Scatterbrain

Where Do I Get My Crazy Ideas

Yes, I finally figured it out!

It's the same reason I can't remember your name, or face, or where we met.

My brain has a lousy retrieval system. Data does surface, but there's no reason to think it'll be the data I went looking for.

I got 99.9 percent on the California high-school system's math aptitude test in 1956. What made college so difficult was my daydreaming in math and physics and chemistry class. Something would spark an idea -- the second law of thermodynamics, say -- and off I'd go, following the implication that the most efficient heat engines will be built on Pluto. I broke more glassware in chem lab than anyone else.

I dozed and daydreamed through psychology, too, but that got me an A. What they teach in psychology class is fiction without internal consistency. Dreaming helps codify such stuff. Where was I The point is, my brain will chase a datum through pathways no sane mind would ever consider and come out matching data that never belonged together in the same book, or library, or mind.

So. Early in my career, thirty-odd years ago, I noticed that time travel is fantasy. There appeared to be no way to make time travel consistent with the laws we think govern the universe. But the best stories are told as games of internal logic, as if time travel were science fiction.

So I dreamed up the Institute for Temporal Research, though the title came from elsewhere. I wrote these stories as a Green pessimist. Thus: By A.D. 3100 most of the life-forms we know are extinct. The United Nations rules the world, and the Secretary General is an inbred idiot who likes animals. The ITR keeps sending its agents back in time for animals out of a book for children.

I only sold one story to Playboy magazine in my life, and it was the one in which agent Hanville Svetz has to kill the great sea serpent to retrieve Moby Dick.

The joke played out after five stories, so I quit.

Then a funny thing happened. Carl Sagan got the mathematician Kip Thorne to build him a plausible time machine. Now time travel is science fiction.

And a notion was playing around in my head.