Bestselling novelist David Brin has written outstanding novels such as "The Postman" (later taken to the silver screen by Kevin Costner), Kiln People, Earth, and the non fiction book, The Transparent Society. He has received such awards as the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, Locus Award for Best Novel and Best Single Author Collection, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author and Best Novel.

Brin has toured throughout the United States giving fascinating insight on scientific topics and about the developing technological world. Brin has a in-depth understanding of the development of our civilization. He has written about society's social problems, the risks that we face and the way that technology has affected us.

Interview by Marisa Darnel

ARTIST INTERVIEWS: In your book, The Transparent Society, you wrote about a world that is supervised by miniature flying cameras and how technology invades privacy. What is your opinion about software that can access your computer through the web?

DB: Some have willfully misinterpreted my 'transparency' point as arguing against privacy. In fact, I devote a whole chapter of The Transparent Society to how essential it is for free people to have secure homes and the power to confide in those they trust. My main worry is that people read too little history. We tend to ignore how elites have conspired with each other in every other civilization, controlling the flows of information and justifying a narrow hierarchy of power. Each of us has some elite we worry about -- Democrats tend to mutter about corporations and the rich, republicans about snooty academics and government bureaucrats. What we miss is the big picture. They are all dangerous. And only one thing has ever protected the common man and women. Accountability. Applying it to all of them. And to do that, the common man and women has to stay able to see.

I despise all attempts to sneak into other peoples' computers without their knowledge. But I predicted technology like that seven years ago. Your only protection will be to catch the invaders in the act and hold them accountable.

AI: Speaking about your last book, Kiln People, where did the idea for the novel come from?

DB: Well, there is always the temptation, in science-fiction, to write the "definitive" work about a certain topic. You haven't seen a lot of trips to the Sun since Sundiver, for instance. So I guess there's a hint of self-indulgence in Kiln People. By damn, I was going to look at every variation of 'people dittoing' I could imagine.

My inspirations came from many directions. One is the ever-present human dream of increased life span. We already live a very long time, for mammals. We get over three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. And of course, it never feels like enough. But nearly all science fiction tales about achieving the wish of more years simply tacked them onto the end... increasing your life in series, as it were. That makes no sense! In some future era you'll just be a conservative old goat, hoarding your money and getting in the grand-kids' way.

No, what we really could use is more life... in parallel! A way to split up into many selves each day and do all the things we need to get done - then reconverge the memories into one continuing being. Ah, to be in two -- or three or four -- places at once....

Another source of inspiration came from the past. Take the mythical golem, or the terracotta soldiers of Xian, China. Or the way Sumerians thought that writing on a clay tablet was the same as inscribing (and immortalizing) your soul. I decided to have my dittos -- or one-day Xerox copies -- be made of clay, in keeping faith with these traditions.

AI: Do you see Kiln People as a comedy, in a way?

DB: Let's just say that I felt at liberty to have fun. And to invite the reader to share some laughs. Some are groaners and some more subtle. A book that explores serious issues can also have a lighter side. Why not?

I'm known as an optimist because I think people are getting better, smarter, wiser. But I don't consider that hugely 'optimistic'. Not if the rate at which it's happening is way too slow. To get better, but not fast enough, that's a unique style of tragedy that Aristotle never imagined. Yet it's one that modern science fiction is wonderfully well-equipped to handle.

I sometimes portray futures a little better than our world -- though filled with new problems and new tensions -- because I think such worlds will face our children. Just as we, who have solved so many problems from the past face perplexing new ones. That's what I find interesting about science fiction, its fascination with change! Dour dystopias and preachy prescriptive utopias seem, in contrast, rather boring.

Would I like to have my wisdom tested by the technology of dittoing? Sure! I give sixty-percent odds I'd use it pretty well... and if not? Well, it offers some exceptional opportunities to send your duplicates out to have fun in ways you'd never, ever risk your real self.

AI: You have also written about intelligent extraterrestrial life. Has anyone close to you had such experiences?

DB: Seems to me the aliens that people keep talking about, with UFOs that abduct farmers and disembowel cattle, would want to stay as far away as possible from a guy like me. I taunt them on radio and have lots of fun. Look, I am an "alien expert" in both my technical-SETI work and in my role as a novelist. There's no one more qualified or interested in the subject. If there were even a whiff that seemed credible, I'd be all over it.

Fact is, if we are being visited by UFO guys, their purported behavior says it all. They are at best creepy, immature little psychopaths, Yawn. Wake me when some adults show up.

AI: You were disappointed with the movie version of your novel The Postman. Do you think it would be possible in the future to pass a law to protect the writer's rights, when a novel is taken to the screen?

