Bob Shaw, of course, needs little if any introduction. He was once, and still is whenever he finds time for it, fandom's best writer. And an all-around nice guy, too, because he'll do things like let a couple of American fans he only slightly knows reprint one of his speeches. Here is a transcript of Bob's Guest of Honour speech from Rivercon, in Louisville, KY, this past August.
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What I Learned From Watching
illo by Charlie Williams Star Trek

by Bob Shaw

I was very interested just now to get the recipe for that great southern fan drink 'swill'. It sounded pretty good, and it's prompted me to give you a recipe of my own. One of the most famous drinks in the world is Irish Coffee. It's a good drink, but unfortunately everywhere I've traveled I find that people make it all wrong. They get the proportions a bit out of balance. To get the proportions right, what you do is take a large glass and fill it with Irish Whiskey, and you get a coffee bean... You tie it on a piece of thread and you dip it in there three times; any more spoils it... Then you throw that bean away because it's finished...

This is one of the craziest conventions I've ever been to. I've been to lots of crazy conventions, but for different crazy reasons. One of my weirdest experiences ever was when I was invited to be Guest of Honour at a Star Trek convention. The only reason this strange event came about was because in the talks I do at media conventions, where people with brains go, I used to do a talk about Star Trek. The whole idea of it was that while we're watching Star Trek every week, something awful always happens. They run into a vast invisible force field and everybody gets thrown out of their seats. And even though it's three or four centuries in the future, they've forgotten about seat belts.

It's occurred to me that this is happening once a week without fail, and it's always with the same people on the bridge. And assuming that the ship works three eight-hour shifts, it means there are two other crews on that ship that nothing ever happens to. They're just as well off, really, because of some of the things that do happen. Take Scotty, for instance; he was at the Star Trek convention where I was a guest. He was a more important guest than I was -- I know that because they gave him more whiskey than they gave me. And he drank it faster than I did! I never really thought much of him as an engineer. I was in aircraft design myself, and aircraft aren't as far advanced as space craft, of course, but I never liked the way Scotty went about his job. Every now and again he had to fix the main drive, and he wouldn't delegate it to one of the two or three thousand assistants; he always did it himself. Which involved lifting up that hatch, just outside the canteen, and getting down in there and moving the different colored Lego blocks. I was always amazed he did it right...

But Scotty was at this convention and I was very pleased to meet him in the flesh. He allowed me to buy him a drink, and then he allowed me to buy him another drink. And then he allowed me to buy him another drink... So at that point I sort of lost interest in the whole thing. When he came out to do his talk the audience went mad. He walked up and down a bit, then he explained that being in Star Trek for so many years had given him an insight into how space ships worked... He said that McDonnell-Douglas had invited him to go to see how they were getting along with making some part of Challenger or something. He said they took him in this design office and these engineers were all sitting there looking sick, because they had been working on this problem for about four years and they hadn't been able to get anywhere with it; they were stuck. And Scotty looked at it and summoned up all his space ship expertise which he'd acquired from Star Trek, and he looked at them and said, "Have you tried putting that there, and that there, and that there?"

So they looked at him and went (*smacking palm on forehead*), "Why didn't we think of that!" And the audience went mad, in that they believed every word of it... I was in aircraft design and I knew it was all lies. They were good lies, but they were lies...

Also at that convention there was Chekhov, Walter Koenig. He was a nice guy, but he came up to me and he said, "I understand that you go on making a lot of money making jokes about me." I didn't try to explain to him that I go to conventions as a fan. It costs me money to make jokes about Star Trek! And also, even more, I didn't like to explain, but I haven't made any jokes about him because he's too unimportant... So that night, when I was doing my speech, I put him in especially, just so his feelings wouldn't be hurt.

I find from many years of reading and also writing science fiction that I too have picked up this mistaken knowledge about the way things work. I'm not very good with motor cars, but I know how space ships work, and time machines and things like that... Time machines were a favourite of mine; my favourite design of a time machine came out in a mystery story in Analog. Time machines all sponsored the same description; there was a cage made up of shimmering rods, and if you remember, they always went together at certain angles that were very hard to comprehend. When you tried to study the shape of one of these cages, you got a curious wrenching sensation behind your eyes...

illo by Charlie Williams I loved those time machines. I put one of them into my science fiction novel called Who Goes Here; it's ten times as funny as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but nobody seems to realize it except me... But in there I have one of these time machines with a cage made of shimmering rods. And this one was used in a restaurant where, if you wanted a vintage wine you just ordered a new wine and shoved it in there, switched it on, and waited a while. You could have it thirty years old if you wanted, forty even. You took it out, and lived it.

