Interview

Stephen Baxter answers your questions

Name: Stephen Baxter
Age: 38
Residence: Great Missenden, U.K.
Last book read: Challenger: The Launch Decision, by Diane Vaughn
SF recommendation: Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson

tephen Baxter began his writing career with the sale of "The Xeelee Flower" to Interzone in 1986. Since then he has continued to publish outstanding science fiction, and this year his efforts have paid off with a John W. Campbell Award for best novel of the year for his book, The Time Ships, which also earned a Hugo nomination. The Time Ships is a sequel to the classic H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine, and it has received both critical and popular acclaim, while also providing Baxter with the impetus to quit his day job and take on writing full time.

Last week Baxter sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to answer questions submitted by our readers about The Time Ships, his writing career and the future of science fiction. Here is what he had to say:

Question	What inspired you to write a continuation of The Time Machine?
*--Ian Watts, iwatts@awod.com*
Answer	Actually the seed idea was to do a big alternate-world history-changing novel. I wondered what would happen if the governments got hold of Wells' Time Machine. They would use it to wage war, assassinating leaders in the past -- and progressively go deeper into time, competing for resources -- until, in the end, it would be possible to reach back and tinker with the Big Bang itself. Fast forward to the present and you have a human society millions, or billions of years old. That coupled with the modern quantum-mechanics idea of parallel world creation as the resolution to the paradoxes of time travel was the core idea. But I needed a time traveler. ...In the end, I hit on the idea of returning to Wells, the archetype. For one thing, Wells left that book open, with an all-time classic teaser. And once I got into Wells the book took another turn as I researched H.G. and his work more deeply. One critic picked this up, that Time Ships is really a Stephen Baxter book within the framework of a Wells sequel; Time Ships could have been written as a standalone, but I don't think it could have been so rich.

Question	What do you think Wells would have thought of your changing his deterministic view of time to alternate world lines?
*--Michael Powell, powell@clark.net*
Answer	Wells in Time Machine wrote of a universe fixed and rigid and said later he thought history was pretty immutable. There is a quote along the lines of, our great men are just the nibs with which the story of history is written. So he probably wouldn't have bought the non-deterministic side. On the other hand he was keen on the idea of alternate worlds; he picked this up from studies of the fourth dimension -- thousands of worlds stacked up side by side, closer than the pages of a book. Overall, I think the younger Wells, who would devour Nature every week, would have enjoyed -- I like to think -- the new ideas. The older Wells would have been a lot more pompous about it I fear...

Question	How would you honestly feel if your ultimate descendants turned out to be Morlocks?
*--Sophie, logic@lds.co.uk*
Answer	If it's my Morlocks, not so bad, because they are a lot smarter than we are. Not to mention better balanced. Even Wells' Morlocks didn't do so bad if you think about it. They retained a mechanical civilization across 800,000 years; our mechanical society dates back just three centuries or so. Of course I wouldn't go to dinner with them. You could argue that any future depicting some kind of humans surviving over such immense time scales is optimistic. Better Morlock than Eloi anyhow. Anyway, how would you feel?

Question	Your novels include humans in extremely alien circumstances, but the characters are still human. Will you be exploring truly alien viewpoints in the future?
*--Ken Otwell, kotwell@charm.net*
Answer	I have in some short stories, such as The Sun People, originally in Interzone, upcoming in my collection Vacuum Diagrams in 1997. Alien life on a Kuiper object. Also there are the aliens on Mercury in "Cilia of Gold" in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, also in the collection. There are some viewpoint aliens in the Xeelee books, such as the Qax. A good alien is extraordinarily hard to do; I always get accused of anthropomorphizing; but I try to design along Niven's lines I think: a consistent biology and non-human motivations. I suspect the great alien novel is yet to be written: something totally inhuman, non-specific consciousness, maybe a different kind of math (able to handle infinity, for instance, but not simple arithmetic), a totally alien sensorium... I'll keep trying.

Question	Now that the traditional material of science fiction has become a standard fixture of the everyday world, do you think science fiction will break free of its "genre" category?
*--Mike Saler, mtsaler@ucdavis.edu*
Answer	In some ways it has. Books like Red Mars are sold as epics of the future, with science fiction somehow implicit in the definition. The marketing of Time Ships in the United Kingdom depended more on Wells than science fiction. My next novel, Voyage, is about an alternate history in which NASA went to Mars. So, strictly speaking, it's science fiction. But it doesn't really have the feel of science fiction and isn't being marketed like that. Even I don't think it's science fiction. But I'd defend the genre. The genre gave us structure and history. Maybe we don't need the support of genre conventions any more; maybe a wider public is more ready for science fiction. But I wouldn't talk about "break free," more "transcending" perhaps.

Question	Do you agree that technology is advancing so rapidly that it is impossible to write with any confidence about the future beyond the next 10 years?
*--Brooks Peck, SFW Staff*
Answer	Yes and no. It seems to me very hard to predict in the short to medium term, because of changes not just of technology but society, the environment, science... Looking further out though it gets easier, when it's the laws of physics rather than economics. We know when the sun will burn out, for instance. What's harder to say is where humans will be against that background. It's kind of a binary choice. In, say, 100,000 years either we'll get off the planet and we'll be all over the System and on our way to the stars, or we'll be wiped out by war/eco-collapse/a nearby supernova/the dinosaur killer/insert your choice of catastrophe. I did a "predictions" article in Focus magazine, their July issue in the United Kingdom; I think it's available in the United States.

Question	What is your opinion on Gregory Benford's position that the science in science fiction may be speculative but must stick to physics to create a proper work of "hard" science fiction?
*--Henning Stolte, kjunge@berlin.snafu.de*
Answer	That could be a definition of hard science fiction. It's applying that rule that leads Benford to write such great stories as "The High Abyss" in New Legends. God, I wish that story was mine. But I would say, there is science fiction beyond hard science fiction; also there is science beyond physics (you could see Red Mars as what-if sociology) and it is fiction after all -- not a textbook on physics -- the important thing is to entertain, and make some kind of resonance, I think. But hard science fiction remains my favorite.

Question	How much of an influence has your background in mathematics had on your writing?
*--Cherie Wein, writa08@midget.towson.edu*
Answer	Very important. I research a lot of technical papers -- the tides on Titan, how the Saturn V worked. Full of equations. My math is still good enough to let me scan the equations, which is how these guys really communicate with each other... On the other hand I don't seem to come up with many smart ideas directly through math. "The Godel Sunflower," about the uncertainty principle, is an exception...

Question	Who, in your opinion, are the best science fiction writers ever, and are any of them your role models?
*--Samual Ray Williams, sam@doc.doc.com*
Answer	Impossible question. The requirements of the job change so much. I'd name Heinlein for his juveniles, Bradbury for his aching nostalgia, Benford for his physics-with-poetry, Clarke for his wonderful ideas and use of language. Role models: I'd name Fred Pohl, Brian Aldiss, Arthur again... all still producing fine work in their 70s, all wonderful guys. If I finish up as content as them, and with half their backlists, I'll be happy.

Question	The scope of the universes you have created can be intimidating to a reader new to your work. Is there any particular place you'd advise starting at?
*--Jesse Chang, pxc131@psu.ed*
Answer	The "easier" Xeelee books are Raft and Flux, because they are standalone, set in enclosed universes. Raft is halfway to a juvenile as it has a 15-year-old lead. Time Ships and Anti-Ice are alternate-Victorian and are pretty easy too I think; my Victorian characters don't have the background or the patience for physics lectures... If you want one nomination, Time Ships. You have Wells' robust traveler, with his 19th century background, being blown away by a modern Baxter universe.

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