Biology in Science Fiction

New post at SIMF: Soylent Green for Dinner?

2012-01-26T18:10:00.000-08:00

I've got a new post up at Science in My Fiction that takes a look at science fictional food pills, tablets and other sorts of "people chow".

Yum!

For more discussion of the history of the way Americans have imagined "future foods", I suggest checking out Warren Belasco's Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (sample chapter, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Google Books). I've found it to be really interesting.

Read "Soylent Green for Dinner?" at Science in My Fiction

( Photo by epSos.de on Flickr )

Twittering with Aliens @ SIMF

2011-08-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

I have a new post up at Science in My Fiction about learning the language of aliens right here on Earth. he photo on the right is a hint about the sort of creature involved.

Go check it out!

Image credit: Body parts I - What are you looking at? by Sami__, on Flickr

What are your 10 top science fiction and fantasy novels?

2011-08-04T01:13:00.000-07:00

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.

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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!

The Kirk Effect or why aliens won't be sexy

2011-07-17T19:31:00.000-07:00

Hi folks. I'm slowly getting back to blogging here after a break, so I have more substantial posts in the pipeline. But while I'm working on those, I thought I'd point you to an interesting talk given by P.Z. Myers at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) this week.

The talk was "A Skeptical Look At Aliens" and takes a look at what scientifically plausible extraterrestrial evolution might look like. He points out that even here on earth we see a number of different body plans that are solutions to evolutionary "problems" like hunting prey in an aquatic environment. And that intelligence is rare and comes in different forms as well.

Myer' sums of what must be considered when thinking about the evolution of aliens as follows:

Evolution doesn't just make finely tuned functional organisms, but is also built on a foundation of chance, so it spawns endless diversity. Every advance carries along the baggage of its ancestry, so we see echoes of our past in every feature. And the more specific and complex a feature is, and intelligence is both of those, the less likely it is to emerge in the same form in different lineages.

If we do find a planet with intelligent life, it is unlikely to be a humanoid or at all shaped like us. And we are unlikely to be able to easily find a way to communicate.

Myers has posted the slides from his talk with commentary on his blog. None of this is really surprising if you have a decent understanding of evolutionary biology, but I recommend reading his post. The slides have pictures with examples from earthly evolution, and are both pretty and nicely illustrate his points.

Myers apparently didn't have time to include everything he prepared, so he's followed up with a post about "the Lost Slides" of his TAM talk that take a look at sex with aliens - or likely lack thereof.

If you watch science fiction TV, you will already be familiar with what he calls "the Kirk effect": which is "to boldly go and explore strange new worlds, and to hump all the women on them."

The Star Trek franchise is of course one of the best examples of this phenomenon, since every week the Enterprise's multi-species crew interacts with each other and with the inhabitants of the planet they are visiting. Inevitably there are romantic entanglements and one night stands. It's not just Captain Kirk that found love with other species.

An unlikely inter-species romance: Kirk x Spock by ~Edithy on DeviantArt.

And sexy-in-human-terms aliens are the rule, rather than the exception in the movies, from the 1966 B-movie Mars Needs Women to the more recent blockbuster Avatar. As director James Cameron has been famously quoted as saying the female Na'vi had "got to have tits".

But as Myers points out, it's not just that non-mammalian female aliens are unlikely to have boobs and male aliens are unlikely to have tight buns.

It's deep and subtle changes to the shape of the face, the eyes, the whole of the body -- cues that we all unconsciously recognize. You don't even need to see a person face-on to recognize sex.

If you want to see an example of "sexiness" that you aren't likely to find arousing at all if your human, check out his example.

I think some people find it easy to dismiss this as over-thinking the details of what is meant to be light entertainment. But I would argue that our assumptions about how the universe works are influenced by what we see on TV and in the movies, even knowing that it's purely fiction.

And while I'd expect that most people who have thought seriously about aliens wouldn't think that alien romance is likely, I do suspect that many harbor the hope that there are indeed extraterrestrials with whom we would be able to communicate, form trading partnerships with and maybe even explore the galaxy together with us.

But we humans rely heavily on non-verbal communication. Sexual attraction is just one aspect of this. We decide whether another individual is trustworthy or kind or intelligent not only by what they say, but by their facial expressions, posture, gestures and tone of voice.

Considering that misinterpretation of such cues can lead to miscommunication even between different human cultures, it's hard to imagine how we might overcome the hurdle with communicating with aliens who neither share our shape, nor any of our evolutionary or cultural history. I don't think an alien would have to have the demonic form of Clarke's Overlords to inspire mistrust and cause confusion - it would just have to be different enough that we humans would not be able to read their body language properly.

