#nu luna

l-r Larry Niven, Andrew Biscontini

In October of 2013 I had the good fortune to be a panelist at the second annual San Diego Comic Fest, thanks to the efforts of my friend and publisher Wyatt Doyle of New Texture.  Major thanks also to Mike Towry, Clayton Moore and everyone else involved with the fest for hosting such a fun event and giving a first-time SF novelist both a chance to interact with a lot of great people and a seat on the dais with some of the most brilliant and talented professionals in the field of comics and science fiction.

For a small con, I found myself torn between concurrent awesome stuff I wanted to see and hear surprisingly often.  But missing out on great shit because of other great shit is what they call one of them happy problems, and every panel I checked out was engaged, engaging, informative and relevant to the state of the arts and the business they exist in, and I was proud to be part of an indie delegation that included Wyatt, Sandee Curry, the great Kate Danley and Henry Baum. 

It also gave me the opportunity to sit on a panel discussing the current state of the private development of the moon with writer and aerospace engineer Blaine C. Readler, John Trimble (who along with his wife Bjo is credited with getting Star Trek on the air in 1966 and naming the first space shuttle the Enterprise), and legendary SF writers Larry Niven (whose Ringworld books and Integral Trees I consider essential to the genre) and Jerry Pournelle, who, in addition to collaborating on numerous seminal hard SF works with a roster of some of the best heads in the game, is generally regarded, by me at least, as the visionary thinker behind the idea that brought about a peaceful end to the Cold War.

Absent any false humility, I have to say that, intellectually, sitting me next to Jerry Pournelle strikes me as a little bit like sitting Bugs Bunny, fresh out of a hole in the ground and noshing on a carrot, next to an F-16: each highly effective but in very different ways and contexts. 

Anyway, Niven showed up and was seated between us just as Pournelle was about to shred a couple of my book's (acknowledgedly theoretical) precepts, and I think the resultant exchange of perspectives and ideas was worthwhile, if disappointing to anyone looking for news of an imminent permanent habitat: the takeaway I got was that space elevators are probably the way to go for regular access to low-Earth orbit, robots are great in vacuum but have cost limitations, there’s no American political will to set up shop first, and the investment is still so enormous that there’s no return on it in sight. 

Niven and Pournelle both seemed to feel that a sufficiently wealthy and unrestrained individual is the missing essential element to spearhead the necessary technological progress, and while I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong, the notion struck me as being somehow very 20th Century.  But I can’t think of any other notion having supplanted it, unless it's the subjugation of human culture to profit algorithms, which would suck.  I recommend Walter Tevis’s The Steps of the Sun on the subject, which Wyatt tossed me a copy of outside the excellent 5Ave books in San Diego.

Anyhow, the whole reason I wound up there in the first place is that I wrote a science fiction novel called nu luna (I’d put it toward the middle of the the SF Moh’s scale) which is set on the moon 400 years after colonization and concerns the problem of the unquantifiable in a highly quantified society.  nu luna is now available as both a trade paperback and an ebook.

I didn't snap enough pics while I was there, but here's a red carpet roll that Wyatt grabbed: