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Steven Gould is a lot easier to get a fix on than the teleporting hero of his science fiction novel "Jumper."

For example, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out Gould's a computer whiz.

When he answered the door of his southeast Albuquerque home earlier this week he was on his cell phone with his father in Rockport, Texas, talking him through the steps needed to open a computer spreadsheet.

And if you didn't know that 1992's "Jumper" had been made into a recently released film, you'd get a clue from Gould's T-shirt.

"Never judge a book by its movie," the shirt reads.

"It's a Christmas gift from my brother," a smiling Gould said.

Actually, back at Christmas, Gould had not seen "Jumper," the movie, an action flick starring Hayden Christensen, Rachel Bilson and Jamie Bell.

But he attended the New York City premiere Feb. 11 and has seen it three times since — twice in Albuquerque and once in Rockport, where family helped him celebrate the translation of his novel to the big screen.

He likes the movie.

"There are tons of things I would have done differently," said Gould, who had no role in writing the screenplay. "They put too much burden on the viewer (to figure out what's going on).

"But I am seeing evidence that people — because of the movie or the movie's trailers — are buying my books. And I am having fun."

• • •

Wheezing noises fill Gould's kitchen as his wife, Laura Mixon, also a science fiction writer, uses the family espresso machine to make lattes.

Gould, 53, and Mixon, 50, are admitted coffee addicts. They got hooked on lattes about 10 years ago while tooling through the Pacific Northwest in their 1971 Volkswagen camper bus during a promotional tour for the novel "Greenwar," their only collaborative effort.

Mixon also approves of "Jumper," the movie.

"I really loved it," she said after bringing three lattes to the wooden-topped kitchen table and settling into a chair. "We are writers, so we tend to pick things apart. But I thought the movie captured the emotional heart of the book."

At the heart of the book is Davy, a teenager who first teleports — instantly transporting from one place to another miles away — to escape a beating from an abusive father.

Gould said his novel is about escaping, about running away, and he candidly concedes it is rooted in his childhood.

"My dad was not physically abusive as Davy's father is in the novel," he said. "But he is a longtime recovering alcoholic."

Gould is close to his father, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for 30 years, but as a child the trauma of being an alcoholic's son was often enough to make him wish he could be some place else in a hurry.

In the movie, the Davy character, portrayed by Christensen, does teleport early on to elude his raging father.

But many other things about the movie are different from the book.

In Gould's novel, Davy is the only character with the ability to teleport, the only jumper.

But the screenwriters added the character of Griffin, another jumper portrayed by Bell, and a whole new plot element about jumpers being pursued by a confederacy of fanatics who call themselves Paladins.

Paladins are out to kill all jumpers because they believe that since jumpers are unnatural they are also an affront to God.

That's a long way from what Gould wrote, but he's cool with it, reasoning that telling stories on the big screen is different than telling them in the pages of a novel.

Besides, it snagged him another novel when his agent suggested he write a book about the Griffin character. He gleaned the essence of Griffin from the movie's producers and turned out "Jumper: Griffin's Story," which was published by Tor Books last year.

Gould is also the author of 2004's "Reflex," a sequel to the original "Jumper" novel. It's scheduled to be reissued in April.

The movie opened on Valentine's Day and was the box office champ last weekend with $27.2 million in ticket sales.

Gould has been enjoying the ride. He is grateful for the sales boost the movie has generated for his books, both in the United States and abroad.

And he gets a kick out of watching the movie with family and friends.

If the movie does well enough, Gould said its producers have plans for two more films in the series.

Gould won't likely be involved in the writing of those screenplays either, but that's fine by him.

He said he might write another movie tie-in book, but he doesn't feel suited to writing movie scripts.

"I'm a pretty good novelist," he said. "As a novelist, I'm in complete control of my product. I can write without consulting whole committees of people."

• • •

Gould and Mixon have been sold on science fiction since they were youngsters.

She was born in Roswell, moved to Albuquerque when she was 2 and grew up on the "Star Trek" TV series, the "Star Wars" movies and on science fiction novels and stories.

She remembers the first science fiction novel she read — Clifford D. Simak's "Ring Around the Sun."

Because his father was in the Army, Gould was born at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, moved to Taiwan and lived in various places around the world.

Cut off from American pop culture for much of his youth, he remembers being influenced early on by Japanese ninja and samurai movies shown on TV in Thailand. And by science fiction novels and stories.

The first science fiction novel he read was Lester Del Rey's "Runaway Robot."

Mixon earned a degree in chemical engineering at the University of New Mexico in 1980. Gould majored in philosophy at Texas A&M but left without a degree when his computer skills got him recruited into the business world.

They met at a science fiction convention in Austin in the mid-'80s, were married in 1989 and settled in Albuquerque in 1995.

Her first science fiction novel, published in 1987, was "Astropilots." Gould's first was "Jumper."

The parents of 12- and 15-year-old daughters, Gould and Mixon took turns staying at home to write and holding down regular jobs to make ends meet. He'd stay at home and she'd work out in the world for a while and then vice versa.

That's different now.

"The money from the movie has enabled both of us to write — at least for a while," Mixon said. "And because Steve and I have done a lot of other things in our lives, we've come to appreciate the chance to spend a lot of time with our children."

They haven't tried collaborating since 1997's "Greenwar," an environmental action thriller.

Since they were working together on "Greenwar," they made a detailed outline of the novel, something they don't do when they are writing solo.

"We are both writers who write to see what happen next," Mixon said. "Writing from an outline killed our momentum.

"Also, we are very different writers. Our prose is different. Steve is a very spare, clean writer. I'm sort of messy and go back and try to clean it up."

Science fiction writers have always faced challenges, not the least of which has been winning the respect of the publishing industry.

But Gould said a major challenge in the field today is declining readership.

"People who read traditional science fiction — that demographic is shrinking and aging," he said.

Still, both he and Mixon have novels in progress.

She is working on the first of a new series set 300 years in the future.

He is writing a post-disaster novel set in the Southwest.

"It's about these self-replicating robot bugs that eat all the metal in the Southwest," he said. "And that includes pacemakers and the metal fillings in people's teeth."

Uh-huh!

Now that ought to stir up some buzz in Hollywood.