Inigo Press

The regolith on the Moon contains, among other things, a huge reservoir of oxygen to support human life. Other minerals included in lunar regolith are silicon, iron, calcium, aluminum, and magnesium. Accessing them requires an industrial presence on the Moon. Initially this will have to come from Earth, at substantial cost. Once this cost has been borne, oxygen and other raw materials will be available at the bottom of a much weaker gravity well than Earth’s. Manufacturing in space for use in space cuts cost dramatically

I’ve been writing short stories as well as novels for a few years now. In 2018 I started getting a little traction. Some of my stories were set so far in the future I wondered if anyone would be willing to publish them. 

A couple of years ago I visited the Salvador Dali museum in Tampa, Florida and was astonished at some of the art on display there, going back to before we were human. I left wondering what an alien might have thought of the museum. With that in mind I wrote The Museum at the End of Time, set in the distant future when the sun has evolved the point where it has wiped life off the face of Earth. On the Moon, still orbiting Earth, a collective alien mind finds a museum of lost humanity.

Last summer Z-Sky put out a call for “eschatological” fiction set in the far future. To my surprise, they chose to publish Museum in their inaugural edition. You should check it out. https://zsky.org/journal/

Emboldened, I sent them Volare, a flash fiction piece written on a canvas that spans billions of years. I was fortunate that they also liked that one and plan to publish it in their Winter edition.

However strange your story is, there’s someone who will be entranced by it. Don’t stop writing.

Ignatius Xavier Ryan, SJ, is the protagonist of my novel Terraformed Earth – New Millennium. Ignatius was born in 2044 to Edmund Ryan and Xaviera Torres in Philadelphia, PA. Edmund was an American soldier who lost his life in a nameless border war in Azerbaijan in 2059. Xaviera was the rebellious daughter of a wealthy Catholic family who married Edmund, a college boyfriend, despite her family’s disapproval.

While Ignatius was a boy Edmund was frequently away on deployment. When he was not, Edmund and Ignatius spent  lot of time camping in the Ozarks, near Edmund’s hometown of Kansas City. Ignatius learned a lot about woodland survival, which will stand him in good stead in ways he cannot imagine.

During Edmund’s frequent absences, Xaviera and Ignatius led a happy life. When they learned of Edmund’s death, Xaviera felt compelled to control Ignatius tightly lest she lose him as well. As he grew, Ignatius was drawn to the Society of Jesus by the faith he shared with her. He joined the Jesuits at least in part to escape his mother’s suffocating embrace. Her family supported him and Xaviera gave him her reluctant approval.

Ignatius spent fifteen happy years in the Society, being ordained and receiving a Ph.D. in linguistics. He was in his first year of a faculty appointment at Georgetown University when he contracted cancer. His cancer advanced rapidly and Ignatius returned to the Novitiate in Wernersville, PA where he had been a novice. He made his peace with God and was prepared to die.

Xaviera was not as ready as Ignatius to accept his death. She hired two men to kidnap Ignatius and deliver him to a research facility in Philadelphia where she had been funding Dr. Bruno Ghirardi’s research in cryogenic preservation of humans. Dr. Ghirardi agreed to preserve Ignatius as one of his first patients.

Ignatius was awakened 75 years later by Dr. Ghirardi’s granddaughter. She had cured his cancer but Dr. Ghirardi, his mother, and everyone he had ever known was dead. Worse, his reanimation caused a theological crisis regarding the doctrine of resurrection. To defuse the controversy Cardinal Bienvenista, the Pope’s camerlengo, ordered Ignatius to reenter cryogenic sleep and spend the next millennium in a spacecraft on a deep cometary orbit, crewed by an artificial intelligence named Grace. Ignatius appealed this assignment to the Pope, a spiritual figure who asked Ignatius to carry the Gospel message forward into an uncertain future. Caught between abandonment and banishment, Ignatius chose to travel into a future without faith or hope.

