Passings: Frederik Pohl, Bruce Murray and Iain Banks

Last month, I lamented - as a science fiction writer and friend - the loss (amid his most productive and creative years) of the brilliant British author Iain Banks -- who wrote books such as Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games in his best-selling Culture Universe.

This month it is a double whammy, with the passing of my colleagues Frederik Pohl and Bruce Murray.

== Bruce Murray, Planetary scientist ==

Bruce Murray was not only a titan of planetary science and technological innovation, but also one of the most agile members of an agile generation. Under his leadership, Jet Propulsion Lab teams extended humanity's reach and vision to distant worlds. More important, he kept the lab alive and vital at a time when every political wind seemed bent on destroying the American mission of deep-space exploration.

A brilliant scientist, he also served his civilization in realms of policy, and even art. He authored 130 scientific papers, as well as books such as Journey into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration. Bruce was among the first to grasp the potential of the World Wide Web to improve human conversation and his early "hyperforum" experiments (I was a founding member) still have not been matched. Above all, his legacy is found in generations of students and others who benefited from his guidance and example. The lesson that I draw from his life is that we are capable of being "many."

Bruce Murray was the truest citizen of our renaissance.

==Frederik Pohl, Science Fiction great ==

Science Fiction Grand Master Fred Pohl passed away on September 2, at age 93.

Beyond a personal sense of loss of a friend and colleague, I must note how tremendous was Fred's influence on our field. He spent his long career both creating new worlds and helping others to do the same.  Both as a prolifically creative author and as an agent/editor who coaxed other authorial visions into life, Fred Pohl may be responsible for more new "universes" coming into being than any other mortal... a point we'll return to, later.

Sure, they were all universes of the imagination -- many of them so ephemeral that they only endured in human thought for the duration of a single monthly issue of Galaxy or If. Others, like The Space Merchants  and Jem and Man Plus may actually divert the path of human destiny, as we modify our policies and creative ambitions, diverting them a little, because of warnings and thought-experiments erected by Frederik Pohl.

I called Fred the "essential" science fiction author. In much the same way that the other "pole" of science fiction -- Poul Anderson -- was the greatest natural storyteller I ever knew, Fred Pohl was the SF writer who cared most about the gedankenexperiment or what-if thought experiment. Fred would start with a question: "what if ____?" and fill in some fascinating possibility. Only then the magic would ensue as he fleshed out a vivid world of possible consequences from that one whatif -- consequences that might be good, bad, and weird, but always strikingly plausible.

Fred won the Hugo Award six times including the 1978 Hugo for Best Novel - "Gateway" - (the first Hugo I ever voted for). He tied for 1973 Best Short Story Hugo for "The Meeting;" and the 1986 Best Short Story Hugo for "Fermi and Frost." Both can be found in his excellent anthology, Platinum Pohl.

Wolfbane was one of the earliest SF novels I read, and at the time it certainly seemed the creepiest!  In contrast, some of his other works with Cyril M. Kornbluth, such as Gladiator at Law, though fun adventures, also helped spur  my lifelong habit of doubting all ends of the silly, nonsensical, so-called "left-right political axis."  Provoking people to rethink their own assumptions -- now that's writing.

One nearly forgotten Pohl book ought to tower high on any shrine of modern techno-visionary prophecy.  The Age of the Pussyfoot was one of the only science fiction stories of the fifties through seventies that envisioned computers becoming common household tools, owned and used, avidly, by nearly everybody.  In fact, to my knowledge it is just about the only work of prophetic fiction to foresee citizens carrying about portable, computerized assistants that would fulfill all the functions we now see gathering together in our futuristic cell phones. And you can bet I salivate for the even-better versions he foresaw.  Pohl's "joymaker" device is as marvelous an on-target prediction as Jules Verne predicting submarines or trips to the Moon.

In The Cool War, Frederik Pohl showed a chillingly plausible failure mode for human civilization, one in which our nations and factions do not dare to wage open conflict, and so they settle upon tit-for-tat patterns of reciprocal sabotage, ruining each other's infrastructures and economies, propelling our shared planet on a gradual death-spiral of lowered expectations and degraded hopes.  It is a cautionary tale that I cite often, and recommended reading for those at the top of our social order.

I could go on and on, but let me just make a central point about a man who I am proud to call a colleague, in what may be the highest of all human professions....

Wait a minute. Brin said what? Oh, sure, readers of this book probably like science fiction. But isn't that taking things a bit too far, calling sci fi writing the highest profession? Well, in a profound irony that ought to amuse -- or perhaps grate -- the many atheists and agnostics who write SF, let me suggest that no other calling, not even that of monk or priest, has a greater claim to sacred status.

