Michael Hanlon, editor, and writer of science fact and fiction

Michael Hanlon is the Science Editor at the Daily Mail. He has appeared on TV and radio and headlined several science festivals. His fourth popular science book, Eternity, was released in 2009. Most notable of his others, at least to sci-fi readers would be The Science Of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Macmillan, 2005).

And for my Seattle readers, he's coming your way later this month. Science: Michael Hanlon: Science’s Unanswered Questions



AW: Especially in your chapters concerning how the future might look on an individual level, I could name all the stories or novels in which I read those very premises. I'm guessing you're a SF fan yourself. You mentioned David Brin's Earth. He's one of my favorite authors, though I haven't read that one. Might have to rethink it now.

MH: Earth, written 21 years ago, had a lot of 'hits', including an almost spot-on prediction of how the Internet would develop in the early 21st Century, and the increasing concern about environmental degradation. Considering nothing dates like the future, Earth has held up pretty well I think.

AW: Who are your favorite SF authors?

MH: Clarke, Brin, Baxter, Asimov, Aldiss, Pohl, Heinlein, Stapledon, Wells, Verne, Ballard. The greats. I have never much gone for anything with elves in it, however.

AW: Have you ever considered trying your hand at it yourself?

MH: Yes indeed. Some of the chapters of Eternity are sci-fi. I am working on a novel right now, and have had a short-story (my only attempt thus far) published in Nature.

AW: You mentioned the devastating numbers of people lost to wars and the population explosion on the same page. was this an intentional placement? Like controlled fires saving the forest? No one would ever want to say that war is a good thing, but were you, in a read-between-the-lines way, suggesting it might be a necessary evil?

MH: No, I wasn't thinking of that. It is interesting that throughout the 20th Century, war had little impact on the inexorable rise in population. The best way to regulate the number of people is not by killing them but by providing better education for women, and giving women economic freedom. Where this has happened, population growth rates have more or less always dropped off a cliff.

AW: Flying cars mentioned a lot (pg 100 was 2nd or 3rd mention. At least 3 more by 115. When did you first fall in love with them?

MH: When I was 3. I am still cross that I don't have one. I use the flying car as a metaphor to represent the futures that could never be.

AW: On page 110, you wrote: Finally, there is the possibility of some wholly new technology: artificial microbes that turn sunlight into gasoline, huge space mirrors, or some way of harnessing the vacuum energy. Can you elaborate on the first one at all?

MH: Craig Venter is working on an artificial microbe to do just that, or at least something very similar. It is early days, but synthetic genomics has huge potential to change the world. We shall see. My point is that world-changing technologies often come out of the blue. No one really foresaw atomic power nor even steam power until they were almost upon us.

AW: My husband LOVES airships. We went on a airship trip around the bay (SF bay) on Airship Ventures' Eureka. It was wonderful. You mention them as a possible future airliner: There will always be a market for flights across the Atlantic in six hours; but throw in enough comfort and enough greenery and a cruise taking a day or two for rhe same distance should not be too much of a hard sell. On shorter routes, airships make even more sense. What are the barriers? What about solar flares and other types of radiation? I know this is a concern for planes now. What happens when we use photovoltaic cells on an airship? Or would it charge up on the ground? How would it hold the charge?

MH: I would love airships to replace planes. I would actually be happy for trains to replace planes (which they yet may). But there are problems. Airships are slow ... best-case is 24 hours London-NYC, using modern engines and aerodynamics. I could live with that (go to the bar, dinner, watch a film, the bar - again, bed, wake up in new continent) but most people, lunatics as they are, want to rush around as fast as possible. Airships are also susceptible to weather, and landing in windy conditions is hard or impossible. Solar flares would be far less of a problem for airships than jet airliners as the former fly so much lower. It would make sense to coat the hull with PV cells indeed.

AW: Do you have any words of wisdom on organizing research?

MH: You mean for writing? Random stabs in the dark is the best way, I find.

AW: What are your top five online research resources?

MH: Well, aside form the usual first-port-of-call on-line suspects, my increasingly unreliable memory, various random books, overheard snippets, surmise, conjecture and the wonderful British Library. And those random stabs in the dark.

AW: Can you tell me about your next book?

MH: Yes. It is a science fiction novel, a detective story set 872 years hence, in a decaying and decadent London, although the action stretches from America to China. All with a HUGE twist at the end. Progress is slow. Hopefully it will be finished before '872 years hence' starts to look too current. If I can't make more progress I might just write the twist and let the readers fill the rest of the book in for themselves.

And his 10 Questions Science Can't Answer (Yet): A Guide to the Scientific Wilderness releases later this month.








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Brenda Cooper - writer, futurist, speaker

I first met Brenda at OryCon last year where she received the Endeavor Award for her novel, The Silver Ship and the Sea, the first volume in a series. She just launched the third in the series on November 10th entitled Wings of Creation. The second volume is Reading the Wind. Brenda has also published numerous short stories which have appeared in major science fiction magazines and a number of anthologies. In addition to her own series, she co-wrote Building Harlequin's Moon with Larry Niven, whom she also collaborated with on some of her short fiction.

In addition to writing science fiction, Brenda is a technology professional currently working as Chief Information Officer for the City of Kirkland, WA., a futurist and board member on the futurist board for the Lifeboat Foundation, and a public speaker.

