Cosmogony is no less full of riddles than the history of Earth. And where there are riddles, there is room for fantasy. However, if it is divorced from reality and rejects verisimilitude and authenticity, fantasy is empty, it leaves no trace in the heart; the best it can do is to titillate the reader's senses. But I have always wanted to achieve "authenticity in the incredible", to write fantasy founded solely on real facts and unsolved mysteries.
One such riddle that excited me was the ring of asteroids (minor planets) between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter instead of the planet, as predicted by Kepler's law, which had exploded for some unknown reason, scattering fragments all round its orbit. How could that have happened?
If the planet had exploded from within because of certain processes, its fragments would have flown in all directions as from a high-explosive bomb and would have continued moving round the sun in elongated elliptical orbits... But they are moving round in their former almost circular planetary orbit. If the planet had perished because of a collision with another cosmic body, their common fragments would have tended towards a resultant, also acquiring elongated elliptical orbits; but they have virtually stayed where they were.
The planet apparently cracked as the result of a powerful impact received simultaneously from all directions; it then disintegrated under the influence of the gravity of Mars and Jupiter. Its remains kept colliding and breaking up, creating swarms of meteorites and stringing out round the whole former orbit of the planet. But what kind of explosion was it? The explosion of its water envelope, its oceans?
It so happened that I was able to put this question to the great 20th-century physicist. Nils Bohr when he met us Moscow writers.
"Can all a planet's oceans explode if a super powerful nuclear device is detonated in their depths?" I asked him.
"I don't deny such a possibility," he replied, and added, "but even if it weren't so, nuclear weapons must be banned in any case."
He understood it all at once! If the planet had perished when its oceans exploded, then there was a civilization on it that had destroyed itself because of a nuclear war.
This was the stimulus for me as a novelist to write my trilogy The Faetians. Other problems found their way into it. Why has the missing link between man and the Earth's animal world never been discovered? Why does Mars seem uninhabited, and was it always so? Why did great cataclysms occur on Earth, such as the sinking of Atlantis and the rise of the Andes? According to some theories, the cause was a gigantic asteroid that fell onto Earth, or the appearance of the hitherto nonexistent Moon in the sky over Earth. Is this so?
The reader will learn all about it in the novel as he follows the lives of the characters, who witnessed unprecedented catastrophes.
The author will be happy if this book helps the reader to acquire a taste for the great secrets of the Universe and of Earth's history.