The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin
"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine
"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review
"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
OK, I know that probably sounds obscene, but I’m hard pressed to come up with a name for what I want to talk about. What I’m talking about probably exists, but I’m not familiar enough with fantasy these days to know for sure, so I hope someone can help me out.
Urban fantasy has been popular in recent years, from Buffy to Anita Blake to Kitty and the Midnight Hour. We have vampires and werewolves running around, having problems with their undead boyfriends or demon attacks. You know, the usual.
Now, one of my kicks is getting the science right in science fiction, and finding ways to educate using science fiction, such as with my astronomy-based anthology Diamonds in the Sky. Well, with science fiction, you get the same sort of stories and the same sort of readers quite often. I think it would be refreshing to have some good astronomy in some fantasy books.
See where I’m going with this now?
There are some natural marriages here. A werewolf should know the phases of the moon and how they work like no one else and be able to lecture their astronomy professor on various subtleties. Vampires should know all about sunrise and sunset times, length of twilight, etc., as a function of latitude and time of the year. Most people, and I’m including presumably smart Harvard graduates here (see A Private Universe if you don’t believe me), don’t know how the phases of the moon or the seasons work. I usually have a few Launch Pad attendees confess they didn’t understand them before the workshop.
The graphic novel/movie 28 Days of Night shows vampires exploiting their knowledge of how the days vanish part of the year above the artic circle.
Constellations and other aspects of the sky are probably useful for astrologers, witches, and other magical folks in fantasy, and I would love to see some real astronomy in there, too, and beyond astronomy there must be all sorts of other scientific concepts that would be essential to understand for different types of beings.
So, do these sorts of fantasy stories with serious astronomy and science exist? Anyone have some recommendations? I’d love to be able to ask the National Science Foundation or someone else to fund a fantasy version of Diamonds in the Sky someday. Students turned off by science fiction might perk up a lot if given the opportunity to read a story about vampires and werewolves, even if it teaches them at what time of day to look for a rising half moon, or to understand why twilight doesn’t last as long in the tropics.
Real Science in Movies? Dustin Hoffman, Hero for Real…
March 30th, 2009
He wouldn’t have been the person I’d predicted to do this, but I am thrilled:
THE actor Dustin Hoffman is to spearhead an initiative to put real science into Hollywood science-fiction blockbusters.
Hoffman, whose fortunes in sci-fi have ranged from the critically praised realism of Outbreak to the mocked killer squids of Sphere, will host events at which scientists and directors will meet to “get it right”.
The capstone of earning a doctorate is the PhD defense, a final oral exam that is the final hurdle to achieve the degree.
What is a PhD defense really like?
Well, I had my own and have talked with many other PhD holders about theirs over the years, but this past week was my first time (times two!) being on the other side of a defense.
I imagine things may differ a bit from subject to subject, university to university, and country to country, but I think the essentials are similar, although keep in mind I am defaulting to astronomy in the United States specifically. There’s a public presentation of the disseration work followed by a private oral exam by a preselected committee. The committee should ideally be professionals in the field who are experts on some aspect of the PhD topic and who can provide guidance during the project and also evaluate it fairly at the end. Often there is an outside member who provides some quality control to make sure that a given department is being reasonably strict and fair.
I remember, years before my own defense, wondering how I could get through such a thing. I imagined how I could fall asleep the night before, and how nervous I would be.
The truth was that I was with a visiting girlfriend the night before and was very relaxed and confident. (In general, I recommend a long-distance relationship for finishing PhD students.) While some PhD defenses show the candidate to be nervous, quite often this is not the case.
After you spend years becoming an expert on a topic and knowing you know more about it than everyone in the room, except for perhaps your adviser, the confidence comes. In my experience, it isn’t that hard to tell when someone is ready. You can see the changes happen in students as they go from being tentative and mistaken in their scientific assessments to being sure and right most of the time.