A very unlikely alien
(source: Project Gutenburg)

It also makes me think of Lisa Tuttle's short story "Wives". It's about a planet taken over by humans - all male - where the native inhabitants have chosen to reshape themselves into "ideal" human females in both form and behavior so that they can be perfect "wives" to their conquerors. I've always understood the story to be an allegory for the way women are expected to perform femininity and not upset the status quo to be accepted in our patriarchal society.

But I think the story can also read on a more literal level too, as an example of human folly in assuming that aliens (and other "foreigners") will mold themselves to meet our cultural expectations and an example of ability to fool ourselves about how well we actually understand Others. In "Wives", the alien called "Susie" rebels and is destroyed by her sisters for trying to destroy their tenuous peace by ending her charade. She is replaced by another and the men apparently never notice the change. I've always imagined that the men have chosen to not to try to understand the true nature of the situation, and that along that path potentially lies great danger.

If humanity someday does meet intelligent aliens would we truly be able to understand their desires and point of view, or would we simply assume that they think like us and their behavior can be understood in human terms? I hope not, since that could be a disaster too great for even inter-species romance to repair.

Understanding Science in Science Fictional Times

2011-04-21T23:31:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Rebecca Skloot's excellent book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at the age of 30. Cells taken from her tumor were out to be the first human cells that could grow in the laboratory.

Those "immortal" cells - coded named HeLa - would play an a crucial role in testing the first effective polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk in the mid-1950s. Since then, HeLa cells have been used in thousands of studies, and added to our understanding of how both normal and cancel cells function.

Skloot goes beyond discussing the science and bioethics surrounding the development of cell culture technology and human experimentation to provide a portrait of Henrietta as a person. And a big part of her story involves Skloot's decade-long interactions with Henrietta's family and friends, and in particular with Henrietta's daughter Deborah Lacks Pullum.

Deborah was a baby when Henrietta died from complications of cervical cancer in 1951. She never knew her mother, but really wanted to learn more. And even though she had little formal schooling, she wanted to know what was happening with her mother's cells. As Skloot described it in an interview:

She had always wanted to know who her mother was but no one ever talked about Henrietta. So when Deborah found out that this part of her mother was still alive she became desperate to understand what that meant: Did it hurt her mother when scientists injected her cells with viruses and toxins? Had scientists cloned her mother? And could those cells help scientists tell her about her mother, like what her favorite color was and if she liked to dance.

Deborah began to teach herself about the basics of how cells work, and read everything she could about HeLa cells. But even when you have a solid background in biology, it can be hard to sort out what's solid science and what's speculation when scientific research is reported by the mainstream media. Even relatively mild headlines like "Cancer cells from long-dead woman invade other cultures" or "Human and plant cells combined" sound pretty sensational.

So it doesn't surprise me that while Deborah was struggling to understand all this unfamiliar information, she latched onto science fiction with related science. That all came bursting out during her first face-to-face meeting with Skloot:

"I saw [Jurassic Park] a bunch of times," she said. "They talking about the genes and taking them from cells to bring that dinosaur back to life and I'm like, Oh Lord, I got a paper on how they were doin that with my mother's cells too!" She held up another videocassette, this one a made-for-TV movie called The Clone. In it, an infertility doctor secretly harvest extra embryos from one of his patients and uses them to create a colony of clones of the woman's son, who died young in an accident.

"That doctor took cells from that woman and made them into little boys look just liker her child," Deborah told me. "That poor woman didn't even know about all the clones until she saw one walk out of a store. I don't know what I'd do if I saw one of my mother's clones walking around somewhere."

It's not that Deborah didn't know the movies were fiction, but that they seemed tell story similar to what she had been reading about her mother's cells. The science fiction seemed to help her imagine the foreign science.

I don't find that surprising. An entertaining story can make science seem more "real" than a dry newspaper article or textbook filled with technical terminology. What I know about neutron stars comes more from reading Niven's "Neutron Star" than from any technical reading.

It's sometimes said that we are living in "science fictional" times. Indeed we have the ability to manipulate the biology of plants, animals, and even humans in ways that were solely the realm of speculative fiction when the structure of DNA was discovered nearly 60 years ago. But the underlying science is complex, and the often poor reporting of current research rarely makes it much easier to understand.

