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
I’m very supportive of such things in general, and I like a lot of things on the site.
Unfortunately — you what is coming by now, don’t you? — there’s some politically correct biased rubbish in there as well that may or may not be fair. I think not, in general. Let’s look at the misconceptions page that lists items in a number of categories. I’ll add my commentary beside some of them in italics with some criticisms. I’ll hit bold too when I have a real issue with the “misconception.”
“Hard” sciences are more rigorous and scientific than “soft” sciences.I have to object to this one. There is a difference between “hard” and “soft” sciences that the labels suggest. I am not sure what the point of this “misconception” actually is. Anyone know? I can apply a lot of quantitative rigor to an issue in psychology and still have no clue about how it works, which is not generally true in astrophysics, for instance. The soft sciences are frakking hard and rigorous understanding is difficult to achieve, which is not nearly so true in the hard sciences. I can calculate when an asteroid will strike the Earth to the second given enough observations. I’m never going to be able to predict when a serial killer will strike even given a library of information and a lifetime to do calculations. This point seems politically motivated.
Science proves ideas. A really good one to include. Biased conservatives insisting on ironclad “proof” of evolution or global warming are asking for the impossible, and they likely know it, the bastards.
Science contradicts the existence of God. This seems really stupid to bring in to me, at least without providing an appropriate scientific perspective. Science doesn’t address the supernatural, but it can certainly test some supernatural claims and has never found convincing evidence for the miracles espoused by leading world religions. A very sizable majority of the top scientists (National Academy of Scientists) are not religious. Religion is an irrational belief that is contrary to scientific thinking. Science simply doesn’t have anything to say about religion except when religion oversteps its claims, and then religion has been consistently been found wrong (e.g., age of the Earth, effectiveness of prayer, faith healing, etc.). This is bogus P.C. B.S. in my opinion and should be deleted from the page in this form. Science simply finds no support for God, and does contradict many claims of the ridiculous.
Science and technology can solve all our problems. Well, I’m a technological optimist. I think there’s a certain class of problem that science/technology can always solve, or improve. The example of HIV is a poor one, I think. It’s so narrowly defined that I have no doubt future tech can solve it, if only in a brute force way with tailored nanotech that is on the horizon now. Problems like “What is the purpose of life?” or “Why is there evil in the world?” are perhaps problems science can’t solve. But appeals to the supernatural have failed also, in my opinion, so let’s not run there.
Science is done by “old, white men.” Depends on the field, to be honest. If you include Asians and Indians, well, it’s almost all men in Physics. Not happy about it, but there it is. No bold.
Overall I am happy there are things like this out there and will likely link to this and similar sites when I teach non-majors introductory astronomy or physics. I just hate to see someone’s political correctness or biases twist things to appease the irrational and make things a little too ideal. Personally I’d axe or edit the items I commented on in bold, and be a bit more honest about a couple of others. We could use more diversity in the scientific endeavor, but we also shouldn’t lie about things. Intelligent design and astrology are irrational beliefs, not science, and science doesn’t have much patience for them. Most conventional religion isn’t far from these at their roots, and aren’t in perfect harmony with science. I have no problem with people who have reasonable ethical systems and like the community and benefits of faith, but the miraculous apparitions, the end times, resurrections, and heavenly visions are really not happening by any objective measure. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t science and no one else should take it seriously.
I read fantasy and like it. It isn’t always my first choice, but I really love a great fantasy book. While there are some deeply profound and moving fantasy novels, I look to fantasy especially for escapism. I still expect it to be self-consistent but I don’t have to tear my hair out over it the way I do sometimes with science fiction. My dad tends not to like fantasy at all — his ability to suspend disbelief is somewhat limited — although he can be tricked into reading it and liking it sometimes.
It occurred to me that I would be interested in seeing what science fiction fantasy writers like, and on the flip side I’m going to suggest some of my favorites and why I like them. Some warnings and caveats first. I tend not to like many of the big fat fantasies (BFFs), and like but do not love urban fantasy or paranormal romance. Also, because my fantasy reading is more limited, I’m likely missing some books I’d really love. George R. R. Martin is a favorite writer of mine, but I haven’t read his Song of Ice and Fire books. I haven’t read C. S. Lewis. I haven’t read Philip Pullman. Highly praised and purchased writers I’ve read but do not love (detest in just a few cases) include Raymond Feist, Guy Gavriel Kay, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tim Powers, Terry Brooks, and Terry Goodkind. I always meant to read a little Robert Jordan, but that’s apparently impossible so I skipped him.
Here are some fantasy reads I have loved, in no particular order. Some books marketed as horror are going to sneak onto the list, too.
I read and loved the Harry Potter books. Heard of them?
American Gods is a great but flawed book in my opinion. I’d have cut the length way down and eased up on the interim sections, for starters. After reading Sandman it wasn’t super original to me, but it was still a great read.
Replay is contemporary fantasy involving time travel of a sort, without explanation. It’s an inspiration for Groundhog Day, a great movie.
