Cold Earth follows a deep-space commander and a far-future doctor whose memoirs collide when a black hole mission sends one crew 50,000 years ahead, where they become accidental saviors of a war-torn Earth. What inspired the idea of linking a deep-space mission with humanity’s world in 50,000 A.D.?

I have always been a big fan of science fiction involving space travel. The idea about linking a deep space mission commander and a far-future doctor came to me during a lunch break at work, after I recalled watching a science channel video about the black holes in deep space. These powerful gravitational anomalies are so powerful that even light cannot escape their gravitational pull. The science program also explained that time would drastically slow down when a spaceship gets close to the black hole, even if it will not cross the Event Horizon, which would be fatal for the ship and the crew, because there will be no escape. I thought, why not make a near-future spaceship experience the same phenomenon and accidentally travel forward in time? And thus, the idea for the Cold Earth novel was born. The rest of the setup involved the character design and the list of events in the story.

Why did you choose to tell the story through alternating memoir-like timelines?

This is a very good question. By choosing to tell the story through alternating timelines, I wanted to tell the readers about the two very different worlds: the world of a science expedition commander, Martin Hall, of the year 2248 A.D., and the far future scientist, Dr. Antares Lang, of the year 50,000 A.D. The world of Martin Hall, in many ways, is similar to our own. He is a professional astronaut, a family man, a husband, and a father. He lives in a time where humanity has finally developed the means to bend space and time, thus ensuring faster-than-light travel without violating the fundamental laws of physics. In comparison, Dr. Antares Lang lives in the distant future, on planet Earth gripped in the period of a New Ice Age. Like Martin Hall, Antares is a former soldier who has a family but lives deep underground in one of the high-tech exotic cities where humans hide from the elements and battle rogue and highly evolved ancient cybernetic organisms on the surface.

How did you approach balancing scientific explanation with character-driven storytelling?

Before I began writing this novel, I wanted to make it grounded in a solid science of astrophysics without boring the reader with technical details. My idea was to present the scientific facts, and present them to the readers in an entertaining as well as educational manner. There is a genre called hard science fiction, where the exact science of today is applied in a very academic manner and woven into the story. I also wanted this novel to be character-driven, where each protagonist is given his or her voice that makes them unique. As for the black hole Gaila BH-1, which becomes the cause of the ship’s accidental travel into the very distant future, such an active celestial object does exist in the constellation of Snake Catcher, and although formidable, it poses no danger to us, being more than one thousand light years away.

Which part of the far-future Earth was the most exciting or challenging to build?

I am not a futurologist, but just like the highly educated people of science and people who are very familiar with human social dynamics, I tried to imagine the far distant future of humanity, where the situation is hard but far from hopeless. Just like we, in our own time, try to handle our own problems of political instability, environmental pollution in the name of profit, unrestrained corporate greed, corruption, and economic uncertainty, I thought that the world fifty thousand years from now would seem radically different from our own in languages, traditions, customs, and technology. I was excited to build the subterranean world, where the return to the deep caves was a temporary measure, and the struggle of men against a new race of intelligent, hostile machines that have evolved from ancient military robots, is presented in a realistic manner, but without many action scenes that readers might have expected. Cold Earth is a tale of evolutionary philosophy, as well as a high adventure beyond time and space.

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