If it's July, it must be Comic-Con: Abusing Science on Fringe

I apparently was caught in a time vortex because all of a sudden I find that it's the last week of July. Where has the time gone?

Anyway, what shook me out of my lack of blogging was the realization Comic-Con had come and gone already. If you aren't familiar with Comic-Con, it's a massive annual convention in San Diego that started out focusing on comic books but has been embraced in recent years by Hollywood. That means movie previews and panels with TV stars along with comics and science fiction fare,

This year a panel on "Abusing the Sci of Sci-Fi" was moderated by Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy), and included panelists*:

• Sean Carroll, a CalTech cosmologist who blogs at Cosmic Variance
• Kevin Grazier, a planetary physicist at JPL/NASA who has been a science consultant on TV show like Eureka and Battlestar Galactica, and who sometimes blogs at Science Not Fiction
• Jamie Paglia, writer and producer of the TV show Eureka
• Zack Stentz, producer of TV shows Fringe and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

 Now I am a fan of Fringe, so it's not a criticism when I say that it appears to have only a tenuous basis in any sort of real science.  I think that works because Walter Bishop (played by the excellent John Noble) is a mad scientist extraordinaire, who works his genius on the fringes of a wide range of scientific disciplines.  The crazy science on the show is no less believable than having a scientist who is a hands-on expert in astrophysics and microbiology and synthetic organic chemistry and mechanical engineering and everything in between. (And yes, I know they claim that the science on Fringe is based on "reality", but I don't see that.)

And on the panel Stentz confirmed that science plays second fiddle to "story" on Fringe as Eric Wolff reported at Science not Fiction:

“Sometimes you have to break the rules to tell the story you want to tell,” he said, and ran a Fringe clip in which Olivia and Peter realize that Bell has  extracted memories from Walter’s brain by removing actual pieces of Walter’s brain.

“He literally had his memories removed,” Stentz said. “We knew when we wrote it that memories aren’t stored in a discrete portion of your brain.”

That episode - "Grey Matters"  - was indeed especially silly science.  Wolff suggests that it's especially bad bad science because most people don't know it's bad science:

Everyone knows we can’t travel faster then light, so we accept a universe where we all agree that the technology exists. But the brains/memories plot device hinges on the audience being too ignorant to understand the inaccuracy. The rule-breaking isn’t based on the paranormal or on advanced technology. It’s based on the audience not knowing better. That seems like the wrong kind of rule-breaking to me.

When I saw the episode I knew it was ridiculous, but in a fictional universe where a person can be wired to a dead man's brain to retrieve his memories it didn't seem particularly out of place. But Wolff may be right that the way the story was presented most people might not have realized that it was as unrealistic as regular travel between parallel universes. Perhaps that has something to do with the average SF-watcher's knowledge of bioscience as compared to physics?

Apparently the scientists on the panel disagreed that science needs to bend for the sake of drama.

I'm hoping someone posts a video of the panel online, since it sounds like an interesting discussion.

Script PhD also has a write up of that and a few other science and science fiction-related Comic-Con panels.

* The panelists seem like an interesting and intelligent group, but they appear to embody the stereotypes that "science" is the realm of white men working in the physical sciences and that the science in "science fiction" is astronomy and physics.  And it perhaps provides a hint as to why the biosciences are portrayed so inaccurately on SF TV shows.

Science Fiction Poetry (with Biology): Jonathan Vos Post

April is National Poetry Month, so before the calender turns to May, I'm kicking off what will be an occasional series of posts featuring science fiction poetry - with biology, of course - that's available for free online.

Jonathan Vos Post - called "greatest nerd of all times"¹, and creator of the Ultimate Science Fiction Poetry Guide - also writes science fictional poetry.

Two of the poems he has made available on his web site have biological themes:

• "The Twilight of Genetic Engineering" (1992), which is a bleak take on our possible genetically engineered future
• "Prologue from Dr. Norton Moise" (1987), which is about "the Adrenal gland and the evolution of human beings"

Read more poetry by Jonathan Vos Post

And check out his page on the Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide about Ecology and Biology

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1. From Vos Post's  LiveJournal profile:

Jonathan Vos Post is a part-time Professor of Mathematics, who has also taught Anthropology, Astronomy, Computer Science, Ecology, Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, and other subjects. He is also a professional Science Fiction author who has co-authored or co-edited with Ray Bradbury, Richard Feynman, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and many others, for his nearly 900 publications, presentations, and broadcasts. A failed actor, who has sold some plays; a failed musician, whose lyrics have made it to MTV; he has finally succeeded as a husband and father, and is thus a happy man, eager to share his delight in life. His primary concern is attempting to answer three little questions: (1) what is the universe, and how does it work?; (2) what is a human being?; and (3) what is the place of a human being in the universe?

 Tags:science fiction, poetry

Scientists in SF

Jon Turney has an interesting post on the LabLit blog - Can science fiction be lab lit? - about the depiction of scientists in science fiction.

"Lab lit" is fiction that features scientists working at science. There isn't really a clear bright line between "science fiction" and "lab lit", and it's not clear whether realistic stories about scientists set in the very near future should be one or the other. I usually consider such stories science fiction (as does Turney, apparently), and the LabLit folks consider them to be lab lit.  But even if you exclude such novels - Gwyneth Jones's Life, for example - there are some good depictions of scientists in SF.

You should read Turney's post to find out which novels he considers to be some of the best examples of scientists in SF.

Turney also cites an informal survey of scientists in SF made by Lucy A. Snyder. In her article - The Portrayal of Scientists in Science Fiction - she compares scientists in short stories from the mid-1990s to the 1950s. It's by no means a comprehensive study, but it seems that over the years the portrayal of scientists in SF has gotten more positive and much more diverse:

In summary, the '50s anthologies I sampled portray scientists as main characters in 10 out of 32 stories (31.3%), and of these 10, 4 are negative portrayals. [...]

I went through six consecutive months of Analog [from the 1990s] and analyzed the stories in the same way that I had the '50s anthologies. Of the 36 total stories in these issues, 16 (44.4%) featured scientists as main characters. And of these portrayals, none were negative except insofar as scientists were shown to be fallible human beings.

[. . .] On the whole, the scientists portrayed in Analog are likeable, highly intelligent, and occupy a sort of moral high ground. There is also a much greater diversity of scientists in these stories as compared with the '50s anthologies. In addition to the traditionally-portrayed medical doctors and physicists, the stories featured liberal doses of paleontologists, ecologists, and other biologists.

So not only more likable, but more biologists!  That's consistent with my own impressions of scientists in SF short stories, but I'd love to see a more systematic study that compares more than 30-ish stories from each era. 

Heck,  I'd do the myself if someone would provide me with the required extensive SF collections the study would require!


Tags:science fiction, scientists