Site icon Brian N. Tissot

The Scientific Foundations of the Songs of the Universe Trilogy

Dr Abalone
Hina

The science behind the Songs of the Universe trilogy provides a foundation for its worlds, its creatures, and the questions its characters face. In this post, I briefly explore the research that helped shape those elements, how I used it, and where its limitations leave room for imagination. Astronomy, marine ecology, evolutionary biology, and climate science establish possibilities and constraints, but they cannot confirm the existence of the beings, technologies, or planetary awareness portrayed in the novels.

Where evidence ends, fiction carries the inquiry forward, asking what might emerge under unfamiliar conditions and what those possibilities could mean for us. That movement runs throughout the trilogy—from Sage’s discovery of life on Thalassa, through Lani and Orion’s search for Earth’s salvation, to Rigel’s encounters with a larger living universe. Science gives this unfolding thread coherence, while fiction allows it to explore the responsibilities that come with recognizing our place among other forms of life.

From marine ecology to alien oceans

Before Thalassa became an imagined world, there was the ocean. Surfing drew me toward it and marine biology taught me to look beneath its surface. Over more than thirty years as a marine ecologist and professor, I studied ecosystems ranging from abalone habitat and kelp forests to coral reefs and the deep sea. Those experiences shaped the questions that eventually became the Songs of the Universe trilogy. What would life become on an ocean planet with a different gravity, a different sky, and a different evolutionary history? How would we recognize intelligence there? And would discovering another living world change how we treat our own?

The trilogy’s science page describes this foundation across astronomy, astrobiology, evolution, bioacoustics, and Earth system science. This post follows those connections through the novels. The research includes longstanding series references and supplementary studies, including findings published after the first novel. Equally, peer-reviewed research can support a physical mechanism or biological analogy without establishing the fictional outcome. Planetary awareness, interstellar resonance, and the Engineers’ abilities remain imaginative propositions.

Building Thalassa in the Procyon system

When I imagined Thalassa, I wanted its ocean to belong to a world with a history of its own. Procyon offered an intriguing place to begin: a nearby system with two very different stars. Procyon A is hotter and brighter than our Sun, while its companion, Procyon B, is a white dwarf—the small, dense remnant of a star that once expanded into a giant before shedding its outer layers. That alone raised interesting questions. What would happen to a planet living through those changes? Could its oceans survive, and what might remain beneath them? Research by Liebert and colleagues placed the system’s age at about 1.9 billion years, the estimate I used in Songs of Thalassa, while later work by Bond and colleagues suggested an older age of about 2.7 billion years [1–2]. Those differences are part of science, and they gave me a foundation for imagining a world whose past was still being uncovered.

The changing fortunes of those two stars helped shape the dangerous system Sage enters. As a star expands and loses mass, it can change both the energy reaching nearby worlds and the gravitational relationships among them. From there, I imagined the debris fields, wandering comets, and uncertain history that make the journey to Thalassa so hazardous. The particular events in the novel are my own extrapolations from those processes. I was interested in what such a history might mean for life: whether it would disappear, find refuge in the deep ocean, or emerge changed by everything the planet had endured. That question follows Sage beneath the surface, where the assumptions she brings from Earth begin to unravel.

Of course, I also needed somewhere for Thalassa to orbit. Research by Holman and Wiegert explores where planets can maintain stable orbits in binary systems, either around one star or around both [3]. I placed Thalassa around Procyon A, with its companion adding complexity to the larger system. Keeping an ocean there would depend on more than distance from the star; the atmosphere, the planet’s interior, and its changing relationship with both suns would all matter. I used those relationships to think about Thalassa as a whole world, with conditions that influence one another. Its particular climate remains an imagined outcome, but the questions guiding it come directly from planetary science.

