Kevin J. Anderson was born March 27, 1962 in Racine, Wisconsin, and grew up in Oregon, Wisconsin.

(meta data) TITLE: A Conversation With Kevin J. Anderson

by Claire E. WhiteThe Internet Writing Journal, October 2003

Ever since he was a little boy growing up in the tiny

bestselling author, Kevin remembers his childhood environment

as "a cross between a Ray Bradbury short story and a Norman

After watching The War of the Worlds on TV, a five year-old

He was so moved by the film that the next day

he took a notepad and drew pictures of scenes

from the film, spread them out on the floor, and told the

being an author and, in fact, was remarkably driven to

for publication while he was in high school

He never let rejection or disappointment

stand in his way, collecting over 750 rejection slips and a trophy

as "The Writer with No Future" because he could produce more

rejection slips by weight than any other writer

After college, where he studied physics and astronomy,

Kevin worked in California for twelve years as a

technical writer and editor at the Lawrence Livermore

National Laboratory, one of the nation's largest research facilities.

Although he had a full-time job, he wrote nights and weekends,

publishing his first novel at the age of 25.

After he had published ten of his own science fiction novels

to wide critical acclaim and many award nominations,

and was offered the chance at writing Star Wars novels.

His Star Wars Jedi Academy trilogy became the three

top-selling science fiction novels of 1994.

numerous other projects for Lucasfilm, including the 14-volumes

in the New York Times bestselling Young Jedi Knights series

(co-written with his wife Rebecca Moesta).

over eleven million of his books in print.

Kevin recently signed the largest science fiction contract

in publishing history, to write the prequels

The three immediate prequels to Dune were

House Atreides, House Harkonnen and House Corrino.

Now, he and co-author Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert,

are writing three more prequels, which take place earlier in time

than the "House" series: The Butlerian Jihad (Tor),

and The Battle of Corrin (Tor). After The Battle of Corrin is published

in 2004, Kevin and Brian will work on the sequels to the original

six Dune novels, which ended on a cliffhanger due to the death

Kevin's most recent solo project is an epic SF series, The Saga of the Seven Suns, published by Warner Books.

The third book in the series, Horizon Storms, is due out in hardcover in 2004.

The books are set in Earth's future, when humans

have moved out into the stars, with the help

of the ancient alien race, the Ildirans,

that the universe is more dangerous than they ever imagined.

rave reviews, and is likely to land on future lists of SF classics.

Publisher's Weekly says of A Forest of Stars:

"He weaves action, romance and science with a rousing

plot reflecting the classic SF of Clarke and Herbert

and the glossy cinematic influence of Lucas and

Spielberg…..Sparked with surprises, enriched by

ecological issues that laypersons can appreciate,

this saga soars as it exposes the inner and external

Unlike some epic SF or fantasy books, which

tend to drag on for chapters before anything interesting happens,

his books will hook you by the first page.

ability to create an instant connection between the reader and

which may explain his immense popularity with

complex and interesting characters, fast-moving plots and

writers would consider daunting: he is incredibly prolific.

Most people think of writing as a sedentary activity, but not

He hikes through the Colorado Rocky Mountains

as he dictates his current book into a hand-held tape recorder.

A world traveler, gourmet cook and avid hiker, Kevin

Kevin spoke to us about the Saga of the Seven Suns,

his road to becoming a bestselling author and why he

never even considered quitting, even when the rejection

He also talks about his deep love for Frank Herbert's SF classic, Dune,

and why he and Brian Herbert feel that Frank Herbert is watching over

What did you like to read when you were a little boy?

When I was a little boy, I was utterly enamored with

a short story together and a pretty substantial outline for

a novel together that we hope to do someday.

is a big Ph.D./physics/astronomy guy and I knew I wanted

to basically turn a gas giant planet into a small sun to warm

up the small moons around it, so people could terraform it.

So we sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine

and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a

That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers

science fiction and fantasy, especially monster movies

Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton, who was one of my

I read was H. G. Wells' The Time Machine when I was

and was so thrilled with it that I wanted to read more about the

remember with this genre was watching the movie,

point at which I decided that this was the stuff was for me:

the giant Martians blasting with their heat rays and dying

because the germs killed them at the end.

That was just the coolest thing I had ever seen.

Somehow, right then, I made up my mind that I wanted to

That is the main stuff that I read, although

I went through plenty of history and adventure stories too.

But science fiction was always my great love.

I read most of H. G. Wells, and all the science fiction books in

and started with the A's and proceeded through the library.

I read Frank Herbert's Dune when I was twelve years old.

influence on me because I wanted to be a writer and

Frank Herbert was the perfect writer for science fiction

Not only did he create terrific alien worlds and

monsters and characters, he also had second and third

order stuff in it as well, that you got if you really paid attention:

all the politics, the economics and the "wheels within

I learned a lot about writing and plotting

I was twenty-four or twenty-five years old called

Resurrection, Inc.. It was not a copy of

Frank Herbert, but it was clearly influenced by his work,

with all the politics and the complicated plot.

that I was going to send Frank Herbert the first signed copy

the book was brought out in paperback, nine months later or so,

I was never able to send him the book and tell him

thing now that I'm writing Dune books myself with

Frank Herbert's notes and with Frank Herbert's

he does know, with all of these strange coincidences

Brian and I feel that this is the thing that we were

and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become

very successful writing Dune books after Frank

Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself

silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.

What else would you go back and tell your

Oddly enough, I wouldn't go back and give myself

encouragement, because that wasn't necessary

not for a nanosecond, doubted that I was going to

I always knew that everything else I was

doing in my life was leading up to it: every job that

I had I was learning something that I would later apply

I went to college and took some creative

in physics, astronomy, history and sociology because

I felt that was the stuff that I needed to know before

back in time and tell myself "Keep at it, you'll

eventually be successful," or anything like that, but

I think that is something I would love to do and

say to myself, "You know what, Kevin? You're going

to be writing Star Wars someday and you're going

to write more Dune books using Frank Herbert's

I wouldn't believe it, because I'm not just a

successful writer in the science fiction genre,

I'm am just the geekiest fan boy in my heart.

To think that I can pick up the phone and call

Harlan Ellison or that I get letters from Arthur

C. Clarke is just about as cool as it gets.

What did your parents think when you got

Kevin at the top of Mount Elbert, the highest

summit in the Colorado Rockies, 14,433'.

Well, they thought it was great as long as it was

was an accountant and they didn't think that

seeking the life of a freelance writer was very practical,

Of course, I was just as determined to do it.

They made me think in a realistic fashion.

make their nice little arguments that, no, I wouldn't make

enough money to live on and so forth. Because I was

freelance writing in high school and college: I sold

working as hard as I possibly could from writing went

from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year.

And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really

to make sure that I had a solid enough day job that I enjoyed

so that I could keep writing during the evenings and the

I did several interesting jobs, working in

restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering

Then I got a full-time job as a technical

writer for a large scientific research laboratory:

Did you work on any classified projects there?

classified projects is that most of them are so utterly

boring and uninteresting that James Bond wouldn't even

Yes, the thing that makes something classified in a

document is a number after a decimal point on a table

to do with a nuclear cross-section or something like that.

There aren't folders full of stuff like secret stealth airplanes

that are being built in Area 51 or something like that.

In fact, I don't think I've ever worked on anything

of my background in physics and astronomy, and because

I had a minor in Russian history (and this was at the time

when the big Cold War was going on) and because I had a

lot of freelance writing credits, I walked right into this

job as a technical writer for a big research laboratory.

clearance to go through the gate to go into a huge

laboratory with the largest lasers in the world, the world's

first supercomputer banks, energy research, and genetics

It's like a huge toy store for somebody who's

time everyday at work reading and editing papers about

cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it.

Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into

"This is our typically American-centric idea....

sure President Bush can say that the U. S. government won't

fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding.

Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.

Does he think that by him saying that because the U.S.

(who theoretically has the most ethical researchers in the

world) will not fund it, that no one else will do it?

you going to let Saddam Hussein's old chemists work on it

Do you think that everybody in the world is

That must have come in handy to get into the

mindset for writing in the X-Files universe.

I did some stuff for the X-Files that are directly

lifted from my daily work at Lawrence Livermore.

I wrote a book with my frequent co-author, Doug Beason,

called Virtual Destruction, which is a murder mystery

set in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

We thought having a crime investigator working inside

this environment where people are classifying things and

cleaning up things so that the investigator can't see classified

material made for an interesting murder mystery.

I've used that experience for quite a bit of good effect

Did you come home from your day job and write every night

Every spare second I would write, somehow.

that after editing and writing all day long, she came home

so exhausted she just wanted to watch TV or veg out. But for

me, I was writing all day long, but I kind of felt like it was

practice and I got to do the real stuff when I got home.

was much more interested in writing a short story for

Analog or anther magazine than writing this lengthy

technical report for the International Society of Respiratory

sending stories out and every once in awhile I'd get

something accepted or get the little trickle of

positive feedback like "That's something we could

my first book, at the age of 25 -- this was after hundreds

and hundreds of rejection letters -- once I got my foot in

the door, it's like they grabbed my foot and dragged

three-book contract after that, and consistently have

sold book after book after book since then.

I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've

So I understand that you also won the coveted

Yes, that was when I was going to writer's conferences.

They had this contest as to who could produce the most

their little stacks in their hands and I had to come in

with Dune and Frank Herbert's notes, in Frank

Herbert's notes and folders, Brian and I found

Dune -- the bestselling science fiction novel

ever written, which has won the Hugo, the Nebula

and is basically the science fiction version of The Lord

of the Rings, basically as good as it gets --

these rejection slips and you think, "I guess

I'd like to talk about the Saga of the Seven Suns now.

First off, I was struck by what a huge project this

It's really incredible what a huge undertaking it is.

Well, first, it's just so much fun to do.

Terry Brooks, the author of the Shannara series,

writing these big fantasy books that have gone

Terry Goodkind all write these big, fat fantasy

I read them and I enjoy them, and they are

"Why is everybody doing these as fantasies?

." What I did is I tried to pull together everything --

and I mean everything -- that I loved about science

fiction, from Asimov to Zelazny, and threw it into

my entire writing career to do this series

learning all the different aspects of how to juggle

multiple plotlines, how to build the worlds and the

technologies and the characters, the monsters and

and I wanted to write something that was all my

my two biggest writing successes in my writing career

have been the Dune books and the Star Wars books.

Dune has all the big, epic vastness of the galaxy, with

politics, economics, intrigues and wheels within wheels plots.

But they don't have any aliens or anything. Star Wars

has all the color, the humor, the action, the monsters

and lots of aliens, so why not come up with an

epic storyline that has all the politics, wheels within

wheels stuff from Dune, but all the color and space battles

and aliens from Star Wars, and just turn everything loose?

It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back

it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.

a lot of hiking and walking and I carry my tape recorder with

me to dictate writing, or I just think and put down notes.

I just went out for days, and I couldn't stop talking

about creating characters and building the worlds,

that will carry this thing out to about seven books.

I was worried it was going to end after three.

Well, I wrote the manuscript for Book 3, and it turned

were each 700 pages long, I realized that I needed to

-write it and change the climax a little bit.

effectively now written both Book 3 and Book 4.

I've got the outline for Book 5 and I know what's

going to happen at least through Book 6.

because the thing grows so much, I don't know

Let's start with the first book in the series, The Hidden

Now that was a first chapter that (literally)

I blow up a planet in the first sentence or so, don't I?

a gas giant to turn it into a sun, using a device called the

I understand you had a little bit of help?

to me, but a lot of people picked up our books first without

Star Wars readers that like my Star Wars books

them sort of 'knew' that they should read Dune but

were perhaps somewhat scared off by it."

I envisioned doing it, and I have a physics and astronomy background.

Another friend of mine is Greg Benford; he and I wrote

a short story together and a pretty substantial outline for

a novel together that we hope to do someday.

is a big Ph.D./physics/astronomy guy and I knew I wanted

to basically turn a gas giant planet into a small sun to warm

up the small moons around it, so people could terraform it.

So we sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine

and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a

That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers

Like how to beam a neutron star into the center of the gas giant.

If you have the means to do what I described to do, the physics

I don't have people opening their helmets in space and trying

to breathe vacuum for awhile or some of the other bizarre

things I've read in bad science fiction books.

Wars books, I threw in details to explain some of the stuff that

the Tie Fighters, as they fly along, they have this weird

that the engines in the Imperial ships always made this strange

feedback noise in the communication systems of all the other

ships that they were near, so that makes scientific sense, even

though it might not be rigidly accurate, at least it makes

more sense than the ships making that noise in empty space.

The way you set up the different cultures in the Seven Suns Saga is

we (Earth) would be far into the future -- we have a figurehead

been consolidated and humanity is moving outward to the stars.

What are some of the things that went into your decision

to create Earth's future as the Hanseatic League?

I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy,

with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like

what I was explaining before, about making the science make

sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too.

just say, "One hundred years in the future we've now got a king

But if you look at the British royal family

and take away the scandals and the goofy stuff that's going on,

people love to have this king to look up to -- the royals are like

And I thought, "If you're going to have a big

boring commercial consortium that is run by the chairman of

the board and diplomatic people, that's not going to make

very good press, that's not going to keep people in this large

commercial, and there was Tony the Tiger

wouldn't a giant, commercial government come

up with their own spokesman, who is designed

to be attractive and fatherly, and people would

with the idea of a figurehead king, but he

doesn't ever actually do anything because all

the decisions are actually made by this consortium.

In my story, the next king, unfortunately for him,

is actually very smart and wants to do something

because all the people think he's the one making

the politicians want King Peter to take the fall for

to take the fall for all the bad decisions he

never agreed with in the first place, he might

as well start making the decisions for himself.

Which does not go over very well with the people

who have been running the show all along.

That's kind of a standard "powers behind the throne

wanting to manipulate the king," although here

the king wants to make his own decisions.

is sort of a classic fantasy storyline or historical storyline.

Let's talk about the man behind the throne: Basil Wenceslas.

It's Basil (bah´-sil), like Basil on Fawlty Towers.

One of my very favorite things to do is to write bad guys.

Because I learned that bad guys never think of themselves

They always think that they are doing the

You can't just have some cackling guy saying

"I want to take over the world because, well, I don't know,

but I just want to take over the world."

you to the railroad tracks, Nell, because I am EVIL."

You have to understand why they are doing things.

In a certain sense, this guy -- who is one of the most evil

people in the book -- he's not really that bad at running the show,

because he knows what he's doing, he's smart and he's got the

He's like the Godfather, and if you read

Mario Puzo's book, he's really a pretty cool hero.

villain than the Emperor, because he's conflicted and

Chairman of the Hanseatic League, to be pulling the strings.

He's got his own plan, but he doesn't have any patience

with people who won't cooperate with him because he

Well that's what he's supposed to be: the Ultimate CEO.

Let's move on to the Green Priests of Theroc: another

communicate with the WorldTrees and tend them.

Well, it is Nature, but it's not Nature fighting back.

still have a very happy and productive and comfortable

life if you are in a situation where you are fully

cooperating with nature instead of cutting down the

ranting ecological message, but because I've done

these Dune books, and I'm a big outdoor hiker and mountain climber,

I think that you can get along just fine with forests and things.

