HG Wells, the Book of Nature, and the Ever Continuing Processes of Evolution

It is sometimes forgotten that the great early science fiction author HG Wells studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley (known as "Darwin's Bulldog") and earned a Bachelor's degree in Zoology. He taught science for a number of years before becoming a full time writer. He wrote both non-fiction and fiction, with similar themes in both sorts of works. For example, in the 1893 edition of his Text-Book of Biology, he writes of the importance of evolution:

It is in the demonstration of this wonderful unity in life, only the more confirmed the more exhaustive our analysis becomes, that the educational value and human interest of biology chiefly lies. In the place of disconnected species of animals, arbitrarily created, and a belief in the settled inexplicable, the student finds an enlightening realization of uniform and active causes beneath an apparent diversity. And the world is not made and dead like a cardboard model or a child's toy, but a living equilibrium; and every day and every hour, every living thing is being weighed in the balance and found sufficient or wanting. 

He concludes that the "book of nature" is as dramatic as a novel.

In the book of nature there are written, for instance, the triumphs of survival, the tragedy of death and extinction, the tragi-comedy of degradation and inheritance, the gruesome lesson of parasitism, and the political satire of colonial organisms. Zoology is, indeed, a philosophy and a literature to those who can read its symbols.

It's not surprising, then, that his 1895 novella The Time Machine the drama derives at least in part from the time traveler's discovery that 800,000 years in the future humanity had evolved into two different species, the beautiful but passive and not particularly bright Eloi, descended from the aristocracy, and the monstrous machine-using Morlocks, originally the working class.

The original serialized version of The Time Machine included a chapter in which the time traveler journeys even further into the distant future and finds that humans have evolved further into grey-furred herbivores. Wells' time traveler concludes that

If you come to think, there is no reason why a degenerate humanity should not come at last to differentiate into as many species as the descendants of the mud fish who fathered all the land vertebrates.

(This chapter was excluded in the book edition, but later published separately as the short story "The Grey Man".)

This is quite different from the popular view of evolution as a ladder, with humans occupying the top-most rung and thus never changing, except, perhaps, to become smarter, longer lived, or otherwise "improved".

It is not that much of a surprise, then, that scientific journal Nature's contemporary review of The Time Machine pointed specifically to Wells' use of realistic science in the narrative.

Apart from its merits as a clever piece of imagination, the story is well worth the attention of the scientific reader, for the reason that it is based so far as possible on scientific data, and while not taking it too seriously, it helps one to get a connected idea of the possible results of the ever-continuing processes of evolution.  Cosmical evolution, it may be remarked, is in some degree subject to mathematical investigations [...] It is naturally in the domain of social and organic evolution that the imagination finds its greatest scope.

I think of this when science fiction writers play fast and loose with evolutionary biology while going into excruciatingly accurate details about planetary orbits or the engineering details of improbable alien artifacts or future technologies. There's no reason not to at least try to be as accurate in the details of evolutionary science, as Wells tried to do well over a century ago.

Read more:

• HG Wells "The Text-Book of Biology" (1893) at the Hathi Trust and Project Gutenburg 
• HG Wells "The Time Machine" (1895) at Project Gutenburg
• HG Wells "The Grey Man" (originally Chapter 11 of the serialized version of the "Time Machine")
• Reviewing Wells "The Time Machine", June 1895 in Nature @ Ptak Science Books

Image: Picture HG Wells about 1890 by LSE Library on Flickr (no known copyright restrictions)

Evolution, popular fiction, and the Lost World

Biology in fiction quote of the day:

Conan Doyle was born in the year of [Charles Darwin's] The Origin. By his fifty-third birthday, the theory of evolution had become so widely accepted that a literary hack could use it as the centrepiece of a work of fiction. Doyle  (who had read the reports of the British explorer who discovered the unique island in the sky) seized he chance and his book sold hundreds of thousands of copies to a well-primed public.

The quote comes from geneticist Steve Jones' entertaining book about Darwin's work as a scientist and evolution:  The Darwin Archipelago: The Naturalist's Career Beyond Origin of Species.

The "work of fiction" he's describing is Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World,  set on isolated plateau high above the Amazon jungle where dinosaurs and other great beasts live side-by-side with humans and "primitive ape-men".  Evolution is a running theme in the novel.

