10,217 words
posted:  march 15,  1999

[The material below is an edited version of a
discussion held at MIT on November 19, 1998.]

Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian Myths

Michael Berstein: Both of you read stories that draw on classical mythology, whether it was Judeo-Christian or Greco-Roman. What do those mythologies have to say to contemporary society? Why are these particular stories ones that we continue to draw inspiration from? or continue to work through as the basis for contemporary story telling?

And a lot of people miss that point when trying to put anachronisms into things. So I was reaching back to myth as an organizing force for the way people once viewed the world and I was comparing it to media and the way they work on how we view the world today. Clearly the Gulf War and OJ kind of wander in there subliminally in the process. I was trying to tie those old tales of vengeance and justice. The Fury is not really justice, she represents something more primitive and she was actually a gang of Furies. I reduced her to this one hard-boiled detective. Everything in the story does have a parallel, even the mountain bikes on the ceiling -- Delphi had chariots hanging from the ceiling. So almost everything I have in there does have some cognate element. Part of that was the game of doing it, and part of that was reaching back and modernizing the story of the House of Atreus, which really is an interesting series of stories.

Mike Resnick: I've given God speaking roles in seven or eight stories and I've always assumed that since it is blasphemous for a Christian or Jew to do it, it required an atheist to become his literary executor. But seriously, I find that in my serious stories I make many more references to God and to the Bible than to science. There are six billion people in this world and I would say that 4 to 5 billion believe devoutly in God. The writer that doesn't take that into account is making a terrible mistake.

There also seems to be a certain contempt for sports on the part of most writers and science fiction fans that I know. As if sports was silly stuff, beneath us. But 200 million Americans are going to watch the Super Bowl and 150 million probably watch the World Series and the writer who doesn't understand that...

Tony Lewis: We use the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman because that is what our culture has grown out of and these are our stories. We use the cognates, but they are still our stories. Our culture has not changed significantly from that. We've had some interruptions like during the Middle Ages. I wrote a story based on the Crusades -- the mind set there was so alien compared to the Greek times it was like a different planet.

Thoughts on Technology and the Third World

Berstein: There is a lot of desire at MIT to wire the world to make sure that computers get into Africa and Asia and the Arab world and so forth. In the MIT perspective that is treated as unquestionably a good thing and I am wondering whether you think it would be a good thing to wire Africa.

Resnick: I think it would be a bad thing. First of all I think science fiction writers and fans and those of you at MIT don't see the world very realistically in this respect. The computer has not begun to change American society as much in the last 25 years as the microwave oven. I think everyone who really needs a computer has already got one. I think half the computers that are bought are like Hawking's book on Time they just sit there and they don't do anything.

As for Africa, right now what Africa needs are not labor saving devices. You've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 million people, most of them uneducated and unemployed. I am acquainted with Kenya the most and there they are turning out a thousand college graduates every year, but they only have about 150 jobs for them. They don't really need computers; they don't need to be wired. Throughout Africa and most of Asia, what they really need are labor intensive jobs.

Jablokov: People always like to get other people to be more like them, I think that's the essence of MIT students trying to ship computers and mid-terms to other countries. It is true that it has been a difficult situation figuring out what development really means and how you go about it. For years big projects have been the way to do it: big dams, big power generating plants and things like that. Now I think computers are probably an improvement over that as a way of developing things. But if things like the drinking water and work are more important, then...

Most of the corruption there comes from a very poor mesh of African tribal society and western society that we have tried to lay over them. You have a country like Kenya where in 1900 they did not have a word for wheel because no one had ever seen one. There was no written language among any of the 43 tribes. Even to this day, 90 percent of the people claim to be Christian, but 80 percent see their witch doctor more often than they see their priest or minister.

Berstein: So it's no different than here.

Resnick: But one thing that is different is that 80 percent of all teenage boys and girls undergo circumcision rituals, which can be pretty brutal. That is also a euphemism for cliterectomy for women. And whenever any well-meaning westerner or church or government has tried to put an end to it, it has been the women who have gone out to march and protest losing their rite of passage.