But this busy lady still had time to drop by SFOO for a chat. (photo by Joe Merkens)



AW: When and how did you first become fascinated with the future?

BC: My father is a rocket scientist – literally. He worked at Douglas Aircraft during the Apollo program, and that got me interested in science and rockets. I’ve always been interested in how the world works, and that led to wanting to understand how we would use science in the future. Then in the mid-90’s, I met the professional futurist Glen Hiemstra, and he has been a bit of a mentor for me on this. He has a site up at www.futurist.com with some interesting articles and a great blog if anyone wants to check it out.

AW: What advice can you give to a new writer about producing three-dimensional, complex characters?

BC: Watch people, listen to them. When I get stuck and wonder what a character might do in a situation, I often write a first-person journal entry from their point of view. I don’t keep lists of character traits, but I do imagine my characters in different situations and sometimes I talk like them when I’m writing.

AW: How did your collaborations with Larry Niven come about?

BC: Steven Barnes, who has also collaborated with Larry, has been a strong influence in my life since the 80’s when I met him in California. I met Larry when he came up to work with Steve on Saturn's Race, and had various opportunities to talk with him at other conventions. Eventually I showed him a story and he knew how to fix it. That became “Ice and Mirrors” which was our first published collaboration. Most of our work was in email and from a distance, and a lot of our early email exchanges were captured in the book Scatterbrain. I was truly lucky to have that opportunity.

AW: How do you find the time to write while still holding down a full time job?

BC: Well, I only write about an hour a day most of the time. Sometimes I get whole days or whole weekends, but most of the time an hour is all there is. But that’s two to four pages, and two to four pages a day adds up. I always have my computer with me, and a journal, and usually some pages I can edit, so if any time does show up, I can use it. Lunches, the hour before work, an hour in a coffee shop on the way home (Yes, it’s a cliché, but it works). I don’t let myself sleep until I’ve written at least 500 words a day, which is 2 pages. Most days I do more.

AW: Can you tell us about your involvement with the Lifeboat Foundation?

BC: The Lifeboat foundation is essentially a large group of people gathered from science, science fiction, politics, futuring, and other disciplines that is hoping to stave off the kind of event that might lead to the current movie “The Road.” So the group looks at everything from asteroids to climate change to disease. My part is much smaller than I’d like it to be – primarily because of my time. So mostly I read lists and sometimes comment, but I would like to do more.

AW: I noticed some of your works now have a Kindle version. Do you own a Kindle and find it helpful?

BC: I love my Kindle. I don’t buy everything on it yet, but I like the portability and the idea that I can hear about a book and be reading it five minutes later. It’s very easy to read on, and disappears in my hand the way a book does.

I belong to a reading group (not writers – just readers) and they try to make sure all of the books they choose are on the Kindle. I think the transition to ebooks is happening pretty fast, faster even than the move to digital music (I can’t remember the last time I bought a CD). I still love the physical form of a traditional book, especially a really pretty one. I just got Leviathan and practically swooned over the cover. So I love my Kindle, but I don’t like the idea that we will eventually lose physical books.

AW: Where do you think we're headed with information and media storage?

BC: It’s all going to be on the net, and we’ll make our own backups on our devices, but the net will be the primary. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook – hard to tell where. Maybe a blend. But we want information to be always available and that’s the place to achieve that.

AW: Is there a dark side to this glut of information at our fingertips?

BC: Yes. That’s a very insightful question, by the way. There are so many inflows of information in my life, that it’s hard to decide where to put my focus. Personally, I find it really seductive to skim along the intertubes and not really think about a problem. I’m easily distracted between Twitter and Facebook and my iPhone and the internet and and and … and so I sometimes don’t focus enough on the hard problems. This scales from me the individual to the society at large. Right now we have a lot of opportunity, but we have problems like climate change and population and nuclear weapons and the pending clean water shortage that take actual focused thinking. They are enriched by the available information, but I feel like we’re an ADD [attention deficit disorder] society right now, and sometimes I’m not sure we’ll find the focused thinking to solve these foundational issues. That’s really scary.

AW: What are you working on now?

BC: I’m having great fun with a new book series based loosely on the life of Eva Peron. I have a strong female character in a generation ship in the far future, and I’m using that closed-loop environment to play with the idea that one person can be so influential, and also so grey. Eva did great things for Argentina, and she also made awful choices. So I’ve created a society with that kind of class divide, a working class, and a certain ripeness for change. This is different than my other series, which is squarely all-ages adventure science fiction, since I’m working with more adult neurosis and politics and sexuality. It feels like a really big and slightly scary project.

Also, I’m gearing up to work on marketing a new book that will be coming out in about a year. If you remember, when I saw you at World Fantasy, I said that I might have some news. I do. Sean Wallace from Prime Books purchased Mayan December. This is a Mayan 2012 book, but very different from the movie that’s out now. The Yucatan Peninsula is one of my favorite places, and I’ve actually set a number of stories there (including one available now in Steampunk Tales #2). I created an adventure in the Yucatan across two timelines, and mixed it up with a little science, a little magic, a little legend, and a lot of research. I’m really excited that Sean liked the book, and so I’m trying to decide how to gear up to tell people about it and help them see it’s different than the apocalyptic 2012 books and movies I’ve seen out so far.

Learn more about Brenda and her works at www.brenda-cooper.com.


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