When I came by to go to dinner in the 1960s, I would at times hear something like a cheap motorbike banging inside the house. It was Phil, hammering at an Olympia typewriter like a woodpecker on meth; with one letter change, he was indeed a wordpecker on meth. Once when I arrived he said, not looking up, “I can finish this novel tonight if I go straight through to dawn.” I pointed out that the speed he was on needed dilution at least, and took him to dinner. And he finished it the next morning, he said.

My being an identical twin fascinated him, as it did Heinlein. Phil thought he’d write a novel about twins, and I suppose in some way he did in some of the more confusing novels. He also asked me lots of questions about time and quantum mechanics, especially for background for Counter Clock World. He thought entropy was a great metaphor but I could never make sense of the eventual novel. In that time he was moving from wife Ann to wife Nancy, and remarked, “You’d guess that a guy who won the novel Hugo would do better with women.” I thought it a doubtful syllogism.

Then he moved to Orange County in 1972, still steamed up about an earlier break-in at his home. He imagined the FBI was responsible. I found he didn’t much like the aspects of the county that I found best, such as the beaches and ocean. He never visited my home perched high up with a view of the town and ocean in Laguna Beach. Only slowly did I realize that he was agoraphobic, so vistas and great weather mattered little. He liked churches, he said, and questioned me closely about my being an Episcopalian. He felt the gospels were powerful messages we should all study intently. He was writing an interminable Exegesis and consulted me on it, but I never read more than a few passages. Not my thing, unlike his novels and especially the short stories that snagged my attention in the 1950s.

As success came to him, he was generous to the poor. He told me in 1981 that he had made $180,000 that year and gave most of it to charities. Even though he lived pretty close to the street himself, he knew what it was like to be down, and tried to help people. The one person who would not have believed in the prominence of Philip Dick in our culture now was Phil Dick himself.

About that time I used some connections in the CIA to inquire with the FBI about Phil, and the break-in. Word came back that there was no Dick file at all. When I told him that he said they had probably destroyed it to “cover their trail.”

He did love music and spent a lot on his FM system. With Tim Powers he often listened to major symphonic works, and mentioned that he could not quite register the nuances from the left speaker. Later, Tim told me, he went to a doctor to check and found that he was losing his hearing in the left ear. “Thank God,” he said. “I was afraid it was in my speakers!”

Somehow that sums Phil up to me.

I found him hard to quite appreciate as he became more intent on the meaning of scripture, transcendental matters, and the Bishop Pike brand of Christianity. Often Phil had, shall we say, a continuity problem. He spoke of hearing a voice from the cosmic sky but what he heard from on high tended to vary often.

I was intent on running a plasma physics lab and so saw him infrequently, though I did continue to urge him to move and enjoy the pleasant aspects of the county, instead of his strip mall neighborhood. In spring 1982 I realized we hadn’t spoken for a year, so I called and made a date for dinner. He was jazzed about the rushes of Blade Runner he’d seen and wanted to talk about it.

Days later, I heard he had died. When Tim Powers called to tell me about the memorial service, I flipped open my appointment calendar and found that the day and time were precisely when we had scheduled to have dinner.

It was what we have come to think of as a Phil Dick moment.

