The Way the Future Blogs

 

A simple high-school electrochemistry question for you smart ones: how do you make that excellent, but tricky, fuel for your car, hydrogen?

Simple. You start with plain old water; you dip two terminals from a battery at the ends of the tank and turn on the current. Something starts bubbling at the terminals, hydrogen at one, oxygen at the other. You can use the hydrogen to make your car go, sell the oxygen, perhaps, to the nearest hospital. It’s a great little system, the only problem being that it takes at least 1.23 volts to split the water molecule and electricity costs money.

Okay, forget the water. Let’s electrolyze a different chemical liquid, say urine.

Human urine takes only 0.37 volts to electrolyze. This cuts your power consumption down to not much more than a quarter, and the process is now economical. What makes the difference is that urine contains urea, and a molecule of urea contains four of the hydrogen atoms that constitute your electric current — twice as many as a molecule of water — and the bonds that hold the molecule together are weaker.

So, supposing you want to start building your plant for peepee power right now, where do you get your urine? You might think that that’s a silly question — nearly 7 billion humans alive on the Earth, and every one of them generating your new motor fuel for you every day — but you may have to go to some trouble to get what you need. No, you can’t just pipe your sewage into a tank and run a current through it. Sewage is contaminated with many other materials, and the worst of them for this purpose is plain old water. Any flush toilet dilutes the urine drastically, and thus also seriously dilutes the urea it contains, so much so that you might as well use plain water to begin .with.

There are various solutions to the problem of the urine collection. One was invented for us by the ancient Romans. They liked to wear white woolen garments, but those garments got dirty and couldn’t be laundered in water because they would shrink. Plain urine was fine to wash them in, though, so to provide their cleaning liquid, those old Roman dry cleaners put barrels out at street intersections, with ingratiating little signs urging those who had to go to use the barrels.

Of course, some neighborhoods might not care for that sort of public display. Fortunately, there are other options. The urine doesn’t have to come from human beings. Any large mammal will do. The particularly placid cow would be close to ideal. And how do you persuade your herd of cattle to pee in a barrel? You don’t.

There is a useful bit of minor surgery widely in use for elderly male humans whose prostate has grown so big it interferes with their urination. One end of a catheter is inserted directly through the skin into the gentleman’s bladder, the other end leads to a collection vessel of some sort. From then on the man never has to dash for a public urinal, and his own urine arrives at the electrolysis plant in a nearly pristine condition. (You save a bundle on water bills, too, since from then you never have to flush for pee.)

See how easy it is to solve some pretty big problems if you want to make the effort?

* * *

If you wonder why I know so much about Roman urination, my new novel — All the Lives He Led — is set partly in Pompeii, and I’ve done a lot of writing about those Romans at other times as well.

Campi Flegrei (Photo by Donar Reiskoffer).

The whole of Yellowstone National Park is basically the gigantic caldera of a super-volcano, the kind that can mess up the whole world’s climate when it blows. The Yellowstone one is pretty regular about how often it does blow, too, and at the moment it’s about 6,000 years overdue for its next ka-boom. One of the postulates — the “big lies” that an author is permitted to tell to set up his story — in my latest novel, All the Lives He Led is that sometime before the story gets going Yellowstone did blow sky-high, covering much of the country with volcanic ash and dust and thus converting the U.S.A. from the richest country in the world to something with approximately the Gross National Product of Liechtenstein.

This means our hero can’t make a decent living in America. Therefore he goes to Italy, where he gets a job in the theme park the Italians have made out of the 2,000-year-old ruins of Pompeii.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, as it happens, during World War II I was stationed in Italy for a time with the U. S. Army Air Force, first with a B24 group on the Adriatic side of the peninsula, then with AAF/MTO (translation: Army Air Force, Mediterranean Theater of Operations headquarters) in Caserta, near Naples. What I am getting at, in my perhaps unfortunately highly discursive way, is that for a long time I have been interested in (a) supervolcanos like Yellowstone and (b) the region of the Italian coast around Naples.

And I have — alarmingly — recently discovered that those two areas of interest have become one.

 
You see, the whole territory around Naples is what the old Romans called the Campi Flegrei (meaning “the burning fields”), and Lake Avernus was described by Virgil, in his Aeneid, as the entrance to Hell. Modern observers have not confirmed that identification, but what they have established is that the lake is actually the water-filled crater of a dormant, but not necessarily dead, volcano.

