One of the nice things about setting a book in the future is that any outlandish technology can be excused as artistic speculation. I’ve written two submarine novels set in (more or less) the present, and I can assure you that submariners, while a generous and enthusiastic group of readers, do hold me responsible for the smallest technical inaccuracies. So I welcomed the idea of writing a book set in the future, because it seemed to offer me unlimited ability to make technology do what I wanted it to do. That being said, I tried to ground this book’s technology in reality wherever possible. The age we live in offers many technological marvels, many of which require no embellishment by an author to make them soar.
For example: the Robobird. This anti-seagull weapon exists, a wing-flapping replica of a hawk (the company also makes an eagle) used to scare away seagulls and other offensive birds. There are several videos available on the company’s website, clearflightsolutions.com.
The big drones in the book required a little more embellishment than the Robobird, although we are clearly now living in the age of drone warfare, and advances in capabilities and tactics are hard to keep up with. The leap to make the drones purely autonomous, rather than directed by a “pilot” on the ground, doesn’t seem like it would require much of a technical leap, but rather one of doctrine. Many of us are squeamish about the killing done on our behalf by drones now; taking humans out of that decision is still some time away. But for some of the mere physical specifications of the drones, the actual dimensions of the thing, I borrowed from the ScanEagle, a drone made in a joint operation between Boeing and Insitu. The ScanEagle has been flying for the US military since 2005, and just like the imaginary drones in this book, it has a wingspan of 10 feet and a length of 5 feet. It weighs just about 40 pounds, and can carry a payload of up to 7.5 pounds. It can soar up to 19,500 feet at speeds up to 80 knots. So while my drones certainly are the product of my imagination, they aren’t too far off from a drone that has been flying over the world’s trouble spots for a decade. More details can be found at http://www.insitu.com/systems/scaneagle.
Degaussing, the process of reducing a submarine’s (or a surface ship’s) magnetic signature, is a very real thing. I have been through it myself while serving onboard the USS Alabama, a Trident submarine. The degaussing range I went through, however, was very much above the surface of the water. And the Soviets really did build a fleet of titanium submarines to avoid this problem.
Submarines really do manufacture their own oxygen, and their own water, from the sea that surrounds them. Ocean water is boiled and the vapor collected to desalinate it. And in the oxygen generators, high-voltage electricity is used to pry the H2O molecules apart, giving the crew its oxygen. When I reported to my submarine, these processes, along with nuclear power, seemed to me to be the most magical, the most Nemo-esque part of submarine engineering, and they still do. Which is probably why I find a way to work them into every book.
Escape trunks are very real. There are three of them on a Trident submarine, and Trident sailors spend a day or so learning how to operate them. They then spend the rest of their sea tours learning how to prevent accidents and fight casualties that might ever require such an escape. This training has a sense of urgency because no one expects the escape trunks to really work—the depths that modern submarines operate in are simply too great for this kind of egress. I once heard a chief say there was a secret procedure somewhere for using the escape trunk as a jail cell—submarines have no brig. I never saw the procedure myself, but if we had ever needed to lock someone up, this probably would have worked as well as anything.
There really is a surface-to-air missile designed for submarines to use against their nemesis, the helicopter. It is made by a German company, Diehl Defense, and was originally designed to work aboard the German Type 212 submarine. It doesn’t appear to actually be deployed aboard any operational submarines, but videos are available on the company’s website. The MOSS is real, too. The acronym stands for “Mobile Submarine Simulator.”
The Dyce Laboratory for Honeybee Studies at Cornell is very real, and looks much like I’ve described it here. And while it may sound like one of the most far-fetched things in the book, the “waggle dance” is also real, and is an amazing, wondrous method of communication between bees that scientists are still deciphering.
Eris Island is, alas, entirely imaginary.