Robert Sawyer on the Relevence of Science Fiction Today

Canadian Nebula and Hugo award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer gave a presentation last October at the University of Waterloo - titled "A Galaxy Far, Far Away" My Ass! - about the relevance of science fiction movies and television "for the here and now". A fan took the MP3 recording of the talk (which is quite interesting) and made videos with related images. The focus is the genre's long history of social commentary - and I'll never look at Star Wars the same way again . . .

Episode 1: Planet of the Apes, Star Trek & Frankenstein


Episode 2: H.G. Wells & Jules Verne


Episode 3: Star Wars


The audio of the full lecture can be found here

Tags:Robert J Sawyer, science fiction

What's Hot in Science Right Now

Last week's Mind Meld at SF Signal asked SF writers "What current avenue of scientific inquiry do you believe people should be paying attention to, and why?" Bioscience topics were brought up by several of the respondants.

• Kathleen Ann Goonan suggested research on the brain, including how memory works and plasticity.
• Nina Munteanu pointed to the environment and ecosystems.
• Jennifer Ouellette talked about science on the fringes, and research at the intersection of the biosciences and physics
  

And Nancy Kress made what I think is a good point about science and the public imagination:

Cutting-edge science manages to go along pretty well without massive public observation, since what interests most people isn't scientific research but its more practical little cousin, technology.

Most people like science that does something. And that's where the creativity of SF writers comes in - thinking of those possible somethings before they actually exist.

Read the whole Mind Meld.

Tags:science fiction, biology

It’s cool ‘cause we’re not lonely

Singer-songwriter Nellie McKay performs "Clonie" at TED:


The lyrics.

Tags:Nellie McKay, Clonie

WALL-E: Future Humans Aren't Fat, They've Just Been in Space Too Long

The new Pixar flick WALL-E - opening tomorrow - has been getting great reviews. The Charlie Chaplin-esque robot is an endearing movie star. Not so much the depiction of future human, who are apparently a fat, lazy, junk food-eating indictment of modern American culture. But that wasn't the original idea of writer and director Andrew Stanton. He told ComingSoon.net that the inspiration for the blobby humans was the real physiological changes that occur in microgravity:

The thing that made me pick humans the way they were. It's funny, I actually tried to avoid obesity. I wanted blobs, I wanted babies. Because in doing research with our, one of the consultants to NASA and his expertise was long term residency in space and the reason we don't send a man out to Mars right now is because if we do, they'll come back with almost no bones because disuse atrophy will kick in with very little gravity and osteoporosis will occur and you will lose a large percentage of your bones, and you'll just be this jello blob. And, so I thought oh my gosh, that's a perfect sort of thing dealing with people, later on in life, who have everything solved for them. [. . .] And the whole realization that if you were out in space for that long you would sort of have a lot of bone loss made me feel like wow, you could almost buy that people would be stuck in their beach chairs and we be almost babies. And I thought that was a great metaphor for having to grow up again and stand on your own two feet. And that's what drove it.

Bone loss is indeed a serious side effect of weightlessness:

Weakening of the bones due to the progressive loss of bone mass is a potentially serious side-effect of extended spaceflight. Studies of cosmonauts and astronauts who spent many months on space station Mir revealed that space travelers can lose (on average) 1 to 2 percent of bone mass each month.

"The magnitude of this [effect] has led NASA to consider bone loss an inherent risk of extended space flights," says Dr. Jay Shapiro, team leader for bone studies at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.

And that's not the only problem. In weightless conditions astronauts can lose significant muscle mass, and blood volume can drop 20% causing the muscles in the heart to atrophy. Internal fluids shift to the upper body and head, causing swelling (see image).

Without a regular exercise program that combats those physiological changes, living in space could indeed be permanently crippling. I guess that wouldn't make for a funny movie.

Image: WALL-E screenshot via Doobybrain.com
Tags:space physiology, WALL-E

And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! is a scientist's view of science and scientists in science fiction, horror and B-movies. Or, as the intro says:

Welcome to a mad scientist's views on other mad scientists. And mad doctors, monsters, murderers, psychopaths, ghosts, freaks, weirdos and things that go bump all hours of the night and day.

There is a whole section of reviews of science fiction movies with an emphasis on sci-fi horror, from Spanish movie Accióne Mutante * to the Japanese movie Yosai Gorasu, and has selections from most of the 20th century, from the 1910 version of Frankenstein to the 2003 movie Clearwater. Unfortunately, not many recent films are on the list, but that's not an issue if you are looking for something to watch in the comfort of your own home rather than in the theater.

* From the synopsis: "Set in the not-too-distant future, Acción Mutante posits a world where the desire for physical perfection has spawned a ruling class of the most wealthy and beautiful; where robots do most of the actual work while the "real" people spend their time striving to join the elite; and where anyone not meeting the extreme physical ideal is shunned and outcast. Rising up in opposition is the terrorist group, Mutant Action, which consists wholly of the physically and mentally disabled."

Tags:science fiction, movies, B-movies, reviews

What is Kara Thrace?

Radii at Galactica Variants has a detailed analysis of the teaser for the next episode of Battlestar Galactica, which is not scheduled until 2009, including speculation on whether Kara Thrace is a clone or a cylon. Needless to say, there are spoilers.

(via io9, which also links to a leaked bit of script)

Tags:Battlestar Galactica, cloning

Mary Robinette Kowal: For Solo Cello, op.12

His keys dropped, rattling on the parquet floor. Julius stared at them, unwilling to look at the bandaged stump where two weeks ago his left hand had been. He should be used to it by now. He should not still be trying to pass things from his right hand to his left. But it still felt as if his hand were there.

~ "For Solo Cello, op.12", Mary Robinette Kowal

Puppeteer and writer Mary Robinette Kowal is a nominee for this year's John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award. Several of her short stories have biological themes:

• "For Solo Cello, op. 12" is about how far a professional cellist is willing to go through to regrow his lost hand.
  
