One challenge, too, you mention, of settling these alien worlds is you say that the DNA of its organic molecules may have the wrong chirality.
Right, that would be the showstopper, and there’s no way of determining in advance whether or not your molecules are left-handed or right-handed. So that part of it is going to be a roll of the dice. Without sending probes in advance, which would take a very long time to get the results back to Earth, you’re casting your fate to the wind.
Right, so basically, if they had the wrong chirality, Earth organisms would be poisoned by them.
Exactly. At which point all of your efforts have come to naught. Game over. But I think that’s probably a risk that is not only one we’d have to take, but I think, a risk that a number of people would be willing to take.
Do we have any idea of what the chances are, or is that something that’s impossible to calculate?
Theoretically, it’s fifty/fifty. It may be more or it may be less than that; again, it’s entirely theoretical.
Given that Nathan Arkwright is a fictional character, how are we going to make this happen in real life?
Okay, for one thing, science fiction is about predicting the future, as we know. I wasn’t trying to set out a blueprint for interstellar travel in this; as most SF does, I was performing a thought experiment. Having said this, something like an Arkwright Foundation may be the way to go.
One of the things that has gone wrong in the exploration of space is that we’ve adopted a mindset since the success of the Apollo program that this is the way it should be done. That it’s got to be done by big government agencies, tax payer-supported, and done as crash programs, because that was how Apollo was done and Apollo was successful. I think that the way to go about this is taking the long view. That we should be doing this by public-private endeavors by foundations that are set up to fund the research and development leading to building the craft itself and doing this over very long periods of time. In the book, it takes generations. It’s going to be something that’s going to be very much akin to building cathedrals. That’s an analogy that John Cramer made at the Starship Century Conference, was that starships may be like cathedrals, that they take generations to build. I think that that may well be the way to go with it.
The way that we’re doing it now isn’t getting us anywhere. NASA is grossly underfunded. It’s like .6 percent of the federal budget. The way to think about that is that if you have a dollar, and that represents the entire federal budget, then NASA’s share of that is half of a penny, and that’s the way that it’s been for time immemorial. It’s been stuck at that level for what, twenty or thirty years now? We’re not going to get to the moon, even, with that kind of money. Let alone to Mars. We’ve got to take another approach. Arkwright was sort of a way of suggesting another kind of approach. Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a science fiction writer who’s going to be able to do this. Most SF writers I know don’t make that kind of money. On the other hand, it sure would have been nice to see George Lucas take some of the money that he earned from selling Star Wars to Disney, and he could take some of that four billion dollars and put it into a foundation, and you could call it the Skywalker Foundation, and it would be a great thing.
It’s interesting because you actually say in the book, you mention a scene where Nathan goes back to WorldCon in the ’80s and feels that science fiction fans aren’t interested in space anymore. How much truth do you think there is to that?
It’s unfortunate, but, yes, I think there is. I think that at some point I noticed that there was a turning away from that in the late ’80s and into the ’90s, where people stopped being interested in space exploration. Stopped being interested in science. And in the last decade or so, it really got to be widespread. Science fiction fans kind of went off to happy-Harry-Potter-land of boy wizards and talking dragons and wise old elves and abandoned futuristic thinking. It seems to me it’s swinging back again. There is now a resurgence of interest in a more realistic science fiction. I’m glad to see that. So, those scenes were kind of reflecting on that a bit.
One thing I saw you say related to that, that I thought was really interesting, was that when cyberpunk was really popular in the ’80s, a lot of authors jumped on that bandwagon, and then their careers suffered when the fad ended.
That’s one of the things that can happen, is that SF writers can jump on bandwagons, as you say, and follow a trend, and trends only last for a certain amount of time. You know, cyberpunk was predicting a particular kind of future, and, yeah, well, we got that future, and it lasted for about fifteen minutes, and then we moved on. The idea that we were all going to be living in a world where we were plugging ourselves directly into computers and walking into these virtual reality worlds didn’t really happen the way that it was postulated. Computers became widespread, and my mother knows how to operate a computer. She’s ninety-seven years old. But she’s not a cyberpunk. We got that kind of digital revolution, but it didn’t come the way that the cyberpunks thought it was going to happen.
But, on the other hand, space exploration didn’t happen the way that science fiction writers thought it was going to happen. Science fiction writers are very bad at predicting the future. On the other hand, we’re really quite good at influencing things.
You’ve said that you’ve been to NASA and that ninety percent of the people got into it because they were science fiction fans.
I went to NASA, to the Johnson Space Center, several years ago for a visit. I was there because I was the Guest of Honor at an SF convention, ApolloCon in Houston. A friend of mine who works for a NASA subcontractor arranged for me to have a VIP tour. It was terrific. I got to fly the space shuttle simulator, and I went to mission control and the historical mission control, and I saw the big pool where they practice zero-G training and so forth. The thing that struck me was the youth of most of the people who were working there. Most of the NASA people who I talked to were younger than I am. Most of the median ages seemed to be in the twenties and thirties. Almost every person I talked to told me that they were science fiction fans, and a couple of them told me that they were fans of my work, which is awfully flattering. I think that this is one of those places where science fiction has very much influenced the shape of things that have come around.
