And there is no way to get from one place to another quickly, so even if there was great variation, I couldn’t move my characters very far.Įven worse, the only way to go outside the moon base involved wearing a space suit, which provided its own limitations. True, there is variation, but for the most part, it is moon dust, with the occasional crater or lava tube. Planet Earth has billions of different locations, all of which are different from each other - but the exterior of the moon is basically the same, no matter where you go. Meanwhile, the world outside the moon base was also more limiting than I had realized. I had originally planned to bring in new residents (which is why the Patucket family is mentioned) but after three books, I was having trouble coming up with new ways to make life in the moon base exciting.

Moon Base Alpha was small and cramped there weren’t many rooms and less than thirty residents. I was very pleased with the world that I created, but it had an unforeseen side effect: My good friend, astronaut Garrett Reisman, who was overseeing the human space flight program at SpaceX, served as my technical advisor. But I also made the decision to write a sci-fi series where space travel was depicted as realistically as possible. When I first started writing this series, I really thought it might run for a long time. The reasons I stopped writing each series are quite different. The posts where I explained this are now a couple years old, so I thought I would revisit the issue. The information in this post may be old news to many of you, but I have been getting a lot of questions from readers asking why both MBA and Musketeer stopped at three books. Charlie Thorne and the Curse of Cleopatra.

Moonbase alpha stuart gibbs