 I'm David Thorburn, director of the Communications Forum. It is my pleasure to introduce our speakers for today. The event is going to be moderated by my colleague Henry Jenkins, who has written widely on science fiction. And he's going to be in conversation with one of MIT's most distinguished and legendary writing teachers and writers, Joe Haldeman, who's the author of numerous novels including the Nebula Award-winning and Hugo Award-winning books, The Forever War and Forever Peace, Collections of Short Stories, and Poetry, which I learned today. He began writing before. He began writing his fiction. His latest books are War Stories and A Separate War and Other Stories, both collections of stories, and a novel called Old Twentieth. In his old age, he's becoming even more prolific than in his youth. And that makes an old man like me very happy and inspires me. Joe has been a winner of a number of awards, including the Riesling Award for Poetry and the James Tiptree Award for Exploration of Gender Roles in Speculative Fiction. As you know, he teaches science fiction writing. And this semester, I think, a remarkable, interesting course on War Stories, war novels. Not only, I think, science fiction in the writing program at MIT. Henry Jenkins. Thank you very much for that generous introduction. So we had agreed that Joe would start by reading from some of his current work in progress. And I'll let Joe just begin by saying a little bit what you're reading and take it away. OK. Basically, I'm reading over there. OK. Because that's where I put it. It occurred to me today, I'm always after my students, not to write science fiction set at MIT. And I just did. In fact, the day before I got to MIT, I turned in this novel this year called The Accidental Time Machine. And much of it does take place at MIT, including the beginning, which I will begin at. The story would have been a lot different if Matt's supervisor had been watching him when the machine first went away. The older man was hunched over his oscilloscope screen, staring into the green pool of light like a 2D and corpulent bird of prey, fiddling with two knobs, intent on a throbbing bright oval that wiggled around, eluding his control. Matt Fuller could have been in another room, another state. A sleet rattled on dark windows. Matt put down his screwdriver and pushed the reset button on the new calibrator, a shoebox-sized machine. The machine disappeared. He stared for about one second. When he was able to close his mouth and open it again, he said, Dr. Marsh, look. Dr. Marsh pulled all of himself reluctantly from the round screen. What is it, Matthew? The machine had reappeared. The calibrator, for a moment there, it looked like it went away. Dr. Marsh nodded slowly. It went away. I mean, like it disappeared, gone, zapped. It appears to be here now. Well, yeah, obviously. I mean, it came back. The big man leaned back against the work table, tired springs on his chair, groaning, and protest. We've both been up a long time. How long for you? Well, a lot, but how long? Maybe 30 hours. He looked at his watch. Maybe a little more. You're seeing things, Matthew. Go home. He made helpless motions with his hands, but it go home. His supervisor turned off the scope and heaved himself up, like me. He took his thermal jacket, a bright red tent, off the hook and shrugged it on. He paused at the door. I mean it. Get some sleep. Something to eat besides Twinkies. Yeah, sure. Look who's giving dietary advice. Maybe it was the sugar though, and the coffee, and a little bit of speed after dinner, and cold French fries, and a chocolate chip cookie, and amphetamines. That might make you see things, or not see them for a moment. He waved goodnight to the professor and sat back down at the calibrator. It was prettier than it had to be, but Matt was funny that way. He'd found a nice rectangle of oak in the miscellaneous storage bin and cut out the metal parts so they fit flush on top of it. The combination of wood with matte black metal and glowing digital readouts pleased him. He always looked kind of scruffy himself, but his machines were another matter. His bicycle was silent as a grease, and you could play the spokes like a harp. His own oscilloscope, which he had taken apart and rebuilt, had a sharper display than the professor's and no hiss. Back when he'd had a car, a Mazda Ibuki, it was always spotless and humming. No need for a car at MIT, though, and plenty of need for money. So somebody back in Akron was just spoiling his handy work on the Mazda. He missed the relaxation of fiddling with it. He ran his hand along the cool metal top of the machine, slightly warm above the battery case. Off to turn it off. He pushed the reset button. The machine disappeared again. Holy shit, he bolted through the door. Professor Marsh! He was at the end of the hall, tying on his hat. What is it this time? Matt looked over his shoulder and saw the calibrator materialize again. It shimmered for a split second and then was solid. Well, I don't guess it's really important. Come on, Matt. What is it? He looked over his shoulder again. Well, I wondered if I could take the calibrator home with me. What on earth would you calibrate, he smiled? You have a little graviton generator at home? Just some circuit board tests. I can do them at home as well as here, thinking fast. Maybe sleep in tomorrow, not come in through the snow. Good idea. I may not come in either. He finished putting on his mittens. You can email me if anything comes up. He pushed open the door against a strong wind and looked back, sardonic. Especially if the thing disappears again. We do need it next week. Matt went back and sat down by the calibrator and sipped cold coffee. He checked his watch and pushed the button. The machine shimmered and disappeared. But only the metal box, the oak base, remained a conical wood screw hole in each corner. It had done that last time, too. What would happen if he put his hand in the space where the box had been? When it came back, it might chop him off at the wrist. Or there might be a huge nuclear explosion, the old science fiction version of what happens when two objects try to occupy the same space at the same time. No, there were plenty of air molecules there when it came back before, and no obvious nuclear explosions. It shimmered back, and he checked his watch a little less than three minutes. The first disappearance had been about one second, then maybe 10, 12 seconds. His watch was a $20 dime store Seiko, but he was pretty sure it had a stopwatch function. He took it off and pushed buttons at random until it behaved like a stopwatch. He pushed the button on the watch and the reset button simultaneously. It seemed to take forever. The rattle of sleet quieted to a soft whisper of snow. The machine reappeared, and he clicked the stopwatch button. 34 minutes, 33.22 seconds. Call it one, 10, 170, 2073 seconds. He crossed over to the professor's desk and rummaged around for some semi-log graph paper. If he took an average, it looked like the thing went missing about 12 times longer each time he pushed the button. Do the next one about six hours at home. He found a couple of plastic trash can liners to protect the machine, but before he wrapped it up, he put a cardboard sleeve around the reset button and fixed it in place with duct tape. He didn't want the machine disappearing on the subway. It was one unholy bitch of a night. The sleet indeed had turned to snow, but there were still deep puddles of icy slush that you couldn't avoid, and Matt hadn't worn boots. By the time he got on the red line, his running shoes were soaked and his feet were numb. When he got off at East Lexington, they had thawed enough to start hurting, and the normal 10-minute uphill walk took 20, the sidewalk slippery with ice forming. Wouldn't do to drop the calibrator. He could build a new one in a couple of days if he could find the parts or his successor could after he was fired. All the calibrator was supposed to do was supply one reference photon per unit of time, the unit of time being the tiny supposed cronon. The length of time it takes light to travel the radius of an electron. Nothing to do with disappearing. He managed to take off a glove without dropping the machine, and his thumbprint led him into the apartment building. He trudged up to the second floor and thumbed his way into his flat. Kara had only been gone for a couple of days, and most of that time he'd been in the lab, but the place was already taking on bachelor pad aspects. The stack of journals and printouts on the coffee table had spilled onto the floor, and though he had sorted through it twice looking at things, it hadn't occurred to him to stack it back up. Kara would have done that the first time she walked through the living room, so maybe they weren't exactly made for each other. Still, still, he put the calibrator on the couch and stacked the magazines. Half of them slid back onto the floor. He went into the kitchen and didn't look in the sink. He got a beer from the refrigerator and took it into the bathroom along with the new physical review letters. He ripped off his shoes and ran a few inches of hot water into the tub and blissfully put his feet into thaw. There was nothing in letters that particularly interested him, but it let him pretend to be doing something useful while he was mainly concerned with thawing out and drinking beer. Of course, that made the phone ring. There was an old fashioned voice only in the bathroom. He leaned over and punched it. Here, Maddie, only one person called him that. Why can't I see you? No picture, mother, I'm on the bathroom phone. I'm sending you money so you can have a phone in the bathroom. I wouldn't mind a phone in the bathroom. It was already here. It would cost extra to take it out. Well, use your cell, I wanna see you. No, you don't. I look like I've been up for 36 hours because I have. What, you're killing yourself, you know that. Why on earth would you stay up that long? Lab work, actually, he was disinclined to come home to the apartment, to the empty apartment, the empty bed. But he'd never told his mother about Cara. I'm gonna sleep in tomorrow, maybe not even go to the lab. He kept talking and pushed the hold button down for a moment. Call coming in, mother, buzz you tomorrow on the cell. He hung up and raised the beard to his lips. And there was a perfunctory knock on the apartment door. It creaked open. He wiped his feet inadequately on the bathroom throw rug and stumbled into the living room. Cara, of course, no one else's thumb would open the door. She was pretty bedraggled, pretty and bedraggled, and had a look that Matt had never seen before. Not a friendly look. Cara, it's so good. I finally stopped trying to call you and came over. Where have you been since yesterday morning? At the lab, oh, sure, you spent the night at the lab, forgot to route your cell with a secret number even I can't call. I did, I mean, I didn't. He spread his arms wide. I mean, I spent the night at the lab and they don't allow you to route calls there. Look, I don't care where you spent the night, really. I don't care at all. I just need something from the bathroom. Do you mind? He stepped aside and she stomped by him, dripping. He followed, also dripping. She looked in the medicine cabinet and slammed it shut. Then she looked at the tub. You're taking a bath in two inches of water. Just, uh, just my feet. Oh, of course, of course, your feet. She jerked open the door. You're weird, Matt. Clean feet, though. Here, she pulled out