All Episodes
Previous Next
May 10, 1996 - Art Bell
01:17:18
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Jerry Pournelle - Comets
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you all good morning.
From cactus country to the Hawaiian and Tahitian island chains, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the pole, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
And I'm Art Bell.
Hello.
Well, I've got a lot to tell you about.
Something you're going to run and want to get your calendar for, I'm sure.
And I would not have believed it was possible.
But I did give it a try.
And I am amazed.
Coming up this next Wednesday, May 15th, at 1 o'clock in the morning Pacific Time.
Richard Hoagland in debate with Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
It's kind of going to be the radio event of the century.
And I make no predictions about its outcome.
None.
But you wanted it.
You got it.
Richard Hoagland wanted it.
He got it.
And I will tell you a little bit about the genesis of this.
Richard Hoagland As you know, he's been on my show many, many times, and now Dr. Edgar Mitchell with a recent appearance, and Richard Hoagland has done a lot of work to try and prove, to show, that there are large glass structures on the moon.
We've had him on the show many times, and then we had Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut on, and he basically said, green cheese and bologna.
In response to Richard's work.
And so earlier in the day today, I called Dr. Mitchell and offered him a debate with Richard Hoagland.
And his initial comments withheld.
He said, no.
I said, okay, fine.
That's kind of what I expected.
And then he said, oh, wait a minute.
Maybe I've been a little hasty.
Let's do it.
So I said, fine.
Let's do it.
So I suggest you mark that one down on your calendar.
Richard Hoagland and Apollo 14 astronaut, the guy who stood there, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, together, for at least some period of time, May 15th at 1 in the morning.
And I want to thank both of them for accepting the opportunity.
And I need not tell you how interesting it's going to be.
Now this evening at about twenty minutes, we're going to have a brief guest on the program.
As you know, I'm a science fiction aficionado.
I love it.
One of the first science fiction books I ever read was One of my favorites remains one of my favorites to this day.
And it's called Lucifer's Hammer.
Well, guess what?
We've got the co-author of Lucifer's Hammer, Dr. Jerry Parnell, as a guest coming up in about 20 minutes here.
And I'm really looking forward to that.
I read Lucifer's Hammer, I don't know how many times.
It is one of my favorite topics.
For those of you who have not read it, it is a book About an asteroid and the Earth.
And we'll talk more about that, and I know Dr. Purnell is working on a new book right now.
We'll talk to him about that as well.
If he's willing to talk about it, we'll see.
So, there's a little bit of what's coming up on the show, both next Wednesday and this evening.
Otherwise, we will have open lines during the night tonight.
You all know by now about Operation Purple Star, the biggest, actually the biggest war game that has been played most recently with tragic results.
50,000 US and British people involved.
Biggest actually in a decade.
Two helicopters collided.
And there are 14 dead, 14 dead marines as a result.
That was at Camp Lejeune, which is where I was born, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
And it's pretty awful.
A CH-46C Knight helicopter transport collided with an AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter, both great big monsters.
There was, uh, at the time, darkness.
Night vision goggles were in use.
I'm sure many of you have seen some of the coverage of some of the faults thought to be contained, um, when using night vision goggles.
The misperceptions.
That may or may not be part of it.
We don't know yet.
IR today's helicopter crash brought back painful memories for me.
Eighty-one, I was a naval corpsman attached to the Marine Air Wing in Tustin, California.
One evening while I stood watch in the sickbay, the crash phone sounded.
It's like the one today.
Two choppers had collided, gone down.
Seven marines died in this one.
One survived.
I'll never forget the sight sounds, especially the smells that terrible night.
So there's going to be a lot of investigation.
They're going to try and determine whether military planes and aircraft helicopters are kept in the same kind of condition as civilian.
There's some indication that the military craft Ron Brown was flying was not, safety-wise, anywhere near ready for civilian standards.
Awful tragedy at my birthplace.
The House has passed adoption benefits.
You adopt a child, you get a $5,000 tax credit.
For families earning up to $75,000, somewhat less for those to $1,515,000.
Colby's autopsy results are back.
to one fifteen hundred and fifteen thousand uh... colby's uh... autopsy results are back no foul play
indicated the state department says the clinton administration has
decided against imposing sanctions on china
for the alleged export of nuclear weapons related technology to pakistan
Ooh, isn't that something?
State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns says no sanctions are needed, because China has now agreed to make no such sales in the future.
How many of you think we can trust the Chinese?
Raise your hands.
A newly declassified U.S.
intelligence document says that Nazi leaders plotted in the waning days of World War II, get this, a post-war return to power in Germany.
The document refers to meetings in 1944 between Nazi leaders and top German industrialists to plan a secret post-war international network to restore the Nazis to power.
Can you believe that?
That sounds just like something out of a science fiction novel.
You know, the Nazis are back, but they almost were.
So it seems what man can imagine, more times than not, occurs.
Tonight, an hour ago, Reuters.
Is it a bat?
Is it a witch?
Is it from Mars?
We only know this much, it is furry.
Has big, bulbous eyes, and sucks the blood of goats and other creatures.
The mysterious vampire-like creature known as Chupacabra has gripped the fevered imaginations of many Mexicans.
Now people hear.
While government officials appeal for calm, enterprising trinket sellers have jumped on the bandwagon with Chupacabra t-shirts, key rings, and so forth.
In Tijuana, they're offering tours of sites allegedly linked to the creature.
This is Reuters I'm reading you about an hour ago.
Some say it is extraterrestrial.
Others say drought in Mexico's northern states has driven bats, wolves, and coyotes to carry out the attacks.
Witnesses say it sucks their blood until they die, leaving telltale puncture marks on the neck and other mutilations.
One man, so far, has been attacked in Mexico.
Two bite marks.
And so the mystery of La Chupacabra continues, and certainly, folks, begins to deepen.
This, last night, No, check that.
Art, I thought you might like to know the Goat Sucker is now in Arizona!
Last night on the news, Channel 3, they reported that El Chupacabra was seen in Tucson, Arizona last week.
A boy woke up to see it in his room!
After he screamed, the creature jumped through the window, breaking it as he did.
Really?
Can you imagine that nightmare?
I mean, when you're little, you jump under the covers frequently enough to avoid imaginary monsters.
How'd you like to have El Chupacabra show up in your room?
Good Lord.
Then this.
Aren't they at a teaser for the 10 p.m.
news here in Los Angeles on Fox, Channel 11?
One of the stories they talked about was about what in the world is killing small animals?
They showed about half a dozen dead rabbits with big holes in their necks.
Is Chupacabra here in L.A.?
And all we have is rumors of the fact that some Mexican cowboy may have killed one.