Then there were the waves. As a surfer, I couldn’t resist imagining what an ocean might look like on a planet with much lower gravity than Earth. Banfield and colleagues studied that very question in their models of winds and waves on ancient Mars [4]. Their work helped me explore how waves could grow and behave differently on a Mars-sized world. Low gravity alone wouldn’t create perfect giant surf, so I gave Thalassa the other ingredients: powerful storms, long stretches of open ocean, and submerged shoals that gather and steepen approaching swells. Those familiar relationships between wind, water, and the seafloor became the starting point for waves beyond anything Sage had ridden. They also gave her a compelling reason to travel there, long before she understood what the ocean would ask of her.

My marine ecology background came into play when I began thinking about what moved beneath those waves. Changes in ocean circulation can redistribute heat, oxygen, and nutrients, altering where organisms live and how entire food webs function. In the novels, Hina’s arrival sets a much larger transformation in motion, changing tides, volcanic activity, sea levels, and access to polar feeding grounds. Tidal heating provides a physical starting point for that history; the extent of the geological changes I imagined, including renewed tectonic activity, carries the idea further into fiction. What interested me most was how those changes could reshape life over millions of years. Hina became part of the explanation for the ocean Sage discovers—and, eventually, for the creatures and relationships that make Thalassa much more than a place to surf..

THE FIRES OF HINA

Hina grew from an idea I found fascinating: a moon can generate heat simply through its movement around a planet. As it follows an elliptical orbit, changing gravitational forces repeatedly stretch and compress its interior, turning some of that motion into heat. Peale and colleagues predicted this process within Jupiter’s moon Io in 1979 [5], providing a scientific foundation for Hina’s fractured landscape and violent eruptions. I imagined what those forces might look like on a moon orbiting Thalassa, and what they would mean for anyone attempting to explore it. For Lani and Orion, the consequences become intensely personal. The same processes that make Hina dangerous also draw them toward the possibility of something extraordinary beneath its surface.

Keeping such a moon active over time involves a delicate relationship among its orbit, its interior, and the other bodies in the system. Tidal heating tends to make an orbit more circular, gradually weakening the stresses that produce the heat, although gravitational interactions with other moons can help sustain them. I used those relationships as a starting point for imagining Hina’s recurring upheavals. Research by Heller and Barnes explores how tidal heating combines with starlight, eclipses, and energy from a host planet to influence whether a moon could support life [6]. What interested me was how these processes could create very different conditions within the same world. A moon that appears inhospitable from space might still hold protected waters beneath its ice, while too much heat could overwhelm those possibilities.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus offers a remarkable example of why we should look deeper. Hsu and colleagues found tiny silica particles consistent with hot water reacting with rock beneath its icy surface [7]. Waite and colleagues later detected hydrogen in its plume, evidence of chemical energy that some microbes on Earth could use [8]. We have yet to establish whether anything lives there, but these discoveries broaden the places where we might search. As a marine ecologist, I find that possibility especially compelling because Earth’s deep sea has already shown us how life can flourish far from sunlight. For Hina, I carried that possibility into fiction, imagining hidden habitats within a moon whose surface gives visitors every reason to turn back.

In Fires of Hina, Lani and Orion must venture into those habitats to understand what the moon holds and how it connects to life on Thalassa. Ice, brine pockets, and volcanic passages become parts of an ecological puzzle, with water, energy, and chemistry guiding the search. But a place where life can survive may differ from one where it could first arise. Damer and Deamer’s hot-spring hypothesis explores how repeated wetting and drying on volcanic landscapes might help assemble the components of early cells [9], offering another possibility alongside origins beneath the sea. These ideas helped me imagine a history connecting Hina’s hidden waters with Thalassa’s changing oceans and islands. The research opens the possibilities; fiction lets me follow them into a living world and ask what discovering that history might mean for the people who encounter it.

Life beneath unfamiliar seas

When I imagined life on Thalassa, I began with the kinds of questions I’ve spent much of my career asking about Earth’s oceans. Where does the energy come from? What eats what? How do organisms find shelter, reproduce, and survive the conditions around them? Those relationships helped me build an ocean whose creatures belong to an ecosystem, with each influencing the lives of others. Some resemble familiar marine animals because swimming, feeding, and avoiding predators present similar challenges wherever life evolves. But resemblance can be misleading, and I wanted Sage to discover that a creature that looks familiar might be quite different beneath its skin.

