AFTERWORD

The idea for this book came from a chance suggestion by Alastair Reynolds in the course of a nostalgic email exchange.

“A Meeting with Medusa,” the novella by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, was ori­ginally published in Playboy for December, 1971. In 1972 it won the Nebula Award for Best Novella, and in 1974 the Japanese Seiun Award for Best Foreign Language Short Story. It was perhaps Clarke’s last significant work of short fiction, and has been reprinted many times since—perhaps most notably as a terrifically illustrated serial in the short-lived magazine Speed & Power (IPC, issues 5–13, 1974), a rendition which made a significant impact on the imagination of a young Reynolds.

The Icarus asteroid-deflection episode of the Interludes was inspired by the results of an interdisciplinary student project in systems engineering run at MIT in the summer of 1967. This was in fact the first serious study of how to deflect an asteroid from an impact with the Earth. The final report (Project Icarus, L. A. Kleiman [ed.], MIT Report no. 13, MIT Press, 1968) was impressive enough to be published, is cited to this day—and was the inspiration for the movie Meteor (1979, dir. Ronald Neame), which did indeed star Sean Connery.

In the 1960s, predictions of temperate conditions of temperature and pressure in Jupiter’s atmosphere, as well as the possibility of the presence of a wide variety of organic molecules, led to speculation about life in the Jovian cloud layers as depicted in “A Meeting with Medusa.” Later, a detailed study by Sagan and Salpeter (Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series vol. 32, pp. 737–755, 1976) led to a famous visual depiction of cloud beasts not unlike Clarke’s in Sagan’s Cosmos TV series.

The notion of using aerostat factories to mine the atmosphere of Jupiter for the rare isotope helium-3 was suggested in the 1970s Project Daedalus starship study conducted by the British Interplanetary Society (see the Final Report, 1978, pp. S83ff). The quantum-mechanical “Momentum Pump” discussed in Chapter 49 is entirely speculative.

All errors and inaccuracies are, of course, our sole responsibility.

—S.B. and A.R.

September 2015