by Larry Niven
Forty years ago, Ken Porter was a black kid growing up in South-Central. Ken’s peers tried to tell him that no white man could ever understand what he was going through. Ken knew they were wrong because he had read Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein. Robert Heinlein was white, but he understood Ken Porter perfectly, and Ken knew it.
The solar system keeps changing—and so does the wider universe—but Citizen of the Galaxy is still readable. Its basic truth remains.
I still recommend much of Heinlein’s earlier work—try Double Star—but it’s not vital. Several generations of science fiction writers have all borrowed from Robert Heinlein. He’s the most copied man in the field. Writers of hard science fiction, in particular, are all compulsive teachers, and maybe we learned that from Heinlein too.
So almost any name will do.
It’s important to let kids into the adult section of the library. A librarian may give appropriate warning if he knows the book, but any child who demands to read in the adult section is probably ready.
Twenty years ago a fifth grade teacher told me that half her class was reading Ringworld. That surprised me, and I’ve heard it again since, but I figured it out. The parts that children don’t understand, they just take the author’s word for it if it moves the story along, if it’s a good story.
And that is why you let children into the adult section, but you steer them to science fiction instead of fantasy. Because they believe!
So how does a librarian tell the difference?
There were librarians in Kathleen’s crowd who refused to admit that 1984 is science fiction. One guy was grinning and baiting me like I was silly and hadn’t realized it. Some causes really are hopeless.
The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.
Where have all the poets gone?
We’ve had immortal poets in every century but the twentieth. Did something peculiar happen during the twentieth century?
Yes, something did.
The immortal poets always understood the sexiest science of their day, the science in which advances were being made, and they all wrote science fiction and fantasy! Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug” is a classic demonstration of logical thinking, scientific process-of-elimination techniques. Alexander Pope understood and used his version of atomic theory. Rudyard Kipling understood engineering and war, the queen sciences of his age, and used them in poetry and fiction. Homer understood sailing and winemaking. Dante Alighieri used Greek science, theology, astronomy, and astrology. In fact he designed an astrologically perfect Easter weekend for his Divine Comedy—the first science fiction trilogy. And he set it in a structure that is large compared to a Dyson shell.
It’s not Dante’s fault if his science has become fantasy. That’s happened to Heinlein too, and (in some cases) me.
But in the twentieth century the critics decided that science fiction is not worthy of consideration.
The best poets have always been drawn to write fantasy and science fiction. Unless you have a precise, global, detailed picture of how the universe works, you can’t be a real poet. Without that your prose becomes mushy and ambiguous. Your work comes out diffuse and unreadable. So you will write science fiction, if you are a potential poet, like all of your spiritual ancestors have for thousands of years. When you get around to writing actual poetry, you will find that Harvard and The New Yorker magazine and the librarians’ conspiracy have locked you out.
So the question becomes: Why would critics avoid science fiction?
I must refer you to a book by C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures. I don’t know who still reads this thing, I sure never did, but the core idea has become a part of Western civilization. Snow said that science majors and liberal arts majors have trouble talking to each other. Their brains don’t work alike. Their interests are different, their line of thinking is different.
Now, if you’re a science fiction fan, you know he was wrong. You and most of the people you know understand and love science, literature, music, art, puzzles, the whole vast domain in which human beings find ways to kill time and play with their minds.
C.P. Snow was mistaken, and he may have known it. In practice, and in my experience, working scientists are just as intrigued as any liberal arts major by good writing, good music, and good art. They don’t have as much time to pursue these things because what they’re doing is more important, or maybe more fun.
Greg Benford, plasma physicist and science fiction writer, writes like he swallowed an English teacher. Not even a librarian can think he’s not literate, but he’s writing on the frontiers of all we know and all we’re learning.
What the liberal arts graduates forget—and what they will never say to each other—is this. They didn’t go into science because it was too hard. They didn’t know how to do the math. And these are the mainstream critics who have swallowed C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures book, line, and sinker.
It’s hard to say they’re making a mistake.
A mainstream critic who forms an opinion of a work of science fiction can make himself look like a fool. He might rave over a brilliant new idea in a not-really-science-fiction novel, something way beyond science fiction, and it turns out to be only Robert Heinlein’s “Universe” ship…which is a brilliant notion, but everybody’s stolen that one. And filed off the serial number, just like Robert said to, and called it something else…like…slowboat.
It’s worth remembering that for most of humanity, science is hard work. But the scientists know that they’re playing a vast game, and being paid to do it. It feels ridiculous. One day they know they’ll be caught.
Last August I came home from NASFIC with an e-mail address, [email protected], a group that exists for the purpose of discussing my work. (That address will have changed by now.) I do sometimes go ego-surfing. I logged on and found myself eavesdropping on discussions of whether you can clone a protector, and whether Teela Brown is likely to have left a child. Within a month of lurking, I had enough material for a fourth Ringworld novel.
I just want to point out that these people do huge levels of research for the simple pleasure of it. They make up their own homework! Mundanes pay full price for a book and then they only read it.
