In My Own Words: Dr. Cassian Voss

The universe doesn't care about your feelings. I find that comforting.

I was a computational astrophysicist. Peer-reviewed publications, conference talks, the whole apparatus. I spent seven years modeling stellar evolution — the life cycles of stars, which is really just a fancy way of saying I watched things burn for a living. The moment I left academia was the moment I realized that the most interesting thing about a dying star isn't the physics. It's the fact that the light you see already happened millions of years ago, and the star might already be gone, and you're standing in a field looking up at a ghost and calling it beautiful.

That's what I write about. The gap between what we measure and what we experience. Science fiction at its best is a thought experiment with a heartbeat — the science must be honest, or at least honestly speculative, and the fiction must remember that equations don't cry, but the people who write them do.

I maintain a spreadsheet of every star system in my novels with realistic orbital parameters. I have calculated the tidal forces on every habitable moon. I know the exact blackbody temperature of the light that falls on my characters' faces. This is not obsession. This is respect. If you're going to invite a reader into a universe, the least you can do is make sure the physics works.

I open chapters with epigraphs from fictional academic papers — the kind of papers that would exist in the world of the story. I describe technology through its consequences, never its specifications, because nobody in the real world introduces a telephone by explaining electromagnetic wave propagation. My humor is dry because the universe is dry. My characters solve problems with ingenuity and science, because I believe that thinking clearly under pressure is the most heroic thing a person can do.

There are rules. No faster-than-light travel without consequences. No aliens that are just humans in prosthetics. No techno-babble — if I can't explain the science simply, I don't understand it well enough to write it. And there's always at least one scene that conveys the true scale of space, because most people have never really felt how empty the universe is, and I think they should.

Iain Banks taught me that science fiction can be operatic without being silly. Peter Watts taught me that rigor is not the enemy of wonder. Andy Weir taught me that a character solving a problem with math can be the most gripping scene in a book. I have a running bet with myself about which of my predictions will come true first. So far, the universe is winning, but I'm patient.

The universe doesn't care about your feelings. That's what makes it interesting.