Lifeline

Afterword: Lifeline Origins

Doug Beason

It must have been the second or third get-together after Kevin and I first met when we discussed collaborating on a short story. I was in California for the summer of ’85 on sabbatical and had looked up this energetic young writer who had a reputation for churning out short stories like normal people breathed. We hit it off, and as most writers did, we talked incessantly about our craft and what it took to make it big.

At the end of summer we’d hammered out the outline for a story that quickly sold to Full Spectrum, an ’80s version of Dangerous Visions. The story gave Kevin and me near-instant credibility as a writing team. Later that year, Kevin met David Brin, who was putting together an anthology called Project Solar Sail. The idea of using photon pressure from sunlight to accelerate spaceships captured the imagination of SF writers and readers alike. It was an efficient, environmentally-clean propulsion concept that struck a cultural chord.

Brin encouraged Kevin to submit a story to the anthology, and with characteristic excitement, Kevin called me, bubbling with energy over an idea he’d had about collaborating for Brin’s anthology. Our Full Spectrum story had dealt with an intelligent man-made plasma, a living entity that evolved the equivalent of millions of years in mere minutes. For Brin’s anthology, Kevin’s idea was to use a living entity, rather than lightweight, wispy metal sheets, for the sails.

Looking back on it, this was typically how Kevin and I decided to collaborate on a work: one of us would have the germ of an idea, and batting it back and forth, a synergistic result would mature, eventually cascading into a full-blown story.

In the “what if” stage that followed, we thought up reasons why people would use organic sails. We envisioned a not-too-distant future where humans had established a presence in space, living in large space stations that were dependent on Earth for supplies. Solar sails might be used to travel between the stations, but we couldn’t come up with a reason why people would do that. Solar sails are accelerated by light pressure, and it takes too long to get enough speed to make traveling that way practical in Earth’s orbit. (Solar sails are much better suited for interstellar travel, when the ever-increasing velocity from photon pressure would efficiently accelerate the sails to near light speed.) It would be much easier to use chemical propulsion—plain-old rockets—to travel between the space stations.

But what if normal transportation had been destroyed? What if there had been a global nuclear war, and Earth could no longer re-supply the space stations? Since the space stations could not survive on their own, the only way to endure would be for the space stations to join forces, and to use the organic solar sails as a last ditch, albeit slow, way to rescue civilization.

An important point to remember is that this short story was written in the 1980s: nuclear war with the Soviet Union was considered a possibility (with all of its associated paranoia); corporate greed was rearing its head; and echoes of peace, love, and the we’re-all-in-this-together ’60s mentality permeated the culture. Additional influences included Princeton professor Gerald O’Neill, who had just popularized the idea of establishing Lagrange colonies, using immense, rotating structures to achieve artificial gravity through centripetal acceleration. To top it off, I had attended early high school in the flora-rich Philippine Islands, which provided an exotic way to introduce the transgenetic research necessary to produce organic solar sails.

We mixed these influences together to come up with three large space stations located at two Lagrange points: a Filipino colony focused on making advances in biotechnology at L-4 (funded by the US government as a bribe to keep their military presence on the Philippine Islands, to counter the perceived Soviet threat); an American corporate colony located at L-5 to perform high-risk, space-related manufacturing; and a secretive Soviet “research” station also at L-5, ostensibly to perform manufacturing as well, but in reality put there to keep track of the sneaky Americans (remember, this was Reagan-era, Evil Empire time, and at the height of the anti-nuclear movement). We then posited a global nuclear war that cut the three Lagrange colonies off from Earth, with all American space shuttles and Soviet Soyuz supply-vessels fried in the nuclear exchange. With each station having only a finite amount of supplies, they were forced to depend on each other for survival—but they had no way to travel from station to station.

With that scenario, growing solar sails to create rescue vessels made sense.

All this background, nearly a hundred pages, provided the material for “Rescue at L-5,” the short story that appeared in Project Solar Sail, and also published in Amazing Stories magazine as “If I Fell, Would I Fall?” I’m not sure who came up with the idea of expanding the short story into a novel, but with our extensive background research for the short story, it was fairly easy to do.

We told our agent about the novel, and he urged us to write it, and write it fast. When we finished the first two-thirds of the novel, he convinced us it was good enough to sell.

Upon receiving the novel, Betsy Mitchell, the editor at Bantam Books who eventually bought Lifeline, called science fiction luminary Gregory Benford to ask “are these guys for real?” After all, we had come out of nowhere to pioneer the premise of using solar sails—and living solar sails at that—to travel between the Lagrange points.

Greg assured her that we were on solid ground.

And with that, we sold Lifeline as well as two additional books—the critically-acclaimed Trinity Paradox, and the Nebula-nominated Assemblers of Infinity.