So I’m still facing 130 librarians while I use up my twenty minutes, but now I want to establish my credibility so they’ll listen to the rest of what I have to say. So I tell them Conan Doyle didn’t write like Mickey Spillane. I said that a quill pen allows you to write with only your right hand and the left side of your brain, but a typewriter or computer keyboard makes you use both sides of your brain simultaneously. Writing from any previous century reads intellectual rather than visceral, straight lines rather than patterns. It’s all left-brain. The keyboard forces us to use our whole brains.
I should add that Connie Willis thinks I’m dead wrong here.
I told them why people talk to themselves. One of the librarians tried to tell me that was the mark of a poet. That’s ridiculous. Plumbers do it too. It’s because our corpus callosum is so narrow. The corpus callosum is that arc of tissue between the left and right sides of your forebrain. There are a lot of nerves in the corpus callosum, but it’s too narrow to carry all the messages you want sent between two lobes. If you’re trying to do something complicated with your hands, you may well want to talk your way through it, to get the information from one side to the other. If you’re in a hurry, if there’s a fire in the kitchen and you can’t find a pail, you may find yourself yelling orders at yourself.
Librarians still use the term escape reading.
I told them that science fiction fans are all compulsive teachers, and the authors are even worse, and if we can get readers’ attention by showing them escape reading, we’ll teach them before they can escape.
In July 2000, during a panel at the Hawaii
Westercon, I solved a puzzle. Where have all the short story markets gone?
It’s movies and television, of course.
What I see is that movies do not replace novels. A novel is too long to make a good movie. Dr. Zhivago showed just the love story. Dune should have been a movie trilogy. Movies replace short stories, novelettes, and abridged novels. When was the last time you saw anyone selling Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels? We see the markets for short stories constantly dwindling. Every writer knows that novels are where the money is, but the real money used to be in cracking Black Mask or Argosy or the Saturday Evening Post.
Robert Forward tells me I beat him into print with a line of cement dust.
This was during the eighties, and Bob was still working at Hughes Research. He was sure that a quantum black hole—they were still calling it that, back before Stephen Hawking changed his mind—a mini black hole falling through the Earth must interact with the Earth somehow, but Bob hadn’t seen how yet. In a short story called “The Hole Man” I showed a line of dust running through a concrete floor, no wider than a pencil lead, the track of a mini black hole. This is tides operating on a minute scale: the tides around a black hole tearing molecule from molecule as it passes through concrete, or bone, or flesh.
I love it when I can beat the scientists into print.
I thought I had another one once. I thought it up independently and put it in “Neutron Star.” It turns out Albert Einstein’s name was already on it. “Einstein rings.” They call it “gravitational lensing” now. This is what gives you several images of a galaxy if there’s a mass in front of it. Looking for gravitational lensing lets you place galaxies and measure their mass.
But I’m not finished yet.
Abisko is a biological research station in Sweden, two hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. I had never heard of it. It’s the site of an annual seminar backed by Umea University. Greg Benford got me into the annual Abisko seminar. About twenty-five people, all the place will hold, gather to lecture each other on a chosen topic. Most of these were British or Swedes. We spoke English; they got tired of Brits trying to speak Swedish.
I was trying to tell them something of my work as a skilled professional daydreamer. So I offered an explanation of the “missing mass” as presently understood in astrophysics. It’s an idea that relates the fate of the universe to the energy of the vacuum and the problem of how galaxies form. Another attendee, Dr. Phil Barringer of the University of Kansas, tried to tell me why it won’t work. I got e-mail from him later saying that he may have been wrong.
So my Nobel prize isn’t hopelessly lost, and I’ve beaten the rest of the field into print. I turned these related concepts into a short story, a Draco Tavern story which appeared in Analog in 2001 as “The Missing Mass.” It’s won a Locus Award, my first award in this millennium.
All of the Abisko speeches were to be followed by questions and comments. During these periods I seem to have developed a reputation for “bullets,” that is, for the epigrams and slogans that speakers might project onto a screen so that an audience will remember something five minutes after he stops talking.
I saved you this one:
NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ADVICE NOT TAKEN. Say the truth as best you can, and hope someone is listening. Liars are not your fault. Gullible fools are not your fault.
And:
THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION. (From Oath of Fealty, where it became a theme.)
I left the librarians with this too. Let me leave it with you:
If there were only one thing you could teach a child, it ought to be this: to play with his mind. To make up his own homework.
It seems that I’ve spent most of my life designing toys for imaginary playgrounds.
END
Tor Books by Larry Niven
N-Space
Playgrounds of the Mind
Destiny’s Road
Rainbow Mars
Scatterbrain
With Steven Barnes
Achilles’ Choice
The Descent of Anansi
Saturn’s Race
With Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes
The Legacy of Heorot
Beowulf’s Children
This is a collection of fiction and nonfiction. All the characters and events portrayed in stories and novel excerpts of this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
SCATTERBRAIN
Copyright © 2003 by Larry Niven
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Niven, Larry.
Scatterbrain / Larry Niven.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1405-5
1. Science fiction, American. 2. Niven, Larry—Interviews. 3. Science fiction—Authorship. 4. Authors, American—20th century—Interviews. I. Title.
PS3564.I9S29 2003
813'.54—dc21
2003042685