You have a country where the president, Daniel Erevmois paid $17,500 a year and in twenty years he's amassed every DC airplane in the country, every Mercedes taxicab in the country, every Mobil gas station (which is now called Cobil), and two million acres of the best farmland, which means he brown-bagged a lot of lunches. It also means that westerners are shocked by this, but none of the locals are, because the chief is supposed to be the richest guy in the tribe. You have situations that are so different that you can't really pull them into a western 1998 simply by going there and spending a lot of money and building a lot of things that you think they should need.

As it turned out, that one hour was the only time that the women had when their husbands weren't making them do really unpleasant jobs around the house. They would talk and gossip on their way to get water and that was their leisure time. So they decided that the well that the Peace Corps volunteers had dug was haunted, that there was the ghost of a dead woman in it and the women would run screaming from it until finally they had to close it up and fill it with concrete. And the women went back to walking their hour. To us walking an hour for water would be very unpleasant, but you have to look at the whole social situation.

Resnick: An argument could be made that penicillin was not necessarily a very good thing to introduce to Africa. For three thousand years, African women would have eight babies. Between six and seven would die in infancy. Now none of them are dying. As a result, Kenya had a population of 6 million at Independence in 1963 and has a population of 34 million today. It is not a big enough country for 34 million. It is the same with every African nation. They ought to be net exporters of food and instead they are all net importers of food. The land can't feed populations that quintuple every thirty years. Obviously you can't take the penicillin back. All I am saying is that every well-intentioned innovation that we have tried really hasn't worked very well. Most of them have worked very badly.

Michael McCaffey: When we are given images of people suffering in Third World countries, what is the best way we can help?

Resnick: This is going to sound unfeeling, but quite frankly it is not my job to solve the problems of the Third World. It might be part of my job to report some of them. What would I do? I would pull out totally and leave them to their own devices. It would be very cruel in the short run but very beneficial in the long run.

One of the reasons I write so much about the Third World in disguised form in my science fiction stories is because there are two assumptions that every writer and reader of science fiction would hold in common. One is, if we could reach the stars we would colonize them. And if we colonize enough of them we are going to come into contact with a sentient alien race. Africa offers 51 separate and distinct examples of the effects of colonization not only on the colonized, which is detrimental, but on the colonizers which is at least as detrimental. And if science fiction is basically distopian in that everybody has by definition a maximum of one utopia within them and probably more than one story to tell, it is legitimate fodder. But I would ask Jim Kelly because I am one of his biggest fans and maybe he has something to say.

Fiction as Polemic

Jim Kelly: I don't have any solutions. I do think that one's job as a science fiction writer is to report when you find out something that you don't think the world knows enough about. You are both writers who will challenge your audience. You talk to your audience in a way that is instructing as well as entertaining. And you sometimes tell your audience that their notions of the world are wrong. I wonder if you could talk about how far is too far?

Jablokov: You just look at your royalty statements I guess and that tells you whether you have gone too far or not. Although it is surprising how much people enjoy being insulted if it is done right. There is a certain market for books and stories that the audience doesn't understand and feel that they are being humiliated by, but that somehow pleases them. I haven't quite hit the formula yet. And I spent my high school years in deep trouble because I was trying to find this formula and never did then either. But when you say, "your audience" it is hard to tell who it is that is reading you.

With this particular story, how much of the Oresteia is any given person expected to know? I didn't just write this entirely out of my head. I actually did go back and read the plays and try to figure stuff out from them. I tried to write so that at least if the names are vaguely familiar you can get a kind of resonance from that. We have a friend John Kessel who wrote a story about a character going back to the Pequod in Moby Dick and the character only remembers as much about the Pequod as he remembers from his high school English class. And I wondered whether John did not re-read the book before he wrote the story so that it was based on what he vaguely remembered from high school, or is this just a big fake and did he actually go through it in detail? I have never asked him that, do you know the answer?

Resnick: He can recite Moby Dick by heart. In answer to your question, I think as long as it works as fiction that is all anybody has a right to ask. When it starts being polemic, and the author has gone astray, hopefully an editor will tell him so. No matter how controversial it is, nor how unpopular a viewpoint it is, if it is a valid fiction story I don't think there is any reason not to write it. Unless you find there is no market for it.