One of Doyle's characters - Professor Challenger - is an expert on the evolutionary theories of Darwin and August Weisman. He pontificates on how animals that we think of as being separated by millions of years of evolutionary history could end up living together in the present day:

"My own reading of the situation for what it is worth—" he inflated his chest enormously and looked insolently around him at the words—"is that evolution has advanced under the peculiar conditions of this country up to the vertebrate stage, the old types surviving and living on in company with the newer ones. Thus we find such modern creatures as the tapir—an animal with quite a respectable length of pedigree—the great deer, and the ant-eater in the companionship of reptilian forms of jurassic type. So much is clear. 

Challenger is arrogant and annoying and challenges the scientific dogma of his colleagues who are, not surprisingly, reluctant to believe his claims about living dinosaurs. But even though he's outside the scientific mainstream, he's not claiming that evolution doesn't happen, but that it works on a different time scale, at least in exotic isolated locations.

That's the point that Jones makes in his comment: Doyle's "paleontological romance", as one contemporary review described it,  takes the workings of evolution for granted. And that scientific point of view didn't seem to affect the popularity of the novel a century ago.

When creationists claim that there is enough "controversy" about evolution that it should be taught side-by-side with creationism (or "intellectual design") in the science classroom, they are ignoring the fact that evolutionary theory has been accepted science - even in the popular imagination - for well over a century.

But Jones' contention that Doyle was a hack?  That I take exception to.

Further reading:

• The Lost World at Project Gutenberg or download on your Kindle (free)
• an excerpt of The Darwin Archipelago (pdf), one of the many free downloads of evolution and climate change books offered by the National Center for Science Education.
• Darwin Online - the complete works of Charles Darwin
•  The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity by August Weismann (1893)

Image: still from the The Lost World (1925) movie

John Carter versus the Clone Army

The Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs is filled with technological marvels. Earthman John Carter discovers the Martians have anti-gravity "fliers", disintegrator ray weapons, and even a great factory that maintains the atmosphere of the planet.

The Martians also have advanced medicine and biological technology.  Indeed the great Martian scientist Ras Thavas - known as The Master Mind of Mars -  has perfected biotechnological techniques that are both fantastic and terrible.

Burrough's 1939 novel Synthetic Men of Mars reveals Ras Thavas's greatest achievement: a vast army of clones.

After Ras Thavas was driven from his great laboratories by Vobis Kan, Jeddak of Toonol," explained Gan Had, "he came to this island to perfect a discovery he had been working on for years. It was the creation of human beings from human tissue. He had perfected a culture in which tissue grew continuously. The growth from a tiny particle of living tissue filled an entire room in his laboratory, but it was formless. His problem was to direct this growth. He experimented with various reptiles which reproduce certain parts of their bodies, such as toes, tails, and limbs, when they are cut off; and eventually he discovered the principle. This he has applied to the control of the growth of human tissue in a highly specialized culture.

From a mass of cultured undifferentiated human cells, Ras Thavas was able to grow arms, legs and eventually whole bodies.  The "synthetic men", known as hormads, would all be genetically identical to both the original human cells and to each other, making them clones even though that term is never used.

The technology isn't perfect. Most of the synthetic men aren't very smart or physically attractive.  And left unsupervised, the process can fail horribly:

"In fact things seem to go all wrong without him," and when I reached the first vat room I realized that that was a crass understatement of fact. Things couldn't well have been much worse. The floor was covered with the remains of hideous monstrosities that the officers had had to have destroyed. The parts still lived. Legs were trying to walk, hands were clutching at whatever came within reach, heads were lying about screaming and moaning. 

A gruesome sight.

So where did Burroughs find his inspiration for Ras Thavas's mad science?  My guess is that he was influenced, at least in part, by the research of French biologist and surgeon Alexis Carrel.  In 1912 Carrel took a piece of embryonic chicken heart and placed it in a flask with nutrients. He successfully cultured the cells for decades, a feat that caught the public's imagination. In the 1930s Carrel (along with aviator Charles Lindbergh) went on to develop techniques that allowed human organs to be kept alive outside the body during surgery. This achievement was also celebrated in popular culture, with Carrel appearing on the cover of Time Magazine in 1938.

Carrel's achievements inspired a number of writers during science fiction's "Golden Age", from Arch Oobler's 1937 radio play "Chicken Heart" in which cultured cells escape the lab and threaten to engulf the world, to the "Chicken Little" food source in  Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.  The ever-growing human cells in Synthetic Men of Mars fits right in with these stories.

