Inigo Press

I am working on a new novel in my Worlds of Sol series and I wanted to remind readers of the two novels and five short stories I’ve already published in that future.

Check them out here.

Both my science fiction and my hope for our real-life future involve an industrial revolution in space. You can get a sense of what I have in mind on this site at Industry in Space

My very first story for publication, now sadly lost, was a short story I wrote decades ago. It wasn’t accepted, but it was my first step as a fiction author. I still remember it but haven’t been tempted to reproduce it, as its future is now our past.

I fell in love with science fiction after reading short stories in the Golden Age. I’m sure some of them were awful, but as a boy the sense of adventure they inspired lit up my life. It led me to Naval Aviation.

I’ve now written over twenty short pieces. They all eventually found a home, not without years of struggle. At some point I may[ublish them as a collection. For now, here’s a list of the stories and where you can find them.

• Banjo Music
  • A newly restored classic Corvette attracts the attention of visiting aliens. Who knew they were muscle car enthusiasts?
  • The first story I ever had published.
• Dust Bunnies
  • Unexpected life in the Oort Cloud – a story of evolution
    • A little girl hears her grandfather’s adventures when he was a space traveler.
• Emergence
  • Evolution of consciousness in an O’Neill probe. Not one of ours.
• Flight
  • A photon’s-eye view of deep history.
• Terraformed Earth – Departure
  • Ignatius Ryan, SJ, is banished to the future after a theological controversy. The Pope, worried that Christianity might not survive in a world in chaos, asks him to go on this journey to preserve the gospel of love. He has no idea what’s waiting for him.
• Terraformed Earth – Creation
  • What would you sacrifice to restore the environment?
  • Seventeen climate researchers sacrificed their firstborn. Their parents genetically modify the Young to live for centuries, increase their intelligence far beyond the rest of humanity, and take away their ability to reproduce. As adolescents, the Young have the tools to change the world. The solution they craft will last millennia. But the side effects are killers.
• UFO
  • A pair of Navy F18s encounter an unidentified aerial phenomenon. Is it a software glitch or an alien ship?
• Night Court
  • On Halloween Joao Santos, NASA Chief Astronaut, receives a subpoena from the First Court of Trans Lunar Crime. The charge, inadvertently killing an alien, seems like a joke. But the bounty hunter who comes for him is definitely not joking. It delivers Joao to the far side of the Moon to stand trial. WIll Joao choose the alien version of Legal Aid or the assistance of a dodgy nonhuman defense attorney? What does the Martian land his son gave him for his birthday have to do with his plight?
• Martian New Year
  • On the day before the Mars Centennial of Mariner 7, the first probe to image the Martian surface (8/17/2153 on Earth), Marc and Sophie are driving one of a group of vacuum tractors heading into the Northern Highlands in search of thorium deposits.
  • Far ahead of their compatriots, scouting an alternate way forward, their tractor is disabled by a rockslide. As night falls, they fear they won’t be rescued before their power is exhausted. As they talk about their lives, lived and yet to live, perhaps never, they confess their growing feelings for one another. To pursue a relationship, they’ll have to find a way to survive the night.
• Martian Requiem
  • Laurent Bernard’s estranged father is dying. Laurent returns to his isolated family farm in the Martian outback to heal the rift. He thought he’d just say goodbye. Instead, a surprise in his father’s will puts him in the center of a long-brewing conflict about annexation of the farm by Tharsis City. As a terraforming manager, he should let the growing Martian settlement absorb the farm. But Marianne Levesque, a girl when he left and now a beautiful young woman, wants something more. So, to his surprise, does Laurent. As his father fails, the conflict between Laurent’s job and his heart grows.
  • Honorable Mention, Writers of the Future, 2020.

