To reach his house you turn off Route One in the geometrical center of town, the bisection point, and travel but a block up a dead end street. His house is cloaked in pine and wisps of the fog that pursued you down from Santa Cruz. It looks warm and cozy; orange splashes signal to you through the windows. You wonder why reading lamps seen through windows in winter seem to glow with a sun warmth, kindling meaning, while in the summer they are just reading lamps in the distance.

Infinity crowds upstairs

There are no astronomicals inside the house. To see them you must go outside, up an exposed wooden staircase, into the study. There they crowd the room in the heady smell of fresh paint, rags, stretched canvas. A congress of infinities.

Does he ever read the things he has illustrated? No, he doesn't like science fiction very much. Not enough solidity, perhaps. He rarely if ever willingly puts a human artifact into his work, a spaceship or a pressure dome, or a space-suited figure. He doesn't have any idea of what the future will bring and feels awkward trying to visualize it. But stars and planets, yes, the astronomer friends he has can give him descriptions of how things must be there and he can see it, too, in some closed mind's eye, so that it comes out right. Most science fiction is quickly outdated, anyway. Look at all the fins on space ships, and the cloudless Earths. Better to stay away from it.

Someone in Palo Alto has made prints of two of his oils. One is of an expedition that has landed on a dry, rust-orange Martian desert and is deploying equipment. It seems oddly out of balance and unconvincing, not his best work. The other is better: Saturn from Titan. His classic signature piece. Wrong, of course, since we now know that the methane atmosphere there blankets everything. But it was right when he painted it, the way any scientific theory is correct as an approximation of the truth which is never fully known, and that is all anybody can ask. He has a few prints left. We should not feel that it is necessary to buy anything, of course. We take the Saturn. There is something awesome in the mass of the planet even at this distance, a cold white with a hard curve to it. Looking at it you believe in your soul that planets are gods and men but pawns.

There are stills from motion pictures he has done. George Pal, worlds colliding, rockets, The Day The Earth Stood Still, a Groucho Marx hanging from a 20th story window against city lights done in oil, but the distant car headlights moving. Stop-motion. Planet-wrecking. It was a lot of fun and a lot of money but his reputation will probably rest on the astronomicals displayed in Boston and New York and San Francisco. Double stars and novae and howling unseen storms in deep atmospheres. A sense of the infinite.

At the center is craft. A view of Saturn at dawn from the Grand Tour probe: it stands dead upright on the easel, half-finished. "Black is very difficult. It is so hard to get the absolute pure black in comparison with the soft color of an atmosphere or a star's envelope. Almost impossible, I think, unless one practices a great deal. I have seen very few painters who can handle it, even in abstracts."

He shows us a few abstracts he has done and they are very good, though none uses very much black. He has tried everything and mastered many techniques, though he has sold very little of it. Most of the good oils he keeps for himself; he can afford to. For a while there was a rush to buy his astronomical oils and he nearly became a factory, turning them out faster than he should have, but that is past. Most sold to aerospace engineers and now they have less extra money and perhaps it is just as well.

He works hard and keeps a regular schedule but he cannot keep up with the load of work. Today arrived an offer from Playboy, which he will accept for a three-page oil, even though it will mean disturbing his schedule. His agent is trying to get him to do another book of the sort he did with Willy Ley, but there is no time. Perhaps next year.

You speak of working together on a book. He thinks "Profiles of the Future" is a good title, but you tell him Arthur C. Clarke has already used it. Well, something else, then, but keep in touch.

Vistas receding

Connections: the book doesn't go through because you are too busy to finish the chapters that year, and then you move to the University and there are years of intense physics after that. But he gives you a name of a friend, just a boy who he knows does good work but has had few opportunities -- after all he is but eighteen yet, give him time. In a few months you hear from him -- Don Davis -- and then you sell a novel, Jupiter Project, the first one worth a damn and as true to the Jupiter we know as you can get it. Don Davis does two oils to illustrate it. The next year it is published and prompts a letter from Robert Heinlein, which is as much as anybody could ask for. A friend praises it too, exclaiming that you were so lucky to get someone so like Bonestell to do the cover. The whole set of principles is now a tradition and it came mostly out of this one man. Connections.)

The only science fiction person he sees these days is Heinlein, he says, who lives an hour away on the coast. He likes the Heinlein approach; it seems more honest somehow, closer to the tenuous facts of science. And the Heinlein futures have a lived-in feel. "He’s the titan of the field," the old man says reflectively, never remarking on his own stature in the landscape he and the writers inhabit.

He does not see many artists. Carmel is a center for them but they are mostly dabblers, amateurs. He does not have much interest in the young: he thinks their technique is poor. They do not see how important it is to get it right. The test of learning to draw a cow is not in the fingers but in the eye: you must learn to see the cow. Few do this today. "Once having seen it, you must draw or paint so that others can see it. Not the thing itself, but the way it seems, that is art. What else is there?"

Editor's Note: Ron Miller of  Bonestell Space Art writes:

"While Greg Benford's "View from Titan" was written as a fan piece nearly 20 years ago, it does contain a small number of factual errors that might be corrected parenthetically (should anyone use the article as a source of information).

"Chesley Bonestell never worked for Disney. He never worked on The Day the Earth Stood Still. That is not Groucho Marx dangling from the building in the painting that Benford saw, but Jack Benny (the film is The Horn Blows at Midnight)."

Rather than interfere with the original text, which has archival significance of its own at this point, I have simply appended this correction in the margins.