I'm not lying, I swear. In October, arriving in Orlando, I stayed in one of those big, faceless conference hotels. DARPA, a Pentagon unit that fosters crazy science in its most speculative forms, organized a brainstorming conference on the project "In a Hundred Years to the Stars" to find out what research would hope that the construction of an interstellar spacecraft would begin at least in the twenty-second century - and for some reason invited a horde of science fiction writers from around the world. It is unclear on which Pentagon the spacecraft is, but I was glad to take a walk in Orlando at someone else's expense, push a speech at a conference and rant on this topic from the point of view of a solid NF...