On a visit to old Sacramento with my family, an exhibit on the influence of the Wells Fargo wagon on the frontier made me think about how it would be for colonists in another star system without faster-than-light travel. After retiring from my engineering career in 2009, I used that inspiration and published the Tau Ceti trilogy: "A Ship From Earth," "The New Colonists," and "The Immortality Conspiracy." That effort spawned new ideas for the universe I had created, and the two Methuselah novels, the Capek novella, and the Ambassador novels followed.