And the truth is that it is extremely rare for anyone to fail. Failures usually don’t get to schedule a defense. It does happen once in a long while, and you hear stories. There are people who really don’t know what they’re doing after years, but most people don’t put themselves through the experience.
So, usually it’s a happy time. You plan parties. You buy gifts. It’s just enough of a procedure to make sure the PhD candidate feels like they’ve been through a trial and has had a chance to show off what they know.
I am happy that I had a memorable first question, even though I wasn’t at the time. I was cool and confident, but not so relaxed I could laugh at a joke (and perhaps the delivery wasn’t what it could have been). My dissertation was on quasar emission-line regions, but the first questions was this: “A PhD is a Doctorate of Philosophy, so could you comment on the relationship between Man and Superman and Immanuel Kant?” Very seriously I replied, “I haven’t read Man and Superman, so I can’t respond. Next question.”
(Anyone know?)
Committee sizes vary, but are usually around 5-6, and everyone gets the chance to individually grill the candidate. This means that even when everything goes well and the candidate has done a great job, it can take an hour or an hour and a half. Sometimes it does take more, as many PhD holders like to hear themselves talk (guilty myself on occasion). Usually the worst case scenario is a long session spawned by the discovery of some fundamental misunderstandings, or some flaw in the work and the development of a plan to correct it. It is quite normal for there to be minor problems and for a dissertation to require revision, although it is very rare for a defense to be repeated.
If you haven’t had oral exams, it is a bit difficult to convey the feelings they sometimes invoke. It’s a bit like Socrates asking questions to lead a student to new understanding, at least if the student stumbles over the initial questions. Usually no one is a dick, but not always. Usually the questions are directly related to the PhD work, but not always.
After the questioning, the committee discusses the student’s performance and the written dissertation. Is the project significant enough? Has the field advanced in some way? Can the student go out into the world as a serious professional without embarrassing themselves or the department?
Anyway, I think I’ve talked around some specifics, but every defense is unique. Someone putting 5 years full-time into a project post college has figured out how to be a professional in a field, and the PhD defense is the opportunity to demonstrate that to everyone.
Science and Science Fiction: The Moons of Mars in Watchmen
March 28th, 2009
In the movie Watchmen, there is a scene that takes place on Mars and two large, round moons are visible in the sky. Mars does have two moons, Phobos and Deimos, but they are not large, round moons. Phobos and Deimos are tiny, with an approximate diameters of 22km and 13km, respectively, and not exactly round.
Let’s figure out how large the moons should look in the Martian sky. We can use an angular size calculator, which is a little easier today in the age of the internet perhaps than getting the rust off high school geometry. There are also simplified versions of the formula we use in astronomy, given that we’re dealing with objects so far away that subtend very small angles. First, consider our own moon, which is largish in the sky and easily visible with surface features. The moon’s orbit gives it an average distance of 384,400 km, and it has a diameter of 3,476 km. From the second link above:
D = linear (physical) diameter α = angular size in arcseconds
d = distance to object
206,265 = is required (arcseconds per radian)
This can be rearranged and solved for the angular size in arcseconds (1/3600 of a degree), which is then 206265 times the diameter divided by the distance. For the moon, I get 1865 arcseconds. Converting that to degrees, you get half a degree, which is coincidently about the same as the angular size of the sun (think about eclipses — the sun has a diameter about 400 times that of the moon, but the moon is about 400 times closer to us than the sun).
So, now for the angular sizes of Phobos and Deimos. I mentioned the diameters of 22km and 13km. We need to know how far they are from Mars. The semi-major axis of their orbits (they’re not quite circular) is 9 377 km and 23 460 km, respectively. Now we can apply our formula. The angular size of Phobos in the sky of Mars is then 484 arcseconds, and that of Deimos is 114 arcseconds.
From Mars, Phobos would look about a third the size of our own moon (actually a bit larger than I expected before I did the calculation — their orbital distances are not that large), while Deimos would be less than a quarter the size of Phobos, and less than a tenth the size of the Moon.
