Ben Bova - The Kinsman Saga.pdf - Ben Bova - margozap

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in

this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or

incidents is purely coincidental.

THE KINSMAN SAGA

portions thereof in any form.

First printing: October 1987

A TOR Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

49 West 24 Street

New York, N.Y. 10010

Cover art by Pat Rawlins

ISBN: 0-312-93026-7

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-50484

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

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-

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.

In the meantime, of course, the scientists and engineers

were making steady progress in the fields of space technology,

lasers, and computers. So much so that in March 1983

President Reagan announced the start of the Strategic De-

fense Initiative. Once again I watched my fiction start to turn

into history. Nothing in the original Millennium and Kinsman

has been invalidated by the events of the past few years. But

now many of the details that I had to sketch minimally can be

shown in much clearer perspective.

Now, in this single volume, the whole story is played out

from beginning to end. From a brand-new lieutenant on a

joyride in a supersonic Jet fighter plane to a man who literally

carries the weight of two worlds on his shoulders. From a

brash youngster who thinks of sex as nothing more than fun to

a man who cares so much about the woman he loves that he is

afraid of a relationship that will hurt her.

There are many differences between the original pair of

novels and this new retelling of the Kinsman saga. For one

thing, the human, emotional story of Kinsman and the

woman he has loved all his life is told properly for the first

time. Because the two novels were originally written the way

they were, many details—and some larger aspects—of the

story did not blend smoothly, one book to the other. Now

they have been reexamined, rethought, and rewritten. All the

characters and themes now mesh properly, and you can read

the story of Kinsman's life from beginning to end as a single

seamless garment.

The social and political implications of building a defense

vi ii

against nuclear attack, however, remain almost exactly as I

originally wrote them. That is because they have not changed.

The ultimate result of space-based defenses against nuclear

attack will be a unified world government. There is absolutely

no doubt in my mind about that. Who runs that government,

what kind of a government it will be, what role the United

States will play in it and what role other nations will play—all

those questions are unanswered. Their answers will be the

political history of the twenty-first century.

There are many symbols in Kinsman's story. I mention

this mainly because most critics have been blind to them. Or

perhaps they think of symbolism only in its psychological

sense, where rockets are considered phallic and a wheel-

shaped space station is thought to be vaginal. That is not the

sort of symbolism I am speaking of.

Kinsman himself is a symbol. A young American male,

full of the adventure of flying, who brings both love and death

to the pristine realm of outer space. In Millennium, he

becomes a Christ figure, and his closest friend, Frank Colt,

takes on the role of Judas. Colt himself symbolizes the

dilemma of the black man in modern America.

The Christian symbolism is at its plainest in the section of

Kinsman where he rescues the injured astronaut on the

surface of the Moon. In that tale, titled "Fifteen Miles" when

it appeared in a science fiction magazine in its original form,

the surface of the Moon becomes a testing ground, a place of

ordeal and punishment. The central question is redemption:

Can Kinsman save his sou!, or is he damned forever? This

becomes the question for all the rest of his life, and forms his

underlying motivation in Millennium.

The technological gadgets of the story also serve as

symbols. Equating Moonbase's water factory with a human

being's heart and blood is obvious enough. So, perhaps, is the

symbolism of a lance of light that destroys the death machines

of ballistic missiles. But the idea of humankind's reach into

space forcing a change in human attitudes on Earth, which

pervades the story of Kinsman's life, has escaped the atten-

tion of most critics.

There are two aspects to this, in the story. One is the

laser-armed satellites, the Star Wars system, placed in orbit to

defend against nuclear missile attack. The other is weather

control, using technology to tame one of the most fundamen-

tal forces on Earth. Push and pull. Negative and positive. Yin

and yang. The important point is that once the human race

began to extend its ecological niche beyond the limits of

planet Earth, all our old ways of thinking became doomed.

Most people do not realize this yet. Most are oblivious to the

fact that national borders are swiftly losing their meaning in a

world of communications satellites, hydrogen bombs, conti-

nent-spanning missiles, and the expansion of human life into

space.

The facts are there to see, but most people are not

emotionally prepared to deal with them. It is through the

symbolism of fiction that we prepare our minds for these new

concepts. In the truest sense, Chet Kinsman does exist, and

his message of hope and peace and love is the ultimate reality.

—Ben Bova

West Hartford.

March 1987

Ben Bova - The Kinsman Saga.pdf

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