• Incoming
  • An asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It’s the end of humanity in an environmental catastrophe that humans are powerless to stop. What could be worse?
• Leaving Acadia
  • Marc and Sophie dream of a future on Mars away from Acadia, the independent farm in eastern Mariner Valley where they grew up. When Sophie’s abusive father threatens them, they flee Acadia in a stolen vacuum tractor through the fractured terrain of Eos Chaos—at night. Her father learns they left and pursues them. When her father’s tractor breaks down, they have to choose—get away or jeopardize their future to save Sophie’s father.
• Android’s Dilemma
  • Murder of a human is the cardinal sin of the Asimovian faith to which all androids adhere. When a Russian gangster is murdered, his android Webster is alone with him in a locked house. Webster reports the murder and denies he is responsible. As Detectives Dave Forsythe and Charlene Asher delve into the facts, they learn much more is at stake than a simple murder. For humans as well as androids.
• November Skies
  • Jay Myriad, an android whose quantum holographic memory is losing coherence, chooses to live in a human memory care facility rather than be deactivated. The one thing he cannot forget is an incident in his past that racks him with guilt. John Carney, one of the human residents in the facility, is convinced an android doesn’t belong there. The recent loss of his wife overwhelms him. As Myriad and Carney spar over their differences, time to find common ground is running out.
• Museum at the End of Time
  • A collective intelligence nearing completion of a history of intelligent species in the Milky Way discovers a previously unknown intelligent species, now extinct. They find no evidence that the long-gone sapients ever had contact with galactic civilization, despite being near several other stars that harbored spacefaring sapients. When nine members of the collective visit the star where the sapients once lived, they find an artificial structure on a large moon orbiting one of the inner planets. Examination of the civilization’s relics in the structure, from its beginning to its ambiguous end, changes everything they thought they knew.
• Boudreau’s Ghost
  • Achilles Boudreau died in a notorious murder-suicide over a century ago. He’s reputedly haunted the mansion where it happened ever since. Zeke installs an artificial intelligence in the house for his Ph.D. project, with robots to do the AI’s bidding. When Zeke brings Amanda to see the house, she’s locked in alone and the house sets out to kill her. Is the ghost in control or is the AI going somewhere dark? Either way, Zeke is the only one who can save her.
• Whale’s Tale
  • The Whale’s Tale is the story of Moby Dick from the whale’s point of view. A most unusual whale. I’ve heard whalesong in the deep ocean on sonar and wondered what they were saying. Could this be it?
• Red Queen’s Gambit
  • On a routine cargo run from Mars to Ceres, the asteroid freighter Sleipner’s AI Odin detects an unknown ship on an interception course. Odin informs Jill, the captain, that they are not carrying the innocuous Earth soil declared on the manifest. Instead, the cargo hold contains nuclear warheads for deorbiting asteroids. Jill and Jimmy, Sleipner’s pilot, take refuge in a safe room. When the crew of the approaching ship blows Sleipner’s airlock, evacuating the ship’s atmosphere, Jill and Jimmy know they have to retake the asteroid—if they want to survive.
• Ryan’s Debt
  • United Nations of Sol Marine Sergeant Pat Ryan owes his life to Sergeant Angelique Fouchet, his fellow Marine and lover, who threw herself on a grenade to save him during a fight on Ganymede. Before she dies, Angelique tells him she has a daughter, Alice, in Gabriel Farm, an independent farm in the Martian outback. She asks him to go back to help Alice. He’ll know what to do when he gets there.
  • Pat musters out of the Corps and finds his way to Mars. But when he arrives at Gabriel, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s supposed to do. He convinces Angélique’s father to let him stay to find out why she wanted him there. What he discovers means his fighting days are far from over.

Thorium Blues is a novel in progress in my Worlds of Sol series about an expedition from the UNS settlement in Tharsis City to the richest thorium deposits on Mars.

Tharsis City is the capital of the United Nations of Sol settlement on Mars. The domed city sits high above Mariner Valley on Thaumasia Planum. In Chasm Town, a domed city in the valley below, terraforming workers live and toil, pulling water from ancient aquifers, extracting energy and oxygen from Martian regolith, and creating fertile soil where Earth plants can grow.

Extracting resources and expanding the farm domes east and west, and establishing new farms takes a lot of energy. As Mars is much further from the Sun than Earth, solar power is of limited utility. The energy demands of the UNS settlement are supplied by fission reactors whose components and fuel must be shipped from Earth at great expense.

As the settlement grows, its power needs expand. The UNS administration decides to send an expedition to explore thorium deposits in the Northern Highlands to decrease their dependence on power sources that require shipping fuel and heavy industrial equipment from Earth.

Faced with growing demands for power, the UNS Administration on Mars decides to explore the use of thorium reactors with fuel sourced on Mars. They send an exploratory expedition to the richest known thorium deposits on Mars, located in the Northern Lowlands.

