Apex Book Company

Michael A. Burstein (www.mabfan.com) won the 1997 Campbell Award. His short fiction, mostly in Analog, has been nominated for ten Hugos and three Nebulas. He and wife, Nomi, live in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is a Library Trustee and Town Meeting Member. He has two physics degrees and attended Clarion in1994. I Remember the Future, his collection of award-nominated short stories, was released by Apex Publications in November 2008.

What sort of ideas do you explore in your own stories?
Probably my most prevalent theme is the question of how we ourselves will be remembered in the future. “Kaddish for the Last Survivor” is an explicit warning about how slippery history becomes the further we are removed from it. And “Paying It Forward” and my new story “I Remember the Future” are homages to the science fiction writers of the past who created the field.

It sounds as if you’re as interested in the past as you are in the future.
I think my love of time travel is showing. But yes, I’m fascinated with how the past serves as prologue for the present, and how both influence the possible futures to come. And, as I said, I worry about how much the future fails to remember the past. One of the stories in the book, “Time Ablaze,” is about a 1904 steamboat fire in New York City that killed over one thousand people. Almost no one remembers it today, even though it was the worst one-day disaster in New York City’s history until 9/11.

Do you see any positive aspects to this clouded lens of history, or do you think remembrance outweighs any possible benefits?
I can’t imagine any good coming out of people forgetting about the past. There’s an old adage first spoken by George Santaya: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we don’t remember where we came from, we’re likely to make the same mistakes over and over. And if we can’t compare our current times to times past, how will we know if we’ve made any progress at all?

You seem to have an interest in a variety of sciences (physics, astronomy, biology), and I know you have degrees in physics. Do you find that physics inspires your writing more than other subjects, or does that vary?
The useful thing to me about having studied physics is that I can use it as a basis upon which to acquire understanding about other topics. I wouldn’t say that physics inspires my writing, per se; some of my stories have very little science in them at all. But it does give me an outlook that I try to apply to my fiction.

Your writing has been compared to the “Golden Age” science fiction, which is often known for its sense of wonder and spirit of exploration. What is your earliest memory of feeling that sense of wonder at something science-related? What about fiction-related?
You ask some tough questions! My first real memory of the sense of wonder at science came from a comic strip in a science textbook when I was in elementary school. The cartoon showed a boy eating lunch and his mother warning him to eat his food before it got cold and to drink his milk before it got warm. The boy wondered how both could happen at the same time, and the textbook explained the basics of thermodynamics (although probably not in those words).

As for fiction and sense of wonder – when I was a kid, Star Wars came out. Need I say more?

Well, maybe I should. My early love of science fiction was also fueled by Star Trek repeats and the stories of Isaac Asimov.

How does your religion influence your work?
One of the things I noticed early on was that much science fiction tends to stay away from religion. I think this goes way back, to the time of H.G. Wells, when a lot of “enlightened” people felt that science would end up replacing religion. In much of the early pulp science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, science and rationality have become the new faiths.

But fiction should not remain blind to human reality, and some of the best science fiction stories written have taken the perspective that religion is a valid form of human expression that will continue to exist into the future. Being Jewish, I wanted to explore how someone of my own faith might deal with the existence of another universe, hence the story “Reality Check.” And my interest in the Catholic concept of sanctuary led to my story “Sanctuary,” in which an alien requests sanctuary from a human priest on a space station.

In short, religion is one of those things, like the past, that I love to explore with my stories.

If an asteroid fell to the earth and landed on your personal library, which five books (besides IRTF) would you try to save?
Only five? I doubt I could choose so few. I’d probably want to keep at least two reference books on writing, one Asimov collection, one Heinlein novel, and the Absolute Edition of Crisis on Infinite Earths that my wife got for me as a birthday present a few years ago. Best birthday present ever.

What’s next for Michael A. Burstein?
Lunch.

Seriously, there are more stories to write, and I’m always (like most fiction writers) working on a novel. But I’d really love to edit a collection of original Jewish science fiction stories, if I could find a publisher willing to take it.