THE KINSMAN SAGA
by
Ben Bova
Author's Foreword:
Reality and Symbols
I HAVE RETURNED to where I started, returned to Chet Kinsman, to the character who has haunted me since I first began writing seriously.
If you have read the Tor Books edition of As on a Darkling Plain, you know the genesis of this book: How I wrote a very early version of it in 1949-50, a version that predicted the Space Race of the 1960s, which culminated in the American landings on the Moon. How Ihe novel was rejected everywhere, in part because publishers were afraid it would incur the wrath of anti-Communist witch-hunters such as Senator Joseph McCarthy. How Arthur C. Clarke encour- aged me to keep writing, and how eventually I was able to hand him the first copy of the first edition of Millennium.
When Millennium was originally published, in 1976, the idea of putting laser-armed satellites in orbit to shoot down nuclear-armed ballistic missiles was widely regarded as fan- tasy. Except by a few of us who knew better. Today the concept is known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars. Billions of dollars are being spent on it. Passionate arguments have been waged over it among scientists, politi- cians, pundits, and even science fiction writers. But in the early 1970s the only place that such an idea could be explored seriously in print, outside of classified technical publications, was in the medium called science fiction.
To the large majority of the public, science fiction is regarded as a field that deals with the fantastic, as far removed from reality as fiction can be. In truth, science fiction examines reality, and explores it in ways that no other form of literature possibly can. I must admit, though, that I am speaking now of my kind of science fiction, the kind that I write and the kind that I published when I was an editor. There are many other types of stories being marketed under the name of "science fiction." They may deal with unicorns or video games, barbarian swordsmen or robot killing machines. It is these types of stories, and the films and TV shows made from them, that convince most of the public that science fiction has no connection with reality.
My kind of science fiction examines the future in order to understand the present. It is social commentary of a new kind, a variety of literature that has been developed and sharpened in this century mainly by a handful of writers in the United States and Europe who are familiar with the physical sciences, their resultant technologies, and the impact of these technologies on society. Those of us who practice this art are agreed that modern technology is the major force of change in society today—and will continue to be, for the foreseeable future.
It seems clear that technological developments, from nuclear bombs to birth control pills, are the driving force in our civilization. The engines of change begin with the scien- tists and engineers. Then come the industrialists, churchmen, politicians, and everybody else. In our fiction we attempt to examine how science and technology bring change. We do not try to predict the future so much as to describe possible futures. We are not prophets warning of doom or describing Utopias, We are scouts bringing reports of the territory up ahead, so that the rest of the human race might travel into the future more safely and happily.
In Millennium, the concept of using lasers mounted aboard orbiting satellites to protect the nations of Earth from nuclear missile attack was both a symbol and a realistic extrapolation of technology. In science fiction, such a scientif- ic concept can be used both as a symbol and as a part of the authentic technical background for a story.
I knew in 1965 that a space-based defense against ballistic missiles was inevitable. I was working then at Avco Everett Research Laboratory, in Massachusetts, where the first truly high-power laser was invented. We called it the Gasdynamic Laser, and the first working model was built and operated under the supervision of the physicist with whom I shared an office. In its first ten seconds of operation, that crude labora- vi tory "kluge" produced more output power than all the lasers that had been built everywhere in the world since the first one had been turned on, five years earlier.
By January of 1966 I was helping to arrange a Top Secret meeting at the Pentagon to inform the Department of De- fense that lasers were no longer merely laboratory curiosities. It was clear, even then, that a device which could produce a beam of concentrated light of many megawatts power could be the heart of a defense against the so-called "ultimate weapon," the hydrogen-bomb-carrying ballistic missile.
The meeting we set up in the Pentagon was snowed out by one of the worst blizzards ever to hit Washington. If you ever want to take over the government, wait for a two-foot snowfall. You can then take ail of Washington with a handful of troops—if they have skis.
In February 1966 we finally met with the Department of Defense's top scientists and stunned them with the news of the Gasdynamic Laser. Seventeen years later an American President authorized the program that the media snidely calls Star Wars. I have told the story of the history, and future, of the Strategic Defense Initiative in a nonfiction book, Star Peace: Assured Survival, published by Tor Books in 1986.
But long before then, I used the very-real facts about laser-armed satellites as the background for my novel Millen- nium.
I had never given up on Chet Kinsman. He was too much a part of me, too deeply ingrained in my subconscious mind, I watched my first, unpublished novel become history as the Soviet Union did indeed put the first satellites and the first human space travelers into orbit and the United States roused itself to leapfrog the Russians and place the first men on the Moon. The way / had written it, that first step on the Moon was not made by Neil Armstrong; it was made by Chester Arthur Kinsman.
Kinsman would not let go of my imagination. I found myself writing short stories about him. He was a dashing young military astronaut who founded the Zero Gee Club, the first man to make love in weightlessness. He fought in orbit and killed a Russian cosmonaut, a shattering experience that altered his entire life. He got to the Moon, finally, and rescued a fellow astronaut who had gotten hurt while on an vil exploring mission. He battled the bureaucracy of Washing- ton, as any modern pioneer must, in his efforts to get the United States to return to the Moon.
While these stories were shaping themselves in my mind, while I was writing them and seeing them published in science fiction magazines, the outline of Millennium crystallized and came to life.
Once Millennium was published, readers reacted power- fully, especially to the ending. I was encouraged to bring together the stories dealing with Kinsman's early life, and I wove them into a second novel, Kinsman, a "prequel" to Millennium even though it was written several years after- ward.
