The facts of fiction
Posted: Friday, August 18, 2006 9:20 PM by Alan Boyle
Jerry Pournelle has seen both sides of the divide between science fiction and science fact: On one side, he's a novelist who, along with his frequent collaborator Larry Niven, is getting a lifetime achievement award at tonight's Writers and Illustrators of the Future Awards ceremony. On the other side, he's been an aerospace researcher, an adviser to President Reagan's transition team on space policy and an outspoken advocate for private-sector spaceflight.
To hear Pournelle talk, the business of science fiction makes a lot more sense nowadays than the politics of science fact.
Niven and Pournelle are being honored with the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to the Arts, which is funded from the estate of the late science-fiction author (OK, he also had something to do with Scientology, but I won't get into that here). The program provides $30,000 in prizes annually for writers and illustrators on the rise. This year, there are 24 honorees. Niven and Pournelle have been judges for the writing contest since 1985.
Pournelle told me he had no idea why the organizers of the award program decided to honor him and his writing partner. "They didn't consult me," he said. But he suspects it has something to do with their role in making science fiction, well, saleable.
"'Mote in God's Eye' was a New York Times best-seller, and then we did 'Lucifer's Hammer,' which got the biggest advance that any science-fiction book ever got," he recalled. "We had some effect on changing the perception by publishers about science fiction - that it was worth real money."
Today, science fiction is a huge genre - or even a spectrum of genres, ranging from the "hard science fiction" that Niven and Pournelle generally do, to fantasy tales covered with a thin patina of science fiction and space-opera lore.
"'Star Wars' is more fantasy than science," he observed. "We don't know of any mechanism by which someone could think his way into shooting lightning bolts out of his fingers."
The kind of routine space travel that Niven and Pournelle wrote about more than 30 years ago in "The Mote in God's Eye" is looking more and more like a fantasy nowadays, when NASA is struggling with the challenges of going back to the moon and on to Mars.
I asked Pournelle why real-life space travel was so far behind the time line laid out by science-fiction authors from H.G. Wells to Arthur C. Clarke. Why wasn't 2001 more like "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Pournelle refers to it as the "where's my flying car" question.
"The money was there," he said. "We have spent enough money on the space program that we should be halfway to Alpha Centauri by now."
Pournelle blames NASA and its need to sustain a permanent "standing army" of bureaucrats. He invoked his Iron Law of Bureaucracy (as he has many times before): Every bureaucracy has two types of people - those who are dedicated to the goals of the bureaucracy, such as educating children or building rocket ships, and those who are dedicated to the preservation of the bureaucracy itself.
"The second group always gets to be in charge," he said. "NASA is certainly no exception."
The way Pournelle sees it, that mind-set has kept human spaceflight frozen in place for a quarter-century. "Your flying car basically got eaten by NASA," he said.
Of course, some NASA officials are trying to change that. On the same day that we chatted, the space agency announced that two entrepreneurial-minded companies would get a shot at developing new types of supply ships for the international space station. Pournelle applauded such efforts - but he was still worried that the standing army would eventually grind down this latest wave of reform.
He had two recommendations for real change:
- First, take a page from the X Prize playbook and offer private-sector prizes for outer-space innovation. But don't be skimpy with the purse. Recently, billionaire Robert Bigelow said that there weren't any serious contenders for his $50 million orbital space prize - and when I mentioned that to Pournelle, he said the problem was that the prize was too paltry. He recommended offering $5 billion to the first U.S. company that puts the same spaceship into orbit 24 times in the course of a year, and $10 billion tax-free to the first company that keeps a 31-person colony on the moon for three years and a day. "How long do you think it would take?" he asked rhetorically. "I'd give it five years."
- Second, take a page from the X-plane program playbook from the 1950s and 1960s - experimental craft like the X-1, the X-3 and the X-15 (but not the X-33, which Pournelle called a "boondoggle"). If they're done right, experimental spacecraft can quickly translate on-paper technologies into true space vehicles, he said. "X programs do not invent new technologies," he said. "They build the best thing you can build with the technology that you have as of Aug. 31, 2006."
Pournelle is hopeful that the federal legislation laying out the ground rules for commercial spaceflight will, in a backhanded way, use Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy for good rather than evil.
"There's now a section of the FAA which won't exist unless it has something to regulate," he said. "That's always good."
For more of Pournelle's peppery perspective, you can always check out his Chaos Manor Musings on the Web. And for an introduction to the fictional writings of Niven and Pournelle, you can check out "The Mote in God's Eye," "Lucifer's Hammer" ... or a little number that I'll list as an official selection of the Cosmic Log Used Book Club. The CLUB Club highlights books with cosmic themes that have been out long enough to show up at your local library or used-book shop.
This month's selection, "Inferno," is a modern retelling of Dante's Inferno. "We wrote 'Inferno' from the point of view that people could actually escape from hell," Pournelle said.
The book is currently out of print, but you can still find it in the usual CLUB Club haunts. Moreover, Pournelle said that Tor Books is planning a reissue to coincide with the publication of a sequel, "Escape From Hell."
The second "Inferno" from Niven and Pournelle is due to come out in 2007, so that gives you plenty of time to page through the first book. By then, we may even find out if the science fiction of private-sector spaceflight is any closer to becoming science fact.
