The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson Page B

with a hard idea can be tough. It makes you feel stupid. But I have learned to ignore that and grind on, and so it’s not so bad once you get in the habit. I don’t much like dealing with editorial comments, but truthfully, my editors now are so good that that part is not so unpleasant either, because it’s helping the book and that always feels good. I like readings. I don’t like the wasted time associated with business travel, but this is not a very bad thing either. I guess I mostly like all of it. I don’t like people telling me what fiction is or is not, in the sense of what I can or cannot do (see below).
    Do you research and then write, or do the two overlap?
    I usually research as I am writing, on a need to know basis. If I did my research first, I would never get started writing. I call this the Coleridge Problem, because he listed all the things he would need to learn before he could write his epic poem, and he never wrote his epic poem. And I find the research is so much more effective when it is specifically to support a particular scene or chapter. So in the Mars books, the Years of Rice and Salt , and the climate books, I researched as I wrote and it worked very well to suggest to me what the scenes needed, or better, how they could be extended or made even more interesting. It’s a good stimulus to fiction, researching on the fly.
    Where did the idea of Years of Rice and Salt come from? That’s got to be one of the great UNDISCOVERED high concept ideas of SF. Mostly we recycle old ones (apocalypse, first contact, etc). Was that a ‘eureka’ moment, or did it just leak in from somewhere?
    Thanks, I like that idea myself. It came to me in the late 70s, and it was indeed a kind of AH HA moment, in that I was thinking about alternative histories, wanting ideas, and thought of the one for “The Lucky Strike” too, and looking over the alternative histories I decided what was needed was the most major change you could think of, that did not simply change the game so much that it wiped away everything. Because you want comparison. So that Harry Harrison’s novel in which dinosaurs evolve to high intelligence instead of mammals, is an alternative history in a way, but not—useless as such, because the comparisons are invalidated by the fact that the difference there is too huge to be able to play the game. So I was thinking, well what would be the biggest change that would still work in terms of comparison to our history, and it seemed to me that Europe’s conquering the world was so big that if it hadn’t happened—and then it hit me, and I said Wow and ran to write it down quick before I forgot it and ended up wandering around moaning saying I had a good idea, I had a good idea but I can’t remember it now, it won’t come back—which has sometimes happened to me.
    So, once I had the idea, I knew I couldn’t write it, that what it implied was beyond what I was capable of expressing. I wondered if I would ever be capable of such a thing (I have a couple of good ideas I’ve never written because I can’t think how to yet), but after the Mars novels I figured I had worked out the method, and I was feeling bold. I’m glad I wrote it when I did; I don’t know if I have the brain cells for it now. Although that’s partly that book’s fault, because I blew out some fuses writing that one that were never replaced.
    Antarctica. You were there. Was that scary, or just fun?
    It was fun. I was having fun every waking moment, and I seldom slept. It was so beautiful, and alien; like being on another planet.
    I did have one scary twenty minutes, when we were in a Kiwi helicopter, pilot about twenty-eight, a real vet, and co-pilot about twenty-four, and we were trying to fly around Ross Island’s north end to get from Cape Crozier back to McMurdo, rather than taking the straight route around the south end; and we were flying