Do Scientists Write Science Fiction?
A history of the literary side of space scientist Dr. John S. Lewis
Over the years as I watched space scientist (and husband) John Lewis write textbooks and other non-fiction books about space, I wondered how he’d ever find time to write his favorite fiction genre, science fiction.
He and I met in 1963 on a blind date. I had sworn off blind dates, but my friend was leaning on me, and I said yes.
An unusual date
A few weeks later, on our third date, I learned that John loved space. Never had any woman been treated to such a date. After dinner, on a clear, cold November night in Hanover NH, he took me on a walk that ended at the college observatory.
This was the darkest possible place on campus, the place with the best viewing. His plan was to hang out there and look at the night sky, to lie on the ground there with the heavens spread out before us and talk about the many discoveries waiting to be made, when the space age finally arrived. Someday.
Pointing skyward, he named everything: stars by location, color, and type. The Moon. And the planets that were visible that night: Jupiter certainly, and Mars, and maybe Saturn. And the backdrop, the Milky Way, which I was not certain I had seen, never having had access to such utter darkness before.
What a vision of the future he had! He was particularly excited about NASA’s plans for a Grand Tour, in which if a spacecraft were launched at just the right time,10 or so years in the future, that probe would be able to swing by several planets, one after the other.
We’d see the planets close up. We’d take photos and send them electronically to Earth. We’d take samples, maybe.
We’d learn so much.
I didn’t realize that without the data, the numbers (the amounts of chemical elements in the atmospheres, the temperatures and pressures), we knew very little. Space probes were critical, and expensive, and we didn’t have the technologies yet. It could take years. Decades and more.
A new sort of vision
We had both grown up interested in rocketry. I had a short-lived rocket club in 5th grade, its brief life due to no one else being interested in rockets. I wanted to build one, but how? Rockets were in the news in that post-war era. Neither of us can remember our first introduction to them, but Werner von Braun was a household name even when we were kids.
John kept track of each rocket launch as the years went by, both American and Soviet.
We were in high school when the first Sputnik was launched. Two years earlier, when John was graduating from 8th grade, he gave a talk in which he predicted that before their class graduated from high school in 1958, a man-made satellite would be launched into space. He was laughed off the stage.
And he was right. Sputnik I was launched on October 4, 1957. Which I know by heart — which every older American may know — because it was such a huge event in our lives.
Sputnik changed everything for us. Science education became more robust, which meant excellent high school chemistry classes. Separately, he and I both fell in love with chemistry in high school.
His passion for rocketry was a challenge for him: He had no idea what the entry point might be wherein he could have a career in rocketry. After that chemistry class, he thought he might have the answer: He could work on developing propellants.
But as we lay looking at the fall sky that night in 1963, I hadn’t yet thought of the exploration of deep space. More compelling to my mind, and more immediate, was Kennedy’s promise to land a man on the Moon within a few years.
But John’s vision was different: he hoped that the huge expenditure it would take to get to the moon would not prevent the far more informative Grand Tour from being funded.
John’s vision was like none other I had heard. We were still in the era of blow-ups on the launch pad, rocket after rocket. I hadn’t looked beyond that.
But that night his dream became mine. Once smitten, it made me anxious that such a launch would be so far in the future, and that it might not happen at all. The road ahead was paved in stumbling-blocks, not only due to politics and funding issues, but also to the technological challenges that hadn’t yet been solved.
But I knew I had to be part of this story. It was a better story and more visionary than the vision of going to space I was already familiar with, the one based on the science fiction I’d read as a kid. And as if it were fiction, a story, I had to know what happened next.
John and I were married within the year.
Embracing the story
In science fiction, overcoming gravity, traveling long distances, visiting other planets and even other galaxies, was managed briskly and with no worrisome details.
It turned out that John had read a lot of SF, and reading SF was something I could do to catch up. Our first year together I gathered up a pile of his science fiction paperbacks and dug in.
Until then, Jules Verne was the only SF author I’d read, but I was quickly introduced to Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and others.
I never thought these were realistic in any sense. Well, who knew back then at the dawn of the Space Age whether they were realistic. No one knew what the surface of Venus was like (see C. S. Lewis’s Venus in Perelandra) or who lived a life of intrigue and power elsewhere in our galaxy or beyond (Foundation books by Isaac Asimov).
It’s what we had. We got a taste of possibilities: other types of worlds, the vastness of space, things that were different.
John, who had read them all, was determined to find out what the real universe was like. Starting with exploring our Solar System.
John received a broad classical education at Princeton, including majoring in chemistry — because chemistry was the key to rocket propellants. But there were no courses in the planets there, even in the astronomy department where he earned a minor.