That's part of the reason why I find it so frustrating when science fiction movies and books get the basics wrong. We still can't clone dinosaurs a la Jurassic Park, and of course a big part of science fiction is pure speculation as to how science and technology might develop. But even wildly speculative biology should start with ordinary cells, DNA, and proteins in the same way that entirely fictional spaceships should obey the laws of physics.

Science fiction - particularly in the movies - has the potential open the door to science to people with a wide range of educational backgrounds. I wish Hollywood would put more effort into getting the basics right.

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For more information about the writing of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, listen to the Radiolab interview with Rebecca Skloot that includes some of her recorded interviews with Henrietta's daughter Deborah.

You can read an excerpt from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks at Oprah.com.

Image by Dr. Timothy Triche, National Cancer Institute. Scanning electron micrograph of cultured HeLa cells infected with Adenovirus.

Intelligent Apes with Digital Fur: Livestream with Weta about Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-04-12T23:46:00.000-07:00

The New Zeland special effects company Weta Digital is going to be hosting a livestream chat about their work on the special effects for Rise of the Planet of the Apes on Wednesday, April 13th at 5:30PM ET (2:30PM PT).

You can watch it right here:

apeswillrise on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the story of a present-day neurobiologist (played by James Franco) working on a cure for Alzheimers. The research involves testing on apes, and one of the subjects - Cesar -starts to display an unexpected level of intelligence, so the scientist helps him escape the lab. The rest, as they say, will be history.

Apparently no apes were used in the production of the movie. It also doesn't follow the lead of previous Planet of the Apes movies that used human actors in heavy makeup and furry suits. Instead Cesar and the movie's other non-human apes will be totally computer animated.

Weta Digital provided award-winning digital effects for Lord of the Rings (including Gollum), Avatar, King Kong, District 9, and a number of other science fiction and fantasy movies. They teamed up with Columbia University's Computer Graphics Group to help develop realistically moving computer-generated fur.

Here's a teaser animation of Cesar:

Looks promisingly real.

The movie is currently scheduled for release in August. It will be interesting to see if the movie turns out to be more than just cool visual effects.

Update 4/13 AM: the link for the livestream has been updated.

If Trees Could Talk: No Lorax Necessary

2011-04-11T22:15:00.000-07:00

I have a new post up at Science in My Fiction about talking trees.

Read "No Lorax Necessary"

Image: “A Criminal Lead By Three Watchmen”, an illustration from Baron Ludvig Holberg’s 1741 novel Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground, involving a visit to the Planet Nazar, which is inhabited by walking and talking trees

Szilard, science fiction, dolphins and EMBL

2011-03-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

In retrospect, it would appear that among the various recommendations made by the President's Science Advisory Committee there was only one which has borne fruit. At some point or other, the Committee had recommended that there be set up, at the opportune time, a major joint Russian-American research project having no relevance to the national defense, or to any politically controversial issues. The setting up in 1963 of the Biological Research Institute in Vienna under a contract between the Russian and American governments was in line with the general recommendation of the Committee.
[...]
This was generally regarded at that time as a major setback for this young branch of science, in Russia as well as in America, and there were those who accused Sergei Dressler of having played the role of the Pied Piper. There may have been a grain of truth in this accusation, inasmuch as a conference on molecular biology held in Leningrad in 1962 was due to his initiative. Dressler spent a few months in America in 1960 surveying the advances in molecular biology. He was so impressed by what he saw that he decided to do something to stimulate this new branch of science in his native Russia. The Leningrad Conference was attended by many Americans; it was the first time that American and Russian molecular biologists came into contact with each other, and the friendships formed on this occasion were to last a lifetime.

~ "Voice of the Dolphins" by Leo Szilárd (1961)

The science fiction story "Voice of the Dolphins" was published by Leo Szilárd in 1961. As you can probably tell from the above excerpt, the writing is pretty dry. Szilárd certainly wasn't known for his fiction, even during his lifetime. But Szilárd - and his tale - did play an important role in the establishment of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an international research institute in Heidelberg, Germany.

Leo Szilárd was a Hungarian-born physicist who was one of the fathers of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Szilárd was one of the first scientists to conceive the nuclear chain reaction. After emigrating to the United States in 1938, he worked with Enrico Fermi at Columbia University in New York. Together they figured out how to make the nuclear reaction self-sustaining, and ultimately patented a nuclear reactor based on their research.

It was a 1939 letter drafted by Szilárd and signed by his friend Albert Einstein, that helped convince President Roosevelt that Nazi Germany might be able to construct nuclear weapons. That lead to the creation of the Manhattan Project, which ultimately did develop the first atomic bomb.