Glimpses is another contemporary story of unexplained time travel, about rock music, and more. I remember being blown away by the audacity to write this sort of book and deal with Brian Wilson, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix as characters. It was cool.
A Wizard of Earthsea is a timeless classic and seems so perfect.
Zelazny is one of my favorite science fiction writers, and I enjoy his fantasies as well.
Stephen King is a fine writer, and I very much enjoyed the opening books of his Dark Tower series. I confess I haven’t gotten around to finishing it, but intend to.
Master of the Five Magics isn’t the best fantasy I ever read. It’s rather pedestrian in a lot of ways, but I really respect the hell out of the carefully constructed and logical magic systems here.
I love Glen Cook’s work. It’s sparse. It’s cynical. It’s funny. It’s moving.
Dan Simmons is a favorite writer of mine, and whether he’s writing science fiction, fantasy, or horror, I’ve enjoyed it. Carrion Comfort is a great read.
A similar sort of book is Brian Lumley’s Necroscope, contemporary fantasy bridging into horror and science fiction.
Forgotten Beasts of Eld is another one of those perfect fantasies, like a crystal or a flower. Poetic and magical.
Soon I Will Be Invincible is a very recent read, and while I consider superheroes their own genre and this particular book fun but not quite meeting my expectations, I really wanted to include it and recommend you buy it if it all appeals to you.
This is a masterpiece of dark fantasy and I found it by turns magical and chilling.
I had the privilege of listening to Bill Spencer read Zod Wallop in draft form in a workshop and it is a great book. It deserved more attention than it got.
Thomas Covenant. Some people hate it. Some love it. I’m one of the latter. Leper. Outcast. Unclean. Indeed.
Pern. Supposedly Pern is science fiction, but I never saw it. I only read the first three books and liked them well enough, but not well enough to read about the harpers and the drummers and everyone else on Pern.
Based on this list, or based on what you think a hard science guy would like in a fantasy, any suggestions? I have no doubt that when it comes to the fantasy field, there are huge swaths of good books I am ignorant about.
You’ve probably already seen this, or heard of it, but for those who haven’t, here is “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, terminally ill professor (now deceased) and virtual reality pioneer, about achieving your childhood dreams:
If you haven’t watched it before, it really is worth an hour of your life.
It’s a terrific message to his kids and to all of us. I think our childhood dreams really do define who we are at our core and to what extent we find happiness later in life. Sure, people do change and people do lose interest in some topics and achieve others. I find myself looking back to my lifelong desires as a guide to what I should do with my life and to keep me on track. For instance, money was never that important to me, but enjoying things that were cool always was. I suspect I now suffer in some ways because I had too many interests growing up, and it’s been a matter of paring back rather than pursuing all with equal vigor.
Here are the things I really wanted to do growing up, say into my high school years at least, with some outcomes or explanations. I’ll start with the home runs and work toward the strike outs.
Become a science fiction writer. I first started writing a novel at 11. It sucked and I never finished it, but the dream was there and I followed through.
Become an astronomer. This was something I came up with at age 6 based on a fascination with space and the things in it. Astronauts only went to the moon or orbit, and all the really cool stuff was farther away. It behooves us to look around the whole universe and see what it is like.
Run a martathon. My dad was a marathon runner and broke three hours when he was in his mid 30s. He ran the Boston marathon, too, if that means anything to you. I was 9 or 10 when I started training for my first marathon, which didn’t happen until I was 39. The idea was always back there that it was something I wanted to do, an ultimate physical test that could be past with enough effort.
Become a chess master. Not quite. My USCF rating hit its peak (about 1950) in my first or second year of college, some 5-6 years after starting competitive chess. I drew the first six masters I ever played, one of whom was a senior master with a rating over 2400, who took the draw I offered because he was totally busted. I lacked the killer instinct in those days, and it was more important for me not to lose than to actually win. You do better in chess winning. I also felt bad beating my friends, which I did in the final round of 1986 to win the Missouri amateur championship, and bad too when they beat me. I let this go in college when I realized I would likely never get anywhere close to grandmaster strength, and that while I might be able to make master (rating of 2200), that would be it after years more of draining effort. I was double majoring in electrical engineering and space physics at a top university (Rice) and something had to give. Drawing Boris Spassky in a simultaneous exhibition my sophomore year (and being featured in a newspaper article about the event) was a nice cap for me for the chess career.
Become a comic book artist. Nope, didn’t happen, but it could have. I was good at drawing and painting and loved it growing up. I won awards at some science fiction art shows at 14 (junior category), and could have gone to college as an art major based on my high school portfolio. In college, doing the science and engineering double, I lacked the time. I was also playing chess, and writing science fiction short stories, in my spare time (what a geek I was!). The idea of a career as a comic artist, even with the virtual rock stardom of Todd McFarlane (and a few others who need not be mentioned), seems not very appealing today. I would still love to finagle a comic book writing gig someday, or write a superhero novel (with realistic science, I know, unpossible!). I still have a comics collection of 3000+ books, and confess that John Byrne was my idol in those days.
Write computer games. I wrote several, and big pieces of several more, on my Apple II+ back in Junior High and High School. The first, somehow named Zarzon II, was the “ultimate game.” I liked how in those days it was possible to be the storyteller, the artist, the game tester, and the programmer. I loved playing video games then, and still enjoy some now. I have some friends who are in the industry and have worked on some famous stuff. Now that games are big team projects, I find the appeal somewhat less, and like science fiction, I do think the golden age of video games is when you’re 12. Hard to totally recapture the magic for me — the technology has changed and the experience is qualitatively different. Favorite arcade games included Donkey Kong, Rygar, Dragon Spirit, Phoenix, Battlezone, and more…played the hell out of that Atari 2600, too. These days it’s more strategy games and recent favorites are the Heroes of Might and Magic games, Diablo II. Trying to quit as their addictive nature and false sense of accomplishment replaces real accomplishmets I’d like to achieve.
Become a paleontologist. Not very compatible with other full-time science careers. But I live in Wyoming and there are summer events where people can participate in digs. I think I’d be satisfied with learning how to find dinosaur bones of almost any type, and finding some. Doable in the future.
Find bigfoot. Well, this sure hasn’t happened. I have done a lot of camping in areas of bigfoot sightings and have visited the location of the Patterson-Gimlin film, which was a fun fulfillment of a childhood dream. I was a member of the International Society for Cryptozoology, founded by my late friend Richard Greenwell. Richard was an awesome energy, and even went to the Congo once on an expedition looking for, Mokele Mbembe, a modern day dinosaur. You may have seen him in some documentaries over the years. As a member of the Explorer’s Club, Richard lived his childhood dreams his entire life with a great and infectious enthusiasm. Man, I am such a geek that I love this stuff. I do though. The odds are really long that any of this is real, but the mystery has an allure for me and makes me want to explore the world.
Become a movie director. My family had a Super 8 camera, and back in the late 1970s I made several movies. There was a poor stop-action movie featuring Micronaut toys (which I loved, and sold to some other child at heart over Ebay in the 1990s), a movie about drug addiction for a school project, a Mr. Bill movie, and a Star Trek movie I never finished. I was in grad school at Texas the same time that Robert Rodriguez was a student there, and I wish I would have met him. I read and admired his comic strips in the Daily Texan (I actually did some comic strips in those days, notably one I turned in with a 63-page takehome midterm for my stellar structure class, which had made me loopy, and considered trying to break in at the Texan, which also featured Too-Much-Coffee-Man). He sold his body to science at the local Pharmaco I drove past every day to finance his first movie, El Mariaci, and the rest is histoy (check out his book Rebel Without a Crew for a fascinating read). I think I might have to settle for making a book trailer at some point, or hope for an option on one of my novels.
Being Charlie of Charlie’s Angels. Oh yeah, I was girl crazy, too. That dream was on the damp side in those days, but it’s all good now. I’m not quite as interested in dating Farah Fawcett today however. I don’t know if the 20-somethings today really know what she was, and how big Charlie’s Angels was. The recent movies were much better than the original TV show, but still really dumb. I never played Doctor growing up, but there was a group of girls in 6th grade that were Mike’s Angels. Seriously. I always was a bit precocious. Unfortunately we actually played at private detective. Well, I have a clue about women today at least and have done more that most men I imagine. I’ll call it a dream fulfilled there and let myself finish on a high (low?) note…
Whenever I get in the mid-life crisis mindset, which happens to professors post-tenure (which is where I am now), I look back to what really made me happy then as a guide to what makes me happy now. It was fun then and it still is to me. I’m currently on sabbatical, which is a good time to do this sort of thing. I’m living in Brazil right now, which was never a childhood dream, although visting the alien worlds of science fiction surely was. Learning Portuguese will fulfull a more adult dream of learning a foreign language. I believe in finding new dreams, too. I didn’t know everything when I was 12, although I’m sure I thought I did.
I’m not talking about the interesting TV show, Life on Mars, but an Einstein quote from a letter he wrote in 1933 to a professional musician living in Germany:
I am the one to whom you wrote in care of the Belgian Academy…Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich’s surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interests in the actions of these creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.
Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone — and necessarily so — and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.
This is with regard to the rise of Nazism, of course, but unfortunately I often feel that it must too often be true everywhere in the world still today, and that I do live on Mars among alien creatures. I want to be engaged and empathetic toward my fellow humans, but so many hold such powerful irrational beliefs and cannot set them aside or acknowledge their own problems even in the harsh light of reason.
We’ve got the Palestinians upset about an invasion when they can’t stop attacking Israel, and will now seek revenge for something they provoked, the rest of the world upset with Israel because they won’t settle for making a minor attack instead of trying to stomp out a serious continuing threat, and the all-too Martian tit-for-tat escalating into destruction even though both sides have lost more than they’ve won.
We’ve got rape victims getting killed to protect family honor.
We’ve got people for political or religious reasons rejecting meritorious scientific positions that aim to educate our children about how the world really works and to warn us of impending disasters.
