JOURNAL #81

 

                                                        January 16, 2011

 

     Anyone who’s ever been in front of a classroom will tell you that nobody learns as much as the teacher. I spent twelve rousing years as an instructor with the Customs Service, first in Chicago, and later at the Federal law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia. My specialty was the  leadership seminar. And my approach was simple enough.

 

          How do you measure leadership ability? Answer: By the way the leader’s people perform. There is no other way. Ask any group about the good bosses they’ve had, and they all describe the same attributes: He knows the job; invites the opinions of his subordinates; recognizes that an idea has merit or not, regardless of its source. He listens;  gives credit to his people (rather than trying to grab it for himself); keeps the success of the mission on the front burner; and takes care of his people.

 

          I was invited to do the seminar for the DaVita Company’s local branch of facility administrators (RNs), administrative assistants, social workers and dieticians. Basically a medical group.

 

          It was the first such seminar I’ve done in about thirteen years. I should admit straight off that the ladies (it was an all-female group) knew what they were doing. And I enjoyed myself thoroughly. It reminded me how fortunate I’d been to have had a Customs Service assignment that I’ve come to miss so much.                                        

 

     My appreciation to Barbara Griffin for the opportunity.

 

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          About a year ago, Maureen and I attended an author event on St Simons Island. Hank Klibanoff and Gene Roberts had won a Pulitzer Prize for The Race Beat, which covered the role of the press during the civil rights struggle. Hank was the speaker, and afterward we collected his signature in a copy of the book.

 

          I got well into it, but it got lost in a flurry of writing projects. A few days ago, I got back to it. I don’t think I realized precisely how horrific the experience was for those who stood up to the segregationists. Reading it now, reading how Bull Conner promised the local mobs time to assault the incoming Freedom Riders, reading how white thugs went after demonstrators with bats and clubs, how they used dogs, how they howled with outrage that others wanted access to a soda fountain, left me with a sense that I’d been a complete innocent. I guess you had to have been there.

 

          It’s hard to believe anything like that could have happened in the USA.

 

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          Readers have generally given me credit for accurate science. (Mostly accurate, probably.) It’s not easy for an English major to get the quantum mechanics right. The truth is that I’ve had a lot of help over the years. No one whom I’ve gone to, whom I’ve asked, e.g., how to blow up a star, has failed to provide a reasoned response.

 

          I should especially thank two physicists who have been providing more help the last few days as I struggle through a short story dealing with a pulsar. They are David DeGraff at Alfred University, and Walt Cuirle, at the U.S. House of Representatives Page School. Thanks, guys.

 

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          The project Dave and Walt are currently helping with, by the way, is a short story featuring a 22-year-old Priscilla Hutchins, who is trying to qualify as an Academy pilot. During which experience, she gets involved in a long-shot effort to rescue a cat.

 

          Title of the story: “The Cat’s Pajamas.”

 

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          I’ve been a Philadelphia Eagles fan since grade school. During that sixty years, I’ve lived and died with them. (Okay, died. All but once.) The fact that we can get emotionally involved with corporations whose employees will walk off to the next corporation that offers more money continues to amaze me. I won’t try to explain it. I’m as delusional as the next person.

 

          Last Sunday, the Eagles lost a first-round playoff game to the Packers. Usually that would induce several days of despair and loathing. This time, I almost didn’t notice.

 

     I guess it was because of the Tucson event the day before. It more or less put things into perspective.    

 

                                          JOURNAL ENTRY #82

                                               February 1, 2011

 

          A week ago, I was participated in a book club discussion dealing with  Thayer Scudder’s Global Threats, Global Futures: Living with Declining Living Standards. While Scudder is at heart optimistic about where we’re headed, he admits that stringent measures will be required to get through the difficult times ahead. He’s especially concerned with poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor in nations around the world. (I’ve always thought of the chasm that we are beginning to see, even in the United States, as the definition of a third-world country.)

          Other areas giving off scary signals: fundamentalist tendencies everywhere. Think in terms of putting belief before evidence.  We will after all require some flexibility to get through this.  And a serious danger is also arising from our failure to take action to preserve the climate.

          I have to confess that I did not have time to read the book, but it has gone on my to-do list. I’ve been concerned since the 1950’s that a constantly increasing population will eventually lead to catastrophe. (The population of the U.S. in those happy years was 130 million. And we did not need to import oil.) I can’t remember a time when it was not obvious that nothing we do will bail us out in the end unless we get control of population growth.

          One of the participants commented that we are all interested in acquiring power. He’s a psychologist, or a psychiatrist. Don’t recall which. But his opinion consequently carried weight. Nevertheless, I have never had the sense that most of the people I’ve known have been interested in power per se. Those that were tended to be bosses of varying sorts. And since I did management and supervisory training for more than ten years, I’d encountered a lot of bosses. But even there, I did not usually see people whose primary interest was moving up the food chain.

          To be clear, I define seeking power, at least among bosses, as a tendency to act according to what is best for one’s own ambitions, as opposed to what the organization needs. Or the people working for us. I’ve seen some, of course. And unfortunately, they do seem to have a knack for getting promoted. I’ve had a sense over the years that people who want to be in charge tend to be fairly limited in their vision, and are also the last people you want making decisions. I suppose it all fits in with Arthur Clarke’s dictum that any one actively seeking the White House shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the oval office.

