DISCOVERING HYPERSPACE

Another question that writers are always being asked is where they get their ideas from. In my experience, the ideas that finally turn into books often result when thoughts that complement each other, but which have never connected together in your mind before, suddenly click together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. While I was writing Inherit the Stars, I found myself thinking from time to time about the “hyperdrives,” “warp drives,” and other exotic propulsion systems that we come across in science fiction. It seemed to me that they had become something of a cliche, tacitly accepted by writers and readers alike as merely a device to shortcut Einstein by moving characters from here to there fast to get on with the story. . . . But wait a minute. We’re talking about a capability that transcends not only any technology imaginable today, but also our most fundamental theoretical beliefs. Never mind getting across the galaxy to save the blonde or deliver the villain his comeuppances—how did they discover “hyperspace” to begin with? Surely, there’s a much more interesting story right here, which we were about to gloss over. What experiments in labs gave strange results? What body of new theory and speculation did this open up? How were the ideas tested? How did things progress from there to proven, working engineering? Nobody I talked to had seen a story about how hyperspace came to be discovered. I played around with some extrapolations of physics that provided a plausible theoretical framework, but that doesn’t make a novel.

Another subject that I talked about with friends sometimes was the interstellar warships that we saw in books and movies. As usual, I was complaining. It didn’t make sense for a vessel that could cross light-years of space in an instant, with the staggering level of technology that implied, to peel off into a dive when it got there, like a World War II Stuka—and usually with a pilot driving it from a World War II cockpit—and drop a bomb on something. After all, what does a bomb do? It concentrates a lot of energy on a target. Well, if you can send a spaceship there through hyperspace, why not just send the energy? Just imagine being able to materialize the equivalent of a fifty-megaton bang out of nowhere, instantaneously, without warning, and with no way for an enemy to know where it came from. That sounded more like a weapon worthy of a futuristic technology. By comparison, sending a spaceship to drop a bomb would be like inventing gunpowder to blow holes through castle walls, but trundling it up to the wall with a horse and cart instead of thinking to invent a cannon. But that doesn’t add up to a story either.

These two thoughts existed in separate compartments in my head for a long time. Then one day, the obvious eventually struck me: Perhaps the new physics that our characters stumble on isn’t recognized as the way to a hyperdrive at all, to begin with. Perhaps they could be investigating its promise of a revolutionary weapons system—which happens all the time in real life. And only later, maybe, the line of new discoveries takes an unexpected turn which leads to spacecraft drives. The two ideas fitted well together, and that was how The Genesis Machine came to be written. It’s the book that seems to generate the most questions about where the idea came from.