The Big Idea: James L. Cambias

Math can sometimes get in the way of a good story, but author James L. Cambias didn’t let pesky physics stop him from majorly transforming Venus. Blast off in his Big Idea to see how he managed to make Venus habitable, albeit not for humans, in his new novel, The Ishtar Deception. JAMES L. CAMBIAS: For this guest post, I thought I’d walk readers through the mental process of one of my own Big Ideas from my new book. The Ishtar Deception is the latest in my “Billion Worlds” series of books and stories set at the end of the Tenth Millennium. In that era, the Solar System is a vast “Dyson Swarm” of space habitats and solar collectors, soaking up most of the energy emitted by the Sun. On the scale devised by the Russian SETI researcher Nikolai Kardashev, the civilization of the Billion Worlds is a Type II. About a quadrillion biological beings live in the Solar System, and a larger number of intelligent machines. It’s a big setting, and it means I can tell a wide variety of stories. The…