I’ve actually seen in some of your bios that you’re almost a consultant sometimes, drawing on your experience as a science fiction writer to help advise government agencies and things like that?
I belong to a group called Sigma, which is comprised of a couple of dozen SF writers who sometimes act as unpaid consultants to the government on matters of national security, and I’ve also been to a defense conference that was held overseas in England. A number of SF writers were brought there some years ago to participate in a three-day think tank on future weapons of mass destruction and things that we should be on the lookout for after the atomic bomb. In the past, I was a consultant with the Space Frontier Foundation, but they put an end to that without telling me, so I no longer do that. Those are the organized things. I think most of my work is really involved in sitting here and writing science fiction novels and stories and putting them out into the world and sometimes they catch fire.
Speaking of national security threats, you talk in the book about climate change and the impact that that’s going to have. A bunch of the cities are flooded in your future, and you say that the world lost over a billion people as a result?
It’s unfortunate, but I think that we’re going to be seeing that, and I think yes, we are going to see a lot of lives lost, and I think we are going to see a lot of loss of property, and entire nations may fall as a result of this. But I don’t think it’s the end of the world. We—“we” being the human race—have a remarkable ability to adapt. We’ve done it many times in the past, and I think that climate change is real. It is coming. But I don’t think it’s going to crush us. If there’s anything that kills us, it’s going to be our own stupidity. And
that is the worst enemy. It isn’t the climate. It’s us being real dumb about things. But, on the other hand, again, I’m optimistic enough to think that there’s more smart people in the world than stupid people, and I think in the end, the smart people will rescue us from the stupid people.
You say that space exploration might actually give us the solution to climate change, or at least to surviving it.
I think, for one thing, one near-term solution that I would certainly like to see revived is the idea of solar power satellites. A lot of climate change is a result of our overuse and overreliance on fossil fuels. If we could move large-scale energy production off the planet and into orbit, that would go a long way to solving this in the long run. I’ve written extensively about solar power satellites in the past. My first novel, Orbital Decay, was about this.
I’m a bit disappointed that the future that was forecast in Orbital Decay has not come to pass. That novel was published in 1989, and I had SPS1 being built in orbit in 2016. Obviously that’s not happening. But I don’t think that it’s an idea that can be tossed out either. I think that there is still being some work done in that direction, and I would certainly like to see more being done.
You say as well that there’s a strong potential for lunar helium-3 to be used as a fuel source for fusion reactors.
I’m not sure if there is a strong consensus for that. It is problematic in the fact that it would take a lot of mining and a lot of refinement to get even a small amount to be used. There’s also the fact that fusion seems to be one of these technologies that’s always ten years down the road. It’s “Soon come, mon.” If we could make fusion work, and if we could set up economic lunar mining facilities, then yes, it could be the energy resource of the future, but in the short term, I think SPS may be more viable.
Is there a limited time window for this, where we need to set up some of this near-space infrastructure before global warming swamps us and our natural resources to do some of this stuff starts running out?
I think sooner is better than later. Martin Rees gave us about a fifty percent chance of surviving in this century unless we make some fundamental changes. I certainly hope that Sir Martin is a pessimist, but I’m also afraid that he may be right, that we need to get off our collective dead ass and get up and do something about some of these things. Again, this goes back to the smart people in the world having to save us from the dumb people.
On a lighter note, I wanted to mention this story. In 2001, I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and you were one of the instructors who came and visited, and you told this story about how you got your first short story published that has always stuck with me. I was wondering if you could tell that story?
Well, the first short story published was “Live from the Mars Hotel,” which was in the mid-December 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and I’ll add incidentally that that short story is now on Mars itself. It was included on a disc that contained a whole bunch of science fiction stories and novels about Mars that the Planetary Society put on one of the Mars probes and sent up there. It actually is on Mars now. Anyway, the short story was written after I had sold my first novel, Orbital Decay. I wrote Orbital Decay because I had been trying for years and years to sell short stories and couldn’t get anywhere, so I tried my luck with a novel instead, and the novel was more successful, even though it took much longer to write.
I was at the science fiction convention Boskone 1987. I was having coffee with my editor Ginger Buchanan, who had just told me that Ace wanted to buy the book, and she also told me because they had such a publishing backlog at that moment that it was going to be two years before the book was published. I said, okay, I can live with that.
She said, “You should go out there and write a few short stories and sell them to get your name out there.” I said, “Well, it’s a little easier said than done. The reason why I wrote this novel is that I was unable to sell any stories, so asking me to go out there and casually sell a few short stories … that’s really kind of hard to do.”