Earth’s hydrothermal vents offered one starting point. Lonsdale’s early observations revealed abundant animals gathered around vents on the deep seafloor [10], helping open our eyes to communities supported by chemical energy far from sunlight. That discovery changed how we think about the ocean—and where we might look for life beyond Earth. On Thalassa, I used vents and seeps as places where life could find energy and refuge beneath the harsher conditions above. Building a sea full of large creatures also meant thinking about the food supply and chemistry needed to sustain them. The research gave me those ecological requirements; imagination allowed me to explore the organisms that might emerge around them.

Bioluminescence added another dimension to that living ocean. Anyone who has watched water sparkle at night knows how extraordinary biological light can be, even here on Earth. Haddock, Moline, and Case describe its many evolutionary origins and uses, from attracting prey and confusing predators to communication and concealment [11]. I carried those possibilities into Thalassa’s luminous creatures and their microbial partners. In the Fracs, I imagined light becoming intertwined with carbon chemistry and relationships among species, extending beyond any known terrestrial example. Their glow becomes a clue for the characters, drawing their attention toward connections they have yet to understand.

One feature I wanted to carry throughout Thalassa was an unusually high degree of symbiosis. On Earth, relationships among organisms sustain everything from coral reefs to our own digestive systems. I imagined a planet where those partnerships had become even more pervasive, with creatures carrying other organisms within them or combining into forms that functioned together. That connectivity gave Thalassa an ecological character of its own: understanding an individual meant understanding something of its partners and surroundings. Predation still existed, sometimes brutally, but even the predators depended on the larger living community. As Sage discovers, the planet’s connections extend much further than she initially recognizes.

The fronds grew from my interest in rangeomorphs, enigmatic organisms that inhabited Earth’s seas during the Ediacaran, before the Cambrian explosion (about 580 mya). Their branching bodies offered a model for an ocean dominated by forms unlike most animals living today. I imagined Thalassa’s fronds ranging from small growths in shallow water to elaborate underwater forests, supported by microbial partners that helped them use the resources available at different depths. We still debate how the original rangeomorphs lived and fed, leaving room to explore those possibilities through fiction. Later research by Liu and Dunn identified delicate filaments connecting some fossil fronds—a fascinating reminder that even ancient life may have been more physically connected than we once understood.

For Pika, I looked to Pikaia, an early chordate from the Cambrian, and to modern lancelets as models for a small swimming organism that feeds on suspended particles. On Thalassa, I gave them spirally arranged feeding structures and a distinctive rotating motion, imagining how an unfamiliar body plan might work in the surrounding water. Pika became an important food source for the Nesoi, Baleena, and the human visitors. The mantis squid occupied another place in that food web, combining the rapid striking appendages of mantis shrimp with the tentacles, camouflage, and light-producing capabilities of cephalopods. Those combinations are fictional, but their components come from animals whose abilities are already extraordinary. They also give Sage good reason to question whether recognizing part of a creature means she understands the whole.

On land, Hina’s cycles helped me imagine an ecosystem organized around brief opportunities amid long periods of difficult conditions. Hardy lichen-like partnerships formed the foundation, producing fruiting bodies when rain and moisture returned. Slug-like creatures fed on that abundance, segmented phyllopods consumed them, and larger predators followed. Periodical cicadas offered inspiration for synchronized emergence, while animals such as spadefoot toads suggested how creatures could wait out dry conditions underground. I brought those ideas together in the river-dwelling chimera the Nesoi call Teeth, a relative of the mantis squid that emerges during the rains and can venture onto land for only limited periods. Hina’s approach therefore awakens an entire food web, turning the landscape into something the visitors are poorly prepared to recognize.

These cycles also connect the planet’s ecology with the Nesoi’s knowledge. Knowing when to feed, where to shelter, and which creatures will emerge becomes essential to surviving Hina’s return. Their songs and teachings preserve experience that a visiting scientist cannot gather from a few samples or a short expedition. I wanted Sage’s encounters to reveal that difference gradually, as apparent chaos begins to show patterns the Nesoi already understand. Thalassa’s connectivity is expressed both through biological partnerships and through a culture attentive to the relationships that sustain life.