We’ve got hate mongers with audiences of millions carrying on about how liberals are traitors, about how the Japanese Internment Camps during World War II were a good idea, about how Obama is a terrorist-sympathizer and how his wife hates America.
We’ve got Catholics leadership lying about the effectiveness of condoms and arguing that the solution to the AIDS crisis is their personal brand of faith, not anything actually shown to work (like condoms).
We’ve got people frothing at the mouth and calling same-sex marriage the worst threat to America today, equating it to bestiality, child molestation, and worse.
We’ve got people who take their horoscopes seriously, who watch TV shows where charlatans claim to talk to the dead, and spend money on consulting psychics.
We’ve got people who are not concerend about the environment because the end times are approaching, and Presidents who invite them to visit him in the White House.
We’ve got women breaking hips during childbirth because their bones are weak from vitamin D deficiency, because they cover themselves from head to toe whenever they go outside in the sunlight, lest they incite lust in men who have access to as much hardcore porn they care to watch.
We’ve got innocent and incompetent people being put to death by the state, teenagers sentenced to 10 years in prison for being on the receiving end of consensual acts, and people being arrested for drunk driving while sleeping it off in the backseats of their parked cars.
We’ve got relgious fundamentalsts of most stripes telling us how to live and plotting ways to kill us if we don’t follow their ridiculous ideas.
We’ve got fast food to supersize our bodies, TV to shrink our minds, Paris Hilton and her amazing friends doing the most outrageous things to distract us from…her dog is named “Tinkerbell” and it really is so cute, I can’t understand why she gets in trouble, and what was that with Brittney’s hair?
I was reading a book of quotes, and one of the notes mentioned that Einstein, much to my consternation, believed that people should NOT read science fiction.
His reasoning?
It distorts science, and gives people the illusion of understanding science.
Hmm, shades of Buzz Aldrin here. I have some of the same objections as Einstein, but limit them to what I consider bad science fiction that makes a lot of scientific errors (distortion is a mild problem compared to some of the horrors out there). To give Einstein the benefit of the doubt, he did live in an era where science fiction wasn’t exactly rigorous about anything, from the quality of the science to the writing. I like to think he’d be more open-minded about hard science fiction and see the power of science fiction to inspire future scientists.
And recall, this is the guy who came up with all his best ideas by starting with thought experiments, like what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, or how in a rocket you can’t tell if you’re experiencing gravity or acceleration.
Sounds like science fiction to me, leading to fundamental scientific insights for Einstein personally, but perhaps also for the public at large who read about these stories.
Maybe some quality science fiction would have helped educate the public about relativity without, I think, much if any distortion.
I think I may have touched on this topic in the past, but reading Redshift Rendezvous the other day reminded me of a common misconception with regard to astronomy.
Again, I recommend John Stith’s novel of mystery and action involving a hyperspace ship on which the speed of light is quite slow and relativistic effects are readily observed. It’s a quick read with a hook and a fast-paced plot and some interesting science along the way. I don’t think John got this next bit wrong given some assumptions that are probably valid, but I recall thinking that some subtle points might have been missed, and are certainly misunderstood in many quarters.
Anyway, objects moving away from us at close to the speed of light have a redshifted spectrum, while those moving toward us have a blueshifted spectrum.
A redshifted object may appear red, but it could also appear blue, or white, or any other color. Likewise a blueshifted object doesn’t necessarily look blue. It could, but doesn’t have to.
When a spectrum is shifted, ALL the colors move in a particular direction. For a highly redshifted object to look red, it has to lose it’s blue light. The blue light in a redshifted object is originally emitted (or reflected) in the ultraviolet. An ultraviolet-bright object that is significantly redshifted is going to look blue, and in fact most intermediate redshift quasars were originally found because of their extremely blue colors. It’s only in very high-redshift quasars, in which the far and extreme ultraviolet part of the spectrum is redshifted into the optical blue, that we see quasars that appear red due to the redshift effects.
Oh, and back to Redshift Rendezvous…most lights and clothing we wear are designed for the optical spectrum. It’s hard to get lights to put out a lot of ultraviolet, and clothes to reflect it. Also redshifting light decreases its overall intensity. I expect that most redshifted objects on board the ship would look pretty red. I’m a little less certain that the blueshifted objects would look blue or violet-tinged. As discussed last summer, a lot of our lights are cool and put out a lot of infrared light, but also as discussed last summer, the key to how things looks seems to be the light level. Highly blueshifted objects are going to be “Doppler boosted” and brighter than normal. Intense lights with particular colors tend to look white. So, I think redshifted objects onboard are likely to look red, but blueshifted objects are just likely to appear brighter than normal.
Anyway, really interesting novel and I recommend it.
I’ve been a big fan of comic books since I was a kid, and most make little sense when viewed from a scientific perspective. That’s fine. I let that axe rest years ago. They’re a particular type of modern, urban fantasy and I can happily enjoy them as such, as long as they enjoy some form of self-consistency.
I just got caught up watching the new Heroes season, and I must say that it is full of fail on this last point.
Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD.
I’m probably way behind on the bitching about this given that I’ve only recently been catching up, but I’ve avoided reading about this season online to avoid spoilers since I wanted to watch the show fresh.
Let me point out a slew of problems, from minor inconsistencies to gaping plot holes, with Heroes this season. I’ll try to find excuses for some of them, but a lot of the problems have to do with stupid writing I’m afraid.
OK, let’s start with the episode with the vortex or black hole man. I won’t even go into anything about his powers or how that all worked. That’s part of the fantasy. But when Noah is urging the guy to kill Sylar, why can’t Sylar hear him? Sylar stole super-hearing from that woman in season one. Is that power gone? The woman couldn’t turn it off, but Sylar does seem to be able to control powers very well, so maybe he can turn it off, but in the scene he was obviously interested in what everyone was saying. So, he didn’t listen in?
Dumb. This is one example of painting yourself into a corner. With power parasites like Sylar and Peter, the writers need to remember what it is they are capable of doing and imagine themselves as their characters. Sylar’s most powerful power, in my opinion, was the one he stole from the Texas waitress: effortless, fast learning. He should be the most educated man on the planet, speak a zillion languages, know how to do almost everything and understand things. Yet he gets tricked with lame lies all the time. Can’t he learn faster?
With characters who can acquire large numbers of powers, this show becomes almost impossible to write intelligently.
OK, let’s talk about Adam Munroe getting dusted. The healing power constantly repairs damage. That’s the fantasy. Take it away, and he should then just age normally. Maybe Arthur Petrelli did something more with his power-sucking power, but the implication seemed more like the Portrait of Dorian Gray. Take away his powers and he ages in a second. This is about as dumb as the kid in the third X-men movie making the Beast’s hair vanish inside his sphere of influence, which then magically reappared outside the field. And Heroes has a ripoff of this kid, too, with a similar problem. Was there never a time when the Haitian blocked his powers? Would he have been dusted during the dumb power-sucking eclipse?
And let’s talk about that dumb eclipse. The powers are supposed to be genetically based, so “science fantasy” in my book. The only effect an eclipse has here on Earth is to change the amount of light and its quality here. You get a stronger effect every night. No one loses their powers at night, or they could just keep the super-powered criminals in the dark. This is some dumb magic thing which is inconsistent with the rules for the powers. Make it magic, or science, but please, let’s not pick and choose which as convenient.
The catalyst — magic infusion for chemistry? The powers thing gets weirder and more magic-like. Fine then, I wish they’d go all the way. It was always ridiculous with Mohinder going on seriously about how the next clear step in human evolution was people flying, healing super fast, etc. In what fantasy world?
And that damn eclipse seemed to last forever, all over the Earth. Total eclipses last for at most less than ten minutes in one location, and cut a particularly narrow swath across the planet that is not simultaneous. The timing of the events in the eclipse episodes had absolutely no resemblance to any such thing as real eclipses, although it is supposed to be Earth and the Moon. It’s hard enough to maintain the suspension of disbelief with the show sometimes, but when it makes this sort of mistake, it’s impossible.
Then there’s the mess with the time lines and how they handle time travel on the show. This is one of my issues, so forgive a mini-rant. Apparently every time someone goes back in time they rewrite history, which ought to screw up the precogs much more than it seems to. I mean, I don’t know why they aren’t totally worthless. And poor Hiro, it seems his time stop is only moving really fast like Daphne. Or is it? He isn’t a blur like she is, and she was caught mid-stride before she suddenly walked around and talked at normal speed. Just not consistent, damn it.
And why is it hard to sneak up on a precog, as Daphne claims. These precogs are painters. The dude paints scenes and there’s no clock in sight as to when these things will actually happen. He even tells Parkman he just paints what he sees and doesn’t know anything more than that. But, moreover, Hiro can freeze time! He can freeze time and search the whole damn place. Why is he wandering around getting smacked by shovels? Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Maybe I missed it, but how did the mental projection of Linderman provide Daphne the file for Parkman? It was just sitting out there? Ah, hell, not going to watch again for this one point.
OK, I was pleasantly surprised that the Heroes writers realized that faster-than-light travel meant travel backwards in time, but that was about the only pleasant thing about it. Now we have someone else who can muck up time in an inconsistent fashion and create paradoxes. The only way to avoid paradoxes is to have a single self-consistent timeline, which Heroes doesn’t have. Anwyay…I still don’t see a logical way to get her to go past light-speed, but I’ll go with it. Off she goes back in time…and then returns in an instant? The only way for her to do this would be to travel at exactly light-speed, which would let her travel into the future, but it was clear that she didn’t have such precise control. Well, maybe she found the time to develop it. But it annoyed me, especially without explaination (e.g., “Wait! How are you going to get back? Hiro doesn’t have his powers!” Answer: “She just travels at near light-speed and she can travel back into the future.”)