But science doesn't really play a central role in Burroughs' novels.  Instead science and technology and unusual creatures are a backdrop for the real story, which usually involves a fight (or three) and romance.  In Synthetic Men, it turns out that some of the hormads are quite intelligent, and they gather their brethren into an army in hopes of conquering the world.  The hero - in this case the Martian Vor Daj - and John Carter work together to destroy the terrible mass of tissue and hormads run amok.  And Vor Daj finds love, despite having his brain transplanted into an ugly hormad body.

You can read the rest of the story for yourself:

Project Gutenburg Australia has a copy of the Synthetic Men of Mars. If you are not in Australia, you can purchase an ebook: Kindle version (Amazon.com, affiliate link)
Further reading:

• ERBzine has a detailed review, along with a great collection of covers from different editions of Synthetic Men of Mars.
• Related Biology in Science Fiction post: Cultured Meat
• Witkowski, JA "Dr. Carrel's Immortal Cells" Medical History 24:129-142 (1980) (note: pdf)

Top image: Cover of Synthetic Men of Mars, 1963 edition

Middle image: Colony of human embryonic stem cells by Ryddragyn at Wikimedia Commons. Bottom image: Fan cover of Synthetic Men of Mars by zimeta08 on DeviantArt

Controlling Our Creations Through Nutritional Requirements: Lessons from Science Fiction

Last week a group of over 100 environmental and watchdog organizations released a report proposing increased government regulation of synthetic biology, which they consider "extreme genetic engineering". The report calls for a moratorium on the release and commercial use of synthetic organisms until such regulations are in place. Their position is a that drastic measures are necessary to protect both the public and the environment.

Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees with that assessment. Representatives of the biotechnology industry have pointed out that synthetic biology is part of the ongoing development of genetic engineering technology that is already covered by rules and regulations. And in 2010 a presidential bioethics commission concluded that no new regulations covering the use of synthetic biology were necessary.

One concern expressed by all parties is that "synthetic" organisms could escape into the environment.Where the disagreement lies is whether current technologies are sufficient for containment.

The presidential commission's report suggests that such organisms could be designed to have limited lifespans or to be dependent on nutrients only available in the laboratory. Such biological barriers to the spread of genetically engineered organisms have been part of the earliest recommendations for safe use of recombinant DNA technology.

The groups calling for a moratorium on the development of synthetic organisms claim that such measures are likely not sufficient and further study is required to ensure that such biological barriers work outside the laboratory.

So what is the lesson that can be learned from science fiction? If creatures are unable to synthesize all the compounds necessary for their growth and sustenance - auxotrophs - can indeed be contained if their nutritional requirements are alien enough.

"Look, we're not fools. We understand these are prehistoric animals. [...]They might have no predators in the contemporary world, no checks on their growth. We don't want them to survive in the wild. So I've made them lysine dependent. I inserted a gene that makes a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. As a result, the animals cannot manufacture the amino acid lysine. They must ingest it from the outside. Unless they get a rich dietary source of exogenous lysine - supplied by us, in tablet form - they'll go into a coma within twelve hours and expire. These animals are genetically engineered to be unable to survive in the real world. They can only live here in Jurassic Park...."

Take, for example, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. As noted in the quoted text, they were designed to only be able to live on a diet with high levels of the amino acid lysine. Since the local plants and animals in the Park wouldn't be able to supply the necessary nutrients, they could only survive on a diet provided by their handlers. That worked, at least for a while, but the setup had a fatal flaw.

Lysine is an amino acid, one of the twenty standard building blocks of protein. If an organism cannot synthesize one or more of those building blocks in its own cells, then it must eat foods that contain those amino acids to survive.

Humans normally require nine such essential amino acids in their diet, including lysine. That means that a balanced human diet must include foods rich in lysine, such as meat or beans. And that also meant that when a few dinosaurs were able to escape their island in Jurassic Park, they were able to survive on lysine-rich crops and meats on the farms managed by the local human population.

A dietary restriction that can be easily filled by eating the local produce is not a great way to contain your engineered critter. A better approach would use a nutritional requirement that cannot be so easily filled by Earthly plants or animals.