Szilárd was apparently horrified by the dropping of the atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the end of World War II he became a strong advocate for arms control, and corresponded with Nikita Khrushchev for several years trying to set up informal U.S.-Soviet disarmament discussions.

He also shifted his research from nuclear physics to molecular biology. He was one of several of mid-20th century physicists to take an interest in this young field that was starting to decipher the molecular underpinnings of genetics. Szilárd worked closely with fellow former Manhattan Project physicist Aaron Novik, who would later found the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon.

Szilárd apparently wrote science fiction stories as an expression of his more utopian political ideas. After one of his non-fiction articles about arms control was rejected for publication, he reportedly commented "If they cannot take it straight, they'll get it in fiction."

He published a collection of his stories in 1961. The title story of that collection, "Voice of the Dolphins", is set in a future where American and Russian scientists have come together to establish an international biological institute in Vienna to study dolphins.

The science fictional twist is that dolphins turn out to be more intelligent than anticipated - smarter than humans, in fact.

Having learned the language of the dolphins and established communication with them, the staff of the Institute began to teach them first mathematics, next chemistry and physics, and subsequently biology. The dolphins acquired knowledge in all of these fields with extraordinary rapidity. Because of their lack of manual dexterity the dolphins were not able to perform experiments. In time, however, they began to suggest to the staff experiments in the biological field, and soon thereafter it became apparent that the staff of the Institute might be relegated to performing experiments thought up by the dolphins.

It's not a particularly gripping story - Szilárd was a vastly better scientist than he was a fiction writer - but I like it's optimistic view that scientists working together could overcome Cold War animosities.

The great thing about Szilárd was that he wasn't just dreamer, he was a a man of action. In late 1962 he met with fellow physicists Victor Weisskopf (like Szilard a former Manhattan Project physicist and campaigner against nuclear proliferation) and Gilberto Bernardini to discuss the creation of a real international biological research lab. They, in turn, called on their molecular biologist colleagues James Watson and John C. Kendrew, who both 1962 Nobel Prize laureates, to help make their plan a reality.

Out of that and subsequent meetings arose the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). And, after more than a decade of planning, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany was finally established in 1974 with John Kendrew as its first director.

Szilárd died in 1964, so he never saw his imagined "Biological Research Institute" become a reality. However, in memory of his role in its foundation, the EMBL library was named in his honor. And in honor of the story that helped inspired it all, they adopted the symbol of the dolphin on its book plates as as its logo. The original logo is shown above. It was replaced with a more stylized logo a few years ago.

Hopefully it serves as a reminder to the library's users of Leo Szilard and his dream of peaceful scientific collaboration.

Considering Szilárd's importance as a brilliant scientist, Cold War peace activist, and proponent of international scientific cooperation, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that the story of his accomplishments was mostly new to me. My post barely scratches the surface of his life. If you are interested in learning more about Szilárd, I recommend starting here:

• EMBL Library - About the Library - About Leo Szilárd
• Leo Szilárd Online
• Bess, M. "Leo Szilard: scientist, activist, visionary" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 3(3): 11-17 (1985)

Many thanks to Anne Barkworth at the Szilard Library for copies of the dolphin logo and permission to reproduce them.

Photo of Leo Szilárd from the Department of Energy Digital Photo Archive

Breaking Waves: Helping Fishermen in the Gulf

2011-02-25T22:43:00.000-08:00

Nearly a year ago, BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, resulting in more than 200 million gallons of oil plus methane and other hydrocarbons spilling into the Gulf. Marine and wildlife ecosystems were terribly damaged, and the fishing and coastal tourism industries have been devastated.

At last week's AAAS meeting in Washington DC, microbial geochemist Samantha Joye reported that the seafloor and its inhabitants had not nearly recovered when they made a dive last December:

Usually, there is a tremendous diversity of infaunal organisms on the bottom. Then, we began to see dead organisms like brittle stars. I noticed there were no holothurians (sea cucumbers) and these organisms are tremendously abundant at seeps. So, it was a grim view. We saw a few crabs but they did not look healthy and we saw oiled and dead corals.

There are some expedition photos on Joye's blog.

And it's not just the ocean depths that are affected. Frances Beinecke - president of the Natural Resources Defense Council and commissioner on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling - wrote in January:

Eight months have passed since the BP blowout, and still the damage and devastation continue. Tar balls continue to wash up along Gulf shores. Oil sheen trails in the wake of fishing boats. Wetlands marsh grass remains dying and fouled. Toxic crude lies offshore in deep water and in fine silts and sands onshore.