CI: You have an identical twin. How’s that working out for you?
GB: I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a singleton, as we call you people.
CI: You have a word for us? [Laughs]
GB: Hey, you have one for us. I could’ve said “loners” but it seems unkind. My brother Jim and I are mirror twins, the closest variety of twins. Beyond us lie the Siamese twins, who don’t separate. It’s great. I’m operating with a back-up copy. We’ve used that in our lives. My brother had a burst appendix fifteen years after I had a burst appendix. I took three weeks to get out of the hospital. His didn’t burst in his office as mine did, because he woke up in the middle of the night, felt this pain that I had described, realized it was the same thing, called the hospital, and his appendix burst on the operating table. He was out of the hospital in 2-3 days.
CI: The science-fiction writer in you must have projected the possibilities of having larger communal categories of experience. What would that be like, to have cultures where the twin sense, advantage, and experience are mapped out much more widely? Would that make an interesting context for science fiction?
GB: It hasn’t been done. I haven’t found a clear way to use that, yet, in a story. We now know things like intelligence are roughly 50% determined by genetics and the rest by environment. But there are also many epigenetic effects, which could lead to many paths. The simpatico I have with my twin comes from shared genetics and shared upbringing. We’re extremely close. Twins typically have two states: they’re very close to each other, or they have a well-defined distance between them. We’re of the former. The advantages accrue mostly from being close. We don’t have a literal private language, but we understand each other immediately, have the same buttons, and can quickly and easily work together. We’ve written about a dozen papers together. Those are great qualities. Trying to extrapolate that to a group of cloned people is different, though in Ursula Le Guin’s early story “Nine Lives,” about nine clones, they have great social utility.
CI: So much human misery and mayhem results from poor or inefficient communication. That’s what you have: incredibly efficient and excellent, almost automatic communication. That’s a great cultural advantage.
GB: It is. We grew up in a small town in southern Alabama. We literally went to a one-room schoolhouse, but we’ve both ended up having professional careers in California and are utterly unlike the other people in our family. Most of my first cousins are farmers, fishermen, and manual laborers. We extricated ourselves from a very different place and got where we wanted to be. A lot of it was working together. We went to undergraduate and graduate school together, and didn’t stop living together until we married.
CI: You were a fanzine editor at age fourteen. How did you get started? How did you get the bug?
GB: The restless urge to write beset me, and still does. I got interested in science fiction at an early age, because it’s the literature of ideas. I always think, “Gee, that’s interesting. I wonder what it’s like to do it.” I do that with essentially everything. I don’t watch sports, I play sports. I can’t resist going into fields that are of interest to me, so I’ve worked in biology, physics, astrophysics, and language groups. Being a science-fiction fan is a great way to get deeply into the culture, to understand where ideas come from, and what kinds of people have ideas. Most scientists aren’t like that, because most scientists do fairly well-defined research that isn’t idea-intensive. I like idea-thick subjects. Most scientists have read science fiction. Isaac Asimov said to me once that by his informal questioning, the majority of all scientists read science fiction when they were young, and after graduate school, if they read anything, it’s usually science fiction, but most of them don’t read anything after graduate school!
CI: Most people don’t read anything.
GB: Yes, sadly. Science fiction is deeply wrapped up in the doing of science. The most influential currents of modern times have been dominated by the scientists and the technologists who bring into being all the outcomes of scientific knowledge. When I began writing fiction, I realized that nobody wrote about their mindscape, the way they think and how that influences how they interact with the rest of the culture. There was a huge, pregnant possibility, and I could write about it because I came out of it. Science fiction was the obvious way to attack that. This is contrary to the view of conventional literature, which believes in a grand, canonical, ensemble model, the “great books” theory, which I think is almost completely false.
CI: Science fiction seems to take it from both sides. Scientists may have been weaned on science fiction, but then they put it aside and don’t give it a lot of credibility; and it’s more antagonistic from the literature crowd. It seems like the quality of the writing does not always determine opinion. It’s the category. Do technology and science pose such a big cultural threat that people are unable to view them clearly?
GB: That’s right. The literary mandarins are virtually unanimous in their fear of science and technology, which undermine conventional world views, and always will. It’s the inherent revolutionary culture.
CI: They embrace someone who deconstructs the language in a clever way, so why wouldn’t they embrace people who deconstruct cultural backdrops in a science fiction book?
GB: They don’t come out of the scientific culture, so the scientific habits of mind are not natural to them. Since you used the word “deconstruct,” I would comment that deconstructionism, whose train has lately left the station and will not soon be seen again, is in my view a way of resuscitating the political conflicts that beset the world academy. The 20th century has been doomed to act out the consequences of the ideas and the political and philosophical landscape of the 19th century: socialism, communism, and fascism. The winner and reigning champion turns out to be the 18th century—free speech, free elections, free markets. This conflict is not over. A lot of deconstructionism is a way of finding that all of human culture is a conspiracy to carry out the agenda of the ruling elite. Where have we heard this idea before? It’s warmed-over Marxism, and Marxism exists in the academy today not in the department of economics, but in the department of literary criticism.
