One of the profound joys of writing speculative science fiction is that you can let your imagination run riot. You can dream up the seemingly impossible and try to make it plausible.
However one of the pitfalls is making what you can imagine make any kind of sense on the page.
The more removed from the material world we exist in now, the harder it is to describe.
This particularly comes to the fore when dealing with hypothetical materials.
I am, I admit, a bit obsessed with materials, there are so many breakthroughs in new material structures happening right now it’s very hard to keep up, especially if you are an amateur fan like me.
To be honest, it doesn’t take much of am imagination to realise that many of the materials being developed at present are going to make profound changes to the world we live in, but what kind of changes?
Imagine an engineer in 1811 trying to describe plastic.
It’s a solid but flammable substance made from a thick black liquid of crushed fossils that have been trapped deep in the earth for millions of years.
How would that person imagine what you could do with plastic, if it was flammable then what use would it be. Virtually everything engineering understood 200 years ago required fire at some stage of the process.
He could maybe imagine a clock made of this magical substance, or a plate, cup or box.
But as we now know, there are millions of things we make using plastic that he couldn’t possibly have conceived of, things that simply didn’t exist even in the dreams of lunatics in 1811.
So what might we be able to do with carbon fiber Nano tubes? I had a few ideas in News from Gardenia with the space tethers.
What about graphene, the graphite material that is literally one atom thick.
One atom thick, you can’t even see it, you just have to believe someone when they pass you a sheet of graphene because you need about 10,000 sheets of it before it’s visible to the human eye.
What bloody use is that going to be to anyone?
Okay, it’s super light, super strong and made from super common stuff (carbon) and is capable of holding and far more importantly transporting electric power at a rate we cannot truly comprehend?
Okay, graphene is very likely to be the plastic of the 21st century and beyond.
In many ways my nerdy amateur interest in such things is what inspired me to sit down and write these books.
I went through a moment when I started ‘News from the Clouds’ thinking, ‘Oh no, I’ve written about all the materials I know, there’s nothing else I can say.’
Since starting on Clouds that fear has gone out of the window. How could humanity deal with extreme weather, with massive changes in the ten thousand year long stable climate that enabled the human race to move from cave to mega-city.
New materials are going to be a vital part of our development if we are to survive.
So I’m reading a great deal about materials science, oh, and economics and population.
Oh, and while I’m here, thanks so much for supporting the book. The next few months are going to be very exciting.