There are infinite number of stars spread through infinite space; that all the stars were actually suns, but seemed to beonly faint dots of light (when they could be seen at all) only because they were at enormous distances; that around all the stars were planets, at least some of whichwere inhabited by intelligent beings.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464)
I’m György Márió Kővári. In the autumn of 1997 I started writing my science fiction novel which I called Star Siblings. On this page I will explain how I came up with the story and the characters, what inspired me, what ideas I wanted to convey, and how the novel has changed over the years.
Premise:
A young man has long searched for his sister, who was taken as an infant from their home planet which was overrun by a cruel, conquering race – and although the siblings eventually find each other, their adventure begins after it is discovered that her home is threatened by the same thing that destroyed their old one.
I’ve been reading Star Wars novels since 1992 and after a while I started thinking that maybe I could write something like that. By then I had already written a comic book and a couple of never-finished story initiatives, and I was also into science fiction so I was increasingly tempted to write something myself because – as I naively thought at the time – if Timothy Zahn or Kevin J. Anderson could do it, so could I.
Of course I didn’t want a cheap Star Wars copy, I was trying to come up with something new although I was obviously inevitably influenced by novels about galaxies far, far away. I decided from the very beginning that there would be no robots in my world. I wanted to make the story as ’down-to-Earth’ as possible while keeping my favourite fantastical motifs but also making sure that the plot and characters were not subordinate to them. The story is more important than the setting in which it takes place.
It was around this time that I first read The Exploding Suns by Isaac Asimov, which contains this quote from Nicholas of Cusa. The thoughtfulness behind the renaissance polymath scientist’s statement which was so far beyond his time captured my imagination that I chose it as the tagline for my novel. The size of the universe as perceived by science is incomprehensible to the human mind so I think it is impossible for intelligent life to exist only on Earth – either in the past or at this moment.
In 1960 astrophysicist and astronomer Frank Drake worked out his famous equation that gives the number of communicating civilisations in a given region of interstellar space. While the numbers that can be plugged into the equation are only estimates and only one estimate – 10 – is produced, if you extrapolate this to the other galaxies in the universe 10 quickly becomes millions even billions. Of course this is all just theory with much uncertainty surrounding it but it does make the open minded wonder.
Astronomer, author and science communicator Carl Sagan said:
If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space.
For this reason I also find it unlikely that life evolved only once, on an even more ordinary planet of an ordinary star. Since the laws of physics, chemistry and biology are the same everywhere (?), the same processes and coincidences can and could have happened elsewhere without further ado, and if something has a chance of happening – especially in 14 billion years – it will happen sooner or later becauseenough time has passed for life to develop and flourish elsewhere. Life, whatever its nature and form, is probably one of the most natural phenomena in the universe and it will always evolve if conditions allow. We have been lucky, why shouldn’t others? This idea was another basis for me to start writing my own novel.