@ The Reef Tank: Arthur C. Clarke and the Grand Banks

I have a new guest post up at The Reef Tank blog: Arthur C. Clarke and The Grand Banks, which takes a look at how Arthur C. Clarke's scuba diving adventures off the coast of Australia and Sri Lanka influenced some of his fiction.

Tags:science fiction, marine biology

Happy Holidays!

Drawing by EMSH, from a mid-20th century issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Part of the cheery Science Fiction Christmas Art: Hillman Nostalgia Christmas page.

Christmas SF: The Rats

Are you tired of crowded shopping malls and all the stickily sweet holiday cheer? Then the 2002 sci-fi horror flick The Rats may be just the antidote you need. Here's the setup:

"A colony of rats—the result of a secret DNA research project—terrorizes the residents of New York City during the Christmas season."

Apparently the pesky rodents set up shop in a "posh Manhattan department store", spreading disease and terror.

Happy holidays indeed!

A few warnings:

- there is an entirely gratuitous dressing room T&A scene near the beginning of the movie, apparently because you can't have a horror movie without boobies

- according to IMDB the depiction of how rats spread disease is not scientifically accurate (which should come as a surprise to no one.)

- there are lots and lots of rats

Watch The Rats at Hulu.com (US only) or below.



Tags:science fiction, movies, rats

Holiday Free Fiction: Visions of Gingerbread

At this year's party, as usual, everyone from my executive VP to the mail clerk steered clear of me. An hour into the evening, as conversations buzzed in every other part of the room, I found myself standing alone, eggnog in hand, looking at the Christmas tree. It was as if I had never seen one before. There was something about the shape of the tree, about its deep green shadows and its smell, that spoke to me. It said, forest. It said, everything is alive. It said, this is the perfect moment. And at that perfect moment, I felt as if I were a key sliding into its lock. The universe and I, we fit.

Sometimes feelings of love, peace and joy need just a bit of chemical assistance.

Read "Visions of Gingerbread" by Bruce Holland Rogers.

Holiday Free Fiction: R3

Damn right we're Christmas—a holiday all about the foolish belief in the impossible. Flying reindeer are perfect for impossible. Doubters said you couldn't make flying reindeer, and they were right: We're not really reindeer; we're more like a whole new animal on a reindeer chassis.

R3 isn't really a reindeer, and he's had a rough life, but he brings Christmas all the same.

Read Read "R3", by Dennis Danvers.

And for a slightly different take on Reindeer physiology, see Robert Billing's Nature Futures short "Harnessing the brane-deer" (pdf).

Image: Image from the Bell Mobility animated reindeer commercial. 

Tags:science fiction, Christmas, genetic engineering

Is Avatar science fiction?

The big science fiction movie of the moment is Avatar - there has been tons of hype and even some science.  It's about humans that can only visit a planet filled with beautiful blue-skinned aliens by downloading their consciousness into genetically engineered alien bodies. Pretty science fictional, right?   But Charlie Petit at the Knight Science Journalism tracker has noticed that many of the reviews seem to be avoiding calling it science fiction at all - and thinks that's a good thing:

One gathers that Avatar has aliens, mend-melding (that part – a sort of neural transference – might be barely plausible), a distant extrasolar moon, an attractive and admirable alien race complete with compatible DNA, and of course clunky dialog plus plain-as-day allegoric resonance with human history and our cultural foibles. Therefore this fantasy movie or space opera, which are the right sorts of genre for things like Avatar, seemed ripe for a sci-fi terminology rant. Yet most reviewers don’t call it sci fi, or fantasy for that matter, but merely and in various ways an imaginative movie. Maybe the s.f. term has been outre among reviewers for awhile. At any rate, that’s good. Science is badly enough understood by popular culture as it is without insisting that the average robo-transformer-predat0r-alien-giantsnake-evilgenius-JulesVerne-IsaacAsimov-based-etc. fantasy movie has reason to be called science fiction.

Personally, that doesn't make sense to me. If you limit the term "science fiction" to movies and novels where all - or even most - of the science is plausible, you list. Space opera, pseudoscience (especially psi powers), and fantastic aliens have been a big part of the SF  genre since the so-called Golden Age of the mid-20th century. Just because some SF has terrible science or an unoriginal plot doesn't make it less a part of the genre.

