Q: Tell us about your story in Bridging Infinity? What was the inspiration behind it?

Pat Murphy:

If you crack the ice on the right Arctic lake and toss in a match, you can set off a methane flare.

That’s not fiction. It’s true. And that’s what inspired the story. (If you doubt me, search “methane lake” on YouTube, and you’ll find videos of Katey Anthony, a University of Alaska professor, demonstrating the technique.)

The Arctic is warming because of global climate change. As it warms, the permafrost is melting. As the permafrost melts, it releases methane, which bubble up in Arctic lakes.

And here’s the nasty bit: methane is a greenhouse gas that’s even more powerful than carbon dioxide. More methane means more warming, and that meant more permafrost melting, which means more methane and more warming…and so on in a positive feedback loop with negative consequences.

When you asked for a story about a super-engineering project, the melting permafrost was on my mind. My friend Paul Doherty and I had recently written about the permafrost and a (real life) project called Pleistocene Park for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So I enlisted Paul in the creation of a project to save the world from the feedback loop of the melting permafrost. Of course, we started with an exploding lake.

Paul Doherty:

Q: What do you believe makes a good science fiction story?

Good science fiction has characters and situations that expand and stretch your perception & understand of the world and your place in it. There is something expansive about good science fiction — it makes you step outside yourself, considering viewpoints alien to your own. And good science fiction makes you wonder: what will happen if…. And what happens is unexpected but at the same time strangely obvious. Good science fiction deals with unexpected consequences.

Q: What are you working on now? And if people like your story in the book, what other work of yours should they seek out?

Pat Murphy:

If you like this story, check out my short story collection — Women Up to No Good. I think two stories in that collection — “A Cartographic Analysis of the Dream State” and “Exploding Like Fireworks” — would appeal to anyone who likes “Cold Comfort”. And look for the science column that Paul and I write for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where we explore science that may become part of the next SF story!

Paul Doherty:

I am co-author of a non-fiction book with Cody Cassidy, And Then You’re Dead: What Really Happens If You Get Swallowed by a Whale, Are Shot from a Cannon, or Go Barreling over Niagara, which is due out in April 2017.

Q: What was the inspiration behind your story?

My home town of Albany, capital of the state and a city much changed by the construction of the Empire State Plaza under then – Governor Nelson Rockefeller, an exercise in grandiose architecture and megalomania that cost 2 billion dollars and was the largest government complex ever built in North America. The project began in 1965, disrupted the downtown for years, dislocated thousands of people and destroyed an entire area of the city. “Aggressively modernist” is a polite way to describe this marble and stone plaza, which looks like it could have been designed by Albert Speer. One of my brothers worked on one of the Plaza’s construction crews, and people here are still arguing, fifty years later, about whether the Empire State Plaza vastly improved our city or destroyed much of its old, essential character.

Q: What do you believe makes a good science fiction story?

The ideal SF story has original, striking ideas rooted in science and informed speculation, involving characters, and luminous prose. Most of us fall short of those goals most of the time.

Q: What are you working on now?

A novel and a novella I’d rather be closed-mouthed about. A new novel of mine, Season of the Cats, came out in 2015 and will be available in 2017 in trade paperback from Wildside; that’s a fantasy set in the present, not SF.

Q. And if people like your story in the book, what other work of yours should they seek out?

Assuming that readers of this book are interested in large-scale engineering projects of all kinds, I’d recommend my Venus trilogy (Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, and Child of Venus), all available through Open Road Media, and a related volume, Dream of Venus and Other Short Novels, out from Wildside Press. Writing novels about the terraforming of Venus, an extremely challenging feat of engineering, took me over a couple of decades and might be the most ambitious SF I’ve ever tried.

Larry Niven and I wrote “Mice Among Elephants” because the recent LIGO discovery of gravitational waves excited our interest. We had set up in our two previous novels together, Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar, a mystery about the target star of an interstellar starship, Glory. Glory seemed to be a normal solar system – so how did radiate such powerful gravitational waves?

As a gravitational wave moves through space, one transverse direction stretches space-time itself, while in the other direction, space-time compresses. But gravitational waves are very weak – so how to make them, short of using masses greater than stars’?

So the humans venture near and find a small system of black holes. The key is that orbiting black holes, carrying the mass of Earth itself, are still only millimeters in size. They can orbit in small spaces. And inside that volume, the black holes don’t have to follow nice, orderly orbits like the planets we know.

Instead, gravitational effects in strong fields (for which you need General Relativity) lead to orbits that can wrap in close, then speed out—whirl and zoom orbits, physicists call them. See the figure—not your mother’s good ol’ ellipse!

This picture is straight from a recently published astrophysics paper. (Do your homework, yes.)

But…why build such a thing? LIGO discovered a natural emitter, waves given off in the collision of black holes with tens of stellar masses. Turns out that the system in our story emits gravitational waves artificially, in a repeating pattern. It’s a signal!

But…why go to such extremes, shoving planetary masses around?

And…who would do such a thing?

Larry and I have largely written sf to explore such what-if puzzles. That’s a way of thinking your way into a drama that stretches the mind. The story brushes against such issues, with more to come in the next novel Larry and I will write together, which concludes the trilogy. Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar, and the final novel, Glory, are ways of asking—What could intelligence do, given time and room, on the scale of our galaxy?

We set out to do the whole idea in one big novel, Bowl of Heaven, back in 2010. . . and found it just grew and grew. This story is a way of inching into the Big Questions we set for ourselves. Plus, it was fun to write—which for us, is the main point, really.

(c) 2016 Gregory Benford & Larry Niven

Q: Tell us about your story in Bridging Infinity?

We wanted to tell an unapologetically Caribbean story, no explanations, no watering-down. People from small nations often travel far for work and get overlooked by large corporate and political interests. We made them the heroes that saved and mended our broken, used-up Earth when no-one else was willing to give it a chance.

Q: What was the inspiration behind your story?

A little bit of history, a little bit of now. There’s a hint of the building of the Panama Canal in there (many West Indians were part of that), and the tradition of sociopolitical commentary in kaiso goes back for generations and remains strong.

And the in-crowd knows that The Mighty Sparrow’s real name is Slinger Francisco. Our protagonist’s name is a nod to that. The people who travel to labor bring their memories and culture with them, so we wanted to show a future where diaspora continued and how vibrant it was.

Q: What do you believe makes a good science fiction story?

A good science fiction story isn’t so much the extrapolation, but the part where it holds up a mirror to a very important part of us that exists right now.

Q:  What are you working on now? And if people like your story in the book, what other work of yours should they seek out?

Read more Caribbean SF! The anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean (edited by Karen Lord) is already out in the UK and will be released in the US very soon, in mid-November. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, so we’re not being biased when we say it’s brilliant!