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
Science and Science Fiction: Artificial Gravity in 2001
September 9th, 2008
One of the other issues I didn’t mention yesterday that comes up in hard science fiction is figuring out the parameters for artificial gravity. It’s relatively straightforward.
Here’s the amazing scene approaching the orbiting space station:
It’s possible to calculate the gravity on board the outer ring.
Wikipedia provides the necessary information in its article about artificial gravity. From the clip, I estimate 1 revolution per minute. For the radius, I make an estimate based on the size of people in the docking bay, and later showing the docking bay and the whole satellite face on, with a value of about 300 meters. This isn’t a perfectly easy thing to do. Make your own estimates.
From the equation in the wiki, this comes out to produce an artificial gravity of approximately 1/3 of an Earth gravity, appropriate for a way station between the Earth and moon. I recall getting something closer to lunar gravity (1/6 an Earth gee) when we did the exercise at Launch Pad. It may have been more accurate given the ability to project the image on a big screen, whereas my estimates here are made off a laptop screen.
Now, to cap things off, how about Armageddon? In that movie, they don’t even get the direction of the artificial gravity right! Show the appropriate scenes to elementary school kids, and they will figure it out. From merry-go-rounds, they know how things should work. Michael Bay, not so much. Unforgivable for a film made in any year, let alone 30 years after 2001 that got it right.
There are a number of issues that continue to keep coming up in hard science fiction, or any science fiction trying to get the facts right. I just helped my collaborator here a few days ago answer a reporter’s questions on one of these (humans expelled into space without space suits). These things should always be right. There’s no excuse in this day and age. We’ll start with the space expulsion.
1. Human exposure to vacuum. People don’t blow up. And probably most aliens don’t, either. A number of movies/TV shows get this right: 2001, Battlestar Galactica, Event Horizon. Some don’t (e.g. Outland). Get it right.
2. FTL. Faster than light travel. It’s a trope of the field. It should be recognized that this is typically necessary for interstellar and even interplanetary travel if characters are doing it in Vipers or X-wings without bathrooms, or for any short timespan. That’s a start. But it should be acknowledged and some excuse given, at a minimum. In the most rigorous cases, writers should realize that FTL implies time travel or at least non-causal effects and has philosophical implications about free will.
3. Teleportation. It’s not just for Nightcrawler. It may or may not violate light-speed and causality depending on the implementation, but it should be recognized that it needs to be handled carefully. If conservation laws are violated, it could be used to create perpetual motion machines and infinite energy. If not, things get more interesting. How are energy differences made up? Think about it. Get it right, or give some lip service to the problems.
4. The Fermi Paradox. Why aren’t aliens common in the universe and already in abundant evidence here on Earth? There are at least 50 possible reasons. Have one if you’re dealing with aliens in the galaxy and space travel, or if you’ve got humans exploring the galaxy and there are no aliens. It doesn’t have to be a big part of the story, but have a reason.
5. The Singularity. On the short timescale, technology is slower than we expect (a few years or a decade or two). On somewhat longer timescales, it goes fast. Humans think linearly, not exponentially. How far ahead can you really imagine? OK, take that timeframe, and add a few thousand years. Or a million. Where are we then? Can’t imagine it? Neither can anyone else. Don’t worry about it too much. Write your story, but be aware of the issue.
7. Alien communication. This isn’t necessarily easy. Acting like it is may move the story along, but it isn’t realistic. Maria Doria Russel wrote a great book in The Sparrow over misunderstanding aliens, as have others, but many have not. Don’t pull a Star Trek on this. You don’t have to create a great story about language exchange like Barry Longyear did with “Enemy Mine,” but again, lip service at a minimum. Dot your “i”s and cross your “t”s.
8. Alien chemistry/biology. Can we eat aliens? Can they eat us? Is DNA the only system for living things? Are our amino acids common to life, or are we just a subset of the possibilities. I’m not saying I know the answers for sure for these questions, although I have ideas, but you better know the answers for your universe and they should be plausible.
9. AI. Artificial intelligence. Strong or weak, we’ll have some version in the future. Which? What can it do? What can’t it do? Note that this is related to the singularity issue, and other things like post-human existence. Is it possible to download humans? Or make simulations that are for all practical purposes alive and independent? I don’t know the answers, but you have to make some decisions if you’re writing sf, because some version of this technology will be with us.