They also won’t look nearly as bright. Sunlight is only about 44% as intense at Mars as compared to the Earth, and Phobos and Deimos are smaller mirrors than the Moon as we’ve seen above.
Science and Science Fiction: Humans as Batteries in The Matrix
March 18th, 2009
The Matrix is a pretty cool movie, a modern classic with an interesting premise and innovative special effects. I always had a problem with it, related to the premise. Some spoilers may follow. Here’s my problem scene:
I’m not going to question the information about how much electricity or heat a human being can generate. I am alive and know I get hot, that my brain uses electrical impulses. What I am going to question is the idea that this makes humans a good way to generate or store energy.
This is classic biology and physics. Classic bad biology and physics.
There’s no sunlight left, so the machines raise humans for energy. “All the energy they will every need.” And they feed them dead humans.
Huh?
Without sunlight, I don’t know why the world isn’t frozen, or at least cool at surface level, and I don’t know how plants can be grown to feed the humans. And if you can grow plants then you can get energy straight from them (e.g., ethanol, alcohol, wood fuels) without taking the hit by using inefficient humans to convert that material into energy.
I’m taking this aside, because if you’re only using dead humans to feed live humans, you run out of humans. To keep the population level, each human would only be able to eat one human in its lifetime. Well, let’s call that 100 pounds of meat. Even on a starvation diet, you go through that pretty quickly.
So either the whole thing is ridiculous, or the machines have a better energy source.
There is a phrase about “a form of fusion” that is probably a science patch. Someone made the same objections I’m making and simply suggested adding an energy source so it wouldn’t be a closed system. But if there’s enough fusion to grow food for the humans, there’s more energy available just using the fusion directly rather than using the humans.
And humans as batteries? We don’t store much energy. We release heat all the time, and then it’s gone. At best our bodies are fuel in a pinch, but the dead get fed to the living…
Anyway, cool movie, dumb idea. A decent writer could come up with a more interesting and reasonable justification, but I’m sure someone was wedded to the idea of an easy-to-grasp image: Morpheus holding up a battery. Or maybe it was product placement.
I’m working on my seminar about science in the movies, and one of the concepts discussed will be what happens when you chuck someone out an airlock without a space suit. We know what happens. There was a poor guy who had an accident in a high-altitude chamber in the 1960s and lived to tell the tale without exploding all over place.
There are some other nice websites that cover the topic, for example this one by science fiction writer and scientist Geoffrey Landis. It covers the topic extensively, and related topics, along with citations and links to other pages.
Movie makers, on the other hand, haven’t always gotten it right. Here’s a compilation of scenes I could find on Youtube with some comments about them.
From 2001, look at the 5:00 mark or so (and if the embedding has been disable go here).
From the Outland Trailer, look at the 1:30 mark or so, and the 2:20 mark:
From Mission to Mars, look at the 9:00 mark or so:
Total Recall, bulging eyes bit on Mars:
So, 2001 gets this right. You have up to about 15 seconds to be conscious and able to operate a little, although you need to let the air out of your lungs and feel the saliva boil out of your mouth. They don’t show much from Mission to Mars, and he’s unconscious if not completely dead in 20 seconds or so — I will give it a pass. That movie does seem to think that things instantly freeze in space, but that’s another topic. Total Recall is a bit ludicrous with the giant bulging faces. Outland is right out with exploding people, but the radiation on Io would have killed everyone anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
Some other places where they get it right, too. There’s a bit in Event Horizon when someone tries to commit suicide opening an airlock, but the scene doesn’t seem to be available on Youtube. Likewise there’s a scene in Battlestar Galactica where some people are rescued from outside requiring them to be blown out of an airlock without suits. Bruised and sick, but eventually okay.
Any more I forgot? I am sure there are more…
OK, back to work on the talk…I have a few other topics to cover!