She said, “It shouldn’t be too hard. Just a moment.” And she raises her hand and said, “Hello, Gardner, would you come over here please?” And who comes walking over but Gardner Dozois, who was then the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and she introduced us. She said, “This is Allen Steele. He’s a wonderful new writer. We’re buying his first novel, Orbital Decay. ”
And he said, “Oh, very pleased to meet you.” We shook hands, had a little small talk, and he walked off. I said, “Well, what was that all about?” Ginger said, “What I want you to do is, as soon as you get home from this convention, I want you to write a new short story. Write the best short story that you can, and send it to Gardner, and remind him that you met over the weekend.” So I did. And that short story was “Live from the Mars Hotel.”
Gardner didn’t automatically accept it. He said it was a little long, and I needed to cut it from 10,000 words to 6,000 words. And I did, and then he bought it. That was my first sale. The moral to this story is sometimes it takes a little bit of face-to-face contact to get things done in publishing.
See, I’m always afraid I’m going to step on the editor’s foot or something and it’s going to do more harm than good.
Yeah, you should not emulate what I did with Robert Heinlein, no. And you should always be on your best behavior and so forth. But the fact of the matter is it’s an editor’s fondest wish to discover the best big new talent … I mean, that’s what makes editing such a dream job for some people. Everybody wants to discover the next Heinlein, or the next Neil Gaiman, or the next Bruce Sterling, or the next Hugh Howey, or the next Charlie Stross, or whatever. You want to be able to find this brilliant story by a previously unknown writer and put him in your magazine or website or publish their first book. If they meet somebody like that in public, it doesn’t matter too much if they’ve got spinach stuck between their teeth; as long as they don’t make a royal ass out of themselves, they’re willing to forgive a lot.
I’ll give that a shot then.
[Laughter] Well, you should.
There was another line in the book I wanted to ask you about, this part where one of the characters says, “When I let one of my professors at MIT know that I read science fiction, he asked me why I was wasting my time with that trash.”
That actually comes from a point of fact. I had an astronomy professor in college. When I brought my first novel to him and showed it to him, he got very upset, and he said, “Dammit, I thought I was training an astronomer, and you became a science fiction writer instead.” There is sometimes a bit of that, I’m afraid.
Right, because he said that he didn’t think the science in science fiction was accurate enough for him.
I’ve heard that a couple of times in academia. I’ve heard academic science professors profess to hate SF because SF writers make mistakes. Well, yeah, they do, but they should be honest, so do scientists. Nobody is perfect, honestly.
The other thing is that the purpose of science fiction is not to teach science. It’s not really even to explain science. It’s speculation. We’re playing mind games. Expecting absolute, rigorous adherence to scientific facts at all times in a work of science fiction is kind of a mug’s game. There are very, very, very few works of SF that are going to meet that standard. Even some of the best SF writers in the world make mistakes. I’ve spotted errors in the works of people like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. People make mistakes. Sometimes it’s mistakes of convenience. It happens.
I think one thing that’s interesting, though, is it seems like sometimes the science fiction is right and the science is wrong. I remember when I was growing up, I watched Star Wars, and Luke Skywalker is watching the two suns set, and I remember scientists telling me that was impossible for a planet to be orbiting a binary star like that, and that turned out to be right.
No, it turned out to be very possible that we could have planets around binary systems. This is one of the
places where the discovery of exoplanets has caused us to rethink our idea of habitability. It was thought that habitable planets would not exist around red dwarves, and now it seems like, yes, they could.
I recently read an old SF novel, The Skylark of Space by E. E. Doc Smith, and I read its original version that was serialized in Amazing in 1928, and it is stated there that in the original version the solar system has eight planets, with Neptune being the one that was farthest away. This was before, of course, the discovery of Pluto. So I got curious about this, and knowing that The Skylark of Space was revised later on, I found the revised version, and yes, it’s stated there that the solar system now has nine planets including Pluto. Now we know that the original version was right all along. The solar system has eight planets and Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object. It’s a minor planet. Sometimes the things that are thought to be wrong are right and vice versa.
One last line I wanted to ask you about is there’s a part where one of the characters thinks back over the classics of literature, and these names include Shakespeare, Poe, Hemingway, Márquez, Clarke, Swanwick, and Le Guin.
I was making a nod to some of my friends.
Do you think though that those are the authors that will be considered the classics in a hundred or two hundred years?
I do. Absolutely. I think that people are still going to be reading Arthur’s, Ursula’s, and Michael’s work. I think those people are going to be stacked right up alongside the great classic writers. One thing, although some of these writers are considered to be popular fiction today, writers that were considered to be classic writers now were popular fiction in their time. Ernest Hemingway wrote best sellers. Raymond Chandler is considered to be a classic novelist now. His work appeared in pulp magazines. You can find stories by writers like Tennessee Williams in Black Mask and other pulps of the 1930s. I think that a lot of SF writers are going to be considered authors of classic literature as we go into the twenty-first century. I honestly hope I’m one of them.
Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016 Page 23