You can find that scenario in science fiction as well. In Michael Flynn's novel Eifelheim alien travelers - Krenk - were stranded in 14th century Germany where they eventually begin to starve. One of the alien scientists explains the problem to the local priest:

"There are certain . . . materials – acids is your alchemic word–which are essential for life. Perhaps four score of these acids befall in nature–and we Krenken need one-and-twenty of them to live. Our bodies produce naturally nine, so we must from our food and drink obtain the others. That food which you have shared with us holds eleven of those twelve. One is lacking, and our alchemist found it nowhere in all the foodstuffs he proofed. Without that particular acid, there is one . . . I must call it a 'firstling', as it is the first building block of the body, though I suppose it shoudl wear one of your Greekish terms."
"Proteios,"Dietrich craoked. "Proteioi."
"So. It puzzles me why you use different 'tongues' to speak of different matters. This Greekish for natural philosophy; the Latinish for matters touching your lord-from-the-sky."
Dietrich seized the Krenk by his forearm. The rough spines that ran its length pricked his hand, drawing blood. "That makes nothing!" he cried. "What of thisprotein?"
"Without this acid, the protein cannot be formed, and lacking it, our bodies slowly corrupt."

Earth foods, it seems, don't contain the full range of amino acids essential to the Krenk diet. They try to sustain themselves by extracting the essential nutrients from their dead companions. And even so they died, because their lives depended on a diet with truly alien components.

So the science fictional lesson is to engineer organisms that require amino acids or other nutritional building blocks that found nowhere in nature if you want to make sure that they are truly unable to live outside the confines of a laboratory. And that may eventually become a reality.

Scientists have successfully been able to engineer microorganisms, animal cells, and even nematode worms  that are able to incorporate several different unnatural amino acids into their proteins. And, more recently, bacteria were engineered to incorporate a normally toxic modified nucleic acid base in their DNA. So the research looks promising.

But scientists are not yet able to create animals or plants that we can be reasonably certain would be unable to live in the wild. And life is so adaptable, there may always be the possibility that biological containment will ultimately fail.

So the question remains whether escaping organisms represent a high enough danger to the environment that current research should be more tightly regulated or put on hold. Or do the potential benefits of synthetic biology - novel sources of energy, more effective drugs, improved crops - outweigh the risks? I'm hoping for the latter.

Background reading:

• "The Principals for the Oversight of Synthetic Biology" (2012) (pdf)
• "New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies", Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (2010)
• Berg P. et al "Summary Statement of the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules" PNAS 72;1981-1984 (1975) doi:10.1073/pnas.72.6.1981 (pdf)
• Wang, Q; Parrish, AR; Wang, L. "Expanding the Genetic Code for Biological Studies". Chemistry & Biology 16 (3): 323–36. (2009) doi:10.1016/j.chembiol.2009.03.001.
• Young TS and Schultz PG "Beyond the Canonical 20 Amino Acids: Expanding the Genetic Lexicon" J. Biol. Chem. 285: 11039-11044 doi:10.1074/jbc.R109.091306
• Freie Universitaet Berlin. "Bacterium engineered with DNA in which thymine is replaced by synthetic building block." ScienceDaily, 28 Jun. 2011.

Top image: The bacteria Shewanella putrefaciens use chemical signals to coordinate biofilm formation and other community-level behaviors. [Credit: DOE Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.]

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"

What are your 10 top science fiction and fantasy novels?

In June NPR collected nominations for the top  science fiction and fantasy novels of all time. That includes a heck of a lot of books, even excluding young-adult and children's books and all horror and paranormal romance.

 The suggestions were narrowed down to a few hundred titles and now they are asking the public to vote for their top 10 picks.  The winners will be compiled into a top 100 list.

The list includes novels that were published over the course of almost a century and a half - starting with Jules Verne's 1870 classic, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - and covers a broad range of genres from graphic novels (Watchmen) to humor (Small Gods, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and swords and sorcery (Conan the Barbarian) to hard science fiction (Rendezvous with Rama) to more literary works (1984) and everything in between.

I don't think there is any easy way to really pick the ten best out of such a diverse selection of novels.  On my first pass I used up almost all 10 picks before I got out of the "D"s.  So to winnow my choices down, I made some arbitrary rules: only science fiction or SF-esque novels, only one novel per author, and the novels had to have some significance to me.

So here are my picks, in roughly chronological publication order.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932).  Brave New World was one of the novels I read in high school that I found really compelling. It wasn't just poor savage John's inability to fit in to "modern" society, but also the description of cool biotechnology.  (And no, I wasn't in high school when it was published).

Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (1954).  I read a lot of Asimov during my formative years, so it was hard to pick a single novel. What put Caves of Steel ahead of the Foundaton Trilogy or I, Robot is its blend of science fiction with a murder mystery, a combination I find irresistible.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein (1966). This is my favorite non-juvenile Heinlein novel. Viva la Revolución!


Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969).  Another novel I read for the first time in high school, as an assignment in English class. I found the juxtaposition of World War II prisoner of war scenes with the science fiction elements strangely compelling and it set me off on a journey of reading more Vonnegut.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975). I read The Female Man for the first time just a couple of years ago.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have cared for it when I was in high school, but as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate fiction that explores gender roles and feminist issues.

The Callahan's Series, by Spider Robinson (1977-2003). Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is full of bad puns and silly situations and wouldn't win any literary awards. But Robinson was introduced to me by my husband when we were first dating, and the Callahan novels in particular always make me feel happily nostalgic.

The Dune Chronicles by Frank Herbert (1965-1985).  The Dune saga is the first series of novels where I acquired new installments as they were published. Never mind that the later books never quite lived up to the original novel.


Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (1992).  Willis is one of my favorite science fiction authors and the Doomsday Book is one of her best. 


Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992). I almost picked Stephenson's more recent and more "serious" Anathem (2008) instead, but  Snow Crash's blend of humor, cyberpunk and vision of future Los Angeles makes it much more re-readable.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003). Atwood is another of my favorite authors, and I find her imagined post-apocalyptic world molded by biotechnology engrossing. And yes, I think it's science fiction.

---


So those were my ten selections.  If I could have chosen ten or so more (still excluding author duplicates), I would have included more "hard" science fiction:

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
The Company Wars by CJ Cherryh.
The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks
Deathbird Stories, by Harlan Ellison
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Heechee Saga by Frederik Pohl
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin
Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler
Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Mote In God's Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke.
The Riverworld Series by Phlip Jose Farmer

And even that was hard to narrow down.


So what would your top picks be from NPR's list?

Vote now!

Temperate Bacteriophages and the Abyormenites

Science fiction author Hal Clement (1922-2003) was known for creating aliens that are well-adapted to the often extreme physical conditions on their home planets. Clement is probably best known for his 1954 novel Mission of Gravity, which takes place on a planet with a surface gravity hundreds of times greater that of Earth. But that's not the only unique world he imagined.

Clement's novel Cycle of Fire is set on the planet Abyormen, which orbits a dwarf star, which in turn circles a blue giant. The planet's usual orbit creates two sixty-five-year-long seasons; the "hot season" and the "cold season". Each season is dominated by a different intelligent species. 

Abyormen's life forms have evolved a unique form of reproduction to account for the widely varying in environmental conditions. All its creatures - including the intelligent ones - lay spores in their alternate season counterparts. Those spores lie dormant until the seasons begin to change.

When the cold season on Abyormen draws to a close, the "cold" Abyormenites die and the "hot" Abyormenites emerge from the spores left in their bodies decades before. Those newly hatched "hot" Abyormenites carry spores for the next generation of "cold" Abyormenites, which in turn lie dormant until the next change of the seasons. Thus each sapient species on the planet absolutely depends on the life and ultimate death of the other for their own survival.
  As Donald Hassler writes in his Clement reader's guide, the inspiration for the Abyormenites came from an article about the viruses that infect bacteria:

Clement has said that Andre Lwoff's article entitled "The Life Cycle of a Virus," which appeared in the March 1954 Scientific American, gave him the idea for Cycle of Fire. Not only is the content of Lwoff's piece referred to in chapter fourteen of the novel but also the poetic tone of this scientific article underlies the novel. Lwoff describes the way certain viruses are capable of remaining dormant inside the totally alien life form of certain bacteria for several generations before they reappear as distinct virus life, and he emphasizes the cycles of life and death coupled here with reproduction and the protection of generation. Although much of Clement's fiction avoids such sublime and poetic images, Cycle of Fire is meant to demonstrate, on this most elemental level of life and death (not microscopic in the novel, of course), the symbiotic inter-dependence of what seem to be very alien life forms.

André Lwoff received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965 for his research on viruses  - called "bacteriophages" - that infect bacteria.  Bacteriophages have two different modes of reproduction. In some cases the bacterial cells are broken open ("lysed") after the viruses reproduce, in what is known as the lytic cycle.

