A few weeks back I interviewed Jeffrey Ford who mentioned Tom Purdom as his pick for the genre’s most underrated writer. So I decided to contact Mr. Purdom and find out a little more about him. I conducted this interview via email. Enjoy:

MT What’s the first science fiction story you ever read?

TP Heinlein’s Requiem, the opening story in the pioneering 1948 anthology Adventures in Time and Space. It had a sentimental, twilight mood that appealed to my fourteen year old sensibility.

MT Has writing science fiction changed your appreciation of it as a reader?

TP Yes. I notice technical ploys and other craft elements that I might have missed if I hadn’t struggled with the same problems myself.

MT What else do you read besides science fiction?

TP In fiction, I read thrillers and mainstream fiction, including literary fiction and less classifiable stuff like Pat Conroy’s work and David Poyer’s naval stories. In non-fiction, I mostly read history, military history, biographies, memoirs,and books about science and scientists. The periodical I read regularly are The Economist, Barron’s, the Atlantic, Science News, and New Scientist.

MT What are you working on now?

TP A sequel to my Asimov’s story Sepoy. Like the original, it’s an action story permeated with moral ambivalence. The viewpoint characters serve an alien government in the same way Indian soldiers served the British raj.

MT Is there a place in the real world that gave you the impression that it was ripped out of the pages of a science fiction story?

TP The checkout line at some supermarkets when I glance at the covers in the magazine display and see general circulation women’s magazines touting articles that promote the pleasures of oral sex. That’s a detail straight out of Heinlein. The magazines women read in the 1940s and 50s are still being published in the twenty-first century but they’re running articles about subjects many of their readers wouldn’t have talked about fifty years ago. I had a similar feeling when I went to the dry cleaner six years ago and spotted a Norman Rockwell calendar opened to January 2000.

MT A lot of people think Science Fiction as a genre doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Do you think that’s true?

TP Yes.

MT If you had the power to ressurect a space program that was cancelled or never got off the ground which one would you choose?

TP The space shuttle design that used two piloted stages. Arthur C. Clarke used that kind of arrangement in his 1950 novel Prelude to Space. The development costs would have been higher but we might have had the kind of Earth to-orbit trucking service the shuttle was supposed to give us-

MT What technology exists right now that you think has the most underated potential?

TP Extreme miniaturization of computers and robots applied to space colonization. I think there’s a good chance we’ll eventually send relatively small payloads to the Moon and build bases, observatories, and even tourist resorts without placing a crew on the surface. We’ll create a destination and a refueling stop BEFORE we start sending large numbers of people and that will change the economics and the general feasibility of permanent colonization.

Tom Purdom’s website (link)

Related posts:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response to this post, or trackback from your own site. Wax-political uses threaded comments so you can reply to any comment directly by clicking on the relevent reply to comment link.