Kirinyaga and Imagining A Utopian Past

Seth Gordon: Too avoid revealing how little I know about Greek mythology, I have a question primarily for Mike Resnick. In a number of your Kirinyaga stories there seems to be a dichotomy between the traditional Kikuyu culture and modern western culture and there seems to be this underlying principle that if you take one step away from the traditional culture it is just a slippery slope all the way downhill to being westernized. It seems to me that historically the relationships between cultures interacting is a little bit more complicated. I don't know a lot about Africa but certainly in Europe and the Middle East you have Jewish and Greek And Roman and Goth and Franc cultures mixing up with each other and not entirely dropping their previous histories, but not strictly maintaining their traditional boundaries either. I am wondering what your take on that process is.

Resnick: Oh that's very easy. A number of critics from the New York Review of Science Fiction, which exists solely to keep me from getting a swelled head, didn't happen to see it, but as I have explained many times: the narrator is a fanatic. I don't agree with him; I think he is dead wrong! It seems to be very unusual in science fiction for an author to put forth a view that he doesn't agree with, but I happen to do that. Is this the logical outcome? No! It's just that he can't see a third alternative. And if you're a fanatic and you can't see one, you don't acknowledge it, and you don't prepare for it. This is why ultimately in Kirinyaga the society doesn't fail, Koriba, the narrator, fails and he has to leave.

You can't stop it from evolving and that's what he wanted to do. His ideal which he has never clearly defined is not a real ideal anyhow. It's made clear toward the last few stories that his notion of what Kikuyu life was a hundred years ago has been filtered through books and fiction too. They never had a chief until the Brits insisted that they have chiefs so they could rule through them during the MauMau. They never lived in villages until the Brits made them live in villages so they could keep tabs on them, but according to him this was this idyllic way they lived 400 hundred years ago. Dead wrong. But again, he's a fanatic and he won't admit it.

I think that one of the things that made the stories as controversial as they were and annoyed the hell out of the New York Review -- they even criticized my dedication pages! they really didn't like it -- was that Koriba, along with being dead wrong, was an honorable man and a moral man. And that is not the way to paint your villains. I don't consider him a villain, but he does villainous things with the best intentions. He destroys a lot of people's lives and a lot of people's happiness because he thinks he is right. You would love to have him as a next door neighbor: he'd never peek in your window, he'd be happy to mow your lawn while he was mowing his, he'd never rob you while you were gone. He's a moral man, he's just dead wrong. That seemed to throw a lot of people off or at least cause a lot of controversy.

Resnick: If you remember, Koriba is the only member of the Kikuyu society in the book who has lived among Europeans. "European" incidentally is the African word for anybody who is white, America never had a colony there so Americans are just other Europeans. He's been to Yale and to Oxford and, as you find out, it has totally corrupted his viewpoint. It's no longer the pure idyllic Kikuyu that it was purported to be. He is willing to use a computer, the only one on this artificial world, to help him establish his notion of a utopia. But since his notion of a utopia doesn't allow for anything western, it's paradoxical in itself.

Jablokov: It's amazing how often revolutions disguise themselves as cultural revivals. You can go back a pick and choose from whatever you had in the past that you enjoyed and truly transform your society into a state in which it never existed before. It has always been a tradition to claim that it's for traditional reasons that you are doing it.

Nostalgia

Naomi Bernstein: In speaking of the drive to return to a past that never was, there have been books on this subject recently about the fact that we are nostalgic for a past that really never did exist, but you still see it in modern day in movies like Pleasantville which features a television show that has an idyllic image of the fifties. Do either of you think that in thirty to forty years people will be looking back at today and doing the same thing?

Resnick: Sure. Hollywood rewrites history better than anybody and influences more people than anybody. You are sitting in a country of reasonably educated folk and about 18% of them don't believe that we landed on the moon. They grew up knowing what the wild west was like, it was Matt Dillon and the Wyatt Earp on the screen, not the scum who were really out there.

Jablokov: There are two forces operating against each other. One is the belief that 50's television shows tell you in some way what the 50's was like, which is kind of a dangerous assumption. The other is that people coming out of the 50's are portraying all 50's families as vipers' nests of depravity, incest, and violence and all 50's families had horribly psychotic fathers and drunken mothers -- the distopian view of a time that many people seemed to have enjoyed, but other people found screamingly boring. Just like your own complicated society, it is not unreasonable that the 50's is seen in so many ways, but if you take one segment of it, and sure you can play with it however you want, nostalgia is a dangerous emotion. Some people feel nostalgic for stuff that is going on right as they live it. I think that might be happening more and more, a kind of automatic nostalgia, where it is no longer for stuff that was decades ago, but for that television show you watched last year that got canceled.