a baby blue box of safe love contraceptive discs. Don't ask, she pointed a finger into his face. Don't you dare ask. Her face was flushed and her eyes were bright with held back tears. I wouldn't. She pushed her way past him. Won't you just stay for a cup of coffee? It's so bad out. Someone's waiting. She stopped at the door. You can take my thumb off the door now. She paused as if wanting to say something more and then spun into the hall. The door closed with a quiet click. Okay, then a couple of chapters go by. And it turns out that he's got a useless time machine. So every time you push a button, it just goes away and you have to wait around and it comes back. I mean, it doesn't bring you the stock quotations or anything like that. It just goes away and comes back. But, but it has something to do with reality and time, space continuum and this and that. So it's worth investigating. He tries, he wonders whether he finds out that if he makes a Faraday cage just a metal box and attaches it to the machine, whatever's in the cage will go. And actually it can even be open on one side. So he tries it with a living thing. He goes out and buys a little turtle at a pet store. And it comes back and seems none the worse for where though it's hard to tell with a turtle. And, and so because he's, he is a weird guy and not particularly responsible. And this and that. I mean, you wouldn't recognize him from any of your classmates, I'm sure. So he's, there is one guy he knows. This is like a, like 2060. He knows one guy who's got a car completely made out of metal. He has most, or he's in composites by then. He's got a friend who's a dope dealer. Who's got a 100 year old Thunderbird. Like a 55 Thunderbird, Dopey Denny. And he's the guy that Matthew goes to for drugs that he needs for studying, right? But they seem to have somewhat intimate relationship. Dopey Denny lived in a large three story Victorian in Back Bay. He swung open the door and gave Matt a big hug. 300 pounds of dope dealer. Understandably stoned at nine in the evening. Dr. Einstein, I presume, he was wearing a black robe with glittering astrological symbols tied with the silver rope barefoot in January. Hi Denny, he looked over the big man's shoulder. Louie's home? No, no, she moved on. How you doing with, what's her name? Kara, she moved on too. Ain't it a bitch, wanna drink? I came here to do, he came here to do science, not socialize, but why not? Sure, what you got? Got it all. He took Matt by the elbow and dragged him toward the kitchen. Matt hauled along the duffel bag with all his time machine stuff in it. The time machine moves an arbitrary distance every time so he doesn't know where he's gonna wind up. If he winds up in Boston Harbor, it's going to be difficult in a very solid metal car so he's got scuba gear and a big graft that he got at an army service. Anyhow, so I've got, I'm doing Heineken, oh, here we go, yeah. The kitchen was all chrome and tile and looked like no one had ever cooked a meal in it. I'm doing Heineken with a whiskey chaser or whiskey with a Heineken chaser. You have one and I'll have the other. Matt took a seat at the kitchen table, a spear-elegant Swedish thing. There was a bottle of 25-year-old Glen Morangie on it and one crystal glass. Denny produced another glass and got two Heineken's from a huge metal refrigerator that seemed to have nothing in it but beer and wine. He should use that for the time machine. It would be cold, but he wouldn't die of thirst. Denny tried to twist the bottles open, then remembered they wouldn't work with the imported beer and crashed through a drawer until he found an opener. He put the beers down and poured Matt a generous amount of whiskey and himself a little more generous one. He sat down on the delicate chair with exaggerated caution. So you see, you say you need the teabird but just to sit in it? Basically, yeah. He took a sip of the whiskey and one of the beer. Then it should disappear and then come back. He nodded slowly. Like those guys who made the Statue of Liberty disappear way back when? I don't know anything about that. This isn't magic. Well, hell, maybe it is magic but I don't know what the hell it is. Not gonna hurt the car. No way. It just goes like somewhere sideways in space. Hell, I'm gonna be in it. I wouldn't do that if there was any danger, would I? Matt resisted the impulse to slug back the whole glass that might communicate uncertainty. Denny took a vial out of his shirt pocket and tapped out a small pile of white powder then produced a little cocktail straw and sniffed it up. He shook all over like a big dog. Want some? No thanks, haven't done it in years. Are you sure you can? Sure, sure, it's not cocaine. It's a DD beta for alertness. He shook again grinning, God damn, cuts to the chase. This was just great. The sole witness to a scientific revolution stoned on an untried drug. Fortunately, all he had to do was push a button which was all Matt had to do as well. He took another sip from each reagent. How long have you been taking it? Got it last night, right up your alley, man, worked till dawn. Maybe later, after it's not a beta, he laughed. You're a fucking wild man, Denny. Hey, it's a job, somebody has to do it. Matt unzipped the duffel bag and brought out the camera. You know how to work this? Yeah, sure, point and shoot. Right, but I wanna make sure the time functions on. The clock down in the right hand corner, he toggled the switch until clock came up and selected it. See, Denny took the camera, no sweat. He held it up and looked at Matt through the point and shoot viewfinder. Just push this big button. Right, it'll be on a tripod, set for video, already aimed, just started when I tell you to. And if I disappear, leave it running till I come back. Maybe in a taxi. He looked at the back of the camera, no picture. No, use the viewfinder, that's to save power. Don't know how long out until I come back. He heard his voice quaver. He really didn't know whether he'd be back. He pushed the glass away. Better not drink any more, change in the bathroom. He waved an arm back the way they'd come. Mikasa Sukasa. Matt picked up the duffel and went down the hall. The bathroom was Italian tile with gold plated hardware and a shower curtain by Salvador Dali. Ornately framed nude paintings. Matt unzipped the duffel and laid out his gear, stripped and threw his clothes back into the bag. Walled in keys and changed in a plastic bag, which he would carry into the uncertain future. The wetsuit was talcomed on the inside and slid on easily. How would he explain it to Denny? Just that he didn't know what to expect, Denny would probably not be able to understand under the best of conditions the tensor calculus he'd used as a shot in the dark guess for describing the thing's behavior. And these were not the best of conditions. He opened the Chinese carry out box and looked at Herman, the turtle, who stared back accusingly. He couldn't leave him at home. He couldn't and couldn't leave him with his mother with no explanation. He probably had a better chance of surviving, hurtling into the unknown in a 56 thunderbird than risking Denny's pet sitting abilities. He put the jar of baby reptile chow in his blouse pocket and picked up the time machine along with the case of bottled water and the bright yellow square of emergency raft and walked back into the kitchen. Holy shit, Denny said, I'm swearing off the stuff. He blinked twice slowly. I got swear you were standing there on a scuba outfit. Just a wetsuit. I don't know what environment where I'm going into. Couldn't afford a space suit. You're going into fucking outer space? No, no, nothing like that. The last time I used this machine it moved but less than a millimeter. He held up his thumb and forefinger. So not outer space, guaranteed? No, not outer space, he hoped. Just the fucking ocean. You're gonna take my T-bird and drop it in the fucking ocean. No, it probably won't move more than an inch. But just in case you dump it in the fucking ocean or the Charles or the harbor, look, Denny, I can't swim. The probability is almost zero, but it scares me shitless. That modified him a little. Yeah, me neither. He shrugged. If it was the Charles or the harbor, I guess we could haul it back up. Yeah, no problem. Unless I drowned, then I wouldn't be able to tell you where it was. He nodded rapidly and stood up with surprising speed. Let's do it. Matt and Herman followed him through the kitchen and out into the garage. There it was, a 270 horsepower dinosaur gleaming under a dozen coats of dehesion red lacquer. It's beautiful, Matt said. New paint job, be careful with it. He opened the door and snapped on the radio. It started playing, I'm Mr. Blue by the Belmonts. Matt unfolded the tripod and set up the camera so it would be pointed at him in the front seat. He put the machine and the rest of his gear on the passenger side and hooked up with the alligator clip, which is on the time machine, to the car's frame. Hey, and don't get any Chinese food on the upholstery. It's not Chinese food, it's a turtle. Oh, yeah, well, of course. Almost forgot, he reached into the pocket with a baby reptile chow and brought out a three by five card with Professor Marsh's name and phone number. Anything goes wrong, call this guy, my boss. Professor Marsh, like in Swamp? Right, he started to close the door but left it open. If he wound up in water, he wanted to be able to jump out. I'm ready if you are, just point and shoot. When Denny Punch pushed the button, so did Matt. He was suddenly blind, immersed in opalescent gray. He heard Herman nervously scratching around in his box. It was strange, but not unexpected. He had time to wonder whether it would be a minute, 10 minutes, 40 days, and then all hell broke loose. Bright daylight dazzled him and a yellow cab crashed into his open door, tearing it off and spinning into the oncoming traffic, where it was broadsided by the slow-crawling number one bus. He was in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, outside of the Pollen Stars Pub. Traffic was scurreling to a halt all around him, horns blaring, with a loud bang, the yellow raft decided to inflate itself. He grabbed Herman and scrunched out of the car, pursued by a wall of yellow plastic, his wetsuit, rather incongruous under the present circumstances, mourning rush hour with snow all around. A siren wailed and a large female police officer came bearing down on him with her ticket book flapping in the cold breeze. Officer, he said, I can explain. Or could he? She sniffed at his breath, are you drunk? A male voice yelled, hands in the air, put your goddamn hands in the air. Matt did, and another policeman marched toward him holding a really large pistol at eye level with both hands. But I haven't done anything, he said innately. He just dropped an antique car in the middle of Mass Ave during rush hour, with no tires. Those were still in Denny's garage. The man's pistol was homing in on Matt's nose. Ran the plate, he said to the woman. The car's stolen, owner murdered. What? Matt said, Denny, you have the right to remain silent. The woman said her own gun pointed at Matt's heart. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney or to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense. But I didn't kill anybody, including the yellow cab driver, who is very much alive, even though his nose was bleeding profusely as he stomped toward the three of them yelling incoherently. Never losing her point of aim, the woman reached up and took the Chinese carryout box and expertly thumbed it open with one hand. She peered inside. A turtle? Well, Matt said, it's a long story. So MIT. The story eventually winds up with MIT about 300 years in the future, where it has become the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy. And the world is rather different. So why don't we talk a little bit about the representation of MIT in the book? You mentioned to me the other day you deal with MIT in a variety of different historical periods, both past, present, and future. Well, I had a lot of fun looking back about the history of MIT before it came here, when it was over on the other side of the water. And it was a very forward-looking outfit. And actually, in its way, conservative tame. I get the impression from reading the publications of the 1880s, 1890s, that they were kind of watching out for the religious types and the politically conservative types, even in those days. And so I don't know, I have course lists, and I have degree programs and everything from the old days. And it's wonderful, all this electrical science and so forth they were doing. And so in the last part of the book, he comes from an unimaginably far future. And they can take him back to where he left with precision. But the time is kind of squishy. Or you can take him back to the exact time, and the space is a little squishy. And they say, do the former rather than the latter, because you don't want to wind up exactly where you were, but in the middle of a concrete wall. So he goes back and winds up at MIT about 10 years before it moved over here. And he's in an interesting position, because he was a physics graduate student, just pre-doc back in the real world. And now he's like 25 years before Einstein. And he can sit and derive general relativity on the back of several envelopes. But he doesn't, because he's got no past. He just suddenly appeared with his girlfriend who he stole from the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy. And so they've got no past. They've got to work their way up. He starts his janitor at MIT and winds up some years later getting degrees and being a professor who's a very careful professor. Because when the first papers about the electrodynamics of moving particles come out, he couldn't do the math just like that. He could do that when he was an undergraduate. When the first tensor calculus descriptions of general relativity come out, he's got a cold. That is, he doesn't discover things, but he can explain things to everybody. And he's sort of a grand old man of the physics department, which is OK by him, because he had been a beleaguered graduate student before. And I don't know. I just have a lot of fun with the sociology of being in this joint. Well, you're touching on something that's rather an under-noticed aspect of science fiction, which is it's a literature about scientists or people engaged in the pursuit of science. So you have to think not just about the science itself and speculation, but how you represent how people do science, what kinds of people do science. Well, and I try to be realistic about it, because I've been around scientists since I was an undergraduate. And I know that they're misrepresented in fiction, for one either on the genius side or on the crazy person side. And so a lot of the scientists, most of the scientists in this story are like people I've known. One is a nutcase who steals the Nobel Prize from our friend, our hero. Dr. Marish winds up being not such a good guy and gets a Nobel Prize in his 70s for the work that our hero did. But he gets back at him. It's a great thing about being a novelist. Anybody who ever did anything bad to you, you can get him sooner or later. So early on in science fiction, the scientist's protagonist would have been a lone tinkerer, inventor. Increasingly, it's represented as corporate science, as science in a research institution. How does that change the kinds of stories science fiction tells as we rethink science as more of an institutional rather than an individual pursuit? Well, actually, you have to rethink what the satisfactions of science are. And I think that one reason I didn't stay in science was my realization that I wasn't going to be a lone hero of astrophysics. It was teamwork back then. It was in the 60s. And I realized, too, that my attraction to science was aesthetic rather than intellectual. And I'd better bail out really fast before I had to take another differential equations course. But these guys, the people who actually do the work, it requires tremendous intellectual discipline without the handicap of being extremely difficult to explain to anybody who's not in your discipline. I mean, even to the extent that somebody who's a biophysicist and somebody who's a crystalline magnetic hydrodynamics person, they have to talk in undergraduate terms to each other because they don't have a professional vocabulary that matches both of their specializations. And if you're writing a realistic story about science, even in the present, let alone in the future, you've got to recognize that it's extremely compartmentalized. And you try to be an educated person. You try to have a general scientific and or uneducation. But I'll tell you, a person who's actually involved in the thin edge, the top of the wedge of research, I don't know when you have time to learn chemistry and philosophy and music and art and everything. We hope that in four years here, we can at least make you somewhat civilized. But I don't know. Just look at the result. What can I say? Well, it strikes me that character in the story you just read from is a hybrid of the two in the sense that he's working in a lab. He's under a supervisor. Yeah, what he's doing in the end to make the story happen is his own work outside of the system, going beyond known science and working with drug dealers. He's modeled after an MIT student I never met that somebody told me about. A guy who was, I guess, at the master's level and would not get his doctorate. And he was working in labs making machines. And he was wonderful with his hands. He could do glass blowing. And he could do electronics. He could do anything with his hands. And he was like a garage mechanic for science. And I thought, God, what a story. A person who has moved sideways away from specialization into almost a craft element of science. And so I decided not to go all that distance because that would be what the story would be about. And I wanted to write this time machine story. So I just gave him some of those characteristics. You're mostly associated with hard science fiction, which is a genre that is very deeply grounded in science. We were talking the other day that time travel stories have had a kind of odd relationship with the hard SF tradition. Well, that's the thing. I mean, nobody's ever demonstrated time travel. But time travel stories are automatically hard SF. Whereas werewolf stories, for instance, are automatically fantasy. But we have observed people exhibiting werewolf-like behavior. I mean, it's not because they're werewolves. It's because they're crazy. But that would be a hard SF story because it was based on clinical observation. Likewise, vampirism. There are all sorts of, especially now, the post-muffy crowd. Oh my god, what's going to happen? But no, it's a funny thing how this is arbitrary. Because time machines are machines, I think. They are associated with hard SF. So of course, time travel has been described in various motifs in higher mathematics. Nothing that most, nothing that a layman could understand. Nothing I can really understand. I'm not going to read the descriptive article and say, oh yeah, that's, that'd work. But I can't do the math anymore. Yeah, I have to say, I was embarrassed at the differential equation level a couple of years ago because I had to do a simple differential equation to figure out how long it takes to get from point A to point B. And I had my old differential equation textbook, and I read through the canonical equations, and I knew what I was supposed to do. But 20 years is too long to leave something like that alone. I called up Greg Benford. Benford works as a physicist. Yeah, he's a full professor of physics at UC Davis. So he still knows those things. Well, the hard SF distinction, in part, grows out of Hugo Gernsbeck's original conception of a literature that popularizes science, that literature that could be part of the popular education of people at a time of enormous technical and scientific change in American society during the 20th century. His idea was that we'd have a literary form that made those ideas more accessible to the masses. And it would be a kind of democratic approach to science education. At one point, Gernsbeck speculated that he might print all the scientific facts and a story in italics so students could separate out, readers could separate out fact from fiction. And then he realized that actually there was a value in the speculative dimension of science fiction, that not being sure, sorting out the line between science fact and science speculation was part of the educational value of this, that it was about problem, what we call sound debugging, or problem solving, or speculation, or the community around it had important functions to play. Well, Gernsbeck was an interesting character because he felt that the only use for science fiction was to turn young people into scientists and engineers. I mean, try to sugarcoat it a little bit so they'd read it. But he couldn't tell good writing from bad. I mean, quite literally. And it's not as if any of my students are that way either. But every now and then you run into somebody who can't tell good writing from bad. And I think about good ol' Hugo, who, the thing about science fiction, which has been true since 1920, God, 1898, is that it's a form of writing, but it's also a way of looking at things. It's a mode of thought. And so you have this paradox that something can be pretty damn good science fiction and be awful writing, really terrible writing, to the extent that you or I, as normal human beings, can't read it. I mean, can't. I can't read the foundation trilogy anymore, which I loved when I was 12 years old. I just can't, you know, my eyes lock on it. I said, why did he do that? And it's true with most of the really old stuff. I can read it as raw material. I can read it to see where I came from, I guess. But, ew, ugly stuff. Some of the ideation's very good. And some of the ideation, for instance, may have saved us from being dominated by Nazi Germany back in the day. All the people who want, all the people at Pinamunde, where they made the V1s and V2s were science fiction fans, so you can't generalize. They all had their astounding magazine subscriptions, and they were sure that after they got rid of England, they would go to the moon, but it didn't work out that way, fortunately. But the ones on our side who got radar and the atomic bomb and all the things that we needed in order to save the world from Naziism, they were science fiction readers. They were that kind of guy, and it was guys in those days, almost all of them. Well, you knew many of those pioneers, or you were saying the other day, going back to Edmund Hamilton even. Edmund Hamilton, yeah, what a nice guy. And Jack, Jack Williamson, who just died about three days ago, 98 years old. I mean, he and Ed Hamilton went down the Mississippi together on a motorboat back in the 1920s, early 1920s, and I thought, by God, what conversations those guys must have had. You probably, none of you have read Edmund Hamilton