It is claimed.
A powerful concoction of illicit drugs, dubbed homicide, dubbed homicide, on the streets sent 116 of the drug abusers into Philadelphia hospitals.
Philadelphia, I said.
An official with the Philadelphia Department of Health said most of those admitted Thursday night had been released.
But several people remained in the hospital.
He said the drug killed five people in Philadelphia in February.
Lewis said the drug was analyzed as a concoction of heroin, cocaine, Scopolamine, I guess it is, which is used as a sedative or hypnotic, vitamins, and a cough suppressant.
Health Department officials said that for about seven hours Thursday,
drug users with overdose symptoms were being rushed to Philadelphia hospitals.
Huh.
It gives me the heebie-jeebies, folks, to talk about something and then have it come true before my eyes.
You know what we talked about the last few days, and then all of a sudden, boom, here we go.
So, there you've got it.
And again, I want to remind you, because it will be the event of the century, it's going to be interesting.
Um, this next Wednesday at one o'clock we're going to have Richard Hoagland and Dr. Edgar Mitchell here.
And it should be, it should be something indeed.
I've got another newspaper article here.
This time from the Oregonian.
Yesterday, entitled, Militias Draw Up Plans for War.
and so it is uh... confirmation of the story that i've been giving you for the last couple of days about what lies
directly ahead with regard to the militias and i'll try and get to that
this morning as well Howdy Art!
Have you heard about the Creation Cannibal?
Rodney Hines, a California resident, was recently arrested on charges of stealing And eating the remains of four people, Hines explained to police that he believed doing so would enable him to live forever.
Unlike Jeff Dahmer, Hines did not kill the people he ate.
In fact, what he had stolen was cremated ashes.
Hines ingested the ashes by sprinkling them on regular food.
Seasoning, I guess, huh?
And by snorting them.
After hearing Hines bragging about his immortality scheme, an acquaintance tipped off the local police.
The authorities in Chico, California had been investigating the disappearance of several urns from a local cemetery, and they made the connection.
Gives a whole new meaning to the idea of having a friend for dinner.
The full story is in our Enigma section in Periscope.
See you in cyberspace.
Indeed, cyberspace.
If you would like to join us in a chat, you may do so.
It'll be a lot of fun.
What you do is go on America Online, right now, click on keyword, no keyword, and enter the word periscope.
That's P-A-R-A-S-C-O-P-E, periscope.
Then when you get to Periscope, you go to the Grassy Knoll.
Don't you like that name for a chat room?
The Grassy Knoll.
Where I guess you can all lurk.
And I'll probably be in there in a bit.
So, AOL, Periscope area, then the Grassy Knoll chat room, and it's a big gathering every night now, and you'll enjoy some people that listen to this program, and the comments are ongoing about it in there.
Let me give you the appropriate telephone numbers to call when we get to that.
The first time caller line, for those that never have ventured forth, is area code 702, 727-1222.
702, 727-1222.
The wild card, direct dial lines, area code 702, 727-1295.
1295.
West of the Rockies, it's one...
1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
six one eight eight two five five one eight hundred
1-800-825-5033.
six one eight eighty-two
east of the rockies one eight hundred eight two five five zero three three
one eight hundred eight two five
five zero three three
if you're outside the good old u s of a get ahold of your eighteen t
uh... u s a direct operator or get the u s a direct number for your air
country 800-893-0903.
800-893-0903 800-893-0903
Well, okay, when I was a youngster I say youngster
I was really, um, on the island of Okinawa at the time I'm-
I read Lucifer's Hammer.
It was a book about a collision with Earth of an asteroid.
It's one of the better science fiction books that I've ever written.
It was co-authored by Larry Niven and Dr. Jerry Parnell.
And we're going to have Dr. Pornel here in a few minutes.
And it captivated me.
It originally sparked much of my interest in space and topics of this kind.
It simply riveted me.
And I'm kind of curious what book Dr. Pornel is working on now.
And what he thinks about all the rather Recent close visitations of comets and asteroids and meteorites and all the rest of it, I mean, there really has been a lot.
The modern version of that might have been Without Warning, which also was, I thought, one of the better television shows I had ever seen.
It was a modern version.
Without Warning was the modern version of Lucifer's Hammer.
So we're going to explore all of that here in a moment and talk with Dr. Pornel.
I think you'll find it absolutely fascinating, and I recommend you stay right where you are.
Pass the word, folks.
It'll be Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the man who stood on the moon in Apollo 14, and Richard Hoagland, Wednesday at 1 a.m.
Pacific Time.
You don't want to miss it.
We'll be right back.
This is the end of side one.
Thank you.
And now it is truly a great honor to have Dr. Jerry Purnell on the show, who co-authored many years ago with Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer.
Doctor, welcome to the program.
Hello.
Hi there.
I've been on this show and In years, huh?
When you say this show, I guess you used to be on with Ray Bream on KBC and LA.
Yeah, that's right.
It's sort of the Insomniac hour on Friday nights.
Doctor, I'll tell you what.
We're almost going to have to ask you to switch to a phone.
I know it's not going to be as good for you, but the audio is just not coming through.
Okay, thank you.
Uh, he's got a headset there.
Is that better?
Oh, that's very much better.
Alrighty.
Yes, much better.
And, um, Doctor, many years ago, your science fiction book, Lucifer's Hammer, was the first sci- it's what introduced me to science fiction.
It's what got me going, and I've been a fan all these years.
Well, that's terrific.
Um, and it's just, I think it's one of the best works ever done on the subject.
Uh, for those who haven't Ever read it?
It's a classic, and would you give them a brief outline of the premise of Lucifer's Hammer?
Well, Lucifer's Hammer starts off with a comet.
It's in fact, it starts at a Hollywood party.
And an amateur astronomer has just discovered a comet, and having a good time telling everybody about its coming, and it's going to come close to the Earth.
Well, as time goes on, It turns out it's going to get a lot closer than they thought, indeed.
It turns out it's going to get very close, like it's going to hit us, or pieces of it are.
And that's the first half of the book, is that it's coming.
The second half is what happens afterwards, because it makes an unholy mess of things.
Well, you know, it was strangely prophetic in a lot of ways.
We have had a lot of very recent close calls in the last few years.
Oh, yeah.
I remember, I think it was 89, wasn't it, that they announced sort of the day after, gee, a big one almost hit.
Well, that was a big meteor, which in fact, I guess, came closer than the moon's orbit, which is That would have made a mess, not quite as big a mess as Lucifer's Hammer.
With Lucifer's Hammer, we exercise some storyteller's art in there.