• "Cerbo en Vitra ujo" is the horrific story of a smart but naive girl searching for her boyfriend in a future where "excess" children can be taken for their body parts.
• "Death Comes But Twice" is a Victorianesque tale of reanimation.
  

The all touch on the horrific side of the biological, and I enjoyed reading them all.

• Read "For Solo Cello, op.12" @ COSMOS
  
• More free fiction from Mary Robinette Kowal
• Jon Armstrong's interview with Mary Robinette Kowal (via SF Signal)
  

Image: MoM by |spoon| on Flickr
Tags:science fiction, biology, Mary Robinette Kowal

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: June 21 Edition

Here are the some of the biology in science fiction links for the past couple of weeks:

Movies

Dan Vergano at USA Today interviews M. Night Shyamalan about the science in The Happening.

Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex writes about M. Night Shyamalan's (not too educated) thoughts on the placebo effect.

At the SciAm Observations blog gmusser asks "Is M. Night Shyamalan anti-scientific?"

The Takeaway has caller reviews of The Incredible Hulk and The Happening (via Blog Around the Clock)

Cleolinda Jones has "The Happening in Fifteen Minutes" (via Evolving Thoughts)

The Economist has an article that discusses concerns about human overpopulation, Malthus, and The Population Bomb:

Paul Ehrlich's best-selling 1968 book “The Population Bomb” gloomily declared that “the battle to feed humanity is over”, predicted huge famines in the 1970s and 1980s and forecast an American population of just 22m by 1999. Others made better predictions but got the consequences wrong. Harry Harrison’s novel “Make Room! Make Room!”, was published in 1966 and inspired “Soylent Green”, a cult film. It forecast a global population of around seven billion by 1999 (the actual figure was six billion), but his dystopian predictions of rationed water and social breakdown did not materialise.

io9 has a clip of William Hurt "de-evolving" in the 1980 movie Altered States.

John Scalzi writes about nerdgassing - kvetching about science or continuity errors - for SciFi Scanner. (Regular readers here will be familiar with the concept). He nerdgasses about The Matrix:

For all that, there's one thing that always makes me yell at the screen -- when Morpheus is explaining to Neo that the machines use human body heat as a power source. What he actually says is that the machines use human body heat "combined with a form of fusion." Fusion, you know, being the form of nuclear energy released by the sun, and which both releases far more energy and is massively more energy efficient than sucking BTUs out of the human metabolism. Saying the Matrix runs on body heat and "a form of fusion" is like saying your car runs on a combination of body heat and "a form of internal combustion," since body heat is required to move your muscles to push down the accelerator pedal.

On BiotechNation Moira Gunn talks to Peter Lee, CEO of Aukland UniServices. He discusses the combination of biology, engineering and computer modeling that is used for digital simulation of biology, giving us Hollywood creatures like King Kong. Listen to the interview.

Television

The DVD version of the brief Masters of Science Fiction series is about to be released in the US. Charlie Jane Anders at io9 says that "Jerry Was A Man" - about a "genetically engineered chain-smoking slave who seeks his freedom" - is a standout episode.


Cool Biology

The Wall Street Journal reviewed the new collection of futurist essays Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge.

Most of the authors agree, however, that if we survive we will become very, very smart. The IQ gap between our descendants and us, one essayist estimates, will be greater than the gap between us and tiny worms called nematodes, which can't even balance a checkbook. In the near term, perhaps beginning in this century, we will soup up our bodies and minds with genetic engineering, nanotechnology and bionic implants. Not only will our cyborg descendants be immortal; they will also enjoy telepathic broadband communication with one another via wi-fi-equipped brain chips, resulting in a global mind-meld that physician Steven Harris describes as "the Internet on crank."

Scientists from Brazil and the Netherlands recently discovered parasites can induce their caterpillar hosts to guard the parasites' offspring.

After parasitoid larvae exit from the host to pupate, the host stops feeding, remains close to the pupae, knocks off predators with violent head-swings, and dies before reaching adulthood. Unparasitized caterpillars do not show these behaviours. In the field, the presence of bodyguard hosts resulted in a two-fold reduction in mortality of parasitoid pupae.

Watch video of the behavior.

Carl Zimmer writes about the early years of genetic engineering, when the organism of choice was the bacterium E. coli and fears ran deep:

Engineering E. coli came to be known as the Frankenstein project. The protests sometimes took on almost religious tones. Tampering with DNA, the MIT biologist Jonathan King declared, was "sacrilegious." Two political activists, Ted Howard and Jeremy Rifkin, condemned genetic engineering in a book called Who Should Play God?

Mike Brotherton has an interesting post about what a planet orbiting a cool M star would look like. The obvious answer is "red", but it turns out it's a bit more complicated than that.

Neurotic Physiology writes about a Cameroonian frog that has claws that are only exposed when stressed:

Lemme repeat that last bit: the frog BREAKS ITS OWN BONES AND SHOVES THEM THROUGH THE SKIN AS CLAWS. Not only that, this particular frog is known as the “hairy frog”, due to the growth of hair-like skin strands that the males grow during breeding season. It has sideburns! This is the freakin’ Wolverine of the frog world! I hereby declare that this frog be renamed “The Wolverine Frog”, or perhaps “the wolver-frog” for short, in honor of our favorite hirsute self-multilating X-Man.

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has a good post about the significance of the recent finding that meteorites contain purines and pyrimidines - organic molecules that help make up our DNA, RNA and nucleotides.

Wired Science asks what the ethical implications might be of finding microbial extraterrestrial life on Mars or an asteroid.

"Fundamentally, the question is what it means to be a space-traveling species, and what counts as being an ethical space traveler. What sort of obligations if any do we owe to any extraterrestrial life that we encounter, whether it's intelligent or not?" he asked.

Nina Munteanu looks at whether killer plagues will wipe us out and what the color of alien plant life might be.

Charlie Stross writes about the Singularity, transhumanism and religion.

