A huge alien object has entered the solar system and is now poised above the Earth. It has made no attempt to communicate.

Out of time and options, NASA turns to its last living astronaut – Commander Sally Jansen, who must lead a team of raw recruits on a mission to make First Contact. 

But as the object reveals its secrets, Jansen and her crew find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival – against the cold vacuum of space, and something far, far worse . . . 

The view of Earth from space is better than cable.

“Dave should talk to some female astronauts,” the publicist said, in a sales meeting. This was well after I’d started writing the book, long after I thought I was done with research. I had a long list of things that seemed more pressing, like finding the third act or remembering to connect on an emotional level with my wife every evening as she shoved my dinner under the locked and bolted door of my office. Interviewing actual astronauts sounded like homework. But I did it. Grumbling and cursing a lot, but I did it.

Once I was done with the interviews, I took a moment. I nodded thoughtfully to myself, cracked open another diet soda, and waited for my hands to stop shaking. Because I knew what having access to all this new information meant. It meant I was going to have to rewrite the book, almost from page one. Originally it had been packed with heavily-researched data, lots of acronyms and numbers, details about how much thrust you can get out of a Delta-IV rocket engine and what partial percentage of oxygen will make you start to hallucinate. What I got from the astronauts was something different.

I got what it meant to be human in space. To actually live there. It made the book immeasurably better. I learned things like…

A bunless hot dog might be the best thing you ever eat.

Everybody gets space sickness, to a greater or lesser extent. Your first couple of days in space are going to be miserable no matter how tough or experienced an astronaut you might be. One of the astronauts I spoke with told me about the glorious moment, three days into her mission, when she realized that she could hold down solid food again. She ate a hot dog and realized she was going to be okay. She could get back to work. Which was good, because—

They keep astronauts so busy they’re barely aware of being in space.

A lot of the questions I asked turned out to be useless, because I kept getting the same answer. “I don’t really remember, there was so much going on…” Whether I was asking about what re-entry was like, or the hours sitting on the launch pad waiting for liftoff, for instance. Such events, though they must rank as among the most memorable a human being can experience, were lost in the general business of astronaut life. NASA keeps its astronauts on a ridiculous schedule. Almost every moment of their day is spent running through safety checklists, exercising to prevent bone loss, doing media events or just the common chores required to keep people alive inside a trailer in space. There’s almost no downtime at all, very little time to sit staring out the windows (which was, hands down, the favorite leisure time activity of every astronaut I spoke to).

A lot of the checklists and rundowns and equipment inventories sounded like busywork. Like maybe NASA was just inventing things for them to do so that the taxpayers would feel like they were getting their money’s worth. The astronauts I spoke to weren’t so sure. For one thing, space is pretty deadly—there’s a whole lot of different ways to die up there, and staying alive often means double- and triple-checking every blinking light and green indicator panel. The other reason to keep the astronauts so busy was to keep them from thinking too much. Those long hours on the launch pad are a perfect time to meditate on the fact that you’re sitting on top of a ballistic missile full of highly explosive fuel. Working out endlessly on the exercise treadmill is a good way to keep your mind off the fact that you’re about an inch of metal away from the cold vacuum of space. The constant work is also good for keeping people from getting on each others’ nerves as much, which is super important because—

Everyone in space is ugly and ready for a fight.

Human bodies were never meant to exist in weightless conditions. All the fluid being pumped around your body right now needs gravity to get it to the right place. Think about hanging upside down from a jungle gym, the blood rushing to your head. How long do you think you could handle living like that? How many days in a row?

In microgravity, all of your internal organs climb up into your chest cavity, because the mass of the Earth isn’t holding them down anymore. This makes it a little hard to breathe. Farts collect inside your intestine until the pressure suddenly forces them out when you least want them to. Fluid builds up in places it shouldn’t, and there’s no good way to pump it back out of your tissues. The most dramatic—and obvious—way this effects you is that your face gets super puffy, distorting your features. And that’s when you learn just how much of living with other people is processing their facial expressions. Since everyone in space looks like they have the mumps, people start to get irritable. Innocent comments get misconstrued, and tempers flare. I spoke with one astronaut who joked that in the future one big career option is going to be “space lawyer”. Because of all the fistfights that are sure to break out during long missions to Mars. Of course, bouncing off other people all the time and getting in their way is inevitable given the close quarters. It might be better than the alternative, though…

You definitely don’t want to be alone up there.

Alone time is something I treasure. As much as I love the people in my life, if I can’t get a little solitude every day, I get irascible. Downright cranky. Speaking to the astronauts about life in space, my immediate thought was that it would be tough when you couldn’t get away from your crewmates, even just to take a minute to yourself.

Oh, no, they told me. Oh, no, you don’t want to be alone. Now, I happened to be writing a novel that was part science fiction and part horror. The horror writer half of me perked up his ears at the sound of that.

