On October 12, 2008, astronaut and video game designer Richard Garriott will be shot into space for a visit to the International Space Station. On board his capsule will be an archive of digitized information intended to tell visitors from other worlds about the great race that was humanity. The scheme is called Operation Immortality. The underlying assumption is a tried and true science fiction theme: that by the time someone reads it, Planet Earth and its inhabitants will have perished.

“The archive will include information on humanity’s greatest achievements,” according to the Operation Immortality website. The file will also carry “messages from people all over the world, and DNA samples from some of our brightest minds and most accomplished athletes. During the month of September, every human being is invited to come to the OperationImmortality.com website to submit their suggestions for our greatest achievements and leave a message for the cosmos.”

Knowledgeable science fiction fans may well wonder if the inspiration for this plan was a pair of novels by Donald Moffitt published in the late 1980s, Genesis Quest and Second Genesis. Unlike the International Space Station, which orbits only a few thousand miles above Earth, Moffitt’s fictional space probe travels for millions of years before ultimately being captured by an alien race that not only manages to decode the information, but uses the code to reconstruct human civilization as well!

E-Reads is proud to publish this amazingly prescient saga and three other Moffitt novels as well. But was he prescient enough to anticipate that two decades later Operation Immortality would enlist such living celebrities as Steven Colbert to contribute their DNA to the project?

You can read about it on the Operation Immortality Celebrity News Page.

– Richard Curtis