There's a feature on Salon.com about creating transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk. One of the scientists profiled respond to some people's fears about genetic engineering of animals:

He scoffs at the implication that GTC's operations are even in the Dr. Moreau ballpark. "People say, 'Are they breeding centaurs out there, some kind of man-goat beast?' No, of course not. We put a control sequence in the transgene to make sure it's only turned on during lactation. And there's a big difference between manipulating a single gene, like we're doing, and manipulating a whole chromosome. Treating them the same is like saying, 'I moved my brother-in-law into his new apartment with a pickup truck. Now I'm going to move all of New York City with that same truck.'"

Robert Full spoke at TED about how engineers learn from animals - think of robots inspired by geckos and ants. Watch the video.

Tags:science fiction, biology

Green Porno

Isabella Rossellini's latest project, Green Porno, is a series of short films about the sex life of bugs. But they aren't your typical nature documentaries:

Each film is executed in a very simple childlike manner. They are a playful mixture of real world and cartoon. Each episode begins with Isabella speaking to the camera “ If I were a…(firefly, spider, dragonfly etc.). She then transforms into the male of the species explaining in a simple yet direct dialogue the actual act of species specific fornication. The costumes, colorful sets and backdrops as well as the
female insects (all simple paper cut-outs and sculptures) contribute to the playfulness of the films. The contrast of this “naïf” expression and filthy sex practices adds to the comicality of Green Porno. This child-like manner allows us to describe things that could possibly come across as offensive to some.

The resulting videos are surreal and fascinating. They look like a cross between a kid's TV show and a cheap sci-fi movie where the creature is a man in a monster suit.

The shorts were conceived, written and directed by Rossellini. She recently talked to Scientific American about doing research for the series:

It was difficult. I was always joking with some of the scientists I called that when it comes to insects, you can go through pages and pages and pages of how their mouths work, and I kept on saying, “I want to know how the genitalia work.” There are great descriptions about mouths and not much about sex. I read scientific books that have a lot of terminology that is hard for me to understand. So I bring it back to humans. That’s the process I tried to illustrate when I did Green Porno. I was terrified of making mistakes. I’m a very big supporter of the Wildlife Conservation Society, so I kept calling them, and their scientists are very kind.

And her love of critters goes back to her girlhood:

Also, when I was little, I always said I should have been born in Africa or been like Jane Goodall. That was my dream. And then when I moved to live in the country, I discovered all these bugs in my backyard. I discovered you can do your own safari. Animals are everywhere. Some are more romantic, like tigers and elephants and chimpanzees, and some are less romantic, like earthworms, but they are just as interesting.

You can watch the Green Porno shorts at sundancechannel.com/greenporno.
An interview with Rossellini for the Sundance Channel is below.


Tags:Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini

Spore: You control evolution

Everybody is talking about Spore, the new Electronic Arts game that lets you create your own creature - and save the galaxy! Terry Johnson, io9's resident biogeek, has an interesting post on the evolution aspects of the game, which he calls "a good balance between scientific fact and playability."

Your critter's biology - the choices that you made while creating and upgrading your creature - will influence the culture that develops as your creature moves into the civilization phase of the game. Twitchy many-eyed herbivores built by nature to constantly search for and flee from trouble do not easily develop into Klingons. The game is likely to be more forgiving than evolution, but one can imagine a player sighing, "The appendix...what was I thinking?" [. . .] Environment, change, and consequence aren't the whole story, but they are a pretty good introduction. As a teacher I've always been interested in entertainment that manages to educate without being obnoxious. If science is done entirely without a sense of play it ends up being wearisome and fruitless.

PZ Myers agrees that it's fun to play with, but he thinks it's "not going to be about evolution, no matter what their PR says — I've read the blurbs, and it's all non-evolutionary." Hmmm. Since the actual game isn't out yet, I think we'll have to wait and see.

While the game and the full-function version of creature creator aren't free, you can download a free trial version of the creature creator to play with. Unfortunately it won't run on my laptop so I can't give you a first-hand account. You can watch this video to see how it works:



Tags:Spore, evolution

Le Guin, Carrots and Playboy Magazine

"[. . .] We are John Chow. But we are differently trained."
Martin looked shell-shocked. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-three."
"You say he died young – had they taken germ cells from him beforehand or something?"
Gimel took over: "He died at twenty-four in an air car crash. They couldn't save the brain, so they took some intestinal cells and cultured them for cloning. Reproductive cells aren't used for cloning, since they have only half the chromosomes. Intestinal cells happen to be easy to despecialize and reprogram for total growth."
"All chips off the old block," Martin said valiantly. "But how can . . . some of you be women . . .?"
Beth took over: "It's easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic, that is, the female. It's trickier to go the other way, have to hook in artificial Y chromosomes. So they mostly clone from males, since clones function best bisexually."
Gimel again: "They've worked these matters of technique and function out carefully. The taxpayer wans the best for his money, and of course clones are expensive. With the cell manipulations, and the inucbation in Ngama Placentae, and the maintenance and training of the foster-parent groups, we end up costing about three million apiece."
~ "Nine Lives", by Ursula LeGuin, 1969

Ursula Le Guin's Nebula award-nominated novelette "Nine Lives" is one of her few "hard" science fiction stories. As she wrote in its preface:

It is as near "hard-core" or wiring-diagram science fiction as I ever get; that is, it's a working out of a theme directly extrapolated form contemporary work in one of the quantitative sciences - a what-if story.

What makes the story memorable is that it's not merely extrapolated science; she uses the science as a jumping off point to explore the implications of cloning and how we perceive "self".

The inspiration for "Nine Lives" was a chapter on cloning in Gordon Rattray Taylor's 1968 book The Biological Time Bomb which talked about recent advances in cloning - not humans, of course, but carrots and frogs. The book is an excellent overview of the cutting edge of biotechnology in the late 1960s¹: not just cloning, but also human genetic engineering (years before the first genetically-modified bacterium), creating viruses and cells from scratch, artificially boosting intelligence and memory, cryonics, and longevity treatments. Anyone who thinks these ideas are recent (or were new 10 or 20 or 30 years ago), simply wasn't paying attention.

