Caution: Singularity Ahead [DEFUNCT]

I just moved and traded in my old desktop for a new notebook. I've copied everything over from the old hard drive, and now it's time for some archaeology while I sift through old files and projects. Here's one I'd barely started - a plot seed for an SF novel with working title, "The Race". From what I can recall, the plot synopsis was that life was discovered on Europa in 2013, kicking off a race between countries, corporations and individuals to build a follow-on mission. Looks like I wrote this back in 1999. From these notes, I think the point of the story was that accelerating technology was making everything unpredictable as the race went on. You'd have unmanned missions controlled from Earth, manned missions, manned missions with augmented humans, static AI and self-modifying AI. I'm not sure what the idea was beyond that, though. Exterior, space: unmanned probe lands on Europa and deploys a heater/miner, which burrows under the ice and VO “T...

I recently rekindled my interest in the late 1970's pencil-and-paper role playing game Traveller. It was the SF answer to Dungeons and Dragons. I dug out my box of old role-playing materials, and started surfing the web for "what's happened since the early 1980's?" Among the various things to happen to Traveller in the 1990's was a fourth edition ("Marc Miller's Traveller") published by the now-defunct Imperium Games. Notable about this version were very stylish covers featuring art by Chris Foss . This style seemed very familiar; I assumed I'd seen these illustrations before. Eventually, I remembered getting large picture books of SF spacecraft out from the local library when I was growing up. But I couldn't find the right search engine queries to figure out what the books were. During a trip to Half Price Books I found a promising clue - Aliens in Space . Popping this into a search engine turned up the Terran Trade Authority  [Wikip...