In the book you have a planet where the trees are sentient

and this special group of people can communicate with them.

But instead of trees walking around like the Ents in The Lord of the

Rings, these trees sit there and love to experience other things

vicariously, because they have roots; they can't walk around and

The Green Priests, the humans who are connected

to these trees, are almost like their ambassadors.

and experience things and places where the trees can't go,

and the trees themselves store all of this knowledge.

this forest is like a gigantic library or databank, and they

can tap into it to get any information they want.

trees are interconnected, when a priest takes a treeling or

one of the trees with him to another planet, he can instantly

communicate with anyone else who has a tree.

a primitive culture, it's just that they don't really care about

They are on a planet that's like a South Sea island

are temperate, and there is plenty of food just falling off the

and colonize other planets and make fortunes for themselves.

What the Terran Hanseatic League find maddeningly ironic

is that these primitive people who talk to trees are the only

ones who can communicate instantaneously across large

And this is the science being realistic.

just send a radio message twenty-five light years away

and expect to have a regular telephone conversation.

It would take twenty-five years each way.

Green Priests to do communications for them, but the Green

Priests aren't really all that interested; they have other stuff

makes them become pawns in some of these larger,

elements in Hidden Empire and the whole series,

you can identify major fantasy icons that are all through it.

The Green Priests are like the tree spirits or the people living

out in the forest; you also have another group

called the Roamers, who are like the Gypsies.

The Ildirans, the old, dying empire that has been around

so long that they are kind of on the wane, are like the Elves.

They are beautiful and have such an interesting culture.

I loved the way you described the incredible Ildiran architecture.

Did you have an artist work with you when you sketched

I hired an artist to do a bunch of background work for me.

who did a wonderful Star Trek graphic novel that my wife

Igor and as I was building this whole series, I ended up with

one hundred pages, single spaces of just notes about

if he would read the outline and draw some of the things for

went ballistic with all these neat ideas.

like twenty pages a day with sketches of the Prism Palace

the Ildiran race, the spaceships, the costumes that

pictures gave me ideas for other storylines that I put

to Igor, because he had such a terrific influence on

Books, I had also done a bunch of work with DC Comics,

and I took the sketches to them and said, "I would love

to do a graphic novel in this universe; isn't this cool?"

They looked at Igor's sketches and the outline and they went

So I wrote a graphic novel prequel, which comes

I have never, ever heard of anyone ever doing that in

I don't think anyone ever has done it, actually.

So what did Warner Books think about that?

Well, since DC Comics is owned by Time Warner,

other comic book companies, but that was one of

at the back of Hidden Empire there is an ad for the

Veiled Alliances graphic novel at the end.

the graphic novel comes out, there will be a full-page

This will tell you about the very first Green Priest,

a woman named Madeline Robinson and her two sons.

They make an amazing discovery --- they are looking through Klikiss

ruins and they accidentally wake up the first Klikiss Robots.

lie…and boy do they have a lot to cover up.

Weren't you mad at me for leaving that cliffhanger

I thought, "Wait, what's going to happen??"

But it's one of those things that's really obvious.

right in front of your face all along that these guys

But because they are robots, the reader never

"don't remember" what happened to the Klikiss race?

Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

That was the scariest robot that I had ever seen.

This came from a conversation that I had with

was ridiculous, because if you had an alien race that looked like

insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves,

My love for Godzilla movies I think also

There are so many things in this series.

that was kind of shocking for humans -- and certainly for Basil --

to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not

"We're like mice on the battlefield" -- referring to

the fact that humans are really just onlookers to this

huge battle between titans -- was very insightful.

of themselves as just mice on the galactic battlefield.

made a comment about "Shouldn't this be more

significant -- that the humans are getting more into it?"

And my answer back to her was, "Jaime, with the humans

getting into this war (once you get into Forest of Stars and learn

how incredibly big this war was) this is like Liechtenstein

I'm pretty sure -- because I'm already up to Book 4 --

and I'm trying to remember what happens in each book -

I think there's a scene where the Klikiss robots want

"Why are you wasting your time with these guys?"

They've got their own agenda, as you'll see in

Will Veiled Alliances go into the history of this

great war that happened long before humans

Veiled Alliances is set about one hundred years

So we find out about the origins of this great war in the

Yes, you find out about it in Book 3, and you'll

Not everybody wants to be a part of the big

own. Brian Herbert was worried a bit that the Roamers

were too similar to the Fremen in Dune, but I think

their entire culture is totally different from the Fremen.

They are still the renegades from society.

I think they are different culturally -- they trade with

is so incredibly dangerous, trying to mine the ekti that

is the major fuel source for space travel.

shape your culture, when everything you do is horrifyingly

These are the guys that are literally living in the places

Or they are grabbing comets and doing other

are treated like dirt by the civilized society, but they are

the ones that are doing all the work that no one

who do this work, and are treated like crap.

back to the fantasy trope here, they are taking the "treasure"

which is guarded by a "giant dragon" -- the Hydrogues, who

It's one of those subjects, where some people

think it belongs in fantasy and science fiction novels and

I thought it worked well because, ultimately,

heroic, archetypal characters and when you're following

the epic storylines, there has to be the greatest love in the

universe, the star-crossed lovers who somehow can't ever

get together (you've probably noticed that storyline going

Kevin and wife Rebecca Moesta during their travels.

If your characters aren't "human" enough -- and I use that word

to cover all the different species -- to fall in love passionately,

then they aren't interesting people to read about.

people who are willing to go the extra mile.

It's an important part of epic literature.

Can you give us a sneak peek into the next book?

A lot of things blow up, more people die, a lot of people

don't die… (laughing) I read a lot of books that are like this:

that I paid attention to as a fan that either I liked or didn't like

One of the technical things that you'll notice

right away is that, at the beginning of Book 2, I did a summary

of the story so far, just because the books come out a year

If you read them when they come out, you'll want some

I like that, by the way, I think it's a very smart thing to do.

It's really helpful for people, like me, who read a lot of books.

As a reader, when I pick up Volume 4 in a series, and it's

been a year since I read Volume 3, I hate it when they jump

right in, because, although I liked the previous ones, I just

thing I put in is a very detailed glossary at the end.

So if you can't remember who somebody is, you can

Otherwise, with these really big series,

you almost need a notepad next to you as you read

I don't think the author should make the reader do

that much work to remember who somebody is.

That way the information is at your fingertips, if you need it.

But it's not in the way, if you don't need it.

Book 2 starts out when I reintroduce one of the characters,

I don't want to say, "This character, who did this and that

And go through this entire summary first.

On a more general level, though, reading some of

these long, epic sagas, a couple of times I've gotten the

impression that the author was treading water or didn't know

where he was going, or was just tying to squeeze an extra book

In every one of these books, and all you can look

at now is the first two, I want to make it so that so many things

happen in them that you didn't expect would happen in this

series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them.

That it's not like an "Insert Adventure Here" novel.

stuff at the end of Forest of Stars is very different than

The introduction of the Wentals, for example.

Fire elementals: the Faeros, the Air elementals: the Hydrogues,

and the Earth elementals, the Green Trees.

I can't wait to see what happens to poor Jess Tamblyn,

who's floating around in an ocean, filled with the Wentals

the little Green Priest, being taken off to the breeding camp.

That was actually pretty horrifying, I have to tell you.

epic series, I suppose bad things must happen.

Another character is her lover, J'orah, who gets his balls

Boy, does he pay a big price to be Emperor, and to

gain access to the thism, the telepathy that bind the race together.

Well, wait for the next book where he has to start

who has been suddenly put in Hitler's shoes.

immediately -- the whole Empire will fall apart."

So he's in a really fascinating situation.