DB: Not in the U.S. Commercial interests are far too strong. Anyway, my disappointment was limited by awareness that I'm not the guy who had $80 million to spend on making a movie. Kevin Costner was. He had a right to take the lead and the resulting film had its good aspects - visually gorgeous, occasionally witty, and it did not betray my book's moral heart. Costner's problem was excluding little guys like me who might have been helpful. The resulting hodge-podge wasn't awful. It was just disappointing. I'll live, y'know?

Better next time.

AI: What do you consider the most important scientific and technological discoveries in the last three decades?

DB: The discovery that other animals use language.

The discovery that our brains are more complex than any ideology can ever describe, so we had better drop simple formulas and work on pragmatic solutions.

The fact that self-righteousness and indignation are actually auto-secreted self-doping addictive states, and the people who are angry all the time are actually on a self-induced drug high. When this knowledge actually takes hold, it will transform society.

AI: Your writing has inspired an electronic German group, a Canadian rock n' roll band and a composer from Baltimore to create music. How do you feel about that?

DB: Fields of art feed each other. I can't count the number of times that music in my headphones helped to drive a scene in a story.

AI: How does art have a role in saving the world?

DB: Let me dare to define art for our purposes. I call effective visual art some work or representation that subtly changes human beings just by the sight of it, transforming hearts and minds without verbal or logical persuasion. By that reckoning, the 20th century featured two hugely effective works of visual art, both of them gifts of physics! First, the terrifying image of the atom bomb changed forever our little-boy romantic attachment to war, beckoning us instead us to grow up a bit in dealing with this new and awesome power to destroy. Defense became the business of serious grownups. Even among soldiers, war itself is now seen as evidence of failure - an urgent and risky measure arising out of inadequate diplomacy, preparation or deterrence.

The second image that changed us was a gift that arrived at the very end of one of the most difficult years any of us can remember - 1968 - a year that brought most Americans to the brink of exhaustion and despair. Then, a final token arrived -- like a gleam of hope shining at the bottom of Pandora's Box. Remember when the Apollo 8 astronauts brought home that first perfect image of the Earth, floating as a blue marble in space? A picture that moved even the most cynical hearts and changed forever our outlook towards this fragile oasis-world.

AI: You are a futurist. Can you tell us your vision of the future of civilization?

DB: Obsession with either past or future can almost define a civilization. Worldwide, most cultures believed in some lost golden age when people knew more, mused loftier thoughts and were closer to the gods -- but then fell from grace. Under this dour but recurrent worldview, men and women of a later, coarser era can only look back with envy, harkening to remnants of ancient wisdom.

Just a few societies dared contradict this standard dogma of nostalgia. Our own Scientific West, with its impudent notion of progress, brashly relocated any 'golden age' to the future, something to work toward, a human construct for our grandchildren to achieve with craft, sweat and good will -- assuming that we manage to prepare them. Implicit is the postulate that our offspring can and should be better than us, a glimmering hope that is nurtured (a bit) by two generations of steadily rising IQ scores.

Of course, the very notion of progress is anathema to the nostalgic-romantic way of looking at things -- one of the underlying reasons for the hostility toward science fiction that roils in the hearts of so many literary establishment figures, who cannot otherwise explain the depth of their loathing. The more recent, upstart belief in universities, democratic accountability, science and human improvability questions the fated persistence of so-called "eternal verities."

To me it's obvious. If you have no hope that your kids might be better than you, what's the point?

AI: David, what are your current projects?

DB: I recently published Forgiveness, which is a ninety page hardcover graphic novel (or in French, as Band Dessinee, a posh word for a high-class comic!) set in the Star Trek universe, based on a story I first envisioned in the 1960s! This is my first graphic novel, collaborating with the famed artist Scott Hampton. Another graphic novel will appear in late-2002, much darker and foreboding. In fact, it is the darkest thing I ever wrote, based on a novella that came in second for a Hugo Award some years back, about a parallel world in which the Nazis win World War II, for an unusual and chillingly plausible reason. It is called The Life Eaters.

Contacting Aliens: The Illustrated Guide to David Brin's Uplift Universe will be out in July. This will be a wonderfully fun tour of the many alien races that people have enjoyed in books like, Startide Rising and The Uplift War. I'm currently working on my first "Heinleinian Juvenile" novel... this one about some rather unpleasant aliens who decide that, because humanity did them a favor, they owe us a gift. The gift they choose is a colony on another world. But for colonists, they zap up three thousand kids from a Californian high school.

AI: Finally, what's a day in the life of David Brin like?

DB: Life with three small kids -- plus many deadlines -- has left me with less time for writing and a need to focus. It's fun. No one has yet noticed my crazy eccentricity, screamed "heretic!" and had me burned at the stake. So I guess I am ahead of the game.

You Can Visit David Brin's Official Site at: www.davidbrin.com