Well, that’s the stuff that was bugging me when I finally got all caught up. I did notice that people were complaining about this season sucking, and I see why. There are other story issues that annoyed me, too, but these types of things are foundational for me. I lose my suspension of disbelief and I don’t care about an instance of bad acting, a bad line, or obscure character motivations. Hell, I’m still waiting for Peter to remember that the love of his life is lost in a future timeline that no longer exists and at least cry about it, or go back in time to save her.
OK, I’m going to go after a biology story today that I found particularly poor. The Perfect Mate: What We Really Want, by Meredith F. Small, apparently an anthropologist at Cornell, somehow, according the bio.
First she opens with something of strawman argument, simplifying a position she’s both going to support and contradict in the very same short article:
For years, the evolutionary psychologists have been saying that men want young pretty women for their mates and women want older men with money.
She then goes on to explain that a recent study supports this “party line” as she puts it (a sure sign she’s got an axe to grind — characterize consensus postions as dogmatic), but with a “surprise” this time. Woman also prefer good-looking men! Oh my, what a surprise compared to the “party line!”
She goes on to explain that there are a dozen or more qualities we can find attractive in the opposite sex and that different genders have somewhat different priorites in ranking them. But somehow adding “good looks” to a list of two items, older and rich, is a huge surprise.
OK, maybe she’s just reaching for an angle to make the less-than-original research sound fresh and interesting. Where does she take this next then?
But all these studies are deeply flawed for the simple reason that they ask people what they want in their mates, not what the actually get. And yet evolution only works on what we do, not on what we desire; from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not our ideal that counts, but who we actually make babies with.
She has a point, but misses the point, too. Big time. Cornell, really?! Evolution is a statistical process operating on populations with a diversity of genes. These preferences, what we find attractive, are at work now because they result from what our ancestors actually got, and what they actually got was probably, on average, the most attractive available to them. On average. Small preferences become reinforced over generations where those small preferences result with improved reproductive success.
There are no guys who prefer sex with great grandmothers, or those showing a lot of signs of age, because those liaisons don’t result in offspring. If they did, we’d have different preferences. This is an easy, strong preference.
Likewise, guys end up with less-than-ideal mates. Sure they do, all the time. But those that are less than ideal are likely still preferable to other choices, and share some attributes with the ideal. And the really hard-up guy will take anything available (pressure to pass on those genes is the same as the pressure to stick his dick somewhere, biologically speaking).
Women should be, and are, more picky, given the higher investment in reproduction, just as theory predicts. They also end up with less-than-ideal mates often enough. Fine.
But back to the original point. Evolution only requires that the different preferences — what we’re attracted to — lead to some increased success when these preferences are followed. If half the population mates at random, and half the population gives some weight (even a small preference) for features that lead to reproductive success, those preferences will grow to be much more common than 50/50 over enough generations.
What does the article say?
No matter what we might say to researchers, the truth is we all end up mating with people who are interested in us, people we run into, people who happen to look our way. And our “choices,” more often than not, make no sense at all.
I can’t actually tell if she’s throwing out all the research as useless, or just trying to say that individuals need not follow general trends. I also can’t tell if the way she puts “choices” in quotes, which would seem to be a tip of the hat to evolutionary forces determining what we find attractive, is contradictory to her statement that they “make no sense at all,” which is not what understanding evolution has taught us. It seems like some platitude to make people feel good about freewill, to undermine what we do understand from science.
After reading her article, I can’t for the life of me really understand if it is supposed to mean that we understand something from evolutionary psychology, despite all the studies reaching similar conclusions, or if she expects us to throw all that information away as useless because mating “makes no sense at all.”
I suspect the latter, based on the ridiculously stupid autobiographical statements like this one:
For example, George Clooney is my ideal mate. He’s rich, popular, and I bet he’d make a great father. Problem is, as far as I know, George is not interested in me. Although I might pencil him in as my ideal mate, the person I got, the person I have a child with, is nothing like George. Instead, he is younger than me, without many resources, and, well look what he got – an older, less than fertile, woman.
She seems guilty of some sort of confirmation bias, trying to tell herself that it’s okay that she settled for less than her ideal — someone “nothing like” her ideal. If I were her guy, I’d be pretty annoyed to be compared to George Clooney, negatively, to a large audience. She’d better have cleared the article with him first, and if it were me, I wouldn’t have let this go as written.
Oh, and it’s an internet article, but I assume Meredith Small and her editor are getting paid something, so why not clean up the spelling/grammar mistakes? It’s not always the case, but we’re conditioned to also think that sloppy writing means sloppy thinking. I give bloggers more leeway, but science reporters should be a little more professional in my opinion.
Often I think the problem with science reporting is that journalists are not well trained in science, or have to write outside their expertise due to covering a broad range of topics. An anthropologist should understand evolution better than this, and be able to write more clearly than this. She’s helped make the world a slightly dumber place.
Somehow we need to a better job of evolution on the internet, and if she consistently writes such crappy articles she should lose her audience. I know I’m going to be less likely to read the next article when I see her byline.
Let me know if I’m being too harsh. This isn’t as bad as when creationists are given equal time next to biologists, but it still undermines public understanding and pisses me off.
Build a small monster, then soak it in water overnight.
