Behind the Book: The Sphere

Earth is dying now, while the man at the podium is still speaking.

His name is Cassian Moru. He wrote the speech himself, three drafts across four months, nobody else in the room. That morning he handed it to his communications director, who read the first page and said he thought it was the most important thing anyone had ever said, and also that people would be very angry.

Moru said yes. The director asked, and then? And then they won’t be.

He walks to the podium without notes, in front of four thousand people in the hall and eleven billion on screens, and he says Earth is dying. Not in a generation. Not in a century. Now, while we sit in this room.

What he proposes is a shell around the sun.

That speech is the scene I love most in the book. Moru knows exactly what he’s asking of eleven billion people, he asks anyway, and I wanted a man at that podium who refused to sweeten any of it.

What came first when Richard Lowe wrote The Sphere?

The sphere. The aliens came later, and they came because of a problem.

Building a Dyson sphere takes forty thousand years. That’s the subject of the book and it’s also the difficulty with the book, because I like to start in the middle of some action, and building a sphere is generations of people being born onto a project, working a lifetime, and dying with it at five percent.

You can’t open on that. There’s no scene in it.

What does a prelude do for a science fiction novel?

It drops the reader into a what-is-happening moment. Two thousand light years from Earth, an extremely old and careful species points its instruments at the galactic center and within a short time is gasping uncontrollably. For the first time in its life, this creature feels fear. It reports what it saw and the entire species becomes gripped with an emotion it has no history of.

Fifty years later, fifteen hundred light years out, a young and aggressive species abruptly ends a war of extermination it’s been fighting for millennia, because one of its observation platforms happened to orient on something in deep space. They settle their disagreements and begin working together for the first time.

Seventy-five years after that, another planet, another instrument, the same result.

The reader doesn’t know what any of them are looking at. Why are all these species terrified of an artifact? Only later do they learn the artifact is human, and the thing frightening the galaxy is us.

Which, when you think about it, is the correct response. It should be terrifying to every being in the galaxy, because of what it implies. If something can build that, what else can it do?

The book follows that thought all the way through, and the answer isn’t reassuring.

Why does the war come before the speech?

Because the war makes the speech necessary. Part One is the war, and it’s a war over resources. World War Three, if you want a familiar handle for it. It’s the thing that nearly kills humanity, and it’s the reason a man ends up at a podium proposing something insane.

Order matters here. If the reader hears the speech first, the sphere sounds like ambition. If the reader has watched the war first, the sphere sounds like the only remaining option, and Moru sounds like somebody doing arithmetic in public.

Humanity wanted to solve the problem permanently. That’s the phrase to remember, because permanently is a word that does a great deal of damage later in this book.

Why is there no faster than light travel in The Sphere?

Because with faster than light travel, why does humanity not simply leave?

That question is the entire reason for the rule. Give a dying species a working stardrive and the story is a relocation story. There’s no sphere. There’s no reason to spend forty thousand years enclosing a star when you could be somewhere else inside a decade.

Remove the drive and every exit closes at once. You can’t go anywhere. You have one star, and the only way to survive is to take all of it.

Every consequence in the book comes out of that single constraint. The generational structure comes out of it, because nobody can cross the distances involved inside a life. The politics come out of it, because a project nobody will live to see finished has to be sold to people who will get nothing from it. The eventual violence comes out of it too, though I won’t say how here.

One rule, held without exception, generated the rest. I get annoyed at science fiction that hands its characters a stardrive the moment the plot gets hard, because it lets the writer off the hook and readers can feel the cheat even when they can’t name it. Keeping the drive out of this book was the most satisfying decision I made on it.

How do you carry a story nobody can live through?

Moru answers that himself, in the speech, and it’s the closest the book comes to stating its own thesis.

None of us will be alive to see it finished. I know that. But I’d ask you to think about what we inherited. The roads under your cities, the languages in your mouths, the literature that tells you what you are: none of it was built by anybody who lived to see it finished. Then he picks up the glass of water on the podium shelf and drinks from it. A plain thing to do. A human thing.

The alternative, he says, is that they carry nothing. Because there will be nobody left to carry anything.

We begin tomorrow.

