Geoffrey A. Landis
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Geoffrey A. Landis is a short story writer. He won the Hugo award for best
short story in 1992 for the story "A Walk in the Sun," and the Nebula award
in 1990 for "Ripples in the Dirac Sea". His first story, "Elemental," was
written while he was a graduate student in physics at Brown University, and
earned a nomination for the Hugo award for 1985. Since then his stories
have appeared regularly in all of the major science fiction magazines, and
have been translated into fifteen languages. His most recent stories
include "Approaching Perimelasma," in the January issue of Asimov's SF, and
"Outsider's Chance" in the December issue of Analog. His most recent
non-fiction is "Adventures in the Mars Business" in the July issue of
Analog. He is the author of one short-story collection, "Myths, Legends
and True History," published by Pulphouse Press as number 26 of their
Authors Choice Monthly series. He lives just west of Cleveland, Ohio.
He has a PhD in physics, and works for the Ohio Aerospace Institute at NASA
Lewis Research Center. He was a member of the science team for the Mars
Pathfinder project, and successfully measured dust deposition on the
surface of Mars. He is currently working on instruments to fly to Mars on
the 2001 Surveyor Lander mission.
JanCyberC Geoffrey A. Landis, scientist and award winning author is joining us this evening to answer your questions. He's online from Japan where he is currently attending a conference. We're also joined this evening by Gardner Dozois, Editor of Asimov's and Dan Imal, Assistant Editor of Analog.
Gardner What time is it in Japan?
Geoffrey It's ten in the morning-- tomorrow morning-- here. I'm in the future now.
Gardner Wow, you went to the Future! An SF writers dream!
Geoffrey Yes, and in the future they speak Japanese. It's very much like a William Gibson novel here.
Gardner So Bill Gibson always predicted!
Geoffrey I even had a can of "Pocari Sweat" yesterday.
Gardner Canned pig sweat?
Geoffrey Tastes like Gator-Aid really. But then, I've always thought Gator Aide tasted like sweat.
JanCyberC Geoffrey, we've got a question from BG1818, which part of Japan are you in right now?
Geoffrey I am in Takasaki.
JanCyberC Takasaki? Is that on the main island?
Geoffrey It's a city about an hour north of Tokyo.
Gardner What are you doing in Japan, besides drinking pig sweat?
Geoffrey It's not a very touristy oriented city-- I've been walking around for two days, and still haven't found a store that sells picture post cards. What I'm doing here is attending a conference on Radiation Effects in Semiconductor Devices for Space43.
Gardner You're there in your professional capacity as a Top Scientist, I take it?
Geoffrey Oops, that's 3, not 43-- it's the 3rd conference on etc. Yep, I was invited to give a lecture on the effects of the Martian environment on solar cells. Takasaki is the home to the JAERI (Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute) radiation test facility.
Gardner Now imagine what the conference will be like by the time we DO get to 43. [g]
JanCyberC Ah thanks Geoffrey. I have a question here for you from the message board if you're ready. Margy asks: What's the extent of your association with NASA?
Geoffrey I pretty much work full time on assignment to NASA. Some of my work is with NASA Johnson in Houston, but I also sometimes work for JPL and Lewis. Right now my two biggest projects are for the manned space center in Houston. One project is working on the MIP (Mars ISPP Precursor) experiment on the Mars-2001 Surveyor Lander mission the other is to work on a solar cell testbed for the space station.
Gardner Do you find that working for NASA fuels your writing, gives you ideas to write about?
Geoffrey To some extend working for NASA fuels my writing, and to some extent not. Most of what I do is far too boring to write about.
Gardner Or do you take ideas from your writing with you to NASA? [g]
Geoffrey Well, that's true to some extent, too. Certainly science fiction gives me a vision of what we want to shoot for! I wish that science were as easy as it's portrayed in SF, though. Come up with a theory in the morning, make a gadget by the afternoon, it works the first time you try it... and you can save the galaxy and be home by suppertime.
Gardner You build a death-ray or a space-drive with plaster of paris, some wires, and a few boards... Were you working professionally as a scientist first, or as a writer? The chicken, or the egg?
Geoffrey I was reading science fiction first, then I was working as a scientist, and then I went off to grad school.
Gardner How did you get into writing?
Geoffrey Grad school turns out to be far easier than working, so in my spare time I started writing science fiction.
Gardner Were you selling before you got out of grad school?
Geoffrey Then, for some completely unknown reason, editors actually bought the science fiction I wrote-- the first story I sold while I was in grad school. The first three, actually.