Like Yellowstone, the area is marked by fumaroles (vents of steam), pots of boiling mud and, most disconcertingly, irregular raising and lowering of ground level in some places by as much as eleven feet, which has not been good for some of the constructions on those sites; a hospital and many, many homes have been destroyed. There is a big difference between the Yellowstone caldera and the one for the Phlegrean Fields, though. Most of the Phlegrean territory is underwater, stretching from the famous Isle of Capri to the less celebrated island of Ischia and including much of my dear unkempt city of Naples. (Another difference is population. In winter, at least, Yellowstone is inhabited largely by bears, while the Phlegrean Fields area is home to four million human beings,)

So how dangerous is the situation? Well, no one exactly knows. It would take quite a lot of drilling down into the worrisome ground to get the evidence to predict just what is going to happen there.

That drilling seemed about to start a while ago, because Giuseppe De Natale, the search director for Italy’s National Observatory for Geophysics and Volcanology, was prepared to get it started with a $14 million course of drilling. That didn’t happen, though Critics reminded Naples Mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino of what happened in Indonesia in 2006 when a mud volcano erupted after similar drilling was done, killing a few people and rendering tens of thousands homeless. Mayor Iervolino took no chances. She stopped all drilling until somebody could prove to her that it was safe.

(By the way, people who have been to Naples and seen Mt. Vesuvius puffing its ominous little trail of steam on the horizon may wonder what part this other volcano plays in the Phlegrean Fields scenario. The answer is none at all. Vesuvius, which destroyed three little cities in one 48-hour rampage back in 79 A.D., is just too trivial to worry about when considering the threat posed by the Phlegrean Fields.)

Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, 2009. (Photo by Cat Sparx.)

From time to time, Robert Silverberg has told the world that he had written himself out and was retiring from the field. Fortunately for the rest of us, these periods of abstinence from the computer were so depressing to his irrepressibly auctorial psyche that he fled back to the keyboard before long each time. Now he maintains a delicate balance between time spent in putting words on paper, as it seems God has intended for him to do, and time spent traveling the world to view art treasures in the greatest museums and the tiniest of ancient churches.

Betty Anne and I were lucky enough to join him once or twice when we found ourselves inhabiting the same land mass at a convenient time. One such episode that sticks in my mind took place in Italy in 1989. Bob with his wife, Karen Haber, and I with my own, Elizabeth Anne Hull — the wives both had elected to keep their maiden names, which tells you something about them, but at least they didn’t make us take theirs — had been attending a World SF annual meeting in a little town, up in the mountains, called Fanano.

The meeting had been good. World SF had been started by a few of us in order to give sf writers in every country that possessed any examples of any such native creatures a chance to interact with the major writers and editors of the world, and it had come to function very effectively, especially in helping writers from travel-restricting countries get permission to join us. The Fanano meeting had people from all over Europe, including a couple of groups from the USSR, as well as people from several countries in Asia and, of course, a large contingent from North America.

When it was over, Bob wanted to visit a bunch of old churches along the Adriatic on the way north to Venice, and Betty and I volunteered to go along with him.

I can’t say that I have a compelling interest in old churches. I do like to wander around new places, though, so Betty and the Silverbergs parked near a church and I went off to explore. I did peer into one or two churches that might have been where Princess Mathaswentha was saved from a loveless marriage by Martin Padway (at least, she was in L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, though in the real world she was less fortunate). But really, after a week of concentrated good fellowship with friends from all over the world I was content with peace and quiet.

Venice, of course, was something else. None of the four of us had been there before, though I had barely missed it once when driving from Trieste down along the (then Yugoslavian, now multinational) coast to the Ancona ferry. And Venice itself was a constant delight.

We had pretty much lost any detailed contact with the world we usually lived in, not having any English-language newspaper or TV handy, but more language-gifted friends in Fanano had told us about big trouble in China. Something was going on in Tianenmen Square, the big open space in Beijing usually given over to crowds of young people anxious to try their imperfect English — or their teacher’s — on us so we could help improve their accents. No crowds of happy youngsters were there now, and no tourists. What young people there were were staring down the barrels of Chinese tanks, and the tank captains — we heard when we found an English paper — were said to have their fingers on the triggers.

It was at that point that we ran across a couple of old friends who, like us, had been at the World SF meeting in Fanano and decided to add on a little Adriatic exploration.