As you read the book, you do believe in the

concept of the thism -- a sort of psychic connection

to every person in the Empire that only the Emperor

was, before the coronation I was wondering how real

it was…but afterwards, it becomes quite real and

That scene was basically like just after

FDR died, Truman being brought into the White

House and told, "Oh, by the way, we have this

atomic bomb you can drop on Japan tomorrow."

And the successor's reaction is basically,

J'orah is such a good person coming to the throne,

now he's taking over for this horribly evil

what all his father was doing -- and why --

You'll learn in Book 3 what's really going on

How interested are you, generally speaking,

I don't consciously study it to see what storylines

I could take from it or anything, but I've read tons

and I've read tons of it second hand, because I've

read so much fantasy and historical fiction, which has

that I make up be grounded in something, instead of

before, you can see "now this is the dragon and

these are the elves" and that kind of stuff.

I try not to make it really overt, but I at least try to

I want to make sure that you finish each book it's

not just another adventure, that starts and finishes.

I want after each one, you to think, "I can't believe

He killed off a main character, he's introducing

I will promise that the booka will come out when

and then go away for five years for you to wait.

The first two are out, I've delivered Book 3 to the publisher,

you can always count on a book coming out when

That is another thing that I learned from reading these

and leaves me dangling for way longer than he's

Leaving you dangling is one thing if you

know that next Saturday morning you'll see the next

That's ok, you're supposed to wait a week, and

leave you on a cliffhanger and then not meet your

responsibilities and delay and take five years

people's attention spans aren't what they used

They seem shorter, and you might lose those

that if somebody was writing a 700 page book,

you would give them a couple of years to write it.

You really couldn't expect it any faster than that.

Now I'm writing a 700 page book in the Seven

Suns series and an 800 page book in the Dune

series with Brian every year, plus two or three

how did your collaboration with Brian Herbert come about?

Dune Books in Chronoligical Order of Events:

But the science fiction community is like a small,

really hard to get in touch with someone.

I was always such a huge Dune fan, and had read all

Chapterhouse Dune and it ends on a cliffhanger.

I couldn't expect him to finish it, but his son Brian

was an established science fiction writer.

Frank's last published book, entitled Man of Two Worlds,

had worked together and that Brian had obviously followed

was beginning to lose hope that Brian was going to

write the next Dune book that I wanted to read.

through a mutual friend, I sent a letter introducing myself.

By this time, I had quite a few credits, some award nominations,

so that proved not just that I'm a hack, but that I could

write in somebody else's universe and do a good job at it.

So I sent him some samples of my books and asked him

if he was ever going to write this book, because if he was,

didn't know what you were going to do the rest of the Dune

story, could I help you with it or offer my assistance --

or if you're not going to do it at all, could I do it.

The first line of my letter was, "What you just heard

myself that I had nothing to lose anyway. If he said

no, well that was all there would be to it.

But Brian called me a little later after he received the letter

and -- not surprisingly, although I didn't think of it at

the time -- Brian had many people who had asked to write

Probably some pretty big names, too, I would say.

But he called me and we started chatting.

in the room, and she loves to tell this story

"Kevin," she says, "After about three minutes

you and Brian just started talking a completely

fan, I had read absolutely everything else that

he's written several times. So when he started going into the

details of obscure Frank Herbert novels, I picked right

It's such a huge, complex universe, you would

have to become totally immersed in it to carry it on,

even though it must have been an hour or two into

the conversation, we just got lost in all these things

Brian told me that plenty of other people had approached

but none of them seemed to have the enthusiasm

I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books,

but I didn't write him a letter saying, "I have a way we

can cash in on this and make a lot of money."

a letter saying, "Your father left this story obviously

unfinished, somebody's got to finish it."

It seemed like something where the shoes were

just too big for Brian to fill by himself. But with the two of

us, with two different sets of feet, we tried to fill

that his dad ever wrote with outlines or notes.

know of any notes or papers we could use.

him for a weekend -- he lives in the Seattle area -- and we

just spent this exhausting couple of days brainstorming like

We decided what we were going to do, which turned

out to be the first three Dune books that we did:

House Harkonnen and House Corrino, which are immediate

prequels instead of Book 7 first, but that conversation might go

Well, here's the short answer: By now it had been

almost twelve years since Chapterhouse Dune was published.

We felt that we wanted to do something that would

re-energize people about Dune, that would make them remember

even if they had just read the first Dune book and not picked

up anything else, that they could still relate to it

It might be a bit intimidating to readers who aren't familiar

with the series, to know where to sort of dive into it.

Yes, if we were to have jumped in and say,

"Here's the long-awaited Part Seven of the Series" you

would only get the people who had read all six of the first

books and still remembered what the mystery was.

So we wanted to write the first prequels as a story that

to me, but a lot of people picked up our books first without

Wars readers that like my Star Wars books.

them sort of "knew" that they should read Dune but

because it brought lots of readers to the original books.

But my Star Wars readers knew they liked my writing,

and decided to give my Dune books a try.

they finished those three books, they could jump right

I met all kinds of fans who came up to me

and said that they started reading the original Dune

the sales of Frank Herbert's old books -- the ones that have

been out forever and ever-have somewhere between

the light on this great series, then I don't think it would

decide what we were going to do with our three prequels,

because we didn't have the outline for Dune #7 and

about four days later and the attorney for the Frank

Herbert estate called up Brian (this is twelve years

after his father's death and three days after we

called up and said "I've just found these two safe

deposit box keys in Frank Herbert's old files.

So Brian went to a bank in the Seattle area and

they opened up the boxes that had been there unknown

and untouched for all these years, and there were

some old disks, some recipes, some letters and things

…and the full and complete outline for Dune 7.

"I was watching when we went into Iraq and I thought

'This is scary, because it's like the Emperor Shaddam going

Emperor Shaddam, as in 'Well, we have the right here,

we have the bigger armies, so we're going to walk in and

these people that are disappearing in the night.

a couple of grenades at us and then disappear.

It was so creepy that Frank Herbert set all this stuff up

So, when you said that maybe Frank is watching over us,

this is one of the things that makes us shake our heads

So now we have the end point of the story

But there were a lot of things that we needed to establish and

We were starting work on House Atreides, and Brian

writing at home; he was a full-time insurance agent.

realized that we were going to be tackling these big

projects that he needed to have a big writer's office

And like most of us with a three car garage, he

parks cars in two of the spaces, and piles junk in the

So they cleaned out all the junk from the

third garage , all the bikes and boxes and old things,

to make room for his writing studio and there, up in the

back corner, by the rafters that had been stashed for

fourteen years or so, was a big xeroxed box of

papers on which Frank Herbert had written

There were character sketches, a lot of the epigraphs

that go at the top of the chapters, files and files of those.

had cut out of Dune: Messiah that had never been published.

By some other very weird coincidence, my letter to Brian

asking him to consider me showed up at Brian's house

joking when I say there may be some sort of approval

Yes, and the one that I'm just finishing tomorrow, and sending

it to Brian on Wednesday is The Battle of Corrin, which is

formation of the Spacing Guild and their Navigators and the

over the course of this centuries-long war.

Well, when you read the original Dune books, there

are quite a few references to things -- such as the war

"I wonder what that was anyway?" How much of those

things did Frank Herbert already have mapped out?

Once you read our books, you will say, "Oh, that's what

and remember, that I've re-read these six books over and over -

but now we have to be like these religious devotees, looking

mistakes in the original six books which took him approximately

I don't understand how he kept it all straight, really, because

glitches, that if you are a fanatic like we are then you

could maybe spot them, although if we have spotted the

glitches it's our job, as Kevin and Brian, to find

couple of pages of my very first Star Wars book, I

explained what Han Solo really meant when he said

"The Millennium Falcon is so fast it can do the Kessel run in under

12 parsecs," so it makes perfect scientific sense now.