because he's so old fashioned, but he was, he had the huge imagination, just galaxy-wide science fiction tales. And Jack is Jack, or was Jack, he was the guy who came up with the idea of terraforming. He was the guy who came up with the idea of contra-terrine matter, using matter, anti-matter as a fuel source. And just, the last time, I just wrote his a bit, so this is in my mind. But the last time I saw him, I was at his house in Bortales, New Mexico, where he taught at the Small University. And he was 96 or 95 at the time. And we were sitting, having a glass of wine, and I was talking to him about gravitational lensing in globular clusters, and the implications that had for the formation of planets in general. And we also talked about aspects of asteroid mining, comparing carbonaceous-contradic asteroids to the metallic ones. And Jack knew exactly what I was talking about. He'd read the same articles I had. He's just, he's a science fiction writer, man. There are a lot of people who write SF now who wouldn't know a carbonaceous-contradic asteroid from their ass. But he's the old school. And a few of us who read it, who wouldn't know that either. I have to say. So you're leading to this question of the science fiction writer as a consumer of science research. And we talked about this a little bit the other day. Your relationship to existing bodies of scientific knowledge, could you say a little more about that? Well, I wouldn't say it's research, so much as observation. Well, a good, a thing in point. So I read like New Scientist and Scientific American and those, you know, fairly accessible things. And so like three days ago, what was Tuesday, whatever, coming back from teaching on the tea, I had the new, new scientist I was going through, you know, as you do. And I found this article that home, holy cow, this woman with her team of party researchers had compressed water like thousands of atmospheres and bombarded it with X-rays for six hours, not five, but six hours. And the result was an alloy of hydrogen and oxygen, metallic hydrogen and oxygen. And I'm going, oh, you know, we never came up with that. And so I, the first thing I did when I got home was I Googled it and I found her actual initial paper and verified what it was. And then I put it on my blog saying, can you believe this shit, man? Because this is the way I did chemistry in junior high school. Now you can just see them in this lab saying, well, we've got this thing. Why don't we put water in it and crush it down like diamond pressure? And then while we've got it that way, let's just put X-rays on it for about six hours and see what the fuck happens. You know, I almost blew up my high school chemistry like I'm doing that. But I mean, well, after I read the paper, I realized that they were indulging in some drastic short-cutting because actually they had some idea of what was going to happen. But the thing, they said, we were so surprised. Well, yeah. Yeah, it didn't, I wonder whether we could make an alloy of hydrogen and oxygen if we, no, I don't think that was in their mind. But it's gonna, you know, it may wind up 20 years from now, that may be what you put in your car to fuel the fuel cells. Because you just scale off the hydrogen and, you know, run with it. They're looking for some way to get hydrogen out of the dirigible down into something that they can slide into a fuel cell and go. So you read this article, and how does, as a creative writer, what kinds of responses does that trigger for you? See, my immediate response was social. I could just see her and her gang of idiots going, hmm, okay, we've got the diamond-like pressure here. Why don't we just x-ray the damn thing and see what happens. I mean, oh, God, I don't wanna be in the same county as them, but. Yeah. Yeah. But no, it happens, the thing is, I actually, I get more damn ideas out of popular science magazines. I don't know. I had to make up a new, I wanted to, okay, I wanted to come up with a new kind of alien. Nobody's steal this, okay, I can't. But I was, I wouldn't, you know this thing at the Museum of Science with the plasticized, dead people that cut open, and it's all very fascinating, and really gory and horrible. And so we went over there and we looked at this, and real interesting, and it's full of philosophical statements about life and death and blah, blah, blah, and so forth. So I'm trying, I'm fiddling with this novel that I'm gonna start December 8th. And I needed to come up with a new kind of alien. So I said, here's one. Everything in the world is either alive or dead, right? What if these aliens are somewhere in between and they're just, they're really just not alive or dead, and maybe they don't even know quite the difference, they don't appreciate the difference between things that are alive and dead. How could I get there? And I happened to read Sky and Telescope. I was going through Flip, Flip, Flip about forms of life that wouldn't necessarily be carbon-based. And there's one, the way backstory is, we've known that silicon forms compounds analogous to organic compounds with solutes that are pretty toxic, like hydrogen fluoride and hydrofluoric acid and so forth. Uh-huh, what I didn't know was some people have been doing work on analogs to those that are done in liquid nitrogen, like organic chemicals that can only exist at 400 degrees below zero. I'm going, they'd be pretty slow, wouldn't they? And so what about, you know, you take the people from the Museum of Science and the people who live in liquid nitrogen and you say, maybe they are fucking dead most of their life, you know, maybe they're just sitarazzi. Somebody pushes the button and they're alive for a while and they do their thing, which takes like 10,000 years and then they go dormant for a while again. And then 100,000 years later they say, oh, wake up Mac, you know, he knows the answer to this and they push the button again, he's alive again. And you get these people up against the human beings who are like mayflies to him. I mean, our lives are so, so brief that they can't communicate directly with us. They have to communicate through intermediaries and so I have a scaled bunch of aliens and these old, old, cold things that live in liquid nitrogen and live for millions of years. They've never died. I mean, they know about death, but none of them has ever died. I mean, God, think how long that would take at 400 degrees below zero. How would you know? And so they're, but they build like genetic engineering, they build these creatures who live shorter and shorter lives until finally they have one that lives in a pool of liquid nitrogen on Triton, you know, one of the satellites of Neptune and it only lives like 10,000 years and it kind of can communicate with us like, you got a point. And basically I'm thinking about trying to communicate with people who are really old and so there's an element of that in it, but also the idea that life can exist on all sorts of time scales, depending on the chemistry of the life. I mean, the biochemistry that mediates the life of a mayfly is so different from ours and a mayfly, mayflies basically, they sit around in some nymph thing for months at a time but when they become real, mayflies, they may live only a few hours and they never eat. They've got mouths, but they're left over and they just mate and die once. That must be a lot of fun. But now what is their life like? I'm saying, see what the aliens are gonna tell us is because they'll know about mayflies. They know about everything. They've been listening to radio and television ever since it began and have been thinking about intelligent life for a long time. They say, if you had to communicate with a mayfly, what would you do? You'd have to build something that moved a lot faster than you and then have it build something that moves faster than it. Have it moved all the way down until you had something that had the same lifespan. For two hours it could speak the same language and then you have to get a common language. The thing is these aliens whose representative lives in this lake on Triton have done it before. And then we find out that the trick is everything is sitting on earth, it's all predetermined because they don't know what we're gonna turn out to be and if we're dangerous, they have a little bit of prophylaxis they can do to protect themselves and it's already in place. They have to see what we do and what we are. And we can't tell because their science is so hugely sophisticated we can't even tell it's science. I mean, you can walk right over one of these guys and think he's just a glacier. And so, you know, science fiction, science fiction happening in front of your very eyes. So in the piece you wrote for the CMS newsletter, you describe a bit the mission that science fiction has at a time when science itself is under assault. And I wonder if you could say some things about your vision of that. Well, I'm kind of in that case about it. I don't know whether you want my vision. I just think that religion is out of hand on a lot of different levels and science fiction is a tool against religion. I didn't say that, I didn't say that. But you know, there you go. Science fiction is a tool for rationalism and for the rational approach to solving life's problems. And you know, I've got to admit things like faith-based initiatives work really well. Like, you know, 9-11 was a faith-based initiative and that changed all of American life. You can't say it doesn't work. It really worked. And I just think that maybe we can come up with something that's more ABC and a little more, maybe not as interesting, but a little safer. And science fiction looks at alternatives. Science fiction is like a flight simulator. It's like a machine where you can go in and try things out without dying. Or you can just see maybe what would happen if things were this way or that way. And try to convince people of the results. I mean, when Al Gore did this movie, you know, the thing about questions. And inconvenient truth. An inconvenient truth, yeah. That was so 30s science fiction. Because you know, we don't know that. I mean, there are a few heretics who say, the world is actually getting colder. But it was fun to watch this guy who's just, he's not even a scientist. He's just kind of a guy who got the message. And he's doing a Hugo Gernsback thing on the rest of the world. He climbs up, says this is where the curve will go if you don't watch out. Ooh, my God. And I just thought it was an interesting injection of a kind of old fashioned science fictional tool into more of what pleases us to call real life. I really think science fiction is more like real life than most of the stuff we walk through. So let's, we've so far been talking about the science part of science fiction. But what about the literary dimension of it? I mean, you talked earlier about there being stuff that's good science fiction and lousy fiction. Yeah. Part of the complaint has been the absence of characterization or vivid characterization in a lot of science fiction. But the piece you just read is very much a character sketch. Yeah. Well, most of my fiction is character driven. And partly, I don't know, you write what you'd like to read. And I get so bored with these cardboard characters going through and essentially giving a lesson. And then they, you put them back in the box and take them out for the rest of the fucking now. You know, it's so boring. It really is. You don't have to do that. You don't have to do that because you can do it both. You can have two balls in the air. If