Forum; James Halperin: The Truth Machine

from the longhorn radio network the university of texas at austin this is for him and most famously we know about science about the future and about the human mind are a lot of news james heller author of the truth machine a speculative novel published by ballantine i had never written any fiction before now in fact aren't and this was my were subject to school and i'd been a businessman my entire adult life and most of my child but about ten years ago i read an article in omni magazine about cloning dinosaurs from dna found in mosquitoes encased in amber and i started telling all my friends that somebody needed to write a novel about this because everybody would want to read about dinosaurs been brought back to life in prison time of course i never wrote that novel and michael

kramer jurassic park and i swore that the next time i had a really good idea for a novel i was going right road ms bishop says former guest james halperin has written a novel truth but she speculates about the results where society is able to actually test for truth he asks readers to imagine a twenty first century machine can always tell when a person's life the development and the ultimate consequences such a machine is the basis of his story that spans sixty years writing novels seemed like a good way to experience a greater cross section of all of the possibilities available in life then about five years ago i read a book called fatal vision which is the story of jeffrey macdonald isn't our army doctor who was accused of

murdering his family and convicted and that book really made me angry because i started i couldn't tell whether he was guilty or innocent and i i thought with all the technology that we have are i mean a lot of it is like magic and yet we can't look inside a person's brain and measuring blood flow in electrical activity and tell if they're lying or not and why not it's it's such an important invention that would maybe be the most important invention a history and we should be directing resources toward building was pushing and i thought i'm water and a novel about this and see if i'll see if i still feel that way after you finish reading the novel and so that that was what got me started so this qualifies as science fiction well some people classified as science fiction i think a lot of

people call it at and techno thriller some people would call a political novel there's a lot of there's a lot of science in it but there's also a lot of time a lot of political stuff is this why you introduce your narrator as a computer you know actually i think i introduced my narrator on my computer narrator because i didn't really know how to write very well and i knew it and i felt like if a computer were narrating it and i wouldn't have to deal with metaphors so much i would have to deal with it i would have to deal with a deeper human emotions that i didn't really feel up to roe and down by the time i finished it i had re written about twenty times i've taken night courses in and writing and hire editors to coach me and read dozens and dozens of books and write by the time i finished it i kind of knew had right

and of course i'm trying to continue to get better and better but when i first wrote it it was really kind of a crutch i think but a lot of people think it worked and a lot of people told me that they love the computer in our narrator and that you know that the sort of the humor in that really grab them but i think mostly people like it because it's a journey into the future because they kind of feel the evolution of technology in the course of the store and um you know of course the story itself is is about the development of a foolproof lie detector and then the effect that that machine has on society all against the backdrop of this evolution technology and mostly from the point of view of the main character who is the inventor of the machine and kind of the greatest software genius of the twenty first century and really quite a tortured soul you stay with this and thinner from his childhood forward

what did you learn about character develop well armed i learned that if you think of everything then you have a character i mean basically you have to kind of put yourself in his place and see the world the way he sees it and try to respond the way you imagine he would respond and i think i think i put i put a little of myself into the character and i'm not like peter armstrong that but there's a little of me in him there's a little of me and all the other characters in the book to even our i hate to say it even in charlestown and i do but town it's it's a a difficult process and if you're not used to it it's it's really work well i spent about two years researching that the truth machine and three months writing the first draft and then about eight months rewriting it and i was i was a driven man i mean i was completely

obsessed with getting every word right in the snow ah which of course i didn't but i am but i did the best i could and i'm very happy with it it hasn't been some ways a huge cast in characters all they're not all on stage at the same time or the same decade or one hand you but it's really it's a it's an astoundingly simple clyde you notes it's so it's i think very original i've never anything like that but it's but it's a very simple concept which is i think why wild studios in hollywood wanted it but turn that i i was very very careful even though there were a lot of characters to make them memorable enough so that you don't have to always go referring back and plus there's a list of them at the beginning just in case but i don't think that people find it confusing at all you know it's really a very easy read

in the press pack it sometimes those include refused to essentially include notices of the film option instead of reviews i thought about katie must've like looked at a fork in the road and went one way rather than another one is what is that process is how does one get an option will what happened in this case is that the publisher hardening agent and the agent sent the book to our studios and they maybe it's analysts or forties active duty was sold four days later so you mean have to do it no i didn't do anything was iridium accept cash the check no no it was my idea that's the beauty of dealing with a publishing house like falling down time random house they they know what to tell and they know it's marketable in one isn't and how to market

do you have any role in the subsequent for cash the check it works for you the locations of the action in the book how range from what dallas mayor harvard for awhile back to texas where these places to you know well yes yes i i grew up in boston and i went to harvard for a year and a half before i dropped out and up the move to dallas in the arm in the nineteen eighties so i wrote about locations that i know and an ad based on the characters and people that i know are composites of people that i know so on and out of course i've always been very interested in technology in and the evolution of technology and endowed the future in fact i'm in the record business i am and dump i was the first record deal or to have a mainframe computer in nineteen seventy five there were two

leading friend computers and in business is a small as ours in nineteen seventy five so i'm a great believer in the power of technology and damn there are parts of technology that we need to be very scared of and parts of technology that prompted that promise wonderful benefits and i think that the more people understand what technology can do both good and bad the better and that the better off all that when this technology to an act of congress well it is an act of congress speeds it up i am and i should explain that in them in the book in the truth pushing the year is two thousand and four and crying violent crime has really mushrooming out of control and a politician from connecticut i'm offers the american public with a solution and the solution is something called swift and sure which is an anti crime

bill that gives a second time convicted violent criminal one swift trial one quick appeal and then guaranteed immediate execution i and the purpose of it is to arm is is to arm basically save money coming you don't want to you don't want to incarcerate these people for the rest of their lives at a cost of millions of dollars when you could spend this money in education are or are health care or other important things and at this but at this point the american public are so fed up with crime that they they vote the sky and well the first year out of swift and sure there are forty thousand executions in the united states and you think i am right to life versus freedom of choice is a violent ague debate a maj and what would happen in this country if we were executing forty thousand people a year some of whom are bound to be innocent well as a response to this

a new bill is introduced and this politician heartily endorse is it on to encourage industry to create a foolproof lie detector mission and all kinds of incentives the twenty five year patent an interim government contract for to administer the test and courts are among other things and then we have this race to create the truth machine a full provide attacked her arm and a lot of machinations that go on that i'm in in this race in this furious battle to be the first and you've given your protagonist pete a novel the history in that tune to understand his actions aren't valid and you know and i think that it turned out i think that as a character he rings pretty true he does to me in and most people

would you say that he's in several men is there something i think they're i think i think so because he's he's kind of an altruistic arm but he's corruptible arm and he's he's had some traumatic experiences that that sort of driving against his better judgment in certain cases and i think that that's a little bit true all of us and it's it's almost it's almost a metaphor for for lying because most of us want to be honest and yet we have these forces within us that cause us to live at times either despair peoples feelings or to get things that we want and it's really because it's sort of genetically ingrained in us to i mean the ability to deceive others has been a factor in human survival for thousands of i'm for thousands of centuries and those who were good deceiving others have tended to survive an appropriate

and a foolproof why detector would completely change i am at a very very key component of our history years not saying that such a pants can fall through the cracks well in that in the story of a triple shane there are tests that one can administer that i am that will tell if a person is insane to the point where they could for tradition so even though you would be able to tell those people are lying or not you at least be able to tell that you can tell and a lot of there are a lot of different nuances like that that are explored in of the thacher guidelines which are which are a series of questions that you asked to get to a certain point and things like that but i am but for the most part with the truth machine guns and examines the effects of such a machine are all different aspects of society politics and protect our kids in particular because

on any politician politicians can take a voluntary true test and of course after a wily politician who refuses to take a test becomes an electable against opponents who will take the tests but also on the presses another example because nobody's gonna buy our newspapers where the reporter's stories are true test on it it becomes sort of a free market thing in the end it won the tradition is first and then it starts out about the size of a desk and it's only used in the criminal justice system to see if a guy really did it but ten years later it's been approved for customs and immigration in business and politics and science and many other things and other briefcase sized and by the end of the story which is in twenty fifty two people are wearing them on the wrist watches or in their contact lenses and using them at home and by then human nature has completely changed and along the way or pete has come through a

very wealthy person but he has the terrible secret and asked for his own machine for a while what about drought some of the things that you added to the people around him to make them real whether it was a criminal or and the politicians his close friends i found it interesting that his friend's david and diana they only had one child and he was diagnosed with the disease expert henry once was fatal to a sexy and i know it was a condition maybe wasn't it was some kind of you know it was and they had no children considering word dealing with the future we shouldn't have

whatever we won yeah well actually the eu learn more about these characters in the first immortal all of the characters in the truth machine are treated as historical figures because i am these are the first to moral law has none of the same character specific it it on it does not take place in the same universe so events that happen in the truth machine or serve referred to in passing in the first morning and you get to find out what happens to some of the characters in the truth pushing an increasing stay tuned stay tuned tell me about the the cryonics this well it's covered very briefly in the truth machine all the other interesting we're not at the end of the book i have i actually have listed an organization where you can write and get more information about it and also where you can learn more about the world future society but tom in the arm in the truth machine i discuss the cryonics laws

which occur around two thousand fifteen when the government sort of gets involved in an unknown what's going to happen to people's money while they're on ice in that and that sort of thing yeah because once the young what once a young it's demonstrated that a mammal could be frozen liquid nitrogen and then re thought i think that a lot of people are going to choose to be frozen rather than buried or cremated just a just and the chance that they might be revived someday and rejuvenated i think that is a subject that people notice something there's possibly in our future but what kinds of problems get you list to look at future treatment and therefore resolution of what kinds of problems or what

