Announcement: Islands of the Mind will be in THE WAY OF WORLDS

a mock-up cover lashed up by me, for my story only:
has nothing to do with the actual anthology --
used here merely to illustrate this blog post

It's official. Islands of the Mind has just gone to contract and will appear in the anthology The Way of Worlds. This one is a piece about terraforming in a distant future where habitable, Earthlike worlds are difficult to find yet critical to human survival because our population never ceased to increase. An explorer fleet has discovered a glorious ocean planet with a sweet atmosphere and friendly gravity, right in the "Goldilocks zone" -- all this world needs is landmasses. The terraformer crew arrives for business and sets about the task of creating those landmasses. And then -- and then -- ah! That would be telling. I'll blog again, with a link when The Way of Worlds comes out.

Terraforming is a subject that interests me deeply. I actually do believe that our population will continue to grow. If I'm right, and it does, humanity has only one way to go: outwards. How long is it since anyone mentioned the term "population explosion," in any but a historical context? It's been decades. Now, countries like China (population 1.412 billon as I write this) are actually passing over the top of the population growth curve. Their numbers are about to fall .. result? Not relief, that the existential dread we all felt at the population explosion if over. Oh, no. Its's all bags of panic and blue lights. Why? Because constant population growth is the only way we (yet) know to power an economy that is also maintains an endless, infinite trajectory of growth.

Far be it from me to criticize the mechanisms of capitalism: I also would like to be floating away on oceans of cash, and buy a castle in Ireland. But at the same time, in the interests of powering economic growth essentially forever, we're certainly going to vastly overload this planet. In fact, specialists say we did that long ago. It's been estimated that around two billion people is the maximum this world can sustain indefinitely. So, the predictable outcome of economic growth without surcease is a dying, or even dead, planet, with a population of ridiculous size packed into artificial environments constructed and maintained by technology in a future where "let technology do the heavy lifting" will have become both our survival mantra and our curse.  Inevitably we'll see a mass return to the colonial spirit of old...

Go west, young man. Or south, and anywhere one can find open spaces, free territory, the opportunity to succeed for ordinary folks who were born outside the .01% of the community who control 99.99% of all wealth and resources. Well, we've already entirely run out of compass points. Every square centimetre of Earth is owned, and fenced ... there is nowhere go up but up, and out.

With physics coming right around to supporting the case for faster-than-light starships, it's becoming more appropriate to look at other worlds -- and I don't mean Mars, though Mars will surely be a steppingstone along the way. I've written many stories about the Martian colonial years, and the violent "troubles" between Earth and Mars (The Way Back; Collateral Damage; Happy Hour, all published to date, with several more still waiting for homes -- Dust Gets in Your Eyes, Home Soil, and so forth). I'm working on the first draft of a new novel, as mentioned in my last post. The Gift of Prometheus....

Now, Gift is about human endeavour and ambition crashing headfirst into human ethics and dreams, in the years when the great Einsteinian starships find the way to the true FTL ships that will eventually, almost inevitably, lead us to the future you glimpse in Islands of the Mind. I'll blog about the writing process as it chugs along. Gift is the first full-on novel I've written since beginning this blog, which shows how long, rotten, and tough to beat the writer's block has been. It hit me broadside the second time we all got Covid. The third bout of Covid turned into post viral syndrome and worsened it. Now I've begun the fightback, and The Gift of Prometheus looks like a great place to begin.

The novel is very possibly set in the same universal canon as my Martian stories and Islands of the Mind. Let me think about this. But I'm liking the idea.