J.T. McDaniel's blog

Arkhgaiizim Passageways, and Why We May Never Have Them

The Arkhgaiizim Passageway is a central element in my new novel, Returning, which goes on sale 3 April 2017. Essentially a wormhole in the space-time continuum, an Arkhgaiizim Passageway allows Imperial Gehunite spacecraft to travel astronomical distances without the need for several generations to be born, live, and die on the ship before it reaches its destination. By making use of an Arkhgaiizim Passageway, the ship is able to make an instantaneous jump of up to 850 light years, during which the crew will age, at most, a few seconds. 

This is very useful, provided the goal is simply one of exploration. Such is the case with Gehunite ships, the larger ones also carrying prospective colonists, should they encounter suitable unoccupied planets. Policy with regard to planets already having native life is one of strict non-interference, and even non-contact, unless the occupants of that planet have already ventured into space.

Were the goal one of conquest, this would be pointless. Though the ships are commissioned into the Imperial Navy, and commanded and crewed by naval personnel, their primary function remains exploration. The sort of faster-than-light travel and communications beloved of television and motions pictures, unfortunately, still violates the laws of physics, which dictate that nothing having mass can travel faster than light.

Nor does this allow practical warp drives, though here the laws of physics seem to agree with the possibility. By warping space, the hypothesis suggests, one could bring two distant points together and move instantly between them, traversing light year distances without actually having to exceed the speed of light. Originally, it was thought that an Arkhgaiizim Passageway would work this way. But when a test was conducted, in which the test ship made a modest five light year jump, spent a few hours exploring, and then immediately jumped back, a problem was discovered.

The crew, who were, after all, only a few hours older than when they left, were both astonished and dismayed to discover that they had actually been gone for ten years, and were presumed to have died during the test jump. Nature, it appeared, was not to be cheated. It was now possible to use technology to travel at a speed of .9999 light speed using the Arkhgaiizim Passageway, but that was as fast as anyone could travel, and regardless of the fact that no one aboard the ship got any older in the process, the rest of the universe did, and it still took 200 years to travel 200 light years from the perspective of anyone not aboard the ship. 

It says a great deal about the Gehunite character that this didn't discourage the Empire from building more and larger ships that would be able to explore deep space, even though their crews might not return home for thousands of years. Because of this, exploration became essentially a quest for pure knowledge, even if the beneficiaries of that knowledge, when the ships returned to Earth, would live in the far distant future.

This isn't something you could expect an organization like NASA to do today. This is not because NASA wouldn't care to do this sort of pure science, but because there is almost no chance it could be funded even if the technology already existed. Which it doesn't. Most NASA long-range projects have a life of no more than eight years, because that is the practical limit of any one President's influence unless he/she came to the job as a vice-president elevated upon the death of a predecessor during the latter half of that predecessor's term, which would allow the new president to run twice on his/her own ticket. 

Projects have this limit simply because it's unlikely any successor President will continue with them. The new President will start new projects, not continue old ones he won't get the credit for. 

The closer to pure science a project is, the more likely it is to be canceled. Making the Administration look good can keep a project going. So can having a military value. Pure science, on the other hand, and particularly during a Republican administration, becomes harder to justify. The payoff may be years down the road. Or it may conflict with party policy. There is a strong strain of neo-Lysenkoism in the Republican Party, where the politicians tell the scientists the results they want, then expect the scientists to get those results. There's no question that climate is changing, and that human action is largely responsible for the rate, but as this conflicts with the results expected by the energy company donors that dictate policy to Republicans, only those results that agree with what's expected are cited. This is the reason behind the frequent citation of reports by Nobel laureates who disagree with the whole concept of anthropogenic climate change, despite the fact that the Nobel Prize winner is no more competent to express a scientifically informed opinion on climate than your average Conservative talk radio host (most of whom are barely competent to express an opinion on anything). 

Deep space exploration, particular deep space exploration that would make use of an actual Arkhgaiizim Passageway, is unlikely to be financed simply because there would be no payoff within the lifetimes of anyone voting to finance it. Americans are loathe to spend money on anything that doesn't pay off immediately, or have a clear military use. This is why Europe has the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and all the United States has is a big hole in the ground in Texas where the Superconducting Super Collider would have been installed if congress hadn't canceled it in 1993. 

You Can Order Now

As of yesterday, you can go to Amazon.com and pre-order your Kindle copy of Returning. It will be automatically delivered to your Kindle on 3rd April, 2017, or the first time after that date that you sync your device. The trade paperback edition goes on sale the same day, but you'll have to wait for the official release date to order one of those. Don't blame me, though, that's a problem with Amazon's pre-order system that limits it to Kindle products only, unless you're with a much bigger publisher than mine.