(laughs) There are so many people who have written

in that universe, which must also make it difficult to keep

errors like distance measurements for time measurements.

Although I suppose they have bibles now.

A lot of it was compiled while I working on Star Wars.

I did a total of fifty-four projects for LucasFilm: I did

novels, anthologies, a young adult series co-written with my wife

(Rebecca Moesta), comics, pop-up books and all kinds of

I was lucky in that I was one of the first writers to do it.

I don't know how a new author can pick it up now, just because

which also owns Bantam, the imprint I worked with.

The Del Ray people -- most of their books now fall

in something called "The New Jedi Order"

which is a big, cohesive story that has been outlined

Each author is just writing a piece in it.

When I started doing it, the playing field was pretty much

They told me to tell whatever story I wanted, in any

Well, they know everything about the Star Wars

They probably don't know if they've got fresh

milk in the refrigerator, but they know what color

the button is supposed to be on somebody's control panel.

And if I'm going to be writing in that universe, then I have

The one thing I don't understand about those people is,

if they hate the series so much, why in the world do they

thing…they are just rabidly negative it seems.

Claire, if you can answer that, you will destroy

to be, "We hate everything as it comes out until

it comes out…until the next one comes out and we

But yet they're going to rush out to buy it, then

get on message boards and talk about how awful it is?

That's the point where I decided not to get upset about

Rebecca and I did this series called "The Young

Jedi Knights," which was fourteen volumes long and on

these discussion groups they would just be yelling and ripping

them to shreds every time each book came out, even though

they kept selling like crazy, won awards and we got wonderful

group people, there was one guy who posted a review of

Volume 13 of "The Young Jedi Knights," and he tore it to shreds, saying

"This one is just as bad as the other twelve books that I hated

so much I could barely read them!" Well, why would he

If you don't like them, you don't like them.

But it's sort of like saying, "I hate eggplant, so I'm going

to eat more eggplant and hate it even more."

But that's really just a small minority of the fans that do that.

Yes, it's actually a very tiny group of people.

amateur psychologist here, but these are very diehard fans

and I think there's a little bit of jealousy here.

wish they had gotten picked to write Star Wars books.

I'm sure you get asked all the time how to become a

But the answer to that is you must develop your own work,

become established as an author, before you would ever

be asked to work in an established universe.

experience with Dune, which was one of the uglier ones

I still kind of shake my head over how unfair they were.

Before House Atreides came out, there was an

"uprising" on one of the Dune fan boards about: how

dare we do this? Even though Frank Herbert was obviously

going to write more Dune books, even though he left

copious notes behind, and even though he had asked

Brian to write a Dune book before he died…but these

people just thought it was terrible and they got together

and they posted sixty one star reviews of our new book

"I don't even need to read this book to know that it

Amazon.com has rules that you can't post unless you've read the

book, so we were able to get those removed.

disturbing how nasty these people were. The light

at the end of the tunnel, or the silver lining or whatever

cliché you want to use, is that after House Atreides came out,

Brian and I received a bunch of apology letters from

that we had really captured Dune and had not

disgraced Frank Herbert's name and they appreciated

what we were doing, even they had been against it

For our readers who don't know anything about Dune

except that it's a big doorstopper book, but who've heard

it's great, what is the best entry point to get into the series?

Luckily, we give them three different entry points with

the original book, Dune, because that's the first book

book, but if you look at it, it's really only about 390 pages long.

It's not that long really, it just seemed long because when it

came out every other science fiction book was only 130 pages long.

which sets up everything that is in the Dune universe and will

introduce you to all the characters that you will meet in Dune,

would be to start by reading House Atreides, which is our first

prequel, which is set 15 or 30 years before Dune.

You can start by reading that story, and it might be

a bit faster of a read, because we wrote it in the

and it will introduce you to the concepts that might

bog you down a bit if you just picked up Dune to start.

Another possibility you could start reading is with

the first book in our other trilogy, called The Butlerian

Jihad, which is a whole different set of characters, and it

establishes and lays the groundwork for everything in the

places and, as I said before, Dune is the bestselling

to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should,

Since the first book was published in 1963, why do you

think it has held up so well when so many other writers' works

from that period have really fallen by the wayside?

"I think that in the next -- insert however many years it's

going to take -- computers aren't going to take over, that

we are going to synthesizing ourselves and we're all going

to have…well, wouldn't you like to have an augmented

memory chip that you could plug into your head so you

don't have to look everything up and remember everything?

Today, we're walking around with Palm Pilots. What if

we could just implant the Palm Pilot so we could just access the

It won't be giant robots standing there with bullwhips making

humans…well, what would a robot want a human to do

Well, it's a good book, I can answer it that way.

thing is, unlike other science fiction books, for example,

look at Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or some of the other

writers who were classic science fiction writers, or Robert

concepts at the time they came out, but when you read

now, they seem a little bit quaint and old-fashioned.

Whereas, Frank Herbert, was almost utterly separated from

His stuff was about concepts and the details of

building this alien world, the politics in a science fiction

exceeded anything that Isaac Asimov had imagined,

the fact of our new technology is irrelevant to Frank Herbert's

So you can pick it up and read it now and it doesn't

feel outdated any more than if you read H.G. Wells' War of the

It doesn't feel dated, because it's set in 1890 and

I'll get fan letters if I put the wrong date on it,

I've read it several times, and I really

get different things out of it every time I read it.

read it as just a plain old space adventure story, people

being stranded on a desert planet that has giant sandworms on it,

but you can also read it and get politics and economics out of it.

Herbert has some fascinating ideas about that stuff in there,

and there's stuff about religious fanaticism, all kinds of things

Also, on a metaphorical basis, there is this

desert planet that has this substance called spice that the

whole universe needs to run their spaceships.

that sounds a lot like oil from the Middle East and Saudi Arabia,

I'm pretty sure that he was aware of that when he

was writing it, even though it was long before the first

But it becomes important and meaningful to us now because

we are always going to get stuck on needing oil and it's always

going to seem unfair to us that the most valuable resource in

the world is buried under this ugly bunch of sand duness out

in the middle of countries where the people have cultures

I was watching when we went into Iraq and I thought

"This is scary, because it's like the Emperor Shaddam going

Emperor Shaddam, as in "Well, we have the right here,

we have the bigger armies, so we're going to walk in and

these people that are disappearing in the night.

a couple of grenades at us and then disappear.

It was so creepy that Frank Herbert set all this stuff up

There is all that, although that's the one where we're working

sixties, it was a realistic fear that computers would become

super powerful and take over, and men would be enslaved

and that's how he set up this whole future.

anybody is particularly worried anymore that their

Apple Macintosh is going to take over the world.

in the Terminator movies James Cameron was using a lot of stuff

So you don't believe in the scenario that A. I. is dangerous?

I think that in the next -- insert however many years it's

going to take -- computers aren't going to take over, that

we are going to synthesize ourselves and we're all going

to have…well, wouldn't you like to have an augmented

memory chip that you could plug into your head so you

don't have to look everything up and remember everything?

Today, we're walking around with Palm Pilots. What if

It won't be giant robots standing there with bullwhips making

humans…well, what would a robot want a human to do

I don't know what Gene Roddenberry thought about that,

but I remember in one of the later Star Trek shows,

Deep Space 9, there was an entire story arc

on how augmenting intelligence artificially (illegal genetic

manipulation to make someone a genius) had

But aren't we doing that now? If somebody comes up with

a technology where you can literally increase your RAM in

your brain, people would be lined up from here to Antarctica

people put on when they are playing virtual reality games,

There are wearable computers being developed

It's helping us speed up faster, do more and experience

more and have better entertainment options which

fanatical religious crisis that would cause a "burn all the

technology so we can all go back to churning our own

There are people who want that to happen.

