Science and SF Tidbits: October 18, 2012: Hard SF, Silky Electronics, and Exoplanets

Recent interesting science fiction and bioscience bits:

• Locus Online Perspectives » Stanley Schmidt: Art of Speculation »
How would you define "hard" science fiction? Analog editor and SF author Stanley Schmidt thinks most fans are getting it all wrong. From his interview with Locus:

‘‘ What I mean by ‘hard science fiction’ is actually pretty simple: there’s some element of speculative science or technology in it, which is so integral to the story that you can’t take it out without making the whole story collapse. [...] The second requirement is that there should be some attempt to make the science or technology speculation plausible.”

I agree with him. The focus on engineering and technology often causes stories with solid speculative biology and chemistry to be overlooked as "hard" SF.

• A musical interlude for Battlestar Galactica fans: Sound of Cylons

Hello Gaius my old friend ....



• Excellent Idea of the Day: Sci-Fi in Class : Discovery News »
Do you think high school level science textbooks should include science fiction references or examples? A recent study suggests that science fiction can stimulate students' interest in science.
Join the discussion on Google+.

• Jumping DNA rides aboard a virus, which targets a giant virus, which infects an amoeba, which infected a woman’s eye | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine »
Examination of the microbes in an infected eye turned up a zoo:

"It was carrying two species of bacteria, and a giant virus that no one had seen before—they called it Lentille virus. Inside that, they found a virophage—an virus that can only reproduce in cells infected by other viruses—which they called Sputnik 2. And in both Lentille virus and Sputnik 2, they found even smaller genetic parasites – tiny chunks of DNA that can hop around the genomes of the virus, and stow away inside the virophage. They called these transpovirons."

• ALPHA CENTAURI HAS A PLANET! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine »
Exciting discovery: The Alpha Centauri star system has at least one Earth-sized planet! As the nearest star system to our own, it's a frequent destination for SF space travelers, from Lost in Space to Avatar.  The bad news: it's so close to it's star, it's definitely not another Earth:

"... the planet is baking hot, far too hot to sustain any kind of life as we know it, or even liquid water."

• Spider Silk Could Weave Biodegradable Computer Chips | Wired Science | Wired.com »
Materials science turns to nature: Spider silk is very thin, stronger than steel, extremely flexible and can transmit light almost as well as glass fiber optic cables. Even better, the human body doesn't have a problem with implanted fibers and the components are biodegradable.  That means that there is the potential to use silk produced by spiders or silkworms to develop implantable biomonitoring devices that do not need to be surgically removed. And perhaps far in the future there will be electronic devices that can be composed, rather than producing toxic waste.

Top Image: Artist’s impression of the planet around Alpha Centauri B. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org) Released by ESO under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. More artist's images and diagrams can be found at ESO.gov.

Science and SF Tidbits: October 15, 2012: Thinking machines and changelings

Interesting articles elsewhere:

• From Cooling System to Thinking Machine | Being Human »
Carl Zimmer writes about the history of Western thinking on the function of the brain from ancient times to the present. Will our current thinking of how the brain functions eventually seem as outdated as the ancient notion of "animal spirits"? From the article:

"Are we brains in a vat? Strictly speaking, it’s hard to prove we’re not. But in any world—real or manufactured—we still know so little about how brains work that we wouldn’t be able to put Putnam’s thought experiment into practice."

( Hilary Putnam is a philosopher who has used the "brain in a vat" analogy to discuss the human concept of the external world)

• Define Me: The Role of Changelings in Folklore »

How does the child in this tale sound to you? A changeling? or would we modern folk simply say he's not neurotypical?  

"Once upon a time there was a poor man and his wife who lived in the middle of the woods.  They had a beautiful little boy with blonde hair and strikingly blue eyes.  He was the light of their lives… and then something changed.
The boy wouldn’t coo. He wouldn’t look at his parents or at the pretty toys they dangled in front of him.  He shrank away from their touch as if it physically hurt him, couldn’t gag down his food, and began to scream."

Mercedes Yardley's article provides much food for thought.

• Oh, You’re one of “those” kinds of people »

Horror artist Russell Dickerson has gotten some negative reactions from people when they learn what he does for a living. He argues that it's people who are outside the norm who make change in the world:

"It takes those strange folks out there, with odd ideas of fantastical things, to really change the world. Scientists, artists, authors, folks from all different walks of life who simply believed differently than those around them. Those odd people created the very world we live in, because they dared to put those strange ideas out there for all the world to see."

Image: Changeling child from DOWN-ADOWN-DERRY: A Book of Fairy Poems (1922) by Walter De La Mare, Illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop

Free Friday Flick: Donovan's Brain, Curt Siodmak, and the science of memory

This week's recommended free online movie is the 1953 science fiction horror film Donovan's Brain, starring Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan) and Lew Ayres, and directed by Felix Feist.

The basic plot: a multi-millionaire's airplane crashes in the desert, a scientist keeps his brain alive in a tank, and there are unintended consequences (of course)!

The movie is based on Curt Siodmak's best-selling 1942 novel by the same name. While Siodmak is probably best known as a Hollywood screenwriter for horror movies like The Wolf Man, he also wrote a number of science fiction novels. And he wasn't just interested in cheap thrills. In a 1997 interview, Siodmak talks about how took pains to assure scientific accuracy in his novels.

I have a trick with writing sci-fi [. . .] . In all these books there is a tremendous amount of research involved. I pick up the telephone and call the most important scientist I can think of in that field in America. So far they have all worked with me because they all are frustrated writers anyhow. If someone is writing [a book] for them, then they can correct it, which makes them feel they wrote it. I siphon off years of knowledge and research from those people for a small fee, or for a percentage of the book, whatever the case. But at the end, I have a story that is scientifically right. 

Apparently not one to mince words, Siodmak doesn't paint a pretty picture of scientists as wanna-be writers. I suppose it's a small consolation that he compensated them for their time and expertise.

In the novel version of Donovan's Brain, the brain is kept alive in a mixture of "blood serum" and human brain "tissue ash". That does appear to be based on the latest science in organ culture at the time the novel was written.

In the 1930s aviator Charles Lindbergh worked with biologist Alexis Carrel to develop devices to keep organs alive in culture. At the time, blood serum was one of the standard components of organ culture medium. Their work was widely known even outside scientific circles, and even making the cover of Time Magazine in 1935.

