by Larry Niven
Eighteen-wheelers use a lot of oil. The United States produces fuel enough to run our cars ourselves, or near enough. I’m surprised that Pons and Fleischmann haven’t published everything they’ve got, damn quick, before Iran sets a price on their heads.
They can do more harm to the oil-producing nations than any novelist.
Run the eighteen-wheelers on deuterium and we’ll find city air growing cleaner.
With small power plants in our basements, we would attain an independence we’ve long thought to be lost…
Wait a minute. We’ve seen how difficult it is to get one of these things to work at all. Wouldn’t that push the commercial product a long way into the future? and make it hellishly expensive to manufacture? and a pain in the ass to own?
Yes. Sorry. For the foreseeable future, the fusor will be a rich man’s toy. And he’s a survivalist. And he hasn’t stopped paying his electric bill because he doesn’t quite trust his fusor.
Then again: everything starts as a rich man’s toy. Be the first on your block… The wealthy test new products for us. The best designs ultimately surface, dependability goes up and the price drops. Maybe by A.D. 2050.
4) Don’t expect high efficiency here. This is a heat engine, but we’ve got to keep the electrodes below the melting point. Thermodynamics tells us that the maximum efficiency of a heat motor depends on the ratio between operating and ambient temperature, counting from absolute zero.
That’s not good, but it’s not awful.
Contrast the OTEC power plant (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion). It gets its power from the difference in temperature between the surface and bottom of an ocean. It’s expected to run on a temperature difference of ten Centigrade degrees. A sea bottom is always at 4° C = 277° A; so the ratio would be 10/277 = theoretical maximum of 3.6 percent efficiency. Lousy. But there’s a lot of ocean; and seawater is very conductive; and because you’re stirring up nutrients in the sea bottom mud, the only pollution is an excess of fish. Low-efficiency, clean-running, infinite fuel supply…and OTEC remains useful, if you have a warm-water ocean.
Fusors are fueled by the deuterium in water. Low-efficiency, clean-running, infinite fuel. We could use up all of Earth’s deuterium over the next hundred thousand years and not deplete the seas by much, because most seawater isn’t deuterium oxide. And when we run out, the moons of the outer planets are water cores inside ice shells!
5) Still, fusors will operate best where it’s coldest, where the heat sink is most useful.
Hey, that’s interesting! Solar power needs sunlight. An OTEC operates best in tropic summer seas. Even orbiting solar plants would deliver power most easily to the equator. But a fusor operates best during a six-month winter night at the Antarctic Pole! If you put a fusor in every basement in Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, and Antarctica, and institute a regular deuterium delivery, what do you get?
Civilization. Where nothing lives, that’s where you want to put your fusor industry. What makes civilization work is a good heat sink. Every nation that borders the Arctic Circle is already exploiting that environment to some extent, except Canada and the United States. But fusors could make the North Pole worth having, and the South Pole worth even more (because there’s land under it). The Soviets could laugh at our warm-water ports.
6) I was in a physics class at Cal Tech the day I realized that the proper place for a power plant is Pluto. My teacher was not impressed. Bright guy, but all these decades later, he still hates science fiction.
So let’s talk about space.
Launch to orbit has always been the bottleneck, and the fusor won’t help us here. The power output will be too low. But “Once you’re in orbit you’re halfway to anywhere,” said Robert Heinlein. The fusor brings everything closer.
A fusor is the obvious power plant for a lunar base, or for anyplace in the solar system that experiences long nights.
Light sails are still the way to explore the inner solar system. But inward from Earth there’s not much besides the sun. Outward from Earth, the sunlight gets thin. You want your own power supply even if you keep the sail. The black sky makes a terrific heat sink, too. A fusor ought to work fine with an ion drive.
Your fuel supply weighs almost nothing and lasts almost forever (though you can still run out of reaction mass. Shall we stop at various outer moons?). The colder it gets, the better your fusor motor likes it. This is what we really need to explore Jupiter and its moon system…and the rest of the solar planets, and the comets of the Oort Cloud…and ultimately the nearer stars. The domain of the fusor-powered ion drive reaches from lunar orbit, to infinity.
Jeremy Rifkin’s response was quick. Cold fusion is evil, not because of an intrinsic danger, but because any form of power encourages the destruction of the environment.
Then it all began to look like vaporware.
The fusor assuredly isn’t a hoax. At worst it’s a blind alley, and not even an expensive one. At best—
Have you ever wished that you’d gotten in on a fad while it still worked? We could have been on Mars with a refitted submarine, before the Dean Drive evaporated. We could have got thin on the beef and bourbon diet; become indecently healthy on brown rice. We could reshape civilization with fusor power.
Anything that makes Jeremy Rifkin unhappy can’t be all bad.
Collaboration
But how can anyone collaborate? Dreams are sacred! Somebody else’s sticky fingers muddying your ideas, playing ignorant games in your personal mental playground—and what if you find yourselves trying to gallop off in different directions? How can you stand it?
Well, it’s nothing to go into lightly.
I’ve done it, though. As of 12/10/1982 I have written:
A novel and three scripts for Land of the Lost with David Gerrold.
