Bill Copeland

Bill was born in Spring Valley in the foothills east of San Diego. The spring, after which the valley is named, runs clear all year long and flows into a creek nearby. In the creek he caught crawdads, pollywogs, frogs, and minnows, and cooled his feet in the hot summers. Bill explored county hiking trails, rabbit trails, even very narrow little bug trails that snuck through the grass and roots of the chaparral.

Growing up on the edge of desert, the clear sky over his part of southern California became a prominent part of his daily experience. For much of each year, clear skies and warm evenings invited him to enjoy being outside. When he was in high school, his aunt and uncle gave him a small 10-power telescope with good optics for Christmas. He turned it to the sky at night. He saw the craters on the Moon and then pointed it at what looked like a small yellow star. He discovered the ring around Saturn. He thought, that’s not so far away. He could just about reach out and touch it. A couple years later he saw a real mind blower. It was the vision of a comet that dominated the western sky as the sun went down. It spread from above the horizon up to the top of the sky. As it moved away he wondered where it was going. Nobody he knew could or would explain it, so he went to the library and got a book on astronomy.

Astronomy became his hobby. He found that the moon goes around the earth and the earth around the sun, and the stars around the galaxy. Comets go around the sun also, and occasionally they come close to Earth. Putting the moon, earth, planets, comets, stars together in one connected 3-D picture in his mind was a thrill.

Bill went to San Diego State College, studied astronomy, geology, math, and history. At the suggestion of his uncle, who went to SDSC before him, he took computer science classes. When he graduated with a BA, he had three different big computer companies offering a job. He went to work at Univac. After a year he was offered a job at the Univac site in Houston at the Manned Spacecraft Center, working on the Apollo communications system. He saw early pictures of the Moon and Earth together in space. One series, in particular, of the earth rising over the limb of the moon blew his mind. The earth looked like a marbled blue and white egg sitting in a nest on the moon. What kind of bird would hatch out of that egg?

Eventually he returned to California and settled in Silicon Valley. He worked for various computer companies while working on an MS cybernetics degree program at San Jose State College. For his masters project he recruited three other students in his class to create a design for an interstellar ark that could fly to the nearest star system.

Silicon Valley was pretty intense at times so he looked into a Zen meditation group to help him relax. A friend asked him to sit with a group that follow the teachings of swami Muktananda. When Muktananda ‘left his body’, he went to his Ashram in Ganeshpuri, India, to see his shrine and study. On a recommendation from a swami, he took a trip Muktananda himself had taken in India and Kashmir. Her wanted to see the area just south of Tibet in India called Little Tibet. He was intrigued to see the Himalayas, the glaciers, the people, their food, yaks, camels, and so on. He noticed that Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and other spiritual groups regard Mt. Kailas as holy.

He wound up traveling to India five times, visiting a dozen ashrams and learning practices in Delhi, Kerala, Srinagar, Udaipur, Ganeshpuri, and Menar. He was invited twice to weddings of friends. Kusoom was the name of one of the brides, and used her name in his book Cosmic Swan.

He kept up his study of astronomy and cosmology. Still thinking about the Earth and what kind of bird would hatch from such a gigantic egg, he imagined a Cosmic Swan that lives for billions of years and flies and explores the galaxy. Cosmic Swans appear as great comets. They lay their eggs on planets in the comfort zones around stars. The eggs hatch and the big bird flies away to live in space, carrying people, animals, and plants, in a comfortable habitat.

The book Cosmic Swan can be read at three levels: as a sci-fi story of the birth out of the Earth of a gigantic space bird threatened with destruction, because it is regarded as a dangerous monster; as a romance between a priestess Kusoom who foretells the birth of a 'great being', and a strong geologist who discovers her secret and helps her protect it from an army; and as a metaphor for the possibility that humans can survive as a species forever in space.