Spider Robinson | Interviews

Robinson: When the existence of the outline of a Heinlein novel was first mentioned on a panel at the [Toronto] World Science Fiction Convention, somebody stood up in the back of the room and said, "Spider Robinson should write it."

So Art Dula, the executor of the estate, sent me the outline and [told me to write] a couple of chapters as an audition piece. ... Fortunately, before I started, Art was kind enough to take me aside and say, "Spider, I don't want to see your very best impersonation of Robert Heinlein, I want you to take Robert's outline and write the best Spider Robinson novel you're capable."

And with that, I heaved a sigh of relief, because that's within my grasp. Writing a Heinlein novel? Let's face it, nobody's capable of that but Robert Heinlein. I can't honestly say I've written a Robert Heinlein novel ... this is a Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson novel.

I wanted to read another Heinlein novel so desperately, I didn't care what I had to do. I was willing to stick my chin out and get pasted by every critic out there, who's sharpening his knife as we speak. I was willing to do the work and 98 percent of the typing. It's just been too long. We miss him. It's been nearly 20 years now, and we're just starting to realize what a hole he'd left. Mister, we can use a man like Robert Heinlein again.

Heinlein left behind eight pages of notes, which sketched the ideas for Variable Star. What he did not leave was an ending. How did you come to realize it?

Robinson: The outline launched the story, but [it] did not contain the ending of the book. Two weeks after I got the gig, the first thing I thought was, "This was great, not only do I get to write with Robert, I get to pick the ending!" A couple of weeks later, I was banging my head against a keyboard. "Oh my God, I've got to come up with an ending!" What ending is powerful enough for the last Robert Heinlein novel?

... On my iTunes I have a few radio clips of Heinlein being interviewed in Butler, Missouri, in 1980, a total of five sentences. And [his] first two sentences gave me the ending of the book: It reminded me about a phone conversation we had once about a story he wanted to tell but John Campbell talked him out of writing. [Campbell] said it was too depressing.

How much of the writing is Heinlein's?

Robinson: It's not a question that's possible to answer. The very first book I ever read being was Rocketship Galileo by Robert Heinlein; the next nine books I read were all by Heinlein's because that's what was there next to that one on the shelf when I brought it back to the library.

Robert has always been my original template for how this stuff looks when it's being done right, so there's always been some of him in my work, whether I was conscious of it or not. Reviewers have commented on this over the years.

There are times when I look at the manuscript and I honestly can't recall if it's something I got from the outline or something I put in myself. But there were times he seemed to possess me, and there were times when I couldn't find him anywhere, and I had to fake it the best I could.

I was very pleased when Charlie Brown, the editor of Locus, mentioned briefly that the first couple of pages sound like Heinlein, because the opening pages were purely mine. I didn't quote Heinlein until page five. That tickled the hell out of me, because Charlie Brown is a noted Heinlein scholar who has read Robert as carefully and as often as any man alive. And if I faked my way past Charlie, I think I'm OK.

Is there anything you received that didn't make it into the book?

Robinson: I have another piece of Heinlein writing that somebody slipped me from the Heinlein archives, an alternate version of Number of the Beast. I'm keeping them in case of severe trauma: If I have a bad day, I'll have something new of his to read.

Do you think Heinlein would like Variable Star?

Robinson: Eric Clapton, he threw a concert for George Harrison at the Albert Hall a year to the day after he died. Everyone said, "George would be so pleased." [Eric said,] "Maybe not—he was such a contrary guy."

And with Robert, honest to God, you never knew what he was going to say. Everyone who thought he was predictable was an idiot with insufficient information.

I wish he were alive, so I could settle once and for all what he would think. I think he would be pleased, I honestly do. I finished the book feeling like I didn't disgrace either of us. So I don't know if Robert would like the book, but I sure I wish I could ask him.

