Michael Cassutt’s latest Analog story was inspired by a late friend who worked for NASA. Check out “Proxima Centauri Blues” in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]
Analog Editor: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
Michael Cassutt: The human story was inspired by the horrific experiences of a long-time friend of mine from NASA whom I will call James. James had just reached retirement age and commenced an exploration of the western USA with his wife, via RV. They were only a few days into this dream of a lifetime adventure when James suffered an aortic blowout that put him in the hospital for an extended period. No sooner had he been released than he suffered a stroke. Once stabilized from that horror, he was sent home in a wheelchair.
James was a medical professional so he had a cold, informed view of his situation. When I came to visit him in Houston, he told me this would be our last conversation, that he could die at any moment.
I had known he was in poor health but not that bad. That last meeting left me more shaken than I can remember, and when James died two months later, I felt I had to memorialize the experience in the way I know best.
The SF aspect was secondary, though given James’s association with human spaceflight, it wasn’t a great leap to tie his experiences to a darker view of the subject.
I borrowed the New Mexico setting from a house belonging to another friend.
AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
MC: There is, of course, a whole musical genre called the blues, of which I am fond. Many of my favorite songs have blues in the title and so did one of my first attempts at writing, back in high school days. Given the sad nature of this piece, a new blues title seemed right.
AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
MC: I know quite a lot about human spaceflight from writing about, and getting to know, astronauts and cosmonauts as well as engineers and doctors, over the past four decades. It seems that I’m always poking holes in cherished beliefs about how or when or even if we will venture into that Eternal Frontier. I guess my position is, we probably will but not the way you think.
The same goes for encounters with ETs.
Many of my favorite songs have blues in the title and so did one of my first attempts at writing, back in high school days. Given the sad nature of this piece, a new blues title seemed right.
AE: What is your process?
MC: I’ve been publishing fiction and non-fiction since the 1970s, and have worked a lot in television since the early 1980s. so I have found a process that works . . . for me. Take an idea, create a paragraph or three defining the setting, the era, the characters.
Then expand that into a brief outline—sometimes just bullet points, or what we in TV call a beat sheet.
Start writing and do a thousand words a day until complete. When complete, let the piece sit for a day or two, read it coldly and brutally and make whatever changes arise. This gives you a short story or novelette in two-three weeks, or a one-hour script in the same amount of time.
AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
MC: My current prose work is a non-fiction quasi-memoir titled True Blue 72: An American High School between Woodstock and Watergate.
As for scripts, as a forty-year member of the Writers Guild of America I just spent five months on strike. But as things settle I will return to a half-hour feature that I not only wrote but will be directing in New Mexico, probably in spring 2024.
AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
MC: Clean fusion.
AE: What are you reading right now?
MC: I’m always reading two types of books, non-fiction and fiction. Recent non-fiction includes Scattershot, a memoir by Bernie Taupin, lyricist for Elton John, as well as American Prometheus, the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin that was the basis for the outstanding Christopher Nolan movie.
Recent fiction includes Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. See my remarks upthread about taking a dim view of human spaceflight: this novel makes me seem like a wildly-optimistic space cadet. Non-sf—Mick Herron’s Bad Actors, the latest in his Slow Horses series about the exploits of a group of castoffs from Britain’s MI6 intel agency.
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