Space is noisy, or rather spaceships and space stations are noisy, because there’s always a fan blowing somewhere and a computer beeping for no good reason. There’s always something moving, and maybe as elements of your ship heat or cool they creak and ping. But those are noises you can get used to. Those are noises you can tune out. And that’s when the real silence, the silence of the void, hits you. That’s when you curl up in your sleepsac and wonder just how far you are from home, and what your chances would be if something went wrong (not very good). Inside a space suit it’s much, much worse. The only thing you can hear is your own breathing. And then you stop hearing that, and you hear your heart beating, instead. You fight to keep it from beating too fast…

Having other people around you is crucial. Human beings need social interaction just as much as they need gravity and oxygen. In my research I found a great story about that. Back in the ‘80s, the Soviets launch a space station called Mir where two cosmonauts would spend up to five hundred days in space, simulating how long it would take to get to Mars and back. Two people living for more than a year in a space the size of, say, three minivans duct-taped together. You might think these two cosmonauts would get sick of each other in a matter of days. Instead, they made a pact with each other. If you were working in one of the minivans while your partner was in one of the other ones, you had to keep at least one foot visible in the junction between modules. No matter how much stretching and contorting it took, some piece of a human body had to be there for the other person to see, every second of the day. The cosmonauts laughed when they talked about what happened when the system broke down, and, just for a minute or so, they were all alone. The brain is a fantastic machine, very good at imagining all kinds of scenarios. It has no problem imaging what it would be like to suddenly be all alone in a very quiet, very fragile tin can, a hundred miles up. The cosmonauts laughed about the things they imagined, the little terror fantasies their minds dredged up. They laughed about these things… once they were back safely home on solid ground.

For all that, space is still super cool.

Well, it’s hard to write a science fiction novel if you don’t feel that way. But yeah, the research I did for The Last Astronaut, while it often terrified me, still made me want to be out there just so bad. To get to see other worlds, to feel what it’s like to be without gravity, even for a moment. And at the end of the day to look back and see what I’m missing, to get what they call the “Longview” effect. Astronauts talk about it in hushed, reverent tones. The sense you get, looking down on Earth from above, just how precious it is. How fragile, and how beautiful.

I wrote a book about horror and screaming panic out in space, a story of death and fear up there, but even in the midst of the scariest bits I knew one thing. Offered a chance to go up there, even for just a day, for an hour—I would give anything to make it happen.

* * *

David Wellington is the author of twenty-one novels, from his first, the zombie tale Monster Island, to this year’s The Last Astronaut. He got his start in 2003 serializing his work online and has made a living at writing ever since. He’s also worked in comic books and video games. He lives and works in New York City.

David Wellington: Website | Twitter

The Last Astronaut: Print | eBook

Hey, I guess I should post my San Diego Comic-Con schedule, huh? Well, here it shall be, for your perusal. Also don’t forget I’ll be at Mysterious Galaxy the following Monday with Adam Christopher. We’ll be signing books and engaging with various shenanigans.

Hope to see you there!

THURSDAY the 18th

Panel: D&D: All Bards, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Horton Grand Theater

Post-Panel Signing, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Autograph Area Row 9

FRIDAY the 19th

Penguin Random House Signing, 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM

Random House Booth #1515-B 

Panel: How Our Present Impacts Today’s Speculative Fiction, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Grand 12 & 13, Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina

SATURDAY the 20th

Penguin Random House Signing, 3:00 PM – 3:45 PM

Random House Booth #1515-B

Panel: What’s New from Del Rey Books?, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Room 5AB

A lethal virus is awoken on an abandoned spaceship in this incredibly fast-paced, claustrophobic thriller.

They thought the ship would be their salvation.

Zahra knew every detail of the plan. House of Wisdom, a massive exploration vessel, had been abandoned by the government of Earth a decade earlier, when a deadly virus broke out and killed everyone on board in a matter of hours. But now it could belong to her people if they were bold enough to take it. All they needed to do was kidnap Jaswinder Bhattacharya—the sole survivor of the tragedy, and the last person whose genetic signature would allow entry to the spaceship.

But what Zahra and her crew could not know was what waited for them on the ship—a terrifying secret buried by the government. A threat to all of humanity that lay sleeping alongside the orbiting dead.

And then they woke it up.

* * *

Trial and error is part of writing

I suppose this is a lesson I’ve learned with every book, but I feel like I learned it extra double well this time around. Maybe it will stick this time! (Probably not.) But even if it once again slips from my mind like morning mist chased away by the first rays of the dawn, it is important enough to keep learning again and again.

This is the lesson: I have to spend a long time thinking about a novel before I can write a novel.

It is a necessary part of my writing process. Sometimes that thinking involves writing thousands of words toward a dead end, words I inevitably delete, on a version of the story that looks nothing like the final book.

I wrote tens of thousands of words on a wrong version of this book before I admitted it was wrong and started over–and that’s not all that unusual for me. I do that a lot. It feels terribly inefficient, but I’ve learned time and again that this is part of what I have to do. No matter what I think I know ahead of time, no matter how certain I am this time will be different, I don’t truly know what I want to write until I’m writing it. I don’t know what my story is until I’m telling it to myself.

