Behind the Scene: Exclusive Author Commentary on Fermi’s Progress by Chris Farnell

Hello and thanks for checking out this Behind the Scene post, where today I hope you’ll join me in welcoming author Chris Farnell – author of the Star Trek: Lower Decks Crew Handbook, among other things – who has kindly contributed an excerpt from his four-part science fiction novel Fermi’s Progress, along with an exclusive commentary discussing this scene. When Chris and I started talking about doing this post, it became clear pretty quickly that with a book about a spaceship that blows up every planet it visits, the only possible scene to choose would be the first time this happens! But fun as blowing up planets must be for a writer, there’s a lot that goes into making a scene like this work, and Chris digs into this really well in his commentary about the scene.

Fermi’s Progress was originally released in four parts before being collected together as a single volume, which I think is a really interesting approach to this sort of “planet of the week” SF adventure! Excitingly, there are more Fermi stories coming later this year, so keep an eye out for those coming soon! In the meantime though, here’s a quick synopsis of Fermi’s Progress to give you a sense of the story, and then I’ll hand you over to Chris!

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“The Fermi is the Earth’s first and last faster-than-light-spaceship. The last, because it turns out its engine vaporises entire star systems in its wake. And nobody knows how to turn it off.”

Four planets. Four adventures. Four apocalypses.

A Dyson sphere, a philosophical zombie apocalypse, a giant airborne beehive and a galactic telesales scam. Each world brings new wonders, new dangers, and a planetary scale genocide. The Fermi crew must survive by what little wits they have as they bounce a trail of destruction across the galaxy.

Chris Farnell: As a writer, patience is not one of my great virtues. I tend to operate on the assumption that if I’m waiting to get to “the good bit” while I’m writing, then so are the people reading, and if they wait too long they might decide it’s more fun to check Twitter, watch telly, or spend time with their loved ones, and we can’t have that.

So when I decided to write a story about a prototype faster-than-light spaceship that blew up every planet in its wake, obviously the first thing I wanted to write was the spaceship blowing up a planet.

Here’s one of my first attempts at the opening of the book:

“The room was spinning. Knowing that it was supposed to didn’t help Connor with the nausea as he picked himself up off the floor of the observation deck. Somewhere he could hear alarms going off. It was dark. The room hadn’t exactly been bathed in light before, but Connor needed a moment to let his eyes adjust to the new level of gloom. He steadied himself on the cheap, cushioned benches that looked like they were ripped straight out of an airport departure lounge. Slowly, the other rows, about a dozen chairs in all, took shape. Only then did Connor dare turn around and look out the window.

Above him was the great knotted mass of metal that was the ship’s engine, the one stationary item in Connor’s view, pointing like an accusing finger towards the Earth. The Earth was wrong. The vast blue green disc spun like a record beneath them, but it had grown swollen and distorted, like a photo held over a flame the instant before it begins to burn. And sure enough, the strange, bulbous continents were beginning to show cracks of brilliant orange as the globe seemed to stretch and inflate like a blob of wax in a lava lamp.”

Of course, then I had to flash back to doing all the set-up, establishing where my apocalyptic spaceship, the Fermi, came from and how the crew came to be aboard it. The trouble with skipping to “the good bit” is you always have to go back and lay the groundwork eventually, you’re just buying yourself time to think about how you’re going to make that groundwork “the good bit” as well.

As it turned out, later on I would realise I’d skipped to the wrong Good Bit anyway. I wrote Fermi’s Progress because I missed old fashioned “planet of the week” style stories that you used to get from Star Trek and its many imitators. It seemed to me that in the good old days of TOS, after a planet had been used for a story it might as well have been blasted to bits by the Enterprise’s warp engines as it flew away, so I decided to write a story where it did.

The opening of the story crept forward in time with each draft – to the aftermath of the Earth’s destruction, to the Fermi’s arrival at its first destination, until eventually I realised what The Good Bit had been all along. I wanted to write a story about landing on alien worlds, and so that is where Fermi’s Progress begins – with its crew setting foot on a strange new world for the first time.

It was the right place to start, but like I said – if you skip to the good bit you still have to do your groundwork, and I had promised the readers an exploding planet Earth. It’s right there on the cover.