But how could a logical person want that to happen?

I can't believe that we'd ever really want to give up our

Muslim group came and told us to bury all of our

TV sets in the backyard, and we had no choice but

to do it, or we'd be executed in a soccer stadium.

But even still, after we cleared out the Taliban in

Afghanistan, what did they do in the first two days

They dug up their TVs, plugged them in and

I wanted to touch on another novel of yours

is a fictional biography of Jules Verne and his

more adventuresome friend, Captain Nemo.

felt sorry for the Jules Verne character, because he

is the writer and his friend, Andre Nemo, has all these

marvelous quote at the beginning of the book about living

life to the fullest, but clearly Verne did not.

How much of Jules' Verne's real life is in the book?

Well, Jules Verne's real life is pretty much sanitized

the more I read, the more I started to hate him (laughing).

Because I didn't get the feeling that you

I entered into this project with this idealized picture of

Jules Verne, because I had read all his stuff and he

his life, and found that he was surly and people didn't

everything around the world, but he felt that all

he needed to do was look at pictures in magazines

story about him running off to join the ship and his

father racing to stop him, and pulling him off it

and locking him up until he promises that he will

only travel in his imagination is supposedly a true story.

At least it is in all of the biographies of Jules Verne.

I was kind of disappointed that he did seem to be

He seemed selfish in the book, or at least terribly

In fact, in the first couple of drafts of the books,

my test readers were yelling at me, saying "He's just

So I had to calm him down and sanitize him.

I admire his imagination so much that I wanted

to set him up as the counterpoint to the swashbuckling,

In another sense, I thought Captain Nemo

(who was portrayed as the bad guy in Jules Verne's stuff)

needed to have a bit of a fresh look at him, too.

to understand that there was actually more of that in

where Verne explains more about Captain Nemo's background.

You find that there was a reason why he had turned against

the world, that his wife and his children had been brutally

and he had barely escaped this revolution in Turkey

got so much fan mail in which everyone wanted him to

about that, because he wanted to write other things.

I had to research this book for three years, not just

read all the Jules Verne stuff, but also to

understand the French history during that period,

and putting it all together, it was like real history was

cooperating and falling into place, because

that was exactly at the time of the Crimean War

and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence

being dug to come out right by the Red Sea,

not too far from the coast of Turkey, where I was

"Of course, he'd want this submarine boat so he

could shoot the ships which were coming through the

All of that stuff just cooperated very well.

Jules Verne really and truly was a good friend

of Alexander Dumas, he was trying to write

for Dumas, but Dumas got into financial troubles

and told Verne to go write his own stuff instead.

I found that entire subplot quite interesting and wondered

It was as close to real as I could make it.

were plenty of fascinating things going on, and you

also throw in the mysterious island and the pirate

battles and the dinosaurs and the passage to the center

It really has all the magic of history and

One scene that was just hilarious…. Captain Nemo

one survivor from the shipwreck, who turns out

to be Phileas Fogg (the lead character from

Around the World in 80 Days). And Fogg doesn't

care that he's just been fished out of the ocean, or that

how he can immediatelyget back on schedule.

fun references sprinkled throughout his work.

Well, one has to keep things tied together.

The disappointing thing was that I had trouble selling this

I was getting these letters from the publishers saying,

"Does any know who Jules Verne is, anymore?" "Does

That's horrifying, that they even asked that.

circumstance, I sold it to Pocket Books to a guy I

had been wanting to work with for a long time.

We sold him two books: the first one was Captain Nemo

and the next is called Mr. Wells and the Martians.

thing as Captain Nemo, but it's young H.G. Wells

and his professor T.H. Huxley. The Cavorite Sphere

is being built in Britain in secret because they

are afraid they are going to have to go to war with

Germany, and they go off to Mars to prevent the

involves Percival Lowell, who popularized the theory of

and his friend Dr. Moreau have found a crashed

cylinder that has a Martian scout in it.

does his dissection experiments and actually

saves the Martian from the germs that would

on the Martian, while H.G. Wells, Percival and

Huxley are off on Mars trying to prevent rest of

Yes, Pocket Books, hardcover, March 2004.

I understand you did the novelization of The League

I've seen the movie and, obviously, read the script a long time

I am also a big fan of Alan Moore's graphic novel.

The main reason that I wanted to do it, was I felt it

things; I'm calling them fantastic historicals -- I can't

doing the H.G. Wells book and I did Captain Nemo,

that it seemed like an obvious thing for me to be doing

I think it's a tough thing to translate a graphic novel or

took the gang of characters and wrote a whole new

The leader now is Alan Quartermaine; wasn't Mina

It's like taking this old-fashioned Justice League

of America and giving them a different story to

I'd like to turn to the subject of writing.

you actually dictate while you hike, and then

someone else transcribes the tapes for you?

Yes. I find that I can do my writing better if I'm

of a scene and the phone rings, it really disrupts

my tape recorder out with me to do my writing, even if

I'm just walking around the neighborhood here.

Just because I'm out of reach from the phone.

What I much prefer to do is to go out the whole

day, and go to the Rocky Mountain National Park

(I live in Colorado) or go into the forests or

I've hiked in Colorado and I have to tell you

that not once did it occur to me to dictate something

foot peaks here in Colorado and I'm doing another one

does a couple of things: one, as you're walking around

(presumably you're not hanging by your fingernails

from a narrow ledge or something) you can

get into a sort of fugue state and concentrate

without interruption about your scene or your world

or your character or whatever you're doing.

I'm surrounded by fresh and interesting details.

I'm hearing the sound of the wind in the trees

and I'm looking at the wildflowers, smelling

giant sand dunes here in Colorado (you can imagine

what I was writing then), or walking in Death Valley,

where I wrote a bunch of Star Wars books because

Luke Skywalker's planet, Tatooine is a big desert

I've been hiking up in the snow in the Sierra

Nevadas when I was writing a Star Wars scene where

they're on a polar ice cap of another planet.

related to what I'm writing, it's still different

sensory things coming in that are storing up in

and don't resist the fact that it doesn't feel natural

because you're used to typing, telling your

story out loud is the way human beings communicate.

We don't normally think up words, translate how to

spell them and then move our fingers up and down over

this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters

appear on a screen to make our eyes look at these letters

to translate them into the sounds of the word and figure

a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter

to you and you read the letter, there are like twelve

extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in

more direct flow for me to be telling stories out loud.

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak

using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning

using full sentences in the way that paragraphs

assistant and typist for eight or nine years now.

types everything and does a good job, translates

on the computer over and over again, so it does go through a fine

goes over everything and redlines it all.

through ten to twelve drafts before it actually is published.

So it's as clean and as streamlined as I can make it.

What's the biggest mistake that you see beginning

They want to know how to get an agent before they've

saying, "I've got an idea for a book, how do I get an agent?"

The answer is: You research the book, you outline the

book, you write the 400-500 page book, you edit

Do you think that most people aren't willing to put

in the vast amount of time required to be a published

author? I know you put in an amazing amount of

publishable before you need to worry about the

a story, they are worried about how you're going

to find someone to sell the movie rights to.

that will come later, if you've done a good job

to say is that they need to focus on getting the story

done right and making it publishable, before they

As a practical matter, it seems to me that you

handle an amazing number of life tasks, if you

will, especially since you and your wife have

an author with lots of deadlines, and you obviously

spend a lot of time hiking and staying fit.

handle your workload and that busy of a lifestyle.

at the same time, so it's not like I'm taking a day off.