Doing something about it
John went on to graduate school and earned a PhD as a space chemist, an unheard of specialty. He taught first at MIT, where his appointment was to the Chemistry and the Geology and Geophysics departments. To teach about the planets, he had to create a never-before taught course. (The Geology and Geophysics department’s name was changed the following year to Earth and Planetary Sciences.)
Years later, he taught and did research at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
Part of his job as a professor was research. For that he needed facts, data. Such as from probes that would penetrate the cloud layers of distant planets and reveal what lay beneath. In other words, the Grand Tour (and other expeditions).
In 1969, a year after John became a professor, the first Moon landing took place. A few years later, the Voyager pair of spacecraft were funded.
The Voyager program was similar to the Grand Tour, but reconfigured. The first of the Voyagers was launched in 1977.
Vision on paper
John’s research, based on all available data, yielded professional papers, about 130 of them during his career. And since he and a few colleagues around the world were founders of new scientific disciplines, he had to write the textbooks for the new fields: The Physics and Chemistry of the Solar System, Planets and Their Atmospheres, Asteroid Mining 101.
Later he wrote popular-science books on the same subjects for the lay audience: Mining the Sky, Rain of Iron and Ice, Worlds Without End, Space Resources: Breaking the Bonds of Earth (on which I am a co-author).
For years he consulted for NASA and for private space companies. It’s a long story. He frequently attended space-science conferences around the world, and served on various rocket-company boards. Later on he found himself in Beijing on Chinese English-language TV explaining Chinese satellite and astronaut launches to the world, from launch to landing, days at a time.
What if?
And then finally, in between things, he began to write science fiction.
Often his full-length SF concerns time travel, alien stories, and alternate histories, also known as ‘what-if’ stories.
My favorites are his WHAT-IF stories. Why what-if? Maybe because it describes our nearly 60-year history together. We were there. We saw the successes and failures, the excitement and the disappointment, the amazing discoveries that were driven by necessity, and because of vision, like John’s.
Here are some of the what-ifs he has written about.
What if it is 1870, when radio is limited, computers don’t exist, and a giant civilization-threatening asteroid seems to be on track to hit Earth several decades in the future? How would that one bit of knowledge change the progress of science and engineering, computers, and international relations over the intervening decades? (A Rending Clash of Worlds: The Astronomers, by John S. Lewis.)
What if your memories of the past allowed you to communicate with the folks you knew back then? Would you tell them about bad things that had happened so they could intervene and change the course of the future? (It Takes Me Back To When, by John S. Lewis.)
John is a real scientist. His SF is based on real science, as much as possible. And it’s not that big a stretch, to go from science to SF (and back again). Today’s SF becomes tomorrow’s new findings and solutions and technologies. It’s a visionary’s tool for communicating what’s coming to his audience.
What if we — the people of the US — hadn’t funded the Grand Tour? That’s a story for another time. Because it wasn’t funded, not exactly. But what did happen is one of the amazing stories of our time.
Just the other night a meteor shower, the Perseids, was predicted to be one of the most spectacular of recent times. The Perseids showers each year are due to Earth passing through the debris from a comet that passed by, now somewhere out at the edge of the Solar System, as it orbits the Sun. That’s how we know when to expect it: Earth is at the same place in its orbit each year.
John and I went out on our warm Tucson patio to see if we could enjoy the show. The sky was amazingly clear, for the moment with no monsoon clouds to block the view. We grew tired of standing with our necks craned, so I got a blanket and we lay on the decking and held hands and watched.
Nothing! We learned the next day that the Perseids were off schedule this year: they had arrived a day early. It’s ok, space scientists reported: Jupiter had exerted an influence on the debris field and thrown off the schedule
Mosquitoes found us rather quickly that night, and we took one last look and went in.
It is almost 58 years since that cold night in Hanover. Since then we’ve enjoyed the night sky together in Tucson, New Zealand, and Cape Breton Highlands. We’ve seen meteor showers, comets, and with the naked eye, seven planets in our own Solar System. And we’ve asked a lot of what-ifs.
What if I’d said no to that blind date?
And what if the Perseids are on schedule next year? Let’s not forget to go out and look.
If you do read John’s SF (or his non-fiction), please consider leaving him a review. Thanks.
Peg Lewis is a novelist, science writer, and world traveler. She likes to write about stimulating locations, such as the Pacific Northwest (the Always Maggie Series about Old Love — Maggie Awake, Maggie Alone, Maggie At Last, and Becoming Ernest) and the Desert Southwest (the Songdog series, in preparation). She also co-authors books (fiction and non-fiction) on space with her husband, well-known space scientist Dr. John S. Lewis.
