“The point Is, diving straight into a sun is a rare thing In the Service. It doesn’t happen every trip. I thought someone ought to tell you.”

°But, Mr. Whltbread, are we no about to do exactly that?”

THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, 1974

FOREWORD

PLAYGROUNDS FOR THE MIND

When every page has been read and the book has been put down, is the story over?

Some stories flow onward through the reader’s imagination. Some authors leave playgrounds for the reader’s mind. That was what charmed me about Andre Norton’s stories: all the endings were wide open. I could close the book and continue moving further into the unknown.

As I grew older I began demanding endings.

As a writer I learned that endings are not so easy. They do make better art; at least most critics would say so. Poul Anderson is king of the powerful ending. . . but when his story is over, the playground remains.

Something should be left behind at the end of the story. There are characters unkilled, and actors who never reached the stage. Esoteric technologies. Alien ecologies. Worlds. The laws by which the universe behaves. The playground.

I knew it long ago: I’m a compulsive teacher, but I can’t teach. The godawful state of today’s educational system isn’t what’s stopping me. I lack at least two of the essential qualifications.

I cannot “suffer fools gladly.” The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can’t handle being interrupted.

Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page.

I knew what I wanted when I started writing. I’ve daydreamed all my life, and told stories too: stories out of magazines and anthologies, aloud, to other children.

One day my daydreams began shaping themselves into stories. I wanted to share them. Astrophysical discoveries implied worlds weirder than any found in fantasy. I longed to touch the minds of strangers and show them wonders. I wanted to be a published science fiction writer. I wanted a Hugo Award!

Money formed no part of that. Science fiction writers didn’t get rich. (Robert Heinlein excepted. Kurt Vonnegut excluded.) I used royalty statements to keep score: how many minds had I reached?

I had my Hugo Award three years after I sold my first story. Among science fiction fans one becomes a Grand Old Man fast. Now what?

Now: become a better writer. I’ll always have things to learn. In my earlier novels almost nobody got old or sick. I still have trouble writing about the things that hurt me most.

But I’m learning.

I used to get allergy attacks. Alcohol, dry air, lack of sleep, or any combination could cause me to wake up blind and in pain, with deep red eyes and puffy eyelids. I had to use a humidifier, or go to sleep with a wet towel.

I stopped smoking in August of 1987, and the allergy attacks went away.

And they’d be none of your business if I hadn’t made it all public. I gave the allergy to Gavving in THE INTEGRAL TREES and Rather in THE SMOKE RING, for story purposes, and I had to nerve myself up to it. I still have trouble writing about what hurts me.

Also, parts of my life are private. My computer erases my early drafts, and that’s fine. My mistakes are not for publication.

Writing is the ideal profession in many ways. It’s not always easy, but— You set your own hours.

You’re being paid to daydream.

In psychoanalysis you would hire a professional to listen to you. You’d have no idea whether he was seriously interested. You’d operate on his schedule. The most you could expect from him is that he’d force you to face the truth about what you’re saying.

But a writer has several tens of thousands of psychoanalysts. He knows they’re listening because they’re paying him for the privilege. Writer and reader both set their own hours. And he will seek the truth within himself, because more realistic writing is more convincing.

This feedback to the author: it’s rare outside of fantasy and science fiction.

A few years ago, while the Citizens Advisory Council for a National Space Policy was in session in my living room, I snatched a moment

to read my mail. Then I ran in to announce, “Hey, I just got a love letter!’’

It sure was. A woman in Britain wanted me to write a congratulatory letter for her husband’s birthday. He was a fan, and she was in love.

Hard science fiction in particular is a game played with the readers. They try to spot my mistakes. I see mathematical treatments of the dynamics of neutron stars, design alterations for the Ringworld, detective story outlines for Gil “the ARM” Hamilton. I get a constant flow of letters from strangers to keep me current on transplant technology, Bussard ramjet possibilities, black holes, magnetic monopoles. There are songs about the Motie Engineers and Lucifer’s Hammer, sculptures of Pierson’s puppeteers in every conceivable medium, and paintings of the Ringworld.

All of this is proper use of playground equipment. A reader need not be satisfied just to read the book. He paid his way in; he can stay as long as he likes.

I know where to go to talk a story over, to be admired, to get criticism, to meet my peers, even to ~o some business. There’s always a science fiction convention going somewhere.

I was never sane until I became an established writer. So why do some writers go crazy?

There are occupational hazards.

It’s lonely. How many professions are there such that you spend most of your working time alone with the door locked? (Terrorist, maybe. Does Stephen King qualify as a terrorist?) A nice view from your window is a liability. An interruption from your loved ones can break a valuable chain of thought.

Collaborations? Not everyone can stand to share a dream, and nobody in his right mind would collaborate with a novice, not even another novice.

Writing is a collaboration with the readers. I sensed that long before I wrote my first real collaboration. It goes like this: Somebody out there, thousands of somebodies, are entertained by the same things I am. They like to play in their heads, and I’m out to help them. I’m writing a dialogue between me and the paying public. I’m not really alone in here.

The money is lousy. After you’ve got a few books in print, and if they’re any good, you’ll be paid for them forever via royalties and foreign sales. But you really need to be born with a trust fund to survive the first several years.