you have one ball in the air, it's not juggling, is it? So yeah, you can do both. And the best science fiction writers have done that since Wells and Verne. I mean, I recently reread War of the Worlds. Who didn't? And I was impressed by what he was doing. This is about the time that Henry James came up with the idea of viewpoint and fiction. And he did so well just saying, oh, well, you know, how many ways can I tell this story? And the tension and the fear and everything they brought up through the various points of view. It's just really good stuff, more than 100 years old, good modern stuff, and modern, little in. And so now we're post-modern. And we're whatever is beyond post-modern now, I guess, is what we're trying to do. I don't know. See, I guess I'm really sort of stuck back in the 1970s. I'm a hard science fiction writer who appreciates new wave kind of sensibilities and the necessity for telling an actual mature story at the same time as doing your science dance. Well, I happen to know you're a big fan of Hemingway. And he's been an important influence on you. So what did Hemingway teach you as a science fiction writer? Well, Hemingway hated science fiction and fantasy and anything that wasn't, you know, that wouldn't grow hair in your chest. Science fiction instantly makes hair fall off your chest. It's good for women. Women should read science fiction. Now, Hemingway, basically by example, rather than precept, I've read, I hesitate to say all of Hemingway, but I've read all of the legitimate Hemingway and most of the crap that they brought out to make some money. And I remember the International Hemingway Society have been for a long time. I'd go listen to papers. I even give papers every now and then. Yeah, I think a writer should be fascinated by some writer. And I'm not sure it matters which writer you absolutely are enamored of. I mean, I really, really know a lot about Hemingway. And I think that's a way to say I know a lot about writing through this filter. It's like in optics, you can have limited band pass filters that can tell you a lot about something that you're looking at. You can tell, like, you get a hydrogen-3 filter and you look at this cloud of gas out in the middle of the constellation Cygnus and you see a thing that nobody could see without the filter. And then you take the filter away and you see what everybody else is saying. You click like that, like that. It's like I can read something florid like Faulkner, who I think is a great writer. But I can look at him through the limited band pass filter of Hemingway and say, I can almost tell you how Hemingway would have written that scene. It wouldn't have been better, but it would have been Hemingway. And you can also, you can do it the other way around. And I wouldn't dare to because I'm nothing like a Faulkner scholar, not really a Hemingway scholar either. But the idea that the thing that makes reading and writing infinitely fascinating is this idea that everybody brings his own set of filters to every situation, whether it's fictional or real life. Real life sucks. But fiction, inventing things, you can take a single scene and tell it so many different ways that fiction is almost endlessly fascinating. I'll tell you, you may have had exactly the same experience because we're of an age. But when I was in the fifth grade and I was fanatic about comic books, I was reading comic books all the time, somebody came out with a 3D comic that was a Western. And it just had one scene in it, which was an encounter in a bar where this tough guy comes in. And he tries to hassle everybody in the bar. And the sheriff draws down on him and they shoot him. The sheriff kills him and then goes through this existential problem afterwards. And then they go back to the beginning of the story and they tell it again from the outlaws viewpoint. And then they go back to the beginning and they tell it again from the viewpoint of somebody who's just sitting at a table. They did four or five iterations of the story. And because it was 3D and all very modern and new, you had to think about it. And I'd never heard of Henry James. I was 10 years old. But I suddenly knew all I ever had to know about Henry James or about Viewpoint anyhow. And it gave me an epiphany about storytelling. Before I had ever read very much. I just read a bunch of science fiction and some dickens and the things you had to read in school. But suddenly I knew that this was not even a finite universe. For every story, there are another 7 billion ways to tell that story because everybody who reads it sees something different. So one of your tasks here at MIT is to teach MIT science students how to write science fiction. So what are the challenges of helping them translate what they know about science into storytelling? Well, one problem is timidity. People who are actual scientists, and especially fledgling scientists, are cautious about using that. I'm not cautious at all. I just say anything. And if somebody says I'm wrong, I can go, hey, I'm not a scientist. But they can't do that. I think there are a couple of problems. One, I have to keep telling myself I'm three times as old as these people. And I've been reading science for 55 years. And I know a lot here and there. I don't know a lot about any one science. But I have this kind of potpourri of knowledge that they don't have because they haven't been reading general science for half a century. And so I get impatient because somebody who's a biochemist doesn't know orbital mechanics. And I shouldn't be because there are only so many years to learn things. And so they don't know. They don't know. That's a problem, but that's not their problem. That's mine. There's a distinct difference I've taught at other places. And the distinct difference at MIT is that most of the people who take your course don't want to be writers. And it's a humanities course. Everybody's got to have humanities, no problem. I mean, I have no problem with it. But a person who's used to teaching writing at someplace like Harvard or someplace will go, oh my god. They don't care. They don't care about the structure. They don't care about the music or the prose. They don't care about this and that and the other thing. Well, news break, they care about a lot of things that are much more important to them than the order of words and a sentence. And if you can't live with that, you shouldn't be trying to teach at a place like this. Because I can't get my ego involved in the success of my students as writers because they're not going to be writers. I've had, what, two students in 23 years who published fiction books. I mean, I'm sure they published their own stuff. But that's OK because that's not my function here. But it sounds like from your discussion that you see science fiction as a generative space for scientists to think about possibilities they might not have explored otherwise through their work. And are there any number of examples of concepts in science fiction, whether it's terraforming or communication satellites or whatnot, that emerged from science fiction first and later became substantiated? Is that part of the job for MIT students? You know, I would be so surprised if that happened to somebody when he was older than 16 years old. I think by the time we get people here, they've absorbed the root nonverbal lesson of science fiction, which is that everything has changed. Just keep open to ideas, no ideas. And I think most of it, I very rarely, this happens. But it's really rare. I'll have somebody who knows a lot about science and has never read science fiction. And they show up in classes, and you read this. And suddenly it's like they're 12 years old, and holy cow, where has this stuff been all my life? Well, I don't know. I guess they were too busy reading chemistry. But that can happen. Usually, I get people who have read some science fiction or more likely nowadays, they've seen a lot of science fiction movies in TV, which is not an inferior form. I keep making myself repeat, but it's not the same. As to the function of science fiction in terms of making people interested in science and keeping their minds open and so forth, this is not the place for that. Not really. I mean, most of my students already have that when they come to the first day of class. And so I teach it much differently than I would teach a class at a normal university. Normal? Did I say we were not normal? Well, we're not. Shifting gears, war has been a sort of central theme running through your work. And it's an interesting theme because it cuts across your more realist fiction or your autobiographical fiction writing and your science fiction writing. And I'm wondering what the two genres allow you to say about the experience of war. I'm not sure. I mean, once a writer starts to get that analytical about his work, I think he's really headed for the rubber room or retirement. Now, I understand that, well, the basic fact is that if you've been a soldier, writing about war is the first natural emotional thing for you to do. I mean, it's going to be the most dramatic thing that ever happened to you unless you really went off the deep end after you came back from the war. And so when you're casting about nobody sits around and says, oh, what will I write about today? But when you face the blank page, one of the things that you go to automatically is the difficulty and the pain and the moral ambiguity and so forth that the battlefield gives to you. And like most people who were veterans, the first novel I wrote was a war novel. Everybody's got to get that one out of their system. And then I wrote some more considered war novels later on. And I don't care if I never write another one, but it'll happen. You look for stuff. And that keeps coming back. I was a soldier for one year, exactly 365 days. And what was that like 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago? 40, I mean, 40 years ago. And much of it is still right there all the time, which I think is true of anybody who goes through a traumatic experience. Well, war has been a longstanding theme of science fiction, but I think critics have commented that your representation of war is some of the more realistic and compelling. Well, most science fiction writers are smart enough not to get drafted, see? So I go to these science fiction dimensions, and all the other guys who are my age who write science fiction and were soldiers are all right wing nuts. None of them was drafted, man. They all joined. I'm going. But my problem was I was accepted to graduate school in physics. And the year before or the year after, I would have gotten out of the draft. But 1967, they rescinded that consideration. And so I got drafted just like, what? And then yell up. We're missing the, or we're not getting anything through the mics down here. Oh, no, we're not. Oh, we are. Oh, now we are. OK, thanks. Oh, hi, Mike. Well, yeah, that was my basic problem was I was born the wrong year. That's the way it goes. There was one year. This is the only time in a recorded history and probably in all the history of the universe when the Association of University Professors had a came together and cooperated with the Department of Defense. Because what happened was in 1967, they said, they were drafting people out of, once you got your bachelor's degree, they would take you away. And so there was nobody left to do the dog work. There were no graduate assistants to grade papers and clean bottles and things like that. And the Army was drafting these people who had a degree and they wouldn't follow orders. You would say, give me 10. Give me 100 push-ups. This is why, because I've got a uniform on. Fuck you, man. And you know, you don't want the other soldiers to listen to somebody doing that. You want them to say, oh, I'm so afraid of them. And so that's literally what happened. For one year, they said, OK, what happened was the, actually, I've got my story a little advanced because it was that year when I was drafted, when all these guys kept up at college and instead of going on to graduate school, they went into the Army and just gave the Army hell. I'd meet them every now and then. And they're sitting around and saying, isn't this like a dream? I mean, you know, man, this is so fucking like a dream. And I'm going, can I have some of that? Yeah. But then they went back to letting the graduates do graduate study and just drafting poor black people, which worked a lot better. I mean, obviously, we did lose the war. I mean, you got to admit, it didn't work that well. But at least it kept all your parents out of the war or many of your parents. Now we have a different situation, and it's very interesting. I'm in correspondence with a lot of people who are fighting now over in the desert there. And it's a different crowd because, of course, they all or at least they joined the National Guard and thought they could get out of it. But so it's a different deal. I mean, we were anarchy. We were just really bad. We were talking in class last night about fragging officers. And you know, there was like a sport in Vietnam. Everybody had heard about it. Even if you hadn't done it, it was kind of, well, it's, you know, hey, man, you joined. It could happen to you. And officers knew that there was that little problem that you had to give a little. Nowadays, they don't do that, I don't think. Nowadays, well, they're still fragging. I mean, soldiers have always killed their officers. I mean, who's your enemy? Who's putting you in danger? It's not the guys in the other uniform there. It's the guys who are making you go to those people. And so you look back behind you and say, oops. A little dynamic that started to happen around the turn of the last century when individual infantrymen had so much power at their disposal that they could actually dispose of their officers and not leave significant evidence behind. So people have compared the forever war with the Heinlein's Starship Troopers. And I've sort of seen it as different generations' response to the experience of war and the ideology of war. And I'm wondering how conscious you were when you wrote that book of engaging with the critique of Heinlein. I didn't think of it at all. I was writing it just, it's a novel. I'm finally writing my science fiction Vietnam novel. I'm typing along. And a friend of mine read the first 60 pages and he said, wow, you're writing an answer to Starship Troopers. And I said, what? Said, yeah, this is an answer to Starship Troopers. Look, you've got people in fighting suits. And I said, hold it. You're fighting in a vacuum. You're going to do this in your underwear. You've got to have a fighting suit or something. And yeah, in fact, Heinlein was a World War II guy and I was a Vietnam guy. So of course, we just like that. But we got along very well together, oddly enough. He respected the fact that I had actually been in combat and got out the other end of it. And I respected him as being an old guy, you know? I mean, he's an old guy. And he was the kind of old guy that I was supposed to be if I had grown up right, you know? Go to Annapolis and become a leader of man and all that. Didn't happen. But he and I had a sort of grudging respect for one another. And we'd have meals together. And we'd help each other out here and there. He's a really nice guy. I mean, he was a real one of the old school, a real gentleman. And some people have argued that Ender's Game then is the next logical response in that conversation. Yeah, it is. And I'd love to see a three-dimensional mapping of the various ideas in the three books. And I mean, if anybody wants an easy master's thesis, there you go. But Scott was so far from being a soldier that it's not funny. And so he wrote this thing about a kid who's sort of like a prototypical or embryonic MIT student who has all the power in the universe. I mean, that book is so much more popular than mine here. But Scott's very strange. Well, that's not news if you've read the book. But he's a Mormon. And so he's writing about wars that kill billions of people at once. And I'm going, Scott, even I didn't do that. And I'm an atheist. He's an interesting fellow. He came and talked here, of course, a couple of years ago. And I think the students very much enjoyed. He's got a wonderful intellect. He's a fine guy. Unfortunately, he's got his little band pass. And I've got my little band pass. And never the two-show. Well, I've been monopolizing the conversation. We have a great audience out there. And I'm sure they have questions as well. So if people want to make your way to the mics on either side, we'll be happy to entertain some questions from the audience. Or declarations, if necessary. While up. Is this on? Could we get down? While we're waiting for questions. I don't have a question, but I have a fact, because you were talking about Ender's Game. And for 30 years in my time at MIT, I distribute cards to my students in the first class, asking them to list certain information about them in case we needed to get this was before. We could find their names on the net, and so forth. And when they finish listing the prior humanities courses they've taken, and so forth, I asked them to list their three favorite novels and their three favorite films. And for 30 years, by far, I mean, 10 times more popular than any other book that appears on that list is Ender's Game. It's interesting to complete that cycle for your would-be master's thesis. Corey Doctro, who's a new hotshot science fiction writer, has now written a book, a story called Ender's Game, that it's from a gamer's point of view, or critique of Card's Ender's Game. So there's yet another cycle of this dialogue that I was just walking us through. Yeah. I'm not sure if there's really questions, but I'm the answer to other comments. I mean, it's always been extremely interesting to me how the science fiction community seems to have these novels of about war or massive conflict as kind of cultural touchstones. Like, for instance, Ender's Game for my generation and Heinlein and Yorke as well, obviously. And I was wondering if you'd read John Scalzi's Old Man's War, because it seems to me that that's probably the newest kind of incarnation of that, at least, you know, like I'm in the field, and like what your reactions to that were. My wife writes, she reads all the science fiction in the family, and I thought it was pretty good. I haven't read it because she said he hadn't read it for ever, and I might not read his until he reads mine. I understand. I might have more questions later that, you know, I'll leave this open for other people if they like. Well, nobody's here asking you. I need to think of them first. So while we're talking about war, what do you think would be likely the impact of the experience of Iraq, the Iraq war on science fiction? I'm particularly thinking about Abu Ghraib as a sort of issue that science fiction writers, no doubt, are starting the process or will be starting the process. Well, you're seeing it, of course, in short stories, which are the immediate reaction to a milestone. I think the kids can release underneath the table. We're coming down to hell. OK, why don't I move mine over for the time being? Here we go. Hello. I feel like the guy in more of the world's working. There we go. We'll pass this around for the moment. Yeah, well, I'm processing it. Once I finish the novel I'm doing now, I'm setting one in the desert, which I think is going to be the Iranian continuation of the Iraqi war. And yeah, they have to deal with that. It was morally easier for my generation, which was mostly people who were made to be soldiers or break the law. And so then you have to just put yourself between two sets of law. But the people who have done all this stuff in Iran all volunteered for it. And it's a profound difference. I mean, even in the world or two, the guys didn't volunteer for it, all of them. OK. All right, I might have another question if you don't mind. Sure, please. I was wondering what your take on writers who write about war, who have never actually been in wars or conflicts, themselves, because my own reaction, as a writer who has never been in an actual war, thank God, is kind of troubled. Because on the one hand, I want to be able to write about these things, which I think are really important and interesting. But at the same time, because I haven't been through that kind of experience, it seems like there are particular elements of it, which I would be unable to portray as accurately as I might like. So it seems like some people who haven't been in war take the opportunity of writing about war as an opportunity to make it and depict it in this extremely glorious, clean light, which doesn't seem to match up to anything which I have seen or read about it. It's a basic John Wayne thing. But you know the touchstone here is Stephen Crane, who wrote the best novel about our civil war. And he was like eight when it was over or something. And I think one of the most telling things I've ever read about the Red Badge of Courage was the review in the London Times. It was a bestseller in London before it was even published in America. And a guy, I guess an old Boer War fellow said, oh, yes. Mr. Crane is obviously a veteran of the American Civil War, but there must have been something wrong with his hearing. He got the sound of the bullets wrong. Well, I'd never heard one, so I got it wrong. But yeah, this is your basic fictional problem is experience versus imagination. And of course, it's big in science fiction because most things you write about nobody's ever done. You have to imagine them. But I don't think that if you don't want to go out and get shot at, you should read a lot of war fiction. I mean, see how other people have expressed it. Hemingway was never a soldier. Hemingway wrote pretty damn good war fiction. And all the things he knew about being a soldier were from watching other people. He was the closest he ever came to being a soldier was passing out chocolates as a member of the Red Cross in World War I on the Italian front. He got wounded. And that's an important part of being a soldier. Next to dying, that's your important thing. And yeah, so he was, he romanticized in a weird way. It wasn't yes or yes or kind of patriotism, but it was more like, if you're going to be a real man, you've got to put your balls on the line. Or no, that's kind of grotesque, but you got it? So some of the game designer, in the game design world, there's this expression, the uncanny valley, which is to say the more you get to photorealism, the more the minor differences stand out at people. And it becomes less realistic and less convincing. Oh yeah, isn't that interesting? As you're thinking about time travel, you have enormous latitude to write about stuff without a great deal of accuracy, because none of us in this room, as far as I know, have had experience time travel. But there will, many of your readers will have experienced war. So do you see a similar kind of uncanny valley in terms of getting accuracy to things that are closer to the likely lives