The cloning experiments Taylor describes were conducted by F.C. Steward at Cornell University. He took cells from the carrot root, figured out how to grow the cells in culture (coconut milk was the key ingredient to the culture medium), then was able to show that they could be induced to put out new roots and shoots and flowers and seeds - complete new plants². While growing cells in culture wasn't novel, being able to develop into different tissues was. In an equally significant line of research, in 1962 Oxford developmental biologist John Gurdon showed that frogs could be cloned by transferring the nucleus from tadpole intestinal cells into an unfertilized egg. From the perspective of 1968, it must have appeared that human cloning was just around the corner. Little did anyone anticipate that it would take more than 30 years before the next cloning breakthrough: production of Dolly the sheep by transferring the nucleus from an adult cell.

While Taylor's description cutting-edge research made it seem as if human might soon be a reality, Le Guin's primary inspiration appears to have been his discussion of the social implications of human cloning:

Members of a clonal group will enjoy an important advantage: like identical twins, they will be able to accept grafts of tissue of whole organs from one another. Apart from the much greater security of life this will give them in general, such an advantage might be supremely important among a small isolated group, such as astronauts on a mission lasting several years, and, at least until such time as the problems of graft rejection are overcome [. . .], it will be an obvious matter of policy to select teams in this way. Indeed there may be another good reason for doing so.

At present the only genetically identical groups with which we are acquainted are twins, triplets and the rare higher orders of identical twindom. There is some evidence that identical (or one-egg) twins have a peculiar sympathetic awareness of each other's needs and problems - even, it has been claimed, a psychic awareness amounting to thought transference. It is certainly true that twins brought up in widely different circumstances have often lived closely similar lives, marrying similar partners of similar ages, and this is so even when they have not been in communication with one another. It is not mere sensationalism, therefor, to ask whether the members of human clones may feel particularly united, and be able to co-operate better, even if they are not in actual supersensory communication with one another.

And there you have the basis for Le Guin's story, which looks at what happens when all but one of such a cloned group of off-Earth explorers is killed in an accident.


So what's the Playboy connection? Back in the 1960s, the magazine actually published a fair amount of high-quality science fiction³, and that was where "Nine Lives" first saw print - under the name "U. K. Le Guin", because apparently a female author would have made its readers "nervous".⁴ Anyway, for those of you who don't have 40-year-old issues of Playboy in your garage (do people keep back issues the same way they archive National Geographic?), the story has been widely anthologized. If you haven't read it, find yourself a copy, because (as Nancy Kress put it) it's "one of the finest cloning stories written".

1. Biological Time Bomb is a treasure trove of science fiction ideas. Take, for example, the chapter on genetic engineering, which suggests that DNA from an egg could be used to fertilize another egg, bypassing the need for sperm. Taylor's conclusion cries out to be the basis of a story (and maybe it was): "The logical extension of this proposition is the complete elimination of men and the creation of a race of Amazons. While things will hardly go so far on earth, it might be convenient to colonize another planet in this way." I wonder if there is a modern popular science text that would be as useful to a SF writer.

2. For technical details, see Steward FC et al. "Growth and Development of Cultured Plant Cells" Science 143(3601):20-27 (1964). DOI: 10.1126/science.143.3601.20

3. If you stumbled on this post looking for science fiction writer veggie porn, sorry to disappoint.

4. Le Guin has commented: "It's not surprising that Playboy hadn't had its consciousness raised back then, but it is surprising to me to realize how thoughtlessly I went along with them. It was the first (and is the only) time I met with anything I understood as sexual prejudice, prejudice against me as a woman writer, from any editor or publisher; and it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was also important."

Tags:science fiction, cloning, Ursula Le Guin

Jurassic BBQ and other cool t-shirts

Jeremy Kalgreen has created a fun line of SCIENCE! t-shirts* . I especially like Jurassic BBQ. The description:

Hypothesis: Over 99% of prehistoric animal species are now extinct, many of which were no doubt delicious. By mastering advanced cloning techniques we can incorporate these long dead animal species into a unique and scrumptious BBQ experience.

Result: The T-Rex proved delectable, but our 'Kiss the Cloner' apron failed to deliver.

Pass the A-1!

For other cool bioscience-related t-shirts, check out alternative fuel, germ wrangler, babe factory, and from his Amorphia Apparel line, life tee, ear mouse and flies.

And if you buy two tees before June 30, you can get a 25% discount. Sweet.

*I wish there was a female scientist on at least one of them though.

(via Deep Sea News)
Tags:science fiction, biology, t-shirts

It's Not Easy Being Green

One thing that the various video versions of The Hulk have in common is that he's big and he's green. But what would a big dude with green blood flowing through his veins actually look like? In both the original TV series and Ang Lee's 2003 movie the Hulk (played by Lou Ferrigno in the former and CGI in the latter) was a bright green color. If you've seen the new movie version that was released on Friday, you probably noticed that the Hulk was looking a little less brightly colored. According to an article in Sunday's LA Times about the movie's visual effects, the toned-down skin color was meant to be more "realistic."

Skin tone was another primary focus, as animators studiously considered, yes, what it would mean to be someone with green blood coursing through his veins. Their determination: The "meat" would be darker as a result, not brighter. Accordingly, their Hulk appears olive in most scenes and, fleetingly, almost slate gray. "We wanted to incorporate him more into our environment, to make him feel like he's right there and you could touch him," says visual effects supervisor Kurt Williams, whose team used software engineered for the fantasy menagerie of "The Golden Compass" as a springboard for rendering the Hulk. "We needed to approach him like a CG [computer graphics] human, not a creature."

I wonder if they'll use the same philosophy when they make up Zachary Quinto as young Spock in the upcoming Star Trek movie (probably not).

Tags:The Hulk, biology, green blood

Nancy Kress on Dogs

Mike Brotherton has an interesting interview with Nancy Kress about her new bioterrorism thriller Dogs and writing science fiction. Her inspiration for her latest novel was real deadly pathogens:

I’m fascinated by the way viruses and bacteria, including pathogens, can both mutate naturally and be genetically engineered. I’ve read everything I can find, for instance, on the outbreaks of Ebola in Congo and Sudan. Genetically engineered pathogens turn up in my books OATHS AND MIRACLES and STINGER. In fiction, the pathogens are usually transmitted by humans. But, I mused, it doesn’t have to be that way …and just about that time I happened to get a dog.

