TophMelonLord

When did you find out?

SPOILERS

There’s a lot of very fleshed out sci-fi concepts in the book (astrophage, eridian biology, etc) - I’d like to know what core inspiration you started from. Like with the eridians, did you start by coming up with the conditions on the homeworld and then ask yourself “given these conditions, this is what they would evolve to be like.” Or did you have an idea (the use of heavy metals in their biochemistry, the super-echolocation etc) and build the conditions around that? Same with the astrophage, did you start with “bacteria are eating the sun, how would that happen?” Or did you have some particular concept (the mobility-through-light, the sun-Venus life cycle) that you then built the rest of the concept around?

Where there any ideas that didn’t make it into the book because you couldn’t make it sufficiently plausible?