Burning City
From 1992 to the beginning of 2000, I was also a columnist for Science Fiction Age Magazine. I participated in the "science forum" for the magazine, initially as a science participant, and then later running the column, selecting people to interview, and coordinating the interview process.
I interviewed Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in November 1997 as part of the science column in November, 1997. This page has the text of the interview.
In the web version, I have added links to each of the books that is mentioned by title, and jpegs of some of the bookcovers. Other than this, the interview is the same as published in Science Fiction Age. The as-published portion runs 4200 words. The actual transcript of the interview ran to 8400 words, but because of page limitations, the interview was edited down to about half for appearance in the magazine.
In the time since this interview, the books that are referred to as "being written" or "due to be published" have, in fact, been published. The work that Larry Niven refers to as Svetz and the Beanstalk has been published under the title Rainbow Mars; and the collaboration that they say that they are working on, The Burning City, has also appeared.
--Geoff
Science fiction is "about" science-- but is it really? How much influence has real science had on science fiction-- and how much has science fiction had on science? When Science Fiction Age wants to know about science and science fiction, who else to ask but the most famous hard-science SF writers of our time, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle?
Niven and Pournelle need no introduction. Together or separately, they produce some of the best hard science literature in our field. In addition to writing science fiction, Dr. Pournelle is a science writer, computer pundit, and a columnist for Byte magazine. He worked on human factors for the early space program. Niven has a degree in mathematics, and is a full-time SF writer. Their bestselling collaboration Lucifer's Hammer (to be re-issued this year) set a new standard for science fiction thrillers. Together, they are hard at work on their next collaborative novel The Burning City. Working separately, Pournelle's newest novel Starswarm is due to be released from Tor this year, and Niven's recent book Destiny's Road came out in 1997 to great critical acclaim.
Our overworked scientist/writer Geoffrey A. Landis was in Pasadena for a Pathfinder Project Science Group meeting, so we sent him off to interview Niven and Pournelle in their California habitat. He caught up with them at a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, and from there they returned to Pournelle's house, the infamous "Chaos Manor," where Dr. Landis turned on his tape recorder and let them speak.
Landis: Is real science eclipsing science fiction, or does science fiction evolve right along with science?
Niven: Real science opens windows for us to look through. We don't run ahead of the scientists, and, no, they're not always catching up to us, because what we do is follow along behind them just as fast as possible. We're right at the footsteps of the most interesting scientists around. And because they're scientists, they have to watch their feet very carefully-- two big mistakes, and their reputations are ruined. We can make mistakes-- we got no problem there.
They're watching their feet, and seeing what's just ahead of them, and we're looking over their shoulders at the mountains, seeing just as far as we can. That's the way it is with us and scientists, and there's no way they can ever catch up to us, because we're dogging their footsteps.
Landis: What do you have your eyes on right at the moment?
Niven: I've been following astrophysics. The discoveries are coming thick and fast, but they all seem to deal with realms that most of my characters can't get to. By the time I can take people out to where Hubble is looking, they won't be human anymore, by a long way.
Pournelle: I tend to try to stay fairly near term. The big stuff right now is in computers. Let me give you an example. That machine that you're looking at right there, that is a dual-Pentium Compaq machine. Given the graphics board built into it, that machine is more powerful than the Cray XMP with which they set up the National Supercomputer Center in Champaign-Urbana. We have supercomputers to play with. Nobody predicted that was going to happen, even in 84, except maybe me.
I said in 1979 that by the year 2000 anybody in western civilization who seriously wants to, will be able to get the answer to any question that has an answer. I really see no reason to revise that statement. That's pretty serious. I mean, the answer to any question, like, how do I make sarin, and other war gasses? How do I make nitroglycerine?
Niven: It is no longer possible to keep an interesting secret. The only real way to maintain privacy is to be uninteresting. It may be that privacy is a passing fad.
Pournelle: Right now the bandwidth problem stops about a hundred feet from me. Other than that last hundred feet, I could be connected to the thousand channels of television with no trouble at all, right to the desktop. Well, it's not going to be long before we get that last hundred feet. Fiber is cheap. In the next few years offices all over the world are going to be connected up at enormous bandwidth. Communications are just not going to be a problem, except places where governments interfere with it. And governments won't be able to do that for very long.