CI: The readers decide. People who care about ideas will gravitate towards the books that are rich in ideas, including science fiction. You were living a double life as a young man. You wrote your first story when you were a grad student, and were heading down the straight, academic, professorial track while you had this other life. Was there any tension there, or was it natural to do both things? Were there disincentives on the academic side for spending time writing, or having a literary persona?
GB: Sure, but I had to do it. I’ve never seen the point in not doing what you want to. Early on, I realized that no one could be good at doing something they don’t like. What’s the point of being a B- businessman when you could be an A+ sculptor? You only go around once, so why not? Most academics are content to do things as conventionally viewed. I didn’t fit that mold. You always pay a price. A lot of people are unwilling to admit that they’re motivated by envy, but we all know that most people are.
CI: The things that happened to Sagan are a good example of that.
GB: The rejection of Carl from the National Academy of Sciences is a scandal that will not go away. I chose an easier path than did Carl. I was lucky enough to find an audience. I wrote because I enjoyed it, and it was astonishing to me that other people liked what I wrote and bought the books, and I had a career, which has made me a fairly large amount of money. That never wears well with academics.
CI: I presume there are no downsides the other way around; having the street cred of being a professor of physics can’t hurt when you write hard science fiction. But was there ever a sense that this was so much fun that you didn’t need the academic side at all?
GB: I wanted to do it, so I did both.
CI: You didn’t feel the need to write more, that you didn’t have enough time to deliver on everything you’re thinking?
GB: I have never written all the ideas I thought of doing, but I’ve written a lot of books, and I’ve done it because I always liked writing. It’s therapy, and they pay you! [Laughs] I did it because it was enjoyable, and it was a blessing that it was highly productive. I’ve had books sell over a million copies, and books that have been published in over a dozen languages, and a lot of books still in print, and that’s great. That’s gravy, though, on top of the meat and potatoes that I want to do it. I would do it even if it never caught on.
CI: How do you define hard science fiction? Is it a useful category?
GB: I find hard SF very useful as a category, because it is the absolute core and center of science fiction. It is best seen as playing tennis with the net up, which is intrinsically more interesting than with the net down. It observes a scrupulous regard for the facts and also the method of science, and that includes the habits of mind of scientists. Hard sf gives you core realism about a part of society that has not had a voice beyond a whisper. Writing about scientists, whom history will regard as far more important than the passing politicians, is the smart-money way to go in literature. Hard science fiction is the source from which radiates much of what then moves into the rest of so-called soft science fiction, social science fiction, futurology, and utopian novels.
CI: Even with hard science fiction as your category, you deal with religion, sentience, emotional landscapes, and linguistic issues. You’ve got enough humanism that it’s not mechanistic.
GB: I try to. Many people think hard science fiction is just fiction with all the rivets showing.
CI: Or two-dimensional characters.
GB: Yes, that’s the cliché comment. I think hard sf should depict how scientists think and work, plus what comes from such habits of mind. You can have a starship captain as your character, but he can’t seem just like a naval commander—his whole ship is a testament to the scientific worldview. But hard sf should be broad, too. Linguistics is an actual science, not hard science, but such are areas of scientific investigation, so they’re fair game. Novels are supposed to be novel, and include new insights. You use the light that comes through whatever window is open at the time.
CI: I agree. Hard science fiction hasn’t won its fair share of Hugos. Within the realm of science fiction, and how the subgenres are perceived, do you sense any lack of respect for hard SF?
GB: There’s a fair respect for hard SF, because most people agree with my characterization that it’s at the core of the field. But awards are determined by essentially sociology and politics. The Hugo audience is interested mostly in great storytelling with lots of keen ideas, and that’s perfectly fine. Most of them don’t find it in hard SF. I haven’t won a Hugo. I’ve been on the ballot a few times, but frankly I don’t pay much attention to that. I’m in it for the life. I’ve won some other awards and that’s fine. But who on his death bed says, “My life is worthwhile! I won the XYZ award!” instead of, “I enjoyed what I did.”
CI: They’re always giving Charles Barkley a hard time because he didn’t get a ring, he didn’t win an NBA title. But he had a great career and is considered one of the top fifty players. Titles go to a team. He’s totally happy.
GB: It’s a piece of metal, that award.
CI: When you look back at your books, you’ve written over thirty. Why was Timescape so huge? It’s classic, it’s like Led Zeppelin III. Do you know why it was so huge?
GB: Timescape’s popularity is somewhat mysterious to me. I finished the novel thinking, I’ve finally written the novel that completely indulges my pleasure in being able to write about my own experience. It’s often said that review articles in a given field of science are actually forms of concealed autobiography. That’s also true of novels. There’s so much autobiography in Timescape. I appear as several different characters. Gregory Markham is me, and the two unidentified twins in graduate school at UCSD in 1962-63 are obviously me and Jim. It’s about going to graduate school, being an assistant professor, and being a fellow at Cambridge, all of which I’ve done. I wrapped it around this plot that’s always obsessed me, the sense of missed possibilities in our lives. The remark I made about the death bed is commonly said, but true. Nobody regrets on the death bed the things they did, but rather the things they didn’t. To echo Jackson Brown: “Although the future is there for anyone to change, sometimes it seems it would be easier somehow to change the past.”
CI: You’ve explained it succinctly. By coupling a classic science idea of tachyons to a deep-rooted human issue, regret, or the sense of things passed, you twinned a deep emotional thing to a deep physics thing. That’s the core, that’s the mother lode.
GB: That’s a good way to describe it. But I didn’t remotely sense that when I was writing the novel.
CI: But you were having a good time, so you knew you were writing a good book?
GB: I didn’t know I had a good book. I knew I had a book that I liked. But so what? My second-favorite novel is the one right after that, Against Infinity, which is also the easiest book I ever wrote. Some people think that’s good, but I think it’s just as good as Timescape, and it’s half the length.
CI: Timescape is probably for an audience that had never had this window. For people in the business, it’s just their world, but you gave such a clear window into what it’s like to do research and be an academic—the whole texture of that world. For people who don’t know what it’s like, you embedded them, and they probably had never seen that before.
GB: That surely must be part of the charm of it. It’s been quoted in books about science and all over the place — always the stuff about what it’s like to do science. That still is a largely unexplored territory.
CI: I agree. When Leon Lederman was nearing retirement and wanting to go do good things in the schools in Chicago, he was spinning up all sorts of ideas, a lot of which he pitched strongly to the major networks. He said, “Have a reality show about scientists. Show scientists sharing a dorm.” The producers said, “But they won’t have any girlfriends. Where are the women?” Esteemed as he was, they said, “Nobody cares what scientists do.”
GB: There’s a sitcom running right now that does exactly this. It’s funny, but it has the same few jokes—they don’t have girlfriends, and they’re non-realistic about the world. If you know real scientists, you realize that’s not true at all.
CI: So it’s still waiting to be done.
GB: The problem is that working scientists do have their exciting moments, but most of science, just like most police work, is about as interesting as watching paint dry.
CI: You need an audience that’s willing to invest in the intellectual back story, the idea landscape, and develop that.
GB: Right, although no one wonders how many people went into archaeology and were disappointed because they watched Indiana Jones movies.
CI: You like to layer ideas in your books, develop and then redevelop. Is it because you had a thread that you hadn’t mined enough and you wanted to return to it, or are you consciously interconnecting all these things as you build them?
GB: It’s not conscious. I do a lot of my writing unconsciously. I let things mull around for a while and realize that there’s a question I hadn’t answered, and didn’t understand. My first thoughts about Timescape were: Is time travel possible? You have to have the right physics. Is there any physics around today that might make it happen? Maybe tachyons. Suppose I was a real scientist—wait, I am a real scientist! What would I do first? Build some kind of phone booth that you walk into, and it turns you into tachyons and transports you? That sounds appetizing. [Laughs] Why don’t we test these ideas by sending a couple of tachyons into the past to see if we can convey some information? My first notes said, time telegraph? I want to send a signal to the past, and that’s actually enough. My God, if you do that, wow! Marconi wanted to send signals to other people; he didn’t want to transport human beings through radio waves. It was the investigation of how I would do it, what would be the first step, that led me through the logic to build the novel. I never got around to the phone booth that transmits people into the past.
CI: Bill and Ted did that, eventually.
GB: I found that a really funny movie. Timescape has been ripped off for so many projects, I stopped making a list. There was even a segment of Star Trek: Next Generation titled “Timescape.” It had no relationship to the novel except for the ideas. The title was trademarked with Simon & Schuster for ten years, and when it fell out of trademark, Simon & Schuster didn’t let me know, so it fell into public domain. Within months, people had used it for all kinds of purposes. There are several books of that title, there’s a Timescape corporation somewhere, and of course the Star Trek show.
CI: So you never clawed it back?
GB: No. I never trademarked it again. Although it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary.
CI: So it’s your gift to the world, then.
GB: It credits me with inventing the word, which seemed like a pretty straightforward word to me. People have now used “mindscapes” and other variants of the word. So what? Life is too busy and too short to try to hold onto everything.
CI: How well can hard science fiction inform astrobiology, this enterprise that hopes to start detecting biological traces in the next decade? Whether or not the SETI side bet ever pays off, we’re moving in that direction. How do you view what you do in that realm as feeding into the enterprise of asking that big question?
GB: You can’t do anything that you do not first imagine. Questions about alien life should be informed by science fiction, so that we properly think about what variations we can expect. Suppose the aliens aren’t organic at all, but computers have taken over civilizations that eventually lost their original life forms, and the automatic cities and great spacecraft of some advanced civilization were all that remained. That’s a whole suite of novels, the so-called Galactic Center series.
CI: Post-biological evolution is a real possibility in a lot of parts of the universe, if biology’s common.
