Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Masters of Science Fiction

Episode Date: March 31, 2003

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This is Planetary Radio. Matt Kaplan here, and do I feel fortunate? Last week we got to spend time with Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Today, it's two more brilliant, thought-provoking, and entertaining authors at the top of their field. David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson will join us on Planetary

Radio in just a minute. Of course, we'll also visit with Bruce Betts for another What's Up to learn who won last week's trivia contest, among other things. First, a technical note, though. We know that a lot of you are attempting to listen to us on Windows Media Player. Be sure you have the latest version.

That's Windows Media Player version 9 or above for the best possible listening experience. Now, here's Emily on Travel to the Stars, and that's no science fiction. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked,

Will it ever be possible to use a warp drive to travel quickly from one star to another? The short answer to this question, according to our present understanding of physics, is no. But that doesn't mean we can't ever get to the stars. The problem with interstellar travel is the huge distances involved. The nearest star is 4.3 light-years away, meaning that, no matter what, the trip to another star could not take any less than 4.3 years. So our spaceship has to be able to travel at a large fraction of the speed of light. It's not possible to accelerate a spacecraft to such speeds using ordinary rockets because there would be no way to carry

enough fuel, so our spaceship has to get its power from space itself. There is one ample supply of power in space, our Sun. If we could gather energy from the Sun and focus it into an incredibly powerful laser, we could use the laser to propel a solar sail to a speed of a tenth or even a third the speed of light. At one-third the speed of light, there are 17 star systems containing 25 stars and possibly hundreds of planets within a 50-year journey from Earth. Fifty years is a bit long for a human traveler to sit idle, but not too long for a robotic spacecraft. Can this actually be done?

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Have you paid a visit to the Uplift Universe, the one where promising species are taken under the wing, sometimes literally, of advanced civilizations and uplifted to intelligence, all except for humans who seem to have done it on their own? Or do you prefer to spend time on the Red planet in a sweeping chronicle of humans on Mars that is almost a blueprint for the humanizing or terraforming of a world?

The creators of these speculative realities are with us on this week's Planetary Radio. Let's start with David Brin. He has a Ph.D. in space physics, but research now apparently takes a backseat to his writing. Campbell, Hugo, Nebula, Locus award-winning stories, including his six Uplift novels, two trilogies, and the third in the set of Foundation novels, sequels to the great Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, the other writers being Greg Baer and Gregory Benford, a past guest on this program. David, welcome to Planetary Radio.

Thanks a lot. It's great to be here. And the killer bees now include Stephen Baxter and Werner Wenge. We can mispronounce his V name. It does not sound like a B. Unfortunately, Stan Robinson has to add something a little to the bottom of his R, and then we'll induct him. Okay. David, did you think, what, 25 years ago maybe, that one day science fiction would not quite supplant,

but at least take a bigger role in your life than research, or does it? Well, I always knew that I'd be a writer. I was a little bit of an arrogant hubris. I came be a writer. So a little bit of arrogant hubris. I came from a writing family, but I tried to escape into science because science is honest. All cultures have arts. All cultures have storytellers.

It fizzes out of humanity so naturally that ironically I felt something that was strangely special was happening in our culture, that we were the first that had millions of trained people trying to find out what's true, whether they liked it or not. But I'm just much better at spinning stories. I mean, civilization pays me much better to tell lies about people who never existed than it ever did to seek the truth.

Well, there's a comment about civilization, I think, which is a topic we'll come back to. Let me go to our other guest, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson's epic tale of humans on the red planet. He has won a range of Hugos and other awards very similar to David Brin's shelf full of awards. They were for these novels and other work. Stan Robinson, welcome to Planetary Radio. Thanks, Matt. Good to be here. Let me tell you about one of the highest compliments I've ever heard for your Mars books,

which have gotten no shortage of compliments. I was at Caltech a while back with a bunch of young, very smart students, and when I mentioned the trilogy to one of them, one guy in this group this guy in the group felt compelled to spend the next half hour critiquing minor details of uh the mars uh series and the terraforming uh process that you described which he was sure you had gotten wrong but what was obvious was that he had devoured the books and probably filled the margins with notes the books were published in their original editions with a lot of errors, and Donna Shirley

of Jet Propulsion Laboratory helped me to fix one of the most prominent of them. And I wonder which editions this young man read, because I've tried to actually correct them in subsequent printings of the book. In different editions of Red, Green, and Blue Mars, I've gotten it as close to correct as possible. The details of terraforming are open to debate since it's a highly speculative enterprise. Well, that's what struck me. I mean, really, I thought he was paying you the highest possible compliment because he had such incredible respect that he was picking out what I thought were pretty minor details.