Five and a half novels, two novellas, and an alternate ending to a movie, with Jerry Pournelle.
A triple collaboration with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes. (Another triple is at dead stall. Triples may be overcomplex.)
A short story and two-and-a-fraction novels with Steven Barnes.
A short story with Dian Girard.
Several stories set in “franchise universes,” in other people’s playgrounds.
Two solar systems, Medea and Thraxisp, with ten and eight collaborators, respectively.
I’ve been advised to kick the habit. I think it’s too late. I suppose I should add that I’ve never followed all of the following set of rules. That’s how I learned them.
1) You must trust each other absolutely.
It helps if each of you has a track record. You don’t write with an amateur…and if you’ve never published, you don’t ask a professional to collaborate with you. He might say yes—and you’d be collaborating with a known fool!
2) Keep talking.
Michael Kurland and I once spent a lovely afternoon walking around Berkeley while we plotted out a collaboration novel. We had a wonderful time. When we got back to his office we realized that neither of us wanted to write the damn thing, together or separately.
Never regret such “wasted” time. Talk is recreation. Writing is work. Until you’re sure you want to do the work, keep talking.
3) There’s an exception, a fail-safe method that can’t cost you anything at all.
When Hank Stine and I were both novice writers, there was a short story I found unsalable. I handed it to Hank with the idea that if he could improve it, we’d split the take. It worked to this extent: we sold it five years later, to Ted White, for what Hank says was the dirtiest check he’d ever seen in his life.
Again: “The Locusts” broke my heart. I didn’t have the skills; I couldn’t get it to come right. Somewhere in there was a powerful story, but I couldn’t find the right approach.
Ten years later I handed the old manuscript to Steven Barnes. Could he make anything of it? He did. We did.
What’s the worst that can happen? The time you’ve expended is gone. He does no work unless he sees p
ossibilities. How can either of you lose? And you’ll learn whether you can trust each other. So: he fixes it…and you find you can’t stand the resulting story. Now you know. You should not write together.
4) A writer has his own ideas of how the universe runs. He makes his own worlds to fit. People who interfere with his world-picture can cripple him. Television writing is notorious for this. Most writers aren’t built for collaborations.
If you’re in that class, don’t let it affect your self-esteem. People who should never collaborate included the likes of Robert Heinlein.
5) You each go into it expecting to do 80 percent of the work. Total: 160 percent. Collaborations are hard. Don’t expect a collaborator to save you work!
6) Every collaboration is different. Each pairing needs different rules; it has to be learned all over again. I can offer some examples:
David Gerrold and I found that we could work in the same room, trading off at the typewriter. We were writing a funny story. Our senses of humor matched nicely. The plot was loose and simple. We knew what the characters were trying to do, we knew how difficult it would be, and we knew they could solve it. We explored likely and unlikely consequences, and did our best to amuse each other. We took turns doing the homework—which was extensive: weaving, balloon flight, magic in anthropology.
(David’s got the typewriter going like an air hammer. I’m on the couch, admiring. Suddenly he shoots to his feet screaming, “All right, I’ve started a riot. You get them out of it.”) (I read what he’s written. I ask, “Why do I want to get them out of it?” and I write the riot.)
Jerry Pournelle plots our novels with infinite intricacy before we start. We hold frequent, intensive discussion sessions, then go off and write alone. We didn’t start writing together until near the end of Footfall, maybe twelve years after A Mote in God’s Eye.
We discovered early that each of us had skills to match the other’s blind spots. Therefore, we carve stories to use our combined strong points to the fullest extent—and we trade the novel off, one keeping it for weeks at a time. Jerry handles politics, warfare, and conversations among large groups of people better than I do, while I run aliens and oddballs and small, revealing conversations. A hero working his way through a sea of troubles on sheer guts is Jerry’s. When a character gets hysterical, that’s me.
Steven Barnes didn’t have all of his skills developed yet, so we worked a little differently. The work still had to be outlined until we’d included everything. (It’s never true, but it should look that way.) Then he did first draft—which he does well, but it’s the hard part—and I did final rewrite, which is the easy part once you’ve been at it for twenty years.
I’m using the past tense because he’s learned everything I could teach by now. Today we trade off, and we’re writing together for fun.
Dian Girard and I had incompatible computers and lived too far apart. We just mailed Talisman back and forth. It produced a good story, but I don’t really recommend the method. If you’ve got compatible computers and a modem, that might work. Jerry and I do; but we live close enough, and like each other enough, that we just carry the disks back and forth by car.
7) Decide two things at the outset.
a) One of you has a veto. (Usually me.) I used it with David where our senses of humor didn’t match, or where his TV training had grown too strong. I almost never used it with Jerry. It gets used with Steven sometimes. Without the veto, a single argument could stop your work dead in its tracks.
b) Someone has to do the final rewrite.
Look: a collaboration won’t automatically read smoothly. You’ll learn each other’s styles to some extent, but the first full draft will still read rough. One of you does an entire final rewrite, not only because he will spot things you have both missed, but because you must remove those jarring inconsistencies of style. If neither of you volunteers for that final rewrite, play showdown or flip a coin. (Steven Barnes is a martial arts enthusiast. I do the final rewrite.) You might even wait until you’ve got a full first draft, so that the loser won’t lose interest while contemplating that final backbreaking job.