Because my wife is also a writer, the "husband time"

(that is, the spending time with her) is easy.

off to science fiction conventions together,

editing each other's books, brainstorming

something while we're both cooking dinner

our going out to a restaurant together and we

at 6:30 or 7:00 and I'll usually work out and

have breakfast and start writing by, say,

I have to stop to make supper (and, yes, I

do most of the cooking) and in the evenings

we generally watch movies or TV shows or

So you love to cook? What kind of food do you

The one that I make when I'm really trying to

killer lasagna recipe that's been in my family

at least 15- 17 lbs…I also do some Moroccan

either made up or picked up from somewhere.

I've always felt, even when I was a bachelor

working full-time and coming home from work

at 5:30 at night, that I would take the time to

cook myself a couple of chicken breasts and

make a salad or something because I work

too hard, and I deserve to have a decent meal

instead of heating up a pot pie or something like that.

I don't know if that makes me a gourmet cook or not.

I think that you make time for the things that

a whole bunch of the questions you are asking

You don't waste time on things that aren't

Yes, and that's why there are so many leaves in

the science or political news know that really fire your

I have to admit that one of the things that

surprised me, as far as how fast science is progressing,

is about a year ago, on TV is the president of the

United States telling people that we were not

jumped off on the issue of whether that was morally

right or wrong, I was more focused on the shocking fact

that we've come so far that our politicians are talking

impossible to imagine the president giving ten years

ago, because it would have been an absurd thing to talk about:

talking about cloning and they are saying things that

anybody with eighth grade science knows that what

Or what they do on the talk shows when they have a

discussion about human cloning, is to have an

expert in genetics speaking on one side of the issue,

and the expert on the other side is somebody from

the local church choir who just thinks "It's bad."

They are putting these people up as equally informed

and I get so mad listening to these people.

Say the topic is whether you can keep stem cells to do any sort of

research on them in order to help people who have

from the church choir is ranting that "You are killing

These stem cells could eventually be made

Even though the experts know that's wrong, the expert

isn't given any greater credibility than the moron

who doesn't know what she's talking about.

I was reading that a lot of the scientists are complaining

that, because the government won't fund stem cell research,

you've basically stopped the research as a practical matter

(although the research is not illegal in the U.S.)

because that's where all the big grant money comes from.

This is our typically American-centric idea.

earlier about the idea in the Seven Suns books about

how shocked we are that we aren't the center of the universe,

sure President Bush can say that the U. S. government won't

fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding.

Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.

Does he think that by him saying that because the U.S.

(who theoretically has the most ethical researchers in the

world) will not fund it, that no one else will do it?

you going to let Saddam Hussein's old chemists work on it

Do you think that everybody in the world is

the uproar over stem cell research happened right

after the crazy Raelians claimed to have cloned a baby

and we had all just seen the latest Star Wars film:

I'm being somewhat facetious here, but can we blame LucasFilm?

Remember the scene when Obi Wan walks in to

and discovers they're building a clone army?

Is that what everyone thinks is going to happen if

You can blame them for the uneducated people getting the

But the people who make policy decisions

should damned well know what they are talking about before

expert on cloning who would be afraid after seeing

But this is one of the reasons I was baffled and perplexed

that under our jury system that you are guaranteed a

where an expert on DNA analysis is put on the stand for

put on, refuting some of the technical details that the first

guy said and to explain that there may well have been

some other person on the planet Earth who had this

same DNA as O.J. You have those two people explaining

highly technical material, and the people who are making

the decisions are people who have such limited lives that

they can't get out of jury duty?? You are talking about

the waitress and the street cleaner and the guy who's out

of work who used to be a disc jockey, deciding this DNA

earlier, I think that's what's happening with making

these decisions about stem cell research.

Where it's coming from is that I don't think that the

people who are making the policy decisions are the

people who know the most about the subject, on either

They are being swayed by the church choir

lady who doesn't like stem cells because they could

what if someone comes up with an eugenics program.

to them I ask, "Ok, but what if we can make Christopher

First off, let me vent about this: It's been how many

years since the Challenger disaster and we never

Columbia and we still have no plans to replace it

so our fleet of five ships is now down to three

even got a new one on the assembly line. Talk

forever that NASA and the other contractors have

been attempting to come up with the next generation

I mean, we need to have a regular commerce

between the surface of the Earth and at least near-Earth

orbit from which we can build other things and send

NASA is, with it's apparently crippling bureaucracy,

the place to get it done or whether the Sultan of Brunei

should just say "Here's my money, build me a space

I have long -- and I don't know very much about the man,

so I'm not saying anything him personally -- I think that

Ted Turner was this wonderful thing that happened

did everything his own way, which wasn't the way

that anybody else did it, and created CNN.

CNN, our entire way of receiving news is totally

They laughed at him when he founded CNN, saying nobody

would want to want to watch 24 hours a day of news.

They laughed at the new style of CNN Headline News,

which had the ticker at the bottom, but it took about

all of three weeks for every news station to copy it.

All of that is a lead up for me saying that I think that

somebody with the resources and innovation and the

idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up

with a successful space travel program, whether it's

Bill Gates wants to do "Geeks in Orbit" or whether

the Sultan of Brunei decides that he wants to have

that the NASA space program is the best and most

rather that they build another space shuttle and that

we'd at least have four of them working than

just sitting around waiting for some miracle to happen.

What's your opinion on the debate about manned vs.

unmanned space flight? What about those who say

that manned space flight is just too dangerous and

that they must be manned, for a number of reasons.

I agree that it has to be manned, for a number of

difference between looking at a National Geographic

magazine and actually walking around in Morocco.

You must have people who are actually there.

of our manifest destinies is to get people up in space,

whether it's a colony on the Moon or on Mars,

or just in a practical commercial sense, that you

want to build factories in orbit because you can

make things there cheaper, such as pharmaceutical,

materials, and crystals, and all kinds of things that

the most lucrative business on the planet Earth

apparently is tourism in some form or other.

If you started getting Hiltons up in orbit, they

probes, you need to send them first, but

it's like this: do you want Columbus to go across the ocean,

or do you want to put a message in a bottle and hope

like the inhabitants of some other country, depends

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The first leg was played on April 17, and the second leg was played on April 25, 2018.

(meta data) TITLE:  Final Kickoff Times Set for 2018 Scotiabank Concacaf Champions League

2018 Scotiabank CONCACAF Champions League

The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (Concacaf) confirmed today the dates and kickoff times for the finals of the 2018 Scotiabank Concacaf Champions League, the region's most important club tournament.

The first leg of the final series will kick off at 8:15 pm ET, on Tuesday, April 17.

Current MLS Cup Champions Toronto FC will welcome Mexican side CD Guadalajara at BMO Field.

The decisive second leg of the finals, to be played at Estadio Akron, in Guadalajara, Mexico, will begin at 9:30 pm ET (8:30 pm local).

The Liga MX side earned the right to host the second leg final after accumulating the most points through its six SCCL matches this season, including the round of 16, quarterfinals and semifinals (4-1-1, 13 points).

Toronto FC finished with a six-match record of 3-2-1, good for 11 points.

Semifinal action culminated on Tuesday night in Mexico City, where Toronto FC joined CD Guadalajara for the two-leg final.

The finalist advanced to the fourth and final round of the competition this week.

Toronto FC defeated Club America, 4-2 on aggregate, while CD Guadalajara edged the New York Red Bulls, 1-0 on aggregate.

The tenth edition of Concacaf's continental club championship is the first to feature the newly introduced, action-packed, home-and-away knockout format, which has captivated fans across the region on the road to the Confederation crown.

The 2018 Scotiabank Concacaf Champions League is broadcast in the U.S. in Spanish by Univision Deportes on UDN and its digital platforms; in Mexico and regionally across Central America and the Caribbean on Fox Sports Latam, and in the U.S. in English on Verizon media properties, including the go90 platform, as well as other rights partners across the Confederation.