I said some time ago that the Soviet Union was doomed the instant that they introduced small computers, even though they had no choice, because they were also doomed if they didn't. And, you know, it happened.
It's almost impossible to keep track of what's going on, because nobody can. I'm closer than anybody else in some respects in trying to keep track of the broad things going on in the computer world, and I can't keep up with it. It's sort of incredible.
Landis: Is there any place in science fiction for the old classic space travel stories?
Pournelle: I think I'm making a pretty good living at that old-fashioned space-travel story. Technically, these stories are fantasy, because I have faster-than-light drives.
Niven: I can do a good slower- than-light story. It's just that the details pile up, and so the nature of the story changes. Clarke made an insight, thirty-odd years ago, in a short story. He said, starships won't be like the old sailing ships, because men are too expensive to launch. They won't launch any dummies. We're all going to be geniuses aboard those ships. It changes the nature of the conversation, the nature of the insights, the behavior, the recreation, the way they work.
Pournelle: In Legacy of Heorot and its sequel we used slower than light travel. The communications are what we can project we'd have a hundred and some years from now, the computer technology is about what you would expect, and so on. There certainly is a place for the space travel novel; you just have to be more careful about it.
Landis: What else is different now, because of what we've learned?
Niven: We've learned how expensive it's going to be. We've learned how important every step is. You have the impulse, as a writer, to race toward the ending, to race toward getting your characters where you want them to be for the story to take place. We have become aware of just how difficult that is.
Pournelle: Science and science fiction, how do you even distinguish the two? We've put our other hats on, and we've had some fair amount of influence over space policy and the space program. In August, up at Larry Niven's house, some fifty rocket scientists and the administrator of NASA met for a weekend. I was the chairman of the meeting and we basically worked on space flight. SDI [the Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense program] happened because of meetings held at Larry's house. Those meetings had Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Dean Ing, Steve Barnes, Gregory Benford-- all science fiction writers. Heinlein was at these meetings, while he was alive.
Niven: Arthur Clarke popped in for several hours.
Pournelle: He did not agree with what we were doing. Still, Arthur Clarke may be the nicest guy in the world.
So in some respects it's hard to distinguish between science and science fiction.
Niven: Everything starts as somebody's daydream. And, when you're daydreaming, it is science fiction. It's when you start work out how you put it together, true science fiction becomes real science.
I listened to Robert Forward. He was hiking, and he looks at a big boulder, and he thinks, if that rock could wiggle, I could build a detector to catch the gravity waves from it. He walks a little further, and it's a big rock, and he looks back at it, and he thinks, wait a minute, what if I wiggle the detector? And he went on, and he built a gravity detector. The first time we ever met him, he was pretty proud of this thing, and it was still up for grabs. And it wound up in a short story called "The Hole Man" that I wrote.
Pournelle: I can claim to have made some contributions to space science, thirty years ago, but not recently. In those days I was running programs. In 1964, I was the general editor of a thing called Project 75, which was an attempt to predict what we would like to have for missiles in 1975. And to do what we wanted to do, you required on-board computers. You can't guide a ballistic missile from outside, because any signal you can send it is subject to security problems. All you have to do is send it one bad signal and it's way off course. So we basically came up with a requirement for an on-board computer for guidance.
Well, they went out and built it. And somebody said, gee, that thing would make a very good general purpose computer, and then somebody else said, golly, I could sell a kit, and the next thing you know, the whole blasted computer revolution came out of it. So you could make the case that my colleagues and I at The Aerospace Corporation were the unwitting inventors of the whole bloody computer revolution.
Niven: I thought I had come up with something real once upon a time. In the story "Neutron Star," I have a star going behind the neutron star. The neutron star is too small to see, but it is a gravity source. The star going behind it becomes a ring, just for a moment.
Landis: An Einstein ring.
Niven: I wanted to call it a "Niven Ring." I didn't realize Einstein had thought of it first.
Pournelle: Medical science is doing crazy things. In my stories, military hospitals have what I called regeneration stimulators. There's a piece in the current Science News about the new interest in regeneration. I mean, God knows if a salamander can grow a new leg, why can't we?