But not all bacteriophages destroy their hosts. As Lwoff explained in his Nobel Prize lecture:

As far as we know, the bacteriophage itself controls its own regulation. The bacterium infected by a virulent bacteriophage has become a virus factory which cannot be stopped except by its own disintegration. A bacterium has no control over the development of a virulent bacteriophage. But this is an extreme case. The relations between virus and bacterium do not always have this dramatic character.

As a matter of fact bacteriophages exist which do not kill all the bacteria which they infect. Some infected bacteria survive and perpetuate the ability to produce bacteriophages. These are lysogenic bacteria. Their investigation has profoundly modified our ideas on the relations between cell and virus.

The DNA of the so-called "temperate" bacterophages that follow the lysogenic life cycle  is integrated into the bacterial genome. The viruses remain dormant until the environment in the bacterial cell is favors lytic reproduction. It's easy to see how Clement drew on the life cycle of these microbes in imagining the life cycle of the Abyormenites.

While this story might just be considered merely an interesting writing anecdote, I think it illustrates an important element of science fiction. Clement read an article about cutting edge science, but didn't just incorporate the scientific observations directly into his story. Instead he built on the science to create something very different from the original inspiration. I think that's one of the factors that distinguishes science fiction from fiction with science. And that's one of the reasons why I enjoy reading SF.

References:

Lwoff, Andre. "The Life Cycle of a Virus" Scientific American 190, 34-37 (1954) doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0354-34 [requires a site license to access)]

Lwoff, Andre. "Lysogeny" Bacteriol Rev. 17(4): 269-337 (1953) [free access]

Hal Clement (Starmont Reader's Guide) by Donald M. Hassler @ Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Cycle of Fire by Hal Clement @ Amazon.com (you can get a "new" copy for only $102! affiliate link)

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

Humanity Dies, Earth Abides

There is an interesting article by Kenneth Brower in the Summer issue of California Magazine (the UC Berkeley Alumni Magazine) about re-reading the work of George R. Stewart, with a particular focus on Stewart's famous post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides. 


Earth Abides starts with a quote from from Nobel-prize winning biochemist and virologist Wendell M. Stanley.

If a killing type of virus strain should suddenly arise by mutation . . . it could, because of the rapid transportation in which we indulge nowadays, be carried to the far corners of the earth and cause the deaths of millions of people 

~ WM Stanley in Chemical and Engineering News, Dec. 22, 1947

That's the premise that sets the story in motion: a "super measles" plague breaks out that kills almost every living human, (not to mention our close biological cousins the apes). UC Berkeley graduate student Isherwood Williams - Ish - happens to hiking in the mountains, working on his graduate thesis The Ecology of the Black Creek Area.  Ish is bitten by a rattlesnake, which lays him up for days in an empty cabin. It isn't until he returns towards the Bay Area that he realizes that amazoeveryone - or almost everyone is dead.

After driving across the United States and back¹, he returns to his home - a thinly disguised Berkeley. He checks that the great University library is intact, and keeps that knowledge to himself as a sort of thin link to the civilization that died. He meets a few other survivors and the form a Tribe.

Meanwhile nature begins to take back the spaces that humanity used to fill. Cats and dogs and cattle go wild, and plants begin to overgrow the buildings.

As with the dogs and cats, so also with the grasses and flowers which man had long nourished. The clover and the blue-grass withered on the lawns, and the dandelions grew tall. In the flowerbed the water-loving asters wilted and drooped, and the weeds flourished. Deep within the camellias, the sap failed; they would bear no buds next spring. The leaves curled on the tips of the wisteria vines and the rose bushes, as they set themselves against the long drought. Foot by foot the wild cucumbers quickly sent their long vines across lawn and flowerbed and terrace. As once, when the armies of the empire were shattered and the strong barbarians poured in upon the soft provincials, so now the fierce weeds pressed in to destroy the pampered nurslings of man. 

There is a plague of ants, which lasts until the ant population crashes. That's followed by plagues of rats and grasshoppers and even cattle.  Mountain lions prowl the campus and dogs run in menacing packs. The message is that it takes time for the ecosystems of the depopulated Earth to become rebalanced in the absence of humans.