Takumi and Sashiko Shibano, from Tokyo, had been doing the Worldcon for years, and once or twice had stayed with us for a day or two before the con. Yang Xiao, from Chengdu in China, was the editor of the very successful Science Fiction World, by far China’s most prestigious sf magazine. Not one of them spoke a single word of Italian, so they had banded together to do their exploration, in spite of the fact that Yang didn’t speak either Japanese or English, either, and the Shibanos had no Chinese. At home in Chengdu, Yang Xiao didn’t need to know languages, having a staff of translators to keep her informed of what was in all those articles, stories and letters, but they were all still in Chengdu, while she was a world away. A clearly courageous human being, Yang had done all sorts of world traveling, with no more English than you can get out of a Chinese-Engish “useful words” booklet.

I admired her pluck, but immediately discovered she had heard nothing about the drama being played out in Tiananmen Square. I began to worry about how to inform her of the problem that looked like it was convulsing her home country.. We all put our minds to it. We succceded, too. Our American team went over the principal stories about Tiananmen Square in the English and Italian papers to clarify any parts that the Shibanos were unsure of. Then either Takumi or Sashiko wrote each story out in Japanese characters. It is a fortunate quality of the two languages that, although the spoken tongues are mutually incomprehensible, the written ones are enough alike that, with some effort, a Chinese reader can make sense of a Japanese story. And Yang Xiao got the news of the dismal encounter that was shaking her homeland up while she was a world away.

Which just goes to show you what a bunch of science-fiction types can do when they put their minds to it.

Part 4 of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

Bester: I’m curious, Fred. Where did you get the idea for The Space Merchants?

Pohl: The Space Merchants has a long history. During World War II, I was with the American Air Force in Italy. I got a little homesick, and I’d brought my typewriter with me. I’d carried that damn thing all over World War II hoping some time to find a use for it and I did.

I thought I’d write a novel about New York City to make me feel a little better. And the most exciting thing I could think of to write about in New York City was the advertising business — which was a glamorous sort of thing —-and I wrote this novel for some 300 pages or so, called For Some We Loved. It’s a quotation from Omar Khayyam. I was 23 years old, what did I know?

And then the war was over and I got back home, and I looked at the novel and perceived there was something wrong with it. What was wrong with it was that I didn’t know anything about the advertising business, and I had written this whole novel that dealt with it. But I knew how to solve that problem. I looked in the Sunday New York Times, classified advertising section, and I saw three or four help-wanted ads for advertising copywriters. I’d never been an advertising copywriter, but it looked easy. So I answered a couple of the ads and one of them hired me, and I spent a couple of years there.

Bester: What agency was it, Fred?

Pohl: A little tiny thing called Thwing & Altman, mostly book accounts. We did the Dollar Book Club and the Literary Guild and William Wise. I got to be pretty good at writing advertising.

And, at some point during those years, I had a summer place in upstate New York looking out over a lake with a big fireplace, and I had my manuscript of my novel For Some We Loved with me, and one night, I began to read it in front of the fireplace and as I read each page, I tossed them in the fire one by one.

Bester: Oh, Fred, no! That’s terrible.

Pohl: It was awful. The concept was painful … but the novel itself was agonizing. I had no choice.

So here I had all this knowledge of advertising and no longer had a book to put it in. Also Fred Wakeman had come out with The Hucksters by then, so it was no longer really a fresh idea for a regular mainstream novel. Then it occurred to me to make a science-fiction novel about advertising, and I began tentatively putting words on paper — a little bit at a time, because by then I had a full-time job running a literary agency. And when I had put about 20,000 words on paper over about a year or two, I showed it to Horace Gold.

Bester: What did Horace have to say?

Pohl: He said, “I am now running Alfie Bester’s The Demolished Man—”

Bester: Leave me out of this, will you?

Pohl: I swear to God, that was what he said. And: “I haven’t got anything to follow it up with. There’s nothing else coming in that looks as if it’ll stand up to The Demolished Man. So I’m going to start with the first installment now, and by next Tuesday please have the second and the third.”

And I said, “There’s no way I can do that. I have a full-time job with the agency.”

And he said, “I don’t care whether you can do it or not, the printers will be waiting.”

So I went back to my home in New Jersey where my old friend Cyril Kornbluth, with whom I’d written a lot of stories before, was staying with me. He read over the part I’d written, the first third or so and said, “Yeah, yeah, we can do something with that.” So he rewrote that and added some, and I rewrote that and added some, and we barely got it into print, but actually the first part was being set before the last was written.

