Featured Interview With Erasmo Acosta
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Cantura, Venezuela, and moved to the United States in 1996 to pursue a software engineering career, sponsored by a small Silicon Valley company. I retired to Portland, Oregon, in 2020 after achieving 32 successful years in the industry. In 2015, I became interested in the implications of the Fermi Paradox as it relates to the prospects of finding another civilization in the universe. Further research into Futurism, upcoming technologies, and the works of American physicist Gerard O’Neill, led me to write K3+. The dystopian novel explores human migration, triggered by inequality and climate change, to rotating habitats in space, based on many currently available technologies. I wrote a story of how humanity moved past the unsettling times we live in to a post-scarcity and egalitarian society—absent of fear, uncertainty, inequality, and despair.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Writing wasn’t necessarily a long term aspiration. After I retired, I watched a YouTube video that discussed both the Fermi Paradox and Dyson Swarms. It had a profound personal impact, leading me to drop some of my most deeply held beliefs. Less than two years later, after plenty of research on these and many other subjects, I started writing the K3+ book.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, and Arthur Clarke are my childhood heroes. I make references to them throughout the story. J. K. Rowling had a different kind of influence. Ever since reading the Philosopher’s Stone—I read all seven books many times—I was deeply impressed by her light and easy-to-digest style. The interactions between Fedrix & SueLing are an example.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
K3+ is the story of how humanity gets past these troubling times, to build a purely egalitarian post-scarcity civilization in space. It begins with climate change and economic inequality coa-lescing into a dystopia that triggers a massive exodus to space colonies (aka rotating habitats). Centuries later, people living in space establish a utopian society, while those left on Earth con-tinue to struggle. As migration to space continues, nations on Earth begin to collapse due to un-derpopulation, making the ultimate conflict inevitable.
After WWIII humanity unites. Everyone now lives inside continent-sized rotating habitats, while Earth becomes a tourist destination. Humans begin to send colonization waves, to build rotating habitats around nearby stars, eventually colonizing the Milky Way and hundreds of neighboring galaxies.
In the final chapter, humans encounter the first alien civilization, in the Virgo Cluster, after eons of space colonization. The non-humanoid aliens are savages, permanently at war with each other, stuck in the Middle Ages. After brief research, humans conclude that the current evolu-tionary course will lead the aliens to become a super-predator, becoming a threat to their sur-vival.
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