Instead of a thing that fried a whole lot of the earth, or maybe all of it at once, we broke it into chunks so that there was enough left that you could have a story afterwards.
Right.
Which may not be the case in real life.
Well, you never know.
I mean, we now know that about every, well, It's not generally known.
The Earth is hit by about 20 megatons worth of energy every year of foreign objects.
That's a lot.
20 megatons.
That is a lot.
But most of it burns up in the higher atmosphere and you don't know about it.
Every now and then you get something like the Tunguska event of 1905 in Siberia.
Where a stony asteroid went off with about 10 megatons of force at maybe 10 or 11,000 feet.
Fortunately, that happened before we had all these nuclear weapons poised to blow each other up or somebody, which you couldn't have told the difference between the one and the other.
The Russians could easily have thought it would have been an atom bomb, except that it wasn't, of course.
If there was something coming our way, evil comet, asteroid, whatever, do we have the ability, in your opinion, everybody always asks this, to stop it?
Do we have the... If you mean... No, we do not.
If you mean could we have the ability in the sense that could we do something that would... now that would let us be able to do it in the reasonably near future, yes.
But we don't have any strategic... we don't have any It surprises most people in this country that we have no missile defenses, as an example.
To speak of we don't, do we?
We have none!
Zero!
If we knew that a missile had been launched from Libya to land in New York City, or the Chinese recently said that if we interfered with their operations in Taiwan that we really Wouldn't want to do that because Los Angeles is more important to us than Taiwan.
You're an enemy.
The official that said that has since disavowed it.
But if we saw a missile launch from China at Los Angeles, all you'd do is run and you'd have about 20 minutes.
We wouldn't shoot it down.
We have nothing to shoot it down with.
So you wouldn't run that far?
You wouldn't go that far.
That doesn't mean we couldn't do it.
We know how to do these things, it's just that we don't deploy them.
Alright, well what about something that would be coming at us that we would have some days or even weeks warning about?
Days or weeks doesn't do it.
It would take a couple of years to develop the capabilities to get to space fast, basically.
If you had a crash program and you threw everything at it and you tried to do it, who knows?
I am sort of an unofficial advisor to NASA on a lot of things, and I know something about our capabilities.
If you just went all out for everything, you might get something out there.
What you're trying to do, of course, is to get enough explosive force at the center of gravity of whatever's coming at you to aim it in a slightly different direction.
Well, if it was an iron, a piece of iron... You wouldn't see it.
You wouldn't see it?
You wouldn't know it was there.
That's the problem.
Again, if you had space-based radars looking, it's not indetectable in theory, especially something like a large iron asteroid.
We know one of those hit, and by the way, it wasn't all that big.
You know Meteor Crater in Arizona?
Yes.
Yeah.
That was an iron asteroid, quite small, under 100 feet in diameter.
Under a hundred feet.
Wow.
It was quite small.
You know, when there was a company formed to go mine it, thinking that anything that made that big a crater would have to be a lot of very valuable nickel iron down there.
Right.
Turned out there isn't much.
It wasn't very big.
It just was a lot of energies moving very fast.
Tell me, if Shoemaker-Levy 9, the pieces from Shoemaker-Levy 9, had hit Earth instead of Jupiter.
It would have been just about like Lucifer's Hammer.
The result would have ended up about like that.
You'd have big tidal waves, lots of coastal areas flooded, mud showers all over the place, salt rain ruining crops.
All right.
Well, what I've heard, Doctor, is that we will not see the one in all likelihood that would hit us because it would be coming directly at us and that would prevent astronomers from getting a good look at it.
Is there anything to that?
Well, that's again not necessarily the case.
You'd need to look from space.
Yeah.
What you really need, if, you know, every ten million years, approximately, something really big hits, I'll give you a number that will surprise you.
Your chances of being killed by a large object from space are approximately the same as your chances of being killed in an airplane crash.
Well, that's... Which is to say, it's a low probability event for any individual.
But in the case of a large object from space, while it's a very low probability event, the number of people that it'll kill is a very high number, if you see what I mean.
I do.
Doctor, did you happen to see on television what I thought was the modern version of Lucifer's Hammer, which was called Without Warning?
No, I didn't see that.
What a great flick that was on television.
But I'm more concerned with reality.
Have you heard of a...
Yeah, there are a bunch of them.
I used to be on the board of directors of the Lowell Observatory, and we'd get briefings on what they know about it.
It is, about every ten million years, something big hits the Earth.
It's in that range.
And by big, I mean big compared to meteor crater is small.
I mean big.
I mean like the Gulf of Mexico type big, or Hudson's Bay type big.
What would that do to the Earth?
I mean, generally, aside from... It would make a great big mess out of things.
You're talking about the release of enormous amounts of energy.
It would turn the lights off.
That's probably what would kill the dinosaurs.
Well, if it could kill them, it certainly could do... It wouldn't do us any good.
You'd have about four years with almost no crops.
You'd have to try to live and... I mean, think of four years of winter.
No, it's unthinkable.
It would destroy the economy of the world.
The economy would be gone.
Some people would live through it, but you wouldn't have much crops.
You wouldn't have much economy.
You'd just... A great deal of the electrical generating structure would be gone.
So that you're not going to grow stuff under light.
You're talking about... Well, I don't know.
When Lucifer's hammered, I think we figured something like a quarter of the population survived.
Maybe that.
Maybe less.
Does our solar system, I'm not an astronomer, but does it move through areas of greater density of these objects?
That appears to be the case, yeah.
And again, that, you know, you got me on the exact numbers, but we orbit the center of
the galaxy with a period in the millions of years.
And some parts of where we go appear to be richer with debris out there and so forth
and others.
The premise of your book that an amateur astronomer discovered Lucifer's hammer, that is in fact,
it seems like the way comets are.
Yeah, professional astronomers spend most of their time looking with great big telescopes
at very far away objects.
There are a few observatories like the Lowell that spend a lot of time looking for smaller
objects and solar system stuff.
But most professional astronomers aren't interested in anything that's under a billion light years
away nowadays.
Great.
Great.
And how much do you think our military is actually doing in terms of having some sort of radar that could see in?
Not very much.
They'd like to, but the trouble is that the administration has interpreted the Strategic Defense Treaty, which was made with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which no longer exists.
Right.
But even so we are honoring this treaty which with an entity that isn't there that has greatly limited the strategic defenses and most of the things that could be used to defend against meteors would clearly be very useful in defending against large So you wouldn't be able to delineate between the purpose?
Well, not really.
I mean, if I've got something that can shoot down things coming at us, then it will obviously do a better job of getting the close ones than it will the ones that are far away, do you see?