Berstein: There is a lot of false nostalgia. Everybody remembers the Eisenhower years as very peaceful; they forget that is when we created the word, "Brinkmanship." In response to the question, who would be nostalgic for the time right now? Well, if we have a dictatorship in twenty or thirty years from now we'll be really nostalgic for the time when we could have impeachment hearings.

Resnick: We also tend to paint the past with primary colors. When you mention the 60s everyone remembers free love, free this and free that and hippies and shoot Nixon and civil rights. I think that for 85 to 90% of the people it all went right past them -- they were just trying to get through one day after another, paying bills just like they do now.

Marty Hiller: On the topic of what it was like in the past and what it is like now, there was a comment about how the culture hasn't really changed so the myths are still relevant. We think as ourselves as living in a very violent time now, but if you think about Orestes' time it kind of puts us to shame. On the other hand, the reason we think we are violent is because we've got this wonderful media infrastructure that tells us everybody who's been killed across hundreds of millions of people. I am wondering is the same thing true of the Orestes story? The way your media and your violence played together -- were you working with those? What kinds of comments do you have about that?

Hearing about more remote violence does have an impact and it is slow to change. For example, I don't know how many cases of poisoned Halloween candy there ever was, but it became this predominant story that even in my youth was talked about. And then there was a very long period when Halloween was restrained and kids were not allowed to wander very far from their houses. I think that is changing at least in my neighborhood. It would be interesting to see what happens if the crime rate keeps falling.

People always feel that things used to be better. Well if you look back ten years and the crime rate is 5 times greater than it is now, maybe things do get better. Or at least they wiggle around some. One thing you remember from the past was, you were young and being young is great! So enjoy it while you can because it doesn't matter what's going on --well almost, things could be so horrible that it wouldn't be fun, but by and large you can overcome anything when you're young. And when you are 80 years old it doesn't matter how nice things are, you're old! And you look back 40 years and yeah, kids were more respectful then because they weren't sassing you! They were sassing the old people around the corner.

Future Revolutions

Question: It seems to me that some of this nostalgia thing is a working out of a dialectical opposition between the 50s and the 60s. We had a cultural revolution in the 60s which went very far in reversing a lot of things. And while there are some people like Patrick Buchanan who literally want to go back to the 50s, most of the retro is a working out of something to try to come up with a new synthesis. I loosely subscribe to a book by Howe and Strauss, called Generations in which there is a wave theory of history -- every once in a while there is an eruption in culture and then pretty much for the next generation or two there is a working out of that eruption into a new synthesis at which point new stultification comes in again and then there's a new eruption and so the upshot of that theory is that probably there won't be any new cultural revolutions at least until the cultural revolutionaries of the 60s have died of old age.

Resnick: Oh I don't know about that. We have had to think of the 60s as being such an enormous cultural revolution because we all lived through it. But the 20s, the 1890s, every thirty to forty years there is a major cultural change that comes along. I don't think what happened in the 60s was a revolution. Most of it is in history's junk heap. Very few of us wear those shirts anymore. Thanks to AIDS and Herpes very few of us have free love anymore.

Resnick: No, of course not. If I could then I would be leading it. You would need a visionary with the clout to do it. For a while it looked like Gingrich might have been able to -- he was the only guy with any ideas for about four years -- but it was strictly political and he had the wrong personality. I would say if you are going to talk about the empowerment of women, if you can find women old enough to tell you, they would say that 1920 was a lot more important than 1968 -- they got the vote.

Jablokov: Well, and this is one of those old fart remarks, I don't see any major changes coming down the pike. I think everything is going to be pretty much the same. The 90s are really anti-revolutionary, they have been very dedicated to stability. As you said, as long as the people who went through the last round keep the lid down... But you have to remember external forces.

Resnick: But usually they are not where you are looking. I would say the next one is going to be a serious clash between science and religion. Science is so far ahead in terms of cloning and a number of other things that religion, which influences politics, is totally against that you are going to see if you can embargo knowledge. Heinlein in Solution Unsatisfactory said you couldn't, but I don't know if he is right.