Heh.
More seriously, my guide for this sort of mad scientist activity is the fossil record. Anything resembling a giant monster there is plausible. Look at dinosaurs, giant sloths, giant lizards and crocs, etc. Plausible. Anything else needs some more work.
The limits on giant monsters are metabolism, food supply, heat loss, and structural integrity. I am assuming we’re sticking on Earth here (giant critters make more sense on a lower gravity world — here they are expensive).
Metabolism first, which is related to the food supply. Cold-blooded reptiles like crocodiles and Komodo dragons keep growing throughout their lifetimes, and don’t have to eat all that often. Anything big will have to have food in large quantities, at some interval. The trick here is to figure out if you’re making a real animal that fits into the ecosystem, or something weird that can suck energy from power lines or whatever. but think about this issue. Most places on Earth today have top predators only a few times more massive than humans, if that.
Heat is an issue. If you have your giant monster living on the tundra, eating polar bears before they drown, or something like that, skip this paragraph. The issue is that as you increase in size, volume increases as the cube of the linear dimension and surface area as the square. Heat is produced per unit volume. Heat is radiated away as unit surface area. Animals like elephants and stegosauruses have ears or plates that can act as heat exchangers. Your giant monster might ought to have big ears, a giant slobbery toungue, or something to let it shed the massive amounts of heat it is going to generate. Godzilla had radioactive fire breath, but King Kong should have probably keeled over with a cooked heart before too long.
Structural integrity and materials is the last point. A giant monster should probably resemble giant man-made structures. A diplodocus has the same build as a suspension bridge, getting everything supported and balanced. Your giant monster needs to manage that, too, unless you’ve invoked unobtanium or other mythical substance.
Finally, I wanted to point out that these issues I have discussed above implicitly rule out simply taking existing animals or people and scaling them up as is. Such giant simulacrums would starve, or bake, or just break their bones.
Now, I really do love giant monsters. I just want them semi-plausible. Address these issues if they show up in print or in a movie, please. I ignore the problems with Godzilla and King Kong since they have been with me since before I could read or think critically. The creature from Cloverfield I kind of liked since they didn’t reveal too much, and it did seem to adhere to structural limitations shambling about on land.
Do you have a most or least plausible giant monster to share?
Cliches are a part of reality. No matter how many times people have seen some things, they want to see more. They like riffs on the familiar. People like new things, but not too new. Mass audiences never seem to tire of cliches. They abound in fantasy and horror in particular: vampires, werewolves, wizards, elves, etc. There seems to be at least one blockbuster vampire book or movie every year. Editors issue guidelines stating that they will reject all vampire stories immediately, but someone is always buying vampires.
Well, what about science fiction? I have my own weaknesses. Here are some science fiction cliches to love.
1. Giant monsters. Most of them make no scientific sense for a variety of good reasons. Godzilla, King Kong, or even a giant space slug. I love them all.
2. Giant robots. More plausible than giant monsters, but not often implemented well. I love it when they shoot rockets out of their fingers. It’s so dumb, but I love it.
3. Ray guns. Call them blasters or phasers, but they’re still ray guns. For some reason, bullets aren’t cool in the future, or in space. Aliens laugh off projectile weapons, and can only be harmed by energy beams.
4. Space babes and mating with aliens. From Kirk and his harem of Orion slave girls to the more gruesome reproductive schemes of Alien or Species, this squishy subject has been done to death. Like sex itself, people don’t seem to tire of it.
5. Space war. It almost never makes sense economically or scientifically. It’s almost got to be easier to just terraform than to travel light years to steal someone’s water and women. Or it’s more likely that there’s such a great technological difference that the war would be so one-sided as to be over immediately. Still, I love Ender’s Game, The Forever War, Starship Troopers, Armor, Halo novelizations, etc.
6. Transporters/teleporters. Almost no one takes the technology seriously. They’re either implausible or underutilized. The Star Trek technology ought to make humans immortal, reproducing a back-up when anyone is killed, or just making infinite copies. Why doesn’t every starship have a dozen Datas? Why do people ever risk their lives at all? Still, it’s just so damned convenient…
7. Faster than light (FTL). Speaking of convenient. I don’t use FTL in my own books because I think it’s too problematic and unrealistic, but I don’t mind seeing anyone and everyone use it in their books. Conditioned too early, I fear, to be a truly hardcore hard sf curmudgeon.
8. Artificial Intelligence. From positronic brains to Hal, a staple of sf that will never vanish. Good, evil, everything in between. And people continue to argue about the nature of consciousness and if machines can ever think, or if they start acting like it, if we’ll be able to tell.
9. Superpowers. I’m mainly thinking of Marvel and DC superheroes here, which I love, even though the science is almost always ridiculous, but more, too. We have aliens with various forms of ESP, telekinesis, telepathy, mind control, healing powers, etc., most of which make about as much sense as they do in the comic books.