GB: Right. The extension of Darwinian mechanisms into other substrates is a straightforward idea. That idea largely came out of science fiction, not biologists. My brother and I have done a detailed compilation of what the beacon builders we imagine in SETI would actually have to do. How much money does it cost? How does the cost influence what the signal looks like? We did this in the face of what appears to be this slackening resolve about SETI. We have now been doing SETI for almost half a century, not well, not often, and we’ve found no signal. What does that mean? A plausible low-cost beacon will still cost maybe ten billion dollars to put together, and it will not be a continuously beamed signal. It will not be one cycle per second wide in frequency, it will be broad; it will not be around the frequency used by cell phones, but rather at ten times larger frequency. This changes enormously how we should look for SETI beacons. That kind of interplay is the great advantage of hard science fiction. You try to imagine how it would really be, and the more concrete your imagination, the more useful its conclusions.
CI: We’re all bounded in anthropocentric traps and ways of thinking, even the scientists who do astrobiology, especially the life scientists. The imagination of a writer must allow you to see those traps and potentially move beyond them. Are you conscious of trying to do that?
GB: Yes. The charm of ideas is new ones. How much can you push the parameters of biology? The most important thing to do in the entire space program is to find out if there’s life on Mars, if it was the original life and colonized the Earth, and if it persists, holds out. How different is it, if it’s there? Those questions could be answered with our space program in the next generation. That tells you what you ought to be doing in the real world, to make a scientific contribution. You shouldn’t be using up all your money going around in circles in low-Earth orbit. You shouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the Moon. You ought to attack the main problem. If you find something really fundamental on Mars, the field will explode. You’ll have all kind of questions to ask. Then there are the other bodies in the Solar System which are much harder to explore, like the oceans under the ice of Europa, or Titan at 100 degrees Kelvin. Is there anything alive there? Those are going to take much longer to explore. You can’t do Europa or Titan without the development of large-scale nuclear rockets. That’s not going to happen next week. Mars is hard to do with chemical rockets, but pretty easy with nuclear rockets. That suggests what you ought to be doing next.
CI: Given that the space age is obviously in its infancy, and all our technologies are in their infancy, how well can we even extrapolate? It’s hard to plan more than an election cycle ahead for anything. The great pyramid building, the historical efforts that consume civilizations, took a hundred or more years. We don’t seem to have that appetite.
GB: Some things do last. The American republic is older than the entire pyramid building era of the Pharaohs. To extrapolate the space program, you should learn from historical analogies. I’m fearful that the Lee Harkins conception that we are the Columbus of space is wrong, and that there’s a good chance that we are going to be the Leif Erikssons of space. [Laughs] Europeans tried to get to North America and settle colonies before Columbus, and they failed. They even forgot about it! Failure is an option. Infrastructure comes before exploration.
The Europeans were lucky to explore the New World using caravels, which were developed for use in the Mediterranean. America was barely within reach using caravels. Within a century they had completely different classes of oceangoing craft. We can’t do much more in the Solar System with chemical rockets. We’ve got to have new infrastructure. That will open up lots of great options, like asteroid mining. The use of resources on the Solar System scale is how we build a brand-new culture such as the world has never seen. That’s how we got to the New World last time.
The most important thing out of the New World was neither tobacco nor the potato. Those were pleasant, but the great outcome of the New World was new ideas. The greatest danger to modern society is the closed box of the Earth. It’s going to get more crowded, and with crowding comes control. Controlled societies don’t innovate much, so if you want to have an opening future, you have to open your frontiers. The existing paradigm for us, the only species of chimpanzee that got out of Africa, is the opening of human horizons. If you play that suit, you’re probably going to keep winning. If you stop playing it, you’re probably going to lose.
CI: One more topic before we wrap up. There’s this dichotomy of “rare Earth” ideas, people who play the contingency card in what happened on this planet over four billion years, and other people who see convergence, inevitability, and the huge numbers of the real estate out there. Where do you sit in that debate? Do you think we’re alone or not? Regardless of what you speculate and write, what do you really think?
GB: I doubt that we’re alone in this galaxy, but I know we need more data. SETI is the fastest way to get the data. It’s the best investment of our funds. Going to Mars and finding out if life arose there separately will cost us in the range of $100 billion. SETI we can do for $100 million. I believe the galaxy has given birth to life elsewhere, probably intelligent life, and it’s quite possible there’s a lot going on, but we live so far out in the boondocks that we don’t see it. The vast majority of the life-bearing stars in the galaxy are on average well over a billion years older than our star. Life-bearing environments have had a long opportunity to proliferate and get in good conversation, but they’re all many thousands of light-years away, where the action is — in the big ball of stars that makes up the core of the Milky Way. We’re out here in the suburbs wondering what life is like in the big city. The first thing we do is look for the search lights broadcast by the wealthy people who have time to waste. Look toward the galactic center, which is twenty-seven thousand light years away. Look steadily in many frequencies.
CI: We’re thinking of experiments of that nature with these new funding sources. I have one last question. Is it true you’ve broken something like ten bones?
GB: Yes, from various sports.
CI: Not pugilistically, just in normal rough-and-tumble sports.
GB: My spine and my left shoulder surfing; then softball; and some ribs in various sports. I was exceeding the strength of materials.
CI: You have the badge of a doer. How about your twin—do you match on bones broken as well?
GB: No, my twin hasn’t broken as many bones. I tend to take more risks. After all, he hasn’t written much science fiction.