The Future is a Thing of the Past

Suzanna Mandel: I have found the talk of nostalgia and the past very interesting especially in light of science fiction which treats of the future. I have found myself left out of statements like "We remember the 50's that way because we all had idyllic childhoods," or, "we all lived through the 60s." I'm speaking as a 21 year old. Some of us don't remember stuff before the late 80s and I can tell you that that's a very confusing time to start remembering things. My cohort and I discuss this a great deal; we grew up on-line and wired. Growing up post modern is very confusing. One doesn't trust one's own past. I don't even remember what my own childhood was like--I only remember what people or television tell me it was like. Being part of Generation-X, I don't even know what that means.

In fact I am after X, Gen-X'ers grew up with the Brady Bunch and Scooby-doo, that's two or three years before me, it is a very important distinction. The humor paper of the University of Wisconsin, "The Onion," put it in a very tidy, satirical way when it said, "The national retro gap is closing, we are running out of past to be nostalgic for and soon we will start being nostalgic for things that have not happened yet." And this is true! I remember being terrified in 1989 when the 1980s compilation CD was being hawked and I realized that I would buy it. We were nostalgic for Grunge and now people are nostalgic for Seinfeld, as you said, the show you watched last week.

So here's my question. We've got this very strange sense that we are living in the future. I don't remember a childhood that was particularly different from the way things are now, and things seem to be accelerating. I don't see many people thinking about the future or what's going to happen in the 21st century. There is this very pervasive milleniallism and it is very strange, manifesting itself in many ways. We don't seem to be able to think about the future anymore. People are either talking about 5 minutes into the future or mining the past or casting into a very far distant future. What happened to the middle future? Is it just that people can't be idealistic anymore? Where has it gone?

We have a couple of generations now that have been raised on television and what this means is that they want the same thing week in and week out. The first two films that ever had a One and a Two after it was the "Godfather Part I" and "Part II." Today it is inconceivable to make a film where you don't hope to have four sequels. You never used to have a rack of 87 Star Trek books, or whatever the big movie might have been thirty years ago, 25 Lawrence of Arabia adventures. But now you have two generations that have grown up on this and they find it very comforting.

Any writer will tell you, that if you try to sell an editor on a book that has no sequel you really better have some sales figures to prove that you can get away with it, because they want to be safe too. Most editors aren't so concerned with doing the right thing but of avoiding the wrong thing. And from their point of view the wrong thing is a good selling book with no sequels or a poor selling book with sequels.

Jablokov: There have been series books around forever: Horatio Alger, Nancy Drew, all the Stratmeyer syndicate things. Kids like them.

Resnick: But now they are for grownups

Jablokov: I remember when they were marketing the movie, "The Madness of King George," The play was titled, "The Madness of George III" and they were afraid that the people would wonder "What happened to the Madness of George I and II?"

Resnick: That's true. I did a novel called Walpurgis III which is the third planet in the system and to this day, 15 years later, I still get letters from people saying, "I can't find Walpurgis I and II." I keep wanting to say, look closer towards the Sun.

People talk about the pace of change, but the difference between going from no phones to having a telephone is much bigger than going from any phone to a touch-tone phone. So there was a huge period at the turn of the century where we got airplanes, cars, telephones, and various other things making it an era of dramatic change! If at birth you lived in a one room house with no indoor plumbing and no electricity and then as an adult you got electric lights and a telephone and could fly on a plane, that is a much bigger change than going from a prop plane to a jet plane. Now the changes are much less visible.

Predicting the future is part of marketing and marketing is the art of the late 20th century and that is the key. All of us have to practice it crudely or badly, we may be good or bad writers, but we have to practice this other art as well. The spin on a product is as important as the product itself. So nostalgia is now a marketable entity. They strip mine nostalgia the same way we strip mine Greek myth or Judeo-Christian stories so they can throw them into the hopper to produce some income. So I don't know what the nostalgia industry is going to do.

Jablokov: And I bet you that some of those products will return, if they aren't current, they'll come back. Just like people buying Bubble gum shrimp which was from a movie, it wasn't even a real product but someone invented it and it sold really well!