JanCyberC Geoffrey, I've heard your writing described as technophilic, would you consider yourself a "hard" SF writer?
Geoffrey I write a lot of different things.
Gardner Unlike Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, and Robert Silverberg, though, you actually went on to work professionally in the academic field you trained for.
Geoffrey Much of it is hard sf, I think, but some of it isn't-- I've even published a few straight out fairy tales. I do admit to being technophilic, though. Science and technology are cool.
JanCyberC I have a question here from TRDouglas: Which authors do you read most these days?
Geoffrey Well, of course I'm very fond of the old "classic" writers. I do like to read the newer writers, though. I've recently been reading Greg Egan, Wil McCarthy, and Robert Reed.
JanCyberC Geoffrey, we have Dan Imal, Assistant Editor of Analog with us this evening as well. Hi Dan!
Gardner Do you ever find it strange that although you're always identified as "an ANALOG writer," all the stories you've won awards for were from ASIMOV'S? [g]
Geoffrey I'm identified as an Analog writer?
Gardner Usually.
Geoffrey I didn't know that. I do have some friends who only read Analog. Analog readers are often very fanatically loyal about their magazine. One time I had a friend-- who is a professor of physics in Colorado-- ask me if I'd published anything recently. I said, yes, I had a story in the most recent issue of _Asimov's_. He said, Oh, I never read that. I meant, haven't you published anything in _Analog_ ?
Gardner And he said, "No, I meant PUBLISHED," right? [g] The result of that, unfortunately, is that a lot of the intensely loyal ANALOG audience never sees any of the really interesting hard science work that is being done elsewhere.
Geoffrey I'd better quickly add that I myself read pretty much all of the magazines, not just one or two.
Dan You said before that you'd written some fairy tales. about what?
Geoffrey I actually am very fond of fairy tales. It's one of my secret vices.
Gardner It's interesting that you mention reading Greg Egan, for instance, since I think he's doing some of the most interesting hard science stuff around these days.
Geoffrey I agree about Greg Egan. Sometim4es I think that Egan writes for an audience of about three people who will be able to understand the theory behind his stories. Sometimes I wonder who those three people are.
Gardner Egan has an article in the new EIDELON that's so hard science-ish and math-intensive that I can't even understand it! So obviously I'm not one of the three! [g]
Geoffrey Really? I'll have to look for it. Eidelon is on the web, I believe.
Gardner About ten pages of equations, with occasionally a "therefore," thrown in.
Geoffrey Egan has a web page where he explains some of the general relativity behind his most recent book.
Dan Can you tell us anything about what your doing for NASA nowadays?
Geoffrey Sure. I work on a lot of different projects. Two of the projects are experiments for the mars-2001 Surveyor lander mission which launches in April 2001. Basically, they are measuring the environment of Mars, the spectrum and dust properties, and measuring the performance of solar arrays and testing methods of mitigating dust coverage. Another experiment is to test solar cells on the space station. Then I also do bits and pieces of other work-- I'm involved in the solar power satellite analysis, for example, and I've been participating in a working group on interstellar precursor missions. I even occasionally do some semiconductor physics.
Gardner Sort of an interstellar foreplay consultant. [g]
JanCyberC We have a question here from dreamer: What was your focus in "Plunge" ...plotwise...or background ideas?
Geoffrey "Plunge" is an excerpt from a story in ASIMOV'S, "Approaching Perimelasma". The focus, I guess, is on the question of what drives human beings to do things.
Gardner Obviously you and Egan are working on similar wavelengths, since your black-hole-plunge story and his ended up on my desk within a few weeks of each other.
Geoffrey Yes, that was an odd coincidence.
Gardner Well, when it's black-hole-plunging time... Where did "Plunge" appear?
Geoffrey I was trying to write a story that got some of the physics of black holes correct. It's on my web page, Gardner. With credit to Asimov's, of course!
Gardner Good! [g]
JanCyberC Folks...we'll be going to open chat now. Let's thank Geoffrey for joining us tonight. Chat will be open, but please wait until he answers one question before you ask another.
dreamer Do you have any interest in the evolution of the human condition...i.e. uploading for immortality? (Plunge)
Geoffrey I have tremendous interest in that. The post-human future has been a recent innovation of science fiction-- the realization that in the foreseeable future we will no longer be anything recognizable as humans, but will have powers that are almost incomprehensible by any human standards.
Gardner Greg Benford says that he doesn't believe in personality uploading--although I notice that most of the stories in the anthology he edited feature that trope!
