How is the story different if a fairly conventional NASA crew goes to Rakhat?
I don’t know. Somebody else would have to write that story. I wanted to work with characters who were so engaging and charming to me, I would go up to my office every single day for years and spend time with them. You know, there are writers who will tell you that they just hate a character and I don’t understand it. It’s so hard to write novels it takes so much discipline to sit down and make this prose happen every day. I don’t know how writers can spend time with characters they don’t like. The trick, for me anyway, is to make villains who are just as engaging and charming as the good guys so I can enjoy their company as well. I might be casting the question in a way that’s not quite right. I’m trying to figure out, from your point of view I’m not trying to get at your motivation, or your interest in composing the crew as you did but because they were who they were, they had a particular kind of experience. If it had been people with a military and science background, and that was t