Ignatius and Grace return in 3261 to an environmental paradise on Earth with little sign of humanity. New Millennium details Ignatius’ life in the far future, in a world of orbiting laser battle stations and the Seventeen Cities, partially buried centers for environmental remediation scattered across the globe. After descending to Earth in the Ozark forest near S’Loo, one of the seventeen cities, Ignatius meets Cats, young breeders for S’Loo, Engineers, managers of S’Loo’s infrastructure and the Young, genetically enhanced post-humans who control S’Loo. The Young of the seventeen cities have largely restored the biosphere and are discussing whether to eliminate humanity entirely when their plans reach fruition.

Ignatius, his faith in tatters, hopes only to survive. Against his will, he finds himself compelled to try to change a world rich in life but devoid of compassion. To do that, first he must change himself.

Terraformed Earth – New Millennium is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Are all priests in science fiction Jesuits? Frankly, I don’t know. Very few priests appear in science fiction. The first encounter I ever had with an SF Jesuit was in James Blish’s A Case of Conscience published in 1958 as a novel after publication of the first part in 1953 as a novella. The Jesuit, Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, wrestles with a dilemma about the nature of a newly discovered planet whose peaceful existence is contrasted with the violent Earth society. It’s a crisis of faith that is ultimately resolved in an ambiguous way, leaving readers to make their own interpretation.

Mary Doria Russell used Jesuits as protagonists in two novels, The Sparrow and its sequel, Children of God. Father Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of an expedition to the planet Rakhat in the Alpha Centauri system financed and crewed by the Jesuits. He believes he has found a culture of peace and beauty, only to learn that almost the opposite is true. His faith is nearly extinguished in the aftermath of the expedition. Both if Russell’s novels rely heavily on the experience of the Jesuit North American Martyrs, although the commentary I have read did not mention that. In a way, they are a metaphor for the European colonization of North America and the moral issues involved. These Jesuit characters in SF novels are further discussed in Jesuits in Space with plot summaries.

Stanislaw Lem, a Polish SF writer, used a Dominican priest, Father R. P. Arago, as the conscience of the crew of a starship that destroys an alien civilization in its unrelenting attempts to force the aliens to communicate. The dominance of the Jesuit motif for SF priests even led one web site to describe Fr. Arago as a Jesuit. In another favorite of mine, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Brother Francis, a member of an unspecified order, is a main character. He is not a Jesuit but he lives in the far future where current religious orders have disappeared.

So, why Jesuits? I have a bit of experience, having been a Jesuit novice for a time. I suspect it is because the Jesuits have focused from their inception on deploying secular knowledge in service to Christianity. They have a well-deserved reputation as extremely well educated men and have collateral strengths in linguistics and missionary work. These make them a good fit for science fiction, with its stress on science and knowledge and the need for language in first contact situations. Some Jesuits themselves are  scientists and they can interact with science and scientists on an equal intellectual footing. Since all good stories rely on strongly presented conflict, Jesuits can either be good protagonists or good antagonists.

I hope that soon another fictional Jesuit, Ignatius Xavier Ryan, SJ, will take his place among these characters. Terraformed Earth – New Millennium, my work in progress anti-dystopian novel is set a millennium from now where Earth’s environment is safe but humanity is endangered. I hope to publish it in 2022.

The Drake Equation was devised as a way to estimate the probability that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The probability other civilizations exist is taken to be the product of several factors, many of which were at the time unknown. Here’s the Drake Equation

where

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy near enough to detect

and

R_∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy

f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e = the average number of habitable planets per star with planets

f_l = the fraction of habitable planets that develop life 

f_i = the fraction of planets with life that develop civilizations

f_c = the fraction of civilizations that emit detectable signals into space

L = the length of time such civilizations can emit detectable signals 

Since we started looking for exoplanets, we’ve gotten some traction on how likely it is that human-habitable planets exist. The other factors are still unknown. Do they develop life, do they develop technological civilizations, how long do the civilizations survive?