Around the same time, Dr. Fenton B. Turck published a book discussing his experiments indicating that tissue ash - tissues baked in an oven, then dissolved in saline solution - was usually toxic when injected into animals, but could stimulate cellular growth in vitro in low doses. He termed the active component "cytost", which appeared to be a species specific. So extracts made from dog tissues would be active more active when injected into dogs, than it would in pigs or monkeys. Taking that to it's logical conclusion, presumably such extracts from human brains would only work to stimulate the growth of other human brains. Unfortunately Turck's results were not reproducible, but that doesn't stop it from being a decent science fictional premise. (Turck also speculated about the possible toxic nature of mummy dust in Egyptian tombs, which is another great science fiction-horror premise.)

I couldn't find any indication that Siodmak had talked to scientists about how to grow a brain in a tank, but it seems that he could have derived inspiration just from the science news in the popular press.

Hauser's Memory, Siodmak's 1968 sequel to Donovan's Brain, likely was inspired by the James McConnell's research into memory transfer in cannibalistic planarians, which seemed at the time to be mediated by RNA. In developing the background for the novel, Siodmak also studied people with memory loss. As he described it:

 In researching that book, I worked at this hospital where they had 2,500 retarded children, insane and old people, too. I remember two old guys asking me, "Tell me, sir, are we going to lunch or coming from lunch?" They didn't know which. But they remembered what they had done when they were eight years old. So we might have a greater amount of RNA—ribonucleic acid—when we are young. As we get older, that substance dries up. That's why we can't learn new languages so easily when we get older, but kids pick it up right away. The growing process of the brain is based on RNA, which is why we learn so fast as kids. Even memory—and also what is right, what is wrong—is information you pick up easily as a child.

So what about the movie version?

There were three mid-20th century movies based on Donovan's Brain. Apparently Siodmak didn't care much for any of them.  He claims he didn't even bother to watch the 1953 Feist-directed version, because in it "God destroys Donovan's brain with a thunderbolt." So be warned that the movie has less scientific plausibility than the novel. Still, it's a decent B-movie for this holiday weekend.

Check it out:

• Watch Donovan's Brain at Hulu.com. Note: this movie may only be available in the US.
• Listen to a 1944 reading of Donovan's Brain, plus a parody by Orson Welles, on the old time radio show "Suspense".

 Further reading for the technically inclined:

• Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s, ed. Patrick McGilligan (1997) 
• Turck FB "The Action of the Living Cell: Experimental Researches in Biology" (1933) 
•  Lindbergh CA "An apparatus for the culture of whole organs" J Exp Med 62(3): 409-431 (1935) (Note that the text abstract is for the wrong article. Click on the Full Text link for the correct abstract) 
•  Carrel A "The culture of whole organs" J Exp Med 65(4): 515-526 (1937)

Image: The quintessential brain in a jar, by Flickr user Kaushik Narasimhan, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Asimov on science fiction, plausible science, and predicting the future

In 1975 Sy Bourgin interviewed prolific science fiction (and non-fiction) writer Isaac Asimov for the US Information Agency. I'm not sure that the interviewer had actually read many (or any) of Asimov's novels, but it's an interesting discussion all the same.

In the interview, Asimov is asked to comment on science fiction writers as futurists. He points out that most science fiction writers - including himself - are pretty bad at predicting what the future will look like:

"When people talk about how science fiction writers predict the present, it's because they've gone through a large corpus of work and picked out certain things. We can't just predict, there isn't enough story material in straight prediction. We make up futures. It doesn't matter whether we really think they'll come to pass or not. But we ask ourselves only if this will be interesting to deal with, if this will make a nice story, and then if some of them due come true, well...sure [it makes him feel very good]."

That is one of my pet peeves: reviewers (and sometimes authors) will pick out a tidbit from a science fiction story and use that as an example of the awesome powers of science fiction writers as technological fortune tellers. Often the "prediction" is vague or obvious enough that almost any development in that field of technology will appear to be a match. And they usually forget to mention all the stuff the author got wrong, which isn't  necessarily just the present-day lack of jetpacks and faster than light travel, but incorrect depictions of basic science. 

That's not to say that science fiction is needs to always be scientifically factual.  As Asimov points out, what's important to the story is that the science is at least plausible. And, to do that successfully, the writer needs to know when they are departing from reality. As he put it:

"You're allowed to depart from scientific possibility provided you know you're departing from it and can explain it. The reader will go along with you into the realm of fantasy if you give them an excuse. But to do it without realizing you are going into fantasy is insulting to the intelligent reader."

I think that the biological sciences often get short shrift in that regard. Science fiction is often so focused on physics and engineering that even basic cell biology, anatomy, evolution, and biochemistry are given short shrift.  Of course, Asimov's background as a biochemist at least let him understand when he was departing from reality in that regard.

But despite his claim that most science fiction authors' predictions don't come to pass, Asimov does talk about the future. He makes the point that technology is changing rapidly, which I think everyone can agree with:

"I think science fiction refers to different societies which are connected to ours through scientific and technological change. There is always that feeling that we are heading right now rapidly into changing societies. People who are young people today know that when they are middle aged that life will be nothing like what it is now. And science fiction gives them an opportunity to try in different societies. It's the only thing that's relevant. Anything that deals with the world of today is going to have no meaning to young people of today in say 30 years." 

I was just a kid in 1975, and while I don't like to think I'm middle aged now, the "young person of 1975" he's talking about could be me. I've seen massive changes in technology in my lifetime, from rotary phones to cell phones and video chatting. And 1975 was the infancy of the biotechnological revolution that has spawned technologies that allow fast genome sequencing, routine genetic engineering (at least of microorganisms) and even the cloning of mammals.  

But some technology hasn't changed that much.  Driving a car isn't all that different than when I learned to drive in the 80s, and we still haven't set up a colony on the moon. 

And what really hasn't changed that much are people.  Sure social mores and attitudes have changed significantly, and I think for the better. But we still have the same human desires and foibles that we did 30 years ago (not to mention a century ago). We still have interpersonal relationships and conflicts. And we still have the need for adventure and the desire to explore.  That's what makes older fiction still interesting and even relevant to the present day.

And I think Asimov's predictions for the society of 500 years from now is way off base. He says:

If by the year 2000 we have not solved the problems that face us today, then I would say in 500 years we'll see a world containing a  technological civilization in ruins, in which there will be a relatively small number of human beings, sort of surviving, and with New York City as the most magnificent ruin in the history of the human race.

By contrast, if we have "solved our problems" by the year 2000 he predicts that 500 years in the future we may be living in a utopia.

It's not clear to me whether Asimov really believed that all human problems actually could be solved in the 25 years following the interview, or if he was just pessimistic. Certainly we still have problems today, and I'd like to believe that doesn't mean the human race is doomed. There are always going to be social, political and technological "problems" for society to solve. I think that it's our ongoing willingness to try to resolve our problems peacefully and efficiently that will determine what our future will bring.