10. Nanotech. Variations on it are coming, or are here already. We’re gaining the ability to manipulate matter on the atomic level to build novel materials and structures. What’s possible? What isn’t? Nanotech isn’t magic, and like teleportation, keep in mind conservation laws regarding mass and energy. Also, as a guide, keep in mind biological systems that are nature’s nanotech. In principle, nanotech can operate very quickly and you can use bacteria as a guide for what’s possible.
First off, I love science fiction, but when it’s bad, oh boy, there’s little worse. As a writer and scientist, I’m probably more sensitive to some of the bad things than the average person, but there are plenty of things that happen too often that we can probably agree to share for a good two-minute hate. With me so far?
1. Bad science. AKA technobabble or just plain getting things wrong. You know, reverse the polarization and charge this doohickey and wham bam thank you ma’am the aliens are toast! There are a million examples out there. Star Trek, though I love it, is a prime offender. There are a lot of sub-categories, but I’ll try to keep them lumped together except for a few cases that need their own number.
2. Bad writing. This happens less, I think, than in decades past, but it still happens. The President of Earth can still be heard slamming his fist on his desk and ordering that Space Commander Sparky Jones and his sidekick Space Babe Sally do something about the alien menace. OK, there’s probably very little this bad out there any more (Galaxy 666, how I miss you), but some of the sci-fi channel movies have echoes. I recall the first-season intro to Babylon 5 being pretty badly written, for instance, and happily noticing it was later revised.
3. Bad aliens. Aliens who are exactly like humans except for their skin color or nose shape. Aliens with biologies that make no sense with ridiculously simple ecosystems.
4. Inconsistent or illogical time travel. It seems like writers just make up rules for time travel that make no sense a lot more often than other types of stories. I mean, WTF was with that fading photograph in Back to the Future? Don’t try to make too much sense of it, please, or your brain will hurt. And while I’m talking about this, bad history or irrational projection of today’s morals/beliefs on other peoples.
5. Blatant politics or moralizing. Science fiction isn’t a good medium for overt polemics. Covert ones, sure, when you can’t come right out and say what you mean because your government will disappear you, or a topic that is too hot socially, ok. But if you can be blatant, sf is not needed. Be clever, be subtle, otherwise use a posterboard and stand by the roadside.
6. The singularity. Every sf story that takes place in the future doesn’t have to be about the singularity, or even address it. If it ever happens, I doubt people will be looking around and saying, “Hey, did you see that singularity happen?” It won’t be like that.
7. Small universes. The universe is big. Really big. Just acknowledging hyperspace or FTL to avoid this issue is usually not enough. The dang Vipers on Battlestar Galactica, with rocket power alone and not too much fuel, still manage to let pilots zip around entire solar systems without having bathrooms.
8. Monocultures and monoworlds. While arguably plausible in some cases, those cases are rarely made. Instead, worldbuilding is given short-shrift and entire planets are reduced to single simple settings. And Waterworld really wasn’t that good.
9. Dark futures. I like the occasional cautionary tale, but at some point dark became cool and all too prevalent. Despite our problems and challenges, technology and the quality of life has been improving dramatically for the majority of people on Earth. Don’t think about this year compared to last or even this decade compared to the last. Think about your grandparents’ experience at the doctor or the dentist, or shopping by catalog vs. internet, or the outhouse. And who remembers dial-up?
10. Heart/faith/determination triumphing over intellect. This happens all the damn time and it drives me nuts. I like my heroes as smart as my villains, and in a technological world being smart is important. Too often, however, writers seem to like to put all sorts of qualities ahead of intelligence and education. It’s probably thought to be reassuring to mass audiences to put down elites and play up traditional values, but I’m tired of that message, especially during election season. A recent example is the movie Armageddon, where the roughnecks are so much better than the idiots NASA’s been training for months. Ugh!
What am I wrong to hate, and what is even more hateable that I didn’t list?
Sometimes I tell people that I write science fiction for Tor and the Astrophysical Journal. That’s tongue in cheek, mostly, but there is a lot of stuff that scientists work on that is, for want of a better term, “science fiction.” Except that it’s very well-informed with science and worked out in some detail. It’s a detailed premise, without a story.
I try to scan the astrophysics preprint server daily (at least now that I’m on sabbatical). Astronomers upload and unofficially publish here months in advance of the in print journals in order to be more timely. You can read the papers for free, although many require years of study to really make sense of (a combination of jargon, audience, etc.).