Astronomy in Science Fiction: “Lobsters” by Charlie Stross
March 15th, 2009
First, I’m not picking on Charlie Stross particularly. It’s just that I’d been meaning to read his work for many years now, and finally got the chance with the purchase of a Kindle. In addition to a couple of his novels, I downloaded his award-nominated story “Lobsters” that I recall hearing many great things about.
It is an interesting story, which I enjoyed reading, and I think it would have blown me away when it first came out. Unfortunately it’s a case of being so good that you set the standard and then the original stuff doesn’t look so original in hindsight. Happened to Tolkien and Gibson, so Stross is in good company.
Anyway, I found this sentence regarding dark matter:
“They even found the dark matter–MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared–suspiciously high entropy leakage.”
There’s some stuff about most of Andromeda being sapient and I take it that this issue has a lot to do with the related stories that together make up Accelerando, which I have not read.
The sentence stopped me cold, however, and would have stopped me cold earlier this decade when the story came out.
In the 1990s there was a project, called the MACHO project, searching for the hypothesized MAssive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) that might constitute the dark matter. Things like red dwarf stars, or maybe black holes. They found some, but far from enough. The vast majority of dark matter is not baryonic (normal matter found on the periodic table) and is not in MACHOs or red dwarf stars (see my primer on the current state of knowledge on dark matter, which was good in 2000 but has advanced even more since).
Now, it does take some time for information to percolate from the scientists to the science fiction writers and the general public, but the study was clearly taking place and Stross knew about the concept of MACHOs so I imagine he knew something about the project.
For me, getting the science right is critically important. One aspect is educational. I don’t know how many sf readers think that dark matter is made up of halo red dwarf stars, but I suspect some do. The other is just the suspension of disbelief. While it is not unacceptable to write about the near-future and have it regarded as alternate history to future readers (see The Watchmen for an example, or most of Tom Clancy’s work), saying something that is just astronomically wrong is always going to throw me out of a story, and hopefully any astronomy students I’ve taught as well.
Anyway, take this as an interesting observation of the day, an excuse to go read or reread “Lobsters,” and to check out the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers before applications close.
Basically, the idea is that it is easier in principle to find and characterize Earth-like planets when you can see them eclipsing their system’s star. Therefore if we want to talk with ETIs, we should be targeting our searches in the plane of the ecliptic. “Plane of the ecliptic” is just a technical term for the directions in space that would see us eclipsing the Sun. The aliens living in star systems in the plane of the ecliptic, so the reasoning goes, would then be the ones most likely to have spotted us and be trying to communicate with us.
Maybe a teeny-tiny bit more likely, but overall a dumb reason to restrict searches in my opinion. (Somehow the article I linked to talks about using the idea to “broaden” searches, but that’s just bad reasoning or writing, in my opinion. The only way to use the idea is to restrict searches.) Let me explain why I think the idea isn’t very good or logical, setting aside my scientist cap for my science fiction writer cap.
We are at the dawn of the era of discovery of exoplanets. We haven’t quite found Earth-like planets yet, but we’re approaching the technology and time required to do so. We’ve gone from no exoplanets known 15 years ago to many hundreds now, and the eclipse-finding technique is just the latest step. We’ll be able to image Earth-like planets around other stars in the relatively near future, and in all likelihood, a century from now barring some catastrophe in our civilization, we’ll have the technology to do a whole lot more. A big enough space telescope could do the job of spotting Earth-like planets in principle, whether or not they are in eclipsing systems.
So, the only way I think this makes any sense as a strategy is if the aliens are essentially at the same technology level we are, and not a century or more advanced.
If you think that high-technological civilizations are short lived (centuries or less), the chances of finding one anywhere nearby is tiny, let alone in the highly-restricted plane of the ecliptic.
If they’re long-lived (much longer than centuries), they will have the technology to spot us whether or not we are an eclipsing system as seen from their world and we should be looking everywhere for their signals, if in fact they are sending us such signals.
