The idea for this story was staring me in the face for years.  In an unsold novel manuscript, I had a character on an interstellar ramjet thinking about its ionizing/defensive lasers, and just as a throwaway line I had her hope that no alien starships would cross its path.  I re-read that line dozens of times before I realized there was a story in it.  But presumably the designers would address that risk, right?  They'd scan for engine emissions or something.

That's where the Chirrn came in.  They were another idea I'd had for years, with no specific story in mind to put them in.  I didn't want the kind of SF universe where everyone gets spaceflight at the same time.  I wanted a species that had been in space for millennia -- but to explain why they'd never visited Earth, I decided to use a concept I'd read about, the idea that inhabitants of interplanetary O'Neill habitats might travel to the stars by just sticking on engines and taking their worlds with them.  I'd added a prejudice against planet-dwelling in general to make sure they'd want nothing to do with us.  Once I came up with the idea for AVG, I realized the Chirrn were the perfect species to use -- not only did it heighten the catastrophe by making it a space habitat rather than a ship that was destroyed, but their prejudice intensified the conflict.  Their mode of space exploration also raised the question, why bother with something as difficult as ramjet travel?

(Of course, it's clear from the story that despite their unwillingness to interact with planet-dwellers, they've extensively studied us from afar.  Not so paradoxical -- prejudiced cultures are often fascinated by the study of those they need to believe they're superior to.  Though I'm being a bit harsh on the Chirrn; a lot of it is just natural curiosity.)

Personally, in retrospect, I find my debut effort to be a bit dry, talky, and light on characterization.  But I suppose that's okay for a courtroom drama; and it went over well with the readers.  I got a few angry letters about the outcome, but nobody had anything negative to say about the storytelling.  I also wish I'd developed the Chirrn's culture better, made them more alien; and some of my scientific assumptions were a bit naive.  The revised version available on this site corrects the science and fixes some wandering viewpoints (i.e. switching between two characters' inner thoughts in the same scene), but leaves the bulk of the story intact.  (The dates have been adjusted to reflect a maximum velocity of 0.951c, instead of the 0.99c postulated in the original.)  I have tentative plans to expand the story into a novel, in which I would develop the characters and the Chirrn's culture in far more depth.

Oh, and for the record, "Chirrn" is only a rough approximation of their name for themselves.  A sequence of a sneeze, a growl and a gulp would come about equally close.

"...a slightly unwieldy title..." -- Mark Watson, BestSFNet Reviews
 

This idea was inspired by a Roger Zelazny story about robot cars roaming the countryside like herds of bison.  His robots were sapient and had gone wild under the influence of a computer virus.  But I was intrigued by the concept of robots acting like animals, their behavior shaped not by programming or self-aware thought but by pure Darwinian pressures.  So I tried to think up a situation in which such a circumstance could logically arise.  That situation came with plenty of tough ethical dilemmas built into it.

This is often the way I work.  Some people might think that sticking to strict science can limit creativity, narrow your range of ideas.  But I find just the opposite to be true.  Having the framework of science and logic to build upon helps me generate ideas.  It lets me extrapolate, to figure out the consequences of such-and-such a premise, and arrive at ideas I never would've found otherwise.  AVG and AWCC both started with the technical questions.

Given that the auxons would ideally need a lot of time for this evolution to occur, I realized that the ideal planet to set it on would be Gamma Leporis V, the destination that AVG's colonists never reached.  The unexpected delay in colonization fit the premise perfectly, and it let me tie the stories together indirectly.  I love continuity.  Most of the stories I write are set in a common universe, which I've been developing for most of my life (though it's gone through many, many changes over the years -- nothing's locked down until it's published, and AVG was even revised when I republished it here).

My first draft was written in epistolary form, as a transcript of recorded journal entries and comm traffic.  I wanted to pay homage to the likes of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, by telling it in the form of a naturalist's research diary.  Analog's editor Stanley Schmidt loved the concept but didn't like the execution.  I can't blame him -- it was very forced and ill-paced.  I also didn't have a resolution for the moral dilemma, and just had the story break off at a point of crisis, a "so what do we do now?" kind of thing.  But Stan hinted that he'd like to see a revised version of the piece.  Unwisely, I sent the first version off to two more magazines before finally taking Stan's suggestions seriously and hitting on a solution for the story's problems.  For the first time, I actually hoped to get a rejection, so I could totally redo the story.  And of course I did.  The moral: take your editors' advice seriously.

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