I’m going to try to point out papers I see there that have some relevance to science fiction fans or writers, with the links and abstracts, sometimes with commentary. There are weeks that go by with nothing of special interest, and sometimes multiple papers in a single day. We’ll start with three, two from today and one from last month.
We propose that a sufficiently advanced civilization may employ Cepheid variable stars as beacons to transmit all-call information throughout the galaxy and beyond. One can construct many scenarios wherein it would be desirable for such a civilization of star ticklers to transmit data to anyone else within viewing range. The beauty of employing Cepheids is that these stars can be seen from afar(we monitor them out through the Virgo cluster), and any developing technological society would seem to be likely to closely observe them as distance markers. Records exist of Cepheids for well over one hundred years. We propose that these (and other regularly variable types of stars) be searched for signs of phase modulation (in the regime of short pulse duration) and patterns, which could be indicative of intentional signaling.
My gut reaction is that this is a little dumb in the sense that a civilization that can do this can probably come up with a better idea. But it’s kind of a cool idea.
We investigate whether it is possible that viable microbes could have been transported to Earth from the planets in extra-solar systems by means of natural vehicles such as ejecta expelled by comet or asteroid impacts on such planets. The probabilities of close encounters with other solar systems are taken into account as well as the limitations of bacterial survival times inside ejecta in space, caused by radiation and DNA decay. The conclusion is that no potentially DNA/RNA life-carrying ejecta from another solar system in the general Galactic star field landed on Earth before life already existed on Earth, not even if microbial survival time in space is as long as tens of millions of years. However, if the Sun formed initially as a part of a star cluster, as is commonly assumed, we cannot rule out the possibility of transfer of life from one of the sister systems to us. Likewise, there is a possibility that some extra-solar planets carry life that originated in our solar system. It will be of great interest to identify the members of the Sun’s birth cluster of stars and study them for evidence for planets and life on the planets. The former step may be accomplished by the GAIA mission, the latter step by the SIM and DARWIN missions. Therefore it may not be too long until we have experimental knowledge on the question whether the natural transfer of life from one solar system to another has actually taken place.
Pretty cool. Natural panspermia among star clusters, and reason to think that there could be similar biologies among stars from the same birth clusters.
The ensemble of now more than 250 discovered planetary systems displays a wide range of masses, orbits and, in multiple systems, dynamical interactions. These represent the end point of a complex sequence of events, wherein an entire protostellar disk converts itself into a small number of planetary bodies. Here, we present self-consistent numerical simulations of this process, which produce results in agreement with some of the key trends observed in the properties of the exoplanets. Analogs to our own solar system do not appear to be common, originating from disks near the boundary between barren and (giant) planet-forming.
This means that if you want solar systems like ours to be rare to make your story work, you’ve got some theoretical support.
When I travel and meet a lot of new people, they often ask what I do. When I tell them that I’m an astronomer, and they don’t immediately mumble something about liking astrology or make some other outrageous statement as sometimes happens, they’ll often follow up and ask what, specifically, is my specialty.
“Quasars,” I usually answer, and usually fail to see the light of understanding ignite in their eyes.
Sometimes I wait for them to ask, and sometimes I just launch into answering the question: What is a Quasar?
Scientists, like novelists and would-be producers, need an elevator pitch to quickly describe their thing. Sometimes you need two or three depending on who you’re talking to and how much time you have. I’ll give you my two-part answer on what’s a quasar, assuming a little more background than I would normally.
Observationally
Quasars were identified as special objects in the sky years before we had an inkling about what they actually were. The word “quasar” is short for “quasi-stellar radio source” and the first quasars were the faint blue stars — or quasi-stellar objects anyway (AKA QSOs) — associated with astronomical radio emission. They showed emission lines in their spectra, and the redshifts determined from their spectra, in conjunction with Hubble’s Law that shows the expansion of the universe, indicated that they were at great distances. They’re faint compared to visible stars in the sky, but given how far away they are, they are actually incredibly intrinsically luminous and capable of outshining entire galaxies. In fact, when we look very carefully with our sharpest telescopes like Hubble, we do in fact see that they are the active nuclei of distant galaxies, shining as brightly as a trillion suns or more.
Theoretically
This is what I usually tell people when I’m short on time and they’re unlikely to be interested in the observational side of things, and the “how we know it” sort of details can be discussed later if I’m wrong.
Quasars are supermassive blacks holes in the centers of distant galaxies tearing apart and consuming the equivalent of about a sun a year. The gas in the vicinity of the black hole is accelerated to very high speeds by the intense gravity, and this fat moving gas heats up as it spirals in. What is shining so brightly as a quasar is not the black hole itself, but the disk of hot gas around it. That disk, which is something about the size of our solar system, outshines the entire surrounding galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars.
OK, maybe, maybe not, but Robert Lemos writing for wired.com, playing up the hyperbole, makes them sound like it with this pronouncement: Rocket Scientists Say We’ll Never Reach the Stars.
Which I don’t think anyone quoted in the article ever quite says.
Never say never, especially in cases of engineering. It isn’t impossible to reach the stars. It’s merely very, very difficult, especially given our technical know-how today. If the sun were about the size of a mustard seed, the solar system would all be within about ten meters or so (each planet being a dust speck essentially), and the nearest stars would be some 50-100 miles away. The gulfs between the stars is vast indeed.
But I have to say that sometimes this stuff makes me mad. Not that it’s wrong, but that it’s presented in a very narrow way with a very non-creative perspective. Let me make my case based on items in the article.
The case is made that even reaching the nearest stars cannot be done with foreseeable technology in a human lifetime. OK. But even giving a pass on the foreseeable technology bit, why is a current human lifetime an insurmountable hurdle? Apparently it is to the rocket scientists who forgot that generation ships are a possibility, as well as suspended animation, robotic explorers (who could be us in a post-human future), or any of a dozen other ways that make a long-timescale a smaller issue.
How about the energy considerations? Well, we have a dork (sorry — stupid smart person) who, according the article which may not be giving his talk a fair shake, who makes a big deal about the difficulty in fueling an interstellar trip with Earth-originating fuels. Did he consider that the sun is an easier and more accessible energy source in space than the Earth? I’m not talking deep space solar panels or anything similarly simple and stupid, but for a laser propelled craft the laser could be powered by a system close to the sun and powered by the sun. Anyway, it seemed like a very tiny argument on his part.
And we have technologies like the space elevator being dismissed in a single sentence because the materials breakthrough hasn’t been made just yet, even though we’ve made a lot recently that are extremely encouraging. And the comment about the engineering making sense is pretty snide and insulting. I haven’t actually seen a compelling case made for any fundamental flaws. Feel free to point me at one if you know one, and make sure it hasn’t already been sufficiently addressed in The Space Elevator by Edwards and Westling.
[Small aside. I had an engineer in the audience of a panel where we touched on the space elevator. He dismissed the idea as too dangerous due to the catastrophic effects of a falling cable. I knew his fears were silly but couldn’t recall why at the time — frustrating. The proposed cable is not based on continuous fibers but shorter fibers bound together by adhesive, which would disintegrate under re-entry, and the pieces would float to Earth safely.]
Anyway, I suspect the meeting was a mix of optimistic visionaries and uncreative naysayers, but Lemos wanted to make a compelling story for his article. And I guess that makes me guilty, too, with my headline. There are a lot of ways for us to go to the stars, and it’s just a matter of figuring out which are the most practical as our capabilities increase. The time to even think about saying “never” is when we’re already zipping about the solar system and have been doing so for a while and actually want or need to go elsewhere. If we don’t destroy ourselves, or suffer catastrophic loss of technology, we’ll get to the stars because extinction is the alternative and we respond well to that sort of threat. Never say never when it’s merely engineering and creativity missing. Save “never” for the really impossible things.
One of the things I like doing as a writer is inventing something new in science fiction. It’s been said that there are no new stories to be told, and while that’s true at some level, every story is unique and there’s always the opportunity to bring something new to the table. I read sf in part to get exposed to new ideas. I like the new. I crave the new.
Here’s a list of places that stories can be told, starting from the mundane (literally) to the far out, and some examples.
Earth. Where most stories ever written take place. For example, Earth by David Brin.
Space/Orbit. Lots of cool stories that take place in orbit or deep space. Most of 2001, for instance. You need to worry about gravity (or lack thereof), radiation, air, energy needs, heating and cooling both depending on the circumstances, and more. There are some good reference books like The Space Environment by Harry Stine.