But it was obvious that they had sort of become this guy's Bible. So once again, here's a guy who's headed into a life of science, unless he follows in David Brin's footsteps, but his life has been forever affected by your fiction. I imagine you hear that from a lot of people who are interested in planetary science or science in general. Yes, I do. It was a move that I was worried about making, but in the end made in the Mars trilogy just to put all the cards on the table, actual figures, amounts, recipes, restuffing science fiction with the actual scientific matter

because Mars had been so intensively studied in the years since Viking, but science fiction hadn't yet made use of it. So I think it was the right move, judging by the results. Let's talk about your new books, gentlemen. They are both about Earths that are very different from the one that we live on, and they could hardly be more different from each other in a hundred ways. I will tell you that I love both of them. David, let's start with you.

Can you give us a thumbnail description of kiln people? Well, first off, a kiln is spelled K-I-L-N, and it's about an ability a hundred years from now or less that I posit that people could have one of life's great dreams come true. Often science fiction is either dire warnings that help us notice potential mistakes, like Orwell's wonderful 1984 helping to gird us against that kind of failure mode, or they hold out the glimmer of a hope. And the hope that I hold out in killing people is that we might someday be able to wake up every morning and get everything done that we want done.

So in this future, you can put your head down on your home copier in the morning, and instead of a little piece of paper coming out, out comes a clay copy of you, full size, with your memories and your desire to get stuff done. with your memories and your desire to get stuff done. But isn't Kiln, K-I-L-N, isn't that also one of, oh, what, two or three thousand outrageous puns in the book as well, because it could also be interpreted as killing people? People like to talk about how they would murder every punster and mime that they could get their hands on. And then they watch a mime with fascination,

and with this self-loathing, they come back to the puns again and again and again. But it's a funny book, but it's also a book that ruminates about theology, about human nature, because different people's personalities use this power to make copies of themselves in different ways. You'd be at a huge economic advantage in such a culture if you can cooperate with yourself.

But if your copies get out of the kiln every morning and they say, oh man, I'm a duplicate, I ain't your slave, I'm going off to the beach, then you're going to be in trouble in this society. And so we have a lot of fun exploring possibility of one more wish fulfillment a science fiction often deals with what would happen if we could add more life to human beings by tacking more years onto the end and wonderful wonderful stories i'm just trying to give human beings more life in parallel instead of in series we should also say that it's a detective story your central character at least one of them is a is a gumshoe except that it's a detective story. Your central character, at least one of them,

is a gumshoe, except that he's a gumshoe who is able to copy himself and send these copies off to do some of his hard work. And to be killed by the bad guys repeatedly. Right.

Yeah, it's important to remember that in science fiction that it has a lot of the professional, craftsmanly pride of murder mysteries. These are the two most American fiction forms, and I always tell my fiction students to do a murder mystery first, because it's very, very honest.

When the whodunit finally comes out, you have to both please and surprise the reader, while at the same time having the reader concede that it was all there all the time. His new book is Kiln People. Stan Robinson's is The Years of Rice and Salt. But Stan, if we can, we need to take just a 60-second break, and then we'll come back and learn a little bit about this incredible novel that starts something almost 700 years ago in the history of Earth with a little twist of fate. Planetary Radio will continue with this discussion with David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson

right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds,

and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments

at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Planetary Radio continues with our special guests this week, science fiction authors Kim Stanley Robinson and David Brin. We've heard a little bit about David Brin's new book, Kiln People. Stan Robinson, let's turn to the years of rice and salt, stories that start even farther into the past than your Mars stories were set into the future.