Resnick: We started out as an agrarian society and we have changed twice. Toward the end of the last century we changed into an industrial society and that changed the whole shape and feature of the countryside. You had airports, cars, roads, the break-up of the family... now we are changing from an industrial society to an information society. But that doesn't change the way anything looks. And people don't understand, because we are making such phenomenal steps with computers, exactly where it's going. It's much harder to predict. Hollywood has no notion. Even science fiction writers don't really, outside of the fact that somebody once said, "Gee maybe there's artificial intelligence," and then everybody started writing about it, we don't really know either. It's much harder to predict this because it doesn't change the landscape.

Jablokov: Well here's the book my story is from, it is a collection of science fiction stories. What is their vision of the future? It's grated industrial flooring which is probably circa 1920 and a circuit board which is circa 1965. And those are the images to show you this is a science fiction book.

Past Influences

Question: Since we are indulging in a discussion of nostalgia. It's weird that this is the theme that has arisen out of your readings here. How about a little personal nostalgia since it's usually the case that every science fiction writer was a science fiction reader at some early age. I wonder if you could each talk a little bit about who you read when you were finding out about science fiction especially with the idea that some of these folks who have trouble remembering the early 80s might want to know those people who are now forgotten but ought not to be forgotten. And on that same line, can you find anything in your own work that you could say, "I put that in there because I read this in 1962"?

Jablokov: I grew up reading the standard Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke triumvirate of early science fiction. One of the disappointments I feel about my own writing is that I don't actually write the kind of books I used to like to read. And I would really like to, it's just that my mind doesn't really work that way. I don't write like Heinlein or Asimov. I don't have that clarity, that pellucid simplicity both of prose and motive that made those so pleasurable to read. On the other hand, there is this weird cross-pollination of those and Phillip K. Dick and R. A. Lafferty which causes my sort of corrupt prose. The review in Locust of my last book called it "Larry Niven on acid." Probably the most accurate thing about it.

I was trying to write a hard science fiction novel, which I love reading, but I wanted to add damaged characters with twisted motivation. Usually the characters in those hard SF books are so straightforward and there is a reason for that. They are the filters through which the bizarre world is being given to you and if the bizarre world is being filtered through a bizarre character, it makes it harder to figure out. But since this is the late 90s, I can do that. Even though my mom is in tears. She loved my first book and since then she's been totally confused and each book confuses her more.

My town library had a very good science fiction section. It had all the stuff that was coming out then in the 60s and 70s and it also had those big Groff Conklin anthologies They were these beautiful, old anthologies bound so that you could drop them from orbit and they would survive. They were packed solid with 800 pages of stuff and they were very good and very selective. And of course that Modern Library, Hales of Time and Space. Those editors managed to dig through all that stuff and there were a lot of very good writers writing from the 30s through the 50s.

Jablokov: I am actually fiddling with a book which would be a Heinlein response and actually a response to Joe Haldeman too, since he has inherited some of that clarity of purpose. I have a generation ship, a typical science fiction trope, and instead of being based on the Oresteia it is based on the Bacchae. The god manifests himself and the rational Pentheus, who is actually a woman in this book, is the Heinleinian rationalist who says, "We can't all rip off our clothes and run through the spaceship because it is irrational and we will all die." There is this whole thing about the inner knowledge that fills this book and all the books that I have read and of course you want to join this rationalist group. The religious fanatics are all wrong and we know how it works

Well, the rationalists do know how the spaceship works, but irrationality is very powerful and the Bacchae is about the power of the irrational. In Joe Haldeman's generation ship novel, the last of those Beverly Omira books, there is a religion that pops up and it's a dumb religion that spreads like wild fire, but they are clearly dumb. I am not religious, but I don't find religion necessarily dumb. So I thought, "what if those two forces did contend against each other?" There was never a true test where the rational people had to do anything other than persuade or do something really clever that would outwit those foolish religious people and get us to Alpha Centuri on time. Well, what if that's not an option? What if your only choice is shoot them or throw them out the airlock? (Although Jim has already used that one.)

Resnick: I was going to suggest that if the Heinlein character doesn't want to take her clothes off and run around this is obviously not late Heinlein.

Jablokov: No that was mandatory in late Heinlein.

More Nostalgia

Question: Since we keep returning to the topic of nostalgia, I'd like to add that the majority of the people of the country who were nostalgic for our rural past descended from people who came to this country after we were no longer rural. There was a story back in the 50s by H. Chandler Eliot, Reprieve from Paradise, which dealt with just that problem. You are part of the small rational group, how do you deal with the large irrational people? And he used very draconian methods with them. Very unpleasant. I think that is why the book dropped out and never got reprinted.