I don't plug my own books, of course... In that same book I had some wonderfully funny ideas. For instance, I had a species of insect that was so ugly, so awful looking that it reproduced through being stomped upon. It's body was full of acid and also eggs, so when you stomped on it the acid ate through the sole of your shoe and before you could get your shoe off you had a foot full of little bugs. They went right through you and it was too late. Mmm; that's nice stuff to hear right after a banquet...

But we're drifting away from the subject of time machines, which as I mentioned is a favourite subject of mine. I remember many years ago back in Ireland in the 1950s, for the cover of a magazine I had to do this picture of a time machine. The only material I had to work with was a wax stencil and a dried-up Bic ballpoint pen. And so I decided not to attempt the shimmering rods and the curious eye-wrenching effect, on the wax stencil with the dried-up Bic ballpoint... Even Da Vinci couldn't have done it... So I went in for a time machine which looked a bit like a telephone booth, and it was for sale in a shop window. It was obviously a time machine; there was a notice on it -- the thing was called 'Chrono Clipper Mark IV', price $10,000. And there was a note under it which said, 'four years to pay'... That's a very subtle joke... The idea was that a person could go into that shop, give the owner a hundred dollar deposit, jump into the time machine, come out four years later, and you'd own it! But I never figured out who was making the payments...

All this goes to show you what a complicated thing time actually is. We tend to visualize it as a straight line, where the present is a dot. It isn't like that; time is more complicated than that. People often get precognizant dream, and sometimes know something is about to happen before it actually happens. For instance, just last week I dreamt that I needed a haircut... And I woke up in the morning and I did need a haircut! It's incredible...

illo by Charlie Williams I've come across only one serious attempt to travel into the future. This was an idea invented by an Irish science fiction fan named Walt Willis, who's one of the best writers I've ever met. He invented something called 'subjective induced temporal acceleration'. The system is that you put a person in a very cold, miserable, damp room, and you keep him there for two or three days. He's not even allowed to drink anything except alcohol-free lager, and he's forced to listen to Barry Manilow records. After he's been there for about four days, you pull a handle and the poor bloke falls through a trap door, and he lands in a room where there's beautiful nude young women plus champagne and cigars and everything like that. You know how it is when you're not enjoying yourself, time slows down? Well, when you're enjoying yourself time speeds up. So while he's been in this awful business time has been dragging on; then suddenly he's dropped in this other situation so he goes into temporal overdrive... And disappears into the future... I don't know how far he got into the future, but I volunteered for experimentation...

Science fiction writers do not deal very much with time travel. It's a difficult subject. Take traveling into the past, for instance. One of the best ways to travel into the past is to be struck by lightning. For ordinary people in real life, if you get struck by lightning you just die. But in science fiction if you get struck by lightning you get thrown into the past. And the distance you get thrown into the past is governed by certain variables -- your body weight, the exact number of billions of volts in the lightning stroke, and also the period of history that the author wants to write about... I've never read a time travel story yet where somebody has got thrown into the past where he couldn't speak the language...

That's possibly enough about time machines. I'll tell you what I've learned about space travel through watching Star Trek. I can tell you one thing; the old idea of firing people into space by a gun doesn't work ... That's no good. The old Jules Verne idea of a gun a mile high is a total impossibility. When you think about a gun a mile high, how could you ever get enough leather to make a holster for it... And who could wear it? You can't even think about wearing it underground because it's illegal to have a concealed weapon...

Then there's the modern communications revolution. There's so much happening these days with computers! I'm not quite caught up in that yet; I'm still stuck at the Alexander Graham Bell stage. I feel sorry for that guy; he built himself a telephone and it was no good, because there was nobody to ring up. He finally realized what was wrong, so he invented another telephone and he gave it to somebody so he could ring him up... Then after a while he invented a third telephone and he gave it to somebody else, and when he rang up the second telephone it was engaged...