After all, what was purportedly God's greatest act, other than creating the universe? And what do science fiction authors do, almost every day, but erect new worlds, and characters to inhabit them?

If a Father is proud of children who precociously try to pick up the parent's tools and apprentice in His craft, then whose play is more likely to rouse a smile from the Big Creator?

Oh, sure, Fred Pohl could not parse Maxwell's Equations very well and when he said "let there be light!" the incantation only flashed briefly, inside the heads of a few hundred thousand readers -- a blaring supernova here, a slicing laser flash there, or else a brilliant insight into some small part of the human soul.  Sure, that's small potatoes, on the cosmic scale of things. On the other hand, it is a step.  And no human ever did it better.

I suppose that is why I urged the great asteroid-hunter, Dr. Eleanor Helin, to pick a couple of her discoveries and name them after two of the greatest... those two "poles" of sci fi... Frederik Pohl (12284 Pohl) and Poul Anderson (7758 PoulAnderson).  They are out there now... glittering hunks of rock and metal and precious frozen vapors.  Just waiting for our heirs to go out and - perhaps - mine those riches and turn them into wondrous things.  And when they do, I am sure they'll hold another festschrifft in honor of the dreamers who helped to make it all so. Dreamers like Fred.

Fred is survived by his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull, who is a past president of the Science Fiction Research Association and a noted scholar in the field (she recently edited a Gateways anthology to honor Fred for his 90th birthday, with stories by Bear, Brin, Benford, Bova, Haldeman, Gaiman, Niven, Vinge, Wolfe, and Doctorow). His grandchildren include Canadian writer Emily Pohl-Weary and chef Tobias Pohl-Weary.

He will long be remembered.

Concerning Robert Heinlein... socialist or libertarian?

In some other places, the topic of legendary science fiction author Robert Anson Heinlein has repeatedly come up, along with shouting matches -- "He was a libertarian!" "No, a socialist!" "No, a fascist!"  I finally had enough and weighed into one of these discussions, with a comment I'll append below... along with more snippets of science.

Robert Heinlein was hard to classify.  If one had to make a political caricature, I’d say he was a compassionate libertarian, in that he believed that humans have an obligation to be both competitively independent and generous.

Think of Ayn Rand with a soul…and with some historical perspective. (Yeah, that’s hard to picture, at a fundamental level. But Heinlein proved it needn't by an oxymoron.) Alas, while this label came close, he evades it as slippery as Schrodinger's Cat.

Heinlein was a loyal member of the American branch of the Enlightenment, a believer in democracy, markets, science, etc… but far more the rule-constrained competitive spirit of positive sum games that underlies all those arenas.

He distrusted government as a sole arbiter--but recognized the need for it.  For example, after disdaining politics in many books, he dared himself to make politicians the heroes, in DOUBLE STAR.

After disdaining socialism in many stories, he praised anarcho-socialism in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND and became a hippie icon.

See his prescriptive utopia, BEYOND THIS HORIZON.  Usually, the 1st half of a Heinlein novel is dynamite and then (alas) the 2nd half kind of devolves into turgid lectures.  But in this case the action-packed 1st half is a silly-ass homage to J. W. Campbell’s loony “armed society” cliché… but the 2nd half is what turns into one of the most brilliant musings on social and biological matters ever written. Future generations may refer to the "Heinlein Solution" for how to manage human self-improvement through genetic engineering, for example... a way to get the benefits without doing crazy things.

In this brief, future speculation, clearly his favorite prescription, we see a future wherein all things creative are flaming competitive (as they should be) but “of course, food is free!”  Does that fit into any simplistic dogma?  I think not.

No, the real misunderstanding is in trying to pigeonhole RAH at all.  Because, above all, Robert A. Heinlein was a science fiction author.

I do not mean the mere profession but the religion.  I refer to a basic personality type that was probably recurrent as a fluke in most human generations, but quickly garroted or burnt at the stake in most other cultures (e.g. Giordano Bruno). Until, at long last, a society came along that would pay us, instead of burning us, for our madness.  For our ornery, contrary, inbuilt need to say “yes... but what if...?”

To those of us born with this affliction, there is something far more important than any and all political views or polemics. That thing is summed up by Einstein's word gedankenexperiment.   The thought experiment that fully utilizes those marvelous organs -- the "lamps on our brows" -- the prefrontal lobes, the things that most make our brains unlike any others.  It is this honest eagerness for the What-if that makes Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson modern blessings and that transforms guys like Bruce Sterling and Jerry Pournelle from mere offensive blowhards into men with real and impressive value to their era. (At times, seemingly, despite themselves.)

