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Author’s Notes


While my stories might occur in a vacuum (that is, space), the writing process itself most definitely does not.

First and foremost, thank you to my wife, Melissa. Trust me when I say that none of this would be possible without her support.

Many thanks to all of the good folks at Baen, in particular Toni Weisskopf and D.J. Butler, for their editorial guidance and support.

As always, I must also thank Winchell Chung for his fascinating Atomic Rockets website. Most everything I’ve learned about the advanced propulsion needed to make these stories work originated there.

Thanks are also due to Dr. Robert Hampson, for helping me understand the complexities of mind-computer interfaces.

Finally, as valuable as internet research can be (in addition to being a major time saver), there’s no substitute for talking to actual experts in the field. For this, I owe deep gratitude to a pair of NASA researchers who helped me keep the science right:

To Les Johnson of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, for introducing me to Dr. Gerald Cleaver at Baylor University, who in turn helped me to understand current theories on wormholes and their related phenomena. Daisy’s statement that a stable wormhole should be “fully traversable in both directions,” and “possesses no crushing gravitational tidal forces” was quoted directly from a paper he authored. Any errors within this book are mine, not his.

To Andy Presby of NASA’s Glenn Research Center, for confirming that pulse fusion technology is perhaps the only realistic path to building fusion-powered spacecraft in our lifetimes.

Each book I’ve written has been the result of a long education process, and this was by far the most challenging. Figuring out how a fictional spacecraft should work is nothing compared to wrestling with the effects of Einstein’s relativity in a story arc. There were occasions where it tied my brain in knots, which I hope you’ve found to have been sufficiently unraveled by now. What follows is a Physics lesson from an English major, so consider yourself duly warned . . . 

Jack’s disappearance was caused by his sudden removal from our local space and being spat into another system twelve light years away. At that point, his local time is years behind those of his friends back on Earth. However, the distance for a signal to travel back through the wormhole is shortened enough to begin conversing as if he were still in our solar system, even though their proper time references are now years apart. That difference isn’t a result of the distance between the two star systems, it’s more a function of gravitational forces within the wormhole.

Think of it like this: the effect of gravitational time dilation has been measured. As one character mentioned, we see it every day in the corrections that have to be applied to the clocks aboard GPS satellites for the system to work at all. Over the lifetime of Earth, this same effect means our planet’s core is roughly 2.5 years younger than its crust. Yet if a tunnel were somehow bored through, a signal could reach the core almost instantaneously. That wouldn’t change the local, “proper” time at either end, and that’s how Jack and Traci could communicate without waiting years for a reply.

Thus endeth the lesson.

The U.N. Protocols for Engagement With Alien Civilizations may be even fuzzier, if that’s possible. In researching this book, I found references to work on this as far back as 2010 but haven’t been able to determine if the protocols were ever finished. I do find it interesting that first contact formalities were being seriously discussed at such levels.

As Traci postulated in Frozen Orbit, finding life beyond Earth shouldn’t result in the cultural upheaval some assume it would cause. There’s still much about our own planet that we don’t yet know which could prove to be just as surprising. Discovering life under the ice on Europa or Ganymede would be thrilling, and would introduce some profound questions, but ultimately it would be akin to finding a new species in the Arctic Ocean.

Finding intelligent life would be another matter entirely. Such an event would confirm many assumptions, and shatter many more. It is entirely possible that the reason we haven’t detected other intelligent life may well be because we are the first, which also introduces profound questions—not that we have the ability to confirm such a thing. But if enough of us believe that to be the case, it should cause us to reflect on our place in the Universe and our ultimate responsibility to “go forth and prosper.” Take care of what we have, and spread life where we can.


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Framed