The Berkeley setting isn't particularly surprising, given that Stewart was a UC Berkeley Professor of English.  In his article, Brower notes that it's likely Stewart's ideas were influenced by his fellow faculty members (in addition to Wendell Stanley, quoted above):

The writer Ernest Callenbach (who himself owes a debt to Stewart for his California-of-the-future novel Ecotopia) supposes that Stewart's sensibilities must have been shaped at Faculty Club lunches with brilliant Berkeley scholars like the paleontologist Charles Camp, the geographer Carl Sauer, the wildlife biologist Starker Leopold, and the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. (The Kroeber connection seems especially likely. "Ish" is doubtless a nod to Dr. Kroeber's friend and subject, Ishi, the California Yahi, last of his tribe and the final "wild" Indian in North America.)

Geographer Sauer, for example, rejected environmental determinism - the idea that the physical environment determines culture - and instead focused on the effect of humans on their environment, drawing some of his ideas from the work of Kroeber. As mentioned above, Kroeber is best known for his work with Ishi², the last member of his tribe, much the same way Ish is one of the last of his kind.

Despite all that, the science in Earth Abides mostly appears as asides to the main story.  The novel is about Ish, his life after the Great Disaster and his death. I think that's one of the reasons the novel doesn't appeal that much to me.

Ish is a loner at heart, both before and after the Great Disaster. He is unable to effectively interest his fellow survivors (and later their children) with his book-based knowledge, and he and his Tribe spend decades living off canned food scrounged from supermarkets and the water still running through the municipal water pipes rather than setting up a sustainable system to feed themselves.  I want Ish to do more, to care more, to get some form of civilization up and running. I suppose I want intellectualism to be important to survival, not an affectation of no particular use for survival.

And another thing I've noticed on recently re-reading Earth Abides, is how much is a book for men. The women who survive the plague spend their time having babies and keeping house and being "given" to the men as partners. A depressing future.

Earth Abides was the first winner of the International Fantasy Award, and influenced many post-apocalyptic novels that followed, including Steven King's The Stand.

While the novel isn't one of my favorites, I think it's final message is true: whatever happens to humanity, the Earth and its other inhabitants will continue on without us.

Read "Natural Affinities: Reading George Stewart in Antarctica" by Kenneth Brower.
Earth Abides at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

1. Earth Abides was first published in 1949, before the creation of the interstate highway system. I found it amusing that when Ish starts driving across the desert and really lets the car fly he's only traveling at 80 miles per hour.

2. Of course in science fiction circles Alfred Kroeber is probably best know as the father of Ursula Le Guin. His work clearly influenced Le Guins own fiction.

Top Image: Ruined Church © Copyright Jonathan Wilkins and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
Bottom Image: Berlin Ghost Town by Snowfalcon

Luc Reid on Neuroscience Fiction

Luc Reid has an interesting article in the latest issue of Clarkesworld Magazine - "Future Brains: Neuroscience Fiction versus Neuroscience Fiction".

Science fiction has had brains on the brain at least since Dr. Frankenstein installed one in his monster. Over the years science fiction has depicted technologies like mind control (in Star Trek, for example), instant learning (The Matrix), telepathy (Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars), and transferring memories and skills (The Dollhouse). While some of these technologies may eventually prove to be possible, others are extremely unlikely to ever work based on what we now know about the brain — because our own minds are much stranger territory than we ever used to imagine they were.

Go check it out if you are interested in the real science behind copying memories, mind control, and telepathy.

Image: National Cancer Institute Visuals Online: Color slide of a single image of a human brain using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. Shows a bright blue color where brain cancer metastasizes in the occipital lobe.
Tags:science fiction, biology

@ The Reef Tank: Mer-Women and Fish-Men: Humans Engineered for Ocean Living

I have a new guest post up at The Reef Tank blog about science fictional mer-people:

Mer-Women and Fish-Men: Humans Engineered for Ocean Living

Image: Mermaid by Brian Kolm, used with permission of the artist.

Tags:science fiction, genetic engineering

Fantastic Voyage: Inside the Cell

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

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

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

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

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

~ Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, by Isaac Asimov

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags:science fiction, Fantastic Voyage

Sci Fi Psi

At io9 Charlie Jane Anders wrote about the riffs on Star Wars in the Ewan McGregor-George Clooney movie The Men Who Stare at Goats. The movie is a humorous fictionalized take on Jon Ronson's (supposedly) non-fiction book by the same name, which documents the real-life US Army program to develop psychic soldiers in the 1980s.

