LHC LOOKS FOR PARALLEL UNIVERSES

If you read about a super high-tech science facility smashing atomic particles together at fantastic speeds and you picture a growing black hole that devours the Earth (!)…you might be a science fiction writer. Either that or a B-movie addict. Or a protestor at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

In the coming weeks the LHC will do its best to produce some black holes, but they’re not mad scientists planning to destroy the world. Really. What they are hoping for is evidence of parallel universes. As in, universes that exist beyond the four dimensions we know (length, breadth, height, and time). New theories suggest that gravity may leak from our universe into other dimensions (and is the only thing that can travel between them) and the experiment at the LHC is looking for the proof. If microscopic black holes are produced/detected, they will be evidence of the existence of these parallel universes.

Don’t confuse this with the “multi-worlds theory” of quantum mechanics from Hugh Everett in the 1950’s. That theory claims that slightly different universes are being spun off every moment because of all of the possibilities that can exist when a traveling particle comes to a fork in the road and goes both ways. (That idea has inspired lots of alternate history stories and TV shows like Sliders, but it’s not provable.) No, a researcher with the new LHC experiment describes the parallel universes they’re looking for as if our universe is a sheet of paper in a stack of many more sheets of paper.

Of course, I’m always looking for the science fiction take on stories like this. The giant Earth-gobbling black hole is one possibility (and worried enough people that they filed lawsuits to try to stop the Large Hadron Collider from being built). But the idea of micro-miniature black holes intrigues me too. Imagine a series of mysterious deaths in Geneva and their corpses are found to have microscopic tunnels like wormholes tunnelled through them! Of course one of the victims would have to be the lover of one of the experiment’s lead scientists—just to add extra emotional depth, don’t you know. Or maybe gravity goes weird and the city starts looking like the famous M.C. Escher lithograph “Relativity” (with no consistent up or down). What if the combination of the LHC’s magnetic field and the black holes pulls asteroids out of space into collision with Earth? (Some conspiracy theorists are apparently already claiming this.)

Parallel universes offer even more fodder for imagination. Maybe our own universe originally came from one of those. Or perhaps life originated there instead of here. Or perhaps we somehow go there when we die.

OK, OK…most of these are still sounding like B-movie ideas, but you have to admit that the thought of protons smashing together at 99.9% of the speed of light with energies of nearly 12 Tera electron volts does fire the imagination.

The likely reality? The LHC team will detect some things never seen before and add to our knowledge of the universe. The world won’t even hiccup. And that’s good too.

THE MARTIAN IS A MODEL FOR SCIENCE MOVIES

Movie poster for The Martian from 20th Century Fox

 If you’ve read the bestselling SF novel The Martian by Marty Weir, you’ll know it’s not a stretch or an insult to describe it as MacGyver On Mars—the plot depends on stranded astronaut Mark Watney using every piece of available technology, biology, and chemistry in creative ways to help him survive the hostile Martian environment. Weir does it brilliantly, with just enough human touches to keep the reader fully invested in Watney’s survival in spite of numerous technical descriptions that some will find dry. Translating such a science-heavy story into glossy Hollywood entertainment for today’s average moviegoer would seem to be as daunting a challenge as surviving on Mars.

Congratulations to Ridley Scott & Co. for pulling it off with flying colours. I hope Hollywood will take the movie version of The Martian not only as proof that science movies can be successful but as a model for how to do them well.

When a ferocious sandstorm forces a crew of NASA astronauts to cut short their stay on Mars, Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is injured and thought to be dead. The crew is forced to leave him behind and return to Earth. The next Mars mission can’t happen for another four years—Watney has enough food and water for a couple of months. His personal survival and any attempt by NASA to rescue him appear to be impossible. Both will require the utmost in human determination and ability to achieve.

In The Martian nearly every character is a scientist—Watney himself is a botanist as well as an astronaut—yet the movie shows that they can be every bit as committed, stubborn, inventive, defiant, funny, sweaty, and courageous as any spy, cop, or soldier. They’re not superhuman, instead they show the best qualities of real human beings and the astonishing things we can achieve. The story isn’t about great feats of daring and stamina (though there’s certainly some of that), but using human ingenuity to overcome seemingly insurmountable problems one step at a time. As the implacable universe throws up each new roadblock, Watney, or the NASA team trying to bring him home, uses brainpower to figure out a way around it.

The scientific explanations are necessarily brief but not absent. When a risky course of action is suggested, the pros and cons are explored honestly. The unpleasant realities of both physics and economics are given fair representation and, true to the book, The Martian escapes being propaganda for the USA by giving an important role to the Chinese space program. I’m deeply impressed by how Ridley Scott has crafted a slick and suspenseful Hollywood offering while keeping it so well balanced. Others have pointed out that it is a rare movie full of optimism. Sure, it has moments of carefully-crafted theatre, but it’s inspirational in a true sense and not just emotionally manipulative.

I can’t talk about a movie like this without mentioning the special effects and they are terrific—eye-popping and authentic (OK, we wouldn’t hear rocket engines in space and the Hermes spacecraft wouldn’t have such big windows, but otherwise…). The Martian vistas are stunning, well worth the extra price of seeing them in 3D. The movie reportedly cost $108 million USD to make and it shows on the screen. Not all of that is Matt Damon’s salary, though he certainly earns his pay by giving Watney just the right amounts of stoicism and nerdiness to grab the audience and hold them—it could so easily have failed in the hands of another actor.