Chris has also written the Star Trek: Lower Decks Crew Handbook, for more SF fun!

It’s Only the End of the World

Here’s the other thing – blowing up the Earth is hard. Oh the actual explosion? That’s easy, and fun, and healthy (probably). But then immediately afterwards you’ve got a bunch of characters who are going to have a lot of feelings. Writing the immediate aftermath of any catastrophe is difficult, because generally your immediate emotional response to something of that scale is going to be either nothing, or such an overwhelming volume of feeling that it circles back around to nothing again. There’s usually not much going on in the middle ground.

At the same time, as a comedic science fiction writer whose mismatched space adventurers have just seen the Earth explode, I’ve got the issue that the greatest talent ever to grace the field has already written the best version of this scene to exist:

“There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parent and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.

He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it, He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every “Bogart” movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger.”

That is Douglas Adams, writing Arthur Dent’s response to learning the Earth is gone in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s perfect. It’s funny and absurdist in the way we always think of Hitchhiker’s being, but at the same time it perfectly encapsulates the human mind’s response to grief.

I was doing the sci-fi writer equivalent of a playwright composing a soliloquy about whether to choose existing or not existing.

This wasn’t the only work I was thinking of when I wrote this, though. I was also thinking of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. I often think about that film. Specifically, one recurring gag in that film. Whenever Austin kills an evil henchman, the film cuts to their friends and family receiving the news.

Whenever I kill a minor character off, especially if my protagonists are responsible, I try to carry the spirit of that gag with me. As Pratchett has said – it’s funny when someone falls down a manhole, but sometimes you have to look down the manhole. I wanted to make clear this wasn’t just blowing up the landmarks flying saucers naturally gravitate to. This was killing everyone, all of them with their own problems.

Then there was my other problem. Because for many, many drafts this was my opening scene, I also had to introduce my entire ensemble cast, making them distinctive and recognisable at the same time.

For a few drafts this resulted in some weird tone shifts, trying to pull off broad character comedy after a literal genocide. Multiple genocide, really.

The solution here was obviously not to do that. Push the destruction of the Earth forward until I’d had time to establish the characters (my quick introductions were much easier to do watching them step onto a brave new world together), so in this scene you only need to sketch out the beginnings of their relationship dynamics.

The other advantage of having the destruction of the Earth happen so deep into the story (96 pages in the paperback version) was that it helped with the aftermath. By now the reader knows what’s going to happen to the crew after they’ve destroyed the Earth, so we can spend a little bit of time just wallowing in their reaction to it without the pressure to move the plot forward.

Of course, the first thing the crew do is argue – the Fermi crew argue about everything, that’s basically what they are for. But I also narrow the scope of the scene to focus on just Connor, the useless one. Connor is the control group in the experiment that created his super soldier brother, Samson.

He brings no applicable skills or attributes to the mission, and shouldn’t really be here. But in the face of the planet exploding, there aren’t really any applicable skills or attributes, and so where everyone else is spinning their wheels trying to do their jobs, he makes a good audience surrogate.

After all, by now I think we all know what it’s like to stand around uselessly while a world-ending disaster is going on.

ToW: Thanks Chris! I really enjoyed getting that insight into the drafting process, and the thought that went into it. Now, however, let’s jump straight into the fun with this excerpt from Fermi’s Progress!

4 Minutes Until You Die

“Are you ready?” Samson asked as Connor entered the situation room.

“Well, I found the toilet. The shower as well. How do you get plumbing to work inside this giant whirligig?”

“With great difficulty!” Rajita called up from the sofa.

Connor came into the room, hopped over the back of what he’d started to think of as “the command sofa” and landed in the middle, glancing around at the other crew with an expectant grin.

“So, what are we doing?” he asked.

“We,” Gordon said pointedly, “are undergoing the final checks before our maiden flight. I’m setting our course, Rajita is keeping an eye on our power output, and Samson is checking our auxiliary systems, while you…”

“Sit still and keep my mouth shut?” Connor suggested.

“Superb idea,” Gordon said.

The lights flickered.

“Okay, I think we’re onto the last of your power cells,” Rajita said. “It’s do-or-die time with the negative energy source.”

