Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  You mention the story takes place over a long span of time, and so you’ve actually structured it as a series of short stories, each of which jumps ahead into the future.

  Right. It begins in 2006, and then it goes back to 1939, where Arkwright meets three other people at the first World’s Science Fiction Convention in New York. The four of them comprise a clique or a club. They call themselves “The Legion of Tomorrow.” And they form the backbone of the Arkwright Foundation. So, the stories that make up Arkwright move forward in time through the twentieth century, into the twenty-first and twenty-second until we finally end in about the twenty-fifth century with the genetically modified descendant of not only Arkwright himself, but also the other people who were involved in building that first starship on this planet many, many light years from Earth.

  You mention that the book starts out with the first Worldcon, and kind of goes through the greatest hits of golden age science fiction moments. How did you decide which moments to include in the story?

  I’ve always been interested in the history of science fiction. The novel was originally conceived as being about the history of SF, but after a while I came to realize that it would best be told as an SF story itself. One of the most interesting events in SF history is that first 1939 convention, which they called “The World’s Science Fiction Convention,” and when I say “world’s” that’s with an apostrophe S. It was meant to tie into the World’s Fair that was being held in New York that year. It really was kind of a small affair. It was only about a hundred people who showed up, mostly teenage boys. It was held not even in a hotel, but in a Boy Scout caravan hall in Midtown Manhattan. There was kind of a fan feud going on at the time between one clique, the Futurians, who would later include some of the founding fathers of SF, people like Frederik Pohl, and Don Wollheim, and Cyril Kornbluth, and the more conservative New Fandom, which were led by Sam Moskowitz. Which led to the New Fandom trying to lock out the Futurians. That was a pivotal moment in the novel that allowed me to show not only where these guys met, but where they were coming from, that these four major characters weren’t just science fiction fans, but were visionaries.

  When I went forward in time, I went to other key events that occurred during SF history, like for instance, the cruise that occurred right before the Apollo 17 launch, when a cruise ship with a lot of key players like Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein, and various other people, went and anchored off the Atlantic coast and watched the final Apollo moon ship take off. And then, progress forward into 1989 at the WorldCon in Boston, which, in fact, I was at. That was where I made my professional debut. So sort of carrying these characters forward to there. There was a lot of research, and actually, I think I probably could have written a lot more scenes. I just pulled up stuff that I thought was particularly interesting and would carry the story forward.

  Going back to the first World’s Con, this is true, I assume, that Cyril Kornbluth punched Forrest Ackerman?

  What I was told was that Cyril Kornbluth liked to punch people in the stomach because it would help them remember who he was. Yeah, that was one thing that I learned that was kind of a weird personality trait. Yep, that happened. The only thing in that part of the story that is made up was that John W. Campbell played in the baseball game that occurred on the last day of the convention. I have no idea whether John Campbell was there. I do know for certain that Ray Bradbury was there, and that he was the scorekeeper. History doesn’t record exactly where Campbell was on that particular day, but I decided that it was too much of a temptation to not have Campbell play baseball and strike out.

  Reading about that softball game, you’re just like, “Oh, man, I would like to be there so much.” Also, with the Apollo 17 launch, like you mentioned, I just wanted to read this part here, you say, “Fred and Carol Pohl chatted with Isaac Asimov and his new wife, Janet. Seated at a table beside the pool was an unholy quorum of Art Clarke, Marvin Minsky, and Carl Sagan. Ted Sturgeon was huddled with Analog’s new editor Ben Bova, while former astronaut Ed Mitchell and NBC anchorman Hugh Downs were having a drink and a laugh with Bob and Jenny Heinlein.” That just sounds like one awesome party, right there.

  That would have been a great party. I would have loved to have been there. And that’s all drawn from fact. All of those people were on that boat. The odd thing about it was that not too many people went on that trip. It was supposed to be something that they would sell tickets to not just science fiction fans but to space buffs, and so you were supposed to go out on this cruise with all of these luminaries and watch the Apollo launch, and very few tickets were sold. They ended up losing money on that.

  I guess that’s an argument against time travel, right? Because if they invent time travel in the future, people are going to want to go back in time and visit.

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

  One thing that really struck me was when you’re talking about the Futurians versus the New Fandom, where you have these people who want to use science fiction for social progress versus these people who just think it should be about monsters and mad scientists and think that the other people are all communists. You don’t have to change that very much to have it sound like it’s about conflicts going on in science fiction today.

  No, you really don’t. It’s really ironic. I wrote that scene before the whole Hugo kerfuffle of this last year happened with the Sad Puppies and so forth, so it wasn’t written in direct reference to that, but it is rather odd and very coincidental that the same arguments are being repeated. And, not only that, but I think most of the people who are involved in all that and had something invested in this were probably completely unconscious of the fact that it does echo the past. History tends to repeat itself.

  I understand that you actually stepped on Robert Heinlein’s foot one time?