I’ve reached the age when the timeless nature of our lives slips away, an illusion; we’re anchored in the passing days. Lifelong friends vanish like the dew.

I’ve started dreaming of old friends. I dream most often of Terry Carr, Roger Zelazny, Buz Busby and most especially Bill Rotsler. No idea why these should feature so strongly, but they do. Often I’m talking to them, walking somewhere, pointing out new amusements, odd angles. Sometimes I ask they salient questions, but never recall their replies. I have no idea what this all means, except that I’m putting my life in perspective now, looking down the long corridor of tapered time, and friends set the scale. Maybe the dreams say that I’d still like to talk to those missing now forever–to continue the conversations that are friendships, time binders.

So I look through old photos, like the one above. It’s at a 1980s convention; I can tell because my arm, broken in a softball game, is in a sling. Roger Zelazny’s smile is still so fine.

See how you like it:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/03/the-sigma-structure-symphony

Arthur C. Clarke and Gregory Benford, 1988

I first met him at the 1979 science fiction worldcon in Brighton, though he had loomed in my life for decades before. Five minutes into our friendship he said amid the crowded convention floor, “Let’s go up to my room so we can think.” In the elevator he said he’d wanted to get away from the press of crowds, because he was feeling “unsteady” – first signs of the post-polio that would shadow his later life.

So we sat in his hotel room and waxed on about the future, ideas, stories we loved. He saw the past as a guide, but what could come next filled him with wonder. In Profiles of the Future (1962), an elegantly phrased “inquiry into the limits of the possible,” he balanced knowledge with his fictional side, exploring what might be achieved within the bounds of scientific law. Books on futurology date notoriously, yet this one has not, because Clarke was unafraid of being adventurous.

Talking to him, I recalled that back in 1962 Clarke foresaw that the mobile telephone would mean that no one could fully escape society, even at sea or on a mountaintop. He went on to describe huge electronic libraries, the breakdown of censorship and high definition electronic screens. He got almost all his many predictions right.

About such ideas he was often wryly witty. I can hear in memory his quick darting mind, seen in his many aphorisms. On religion: “I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.” Of space and politics: “There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.” On progress: “New ideas pass through three periods: It can’t be done; it probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; I knew it was a good idea all along!

His vision carried precisely because he remained almost obliviously above the fray: “Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.” But speculation had to be rigorous. “Exact knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of imagination and fantasy.”

He was quite aware that his greatest success was his coauthorship with Stanley Kubrick  of the film and novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its blend of hard technology and mystical opening was a huge cultural benchmark, bringing to life his assertion that  “whatever other perils humanity may face in the future that lies ahead, boredom is not among them.” Kubrick observed, “He has the kind of mind of which the world can never have enough, an array of imagination, intelligence, knowledge and a quirky curiosity, which often uncovers more than the first three qualities.” Clarke later relished telling the story of visiting United States when an immigration official looked at his passport and said, “I won’t let you in until you explain the ending of 2001. “

Since the 1980s he sometimes used a wheelchair but could still continue one of his lifelong passions, scuba diving.. He founded the first diving shop in Asia, having moved permanently to Sri Lanka in 1956. He felt “perfectly operational underwater” and restored the business after the 2004 tsunami. I was to go diving with him in 1995 but the weather turned bad Sri Lanka gave Clarke creative isolation, but he became the first citizen of the global village, traveling and later keeping in touch with friends, colleagues and fans via daily e-mails. Surrounded by spicy tropical cusine, he never gave up his taste for a steady diet of bland English food, preferring roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I ate this dutifully in his home, and dined on local zippy curries the rest of the day, during my two visits to Sri Lanka.

In 2007 when we visited him again in Colombo, he seemed unsettled by the unending Tamil Tiger war. The fascist Tigers have been assassinating major public figures to draw attention; there were armed guards at both intersections by his home, and one near his driveway. Arthur hated small-mindedness, and the Tamils had come haunt him. Luckily, they’re gone now. Arthur didn’t live to see their demise, alas.

He took us to the Swimming Club for lunch, a sunny ocean spot left over from the Raj. It felt somehow right to watch the Indian Ocean curl in, breaking on the rocks, and speak of space, the last, greatest ocean. Our hotel with a similar ocean view, the Galle Face, is the oldest grand Raj hotel east of Suez, dating from before the Civil War, and reeks of atmosphere. Since the Galle Face is next to the British High Command compound, and just down the street from the presidential residence, subtle security lurks everywhere. A heavy machine gun on a nearby tower peered over us as we swam in the pool. Arthur mused, “All this effort, all this death, when we could be building the staging area for a seaborne space elevator.” In The Fountains of Paradise he had moved the island five degrees south so it could sit on the equator.

In his home’s “Ego Chamber,” amid many awards, I noticed a page by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, saying, “To Arthur—who visualized the nuances of lunar flying before I experienced them.”

His last wishes were for the further expansion of human horizons, saying to the Mars Society, “Whether we become a multi-planet species with unlimited horizons, or are forever confined to Earth will be decided in the twenty-first century amid the vast plains, rugged canyons and lofty mountains of Mars.”

It is easy to see him as a monument now, but he was more interesting as a man. That’s what I miss most.

Starship Anthology Features Best Minds Exploring Deep Space Travel
Top scientists and science fiction authors combine to tackle the opportunities for our long-term future in space. The new Anthology features possibilities envisioned by Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, Robert Zubrin, Martin Rees, Jill Tarter and many others.