And she strives to get the science right in her novels:

Whether it’s detailed or merely sketched in, I try hard to get the science right. This isn’t always easy for me, since I have no scientific training. One of my proudest moments was a call from the Whitehead Institute for Biological Research in Boston. The scientists there had been passing around OATHS AND MIRACLES, part of which is set at Whitehead, and they wanted to know whom I knew up there that was working on envelope proteins.

That must have been a very cool moment!

You can win a copy of Dogs from Tachyon Publications by submitting a photo of your favorite canine before July 31.

Tags:Nancy Kress, Dogs

Stan Winston (1946-2008)

Special effects legend Stan Winston died yesterday of multiple myeloma. He won three Oscars for his work, which included The Thing, Aliens, Predator, Edward Scissorhands, all three Terminator movies, Jurassic Park, AI, and Iron Man, among many others.

Winston was interviewed by Hugo Perez at SciFi.com when AI was released in 2001. He talked about his work, and his views on science fiction and science:

Can you talk about how you see aspects of certain films you've worked on, i.e., Terminator, Jurassic Park, A.I., becoming the truth of tomorrow?

Winston: [. . .] Someone has now with their imagination said, "Boy, wouldn't it be cool if you could take the DNA of something as historic as the dinosaur and bring it to life based on DNA that has been fossilized over years?" Well, guess what? Something like that is going to happen. Why is it going to happen? Because Michael Crichton imagined that it could happen, and there is a science that is at the base of that imagination. And now with the combination of science and this man's imagination, there are going to be some human beings out there that will crack this problem, and using DNA are going to create life. It's happening now. It's science and the imagination that fuels the creative mind of mankind, and there is nothing that will stop it from happening until mankind doesn't exist anymore, and I don't see that happening anytime in the near future. As long as we exist, we will continue to create, and we will create a reality that we have imagined.

His enthusiasm about the boundlessness of human creativity and its effect on science sounds strangely optimistic coming from someone who has worked on movies in which the hubris of scientists wreaks havoc (for example, Jurassic Park and Terminator) or man's insatiable need to travel between the stars brings us into contact with monsterous aliens.

RIP Stan Winston.

(via Ain't It Cool News, which has some cool photos)
Image: The Thermians in Galaxy Quest
Tags:science fiction, special effects, science fiction, monsters

Getting the Science Right in SF

Jo Walton has written an interesting post where she claims that she doesn't write science fiction because she know both too little and too much science. If she were ignorant, she could write without caring whether she got the science right, but she isn't, so that means having to do research that distracts from actually writing the story:

So I have this thing about aliens with four genders. It takes place in the universe where the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that FTL drives make your star explode after 20 uses. So these aliens are stuck in their solar system (with a couple of other aliens who showed up and can't go home) and they know about other aliens. (Earth may or may not exist in this universe. It doesn't matter. This is a story about some aliens.) My aliens have a mother planet and a terraformed marslike, and a moon where they live in domes. My character comes from the terraformed planet. He's leaving a spaceship on the mother planet, he smells the mother planet air, and he thinks "Ah, the sweet smell of /INSERT ATMOSPHERE COMPONENT GAS HERE/, which we don't have in the air of my terraformed home, which smells so atavistically good because this is where my ancestors evolved, but which nevertheless reminds me of the three years I spent here in the prison camp." And I stop, and I trot off to ask what atmospheric component gas it could be (and already you notice I have stopped writing and started checking, and also, note how much I had to explain to get to this point, which in the actual story would all not be explained) and after a long discussion I find out that there's nothing, unless I totally change everything I want, or give them noses that can smell argon or something (which is an unnecessary complication when they already have turtle shells and four eyes and the interesting thing is the four genders) and I have to scrap that sentence which was doing set up and incluing and background and was about to set up the next sentence about how he met his best friend in the prison camp and was going to lead on into some actual story.

If I didn't know any science at all, I'd just merrily put traces of chlorine in an oxygen atmosphere and it would all be as dumb as heck but at least it would actually get written and the characters would get out of my head and get to have their adventure.

While some commenters are arguing that she doesn't need to identify that atmospheric component to tell the story, the point is that Walton does need to, to tell the story the way she would want it to be.

And certainly there are people who would notice the omission of a plausible explanation. As SF writer (and astronomer) Mike Brotherton points out, getting the science wrong can take readers out of the story:

If you don’t, you risk the greatest threat to fiction writers, a threat greater than poor characterization or limp prose or anything else. You risk losing the suspension of disbelief. The suspension of disbelief is critical to the entire enterprise of fiction, and when it’s gone, you’ve lost the reader, perhaps forever. Bad writing or weak characters risk this too, of course, but having a reader stop and think, with regard to an important plot point, “I thought penguins were at the south pole, not the north,” and then wait for a payoff that never comes…well, that’s a crime against readers.

And ultimately the author is responsible for what ends up on the page:

One of the best one-sentence pieces of advice about writing professionalism I got from Octavia Butler. She said that you shouldn’t ever send something out that had mistakes in it that you knew of. You were ultimately responsible and a professional didn’t send out something with errors.

Perhaps your editor will forgive you, and your audience too, if the error makes it into print. But perhaps not, and that may be the only chance you ever get with them.

I personally don't think that SF necessarily needs a ton of technical details to be "good" (in Walton's example, she could simply say there was a unique smell without specifying the source), however the details that are included should at least be plausible.

(Jo Walton post via Charlie Jane Anders @ io9)

Tags:science fiction, science, Jo Walton, Mike Brotherton

Hard Science Fiction, Biology and Women (again)

"Sorry guys, I can't join you at the pub until I finish this ELISA for Professor Ribbit."