Structurally, that’s also the answer to how the book works. It moves through people who are on the project for a while and then aren’t, and it lets them go.

The book is six parts and a prelude, and it covers considerably more ground than the sales page admits to. The page mentions forty thousand years because forty thousand years is all I wanted to give away.

How does a huge time scale change the way a novel is written?

It forces you to give up continuity of person, and that’s harder than it sounds.

A normal novel runs on a reader caring what happens to somebody. Here, anybody the reader attaches to will be dead long before the thing they worked on is finished, and their grandchildren will be dead too, and the project will still be at five percent. There’s no way to write around that without cheating, and cheating means either a stardrive or an immortality trick, and both were unavailable by rule.

So the continuity has to live somewhere other than in a person. It lives in the project. The reader follows the sphere the way you follow a cathedral, and the people are the generations who worked on the nave. What that buys you is an unusual emotion. You feel the loss of somebody, and then you feel the far stranger thing underneath it. The loss didn’t slow the work. The work doesn’t notice. That’s the sensation the whole middle of the book is built to produce, and there’s no shortcut to it.

The other technique is the journal entries and the bracketed asides that tell you, flatly, what happened to somebody afterward.

A character gives an address at a hundred and fourteen and thinks she’s nine more years before retirement. The aside notes she had four, and died in year 9,894 of an old injury that had become tired of being managed. That’s a whole life closed in a sentence and a half, roughly the weight a single life carries at this scale.

Those asides were the hardest thing in the book for me to write. You spend pages making somebody matter and then close their life in a bracket, and every time I did it I felt a little cruel. I left them that way because that’s the scale the story is told at, and softening it would have lied about what forty thousand years does to people.

Do writers know how a novel ends before they finish it?

No. That came later. The book kept growing.

This is the same thing that happens with most of my fiction. I establish the conditions carefully, hold them without cheating, and then follow what they produce. With Cloudborn the conditions were an atmosphere and a creature. Here the conditions were a dying planet, no stardrive, and a species that had decided to solve its problem permanently.

What those conditions produce, several hundred pages later, is a good deal worse than what they seem to promise. There’s a second war in this book that the sales page doesn’t mention, and there’s a third act that I have deliberately kept off the page in every piece of marketing I’ve written for it. I didn’t plan any of it. I followed the rules I’d set and arrived somewhere I hadn’t intended to go. That happens when you refuse to bend a constraint for the sake of a nicer outcome.

Should a bleak science fiction ending be softened?

No. I had to restrain myself from making it worse. That isn’t a joke and it’s worth being precise about. The content warning on the book covers orbital bombardment, siege warfare and mass civilian casualties, and all three are in there, and none of them are the hardest thing in the book.

There’s no character positioned as clearly correct. There’s no faction the reader can safely stand behind. One of the viewpoint characters spends three hundred years arguing a question she can’t answer: whether a species that does a thing, even necessarily, even correctly, is the same species afterward. She doesn’t resolve it. She says she’s had three hundred years to find an answer and hasn’t found one, and says the question should be on the table because we live in the aftermath and ought to know what kind of aftermath it is.

That’s as close to a moral position as the book takes. It never tells you whether the arithmetic was right.

Who did Richard Lowe write The Sphere for?

Me, like most of my books.

The ambition is easy to state. It’s Larry Niven’s Ringworld with the problems Niven introduced into his structure resolved. It’s Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker books with the problems Saberhagen introduced into the berserker technology resolved. Those are two of the great big-object ideas in science fiction and both have structural flaws that get waved past, and I wanted to see what happened if you didn’t wave past them.

I think people will like it, with the caveat that liking is a strange word for what this book does.

It’s a sweeping history. It’s a couple of turns that go wild, including a war nobody sees coming. The ending is very bleak, and I mean bleak in a way that isn’t softened by any of the usual devices.

I don’t especially mind whether it sells. It’s 590 pages of one constraint followed to its conclusion, and following it that far was the point of writing it.

The bones are in the wall of the world, and the world is built, and the bones are holding part of it up.

From the author

The Sphere
The Sphere covers forty thousand years of building a shell around the sun while Earth dies. It runs six parts and a prelude, and it ends with what got voted on afterward.

Frequently Asked Questions