Watch the whole interview for more from Asimov about his prolific writing, non-English language science fiction writers, the plausibility of the biology in Fantastic Voyage, and space exploration. 

The interview is also available for viewing or download at archive.org.

Books mentioned include Asimov's Fantastic Voyage and Robot books, and Richard Adams' Watership Down (which Asimov calls "excellent fantasy"):

.  .

(Thanks to Zetetic Elench for posting the link to the video in this discussion on Google+)

Putting More Science into UK Fiction and Movies

A group of UK SF writers, including Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Geoff Ryman, Justina Robson, Simon Ings and Paul McAuley, are calling for a UK equivalent to the US Science & Entertainment Exchange, which connects scientists with the entertainment industry.

In their letter published in the Manchester Review they suggest that scientific credibility in entertainment is important to both scientists and the public:

In Britain, though, scientists, and people in arts, TV, movie and literary worlds do not work together as they should. This is a major problem: we all desperately need to understand each other’s constraints to create works that are entertaining, enlightening, and scientifically authentic. But worryingly, Britain is falling behind the United States, where organisations such as The National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange are forging these new and productive relationships between scientists and the entertainment industry.

The authors are participating in the "Putting Science in Fiction" symposium at the University of Manchester this week.  The scientists participating in the conference include biologist Matthew Cobb, astrophysicist Tim O'Brien, and paleontologist Phil Manning. They are joined by David A. Kirby, author of Lab Coats in Hollywood (sample chapters), and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, author of Science on Stage (sample chapter).

As Ryman told The Guardian, part of the problem is poor communication between scientists and science fiction writers:

"I work with a lot of scientists and one of the frustrating things they find is that all this fascinating stuff is being done which doesn't find its way into science fiction. They say look at the science fact pages – they're so much more imaginative than science fiction," said Ryman, winner for his novels of a British Science Fiction Association award, a World Fantasy award and an Arthur C Clarke award, and a creative writing lecturer at the University of Manchester. "It's my experience that scientists can find it difficult to understand the needs of scriptwriters or storytellers. [. . .]"

On this side of the Atlantic, the Science and Entertainment Exchange is a program of the US National Academy of Sciences. It will be interesting to see whether the UK group is successful in organizing a similar program with ties to the Royal Society or another scientific organization that can help with promotion within the scientific community.

And I wonder how interested the entertainment industry is in getting suggestions from scientists about "fascinating stuff" - from the interviews I've read on the Science and Entertainment Exchange site, it seems more common that scientists are asked to help with the implementation of scientific ideas that are already part of an existing screenplay. It seems to me that the more unusual scientific discoveries are more likely to appear in written science fiction than on TV or in the movies.  But maybe that's a misperception influenced by my entertainment choices.

In any case,  I strongly believe that popular culture influences the public perception of both science and scientists.  Any improvement in the interaction between scientists, writers, and members of the entertainment industry is good thing.

Vonda McIntyre on the inspiration for Dreamsnake

I was doing a bit of YouTube surfing and stumbled onto this video clip of Vonda McIntyre winning the 1979 Hugo Award for her novel Dreamsnake.  In her acceptance speech McIntyre acknowledges Avram Davidson, which made me curious what role he played in the story's genesis.

Dreamsnake, if you haven't read it (and you should), is set on a future Earth which has been laid to waste by nuclear war. Despite the widespread devastation, future humans have developed advanced biotechnology.  The story follows the adventures of a healer named Snake, who travels from community to community using her genetically engineered snakes to treat the sick and hurt.

Fortunately for my curiosity, McIntyre has explained the story-behind-the-story in an afterword to Dreamsnake posted at the Book View Cafe.  Avram Davidson was the writer in residence at the Clarion West writer's workshop.  In a session he was leading, Davidson wrote words on slips of paper that the workshop participants drew from a cup.  One of the words McIntyre drew was "snake" and one of her fellow students suggested that she create a main character named "Snake".  The other elements of the story eventually fell into place:

Finally, during Terry Carr's week as writer in residence, I realized that a serpent named Grass should have hallucinogenic venom. The idea came from out in the ozone (or maybe the back 40 again), and my only excuse for not realizing it sooner is that during the 1960s I was a science geek.
[. . . ]
The next day the story got a pretty good reception, though the class snake expert and boa constrictor owner said that even genetic engineering would not excuse a venomous python. Never mind, I said, it's too heavy to carry, I'll make it a cobra.

The finished novellette "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" won a Nebula award in 1974. The story was later expanded into the novel Dreamsnake which won both Nebula and Hugo awards.

It's cool to see what can develop from a single word and some science geekiness!

You can read "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" for free at the Book View Cafe.

You can purchase the Dreamsnake ebook directly from the Book View Cafe. An audiobook version Dreamsnake  is available from Amazon.com (affiliate link).

(thanks to Cheryl Morgan posting the video clip on her YouTube channel!)

Photo:Snake 006 by cygnus921, on Flickr

Previously: Vonda McIntyre and "Of Mist and Grass and Sand"

PD James: A Moral Fable

This is the last in my series of posts on science fiction author interviews in the Paris Review. Previously: Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Hortense Calisher, Doris Lessing.

I'm a fan of P.D. James. She's a master of her genre, which happens to be detective novels, rather than SF. However, I think her 1992 dystopian novel Children of Men should well be considered science fictional.

Children of Men opens in January of 2021, the last recorded birth on Earth - now 25 - has been killed in a bar fight. Our narrator describes how the declining birth rate and eventual universal infertility lead a world without children and a population sliding into despair and hopelessness.

The world didn't give up hope until the generation born in 1995 reached sexual maturity, But when the testing was complete and not one of them could produce fertile sperm we knew that this was indeed the end of Homo sapiens.   It was in that year, 2008, that the suicides increased.

It's a bleak picture she paints of future childless England - and very different from her realistic present-day crime novels.

In her 1995 Paris Review interview , James describes the science* that inspired her novel:

[. . . ] I don’t think of [Children of Men] as science fiction, as some have claimed. I didn’t set out to write a moral fable, but it came out that way. This time it was not a setting that inspired it, but the review of a scientific book drawing attention to a dramatic drop in the sperm count of Western men—fifty percent in as many years. I asked some scientists about this and they said that it was perhaps due to pollution. But the article drew attention to another factor: that of all the billions of life-forms that have inhabited this earth, most have already died out, that the natural end of man is to disappear too, and that the time our species has spent on this planet is a mere blink. So I wondered what England would be like, say, twenty-five years after the last baby was born and then for twenty-five years no one had heard the cry of a baby. I sat down and wrote it.