I guess it's a bit nice to see the flip side of the old "it's good so it's not science fiction" argument, but I think that really "it's bad so it's not science fiction" is just as unreasonable. It looks to me that, if nothing else, Avatar evokes a science ficitonal sensawonda, and it's worth seeing for that - and
as Petit points out "handsome, brave, underdressed aliens."

Image: Illustration from the 1953 edition of H. Beam Piper's "Ullr Uprising", which you can read for free at Project Gutenberg. The novel was based on the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion.

Tags:science fiction, biology

Holiday Free Fiction: The Christmas Count

The sky over the river is already light and I’m still six miles from his house -- ten more minutes. Provided I don’t get caught at the tracks by some goddamned, two-hundred-car freight train. Ron will have his audio equipment out, but it won’t do us any good. Not this late. Once the sun’s up, even a set-up as good as Ron’s is pretty much useless for calling in owls. Great-horned, screech, barred; usually Ron and I can call in at least two out of the three. Not this year. Maybe someone else in the McCarron count circle will have owls on their list, but it won’t be us. Two years ago the count had none at all, and Clover County beat us by two species. Two lousy species.

For over a century the Audubon society has sponsored a Christmas Bird Count, in which ordinary people help take a census of birds throughout the Americas. In the not so near future biotechnology may allow Christmas counters to spot birds that haven't been seen in decades . . .

Read "The Christmas Count" by David B. Coe.

Image: Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, from Orthogenetic Evolution in the Pigeons, 1920 (from Wikimedia Commons)

Tags:science fiction, biology

Censoring Darwin

At the Science and Entertainment Exchange blog, geneticist and Lecturer in Science Communication Studies David A. Kirby has a very interesting post about "Creation, Darwin, and Movie Censorship". It's mostly about the difficulty the Darwin-biopic Creation has had finding a U.S. distributor, but Kirby also takes a look at the general depiction of evolution in the movies, particularly the "mad evolutionists" in the post-Scopes trial horror movies of the 1920s and 1930s. Surprisingly, even the negative depiction of evolutionary biologists in those films wasn't good enough for them to escape censorship:

For example, filmmakers had to remove any reference to Darwin from the horror film Dr. Renault’s Secret to avoid offending religious people. The [Production Code Administration’s] judgment on the film reads: “The story is based on theories of human origin in such a way that, if presented to the public, will undoubtedly offend the sensibilities of large groups of religious people of different faiths, and accordingly, could not be approved under the provisions of the code.” Of course, such a judgment would have killed the film’s commercial value so after consultation with the executive producers and the studio executives: “It was agreed to eliminate any reference to Darwin or to his theory, and to establish the ape as a throwback."

Those currently fighting to keep religion out of the science classroom should take small comfort in the fact that at least Darwin and evolutionary theory is no longer considered to be too shocking to even be mentioned on screen.

But what if Darwin's opponents had succeeded in quashing the inclusion of evolutionary theory into the framework of the biological sciences? It's a bit hard for me to imagine, since the modern synthesis of genetics and evolution is so fundamental to our current understanding of biology.

But imagining bioscience without Darwin is what SF author Ted Kosmatka - a self-described "laboratory research drone" - has done in his novelette "The Prophet of Flores".

"Carlson, can you tell us in what year Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species?"
"1867", Paul siad
"Yes, and in what year did Darwin's theory finaly lose the confidence of the larger scientific community?"
"That was 1932," Anticipating this net question, Paul continued, "When Kohlhorster inventerd potassium-argon dating. The new dating method prove the earth wasn't as old as the evolutionists though."
"And in what year was the theory of evolution fianlly debuned completely?"
"1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel prize in 1960 when he uswed carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the Earth was 5,800 years old."

Now, in our world, Willard F. Libby did indeed win the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of carbon-14 dating, but despite the arguments of the creationists, it did not prove the earth was young.

Also as in our world, the remains of tiny humans were discovered on the the Indonesian island of Flores. Study of Flores man - popularly nicknamed "Hobbits" - indicate that they are a new hominin species, Homo floresiensis. In the context of evolutionary theory, they are an interesting branch on the human family tree. In the absence of the framework of evolution they instead provoke a crisis of faith. It's an excellent story, well worth reading (or listening to).

