History

The writing of my current project, set fourteen hundred and some years before the Jack Mack novels, has required a more extensive look at the history of that time. I’ve mentioned some of it in the novels without going into great detail. Now I need to be a little more exact about just what was going on.

I am not going to set an exact date on when the Orlova Drive was perfected and the age of interstellar travel began. Let’s say a couple hundred years from now or thereabouts. I’m entirely willing to say records from that time are too sketchy for anything more precise. We do better moving forward; all dates are counted from the time of that first jump. Jack McFee was born in the year Orlova 1420.

In those years between now and my stories, Earth suffered much. Climate change, famine, war. The ‘great powers’ fell, to be replaced by new ones. Yet exploration of the Solar system went on, humans expanding to Mars, the asteroid belt. Colonies appeared. It may be the troubles on Earth actually accelerated the move into space, in the somewhat vain hope of escaping. That is the world in which my scientists and pilots operate, one not so different in many ways from our own. And quite different in others.

I’ve mentioned ‘recent’ history here and there in what I’ve written so far. That’s the place to find out about it — and expect it to continue to expand as I complete the story.

The novelette ‘Mission Delayed’ I wrote a little while back tells of the discovery of a ship from two or three hundred years after the first jumps outward. The technology is, in many ways, much the same but with considerable refinement. Ion propulsion is still standard, a version of the Orlova Drive remains in service. The big advances in engines, in dampening fields, and much more I toss off as everyday technology in the Jack Mack novels is yet to come. However, there was definite development in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, that plays an important role in those novels.

There’s a lot of interesting history hinted at in that period too. Whether it will ever be more than hints, is to be seen.