Thoughts on My Books 5: Threshold

My fifth published book was Threshold, sequel to Boundary. The gap between the publication of Boundary and Threshold was quite large -- several years. This was due to the fact that while I had completed the first draft of the novel, but for various reasons Eric was unable to look at it and do any editing for a long time. Because of this, despite the first draft having been finished a few years before I'd written GCA, GCA actually got published first.

Threshold continues the adventures of Helen Sutter, her husband A.J. Baker, Joe Buckley, and his wife Madeline Fathom, as well as several other characters as they find themselves in the middle of a modern, multipronged gold rush, with every country that can get into space searching for their own cache of alien technology... and some of them are willing to do pretty much anything to get it!

Unlike the other two books in the trilogy, Threshold DOES have interpersonal conflict, including the first spaceship VS spaceship warfare in the history of the solar system -- but all done in such a way that people back home have no idea what's going on. When everything comes apart, it does so in a devastatingly spectacular fashion, ending with our heroes and some new friends marooned on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Threshold again put strong demands on my research capabilities, and got me more consultants from NASA and elsewhere; I showcased a new and interesting drive (the dusty-plasma sail, which I don't think has been used anywhere outside of this particular book universe) and had some long-range, really slow exchange of shots, demonstrating that even when you're relatively close... space is BIG. 

While at this point I was writing most of the book (Boundary had been about 60/40 me/Eric, Threshold ended up more like 85/15 me/Eric), there were still some vital parts that Eric either wrote, or directed the writing. Eric's biggest function in these novels is to rein in my natural melodramatic tendencies; for instance, the confrontation between General Hohenheim and Richard Fitzgerald, as I originally wrote it, was much more suited to a technothriller like one of Clive Cussler's novels than to a hard-SF adventure as Boundary and Threshold were supposed to be; Eric kindly pointed this out and said that while it was a great scene, it didn't belong in this book. And he was right, and I had to rewrite it to the form you now see.

I think it was good to HAVE this contrast, though, because it nicely joins the two non-violent books together with an acknowledgement that you'll always have conflict between people... and a need to deal with it.