Interviews & Essays
Hmm. Bantam has asked me to spice up this newsletter with something fun, interesting and unique, about my two Bantam Spectra novels, THE COLLAPSIUM and THE WELLSTONE. Or about science and technology and their impact on human affairs ("like the stuff you do for WIRED and the SciFi channel, Wil."). But you know, that's the sort of writing I do every day. That's my job. Well, that and engineering; over the years I've worked on robots and rockets, lasers and satellites, quantum dots and programmable matter, and even some secret stuff I can't tell you about. People do seem to find these subjects interesting, but I've written all about them for years and years. Read my novels if you want that stuff. That's what hard science fiction is for.
But what's really on my mind right now -- and on a lot of other minds out there, I'm sure -- are the basics of daily life: love, sex, food, death, home improvement, and the raising of children. I have two kids of my own, and yeah, they're a handful. And no, I can't think of anything I'd rather be than their daddy. It's a title I'll hold until the day I die, and indeed, there's nothing like a birth or two to remind you -- albeit pleasantly -- of your own mortality.
Like most people, I feel my life could be better in a number of particulars. But one thing about real life is that "better" usually gets steamrollered by "good enough." I've lived in the same house for 13 years now, not because it's my dream house but because it was the finest I could afford at age 23, and since then I've had no compelling reason to move. But now the kids are getting bigger, my wife and I are feeling restless and cramped, and theHouse on the Hill we've been staring up at for years just went on the market. And we're buying it, though the cost is dear. Like anything worth having, houses are always too expensive.
Is there anything more romantic and terrifying than purchasing a piece of the Earth? Is there anything quite as cleansing as a move? You pack up all the things you love, throw away all the things you don't, and when you're done the view outside the window is different. Hopefully better, but definitely different.
When there are children involved, you can't help wondering if you're doing the right thing. Is this better for them? Is it worse? Is it good enough? Kids are adaptable -- they'll slot right into any environment and call it normal -- but we all remember the way we ourselves grew up. We're anxious to give our children the same opportunities we had, and to shelter them from the problems we suffered through. Each generation finds its own answers, and each one gets it wrong in various ways which then crystallize the resentments of the next generation. And so it goes -- one way or another, we're definitely screwing our kids. But we mean well, and in the end that's all the little bastards can ask for.
This, by the way, is what my books are about: Life. People. Moving on. Solutions which bring fresh problems. Oh, sure, I love the eye candy, the brain candy. I throw in some quantum gravity, a space battle or two, and a bit of "wellstone" programmable matter (which really is cool stuff -- look it up if you're interested). These keep the story hopping, which is good because a brisk plot is important to me. They also give readers a bit more to think about than a mainstream novel really allows. But "hard science fiction" can be an intimidating label, because in addition to providing outlandish stories which could maybe actually happen, it can sometimes obscure the things that matter even more. If you ask me, any honest story is, at heart, a reexamination of our own humanity -- our love, sex, food, death, homes and families -- in a fun, fresh context. Or why bother telling it at all? Laser beams are cool, but what we really care about are the people who use them, or get shot by them, or whatever. Why do they need a laser? How are they going to get power for it, and are they going to die or maybe have sex? That's drama. That's what great fiction is all about. And mine, too! <wink>
-- Wil McCarthy, November 2002
Read an Excerpt
in which an
important experiment
is disrupted
In the eighth decade of the queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet in the
middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji
who, at the time of our earliest attention, was beginning his 3088th
morning walk around the world.
The word "morning" is used advisedly here, since along the way he walked
through the day and night and back again without pausing to rest. It was a
very small planet, barely six hundred meters across, circled by an even
tinier "sun" and "moon" of Bruno's own design.
Walk with him: see his footpath cutting through the blossomy mea-
dow, feel the itch of pollens in your eyes and nose. Now pass through into
the midday forest, with its shafts of sunlight filtering warmly through
the canopy. The trees are low and wide, citrus and honeysuckle and
dogwood, not so much a shady, mushroom-haunted wilderness as a compromise
with physical law--taller trees would reach right out of the troposphere.