                                                                   #

          Mike Resnick and I have started work on The Cassandra Project. Since the original short story was mine, my assignment was to write the first chapter. I completed it the other day and sent it to Mike. This was the first time I’ve allowed anyone to see a first draft. But we don’t want to start reworking anything until we have a complete draft in our hands.

          This by the way is an important principle for anyone with ambitions to write a novel: Don’t try fixing stuff until you have a complete book. You don’t want to spend a lot of time tuning up, say, chapter three when you don’t know yet that chapter three will even make the final cut.

          Mike took a look at it, pointed out where I’d run off the road, and made some suggestions. He was right.  I sent the new version to him an hour ago. And if you’re thinking I don’t take my own advice, this wasn’t simply a matter of polishing the prose. I’d gotten us headed in the wrong direction.

          By the way, if you’ve read the original short story and think you know what’s going on, you have a surprise coming. The short version was a cover-up.

 

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          The Priscilla Hutchins story is done and has been sent to John Adams. If he likes it, it will appear in his forthcoming anthology Armor. Hutch is 22, trying to qualify for a pilot’s license, when she us assigned to a ship taking supplies to a research vehicle near a pulsar. Just drop the supplies and come home.

          But when they arrive, they discover the research vessel has been devastated by orbiting debris. Hutch’s partner, using the only armored pressure suit they have, goes over to look for survivors. There is one: a black cat.

          The problem: How to get the cat to the rescue vessel through heavy radiation. Unfortunately it and the pilot won’t fit together in the suit. Question: Is it rational to risk your life to save a cat?

          I suspect –though I shouldn’t say so— that  “The Cat’s Pajamas” will be a chapter in a new Hutch novel shortly. (That would be 2013, if anyone’s counting.)          

           

 

                                                JOURNAL #83

                                               February 16, 2011      

 

The Singularity has shown up as the cover story on the current issue of Time.  The prediction is that it will happen in 2045. With a little luck, we will achieve superintelligence, get rid of death, and, apparently, find ourselves in a world dominated by software. Lev Grossman, who wrote the story, paints a dazzling picture of what may be coming, but cautions us against certainty.

            I agree with him there. My natural skepticism about predictions might be a lingering aftertaste of my failure to get a jet pack. Or the notion that by 2001 we’d have a base on Mars and be sending manned missions to Jupiter and Saturn. If we’ve learned anything over the past century, it is that the world will change, but that it will probably do so in wildly unpredictable ways. We’ll see.

            The current issue of The Atlantic also has a cover story of interest to those of us who wonder what’s coming down the road. It’s artificial intelligence this time. The author, Brian Christian, takes the position that AI’s will ultimately help us get a better sense of who we are. Or perhaps, more to the point, who we can be.

            I’ve always been struck by the vast range of human behavior. From people with a brilliant sense of humor to those who see only the dark side of everything. From a cop who will jump in front of a train to pull a drunk clear, to those who stand around and watch someone being assaulted without lifting a finger. From Albert Schweitzer to Joe Stalin. How do we account for it? Is it primarily genetic? Or might world history have been different had a few people told Adolf Hitler how good his painting was?

            I guess the question I’m really asking is whether there isn’t a superior human being in all of us, funny and smart and compassionate, or whether we are doomed to obey, within narrow parameters, the instructions laid out by our individual genetic codes?

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            I finished another story yesterday: “Listen Up, Nitwits.” That makes four in the last few weeks. One of them, I suspect, doesn’t work. Maureen’s not impressed with it and she’s a pretty good judge. The others, “Lucy,” “The Cat’s Pajamas,” and “Nitwits” should be okay.  

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            The Dallas/Fort Worth Convention (DFWCon) beckons. My son Chris and I are leaving tomorrow. We’ll be driving. Chris is selecting a couple of audiobooks  for the trip, and I’ll contribute a few episodes of Stroke of Fate. It’s a radio show from the 50’s that presented historical turning points which could easily have gone in another direction.

            I recall one episode in which Lincoln took a different career path and never became President, and another in which Lee accepted command of the U.S. Army. Julius Caesar marries Cleopatra, France kicks Hitler out of the Rhineland in 1936, and Hamilton wins his duel with Burr. It was my first experience with alternate history, and I began wondering why they didn’t teach history that way in the schools. Instead of worry about the date that something happened –we were always doing dates--, why not have students give their opinion how things might have gone had Alexander not died so young? Had Washington done what every other leader did after a revolution and seized power?

            There by the way is the real debt we owe to our first president. He set the template.

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            I’ll be doing signings at the DFW Con Friday and Sunday. And I also have a Sunday reading. Readings work best if the material is short. And preferably hasn’t been published yet. That sounds like “Listen Up, Nitwits.”

 

                                                               Journal  #84

                                                              March 1, 2011

 

            My son Chris and I attended ConDFW in Dallas last weekend. This constituted a second effort to get to the con after being snowed out last year. (All this strange weather makes me feel as if I’m living in an SF novel, and that’s not usually a good thing.)   We had an opportunity to spend time with Tim Powers, NASA’s Paul Abell, and Bill Fawcett, and a lot of other people.