One of the standard science fiction subgenres is the alternative history. It has a long and distinguished tradition in the form, and I've always been interested in it. About 25 years ago, I had an idea for an alternative history which postulated that all of the Europeans died in the Black Death and what would happen to the world subsequent to that in the centuries that followed. A difficult idea, and so it took me a long time

to gather the materials and my thoughts, and that's the novel that describes world history from about 1420 when the plague is finished off Europe, to about 60 or 70 years past what would be this year. A long time span for a novel, but that's another thing that science fiction does occasionally. And we should say that it's a world where, because Christianity has just about been wiped out, the world is pretty much left to the followers of Buddhism and Islam.

Yes. It seemed to me that the Chinese and Islamic civilizations and India would be the three powers that might contest the world, that it wouldn't be, at least it was possible to conceive, that it wouldn't be one power like Europe conquering the rest of the world that it wouldn't be, at least it was possible to conceive, that it wouldn't be one power like Europe conquering the rest of the world. So it's a bit more divided up in my novel. I see similarities, I should say, to the Mars novels in this sort of sweeping development of a world, very much tied to the environment, but not just the biological environment,

the political and the social environments as well. Yes, it was writing the Mars books that I thought that prepared me in terms of methods, techniques to take on such large blocks of time. And so when I finished the Mars novels, I thought, well, if I can pull it together, I can do the alternative history. Gentlemen, one thing that these books do have in common is that they're both nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel Published in Britain during 2002. So congratulations to both of you, first of all. Four other authors are also nominated.

You've got some pretty stiff competition, including with each other. What do you think of what you're up against? Oh, I think in this particular case, it really is just an honor to be nominated. I don't think sci-fi murder mystery filled with puns is going to stand a chance against the likes of the very serious, wonderful novels by Stan, which I'm handicapping as being the probable winner,

or China Mayville or Christopher Priest. I'm John Harrison. These are wonderful authors who've done very, very interesting works. I'm honored to be in their company. Stan Robinson, what do you think? Well, it's a prestigious award in England. It's a juried award, so there are six or seven people who are reading as much as they can, and they will meet and hash out who actually gets the award.

I think the list itself is a wonderful list, and as David says, it is an honor to be nominated in a crowd like that. And all you can do is kind of thank the jury members. I don't know who they are, but it's a nice... All these little markers are nice in the fundamental aspect that they possibly will get you more readers. Really, every reader is an award, so it's good in that regard. This is the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Of course, Arthur was our guest last week on this program. That made me wonder, talking to a couple of guys who are still very, very much contemporary science fiction writers, both of whom grew up heavily influenced by science fiction. What do you think about these guys from the Golden Age, the greats? David Brin, you certainly have thought about it. I mean, you took on, as we said, continuing the Foundation saga by Isaac Asimov. We completed this Isaac's universe at the request of his wife and daughter. It was a bit time out from my own work and I guess I wouldn't

have done it if I hadn't felt that the topics that Isaac had raised in his succession of novels were fascinating. It was part of the dinner table conversation about human destiny that we've been having. As soon as we liberated free minds to join the conversation with elites, starting a couple of hundred years ago, we've been talking about where are we heading? Is it possible that the future will be different? Is it possible that human beings might control their own destiny, or are they controlled from something from without or within?

What's very interesting about some of the greats, like Clark and Asimov, is that in public, and in their nonfiction, they would sound very, very optimistic. But in their science fiction, if you look inside, both Clark and Asimov, there's certain dour pessimism about whether the common man or woman is going to be able to control their lives and rise up high enough, fast enough, to save themselves from the consequences of human stupidity. And in many of their books, they are saved from the outside, such as Clark's Childhood's End, the Asimov Robot books, things like that. I think that Stan and I, while standing on their shoulders of greats like them

and Philip K. Dick and Orwell, we have a slight tendency to be among the most optimistic of the science fiction authors who are out there these days. Both Stan and I, on occasion, amid our dire warnings, sometimes say the common man and woman that we're giving birth to are grandchildren. These people might actually be better than us. Stan Robinson, what do you think? And I want to mention that your Ph.D. thesis a long time back was published as the novels of Philip K. Dick.

Obviously, you've given some thought to this era. Yeah, so I love these guys, and would agree with david about our our attitude towards the future and uh... one of the things that i love about as a modern clarker is exactly the the progressive liberal and positive public stance that they've taken uh... i think it's important to have people writing about the future have that attitude and take that public stance and they also were always defenders of science fiction as a form and a method of human thought.