Nesoi

The Nesoi grew from my fascination with whales and their evolutionary journey between land and sea. Thewissen and colleagues’ study of Ambulocetus, an early whale with adaptations for both walking and swimming, provided a particularly compelling foundation [12]. It helped me imagine an amphibious creature comfortable moving through surf, along rocky shores, and into coastal caves. In the trilogy, the Nesoi share ancestry with Earth’s cetaceans, with their arrival and development on Thalassa woven into the larger history of planetary seeding. I used the fossil evidence to explore possibilities within that history, while imagining an evolutionary path shaped by Thalassa’s distinctive conditions. Their bodies reflect the places they inhabit and the lives they lead.

Their intelligence follows a similar connection between research and imagination. Fox and colleagues found relationships among cetacean brain size, social organization, and the richness of their behavior [13]. That work encouraged me to think about what intelligence might become in a world where cooperation, memory, and communication mattered more than the technologies we tend to associate with civilization. The Nesoi’s clans, relationships, and shared traditions grew from that question. How would we recognize a sophisticated culture if its achievements were expressed through sound, movement, and care for one another? For Sage, learning to recognize those achievements becomes part of learning how to belong on Thalassa.

I imagined the Nesoi’s descendants, the Ceti and Baleena, as different branches of a family shaped by Thalassa’s oceans. Earth’s whale evolution gave me a starting point: amphibious ancestors eventually diversified into predators and filter feeders, adapting to different ways of finding food [12]. The Ceti carry that history into Thalassa’s submarine canyons—large, toothed hunters with webbed limbs, pursuing mantis squid and herding prey that they sometimes share with the Nesoi. The enormous Baleena follow another path, feeding on the rich plankton of the polar seas. Their size depends on the productivity of those waters, connecting their survival to the currents, nutrients, and cycles that sustain the ocean.

Whale song brought these ideas together. Payne and McVay documented the organized, repeating patterns of humpback songs [14], while Garland and colleagues later traced their cultural spread across South Pacific populations [15]. More recent work by Sharma and colleagues revealed contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm-whale vocalizations [16]. We are still far from understanding everything these animals communicate, which leaves room for both scientific inquiry and wonder.

Where imagination carries the story further is in their shared music: Nesoi, Ceti, and Baleena sing together, their distinct voices joining across habitats into the song Sage finally recognizes as Thalassa itself. Research on whale song and cultural transmission helped inspire that possibility [14–16], while their planetary chorus expresses something I wanted readers to feel throughout the trilogy—that different ways of living can remain connected within a larger whole.

I imagined the Nesoi carrying that capacity further, using songs and dances to share experience, sustain relationships, and preserve aspects of their history. As the trilogy unfolds, those encounters help prepare the way for the Resonant Lattice, where the biological reality of song becomes the foundation for imagining connections extending beyond a single ocean or world.

The Fracs and alternative biochemistry

The Fracs grew from a question that opens up enormous possibilities for imagining alien life: does everything living elsewhere have to use DNA and RNA? On Earth, these molecules are fundamental to the biology we know, but research suggests that other genetic chemistries are possible. Pinheiro and colleagues demonstrated that several synthetic genetic polymers could store information and, with engineered copying systems, support heredity and evolution [17]. That gave me a foundation for imagining organisms with a different way of passing information between generations. In Fires of Hina, the Fracs use chemistry resembling TNA, which substitutes a sugar called threose for the ribose found in RNA. The laboratory research explores those molecular possibilities; I carried them further into organisms with their own evolutionary history and ecological relationships.

