StarChild

Coming Soon: StarChild

The StarChild Story

Interstellar travel may still be in its infancy, but adulthood is fast approaching, and our descendants will someday see childhood’s end.
E. Mallove and G. Matloff, The Starflight Handbook

StarChild is a coming-of-age story that takes place in the context of an epic ‘road trip’ – the first human journey to rendezvous amidst the stars with an alien civilization.

It’s a fictional reflection on one boy’s experience of adolescence in the context of two current trends in human history. First, there’s a reasonable chance that StarChild’s readers will be the first generation of humans to know that there are other Earth-like planets around distant stars. The first planet around another star, an exoplanet, was discovered in 1996 and since then 400 have been discovered. There’s now an international race, involving several space-based telescopes, to discover the first Earth-like exoplanet – one that’s rocky and capable of harbouring life.

Second, there are now plans for a human mission to Mars. This will be the first time that humans experience multi-year space travel. It will also be the first time that a human mission goes beyond the ‘Earth horizon’, the point at which the Earth is no longer visible as a planet, but rather becomes a small, blue dot. The planners of this Mars mission believe that individual and crew psychology – how they deal with life in space – will be a make-or-break aspect of the journey.

“Here in deep space, traveling at half light speed, the position of stars was always changing. You had to know your stars. How bright, what color, their positions in relationship to one another. The boy in the bunk knew the local Milky Way star field better than anyone else on Gaia. His mother just laughed when he challenged her to a star ID contest.”

StarChild extends these two great historical trends to imagine the first multi-generational, interstellar mission to meet an alien civilization. The story is told through the eyes of Adam, StarChild One – the first child born in space. Through Adam’s journey, the novel explores perennial questions of identity, in a modern/futuristic context. StarChild one grows-up and hits adolescence within the confines of a spaceship. How do you rebel, or find your own place in the world, when there’s nowhere else to go? What does it mean to be human in a modern context, one that for many people is cut-off from Mother Earth? How does history frame our individual choices? Each of us is born into a particular historical moment and comes to understand the world, and must make life choices, within this context.