This argument can be quantified, which would take time away from things more important to me that this flawed proposal, in order to say exactly how small the benefit would be from adopting this strategy, if in fact there is any benefit at all. It is not at all clear to me that it is one. In fact, I will go as far to say that I think the study is wrong. If civilizations are long-lived, we’d be idiots to restrict searches as there are a lot more systems outside the plane of the ecliptic than in it. There would only be a benefit for short-lived civilizations, which would be unlikely to be there and broadcasting anyway, and then it becomes a contest between the exact time-frame a civilization has advanced technology versus the number of stars in and out of the plane of the ecliptic.
Here is the original paper, by the way. The author seems to want to have it both ways, assuming an optimistic million-year lifetime for a civilization but claiming that finding Earth via direct imaging is unlikely for anyone except very nearby ETIs. The million-year lifetime, however, suggests that nearby ETIs are likely to exist, and that they are likely to have technology hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than our own. Hundreds of thousands of years. And only “nearby” ETIs are going to bother to do anything but eclipse studies to find Earth?
OK, he does try to respond to my point, even though his search restriction only improves search efficiency by a factor of “16-40.” Damn small gain to weigh against the competing issues. His counterargument relies on the assumption that it will take the aliens “hundreds of thousands of years” to find Earth via proper motion or other sorts of studies, which is ridiculous.
It’s like he can’t imagine technology or resources very much more advanced than our own, or, when he does, still claims eclipsing is easier and we should neglect searching 90+% of the sky.
Remember, according to some we’re supposed to have the Singularity in a couple of decades and get superpowers. I think a civilization just a thousand years more technological advanced than ours will not have any problems finding us if that’s what they want to do.
OK, done picking on a guy thinking in interesting ways about an interesting problem. He’s been very quantitative about some easy things, and neglected the hard questions like what is the lifetime of a civilization and would it really be hard for a much more advanced civilization to find us without eclipses. “Hundreds of thousands of years” seems like a laughable strawman to me. I mean, we went from an era 50 years ago where people got PhDs for studies of samples of a few objects, to today when people do projects studying millions of objects. The number of stars in the galaxy does not seem daunting to me in the face of advancing technology.
This is a favorite topic of mine. I love stories and I love science, and science fiction movies combine these.
Unfortunately one or the other usually suffers from the combination. Still, for the purposes of education, getting the science wrong can be as instructive as getting it right, if not more so.
I have been giving public talks and class lectures for years using movie scenes, primarily from science fiction films. I’m not opposed to using more mainstream films, but science issues don’t come up so frequently as we know how things are supposed to happen here on Earth and mostly things are right. When they’re not right, it’s usually obvious fantasy anyway and not a good example to use.
Some of my favorite movie scenes for physics involve artificial gravity. 2001 A Space Odyssey does a great job of getting realistic gravity from spinning a ship or space station, while Armageddon somehow gets almost everything wrong, and even school children can figure it out. Things are shown to estimate scale, and you can get some real numbers for how strong the gravity should be and in what direction.
Another topic that comes up a lot is what happens when someone is exposed to vacuum. Again, 2001 gets it pretty much right, as do some other movies and even TV shows like Battlestar Galactica. I seem to recall someone blowing up in Outland, although I haven’t seen it in years, and the super-tough aliens in the Alien movies seem to pop whenever there’s the slightest whiff of vacuum.
Contact and Apollo 13 are pretty scientifically accurate movies that do a lot of things right and have some illustrative scenes. Deep Impact is better than Armageddon, but still has some boners that are good to learn from. There are some very basic scientific concepts, like chaos theory and the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that movies like Jurassic Park and the Matrix don’t seem to understand.
Anyway, I am giving another talk on this topic next week and here in Brazil I have a more limited suite of movies than normal. I’ve already bought a lot of DVDs here, and I can find some more things on You Tube, but I thought I’d get some input from you about the things you’d like to see. A year and a half ago I gave one talk here on this topic, and this one I want to get into more physics. I am sure I will do gravity in the 2001 space station, getting the audience to help estimate numbers from the film, and I will for sure talk about what happens if you get tossed out an airlock, but beyond that I am still thinking.