Well, I can almost see the committee and Senate hearings that would be held after something hit.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Why didn't we do it?
Well, this, that, and the other.
I mean, people would be impeached.
Well, that's assuming that the Capitol survived so that you could have Yeah, well, yeah.
By the way, I'm supposed to push a book.
Oh, I want you to push a book now.
Yeah, Higher Education by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Purnell, which is a Jupiter's book series from Tor Books.
The imprint Jupiter belongs to Charlie Sheffield and me.
Higher Education?
Higher Education.
It's a young adult book and it got Tremendously good review in Booklist just this week, so we're quite proud of that.
So they can get it in major bookstores?
It will be shortly.
I think it's not quite out, but it's like a week or two.
All right.
Are you working on a book now?
Several, actually.
Several?
Devin and I are doing one that is set some 12,000 years ago in a universe in which magic works.
This is the fall of Atlantis type of thing.
I see.
And I am at present finishing another young adult for this Jupiter series that's my own called Star Swarm that, I don't know, it may be the best thing I've ever done.
Really?
Well, I like it anyway.
What's the premise?
Uh, it's, uh, you have to have faster than light to have this happen, but it's an alien life form that is very different.
Have you been hearing all the recent stories about this strange creature they're calling Chupacabra?
No, I don't think so.
Very strange animal that is killing goats, taking the blood.
Very strange.
Showed up first in Puerto Rico, then South America.
No, I have not heard of that.
Now in our country, yes.
Very, very strange.
It's an animal?
It is some type of animal, yes.
Like a bat or a...?
Well, it's described to be about four feet tall, with red eyes, a lizard-like appearance.
Great heavens!
Yes, yes, indeed.
I don't know a thing about it.
And what, these things are running wild there?
Well, they're killing animals, and strangely, there are two bite marks, and all the blood is gone.
You mean like a vampire?
Like a vampire.
Two marks on the outside of the neck.
This is a natural phenomenon, not a supernatural thing.
A lizard-like creature?
I know nothing about it.
Where would... No, I'm afraid you've got me by surprise on that one.
Okay, well, that's fine.
You may want to look into it.
It's a pretty strange story.
It sounds interesting.
Wow.
It is, yes.
Is this something more solid than Bigfoot?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
Nobody has yet caught one, but many, many, many, many hundreds of animals have now been hit.
Huh.
Very strange.
That is very strange, and I must say that I haven't seen a bit of it.
I'm astonished.
Doctor, what do you think the possibility or probability is that there is extraterrestrial life?
Anybody, anywhere, other than ourselves?
Yeah, I understand.
The best answer to that is Enrico Fermi's question.
Fermi, one of the guys that helped develop the atom bomb and so forth?
Yes.
Fermi was famous for his little seminar dinners, where he would have his graduate students over to dinner, and they would discuss things, and then he would ask a question at the end of his dinner.
And one night, the question was this.
If you assume that the galaxy consists of 100 billion suns, and 1% of those could have planets, And 1% of those planets could possibly support life, and 1% of the ones that can support life do, and of those, 1% of those have life that's a million years older than we are, so would be more evolved.
You are still talking about billions of planets, do you see?
So where are they?
So where are they, yes.
Why have the aliens not got here?
And the problem is that on any set of rational assumptions, if there is extraterrestrial
life out there, they should have been here.
Already.
Perhaps they have been.
Yeah, well that's that.
Bob Bussard says, well, yes, they've been here and we're them.
That people didn't actually evolve on this planet, that we were put here by somebody.
The DNA evidence is becoming clearer and clearer that that's probably not true.
Well, there is quite a bit of mounting evidence that man has been here or some form of man has been here before.
Yeah, that's kind of Bob Lessard's argument.
That's one.
Another one is that I wrote a series called Janissaries, which is being reissued from Bane Books, by the way.
I think Isaac Asimov once said that there is no possible explanation for the notion that aliens, beings powerful enough to get here, across interstellar distances, if they wanted to remain hidden from us they could remain hidden from us.
There is no explanation for why we would see them at all if they didn't want us to.
Right.
So why haven't they, so if they've got here and they haven't walked up, you know, landed on the The White House lawn or in the U.N.
Plaza, then it's because they don't want us to know it, and so there's no reason why you would ever see them.
And I got thinking about that and realized that Isaac was at Boston University and not there for very long, was mostly a writer.
He'd never been around, let's say, out in Pasadena on the night after final exams at Caltech, has he?
So I got to thinking, suppose that the reason that they don't want us to know about them, because they're a bunch of professors of anthropology and they're, you know, they're examining us, right?
Yeah, oh yeah.
But their graduate students get drunk and put on a show for the locals every now and then.
So that's why you sometimes see a flying saucer.
I see.
I don't claim that's true, you understand.
I merely, but certainly, as I pointed out to Isaac, at least that's a possible explanation.
You can't tell me there is no possible explanation here.
Indeed.
Doctor, we're very near the top of the hour here.
Love to have you for another half hour if you can stick around.
Sure.
Glad to.
One thing that I would like you to think about during the break is there was something called the Brookings Report, which I would imagine you're familiar with, that says that the American people are not ready They are not ready to accept the fact that there is a greater intelligence or that there would be anybody from elsewhere with a greater intelligence.
Yeah, sure, but the people that wrote that are eggheads.
Well, some of them do radio talk shows, and with the calls I get, I wonder if the Brookings Report might not be right, but we'll talk about that when we come back.
All right.
Stay right there.
Dr. Jerry Parnell, co-author with Larry Niven of Lucifer's Hammer, one of the greatest
science fiction novels of all time, and we'll be right back.
All right, back now to Dr. Pornel Dutton.
Doctor, I wonder if it would be possible for you to give us kind of a brief resume of yourself.
Well, get as old as I am, I've done everything.
I got started off when I was in the Korean War, so that'll tell you how old I am.
Okay.
As an artilleryman.
And then I used to run the human factors program for Boeing back in the late 50s and early 60s.
And then come to California in 64 at the Aerospace Corporation.
Went over from there to North America and I was part of the Apollo program, that sort of thing.
So I did a lot of aerospace operations research work and human factors work, that sort of thing.
And then I was Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles.
I was actually Executive Assistant to the Mayor, but it was the same position in Yorty's time in 69 and got out of City Hall and decided to act with it.
and try to make a living writing it, and I've been doing it ever since.
Were you surprised at the great reception that Lucifer's Hammer got?
Well, yeah, it was at the time when it was...
They had a big book auction on it, and it was the first science fiction novel that ever
got paid any large amount of money.
It was about a quarter of a million dollars.
Oh my!
That is the largest amount of money that had ever been paid for a science fiction novel
in history.
