Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and the Ustari Cycle from Pocket/Gallery, including We Are Not Good People. At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog he tagged five "mundane sci-fi books in the spirit of First Man"--"mundane SF eschews the deliriously futuristic in favor of the possible and the soon-to-be"--including:Arkwright, by Allen SteeleRead about another entry on the list.
Like Robinson’s, at first glance Steele’s story seems too big to be mundane: a dying sci-fi author, convinced the Earth is ultimately doomed, uses his wealth to set humanity on a path towards colonizing a distant planet, setting off a chain of events that unfolds across centuries and light years.But Steele keeps his technology realistic, imagining that the colonists eventually set off in a ship powered by a microwave beam—a technology that’s already theoretically capable of slowly accelerating a ship to about half light speed, which would get it to a planet dozens of light years away in a difficult but manageable amount of time. The rest of the logistics are dealt with in a similarly realistic manner; while the book’s overall scope is a bit outside the strict parameters of the mundane, it’s definitely there in spirit, and like First Man conveys a sense of epic effort and heroic sacrifice that would be required to turn such a project into a reality.
--Marshal Zeringue
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