Thoughts On My Books 3: Boundary

Third in my list of published novels is Boundary, my first hard SF novel, and one written as a collaboration with Eric Flint. 

Eric had tried to write the story that became Boundary twice before, from two different perspectives, but felt that he didn't quite have all the writing tools necessary to make it work. Reading Digital Knight and seeing what I did with Diamonds are Forever, he thought I might be able to provide the technical-without-being-boring elements that are necessary in any hard-SF novel.

I was, put bluntly, terrified of the idea of writing a hard-SF novel. There's a reason I like space opera and fantasy; I can wave casually at reality as it goes by. That doesn't mean the actual WRITING of such things is any easier, but there's no one who can OBJECTIVELY tell me I'm wrong when I'm doing so. 

On the other hand, it was an opportunity, as a new author, to do a full-length book with a much more well-known author, in a field that I had never thought I could touch, and one that I had considerable admiration for. So I accepted the challenge.

Boundary is the story of several people, perhaps most prominently Helen Sutter, a paleontologist who makes a bizarre fossil discovery at the K-T boundary layer -- a discovery that later turns out to be very much connected to an even more unexpected discovery on Mars' moon Phobos. Ultimately, this will take her to Phobos and then to Mars itself as they unravel the clues of what happened in our solar system sixty-five million years ago.

When writing this story, my intent was to write a book that was close in spirit to novels like Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and perhaps also to some of Heinlein's juveniles. Even though the story focused on some quite technical issues, I wanted it to be easily accessible to the average reader and neither inaccurate nor boring. Achieving that was something of a challenge.

A notable difference between Boundary and its sequels and most of my other work is that they have virtually no interpersonal violence -- humans may conflict, but they don't hit, shoot, or otherwise injure each other. There is some exception to this rule in Threshold (of which I will speak in its own time), but for the most part the adversary of the main characters is not other people, but the vast, uncaring, and generally dangerous universe itself. The point of Boundary, therefore, is exploration and sense of wonder towards that which really is, or really could be. 

One of the tricks to making a hard-SF world FEEL hard is to have elements of the "hard" (read: accurate science/engineering) that are really absolutely correct, because the author KNOWS about them. For Boundary, this was embodied in the work of A.J. Baker, wireless systems and sensor expert, derived from my work at my day job, where I worked in the design and development of smart sensor systems, wireless sensor nodes, and other technology closely related to A.J.'s field. All I had to do was some reasonable extrapolation of what I already knew.

To make the SPACE part of it realistic required research and consultants. Eric found a couple of people who could advise us on Mars itself (and I bought books and studied a lot). I also found, serendipitously, that one of the consultants for my day job  -- Philip Moynihan -- had in fact worked on the NERVA project in the 1960s. he was gracious enough to provide me with information on that project, and I Tuckerized him into the test run of the neo-NERVA engine that would eventually power Nike.

I was also fortunate in that an internet acquaintance of mine was interested in testing his modeling skills and was willing to do so by modeling some of the Boundaryverse vessels. Keith Morrison produced some absolutely stunning images, and would do more later. 

Boundary was also the beginning of its own universe, which in the end encompassed six books -- the three in the initial trilogy, and the three Castaway Planet books (which take place in the same universe about 150-200 years after the end of the first trilogy).

Re-reading Boundary, I find it slightly rough; Eric and I were still feeling out the best way for us to work together, and my skill in writing was lagging well behind his, which made it a bit harder to polish the book. Nonetheless I think it came out well, and it starts an amazing hard-SF epic adventure!