And back in the decades when it was looked down upon, it was hard to make a living at, and these guys did the struggle, broke down that kind of ghetto wall, and so David and I and our whole generation are the beneficiaries of an enormous amount of hard work and work against resistance to break down prejudices and barriers. And it had a very damaging effect on Philip K. Dick, and Clark and Asimov were able to kind of overpower it by the force of their characters. And so I love those guys. Gentlemen, something else you have in common,

and you share this in common with Arthur C. Clarke. You're all members of the Advisory Council for the Planetary Society. We only have a couple of minutes left. I wonder if you could put that hat on for a moment. Talk about the role of the society and whether that role changes in times that are perhaps less than optimistic, bad economic times, a time of war, in fact. Do you see the role of the society perhaps needing to change because of that, or should it be sort of a stalwart, never-changing

bastion of something? Well, a bastion may be a proper metaphor at this point. It's in rough times. It's when people turn inward that societies like planetary society are necessary to keep a flame alight. Lately I've been wondering, I've been thinking about the Apollo program, and I've been realizing that we've been looking at it the wrong way. We've been saying, oh, we reached for the stars, and we were bold then, and now we've shrunk back. Jerry Cornell said that he always knew he would live to

see the first man land on the moon, but he never imagined that he'd see the last. Suddenly, I've decided that the Apollo landings were something completely different. They were a furious effort to send a dugout canoe to do 50 years early what we're starting to get ready to be able to do competently and well. It's like the VCR gave us the ability to record things with this incredibly kludged electromechanical device, what we're now able to do properly and digitally. I think that people have much too gloomy a mood about space. I think we're getting ready now to be able to do it in a natural and with normal ambition.

The Apollo landings were a momentary miracle of just total, total arrogant, foolish wonder that we stabbed out and we touched the sky. In any event, whether I'm right or I'm wrong, the planetary society is absolutely essential for people to keep this flame alive. As they said recently, the long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over at last. As they said recently, the long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over at last. Stan Robinson, with just a few moments left. Well, in times of war, the Planetary Society can just remind us that we're on a planet,

that it's one planet. You can look around at the other planets in the solar system, and they're all beautiful, but this one's the most beautiful and need to be reminded of that. You know, this war is a triumph for people who think that military solutions will work, and they don't, and they won't. And they will militarize space as quickly as they possibly can so that the planetary society has to stand for the peaceful use of space, the demilitarization of it, and keep it that way like it has been since the start of the space age and do their best to remind people of planetary consciousness because I think that is always a force for

peace. Gentlemen, much as I would like to continue for another couple of hours, we are out of time. David Brin's new novel is called Kiln People. Kim Stanley Robinson's is The Years of Rice and Salt. Both are available from Amazon and just about everywhere else you can find great books, including the Planetary Society's website, which has a link to Amazon.

I hope that you can join us again sometime, guys, and please, please keep up the great work. Thanks a lot, Matt. Thank you. Our pleasure. Planetary Radio will continue in just a moment. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. How soon could we use a laser sail to travel to another star? There are only a few technological hurdles to laser propulsion, but they are, admittedly, big ones.

For one thing, the laser sail material has to be incredibly lightweight so that a sail hundreds of kilometers in diameter wouldn't be prohibitively heavy. The sail must also be incredibly reflective so that the powerful laser can't heat it up to melting temperature. Most troublesome, the propelling laser has to be huge, producing hundreds or even thousands of times the total power output of all of Earth. The only way to produce this kind of power would be to put a huge station in orbit close to the sun, where it would gather sunlight and focus it into a powerful beam. Can we overcome these obstacles?

In the words of the late Robert Forward, physicist and science fiction author, it is difficult to go to the stars, but it is not impossible. All it really takes is the desire and the commitment to a few decades of hard space engineering work. Our first interstellar probe could be heading to the stars within our lifetimes. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Now, here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Bruce Fetz is here for What's Up? Well, actually, he's not here. He's at another remote location.

Where are you this week, Bruce? Well, Matt, I'm brimming with trepidatious excitement this week. I'm in Puerto Rico at Arecibo Radio Observatory, the largest radio observatory in the world. And we'll come back to why I'm here. We have an important announcement. Let's do what's up in the sky. Okay. Jupiter is bright overhead in the early evening, extremely bright. You can also see Saturn in the evening, but for some reason it's bluer than usual.