While the UNS is nominally a global organization whose members are all the nations on Earth, America is pursuing parallel agenda and China is not a member of the UNS. China’s primary focus is a research center in Isidis Planitia. The station is sending a competing expedition, nominally to thorium deposits further east, but in reality intended to tap the richer ore nearer Tharsis City.

The different visions of China and the UNS will meet head-to-head in the vast Northern Highlands of Mars.

Among many other things we’ve learned about the Red Planet, the 2001 Mars Odyssey satellite did a survey of radioactive emissions from thorium, a high-Z fertile material that can be bred in a nuclear reactor to provide a continuous supply of fuel.

If humanity establishes a long-term settlement on Mars, its distance from the Sun and the ubiquitous Martian dust make solar power a problematic source of power. A nuclear fission powerplant is a far better solution. And, if a reactor initially fueled with uranium, it can be used to breed more fissile Uranium-233. The life cycle of a thorium breeder reactor produces far less nuclear waste than a uranium-235 fission reactor and has a number of other advantages.

The biggest problem with nuclear power on Mars is the weight of the reactor and fuel that must be brought from Earth. Once the initial plant has been transported, sourcing thorium on Mars will make it a far less expensive source of power.

My WiP novel, Thorium Blues, deals with a race between a United Nations of Sol settlement on Mars and a Chinese research station to find and exploit the thorium on Mars.

In real life, private companies are rapidly advancing the state of the art of access to space. SpaceX, Blue Origins, and a number of other private companies are developing new technology as well. These efforts will give us the opportunity to create an industrial future in space that can offset some of the ill effects on industrialization on the planet surface.

It’s been over five decades since the first manned landing on the Moon. Despite a lot of stagnation and dead ends, humanity is now at a point where we can venture into space to stay. I envision two clusters of industrial outposts in the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 Lagrange points. These stable points can serve as a center of a cluster of orbiting stations where mining and manufacturing can take place.

Asteroids represent both potential hazard as well as potential opportunity. A key goal of an industrial future in space will be asteroid surveillance and deflection to prevent a catastrophic impact on Earth. Once we learn how to guide asteroids away from Earth, we may well learn how to corral them and move them into the L4 and L5 clusters for mining. This can provide raw materials for manufacturing in space as well. It will be far cheaper and easier to source raw materials in space than to lift them out of Earth’s gravity well. This will be an ideal plalce to build space habitats and vehicles for exploration of the Moon, Mars, and other Solar System resources

If we can move asteroids and mine them, we can also sculpt them into habitats where spin gravity and radiation shielding can ameliorate the ill effects of long-duration stays in space. Each of these steps can help us reach out even further.

Stay tuned for more discussion of this important aspect of our future.

You can also see more of my musings and news of space infrastructure on my Facebook group Industrial Future in Space.

Ryan’s Debt is now a standalone Kindle eBook in a new version based on the version published in the 2024 anthology by the Facebook Group Science Fiction Authors. It has a new ending better suited to a short story format. Find it at: Ryan’s Debt

UNS Marine Sergeant Pat Ryan owes his life to Sergeant Angelique Fouchet, his fellow Marine and lover, who threw herself on a grenade to save him during a fight on Ganymede.

Before she dies, Angelique tells him she has a daughter, Alice, in Gabriel Farm, an independent farm in the Martian outback. She asks him to go back to help Alice. He’ll know what to do when he gets there.

He musters out of the Corps and finds his way to Mars. But when he arrives at Gabriel, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s supposed to do.

He convinces Angélique’s father to let him stay to find out why she wanted him there. What he discovers means his fighting days are far from over.

I just finished The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I was astonished to find that it had elements of two of my novels: Terraformed Earth – New Millennium, published last year on Amazon, and Watanabe’s Hamer, a WiP I hope to publish in 2024.

3BP is focused on environmental damage done by humans and an attitude by some characters that humanity is irredeemable and needs to be eliminated. In Terraformed Earth – Creation, the prequel to New Millennium, a cadre of gene-modified humans unleash a package of designer viruses that virtually destroyed humanity so they can restore the environment. New Millennium deals with the aftermath a thousand years later, in a world rich in life but devoid of compassion.

3BP also envisions an alien race that wants to invade Earth because their world is being destroyed by the instability of its orbit in a triple star system. The conflict in the sequels to 3BP is going to deal with the positive and negative aspects of this decision and the influence of humans who support an alien takeover.