So she asked what kind of of future might arise from an extrapolation of present-day scientific findings. That definitely sounds like science fiction!

But the novel does feel very "English"  from my American point of view, much in the same way James' novels featuring the Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgleish do.  I'm not sure if it's the realistic-seeming setting in the English countryside or the characters' mannerisms, but that aspect of Children of Men doesn't seem very science fictional. In that way it's much closer to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, than "regular" science fiction.

Read the entire 1995 interview with P.D. James, in which she talks about being a feminist, writing about detectives, her belief in God and her preoccupation with death.

It's quite worth checking out all the Paris Review author interviews, since they cover a wide range of topics and, as Nicola Griffith pointed out, it's a  an excellent way for anyone interested in writing to "get an education, for free".
-------

* I think it's interesting that in the movie version of Children of Men, creator Alfonso Cuarón chose to twist the science underpinning the story 180 degrees by making women, rather than men, infertile. It isn't clear to me why that change was made. Cuarón has said the infertile women are a "metaphor for a fading sense of hope", but I don't why infertile men wouldn't play the same part - unless you think of male characters as individual humans, and female characters as symbols.

Doris Lessing: Sufism and Space Fiction

A continuation of my series of posts on science fiction author interviews in the Paris Review. Previously: Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Hortense Calisher.


Between 1979 and 1983 Nobel prize winning author Doris Lessing published five "space fiction" novels. The  Canopus in Argos series is influenced by Lessing's interest in the mystical and spiritual aspects of Sufism, and focuses on an advanced interstellar species accelerating the evolution of less advanced species.

The Canopus in Argos series was not Lessing's first dip in to science fiction.  Her 1969 novel The Four-Gated City  - sometimes called her most important work - begins in post-WWII Britain and follows the characters through a bloody future World War III at the close of the 20th century.

In her  interview published in the Spring 1988 edition of the Paris Review, Lessing talks about the role of the novelist in possible futures in fiction:

Lessing:  I know people say things like, “I regard you as rather a prophet.” But there’s nothing I’ve said that hasn’t been, for example, in the New Scientist for the last twenty years. Nothing! So why am I called a prophet, and they are not? 

Interviewer:  You write better. 

Lessing:  Well, I was going to say, I present it in a more interesting way. I do think that sometimes I hit a kind of wavelength—though I think a lot of writers do this—where I anticipate events. But I don’t think it’s very much, really. I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on.

 I think that's an interesting take on the "predictions" that so many science fiction writers lay claim to - it's not so much a special knowledge of science or current events that allows authors to do that, but the habit of thinking about the way the world works that allows for plausible extrapolations to be imagined.

Even though Lessing doesn't think of her novels as science fiction, it's not because she disdains the genre. She raves about Stanislaw Lem's Solaris - and about being the guest of the 1987 Worldcon:

I’ve just read a book by the Solaris bloke, Stanislav Lem. Now that’s real classic science fiction . . . full of scientific ideas. Half of it, of course, is wasted on me because I don’t understand it. But what I do understand is fascinating. I’ve met quite a lot of young people—some not so young either, if it comes to that—who say “I’m very sorry, but I’ve got no time for realism” and I say “My God! But look at what you’re missing! This is prejudice.” But they don’t want to know about it. And I’m always meeting usually middle-aged people who say, “I’m very sorry. I can’t read your non-realistic writing.” I think it’s a great pity. This is why I’m pleased about being guest of honor at [the World Science Fiction Convention, in Brighton] , because it does show a breaking down [of compartmentalization of SF and non-SF].

In the interview, Lessing says she's going to publish a sixth Canopus in Argos novel, a sequel to  The Sentimental Agents. That novel apparently never materialized, and she moved away from writing "space fiction". The "goblin child" story she talks about writing is likely The Fifth Child, published in 1988, and since then she has published other speculative fiction works (although  fantasy or horror, rather than science fiction).


Read the entire interview with Doris Lessing, for more about living in Persia and Africa, involvement with Sufism,  her writing habits, the "Jane Somers" hoax and having one of her  SFnovels turned into an opera by Philip Glass.

Tomorrow: The series wraps up with an interview with PD James.

Hortense Calisher: Alien Gender and "Math" vs. "Word" People

A continuation of my series of posts on science fiction author interviews in the Paris Review. Previously: Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury.

While the previous interviews in this series were with authors who should be familiar to most readers of both SF and literary fiction, Hortense Calisher's writing probably nearly so widely known to genre fiction fans*. Which isn't to say that she was in the least an obscure writer.

Calisher served terms as president of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the PEN international writers' association. Her short stories won an O. Henry Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and she was a finalist for the National Book Award three times. She had a number of stories published in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine  (subscription required).

Calisher's work is known for its "intellectually challenging fictional situations and complex plots", with "extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds".  She brought those writing qualities to her 1965 science fiction novel Journal from Ellipsia.  According to one review, the novel

... details the frequently comic misadventures of a genderless being from the planet Ellipsia, who comes to Earth to learn to be come human as part of an apparent exchange program between the two planets. To do so, s/he must learn the concept of "I-ness," having experienced only "we-ness" on Ellipsia.

When Calisher was interviewed for the Paris Review in 1987, the introduction describes it as anticipating the feminist fiction of the 1970s:

Her Journal from Ellypsia[sic] foretold by twenty years the 1970s’ preoccupation with issues of gender. Though Calisher resists the term feminist, her sense of direction and personal certainty might seem to suggest otherwise. 

In the interview,  Calisher describes how she trying to explore gender issues:

I was trying to get down to basic—a priori—flesh sensations in the beings we call the human animal. And in those we may know nothing of. It’s always amused me that run-of-the-mill science fiction—another genre I don’t go for—so often imputes our own sexual orientation to other possible worlds. Scientists themselves do the same. It’s hard not to.

Yeah, unfortunately that's a jab at "regular" science fiction - of course as a literary writer, she's not a fan.  (But to be fair, she could have enjoyed non-run-of-the-mill SF, whatever that might include.)

But she makes a valid point. Before the advent of the "New Wave" of the 1960s, most SF featured traditional gender roles and explicitly heterosexual heroes.  Before the 60s there weren't many SF authors exploring sexual orientation. And it's indeed true that scientists' implicit assumptions about gender differences can affect their interpretation of scientific data.