We've about done the DNA sequence on people. Now, imagine a world, not very long from now, when that machine right there on that desktop can sequence the DNA for mutated anthrax. And then I just connect it to something that makes an organic molecule. Hmmm. It's going to be interesting times. Imagine that crazy guy who was trying to blow poison gas around in the subways in Japan, if he'd had something like that?
Niven: Yeah. Another reason why privacy could be just a passing fad, terrorism is going to get too good. Privacy hasn't been around that long anyway, in the matter of keeping interesting secrets. The kings of medieval England and France didn't have privacy. They dare not. Made them too good a target.
Pournelle: No man is a hero to his valet, but everybody has a valet now. And the valet's got the internet.
Niven: The machines pass on information.
Pournelle: Don't slip up once. Get drunk and make a pass at a 14 year old girl, and you may be finished forever. How do you keep a secret?
Niven: You keep a secret by being uninteresting. Run for office, get a job as an actor, and you're doomed.
Pournelle: And don't get anybody mad at you enough to dig that deep.
Niven: The result could be, nobody's got any secrets, and nobody tries to keep them. What you are is open on the face of it.
Pournelle: At least, what you are whenever anybody can see you. They can't see through walls yet.
Niven: But they will.
Pournelle: And don't get drunk on the internet. I used to do that, used to get drunk and type messages and get in arguments with people, and I look at some of the stuff I wrote when I was doing that years ago and it's embarrassing as hell, and it's still around.
Niven: Anybody who gets into arguments with Jerry Pournelle on the internet is probably the type who'd keep the record. SF-Age: Some people, most notably Vernor Vinge, have predicted that scientific capabilities are growing so fast that within fifty years, everything will be possible.
Niven: He calls it the "singularity." Greg Bear asks audiences, "in fifty years, do you believe that people will be recognizably human?" He doesn't believe so. That fifty year thing is an outside guess. And they may be right.
I don't think things are going to happen that fast. I believe in hysteresis. Sluggishness, the mass of events. It takes a while to change the direction of anything. For the sciences, the way to change science's perception of things is to wait until all the old farts have died off. That is the way we came to accept that continents drift. It isn't because anybody convinced the old guys; they died.
Pournelle: Same with the military. Possony and I may be the most influential guys in the modern military, even though most of them never heard of us. We wrote a textbook, and it was used as a text in the war colleges for years. Nobody remembers having it as a text, but they all think like we do now. It's called The Strategy of Technology and basically, as the old farts died off, our kids got promoted, and now they're generals. The desert war came right out of that book. We never won any arguments with anybody; you can't. Especially in the military, because they confer infallibility between the second and the third star.
Niven: I do love a war in which the major casualties were pregnancies. It points up a problem. But it's still better than the previous problems, which were getting shot. Or stabbed.
Pournelle: I guess we're shying away from your question about the singularity because we bloody don't know. I don't know whether we'll be recognizably human in fifty years. I think so. My guess is yes.
Niven: I can only tell you that I stay within a thousand years. Beyond a thousand years from now humans are not quite recognizably human, and I have trouble finding characters. With "known space," the assumption was that humans had been bred for luck, and the lucky were spreading through the gene pool. But it doesn't take that. It only takes the perception that something's going to happen, that a lot of curves are going to go asymptotic. That's Vinge's claim. For a writer, it's: where do you find your characters? Mind you, we can postpone the singularity if we assume a war.
Pournelle: And we did. I mean, The Mote in God's Eye assumed several wars, which is no bad assumption. "Peace is a condition we deduce from the fact that there have been intervals between wars." You expect wars, and you expect them to get worse and worse all the time, and that's kind of what we did in Mote in God's Eye. There have been cycles in history, always have been, why not now?
Pournelle: It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice.
Niven: Sure, I like writing books that people keep re-reading. But some stories do stick in your head through having been read once. The point is made, it sticks there, it guides your life. "The Cold Equations" was one of those. The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it.