As it is, the highest limbs brush and break apart the puffy summer clouds
that happen by.
Pass the Northern Hills; watch the stream trickle out between them; see
the forest give way to willows at its bank. The bridge is a quaint little
arch of native wood; on the far side lie the grasslands of afternoon, the
vegetable gardens tended by stoop-backed robots, the fields of wild barley
and maize tended by no one, lit by slantwise rays. Behind you, the sun
dips low, then slips behind the planet's sharply curved horizon. Despite
the refraction of atmospheric hazes, darkness is sudden, andwith it the
terrain grows rocky--not jagged but hard and flat and boulder-strewn,
dotted with hardy Mediterranean weeds. But here the stream winds back
again, and as evening fades to night the channel of it widens out into
cattail marshland and feeds, and finally, into a little freshwater sea.
Sometimes the moon is out, drawing long white reflections across the
silent water, but tonight it's only the stars and the Milky Way haze and
the distant, pinpoint gleam of Sol. All of history's down there; if you like,
you can cover the human race with your hand.
It grows colder; realize the planet shields you from the little sun--
the only local heat source--with the deadly chill of outer space so close
you could literally throw a rock into it. But the beach leads around to
twilight meadows, and the horizon ruddies up with scattered light,
and then suddenly it's morning again, the sun breaking warmly above
the planet's round edge. And there is Bruno's house: low, flat, gleam-
ing marble-white and morning-yellow. You've walked a little over two
kilometers.
Such was Bruno's morning constitutional, very much like all his others.
Sometimes he'd fetch a coat and take the other route, over the hills, over
the poles, through cold and dark and cold and hot, but that was mainly a
masochism thing; the polar route was actually shorter, and a good deal
less scenic.
He'd already eaten breakfast; the walk was to aid his digestion, to
invigorate his mind for the needs of the day: his experiments. The front
door opened for him. Inside, robot servants stepped gracefully out of his
way, providing a clear path to the study, bowing as he passed, though he'd
told them a thousand times not to. He grumbled at them wordlessly as he
passed. They didn't reply, of course, though their bronze and tin-gray
manikin bodies hummed and clicked with faint life. Mechanical, unburdened
by imagination or want, they were utterly dedicated to his comfort, his
satisfaction.
Another door opened for him, closed behind him, vanished. He waved a hand,
and the windows became walls. Waved another, and the ceiling lights
vanished, the floor lights vanished, the desk and chairs and other
furnishings became optical superconductors: invisible. Projective
holography created the illusion of his day's apparatus: fifty collapsons,
tiny perfect cubes visible as pinpoints of Cerenkov light, powder-blue and
pulsing faintly, circling the holographic planet in a complex dance of
swapping orbits.
He'd spent the past week assembling these, after his last batch had gone
sour.
Assembling them? Certainly.
Imagine a sphere of di-clad neutronium, shiny with Compton-scattered
light. It's a sort of very large atomic nucleus; a billion tons of normal
matter crushed down to a diameter of three centimeters so that the protons
and electrons that comprise it are bonded together into a thick
neutron paste. Left to itself it would, within nanoseconds, explode back
into a billion tons of protons and electrons, this time with considerable outward momentum. Hence the cladding: crystalline diamond and fibrediamond and then crystalline again, with a bound layer of well-stone on top. Tough stuff indeed; breaking the neutrons free of their little jail was difficult enough that Bruno had never heard of its
happening by accident.
These "neubles" were the seeds of seeds--it took eight of them, crushed
unimaginably farther, to build a collapson--and the little "moon" was
actually just Bruno's storage bin: ten thousand neubles held together
by their own considerable gravity. Another fifteen hundred formed
the core of the tiny planet, a sphere about half a meter across, with a
skeleton of wellstone built on top of it, fleshed out with a few hundred
meters of dirt and rock and an upper layer neatly sculpted by robots and
artisans.
From the Hardcover edition.
loading...