Lifeline

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.

Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank the following people for adding their thoughts, expertise, and opinions to this project: Laurence A.P. Moore (and his amazing database!), David Brin, Kevin Mengelt, Steve Homann, Chuck Beason, Stan Schmidt, Betsy Mitchell, Richard Curtis, Michael C. Berch, Walter Williams, M. Coleman Easton, Dan’l Danehy-Oakes, Clare Bell, Avis Minger, Gary W. Schockley, Lori Ann White, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lisa Ice, Pat Weber, Pat Price, Pat McGraw Brown, Sally Gwylan, Patti Nagle, Karen McCue, and the countless others who encouraged us to keep at it.

About the Authors

Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson is the author of nearly 100 novels, 48 of which have appeared on national or international bestseller lists; he has over 22 million books in print in thirty languages. He has won or been nominated for the Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, the SFX Reader’s Choice Award, and New York Times Notable Book.