So please, Sannah. Talk to us. I’ll take my own kids to see you when they bring you home to L5. I’ll help the President find some place to pin a medal on you.
Granddad would have been proud as hell.
AFTERWORD
As the first section heading implies, four of the stories here are set in the universe of my novels Proxima and Ultima (2013–14). The previously published stories have been lightly revised for compatibility with the finished novels.
Several of these stories have been influenced by my membership, since 2008, of an international advisory group for SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and since 2013 my membership of the UK SETI Research Network (UKSRN). In 2008, I published an academic paper setting out the idea, dramatised in ‘Eagle Song’, that extraterrestrial intelligences might choose to signal to us, not with radio waves, but with naked-eye-visible optical beacons (‘SETI before Marconi: Sunlight Beacons and the Fermi Paradox’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society vol. 61 pp. 440–443, November 2008). And in another paper (‘Renaissance Versus Revelation: The Timescale of the Interpretation and Assimilation of a Message from ETI’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society vol. 62 pp. 382–5, 2010) I explored the idea that contact with the alien might have parallels to religious revelations of the past, as dramatised in ‘The Invasion of Venus’ and ‘Turing’s Apples’. The ‘Benford beacons’ referenced in ‘Turing’s Apples’ have been described in papers beginning with ‘Messaging with Cost Optimised Interstellar Beacons’ by J. Benford, G. Benford and D. Benford (2009, arXiv:0810.3964v2). Dr John Elliott at Leeds Beckett University has been developing signal-analysis protocols of the kind mentioned in that story and in ‘The Invasion of Venus’, a work to which I’ve contributed to a small extent (see ‘The DISC Quotient’ by Elliott and Baxter, Acta Astronautica vol. 78, pp. 20–25, 2012). The ‘Hoyle strategy’ mentioned in ‘Turing’s Apples’ refers to Geoffrey Hoyle’s 1961 BBC TV serial A for Andromeda.
The starship technology and mission plan described in ‘StarCall’ are (very loosely) extrapolated from the papers ‘Project Icarus: Target Selection’ and ‘Project Icarus: Scientific Objectives’ by I. Crawford, and ‘Mass Beam Propulsion: An Overview’ by G.D. Nordley and A.J. Crowl, presented at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, Orlando, Florida, 30 September–2 October 2011.
I’d like to thank Simon Bradshaw for the enjoyable conversations about Mars and Able Archer 83 that led to the concocting of ‘Mars Abides’.
Any errors or inaccuracies are of course my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
April 2016
ALSO BY STEPHEN BAXTER FROM GOLLANCZ
NON-FICTION
Deep Future
The Science of Avatar
FICTION
Mammoth
Longtusk
Icebones
Behemoth
Reality Dust
Evolution
Flood
Ark
Proxima
Ultima
Xeelee: An Omnibus
Xeelee: Endurance
NORTHLAND
Stone Spring
Bronze Summer
Iron Winter
THE WEB
Gulliverzone
Webcrash
DESTINY’S CHILDREN
Coalescent
Transcendent
Resplendent
A TIME ODYSSEY (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn
TIME’S TAPESTRY
Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator
Weaver
The Medusa Chronicles (with Alastair Reynolds)
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2016
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The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
Gollancz
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This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 21277 0
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