, there can be no wormholes, warp drive, FTL travel, universal translators, humanoid aliens, teleporters, gravity plating, etc. Most of the science in this novel is found in the biology and geology, rather than the physics of space travel. I researched known exoplanets and simulated possible atmospheres, for example. The method of space travel is one of the more questionable scientific aspects, as the ship has a ramscoop and fusion drive. (To learn more about this, I recommend the website Atomic Rockets.) It doesn't seem impossible from a physics point of view, but it might be practically impossible from an engineering point of view. Also, modern humans would not survive the trip, so my characters are genetically modified in a particular way.
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