Their appearance came from another fascinating feature of life: the way branching patterns create opportunities for growth and exchange. We see these patterns in microbial colonies, trees, blood vessels, and countless other living structures. I imagined the Fracs spreading across Thalassa’s cave walls in intricate, luminous colonies, their fine branches exposing more of their surfaces to the surrounding water. Those patterns helped me give them a form suited to gathering resources and depositing the carbon-rich material they produce. More surface area can help, but growth still depends on available energy, nutrients, and the chemistry of the organism. The Fracs’ extraordinary abilities emerge from the fictional biology I built around those principles.

As a marine ecologist, I was especially interested in making those abilities depend on relationships with other species. Symbiosis is common in Earth’s oceans, where organisms provide one another with food, shelter, or chemical resources that neither could obtain as readily alone. On Thalassa, I imagined the Fracs responding to catalysts associated with the Nesoi, making their carbon removal part of a larger ecological relationship. That connection becomes a problem for Orion: collecting a promising organism does not necessarily mean he can reproduce what it does in its natural habitat. He has to understand more of the world around it. The search for a useful microbe gradually becomes a search for the relationships that sustain it.

The distinction between capturing carbon and storing it also helped shape the story. Krause-Jensen and Duarte’s research on macroalgae explores how carbon fixed by marine plants can reach sediments and the deep ocean, where some remains sequestered [18]. Much of the carbon taken into living tissue eventually returns through respiration and decomposition, so rapid growth alone is only part of the solution. For the Fracs, I imagined a carbon-rich matrix that gradually hardens, providing a possible route to longer-term storage. Their remarkable rates of carbon removal carry that idea into fiction, while leaving the ecological questions intact: what sustains them, where does the carbon go, and what happens when they are moved to another world? Those questions connect Orion’s hope for Earth’s recovery with the need to understand and protect the living system he has come to exploit.

Seeds among the stars

One of the ideas that drew me toward astrobiology was the possibility that worlds exchange some of the ingredients needed for life. Comets and asteroids are more than wandering rocks and ice; they can carry a surprising variety of organic compounds. Altwegg and colleagues detected glycine, an amino acid, and phosphorus around comet 67P [19], while Furukawa and colleagues identified ribose and other sugars in primitive meteorites [20]. More recently, Glavin and colleagues found abundant ammonia and nitrogen-rich organic material in samples returned from asteroid Bennu [21]. Discoveries like these make me wonder how much of a planet’s biological potential begins beyond its shores—or even beyond the planet itself. They provided a foundation for imagining Thalassa as a world whose history was connected to material arriving from elsewhere.

Of course, delivering the ingredients for life is different from delivering something alive. Organic molecules alone cannot tell us whether an organism ever existed, much less survived a journey through space. But impacts offer a possible way for living material to move between worlds, protected within fragments of rock. Melosh explored how impacts can eject rocks into space [22], and Mileikowsky and colleagues examined whether microbes could survive transfer between Mars and Earth [23]. Such journeys involve considerable hazards, including shock, heat, radiation, and the time spent in transit. What interested me was the possibility that, under suitable conditions, a catastrophe on one world might carry the beginnings of life to another.

In Fires of Hina, I used that possibility to connect the moon’s history with the life Lani and Orion discover on Thalassa. Material traveling between a moon and its nearby planet offered a setting in which to explore biological transfer over a much shorter distance than an interstellar journey. The chemistry of rocks becomes part of their investigation, helping them trace where that material originated. Establishing a biological connection takes more than matching rocks, however; it also involves understanding the organisms and their ancestry. I brought those lines of evidence together in the story, imagining how discoveries made in separate places might gradually reveal a shared history. For the characters, learning where the Fracs came from changes where they must search next—and what they are willing to risk.

Impacts also leave records of destruction that can remain readable millions of years later. Schulte and colleagues brought together evidence linking the Chicxulub impact to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous [24]. Shocked minerals, scattered deposits, and chemical signatures help scientists reconstruct an event no human witnessed. I used that kind of geological detective work to give the characters a way to uncover Thalassa’s past, while carrying the consequences of planetary impacts into the trilogy’s larger story. As the Engineers’ role emerges, the movement of life between worlds becomes a question of responsibility as well as possibility. If we could seed another planet, what would we need to understand before changing its future?

