Gregory Benford has decades of experience as a space scientist, both as a professor of astrophysics and plasma physics at the University of California, Irvine and as a consultant to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Department of Energy and the White House Council on Space Policy. He is perhaps better known, though, for his award-winning and bestselling science fiction.

Why is space important?

Gregory Benford (GB): It's the last great territory, an indispensable source of wonder and raw materials alike. We're going to get itchy, cooped up on this small world.

George Zebrowski (GZ): A culture that fails to develop spacefaring risks extinction at worst and extreme discomfort and backwardness at best. I'm with Arthur C. Clarke about this: an age of exploration brings cultural renaissance, because exploration outward is also a journey into ourselves.

What is the relationship between science and science fiction?

GB: Far too large a question! I'd say SF is the bard of science, as Poul Anderson put it.

GZ: The simple answer is that what we can do we must first imagine. The more complex answer is that science and technology have an effect on human lives, and that this effect can only grow more profound, and that is a fit subject for fictional explorations.

Literature of the traditional kind assesses what has been; science fiction looks forward through the shadows that possibility casts backward into our times, and attempts to see the dramatic changes that will work on human character. See my essay in the current Nebula volume, just out.

What are you reading right now?

GB: The Light of Other Days by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke.

GZ: I read a number of books at once. Recently I have read some very little-known works: two novels by Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend and The Fall of Valor, both from the 1940s. A remarkable book from the 1930s, All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst's by Hugh Edwards. A work on cosmology by Martin Rees, Before the Beginning. A remarkable old book by Lancelot Law Whyte, Essay on Atomism, and The Future of Unbelief by Gerhard Szczesny, which though written in the 1960s has not dated in its insights at all. The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, which I have never read before and find wonderful.

Atypically for an SF anthology introduction, the introduction to Skylife (a longer version appears in two recent issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) is lengthy, dense, filled with ideas and a lot of fun to read. This is a truly amazing piece of work--what was the division of labor?

GZ: We each rewrote each other's drafts. I went first, then Greg. Four or five times. We added paragraphs right up to the end. Greg did the magazine pass all by himself, and I wish we'd gotten that draft into the book. We had no disagreements.

GB: We each handled aspects we thought we knew best. I did the more technical, George the metaphysical.

The selection of tales in Skylife is excellent, but are there any others you wish you could have included? Is a Skylife II likely?

GZ: Robert A. Heinlein's "Universe", of course, but his estate has reserved reprint rights on just about everything. We might have looked for more original work, and perhaps an all original Skylife collection will be next. We have a bibliography at the back of the book, which should keep readers busy for some time.

GB: Sure -- Heinlein's "Universe". We would've, except his widow wouldn't give us permission, and I thought the Don Wilcox story "The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years" actually told more about the history of the ideas, too.

In the realm of the space habitat, we've had Skylab, Mir, and soon the International Space Station. What do you see as the next logical step for the space habitat? Do you think there will be a "next step" anytime in the near future?

GB: We must develop a true recyclable habitat, no more camping out in space. This is crucial to going to Mars, or anywhere beyond the Moon, for a few days. And we must have centrifugal gravity experiments in low earth orbit, to prepare for longer missions. These have been obvious since the early '60s, but NASA has resolutely done zero-g work, not the crucial centrifugal jobs.

GZ: My feeling is that the International Space Station will become a "construction shack" for the building of something much better, even before it's complete. Lunar bases seem logical. Fast, continuous-boost ships can shrink the solar system to something that can be crossed in weeks, and these will need a place in space where they will be constructed. Soon? Maybe not. Human beings seem to recharge after a quiet period, and often the same problems are better solved with later knowledge and technology.

The U.S. space program has been slowing for the last thirty years; a manned mission anywhere out of low earth orbit is at least a decade away. Do either of you see a government like China or even the private sector as likely to take up the slack?

GB: I doubt any government, especially China, will summon the resources to go into space in a big way. That's why I proposed in The Martian Race a prize system, with half a dozen governments providing the funding (after the explorers return, though!) but leaving the innovative private area to do the job and take the risks -- two areas NASA fears. I really think this is the only way to do it.

GZ: The private sector has everything before it. Other nations, of course, may try, but I think they lack the dedication -- and even when they have it, they lose it quickly.

If you could each pick one big-ticket program related to research or exploration to be funded, what would it be and why?

GB: Study centrifugal gravity and make a closed habitat work. Without those, there will be no more exploration at all.

GZ: Improvements in human health and longevity might make us less frantic to do what we do at the corporate and governmental levels, and maybe help us look outward more than we do. Maybe.

Given that I have the attention of you both -- Benford collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke on Beyond the Fall of Night and Zebrowski is a Clarke scholar and one of the author's close friends -- I'd love your reactions to the fact that the New York Times Millennium Time Capsule at the American Museum of Natural History contains a copy of 2001. How do you think that the people of 3000 AD will react to it?

GB: I served on the New York Times time capsule panel, and got a laugh out of including 2001. They might as well know us by our unrealized dreams... I think denizens of 3000 AD will find it amusing, betraying attitudes and assumptions we cannot now even guess.