10. Artificial gravity. I’m not talking about spinning a spacecraft, but a button you press that magically provides gravity on board a starship. I don’t know if gravity is so popular and acceptable to people because it’s natural to us here on Earth and not seeing it is too strange and distracting, or if decades of TV and movies, where it was difficult and expensive to shoot zero gee, simply raised us all to expect it. Anyway, I barely bat an eyelash if an alien ship has gravity and I don’t see anything spinning.
One of my common themes is how to properly educate people to think more scientifically. I think the world would be a better place, more rational, more productive, if people made their decisions based on reliable information — the kind that comes from science. Unfortunately a majority of people don’t do this regularly, and even people who are so inclined wind up making big mistakes once in a while.
I’m not worried about the occasional mistake. We all make them and learn from them.
I’m worried about the vast numbers of people who are unaware they’re making mistakes, or, if they are aware, they often don’t know how to do better when given another chance.
I’m talking about people who think it’s reasonable to think that vaccines cause autism, and then don’t vaccinate their children. People who first didn’t acknowledge that global temperatures were rising, and then refused to entertain the idea the humans are responsible, at least without “absolute proof.” People who base their votes upon sound bites in commercials. People who consult their horoscopes to decide when to take a vacation. People who pay large amounts of money to mediums who claim to be able to speak to the dead.
There are a lot of good books about how to think better, how to apply scientific knowledge to life, how to spot pseudo science. You can pick up some science from hard science fiction novels, too.
And the target audience who needs these types of books doesn’t read them.
What we need are ways of reaching the average person who doesn’t read a lot. We need TV, movies when possible, and books that are consumed by the masses in large quantities: self help.
People who buy subliminal tapes to curb their diet or concentrate better surely would consider anything toward reaching their goals. How about science? I’d love to see “An Idiot’s Guide” or a Dummy book, with supporting audio files and websites, about how to think scientifically. I wouldn’t be above some hyperbole and overselling. I mean, science does give us the most reliable information about diet, drugs, vaccinations, and many issues. There is research that provides advice about how to live longer, happier lives, raise smarter healthier children, and more. Maybe science can’t help too much about investing money, or how to remodel a house, but it can offer plenty.
Get people to buy into it as a basic self-help principle that works better than crap like “The Secret” or whatever bone-headed shit is being shoveled this month, and it could catch on. It isn’t like science is a fad, and to the extent it changes and expands, new editions can be issued. It can be tested and shown to work better than the silly alternatives.
Maybe I’m being naive here, or maybe there’s already some books out there like this (some of the self-help books written by PhDs and real experts on various topics), but I think there’s a chance this idea can make inroads. How about a TV show “Science Challenges the Secret?”
I mean it, literally, as a premise for a story to learn about ourselves.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about subtle science fiction, in which human nature was explored by changing some aspect of human nature and seeing the results, rather than the more common juxtaposition of human beings in novel or extreme circumstances.
There isn’t much subtle science fiction out there. I think it’s tremendously difficult to conceptualize, let alone to write.
I’ve been on a kick lately, perhaps more than a kick, about the importance of rational thinking and how humans are so bad at it. As a scientist I regularly see the power of reason in solving problems and learning new things about how the universe works. As an American who has seen more than a few Presidential election cycles and watched TV shows of all types, I also regularly see the stupidity and irrationality of my species proudly on display. And Americans, on the whole, are better educated than most in the world.
So, I was just wondering: what if everyone was smart and rational? All the time?
I’m not asking what the planet Vulcan is like. There’s still plenty of room for emotion, art, humor, and more in a rational world. There would still be good and evil, and motivated self-interest, as well as self-sacrifice. But a lot of things would be different.
Here are some things that I think would have to go into the world-building:
Fear-mongering would be finished, except when based on actual threats. Then the actual threats would be evaluated and appropriately addressed. This would have prevented Iraq (the faulty intelligence wouldn’t have been an issue), sensationalist TV (what, another death-threat from germs in my kitchen?), and more.
Ideology would be finished, or much diminished. Things like school vouchers would be evaluated and adopted, or dropped. Abstinence-only education would be over. No one could get away with the idea that tax cuts are always a good idea, or less regulations are always a good idea, etc.
Liars would be recognized and ostracized. Rush Limbaugh would have no audience, and in fact, I don’t think he could even exist in the world I am imagining.
And some issues would vanish completely, like fundamentalist terrorism. Smart, rational people do not kill themselves over promises of doe-eyed virgins in an afterlife. It could however be replaced by a terrorism that engages in a battle with a superpower in the only feasbile manner possible.
Boring, easy jobs would probably pay better than interesting and challenging jobs. Education would be more valuable, as it would be something everyone sought and would be a way to distinguish between different capable people.
Advertising would change into something more fact-oriented.
We might even all go adopt a single language like Esperanto.
There would still be conflict, of course. Politicians would be more openly Machiavellian, for better or worse.
Bureaucracy would be minimal.
Of course, the entire world would look nothing like it does today. All of history would have to be different. You might as well write about aliens, or radically altered humans colonizing a new world. That’s what makes this style of science fiction so hard to write. It has to have some relationship to our world today, or it isn’t even intelligable.
