Author Interview: Are We Ready for Outer Space? Is Outer Space Ready for Us?





My newest work, Star Settlers: The Billionaires, Geniuses, and Crazed Visionaries Out to Conquer the Universe (Pegasus) will be available online and at bookstores in August 2020.
Trident Media  literary agent Mark Gottlieb's interview with me begins: 

What is it about the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1940s/50s) and the New Wave movement in science fiction (60s/70s) that has fascinated many of the scientists and billionaire space explorers today? Did the "pulp era" (20s/30s) have any sort of role to play, or was that much too early on?
I’d credit the pulp era for spawning interest in spacefaring (and time travel and robots and multiple dimensions—very big in the 1930s). Pulp magazines like Amazing Stories didn’t just nurture the idea of interplanetary travel—writers for Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories started the American Rocket Society in 1930 and it quickly became more than just a fan group. Its members devised their first test liquid fuel rocket at a cost of $49.  Several went on to found Reaction Motors which built the engines for the Bell X-1 rocket plane in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. Readers of 1920s and 1930s science-fiction magazines could regard them as escapist fantasy or as potential, if far-fetched, blueprints. It is interesting that Robert Goddard, who already had many rocket patents by the 1920s, kept his distance and didn’t agree to be on Gernsback’s advisory board. But it was when he was a teenager and read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds that Goddard first developed his rocketry dreams. 

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