So what you think your role is as a writer, given this kind of technology? Have you tried to put that into your books and make people aware?

Well, a writer of any kind responds to the life around him. And being trained in philosophy and history and knowing what I know, I respond to human life in that way. A writer responds to what he finds of interest or what he observes. And I think it's incredible that we have, in the 20th Century, well, ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818, that we have a literature that is actually responding to significantly different changes. That we should have this literature at all is remarkable, and yet commerce occupies it, so the focus is on entertainment and adventure. Which I don't mind, but even as adventure and entertainment it's terrible. If you look back 50 years in science fiction, some of the entertainment stuff is better.

It's entertaining now but for a different reason than was originally intended to be.

Yes, and yet by inherently critical, I mean that if you read science fiction at an early age, the first thing you know when you read, say, Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space — a beautiful space opera, better than Star Wars. The first thing you notice is, hey, the real world may not be what my father says it is. And you know what I mean, that things might be different. So it's inherently critical, inherently mind opening. Even the junkiest junk says it's going to be different.

What unique challenges come with writing Star Trek books that can stand on their own and yet are part of another person's world, Gene Roddenberry's world? Is that a challenge?

All of that science fiction, what I call visual or media science fiction, all comes originally from print SF. Star Trek comes from The Way of Space, and Men, Martians and Machines by Eric Frank Russell, and a wonderful movie in 1956 called Forbidden Planet (ph), which Roddenberry acknowledges as being the first Star Trek episode. So I already know what Star Trek, what the visual media science fiction is and where it comes from.

Many of the young directors, especially of some ambitious films, don't like to hear that, because they think they've done it all themselves. And they haven't. They're getting it almost by osmosis. Like Philip K. Dick has permeated all culture. And so people come up with a Philip K. Dickian movie, and they think they've invented it. If Philip K. Dick were alive, he'd be laughing himself silly.

Chad Oliver, for example, an anthropologist who wrote beautiful science fiction, the two Cocoon movies are basically Chad Oliver in the conception, in that people orientation that he had. The critics said he always touched the human problems regarding contact with the aliens.

So all of the visual stuff comes out of written science fiction, although there are some people now who have been working with it long enough, for example, the people who made the new Outer Limits episodes. That was about six years ago now. And there's no new ones, but they'll be on DVD. But they've actually managed to work over ideas in original teleplays, some of which are quite original, even if they came from older ideas.

So it's not always going to be print media. It may go backwards the other way. There will be people eventually who will write original science fiction for the screen that will be every bit as good as the print has been. In fact, I think some of them are actually bypassing writing novels and stories, and they're writing directly for the screen.

But again, commerce will occupy their efforts. And I think of science fiction as an occupied country, you know, occupied by money, you know? And ask yourself what do I mean by that? Money is an ulterior motive. Now, something is made for an ulterior motive, published for an ulterior motive, what is it?

Now they claim, of course, that sometimes good things get published also. And that's because their tyranny is not perfect. And so some good things get through. But generally, when they close the doors, you're finished. And how they close the doors on you is you don't sell enough copies, they don't publish you. Which means worthy books don't get published.

I had an editor at HarperCollins tell me once that, "George, the quality of your books has nothing to do with whether we publish them."

And I said to him, "Go to the mirror every week and say that to yourself. Then try not to laugh."

What are you reading now? Which authors are you reading now?

What am I reading? I read very strange things. Sometimes I read things that are 50 years old, because they interest me. Strangely enough, I'm reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov in a new translation which is utterly different than Dostoevsky has ever been. It's called The Brothers K. And I'm reading it very slowly. Dostoevsky wrote more like Jack Kerouac and jazz musicians than Tolstoy, which is the way he's been translated.

I've also been going back and rediscovering certain science fiction writers like Edmund Cooper, a novel like A Far Sunset or Seed of Light. A little bit of vanity in that, because I said to myself, "Gee, it's not unlike the author of Brute Orbits."

I try not to read my contemporaries too much, because you don't want to go trend sniffing and checking out your competition. And then everything becomes that kind of consensus adaptation. You adapt to what is. As I was saying in a panel earlier, you should not adapt to what is. You should be individual. And if all the advice given to writers is indeed, you should adapt to everything good, I think Vonnegut said it beautifully. He said you've got to write a book that nobody will ever want to read. And he doesn't really mean that. What he means is write it for yourself so that it will be so individual that it will be what they want to read.

I can think of one contemporary whose work that you read, sitting at this table [Pamela Sargent]. I asked her from her point of view how your relationship informs your writing.

Most science fiction writers are also fairly good editors, and they do a lot of editing. As you've seen, we've edited many books. And what has happened, then, is that she puts on her editorial hat sometimes and tells me that that's terrible. And I do the same thing. So we try to use that function, the editorial function, on each other when we can. We don't read it for fun.

Now, I did not read Climb the Wind. Some day I will read it for fun, because it's already been published. So however it is, it has to be.

She was telling me that you understand what a writer needs to do.

Well, it looks most of the time like you're doing nothing. But you're actually working.

I hate to say it, but there are many writers who have very little to say and they don't think about what they do. They put their energies right into their work. I don't know if that's better or not, but I always like to think I understand what I'm doing.

What are you working on now?

Well, I just did the proofs for "Piano Full of Dead Spiders," which is a short story.

And I've just delivered my next short story collection, Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts to the Golden Gryphon, and it will be published next fall. The major story, "Black Pockets," is original to the book. I've never sold it or published it anywhere else. And the others will be stories I've collected from various magazines over the years. And they're more horror oriented, although horror can be science fiction.

For example, there's a political story in there about Fidel Castro, called "I Walk with Fidel" about a zombie. And there's another story called "My First World," which is set in the Brute Orbits background.