8) Outline what you’re doing. You never really know exactly how it’s going to go, but it should look that way. David and I didn’t do enough of that, and I think it shows. Jerry and I wind up with enough notes to fill a normal book. When you see a better path than the one you outlined, take it! But discuss it first.
9) Make frequent copies!
If you’re still using a typewriter—or a quill pen, for that matter—you’ll find this a hassle. Do it anyway. You’ll make marks in the margins of each other’s photocopies, and wind up with nonidentical manuscripts. Not to worry. The melding of two copies took one afternoon for one of us for a 150,000-word intermediate draft. I was startled.
10) It doesn’t matter who contributed what idea. Argue or brag about it if you like, but keep this in mind: if your friends can’t tell who wrote what by reading the work, you did it right. If they can, one of you should have done that final rewrite you skipped because it was too much work.
11) If you find your novel coming apart, you must decide who gets what ideas for his own use. In general, two writers working from the same ideas produce utterly different works; you might start with that assumption.
But why do it? I tried it the first time just to see if I could. I went into the second collaboration because the first was so much fun. It became easier. I got hooked.
1) I have this quirk. I can only write so far on a novel before I have to turn to something else. With collaborations I never have that problem; there’s plenty of time for short stories and nonfact articles while the novel is elsewhere.
2) It’s a wonderful thing to know that your novel is writing itself elsewhere while you’re goofing off. It’s almost eery to see your scenes improve themselves, shape themselves into what you were trying to say but couldn’t get quite right.
3) You know the feeling you get while talking to a fan about the intricacies of your universe? I get it when I meet someone who’s done the math for Neutron Star or computed the exact instability of the Ringworld or really worked out Pierson’s puppeteer physiology. Well, there’s a touch of that here. Each of you seems to be flattering the other. When you’re stuck on a scene, your other half can get you off the dime, or even take over the writing until you can see where you’re going next.
4) You catch each other’s mistakes!
5) The characters will deepen and develop through the interactions of two writers. Inevitably, you’ll each pick favorite characters and speak through these. The opposing viewpoints can make a more interesting story.
6) If you’re lucky or careful, your different skills will match. You write something neither of you could have written alone—and that’s the only real excuse for a collaboration. Otherwise, it’s too much work.
7) Corollary to above: you learn from each other.
From David I learned not to hesitate before jumping into a scene. You can always burn it afterward.
From Jerry I’ve learned to write of boardroom power and precedence battles; I get a glimmering of military strategy; I can write of duty-oriented characters (though I’m still more comfortable with tourists like Beowulf Shaeffer or Kevin Renner). Steven has a different approach to character development. And his characters have such fun! Dian does nice detail work re daily life in an odd environment. Working with them adds to my own skills. I need all the skills I can get. So do you.
How do you get into a collaboration? I don’t know. David and I started a short story one night. Jerry and I sat down with coffee and brandy and spent a long night working out ideas, exploring possibilities and jotting notes. I handed Steven a failed story, looking for a new approach; he took my own approach and made it work. Then he showed me a map of Dream Park. Jerry showed me a map of Todos Santos and I put a high diving board at the edge of the roof. I told him I wanted to write a sequel to Dante’s Inferno, and he told me that Benito Mussolini was a much-mis
understood man. Joel Hagen got eight of us in a room for a three-day convention, and we produced notes and sheets of math and paintings and maps and sculpture and relief globes and music…
The opportunities just happen. Be ready to talk. At the beginning of a collaboration you both have a good deal to lose. You may have a great deal to gain.
Intercon Trip Report
INTERCON is a once-per-two-years convention at the University of Oslo, Norway. At the Holland Worldcon they asked me to attend as the Guest of Honor from USA, with Mary Gentle from England, and two locals.
Sunday: I drove Marilyn to Los Angeles International. She’s running next year’s Old Lacers convention. This year’s is in New Jersey. So it’s Marilyn in New Jersey and her husband in Oslo.
Monday: I wrote down the exact location of the car in Lot C, phoned and left it on my answering service for Michelle Coleman to transmit to Marilyn in New Jersey.
SAS boosted me to Business Class. The seats are perfectly orthopedic when reclined, and a shelf pops up under your legs too. They’ll bust your back when upright if you don’t kill the curve with a pillow, but SAS supplies a pillow.
Tuesday afternoon: Landed at Oslo Airport. Nine-hour time difference. My back felt fine. The seats work!
Bjørn Vermo had volunteered to escort me around. He drove me to the Nobel Hotel, then walked me around Oslo for a couple of hours. Walking after a long plane flight seems to be a powerful antidote: I felt wonderful. And I collapsed right quick.
Wednesday: The Nobel serves a wonderful breakfast, brunch-like, terminating at 10 A.M. No problem. My body had shifted by twelve hours, and stayed that way.
Bjørn drove us to Alfred Nobel’s historic dynamite works, now a museum, at Engene. Interesting. Then more…I was still jet-lagged, dozing in the car.