I’ve loved science fiction since I was a kid, but that doesn’t make me an expert in writing it. My first sci-fi novel, Time Travel Rescue, was an exercise in fantasy with a good helping of research into climate change. But mostly, it was fantasy. My new novel, Moon Rescue: Escape from the Dome, required much more attention to science since it deals with a concept that’s not so far off–populating the Moon with humans in a habitat that will have to support them for years. There’s still plenty of fantasy, of course, but the story treads significantly into the real problems of living on the Moon–a safe habitat, supplying air, water and food, and the inevitability of human frailty’s effect on everything.
I decided to turn to the people many adults turn to for advice on tech and science, teenagers, specifically high school engineering students at Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy. I talk to their teacher, John Kamal, about his remarkable students and his own brush with space-related greatness in the first episode of my new podcast Type-Tint-Tune. Here it is: