What exactly is an 'autochef'? Like the replicator on ST?
Alas, no. Trek's replicator technology depends on transporter beam technology and using raw materials to 'beam into being' anything from a cup of tea to a plate of mashed spuds. In the NARC (and HELLGATE, 200 years later) universe, I haven't touched on any such technology ... to me, it seems more 'iffy' than e-space transit systems and the pseudo-transoptic 'hyperflight' which allows ships to travel fairly rapidly between stars. Transporter beams are very, very convenient for the medium of a TV show (you don't need to have special effects depicting a ship landing in a new location each week), but for text, you don't need to beam down, and in fact, describing a ship entering a new environment gives the writer's muscles some exercise! So I haven't touched on the technology which is lurking behind the replicator concept ... instead, I refer to it as an autochef ... so, what the hell is an autochef? Something like a hot-locker, where meals are stored pending serving (like the serving carts you see on an airplane? Almost, but not quite. Imagine a cubic meter of food: tanks of noodles, rice, ten different sauces, five different meats and fishes, ten assorted vegetables, all cooked to perfection and stored in cryogen. The only part of the machine the user sees is the interface: a keyed menu pad, and a 'dumb waiter.' When you key in what you want, the *ingredients* are flash-heated and served up with whatever timelag. The user can get about a hundred combinations, working with what the machine has in stock, and the machine is called a 'chef' because rather than just serving up a pre-plated meal, it combines the ingredients on demand. The only SF technology involved is the super-cold storage and flash-heating. The autochefs would be restocked by kitchen staff ... daily, in the mess, and weekly in the case of private 'chefs in officers' quarters.



These guys sometimes smoke ... what are they smoking?
I refer to it as kip grass, there's also bel grass, and so on. A plant of some kind, given the fragrance of roses or jasmine, or whatever; it's a very mild sedative (ie., it takes the edge off when you're living on your nerves), but I would guarantee to you that there is nothing harmful in these cigarettes. Don't confuse them with the 'cancer sticks' we know in our century! I personally don't smoke (when you've watched someone take eighteen years to die of lung and brain cancer associated with smoking, you don't smoke yourself), but a majority of people between the ages of 12 and 50 do, and I think they always will. The fact is, people *need* something to take the edge off. The pressures of life are not getting any easier, nor will they in future ... but the second fact is, smoking kills. Put the two things together and you come up with one realistic conclusion: a cigarette has to be developed which will take the edge off, and is not dangerous. I invented a weed called kip grass to fill the void: harmless, mildly sedative, and you add in a fragrace like jasmine both for relaxation pursposes and to make the second-hand smoke acceptable to others. I may be a non-smoker, and I'm absolutely convinced that smoking kills, but I also believe people will always smoke ... so being realistic in the SF context, I met everyone halfway and developed something harmless.



What language are these people speaking?
It's not quite English, that's for sure! Yet I write in English, which is a second-language for so many readers around the world. We ship these books to Scandinavia, Germany and Swizerland, France, Spain and Italy, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, The Phillippines ... the common denomenator is English, and I have to be extremely cautious about using too much of a mish-mash of 'cityspeak,' slang and dialect. If I were to write the dialogue in the language they're really speaking, I think it would be a mixture of English, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. Why? Because these are the dominant languages of our century, as we prepare to 'head out,' and these are the lanuguages we'll take with us. Imagine a colony fleet heading out from, for example, the Shanghai con-urb. I can guarantee to you that if three million Chinese-speaking colonists were going to settle on the world which their terraformer fleet had licked into shape for them over the previous decade, the mother tongue of that colony won't be English! But as the colonies grow up, grow old and homogenize, and populations spread themselves around as people follow work ... the language of the street will develop into a curious mixture. I think it will simplify. No one will conjugate the definite article, there won't be masculine and feminine nouns! When a word has been settled on by a majority of 'end users' to stand for an object, irrespective of what the root language was, that will *be* the word. For instance, the English language is already becoming a hybrid! We're using words inducted from French, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Indian, plus the ever-drifting slang terms. In the last half-century, no one blinks at words which are actually far from English. Fast-forward four more centuries, and although I think the structure of the language won't change (the grammatical framework), the nouns and verbs will drift ... and then, the pronunciantion will drift too. I'd like to experiment with this, but I can't, and won't: I respect my readers in countries like Finland and Japan! They have a great English dictionary to hand; but that dictionaty won't supply them with a blizzard of Spanish and German slang! I'm very much aware, the bottom line is readability across many borders ... so I content myself with dropping copious hints. The names of things and places and people actually tell you what's going on, while you soon come to realize, the book you're holding has been translated into English for your reading pleasure!



What's life expectancy in this era?
A lot longer than it is in our age ... but everything depends on how you treat yourself. I refer to Harry Del at one point as 60, but looking 15 years younger; Bill Dupre is in Harry's age bracket and still conveys a feeling of youth. Gene Cantrell is right behind them by ten years, and still in the field, though it's 25 years since he busted Aphelion out of the Jupiter sysem. Leo Michiko is mid/late 50s, and ageless ... and I dropped a hint at another point, that Cassius Brand went into a new career in his 70s, when most people were starting to think about retirement. I'd say life expectancy in Jarrat's and Stone's era is flexible, from about 120 to about 200, but after that it depends if you want to take good care of yourself and live that long. Substance abuse and junk food will still shorten your life back to about 100 (and you can do that in today's world ... lots of people live to a ripe old age on a diet of whiskey and fat cigars!) ... but we ourselves are swiftly living into an era where being a centenarian is nothing unusual. A person who, today, is still under 50, fit, healthy, and determined to stay that way, can seriously expect to live to 110-120 without any outside help. Now, in the case of a person of 30, that gives him/her another 90 years from now. This guinea pig of ours will be winding down as we approach the dawn of the Twenty-second Century. Hmmm. Don't we expect any advances in the gene therapies for the diseases of old age? Controls for cancer, heart disaease and the sclerotic diseases (including Altzheimers and MS) are high on the agenda of medical research right now. I think you can expect to see the human life span extend out, with the quality of elastic, to about 150 by the year 2100. So our thirty year old can hope to see the year 2125 come in. And if you look forward three further centuries, to say that people are living to 200 in the era of Jarrat and Stone isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination. Having said all this, the *desire* to live long is a pivot-point in one's life. Not everyone wants to live for two centuries, and as I said above, a steady diet of junk food plus substance abuse will drop the curtain prematurely on anyone. As for me? I'd love to see where the next century goes ... but only if I have my health and vigor. So long as brain and body are working just fine, why not see what tomorrow is going to bring?



Can you outline gender roles in this 'universe'??
In a line ... there aren't any! One of the best things about going back to play in this universe is, the exotic dancer is a guy and it's a gal flying the gunship. There is no gender role playing any longer. A lot of gender demarkation which is hanging on in our century, is still about work, and dress habits, and the lines are eroding. Stay-home dads and moms who drive dump trucks are accepted on the street now. Girls in bluejeans and guys with ponytails and earrings don't raise eyebrows ... 'punk' fashion will always 'clash' with the rest of soceity: that's what it's for. Gradually, the outrageous becomes normal, and 'punk' fashion will always be pushing, looking for something new to make eyebrows rise, but we're in the process of leaving behind gender roles as defined by one's clothing! Women have been wearing the bluejeans for a half century, and you only have to 'retro' to 1800 to find guys in lace, pantyhose, high heels and eyeshadow ... folks, it's ALL been done before, and it'll all be done again. The important aspect for a writer of speculative fiction is to forcibly separate gender (and by extension the role-playing games of centuries gone by) and dress codes, unless those dress codes are a key part of the world-building. For instance, a 'police state,' a thousand years from now, virtually insists that males wear their skirts tight and their heels high, and if women don't wear a tie they're not going to get into this fancy restaurant. No, seriously, folks ...! Gender roles date back to our pre-human ancestors; it's the badges and symbols of those roles which have been enforced by ourseves, and they're arbitrary. The roles themselves are set, and then busted wide open, by sheer necessity, as in a time of war which puts women down the coal mines, because there's no one else left50 to do work which, ten years before, no one believed women could even physically do. Once rules have been broken, they're very hard to glue back together. Like the saying goes, give people an inch, and they'll take a mile. And rightly so.



What is the status of religion in Jarrat's and Stone's universe?
Religion survives, but, for most people, as a background feature to one's life rather than the hub about which one moves. God and gods, heaven and hell are most certainly still in the vocabulary! The liberal profanity of the era reflects the public knowledge and nature of spirituality, and I've made throw-away references to prayer on many occasions (Gable, when Stone is playing 'chicken' with the freighter in SCORPIO, for one). The one aspect of Twenty-fourth Century spirituality I haven't delved into is *which* God or gods, *which* church or temple, has survived. I would suggest, they all do. And I do mean all: four centuries from now, you'll be as likely to find a Temple of Ganesh as a mosque, a synagogue or a chapel. The only religious institution I recall referring to in specific terms (in EQUINOX) is a Temple of Gaia. Here's the quotation:

[Stone] saw several overviews of the funeral in Belreve, the grieving family, a knot of politicians and local Tactical officers. Notable by his absence was Stuart Wymark. So Curry was keeping him out of sight. The eulogy was read by a friend. In the background were clergy in the green robes of the Temple Of Gaia.