Fast pacing and strong atmosphere are not in opposition

Before I wrote Salvation Day, nobody had ever accused me of writing fast-paced stories. The pacing of my previous novels tend toward measured and leisurely. Mostly by choice, to be clear, because I write stories that I would want to read, and when I read I want to sink into a book thoroughly, to luxuriate in the depth of its world and characters, to revel in the strangeness of taking a wander through an unfamiliar world–whether that world is fantastical kingdom ruled by magic, a sentient spaceship a million years in the future, or a misty English village beset by murders. I love to create atmosphere when I write; I want readers to feel the story wrap around and draw them in with every one of their senses.

But I kept running into a tiny little problem while writing Salvation Day: there is no time. There is no time for luxuriating in the setting, for wallowing in the senses, for exploring the world. There is no time for anything. I very cleverly handed myself a plot that takes place in an extremely limited environment (a single spaceship) and an extremely limited time frame (a single day), and on top of that I decided to put my characters in a new kind of mortal peril on every page.

It took me a while to figure out that didn’t mean I had to abandon my love of richly atmospheric stories. I just had be more smarter about it, which is a skill that I’m glad to have finally acquired, even though it did take four novels and some dozen-plus stories. But, in all fairness, I did also cheat a little bit, because a story set on an abandoned literal spaceship full of literal corpses rather provides its own moody, intense atmosphere. I just had to describe the corpses.

Which I did. With great frequency, in great detail.

Gravity: still my favorite fundamental force

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer who hates writing action scenes because I’m not very good at them. Then (ref. clever decisions, cited above) I decided to write a book that is basically nothing but action scenes. Oh, and those actions scenes all take place in the microgravity of a very distant orbit around Earth. Mostly involving people who have never been in space before.

Now, I have a fairly strong science background. I have a PhD in geophysics. I know enough to know where and how I need to research. But, man, did I run into some unexpected problems while writing action scene after action scene in microgravity. Time after time I caught myself having characters stand up, or set something down, or even bleed or cry the way people normally bleed or cry, and none of that works the same without gravity. It was an epic and ever-evolving learning curve for me to remember, on every single page, that the rules of movement were different.

(But maybe I didn’t learn my lesson after all, because I’m currently working on a novel that takes place on a small, irregular asteroid, where gravity gets even more complicated! I love you, gravity.)

That old man in that one scene in The Avengers was right

You know that scene in Marvel’s The Avengers when Loki shows up in Stuttgart and tells everybody to kneel and one of man stands up and, deeply unimpressed, dismissing the bratty trickster by saying, “There are always men like you”?

You know that scene? That scene is correct. There are always men like that.

Men who want people to kneel before them. Men who rant and rage and splutter and demand obedience and loyalty and admiration. Men who get those things, and declare it’s not enough, and demand more. Men who claim to have the answer to all of humanity’s problems, an answer nobody else could provide, an answer they alone are capable of delivering. There are always men like that.

I did a lot of research into cults as I was writing this book, and the one thing I learned that surprised me–although perhaps, in retrospect, it shouldn’t have–is how very ordinary the infamous, terrifying cult leaders of history seem once you learn about them in any depth. They are pretty much all cruel, petty, narcissists with delusions of grandeur who want people to cower before them. They rant and rage and splutter. They might gather a handful of followers, or hundreds, or they might be elected president, but that doesn’t make them extraordinary. There is nothing more ordinary, more mundane, more common, than a cruel, petty man who rants and rages and splutters and wants to rule the world.

Trust your gut when it comes to both your stories and your career

I was about halfway through the first draft of Salvation Day when I had to make a pretty huge decision about it. The publisher I was with at the time wasn’t interested in it; they wanted another book from me, one I had pitched but hadn’t started writing beyond a few sample pages. I had to make the choice between the sure thing of staying with the publisher who’d handled my first three novels, or turning down their offer and taking the chance that somebody else would want my grim little sci fi nightmare about a spaceship full o’ corpses.

It was the sort of decision I had always assumed must be hard for authors to make. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t a difficult decision at all. I knew what I wanted to do as soon as the choice was before me. I knew I had a good thing going with this book. I knew I would regret setting it aside to work on something else, something I wasn’t fully invested in yet. I made myself pause and breathe and look at the more practical consideration–and talk to my agent–about the risks and challenges of changing publishers, changing genres and age groups, turning down certain money now for uncertain money in the future. But in the end in came down to the fact that I felt good about this book and what it could become. My gut instinct was that I wanted to write it, because it was worth the risk.

Writing stories is the best job in the world, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But it is basically a never-ending series of jumps into the unknown. I don’t know if I’ll be in the same position or have the reasons to make the same choice again in the future, but I’m glad I learned that I could take that jump when I needed to.

* * *

Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. Salvation Day is her first novel for adults. She is also the author of the young adult novels Shallow Graves and The Memory Trees, the middle grade fantasy City of Islands, and short stories that have appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, Tor.com, and other speculative fiction magazines. After spending most of her life in Colorado, she now lives in southern California.

Kali Wallace: Website | Instagram

Salvation Day: Mysterious Galaxy | B&N | Indiebound | BAM | Amazon