Listen to "The Prophet of Flores" on StarShipSofa.

You can learn more about Homo floresiensis by watching the Nova program "Alien From Earth" (free online) or, if you are interested in more technical details, Nature's Flores man special issue (videos are free, most of the rest subscription only).

You can also read the first part of Kosmatka's zoological short story "Blood Dauber", written with Michael Poore and published in the October/November 2009 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. (You'll have to get a dead tree copy to read the ending.)

Top Image: Artist Pure Evil's image of Charles Darwin made up of little monkeys (via Don't Panic Online).
Bottom Image: University of Wollongong scientists with a life-sized portrait of Homo floresiensis.
Tags:science fiction, evolution

Fantastic Voyage: Inside the Cell

Konev said, "The surface is gathering us in."

Dezhnev nodded. "It looks like its doing this." He held up his thick and callused hand, cupping it. "Exactly," said Konev. " It will invaginate, make a deeper and deeper cup, narrowing the neck and finally closing it, and we will be inside the cell." He seemed quite calm about it.

So was Morrison. They wanted to be inside the cell and this was the way it was done. The receptors continued coming together, alongside each one of them some molecule - some real molecule - and in among them the feigning molecule of the ship. The cell's surface, like Dezhnev's cupped hand, closed upon them entirely and drew them in.

[-- big snip of text with escape from the vesicle -- ]

Dim objects to either side loomed up ahead, drifted to one side, left or right, and fell behind. Ribosomes? Golgi apparatus? Fibrils of one sort or another? Morrison could not tell. From the vantage point of small molecule size, nothing, not even the sharpest, most familiar intracellular object, would look familiar, let alone recognizable.

~ Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, by Isaac Asimov

As many of you probably know, Isaac Asimov wrote the novelization of the 1966 Racquel Welch movie Fantastic Voyage. Asimov was apparently unsatisfied with the poor science in the story, which he was unable to change because it was central to the movie. So what he did was write a new novel in 1987 - Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain - which isn't really a sequel, but is rather a new story with a similar plot.

I recently found a copy of FVII:DB at my local library's book sale and found it pretty entertaining. Asimov does his best to create a plausible scientific basis for the miniaturization technology and the descriptions of the miniaturized sub exploring the brain are pretty good. It's not perfect - characterization isn't really Asimov's strong suit, particularly of female characters, and the story has a disappointingly psi-based ending - but it was certainly worth far more in entertainment value than the 50 cents I paid for it.

Anyway, the novel's description of traveling through inside of the cell reminded me of the excellent video by XVIVO, produced for Harvard University:


Watch XVIVO's Inner Life of the Cell - blow it up to full screen size for the best effect. There is a narrated version that explains what you are seeing (but isn't quite so high resolution) on Harvard's BioVisions web site.

Note that the video depicts a highly simplified version of the interior of the cell. As one of the animators explained in an interview:

We had to figure out how to take a cell that is so packed with molecules and to edit out visually about 90 to 95 percent of those molecules and still keep in all the kinds of structure that would indicate to the student what’s going on.

The reality is that there isn't much space in there for maneuvering, even if you are traveling in a submarine the size of a glucose molecule.

To get a sense of scale of the cells and cellular structures, check out the interactive "Cell Size and Scale" graphic at the University of Utah's Learn Genetics site.

(tip of the hat to ERV for linking XVIVO's latest video about the flu)

Tags:science fiction, Fantastic Voyage

@ The Reef Tank: Ocean Denizens Strike Back

"I can't put it into words. It has something to do with the idea that the sea is still, well, strong. Perhaps it can take revenge? No, that's too simple. I don't know. I have only a feeling that our ordinary ideas of what may be coming on us may be – oh – not deep, or broad enough. I put this poorly. But perhaps the sea, or nature, will not die passively at our hands . . . perhaps death itself may turn or return in horrible life upon us, besides the more mechanical dooms . . . "

~"Beyond the Dead Reef" by James Tiptree, Jr.

I have a guest post up at The Reef Tank: Ocean Denizens Strike Back.

Go check it out!

I'll be writing a guest post there about once a month, so keep an eye out for my next post.

Tags:science fiction, marine biology