GZ: 2001 (the novel and film) may become a human "uplift myth" in future centuries, and be viewed much as we see the Odyssey of Homer as a meditation on life and mortality; and it may seem just as quaint in its surface features, though maybe not in essentials.

Both of you have been SF writers for three decades or more. What do you think is the biggest difference in the field between when you started and now?

GZ: Intellect and thought have less prestige within SF, although there are more thoughtful and brilliant writers than ever -- but whose ear do they have? Intellect and thought are not as admired as they once were. As Jay Bulworth (in Warren Beatty's movie) said, "Money turns everything to crap."

Money should be a means, not an end. When editors throw up their hands and say "what can we do," I reply that it was publishers who made today's lesser readers, by following rather than leading. He who does not oppose what is makes a pact with all past wrongs.

GB: It's split into myriad subfandoms. Hard SF was a small area when I started writing, and now supports perhaps a dozen or more writers. It's always been the core, and expansion of audience has helped. But SF has taken over the visual media, and the genre's tragedy is that its best work does not get translated to TV or movies. To do it is difficult, but not impossible.

Any particular stories you'd love to see on the big screen?

GZ: Starman Jones and Have Spacesuit Will Travel, both by Heinlein. And instead of the Stars Wars films, I once dreamed of the Lensman novels by E. E. Smith with Christopher Reeve in the lead as Kimball Kinnison. Jack Williamson's Legion of Space novels would have been so much better than Star Wars. Come to think of it, The Paradox Men by Charles L. Harness, often described as "widescreen baroque," would beat anything on the screen --if done straight, with no updates or fiddling. Any of H.G. Wells's novels, with no updates, in period.

GB: I'd like to see Poul Anderson's The High Crusade made -- great fun!

I think someone actually did The High Crusade...

GB: I know, but it's terrible! A cheap German production, actually. Even Poul hates it. I meant a real movie of it, done Spielberg style.

Both of you have taught SF at a college level. What was on the syllabus (i.e., what books, in your mind, are crucial to the history of the genre, or were at the time)?

GB: I taught the classics, as might appear in the SFWA anthology. But more recent work should be included, perhaps by having the class read all or most of the Hartwell or Dozois Best of the Year collections.

GZ: I taught one of the first full-credit university courses in SF during the early '70s at SUNY/Binghamton, Harpur College. My books included mostly what was in print: City by Simak, Starship Troopers by Heinlein, and a half dozen others. I took students by petition, and turned away 60 or more.

You've been friends a long time, yet this is your first collaboration. Now that it's received its share of critical acclaim, do you think you'd like to make this an ongoing partnership? If so, what would you like to do next?

GZ: Greg and I have one or two major anthology ideas in mind, which will be announced in due course. But I think the most important stuff that has passed between us over three decades is the conversations and the friendship.

GB: I have a few vague ideas for collections that should be done--but whether publishers think them profitable we'll have to see. Maybe a volume of Sex Meets SF?

Is there a question you have always wished an interviewer would ask? If so, what's the answer?

GB: Q: Why do you do all this labor, when just being a professor of physics should be enough? A: Gosh, I never thought of that! I'll stop writing right now . . . .

GZ: What do I wish you'd asked me? Was the career as a writer and editor of SF worth it? My love of what I do is undiminished -- and what I do when I write is so much more interesting than actual publication. I learn constantly, in many fields. I observe the world, not just see it. I have known some of the most interesting people of my time. My childhood gods have in some cases become my friends. But what goes on between a writer and his readers is still mostly an affair about which the publisher is the last to know.

What are you working on now?

GB: I'm taking time off to help develop a new sort of spacecraft for NASA, a light sail to be driven in space by microwave beams directed from the ground. Like a solar sail, but with photons controlled from the source, so light pressure can change orbits, spin the sail, maybe even more. It's a wild card longshot idea. We're trying to test this at JPL now, trying to levitate a sail and spin it, against gravity.

I want to take a year off writing, at least. I've done too much the last 2 years -- 2 novels, 2 anthologies, short story collection, 2 nonfiction . . . whoosh!

GZ: Right now I am working on short stories and articles, also on a mystery/detective novel. Other projected novels, well developed already, are: After the Stars are Gone, The History Machine, Stranger Ships, This Life and Later Ones. Two sequels to The Killing Star, and The Biotimers, all with Charles Pellegrino, if we can find the time.

Beyond that, I have great feeling for another dozen novels, and maybe 50 works of short fiction, if life and energy stay with me.

The biggest problem is a publishing industry that is in ruins, that does not know what to do about it, that does active harm to authors by slowing their careers, often stopping them. It's time to take back the SF field and put it again into the care of its writer-editors, the kind of people who created this distinctive movement of literature.

There has rarely been a major SF editor who was not a writer. Dream teams of SF writer-editors wait to do the job, except for the ignorance of corporate money.

Additional question to George Zebrowski

Additional questions to Gregory Benford

Robert A. Heinlein's "Universe" is currently in print and available as the first half of Orphans of the Sky.