Gene Wolfe says that what an aspiring writer generally wants is to quit his job. Gene argues that his job frees him to write what he likes, and spend as much time as he likes on any story—which to Gene is important,

as he’s the world’s prototype nitpicker—and he can do it without worrying about deadlines.

I wouldn’t know. I was born with a trust fund. And now I don’t need it, but I lived off it for the first ten years of my career.

Marijuana is death on writers. I’ve seen several go that route. Typical behavior for a long-time marijuana user is as follows. He gets a story idea. He tells his friends about it, and they think it’s wonderful. He then feels as if he’s written it, published it, cashed the checks and collected the awards. So he never bothers to write it down.

Alcohol can have the same effect.

The suicide rate is high among writers. Maybe you have to be neurotic to write and sell your first story. H. Beam Piper’s agent had neglected to send him a check. Piper may have felt that his work was no longer popular, since he thought his story hadn’t sold, and he needed the money, too. For us, love and money may be nearly indistinguishable.

“I suppose I’ll say this again sometime,” Steve Barnes said, “but I just love being a writer!” We were finishing up “Achilles’ Choice,” a novella, “the story we were born to write.” And yeah, it was fun.

Too many would-be writers are really would-be authors. They want to have written.

But a writer can pay moral debts by dedicating a book. He can put friends in his stories, changing them to suit his whim. The feedback can be wonderfully soothing to the ego. There’s the opportunity to sound off without being interrupted.

I suppose there was always a fanatic inside me, demanding to be let loose; but I was lazy. I didn’t get fanatical about anything until the organ transplant problem entered my soul.

If organ transplants become easy and popular, who are the donors? Condemned criminals have already donated their eyes and such to hospitals. The Red Cross must ultimately see the obvious, that a man on death row could donate five quarts of blood as easily as he faces the gas chamber.

The problem is this. While Jack the Ripper has five quarts of healthy blood in him, and a working heart, lungs and liver and kidneys, the same holds true for a political dissident, or a thief, or for a man who gets caught running six red traffic lights within the space of two years. You can go too far with this!

I wrote “The Jigsaw Man” two years before the first successful heart transplant. It seemed to me that nobody else had seen the problem, nobody else was worrying about it, and I had to sound off. Then came the heart

transplant in South Africa, and suddenly a dozen doctors’ ,groups were studying the ethics of the situation.

Maybe I was worried needlessly. We could have been executing criminals by exsanguination for these past ninety years, and we haven’t done it. I’ve had to find other things to worry about, and when I find them, I sound off.

Nuclear power plants! Do they scare you? Are you afraid they’re shooting out atoms at you?

Look: I write books with a man who is afraid of heights. Jerry Poumelle can tough it out if he knows what’s coming. I’ve followed him along a ledge no wider than our feet, with fifteen Boy Scouts following me, and our backpacks unbalancing us toward a twenty-foot drop.

I asked him afterward, How? He said, “You just do it.”

But . . . Bob Gleason took us to the top of the World Trade Center for a drink. Self-involved, I didn’t notice Jerry’s unnatural silence in the wavering elevator. We got to the top, got out, and moved down some shallow steps toward floor-to-ceiling picture windows. I turned from admiring the magnificent view to see Jerry frozen in place.

“Go ahead,” he said, “I’ll be right with you.”

He joined us in a few minutes. He said, “I remember being at the top of the Statue of Liberty, and being terrified. Now there I was looking down on the Statue of Liberty like a toy!”

I have never once heard Jerry suggest that people should be forced to stop building skyscrapers.

Nuclear is the safest power source we’ve got—with two exceptions, neither of which is being built. If some folk are terrified of unseen death by radiation, then let ‘em deal with their own neuroses, instead of forcing us to stop building the atomic plants.

Hence the nuclear plant in LUCIFER’S HAMMER, defended by the heroes and attacked by environmentalists who have turned cannibal. We’ve been accused of preaching in that book. I’m shocked, shocked, that you would accuse us of such a thing.

We preach for a viable space program, too. Of all the excellent reasons why we should be going into space, the danger of a Lucifer’s Hammer is not even the best. But—When I was growing up, the mystery of the dinosaurs had everybody’s imagination. They had ruled the Earth for about thirty times as long as mankind. Then, poof. I remember a certain contempt on the part of the popularizers. The dinosaurs couldn’t hack it. Something changed, and they lay down and died.

Okay, they lay down and died. But what hit them, apparently, was a medium-sized asteroid, a nickel-iron mountain nine kilometers across

or else a much larger comet nucleus, mostly ice, carrying the same tonnage of nickel and iron and rock. Picture Lucifer’s Hammer, only big.

What have we got that the dinosaurs didn’t? We’ve got telescopes to

see it coming. We have the potential to control the solar system, to push the dinosaur-killer out of our path. And we’ve got William Proxmire, and NASA.

Then again . . . now and again, I could be wrong. It’s one reason I wouldn’t tell—for example—Ralph Nader to shut up, even if I could make it stick. It takes a lot of people to hold civilization together; some of us are only here to ask the right questions.