Panels gave advice to aspiring writers, discussed whether space flight has a future, described how to write action in space without violating the laws of physics, and how to do world building.  Lee Martindale, who conducted a telephone interview with me last year when the storm hit and I couldn’t get there, reprised her role. This time we sat in front of an audience and talked about how much fun SF can be, and why so many of us are so passionate about it.

            I love cons. I’m repeating myself here, but it’s worth saying again: Science fiction readers seem to be drawn from the same crowd no matter where you encounter them. Alabama to Rockland to San Diego. It always feels like the same people, and it always feels like coming home.     

            The nation’s problems derive largely from the fact that too many of us do not pay attention to what’s going on around us. That does not seem to be true among SF enthusiasts. And I’m not suggesting we all agree politically. We clearly do not. But most of us seem to have a reasonably clear view of the world, and the same general skepticism about talking points, no matter where they come from. It might be that we share a curiosity about the universe in general, or maybe simply that we like to read.

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            I’ll be doing a reading at the ICFA in Orlando Saturday, March 19. Then back to Orlando for  OASIS at the end of May. I’ll also be at Dragoncon in Atlanta at the beginning of September.  Maria Perry, at Flights of Fantasy for Books and Games in Albany, NY, has invited me in for a signing. That’ll happen Thursday evening, May 19 at 7:00 p.m.  

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            Currently reading: Attack on the Liberty, by James Scott. It’s an account of the Israeli assault on the U.S. intelligence-gathering ship during its war with Egypt in 1967. Also: One Christmas in Washington, by David J. Berguson and Holger H. Herwig.  Churchill and FDR put together the Grand Alliance after the attack on Pearl.

            While traveling to Dallas –we drove— Chris and I listened to a recording of the newscasts coming  in on December 7. I got an impression that, although everyone recognized that a war had begun, they seemed not yet to have grasped the full implications of it. There might have been a sense that the Japanese were a small nation, and that they could not long withstand U.S. firepower. And we hadn’t gotten word yet that U.S. battleships had been lined up like ducks in a row. Everyone knew there was a distinct possibility of an attack, but it doesn’t seem we took many precautions. And there was, as yet, no talk of Germany.

            The Japanese had apparently intended that the White House would get the declaration of war prior to the actual start of the attack. But if so, the timing wasn’t good. The incoming message was long and required translation.  Unfortunately, there’d been a party at the Japanese Embassy the night before, and the translators were not at the top of their game.

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            I was invited to participate in a Space.com project: If I could ask the President one question, or make one suggestion, regarding the U.S. space program, what would it be? The segment is now posted:  http://www.space.com/10985-obama-congress-space-exploration-budget.html--

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            Good news last weekend: Echo made the final Nebula ballot. The winners will be announced May 21 in Washington. Needless to say, I’ll be there. 

 

 

                                                              JOURNAL #85

                                                              March 15, 2011

 

            Readers have been asking about Hutch, whether she’ll be back. I mentioned in one of the earlier journal entries that I’d completed a story featuring her in training to be a pilot. The title is “The Cat’s Pajamas,” and it will appear in Armor, edited by John Joseph Adams, with a 2012 publication date. So yes, she’ll be back.

            Writing about her had the effect of renewing my own interest. I’d been thinking about doing a prequel for some time, and “The Cat’s Pajamas” would make a decent chapter. When Mike Resnick and I finish writing The Cassandra Project, toward the end of the year, I expect to start on a Hutch novel. As of now I have no story line, no title, just a cat in an impossible situation.  But I suspect the rest will show up, probably during a heavy rainstorm. Unfortunately, even if all goes according to plan, the book would not arrive in the stores until 2013. (Assuming we still have bookstores then.)

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            Usually, when writers do a reading, they’re more or less expected to read something that hasn’t been published yet. I’m scheduled to do a reading at 2:00 p.m. this Saturday, during the ICFA event in Orlando.  I have three stories available, but all are too long. The people running ICFA have prudently limited us to twenty minutes. That’s a good idea, because reading something much longer than that tends to put everybody to sleep. 

            That leaves me with only one nonpublished  alternative. That would be to do a section from Firebird, the Alex Benedict novel that will be out in the fall. But I’d have to pick a cliff-hanger fragment to get it to work. And I don’t much like doing cliff-hangers for an audience that will, at best, have to wait eight months to see how things get resolved. If the book were due out in two weeks, I wouldn’t hesitate.

            Best is to go for a story that’s been around. Preferably a comedy. So I think I’ll read “Henry James, This One’s For You.” It was  a Nebula nominee a few years ago, I’ve read it before, and it always gets laughs.

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            The Japanese disaster this week has caused all of us to back off and take a second look at nuclear power. In a world replete with fault lines and religious crazies who have no compunction about blowing themselves up, it’s hard not to conclude that the atom does not constitute a long term solution to the energy problem. Les Johnson, Greg Matloff, and C. Bangs offer a possible solution in Paradise Regained (Praxis, 2010). The authors argue that the technology exists, or is within reach, to put solar collectors into geostationary orbit. They would pick up solar energy, convert it to electromagnetic radiation, and beam it back to ground stations. This technique, they argue, could be made to supply energy needs around the planet. (I should point out here that Les is a friend, and in fact I wrote the intro for the book. So I’m not exactly objective. But it sounds good to me.)

            The problem is that a collector project would take a lot of money, a sustained effort, and consequently some serious sacrifice in the short term. I can’t help wondering where we might have been had some of the resources that have been put into the wars of the past half-century been directed instead toward solving the energy problem that we saw coming back in 1950. At least the kids at my high school did. Not sure about the politicians.

