This book is likewise better for the counsel of astrobiology educator Nicoline Chambers, my long-time science advisor (and, y’know, my mom), who never seems to tire of my sloppy late-night emails about whether I should use this term or that, whether my planets make sense, and so on. Among my many questions was that of what gear the Lawki 6 crew would bring along for the ride. The Merian’s labs were stocked by both her and her colleagues Charles Cockell, professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, and Caroline Williams, assistant professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. My thanks to them for helping me assemble a shopping list.

I also must give a hat tip to some folks who I don’t know at all but would be very happy to have a beer with. My inspiration for OCA came in part from real-world citizen-funded spaceflight efforts, whose creativity and tenacity sets me on fire. If this concept appeals to you, I encourage you to check out the ongoing work of Copenhagen Suborbitals, Pacific Spaceflight, and the Planetary Society’s LightSail project.

As always, this book wouldn’t be a book at all if it weren’t for the people who unfairly do not have their names on the cover despite all their hard work: Sam Bradbury, Oliver Johnson, David Pomerico, and the amazing teams at both Hodder & Stoughton and Harper Voyager.

Most importantly, love to my family, love to my friends, and love to my wife, all of whom kept me upright through a beast of a year. I’d be lost without you.

Read on for exclusive content

Having a science consultant while writing a sci-fi book is a tremendous amount of help. They’re the person you email in the middle of the night when you’re not sure if you want a bacteria or a virus (or maybe a fungus), or in moments of panic when you suddenly wonder if you got gravity wrong. They’re the one who patiently tells you how to fix it, or how to redo it, or how, as the case may be, you might gloss over the bits that don’t plain work. Writing a book may look like a solitary activity (and in many ways, it is), but I’ve yet to meet the author who doesn’t breathe easier after getting a second pair of eyes on whatever mess they’ve written themselves into.

I’m lucky enough to have had the same person on the line for all my books thus far, and since I’ve got some space in this special edition to do anything I fancy, I’d like to introduce you to her. She’s an astrobiology educator based in Southern California, a teacher ambassador for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is currently doing research with the University of Edinburgh Centre for Astrobiology and the UC Berkeley Department of Integrative Biology.

Her name’s Nikki Chambers, and yes, she is also my mom.

In 2018, my mom accompanied me to Worldcon in San Jose (her first!), and we did a panel together on the relationship between real science and science fiction, from the perspectives of author and consultant. Like many science fiction authors, I write stories about space and science because I love space and science. On the flip side, there are many scientists who got into their fields because they were inspired by stories they loved. It’s an amazing symbiotic relationship, that cycle between the real and the imaginary, and it’s one of the core reasons why I write in this genre.

But there is a trickier, potentially problematic side to that as well. Misconceptions about how the universe works can be absorbed as truth, thanks to the famous tendency we pop culture purveyors have of getting things wrong. I’m pretty sure that for every scientist out there who adores sci-fi, there’s another who’s been driven to the brink of madness by the mistakes we make. So for our panel, we dug into that complicated relationship. What, if any, responsibility do science fiction authors have to champion real science? And what are the narrative reasons why storytellers sometimes intentionally play fast and loose with the rules, even when we know better?

We had a great time unpacking all of that with each other (and with our awesome audience). We’ve recreated a little bit our conversation here, as a sort of on-the-page encore.

Becky’s questions for Nikki

Would you agree that science and science fiction have a symbiotic relationship, outside of our nerdy family? Do you see examples of that among your colleagues?

Oh, absolutely. In the end, both are stories we tell as we work out our place in the world. I love examples of science fiction driving real-life exploration, discovery, and invention. Sliding doors in grocery stores will tickle me forever. I also love the reverse: when what we know inspires stories about what we might yet come to know. (Of course, I get pretty cranky when that slides over the boundary into pseudoscience. Cherry-picking scientific understanding in a real-world context is infuriating at best, dangerous and morally wrong at worst.)

I do have quite a few colleagues who adore science fiction. One of my fellow teachers is having a Star Wars-themed wedding this summer. There were a boatload of scientists at Worldcon. Stephen Hawking relished his cameo on Star Trek. Et cetera!

While you spend lots of time in labs and with other scientists, the majority of your time is spent teaching high school. Do you think science fiction has a positive impact on your students, or is it fostering ideas that are unhelpful? Or a bit of both? Are there any particular pop-cultural misconceptions your students tend to bring up a lot?

My impression is that kids are pretty clear-eyed about the difference between science fiction and science, most of the time. It definitely seems to depend on the medium, though! Books and movies – they get it. But internet content and streaming videos can be more difficult for them to contextualize. Pseudo-reality “documentaries” about extinct giant sharks, mermaids, and so on – they need help with skeptical thinking about that rubbish. I think that’s true for people in general, though. Educating people of all ages about the incredible value of evidence-based thinking is sadly lacking in too many facets of our society.

On the other hand, while this may sound contradictory, I am a firm believer in fostering imagination in young children. The pursuit of scientific understanding has an incredible component of imagination. I often think that too many young people these days haven’t had their imagination encouraged enough. In that sense, stories can be helpful in exercising that muscle.

Art is, of course, subjective, and as a writer, you can never predict what reaction a reader’s going to have to your work, because everybody’s viewing that story through a unique lens shaped by their own life experience. In the same vein, a scientist’s mileage with a story will vary a lot depending on what field they’re coming from. I vividly remember you hating The Matrix through your lens as a biologist, but we’ve also watched plenty of goofy sci-fi popcorn movies that you loved. So, at some point, how much should writers reasonably worry about getting things right, if there’s always going to be someone out there who knows a field better than we do? I have my own answer for this, but I’m curious about how you feel on your side of the table.

You are never going to make everyone happy. I think it is a very personal decision for a writer: What kind of story do you want to tell? In the end, scientific concepts are only one of group of things that a sci-fi writer needs to think about “getting right.” You could write a story that is dead-on accurate, down to the tiniest scientific detail, and it might still be an awful story. What you and I have in common in our jobs is that we both have the same daily, ongoing challenges: What story do we want to tell? To whom are we telling it, and why should they care? How do we want to tell it? Those are incredibly complex, nuanced questions for which you and I both are forever chasing answers. I don’t know about you, but every time I think I have it nailed, something or someone throws me a curve ball, and there I go again, hoping to tell the elusive “perfect story.” We’ll never achieve it. That’s part of the challenge, but also part of the fun!