From Fawcett Books bought it, from the paperback right.
And it was 15 weeks as number two on the bestseller list.
During those same 15 weeks, the Thornbirds was number one on the list.
And then that woman had the nerve to go write the best historical novel I've ever read in my life after she kept me off the Best Seller half being number one on the Best Seller list.
We never made number one with Lucifer's Hammer.
We were number two for 15 weeks.
We got number one with a book called Footfall a few years later.
Well, I can tell you this.
It was magic for many of us and got us started in science fiction.
Well, thank you.
It does seem to have had some influence in its time.
It was a big survivalist book back in the days when survivalism was... when we thought World War III might really happen and people really paid attention to Having places on the Rogue River and keeping camping outfits and that sort of, that kind of thing.
It may be coming back into vogue.
Yeah.
Yeah, it could be.
Um, there have been, uh, a couple, there are a couple things I want to talk to you about.
One is, um, something that I've noticed doing talk radio over the years.
And that is, things are quickening.
Socially, economically, politically, almost every way you can imagine.
Even earth changes, earthquakes, and all the rest of it.
Uh, there seems to be more of it all going on, and it seems to be happening faster.
So we're, we're headed, it seems, like some, uh, toward some sort of change.
It could be.
Of course, as you get more people and you get... The communications are better, of course.
I mean, when I was a young man, they had a big tornado in Tupelo, Mississippi.
I was in Memphis, and we saw people being brought up to the Memphis hospitals on flat cars from the railroad.
There were that many.
But nationally, almost nobody knew about it.
Today, that would be on television, if you see what I mean.
Well, yeah, I think you're right.
The pace of bizarre happenings is picking up.
It is also the case that more of them get reported.
It's true.
How do you feel, you'll recall the Unabomber and his manifesto which called, which decried technology and the march of technology and the fact that we're not keeping up with technology and it will eventually ruin civilization.
How do you feel about that?
Well, I think that you have no choice.
Well, that's true.
One of my friends is Wendell Berry, who is a farmer in Kentucky and wrote a wonderful book called Another Turn of the Crank.
Wendell has much the sentiments that many people have that these huge agro-businesses, there's not very good farming, but I'm not sure what you do about it.
Uh, if you try to go back to the old family farm concept, your farm productions will fall fairly rapidly, and food prices will either go up or people will start starving, or both.
In a sense, we have built ourselves into a box, haven't we?
In a sense, we have.
And the American people are not, you know, if you could conserve your way into prosperity, Bangladesh would be the richest nation on earth.
Let's take a few phone calls and let the audience ask you some questions.
Are you up for that?
Sure.
All right, good.
Everybody out there should know the numbers.
Here we go.
On the wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Purnell.
Hi.
Hi there, Art.
It's good to finally talk to you.
And to you.
I'm a big fan of Jerry and of your show.
Where are you, sir?
I am in Sherman Oaks, California, listening on KABC-AM.
Very good.
And sorry about that.
One thing I wanted Dr. Pornel to speak on at whatever length he can is the system of propulsion for the ship in football, which was the Orion nuclear pulse propulsion.
That's a very interesting topic for me because I'm a big advocate of space exploration at any cost.
And I just was wondering if you could discuss that at length, or at whatever length you can on the air, and also give me a hint as to what happens after footfall, because I've always wanted to know.
All right.
Doctor?
Yeah, well, our publisher, the late Judy Lynn Del Rey, always wanted us to do a sequel to footfall called Harpinet for President, in which the alien runs for president, the captured one.
The one that had come over to the Dreamer fifth herd.
Orion would work.
The concept was originally put together by Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Studies and Ted Taylor, a nuclear weapons designer.
And you could, with an Orion, put about a four million pound package on the moon in one whack.
What is an Orion?
Basically take a manhole cover, a big one, say in the order of three, four hundred feet across, a big thick manhole cover, put an atom bomb under it and blow it off.
That sucker will move.
And if you keep throwing bombs underneath it, obviously you have a ship on top of you, you have a dome, you have some springs to keep it from shaking everything to death, but you can We have a several million pound spaceship, and in footfall, that's what we do.
In order to try to fight the aliens, we essentially build a space-going, nuclear-powered battleship.
There is nothing in that concept that wouldn't work.
But, you can't do it.
The Treaty of Moscow prevents atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, and you certainly are talking about putting 10 or 15 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere to get it out of the atmosphere.
So it's kind of like putting a firecracker under a can when you were a kid?
It's like putting a firecracker under a can when you were a kid, and then suppose you could keep throwing firecrackers underneath the can after it was in the air.
Fascinating.
And that's all right, and it would work.
It certainly would work, but the best way to get to the moon is the way Buck Rogers did it.
Or to get space the way Buck Rogers did it, which is to say you take a ship You fill it up with fuel, you fly it to space, you bring it back, you fill it up, you fly it again.
Like you do on an airplane.
Instead of these disintegrating totem poles that we use, that basically throw most of the ship away on its way up.
Alright, I had a member of one of those disintegrating phone poles on my show recently, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
He's coming back.
Right, yeah.
When I was the president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, I asked him to be the master of ceremonies at the awards banquet that year.
He came down and presented the award.
Yes, I know Captain Mitchell well.
Tell me, why did we go to the moon, and go to the moon, and go to the moon, and then quit?
Well, you must understand that as the mission planner for Apollo 21, or one of the mission planners for Apollo 21, You will also remember there was no Apollo 21.
Yes.
Clearly, I had some stake in it continuing.
In fact, that's why I left the aerospace business, is that there weren't any more Apollo missions.
The reason we stopped is because we did it the wrong way.
How would you have done it?
Basically, well, I'll even tell you the story of what happened.
When Kennedy proposed that we go to the moon, Art Kantrowitz went and talked to Jerry Wiesner, who was at that time Kennedy's science advisor, and he pointed out that if you really wanted to do it, the way to do it was not to build those huge disintegrating totem poles and do it all in one walk.
You built basically a space station.
And he uses a space station to fuel a ship, and you fly the ship from the space station to the moon, and it comes back, and you would build the structure up, and you could do it fairly routinely, having done that, right?
And it would be reusable.
Yes.
And, Wazer went in to tell Kennedy, and he came back with his head under his arm, basically.
And he said, don't you ever do that to me again, because it turns out the hidden agenda for the prior Apollo program was Lyndon Johnson's price, which was the re-industrialization of the South.
Mm-hmm.
And all of that huge structures built in Florida, and in Texas, and in Tennessee, and Michoud in New Orleans, in Louisiana, and the rest of that was part of the price of the political support of the program by Johnson.
He literally wanted the re-industrialization of the South.