It's not clear how long it will take for the Gulf to recover - and it may never recover completely.

In the face of all that bleak news, I was pleased to discover that that the members of the Book View Cafe have contributed to the recovery effort by creating the anthology Breaking Waves. The book is a collection of poetry, essays and fiction from award-winning science fiction and fantasy writers in support of the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund. The Fund focuses on helping fishermen and their families in the Louisiana Parishes most affected by the massive oil spill there.

The table of contents:

In England in the Fifties, a new poem by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Little Song, A Little Dance, David D. Levine and Andrine de la Roch.
Levine writes:

This story started with a diary that Andrine emailed to her friends after her trip with the New Old Time Chautauqua's "Jambalaya Vaudeville Tour" to New Orleans and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. I read her email, dripping with local color and theatrical personalities, and realized that it had everything it needed to be a fantasy story except for a fantasy element and a plot, and with her permission I added those elements. I'm glad the resulting story will continue to help the residents of the area.
A Modest Proposal for the Perfection of Nature, Vonda N. McIntyre
Site 14, Laura Anne Gilman
The House That We Built, a nursery rhyme by nature writer David Gessner
Black Gold, Tiffany Trent
Autumn Leaves, James Sallis
My Mother’s People, Elaine Isaak
The Blue Curtain, Brenda Cooper
Christmas Count, David B. Coe
Eternal Return to the City of New Orleans, James Sallis
Javier Dying in the Land of Flowers, Deborah J. Ross, writing as Deborah Wheeler
She writes:

[. . . ] "Javier, Dying in the Land of Flowers," took shape during my years in Southern California, when I became aware of an underground of workers, many undocumented, usually unskilled, but with great resourcefulness and strength of spirit. I asked myself where this system might lead "if this goes on," threw in the deterioration of the ozone layer, and ended up tales of loyalty and hope within an oppressive caste system.
Origami Action Heroes of Singing River, Sandra McDonald

We row as far as Singing River/where all them Pascagoula Indians drowned.
The Power to Change the Shape of the Land, Dayle A. Dermatis (originally published in Sword & Sorceress XVI)
The Girl Who Dreamed of the Sea, Judith Tarr
The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson
(presumably an excerpt from Carson's National Book Award winning 1951 bestseller by the same name, about the ocean's ecosystems)
Terra Incognita, Camille Alexa
Suicide Note, a poem by Mario Milosevic
Serpent Singer, M.H. Bonham
Emergency, Nancy Jane Moore
Preparing for the Hurricane, James Sallis
After the Dragon, Sarah Monette
Comet Summer, Jennifer Stevenson
Backtiming, Randy Tatano
Rescue Work, Pati Nagle
Candace, Judith Tarr
I Sing a Song of Mourning, Dayle A. Dermatis
Galveston, P. G. Nagle (an excerpt from the novel)
Indigo Bunting, Lyda Morehouse
Paradise, Vonda N. McIntyre, with Photographs by Carolyn McIntyre. McIntyre writes:

[Paradise] is a memoir of winters on Sanibel Island in the early 1950s, with photographs by my sister, Carolyn McIntyre.
Shark Attack, Sue Lange
Disaster Relief, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
A Field Guide to Ugly Places, Patrick Samphire
Troubled Water, a poem by Kelly Ramsdell Fineman

I've linked to a few of the entries you can read online to get a sense of the contents.

You can purchase a copy of the DRM-free e-book at the Book View Cafe, or the Kindle edition at Amazon.com. Proceeds go to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund.

PD James: A Moral Fable

2011-02-22T23:01:00.000-08:00

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".
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* 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

2011-02-21T22:59:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-20T22:58:00.000-08:00

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.
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* 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

2011-02-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-18T21:56:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-17T21:20:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

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.

Romance and the Sea

2011-02-14T18:25:00.001-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day, dear readers!

For a bit of romance, I recommend Bruce McAllester's "The Courtship of the Queen". It's the story of a shell-collecting boy who grows up with a secret.

It's not quite science fiction, but it's a lovely tale.

Image: Moltkes Heart Clam - Meiocardia moltkiana - by Flickr user smallislander.

Just in time for Darwin Day: The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution

2011-02-12T23:52:00.000-08:00

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
~ On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1876 Edition)

Today - February 12th - marks the 202th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Just in time to celebrate, the print version of The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution - an anthology of evolution-related fiction from Tangled Bank Press - has just been released in print.