Resnick: I think the reason that there's so much nostalgia is probably there is no problem so complex today that it won't be more complex tomorrow and that's probably been true for a century or so. People are just nostalgic for a simpler easier time. or simpler easier solutions.

Jablokov: Well, simpler not necessarily easier

Resnick: No, it only seems easy in retrospect. Personally I like electricity and running water.

Jablokov: This is one response I really liked, a woman came to Asimov and said, "Wouldn't it have been great to live in the past when life was easy and we could have had all those servants?" And he said, "Look if we lived back then, we'd be the servants!"

I have started to read Deeper Sea. I of course like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke and one of the things I like about your work is that it is not like theirs There is an awful lot of work out there which is very formulaic and this is not the case with your book. Keep confusing your mother.

Jablokov: It is a tough thing to decide what to put in your books when you know your mother is going to read them. Some people deliberately put those things in their books because they know their mothers are going to read them! It would be better if she didn't read my books; she never came to my track meets, and I was grateful for that.

Resnick: Every now and then there is a moment of crystal clarity when you understand what you are trying to do. I was on a panel years ago with Larry Niven and somebody asked him what he was trying to write, Larry's answer was he wanted to write the kind of science fiction that he always wanted to read when he was 12. It occurred to me at the time -- I think I was 40 -- that I wanted to write exactly the kind of story that I wanted to read when I was 40. Mostly I wanted to read about adults in an adult universe who are subject to the results of their own actions. To me that is legitimate grounds for writing. As is Larry's -- I'm not denigrating his answer, I'm just saying that it occurred to me the second that I heard his that mine was the polar opposite.

Question: You were talking about change in our society at the turn of the century. Well, you can go back farther and look at watershed events like the printing press and people learning how to read in large numbers. Things like that are going to keep happening and we can't predict them. Science fiction authors can continue to guess and sort of tell us how to deal with such things when they happen but we can't know what they are. When we get AI all of a sudden or when we have faster than light travel, or when we have nano-technology which is sort of on the horizon, who knows?

Jablokov: Right now I am reading Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo which is about that transition. At one point Frolo holds up a book and points to the cathedral and he says, "This will kill that." Because the solid communication of the Middle Ages was going to be supplanted by the flexible, self-perpetuating communication of the Renaissance. The book is partially about that transition and after I read it I realized that this is what people worry about now: "this will kill that" -- for example, electronic media will kill our beloved books. That is what Frolo was terrified by -- books were going to destroy his life. Each of us starts out a radical and ends up a conservative.

Science Fiction: Predictions for the Future?

Janice Amenoff: You must realize that electronics will never kill off books because then we would never have anything for you to sign. I'm beginning to wonder whether I am the only person in this room who feels absolutely no nostalgia for the past. I'm 29 so I am pretty firmly in Generation X, but I grew up with the cold war in the 80s and having adolescent nightmares about nuclear winter and designing bomb shelters when I was twelve so now I feel like we are in an idyllic state. There is no enemy as Mike Resnick said. And I can remember when I was in high school and a friend said, "Someday we are going to be carrying around computers in our pockets." And here I am with a computer in my purse! But what surprises me is now we are seeing things predicted in science fiction happen on an almost routine basis and yet science fiction continues. It is still perpetuated. There are still things out there to be explored. How do you deal with this?

Resnick: I don't think it is science fiction's job to predict anything. If it predicts something that turns out to be right that is a fluke, an accident, it's nice and who cares? I want to respond to your comment about our having no enemies by saying we have no identifiable enemies. We have a lot of enemies out there and nukes are cheap. And I don't think ideas of technology are very important. I think science fiction should be using the future and the alien as metaphor. When you actually really work out the technology it intrudes on the story to the point where if it succeeds as technology it probably fails as fiction. The purpose of science fiction as with any fiction is first to elicit an emotional response from the reader. To make him love or hate or fear. If it also makes him think, so much the better and you have written a better story for it. Science fiction does that at its highest levels. But if it doesn't elicit that emotional response than all you've really done is written a polemic or a technological crossword puzzle. Some of our great so-called classics are just that and I don't think they hold up well. I think you are going to find a century from now that almost nobody reads Asimov or Heinlein, compared to writers who we consider more literary who deal with the human condition like Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, authors from that same era. I think they have a much better chance of surviving simply because what they write about doesn't hinge on whether or not they were right about the future.

