Colin Barrett: Blog

Bringing the Edenites into the picture--with the usual difficulty of communicating across the species gap.

Some new and surprising information.
We're coming to the end of the Eden trilogy. This is where I leave Eden and the Edenites.I'm also planning to stop posting for a while. Of the novels I've written I've put four on SOL. The others are available, if you're interested, on Amazon, for a nominal price. They're for Kindle, of course, but if you don't have one (or don't like them) Amazon offers a free emulation for your computer or tablet.

A reader e-mailed me yesterday, suggesting that "maybe there's some way the Edenites could help Amanda." Good idea; I wonder whether that reader's been looking ahead.
Another reader, professing to be an erstwhile Glaswegan (resident of the Scottish city of Glasgow) wondered why MacPherson is the only character to speak with an accent, which he said was barely intelligible as I write it. Actually, if you'll think back quite a few chapters, there was another accented character, that one with a Teutonic accent. I got started with Mac's Scots burr back when he was intended only to be a minor character; when he grew more important to the story I just kept it up. I don't profess to be all that knowledgeable about Scots pronunciations and dialect, but I'm also aware that they're quite regional even in that small country. I hope readers are able to follow his speech OK; I think it adds a bit to his characterization. Many people, I've found, deliberately seek to set themselves apart by the mode of their speech; if you'll recall, this was specifically an issue in the first book of this trilogy.
There was a third reader who pointed out that an increase in local gravity wouldn't affect buoyancy in water. True; but if you find you weight half again as much without any increase in size or surface area, you're not going to be real happy trying to swim.
Thanks very much to those others who've also commented. It flatters me to know that readers are so caught up in my story,

Well, with conditions on the Ark back to normal, can Meiersdottir recover from her broken thigh? Old age, as people have said, isn't for sissies.
Someone pointed out yesterday that my definition of an astronomical unit (A.U.) was a few zeros shy of accurate. The Earth is about 150,000,000 kilometers from the sun, which is the definition of an A.U. That's million, rather than the 150 thousand I mentioned.
Global warming hasn't reached that pitch yet.

A few points about the "science" in today's chapter. I use quotes around the word "science," because I have to acknowledge that this time I've played a bit fast and loose with it.
First off, gravitational lensing. I've ascribed it to the impact of gravity deflecting the flow of particles passing near a massive gravitational source, such as a star, but it's actually a lot more complicated than that. Yes, gravitational pull on the passing particles may have an effect, but the phenomenon is mainly due to the distortion of the space-time fabric caused by the star's presence. The thing is, try explaining that one in the context of a work of fiction that needs to flow. The second thing is that, irrespective of cause, the focal point of reconvergence of particles affected by gravitational lensing is nowhere near as short as I've postulated. Presumably the Ark is somewhere around one or two astronomical units beyond Eden's sun (one A.U. = the distance between the Earth and its sun, which of course varies depending on where Earth is in its orbit, but is conventionally set at 93 million miles, or about 150,000 kilometers). Current theory says that the focal point of gravitational lensing caused by our sun would be somewhere a bit more than 500 A.U.'s beyond the sun. There would undoubtedly be some intrusion of the nova's radiation into the nearby umbra (shadow) of Eden's sun, but probably (according to current theory, at least) not to the catastrophic extent that I've hypothesized.
Still, I think my science is at least a bit more accurate than that of Jack McDevitt in Devil's Eye or Robert J. Sawyer in Calculating God. Both writers used a temporally brief shield to avert the effects of a nova on a distant planet, and neither postulated the kind of focused effect caused by coincidence of the nova's magnetic and rotational poles that I have. Realistically, both don't quite work for the true astro-physicist, any more than does my own view. Science fiction doesn't always have to be 100% true to actual science, that's what the "fiction" part of the designation is all about.
The rest of the stuff about the effects of an incomplete transition of a material object into a Lorenzian wormhole, and the nature of "worm space," is obviously my own invention. There's no possible way of knowing these things, any more than it's possible to know today whether a large object such as a spacecraft could in fact traverse a wormhole (much less with directional control). At least what I've written sounds vaguely scientific and doesn't controvert as much knowledge as we have today.
That's about all the major science-type stuff for Eden Rescue. I thought it added something to the story. You can actually pretty much skip over it if you like; it's not crucial.