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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri with your science fiction writer and futurist Robert J. Sawyer has been interviewed by three hundred and fifty times on radio, three hundred and fifty times on television, and then those numbers have probably increased and countless times in print. Based out of Toronto, Rob hosted the Canadian TV series Supernatural Investigator for three seasons, principal commentator for the History Channel's
Canada's popular History Erace TV series. He is one of only eight writers in history the only Canadian to win all three of the world's top science fiction awards for Best Novel of the Year, the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He was last with me three years ago, as we talked then about his Oppenheimer alternative Robert. Its timing is great. Welcome back, Hi, George.
I'm delighted to be here again. Thanks so much for having me.
Were you insulted at all in the upcoming Christopher Nolan's blockbuster that they talk about Oppenheimer?
I was not, but the man who you know. It's based on a book, unfortunately not my book. I would be on a yacht right now instead of fitting in my friend's living room, which is where I'm at the moment. The book that it's based on is actually called American Prometheus, The Triumphant Tragedy of Jay Robert Oppenheimer, which is a
non fiction book. My book is a novel about Oppenheimer and the men who wrote that book, Martin J. Sherwin and Kay Bird Kai Kai an unusual first name, Kai Bird, And sadly, Marty Sherwin just recently passed away, unfortunately just before he got to see the movie that was based on his book. But before he did, he did read my book and gave me a very nice cover blurb.
So I'm one step away, let's say, from Nolan's source material, And of course Nolan's movie and my novel are all based in the historical record, so the facts are facts.
As the saying ghosts, why are they saying that this is going to be the summer blockbuster?
You know, that's a really good question, and I'm not sure honestly that it's going to be. That it opens the same weekend as the Barbie Movie, Margo Robbie. Now, when you think about what do you want to do on a summer night, right, do you want to relax with a frothy, light fun film like the Barbie Movie? Or do you want to be reminded that Vladimir Putin and maybe Kim John Um are even as we speak, stroking the buttons that can launch their nukes. So I'm
not sure the timing is right now. A movie like Oppenheimer takes years to make. So when Christopher Nolan decided that this would be his big blockbuster film for the summer of two thousand and three, was before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and it was a world that was post the Cold War. It was a world where we thought, you know, as I had said to my young niece a little while ago, we thought this was
all in the past. We grew up a duck and cover and all of that, you know, fear of nuclear holocaust in the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, we thought all that was passed. So I don't know if people are going to flock to this film the way Christopher Nolan and the star Killian Murphy are hoping that they will. I'll certainly be there to check it out because of
my interest in the topic. But whether it's going to draw people who want to be first and foremost entertained by a summer blockbuster, I really don't know.
Some of the snippets I've seen about the movie, Robert, from critics who have probably previewed it, say that it is truly horrendous in terms of what has happened. I mean, they say it's a great movie, but they're scared to death.
That's right. There's no question that Christopher Nolan is a brilliant director. Kirian Murphy, best known, you know for Peaky Blinders, the British crime series, is a brilliant actor. But every advance review, and there are lots of people who have seen it out has been screened for sure to select
audiences have said people come out devastated, shocked. You know you're going to see and remember, this film is being released in seventy millimeters IMAX, the largest format available for commercial motion pictures, and a tomic explosion, the hell fire that happened at the Trinity Test of Los Alamos, and then of course that Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan where tens
of thousands of people die. So yeah, you can understand very well that people come out emotionally brought from having seen this spectacle that you know, for whatever reason, Christopher Nolan has decided to give to us in a higher resolution than even the people who saw it in the flesh seventy eight years ago experienced.
And did not.
Penheimer have mixed feelings after the fact.