LiveJournaler badgerbag has put up a transcript of the WisCon 32* panel on "Women and Hard SF". The panelists were Margaret McBride, Janice Bogstad, Victoria Gaydosik and Sue Lange. Not surprisingly (to me anyway) their discussion touched on the biological sciences:

JB: Part of the reason the concept, the term [hard science fiction] is problematic is it's used as a norm for "real science fiction" and however we define it, it has changed as more women enter the field. Fantastic, speculative, there's other terms they call it when they don't want to call it sf. Femspec. In early days of 50s and 60s sf, male authors would write about social issues and the social issues around tech but when women do it's soft sf. Then we come to 70s and 80s when writing about biology was considered soft, because (the rhetoric is that) women are their biology in some way, women can therefore more easily be biochemical scientists... I expect the next thing to fall is going to be mathematics. Real, normative, actual, the only kind we should really care about, that counts, used in book reviews, not included in canon. This changing definition has a gender bias to it.

The argument that the association between women and biology is part of the reason why it's considered less "hard" than physics isn't a new one (for example see my previous post on Women, Biology and Hard Science Fiction). And it's true that many more women receive degrees in the biological sciences than in the physical sciences.**

The discussion also touches on one of my pet peeves: the conflation of "science" and "technology". SF with gadgets and gizmos and exotic engineering is often considered "hard", even if those gadgets don't have any scientific basis (FTL travel, for example). And I think that feeds into the notion that biology isn't "hard" - there aren't that many gadgets that have come out of the biological sciences, at least as compared to the physical sciences.

I don't completely agree with the idea that women don't like SF because there is too much science and technology in it, however.

Aud: I would like to like hard sf, but, it's like the cold skeleton, bare bones, boy playing with his toys, in Singularity Charlie Stross (something), there's no movement, human touch, it's the skeleton of ideas without people moving through it.

Margaret: This raises a very significant thing for me. The people who doesn't read SF at all, especially women, because they think that's what it is. Even more importantly, is it making the feeling of science less interesting or important to women, because they think that's what it is?? That's why it's important and that's why these tropes and definitions matter.

She seems to be arguing that women are less interested in hard science fiction - and science - because we prefer the "human touch" to technology. While it may be true for some women, it's definitely not true for me. I like the nifty gadgets and descriptions of black holes and weird speculation about the evolution of mutant alien viruses, as long as there is an entertaining story to go along with it.***

Anyway, there are many male writers whose science fiction people consider to be "hard", but who don't actually use much rigorous science in their stories. The discussion brought up Heinlein and Crichton and Bear, who got thwacked pretty hard:

Annalee: Greg Bear, number one our list of criminals, he sits on a committee that advises the DOD on future scenarios, he's very proud of it! He thinks he's the hardest of the hard, but his science is terrible! and he's dealing with biology! Which a ton of women have dealt with.

Ouch.

For some good hard science fiction by women, Annalee Newitz at io9 lists "10 books that prove science fiction just got harder", which includes The Nanotech Quartet by Kathleen Goonan, The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories by Nancy Kress, Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler, Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh, and Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold. There's lots of bioscience in the list too.

(via Feminist Science Fiction)



* WisCon is "the first and foremost feminist science fiction convention in the world."

** In the 1999-2000 academic year (pdf) women received 58% of the bachelors degrees in the biological and life sciences and 40% of the bachelor's degrees in physical sciences. In the same period women received 44% of the doctoral degrees in the biological and life sciences , but only 25% of the doctoral degrees in the physical sciences.

*** That especially bugs me, because it's the kind of argument SciFi has made for reducing the actual science fiction on its schedule - according to them, women like the ghost hunting and psychics and the "touchy feely". What I do like is science fiction that doesn't give short shrift to it's female characters. Or even better - puts women in the starring role. It can be soft or hard science-wise, but please give me women who are more than eye candy or info dumpees. Definitely read Annalee Newitz's rant on the subject.

Image: Half nude chick doing biology inspired by this exchange: "Margaret: I have to be a little bit cynical. editor at tor, book cover panel, memo, I don't care what you people think, the half nude broad is what sells it. Annalee: Well if that half nude broad is doing biology, I'm down with it." I used my leet Photoshop skillz to mashup an old Avon paperback cover with the tools of the trade.

Tags:hard science fiction, biology, women

The Happening and Intelligent Design

Annalee Newitz at io9 reviews The Happening, and points out that the science isn't just bad - it's actually an anti-science movie.

Maybe you thought Ben Stein's ill-fated documentary Expelled was the only movie to argue in favor of the neo-Christian idea that an "intelligent designer" created the universe. Think again. With its references to "unexplained acts of nature" and a science teacher main character who calls evolution "just a theory," The Happening is basically a giant propaganda machine for intelligent design. Maybe science journalists are jizzing all over its allegedly realistic plants-attack-humans plot, but we talked to Shyamalan and we know the truth.

It's really a movie that touts Shyamalan's devout Christian world view. Not only is "science not enough" to explain nature, but it's about Zooey Deschanel's character "Alma" becoming a proper wife.

In the film's other major Christian-influenced subplot, we discover that Alma and Elliot have "been fighting" — not only does Alma have the gal to insist that they "wait to have children," but she also went out to dessert with a male colleague without telling Elliot. What? Dessert and lack of babies makes her evil? Apparently so.

And of course it ends with Alma happily preggers. I'll definitely save my $10.

Tags:The Happening, intelligent design, evolution

Ratha's Creatures

Clare Bell's Ratha series of young adult novels features sapient prehistoric cats who live by herding deer. The first novel in the series, Ratha's Creature (published in 1983) won young adult fiction awards from the International Reading Association and PEN Center USA. The novels are about Ratha, a young female of the "the Named", a clan of sapient prehistoric big cats.

They have laws, languages, and traditions and live by herding the creatures they once hunted. Surrounding the Named are the more numerous non-sentient UnNamed, who prey on the clan’s herds. Mating between Named and UnNamed is forbidden, since the clan believes that the resulting young will be non-sentient animals.

Ratha breaks with the clan's tradition that herders are male - and discovers the use of fire, fundamentally changing the cats' society.