Geoffrey The difficulty, though, is that these post-human characters may have nothing in common with us, so how can you write about them? I don't understand why Benford says that.
Gardner Well, humans have always written about the gods...
Geoffrey It seems to me that once the computer technology is ready for it, there's no way that we can *not* have the technology to upload humans. Sure, humans have written about gods, but the gods they have written about have merely been humans, magnified.
Gardner He came up with a number of technical reasons in his column a few years back why he thought it wouldn't work.
Geoffrey A *real* god would work from motives we couldn't comprehend.
Absarka Hi Geoffrey. The "question of what drives human beings to do things" is kinda of the point behind "Outsider's Chance", your new story in the Dec. ANALOG, isn't it?
Geoffrey Absarka: sure.
dreamer So its a challenge to write about post-human entities....
Gardner Be interesting to read the fiction that the gods would write about HUMANS. [g]
Geoffrey Somebody, I think it was Niven, once mentioned that one science that SF rarely bothers with is economics.
Gardner Geoff: "God works in mysterious ways." Don't they already say that?
Geoffrey Yep. But what good is a story about characters who you can't understand.
Dan Wouldn't post-humans BE humans magnified? Can we abandon humanity entirely?
Gardner If post-humans have the powers of gods, would we even be able to recognize their economics, let alone understand them?
TRDouglas Hi Geoffrey. Love your short fiction: ~ how many pieces do you write in a year?
Geoffrey I would have said that I don't write very many stori3es-- I basically write only when I have some spare time--
Gardner TRDouglas: Not enough of them! [g]
Geoffrey but when I look over my publications, turns out that I write about three stories a year.
TRDouglas Yes, Gardner!
Gardner What stories do you have out this year, Geoff?
Dan Do you ever think of doing a novel?
Geoffrey Let's see-- this year I have "Approaching Perimelasma" in ASIMOV'S, "Outsider's Chance" in ANALOG, a non-fiction piece about Pathfinder in ANALOG, and that's about it.
Gardner Do you have a piece in STARLIGHT 2?
Geoffrey I also will have a story in the upcoming anthology STARLIGHT 2, but I don't think that will be out this year.
Gardner It's supposed to be. I've seen bound galleys already.
Geoffrey Oh. Great. Then I'll be up to my yearly average :)
Absarka I liked "Outsider's Chance" quite a lot. It has an excellent back-story built into it. Is it part of a series?
Geoffrey I'm not sure.
Gardner Yes, where are all the Geoff Landis novels? You're unusual these days in writing only short stories.
Geoffrey I don't write novels, but "Outsider's Chance" has the background of a novel that I haven't gotten around to writing.
Gardner Absarka, it WILL be if you and others write enough fan letters about it in to the magazine! [g]
Gardner Is that a conscious choice, not writing novels?
Geoffrey I may get to it some day. Not really. I just have a short attention span. I love that fast pay-off you get when writing short fiction.
Gardner What about a "fix-up" novel, made up out of three or so novellas or novelettes previously published in magazines?
Geoffrey And also, I write mostly on free weekends, and it's hard to finish a novel in odds and ends of time.
Absarka There's a lot you could do with it. The pilot of "Bessie" can't be incurious about what the Outsider life is like. Might he not feel drawn to explore it?
Gardner I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, you understand, since I'm a short fiction man myself...and I also don't want you to stop writing short stories!
Geoffrey Although some of the best writers in the field have done so, I don't know how.
Gardner What you do is plot a story arc over some expense of time, and then write the novel in sections, one free-standing section at a time.
Geoffrey I like the idea of a "fix-up" novel (who invented that term? I hate it. how about an "episodic novel"?) But I find it hard sometimes to write a second story with the same characters as an earlier one.
Gardner While you're at it, subscribe to ASIMOV'S too, where Geoff Landis also appears! [g]
Absarka Gardner's right. I'm here tonight mostly because you're one of the better hard SF writers working in short form. I look forward to much more.
Geoffrey I've tried doing that recently, thou7
JanCyberC At www.asimovs.com
Geoffrey Thanks.
Gardner You need the same SETTING, Geoff, not necessarily the same CHARACTERS.
Geoffrey Oh!
BlackCyberC LOL
Gardner It's perfectly valid to have the Fix-up novel cover a span of generations, so the lead character in one is an old man in the background of another story.
Absarka Like I said, the world you built for "Outsider's Chance" practically begs for more exploration.
