I was struck by two things. The first was how passionate we were about science fiction and how these imagined worlds blended seamlessly into our discussions about the real world today. I had never wanted to be a writer, but I had always wanted to change the world. I was beginning to realize that fiction was a powerful tool that could unleash people’s imaginations, bring important topics into the forefront of social dialogue, and give people hope that can drive our actions towards a better future.
The second thing that struck me was how unique this point in time was in the history of mankind. Our conversation moved from the optimism of technology defeating death and humanity surpassing the limitations of the physical world to the almost inevitable downfall of civilization through peak oil, a water crisis, nuclear proliferation, global warming, or any of the dozens of hauntingly plausible future disaster scenarios looming over the horizon. Enjoying this quickly commercializing tropical paradise, I was particularly eager to resolve the contradiction of technology as a savior of humanity, and the near-term destruction of our environment in many ways enabled by that same technology.
Months later, my mind returned to the topic of global warming, spawned by an article from New Scientist that explored the impact of climate change, assuming that it was highly likely we would not be able to stop it. I thought to myself, “If I take everything in this article to be true, how could technology be utilized to prevent this from happening? How could this story still have a happy ending?” No matter how I looked at it, the timeline just didn’t work out. We had started too late. We didn’t have the cohesion or the will to fix our fate. But most importantly, we didn’t have enough time.
Solving that problem was the genesis of Terrene.
Acknowledgements:
This book wouldn’t have been possible without the support and encouragement of my wife, Connie. Thanks also to my parents and to my sister Eileen for her insistence that I should try and do something with this book.
I found inspiration from the experiences of several people, Colin Walke, Leo Lin and Lester Carter to name a few. Special thanks goes to Mike Grabowski who saved me from having to actually jump out of a plane.
I had numerous test readers which included Angela Yu, Ray Yu, Neal Kanodia, Evan Parker, Gem Chien, Deb Henigson , Heraldo Botelho, Chris Li, Tanya Dhir and Becky Neil. And of course thanks to Danielle LaFors and her book club “Swords, Lasers and Cocktails, Oh My!” for their honest and passionate criticism. Members include Paul Menage, Amy Romanek, Yanny Siu, Mike Campbell, Kevin ‘Tex’ Neely, and Renae Hardy.
About the Author:
Eric Liu is a technologist. He has technical degrees from MIT and Stanford and has worked in high tech companies in Silicon Valley for over eight years. He exercises his creativity through song, dance, and writing and believes that we make the world stronger by bringing things together: art and industry, science and tradition, corporations and communities, and government and technology.
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