The series is set in the Miocene epoch, about 20 million years ago, and "all the animals that appear in the novels are based on fossil creatures, with some extrapolation." On Bell's web site, she talks about the fossils that inspired Ratha and her clan. Originally the cats were based on the leopard-like Nimravus, naming her species Nimravus illumina sapiens (recent research has suggested that Nimravus is not a true feline). She currently imagines "the Named" as Dinaelurus illumina sapiens, based on Dinaelurus crassus, a "cheetah precursor" discovered in the Jon Day Fossil Formation in Oregon. Bell has gone on to make a detailed sculpture recreation of a Dinaelurus head.

She has blogged about about more of the prehistoric creatures the animal characters in her novels are based on, including the "face-tails", "treelings", "seamares", "barking raiders", "bristlemanes" "blubber-tusker", and the character Shongshar. Of course the information isn't necessary to enjoy the stories, but I find it interesting to learn what the critters were based on.

Ratha's Creature and Clan Ground were reissued in 2007. The fifth novel in the series, Ratha's Courage, was published last October by E-Reads.

More about Ratha:

• Ratha's Creature was made into an animated special for CBS's "Storybreak", which Bell has posted to Youtube. Go watch!
• Bell has recommended The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives as a non-fiction source on fossil felines.
  
• The first six chapters of the fourth book in the series, Ratha's Courage, can be read for free at Baen Webscription.net.
• Clare Bell's Ratha drawings and sculptures on deviantART
  

Image: Clare Bell's design for a sapient feloid
Tags:Clare Bell, palentology, cats

The End of Man?

I've been reading some of the Nature Futures series of short short stories at Concatination.org, and a few of authors have imagined different ends for Homo sapiens:

• Steve Longworth's "Succession" looks at the obvious outcome of homeopathy (originally published 16 August 2007)
  
• Bruce Sterling's "Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct", about the last "man" on Earth (originally published 11 November 1999)
• Henry Gee's "Are we not men?", suggests that we haven't ever been purely human anyway (originally published 30 June 2005)

The the single page stories are more thought experiments than full-blown fiction. But that just lets your imagination fill in the gaps.

Tags:science fiction, biology, evolution

What Kills Everybody in The Happening?

*** Spoilers ahoy. Stop reading now if you want M. Night Shyamalan's new movie The Happening to be a complete surprise. ***

M. Night Shyamalan has been talking with reporters about The Happening, which opens in theaters on Friday the 13th. It turns out the rash of human suicides - and mysterious bee deaths - are due to neurotoxins produced by plants and algae. He told Shock Till You Drop:

Shock: I know "Scientific American"* grilled you earlier at the press conference earlier (see below) and the bees were something out there, but did you look into all the possibilities of this movie's scenario coming true?
Shyamalan: Definitely, yeah, we did and we got all kinds of research on similar events that happened in the water, plankton releasing toxins and things like that, which just happened again, there were some neurotoxins released in a lake in Bali or Thailand or something like that. Then there was interesting articles about things rising. One of the things that I guess was in the back of my mind was that one in six emergency room cases for the United States is asthma-related. I'm going, "What? When I was a kid, the kid who had asthma was that freak kid three schools down who had asthma." Now, it's like every other kid has asthma. Everybody's like wheezing and there's a line outside the nurse's office for an inhaler. What's that about? We're becoming allergic to what? There's peanut-free tables in every school right now. When was that (done)? We're all becoming really sensitive to something in the air.

Phytoplankton - microscopic single-celled algae - can "bloom" causing the phenomenon commonly known as a red tide. The plankton produce potent neurotoxins that become concentrated in shellfish, making them poisonous to eat. Other algae, such as the dinoflagellate Pfiesteria piscicida, produce toxins that can cause memory loss, confusion, upper respiratory irritation and acute skin burning. I Googled a bit, but wasn't able to come up with any particular algal bloom at an Asian lake that Shyamalan might be talking about, though. There's no connection to asthma or peanut allergies. (Also, Shyamalan's perception of the prevalence of asthma is a bit skewed. While there was a significant increase in the percentage of kids with asthma between 1980 and 2005, that increase was from 3.6% to 8.9% - hardly a change from a few "freaks" to "every other kid".)

Shock: What do you find that science allows you to do that fantasy hasn't?
Shyamalan: When I came up with the idea, I said to the research people, "Give me every piece of information. I want to know 1 to 10 whether this idea is totally possible, probable or impossible, completely." When they came back with a stack of information about how the environment works and how plants work and how examples of anomalous things that have happened in the world. How a cotton plant can send out a signal to the other side of the field to tell them that this insect is coming and they send out poisons and they send out toxins and all these things happening in a smaller form, the exact kind of thing. It was really fun and then I talked to the University of Massachusetts and some other institutes about how the brain works, about toxins and how they affect each other. It was really fun to ground… [. . .]

Plant-to-plant communication is a relatively new area of study. It turns out that many plants that are pest-infested or damaged can send out a signal that stimulates neighboring plants to beef up their defenses. Discover Magazine ran a feature on "talking plants" in 2002:

[Marcel] Dicke and his colleagues have found that mere exposure to airborne emissions from mite-infested cotton and lima beans will prompt undamaged plants to release signals that summon an enemy of the infesting mite. Over the last 19 years, in various experiments, researchers say they've caught willow, poplar, alder, and birch trees listening to their own kind and barley seedlings listening to other barley seedlings. In each case, damaged plants, whether eaten by caterpillars, infected by fungus or powdery mildew, infested by spider mites, or even clipped mechanically, sent out chemicals that seemed to jump-start the defenses of undamaged plants nearby.

Presumably in The Happening plants have evolved to fight their biggest pest: humanity. That sounds like an interesting science fiction-horror premise. However, from what Shyamalan said in a recent press conference, the science is wrapped in New Agey spirituality.

The idea of plants having consciousness is kind of a non-western world view. Did you consider that as coming from your other influences. Could you guys talk about how your non-western experiences have influenced you? And could you talk about the spiritual side of the film?

