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KNOWLEDGE IS A MIND-ALTERING DRUG

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I sometimes suspect that one of the reason writers write is that it gives them an excuse to do the research. In an age when people are constantly being urged to be goal-oriented and efficiency-conscious, and get sent by their firms to seminars to learn how to manage their time, it's easy to develop a guilt complex over reading anything other than a company procedure manual. But I find the most enjoyable reading is that which is purely for fun or out of curiosity—with no conceivable relevance to making money, furthering one's career, or with any other such redeeming quality whatsoever. One solution to any residual guilt from company indoctrination is to be a writer. Then it becomes possible to relax and enjoy whatever one pleases, rationalizing it by the thought that "Who knows? I might need if for a book one day."

I remember once, when I was in my teens, a friend accused me of never being bored by anything—which can be an unforgivable aberration among teenagers. I had never thought about that, but it seemed worth investigating. I resolved, therefore, that to test the allegation, I would force myself to read for one hour on the dullest subject I could think of. I couldn't think of anything that sounded more dull than Greek architecture, and so, when I was next in the public library, I took down a couple of formidable-looking tomes on the subject and steeled myself. It turned out to be fascinating, and I ended up staying until closing time.

It's easy to get carried away, sometimes. Voyage From Yesteryear featured a huge, fusion-powered spacecraft, with a population of tens of thousands, that traveled to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us. The entire structure rotated to simulate gravity, and at one point I was writing a part of the story that included a conversation between a boy who was born during the voyage, with no experience of planetary gravity, and his father, who grew up on Earth. To the boy it was self-evident that a thrown baseball moves in a straight line, and the hand of the catcher is carried in a curve by the spin of the ship to intercept it; but the notion of something going up, reversing, and coming down again made no intuitive sense at all. Then, having written that much, I found it difficult to convince myself that a baseball trajectory as seen by somebody on the inside of a spinning structure would look like the curve of one thrown up from the ground on Earth. I spend a whole week deriving from first principles a set of equations to transform curves from fixed to rotating coordinates and drawing graphs of the results—the simulation of "real" gravity turned out to be surprisingly close. Then, of course, I had to write the procedure into computer programs "in case I need to do it again some day" (I never have). That took another week. And after all that, when I finally edited the draft, I deleted the paragraphs in which the conversation took place, because by that time it didn't seem so important.

The Proteus Operation required a lot of research into modern history and World War II, the beginnings of nuclear physics and the Manhattan Project, and on the biographies of the several real-life people who appeared in the story. There was a six-month gap between my writing the prologue and Chapter One—a result of getting carried away again.

When I was writing Inherit the Stars back in England, I received a lot of help with background material from my customers. One of them was a physicist at Sheffield University, called Dr. Grenville Turner, who used one of our computers to analyze moonrock samples from the Apollo missions. On one occasion, while we were eating lunch on the campus lawns, I mentioned the idea of having the moon captured by the earth, as is described in the book. Gren though for a while as he munched a sandwich, and then said suddenly, "You're dead! It won't work."

"Why not?" I asked him.

"Stromatolites."

"Never heard of them."

Stromatolites turned out to be a kind of fossil coral found in Australia that preserves records of the tides from hundreds of millions of years ago. Stromatolites show that lunar tides have existed since the beginnings of Earth's history, and therefore the moon couldn't have arrived comparatively recently in the way the book said. I eventually managed to fudge that around in such a way that it actually became supporting evidence for the capture theory, but the reason I mention it here is that it led me off into a new line of research on the ancient Earth and the processes that have shaped it into what it is today. I believe that much of this kind of thing is taught in schools these days, but it was all new and fascinating to me, because, as you may recall, the curriculum that I took hadn't been updated since the days of King James the whichever. Some other readers may not have met this in school, either. So, for them—or maybe anyone interested in finding out if they can be bored, if it sounds like that kind of subject; but they may get a surprise—here is a distillation from the notes I compiled. They're not doing anyone much good in the bottom of my filing cabinet.

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Framed