Two specific impulses drew me to write this novelette. First, and more generally, I hungered to do a far-future, outer space piece, the sort of thing I had once thrived upon as a reader, as when in my younger days I devoured pulp-magazine classics like E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series and the exploits of Captain Future by Edmond Hamilton, and when as an adult I took in Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish novels, David Brin’s Uplift sequence, and individual books by the likes of Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, and Samuel Delany. It felt like the time was ripe to make my own attempt to plow that ground. In the Short Fiction Reviews topic on the lamented GEnie electronic bulletin board, I had read messages by Gardner Dozois bemoaning the over-emphasis in the Asimov’s SF submission pile of near-future Earth settings, as if, to the current crop of writers, the era when humankind can travel to distant parts of the galaxy is too remote to address. Vernor Vinge and other exceptions abound, but in some ways I have to agree with Gardner’s assessment. Modern sf writers have in great numbers conceded the outer void to the space opera crowd and the media tie-in franchises, eschewing the milieu as a canvas for non-formula work, especially at short lengths. Perhaps it has finally sunk in just how vast the galaxy is, and how silly a fantasy hyperdrives and warp engines and jumpgates are. It could be that when it comes to humans living on worlds outside our solar system, we really can’t get there from here by any means that our species would accept as a viable method. Though science fiction is supposed to be about flights of imagination, it’s also supposed to be about situations that might somehow come to pass, given what we think we know to be true about the universe. It’s annoying not to be able to do what Asimov did in a more naïve age and paint the galaxy as a latter-day Roman Empire, with the distant provinces no more than a few months’ journey away. Easier to avoid the frustration. I’m as guilty as other writers when I prefer to sidestep the challenge and either write fantasy of one sort or another, or science fiction set close to right here, right now. With “A Raven on My Shoulder,” I wanted to make up for that laziness.
Once I set the task for myself, however, I did not wish to depend upon the crutch of faster-than-light travel. I knew I wanted to be more strict than that. Right away that determined what sort of story I would concoct. If my characters were going to have to travel at speeds far slower than c, I couldn’t have them whizzing about from place to place. Once they got somewhere, they needed to stay put. So I knew from the git-go that that my tale would concern a colony world, and that the planet and its location, environment, and other characteristics would be an integral part of the tale.
The second guidepost I can date with precision. I came to it at the 1994 Nebula Award banquet in Eugene, Oregon. Keynote speaker Eric Drexler, of nanotechnology fame, devoted much of his talk to wishing aloud that science fiction writers could incorporate more of the real-science visions that were tantalizing himself and his colleagues. (In many ways the same sermon I heard routinely from Bob Fleming, the very person who had introduced me to Drexler’s seminal work, Engines of Creation.) Among his examples, Drexler pointed out that long before we would have any real hope of physically journeying to the far parts of the galaxy and meeting sentient, technology-wielding aliens, we would be able to see them. Or at least, see evidence of their civilizations.
Drexler described a series of satellites strung in a circle around Sol out, say, a bit beyond the orbit of Neptune. Meaning that the diameter of that circle would be on the order of two billion miles. By coordinating the signals received by those satellites, they could serve as a huge interferometric lens, a telescope to outstrip all telescopes.
We don’t have to wonder if it would be possible to build it. In the past twenty years since that 1994 awards banquet, interferometric arrays have become something of a “thing” in deep-space astronomy. Even back then, as Drexler pointed out, the sort of array he was describing required no new major scientific discoveries. The project is more along the lines of an “engineering challenge.” The great roadblock continues to be funding and the will of society. When it becomes cheap enough to build that lens, and enough people want it built, the concept will become a reality.
With such a lens, we could resolve planets on stars in the Andromeda galaxy. We could see continents and other major features on almost any planet within our spiral arm of the Milky Way, unless stars or dust or other matter stood directly in the way. And we could make out buildings and streets of cities on planets around stars many dozens of lightyears from us. We wouldn’t actually be able to see living creatures, because the images would have to be built up over multiple sessions — snapshots taken at the same time of day (time of day on the alien planet, not ours) over and over until details fully resolve — and anything moving around would not succeed in making an impression.
Hearing Drexler describe this was fascinating. It was also unnerving once I considered some of the possibilities. Right now, if there is a civilization on a planet circling Gamma Leporis A, the locale of “A Raven on My Shoulder,” if they have an interferometric lens of that magnitude, they could be viewing a picture of my home of twenty-seven years ago, a rental tract house on the other side of Santa Rosa from the neighborhood in which I now dwell. Alien eyes could be gazing right now upon the light reflected off the swing set my toddler daughter would go out to on many an afternoon so that I could push her. They wouldn’t see me. They wouldn’t see her. But they would see the swing set, the lawn, the apple tree. I thought of that backyard as our private domain.
Glass houses, my ass. We’re living in a glass universe.