I honestly struggled with this song the most. I knew the concept of an interstellar traveller was something that I simply had to include. But how to write something that David Bowie hadn't already written?

Through the process of writing, I imagined the many tales of interstellar travellers that I had read over the years, and one in particular stood out to me, called "Planet of Adventure," by Jack Vance. It's about a man, Adam Reith, who crash lands on an alien planet, and is taken in by a local tribe. They heal his wounds and teach him the language, and of course, he wants to go home. The plot revolves around his journey around this planet, meeting tribes and visiting cities and wreaking havoc wherever he goes. Quite the swashbuckling adventure indeed.

But there's a bit of a different struggle near the end. One of the more powerful leaders of one of the larger cities offers Adam many riches and a lot of status to stay on the planet and be some sort of emissary or what have you. Of course Adam eventually declines and finds a way home, but this is quite a struggle for him.

I realized then that this song is about an impending sense of hope. "What is an impending sense of hope?", you ask? To me, it's that place where you've hit rock bottom. You've lost everything, and all that's left is this giant smoking crater and ashes of your former life around you. After you recover, you start to get that feeling where you know that everything is going to be okay, you're fine, you're alive, all you can do is trudge on.

The impending sense of hope is when you can see to the top of the crater, and you catch a glimpse of something. You don't see it or know what it is, what it could be or how to get to it. But you see it and you know that it has to be yours. And sometimes you climb up one side of the crater and you see it but you can't catch a full glimpse of it and you can't quite climb out, so you try another side of the crater and the same thing, you're almost there and you can almost see it.

That state of limbo, where you don't know what you want or how to get it, but you know it exists and you know that you have to have it at any cost, that's an impending sense of hope.