R. Peter Keith deftly guides readers through alien virtual worlds

In the 1990s, R. Peter Keith was not yet considering how to engage readers with his SF trilogy Wine Dark Deep; he was pondering how best to immerse people in an unfamiliar world. “I had this incredible love of video games,” explains Keith, who splits his time between Vermont and New York City. That love led him and a partner to mount one of the first large-scale exhibitions on the history of video games. As they found new, clever, and interactive ways to get visitors of all ages interested in the virtual, Keith and his partner decided to extend their ideas to other topics for exhibits in order to, as he puts it, “create kick-ass video games that were also organic learning experiences.”

Following their first efforts, Keith’s company re-created the largest (virtual) extinct ecosystem ever built, allowing kids and adults to experience the world through the eyes of a dinosaur. After that, Keith set his sights on his most ambitious topic—and one that would spark his creativity for years to come: space. For four years, Keith worked on re-creating space flight in painstaking detail and on finding ways to really put people inside an astronaut’s helmet. That exhibit was a blockbuster for Keith’s company when it opened in Houston in 2015, and they are working on bringing it back this October. “In every other space exhibit in the world, you walk in and look at a diorama of the moon,” he says. “In this one, you have to land on the moon.”

It should come as no surprise that Kirkus Reviews commended Encounter at Jupiter, Keith’s second novel, for how he creates a tense shipboard mystery with his “well-informed imagination.” “I lived in this stuff for so many years,” Keith says of the lengths he went to in order to understand space flight. “I literally lived in these simulations.”Although NASA does not directly endorse exhibits like Keith’s, his collaboration with the organization did earn his company the honor of being a Space Act Agreement partner. In his quest for accuracy, Keith found himself digging through mind-numbing moon-landing record data from the ’60s, learning about atmospheric pressure on Mars, and even flying the Lunar Landing Simulator at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

“I started to envision the people who are going to do this,” Keith says of deep-space travel. “What kind of problems do you have when you’re six months away from home?” From there, the ideas for his books came naturally, and Keith quickly produced the first title in the series, Wine Dark Deep, which introduces the futuristic spacecraft Ulysses and its crew, led by Cmdr. Calvin Scott. In constructing the Ulysses crew, Keith paid particular attention to each character’s role, looking at the book as if it were an exhibit on interplanetary travel and then defining what specialists would be needed to help people understand the ship’s mission and how their futuristic world works.

Inez (Comms/IT specialist), Xu (Science Officer), Susan (Medical Officer), and Paul (Engineer) all join Cal onboard Ulysses, serving up witty workplace banter and also acting as guides for readers who might otherwise get lost in the complicated jargon of hard SF and realistic space flight. In creating the Ulysses, Keith thought a lot about books he loved as a child—not just H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, but also C.S. Forrester’s seafaring Hornblower Saga books—and how they could make the language of 18th-century seafaring understandable and exciting even to a 20th-century kid who couldn’t swim. “I asked myself what would PBS have done if they’d made Star Trek,” Keith says. “I wanted a storyline with really competent, specific experts….I wanted drama that arose from real situations, real scientific challenges.”

In Encounter at Jupiter, that science-based drama comes from the crew’s stumbling upon an alien life form, but Keith eschewed any conventional little green men and drew inspiration from baffling scientific phenomena like slime molds to create a fascinating object that attaches itself to the Ulysses and infiltrates the ship’s infrastructure with red-black tendrils. The alien defies classification as either organic or mechanical and leaves the crew wondering if it’s an infection or a visitation. “I wanted it to be about not only the confrontation and the experience of the unknown, but [also] the possibilities of the unknown,” Keith explains about his unusual alien creation. “Maybe aliens are just not something that can be understood.” 

Keith drew directly from his wealth of knowledge about space to create some of the book’s most thrilling passages, set in the atmosphere of Jupiter as the Ulysses hurtles though a field of diamonds:

Ulysses flew over the equator and through the most intense belts of radiation in the solar system….The cerulean shades of the whipping atmosphere grew dark, mottled by turbinations of slate gray and streaks of obsidian. Another vibration hit. A shower of diamond ricochets washed over the ship, punctuated by a burst of lightning that momentarily restored detail to the cloudscapes.

“All that crazy, crazy stuff about Jupiter’s atmosphere? That’s real!” Keith exclaims. For him, though, what’s most important isn’t educating readers on what fascinates him about space; it’s about building something that feels real to both hard SF fans and genre novices—just like he did with his exhibits. Keith admits that the third and fourth books in the series, which he is currently at work on, get even “weirder.” By the time readers arrive at those moments, he hopes to have built a base so everyone can and will follow him. “I want to make you believe in the reality so you’ll go along with me on this journey….I want to earn every wacky turn.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris, France.