I was recently asked to do an interview with a local journalist about my new novel, Russet. Here’s an excerpt from that interview.

DM: Thanks for joining me, Steve. Let’s start with this: Why this story? Why science fiction?

SS: When I was a kid back in the early 60s, space really was the next frontier. The USSR’s Sputnik went up, followed by Laika, the dog, then by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Not long after that Alan Shepherd and John Glenn went up, and the race was on. First there was Mercury, then Gemini, and then Apollo, which of course, took us to the Moon. Everyone’s imagination was firing on all eight cylinders.

So, I’ve been a space geek since I was in elementary school. I remember that whenever a launch was scheduled, it would be the only thing on TV—of course, we only had three channels. The coverage started hours before the actual launch, and once the rocket left the launch pad, the mission preempted everything else on TV until the astronaut or astronauts, depending on the mission, were back on Earth. Today, rockets launch all the time, and they barely get a mention on the news. It’s kind of sad that we aren’t still awed by it.

So, back to your question about why science fiction. With all the fake news and attacks on science that we’re experiencing today, I wanted to write something that celebrates the breathtaking legacy of NASA and the people who accomplished (and still accomplish) such extraordinary, near magical things.

DM: I like your use of that phrase, “near magical.” What do you mean by that?

SS: Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Childhood’s End, and Rendezvous with Rama, among others—he wrote more than 30 novels—once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I love that, and I absolutely agree with it. I’ve spent my entire career in the telecommunications industry, watching as we went from black Bakelite telephones that sat on a table in the hallway, to mobile devices with capabilities that boggle the mind—and we completely take them for granted. We have satellite communications—a technology that was invented by Clarke, by the way—that allows us to be connected anywhere on the planet, so reliably that we don’t even think about it. I remember being on a business trip to Johannesburg in South Africa, 8,000 miles from my home. I picked up my mobile, called my wife in Vermont, and seconds later the phone rang, and we were talking, as if I was down the street at the grocery store. Contrast that with the technology behind the lunar lander that touched down on the moon in 1969. For example, NASA realized at the last minute that they didn’t know how they were going to know when to shut off the engine when the lander reached the surface, so they rigged a wire attached to a switch so that when the tip of the wire—think coat hanger—touched the ground, it would flip the switch and shut off the engine. And, it worked flawlessly, in spite of the fact that Rube Goldberg would have been proud of the design.

Sorry for the long-winded answer. In this book, Russet, I pull together a collection of technologies, some of them near-magic in terms of what they do and how they work, some of them from the 18th century. They work together brilliantly to make the story happen the way I think it would happen in the real world. The book celebrates what results when humans manage to come together and work toward a common goal. It’s not as hard as it seems, in spite of what we’ve come to believe from current events.

DM: Where did the storyline come from?

SS: That’s always the hardest question to answer, and you’ll hear that from every writer. If anyone ever replies, “It was a flash of brilliant clarity, and the story appeared!” They’re smoking something extremely pleasant. That just doesn’t happen. The thing that makes a writer a writer is the gift of focused observation. I just made that up, but hopefully you get it. We pull from personal experiences, from the myriad things we read, from conversations we have and conversations we overhear, from the endless research we do, and from our imaginations. There’s no formula. Let me give you an example. I teach seminars for executive audiences on technology trends that may affect their businesses. One of those is additive manufacturing, sometimes called 3D printing. I know a lot about it, I know what it’s capable of, and I know what its future may look like. It plays a somewhat central role in the book. 

Now, think relationships. I had the honor to meet and have several conversations with a NASA astronaut, a Mission Specialist, who spent time on Mir and on the ISS. He filled my head with possibilities from his firsthand experiences up there. 

Then, I had the opportunity to meet one of NASA’s chief scientists because of a relationship I have with a university that I work with. Those two encounters filled my head with possibilities that made their way into the book.

And not to put too fine a point on it, I’m kind of an old fart. I remember very well the launches of Mercury and Redstone rockets, with Walter Cronkite on TV, moving the little magnetic capsule on the orbital chart behind him to show us where it was above the earth. 

Finally, I read a lot. I read all kinds of stuff. One of my email signature lines says something like, “Writing is my craft; reading is my gym.” I truly believe that. All good writers read incessantly. It’s not an option. Over the years I’ve read all kinds of books about space, about the technology required to get us there and keep us there, and memoirs by people who went up there, lived for a while, and returned, fundamentally changed because of the experience of waking up every day, looking down on Earth. And I haven’t even mentioned all the fiction I’ve read.

So: where did the story come from? Well, I capture it pretty well in the Preface of the book, but basically, I looked at the facts—and the challenge, which the facts don’t really support. We sent three astronauts to the Moon in 1969, a round-trip of about ten days. As big as the Apollo capsule was, it was pretty small. Basically, they traveled to the Moon, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a row of what were basically three lawn chairs. There was no bathroom; they couldn’t really get up and wander around; there was no such thing as alone time. So now we’re going to Mars, a trip of four to six months, depending on a lot of factors. There’s no way we’re going to get people to sit for that long—they wouldn’t survive. No way at all. So…I figured out a way to get a crew all the way to Mars without killing each other. That’s what the book is about.

DM: You’re not going to tell us more than that, are you?

SS: (Laughs) Nope. You’re gonna have to read the book. 

Steven Shepard’s newest novel, Russet, is now available on Amazon and will soon be available in bookstores.