But sexual orientation and gender were not the only themes in Journal to Ellipsia. Calisher explains:

... I was interested in so much else in that book—the gap, for instance, between “word” people and “math” people, there for me ever since high-school algebra. Or between word philosophers and physicists, and their supposedly opposed explanations of the universe. When one critic called that book the first feminist book of the decade, I was utterly surprised. Flummoxed.

Not having read Journal from Ellipsia (which is long out of print), I can't comment on whether I would consider it feminist or not. But what Calisher seems to be saying is that she was surprised her novel was considered "feminist", because it did more than just explore gender roles.  If that is what she meant, I'm a bit surprised that she would be surprised, since even today many people associate being a "word" person with the feminine and being a "math" person with the masculine.

I looked up a couple of contemporary reviews of Journal from Ellipsia, and it seems to have been the sort of novel one either loves or hates. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for example, called it "undoubtedly the best science fiction novel of 1965", while the reviewer for Time Magazine thought it was "plonk" and suggested a potential reader should instead "throw it in the wastebasket". 

So putting the novel's aspects together - exploration of gender and differences between the worldviews of humanities and science; plus F&SF love and Time hate - it sounds like a book I need to find myself a copy to read.

Journal from Ellipsia was not Calisher's only book with speculative elements. Her 1983 novel Mysteries of Motion was set on a space shuttled in a then-future 1990.  She spent about a week doing technical research:

I read NASA’s own reports. Which stank to high heaven—excuse the pun—of bad possibilities. When the Challenger fell [in 1986], I was teaching a class at Brown. Students brought me the news. All I could say was “Yes.” Not that I was a prophet. It was just—all already there if you looked. Later I thought of going over the book to check all the stuff that had come true, but I couldn’t bear to at the time.

Even though one might consider a speculative near future story set in space would be science fictional,  the novel totally was not science fiction, at least according to the author.

Calisher - who died in 2009 - only wrote one other work of speculative fiction: the horror story "Heartburn", published in The American Mercury in 1951.

Read the full interview with Hortense Calisher at the Paris Review.

Tomorrow: Doris Lessing.
---
* Which is to say, I had never heard of her before reading this interview.

Ray Bradbury: The fiction of ideas and giving the gift of books

A continuation of my series of posts on science fiction author interviews in the Paris Review. Previously: Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut.

Ray Bradbury shouldn't need any introduction. His earliest stories were published in science fiction fanzines in the late 1930s. Since then, he has published hundreds of short stories and novellas;  a dozen novels, including The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, plus plays and poetry.

The Paris Review's interview with Ray Bradbury is a composite of unpublished interviews from the late 1970s, supplemented with additional discussions not long before publication in early 2010.  In it, he talks about reading, writing and what science fiction means to him:

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

That sounds like a solid definition. Of course what some people consider "impossible", others just consider "improbable", so, as ever, the boundary between fantasy and science fiction is a fuzzy one.

But whether fantasy or science fiction, Bradbury argues that books can inspire kids to become scientists or engineers or simply do something interesting with their lives.

That’s what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten, Hey, life is fun! Grow tall! I’ve talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. [. . .] I find this in most fields. The need for romance is constant, and again, it’s pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they’re going to stunt their kids. You can’t kill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance.

Although kids today are more likely to read Harry Potter or The Hunger Games series than Tarzan, I think his basic premise is right. Fantastic fiction can help kids (and adults) set their imaginations free, and inspire dreams of progress and adventure. 


Bradbury also talks about writing pensées - evocative poetic prose - like the description of the dinosaur in his short story "A Sound of Thunder":

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. [...]

He really can paint a picture with words, which is what I enjoy about Bradbury's writing.

Read the whole interview to find out about Bradbury's views on other writers, how he writes, and the stroke he suffered in 1999. Most of it is great, although I totally disagree with his opinion on the value of learning mathematics.

Tomorrow: Hortense Callisher

Kurt Vonnegut: War, Anthropology, and Atheism

This is a look at another SF authored who was interviewed by the Paris Review. The interviews with  Aldous Huxley and William S. Burroughs took place in the early 1960s. Now we jump ahead more than a decade to a 1977 interview with Kurt Vonnegut.

The Paris Review's interview with Kurt Vonnegut starts out with a discussion of Vonnegut's experiences as a infantry scout in during the Second World War.  His experience as a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden formed the basis for his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five - at least for the parts that weren't set in a zoo on the planet Tralfamador.

Before the war Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell University for several years. When he enlisted in the Army, he was transferred to the Carnegie Institute of Technology where he studied mechanical engineering. His studies were interrupted by the war.

After the war was over, Vonnegut went back to school to study anthropology as a post-grad at the University of Chicago. As he describes it, anthropology influenced his opinion of religion and his own atheism:

After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all.

[. . .] [Anthropology] confirmed my atheism, which was the faith of my fathers anyway. Religions were exhibited and studied as the Rube Goldberg inventions I’d always thought they were. We weren’t allowed to find one culture superior to any other. We caught hell if we mentioned races much. It was highly idealistic.

Those views would influence the depiction of the fictional island dictatorship of San Lorenzo in his Hugo-winning 1963 novel Cat's Cradle. The government of San Lorenzo promotes (by prohibiting) a made-up religion to control its population. 

Apparently a poor student, Vonnegut left the anthropology program without completing his degree.  Luckily one of the University of Chicago's deans was apparently a fan, and got Cat's Cradle accepted in lieu of Vonnegut's rejected thesis in 1971.  

Twenty years [after leaving the University of Chicago], I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. He had shown Cat’s Cradle to the anthropology department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree

According to Vonnegut it was a "piece of cake".

Several characters in Cat's Cradle were inspired by the scientists he met while working in the public relations department of General Electric in Schenectady, New York.  Even the idea for the novel's compound "ice-nine", supposedly came from Nobel-prize winning GE scientist Irving Langmuir.   The way Vonnegut tells it, he wasn't even the recipient of that suggestion:

[H.G.] Wells came to Schenectady, and Langmuir was told to be his host. Langmuir thought he might entertain Wells with an idea for a science-fiction story—about a form of ice that was stable at room temperature. Wells was uninterested, or at least never used the idea. And then Wells died, and then, finally, Langmuir died. I thought to myself: “Finders, keepers—the idea is mine.”

Even if Wells had used the idea in a story, I doubt it would have turned out anything like Vonnegut's version.

Read the whole interview for more of Vonnegut's reminiscences and thoughts on writers and writing.

Tomorrow: Ray Bradbury

William S. Burroughs: Body Modification and Biologic Courts

This continues the series on interviews with SF writers in the Paris Review. Yesterday, I posted about the 1960 interview with Aldous Huxley. Today, I'll take a look at the 1965 interview with William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1965. His weird and controversial novel Naked Lunch had been published in the United States in 1959. At the time this interview was published, its sale was still banned in Boston.