At Wired's Danger Room blog, David Hambling takes a closer look at the program, and its origins in New Age woo. But it's woo with a sciency overlay. Just take a look at Lt. Col. Jim Channon's First Earth Batallion manual (pdf), which suggests that psionic powers are a matter of evolution (we may be abled to live on a diet of radio waves and our carbon based bodies may be turning into silicon!).

I kind of like the manual's description of warrior monks who participate in "ethical combat" and are connected into the biosphere and the universe. But I find the psychic powers idea to be pretty silly non-supported by any conclusive evidence that it work. Read the whole Danger Room post for more about what was tried and what they succeeded in doing.

But the idea that the human mind holds untapped abilities is a familiar one to anyone who has read the classics of science fiction from the mid-20th century. That was due in large part to the fascination of John W. Campbell - influential as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction - with pseudoscience. As Wikipedia quotes:

In 1957, novelist and critic James Blish tallied: "From the professional writer's point of view, the primary interest in Astounding Science Fiction continues to center on the editor's preoccupation with extrasensory powers and perceptions ('psi') as a springboard for stories.... 113 pages of the total editorial content of the January and February 1957 issues of this magazine are devoted to psi, and 172 to non-psi material.... By including the first part of a serial that later becomes a novel about psi the total for these first two issues of 1957 is 145 pages of psi text, and 140 pages of non-psi." James Blish, The Issues at Hand, pages 86-87.

But psi-based science fiction stories didn't start with Campbell. There's a long list of pre-golden age SF featuring telepaths at io9, many of which have passed into the public domain. And moving into mid-century - Campbell's era - there are number of SF classics featuring characters with psi powers: A. E. van Vogt's Slan (1946), Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation (1953), John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), to name a few.

There is a common theme that development of psychic powers is supposed to move Homo sapiens up the "evolutionary ladder"*:

"E for Esper," he muttered. "Esper for Extra Sensory Perception . . . For Telepaths, Mind Readers, Brain Peepers. [ . . . ] Those damned mind-readers are supposed to be the greatest advance since Homo sapiens evolved. E for Evolution. Bastards! E for Exploitation!
~ The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

Definitely good reading, but personally I don't consider telepathy to be "science" no matter how it's dressed up in technical terms. While some parapsychology researchers have claimed to see positive results, those studies are controversial and, even if valid have only demonstrated minor effects.

I get the sense that SF authors sometimes want to write about powerful wizards in a technology-based setting, hence psi-powered supermen that explore the stars. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it does annoy me when people go on about about how "hard" the science was during the olden days "Golden Age".

And coming back around to The Men That Stare at Goats, it sounds very much like the story of people who view the world through a science fiction lens. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

(Danger Room post via BoingBoing)

* Of course evolution has no direction or goal. Continuing human evolution does not mean that Homo sapiens will become more "advanced", only different. Listing the SF stories that get that wrong is a completely different post.

Tags:science fiction, parapsychology, psi

The Unselfish Gene: Altruism and Zombies

The Unselfish Gene is the first published novel of science journalist Robert D. Burns, and it sounds like a lively mixture of pulpy science fiction-horror and genetics. The novel's blurb gives you a taste of that:

It's love and terrorism in the time of cholera. In the mid-21st century, a form of bird flu has killed billions and turned most of the rest into mindless, stumbling zombie-like invalids. The few humans who had immunity now face the threat of a comet on a collision course with Earth. Settlers from the Moon colony were spared the disease, but face their own threats to survival: radiation-induced mental illness, a limited gene pool and shrinking resources. The Moon settlers have launched a last-ditch mission to Earth to salvage human DNA and other crucial materials ... before the comet strikes. The salvage crew find the biggest threat to the mission is neither the zombies or the comet, but insanity within their own ranks.

Now if you are a biology geek like me, the first thing you think of when you hear the novel's title is Richard Dawkin's classic book on evolution The Selfish Gene. It turns out that that was indeed one of Burns's inspirations for the novel, as he told Irma Arkus in an interview on Hi-Sci-Fri (The interview begins at 22:17). They also discuss the evolution of altruism, the deleterious effects of radiation, and other sciency bits from the novel.

Read excerpts from The Unselfish Gene, and take a peek at the novel's illustrations.

Purchase The Unselfish Gene @ Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Bioscience books discussed on the Hi-Sci-Fi podcast:




David Sloan Wilson's Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior.







Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene



Tags:science fiction, zombies, genetics