(Courtesy photo)
Dr. Bill Colson, a physics professor emeritus at the Naval Postgraduate School, has published significant research to considerable renown in his field. Yet, following his retirement in 2015, he turned his attention to writing fiction.
Colson is one of those rare people who are transported through life by the alchemy of a keenly intelligent, analytical mind and a tender heart. That is how he conceived a story about an android, a couple of centuries in the future, who is scheduled to terminate but wants to do so on her own terms, with the feeling of human touch.
Colson could tell us how it turns out, but he’d rather we read the set-up, and develop a sense of it from the setting, the circumstances, and the era, to gain perspective on the protagonist, enabling us to feel empathy at the end. Like most things, he’s thought it through.
Growing up in Royal Oak, Michigan, Colson knew, by the end of high school, he would go into either physics or math. Recognizing that, while math adds up, not everything you calculate in physics is going to work, so he decided to take the more difficult route and study physics theory at Wayne State University.
His passion for the field was further ignited by a professor who stood on his desk and shouted his academic passion, a la Robin Williams in the film, “Dead Poets Society” (1989). It also may be what triggered his flair for the dramatic.
After earning his undergraduate degree, Colson worked in a technical research lab in Michigan, where his talents were recognized, earning him a ride to Stanford to earn his Ph.D. While seeking a project that would enable him to focus his thesis on something with practical applications, Colson learned about a project in the department regarding a superconductor accelerator, whose research findings were incomprehensible. His advisor asked him to take it on.
“The paper was actually correct but poorly written,” Colson said. “I explained it more simply, more clearly, and it pretty much set my career in motion. It is still used around the world. People came to me, offering research projects, and I never had to ask for funding.”
While at Stanford, Colson fell in love with a fellow student, who had given up tennis to double major in physics and English literature before continuing with the pursuit of her Ph.D in physics, with a focus on the absorption of X-rays by interstellar gas. Her name was Sally Ride.
“I moved to Houston with Sally and was there with her when she became an astronaut. We broke up in 1979 and, four years later, she was in space.”
Moving on
Colson, who had been working as a researcher and assistant professor at Rice University in Houston, went on to work at UC Santa Barbara for five years, before moving on to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, supported by consulting firm Berkeley Research Associates, which required a lot of international research.
“Yet I was sitting on a beach in Sicily when a professor from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey introduced himself and asked me to apply to NPS. At this point,” said Colson, “I was kind of well known.” Others have said there is no “kind of.”
Colson spent 25 years at NPS, investing three-quarters of his time on research contracts, and the other quarter, teaching. In 2015, the Carmel resident retired and found himself, above all, bored. Until he discovered The Carmel Foundation, a senior center whose mission is to provide a place and a reason for members to gather.
“The Carmel Foundation is a really great place,” Colson said. “They offer classes of all kinds — painting, sculpting, drawing, photography, writing. I took a painting class and quickly decided writing wouldn’t be as messy.”
Except maybe emotionally.
Colson’s approach to writing, similar to his physics career, is to allow curiosity to arise and then work to satisfy it. Whatever happened to the first cave painter, for example, 40,000 years ago? The new guy, with unprecedented skill, was he accepted into the clan? Colson wrote about him.
“One thing I really like, by the way, is being the new guy,” he said. “There aren’t any expectations. I can bungle things and mess up, and things will get better. With physics, for 40 years, I wasn’t the new guy. This is my chance. As a writer, I’m still new and still learning.”
In March of this year, Colson, who has now completed 80 short stories, selected his 10 favorite and published them in “Spectrum, Flash Fiction Stories,” so named since the stories cover a range of themes and always in one or two scenes. Yet all of them carry a central theme of significance. They mean something to the author, the characters and, hopefully, the readers.
Sometimes, when reading his own stories aloud, he becomes emotional. One of his writing instructors said she was reluctant to take on a physics professor, said she would have dropped him as a student, recalls Colson, had he not cried about his characters, become emotional as he developed their storyline.
“Wasn’t it Robert Frost who said, ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader’? When I hit on something that triggers tears,” said Colson, “I know I’m onto something and should keep going.”
On June 6, Colson, poet Peter Thabit Jones, who published “Spectrum,” through his Seventh Quarry Press, and Julie Tully, manager of River House Books, hosted a literary conversation at the bookstore, where the book is available.