[Variable Star contains] his ideas, his themes, the things he cared about most in his life: mankind going to the stars, establishing ourselves off the planet while there's still time, trying to form some covenant we can live together under that doesn't require a bearded guy with thunderbolts up his sleeve to enforce it, a society based on a rational covenant rather than collection of shared superstitions. These ideas he put forward all his life haven't been given enough currency lately.

So while you were collaborating with Robert Heinlein, you also worked with rock luminary David Crosby on a song from the book. Can you tell me about it?

Robinson: Basically, after I got this gig, I also got a fan letter from David Crosby, saying I just read your book Very Bad Deaths, and I like it a lot. I wrote back an effusive letter saying, are you kidding me? A month hasn't gone by ... in the last 30 years that I haven't played your songs.

Naturally, early on in the conversation I managed to boast that I've been asked to write a novel by Robert Heinlein, and he flipped out. David's a major Heinlein fan, and he's put explicit references to Robert's work in several of his songs: "Triad" mentions "water brothers" from Stranger in a Strange Land. And he wrote the one of the first science-fiction songs that wasn't a joke or a novelty, "Wooden Ships."

He asked if there was anything he can do. And I realized I written some song lyrics into my sample first chapter that I didn't have a tune for. And he said I'll write them for you. My jaw bounced off the floor again, but by that time, I was already numb.

Over the last six months or a year, we were working over iChat on our song. A couple of weeks ago, I got flown down to L.A. to do a TV interview for Variable Star, and David was kind enough to come on and do the TV interview with me, with expandedbooks.com.

... After that, he signed off on it and said we're done, and that night [wife and collaborator Jeanne and I] went to see him and the boys [Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young] at the Hollywood Bowl, and they were fantastic. I don't usually hang backstage with Billy Crystal, Virginia Madsen and Thomas Hayden. I've been hanging out with a fast crowd lately. ... After 30 years I'm an overnight success.

[When the song is released, it will most likely be available as an MP3 on www.variablestarbook.com.]

Is a good science-fiction novel as important today as it was in Heinlein's day?

Robinson: For some reason, the readers who are voting with their feet are migrating from science fiction into fantasy. Basically, they've all decided they'd rather not be exposed to any story that their grandfather would not have recognized.

I don't know why that is. Just as we're entering the future, just as technology is proving itself, just when we've managed to keep 6 billion people alive where we had trouble feeding 2 billion, just as the commercial space program is taking off, suddenly everybody goes, "Let's stampede backward into the past."

It's dismaying, but a number of my colleagues, sensing the way the wind is blowing, have migrated away from science fiction toward writing about elves and magic and the supernatural, and they're making good money. I hope that the wheel will turn again one day—because we don't live in the past, and we do live in the future.

And no matter what you say about the original Star Trek—and there were many things about it to criticize—it did hypothesize that there was going to be a future in which we spread out to fill the galaxy and behave rather decently about it. I'd hate to see that assumption vanish.

You and your wife Jeanne are advocates of human spaceflight. Did your friendship with Heinlein have anything to do with that?

Robinson: Robert said over and over, "Earth is too fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in." He's absolutely right. Anything as stupid as a rock falling out of the sky can doom everything on the planet.

We're fast running out of the resources and the fuel we need to get to space. And if we use it up, that's it. It's gone forever. And if that happens, then we've proven that we're like the dinosaurs: too dumb to live.

... Robert kept saying, "It's raining soup, somebody grab a bucket." Right over our heads, there's free [solar] power, there's free metal and you don't have dig holes in the ground and pollute the environment to get [it].

Right now the window is open. We have the possibility of ensuring our survival for the next million years. Or we can restrict ourselves to living on the planet, and no matter how you cut it, everything that lives on this planet sooner or later gets ground under. There's no species that's lasted a million years yet.

... I have the opportunity to work at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre as the first Writer in Residence. I'm not correcting kid's fiction: I'm running around and whipping up public awareness [in space]. To paraphrase, "We've got to get out of this place, or it's the last thing we'll never do."