The Moon. Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford is one of my favorites, even though the title implies a misunderstanding of lunar surface gravity (about 1/6 that of Earth).
Mars. There have been many stories set on Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars is one of the more recent and very technically accurate examples.
Jupiter. We’re talking about life in the clouds here. There is an atmospheric level with Earth-like temperatures and liquid/water with clouds. For a science treatment, see Carl Sagan’s article. For fiction, see A Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke.
Io. This inner moon of Jupiter is a cool place experiencing major tidal stresses and volcanoes. The movie Outland was set here. Unfortunately, the hard radiation field is lethal.
Europa. Second moon of Jupiter, it probably has a liquid ocean under its ice and geothermal vents for energy. Strong possibility of life (at least compared to some places).
Venus. Like Jupiter, there is a cloud level where the temperatures are not outrageous. Floating cities could be built. Larry Niven wrote “Becalmed in Hell” set in the clouds of Venus.
Comets/Asteroids. They’re not just for smacking into the Earth! They can provide some resources and protection that spaceships can’t.
The Sun. Okay, the surface gravity is ridiculous (over 20 gees), but you can coast by in orbit if you can stand the heat. Sundiver by David Brin is one interesting story.
Exoplanets. OK, all kinds of possibilities. Big planets, small planets, high gravity, low gravity. Fast spinning, slow spinning. Ringed. The sky is the limit. Things need not be quite Earth-like. Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity provides an example of a high-gravity, fast spinning planet. Tatooine with its two suns, shows an example of a planet in a binary star system.
Rogue Planet. Planets get torn from their parent stars sometimes in star clusters. Probably frozen worlds hurtling through empty space, but possibilities there. Space 1999 is not the best guide.
Alien Suns. The sun for your extrasolar planet need not be like the sun. More massive more luminous stars are somewhat unlikely if you want time to evolve local life, but cooler, lower mass K and M stars are possibilities. There are consequences for what the stars look like from the surface here. Fredrick Pohl’s Jem is an example of a story set around a very cool, red star.
Star Clusters. Issac Asimov’s story “Nightfall” is a classic. What effects do multiple stars in the sky have on a culture?
Neutron Stars. Cool objects either to be around, if the radiation/tidal forces don’t kill you. Larry Niven’s “Neutron Star” and Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg are classic stories.
Black Holes. A number of stories about falling into, or being near, black holes. Tidal forces (for stellar mass black holes) can kill you. Then there’s time dilation, gravitational redshift, frame dragging, and more odd effects.
Galactic Center. A supermassive black hole several million times the mass of the sun, massive stars and supernovas…not hospitable, but cool. Gregory Benford had a Galactic Center series.
Nebulae. They look cool in pictures, but probably less cool in person, so to speak. Dangerous radiation, supernovas, and more. See Jeffrey Carver’s Sunborn.
Accretion Disks. See Mike Brotherton’s Star Dragon.
Dark Matter Planet. See Mike Brotherton’s Spider Star.
Big Dumb Objects (AKA BDOs). I’m talking things like Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Halo, Dyson Spheres, Robert Reed’s Marrow, Spider Star, etc.
A bit rushed given Worldcon going on here. Made my dark matter panel with seconds to spare. It went well (I’m up on the topic right now). My autographing went well and I signed about a dozen books/cards. The dealer’s room sold out of Spider Star, and I really should have brought books with me from Laramie. Sigh.
I throw a lot of links at the writers attending the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. I usually do it on the fly before a lecture, or embedded within lecture slides. It made sense to pull them out and to put them in one place with a little organization. The idea is that these sites have lasting and specialized value to the writer wanting or needing to include astronomy in their work. I’ll be maintaining and making future edits to the list (attendees are contributing, too), so please feel free to suggest a key site if you think I’ve overlooked one. Here they are for the attendees and the public. Enjoy!
General Astronomy Information and News
Bad Astronomy: Phil Plait’s Blog is an excellent source of basic astronomy information and news in the field.
Space.com: One of several websites I like doing a consistently good job of covering astronomy news. You can sign up for a weekly email summary of stories.
Hard SF Writer’s Bookshelf: My list of some books on my bookshelf that I pull out to share with Launch Pad participants.
Powers of Ten and Cosmic Voyages are two excellent films illustrating the basic size scales of the universe.
3D Star Maps: Really cool resource designed for sf writers.