of your readers than things that are purely speculative and imaginative? Or how does that work? See, it depends. I don't know, in fact, there may be a profound difference between readers and gamers in this regard. But a lot of my experience came from books. I mean, really, I know a lot more about the 14th century than I know about the 17th, in terms of living there, because I read Barbara Tuckman, a distant mirror, and bang. So I know she gave me that century. And likewise, somebody who's only seen a sort of comic book and facile sort of descriptions of war probably couldn't, and certainly couldn't, write as well about it as a person who's read the great war novels. But for the reason Stephen Crane says he wrote the Red Badge of Courage was he read Zola. And Zola had been a soldier, I guess, in the same war as Stendhal. And he wrote this thick, romantic novel about how wonderful and horrible it is to be a soldier. And supposedly Stephen Crane threw it across the room. And he said, I've never even been a soldier, but I could write a better war novel than that. And so he went off and did it, but not in a weekend. I mean, he interviewed a bunch of veterans. He spent months interviewing veterans at hospitals across the Middle East of the United States. He interviewed his brother, who had been at Appomattox, I guess, and interviewed him for a week. And he just took all kinds of notes. I've seen his materials. I'm not a Crane scholar, but I did write a scholar in the introduction to the Red Badge of Courage once. And God, man, he had tiles of stuff to work from. And well, he was just a gifted guy. He was a genius. And he could take all this raw material and percolate it through his own personality and feel the fear and feel the horror and everything. Now, nobody can tell you how to have that gift. You're just born with it, or you don't have it. Joe, one question I have, stimulated by the things you've been saying, is to take you more deeply into the course you're teaching. And not so much about science fiction, but the war novels you're teaching. You just talked about Stephen Crane as a great war novelist. Who are the other writers that you teach or about war that you think very highly of and why? Well, of course, Hemingway and Norman Mailer. And well, I should say in the course I'm teaching, we're not teaching the war novel as such. But it's a course in genre fiction, and I'm allowed to choose whatever I want. So I chose novels about war in the various genres and to try to use that as a unifying principle and also because I want people to think about what we're up against. That's my freedom as a teacher. And well, I did Starship Troopers. That's a genre novel about war. I did the things they carried, which is a personalized memoir, which is a genre. I did Master and Commander, which is a totally alien vision of war because everybody thinks, this is cool. We can go die, but the French are going to die too. So hey, maybe if we're lucky, more of them will die than us. And meanwhile, we've got Rats and Bilge. Oh, my George. This is creepy war writing. I know. And they're evidently marvelous. All these stuff I get googling about them, I can see that there are people who live to read those novels. They get to the. Pardon me? They're called O'Brien's Natives. Yeah, thanks, O'Brien. Well, anybody named O'Brien is probably a good novelist. Excuse me. You know, he just did huge research into the British Navy, and he claims that everything that he uses as scenes in his novels have an analog, if not a precise, version in the annals of British naval history. The annals of British naval history, of course, would fill its room in single-spaced sheets of paper. And so he was just a tremendous researcher and a guy who was absolutely smitten with the idea of being a sailor. But he wasn't. The thing is, I haven't read that much. I've read Horatio Hornblower. And there seems to be a difference in that the people in O'Brien's books, it seems to me that when something really bad happens, it really seems to happen to them. That is, like a man is found guilty of not homosexuality, but having sex with an animal. And so he's to be hanged. And the officers are up in the folksalor, wherever they folk around. He said, does this seem quite right to you? It was just a goat. Yeah. He says, no, it's not right. But you do have to make an example of him, otherwise they'd all be doing it. And he says, oh, well, hang him. And I'm going, woo-doo-doo-doo. And in this case, it's very strange, because these were written in a not particularly liberal time. But evidently, one of the higher up officers is, we would say, either gay or closeted nowadays. And everybody knows, I think, except him. And they're all going behind their backs, oh, yeah. He's getting in the captain's scuppers, isn't that? Whatever they said in those days. And the captain and his mate don't really judge him. They say, well, you know, that's a man's business. But if anybody finds out about it, he's got to go. And I mean, walk the plank or whatever they do in those days. I was just really curious, because the guy, I don't find him a tremendously skilled novelist. The book is overly long. It's so full of info dumping, it's painful to read. If you ever want to know everything about knots and sails and all that crap, just sit and read every word of that book. Man, you could go build a ship after you've read this book. And maybe that's not the way I write novels myself. They ship in the 15th novel. Oh, they do. Blueprints. Like that. Then they have to build a new ship to escape. I like that one. Kind of Robertson Crusoe, kind of. Well, anyhow, I also did, as a counter-poise to Starship Troopers, I did the dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, because I wanted novels about war and peace. And the dispossessed is a, well, it's a didactic novel about possibly having a world where war was not possible by the proper indoctrination of the population. And you get the old idea. You can have peace, but you can have peace and freedom at the same time. Or you have to redefine freedom. That's what Le Guin was saying. Very, very interesting. She's a wise, wise woman. Disappear with her, of course. Oh, well, don't worry. You know, don't worry. Two maybe related questions. One is, what do you think the impact of the internet has been on science fiction, particularly blogging, but also virtual realities? Well, it's like Sims in Second Life and things like that. And secondly, and maybe this is an indication of myself getting old, I sort of look at the last 30 years and see how fast technology and science has evolved. And wonder whether it's that much harder to write science fiction as opposed to science fantasy now than it was 30, 40 years ago. Or is that just my perception? It is more difficult. And what's gone is the easy stories. It's difficult to tell a story set in the solar system now because you know too much about the solar system. That is to say, you may take a broad viewpoint and say, well, I could write a story about the first man on the moon if I wanted to. And just make it different from the one that is history. And so it becomes an alternate history story. And so you can still do whatever you want if you want to put that kind of a spin on it. But in fact, if you're going to do anything like on the edge of science, you're stuck with a lot of explaining. You can't assume that everybody knows enough to get up there on the edge with you. And unless you want to write just for Wired magazine or whatever, it's different from when I started. It really is. I mean, my first science fiction story came out in 69. And I wrote it in 67. And the world was simpler then. I wouldn't have said that at the time. The world seemed awfully complex then. But yeah, it's harder to write science fiction now. Well, some people have noted that the time frame of science fiction has gotten shorter and shorter as the 20th century has run along, so that all staples to center someone would write thousands of years in the future. And by today, 20 minutes in the future is far enough to envision radical difference in significant technological change. And your audience is all aware of the importance of change in their lives. I mean, like your grandfather's computer. I came across that in a newspaper article today about the permanence of books, paper books, is try to find anything that will work on a computer that you had 20 years ago. All that data that you've got. I wrote a whole screenplay for Mindbridge, one of my novels. And it's on the little floppies that came before. The big floppies came before the five inch ones, the eight inch floppies. And it was a language called Dr. Memory, which has been forgotten. And I tried to find someplace in this hugely technological town that could transcribe Dr. Memory and put it into a word, or even some text file, or some UNIX thing, or whatever they do. Digital, binary, give me binary. Nobody could do it. And this is a whole, you know, like three months' work translating a novel into a screenplay. It's just gone, because I don't have a paper copy anymore. So he was also asking you about blogs and their impact on science fiction. We're both bloggers. Well, I'm a paleo blogger, I guess. Because I've been, I started, I didn't call it blogging, but I started keeping an interactive diary in the late 80s, and when the Genie Network started. Genie was, General Electric had these big computers that were more or less not being used from 9 at night until 6 in the morning. And so they would partition stuff and let us use them as a sort of a primitive ARP in that kind of communication. And there was one set off for science fiction writers at a time when there were only like 150 science fiction writers around. And so we had a wonderful little party going. And that was a lot of fun. Now, I'd always read about writers should keep diaries. Obviously, a writer must keep a diary, so you have a record of everything. And what bothered me about that was nobody would ever read it. Why should you write something if nobody's going to read it? Wine, wine. And so I would write about a page in a diary and then lose it. A couple of months later, I'd say, oh, shit, I'll start another one. And I'd write a few pages in that. Oh, I've lost that one. Someday I'm going to find all of them and put them together. It might be like 30 pages of diary covering 25 years. But then this thing came along, and I thought, we're talking every day. So why not just keep a diary and say, what do you think about this? And basically, that was the proto blog. And a lot of science fiction people do it. I think Dan Simmons has the most interesting one intellectually. Mine is not intellectually that interesting because I do it every day. It's my diary. But Dan comes up with extremely provocative questions and throws them out to, I don't know, a couple of thousand readers. And it's interesting to watch that. Question over here. You said that you're starting your novel on December 8th, and the precision of that interested me. And I was wondering, how do you usually set up to start a novel? I usually, nowadays, I used to be able to just write until I had finished it. Oh, what a wonderful thing. I try not to work on the text of a novel while I'm teaching. It's difficult, really difficult, to do both at once. They seem to engage the same sources of energy or whatever. So December 8th is when I turn in my grades. And this is my life. I finished my last novel on the plane. I delivered the last part of my novel on the plane here in August. I put it in the mailbox