“Well, that too,” Bill said, chuckling. “It’s a big old universe and we’ve hardly scratched the surface. Don’t you?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Miller admitted. “Wouldn’t miss it for the w… universe. But this time, I’m taking some more flowers. And a bigger grapping gun…”
Afterword
I rarely, these days, look at reviews on Amazon. As a fellow author puts it, “they are the slush (the unsolicited and mostly unreadable manuscripts) of reviews.” There are rare, very rare, nuggets of brilliance in them and the “Top Reviewers” are generally very good. The rest, however… Sigh. One must shovel a great deal of muck to find a diamond. I have no patience for reading slush and less for Amazon reviews.
I did, nonetheless, read some of the reviews of Into the Looking Glass, the prequel to this novel. And I, as usual, had to shake my head. Especially at one reviewer (now made semi-famous and immortal) who thought it was a good book but “there was too much science in it.”
Two words: Science Fiction.
Looking Glass was a very strange book that came from nowhere. It had no precedents in my thought processes. But as I wrote it I became very happy. Because strange as that novel was, it had some serious science in it. I am not a scientist but I grew up with science fiction. Indeed, much of what I know about physics and astronomy comes not from classes (of which I’ve had few of the former and none of the latter) but from reading the “greats” of science fiction.
When pressed by my publisher to create a series from Looking Glass (which I’d intended to be a stand-alone), I realized that I had a golden opportunity to write some serious SF. Not aliens creating a pretext for a world war. Not a science fictionalized “boat book” (a term of art about a young man exploring a world new to him). A real, old-fashioned, can-you-handle-your-astronomy-straight-up? science fiction series. Nobody but nobody has said it better than Gene Rodenberry. “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” And, along the way, impart a modicum of science to the uninitiated. (While avoiding as much balonium and make-maulk-uppium as possible.)
I knew that much of that was beyond me. I am neither an astronomer nor a physicist (as noted). I’m a former grunt with some background in biology and geology who likes SF. To do it, I needed a scientist, specifically an astronomer and physicist, to do the “fiddly bits.”
Thus I enlisted Doctor Travis Taylor, Ph.D. For those who find “Dr. William Weaver” unlikely, a snippet from Dr. Taylor’s bio:
Travis Shane Taylor is a born and bred southerner and resides just outside Huntsville, Alabama. He has a Doctorate in Optical Science and Engineering, a Master’s degree in Physics, a Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, all from the University of Alabama in Huntsville; a Master’s degree in Astronomy from the Univ. of Western Sydney, and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Alabama.
Dr. Taylor has worked on various programs for the Department of Defense and NASA for the past sixteen years. He has been a guitarist with several hard rock bands, the 2000 Alabama State Champion in Karate, is a nationally recognized mountain biker, SCUBA diver, private pilot and is worshipped and adored by legions of female fans since he looks like a cross between Tom Cruise and a young Richard Dean Anderson.
(Okay, I added that last bit. )
So much for “Yeah, like there’s really a redneck physicist who mountain bikes for fun…”
From my point of view, the mission of SF was handed down from the greats. Science fiction, speculative fiction, however you wish to say it, has the mission of looking at current theory and taking it beyond the realm of the currently possible. To push the boundaries and think about what could be out there. Whether that is in macrocosmic space, looking at what planets might look like beyond our solar system, or in the microcosmic, looking at what particles might really be doing and why, in biology extrapolating and questioning the ethics of bioengineering in all its manifestations, SF is now and always has been about pushing the boundaries of the known and striking out into the unknown. To speculate, not to prove. What ifness to the nth degree. And maybe get some bright young guy to invent some of this stuff thus making my job harder. What, you don’t have a communicator? AKA a flip-phone?
While, of course, hopefully having a cracking good storyline and some characters people like.
Whether we succeed in our mission, to boldly impart some of the most advanced ideas in quantum theory and cosmology to the uninitiated, to enlighten and entertain, to develop a spark that blossoms into the flame of reality, or not, the mission is worthwhile. And maybe Doc will eventually get me to understand what a fermion is and why it’s important.
Alas… I have the mind of a fourteen-year-old male. Whenever I even write “fermion” I get an image that is anything but cosmological…
John Ringo
Chattanooga, Tennessee
August 2006
Thought I would add my two cents in here as well. There is an awful lot of talk about particles and such in here so I thought a quick description of the fundamentals might be useful. But then again, it might just be damned confusing. But if I were going to give the Space Marines a one- or two-page summary of particles they should keep up with I’d do it with the following information.
Known fundamental particles that can’t be broken into smaller particles are:
Fermions:
Quarks: up, down, top, bottom (sometimes called beauty), charm, and strange
Leptons: electrons, muons, tau, and the three flavors of neutrinos which are electron neutrino, muon neutrion, and tau neutrino
Bosons:
Gauge bosons: photons, W+, W–, Zo, and gluons
Other bosons (theoretical and possibly gauge): Higgs and the graviton (although I personally don’t hold a lot of stock in the graviton)
Now, these are the fundamental particles that can’t be made smaller by splitting them or smacking the hell out of them or anything else. It is these particles that in some combination or other that make up all the matter and interactions in the universe. Well, if you don’t like the graviton we have to consider gravity from some other approach like strings or membranes or spacetime fabric or — oh hell, let’s leave it at that for now.
Fermions are normally the ones that make up matter and stuff and the bosons are the ones that do the interacting or make up the so-called “forces” in nature that we hear about. The four forces are gravity, electromagnetism, weak, and strong forces.
And here is how they work.
Gravity works through the graviton (remember this is debatable as gravity can be described quite well with Einstein’s General Relativity, but most particle weenies won’t admit that. Einstein. Need I say more? Probably, but that’d take all semester).