The world of the Rocket Ranch is set some 80 years into the future (hello, Posterity) but not pinned to a specific date.
Many of my favorite science fiction stories ask the reader to permit faster than light travel, infinitely strong materials, and other tech that may never be. But in reality, the fastest spacecraft built in my time, would take tens of millennia to reach the nearest star to our own. A near future breakthrough might knock a few zeros off that daunting figure, but not down to the scale of a human lifetime. Put another way, it is less likely that you are reading this in a different solar system than mine, than it is that the English language will survive long enough for you to read it.
We’re even limited by the expanse of our own solar system though our automated probes have explored every planet in some depth. But no one I know is going to walk on Mars any time soon, so, for now, the Red Planet remains inhabited only by robots.
What’s left to explore? Our own planet, spinning in space for four billion years. Life emerged in splendor here, pretty much as soon as the laws of thermodynamics, and the laws of chemistry, allowed. We humans arrived less a million years ago. The invention of literature, the control of fire, the wheel and axle, and the discovery that we stand on only one planet of trillions vanish “as the dust of one stroke of a nail file” on that vast ruler of time.
This is a story of exploration of a planetary body, the Planet Earth. I think it’s the best planet I know, or have even heard of, filled with wonders that exceed present frontiers of knowledge and imagination. As we tread upon this earth, we leave marks behind, for good, or ill. This story is about that too.
Captain Bender and their crew find explore an exotic alien world, full of mysteries to be solved. It just so happens to be the planet they were born on.
I hope you like it.
Louisville Kentucky Oct 3, 2025.