Pournelle: The lesson I got from it is, don't plan your systems to be so stupid as to leave no room for wiggles. He had to construct that very carefully to make that result come out. Fuel was enormously expensive, and we so won't put even a ten percent safety margin into the fuel for a rescue mission? Bull puckey. SF-Age: Are there any stories in particular that really did get the science right?
Pournelle: In what way? Heinlein got it right as far as he knew, for when he was writing. He was wrong in many details.
Niven: The flavor was always right.
Pournelle: They were using slide rules on spaceships in his time. Starman Jones has some of the silliest assumptions about computers, but the only computers Heinlein had anything to do with were the old analog fire-control computers for battleships.
Niven: Science fiction has gotten more accurate as we've gotten closer to the present, because science fiction stories have not only attracted, but also generated current scientists, and they got better at talking, and the writers got better at listening. The result is, the best science fiction writers around today are the equal of any one of the past. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.
Pournelle: Heinlein, in a sense, made it possible for us to be friends with Carl Sagan. In Heinlein's day, Pohl Anderson couldn't go to a famous scientist and say, I'm a science fiction writer, do you want to talk to me? The scientists wouldn't pay any attention to us. Then there came a generation of scientists who grew up reading science fiction. By the time you got the Viking Mars landing, Heinlein was out there at JPL when it happened. Now, some PR idiot had actually tried to throw him out of the press room, but that's another story.
Niven: And the press all followed him out to the cafeteria.
Pournelle: But, literally, there came a generation of scientist who paid attention to us. In the 40's, very few scientists would. Vannevar Bush, testifying to the Senate, spoke of "this fantasy about rockets into space, and intercontinental missiles, and rockets to the moon: I wish the American people would leave that out of their thinking." The man who was basically the chief scientist of the United States at the time, the most influential scientist in the country. This was after the atom bomb!
Niven: By the time I had a reputation as a science fiction writer, it was enough to get the attention of a good many of the scientists. The ones who were really at the top, too busy to tell the public what they were doing, were the ones who wanted me to talk with them.
Niven: OK, where are we? Every hard science fiction writer I know has written a Mars novel recently. So I did my take on Mars as a fantasy. You haven't seen it yet, because it's still out to auction. Svetz and the Beanstalk.
Pournelle: I did my Mars novel many years ago, and I see no reason to change it at all.
Niven: That was Birth of Fire.
Pournelle: It's Mars as we know it now. I got it right to the best I know, and just after the Mariner probe. We haven't learned that much about Mars since then. It was no longer Lowell's Mars, there's no canals, no atmosphere. On the other hand, I postulated that you might be able to terraform it, and there is more and more reason to assume that that is possible. Terraform it, it probably wouldn't last more than a million years or so, but it'll last my time.
Niven: If it didn't cost too bloody much-- and by that I mean, the world's output of wealth for about a year--
Pournelle: In Birth of Fire I made it a lot cheaper than that, by dropping nuclear weapons down Olympus Mons and waking the volcanoes.
Niven: Bombardment with comets would cost a lot more.
Pournelle: Jim Oberg did a piece about terraforming planets with a whole chapter about the methods I implied in Birth of Fire. We probably could terraform Venus, too, tailor the right kind of bacteria to change that atmosphere. No? You don't think so?
Landis: Sagan proposed that in '61, but it turns out it won't work. Too much atmosphere.
Pournelle: But that's what I mean, you eat the atmosphere.
Landis: Venus has so much atmosphere, that even if you could turn it all of the carbon dioxide into oxygen, the oxygen pressure would be so high it would be deadly at the surface.
Pournelle: If you start turning it into oxygen, it will bind with other stuff.
Landis: It turns out you would have to garden the surface to several kilometers before you've exposed enough rock surface to bind the required atmosphere. Even with asteroids, it's not practical to pulverize the crust that deep.
Pournelle: You're probably right. I haven't looked at it in a while. The models we got when we first were looking at Venus, it looked like you might could do it from the top down.
Landis: Yeah. Until they finally got there, and found what it was really like. Venus is tough.
Pournelle: All right. I haven't paid much attention to Venus in a while. Certainly a lot of energy there, so you might could do something. But Mars I looked at hard.
Niven: I'd be inclined to do something ambitious and quick. Drop a mass past Venus to accelerate it out to around Mars' orbit, so it can shed some heat, and then work on it.