Originally released as an e-book, editor Chris Lynch has collected contributions by a number of speculative fiction authors and poets:

[. . . ] The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution is bursting with stories, poetry, and full-page artwork about the meaning of evolution. From science ﬁction and fantasy, to comedy and horror, to fairy tales and literary ﬁction, this anthology has something for everyone. An international lineup of more than 40 contributors includes Sean Williams, Brian Stableford, Patricia Russo, Carlos Hernandez, Jetse de Vries, Christopher Green, Bruce Boston, and Emily Ballou. Dark, whimsical, and shot through with wonder, The Tangled Bank explores the universe Charles Darwin revealed.

Chris Lynch has generously sent me a copy of the e-book, and I'm looking forward to reading it. The bits I've sampled so far have been both interesting and entertaining. It's also beautifully illustrated with drawings by Ernst Haeckel.

If you'd like a sample, you can read Christopher Green's short story Darwin's Daughter for free.

You can also read a couple of contributor Anne Bryan's Darwin-related sonnets on her web site, and listen to poet Emily Ballou read from her collection The Darwin Poems

Print, e-book and EPUB editions of The Tangled Bank are available for purchase through Lulu.com

Is SyFy the New Bravo?

2011-01-27T00:51:00.000-08:00

Here's a confession: I really like contest shows - the kind where creative professionals are compete in challenges. Top Chef and Project Runway my current faves. Top Chef because I like experimenting with cooking, and Project Runway, because I like watching people create clothes, I guess*. The competitions involving hair styling and "fine art" and interior design, not so much.

That means SyFy's new show Face Off is right up my alley. The competition pits makeup special effects artists with a range of backgrounds against each other. Some competitors have backgrounds doing makeup for movies (mostly B-grade) or have corporate clients, while others are fresh out of school. What the do looks like a combination of sculpture, painting and acting (or at least thinking like a character). The show follows a pretty standard formula: a quick challenge at the beginning that gives the winner immunity or other advantage, followed by the major competition.

In tonight's premiere episode, the competitors teamed up to create a human-animal hybrid character. The limitation? They had to use one of three animals as their inspiration: a black beetle, an ostrich, or an elephant. The winning team created an "elephant man" that looked good even close up. I think the way their model moved also helped sell the look.

The Winners. You can watch full episodes of Face Off at SyFy.com

So far, there hasn't been much soap-opera-like squabbling or painting of particular contestants as the "bad guy" or the "prima donna" or other personality stereotypes, which is also a good thing. Based on one episode, I find it's entertaining.

But I wonder where SyFy is going with this programming?

During the show, there was an ad for yet another new SyFy reality show. It stars Marcel - the annoyingly arrogant please-not-yet-another-dish-with-foam Top Chef contestant** - and is going to be about molecular gastronomy. While I think molecular gastronomy's really cool, Marcel's personality can be annoying, so I have mixed feelings.

Given the choice between Face Off or Quantum Kitchen and yet another Ghost Hunters episode or wrestling, I'll happily take makeup and cooking. But what I really want to see is more SF!

I'm disappointed SyFy canceled Caprica and decided to burn off the remaining episodes in a long single night marathon. I'm disappointed that they decided on a North American remake of Being Human, rather than importing the superior UK original (at least based on the first couple episodes).

Until Stargate Universe and Eureka return with new episodes, there's really not much reason to turn to on SyFy at all.

It seems like there's a big hole that SyFy could fill - The Cape is pretty meh, Chuck is getting a bit long in the tooth, Primeval went way downhill when they killed off Nick Cutter. I only just noticed that V hadn't been canceled and was showing new episodes again - I pretty much lost interest and was watching by the end of the fall season.

The only SF show I make a special effort to watch at the momemnt is Fringe, and I'm afraid that its move to Friday night is a signal they are losing Fox's support.

So while I get that SyFy wants to attract some of Bravo's usual audience who might come for the competition and stay for the ghost busting***, as a viewer who actually likes science fiction drama, I feel neglected.

Some of us would like both a SyFy with science fiction and a Bravo with reality programming - why mix up the two?

(And yeah, I know NBC Universal-Comcast doesn't care a whit about my personal TV preferences. I just had to get that off my chest.)

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* I really enjoy Project Runway, even though I am one of the least fashion forward people around. The clothes usually fall into the same neat-to-look-at-but-I'd-never-wear-that category for me (for example) that costumes do.

** The current season of Top Chef is also showing Wednesday nights on SyFy's sister station Bravo. It's probably no coincidence that there was a Top Chef re-run tonight and there was no hint of Marcel's new show until he was eliminated from the competition last week. Hmm.