Jablokov: There is a practical problem if you do put cool stuff in your books because it better be cooler than what you can buy in the store next year. There are a lot of very clever people coming up with some cool stuff. It may not be the meat of the matter but I like cool stuff, I like to read about it and I like to buy it. So I think that is a legitimate part of science fiction and it is hard because things are moving so fast. And it does date books. You can't really tie the coolness of your concept to the coolness of your gadgets because the gadgets get superseded, and the books get remaindered and sent to third world countries.

Resnick: I'm going to paraphrase Arthur Clarke because I just read this sentence in a book "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from double-talk"

Berstein: The correct phrasing is "any sufficiently expensive card game is indistinguishable from magic." -- Harold Feld.

Future Projects

Ellen Kushner: You are both writers who don't make things up out of whole cloth. You are drawing on cultures that you have studied whether you have traveled in them or have gone into the books. And I am wondering what you are working on now, what is next, what are your influences? I run into Alex all the time in the used bookstores saying, "I am doing Egypt right now" or "I need to find a whole lot about ancient Rome" and I never know what's coming next so I'm dying to know from both of you what the outside cultural and historical influences are, and I'd also like to know where you would never go, that is, what culture, what influence, what country has no appeal for you whatsoever and why?

Jablokov: Well, the project I am working on now is not a nice historical thing. It's an AI Bounty-hunter thing that kind of grew out of something I did when I was on a little science fiction panel at Tufts. It was a panel about the Future --people are always having panels about the Future -- and a whole bunch of prominent cognitive researchers were together in a room -- Marvin Minsky and Sheri Turkle and Danny Hillis, all sorts of interesting people. And they were having a discussion about AI issues when someone suggested, why don't they just kill them if it bothers them that they are doing AI projects? Hans Moreveck said, "Well, that wouldn't do any good." And Marvin Minsky smiled and said, "Yeah but it would be a good start." So I came up with this whole AI bounty-hunter thing. Actually it's illegal to kill AI researchers, but these bounty-hunters hunt AIs and they actually have to raise money -- maybe this is my writing lifestyle that has led me to this obsession but -- the main characters are traveling all over the solar system and they have to pay their own way.

I've always been kind of bugged by system-spanning novels where people seem to do it for no cost. They never have to pay anyone to get on these space ships and get all this gear together, there is always some angel, some wealthy person or wealthy alien that gives them all the equipment and everything. Well, my characters always have to scrape along and demean themselves doing jobs so that they can get to the next place to figure out the mystery that they want to figure out. These AI bounty-hunters are a kind of grubby lot and they think they are in the pay of other AIs that are just eliminating their competition, but they are not sure. Anyway, the money is good. I hope to have that done by the end of the year and now I will hand it over to Mike while I try to think of the culture that I would want to avoid.

There are two things that I am going to be researching next: the historic Ophir and dinosaurs. Actually I've been doing dinosaurs for about ten years and finally got the contract so now I've got to do it a little more intensely.

I wouldn't write under any circumstances about England. I've been there and I'm not enthralled with it. It doesn't speak to me the way Africa does. But more to the point, everybody knows more about England than I do and as a writer you are supposed to know at least as much. If we are science fiction writers we can cheat and you don't have to write what you know about, but it's got to be what they know less about. But however we do it, everybody knows more about England than I do. I've never understood why I should care about 15th century monarchs -- my wife can name all of them and their cousins and how many bunions each had on his big toe. Doesn't do much for me.

Jablokov: Just like everyone else I have always wanted to write a Jacobean revenge tragedy, something set in the 17th century, sometime in the 1680s, but I'm never going to do it for precisely that reason.

Kushner: You could collaborate.

Jablokov: Oh yeah, Mike and I together will write a revenge tragedy in verse.

Henry Jenkins: On that note why don't I ask if our two speakers have any closing comments?

Resnick: I'm very glad that you invited me here. It's been an enjoyable discussion and I hope we do it again sometime.

Jablokov: I really enjoyed it and I hope if I come back a third time the audience fall-off will not be as great from the previous one because then I will have to make my mother come.