  That was an embarrassing incident. I’ll tell you the story. Yes, I did. When I was eighteen years old, I was at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1976 that happened in Kansas City, MidAmeriCon I. We’ve got MidAmeriCon II coming up later this year. Heinlein was the Guest of Honor. It was almost impossible to meet Heinlein. Whenever he was in public, there was a solid knot of people always around him. There were people, I understand, who literally camped outside of his hotel suite waiting for when he would emerge. He had fan security people always around him, and they were keeping people away, when Heinlein himself, I think, really wanted to meet more people.

  After a day or two, I realized that my chances of meeting him were probably impossible, and so I pretty much gave up on it. But, Saturday night of the convention, a party was held in the penthouse suite of the convention hotel, the Muehlebach. It was Kelly Freas’s birthday party, Kelly Freas the illustrator. It was an invitation-only party, and a couple of dear friends of mine from the Nashville Science Fiction Club, both of them no longer with us, Ken and Lou Moore, had been invited, and I begged them to let me tag along. They did, and I sort of snuck in the door with them.

  It was an absolutely jam-packed party. It was literally shoulder-to-shoulder and chest-to-back. You could not walk, you could not breathe. I was in there for about ten or fifteen minutes, and I decided that I wasn’t really having a lot of fun, so I began to try to make my way back across the three rooms to the front door. I’d gotten about halfway there when the door opens up, and in walk Robert and Jenny Heinlein. They’d come late to the party. They’d been at the opera that evening.

  I’ve never seen anything like this ever again in my life. I mean, the whole party just dropped dead. Everybody stopped talking at once, and just looked and went, “Oh my god.” And Heinlein very graciously just said, “Proceed. We just wanted to stop in and give our birthday greetings to Kelly.” And the party picked up again. So I began considering making my way towards the door, not intending to meet Heinlein at all. I had given up on that idea. But he was heading my way, and I was heading his way, and quite abruptly I found myself quite literally face-to-face with him. I realized, okay, it’s now or never. I said, �
�Mr. Heinlein, pardon me, my name is Allen Steele, and I’ve been reading your work all of my life. Rocket Ship Galileo was the very first novel I ever read. I’ve read most of your books, and I just wanted to tell you thank you so much for all the hours of pleasure that you’ve given me.” It was something like that. It really came out as much more of a babble than that.

  At one point he said, “Excuse me, I can’t quite hear you.” And I had to step a little closer so that he could clearly hear me. He heard me out, and he nodded, and he said, “Thank you very much, young man. I greatly appreciate it. Now, would you kindly get off of my foot.”

  And, I looked down, and sure enough, there was my grimy Adidas sneaker standing on top of his perfectly spit-and-polished brogues. Oh god, I felt horrible. I just shrank. I apologized profusely.

  The thing about it is that I’ve told this story a number of times, and two people who knew Heinlein personally, who knew him well, one is Jerry Pournelle and the other is Spider Robinson, told me that Heinlein didn’t take crap from anybody. And if he had not been genuinely flattered by what I had to say to him, then he wouldn’t have put up with that for a second. The fact that he was actually willing to put up with physical pain while I spoke to him meant that he must have been complimented, so it made me feel a little better.

  Did you save that sneaker?

  I should have! I would like to say that something wore off during that.

  That might be worth something these days.

  Yeah, this sneaker touched Robert Heinlein’s foot. I wish I had something like an autograph or something like that, but I think the story is even better.

  Do you think that there’s a big Heinlein influence on Arkwright?

  I think so. Of course, I think there’s a Heinlein influence on a lot of what I write. Heinlein was somebody who has influenced everybody. He’s science fiction’s Hemingway. He was the person who changed the rules of the game and altered science fiction forever. Even if you’re not consciously emulating what he’s doing or walking in his shoes, even if you’re completely rejecting it, in some way or another, you’re being influenced by him.

  This reminds me a little bit of Time for the Stars and a little bit of Orphans of the Sky toward the end.

  That’s very complimentary. Thank you. I was thinking a little more along the lines of “The Man Who Sold the Moon” in the way that this is a story not so much about the trip itself, but the preparation for the trip, about the effort that it takes to go into building the starship. And not to spoil things for anybody who might read the book, but we don’t actually get to the planet until the last quarter of the book, and that’s a very deliberate thing. It’s about the trip. It isn’t about the destination.

  I also thought this idea of this wise person who puts a plan in motion to safeguard the human future obviously has echoes of Asimov’s Foundation in it.

  Oh yeah. In fact, there’s a scene in there, again without giving things away too much for anybody who might want to read the book, but there’s a scene in Arkwright which is a very deliberate emulation of a very famous scene in Foundation with Hari Seldon.

  I was thinking very much about the golden age of science fiction as I was writing this novel, and there’s lots of little things hidden away that readers who know much about SF are going to be able to pick up on.

  One thing in the book that’s quite different from the typical golden age science fiction story and from the starships we see in movies and TV shows is the starship itself. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with that?

