He is the author of the novels The Hercules Text, A Talent for War, The Engines of God, Ancient Shores, Eternity Road, Moonfall, Infinity Beach, Deepsix, Chindi, Omega, Polaris and Seeker. His latest novel, Odyssey, was published last November. His short fiction has appeared in Amazing Stories, Analog, Asimov's, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, in many anthologies, and has been collected in Standard Candles and Ships in the Night. Outbound, a new collection of essays and fiction was published in November.

His first novel, The Hercules Text, was published in 1986, and was awarded a Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation. His novella, "Ships in the Night" was the first English-language winner of the UPC Science Fiction Award, an international award which bestows the largest cash prize in science fiction. He is also a winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, is a two-time Hugo nominee and an 11-time Nebula Award nominee. His Web site can be found at www.sfwa.org/members/McDevitt/.

SCI FI Weekly interviewed McDevitt via email in September 2006. In your new novel, Odyssey, one of the characters, speaking about a book he's been reading, says "It's about things that get lost. ... Things we care about." That could describe Odyssey, as well as much of your other work—whether it's losing starships as in Seeker and Odyssey, or human civilization itself in Eternity Road. What is it about that theme that keeps you coming back to it again and again in your fiction?

McDevitt: It's compelling. I can't think of anything that locks in the emotions quite like the sense of something valuable, something utterly irreplaceable, that goes missing. That disappears. Whether it's a lost lover, or Atlantis, or how Egyptian engineers got those large blocks of stone across the Nile. It's the electric train set you had when you were a kid and foolishly gave away and wish now you still owned. It's that first car.

I remember being especially struck by the experience of a Renaissance scholar sailing home to Venice from Athens with a trunk full of manuscripts from the Golden Age, plays and commentaries thought lost forever. The ship encountered a storm and went down. Along with the trunk. The scholar survived but never told us what was in the trunk. Which immediately acquired a mystic resonance. What had he found?Your writing has been lauded for the great sense of wonder it evokes. Many of your stories and novels also have a strong mystery element driving the plot. Is mystery an important component in conveying sense of wonder?

McDevitt: "Important" sounds like "necessary." I don't think it's necessary, in the sense that wondrous elements, a supernova, whatever, form the backdrop for the events being played out by the characters. I've read novels that evoked my sense of wonder without bringing in factors that would normally qualify as mysterious. Greg Benford's The Sunborn is a good example, or Ben Bova's Mercury.

But I love a good mystery. And if I can use a black hole as the takeoff point for strange goings-on, sure, I'm on my way. Deepsix employs an approaching planetary collision to get things moving, but there's nothing mysterious about the narrative. Polaris, however, uses a collision between a star and a brown dwarf to set up a situation in which the pilot and passengers disappear from a starship, much in the manner of the Mary Celeste.

On a different level, mystery is at the heart of all these things, because we cannot watch a butterfly without being struck by the complexity of the creature. Or the quantum reality at the heart of the cosmos, which introduces an element of unpredictability. Free will. Anything can happen. Some nice engineering there. I wonder how much more wondrous a sunrise was to the early Egyptians, who could not explain how the sun got returned every morning to the east. Some of them must have suspected there was an infinity of suns, one coming up each day.Judging from your novels, one might assume that you think the future of space travel will be fraught with peril. Do you think that's true, or does it just make good drama?

McDevitt: It's certainly fraught. We've already closed it down once. The problem with space travel is that you don't really get much benefit from it. Not the sort that makes, say, for better transportation or better toothpaste. NASA is always trying to sell it that way, but the money would be better spent developing the toothpaste directly than looking for it to come out of the space program.

The problem is that scientists are notoriously poor public relations people. The space program gives us, basically, blue-sky science. It teaches us about the place where we live. But the truth is most people don't care. More than half of the U.S. population, before the recent stir over "degrading" Pluto, didn't know where in the system it could be found. Whatever the reason, we've been notoriously unsuccessful in stirring the interest of kids in the sciences. The condition is exacerbated by the fact that roughly 1/3 of the U.S. population sees science as an enemy, as a force trying to disrupt their faith.