As you can see, we've got a new cover, which I think looks rather nicer than the original. Sometimes it's a little annoying that actual NASA photos aren't nearly as impressive as shots where an artist has manipulated the image, but that's how it is. 

The cover presented a minor issue for the print edition. We had a dummy made up, with this front cover, and some place holder text on the back. Naturally, the first time we uploaded all the files, the wrong cover was included, and no one at the printer apparently thought that there was anything odd in back cover text consisting entirely of "we'll put such and such here for the finished version." So, we had to re-submit the cover, and this time we made sure the right file was sent. This won't affect the release date. It's just one of those annoying little things that happens any time you're preparing a book for publication.

 Editing is always the fun part. This is where authors discover so many new things. One of the things I always discover is that I'd never make it as a legal typist. Those guys aren't allowed to make mistakes. I make tons of them. This is why, after I'm finished writing, I go through the book on the computer screen and fix all the goofs I discover that way. Then I print it out and read through it again, fixing the typos and other errors I missed the first time. 

After those are corrected, and the manuscript entered into InDesign and formatted for the printer, I read through that, on screen and out loud. At this point, sure enough, a few more typos turn up. Or I realise that I've got somebody talking to himself, or I've written "her" when it should be "he," or vice versa. So then I get to fix those. And then I do another pass on the corrected version and very likely find a few more things that I missed the first three times.

Naturally, after all that, when I get my hands on the final, printed book, I'll be reading along and something else will suddenly present itself. About all any editor can do is get a book as close to perfect as possible before it's released. It's unlikely that any book has ever been released with absolutely zero errors.

I've been reminded of just how important editing can be by a book I'm currently reading. I'm not going to mention the title, as it's actually a nice little book, and I'm enjoying reading it. But it's badly in need of an editor. The spelling is atrocious, and the author even manages to reverse the usual trend of writing "to" when "too" is meant by frequently doing it the other way around. He also makes several references to "Fontine" in Les Miserables. Now, admittedly, that's how you pronounce it, but it's spelled "Fantine." More than a few times I've had to read a sentence over again to figure out what the author intended to say. Frequently, to be honest, it reads a lot like a book that was dictated using a speech-to-text program that didn't always understand what was being said.

Which brings us back to Returning, where exactly such programs are important for communicating between the returnees and modern humanity. These people have been gone for nearly 87,000 years. It's hardly surprising no one still speaks their language. Only a relative handful of people can still read Old English, and that was still commonly spoken as late at the 12th century. Whether the way we read it today would be understood by a 9th century Englishman is hard to say. There's a bit in Returning where it's noted that the language on a colonial world has changed significantly after a few thousand years, and the modern scholarly opinion on how words used to be pronounced was, at best, rather eccentric. 

So the returnees use computerized translators, rather than try to learn English and other modern languages. They're not planning to be around long enough to make the effort, and the next time they come back, most of those languages will have continued to evolve anyway. Very likely, the way people will actually speak in 2126 is somewhat different from what I've used in the novel. The John Wayne version of True Grit, which was very careful to employ period-correct language, sounded rather odd in 1969, though the film's setting was not quite ninety years earlier. I suppose, when 2126 comes around, anyone reading Returning then may be inclined to comment on the "quaint" language. I did my best to avoid the temptation to coin any neologisms. Having 22nd century people speaking 21st century English carries less risk than guessing what new words will be added. 

The returnees, naturally, speak contemporary English amongst themselves, as the reader is seeing translations most of the time. Here and there you'll find the odd phrase in Gehunite or Callaaish, where it's a contemporary listener hearing the words as they're spoken, rather than through the medium of the automatic translators. 

I made a few predictions. By 2126, cars are mostly electric, and driving yourself, rather than letting the car do the driving, is considered a bit eccentric. At least some cars have a touch of KITT in them, with a British consular limousine in Seattle giving two estimates of the driving time to its destination, with a longer one "if you drive yourself." The electric, self-driving car model even prevails in the United States, which has presumably been forced into it as oil supplies have dwindled to the point where the use of petroleum for fuel is considered wasteful even by political conservatives. By 2126, petroleum supplies are dwindling, and non-fuel uses are more important.

Electric power is mostly solar and wind generated, except in coastal cities, where wave power becomes a primary source. Electric utility companies are, by then, mostly an American phenomenon. In the rest of the world, power is mainly obtained from solar roofing and backyard, bladeless wind generators, and power companies are mostly obsolete outside of large cities, where there isn't enough roof space to power many tall buildings. The US, naturally, still wants people to buy their power, and probably retains some ill-conceived contemporary laws that require connection to the power grid even for homes that have no need of outside power.