Burroughs was interviewed the year after publication of his Nebula award-winning novel Nova Express. Nova Express was the third book in his Nova Trilogy, and was assembled using the cut-up method, in which "existing texts ... cut into various pieces and put back together in random order." Definitely not what most people would think of a standard science fiction novel.

The plot summary for Nova Express makes it sound hallucinogenic:

The Nova Mob—Sammy the Butcher, Izzy the Push, The Subliminal Kid, and others—are viruses, "defined as the three-dimensional coordinate point of a controller."[...] "which invade the human body and in the process produce language." These Nova Criminals represent society, culture, and government, and have taken control. Inspector Lee and the rest of the Nova Police are left fighting for the rest of humanity in the power struggle. "The Nova Police can be compared to apomorphine, a regulating instance that need not continue and has no intention of continuing after its work is done."

The novel also apparently involves biologic police agents and legal battles between competing life forms are fought "Biologic Courts".

As Mac Tonnies described it, it's "the literary equivalent of downing a few vials of choice LSD".

In the Paris Review interview, Burroughs expands on the idea of that the future of the human race will involve genetic engineering and require some sort of "biologic law" and courts to mediate the changes.

Science eventually will be forced to establish courts of biologic mediation, because life-forms are going to become more incompatible with the conditions of existence as man penetrates further into space. Mankind will have to undergo biologic alterations ultimately, if we are to survive at all. This will require biologic law to decide what changes to make. We will simply have to use our intelligence to plan mutations, rather than letting them occur at random. Because many such mutations—look at the saber-toothed tiger—are bound to be very poor engineering designs. The future, decidedly, yes. I think there are innumerable possibilities, literally innumerable. The hope lies in the development of nonbody experience and eventually getting away from the body itself, away from three-dimensional coordinates and concomitant animal reactions of fear and flight, which lead inevitably to tribal feuds and dissension.  

I'm struck by how much that last part  - about the future of the human race eventually "getting away from the body itself"  - sounds like some modern proponents of transhumanism who see the divorce of the mind from the limitations of the body as one of their ultimate goals. A man ahead of his time, perhaps? or is it a simply reworking of Buddhist ideas of mind-body separation within a scientific frame? I don't know enough about Burroughs' ideas to tell the difference.

In the interview, Burroughs also talks a bit about the inevitable cross-fertilization of science and art:

In the first place, I think there's going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific.

Perhaps inspired by this notion is the "Mutate or Die" project, which involves isolating and manipulating DNA from a preserved sample of Burroughs' poop.  It definitely involves science, and it's meant to be art.

Read the whole interview for more from Burroughs about cut-ups, addiction, and how he created his fictional characters.


Tomorrow: Interview with Kurt Vonnegut.

Paris Review Interview with Aldous Huxley: Psychedelic Drugs and Enlightenment

A few months ago, Nicola Griffith posted that the Paris Review had opened its archives of author interviews, back to 1953. I don't usually read literary magazines, but I finally got a chance to browse through the Paris Review's archives. It is quite interesting to see what the science fiction writers they interviewed have to say about science and their fiction.

Of course the authors they interview are all "literary" sorts of authors^*, and they wouldn't necessarily agree that their writings that I would consider science fictional are SF. Even so, the authors did take into account science in their writing.

I thought I'd highlight a few of the interviews that touched on the biosciences. The first is an interview with Aldous Huxley, in which he talks about his ideas about society and drugs.

When Huxley was interviewed in 1960, he was 65 years old at the time of this interview, and working on his novel Island, which would be his last. Island depicts a utopian community, that is a counterpoint to the dystopian society he depicted in Brave New World. Huxley describes his work in progress:

It’s a kind of fantasy, a kind of reverse Brave New World, about a society in which real efforts are made to realize human potentialities. I want to show how humanity can make the best of both Eastern and Western worlds. So the setting is an imaginary island between Ceylon and Sumatra, at a meeting place of Indian and Chinese influence. One of my principal characters is, like Darwin and my grandfather**, a young scientist on one of those scientific expeditions the British Admiralty sent out in the 1840s; he’s a Scotch doctor, who rather resembles James Esdaile, the man who introduced hypnosis into medicine. And then, as in News from Nowhere and other utopias, I have another intruder from the outside world, whose guided tour provides a means of describing the society. Unfortunately, he’s also the serpent in the garden, looking enviously at this happy, prosperous state.

The islanders take moksha medicine, a fungus-derived psychedelic drug. As it's described in the final version of the novel the drug helps liberate consciousness and bring self-knowledge:

Their response is the full-blown mystical experience. You know—One in all and All in one. The basic experience with its corollaries— boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning.

"Not to mention joy," said Dr. Robert, "inexpressible joy."

In contrast, in Brave New World, the drug soma is described as making people content, complacent, and able to ignore the difficulties of their daily lives. Linda, mother of the "savage" John, takes massive doses to cope with her return to civilation:

The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses.

The permanent soma-induced holiday leads to Linda's death.


Huxley's different take on drug use in his two novels appears to be based - at least in part - on his own experimentation with drugs in the years between publication of Brave New World and his work on The Island. In his interview, Huxley talks about drugs in Brave New World and in real life, based on his drug-taking experiences that he described in his non-fiction book The Doors of Perception.

Soma is an imaginary drug, with three different effects—euphoric, hallucinant, or sedative—an impossible combination. Mescaline is the active principle of the peyote cactus, which has been used for a long time by the Indians of the Southwest in their religious rites. It is now synthesized. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) is a chemical compound with effects similar to mescaline; it was developed about twelve years ago, and it is only being used experimentally at present. Mescaline and lysergic acid transfigure the external world and in some cases produce visions. Most people have the sort of positive and enlightening experience I’ve described; but the visions may be infernal as well as celestial. These drugs are physiologically innocuous, except to people with liver damage. They leave most people with no hangover, and they are not habit-forming. Psychiatrists have found that, skillfully used, they can be very helpful in the treatment of certain kinds of neuroses.

So Huxley seems to have formed his later ideas about drugs through a combination of personal experience and science. Mescaline and LSD were both made illegal in the US in 1970, seven years after Huxley's death. I suspect it's less likely that present-day authors would feel so free to experiment with psychedelics - or at least freely discuss their experimentation.

Be sure to read the whole interview for more from Huxley on his writing process and thoughts about fiction.