The worlds Rigel encounters

As Rigel’s journey carried him beyond Thalassa, I wanted the worlds he encountered to expand his understanding of what life could become. Each began with a different physical setting: a red dwarf, a family of moons, several interacting stars, or the remnant of a sun. From there, I asked how those conditions might shape perception, memory, and survival over long periods of time. Astronomy gave me the environments; biology helped me think about the demands they would place on their inhabitants. Fiction allowed me to follow those relationships into forms of life whose experience of the universe would be profoundly different from our own.

For Ishka-Morr, I imagined an ancient world orbiting a red dwarf, where the relationship between light, atmosphere, and rotation could create conditions quite unlike Earth’s. A planet close to such a star may become tidally locked, with one side facing its sun while the other remains in darkness. Yang and colleagues showed how clouds could help moderate heating and extend the habitable zone in their models of these planets [25]. That interested me because it opened possibilities beyond the simple picture of a scorched hemisphere opposite a frozen one. The Morr-Seers grew from a related question: could intelligence become distributed across an environment rather than concentrated within individual bodies? Nakagaki and colleagues’ demonstration of maze-solving in a slime mold offered a small but fascinating example of adaptive behavior without a centralized brain [26]. I carried that question much further, imagining crystalline networks in which a civilization’s accumulated experience had become inseparable from the planet itself.

Aurix gave me another way to explore how an environment might shape awareness. Its seven moons move in resonant orbits, creating a setting where tides, radiation, and changing conditions would matter deeply to survival. Heller and Barnes’ research on exomoon habitability helped frame those relationships between a moon, its planet, and its star [6]. I imagined the ancestors of the Serrin-Tal surviving through sensitivity: noticing vibrations, pressure changes, and signs of disturbance before danger arrived. Over time, that capacity became central to their biology and culture. Kiri’s perception of emotion and intention extends those adaptations into fiction, allowing me to explore what life might be like for someone who experiences the suffering of others with an immediacy most humans can barely imagine.

The Qen system, with three stars and fourteen worlds, let me approach perception through gravity. Multiple stars can create complex environments, as Kraus and colleagues showed in their observations of the warped disk around the triple-star system GW Orionis [27]. Their research provides a glimpse of how gravitational interactions can shape the material from which worlds form. I imagined a civilization developing within such complexity, where recognizing changes in the surrounding system could become essential to survival. Quenari’s ability to sense gravitational gradients carries that idea into an unfamiliar physiology. Through him, Rigel encounters someone for whom the structure of space is part of lived experience, much as currents and waves are for creatures of the sea.

The diamond star grew from one of astronomy’s most remarkable findings: the interiors of white dwarfs can crystallize as they cool. Tremblay and colleagues found evidence of this process, in which solidification releases heat and slows the star’s cooling [28]. These cores contain densely packed carbon and oxygen under extreme conditions, giving “diamond star” a meaning far beyond an ordinary gemstone. I found that transformation compelling—a star carrying its long history into a radically different state of being. The ages of these objects also matter, especially in the stellar landscape around the young Pleiades, where ancient remnants would belong to older populations. From that physical foundation, I imagined Rigel encountering a stellar awareness whose transformation becomes part of his own struggle to understand change, loss, and continuity.

The portals connecting these places draw on another scientific possibility that invites imagination. Morris and colleagues explored traversable wormholes within general relativity, including the difficult questions they raise about causality [29]. Their work offers a theoretical starting point, although creating and maintaining such a passage remains beyond demonstrated technology. I used that opening to imagine civilizations with very different ways of understanding and working with spacetime. Similarly, the trilogy’s language of fields, resonance, and song begins with physical relationships and extends into questions about awareness and connection. Those ideas allow Rigel’s travels to become more than encounters with unusual worlds: each challenges something he assumes about life and his place within it.