In the morning, you can see Venus extremely bright in the east-southeast in the morning sky, and normally you are able to see Mars to the right of it, but Mars has inexplicably vanished. Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Okay, go on. All right. This week in space history, April 1, 1961, Chimps, Charlie, and Delta had the first kiss in space. April 2, 1961, the first primate Palamoni suit was filed. On to random space facts!

Mars used to be almost twice as big as it is now, but heating from the sun caused it to shrink following the outflow of water on its surface 3.5 billion years ago. That's so sad, and they told them not to wash it in hot water. If they would have read the tag that's up by the North Pole, they would have known. Anyway, back to why I'm here in Puerto Rico. As our listeners know from your brilliant interviews, the Planetary Society SETI at home has been re-observing promising targets recently. They've just announced decoding the first seemingly extraterrestrial signal observed here using the Arecibo radio dish. Oh, this is incredible.

Someone call CNN. This is amazing. Okay, it's already been, you say, decrypted or translated? It has. It's been translated. Now, there is some bad news in the translation. The signal seems to say, please deposit another 75 cents to continue this conversation. Oh, damn.

I know. I hate it when that happens. Yeah, because, like, there's no slot to put it in. The scientists are currently working on how one would transmit 75 cents across several light years. I wonder if they take American Express. Well, anyway, you better go on. Okay. Let's move on to the trivia contest, and maybe we can discuss last week's trivia question, which is a bit of a break from the rest of the show.

Who discovered Saturn's moon, Titan? And do you have an answer for us, as well as a current winner, Matt? I do have an answer, and I should have thought of this last week. It was, of course, the great Dutch astronomer, Christian He, he, he,

he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, Are you okay? Why don't you say it? Okay. Wait, was this Carol Burnett's character with the secretary, Mrs. Huygens? You are our winner this week. Well, no, actually, you're not. Christian Huygens, that's right.

And our winner this week is Leon Kammer, whose name is much easier to say. Leon listens to us in Aberdeen, Scotland. That'll be great. Leon, congratulations. You are this week's winner. You'll be getting that Carl Sagan Memorial Station t-shirt. We had a lot. We had about 40 correct answers this week. And here is the person I'd have picked if we could have picked someone instead of doing it at random. Roger Gilbertson, whose subject line for his message was simple and to the point. Pick me.

And here's the pronunciation of his name. Now, the name is right above. Roger G. Gilbertson. Of course, we ask for the pronunciation of people's names. He put Rutabaga Hornswaggler. That is just not keeping with the serious nature of our show. No, really, really. I'm quite shocked, Roger, and I think you're going to have to stand in the corner for two weeks of trivia contests.

By the way, Roger, you didn't tell us where you live, at least not your city or your state or whatever. Apparently in a garden patch. Yeah, so you wouldn't have won even if you had been the random winner. But listen, entertain us again, and who knows, maybe you'll win. Speaking of entertaining us, how about next week's contest? Well, following along this week's somewhat irreverent, all right, let's just say it, April Fool's show.

We're changing the mode a little bit. We've asked you for genuine, serious, factual answers. Right now we're asking for an opinion, and it will be judged on humor value. What will the first message from an extraterrestrial say? We will read through those, and based upon our own extensive knowledge of humor, we will judge a winner. What will the first message from extraterrestrials say? Please submit it to Planetary.org. Go to Planetary.org.

Follow the links to Planetary Radio. It will tell you how to submit your entry. And is there something they should remember, Matt? There sure is, Bruce. Remember, folks, the deadline is Thursday at noon. Thursday at noon. If you submit after that, you're out of luck. We don't care. We might read it on the air if it's really funny, but you're not going to get a T-shirt. Exactly. Well, thank you all, and have a happy April Fool's. And when you look up in the sky, think of something to make your friend laugh. Bruce, happy April Fool's Day.

Happy April Fool's to you as well. Thank you, and good night. Bruce Betts is the rather humorous Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us each week on this segment, What's Up? We're running a little late, so I'll just wish you a great week. And be sure to join us again next week here on KUCI or planetary.org.