Below I have some ideas for some things to show and discuss. Let me know which ones you like and feel free to suggest others, especially if there is a You Tube video to go with it (leave a link, and bonus for a Portuguese version!). Pick up to five. I’d love to get some new ideas, so get creative.
Why Science Fiction Rules the World (but not enough!!!)
March 11th, 2009
In many important ways, science fiction rules the world, but is regularly dismissed by the public at large.
I’m going to use an expansive definition of science fiction, as opposed to my usually more rigid definition that demands some adherence to science, and open this up to speculative fiction in general and nearly all novel, creative thinking that gets called “science fiction” by mainstream people. I know some English professors who call Harry Potter science fiction, for instance.
All this stuff, all this “sf,” is considered weird to normal mainstream people, the mundanes. Until it becomes popular or important, then the ignorant and arrogant bastards seize it as their own.
This is most obvious when it comes to movies. Here’s one list from the 1980s that is totally dominated by sf movies, including Blade Runner, Aliens, The Terminator, The Empire Strikes Back, E.T., Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Princess Bride, etc., etc. These films are spectacularly great and exploit the special effects of movies in a way that real life rarely demands. A movie like Forrest Gump benefits from special effects, too, but sf thrives on it.
And people love it. It makes sf accessible.
Because the truth of it is that we fans of science fiction have capabilities that the general public lacks, to enjoy novelty and think about difficult concepts. To enjoy things that blow our minds, and seek that regularly. The general public needs it dumbed down and shown to them in very clear terms. To make it real. And movie special effects make that easier to do. Then everyone can enjoy it as mainstream entertainment and not consider themselves as weird novelty seekers, and then flock to sequels and just treat it as normal stuff.
Books don’t fare as well because they’re harder work. Still, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling manage. The science fiction not so much, falling into the cracks as it requires too much thinking usually in book form.
The public at large waits until science catches up before it worries about anything from the realm of science fiction. Cloning was a scary fantasy, but not more, in movies and books, before the reality of Dolly the Sheep. Then to make sense of this development for public policy they called in experts like…doctors and clergy?
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The science fiction community had been talking about this for decades in serious ways and had a grasp of it better than even the people involved with the actual research. I mean, the creator of Dolly thought that cloning humans was a bad idea because if a couple cloned the father, say, to have a child, the mother would then find the child sexually attractive when he grew up. WTF??? Seriously, this was his position.
What I am trying to say is that the average person, the practical person, the people who live in the real world, are basically clueless when it comes to novelty and the things we think about and talk about on a daily basis, and somehow we get regularly excluded when the issues become relevant.
I’m trying to figure out why that is, and I think everyone is to blame.
It is part of our culture. Something ridiculous is called “science fiction” until it become practical then it moves from our thing to their thing. And we seem to let it happen too often. To be fair, a lot of us prefer to look for the next interesting idea and refrain from getting involved with practical things.
There are figures from science fiction like David Brin, Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, and Bruce Sterling who are viewed sometimes as more than “just” science fiction writers. They have to be called futurists or something else to have legitimacy, it seems, even though it’s the same side of the same coin.
The thing is, Singularity or not, technology is moving forward rapidly and the possibilities are expanding. Our politicians and pundits, our business leaders, ought to be well versed in science fiction and science fiction thinking, but if they are they hide it well. Science fiction conventions are still covered on local TV news as a joke, a chance to laugh at the socially maladjusted people sitting in Denny’s in their costumes.
Anyway, science fiction rules the world in the popular culture of our films and in the technology that dominates our every day lives. The world today is more fantastic in many ways than any sf writer imagined in the 1950s. We have test tube babies and are on the verge of human cloning and designer babies. We have portable devices that give us world-wide telephones, GPS, libraries of books and music, and the internet. An individual can post a movie online that tens of millions of strangers then watch, just for fun. One of the dominant issues of our era is global warming, and we worry about protecting ourselves from killer asteroids. Science fiction stories about alien contact certainly can have something to teach us about interacting with alien human cultures, which seems to be a regular problem of great importance today.
My point here is that the people who need to know about this stuff don’t think about it much until it is already well past real. Those of us who do think about this stuff tend to focus on the unreality as it is more interesting to us as novelty seekers, and we let ourselves be marginalized as weirdos. Things have improved somewhat in recent years with some sf geeks coming out of the closet, so to speak, like Paul Allen of Microsoft and Newt Gingrich in congress, but too little.
Science fiction is important, practical, every day business. Global environment and survival, the future of energy, the future of the human species and how we reproduce and alter ourselves, our technological devices and their effects on our culture, the clash of ancient tradition and the changing reality, these are the stomping grounds of science fiction. Those of us into novelty and difference for the sake of difference have a lot to offer. We have to find ways of communicating these ideas to those who think they live in the real, practical world, which isn’t the one they grew up inside.
How are we to do this?
Well, we have to be more confident and assertive in our identities. We have to be polite but persistent, and dismissive of efforts to dismiss us. We have to remind people of how the vision of science fiction is our present and near-future, from cell phones to computers to people’s babies.
It is amazing how people swallow this stuff and adopt it when it is on the big screen and the director has made it visual and easily assimilated. We have to strive to do the same things when we talk with our friends and neighbors, our co-workers and politicians. Egg-head and geek and nerd have to be empowering terms. Everyone has to feel like they need one of us to talk with, or have resources to read or hear what we think about things. And we have to be willing to do it.
A lot of us are elitist and just as dismissive. We have to communicate dangers and possibilities of new concepts and not just discuss them amongst ourselves. We have to make an effort and find ways of doing this. Movies remain one possibility, but just as people dismiss ideas as “that’s science fiction” they also do so with film saying “it’s just a movie.”
More and more often these things are aspects of our modern reality that have no precendence in human history. Somehow history gets respect and people say it “repeats itself” even though that is not true. Science fiction isn’t exactly great at prediction, but the process is very useful for meeting the future with open eyes.
Anyway, I’d like to see suggestions for things we can do to open better communications and bring more people into the sf tent. It’s healthy for a civilization to have its conservatives, but it isn’t healthy when such a large fraction of everyone can really be counted as conservatives in a fast-changing world.
Here’s my short list of tactics, starting with things that already work and getting more speculative: movies, TV shows, books (fiction and non-fiction), blogs, futurist activities (various foundations, conferences, reports, and more). Seems too traditional and inadequate. The rest of the world gets things from TV talk shows and news (who seem to take joke approaches and are cutting their science staff), churches, friends, popular magazines…how do we break in there?
How do we get a Vernor Vinge or Bruce Sterling sitting there next to Chuck Todd or Ben Stein on a political talk show? Maybe it’s through the pundits who are already one of us, like Paul Krugman. Maybe we can press writers like Bill Bryson into more sf-oriented work. Hell, even just getting the Sci-Fi channel to stop making cheap crap movies that are dumb would help the cause — I’m not above some light escapism but it seems like giant-snake-of-the-week movie isn’t putting our best foot forward.
What is our best foot, and what high-tech materials do we build it out of?
OK, not quite getting away from The Watchmen quite yet. A friend pointed me at a video about the science of The Watchmen:
University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios discusses how he was tapped to add a physics perspective to the upcoming Warner Brothers movie, Watchmen. Kakalios discusses how quantum mechanics can explain Dr. Manhattan’s super human powers in the film, and how he came to become an expert on the topic of the physics of superheroes. Check out Kakalios book at www.physicsofsuperheroes.com
I recommend his book highly. And now for the 6-7 minute film.
