The editing process continues: chapter three of Longshot has been re-posted. My thanks, as always, to my editor for his corrections and feedback.
The science fiction I write tends to be "hard", in the sense that everything in it is scientifically possible: there's no faster-than-light travel, and details such as Longshot's antimatter drive and its rate of rotation have been exactingly researched, even if this information remains in the background of the story.
However, many stories require one aspect that is not fully factual in order to complete the plot. In technical discussions, this is called "handwaving"; in the realm of scientific hypotheses, they're commonly referred to as "blue fairies". Regardless of the pursuit, the idea is the same: there is a certain point in a conjecture where you don't know the details of how things work, but allow it in order for the rest of the argument to hang together.
Importantly, you're only allowed one blue fairy: anything more than that is considered cheating or fantasy. The same goes for my stories. Sometimes, as in Resonance, the blue fairy is central: there's no real explanation of how the protagonist's gift works, just that it does, while the rest of the story remains realistic. In Longshot, the unknown factor is the ship's climate. Longshot has thousands of square miles, but a polar cap and a desert separated by just fifty miles and a wealth of diverse biomes between them strains the ability of any technology to maintain a thermodynamic balance. In Longshot, it "just works", hopefully to the pleasure of the reader.