as you note thinking in terms of being a futures and wanting to our flesh out a the universe a generation from now what would he sure out and what were you looking at ellington we said yes crime politics crime on the list is endless i mean everything of course our problems today would seem on what would would hardly seem like problems to somebody who had five hundred years ago on people you know lived in in hovels and and that we're lucky if if a quarter of their children survived in and then when you no kings have head lice but the ukulele a near future episodes it so that we can almost feel that they were not gonna write necessarily be there are so i mean our biggest problem is the survival of the species because we have weapons of destruction that could that could wipe out the entire human race and i don't consider that i'm a forgone

conclusion by any means because we have a lot of smart well meaning people there working against that our potential but i am and i think that you'll find that the truth machine or your listeners will find that the tradition is a very optimistic book the present possible solutions to these seemingly overwhelming problems though you know that i'm there are so many problems that we face poverty hunger on injustice political arm upheavals i am and so many of these problems are related to two deceit of one person to another and i'm not saying that are eliminating to see would solve all of these problems but it would go a long way toward solving a lot of but then there would be plenty of new problems take place until grass of the loss of privacy is an example of the feelings of loss of privacy

but that's a problem that may come about regardless of whether we have a tradition simply because it's getting cheaper to store information and where we're going we're going to see cameras and microphones on in almost every public place barriers so people are going to be wearing cameras in and microphones in their clothing and you're not going to know when you're talking to me whether i'm documenting our entire conversation these are these are some of the problems that are going to be faced in the future and on its critics in getting used in what seems like just business is going to do dr things in that direction because those are marketable items that can be sold people that consumers will buy them and and that's what will but us where we are there to take something was

tangible and more authority for just a minute world peace in a business stake as they are oh i don't think so i think it can help me trade certainly helps and we'd become dependent on other nations for trade and we have a good trading relationship we're much less likely to go to war they say that democracies don't make war on other democracies but that's not entirely true when you look at the american civil war that was certainly to democracies but tom but there are a lot of different factors that can they can mitigate on they can mitigate our were like tendencies and one of them is trust right now a fight say something to you you have to have some suspicion because you know that people lie

but what if we had what we had these foolproof lie detectors everywhere these traditions and i gave you assurances that i have no intention of invading your country iraq whatever well now you can believe me so it's not really it's not just a matter of love and people being unable to lie but more important people believing you when you're telling the truth so we can look at binding contracts and that's one example another example is in one we're talking about terrorist acts we can ask people questions about what their intentions are when they enter a country you know do you intend to you know committing crimes when you're here well all of a sudden on the world as a whole lot safer so when you confront

writing a sequel which the first immortal immortal immortal first immortal is do you have to redesign the problem to solve or can use simply keep working as well i tackled different a different problem in the first immortal and the different the different problem being our mortality the fact that we all die someday we may not all die and i tried to imagine what a world would be like when people start running and how and how it would get to that place is your computer at hand didn't and somewhere to buy emi and i simply mean out a presence either you know in a home a sense of hero or villain even armed well in that in the first immortal there are so many there isn't a villain per se there are certainly forces and there are villains smaller villains rather than a manger

but the story is really sort of a man against nature i'm kind of i'm kind of saga the ecology is the problem in this is not it's not it is occasionally mentioned in some of the predictions and some of them the new shorts but but no it's not it's not a big issue in the in the traditional art it's more it's discussed a little bit more detail on the first immortal are you know writing with hollywood career television or film no immediate future the guy i have no plans to do that i'm actually half completed four novels now i'm editing two of them and i'm working on number five and so i'm planning on just writing novels for a while you said your business career goes back even to hear your childhood you had been so wedded to that that field koreans in that and the business of it

yet is as a kind of retirement well i wouldn't say so i'm i'm working harder reading novels than i think i ever have a point i and before i started with when this was fifteen years old and before that i published comic books that i found when neighborhoods circus's iran my high school snack bar and i i've had businesses my whole life and i think being a businessman in away helps me understand some of the forces that shape our society and human motivations because you have to you really have to understand what people want to run a successful business so it doesn't know says well and i think that jump i think that the two compliment each other i get a lot of ideas for our for my business from my novels and endless first course paul's boutique

james the truth the views expressed in this programme do not necessarily reflect the views of the university of texas at austin where this station technical producer for former cove harbor production assistant benny saw it and your producer and host olive green businesses are available and maybe purchased by writing for and cassettes communication giving the ut austin austin texas seventy seventy one to that's for a cassettes communication at ut austin austin texas seventy seven wanted to

this exchange at the university of texas at austin this is the la morning radio network as bell this week on for what your genes how rude i don't read a lot of pictures and mostly read and i'm assuming that science human mind are reliant news the truth machine speculative this week and foreigners did head a k