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            The Great Books Foundation has just published Science Fiction Omnibus. The organization describes itself as “an independent non-profit educational organization whose mission is to empower readers of all ages to become more responsible and reflective readers.” The Omnibus includes  E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” (which gets my vote as the all-time best SF story), Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man,” James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and Connie Willis’s “Even the Queen.” Among others.

            I wish, when I’d been an English teacher, I’d had this anthology to work with. And I should confess that seeing my own story, “Promises to Keep,” in the table of contents, has made it hard not to walk around these last few days with a silly grin.   

 

 

                                                               JOURNAL #86

                                                                 April 1, 2011

 

            In the last entry, I mentioned possibly doing a Priscilla Hutchins prequel after finishing The Cassandra Project. But a different venue might work better. I’d recently completed a Hutch short story, “The Cat’s Pajamas,” for the John Adams anthology, Armor,  due out next year. This morning, I finished a second Hutch story, “Maiden Voyage.” And I’ve discovered that she works at least as well in the shorter format as in the novel. I’m going to try to do a few more and see how that plays out. Both stories, by the way, take place during her qualification flight.

                                                                                #

            Les Johnson and I have finally settled on a title for our 2012 anthology, which will feature both fiction and nonfiction centering on efforts to leave the solar system. It will be Across the Void. At the moment we have stories in from Ben Bova, Charles Gannon, Sarah Hoyt, Louise Marley, and Michael Bishop.  Les and I are also making contributions.

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               Word arrived last week that Chindi has been nominated for the Czech Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Award, in the category of the Best Science Fiction Book of 2010. The other shortlisted books are Pump 6, by Paolo Bacigalupi;  The New Space Opera 2, edited by Gardner Dozois  and  Jonathan Strahan;  Brasyl, by Ian McDonald; and The Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi.

            The results will be announced as a part of the Book World Fair in Prague May 14th.

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            Came across some intriguing comments by H. L. Mencken today. Writing about critics, he comments that the majority of them settle for discussing the book or piece of art or musical rendition at hand. It is, he maintains, short-sighted. That nobody really cares what the critic thinks about the work in question. A serious critic, he maintains, takes on the issues dealt with the work. Not the work itself. Or at least not principally the work itself. One does not read a critic to find out whether he should go see the latest film remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” but rather to get a fresh perspective on the question of whether human beings will ever be capable of keeping the peace.

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            I’m interested in watching the eight-part John Kennedy film originally scheduled to run on the History Channel. But the History Channel backed off. I’m not clear why. Political pressure of some sort, apparently. Instead it will begin April 3 on REELZ.

            I’m just old enough to remember how the country reacted to Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945. Broadcasters in tears. My father commenting that it reminded him of his own immortality because FDR was such a gigantic figure. The entire country plunged into mourning.

            In 1963, I was just out of the Navy, doing an English class at Woodrow Wilson High School in Levittown, PA, when word came in that JFK had been assassinated. When we’d finished for the day, I went back to my apartment, and then drove to my folks’s place in South Philadelphia. It was a painful ride, and somehow all the images have stayed with me. (I guess we all have a good memory for disasters.  I can still remember hearing about the Pearl Harbor attack.)

            But it’s interesting: Of all the killing visited on the country by lunatics, Pearl, 9/11, the Lockerbie bombing, a good many others, the death of JFK maintains a particularly personal note. Maybe because we all thought we knew him so well. (We didn’t, but that’s beside the point.)

            Maybe because of what followed: It was impossible not to think that Kennedy would have been too smart to make a major commitment in Vietnam. That was undoubtedly something we wanted to believe. I don’t know why. But it was as if the lives of countless numbers of people were cut short by those fatal shots.

            It fits with Robert Dyke’s excellent film “TimeQuest”  (now upgraded and renamed “JFK: Second Chance), in which a time traveler goes back and warns Kennedy about Dallas. We avoid the war, Martin Luther King eventually ascends to the presidency, and by the 21st century we have Moonbase.

            Would that it had been so.                  

 

 

                                                   JOURNAL #87

                                                     April 14, 2011

 

            James Scott’s Attack on the Liberty is a compelling account of the 1967 assault by Israeli forces, during the Six Day War, on an American spy ship in international waters. The author is the son of one of the junior officers on the Liberty. More than thirty men died, and two-thirds of the crew were injured, many severely. The Johnson White House, engulfed in the Vietnam War, covered it up as best they could. They did not want a loud argument with Israel, which they felt would generate even more heat in a nation already furious with the President. No one on the Israeli side ever accepted responsibility, and no one was ever prosecuted. Johnson and his staff, apparently, did not want to take a chance on alienating Jewish voters who, they felt, would have sided with Israel. That was one of the more frustrating aspects of the event. LBJ and his people forgot that the voters he was worried about are Americans first. I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have supported the President.

            Incidentally, no explanation for the attack has ever been made public. It doesn’t appear that Israel could have failed to realize the Liberty was an American ship. What then could possibly have motivated them to risk their alliance with the U.S. by going after it? So we did nothing. There was no admission of wrongdoing. The Israelis paid token amounts to the families of the victims. And we moved on.