*** Also, the monster-of-the-week movie SyFy's been advertising looks like the hair, makeup and catfighting were taken from one of the Real Housewives of ___ shows. Another crossover, perhaps?

Lose an arm or a leg?

2011-01-25T20:57:00.000-08:00

I've got a new post up at Science in My Fiction that looks a bit at the possibility of limb regeneration in humans.

Read: Losing an arm or a leg at Science in My Fictoin

(Back to regular posting here soon!)

Image: "Red on Sale" by Artiii on Flickr

Joseph Kulper: Brain viruses and strange equations to save the human race

2010-12-12T19:27:00.000-08:00

Today I received a mysterious message:

My name is Joseph Kulper, I work as a geneticist at Celtran
Corporation, one of the world's leaders in bioengineering, and I'm
sending this message to you because I have discovered something very
important, something that has the potential to change everything we
know about human life. I'm not asking for anything from you, I don't
want you to reply or click anywhere, alI I'm asking of you is that you
watch the video I have posted on youtube. Search under my name 'joseph
kulper' and you will find it. It's for you that I'm posting this
video, for all of us, so please take just a moment to watch it.

It wasn't sent to me personally and has the appearance of hapless self-promotion or odd spam.

But I was curious, and I turned up "Kulper's" video, where he invites the viewer to "become part of something greater than yourself. You see the destructive effects of climate change are inevitable, and some sort of drastic action is required to save the human race. So what has Kulper done? Created the Elysium virus, designed to "speed up evolution" so that only the smartest will survive. Watch:

So what is this? This looks like a teaser promotional video, likely for Neill Blomkamp's new movie-in-progress, Elysium.

There are a bunch of images that flash for a fraction of a second during the video which presumably have clues in them. In particular, there are a series of equations at about 4:27. I don't recognize the equations, and they could just be a red herring. Take a look - any guesses?

I couldn't find out much about the movie itself, other than Sharlto Copley - who starred in Blomkamp's District 9 - is part of the cast, and that Matt Damon may join up as well.

Despite the buzz, there hasn't been much information regarding what the plot will actually be about. Another teaser video released in November shows mutant livestock:

So the movie involves global catastrophes and genetic engineering and a selective virus passed from mind to mind; it's apparently set in a dystopian near-future in which biotechnology has run amok. So maybe it's an action-packed version of Oryx and Crake?

It could be interesting. I just hope there aren't any zombies.

Life Force

2010-12-10T17:59:00.000-08:00

The few minutes I had to spend in the Institute’s waiting room were my least favorite part of coming up to visit my mother. It felt more like a dialysis room, the visitors sunk into the overly-soft couches and not speaking, just drinking orange juice and recovering. There were no magazines and no television, just cold air blowing from the vents and generic music flowing with it. I’d finished my juice and was beginning to brood on my dislike for overly air-conditioned buildings when my mother arrived attended by a nurse.

I kissed and hugged her, automatically asking how she was, mouthing the answer she always gave as she gave it again.

“I’m fine, same as always.”

It wasn’t strictly true, but true enough.

~ "Élan Vital" by K. Tempest Bradford

Last week Escape Pod republished K. Tempest Bradford's short story "Élan Vital".

The science part is handwavy, but I don't think that takes away from the story at all. The first time I read it, it was only a few months after my dad had passed away and it really hit home.

What would you be willing to give to keep someone you love alive?

Listen to and read "Élan Vital" at Escape Pod

Read "Élan Vital" by K. Tempest Bradford at Sybil's Garage

Image: "Free Souls Embrace" by D Sharon Pruitt on Flickr. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Fiction provides refuge and transforms the impossible into possibility

2010-12-07T20:22:00.000-08:00

Peruvian writer andwinner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, gave a moving Nobel Prize lecture - "In Praise of Reading and Fiction" - about the importance of fiction to his life and to humanity.:

But thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

And, when at age 11 there was a great upheaval in his family life, Vargas Llosa found reading and writing to be a great comfort:

I lost my innocence and discovered loneliness, authority, adult life, and fear. My salvation was reading, reading good books, taking refuge in those worlds where life was glorious, intense, one adventure after another, where I could feel free and be happy again. And it was writing, in secret, like someone giving himself up to an unspeakable vice, a forbidden passion. Literature stopped being a game. It became a way of resisting adversity, protesting, rebelling, escaping the intolerable, my reason for living. From then until now, in every circumstance when I have felt disheartened or beaten down, on the edge of despair, giving myself body and soul to my work as a storyteller has been the light at the end of the tunnel, the plank that carries the shipwrecked man to shore.