Tomorrow I'll look at the Paris Review interview with William S. Burroughs.
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* You can tell they are "literary" writers from the covers of their novels: rather than illustrated characters or scenes, they usually just abstract images and text.


** Aldous Huxley's grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, known as "Darwin's bulldog" for his support of Darwin and advocacy on behalf of his evolutionary theory.

Paolo Bacigalupi: Science fiction that makes us look at the world through a different lens

In May Paolo Bacigalupi gave a talk at the Google offices in San Francisco, not long after winning the Nebula Award for his novel The Windup Girl

He talked about how science fiction can "stretch the normal" like a rubber band, that eventually snaps back and makes people look at the present differently (quoted from the transcript:

So the thing I like about science fiction is the opportunity to take what looks normal and then to twist it, to- to take an idea and stretch it out into some unreasonable place where you think the world is going to be safe and stable, and then to rip the floor out from underneath you and drop you into something else. Ideally that process is a bit like stretching a rubber band. You pull somebody out into a different world, and then you let the rubber band snap. And when people come back to this world they're going to look at our place now, the present, with a different lens as well. And that's really the thing that excites me about science fiction.

Bacigalupi also talks about using science fiction to make people environmental issues that might otherwise be ignored:

"[to] look at drought or look at how chemicals might disrupt our endocrine systems and turn us all into stupid people. Or how agricultural companies with their IP and their terminator genes might actually really change the way that we interact with food. [. . .] And maybe interact with in a more tangible, visceral way than we would otherwise.


[. . . ] Yes, I want my characters to be interesting. Yes I want my stories to be fascinating and gripping.  And yes, I actually am this evangelist banging on my pulpit trying to get people to pay attention to some things that are pretty interesting and fundamental. And that we mostly spend our time not looking at. And that we prefer not to.

He also reads from his disturbing short story "Pop Squad" and his all-too-plausible tale of drought "The Tamarisk Hunter"

Watch the video:



A few samples of Bacigalupi's short fiction with biological themes you can read for free:

• Small Offerings (@ Tor.com)
• The Tamarisk Hunter (originally published in High Country News)
• The Calorie Man (sample from Windup Stories)

Bio in SF Bits 8/16/10

Cleaning out my (much too long) list of bookmarks:

On the Influence of SF: 

Letters of Note: He was there with you on the bridge
A woman writes to Patrick Stewart about how much pleasure Star Trek: TNG gave her son with muscular dystrophy.

All through last year Wednesday evening was his highlight of the week, his excitement being matched only by his anger if "Star Trek TNG" was cancelled. I think that in his imagination he was there with you on the bridge, free of any disability, sharing to the full in all your adventures - he never missed one.

Big Think: Interview with neurophysiologist Vincent Pieribone

Science fiction is huge, but it doesn’t translate into science reality for students.  They love to go see science fiction films, but I think science is not nearly as exciting today as the science fiction is.  I got a lot of people who show up in the lab and they think every day is going to be like Mr. Spock running around the deck of the Enterprise making huge discoveries and stuff.  And it’s a little slow.  It’s a lot of [pipetting] and you know, things don’t work and like any job, it’s really like any job.

Timmi Duchamp @ Ambling Along the Aqueduct: Because culture, not nature, is the problem (on Helen Merrick's "Engaging the sciences through feminist science fiction")

In this article she argues that feminist science fiction has the potential for bridging the "two culture divide" that persists in feminist scholarship-- the divide between the sciences and the humanities. 

On Science in SF

At ScienceOnline2010:  Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette discuss "how online video and social networking tools are playing a part in connecting science, Hollywood and its fans."

Gary Westfahl @ IROSF: No Bark and No Bite

Dogs, in contrast [to cats], appear to be relatively rare in the science fiction futures of all media, with few examples coming to mind. [. . . ] Could the reason be simply that most members of the science fiction community, like myself, tend to like cats better than dogs? Or is there some logical reason for this curious imbalance in the genre's predictions?

Mark Terry @ Tobias Buckell's blog: It's all science fiction, right?

I have a degree in microbiology and public health, spent some times in an infectious disease research lab, then worked about 18 years in a clinical genetics lab before turning to writing full time. So I can safely say that what goes on in those TV shows about forensics have about as much in common with how real crime labs operate as Star Trek has to do with how NASA operates.

Juliette Wade @ TalkToUniverse: Body Models and Metaphors

The aliens we create can similarly have different models and metaphors for the body and its operation, and if you use those things to your advantage, they can influence characters' behavior and judgments, and possibly even the plot of a story. If a character were injured for example, why would or wouldn't he/she decide to get treatment? How would that influence the course of the story? Would two people from different countries in a fantasy world have different ideas of how the body worked and what kind of treatment would be good for it? Might one believe that washing with soap was dangerous (as we used to), while the other believed it was necessary for sanitary treatment?

Deborah J. Ross @ Book View Cafe: Not Just Another Funny Forehead: Creating Alien Characters

Since I loved invertebrate zoology in college, I used the gastropod family as a model [for my aliens in Jaydium]. In doing so, I violated a slew of biological realities (including the limits on size of creatures that don’t have skeletons, internal or external, as well as the limiting rate of oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange). And yet, what I did worked. No one, not even my professor (to whom I presented a copy) railed at me for scientific idiocy.

Mary Catelli: Babies in World Building

One world building error that I find as often in SF as in fantasy:  many, many, many writers neglect to figure out Where Babies Come From and Why It Matters. 

Alien Romances: Pull out the genitalia

[. . . ]we could give the peculiar goolies to the alien villain... as long as he is not a close relative of the hero. This could be quite useful. The heroine doesn't have to see them. The gentle reader only has to hear about them. Yet, the point is made that aliens have evolved differently.

jeremy @The Voltage Gate: The walk from dreamed inspiration to story

It was 12:40 a.m. when I rolled out of bed, only three hours after falling asleep. The dream had ended at what seemed to be a confounding crossroads, but as I paced to the bathroom, groggy, I was already working out what happened next. The story that my unconscious had crafted was now being filled out consciously.'

Written SF

At Tor.com there's an interesting discussion going on of the new Heinlein biography.  See the round up of posts here.

L. Timmel Duchamp reviews Anil Menon's the Beast with Nine Billion Feet for Strange Horizons

The Beast with Nine Billion Feet tells a story in which the characters' personal lives and relationships become inextricably braided into an ideological conflict pitting two takes on the material consequences of biotechnology in bitter opposition.