Absarka Take us back there!
Geoffrey I keep thinking I ought to try taking some time off and just writing, but just when I think I ought to be free, one of my projects demands full-time attention.
Gardner If you don't like "fix-up"--I think it's rather negative myself--you can call them "mosaic novels" instead.
Geoffrey There actually is a lot more background in "Outsider's Chance" than appears in the story.
Gardner See? There you go! [g]
Geoffrey Among other things, I was looking for a good economic reason for space piracy.
Absarka I thought as much. What part of it do you think you might look at next?
Dan I have to ask about that fantasy stuff again -- Do you ever write it?
Geoffrey That sounds like a hint.
Gardner Dan, Geoff's first story was one of those hard-to-classify pieces that had both SF and fantasy elements in it.
JanCyberC That reminds me of a question I heard from a friend this weekend, Geoffrey. Which was more exciting? Winning the Nebula or finding out your experiment was going to Mars?
Geoffrey Actually the most exciting part was when the experiment actually LANDED on Mars. That was incredibly exciting. I don't think that anybody actually believed that it would work until they saw it.
JanCyberC So your first love is Science then?
Gardner How about throwing yourself off a 500-foot-drop at the Nebula banquet? Was that exciting? [g]
warpCT lol
NoPainNoGain I'd think refined metals would be one reason.
Geoffrey (Pathfinder, not the 500 foot tower at the Nebulas)
JanCyberC 500 Foot drop?
Gardner Geoff volunteered for volunteer free-fall experiments at the Nebulas. [g]
JanCyberC LOLOL!
Geoffrey It's hard to separate the science from the science fiction. Really, SF is probably the reason I was interested in science in the first place. I'm a poster child for Hugo Gernsback's theory of SF!
JanCyberC Great!
Gardner "If you build it, they will come."
Absarka "Send this boy to space"
Geoffrey OK. I'm going to have to log off in about five minutes or so.
Gardner To explain the above remarks, Geoff went bungee-jumping at the Nebula Banquet a few years back.
JanCyberC Folks...any final questions?
Geoffrey For those of you who weren't here in the beginning, I should mention that I am logged in from Takasaki, Japan. I'm an invited speaker at a conference on radiation effects in semiconductor devices from space.
Gardner What's your next short story going to be, and when am I going to see it?
Geoffrey Real soon now, Gardner!
NoPainNoGain :::bows deeply to Geoffrey.... falls on face:::
dreamer [g]
Gardner What do you think is going to be the hot new area of scientific study in the opening decades of the next century?
Absarka Radiation effects FROM space, or In space?
Geoffrey I am afraid to confess that I think that the hot area of science in the next century will probably be biology. When I realize that the human genome is about to be decoded, I find it hard to believe that this won't have some incredible results.
Gardner Still time to switch specialties if you bone up! [g]
NoPainNoGain Not combined?
JanCyberC Genetic engineering is our next big step? As in Old Los Angeles?
Geoffrey I hope not!
Gardner What if, when they decode it, it says "POST NO BILLS"?
Geoffrey Although you can think of the "Old LA" effect as being evolution in action.
JanCyberC LOL.
Gardner Or perhaps it says, "IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU'RE TOO DAMN CLOSE!"
NoPainNoGain strange we thought the LA effect was where okies went to marry none strangers
JanCyberC when you're not in Japan.
Geoffrey Thanks. Sorry I have to run--There's a talk on single=even burn-out in epitaxial bipolar transistors coming up--
Gardner Hot!
Geoffrey Thanks for joining me, everybody. It's been a lot of fun chatting
warpCT Thanks Geoffrey :o)
BlackCyberC Thanks Geoffrey!
JanCyberC ACTION applauds
dreamer :::pok pok pok:::
JanCyberC Geoffrey...thanks so much for joining us this evening. Your website is a wonder! Hope we can get you back out here with us sometime...
Gardner Thanks, Geoff! Have a good time in Japan!
JanCyberC Good night Geoffrey!
BlackCyberC Bye Geoffrey
dreamer siyonara...geoff
Dan Thanks Geoff!
Absarka Thanks, Geoffery. I'll keep watching for your name in ANALOG - and ASIMOV'S too!
Alex Thanks Geoff!
TRDouglas Good luck Geoffrey
NoPainNoGain Night Geoffery! THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gardner You have been assimilated. Resistance is futile.
JanCyberC LOL!
TRDouglas hehe
dreamer [g]...LOL
Geoffrey domo arrigato, everybody. Sayonara.