Cycles in the Sky
Phases of the Moon: One of several nice websites illustrating this basic explanation. This one is better than many.
One page about the seasons that gets the explanation right and addresses some common questions and misconceptions.
In general, it is possible to know what the sky looks like at any given time from any given place on Earth (assuming no clouds), in the past or in the future. Check out Sky & Telescope’s Interactive Sky Chart.
Misconceptions
A Private Universe is a movie showcasing the issue of misconceptions in science with particular focus on the seasons and phases of the moon.
Star Clock is a program you can run on your PC that shows stellar evolution as a function of time on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. I used it when plotting my novel Spider Star.
Galaxies
Awesome page about the Galactic Center and the supermassive black hole that lives there.
Ned Wright: Ned is a professor of astronomy at UCLA. His website has very nice tutorials with good animations and FAQs about cosmology, as well as a “cosmology calculator” that lets you get quantitative.
Wayne Hu: Another nice set of tutorials, with excellent illustrations. Specialty is here the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation.
Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy addresses the question of why are there no green stars. It’s a nice post and brings together astronomy and biology in interesting ways, and reminds me of the posts I did a couple of months ago for a friend who’d just sold a story about life on a world orbiting an M star and wanted to know some things about how it would look there.
At first I thought everything would look red, but decided that was not quite right. Those posts have some very good links as references on this issue, on both the astrophysical and biological sides and I expect to refer back to them in the future.
And then discussing these issues with some fellow astronomers we figured out that if there weren’t exactly green stars, there are at least green star-like objects in the sky anyway.
Ten Great Examples of Science Fiction World Building
July 28th, 2008
I am taking part in a Mind-Meld post over at sfsignal.com later this week. The subject is our favorite example of world-building. The ultimate in world-building was probably Lord of the Rings, for which J.R.R. Tolkien invented entire languages and histories. Not my favorite though by a long shot (did all the ballads and poems have to be used?), and Tolkien is likely underappreciated for his world-building since so many people have copied Middle Earth, or aspects of it, over the years, and it feels far from fresh.
As a hard sf guy, my favorite world-building tends to involve a lot more science and a lot less map making, while keeping in mind a very diverse view of world-building. I put a lot of effort into the world-building in my own novels. Star Dragon featured a biological starship and alien creatures living in an accretion disk around a white dwarf star, while Spider Star has a giant alien space station in the gravitational potential of a dark matter planet.
So who/what do I love in sf for the world building?
David Brin’s Uplift Novels like Startide Rising and The Uplift War showcase a Galactic alien society and the mix is quite creative. The Milky Way seemed like a big and fascinating place. Brin did an even better job of world-building with his novel Kiln People. In that book people have the ability to make different kinds of copies of themselves, and, moreover, surveillance devices are widespread as in his non-fiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Both elements are well realized and integrated throughout.
Larry Niven’s Ringworld specifically, and his Known Space more generally. Ringworld is literally an entire world, a classic “Big Dumb Object” (AKA BDO), representing some of the best in sf world-building. When it was pointed out that Ringworld wasn’t stable, Niven had an excuse to write a sequel addressing the issue. Oh, and the Ringworld was cool enough to be ripped off for Halo.
Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought books, A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, constitute two of the best examples of building truly alien alien cultures. In the first, Vinge does a fantastic job of writing from a group mind perspective. In the latter, he has aliens who live through periods of deep hibernation.
William Gibson’s work, especially Neuromancer, established the entire genre of cyberpunk. The man invented cyberspace and has had a profound effect on our computer experiences. Apparently Gibson wrote the book on a typewriter and had not even touched a computer himself at that time.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama gives us another fascinating alien BDO to explore. I love BDOs.
Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity is another world-building sf classic, describing life on a heavy gravity world.
Another classic is Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg, about alien life and its rise to civilization on the surface of a neutron star.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons is a tour de force of writing and world-building, one of my all-time favorites. The time tombs, the Shrike, the lightning trees…just way cool.
One of the great masters of world-building is Philip Jose Farmer. He wrote two series that were defined by the clever worlds he invented: The World of Tiers: Volume One and the Riverworld series starting with To Your Scattered Bodies Go. These two series, and Philip Jose Farmer’s work more generally, are why I’m a science fiction writer today. I loved them.
Tune into sfsignal.com to see which I finally chose as my favorite. Hint: it isn’t Spider Star, that would be cheeky, but another great BDO.