Shyamalan: Definitely. It’s interesting because the Native American culture, that’s all it’s about. My middle name, Night, it’s an American Indian name. That is what I felt so attached to when I was a kid—from the American Indian culture—the relationship to nature, and worshipping the sky, the earth, the rock. That relationship felt correct then, as a kid, and it feels correct now, as an adult. It’s interesting how in all our religions, so little is said about how we should feel towards nature. It’s an interesting thing to kind of get the hierarchy back in line. We’re just one of many living creatures on the planet.

Apparently the movie ultimately turns away from science fiction, with a "spiritual message" and a conclusion that demonstrates that there are "limits of rational thought".

For more: check out the early reviews at Ain't It Cool News. The consensus seems to be disappointment.

ETA: In the less-than-glowing review in today's LA Times, reviewer Carina Chocano asked:

The mysterious airborne substance that's making people kill themselves is believed to be some kind of neurotoxin that blocks the self-preservation instinct in humans. But would simply removing the self-preservation instinct really cause people to instantly annihilate themselves? En masse? I'd have thought it would lead to slower, more indirect forms of self-destruction, like riding a bike without a helmet or drinking and driving or unsafe sex. This, sadly, is the question Shyamalan neglects to answer, which, in the wake of films like "28 Days Later," is a letdown.

Sounds like Shyamalan should stick to fantasy.

(via Abbie at ERV, who isn't at all pleased about the spirituality stuff)

* Scientific American hasn't published anything about the movie yet.
Tags:The Happening, M Night Shyamalan, plants, algae, red tide

Biology is the headline science of the 21st century

In April, Åka at Physicality of Words interviewed Peter Watts about the science in science fiction. Asked about a recent Con where the science panel was made up of astronomers and physicists, and whether he "get[s] the feeling that biology and biological ideas get less attention in science fiction than physics and astronomy?" , Watts opined:

Biology is the headline science of the twenty-first century so far, and I think that's being reflected in the more recent sf to come down the pike (mine, for example). If con panels still emphasise physics and astronomy, perhaps that reflects the "graying of fandom" we keep hearing about; perhaps panels are disproportionately populated by the TwenCen old guard who haven't caught up with the times yet.

Go read the whole interview.

Tags:science fiction, biology, Peter Watts

Stephen Nottingham: Screening DNA

In 2000, agricultural biologist and writer Stephen Nottingham published a book about genetic engineering technology in the movies, Screening DNA: Exploring the Cinema-Genetics Interface. While print copies aren't available in the US*, he has kindly provided the full text on his web site. With chapters on cloning, resurrecting dinosaurs, designer babies, alien DNA, scientist biopics he takes a look a wide range of films with genetic themes. He concludes that, while biotechnology is often portrayed negatively (and inaccurately) in the movies, he believes that they have little influence on the politics surrounding use of genetic engineering, cloning and other technology.

The power of genetic engineers to radically modify organisms is usually exaggerated, while misconceptions about scientists' ability to regenerate life from DNA abound. The benefits of genetic engineering are often acknowledged, particularly advances toward curing diseases such as Alzheimer's. (55) However, whatever the benefits, the risks always tend to outweigh them, because narrative conventions require a crisis. The potential threats posed by genetically modified ("alien") organisms are consistently exaggerated. Misconceptions about cloning are everywhere in the movies. Clones have often been portrayed as exact instant copies of adults, whereas clones arise from embryos. In the movies, clones are derived from originals, who have precedence, unlike real clones who are equals. Clones are also either erroneously seen as inferior copies, or as the child rather than twin of a cell donor. No cloning movie can be said to further advance the public understanding of science. Meanwhile, human genetic enhancement is represented as a highly predictive science, which overemphasises the role of genes in determining complex human behaviours. Movies therefore reiterate a key, but politically-loaded, assumption of the genetic determinism. Artificially assisted reproduction technology, from artificial insemination, through IVF, ICSI, PGD, to the uses of human cell cloning, continues to be branded with the label "unnatural practice" in the movies. The nature of the scientific method and the motives of scientists, corporations and governments are typically misconstrued. To cap it all, genes have been given a mythic or spiritual aura, a genetic essentialism that conveys the impression that DNA is somehow in god's realm and not something for man to meddle with. Despite all this though, movies have tended to reflect society's anxiety about biotechnology, rather than creating that anxiety.

In the long-run, it will not be movies that stop technological progress by influencing public attitudes, but well-informed considerations of the benefits and risks of the technology. An important debate is now taking place, with the messages of multinational corporations, politicians, environment and consumer groups, and the media reaching a large proportion of the population. If human cloning, transgenic crops, or any other application of biotechnology is stopped, then it will not have been movies that were responsible, but a concerned citizenry worried about the type of world their children will grow up in. Important technological developments that affect everyone within a democracy, for example, those that affect the food supply, should not proceed without a popular consensus approving them. It is up to politicians, scientists and corporate biotechnologists to put the case for each application of biotechnology to the public. If the public do not buy it, then so be it.

I have to disagree with his final conclusion. The debate surrounding the use of biotechnology is driven not only by "concerned citizenry" but by politicians, and religious and corporate groups that have their own agendas. There is a ton of misinformation (and outright lies) promoted by lobbyists for those groups, and, not surprisingly, members of the public who are largely informed on scientific topics by popular culture are likely to have opinions about biotechnology that are based on emotional appeals and its sensationalist depiction in the movies than on careful analysis of the facts. I hate to think that our public policy is being set by the special interest groups that are best able to spin an entertaining tale.

In addition to Screening DNA, Nottingham's web site includes his "Biologist at the Cinema" series of essays and reviews that look at some popular science fiction films from a biologist's perspective:

• A.I. Artificial Intelligence (intelligence and consciousness)
• Blade Runner (clones, DNA and memory)
• Jurassic Park 3 (genetic engineering and ecology)
• Planet of the Apes (animal experimentation and evolution)
• The 6th Day (clones)
  
• Solaris (clones)
  

* You can order a hard-cover copy of Screening DNA from Amazon.co.uk
Tags:Stephen Nottingham, movies, science fiction, biotechnology, genetic engineering, cloning