Metafilter: James P. Hogan, author of Inherit the Stars, died on July 12th


Metafilter: The Waves of Sand Roll On (Frank Herbert and the Oregon Dunes)

Golden Age Comic Book Stories has great scans of Ed Cartier's illustrations for Travelers of Space

JC Hallman @ Bookslut: Jurassic Park and the Utopia Wars

The maddening thing is that when you try to explain something like Pleistocene Rewilding to someone who’s never even heard of it, you discover that before your utopian vision is complete, the dystopian retort is already in place: “Sounds like Jurassic Park to me.” That Jurassic Park might veil an ideology is a fact that many, it seems, would prefer their grave to accepting.

At the Mad Hatter Review Lavie Tidhar reviews Luna: The Genetic Paradise:

In brief, what Moav proposes is the establishment of a society along the lines of selective breeding, a complex structure dictating how many children—and with whom—anyone can have, based on their “humanity index”, a combination of IQ, artistic talent, and social-moral behaviour, with the focus on moral quality. Inherent in this scheme is Moav’s conviction that moral behaviour has a genetic basis, and can be passed on from parent to child.

The Phoenix interviews Paolo Bacigalupi about The Windup Girl:

When I say science fiction, I think of classic Foundation, I think of rocket ships. But there's this other tradition of science fiction, which is sort of the stealth version. It's the stuff you see with Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, where you're extrapolating about who are we, where are we going, what our society looks like, and I feel very connected to that strain of science-fiction writing.

And Bacigalupi was interviewed by Annalee Newitz at io9 about the future of hard science fiction:

I do research, but it's after stuff has percolated for a while. When I was an editor at High Country News I was reading all their stuff. There was a one-liner about checkerspots in [my short story] "The Gambler" - stuff like that, which I've absorbed elsewhere, drops in at convenient places as I'm writing. I'm always reading environmental journalism. Science writers point the way to interesting stories.

John Scalzi interviews Ted Chiang about The Lifecycle of Software Objects:

People routinely attempt to describe the human brain’s capabilities in terms of instructions per second, and then use that as a guidepost for predicting when computers when be as smart as people.  I think this makes about as much sense as judging the brain by the amount of heat it generates.

SF Signal interviews Jeff VanderMeer about The Third Bear

I wanted to show progressions and commonalities of theme or style. For example, "The Situation" with its biotech is followed up by a Dr. Moreau-type tale. A story about trying to find something that can never be found is followed by a story about wanting to be lost. I tried to also vary the length where possible. For example, the longer "Errata" and "Appoggiatura" couldn't really go back to back. "Appoggiatura" didn't feel like a story that could have anything come after it, so it's last. It has the finality of "The Third Bear" but also an openness to its ending. Some, like "Shark God vs Octopus God," are placed as palate cleansers.

Book Trailer for Scott Sigler's Ancestor a "bone crunching tale of high-tech horror"


Kay Holt @ Science in My Fiction: I know why the vampire sparkles!

By now, I’m sure you’re all with me; vampires are bugs. But what kind? It took me a while to figure it out, but now I’m convinced that vampires are nothing more than overgrown, parasitic…

Joel at Twelve Hours Later on "Year of the Rat"

In “Year of the Rat” (鼠年), published in the May 2009 issue of Science Fiction World, Stanley Chan Qiufan (陈楸帆) gives his unemployable college seniors an opportunity to serve their country by joining up with a rat-fighting brigade. Armed with crude spears, the new recruits hunt Neorats (新鼠), genetically-altered rodents that escaped from the incubators where they were being raised for export to international markets. It’s brutal work, particularly as the rats begin to evolve in ways that make them harder to track and kill, but the young men have no other choice [. . . ]

 Elizabeth Bear: long past their woodland days

It will probably come as a surprise to nobody, but I love me some science fiction. 
But recently, an acquaintance asked "Do you believe in science fiction?" Being in a contrary mood, I answered "no." What I meant, I admitted when pressed, was that I did not believe in the valorization of SF as the literature that's going to somehow save the world.

Television

The Science and Entertainment Exchange's has an overview of the "Watching the Watchmen and Cheering the Heroes: The Science of Superheroes" panel at the 2010 AAAS meeting.

The question of how much of who we are is genetically determined, and how much is a factor of environment and the choices/decisions we make, underlies the entire story arc of Heroes, which explores the question of destiny versus free will when it comes to our identity, our abilities -- and our future.

Script PhD interviews the science adviser for Fringe. 

And Popular Mechanics looks at some of the science in the most recent season of Fringe: Fringe Double Feature Plays with Mutation and Exorcism, Does Fringe's Virus Eradication Plan Hold Up?,  Fringe's Killer Biological Weapon is Rooted in Fact


American Physical Society: The Futurama of Physics with David X. Cohen
Futurama Executive Producer and head writer David Cohen on his background in physics:

Cohen knew from an early age he wanted to be a scientist–he was directly influenced by both of his parents being biologists. “It became a matter of which science I would go into,” he recalls. He had always gravitated towards math and physics and computers, and contemplates that his choice to pursue physics in college was perhaps “a pathetic form of rebellion against my parents.”

Regeneration in Doctor Who was modeled on "Acid Trips"

Metafilter post rounds up links to BBC documentary series on British science fiction

Movies

Scott Pierce of Popular Mechanics talks to the CDC about the Franken-Virus in the Crazies

Eisner spoke with the CDC's Steve Monroe to figure out the possibility of manufacturing a virus in a toxin that switches from a waterborne illness to an airborne disease as it mutates. "The filmmakers clearly realized that they were going to stretch reality, but wanted to know about what was possible," Monroe says.

Scott Sigler's AMC column is about the use of protoplasm in Hollywood

When you think of slime creatures in real life, you may first think of the amoeba," says Tom Merritt, a Ph.D. in virology, gene therapy, and human molecular genetics. "These living slime packets are great, as you can throw them into liquid nitrogen -- freezing them instantly and suspending life itself -- then just thaw them out later like nothing happened. I don't think the same can be said for Ted Williams."

io9: The Hyperevolved Fish are Ready for Sexytime in  Humanoids from the Deep

Dayle McClintock @ Tor.com: Mega Piranha: an interview with director Eric Forsberg

I always research my projects. In this case, I did not research genetically-manipulated piranha. I did research food projects ongoing in South America.

Hero Complex: 'Planet of the Apes' Again? Yes Hollywood Still Has a Monkey on Its Back

Stephen Popkes @ Book View Cafe: Understanding Evolution

. . . I saw Cameron’s Avatar a few weeks back. I knew immediately that the aliens (the Na’vi) were not native to the planet.
Why? You might ask.

WolfGnards: How Long Could Luke Survive in a Tauntaun?

Games

GamePro: The real science of StarCraft 2 

GamePro: The real science of Mass Effect 2