For the last couple of months I have been heavily plugging the first in my new series of novellas, Fermi’s Progress (you can buy it here!) but I’ve been working on it far longer than that. Dyson’s Fear and it’s three as-yet-unannounced sequels have been a labour of love over the last five years, a period of time where I think we can all agree a lot of shit has gone down.
I wrote the stories of Fermi’s Progress wanting to talk about a lot of different things, not all of which are immediately apparent in Dyson’s Fear, but unsurprisingly a great big honking theme throughout the stories is Fermi’s Paradox. The great big question “Where are all the aliens”? was posed by one of the fathers of the nuclear bomb, so he may have answered his own question.
From its title onwards, there’s quite a few times in Fermi’s Progress where, despite all the aliens, I’m thinking about what it means to be alone in the universe, what that tells us about the universe, and what it tells us about ourselves.
You know what would really fuck that up?
If we found some aliens, that’s what.
So for the last five years I’ve been getting extremely nervous whenever ET has threatened to phone home. Here are some of the more nerve-wracking news stories I’ve read while Fermi’s Progress was still a WIP.