by W. Steve Wilson
Every so often in Science Fiction movies, the events that get the whole thing started or bring it all to a conclusion have been done before. It’s almost like aliens share notes on first contact, and we humans have a go-to tool in the toolkit when faced with cataclysmic events. What is Steve talking about, you might ask?
In the first case, how many SF movies start with an alien probe? Star Trek alone starts two movies that way (Star Trek: The Motion Picture with V-GER and The Voyage Home with the probe that wants to talk to the whales.) In a similar respect, Star Wars V The Empire Strikes Back starts with a probe from the Empire landing on the ice planet Hoth. You could almost argue that the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey begins with discovering an alien “probe” on the Moon. And in a unique twist, there’s the 1996 thriller Lifeform, where the arriving probe is one of ours, Viking, returning from Mars.
At the other end, what do we do to thwart the aliens, divert the asteroid, re-spin the Earth’s core, or fix the Moon? Well—we use a nuclear device. In Independence Day, the aliens’ shield protected them, but it was our first try. 1998 saw two movies, Armageddon and Deep Impact, both blow an asteroid to smithereens with a nuclear device. And we must include The Core, where Hillary Swank and company deployed a daisy chain of nukes to get the Earth’s core spinning again, if for no other reason than so pigeons could fly straight. And we have 2006’s Earthstorm, where we use nuclear charges to keep the Moon in one piece. Moonfall might count; that was ultimately an EMP, but the military wanted to nuke it.
Last year, I thought: why not combine these beloved tropes into a single tale, and the kernel of The Hydrogen Thieves was born. Last year we started off with a probe. This year we’ll end with a nuclear device.
I hope you enjoy the adventure.
In Book One (2022): It Always Starts with a Probe, Radio Astronomy grad student Jenny Chandler and her partner, post-doc fellow Kate Watson, detect a signal embedded in radio astronomy data, apparently from the Cassini probe sent to Saturn. But Cassini had crashed into the planet five years earlier and was destroyed. Decoding the signal leads to a discovery that exposes forces seeking to steal the knowledge and control colonization of the Solar System—forces unconcerned with risking the lives of the two students.
In Book Two (2023): It Always Ends with a Nuclear Device, Jenny and Kate, along with their daughters, Celina and Celeste, head to Mars to join the team building a ship to visit the outer planets. In transit, a breakthrough by the onboard AI, Lexi, upends what they thought they knew about the Gas Giants.
Watch for each episode as we follow the crew to their inevitable clash with The Hydrogen Thieves and the ultimate confrontation that could set the limits of human colonization of the Solar System.
Read the complete Book One: It Always Starts with a Probe from 2022
Follow along with Book Two: It Always Ends with a Nuclear Device for the next several months as we publish each episode in old-fashioned serial style.
Thanks for reading.
Note: If you’re not on my mailing list and would like to be notified when new episodes come out, please sign up here.