These conflicts are central to our current struggle with climate change and humanity’s impact on it. One of the reviewers of TE-Creation said the discussion of the people who wanted to eliminate humanity were eerily similar to her routine breakfast conversations with her adolescent daughter.

If you want to see my take on climate change and its aftermath, check out New Millennium on Amazon. Watanabe’s Hammer is still not finished, but there are two novel and two short stories in the Terraformed Earth series.

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In 2021 I published my first novel, Asteroid Gambit. Set in the Worlds of Sol future, AG features a Mars in the earlay stages of terraforming and a thriving prospecting culture on Ceres. It deals with a rebellion on Mars and the attempts by the United Nations of Sol to address worker grievances.

The Worlds of Sol did not arise magically out of nowhere. Fire in the Belt is the story of the Will Lafontaine and Amanda Stolz and their pioneering effort to use nuclear warheads to move asteroids from the Belt to transLunar orbit for mining.

Earth is in trouble. Mining and manufacturing in space are mitigating climate deterioration, but the number of mineable near-Earth asteroids is dwindling. Most are rubble piles unsuitable for resource extraction.

Will Lafontaine wants to use nuclear warheads to move mineable asteroids to Earth from the Belt. But his old-fashioned boss refuses to innovate. His co-worker Amanda offers to help, but he doesn’t trust her agenda. The shady investors he finds to finance the project demand results above all else, and the next launch window for a trip to the Belt is looming.

Will is running out of time.

Can he and Amanda find a way to work together to provide Earth with an inexhaustible supply of asteroid resources? Only pride and stubbornness stand in his way.

A Beta Reviewer said: “The world-building is just incredible. There were times I thought you must be writing from personal experience in that world (that doesn’t exist), that’s how good it is.”

Travel from Earth to Mars is demanding. A vehicle from Earth needs to accelerate to get to Mars and then decelerate to enter Mars orbit. It needs even more fuel to land and take off and the fuel requirements to repeat the process to get to Earth orbit are daunting.

A single spaceship carrying humans to Mars from Earth needs to carry enough fuel for the entire trip or refuel at Mars from a base that was established there first. During the entire journey the ship has to protect the crew from solar radiation, galactic cosmic radiation, and the detrimental effects of microgravity. The challenge is enormous.

In the 1970’s astronaut Buzz Aldrin showed that a vessel on a trajectory called a Mars cycler can pass both Earth and Mars on a regular basis with little to no requirement for fuel once established on he trajectory. The most famous of these is the Aldrin Cycler, first postulated by the Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The Aldrin Cycler allows travel from Earth to Mars in about five months. once established on a cycler orbit.
A ship launched from Earth would have to use a lot of fuel to establish itself on the Aldrin Cycler and a lot more to decelerate and land on Mars.

After a ship on the Aldrin cycler passes Mars, it takes another twenty-one months to return to Earth. An Aldrin cycler orbit that takes five months to travel from Mars to Earth requires twenty-one months to get back to Mars.

A ship that wants to use a cycler trajectory must accelerate to match the speed of the trajectory as it passes Earth and decelerate as it passes Mars. With the demands for propulsion fuel, radiation shielding for the crew, and microgravity, this is a difficult requirement.

Aldrin suggested use of a “castle” on a Mars cycler orbit. The castle would make a continuous round trip from Earth to Mars and from Mars to Earth. It could provide substantial cargo capacity, radiation shielding and spin gravity. A lightweight shuttle could bring cargo and astronauts from Earth to the castle as it passes Earth and from the castle to Mars as it passes Mars. The shuttle can have limited radiation shielding and no spin gravity, reducing the fuel requirements to a minimum at both ends.

An asteroid on an Earth-Mars cycler trajectory makes an ideal castle. A solid enough asteroid can rotate for spin gravity and houses personnel, equipment, and supplies in rooms hollowed out of the asteroid beneath the surface. In my Worlds of Sol future, the United Nations of Sol use such asteroids to bring people and supplies to and from Earth.

Humans being humans, nothing ever happens without conflict. My WiP short story Red Queen’s Gambit tells the tale of pirates who intercept Sleipner, an asteroid ship on a cycler orbit carrying a cargo of nuclear warheads to Ceres for asteroid redirection. Jill and Jimmy, the crew of Sleipner, realize the pirates will leave no one alive to tell the UNS authorities what happened. They need to outmaneuver the pirates if they hope to survive.