As part of the, as his price for supporting the moon program.
Brother.
And as a consequence, we went about doing it in a way that built a huge standing army of space people, rather than just getting the job done.
Do you see what I'm getting?
I do.
And that hidden agenda has eaten the dream ever since because The shuttle was designed to employ 26,000 development scientists rather than to just go to space and come back.
It does that.
If you think of the shuttle as the full employment act for a bunch of civil servants, What do you see ahead for us?
Are we going to pull away from that political... Have you seen the DCX?
Have you seen the flight of this little ship that flies out in the desert, goes straight up and comes straight down again, lands on the tail of fire like God and Robert Heinlein intended?
Well, I tell you, I live in a place called Pahrump, Nevada, adjacent to or just across the mountain range from Area 51.
So, we see a lot of things... We've been flying this DCX at White Sands for a long time.
Now, that ship was essentially designed in my living room.
The story is fairly well known that in the last part of the 80s, Dan Quayle, the Vice President, was the Chairman of the National Space Council.
Clinton abolished the National Space Council, and thus Mr. Gore does not have that job.
But under Bush, the Chairman of the Space Council was the Vice President of the United States.
And General Daniel Graham and an engineer named Max Hunter and I went to the White House and talked Dan Quayle into building this reusable spaceship, this little DCX that you see on television and everybody where they're
flying the a model of it On the 17th of this month. What are the capabilities of the
DC?
that You understand what they're flying the scale model to
demonstrate the concept Understood a full-fledged single stage to orbit ship
basically puts up somewhere between nine and twenty thousand pounds
In orbit for a century for the price of the fuel Yes, which is to say unlike the shuttle where the flights
are in the order of between a half a billion and a billion dollars a flight for 35,000 pounds
To orbit yeah, you're talking about about somewhere between nine and
19,000 pounds to orbit for a few million dollars not a billion
Wow.
Well, I don't want to get too technical, but the Most airlines operate at about three to five times fuel cost.
Right.
That's just basically the operating cost of an airline, and the fuel cost is largely the driver of an airline.
Yes.
It takes the same amount of fuel to put a pound in orbit as it does to fly that pound from here to Sydney, Australia.
There isn't any reason why space operations should cost a heck of a lot more than flying from here to Australia.
The difference is, when I fly to Australia, I don't land the ship and then push it off into the Coral Sea and build a new one.
Well, that's true.
So, it was cost... When I asked Dr. Mitchell the same question, why we haven't been back, he said, because the American people don't care.
I think that's not true, but whether they care enough at... Again, let me... See, Ed Mitchell comes from NASA.
And he sees things the NASA way.
Right.
Let me tell you something, you have to take it on faith.
I could prove it if you ask the right questions.
If you were to come to me and say, we want to go to the moon, And you as the chairman of the Lunar Society, the non-profit corporation, what would it take to put a colony on the moon?
By colony I mean a self-sustaining colony.
People go up there, they live there, they're going to die there, they're going to have kids there.
Yes.
If you were to tell me, I'd say it'd cost two billion dollars if I do it.
You hand me the money, get the heck out of my way, I'll do some of it in Grenada and Places other than the United States, simply because of the Occupation Health and Safety Acts and the, I don't need to hire crippled astronauts, I'm sorry to put it that way, but the Americans with Disability Act would require me to have wheelchair access.
Alright, so assuming you could avoid all of that.
I could do it for about two billion.
Two billion.
Now, if you were to tell the Air Force to do it, and you say, but do it black, which is to say you're not hampered by the Armed Services Procurement Regulations, Just go to a skunk works and get it done.
The Air Force had won about four because their red tape is just, they have more than I do.
They have more of an overhead than I do.
Cost overruns though.
Now we would still have, you understand that we would both be hiring the same people to do the job.
If you were to advertise in Commerce Daily and say given all of the The Air Force wants you to put a lunar colony up.
What would you bid?
And the major aerospace companies bid.
The bids would come in at about 8 billion.
Why would we want to have a lunar colony?
Well, I'm just trying to get across the... No, I understand.
What would be a good... But NASA has already said that if they do it, they want 80 billion.
80 billion.
So do you see what I'm getting at?
That the difference in cost is dependent on who does it.
As to why it would be a good idea for the United States, I'm not sure it would, that the government ought to do it.
I'm not at all sure.
If we really wanted a lunar colony, by the way, I'd tell you the exact way to do it.
The Congress should just say that we determined that it is in the national interest to have an American colony on the moon, and the first American company that puts 50 Americans on the moon and keeps them there alive and well for two years and a day is to get the sum of a $5 billion tax-free prize, and no other public money shall be spent on this venture.
A new space race.
All right, Doctor, hold on.
We'll be right back to you.
Dr. Jerry Pornel is my guest.
You're listening to the American CBZ Radio Network.
♪♪ Back to Los Angeles and Dr. Jerry Purnell.
Doctor, a couple of questions for you by fax.
One is, what advice would you give to a young, aspiring science fiction writer in Oklahoma City?
Okay, same advice I'd give to any writer.
If you want to be a writer, you have to write.
And most people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers.
to be authors, they want to have written.
The, Mr. Einlein, Robert Einlein, who was the best of a lot of us in my judgment,
years ago published the rules for how to be a professional writer.
You have to write, you have to finish what you write.
You have to then take it and send it to an editor who can buy it.
And you have to start on another work.
and keep doing that and you'll probably manage it.
Most people begin a novel and never finish it.
Never finish it, or they do finish it, they don't send it to anybody who could buy it, they get their friends to read it, or they trot pieces of it out and read it to people in bars.
So in other words, don't talk about it, do it.
You just have to, the only way to become a writer is to write.
Now if you will find that you write more by Joining a club or a group of people who read each other's works, that's fine, but most of those turn out not to be much use simply because they really are places to go to tell the story of why you didn't write anything today.
The other piece of advice I'd give somebody who wants to be a professional writer is that four pages a day is four books a year.
Oh, that's something to think about.
One page a day is one book in a year.
Alright, now this one.
I think a good reason that extraterrestrials don't land at a place of science or higher learning is because they're probably afraid we'll take them captive, cut them up to see how they work.
What do you think about that?
That goes back to my question about the Brookings Report.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying.
My guess is if they're powerful enough to get here, they're not in much danger.
Yeah, it's a very, very good point.
This is the end of side one.
Please leave the... East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Purnell.
Where are you calling from, please?
Austin, Texas.
Yes, sir.
Uh, doctor, I wanted to ask about... First time callers, area 702-727-1222.
