Are there other things that interest you in your work? Other types of
issues that you like to address?
I'll give you two. The two that I delve in are gender relations and what I tend to think of is the management of violence. How do you control violence? Sometimes meaning you must decry violence to maintain the peace. And you have a violent person in your group, then they have to be willing to control them. That means they must apply violence. But the issue is to keep violence under control in society.
I keep telling people I write about sex and violence. And it's kind of true, but I think mainly if you look at the stories, ultimately, the hero, even though he may be engaging in really violent actions, he's generally trying to restore the peace.
The other thing is macroeconomics. Basically, the standard of living, when you measure it by per capita GDP, has been doubling in America every 30 years, about three times a century. And when you get to Korea and other places that had rapid growth, in Korea they did the three times in 30 years. But if you project this into the future, of course, you get very wealthy societies. And in fact, in the "Bank Run" story, that's in there. And of course, you get questions about what the standard of living will be, will people actually have to work, what will they do if they work, and all those questions. And what I find is this is a hard thing to deal with in science fiction, because most people don't believe it.
One advantage of having lived longer is that I know that the standard of living has changed. I know it. I've seen it.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Of course, "Bank Run" came from reading. The story "Sheltering", the war games story, that just came from my own experience. And also, I had a conversation with Gregory Frost, and I was thinking about how during World War II when I was a kid that it actually was good for me that I didn't experience the war as a child, realistically. You know, you're a kid, right? So your experience is through comic books, John Wayne movies and, you know? I think that's the way it should be. It may be false, but you can learn the truth later. On the other hand, you can't avoid it either, thinking about it. So Greg said to me that would make a powerful science fiction story. It came from that.
Most I guess do come from reading. I'm now reading a history of the royal navy. It's a subject I'm interested in. One volume is a history of the British Royal Navy in the modern world. It's a very interesting book. It's a general interest in military history that I have, and history.
I don't think I asked you who your main influences have been in writing.
Certainly, Heinlein. Everybody my age who read science fiction, Heinlein really gave the feel for what you could do. And in general fiction, Hemingway, of course. Though I think he can be a bad influence, too, because you start trying to write little short sentences and write like him. He himself said that he shouldn't try to actually write like him.
I think what he did the best, though, was that he had this real sense for only writing what was needed. I like to think of it as he distrusted the adjective. If there was an adjective in there, it needed it.
That's right. The integrity, the economy and the integrity. And the basic, I think, drive to have that impact, understatement.
And you know, James Thurgood divided writers into "taker outers" and "putter inners." And I think I'm probably more in the middle, but I veer more toward the "taker outers" than the "putter inners."
You write a draft and then you cut stuff out of it?
Yes, I find that's a good way to do it. Because your brain's flowing. You know, especially when I'm writing my music column, 750 words. I'd write maybe 1,000. Don't worry too much about being tight. Do it and then go back and cut and cut. And that's beautiful with a computer, because you can cut from the middle. And then every now and then you check the word count. But it's really nice to be able to move around in the manuscript and cut wherever you want.
So Hemingway in economy and I love Tolstoy for War and Peace. And there are all kinds of science fiction writers. I think science fiction has a collective impact on you. Often you can't pick any particular story you'd say was a great science fiction story, but the whole field affects the way you think and the way you look at things.
Where do you think science fiction is headed today?
I will say this. There's all these people, like, slipstream is the thing and combining the genres is the thing. I think that science fiction in the classic sense I was talking about is still being written. It still has an audience, and it still has a future, because the one thing is you are constantly being provided with new subjects to write about. The scientists and the engineers are out there. They're constantly giving you new things to think about, new variations on old things. So I don't think that they're going to run out of material. And of course, it is somewhat better written, certainly, than it was in the past.
The real question is whether the field can hold an audience. I sometimes
feel science fiction is something that appeals to a minority. And some
of that potential audience has been siphoned off to fantasy, which they
prefer. So there is a question to me. But I think it will last, and
I think there is an audience. And it may be that we'll have to adopt
new methods of reaching that audience, like electronic publishing. I
don't think we're going to run out of things to say and write about.