Earth through 2120

Of all the worlds I imagined for the trilogy, Earth was the one that concerned me most. Songs of Thalassa begins in 2090, and by the time Rigel’s story unfolds in 2120, humanity is living with the consequences of decisions made generations earlier. My work as a marine ecologist gave me a firsthand view of how ecosystems can change, sometimes gradually and sometimes with startling speed. I carried that experience into the books, asking what familiar places might become if the pressures already affecting them continued. Climate research helped me explore those possibilities, while leaving room for the choices that could lead us toward very different futures.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report makes the importance of those choices clear. Its estimates for warming late in this century range from about 1.4°C under very low emissions to 4.4°C under very high emissions, measured against temperatures in 1850–1900. Projected sea-level rise by 2100 ranges from roughly 0.28–0.55 meters to 0.63–1.01 meters across those same pathways, relative to 1995–2014 [34]. Those differences have enormous implications for people living along the coast. I imagined the flooded shorelines in the novels within a future where warming and rising seas had continued to place pressure on communities already struggling with other problems. That is one possible course through the research, with its outcome shaped by how people respond.

I also wanted to look beyond 2100, because neither the ocean nor the climate recognizes the end of a century. Kopp and colleagues developed sea-level projections extending into the twenty-second century [30], while Cheng and colleagues reviewed the continuing accumulation of heat in the ocean and its consequences [31]. These studies helped me think about Earth in 2120 as a world still responding to its past. Reducing emissions would matter enormously, but it would not immediately cool the ocean or restore a lost shoreline. That persistence became part of the urgency behind Lani and Orion’s search. They are trying to give humanity a chance to recover while changes already underway continue around them.

For me, those changes become most tangible through the living communities they affect. Hughes and colleagues documented recurrent mass coral bleaching [32], and Smale and colleagues examined the damage marine heatwaves can cause to biodiversity and the benefits people receive from healthy seas [33]. Having studied coral reefs and kelp forests, I think about what those losses mean beneath the surface: disappearing shelter, altered food webs, and species struggling to survive in places that once sustained them. Above the water, the consequences reach families, livelihoods, and cultural relationships with the ocean. I brought those connections into the trilogy because environmental damage is experienced through particular places and lives. A reef’s decline can change far more than the reef.

Storms add another layer of risk. Knutson and colleagues’ assessment projects increases in tropical-cyclone rainfall and average intensity, although changes in storm frequency remain uncertain and vary among regions [35]. I used those findings to imagine the threats facing coastal communities, particularly where higher seas make flooding worse. The research helped me think about how several pressures could converge during a single disaster. In Orion’s story, that convergence becomes personal through the loss of his mother and the life he builds afterward. His determination to find a solution grows from grief as well as scientific ambition.

The Fracs gave me a way to explore what might happen if humanity discovered something capable of helping on an extraordinary scale. But even remarkable carbon removal would leave us with damaged ecosystems, lost species, displaced communities, and difficult decisions about who controls the discovery. Those questions draw on my experience with conservation, where useful scientific knowledge can become entangled with competing interests and deeply held values. I wanted Lani and Orion to confront that problem as their understanding of Thalassa grew. Finding a possible remedy for Earth also means recognizing their responsibilities toward the world that provides it.

That relationship between life and its environment runs throughout the trilogy. Lovelock and Margulis’ Gaia hypothesis helped frame the idea of organisms and their surroundings as an interacting planetary system [36]. I carried those relationships into fiction by imagining living worlds whose presence could be perceived and, eventually, heard. Planetary awareness belongs to the imaginative reach of the novels, while the dependence of life on the systems around it is something we can study here on Earth. Sage, Lani, Orion, and Rigel encounter that dependence in different ways. My hope is that their journeys encourage readers to consider how much of our own future rests on understanding and protecting the relationships that sustain us.

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Selected peer reviewed research:

The following papers support the physical mechanisms, biological analogies, and climate scenarios discussed above. Inclusion here does not mean every paper directly inspired the original manuscripts. For a fuller list of references see this list.

