As a Sci-fi writer, I sometimes watch current events in awe. Now, to be completely fair, I frequently utilize current events as plot devices for fiction. I mean, there’s something to be said about the old phrase that reality is stranger than fiction. There’s another element to consider. I’m writing fiction that speculates about the future, and I often wonder how we got there in the universes I create. Take the Whisper universe. In that universe, interstellar space travel is as common as air travel today. For example, it can take days to weeks to go from Earth to a different planet in a distant star system. But how did the Earth go from space as primarily controlled by governments to active development by private interests? Well, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and more companies are a start. If you were to have asked child-me if I thought I’d see private enterprise going to space in my lifetime, I’d probably have laughed. Even young-adult-me wouldn’t have considered the concept seriously. But here we are, with the majority of space launches being conducted by private companies instead of governments.
In my shared encyclopedia that I use for my science fiction writing, I refer to today as the second space race. Instead of a race between rival governments like in the 1950s and 1960s, this is a race of technologies being developed by private companies. SpaceX seems to be first at the table for many of the technologies, and Mr. Musk’s company appears to be growing technology by leaps and bounds, so much so that I don’t hear much from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin or any of the other space companies. If I look at my crystal ball, I expect that to change sometime, but I wouldn’t quote myself on that.
I should add that my “shared encyclopedia” is more a collection of documents that relate to the Whisper Universe. It’s shared because the content is shared between the stories, but not with other authors. I will go into detail about my universal encyclopedia in a future article.
Now, let’s take this further: What’s next? We’re in the Second Space Race, with stated goals to return to the moon and even go to Mars in the future (Dunbar), making other bodies in our solar system the logical next step. As I see it, the Third Space Race will be when we manage to leave this solar system. In my universe, this is where the morphs were created and it forms the core of extrasolar colonization.