            Looking the other way inevitably has a price, though. Less than a year later a second intelligence ship, the Pueblo, was seized by the North Koreans. Its crew was captured and tortured.

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            I’ve been collaborating with Mike Resnick on The Cassandra Project. It’s given me more free time than I’ve ever had working alone. Consequently I’ve been able to write more short fiction in the last three months than in the previous several years. I’m at six stories now, after completing “Waiting at the Altar,” in which Hutch continues her certification flight. 

            The collaboration, by the way, has been going well. Mike’s been a friend for a long time, but I’d heard a lot of stories about the difficulties involved when writers try to work together. Not that I hadn’t done collaborations before. I’ve written stories with physicist Michael Shara, with Stan Schmidt, and a story for a Batman anthology with Mark Van Name. They all went easily enough, but doing a 5,000-word narrative is not quite the same as putting together a 120,000-word novel. It’s not only the length, but there tends to be more complexity in the longer work. If there isn’t, there should be.

            But so far everything’s gone well. And seeing the way someone else approaches a narrative can become a valuable learning experience. Especially someone who operates at Mike’s level.

                                                                            #

            Over the years, I’ve probably gotten as much enjoyment out of Ben Bova’s Sam Gunn stories as any other series I can think of. Tor books published a complete collection, The Sam Gunn Omnibus, two years ago today. It’s a brilliant collection, sometimes funny, often poignant, invariably imaginative. Sam is my favorite astronaut. If you haven’t met him yet, this would be the way to do it.                        

                           

 

                                                   

                                             Journal Entry #88

                                                  May 01, 2011

 

          The copy edits for Firebird are in. Firebird is the next Alex & Chase novel, in which the antiquarian looks into the disappearance forty years earlier of an erratic physicist well known primarily because he vanished. But there’s something else odd about him: Over thousands of years, ships of an unknown nature have shown up occasionally on sensors and scopes, failed to identify themselves, and subsequently went away. Nobody has any idea what they are or where they originated. And there seems to be a connection with the physicist. On two of the three occasions during his adult lifetime that sightings were made, he was present.

            The book will be released in November.

            Writers and editors usually get the credit, or the blame, for the final product. And that is as it should be. But there’s a major contributor who tends to remain invisible, and that’s the copy editor. His responsibility is to go through the manuscript, fix the grammatical errors, get the spelling right, and suggest smarter ways to say things. That’s the easy part. He is also expected to catch inconsistencies and pick up other blunders. When Harry shows up in chapter 14, it’s up to the copy editor to point out that the author killed him off in chapter six. He will also note that the lander doesn’t refuel, as the narrative says on page 401; rather, it recharges (p. 38). And he has to do all this without alienating the author.

            When the math goes wrong, when the author gets the girl friend’s name wrong –It was Jennifer originally--, when some other detail goes astray, we expect the copy editor to point it out so it can be repaired. There are, at a modest estimate, several hundred repair jobs of different kinds that needed to be done on Firebird. And I’m only halfway through. Anyway, this seemed like the right time to raise a glass to my copy editors, Sara and Bob Schwager. (Yes, I need two of them.) Thanks, guys.

                                                                     #

            Tad Daley has written a book that reminded me of a cause I’d embraced years ago, and managed to forget during the years since the end of the Cold War. It’s Apocalypse Never, and it’s probably the most unsettling book I’ve ever read.

            During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I can remember being parked outside the Main Library in Philadelphia, the one just off the Parkway in center city. I was listening to radio reports as U.S. destroyers moved to block Soviet ships headed for Cuba carrying missiles and, maybe, nuclear weapons. At that time, I did not believe we would make it to the next weekend. A breakout war with the Soviets seemed inevitable.  There’d been showdowns over Berlin, massive weapons tests, Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the table at the U.N. Lots of threats back and forth. When I was in high school, we conducted drills, hiding as best we could. (None of us could fit under the desks.)

            We’ve forgotten all that now. And yes, a shootout between Russia and the U.S. is much less likely in 2011 than it was in, say, 1965. But the possibility nevertheless exists. And both powers have thousands of nuclear weapons in their arsenals. And Tad Daley points out that, if such a confrontation seems unlikely, there are plenty of other scenarios that could get us killed by the millions, or, possibly, end our existence altogether. With all these weapons rolling around loose, he says, it’s only a matter of time before somebody accidentally sets one off. Or steals one to blow up some infidels. Or a government with nuclear weapons collapses and suddenly we are looking at some crazies with their hands on a nuclear arsenal. Or--  But you get the point.

            His argument is that as long as the bombs exist, they are an ongoing hazard. That it’s just a matter of time before one or more of them goes off. And that the consequences, even after the detonation of a lone bomb, could ultimately be catastrophic around the world.

            When I finished the book, I found myself back in my car parked outside the Philadelphia Library again.

                                                                                  #

            A couple of readers have asked about my reaction to the elimination of funding for SETI. Obviously, it costs too much. Maybe not quite as much as a war, but after all we have to keep our priorities straight. After all, why should we be spending money on an issue of no consequence?

            We continue to spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. I haven’t run that through Fact Check, but I’ve seen it in so many places that I suspect that, if not true, it’s probably pretty close. But we need those bases around the world. 

            When the second war ended, in 1945, I was in the fourth grade. And I can remember thinking how nice it was going to be growing up in a world where the USA would be at peace.

            I wonder where the country would be today had we taken advantage of the collapse of the USSR, reduced our military footprint, and put the money into improving our schools, developing energy alternatives, restoring the infrastructure, and maybe installing some high-speed lines? It’s hard to think, historically, of a single major power that didn’t eventually lose ground, or collapse altogether, because it overextended itself.     

                

 

 

                                                         JOURNAL #89

 

                                                          May 16, 2011

 

Being an editor isn’t as easy as I’d always believed. I was under the impression that editors simply decided what they would publish from the assorted submissions that came in, and sent out checks.

 

Les Johnson, an author and physicist who works for NASA, invited me to help assemble  an anthology that would feature nonfiction and fiction, with a focus on plausible means to escape the solar system. How it might be done, using reasonably foreseeable technology. (Translation: No FTL.)

 

It turns out that editing involves a lot of reading, some judgment, working with writers –something you tend not to notice when you’re the writer--, and a fair amount of organizational skills. Fortunately Les has done most of the administrative stuff, and I’m happy to report the project is nearing an end.

 

We have four essays, “Fusions Starships” and “Antimatter Starships,” both by Greg Matloff; “Solar Sail Ships,” by Les; and “Project Icarus,” by Richard Obousy. Considering the time involved to get to even the nearest of stars, I’m inclined  to wait for the Enterprise.  

 

We’ve also acquired stories by Louise Marley, Sarah Hoyt, Charles E. Gannon, Ben Bova, Mike Resnick, and Michael Bishop. Les and I have also contributed.  What we do not yet have is a title. We’ve considered Going Interstellar, Across the Abyss, Across the Void, Centauri Express, Road to Centauri, and a few others. I’d have suggested Outbound except that I’d already used it for a collection.

 

The book, whatever the title turns out to be, will be published by Baen, probably sometime in 2012. It will be intriguing. Stay tuned.

 

                                                             # 

In the previous journal entry I mentioned Tad Daley’s Apocalypse Never, voicing his conviction that we need to get rid of the world’s nuclear stockpiles. The book is so significant that I hope to see it get serious attention. I couldn’t resist writing a review, which appeared last weekend in Jacksonville’s newspaper, the Florida Times-Union. Link:

 

http://search.jacksonville.com/fast-elements.php?querystring=Apocalypse%20Never&profile=jacksonville&type=standard

 

                                                                #

Busy week coming. I’ll be in Albany, NY, at the Flights of Fancy Books and Games Thursday evening, May 19 at 7:00 p.m. to sign and hang out. 

 

Friday, May 20: Visiting my alma mater Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. At 3:00 p.m., David Miller and I will participate in a seminar, “Heading for the High Country: Change and Science Fiction,” which will try to look at where we’re going and whether we really want to take the plunge. The event is scheduled for the Exley Science Center, room 184 (the Woodhead Lounge). I should add that the title was, early on, one of those considered for the  anthology.

 

David’s special field of interest is planetary robotics. He’s a cofounder of KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, and has been developing tools to promote technology education through robotics at both the University and the K-12 levels.    

 

I’ll be at the Washington Hilton Saturday and Sunday for the Nebulas. SFWA has scheduled me to moderate a Sunday morning panel, “Old Ways, New Ways.” I’m something of a premier expert on the old ways, with fond recollections of carbon paper and electric typewriters, which were pure magic in their time.   

 

The following weekend, May 27-29, Maureen and I will head for OASIS in Orlando. Dragoncon is also on the schedule. This was originally planned as a year off. Not sure what happened.         

     

 

 

                                                                     JOURNAL #90

 

                                                                        June 2, 2011

 

            Connecticut is a long way from South Georgia. I drove first to the King of Prussia area west of Philadelphia to spend some time with old college friends. Then on to Albany, New York, for a signing at the Flights of Fancy Books and Games. Maria Perry, the store’s owner, treated me to dinner. We were joined by Jay Finder (known to fandom as The Wombat), Pam Sargent and George Zebrowski. Afterward we returned to the store, did the signing, after which a group of us sat around for another hour or so and solved the world’s problems.

 

            Next day, Friday May 20, it was on to Middletown, CT, for the beginning of the Reunion and Commencement Weekend at Wesleyan University, where I’d received my master’s degree. (In literature, in case anyone’s wondering.) I joined physicist David Miller for a seminar about evolving technology and the way it is affecting us. Dave is a relaxed and entertaining explainer of the mysteries of the universe. People seem increasingly interested in SF. The conversation drew an overflow crowd, which jumped in with enthusiasm. Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves.

 

            It was the first time I’d been back since my graduation, in 1972. That’s the sort of experience that reminds you how much the world has changed. Middletown, a quiet, almost country place with picket fences and patches of woods in those years, has acquired the heavy traffic and crowded streets of a growing thoroughfare.

 

            Another reminder of change: When we’d finished, I took off on I95 headed for South Jersey. It was a route I’d routinely driven when I was stationed at Newport, and later when I was in school. Never a problem getting through New York City as long as I didn’t get off the interstate.

 

Not this time.

 

I stayed with friends in Cherry Hill Friday night, and enjoyed a breakfast with them at Ponzio’s, where Phillies’ manager Charlie Manuel conducts his radio show. I’d have enjoyed asking him if the hitting will ever come around, but the timing didn’t work.

 

Afterward, I headed for D.C. and the Washington Hilton, where, that night, the Nebulas would be awarded. Mike Zipser, of Fast Forward, had arranged for an interview. Mike arrived shortly after I did and took me over to the studio. The interview was conducted by Tom Schaad.

 

Two hours later I made for the banquet hall and the awards ceremony, which was conducted smoothly by Michael Swanwick. Harlan Ellison’s “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” was among the nominees for best short story. Harlan was unable to attend, and had asked that Shawna McCarthy and I represent him if he won. He did, sharing the award with Kij Johnson, who took the prize for “Ponies.”

                  

                                                               #

 

I met Harlan twenty years ago at the Sycamore Hill writers’ workshop. The workshop, at that time, was conducted by John Kessel and Mark Van Name. It was one of the more valuable professional experiences I’ve had, not only because it was an opportunity to sit with established writers and talk about what works –and what doesn’t--, but also because it provided an opportunity to actually relax with them and get to know them on a personal level. Something that never really seems to happen at a con, where somehow time is always short. 

 

Among others I first met at Sycamore Hill were Mike Bishop, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, Jim Morrow, Charles Sheffield, Carol Emshwiller, Gregory Frost, Richard Butner, Maureen McHugh, Bruce Stirling, and Jonathan Lethem. Karen Joy Fowler was also a regular, but I’d been welcomed by her a few years earlier to a Nebula event on the Queen Mary. I miss Sycamore Hill. You want to attend a workshop, that was a pretty decent crew.

 

                                                          #

 

Maureen and I spent this following weekend at OASIS 24 in Orlando. I participated in four panels, dealing with topics ranging from the future of atomic energy to how to write salable fiction. The writer GoH was David Drake, who also has a Sycamore Hill connection, although I don’t think he ever actually attended. David showed up a couple of times at the closing parties.

 

I shared a signing table with him. He had –how should I put it?—a substantial crowd.

 

                                                           #

 

Shortly after I came out of college, I picked up the Oxford collection of Montaigne’s essays. It’s a substantial volume. Over the years, I’ve looked into it periodically. Always enjoyed it. Recently it seems to have taken me over completely. Probably won’t be doing much else for the next year or so. 

 

 

                                                        JOURNAL #91

 

                                                          June 15, 2011

 

 

            We’ll be going out this evening to celebrate: Going Interstellar is finished. My co-editor, Les Johnson, is finishing with the loose ends. The anthology deals with getting out of the solar system with the technology that we already possess, or that we should have within the reasonably foreseeable future. That means no FTL.

 

            We have five essays on the topic, two by Gregory Matloff, and one each by Charles E. Gannon, Richard Obousy, and by Les. Les has my favorite method, the solar sail. There are also eight stories, by Ben Bova, Louise Marley, Michael Bishop, Sarah A. Hoyt, Mike Resnick, and one each by the two editors.

 

            I’ve done a substantial number of writing seminars, and I’m always full of advice, some of it useful, some maybe not, but one piece I’ve neglected. And it’s important: When you finish a project, especially a substantial one, it’s important to celebrate. At the very least take the evening, go out, forget the diet, and raise a toast to the Designer who has allowed you to make a living doing something so enjoyable.

 

                                                                          #

 

            Working on that book has had a curious effect on me. I’ve always had my doubts about whether we’d ever get out of the solar system. When you realize that the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is so far away that Apollo XI would need 50,000 years to get there, you tend to conclude it isn’t going to happen. After reading the essays and stories, I find it hard to imagine it will ever happen.

 

                                                                            #

 

            In the United States, we seem always to be in an election season. It’s happening now, of course. I’m listening to politicians on both sides go on about the deficiencies of their opponents. But nobody ever takes on either of the most significant hazards the world faces: nuclear stockpiles. And overpopulation. 

 

            Of course, no politician with any hope of being elected would dare to suggest that we campaign for a deal to get everyone to disarm. That would scare the devil out of some people who believe you could never set up a foolproof system to make sure everybody’s following the rules. (Maybe you can’t, but maybe it’s not really essential.) As to a constantly growing population, no one seems to realize that environmental issues, energy production, food and water resources, and so on, cannot be managed ultimately as long as we face a constantly growing global population. But what American politician could argue that we need to show some restraint and retain any chance of being elected?

 

                                                                                #

 

            I haven’t had much time for reading over the past thirty years. Consequently, my library has been piling up with books I’d really like to get to. These include Civilization, by Roger Osborne; the Modern Library collection of Francis Bacon; A Brief History of the Mind, by William Calvin; approximately twelve Dickens novels; Paideia, by Werner Jaeger; The Modern Mind, by Peter Watson; a couple of Mark Twain collections; Black Holes & Time Warps, by Kip Thorne; Hercule Poirot’s Casebook, by Agatha Christie; and Brian Fagan’s Time Detectives. Also, there is Nancy Kress and Greg Benford and Greg Bear and Karen Joy Fowler and about a dozen more to whose work I’ve become addicted.

 

            I probably spend fifty hours a week writing. Add baseball to all this, a passion for the theater, and a love for old movies (I took time last night to watch Stan and Ollie in The Music Box), and life has a tendency to get crowded. That’s not a complaint, by the way. And Stan and Ollie, despite the fact that I’ve more or less left slapstick behind, are still hilarious.