in the Atlanta airport. And then I came and became a teacher. Now, on December 8th, I stopped being a teacher. And I go back to being what I really am. I bought this tweed suit, thought I could fool people. But basically, I'm a bum. No, it's December 8th. It's going to be my freedom day. What I've done, I know the novel that I'm going to write. And I've been pitching ideas at this thing for, well, actually, a couple, seven years. And that's typical. Because you don't just start writing. I mean, that would take a lot of guts to just start a novel without any preparation, especially a science fiction novel. You've got to get the science worked out. That's funny. I was reading a thing this morning by Jack Williamson, because I was trying to get stuff to write for his obituary. And that's the way he did it, too. First, you get the science. First, you find out where you are. And you get whatever the themes are you going to be writing about. You don't know what that really is. It's something very deep within you that you have to write about. So you don't get specific about that on an outline or anything. But you want to know where they're going, what they're doing, what the year is, what their technological capabilities are, this and that. And the other thing is there's something really, really different about the way that the human relations go and so forth. So I'm just sitting there typing, man. What I love the computer for is that I can just spread all over the place. And I've got notes that are hypertext to each other and go back and forth. And I'm just a real 21st century guy until I start writing the novel, which I always I write literally by candlelight with a fountain pen and blank books. I write one draft that is a novel. I write a book like they would write a book in the 12th century. And I don't know why. I mean, it's just the other way. I've always written that way. I tell my students, don't do this. Don't listen to me. Don't do this. Because you're supposed to write this long rough draft and have fun doing it. And then you cut it down to something that's about a fourth as long and is really, really crisp and everything. I don't do that. I just write a line at a time, man. It might take me two hours to come up with the next sentence. And I don't care because it's going to be the right sentence. And then I'll do the next one. That's what I've always done it. And I'm not the only one. It seems to me that something like a quarter of the people I know who write for a living do some version of that. But see, writing it down in longhand in a bound book means I have a first draft. If I were typing it on a computer keyboard into a computer file, I could call it a first draft. I could call it anything. But I couldn't prove that it was a first draft. There's no provenance for it. If it's handwritten into a book, then it's the first draft, which to me is important. If I go back to something I would like to have students take to heart is there's a problem working on a computer and that you keep wiping out things and replacing them and so forth. You might have had it right. And two days later, two hours later, you can't even remember what it was. Whereas if it's down in ink and you scratch over it and write something else, you still have the original. That's very, very high tech, but which don't lose anything. I never throw anything away. I've got, I have a room full of paper. This is for my sins. But if I need to come up with something, it's in there someplace, you know? It's there. She organizes it sometimes. By the story that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter. He'd never even seen, he never owned a computer. He'd never programmed one, which actually is kind of obvious if you look at it. Talk about people who write about stuff that they haven't experienced directly. Yeah. Alec? So I have one more question if you don't mind. Earlier you were talking about Kewgernsback's idea that science fiction in some way ought to be a literature that communicates the ideas. And not just the raw facts of science, but also the kind of principles and processes. And to actually choose a word that's slightly weighted, I mean, the ideology of science to its readers. And I was wondering what your feelings on that idea were. I mean, I think you talked about that briefly already, but especially in the context of science fictions positioning in today's marketplace of ideas where what science fiction is represented as on TV and in movies doesn't really correspond very well to what it tends to be in books. And also where science fiction as a literary genre seems to be a shrinking portion of the market preferred trade books. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, science fiction, like all fiction, is becoming less important culturally. There's this ironically little interview with Truman Capote, no with the, ah, the other old gay guy. Tennessee Williams, maybe. No, no, no, still alive, still alive. Gorgadal? Gorgadal. OK. That's it. Hey. Somebody said, are you an important novelist? And he says there is no such thing as an important novelist now. He could be a famous novelist. He could be a famous movie star. He could be a famous cook. But there are no famous novelists because not enough people read novels. And this is a point. I think a novel can still change things because the people who read them tend to be people who are educated and might be in a position to change things. But as far as the Gurnsbackian thing where you wanted to preach science to people and actually take thousands of people and turn them into scientists and they might have been librarians or something, that's not there anymore. And also, the arguments, you use the word ideology of science, which is interesting because through the 60s and 70s, science fiction became anti-science or anti-tech. And it was almost difficult to sell a story that was positive about science or about technology because everybody had this negative dream about how it was going to destroy the world rather than save it. And now we're coming back around having had our little fill of faith-based initiatives. Maybe people are starting to take a more complex view of it. Science isn't innately good or bad. I mean, all of us know that. It's the people and the way that people use science that's interesting. And I think science fiction reflects that now. There's nothing that's black or white about it. So one of the interesting things about science fiction is the apprenticeship model that takes place between professional science fiction writers and fans or readers where a high percentage of science fiction writers got their start in some sort of fan zine publishing or some sort of fan relationship to the genre. And I wonder if you could say a little about that and maybe suggest something of your own apprenticeship, how you became a science fiction writer. Yeah, well, I guess I had a little apprenticeship because I wrote poetry all my life. And I never thought I was going to be a fiction writer. I thought I was going to be a poet. And I knew that you don't make a living at it. And it was just something that a passion that would never control my life would be part of it. But then I wrote some fiction literally in the last semester of my senior year in college and sold it. And I thought, hmm, beer, money, I could do this. And when I got back from Vietnam, I did a three-semesters graduate work in mathematics. And the third semester, I was getting kind of ack. And I sold my first novel. And so I just bailed on that. And just, I don't know, became a writer. But the question was about apprenticeship. See, in that sense, I didn't have one. My brother was a science fiction fan. I mean, he was a fan of the capital P-H, science fiction fan. He had a huge printing press the size of this table, almost the size of this table in his basement. And he cranked out a fanzine that looked as good as any industrial magazine. They cost him all his money and a marriage. But he did a wonderful fanzine. And yeah, he did the whole nine yards. He went to all the conventions. He met all the writers. And he went to workshops. And he did this and that. And he wound up writing two science fiction novels and maybe a hundred short stories. He didn't make enough money to do it for a living, which is true of most people to go that route. But he pursued it with more intensity than most people do, possibly because his younger brother was a success. I mean, that could do it to you. But yeah, what happens is what the classical model is. Science fiction writers have always been conscious of having been helped by older writers. And you pay it forward by helping younger writers to essentially replace you. I mean, that's what it is. But you don't want to articulate it that way because you don't want to think of yourself being replaced. But you know, you can always knock off the weak ones on the way. No, we don't do that. We knock off the strong ones. There's less competition. But we've always been, I don't know, I was helped by a number of people, remarkably, Ben Bova, who actually made me into a writer by intervening for me in some difficult editorial situations. And he just knew more about publishing than me. And he said, no, do this. And he said, let me write a letter for you. And wow. I've never had success with that with younger writers. I've never been able to say, here, I'll just put on my cape and I'll take over the situation and save you. I'm not that kind of guy. I say, you know, I can fix your semicolons just like that. OK, over here. I have another question about your writing process. How close are your first drafts to what we see in print? Almost everything that my first draft is on my first draft shows up in print, probably 98% of it. But often, the editor asks me to expand a section here and there. So I guess 110% of my first draft winds up in print, which is a terrible way to write, terrible way to write. Don't do it. And don't tell your writing teachers I told you I did. Oh, I had to go talk to a third grade class in Iowa City when I was at the Iowa Writers Workshop. And I was supposed to tell them how to write stories. And they're all just like this. Just cute as can be. And of course, their teacher is pretty cute too. But she says, well, Mr. Haldeman, do you must outline your stories before you write them, don't you? I said, no, you just start writing. She says, no, but first you have to have a plan, right? You have an outline. I know just kind of paper is what it really takes. You just write on the paper. And not all the third graders were supposed to hear. OK, over here. In your time travel story, 300 years in the future is the star and plow still in Cambridge? Is the plowing star still in Cambridge? No, no, actually that's only a year and a half. So the plowing star was there for a short jump. But when it goes way up into where this is the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy, Mass Ave is still there, but it's a cow path. And the Harvard Bridge, alas, fell in. And they've got logs over it. And they have to control traffic because it's all oxen and so forth. We have come to a pretty pass by then. So they still paint smootes on the logs? No, that sucks really just, I think. The great God, Smoot, has been defeated by 2352. OK, well, on that note, I think we'll bring this to a close. There's a book, Joe's books are on sale outside in the lobby, and he will shortly be there to sign copies of books. He'll linger here, I'm told, for a few minutes to deal with people up front. But thank you very much for coming.