WINSTON (cont.):  “. . . Of myself, I haven’t even let in one outside writer.  Sara Paul had a short story in SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM #8 that coincided with an aspect of what I was writing for GODDESS UHURA.  And I asked her permission to put a rewritten version of ‘Music Has Charms’ in GODDESS UHURA.  That is the only outside contribution that I have ‘accepted’ for the Swahili Series, except for some poetry by some friends of mine.  I’ve stopped writing poetry, so Fern Marder does a lot of poetry for me, poetry that mirrors what I’m writing in the Swahili Series.  But the stories are all mine.  In the end, it makes it better that way, I think . . .  Somebody has a question?”

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  “Right now, of course, you’re talking about your own experiences in your TREK universes, but I’ve been sort of been playing around in my mind about non-TREK universes, I guess that’s the next step, and I think one of my big problems is not having the complete scientific knowledge required I don’t think anybody has.  The only person I can think of is Ann Popplestone . . . and Isaac Asimov, possibly.  Everybody else is a ‘specialist’.  The other day I was doing illustrations, and was saying, ‘Here’s a being that comes from a heavy-gravity planet.’  And I assumed he would look ‘pulled down’ and ‘weighted.’  And we started talking about pressure and atmosphere, and I just didn’t know enough.  As soon as you start creating something that is non-Earth-like, that is not a desert, and not a jungle, and not an ice planet — all of which we have wherever I go — and then we get into real science fiction.  Where do we go for this information?”

WINSTON:  “We research.  I needed to find out what would happen on a world where the rain that fell was nitric acid, and yet the beings still had to have water to live on.  ‘How do you convert nitric acid into water?’  And yet chemistry was one of my worst subjects in school.  But when I got out of school, I kept a couple of my chemistry books, I looked through them and found what I was looking for.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER#2:  “When I went to school, girls didn’t take chemistry.”

WINSTON:  “My condolences . . . I bugged the life out of some people in order to find some of the things I was looking for.  And sometimes I just guessed, because sometimes you don’t want to get into heavy sciences to write a science fiction story.  You move around the edges.

“One of the greatest things I ever got away with was creating the Ballenites in GODDESS UHURA.  Nobody has shot me down yet.  I expected three or four physics students to go ‘KILL!  KILL!  KILL!’  because I’d created these tear-drop-shaped creatures that manufactured small amounts of matter- anti- matter in their bodies and shot them out the rear end in order to go traveling through space at warp speeds.  They lived off radiation.  And I got away with it!