“Let’s get it started then,” Gordon said.

Rajita got up from her seat and headed for the door.

“Rajita, you know that you can control all of the capacitor systems from your tablet, don’t you?” Gordon sighed.

“Well yeah,” Rajita said. “But then I don’t get to see all the retro dials and readouts go ‘ping’ do I?”

Gordon rolled her eyes, but smiled. “Have fun,” she said.

Connor twiddled his thumbs and looked at the big telly. Graphs and numbers Connor didn’t understand flowed down either edge of the screen, but the middle of the screen was still filled with the marbled blue vista of the planet below.

He leaned over to Samson “So where are we going again?”

“Trappist one,” Samson said.

“And that’s what? Forty light-years away?”

“Approximately, yes,” Samson said, giving Connor an encouraging nod and returning to his work.

“For our first go, shouldn’t we go somewhere, I don’t know, nearer?” Connor said. “Our nearest star’s Alpha Centauri, isn’t it?”

“Proxima Centauri,” Gordon said. “And if we launch and it goes wrong it won’t matter whether we’re one light-year or a hundred light-years away, there’s no coming back from it.”

“Trappist one has a planetary system of seven worlds,” Samson said. “Five of them are similar in size to Earth, three of them are within the habitable zone.”

He tilted his tablet to Connor to show him the image.

“If we’re going to do this,” Gordon said. “We might as well go somewhere interesting.”

“Well, yeah but…”

Gordon lifted a finger to her lips. “The grownups are working now. Didn’t you say you made a mean cup of tea? How are you with coffee?”

“Okay guys, I’m in the capacitor room,” Rajita called over the intercom. “Engaging the negative energy source in five, four, three…”

Connor sighed and stood. “I’m sure I can figure it out,” he said making to leave.

“…one.”

Then Connor had the oddest sensation that he was about to pass out. The room seemed to tilt sharply, but nothing had moved. Nothing except the blue planet on the screen. It was no longer a curved horizon. It was a ball, hanging in the centre of the screen, surrounded by the thin white streaks of the stars.

Then it broke.

This is how you died.

Not just you. Every politician, every movie star, everyone who’d ever been a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The North Sentinel Islanders, the entire populations of Durban and Seattle. Every single person on Twitter. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station. All the political prisoners in the Chungsan concentration camp and every inmate in ICE’s immigrant detention centres. So many children.

They all died.

Every living human, apart from the handful aboard a single spaceship, died in an instant.

One second the Earth was there, blue and green and cloud mottled just like on all the Atlas covers. Then continents showed cracks of brilliant orange as the globe twisted and spread out like a blob of wax in a lava lamp. It expanded, like the picture on an over-inflated balloon, and the balloon popped, and there were only the streaming stars.

Connor had no idea how long he stood there, staring at the screen as the other crew rushed around him. Samson shouted something about having to start up the ship’s magnetic field, Rajita charged back into the room looking panicked, and she and Gordon shouted at each other in Science.

“Could it be the Geraint Lewis Proposition?” Gordon asked.

“No, that would only affect the planet ahead of us,” Rajita said. “Besides, it’s just way too big…”

“Okay, I get it! I’m thick, really, proper thick. But what’s actually happening here?” Connor begged.

The shouting stopped. Everyone turned to the big telly and its rolling stars.

Gordon was the first to say it.

“The end of the world.”

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Chris Farnell is the author of apocalyptic space opera Fermi’s Progress, YA clone novel Mark II and creepy fiction anthology Dirty Work. He has also written the Star Trek Lower Decks Crew Handbook, and Doctor Who tie-ins The Time Traveller’s Diary and Knock! Knock! Who’s There? the official Doctor Who jokebook, alongside scenarios for TTRPG, Spire: The City Must Fall’s source books and articles for Den of Geek, the Radio Times, Wireframe magazine and others. He is based in Norwich.

Find out more at Chris’ website.

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There you go then – how about that for the end of the world?! Thanks so much to Chris for sharing this excerpt and his fantastic commentary on that scene – I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I did! And if this has whetted your appetite for Fermi’s Progress, make sure you grab a copy and read on to find out what happens next.

Fermi’s Progress is out now – check out the links below to order* your copy: