eoffrey A. Landis has won the Nebula Award once ("Ripples on the Dirac Sea," 1990), the Hugo twice ("A Walk in the Sun," 1992, and "Falling Onto Mars," 2003) and the respect of SF readers, writers and editors everywhere. More than 60 short stories and novelettes of Landis' have been published. His first novel, Mars Crossing, was published by Tor Books in 2000, and his short story collection, Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities, was published in 2001.
He is also busy in the field of science, working for NASA as a researcher (the NASA Glenn Research Center has an information page about Landis at powerweb.grc.nasa.gov/pvsee/publications/mars/landis.html. He is also a poet, with more than 20 of his works appearing in print. In 2001, he returned to Clarion as an instructor along with his wife, Mary Turzillo. (Turzillo's short story "Mars Is No Place For Children" won the Nebula in 2001). A downloadable version of Geoffrey Landis: Short Stories Vol. 1 is available now via Amazon.com.
Landis has published over 250 scientific papers in the field of astronautics and elsewhere, and is a member of a mysterious organization known as the Cajun Sushi Hamsters, also known as the Cleveland Science Fiction Writers Workshop.
Landis' website can be found at www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis.
How have events like the moon landing and the current exploration of Mars changed the face of SF as we know it?
Landis: The easy answer is that the moon landing and robotic missions to Mars have changed SF by taking away the settings we knew from old science fiction—the elder races of Mars, the swamps of Venus—and replaced them with worlds that are less interesting, or at least less swarming with life. It forced the science fiction of the '70s and '80s to either move outward, away from the solar system, and toward interstellar space, or toward the near-future thrillers on our own planet. But lately there's been a renaissance of stories set in our own solar system, where I think science-fiction writers have been beginning to realize that the solar system is still, in its own way, weird and wonderful, and that there are still stories you can set here.
Do you support the idea of a manned mission to Mars?
Landis: Yes, of course, I think we need frontiers, and we need humans to explore them. Robots are great, but it's like sending a robot on vacation to send back picture postcards—it's nice, but it's not the same as going yourself. Let's go!
Your work features the element of the human condition within the world of hard SF, an element sometimes missing in the genre. How do you manage to maintain it in your stories?
Landis: Well, good stories are always stories about people. And I love science.
What was the inspiration that led you to write your first novel, Mars Crossing?
Landis: Actually, it was sort of an accident. My agent, Ashley Grayson, suggested that I should write about Mars. This was not too long after the Pathfinder mission, and he suggested I should write an outline to pitch to the movies, or for a television miniseries. I wasn't sure I had anything to say, but the more I thought about it the more ideas I had, so I wrote an outline, and then turned it into a novel. Looks like he was right about the idea of a Mars movie, but probably a little late—three of them came out the year after Mars Crossing did.
You wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Singular Habits of Wasp. What is your opinion of other author's work in that area, Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, for instance?
Landis: Have to admit that I haven't read that one. What I like about the Sherlock Holmes stories is the characters, and I'd say I like about any story that gets the characters right.
"Ripples on the Dirac Sea" is one of my favorite stories of yours. What can you tell us about the writing of it?
Landis: I wrote "Ripples" when I was in grad school. I plotted it out while I was daydreaming in an advanced quantum mechanics class (maybe if I'd paid attention, instead of daydreaming about science fiction, I'd have a better understanding of quantum field theory). I wanted to write a story where the physics was real physics, a little past the usual simplifications you get in science fiction, although I do have to admit that I put together a bunch of ideas in a way that they're not really meant to fit together. And then, I entered high school right at about the peak of the hippie era. Things went weird from there, I'd guess—who would have predicted the '70s? The San Francisco summer of love was a real place and time, vanished now, a different world.
You have not only written novel-length and short stories, but also comprehensive papers on science. Have you had any difficulty in shifting from one to the other?
Landis: I like writing science papers—it's like science fiction, but without the characters.
Can you tell us something about yourself that your readers don't know?
Landis: Sometimes when I walk by, people spontaneously explode. Oh, wait, you wanted something truthful?
With the writing outside of fiction that you've done, what is special for you about the genre of SF?
Landis: Well, I love science fiction—there's just a thrill from writing science fiction that doesn't come from anything else; it's participating in a community of people that like to think, like to be exposed to outrageous concepts and have their imaginations stretched. I guess in some ways I'm still trying to write something that would recapture the feelings I had when I was 13, when everything I was reading was new, and all the concepts were new and all were mind-expanding. I really want to impress myself.
What first sparked your interest in science?
Landis: I've been interested in science for as long as I can remember. One of the first books I can remember reading, other than Dick and Jane and Doctor Seuss books, was a little children's book called You Will Go to the Moon. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was quite an odd book—written in second-person future tense. At age 4 or 5, I had no notion that this was something unusual...
You've said that there have been some characters that you have written that you haven't liked. Who is the character you like the least, and was that a liability to telling the story?
Landis: Did I say that? No, I love all my characters—it's a occupational hazard with writers, I think. But then, sometimes I do write stories with villains in them—not very often—but sometimes. I had a story, "Meetings of the Secret World Masters," in a volume called Saving the World, edited by Charles Sheffield, that had some villains that I found quite slimy. That story really was a novel, but I realized when I tried to start it that I didn't have the time to learn the biology I needed to write it the way I wanted to.
What's it's like to live with another author in a two-award-winning household?
Landis: The great advantage with living with another writer is that when I want to ignore everything and go up into my study and write, she understands and doesn't interrupt. With the Mars mission and other things recently, though, I haven't had much time to do that—Mary keeps telling me she's going to lock me in the office and not let me out until I can show a thousand words. ...
You have also written humor; what are the particular difficulties in approaching a humorous slant in SF?
Landis: Science fiction has always been rather friendly to humor—Robert Sheckley and William Tenn, for example, were both writers I used to enjoy a lot of when I was a kid. A lot of the humorous stuff I've written are actually pieces that I wrote with no other intent than to amuse myself, and maybe a couple of friends, and then only later decided, hey, that's not bad, maybe I'll send it out.
Given what we now know about Mars, are the older SF stories still relevant?
Landis: Well, not as stories about Mars, perhaps, but they can still be good stories. Zalazney's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," for example, still packs a punch even though the Mars he wrote about never existed. Even Wells' War of the Worlds is a landmark story that still works for me.
Who, other than your wife, do you think you could survive being locked up with on the way to Mars?
Landis: Wow, that's a tough one. Somebody who knows how to fix the life support system when it breaks down, I'd say! Just give me a pile of good books, a porthole to gaze out of, and some earplugs.
What makes you laugh?
Landis: One time I was at the Nebula awards, and I sat at the bar between Karen Joy Fowler and Tim Powers. That was probably the funniest experience I've ever had—they just played off each other, Karen with her sly humor and Tim topping everything she said with something even more outrageous. I just sat there and tried not to explode.
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The cast and crew of I, Robot
