What got you started writing? Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?

Yes, since about 11. I said to myself, this is what I'd really like to do. And you start out admiring things. And then you move from that to imitation, and then in imitation you find your own way. First you imitate, and then you find your own way.

Were there authors that were inspirational to you?

Yes. I read Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury. And what was really wonderful was people like Asimov and Clarke, they became friends. That's one of the nice things about science fiction, is that you can actually grow up meeting your childhood gods and have them become your friends and colleagues who will then say something about your work. Clarke made a wonderful comment when Macrolife came out. I've known Clarke since '61.

My background is philosophy of science. And I always thought that philosophy, especially philosophy of science, was the perfect material for science fiction. Much of science fiction is a kind of applied philosophy. Another Star Trek characteristic is the mind-body dualism is at work.

So a certain operative philosophical concept that materialism or sociology or free will or determinism that really operate in almost all of science fiction, almost unconsciously, and they do come out of the speculative philosophy of the 19th Century. They certainly come out of Plato and Aristotle. In fact many of Plato's dialogues really are science fiction. Timaeus is science fiction of myths before anybody knew how to write science fiction, because science was not as advanced, the secular.

Would you go so far as to say that science fiction, in a sense, is the mythology of our times?

Well, it is sort of the outflow of a technological, scientific civilization. The literature and the fairy tales and the hopes and fears of a technological culture. And that has affected the culture. There was an anthology called Science Fiction Stories That Changed the World. You can show straight lines from certain science fiction stories through the actual reality.

As an example, H.G. Wells, 1914, The World Set Free, nuclear fission, atomic bombs, atomic war, and a nuclear arms race, in 1914. Remained absolute nonsense to most people, including Einstein, until 1936 when fission became practical.

And it became practical because Niels Bohr (ph) read Wells' book, The World Set Free, stood on a street corner in Germany, saw a light change from red to green, and suddenly realized how that neutron hits one atom and starts a chain reaction and said, "Oh, my God!" And he hurried out of Hitler's Europe to Princeton, first thing, and they rejected him. So contacted Einstein at Princeton, called and convinced him that fission was possible and the Germans might have it first. They wrote the letter to Roosevelt, and then they build the bomb. A clear line.

I was wondering, because you often address issues of the nature of human existence, especially as it combines with technology and medical science, what's your perspective on some real life changes in the medical field? For example, you can have a pacemaker installed now, and a doctor can check on your vitals long distance, from his office.

Well, this is an example of the Asimovian definition of science fiction, the human effect of changes in science and technology. But you can even take out the human effect of science and technology to just the human effect of possible changes. It could be anything, future political policies and sociology. If you carry through that human impact of those changes, you're writing science fiction. This is where it significantly differs from contemporary fiction, which essentially deals with life as it is, how it is being lived, or perhaps how it was lived. That, too, is very, very important. And I was talking about this on a panel. I think the most mature science fiction deals with both the constraints on human life that we find in general literature and then the new little things that throw everything into doubt and question. And it's almost impossible to be a genius at combining all skills of contemporary literature and being writerly and writing about people and characters and then also bringing in the science fiction so that the story is one that could not have happened without the major change.

And then science. You have a great knowledge of science.

I keep up with everything, but I do delve into the technical aspects of several sciences. I do try to keep a perspective as to answering the question, "What does it mean?" What is it going to mean for people? What is it going to mean for politics? What is it going to mean for society? What is it going to mean, more than anything, for our ability to have foresight?

In 1910, Wells wrote a little essay called "Study of the Future." In 1910, this was a new idea, that the future was something to be discussed. But foresight is what he then began to preach in that essay. So he not only started a lot of science fiction; he started future studies and science fiction. Those two merged together then.

So I try to keep up with all of this, and so what's most interesting to me in science fiction is that it's an inherently critical literature.

Critical of the science?

Critical of the science, of the present, of the past, always looking at ourselves from the future, from the vantage point of future possibilities. So you read The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds as period pieces, but they still make their points.