Jeremy Clift’s father was a big supporter of public libraries, the author recalls. “He didn’t buy books; he checked them out of the library,” he says. “So he doesn’t have a huge collection.”

Recently, Clift had the pleasure of gifting his father with a book to add to his scant home library, his own, Born in Space: Unlocking Destiny, the first in a series. “How fantastic if he had checked my book out from the library,” Clift says with a laugh. “That would have been a very nice thing to happen.”

Reactions to his first book have been, well, out of this world. Kirkus calls the futuristic story “epic…profound and full-bodied.” Set in the mid-21st century, Born in Space introduces the formidable Teagan Ward, a teenager who, along with her father, a professor, is invited by billionaire Howie Rich to relocate from Earth to Quivira, a rotating space habitat. There, she and other girls are encouraged to donate their eggs, which are used to birth seven “experimental babies.”

Her efforts to claim her children are rebuffed. “You have no rights here,” Dr. Cesar De Luca tells her. But Teagan, refusing to be “a madman’s lab rat,” tries to “buck herself up”: “Come on, Teagan, you’ve been in hair-raising situations before, you can think of something. Then she thought of the joy she felt when she carried her daughter in her arms. The comforting thought gave Teagan a new resolve. She would find a way to escape this place, and…end Cesar de Luca and his plans.”

Growing up, Clift read books that anticipated his own creation of fantastic new worlds. He basked in the globe-trotting adventures of boy explorer Tin-Tin as well as the Babar elephant series. He was also drawn to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Richard Hannay adventure novels filled with intrigue by John Buchan, such as The 39 Steps.

An English teacher, a World War II veteran, encouraged his writing and inspired him to go into journalism. Following a stint at the London School of Economics, he joined Reuters, which assigned its writers to a different country for one year. For two decades, he lived in China, Indonesia (where his daughter was born), India (where his son was born), Asia, and the Middle East, where he served as a war correspondent.

“I covered the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Lebanon,” he reports. “And I was in Egypt when Anwar Sadat was killed. When Israel returned Sinai to Egypt, I was able to cover the various ceremonies in different parts of the Sanai Desert. That was just an amazingly beautiful location.”

But it was while stationed in Jakarta, Indonesia, that he realized it was time for a change. “One night there was rioting in the streets. My kids were stuck in school, and I thought it was time to move somewhere quieter,” he recalls.

He got a job writing for the International Money Fund in Washington, D.C. “The irony was,” Clift says, “a year after, we experienced 9/11.” He has lived in the U.S. for the last 25 years.

At the IMF, one of his roles was to teach nonfiction writing to IMF economists from other countries. “They had Ph.D.s,” he says, “but their command of English was not quite there, and at the IMF, you had to be particularly good at writing. It was quite rewarding.”

Clift was put in charge of the IMF’s publishing program and conducted interviews with prominent economists for its magazine, Finance and Development. “I learned the art of more conventional publishing and this newer world of print on demand,” he says. “So when I left the IMF, I thought, Okay, what am I going to do?”

Around this time, he became interested in articles about asteroid mining, retrieving the riches of space. “This got me thinking how that might destabilize the global economy,” Clift says. “I compared it to when the Spanish conquered Latin America, and their ships [were] laden with gold returning across the Atlantic.”

This set in motion the inspiration to write Born in Space. “There’s a tradition of Reuters journalists becoming fiction writers. Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal) was one of them. I didn’t want to write the same stuff—thrillers. I was a fan of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, but when I read Andy Weir’s The Martian, I thought it was an interesting way of bridging into a different world.”

It was also not lost on Clift that The Martian was something of a Cinderella story, initially self-published, picked up by a major publisher, and then adapted for the screen in a critically and commercially successful film starring Matt Damon.

“I thought, well, I do know something about publishing,” he says. “Andy Weir had been successful on his own. Maybe I could do this as a venture.”

He attended 20BooksTo50K, an annual convention for self-published writers in Las Vegas (it has since been rebranded as Author Nation). “There is a lot to learn about self-publishing,” Clift says, “and I received a lot of information.”

One of the most impactful pieces of advice he got was to write a series, that a one-off book would not be enough to sustain him financially. He is poised to publish the sequel to Born in Space, which he deliberately crafted to set up characters that could be developed or perhaps spun off in future volumes.

“Marketing is a very difficult, complex thing,” he says. “I’m still learning a lot about it.”

Clift was drawn to science fiction as a vehicle to comment about what is currently going on, he says. His ruminations about space habitats dovetailed with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos launching flights to the edge of space. “So quite quickly, you could imagine having space habitats that are a bit like pensioners on cruise ships traveling around the world. You could also imagine that certain things are done better in space, such as medical facilities that produce spare body parts and take advantage of low gravity.”

About big-picture concerns, he says, “Obviously, everybody’s worried about climate change, and my next book is about corporate dominance, corporate greed, and monopoly.”

Clift’s journalism background served him well when charting Born in Space’s universe. “I’m not good at outlining,” he says, “but I did do a lot of research on asteroid mining, designing space habitats, and areas of the moon where people might put settlements.”

He deliberately created his female hero because he didn’t want to do “the conventional male-dominated Robert A. Heinlein type of thing,” he says. “The book is meant to be about the overwhelming strength of motherhood and the overwhelming beauty of Earth. It’s meant to be a message of hope.”

Clift currently lives in Virginia and continues to serve as a writing coach for the IMF. He considers himself a full-time writer, although, he jokes, “Yeah, I have the luxury of not having to do anything full time.”

Now that he has launched Born in Space, he reflects on the phenomenal success of The Martian, though he hasn’t gone so far as to wonder who would play Teagan in a feature film. “But a couple of things happened quite surprisingly after the Kirkus review came out,” Clift says. “Two people contacted me. One was a film scout; the other one was a rights person. I hadn’t thought about either, but it encouraged me.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who is published in the Washington Post, Town & Country Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and on vanityfair.com.