The spaceship Effugium, from my new anthology of the same name, was the prototype for a fleet of recreational space vehicles. It was refitted and repurposed for a much longer voyage than it was ever intended to embark upon, but in the beginning, it was totally going to be like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic project, which I actually hadn’t heard anything about in a long, long time.
Always thought it was cool, though, and it’s been in the news again lately. I wouldn’t have heard about it if I hadn’t been making google searches about commercial spaceflight, because I don’t pay attention to the news. I choose not to dwell upon what Donald Trump ate for breakfast every day and what the resulting farts smelled like. You people enjoy your weeping and gnashing of teeth, agonizing over that dude’s very existence, or conversely, clamoring for a taste of his salty ball sweat. I’ve checked out.
Anyway, seems like VG has been making some noise again, and pretty soon you’ll be able to visit space for a few minutes, to the tune of $250k. If this is just a ruse to load up a bunch of rich assholes and send them on a one-way trip to outer space and make planet Earth a better place, I’m all about it. Whoever decides that life-saving meds that cost pennies to produce but cost the customer the price of a house should definitely receive first-class tickets.
Another topic dealt with in the book is AI attempting to replace man. That’s a thing people are talking about now, too. Looks like Effugium is a pretty topical book!
Lastly, I had no idea that the basic concept of the book’s Terrestrially Regenerative Enhanced Extranet (TREE) was already a real-world idea when I conceived it. Pretty cool. As far as I can tell, no one else is writing science fiction about it. Yet another reason for you to cop my dope-ass new book.
I don’t consider it hard sci-fi, because I don’t really get into the nuts and bolts of these things. I prefer to think of it as hard sci-fi concepts softly executed.
I’m more about the vibes and the characters and the outlandish circumstances human beings always seem to be able to adapt to. That’s the core of the book. It’s sci-fi for people who love sci-fi as well as those who don’t.
So if you’re intrigued by these things, or if you like a little bit of humor and a lot of heart mixed into your sci-fi, Czech it out! I wrote it for you.
Effugium 
Reblogged this on Patrick Walts.
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There really should be more examples of hard Sci-Fi concepts executed softly. Not everyone wants to dig into the complex details of science, but everyone should be aware of this stuff.
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Yeah. I do appreciate the material that really delves into it. I’m not knocking people who write that stuff at all, it’s great. But for your average reader, that’s one of the things they dislike about sci-fi. It can get bogged down with technobabble. And a lot of people do like technobabble, but I know there are a great many who don’t, as well. There’s room for everything, I think.
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I will also say that it’s concepts that propel technology forward, not details. The details are often made up and not how the things actually work when they’re invented. Creative people have an idea, tech-savvy people are inspired by it and work towards making it reality, and they’re each contributing something the other generally can’t do. For example, you see a lot of astronauts, scientists, engineers etc cite Star Trek as a huge reason they pursued those careers. You don’t often hear them say they were inspired by 800-page hard sci-fi books. People call Arthur C. Clarke the inventor of the satellite, but he didn’t sit down and draw up some technical schematics for it. It’s a basic idea.
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