  The novel came out of a conference that I went to a few years ago at the University of California at San Diego called the Starship Century Conference. It was really a unique conference. Greg Benford and his twin brother Jim organized the thing, and they brought together scientists and science fiction writers to sit together on two days of panels and discuss the possibilities of building a starship in this century. They basically threw out the idea that interstellar travel is something that we’ve got to wait until some kind of exotic technology comes available to us in the twenty-third century, and only then can we build the Starship Enterprise. The conference was talking about near term prospects for this.

  So, I was a participant, but most of the time I was actually listening, and while I was listening to what other people were saying, I began to see a way of mating this story that I had had in the back of my head for a long time about the history of science fiction to a novel about the building of the first starship. Because one of the things that struck me was the fact that this conference was a clear example of how science and science fiction influence each other. That science, just as much as science fiction writers are looking over the shoulders of scientists for their ideas—that a lot of science and technology is inspired by science fiction. There’s a feedback loop that’s always in place, and it’s been there for quite a long time.

  The starship itself was based on ideas that were put forth during this conference by Greg and Jim about microwave propulsion systems, microwave solar sails. And also coupled with Freeman Dyson’s paper that he delivered at the conference where he pointed out that one of the most difficult aspects of interstellar travel is keeping people alive for the journey, and perhaps we should not even bother with that. Perhaps we should send out seed ships, as it were, to use the old-fashioned term for this. We should have DNA instead and have people basically cloned in situ at a planet which could even be transformed to make it into a habitable world. The novel was sort of a synthesis of a lot of different ideas that were thrown out during this time, and so the Galactique, the ship which is built and launched in my novel, came out of that.

  Just to give listeners a bit more detail about this ship, it’s kind of this long rod, and it has this solar sail that’s over a hundred miles wide.

  Basically, the ship is comprised of four modules that are assembled on the ground and launched by reusable unmanned rockets. They’re assembled in high Earth orbit, and then an additional module contains the solar sail. I keep confusing solar sails. It’s actually a microwave sail, which is in turn pushed by a beam or a microwave satellite which is parked in a Lagrange orbit, so you effectively leave your engine behind. The microwave beam from the satellite propels the craft once the sail is deployed, and you have a boost phase, which lasts—I forget what it was in the novel.

  It’s two and a half years.

  Until it reaches half of light speed, at which point it has reached cruise velocity, and it continues to its destination.

  I think most people think of interstellar planets as being so far away it’s impossible to reach them, but you say in this book, if you could get a ship up to half of light speed, you could get to some realistic prospects for human settlement in a reasonably feasible amount of time.

  During this conference it was postulated that the minimum cruise speed that you would need to make something viable would be about twenty percent of light speed. This particular proposal, which Jim Benford and his company Microwave Sciences have come up with for microwave propulsion systems basically has it in theory that you could get a craft up to half the speed of light, and at which point it would be possible to reach a star within about twenty to thirty light years from Earth in about a half century or so.

  The planet that they’re going to in this book is Gliese 667C-e. Could you talk a little bit about that?

  The planet itself is now only theoretical—the star system exists, the planets have been pretty much ascertained to exist, but that particular one is still kind of controversial, and I mention that in the book. That one may or may not actually exist, but if it exists, it would be in a kind of a Goldilocks position considering it is in orbit around a red dwarf. See, that’s one of the interesting things about the recent discovery of exoplanets, the realization that habitable zones may be a lot more flexible than originally thought. That what is considered to be habitable may not necessarily be the same thing as what we thought years ago, that habitable planets could only exist around
G-class suns like our own. You may well be able to have habitable worlds around N-class red dwarfs like Gliese. So I was postulating the idea of a world that would not be like Earth when we get there, but which a probe could terraform, and then once the planet is transformed into something that would be habitable, then you would take the genetic material of your colonists-to-be that are aboard your ship, and then you tinker with them so that you have a race that is suitable for this particular planet. They may not be suitable for life on Earth, but they would be perfectly suitable for that particular planet.

  A couple of years ago I interviewed Annalee Newitz, and she had written a book where she had interviewed a bunch of scientists and a bunch of science fiction authors, and all the scientists said, “Oh, we’ll never do genetic engineering on humans,” and all the science fiction authors said, “Of course we will.”

  This is one of those things that seems to be a little bit of a disagreement between scientists and science fiction writers. Again, we have to remember something that Arthur C. Clarke said many years ago, and that was that when a respected senior scientist says something is impossible, generally speaking, they usually turn out to be wrong. I think that if the technology is there, it may well be possible that we may do it. We may do it for those particular reasons. I’ve been playing with the idea of genetically modifying people for living in space for a while now, and in fact, the next book that I’ve got coming out, I deal with it quite a bit, and that’s here in our solar system. I think that that’s something that is not only possible, but as we go out into space, and not necessarily to go to interstellar worlds, but going to worlds within our own solar system, it may actually be desirable.