So his change of heart you can date to a very specific seventy two hour period he went along with them dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, which was August sixth, nineteen forty five, the first use of the atomic bomb in war. What shocked him was that the second use came only seventy two hours later on October ninth, when
Nagasaki was bombed. Remember the bomb took out the railway lines, it took out the highways, It took out the telegraph and telephone lines between Hiroshima and the Japanese High Command in Tokyo. So word was just reaching by people straggling in by foot or trying to get there unbroken roadways, just reaching a high command that some previously unknown monstrous bomb had been used, and then they used it a second time, and for Oppenheimer, that was when it went
too far. This word did not exist in the English language, but it was coined at that point, and Oppenheimer was one of the first to use it overkill. It was more killing than was necessary in his view, and that changed him from a hawk to a dove overnight.
Do we know, Robert, if there were plans to use it a third time?
There was no third bomb yet they were desperately trying to get a third to one built. The United States used its entire arsenal, and they were two very different bomb designs. There's one called the uranium gun design, or the Little Boy, and one called the implosion lens design or the fat Man, and the United States government wanted to test them both. After the test at Los Alamos, where they tested the fat Man designed for the first time, Poppy said, the war's over, and General Groves said, this
comes from Groves's own autobiography. This isn't revision of history. This is what he said when they first tested it in New Mexico. Yes, the war's over. Just as soon as we dropped two bombs on Japan. He was hell bent. And they used that phrase advisedly. General Groves, the leader of the Manhattan budget, was hell bent on testing both different competing designs on civilian targets to see which one was more effective. And there was no third bomb, so
the Japanese had dug in their heels even longer. You know, the threat was. They didn't know we were out of bombs at that point, but we were. We hadn't had the ability to build a third one yet.
Your cover that has an artistic sketch of a rocket ship and Oppenheimer, he looks kind of scary. How close did he look to that picture.
That the artist who did the cover for the American edition of my novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative, was working from a photo of Oppenheimer, So that's what he really looked like. Wow. You can see, you know, in that Killian Murphy who's been cast to the role of the movie great actor, but the principal reason he was cast, obviously, is a profound physical resemblance to Oppenheimer himself. Oppenheimer, and you can see it on the cover of my book because it's
in full color. Most of the photos we have Bobby, of course from the nineteen forties were black and white. He had piercing blue eyes, although he looked scary of course on the cover of my book, and it was certainly contemplating the destruction of you know, whole populations. He was also famously charismatic, funny ladies man. Women swooned in
his presence, literally swoon his student. He was a propost prefsler at the University of California, Berkeley before he was co opted to be the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. They all imitated his mannerisms and his style of dress because they thought this was just the coolest cat around.
Was he at odds with the other physicist, Edward Teller.
Very much so, for a couple of reasons. Fundamentally, one is they were just polar opposites and personality. Affy was outgoing and basically a friendly and pretty happy man. Keller was a bitter, bitter man, as Color himself said. You know, he had fled twice from persecution, first when he had to you know, flee his native Hungary as a young man, and then when he had to flee from the Nazis
when of course the start of World War Two. And the second reason, though, was Oppenheimer wanted to build what we know today is the A bomb, the atomic bomb, the nuclear vision bomb. And Teller said, he said us quite literally, that's not worthy of our intellects. Your grad students, who said topp Nimber could build that device. What we need is the H bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the thermonuclear bomb, the nuclear fusion bomb, which is hundreds of times more powerful.
And they were at complete odds over that. Oppenheimer, in fact, of course, spearheaded the successful effort to make the A bomb. Teller, although he was at Los Alabos, set that effort out. He refused to work on this project he felt was Beneatha's dignity, and spent all of his time during World War Two working on what Oppenheimer thought was a pie in the sky unnecessary, the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, which of course is the one that will be used today if
we do have a nuclear war. Yeah, they did.
They came out with it. Everybody has one.
Now, everybody has the one because of espionage, the atomic bomb with claws, Fukes and some other spies sold the atomic bomb secrets from Los Alamos and gave them to the Russians. It turned out that you know, in the aftermath the debriefing after World War Two that the Japanese were nowhere near having an atomic bomb, the Germans were
nowhere near having an atomic bomb, the Russians weren't. If that brain trust that was assembled on the Mesa of Los Alamos, New Mexico had never been brought together, we probably never would have gotten the atomic bomb. But once one country has, as you know as well, George, any military secret, every country has that within a few years, because espionage is way cheaper that research and development in retrospect.