...read any of our insurance books.
to seven to seven one two two two read and i would have heard
but i uh...
listen to him on the radio a couple of times when i was in new york to do
speeches and things but really i am not very familiar with our
Good answer.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Purnell.
Hi.
Hi Howard.
Hi Dr. Purnell.
Andy in Eugene, Oregon.
Hi.
I was wondering, Dr. Purnell, your considered opinion on Robert Monroe's work involving interdimensional travel and so on.
Are you familiar with it?
I'm afraid I'm not.
I am what you would call a hard science writer, and I spend more time at things like the American
Association for the Advancement of Science meetings than I do in places that discuss
philosophy and metaphysics and occult and that sort of thing.
I know some people who do pay a great deal of attention to that sort of thing, but I
Sure.
Okay, thanks.
And Art, congratulations on being number one, pal.
Thank you, my friend.
Take care.
Yes, I rather have always enjoyed the style of science fiction that you do, the good, hard sciences kind of science fiction, as opposed to the paranormal aspect, although I look into that as well.
Yeah, and for instance, My friend Tim Powers has this new book out, Expiration Date, in which basically the ghost of Thomas Edison is imprisoned in a vial and is allowed to get loose.
Now, I don't write that sort of thing, but Powers does it splendidly.
You would think that you were reading about Los Angeles until you suddenly realize that there really is a ghost in this story.
Well, there really may be ghosts.
Oh, I didn't mean that.
I don't mean that there might not be.
What I mean is that Powers makes it extremely real.
That isn't the kind of thing I write, but there are people who do what you might call
fantasy with rivets, and Powers is certainly one of them.
No, I like science fiction that may well or could easily be seen to become science fact.
Yeah, that's the sort of thing I like to write when I can.
I fully understand.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Purnell.
Hi.
Hi.
Calling from Duluth.
Duluth, Minnesota.
Yes, sir.
I just wanted to comment on something that washed up on the shore here in Duluth.
A giant egg.
Five foot across?
A giant egg five feet across?
It's at the Duluth Zoo right now.
Well, are they trying to hatch it?
Well, they say there's a heartbeat inside of it.
Where?
In Duluth. It washed up on Lake Superior.
I know nothing of it. I...
Boy, I think I would want to stand well back or have an Abrams tank to be in when that thing hatches.
They have it under isolation.
They're not sure what it is.
I guess they have someone coming from Washington to look at it.
But they said it's five foot across.
The question is, how many zoologists will it take to sit on it?
I don't know.
Do you remember that wonderful old Charles Adams cartoon?
The archaeologists are out in the desert and they're digging around and there is this one rather overweight lady in shorts and the two guys in khaki shorts are looking at them and saying, Miss Abrams, we have a very strange request to make of you, and they're looking down at this egg.
Well, the guy who called is probably serious, and the way things are going these days, I don't doubt that what he said is accurate.
Well, I really don't.
Now, have you at all looked at the Roswell films?
I've seen, I think, all of them, Doctor, and there's something even more interesting than that.
About three weeks ago now, somebody sent me a letter in what purports to be debris from Roswell, from the Roswell crash, and I actually have pieces of metal.
What is it like?
Is it an odd metal?
It is an odd metal.
It's extremely light.
I've got photographs of it up on the internet now.
What's the URL there?
I'd like to take a look.
Okay, it's www.artbell.com And you'll see the...
But you've got your own domain name and everything!
I will have to have a look.
I wouldn't mind looking at that myself.
Is it really metal?
And I might add, those pieces of metal are now being tested and I expect within the next
day or so to have the results of that testing.
I wouldn't mind looking at that myself.
Is it really metal?
I mean, it's electrically conductive and...
We will determine...
All that is being determined now.
Because the speculations I have heard on the Roswell incident, about which I know no more than I've seen the movie, were that possibly there were some new plastics involved, and plastics were not We're not common in 1947.
Well, these metals are so light that they are not aluminum, but they're also not plastic, so I don't... You know, a layman... If it's conductive and a metal and it's very... I mean, that would be very interesting.
Ted Sturgeon used to say that the only thing that would convince him of the existence of flying saucers would be wreckage and bodies, and he'd have to see it himself.
I don't know.
I took the trouble to talk to a couple of the chaps involved in making the special effects for the first Star Wars at a Dykstra shop just to see what it would cost to make the special effects.
If you were to do the Roswell autopsy films as a special effect and they claimed that with modern techniques they could do it for a few million dollars.
Now this is not a small sum.
No, it isn't.
And it couldn't have been done at all 20 years ago, but of course, you don't know that the film was shot 20 years ago.
You only know that at least some of the film came from a batch that was made in 1950 years ago.
Well, let me just straight out ask you your impression.
You saw it.
What was your impression?
Well, my impression is, I really don't believe it because I don't want to, but I didn't see anything on it that That I couldn't explain in terms of it being real, if you understand what I mean.
Sure I do.
People say, well, why are they wearing radiation suits?
And because it's a biological hazard?
Well, because radiation suits are what would be around at that heavy bomber wing.
And why are the autopsies done so clumsily?
Well, because they're flight surgeons, for God's sake.
They're not professional pathologists that are doing this.
They've got deteriorating corpses, and they're flight surgeons, and they're wearing this clumsy equipment because it's the only thing they've got, and, you know, it's kind of a scary situation.
There isn't anything else that doesn't ring I think it was probably staged, but only because that's the probability, if you understand what I mean.
But there's no specific hole you can punch in it?
I don't see one doggone thing that really says... I saw these issues of the Skeptical Inquirer, but the trouble with the Skeptical Inquirer is that, as far as I can see, there ain't nothing ever happened that wasn't explained.
Alright, on the wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Purnell.
Hello.
Hi.
Yeah, this is Mark from Colville, Illinois on Peckham.
Yes.
Art, considering Jerry's expertise, I'm surprised you haven't asked him about Hale-Bopp and the controversies surrounding it.
All right, well, we'll ask him about Hale-Bopp.
I'm not sure what controversy are you referring to?
Well, the one you are aware of and are, well, a part of.
What is that?
Well, consider Mr. Fudgen, your guest.
Yes, I had Dr. Cijin on my show, yes.
Well, there you go.
All right, well, he wants to ask about the comet Hale-Bopp.
And it's a big one out there, all right.
Yes.
And now, Zachariah Cijin thinks that Hale-Bopp may be a harbinger of more to come.
Well, he's got to know more about it than I do.
What I know about comets, I largely get from Gene Shoemaker.
As I said, I've been on the board of directors of the Lowell Observatory, where Shoemaker is, so I can call people out there and they will talk to me.
I know far less about this sort of thing than they do.
If you really want to know a lot about comets, get Shoemaker on the phone.