Furthermore, manned flight provides only two advantages I can think of: (1) the capability to move enough people off-world in the event of a general disaster to ensure, at least for a while, the survival of the species. And (2) poetry. We loved watching astronauts walk on the moon. And we'd enjoy seeing astronauts walk on Mars, though it wouldn't be as big a deal to most people, because it's already been done. (On the moon. And after all, what's the difference between one barren rock and another?)

The old notions that we would mine the asteroids and establish off-world colonies and so on will probably never go anywhere. We are unlikely to be able to overcome the physical problems resulting from low (or zero) gravity. Or protect astronauts from radiation. One good solar burst—and they happen frequently—while the Mars mission is on its way and it would be all over. But the real problem is that there's no money to be made from space flight. At least nothing that would offset the initial costs of traveling off Earth.

I'd love to see an ambitious manned program. But we all thought back in the 1950s that we'd have Moonbase by now. And a footing on Mars. Arthur Clarke's Space Odyssey, remember, was set in 2001.In your Academy novels, one of those perils is a phenomenon known as the omega clouds. Where did the idea for that kind of a civilization-hunter/killer come from? An explanation for Fermi's Paradox?

McDevitt: I've always had art affection for storm clouds, bad weather, thunderbolts. I love blizzards. I can't tell you why. But I used to watch the thunderheads come in from the west, watch them light up, watch the rain beat down, listen to the rumble. When I needed something mysterious to take out old civilizations, those storm clouds pretty much came front and center.

I'll admit here that I thought no explanation for the omega clouds would be necessary, beyond the fact that they simply existed. One more aspect of a mysterious universe. In fact, I had intended to avoid ever writing a sequel. As it turns out, there'll be six Academy novels in the complete arc. So much for good intentions.

Readers were not satisfied without an explanation. The truth was that I didn't have one. I didn't want to resort to the tired notion of an ancient weapon run amok. Or to the urban renewal project run amok. So I wrote a couple other books in that universe while I tried to decide what the clouds were. Priscilla Hutchins advances a theory in Omega, and she has part of the truth, but got it [the] wrong way round. Ultimately, she'll make the climactic flight—after a better star drive is developed—to the area near the center of the galaxy where the things seem to be coming from. That will happen in the final novel in the series, Cauldron, which should be released in 2007.Since the Omega Clouds seem to have been taken care of, at least for the time being, what's at stake in Odyssey?

McDevitt: UFOs are still around, although, in the 23rd century they're called moonriders. As is the case today, nobody really believes they're there. Then they suddenly become too prominent to ignore. They begin doing mindless things, like turning an asteroid toward a world with a biozone, but on which no one lives. Why attack the equivalent of deer? And firing another asteroid at an orbiting hotel under construction in another star system. What's going on?

Meantime, a 15-year-old temporarily marooned in an orbiting museum gets a chilling message from a ghostly Priscilla Hutchins. And Gregory MacAllister finds some of the answers in the "hellfire trial," where the country is debating whether scaring the devil out of kids with detailed descriptions of what awaits sinners in the next world constitutes child abuse.Your Academy novels deal with the familiar trope of a future civilization exploring space with faster-than-light starships, but is unusual in that the ships are unarmed and not at all designed for warfare. Was that important on some moral level, or simply a way to distinguish the Academy novels from other space-faring SF that involves lots of space battles?

I've never been able to believe that, if we could develop an FTL drive, that we'd send battleships out to look around. Everything we know about the universe suggests it's either empty or nearly so. If not, if there are other civilizations out there, it's hard to imagine a reason for them to go to war. Earth would probably not be comfortable for aliens. Gravity's too high or too low. The mix of atmospheric gases causes their snarfers to ache.

If the fleets can move faster than light, which they'd pretty much have to, how could you ever bring an enemy to battle anyhow? Moreover, the war would be suicide no matter how well-armed your ships were. Charles Pellegrino points out that all you'd have to do is to get a ship up to a sizable fraction of light speed and crash it into the other side's home world. It would destroy the planet; they would do the same to us. And everybody's dead. Maybe you could work out a defense. But it's hard to see how. Makes more sense to behave like rational creatures.

I more or less sideswiped military SF years ago in A Talent For War. But that was really a mystery about events that had happened during a war, rather than a book about combat.In Eternity Road, you destroyed civilization. In Moonfall, the moon. Now, In Odyssey, the entire universe is threatened. Do you fancy yourself an agent of entropy, or do you just like destroying stuff?

McDevitt: Blame it on CBS. When I was a kid, I was enthralled by the radio show, CBS Was There, which had a later incarnation called You Are There. Reporters with microphones show up at the Battle of Gaugamela and interview Alexander, talk to Darius, ride along in the cavalry charge, get comments from the guy who takes care of the war elephants. It was great fun. And a week later they did the same thing at Gettysburg. Somewhere along the way, yes, I developed a taste, not so much for blowing things up, but for watching people react to extraordinary events. That's why Moonfall has all the on-the-spot reporting, CNN commentaries and people arguing on panel shows.

Eternity Road is a different case altogether. You don't see the damage getting inflicted. It's ancient history when the book opens. The inspiration for this, and for several stories, is a sequence from one of Gilbert Chesterton's Father Brown adventures. Father Brown, who is probably the antithesis to Sherlock Holmes, explains how the other detective—a Holmes stand-in, as I recall—follows footprints and examines tobacco stains and so on. Chesterton's detective, on the other hand, looks for someone who does something out of character. The conservative general who charges a fortified hilltop against heavy odds and gets most of his people killed. Why would he do that? Father Brown smiles: Where is the best place to hide a tree?

I was taken by the idea. In an early story, "Cryptic," an astronomer who spends his life with SETI, who is always being lectured by others that he's wasting his career, eventually dies of cardiac arrest. It is then discovered that he had in fact detected artificial signals years before but told nobody. Buried the secret. Why on Earth would he do that?

In "Fifth Day," which will appear in the 30th anniversary Issue of Asimov's (Apr-May), a brilliant biologist, who'd been trying to understand how life originated, dies in a car crash. After which the university learns that he'd solved the problem years before and, like the astronomer in "Cryptic," kept it quiet.

Eternity Road features a hunt for a place where the history and science of the old civilization, the Roadmakers (us) is stored. An expedition has gone out, thought they knew where it was. All died except the leader, who returns to confess failure. He is mocked and derided by everyone in the small Mississippi town where he lives. Ultimately, he walks into the river. The novel opens as a couple of kids stumble across the body. Later, relatives find books in his home previously thought lost. A Mark Twain novel. The expedition, it seems, had succeeded after all. But why had he kept it quiet? Why endured the abuse?

If you can come up with a rational answer to these questions, while avoiding the obvious ("Too horrible for the world to know about"), the book or story pretty much writes itself. The explanation should be one that, when revealed, the reader will ask himself how he could have missed it. (Or maybe she didn't.) So my interest in Eternity Road had nothing to do with killing off civilization, but was rather intended as a mystery. Pure and simple.There's a Stephen King blurb on your books that says you are "the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke." Do you feel as though you're continuing in their tradition? And did you set out to do that?

McDevitt: I set out, as I suspect most of us do, to write the kind of books and stories I liked to read. I can't make a judgment beyond that. That's for someone else to do. King paid me a substantial compliment and I'd like to think it's so. But however that may be, I'll take it and run.While you might be telling the same sort of stories as Asimov and Clarke, you seem to put much more of an emphasis on character than either of them. Whereas Asimov and Clarke often used characters merely as tools to convey the plot, your characters feel very vivid and lifelike, and are participants rather than pawns. Do you put a lot of effort into character development, or does it come naturally to you as you're writing?

McDevitt: For me, the pleasure to be derived from SF comes largely not from putting, say, a spectacle on display. It's not the simple act of using a starship to watch a collision between two stars. Rather, it's watching the reactions of the characters who get to live the experience. It's watching people react to the notion that the edge of the universe runs through their dining room, or that the guy next door has a nuclear-powered refrigerator. That's what I'm interested in. The reaction. I don't really care that my uncle Frank owns a combination pool table/time machine. But I want to be there when somebody finds out about it.The Academy novels feature a virtual-reality technology which allows people to act out and become participants in narrative entertainment. In a scene in Odyssey, the characters act out a musical. Are you a fan of musicals and theater? Do you act or sing?

McDevitt: When I start singing, people call the police. But I've always loved the theater, and have a special appreciation for musicals, of which my favorite is South Pacific. I was a high-school theater director for eight years.You recently received a Southeastern Science Fiction Achievement Awards lifetime achievement award. What was your reaction to that news?

McDevitt: Lifetime achievement awards are, I suspect, always a mixed bag. It's a clear signal that the readers appreciate what you've done, and that's an ultimate compliment. Sends you off with friends and family to celebrate. But there's also a suggestion of drawing close to the end of the run.

A good many of today's writers got an early start, and were publishing by the time they were 25. Some started in their teens. I recall reading David Copperfield when I was in college. I'd won the Freshman Short Story contest, and was at the time a sports columnist for the college newspaper, so I thought I was on my way. That one day I'd write the Great American Novel. (Every other English major in the school had the same notion about himself.) I realized early on, though, that I'd never be able to write like Dickens, so I gave it up. Didn't write a word of fiction for 25 years after college. It never occurred to me that I didn't have to be able to write at that level.Who are some of your favorite authors, and which authors have most influenced your own writing?

McDevitt: Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, James Thurber. John Dos Passos, Melville. Wouk. H.L. Mencken.

In SF, Bradbury first and foremost. He got to me when I was 12, and demonstrated what a capable SF writer could do. My all-time favorite book is The Martian Chronicles. Years ago, when I was teaching high school, I used it to win over students who thought books were mainly a hassle. The guy's pure magic. Also: Heinlein, Clarke, Hoyle. Jack Williamson, especially for The Legion Of Space, Benford and Ellison come to mind; Benford for the cosmic sweep of his novels; Ellison for the sheer power of language. Ellison writes like a guy on fire.

Dos Passos probably affected my writing more than anyone, especially his USA trilogy. His journalistic techniques, the use of headlines and bios to capture the flavor of the time, so the characters are not operating in a vacuum. And, I suspect, the gritty style of the narrative. (I'm not sure about the latter. Somebody else will have to make that call.)You had a varied career before settling down to write full-time. You were a naval officer, a cab driver, an English teacher, a customs officer and a motivational trainer. How did those experiences inform your writing?

McDevitt: We're all formed by the life we lead. I don't know how to lay down specifics, but had I not spent 10 years trying to show kids how much fun Ray Bradbury can be, I'd be a different person. Just as, if you'd married someone else, you'd be different. Can't help it. I came away from my teaching experience with a sense of how essential parents are to the education of their kids. Much more important than any teacher can ever be. Then I watch politicians try to reform the system and talk only about the teachers and the curriculum.

Doing management seminars for the Customs Service made me aware how important it is to acknowledge performance. You don't have to give cash prizes and certificates saying how great the employee is. All you have to do is gain the employee's respect, then make it a point to notice when he performs well. Say something. It'll be enough.

Learn to listen to people who don't agree with you. Encourage people to tell you when they think you're getting something wrong. Don't get angry when people tell you what you don't want to hear. It's all stuff I wish I'd known when I was 20.

It sure it shows up in my work. It has to. In The Engines of God, there's a reference to a group of scientists trying to terraform a distant world. But they have no authority to make key decisions. Everything has to be run through Washington, which, of course, is light-years away.

Priscilla Hutchins, the heroine of the Academy novels, has become a manager. She's a good one. She blunders occasionally, but she's been learning. Like the rest of us.