When writing “Gray Lies,” I was thinking about how a transformative technology like World War 2’s surface ships versus aircraft could come about in the context of interplanetary warfare. Thanks to Larry Niven I was obsessed with Bussard ramjets and I settled on the scenario of old-guard fusion torchships – fusion rockets – being trounced by interplanetary ramjets. (This was before critics calculated that a ramjet would produce more drag than thrust.) I was also thinking a lot about Von Neumann probes – self-replicating space probes that could sweep through the galaxy in fairly short timeframes as these things go. Oh, and the idea of being able to upload minds into computers. It was a lot to pack into one short story.

I wrote it while obsessively listening to the 1990 release of Best of Van Morrison. Which is odd for several reasons; I’m more of a Pink Floyd / Grateful Dead kind of guy, and I usually don’t listen to anything with words while writing. Regardless, Best of Van Morrison was what got me into the groove, and is probably why the story has such an optimistic, or at least kind, ending.

The universe the original story imagines is immediately adjacent to that of THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN. I always enjoyed the works of authors who had created a somewhat consistent but large universe – again, Larry Niven in his Known Space universe, and much earlier, Robert Heinlein. Though it was sometimes hard to see how the pieces all fit together in Heinlein’s case! In any case, it would not take much of a rewrite to nudge “Gray Lies” over. The main discrepancy is the war between Pallas and Confive; in THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, the main conflict is between Earth (or proxies thereof) and Mars. And I’ve largely moved on from ramjets to more esoteric drive technologies, so that might have to be adjusted. But these are minor fixes – surface details that are easily reworked.

So enjoy the original here; odds are good by the time it gets to Amazon it’ll be polished up to present the illusion that I’ve known what I was doing from the beginning!

– Magazine cover art by Peter Peebles