Roberts should we have nuked everybody that was our enemy.
So the original goal was to build a bomb to nuke Hitler and drop on Berlin. And many of the scientists who were working on the Manhattan Project, of course, were Jewish emigrats from Europe, right, You.
Know Offenheimert was Jewish, wasn't.
He He was He was not an emigrant. He was born in New York City. His parents were wealthy and had kind of missed out on all of that persecution. But the families of many of the others knew that their families were being you know, that the programs, and although we didn't find out the extent of the Holocaust until after the liberation of Auschwitz and elsewhere. They knew that things were very, very bad or European Jewry because
of Adolf Hitler. The idea was originally to build a bomb and use it against Berlin, and the Manhattan Project actually failed in its goal because Adolf Hitler did with a single bullet in April of nineteen forty five what all of the two billion in nineteen forty five dollars of research that went to the Manhattan Project had failed to do, which is take out Adolf Hitler. He killed himself because conventional mostly Russian troops were pressing in on Berlin. Knew he was a goner at that point.
Unless he snuck off to South America.
Well that, of course, you know, we still had those conspiracies out this point. He almost certainly would be dead regardless, given just the age of the man that it was seventy eight years ago that he killed himself seventy eight years ago this past April. But yeah, there certainly always was that specter of possibility, and of course his death and the death of some of the others who disappeared three dates the other big scientific breakthrough of the twentieth
century one of course, was the atomic bomb. The other was the breakthrough of the decoding of the human genome, the discovery by Crick and Watson of DNA. We had no way except visual identification to say that was Adolf Hitler. And we all know this past week, you know, when Vladimir Putin has supposedly been appearing here and there and everywhere to kind of reassert his dominance in the Soviet Union after the essentially the coup attempts from the Vagunar forces. Yeah,
the last week, but is a Putin? We well know that the Soviets and now the Russians have often used lookalikes for public appearances because if somebody succeeds and it's fascinating the lookalikes, well you know, it's bad look for the lookalike, but the actual leader is say that's good. Ye.
Now, the title of your book is called The Oppenheimer Alternative. What does that mean?
So it's a science fiction novel, and there's a branch of science fiction called alternate history, which takes, you know, the basic facts as we know them, and God comes up with an alternative. And in my case, the alternative is instead of Oppenheimer and all of these scientists, including as you mentioned, Edward Teller, but also Enrico Fermei and Hans Beta, and they are Zillard. All of the scientists sort from the Manhattan Project instead of them dissipating back
into mostly academia. In the fall of nineteen forty five, after the bombings of Japan and the end of World War Two, they stay together to try and save the Earth from appending a solar disaster, disaster involving our son. So it goes to the point of the dropping of the bombs on Yoshima Magasaki, following history as we know it, and then goes off in a different, more science fictional direction in my novel, The Alpenheimer Alternative.
Robert, how did you get involved in science fiction writing.
I'm of that generation, I said, you know, some people were lived in nineteen fifties. I wasn't. I was born in nineteen sixties, in nineteen sixty, so I'm of that generation that had two things that brought me into science fiction.
The twin prongs of the original Star Trek, which premiered when I was six years old I saw it in first run, and of course the landing of people on the Moon, the Apollo effort was the backdrop of my life and the movie two thousand and one of Space Odyssey that came out in nineteen sixty eight when I
was eight years old. Well, they were saying in that movie by the time I was forty one, an age that's long done now two thousand and one, that we would have orbiting space stations with hotels aboard them, and cities on the Moon, and planetary travel and something imagine we'll talk about later in the program, George, artificial intelligence.
Well we didn't get it all by two thousand and one, but the promise that we would have all those things made me wanted to vote my career to speculating about what we were going to get and when we might get it, and those thinks, Star Trek, Apollo Program and two thousand and one A Space Odyssey were my entrees into thinking about the future.
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