What do you think is the
relationship between science and science fiction?
We follow the scientists
around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable
mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we
don't get penalized for mistakes.
Why is space important?
For 50 years or so the answer
has kept changing. Today:
The wealth
of the universe is all over your head. We need to take command of the
solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government
is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur
Killer asteroid.
But since I was a kid I've
just wanted to go.
Early in your career,
you predicted crewed missions to Mars by this time. You have observed that
the bottleneck seems to be in the high cost of launching materials into
earth orbit. What technologies most excite you in terms of their ability
to overcome this obstacle?
Everyone I know backed Rockwell's
Delta Clipper, one of the designs that lost out to Venturestar.
I watched Gary Hudson's Roton
with some hope. But I think we should bite the bullet, cancel some treaties
and go nuclear: finish building NERVA.
Arthur
C. Clarke believes that a comprehensive and well-funded program to
track
near-Earth asteroids (Project Spaceguard) should be amongst the highest
priorities of mankind's space exploration initiative.
Given that your own novel
Lucifer's Hammer (with Jerry Pournelle) describes the effects of a major
asteroid collision event, do you agree with Clarke's concern? How do you
envision such a system? What about its potential for misuse as a weapon?
It should be done.
Start with current telescopes
-- which have become near-magical. Weapon? How do you use a telescope as
a weapon? But any device that could stop or turn a Hamner-Brown Comet would
have to be guarded.
NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena features strongly in your novel Footfall
(with Jerry Pournelle). Do you visit often? If so, what is your favorite
memory of JPL?
It's described in the beginning
of Footfall -- the couple of days when information was flowing back
from Voyager One, and all the hard SF writers gathered to watch.
Who was there?
Jerry Pournelle
Poul and Karen Anderson
their daughter Astrid Anderson
and her husband Greg Bear
Bjo and John Trimble
Robert
and Ginny Heinlein-- this time or the next, our house guests
Robert Forward
Jim and Valerie Ransom
I can't be 100 percent certain
of all these, and I must have forgotten a good many.
Your 1974 essay "Bigger
than Worlds" appears in George Zebrowski and Greg Benford's forthcoming
anthology Skylife: Space Habitats in Science and Story. In it you
talk about the various types of engineering possible in space-- from small
space stations to your own Ringworld. Now that time has given you more
perspective on the issues involved, and given us Skylab, Mir,
and the oft-delayed International
Space Station, what would you like to see next?
Anything beats an expensive
stack of paper. We've fallen way behind. Building one space station for
everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
Your Known Space series
prominently features commercial exploitation of mineral resources in the
asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Now that this possibility is beginning
to receive serious consideration, do you feel that any of the credit for
this is yours? Given NASA's recent and forthcoming flybys of asteroids
and comets, how far off do you think fulfillment of your vision is? Do
you see private sector involvement as likely?
I was following an
earlier writer, Randall Garrett, whose vision of asteroid belt civilization
seemed entirely plausible. The facts have changed since, of course. I'm
scrambling to keep up.
We've always wanted to believe
in "private sector" space -- hucksters make better characters than a government
does.
You're a predictor and
extrapolator of no small ability. I am sure our readers would love to hear
what new technology or technologies you feel will be most important or
promising in the next century.
I love superconductors.
I've pictured a huge fusion plant on the Greenland ice cap -- big enough
that fusion can work, economies of scale, etc. -- and lasers sending power
into space while superconducting cables run under the ocean to the world's
continents.
Cheap superconductors imply
maglev trains everywhere. Computers could get big again, with RAM/ROM rising
by powers of forty and fifty, if superconductors shed the heat.
Laser handguns against superconducting
armor. I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.
In the same vein as the
last question, looking back at your three and a half decades in SF, what
are you most proud of having gotten right? What do you feel you got most
spectacularly wrong, by way of failure to predict or just plain being wrong?
We should not have assumed
that a political space station could be built. We'd have most of what we
predicted of the conquest of space, if we hadn't ignored parasite control.
The wealth (as in flying cars) predicted by Heinlein and his followers
(including myself) was another matter. It all went to welfare programs.
Vast numbers of people are
microscopically better off for that, except that we all have less to aspire
to.
Here is where the predictions
failed: We didn't take Cargo Cult mentality into account [that being] "if
somebody has something I don't, he must have stolen it."
We didn't understand how
good we could get at communication -- when you have something that someone
else doesn't, the whole damn planet knows it. But the space defense initiative
drove the USSR bankrupt, and it originated at my house in Tarzana.
Who are your favorite
SF authors at the moment?
I'd offend friends if I answered
that. But Neil Gaiman may be the best short story writer alive; he's not
just comic books. [Stephen] Baxter
may have the furthest reach, unless it's Vernor Vinge. Terry Pratchett
is the funniest. Stephen King is the scariest; any writer knows how good
he is after reading Misery.
After a 16-year hiatus,
you returned to Known Space for The Ringworld Throne. Can we expect
more books set in this immensely popular universe? Also, what's next in
general?
In general, I don't know
when inspiration will pop up. But I'm massaging an outline for a fourth
Ringworld book. Due from Simon & Shuster in March 2000 is a thick novel
that took eight years to write: The Burning City, by me and Jerry
Pournelle. Due in May from Tor: Saturn's Race, an ambitious near-future
novel by me and Stephen Barnes.
What question, if any,
have you always wished an interviewer would ask? What's the answer?
If I knew such a question,
I'd have written it up in a speech, turned it into an article and sold
it two or three times already. If I knew the answer, even better.
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