To us, "What-if?" is like prayer. We do have doctrines, opinions, political and polemical views.  But they all take second place to the itch. A sci fi author (a true member of the breed) who is deeply conservative will be more curious than hostile to a smart Marxist, and pester her with questions while buying drinks, not heckling her with simplistic/smug insults... much to the disappointment of his allies on the right, who will (rightly) suspect that his heart is not in the take-no-prisoners version of politics. And it goes both ways, I've seen it.

I know about this.  I consider myself a feminist and GLORY SEASON had some pretty strong feminist premises... in some ways far more honest and bold than anything by Tepper or Charnas. So why do  polemical feminists hold that novel (and me) in deep suspicion? Because to me the Thought Experiment was more important than any polemical point.  And they could sense my priorities; I followed the implications, and did not force them to follow dogma.  First, above all, I am a science fiction author.

And it was the thought experiment that was most important to Robert Heinlein.  In fact, the only person I knew who was more devoted (and a far better storyteller) was Poul Anderson.  But more on that elsewhere.

People who understand Heinlein know that “fascist” and “socialist” are silly terms.  They apply to people who are so weak they must clutch onto simplistic nostrums.  The kind of oversimplifying stupidity that we see on both the left and right and that is now tearing America apart.

But not us.  Not we who love a complex and weird and wonderfully surprising world.  When the prefrontal lobes function with mutant, superhero power, that is when you get people like Robert Heinlein, who did not dwell on left or right wings, but in the future.

To support the ideals and memory of Robert Heinlein, support the Heinlein Society, an organization devoted to Paying It Forward.

For more: See Speculations on Science Fiction

= MORE SCIENCE =

Any of you who love the notion of asteroid mining, see this amateur but enthusiastic paper by Dr. Michael Montague. Frankly, I am not at all sure the world’s public would put up with anyone targting Earth for a very near miss (for aeocapture) of even a small asteroid.  Alas, this is not an era of can-do daring and ambitious guts.

The Biracy Project seeks to use fan-generated crowd-sourcing to make and distribute a new science fiction film.  Sounds daring and fun.  

See the latest cool gedanken-fiction from Eliezar Yudkowsky... a cute riff on Harry Potter.

This fascinating paper argues that neo-classical economics is clueless about fraud, and gives several real-world examples of global-scale harm. The examples reinforce one (of many) interesting points in the paper: that in the early stages of fraud, the faked results appear to support the neo-classical economic policies. Alas, what had been an interesting theoretical set of economic conjectures has mutated into something deeply delusional, threatening the health of the republic and the world.

Julie Korenberg has identified a gene, STX1A (which helps control electrochemical processes at synapses), whose expression can be linked to intelligence.

Fascinating article about human endurance and people who go beyond.

A TRIBUTE TO ARTHUR CLARKE

Arthur C. Clarke (who called me a colleague and friend, despite our only having met by mail) passed on today, after ninety years of a life that only could have happened in the century and civilization that he helped to shape.

Arthur has long and deservedly been called one of the finest “hard” science fiction authors, for good reason. From the beginning of his career as a writer, he explored frontiers of human knowledge, pondering the implications of everything from cetacean intelligence to planetology. From the logic of John Von Neuman’s universal self-replicator to the possible motives of beings far in advance of ourselves.

And yet, what most intrigues me about Arthur’s work is something else -- his ongoing fascination with human destiny -- a term seemingly at-odds with the scientific worldview.

True, a great many of his stories focused on problem-solving, in the face of some intractable riddle. His characters, confronted with something mysterious, are never daunted. They gather resources, pool knowledge, argue, experiment, and then -- often -- transform the enigmatic into something that’s wondrously known.

This part of the human adventure has always shown us at our best. Peeling away layers. Penetrating darkness. Looking back at the wizard, standing behind the curtain.

But there was another Arthur C. Clarke. The one who sent David Bowman careening through the monolith, helplessly bound for transformation and deification. The author who gave us CHILDHOOD’S END and 2001 A Space Odyssey. One who frets that we may not be wise enough to survive the next few generations of tense immaturity, let alone worthy of joining more advanced communities of mind.

And so, we have a recurring theme of intervention -- quasi-divine -- receiving outside help to achieve our potential. (And wasn’t Clarke’s law that a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic?)

In this mix of both fizzing optimism and dour worry, Arthur always struck me as similar to two other giants, both Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, who also surveyed very wide horizons, from alluring to disquieting.

What none of them ever did -- and especially not Arthur -- was give in to despair. The notion of change never lost its fascination. His works appeared always to say "what was will not always be, so get ready." Yes, the past deserves honor -- it got us here -- but the future is what draws us forward.

As it always drew Arthur C. Clarke.

====    ====    ====

Footnote: Recently, I've been involved in starting the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego. 

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." --Arthur C. Clarke

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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