Gregory Benford and James Benford announce a groundbreaking anthology of science and science fiction based on findings and discussions of the 100-Year Starship Symposium (100YSS) held in September/October of 2011.
Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Starship Symposium brought together the many of the top science and science fiction minds of our time, delving into interplanetary and interstellar technologies.
“The anthology theme is the development of starships as a key inspiring goal for future interplanetary technologies, leading to the ability to build the first starships within a century,” says Gregory Benford, an award-winning science fiction author and physicist. “It addresses how future growth of an interplanetary economy can occur, meeting the resource needs of Earth, leading to starships.”
The anthology explores the compelling visions that the Starship Symposium generated– ideas such as exploiting resources like asteroid mining, and advanced interplanetary propulsion and communications. James Benford, a leading expert on space propulsion, added “It will lay the foundations for a society that focuses outward for its own evolution.”
The anthology contributors are largely drawn from the Symposium attendees. Nonfiction contributors include Freeman Dyson, Jill Tarter, Robert Zubrin, Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees and others. Fiction contributors include Steven Baxter, Nancy Kress, Allen Steele, Joe Haldeman and others. Additional contributors will be announced in coming months.
The anthology will include non-fiction and science fiction in roughly equal proportions and will go on sale within a year.
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Please address questions to James Benford, jbenford@earthlink.net. He is available for interview and further information.

We slept fitfully and woke several times to the rattle of machine gun fire. Probably to scare them off, I thought. Then M1 rifle shots, sharp hard raps in the moist night. I looked out our bedroom window and saw a flare blaze into the dark sky. More snapping shots. Nearby, clearly.

We lay and watched the fitful glows fall on smoky tendrils from the black sky. Nothing more sounded. No doors opened. Our parents maybe didn’t hear. Or maybe they didn’t want to know about it. But we did, yes. Silence.

Too early to go out and see, so my brother Jim and I went back to sleep. Nothing is easier than sleep when you’re nine years old. But at 5 AM the first orange feelers of dawn crept across the Japanese sky and we got up quietly, with excited whispers. Dressed, down the stairs with shoes held in hand, out the back door. We moved as stealthily as we could, heading outward through Narimasu Base’s cookie-cutter uniformity, each unit in the military housing complex built to mirror image sameness. The Army likes consistency. The guarded perimeter at the edge of Tokyo lay only three blocks away. The Base was built atop a large Japanese Air Force airfield and was perfectly flat since it was the landing field. We used bushes for some cover as the dawn was turning rosy now.

Already there had been riots in Tokyo led by the Communist Party. In Japan and Europe, many thought that communism was the Next Big Thing, since after all, they had paid the most and done the most to defeat the Germans. As many as half a million people surged through the streets, shouting. Our father came home to tell of US cars burned in the streets as the human tide rushed past. One rioter would unscrew the gas tank, a follower would push a cloth into the tank to draw gasoline up through wicking, and a third lit the result. The Communist opposition to US and British occupation tried to provoke incidents. Some well-armed hardcore Communists  tried to get into the US residence camps where we lived. The Marine guards at the Base perimeter were deeply necessary, not decorative.

By the time we got to the perimeter the sun sent slanting rays across the rice paddies as pearly mist rose in the soft glow. US Marines were bent over out in the flooded rice fields, knee deep. As we arrived they were pulling bodies out. The men in black shirts and trousers had been lying there for hours and certainly were dead. A med team with stretchers followed the searchers at a trot along the raised paths between paddies. I counted three bodies.

The Marines saw us and shooed us away. We slipped back home and got back into our beds without our parents waking. But we did get a curious look from our maid who came out of her room to see us creeping light-footed in our socks down the hallway.

We had come to Tokyo midwinter of 1949-50. Before that we had grown up around the small town of Fairhope, Alabama. We spent a year in transition to Japan, in Lawton, Oklahoma’s Fort Sill after our father gave up his high school teaching position in 1948 as the Cold War warmed up, and accepted a Regular Army commission as a Captain. He had fought in WWII, called up from the Reserves a week after Pearl Harbor. In the 3^rd Army he went into Normandy at Omaha Beach the 5^th day and fought across France, at the Bulge, and all the way into Austria by the end. Of the 16 forward observers in his battalion who who went in at Normandy he was the only survivor. They had to move with the infantry and between units and the Germans knew to target them to avoid the US artillery, which was superior in both quantity and quality.A farm boy, he knew how to move quietly in the natural world.

Now the Korean War was in its first raging battles less than 150 miles from where we listened for distant riots and close-in rifle fire. Dad was a senior staff officer for General McArthur and often worked weekends and came home late at night. In that role he was the watch officer for the entire Pacific Command when he picked up the hot telephone in the small hours of Sunday 25 June 1950. An officer at the South Korean border reported he was taking incoming artillery. Dad told him to pull his regiment back. The North Korean Army had crossed the 38th parallel behind artillery fire at dawn. Dad didn’t come home for five days, though he was only a 40 minute drive away. After that we had less time with him, and though our mother compensated, that’s not the same kind of fun.