And reading fiction transforms us, the readers:

From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.

He's not talking about speculative fiction specifically, but I think it applies. To me science fiction is indeed a way of dreaming the impossible and getting lost in adventure and fantastic worlds.

In Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist, he does write about the "fantastic" and "levels of reality" in fiction. But he also points out that any fiction is a rejection of reality:

Why would anyone who is deeply satisfied with reality, with real life as it is lived, dedicate himself to something as insubstantial and fanciful as the creation of fictional realities? Naturally, those who rebel against lie as it is, using their ability to invent different lives and different people, may do so for any number of reasons, honorable or dishonorable, generous or selfish, complex or banal. The nature of this basic questioning of reality, which to my mind lies at the heart of every literary calling, doesn't matter at all. What matters is that the rejection be strong enough to fuel the enthusiasm for a task as quixotic as tilting at windmills – the slight-of-hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction.

And that rejection of reality can have real world consequences.

When readers are faced with the real world, the unease fomented by good literature may, in certain circumstances, even translate itself into an act of rebellion against authority, the establishment, or sanctioned beliefs.

That's why the Spanish Inquisition distrusted works of fiction and subjected them to strict censorship [... ] [Using the pretext that] these wild tales might distract the Indians from the worship of God, the only serious concern of a theocratic society.

While you might argue that science fiction doesn't qualify as "good literature", I think that SF doesn't only show a reader the possibility of adventure and a depiction of the world-as-it-might-be. It also can provide a framework that allows seeing the world through the lens of science and technology. It gives us a glimpse at a way to "... alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility" using knowledge and engineering, rather than through supernatural forces. And that is a powerful notion.

Read the entire speech: "In Praise of Reading and Fiction"

Letters to a Young Novelist at Amazon.com

Also check out Daniel Salvo's article about SF in Peru for the World SF News Blog.

Medical aid on distant worlds

2010-12-03T23:30:00.000-08:00

The colony sat at the edge of a river, under an evening sky of breathable air set with three brilliant, fast-moving moons. Beds of glorious flowers dotted the settlement, somewhere in size between a large town and a small city. The buildings of foamcast embedded with glittering native stone were graceful, well-proportioned rooms set around open atria. Minimal furniture, as graceful as the buildings; even the machines blended unobtrusively into the lovely landscape. The colonists had taste and restraint and a sense of beauty. They were all dead.

~ "Ej-Es" by Nancy Kress

The November issue of Lightspeed Magazine republishes Nancy Kress's 2003 short story "Ej-Es". The tale follows a member of a team of "medicians" that lands on a colony planet where the inhabitants have been wiped out by an unknown disease.

In an interview with Lightspeed, Kress explains the inspiration for the medical team:

The Corps is based on USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. This group has joined (and sometimes waged turf wars with) the CDC in fighting epidemics in third-world countries; they also have shared jurisdiction, with FEMA and the CDC, for any bioterrorist attacks here (potential turf wars).

Of course USAMRIID's web site makes it sound like they are quite chummy with the CDC. It's true, though, that the vaccines, antivirals and antitoxins developed by USAMRIID have been used to help people around the world.

I like the idea that when humanity does spread through space, there will be a medical organization equipped to help identify and fight the unexpected diseases we are likely to encounter. I think it unlikely that viruses or microbes evolved on alien worlds to infect the local life forms would find humans to be good hosts, but who knows? That's why we'd need medical experts ready for the unexpected.

The other scientific aspect of "Ej-Es" is that the infections seem to have induced conversations with invisible companions. In an accompanying article, neuroscientist The Evil Monkey takes a look at the science of how a brain malfunctions and seizures could lead to visions. He writes:

How is it possible for a sane, sober, rational human to see things that aren’t there, and that maybe don’t even exist? Because your mind is your reality, that’s how. And your mind only exists because your brain exists. And your reality only reflects REALITY^TMinasmuch as the information your brain processes accurately represents the world. Which, of course, then begs the question: what happens to us sane, sober, rational humans when our brains misfire?

Read the article to learn how our brain affects our perception of the outside world.

Read "Ej-Es" by Nancy Kress

How far was that?

2010-12-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

Science comedian Brian Malow at 2010 WonderFest riffing on bad science in Star Wars the movie and Star Wars the novel.

Yes, it's an easy target. No, it has nothing to do with biology. But hey, it's Friday night!

See the full-size video at ForaTV