Goodreads asked Eric Kay:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Eric Kay The most direct inspiration for my novel No Lack of Sunshine was from the novel The Songs of Distant Earth [414998]. In it the author, Arthur C. Clarke has a one or two sentence description of the first generation of colonist. He said something to the effect that the first generation of humans had psychological problems. I stopped reading and said 'whoa I want to read that book.' There is also a planet-wide ocean in that story, but that was not the source for that. Such an ocean is one of the only ways to keep a tidally locked planet from icing over.

The biggest influence has been my study of exoplanets. I had long been interested in actual practical settlement of the stars. Unfortunately sending a spaceship to another star requires unimaginable amounts of energy.

I felt practical interstellar travel was unrealistic and instead defaulted to settling Mars. No one can study Martian settlement without hearing about Dr. Robert Zubrin. At some point after watching his videos, Youtube showed me a presentation he did for one of the Breakthrough Initiatives and the dipole drive, which is a modified electric sail. After that I was hooked and kept thinking about how we could settle the stars.

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