And yes, I will stop talking about The Watchmen soon. I think.
Some comments. I love almost all of these authors. They’re great! With the exception of perhaps one or two, every one has written something I love. Celebrating them is a good thing. My list will have some changes. I favor more contemporary writers, although the test of time is a good test. I think we’ve learned something about writing science fiction over the past century, and more people do it better now than at any time ever in the past. Great writers are expected to have the complete package and perform regularly and well over a career.
For myself, I weight novels more than short stories, and have my own personal preferences. I weight serious science fiction more than softer things, but not always when I am swept away.
My list
15. David Brin. The Uplift books are wonderful and imaginative. Some of Brin’s short stories are legendary. Kiln People was a really good book, and some of his other stand alones are also remarkable.
14. John Brunner. Stand on Zanzibar is one of my favorite novels of all time. I feel like he was an unappreciated writer.
13. Neal Stephenson. Snowcrash and The Diamond Age are instant classics, and his other books are also quite memorable. I will remember the opening chapter of Snowcrash forever.
12. Philip Jose Farmer. As I said yesterday, he was my first favorite author, and the World of Tiers books and the Riverwold books are great.
11. Ray Bradbury. Not the hardest sf writer out there, but a really great writer. Farhenheit 451 still resonates today in so many ways.
10. Arthur C. Clarke. Not as high as you might have expected. I’ve liked nearly everything I have read from Sir Arthur, but haven’t loved a lot so much. Very good to great, but not legendary consistently.
9. Ursula K. LeGuin. Unfortunately the only female writer on my list. I don’t know whose fault that is exactly, but there it is. Her novel The Dispossessed is one of my all time favorites, and so is A Wizard of Earthsea if you will let me stray into fantasy for a moment.
8. Dan Simmons. God, I love this guy. Hyperion blew me away. So did Carrion Comfort, and many more of his novels and short stories. I have fallen behind reading him, and I am more than willing to jump genres to do so. He only lives a couple of hours drive away in Colorado and I must meet him sometime.
7. Fred Pohl. My first year of college Pohl was my favorite writer. I devoured the Gateway books, Man Plus, everything he write that I could buy. His short story “Day Million” is one I love so much.
6. Roger Zelazny. Another love in college. Lord of Light. Creatures of Light and Darkness. Isle of the Dead. Over in fantasy the classic Amber series. And such wonderful short stories…he died way too young.
5. Joe Haldeman. The Forever War was a special read for me and I still remember buying the book in a mall B. Dalton’s back in the 1970s. So many other great novels and short stories coming so consistently. His novella “For White Hill” is one of my favorite short pieces. I am fortunate to have had Joe as a Clarion West teacher and to have him come as a guest for my Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop (now taking applications for July 2009).
4. Larry Niven. I don’t know that everyone would put him so high, but I really admire so much of his work, albeit some is in collaboration. Ringworld still blows me away. So does “The Hole Man.” Legacy of Heorot is also a favorite novel, and don’t forget The Mote In God’s Eye.
3. Isaac Asimov. I have to put him this high, but not higher. So many books and short stories, so many so clear and insightful things he had to say. He was always like a friend I never met. The Robot stories and Foundation carry so much magic with them. Timeless.
2. Vernor Vinge. I hope Vernor doesn’t feel he is getting too old to be this high! His Deep books, his Bobble books, and more put him up here. And while I have some issues with his vision of the singularity, I find him quite visionary and worth listening to as a thinker independent of being a writer.
1. Robert Heinlein. Between Starship Troopers and especially Stranger in a Strange Land, this guy has always been science fiction to me. And about another dozen books and short stories.
Honorable Mentions: Orson Scott Card, Nancy Kress, Gregory Benford, David Gerrold, Robert Silverberg, Robert Sawyer, Michael Swanwick, Robert Charles Wilson, Alfred Bester…
Who do you think? As usual pick up to three, and be encouraged to explain your picks.
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