Well, that covers the field of telecommunications. I think that science fiction is becoming part of education. I remember a good four years ago in Britain we'd been having a series of very bad summers. We haven't had one this year; it's been awfully good, but four years ago it was a typical summer -- raining, cold, and miserable. One day when I was sitting chatting with the landlord, he said, "You might not quite buy this, but we don't get good summers anymore." I was interested, so I said, "Why? What is the reason?"

He said, "It's this business they've brought in about leap years. Every fourth year they put in an extra day. These days are all adding up, and the calendar is getting out of step with the seasons." There followed three hours of innocent conversation, where I tried to persuade him that he had a nut loose, and that the extra days were there to were there to keep the thing in step. But he won in the end when told me, "Just look right through the door. Is it summertime, Sir?"

illo by Charlie Williams There's also the greenhouse effect. Everybody's worried about the ozone layer disappearing. In Britain, energy costs are a bit more expensive than they are here, so people get double glazing on their windows put in to save on their heating bills. And it's a funny thing about this. If you know the greenhouse effect, you have a little glass house; it keeps the heat in and plants grow better. That's what greenhouse means. So, what they're saying is, if you have a greenhouse, the heat comes in and stays in and keeps the place warm. But when you have an ordinary house with windows in it, the heat goes out through the glass and makes the house colder. So after many years of study I realize that house builders in Britain are putting the glass in the window in backwards... You've just got to turn it around, and all the house will start being warm. Of course a few people made a mistake with greenhouses and they end up with little icehouses instead...

Well, I presume everybody has heard about the Bermuda Triangle mystery. That's another one I solved through my intuitive knowledge of science gained by watching Star Trek. The big thing about the Bermuda Triangle is that ships and things keep disappearing. Now, there have been millions of books written about the Bermuda Triangle, paperbacks made of very absorbent paper. And since there have been shiploads of books written about it, people who live in the Bermuda Triangle want to read them, naturally enough. So all these ships full of very absorbent paper are fishing around inside the Bermuda Triangle. And when all the absorbent paper gets wet and heavy, all the ships disappear by sinking... And this leads more people to write books about the Bermuda Triangle mystery, and the whole thing keeps going on and on...

The great thing about science is that to make great scientific discoveries, you don't have to be a genius. I found this out through watching Star Trek... Take the case of old Albert Einstein himself. He made his mark in science, but it wasn't his great IQ that made Einstein famous and successful as a scientist; it was the fact that he had a simple child-like approach. For all I know, I might be even more simple and child-like, so I may be making even better discoveries than he did. But the one about the twins paradox I'm afraid was his greatest slip-up.

Two twins -- one of them gets on a spaceship and flies way around the galaxy, on a holiday cruise... Just like in Star Trek... This character, he swarms around the galaxy for two or three years, having a lovely time, having drinks, watching comets go by and watching Star Trek. Then he comes home and lands and he gets out of the spaceship and he's younger looking than the twin that stayed behind. Well, of course he is! The other one was looking after the house; he was paying the bills. He was doing all the work. That poor twin brother was worn to a shred! He seemed much younger so Einstein misinterpreted that time had passed more slowly for the one on the spaceship. He got it all wrong...

I was promised I'd be heckled... As well as practical science that I've been talking about, I hope I'll say a little bit about pure mathematics, another field of mine that I learned from watching Star Trek... Probability mathematics is a great favourite of mine. It's difficult in that you cannot predict the future as any student of horse racing will tell you... One of the themes of probability mathematics is that if two people lose each other in a very large department store, there's no guarantee that they'll ever meet up again unless one of them stands still. On the face of it, that seems a useful piece of information except that if it happens to you, how do you know which one moves and which one stands around... So it's a big decision to make. You could stand there and the store could close, and one of the assistants could come up and start taking your clothes off... And that would be all right except they would start by unscrewing your arms... So I've given up on probability mathematics altogether.

Anyway, in closing, I just want to say how pleased I am to be here tonight. And I'm just about as happy as a NASA scientist if a Mars lander had dug up definite proof of the existence of Ray Bradbury. Thank you for listening for so long. Now if anybody wants to heckle, I'll heckle back...

All illustrations by Charlie Williams

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