For more information, including broadcast information for the final matches, please check your local TV listings.

The winner of the 2018 Concacaf Champions League will represent the region in the 2018 FIFA Club World Cup in the United Arab Emirates.2018

Scotiabank Concacaf Champions League Schedule – Finals*Listed in ETTuesday, April 17, 20188:15 pm Toronto FC (CAN) vs CD Guadalajara (MEX) – BMO Field, Toronto, CanadaWednesday, April 25, 20189:30 pm CD Guadalajara (MEX) vs Toronto FC (CAN) – Estadio Akron, Guadalajara, Mexico


The series order was officially announced in May, with an anticipated premiere date of 2020.

(meta data) TITLE: Renewed: Bluey – TV Tonight

By David Knox 5 commentsFiled under: News,

Smash hit ABC KIDS series Bluey has been renewed for a second season.

Since its launch the show regularly tops multichannel ratings.

It is the #1 show of all time on iview, at 75 million program plays (55m this year alone).

In a second series Bluey will play fun and elaborate new games with her sister Bingo; Chilli's relationship with her girls will be further explored as she juggles work and family life; Bandit returns with his wry sense of humour; and we'll meet more of Bluey and Bingo's family and friends.

The second series will comprise of 52 x 7-minute episodes, with production commencing later this month.

Series two will debut on ABC KIDS and ABC KIDS iview in 2020.

Bluey merchandise is also on the way after a BBC Studios deal with Penguin Random House for three books to be available in stores before Christmas 2019.

"The first series was a massive effort from our talented and dedicated young team.

We've all been amazed and overwhelmed by how Australians have taken Bluey into their hearts and we're totally stoked to be making another fifty-two brand new episodes," said Charlie Aspinwall, Executive Producer.

"The phenomenal success of Bluey is a testament to the incredible creative vision of the Ludo team and we can't wait to share the new adventures in series two with Australian kids and their families" said Libbie Doherty, Acting ABC Head of Children's Television.

"Australians – young and old, with kids and without kids have embraced Bluey, Bingo, Chilli and Bandit, and ABC KIDS is thrilled to be able to offer them more of this warm and funny series next year."

"Bluey is a series with huge heart, warmth and humour that offers a modern and authentic look at family life – and it has taken Australia by storm.

The response from global clients has also been phenomenal and we think it will be embraced by audiences worldwide.

We can't wait to introduce the world to this Blue Heeler family who will clearly resonate everywhere," said Henrietta Hurford-Jones, Director of Children's Content at BBC Studios.

Sally Caplan, Head of Content at Screen Australia, said, "Bluey is a phenomenon and it's been a long time since a local children's show has made such an impact.

The incredible success of series one is a testament to Ludo Studio's ability to create uniquely Australian content with universal appeal that resonates with children and their parents.

Screen Australia is committed to supporting inventive and authentic children's programming like this, and I can't wait to see what Bluey and her family get up to in the second series."

"The second series of Bluey will allow Ludo Studio to continue to grow their animation studio, create 40 jobs in Queensland and inject close to $6 million into the local economy," Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said.

"The Queensland Government, through Screen Queensland, is very proud to be one of the many partners supporting the growth of Ludo Studio, and the creation of this Queensland story, showcasing our beautiful landmarks and lifestyle to global audiences young and old."

This true-blue Australian series is created by creator/showrunner Joe Brumm (Charlie and Lola), Emmy® awarding-winning executive producers Charlie Aspinwall and Daley Pearson (Doodles, #7DaysLater), producer Sam Moor (CBeebies), and supervising director Richard Jeffery (Tinga Tinga Tales)

The series will be executive produced by Libbie Doherty, Acting ABC Head of Children's Television, and Henrietta Hurford-Jones, Director of Children's Content for BBC Studios.

Production credit: Bluey series 2 is a Ludo Studio production for ABC KIDS.

Principal production investment from BBC Studios, in association with Screen Australia.

Post Production, Digital and Visual Effects work undertaken in Queensland, Australia with funding from The Queensland Government through Screen Queensland and the Australian Government.

Well I know one 3yo (and her mid-30s uncle) who will be very happy with this.

Log in to Reply J Bar May 16, 2019 4:19 pm

Log in to Reply dan May 16, 2019 3:37 pm

Great to see a Australian show doing so well Ben Fordham did an interview with the creator on his radio show the other day

Log in to Reply barrington bumbaclaart May 16, 2019 12:36 pm

Log in to Reply Elizabeth H May 16, 2019 3:10 pm

My husband was literally laughing out loud the other day…I told him it was our daughters' favourite show.

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He conceived the idea independently in 2016 and approached Ludo Studio to develop it. The series was pitched at the Asian Animation Summit in 2016, and was noticed by ABC and BBC executives for having the unique tone that they was searching for. The two networks ordered 52 seven-minute episodes, with BBC investing 30% of the funding and acquiring the global rights for distribution and merchandising. The series was produced entirely in Australia by a local team, many of whom were first-time animators from Brisbane. The program was announced to premiere in Australia on ABC Kids, followed by a British premiere on CBeebies.
 The first series premiered in Australia on ABC Kids on 1 October 2018, with 26 episodes airing daily throughout October. The remaining 26 episodes of the series began airing on 1 April 2019.
 It was announced in March 2019 that production had begun on a second series of 52 episodes.


The council was founded on 1 July 1997 with the amalgamation of the District Council of Clare, the District Council of Riverton and the District Council of Saddleworth and Auburn.

(meta data) TITLE: Clare & Gilbert Valleys Council - Council Profile

(meta data) PUBLISHER: District Council of Clare and Gilbert Valleys

# "Clare and Gilbert Valley Councils, vibrant communities working together"

The Clare & Gilbert Valleys Council was proclaimed on 1 July 1997, having been formed through the amalgamation of the District Council of Clare, the District Council of Riverton and the District Council of Saddleworth & Auburn.

Distance of Principal Office to Adelaide: 143km

Total Roads including sealed and unsealed 1,833

Population: 9,311 (SA Government Grants Commission 2018)

Ranging from the district service towns of Clare, Riverton, Saddleworth and Auburn through to the villages of Stockport, Tarlee, Rhynie, Manoora, Marrabel, Waterloo, Mintaro, Penwortham, Leasingham, Watervale and Sevenhill.

The Council comprises of a total area of 185,142 hectares.

There are 9 Councillors, plus the position of Mayor.

The current representation quota for the Council is 718 electors per Elected Member.

Our district comprises some of the most productive lands and scenic landscapes in Australia, with the capacity to deliver premium products and experiences.

Located adjacent to the outer metropolitan area of South Australia's capital, Adelaide, the Clare & Gilbert Valleys district enjoys the advantages of proximity and accessibility with an enviable rural lifestyle.

The productive and fertile lands of the Clare and Gilbert Valleys combined with favourable climatic conditions, result in excellent broad acre cropping opportunities and livestock production.

This strength provides a strong foundation for Clare Valley Cuisine and an increasing trend towards value adding before the farm gate.

The Clare Valley wine region is famous for its world class Rieslings and has achieved recognition as Australia's 'Capital of Riesling'.

Combined with shiraz as another staple, and emerging wine varieties, the Clare Valley has a strong future in viticulture and winemaking.

The high level of health and associated services available locally, including two hospitals and an excellent ambulance service along with the presence of the Mid North Passenger Transport Scheme provide well for those that need assistance.

The southern boundary of Clare & Gilbert Valleys Council is located 77 km from the Adelaide city CBD.

The completion of the Northern Expressway has provided greater access to the district, and has improved transport and travel times to Adelaide and Outer Harbour.

The Clare and Gilbert Valleys Council is a local government area located in the Yorke and Mid North region of South Australia.