Pournelle: (laughs) Well, he thinks big.
Landis: I'd hate to see the environmental impact statement for that.
Niven: Please don't make me fill out a form.
Pournelle: So what else?
Niven: I'm inclined to push the economics a bit. We need people writing economics in science fiction. We need fewer people writing politics in science fiction, because it turns fascinating for the writer, without ever turning fascinating for the reader.
Pournelle: As you get further and further out, economics becomes harder and harder to write about, because economics is basically about production and distribution in an era of scarcity. If there is enough that everybody can have everything they want, you have no economics any more. That was pretty close to what we postulated for the Earth in Legacy of Heorot. They had so much money they didn't know what to do with it, so they sent a starship with a colony off to Tau Ceti, because they could.
Niven: Even so, having done something that weird, you wind up that they did some silly things.
Pournelle: Yes. Twice. They also sent your colony, in Destiny's Road.
Niven: Right. Destiny's Road is a later expedition, done by a civilization even wealthier. The thing is, a few silly things have cropped up, and one of them is the clocks. They've got only a few nanotechnology things going out there, and one of them is terribly important, but one of them is just making clocks that keep Earth time. So any damn fool can have a clock that keeps Earth time, because somebody back in the solar system wants Destiny to be keeping Earth time for the rest of eternity. This is somewhat how we work. Jerry works out what's logical, and then I'll do the crazy stuff.
Pournelle: And if it's good enough crazy, then I'll go back and fix things so that it's possible.
Niven: I've changed you, but you still aren't crazy enough.
Pournelle: Not as crazy as you are, no, not crazy enough. But, I'm getting there.
Niven: Crazy is a vital resource in science, too.
Pournelle: Yes, science works funny nowadays. There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough. We finally decided not to build the superconducting supercollider. Science is getting tougher in that respect. But, again, computers are making it a lot easier. You don't have to do the experiments any more.
Now, that could be dangerous. We're dry-labbing a lot of stuff, and if your assumptions are right, fine, but if you got your assumptions wrong, you keep getting the same answer, and it's just... wrong. We're down to the third decimal place in rocketry now. The payload on a single-stage-to-orbit ship is often the third decimal place. And our models are just not good enough. I don't know what the payload is. People keep pounding on me, if I got a six-hundred-thousand gross lift-off weight ship, what's the payload? I don't know! Somewhere between zero and nineteen thousand pounds. It may even be less than zero. It may not make orbit. But my guess is that, you build it strong enough, and you start flying, and you start boring holes in the structure when we discover places that have been overbuilt.
You ever hear that story? When Max Hunter was running the Thor program, about number four or so launches, and it started tumbling. And it holds together. And Max is looking at the movie, and he says, damn it, I told 'em they could have gotten another five hundred pounds out of that structure, it's much too strong. Because it shouldn't hold together, when it's doing that. That's the way to design these things. Computer models are bad in that respect.
Niven: It tells you the story you set it to tell. You've got to build.
Pournelle: Fly something once in a while.
Niven: We're preaching to the converted here.
Pournelle: But you can do a hell of a lot of interesting stuff on these things. Social science experiments are easy. Ever see "Sugarscape?" Sugarscape is a model done by some guys at Brookings Institute. You take some very simple assumptions, about these actors, which are just these little round dots, about what they eat, and how they interact, and you put them on the machine,and you grow very complicated societies out of very simple rules. And you start mucking around with these simple rules, and you can see effects, and you can have hundreds of generations. It reminds me a little of Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God." Wonderful story. We're getting closer to being able to do that, only on a computer. We don't have to have generations.
Niven: Pretty soon we'll get to the point where we're not sure if they're creatures or not.
Pournelle: So far these are only little bitty bit patterns in my computer screen. But when you have a supercomputer on every bloody desk, you can start putting personality into the little dots, too. You can make much more complicated actors, to let them interact with these simple rules. I foresee a real era of experimental science almost in social science as a result of the computer revolution.
Niven: The science fiction of today has shaped the science of tomorrow, by raising interesting questions. And it's done that for several generations. This is not just a matter of us following the scientists around-- sometimes we're pushing.
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