What if we’re going about this all wrong?

When I was doing my Ph.D. research project in pattern recognition I came across Watanabe’s Ugly Duckling Theorem.  Classification of an object depends on measured characteristics (“predicates”) of an object. If you are not even sure of what the relevant categories are, then the measured characteristics need to determine the list of categories as well.

The Ugly Duckling theorem concerns how you assign importance (“weight”) to the attributes of an object you measure. The theorem states that, if all possible predicates are equally weighted, all objects are members of the same class. To make any progress you need to limit the number of predicates you consider important and weight each one according to its importance in determining both the list of categories and the category to which an individual object belongs. The list of key predicates and their weights constitute your bias. You might think bias is your friend, at least as far as classification goes. But if your bias leads you in the wrong direction then not so much. As so often, the devil is in the details.

What if the whole problem with the Drake equation is that the predicates we use to define intelligent life are the problem, not the solution? If we are biased toward recognizing life as we know it, or recognizing signals we expect, we may miss life that’s outside the boundaries of our imagination. We may fail to consider whether a body we do detect might harbor life even if it would not support us.

This is all a nice intellectual exercise until something alerts us to look where we might not. In the movie Independence Day, the first  scene where the characters realize that they’re dealing with an intelligent species is when they notice that the incoming visitor from beyond the solar system is not speeding up as it approaches the Sun – it’s slowing down!

This is the premise of my WiP novel Watanabe’s Hammer. Stay tuned.

I get a weekly email prompt on writing from Pam Sourelis of Winged Horse Writing Studios that I find very helpful. She recently suggested writing a scene about a cultural celebration that I thought fit the season. Here is a snippet from the prompt:

How someone responds to or engages with a cultural celebration (are they part of it? excluded from it?) can reveal a great deal about them. How they engage with, or ignore, the solstices and equinoxes can also be revealing.

If you think this might be a valuable weekly prod to help freshen up your writing, you can sign up here:

https://wingedhorsewritingstudio.com/signup/

In the vein of holiday stories, here’s an anthology from Area 42 Team Five

Holiday Tales from Team Five

A writing coach suggested to me this week that listening is crucial to writing. Not listening to advice, or music, listening to the voice of the story. She called it “discovering the soul of the story.”

That happens to me sometimes. Something about the story just keeps going in my head and I write it down. I once visited the Salvador Dali museum, which has art going back to before we were human. As I browsed this eclectic collection, I wondered what an alien would make of it. Somehow I could almost hear the alien’s voice, wondering what it all meant.

My story, The Museum at the End of Time, grew out of that effort. I write it in a very short time and, aside from edits of the strange pronouns I was experimenting with, it pretty much stayed the way it was until it was published.

Special relativity is based on frame-related time and space dilation. But the fundamental premise is that the speed of light measured in any frame is always constant. The time dilation at the speed of light predicts that the duration between two events is (asymptotically) zero. Thus a photon experiences no time while in flight.

I started wondering what a consciousness embodied as a photon would experience in flight and at interaction points. Out of this came Volare.

My flash sci fi story Volare was accepted for the winter edition of Z-Sky magazine two days after I submitted it. I’m on a roll.

My story “Museum at the End of Time” was chosen as the lead-off story in the first edition of Z-Sky science fiction magazine. Here’s how they described it:

Steven Fritz’s majestic “Museum at the End of Time” transports us far away into perhaps they furthest future in our collection. Fritz’s innovative plural-and-singular first-person narrator carries us forward into a divine mind as it completes the history of its home galaxy.

You can see the online version or get a paperback copy here

The U. S. Navy has recently publicly admitted encountering unidentified aerial objects on F/A-18 targeting radars. The Navy will neither confirm nor deny that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin.

As a Navy helicopter pilot I’ve had similar experience with an unidentified underwater object. That experience forms the basis of the following attempt to explain the Navy’s recent report.

UFO Encounter

The Navy neither confirms nor denies the accuracy of my story.