Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 194 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Alan Steele.

He's the author of such novels as Orbital Decay, V.S. Day, and Ocean Space, as well

as the 8-volume Coy series, about colonizing a habitable

Moon in the 47 Ursi Majora system.

His short story collections include Rude Astronauts, the last science fiction writer, and Sex and Violence in Zero G.

He's also a highly regarded expert on space travel, who is testified before the House Subcommittee

on Space and Aeronautics.

His new novel, which is out now, is called Arckwright. And now here's our

here's our interview with Alan Steele.

All right, so we're here with Alan Steele.

Welcome to the show. Oh, thank you, David.

Nice to be here.

Okay, so tell us about your new book, Arkwright. What's that about?

Arckwright is a story about a family of the descendants of a science fiction writer of the 20th century,

Mason Ark Wright, and their effort over many generations to build the first

Starship and launch it to a world 22 light years from Earth.

Nathan Argrite was one of the four great science-generation writers of the 20th century.

There was Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark and Robert Heinlein and Nathan, who is fictional of course,

but he was, I credit him as being the Grand Master Space Opera and he created the Galaxy Patrol series, which is the name right there is a homage to E.E. Doc Smith and these stories which became, you know, first of course is a series of

novels and then a radio series and a TV series and

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