I never imagined, until a few years ago, that I would ever collaborate with an­other writer on a work of fiction. Non-fiction was different: I’ve been involved in no less than fourteen multi-author projects (two with the editors of Life, and you don’t get more multiplex than that). But fiction — no way! I was quite sure I would never let any outsider tamper with my unique brand of creativity…

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the word processor. Early in 1986 my agent, Scott Meredith, called me in his most persuasive “Don’t-say-no-until-I’ve-finished” mode. There was, it seemed, this young genius of a movie producer who was determined to film something — anything — of mine. Though I’d never heard of Peter Guber, as it happened I had seen two of his movies (Midnight Express, The Deep), and been quite impressed by them. I was even more impressed when Scott told me that Peter’s latest, The Color Purple, had been nominated for half a dozen Oscars.

However, I groaned inwardly when Scott went on to say that Peter had a friend with a brilliant idea he’d like me to develop into a screenplay. I groaned, because there are no new ideas in s.f, and if it really was brilliant I’d have thought of it already.

Then Scott explained who the friend was, and I did a double-take. The project suddenly looked very exciting indeed, for reasons that had nothing to do with Peter Guber, but a lot to do with Stanley Kubrick.

Flashback. Twenty years earlier, in 2007: A Space Odyssey, Stanley and I had visited the moons of Jupiter, never dreaming that these completely unknown worlds would, in fact, be reconnoitered by robots long before the date of our movie. In March and July 1979, the two Voyager probes revealed that lo, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were stranger places than we’d dared to imagine. The stunning views of Jupiter’s giant satellites made it possible — no, imperative — for me to write 2070: Odyssey Two. This time around, the Jovian sequences could be based on reality, not imagination; and when Peter Hyams filmed the book in 1984, he was able to use actual images from the Voyager spacecraft as backgrounds for much of the action.