He's a nice guy.
You know, you'd have to make an arrangement there, but they're on the same time as Los Angeles, because they're in Arizona, and that's mountain time, but they don't believe in daylight savings, so... Yes, I know.
Their time scheme is the same as ours.
All right, well, that sounds like it.
And Gene Schumacher's the right guy to ask about comets and that sort of event.
He knows more about them than the next three people I know are put together.
All right, Dr. West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Jerry Pornel.
Good evening.
Hi, Art.
I like the way he thinks of Dean Kuntz.
Where are you, by the way?
I'm from Oakland, California.
I think Dean Kuntz is one of the scariest writers I've ever read.
I've known him for 20 years.
He's, in person, a very nice guy.
Boy, I think he's scarier than Stephen King.
All right, there you go.
East of the Rockies, your turn with Dr. Jerry Purnell.
Good evening.
Hello, this is Jack in Charleston, South Carolina.
Hi, Jack.
That DCX ship that you mentioned, is that the one, I think, must have been on the news, I guess, two or three years ago now, which took off, moved horizontally, and landed?
That's correct.
That's the ship.
It was more or less designed in my living room.
Yes, that was, when I first saw that, I thought, wow, that is a real science fiction spaceship.
Yep.
I couldn't believe it.
Yep, that's right out of, that's the course of where Buck Rogers used to go to space.
You fill up the ship with fuel, you fly to space, you come back, you land, you fill it up, you fly it again.
I love seeing that.
I wish that there'd be some serious stuff.
Well, the next one will, that one was, you know, like single stage to a thousand feet.
It didn't go very high.
It was a scale model to demonstrate you could control The ship, and the tankage was made out of iron.
That ship, they have since taken the iron tanks out and put in aluminum, lithium, oxygen tanks, and carbon-hydrogen tanks.
And it should fly, like, a third of the way to orbit now.
Wow.
It'll go well out of sight, and of course the next demonstration is to fly it two or three times in one day to demonstrate that you'd turn around, you know, not like the shuttle where it takes weeks to months.
Doctor, if the money was available, would you like to head a private effort to put that kind of vehicle... Oh yeah, sure.
I am the chairman of a thing called the Lunar Society, which is a non-profit corporation, and we actually are... we have bid to NASA to To do a ship something like that, it's even weirder.
There's a competition for a thing called the X-34.
And some of my people put together a proposal for it.
Now, I don't believe we'll win it, you understand, because we would have to contract everything out.
I don't have an aerospace company.
But I think we could, in fact, demonstrate some fairly interesting stuff.
And I think that would be to the national interest to do it.
I think that the control of space in the next century is going to be as important as the control of the sea was in the last.
I'm sure you're correct.
Doctor, I've had on the show many times a fellow named Richard Hoagland.
Hoagland, yeah.
Well, yeah, Dick Hoagland used to be science advisor to Walter Cronkite.
That's right.
God knows how many years ago.
That's right.
Let us say that I am more skeptical about some things than Dick Hoagland is.
Well, uh, you know, he... Particularly the Cydonia stuff on Mars.
I've seen the same photographs he does, and I don't get the same interpretations he does.
Well, his newer, uh, course of investigation has been the moon, and he believes there are structures on the moon.
Yeah, I understand he says that.
I, again, I don't see those, but the easy way to find out is to go there and look.
That's right.
That's right.
And you say you would love to have an effort to do something there.
And I would love to go out and do it.
For two million bucks, I could put you in a permanent colony on the moon.
I don't have any trouble getting people to do it, by the way.
We once advertised just to see the Lunar Society has a registry of several hundred people who would actually pay a hundred thousand each for a one-way ticket to the moon.
I have a question for your guest.
I'm not familiar with any of his work, but from listening to him speak, he sounds like he's very similar to the writings of Arthur C. Clarke.
I have a question for your guest.
I'm not familiar with any of his work, but from listening to him speak, he sounds like
he's very similar to the writings of Arthur C. Clarke.
I was wondering quickly if he could do a quick compare contrast.
Between himself and Mr. Clarke?
Well, I wrote Lucifer's Hammer before Arthur Clark wrote his comic novel last year.
I've known Arthur for a very long time.
He is a very dear and splendid man.
I don't know, comparing contrasts, very fair.
He's won more awards than I have.
Well, it sounds like both your writing is based more in science.
Your fiction is based around science.
Yes.
Is that fair?
I mean, I have been called the successor to Arthur Clarke.
Whether or not that's true is not for me to say.
Arthur, of course, has been at it a lot longer than I have.
He's stopped writing though, hasn't he?
Oh, he hasn't exactly stopped writing, but he is an elderly man, and he has been ill some of the time.
But he, about a year ago, had a novel about a comet hitting the Earth, you know?
Oh, I wasn't aware of that.
I think it was called, mine was Lucifer's Hammer, I think his was called The Hammer of God, I believe it was called.
Okay, I do appreciate your comparing.
I'll hope to get out and pick up the book then.
Yeah, much better.
Listen, is there a phone number or something that people can call to get hold of your books?
I think that Fawcett Books was bought by Ballantyne Books.
And at the moment, I don't believe it's in print.
They are about to get it out again.
It's been through 35 or 40 printings.
And this is the first time it has been out of print since it was uh... sense sense at first came out and given how much
money they paid for it i think they will get it back in print but
i believe lucifer's hammer is not in print with regards to uh... higher education that should be in bookstores within
the week well that's wonderful
Well, all right.
That's tour books.
Oh, okay.
Doctor, it has been a real pleasure to have you on, and I would like to be able to file you away and come back to you when there's reason.
You know how to get ahold of me with email.
Just check it out first, because I never know my schedule, and of course, if I have deadlines, I have deadlines.
I fully understand, and we'll work around them.
But it's been a lot of fun.
It has.
Doctor, thank you.
Thank you.
That's Dr. Jerry Bornell, and he is the author of Lucifer's Hammer.
And when I tell you that it was the first science fiction book that I read that sort of launched me into the world of science fiction and the continuing, everlasting interest that I now have, you can believe it's true.
If you have not read it, though it is out of print right now, you can probably find it in a library, in a second-hand bookstore, scrounge around, talk to your friends, get a copy of it.
It is as good today, as good a read today, as it was when it was brand new on the shelf.
That's all I can say about it.
That's of course...
An incredible man with an incredible... I'm glad to have had the opportunity to interview him, and we will do it again.
Lucifer's Hammer, co-authored by Dr. Jerry Pornel, who says he could take us back to the moon.
He could put a colony on the moon for two billion dollars.
Which is, by a factor of many times, less than it would cost NASA.
▲
Export Selection