 

            I lost interest in the American slapstick comedy I’d grown up with when I discovered during my college years that the Brits were far ahead of us. No American could touch Terry-Thomas or Alistair Sim. And I was never the same after watching the machinations of the young ladies at St. Trinian’s.

 

                                                                    #

 

            I received the copy-edits yesterday for a story that will be appearing in Analog at some point over the next few months. The story is “Dig Site,” and, as you can guess, it has to do with an odd archeological discovery on an island in the Aegean. Analog has also picked up “Listen Up, Nitwits.”    

             

                                                                     #

 

I’ve accepted an invitation to attend ConCarolinas next year in Charlotte, June 1-3. Also, I’ll be at Miami ComicCon, December 8-9, 2012. (Note: next year.)

                                               

                                                           JOURNAL #92

 

                                                           June 30, 2011

           

            One of the characters in The Cassandra Project, which I’m co-writing with Mike Resnick, is George Cunningham, the president of the U.S. The year is 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landings, and the beginning of a presidential election season.

 

            Cunningham is caught up in a flood of rumors about the original Apollo missions, but there’s no way to go through a novel featuring someone sitting in the oval office without at least mentioning some of the other problems he’s facing. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about over the past two months. We can assume the usual issues will be front and center.  The country will undoubtedly still be broke. The present imbalance of wealth –one of the signs of a third world nation—will probably have gotten worse. I’d be surprised if we’ve done anything positive about the schools. (You’ve seen the statistics now, with American students lagging well behind the kids from almost every other industrialized nation.) The basic problem with American education isn’t the schools per se, it’s the culture which the schools represent. E.g, every plan for improvement produced by politicians tends to overlook the most critical factor in the system: the parents. If kids come from homes where the parents don’t care, or are missing, or can’t set an example, or don’t know what to do to help, they are handicapped from the start. Until we can find a way to involve Mom and (hopefully) Dad, we’re going to continue to stumble along.

 

            But that’s old stuff. I’ve been looking for problems that no one’s paying attention to at the moment. And that, in our traditional way, we won’t bother with until they become a major issue. For example, life extension. We continue to make major strides. But what happens when people routinely live past 100? Do we retool social security some more? Raise the retirement age to 85? If the whole population starts restricting diets, doing exercise, and gives up smoking, we are going to face some serious issues. Maybe there’ll be a nationwide movement for people to demonstrate their patriotism by jumping from a pier.

 

            Aside from extended life spans, we will still be facing a population problem. But how do we even confront it? I can’t imagine an American politician having any chance of getting to the White House while campaigning on a theme of having smaller families.

 

            There’s the loss of value in the currency, which has been going on a long time. How many dollars will you need to buy a Coke?

 

            Then there’s the population imbalance issue, deriving from the increasing popularity among undeveloped nations of China’s one-child-per-family plan. One problem is that poor families want workers and abort girls. There is already a shortage of girls in a number of countries. How annoyed do you suppose millions of young males may become when they can’t find any women?

 

            There are other issues, but that’ll probably do for now.

 

                                                                    #

 

            I’ve mentioned before that no SF film ever has hit me the way Robert Dyke’s TimeQuest did. Maybe it’s because of the sheer power of the film. Maybe it’s because Kennedy’s death had such an impact on my generation. A time traveler goes back to Texas in 1963 and warns Kennedy of the forthcoming assassination. And also of ‘a second assassination.’ ‘Stop cheating on Jackie,’ he says. ‘The world will find out.’

 

And history takes a different route. JFK becomes the president we’d thought we had. We don’t go into Vietnam. MLK eventually becomes president. We get Moonbase. An upgraded version of the film is now available as JFK:Second Chance. And the ‘second chance’ has a different significance from what you might expect.

 

For transparency: The writer/director, Robert Dyke, is a friend. But I didn’t know him when I had my initial reaction to the movie.

 

                                                             #

 

Free will may be an illusion. The July/August issue of The Atlantic has an intriguing article, “The Brain on Trial.” When people do seriously deranged things, like climbing a tower in Texas and shooting everybody in sight, to what degree, if any, are they responsible? The argument offered here is that we aren’t nearly as much in control of our lives as we think. Free will is, to a remarkable degree, an illusion. Genetics gets involved. Brain damage. Tumors. But if we’re not responsible for our actions, and we aren’t talking here only about murder, but also about things like having an extraordinarily good time, partying through the night, can anyone hold it against us?  

 

                                                           #

 

The Great Books Foundation has released the Science Fiction Omnibus. The contents include Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” Arthur Clarke’s “The Star,” Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man,” and stories by J. G. Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Orson Scott Card, and Connie Willis, among others. They’ve also picked up my own “Promises to Keep.”

 

“Promises to Keep” was written in the Customs office of the railroad depot at Noyes, MN in 1982. Between trains. I would have loved to know that one day it would be keeping such company.

 

Also, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have released Year’s Best SF 16. It includes the “The Cassandra Project,” a short story from Lightspeed, which inspired the novel mentioned above. Incidentally, readers need not worry about the story being a spoiler. Can’t happen.        

 

                                                              #

Upcoming: I’ll be at Dragoncon September 1-5, in Atlanta. And at the Northeastern Georgia Writers’ workshop Wednesday, Oct 5, 1-3 p.m. We’ll be on the third floor of the Peach State Bank.