Stars oceans and moons

  1. Liebert et al. (2013). The Age and Stellar Parameters of the Procyon Binary System. The Astrophysical Journal, 769, 7. Paper.
  2. Bond et al. (2015). Hubble Space Telescope Astrometry of the Procyon System. The Astrophysical Journal, 813, 106. Paper.
  3. Holman and Wiegert (1999). Long-Term Stability of Planets in Binary Systems. The Astronomical Journal, 117, 621–628. Paper.
  4. Banfield, Donelan, and Cavaleri (2015). Winds, waves and shorelines from ancient martian seas. Icarus, 250, 368–383. Paper.
  5. Peale, Cassen, and Reynolds (1979). Melting of Io by Tidal Dissipation. Science, 203, 892–894. Paper.
  6. Heller and Barnes (2013). Exomoon Habitability Constrained by Illumination and Tidal Heating. Astrobiology, 13, 18–46. Paper.
  7. Hsu et al. (2015). Ongoing hydrothermal activities within Enceladus. Nature, 519, 207–210. Paper.
  8. Waite et al. (2017). Cassini finds molecular hydrogen in the Enceladus plume: Evidence for hydrothermal processes. Science, 356, 155–159. Paper.
  9. Damer and Deamer (2020). The Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life. Astrobiology, 20, 429–452. Paper.

Marine life intelligence and alternative genetics

  1. Lonsdale (1977). Clustering of suspension-feeding macrobenthos near abyssal hydrothermal vents at oceanic spreading centers. Deep-Sea Research, 24, 857–863. Paper.
  2. Haddock, Moline, and Case (2010). Bioluminescence in the Sea. Annual Review of Marine Science, 2, 443–493. Paper.
  3. Thewissen, Hussain, and Arif (1994). Fossil Evidence for the Origin of Aquatic Locomotion in Archaeocete Whales. Science, 263, 210–212. Paper.
  4. Fox, Muthukrishna, and Shultz (2017). The social and cultural roots of whale and dolphin brains. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1, 1699–1705. Paper.
  5. Payne and McVay (1971). Songs of Humpback Whales. Science, 173, 585–597. Paper.
  6. Garland et al. (2011). Dynamic Horizontal Cultural Transmission of Humpback Whale Song at the Ocean Basin Scale. Current Biology, 21, 687–691. Paper.
  7. Sharma et al. (2024). Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations. Nature Communications, 15, 3617. Paper.
  8. Pinheiro et al. (2012). Synthetic Genetic Polymers Capable of Heredity and Evolution. Science, 336, 341–344. Paper.
  9. Krause-Jensen and Duarte (2016). Substantial role of macroalgae in marine carbon sequestration. Nature Geoscience, 9, 737–742. Paper.

Cosmic chemistry impacts and other worlds

  1. Altwegg et al. (2016). Prebiotic chemicals—amino acid and phosphorus—in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Science Advances, 2, e1600285. Paper.
  2. Furukawa et al. (2019). Extraterrestrial ribose and other sugars in primitive meteorites. PNAS, 116, 24440–24445. Paper.
  3. Glavin et al. (2025). Abundant ammonia and nitrogen-rich soluble organic matter in samples from asteroid (101955) Bennu. Nature Astronomy, 9, 199–210. Paper.
  4. Melosh (1988). The rocky road to panspermia. Nature, 332, 687–688. Paper.
  5. Mileikowsky et al. (2000). Natural Transfer of Viable Microbes in Space: 1. From Mars to Earth and Earth to Mars. Icarus, 145, 391–427. Paper.
  6. Schulte et al. (2010). The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. Science, 327, 1214–1218. Paper.
  7. Yang, Cowan, and Abbot (2013). Stabilizing Cloud Feedback Dramatically Expands the Habitable Zone of Tidally Locked Planets. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 771, L45. Paper.
  8. Nakagaki, Yamada, and Tóth (2000). Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism. Nature, 407, 470. Paper.
  9. Kraus et al. (2020). A triple-star system with a misaligned and warped circumstellar disk shaped by disk tearing. Science, 369, 1233–1238. Paper.
  10. Tremblay et al. (2019). Core crystallization and pile-up in the cooling sequence of evolving white dwarfs. Nature, 565, 202–205. Paper.
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Earth through the twenty second century

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