This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Andrew Johnston with his story Starless night. Currently based in Kansas, Andrew writes and occasionally photographs squirrels. You can catch up with him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.
Writing Starless night
The worst job I’ve ever had was at a vineyard on the Kansas–Missouri border. It was back-breaking, dirty work in bad working conditions and often inhospitable weather, but the worst part was the sheer monotony. To pass the time, I made heavy use of the public library’s audiobook collection, going through two or three a week, almost all nonfiction. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they can’t listen to a science audiobook, but they suited me just fine.
Among those audiobooks were a handful on deep-space exploration, exoplanets and rogue planets. Rogue planets don’t show up in science fiction much, which is a shame as there are so many stories that one could build around them. This one focuses on the exceedingly unlikely possibility that complex life could develop on such a free-roaming body. It would have to be adapted to extremes of temperature approaching absolute zero, resistant to cosmic radiation and capable of navigating its environment without visible light — something truly alien.
On a related note, Explorer Nozek was the first but not last astronaut I launched into deep space and stranded to face the tender mercies of a strange life form. A subconscious theme, perhaps — just the way you think when you’ve spent your adult life hopping back and forth across the Pacific Ocean.