Jim and I had the vast strange land beyond our Base perimeter to explore, an alien landscape of fascinating detail -- a daily excitement. But we had larger horizons still. They rose from Nippon’s serene blue into the star-struck reaches of space. Science fiction called us to look further.  Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke--they told us of what could be, not just the gritty reality of what was.

I recall my twelve year-old self thinking, when I sighted Farmer in the Sky for sale in the big Post Exchange in Tokyo, There it is. Gosh, $2.50. That’s a lot…5 weeks’ of both our allowances. But…I can’t wait! Got to persuade Jim…

I recall vividly reading those Heinlein juveniles, which helped direct our attention to space, science, the limitless future. I’ve noticed that many Army brats turn up in fandom and sfdom generally. In foreign lands while young, the book is a good friend. My brother and I were self-reinforcing, united in a focused effort to understand the strange forces all around us, to make sense of it all. Heinlein played a major role in giving us a viewpoint, from within the military culture, of how to think about the enormous events transpiring around us.

There is a further commonality between sf and the South: we’re outsiders. Though the South has dominated conventional culture to an impressive extent, and sf is the champion American genre (still alive in the magazines, and ruling Hollywood), both derive power and profit from taking an exterior angle. We look askance at the expansive Northern culture. For a Southerner this is automatic. When Japanese rioted through the streets, shouting “Yankee Go Home!” I had been momentarily scared, but then felt relief; after all, I wasn’t a Yankee.

By the time we had reached Giessen, Germany in 1955 our father commanded a field artillery battalion. We served drinks and canapés at the battalion parties in our home, a three-story 19^th century stonework with a maid and furnace man and gardener. A long way from Fairhope. Servants! My mother especially loved it, bless her.

During the Hungarian revolt of 1956 the battalion deployed to the Austrian border and my reaction was to imagine a story with us on a school bus, caught in a suddenly escalating war that became nuclear in Europe. We had to seize the bus and drive west to avoid the front. I tried to write some of it and suddenly realized that I liked telling stories. I wrote some for our fanzine, Void--simple idea stories, very short. One quite clearly contained the precursor ideas to my novel Timescape. I discovered this while rereading one over half a century later.

But lurking all around this imaginary future of Mars colonies and time paradoxes was the Cold War, standing in the bombed out shadows of WWII. The present seemed choked with war, brimming just over the horizon. The future, ripe with promise, was a much finer place to live in one’s mind’s eye.

I have many memories of those years. Dad driving us from the ship we came on, the Shanks, at berth in Yokahama, to Narimasu Base.  I looked out over fields of grass and suddenly, jutting  from that waving ocean, was a chimney. In an instant I recalled a car voyage across Georgia, along the route Sherman took. Across vacant fields the sole monuments to the Civil War were the brick chimneys standing forlorn above seas of grass. Same story: the big air raid on Tokyo in 1945 had burned away thousands of homes and left only grass to mark the 100,000 who died.

We had been on the way then to my first funeral. My uncle had been Sheriff of his county. On a hot summer day he had led a party up a steep hill to a tin distillery specializing in White Lightnin’. They found it by the cottonwood smoke, an amateur’s error – smarter moonshiners would have used drier fuel, maybe oak. The entrepreneurs had vanished, taking some of their product, and on that hot July day my uncle asked for a dipper of water. There seemed some confusion over whether he had gotten water or White Lightnin’ in that dipper but what was beyond dispute was that he had toppled backward, a man in his forties, and died as he hit the ground. It was later found to be a heart attack, from too much exertion in the heat., not raging retribution of the gods of moonshine. But knowing the cause only made my uncle’s transformation from so vividly living--sweating, swearing, laughing--to this sudden emptiness, deeply mysterious.

Those lonesome chimneys lingered in my thoughts, the last remnants of homes and families long vanished.

So these grass fields in Japan hid a similar secret. The fire bombings of Tokyo killed more than Hiroshima and stopped nothing, except over 100,000 lives.

Only long after that morning of flares and rifle fire did I realize that I wanted none of that. I wanted the future I had read about, not the hard slog of the Cold War, which looked as though it could last forever. And it did last over 40 years more.

Jim and I dutifully took ROTC at university for two years and had planned to sign on for the two years more to get a Lieutenant commission. But then we both decided to follow our noses, not our origins. We failed to appear to sign up when we registered for our junior year. We were bound for the profession of physics, which came directly out of our sf reading.

It was a strange path indeed to the abstract graces of theory and experiment. Science tries to understand the world, at least in constricted, controlled ways. But in physics when you understood something, it meant more than the chaos of the world itself could ever mean. It somehow lived above the fray, eternal and true. That was a blessing.

And we would not have to pick bodies out of a rice paddy.

http://www.thevoicesoffandom.com/mp3/Greg_Benford_Interview_for_SF_Radio_Show.mp3