About 11 years ago I’d done a lot of writing but the only payment I’d received was something like 1/5 of a cent a word or payment in contributor’s copies. Still I considered myself a writer.

So one day I’m in the club house of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, and Larry Niven walks in. When Larry walks in, you understand, he is completely surrounded by the people there. It’s like he’s a god, and this is his domain.

I walked up to him and said: “Hello, Mr. Niven, my name’s Steven Barnes, and I’m a writer.”

He took a puff on his pipe, looked at me and said: “Okay, tell me a story.”

I just about died. But it so happened I’d sent out a story earlier that day about a compulsive gambler who pawns his pacemaker, and somehow I stumbled through it.

After that we started talking. He seemed kind of reserved, but even then I could see he was still in touch with his child-personality. I could especially see it in his eyes. In some ways it was as if the beard and pipe were props to convince you that, yes, these are the badges of adulthood. But back there were these little boy’s eyes.

I asked him if he’d read a story, and he said he would, and the next week I gave him an envelope containing three. I saw him the week following and asked if he had read them, and he said, yes, Jerry Poumelle and he had both read them. He said he was intrigued and asked me whether I’d be interested in looking at a story he’d tried writing ten years before and hadn’t been able to complete to his satisfaction.

Thank God the problems with the story had nothing to do with astrophysics or any of the technical things that Larry is a master of. They had to do with the way the human beings were relating to one another, and I was able to fix it.

We’ve been collaborating ever since.

The imperative for men in our culture is that they must go out and create—work, produce, change the land around them. Now people often think that it’s easy when you have a lot of money handed to you as a kid, as Larry had. All that does is say to you that the chances are very good you’ll never live up to the man who created all that wealth.

But Larry created a career separate from anything his family had handed him. He could have taken their money and lain by the side of the pool and vegetated or put it into land or condominiums and made a lot of money. And, indeed, he has made money off the money his father handed him. But the most important thing Larry did was to go out and define a whole new world. If his world in California had already been conquered, then Larry would create new worlds to conquer and people them with his own creations.

—from a conversation with Steven Barnes