Did you know that cosmonauts used to piss against the side of the bus that takes them to a rocket before launch for good luck? Female cosmonauts would bring vials of urine and splash it. New suit designs made this impossible from 2019. Yuri Gagarin possibly started this in 1961, but it may have started earlier. We’ll skip right past the Vladimir Ilyushin conspiracy theories.

So space is weird and dangerous, but the ways were not all useful narratively or I’m not a good enough writer to utilise them. I had to leave a lot of stuff on the “cutting room floor” for the sake of storytelling. You can bet I took artistic licence. This is a novel, not Popular Mechanics. Story comes first.

I fell back on what I knew: my own experience as a highly trained professional in a high stress environment. It had to be someone’s first flight, a high performer who lacked experience. I drew on my experience in my first few months out of medical school. You’re well-trained, you know a lot, but you’re aware of exactly what you don’t know. It’s a combination of terror and exhilaration on the inside and calm on the outside. I remember the first time I treated a patient on my own. When the person improved, I thought, “Oh, shit, this stuff they taught us actually works!”

And that’s where Shell Campion comes from (Campion is the name of a ward I trained on). I needed to portray her like I had seen the real astronauts in crisis, in other words, calm and methodical no matter what crazy stuff the situation threw her way. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I’m happy with how she turned out.

With all of this, I still managed to include my Afro-spiritualist leanings, because reality is more fluid than we think, and aliens must be alien. I try to lean away from aliens being Other because that’s tied up with colonialist thinking. It’s one of the reasons I tried to avoid empires and massive space battles. I just have people who want to survive in the wider universe.

We shouldn’t forget the victims of Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. At least 20,000 out of 60,000 sent to the camp died. This was the slave labour that produced the V2 rockets. You can thank Operation Paperclip and the corresponding Soviet Operation Osoaviakhim for spaceflight by employing thousands of German scientists that worked on the Nazi rocket programme. We can’t erase the murderous origins just because we can see the first sunsets from Mars.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my book. I enjoyed writing it, but it’s you, the readers, who make it possible. You keep reading and I’ll keep writing.

Tade Thompson

2021

Acknowledgements

Couldn’t have done this without the following people: Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliot, Alexander Cochran, Jenni Hill, Nivia Evans, Nazia Khatun, Joanna Kramer, Rob Dinsdale.