Bester: My God, you were living dangerously, Fred!

Pohl: I had nothing to lose. It was Horace’s problem!

Bester: Whose title was it — Horace’s or yours?

Pohl: I called it something ridiculous like “Fall Campaign,” and Horace put “Gravy Planet” on it.

There was a big book boom in science fiction at the time, all sorts of publishers deciding to bring it out in hardcovers. So, I thought, what the hell, I’ll sell it as a book, and I was a literary agent, and I knew every publisher and editor in New York, especially the ones that dealt in science fiction — a lot of them were very good friends of mine. So I took it off to one, and I said, “Here, print this. It’s pretty good stuff,” and he read it and gave it back and said, “No, that’s not really what I meant at all!”

And I said, “So much for you,” and I took it to the next one. And it was rejected by every publisher in America who then had a science-fiction line.

Bester: So was The Demolished Man, sir! It was bounced by everybody.

Pohl: Well, I think it’s the same story.

So, there was no publisher left to offer it to. Then Ian Ballantine started up his own company, and he was so inexperienced as a publisher that he didn’t know this was unpublishable. So he published it! You know, it’s been translated into 45 languages now.

Bester: It shows you, the greatest books in the world can be bounced by anybody. Look at Fred’s! The greatest science fiction novel of all time. Bounced by everybody! It’s preposterous!

 
To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• Alfie, Part 1, Part 2
• Me and Alfie, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

From the blog team:

Fred’s been a little busy lately starting another book, so we’re taking it on ourselves to give you some of his publishing news. St. Joseph’s Day seems an appropriate day to tell you about Fred’s new novel, set in Italy. All the Lives He Led is due out April 12 from Tor. From the press release:

The year is 2079. In the shadow of Mount Vesuvius a virtual reality theme park has been erected for Il Giubelo — the celebration honoring the 2000th anniversary of the volcano’s great eruption. Tens of thousands of tourists from around the world have converged on the site for the occasion. But trouble is brewing in Pompei. . . .

Brad Sheridan, an indentured servant from a post-disaster United States, has been hired to work as an “authentic” ancient Pompeian wine seller for the event. Brad already has his hands full — with the woman of his dreams, and with troubling events that threaten to cost him his job. But as the fateful day draws near, he uncovers a much bigger nightmare: A terrorist cell is devising a plot to draw attention to their cause by creating a disaster — one so massive it could wipe out humanity.

With his trademark eye for humanity, Frederik Pohl has created a multi-layered story about a group of people caught in the shifting current of political unrest. All the Lives He Led is gripping science fiction — a new masterwork from the Grand Master.

Also in April, Orb Books will bring back into print Fred’s classic novel Man Plus. A gripping story of cybernetics, political intrigue and the creation of a superman, Man Plus won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1976 and was nominated for the Hugo and several other awards.

   Hal Clement, 1965.

When I first began reading Hal Clement stories in Astounding, I was struck by this new writer’s affection for cloud types and air masses. Had to be a weatherman, I assured myself. Nobody else could, or would bother to, get all that meteorological talk down so well.

When I learned that Clement had been with a B-24 group, I was yearning for more, for so was I; and when it turned out that his bomb group was the 457th, I was fascinated. Mine was the 456th. Near us in the Stornara, Italy, neighborhood were the 458th and 459th; since the Air Force customarily packaged its bomb groups into bomb wings of four groups each, I had always wondered what they had done with our 457th.

Now I know that it was in England, flying right across the Channel to drop its bombs instead of chugging north through most of Europe before they got to a target, as our Mediterranean Theater of Operations bombers did. But why?

Ah, there is no “why” when you talk about the doings of the military.

Even after I met Hal Clement — aka Major Harry Stubbs, not a weatherman but a pilot, he explained; “but of course we had lots of courses in weather” — he didn’t know what had happened to detach his group from its siblings either. All he could tell me was that one day around 1942 or so they’d got orders to draw desert-type clothing and hot-weather instruments, along with the other nearby groups; then the 457th’s orders were reversed, while other groups began flying to Italy, and ultimately they were ordered to England.

And what did I mean, “Why?” Whoever knew “why” anything happened in the Air Force?

Nevertheless we became good friends, and ultimately I became his agent.

 
More to come.

 
Related post:
Hal Clement, Part 2