The Martian is a movie without any killing, martial arts, fleets of helicopters, contrived romance, explosions meant to destroy or terrorize, inane humour, super powers or supervillains. So it’s truly a breath of fresh air. I hope box office numbers will show Hollywood that there’s an appetite for this kind of movie and at least one director who knows how to make them.

MARS FEVER IS HEATING UP AGAIN

A scene from The Martian from 20th Century Fox

If you follow the news at all, you’ll have heard the big news from NASA this week:

They’ve confirmed evidence that liquid water sometimes flows on Mars.

The evidence relates to certain kinds of darks streaks that have been observed down mountainous slopes in a number of locations. The streaks appear to ebb and flow according to the Martian season. The NASA scientists are convinced that the streaks are flows of liquid water just beneath the surface which occur when the temperature rises above minus 23 Celsius. Obviously that’s a lot colder than the freezing point of fresh water, but this Martian water thaws and stays liquid at that temperature because its full of various perchlorate salts (the same principle as the ice melting stuff you might sprinkle on your driveway in the winter).

Why is it important? Because liquid water is considered to be a prime requirement to support life. Mind you, this Martian water is probably too salty to support life as we know it, but never count life out—it’s constantly surprising us. So this is the best evidence yet that there has been/is now/could someday be life on the Red Planet (take your pick).

We’re eager to know if Earth is the only home of life in the universe. And there are many reasons we might want to establish a permanent presence there—if we do, we’ll want to take some of our plants with us. A planet with the means to support life just might be coaxed into supporting our kind of life.

The timing of the NASA announcement happens to coincide with the release this week of the movie The Martianstarring Matt Damon and based on the novel by Andy Weir. The story is about an astronaut accidentally left behind on a Mars mission who has to survive using only what he has on hand and a vast amount of ingenuity. The book was great—I hope the movie will be too. Once you go see it you’ll no doubt want to read about the nine real NASA technologies featured in the film.

Perhaps to capitalize on all this interest (and why shouldn’t they?) NASA has also begun a series of articles about NASA technologies that have been spun off for useful purposes here on Earth, and I’m not talking about Tang or Space Food Sticks. The developments include sensors that attach to plants and help farmers give their crops the optimal amount of water without wasting it, a radar water-detection system that was used to locate a huge reservoir in one of the world’s driest inhabited areas in northern Kenya, and an oxygen recovery system that’s used in refuge shelters for miners in the event they’re trapped underground.

A research paper from a NASA-led team published last month also got some attention by making a thorough scientific case for the use of cyanobacteria in efforts to colonize Mars. Different varieties of the bacteria could be used to pull nitrogen out of the air and into the soil where it would help plants to grow, mine desirable minerals from rocks, produce oxygen for us to breathe, create hydrogen fuels or biofuels, provide the basis for synthetic manufacturing compounds, and even feed the colonists. Terraforming Mars with bacteria might take a very long time, but it would be a whole lot easier and cheaper to transport there than the end products we’d use it to make.

To fully answer why we care about all of this, you’d have to answer why Mars has fascinated humans for thousands of years. It has, and will continue to do so.

Let’s be honest: we’re messing up Earth in a big hurry. We need somewhere else to go, for the sake of our home planet and for the sake of our descendants. Mars is relatively close and available. The Mars Express has begun to gather steam. Let’s hope it really gets rolling soon.

TO STAND ON OTHER WORLDS

Since its beginning, science fiction has taken readers to other worlds through flights of the imagination (manifested as rockets, giant hollow cannon shells, weightless spheres, wormholes through space/time, strange creatures, balloons, flying saucers, transporter beams and more means than I can remember). The challenge has always been to make readers and viewers feel like they’ve actually been there.

We know that being present on the surface of another planet would be very different from standing on Earth, but we will never know just how different until we actually do it, no matter how much scientific research we do. For a long time we only knew of our solar system’s nine planets (back before Pluto got demoted) and imagination sketched Mars as a dry planet criss-crossed with ancient canals, while Venus was a torrid swampy jungle. New information corrected those visions, and now space telescopes like Kepler have discovered planets around other suns as strange as anything we could have imagined.

Still, the key to making those planets come alive to readers of science fiction depends on tapping into how those environments will be perceived by our senses. It’s a daunting task.

Take a so-called super-Earth planet, for example—considered similar to ours in atmosphere and temperature range perhaps, but with stronger gravity. Of course, we’ll feel that extra weight (and immediately look for a quick and easy diet plan) and complain about the extra effort required by every movement. We’ll breathe harder, especially at first, and with the extra gravity will come a denser atmosphere—a higher concentration of oxygen if we’re lucky, but possibly more of the lighter gases that would have escaped from smaller planets. The content of water vapour in the air will be different, and you must have noticed how smells are amplified on hot, humid days. Smells will be much more pungent on planets with denser, wetter air, and since so much of our sense of taste depends on smell, foods will taste different too—possibly more flavourful, which is good, but subtle elements could be much more noticeable as well. If you cook like I do, there won’t be any hiding that burnt taste from the bottom of the pan. Astronauts in space crave spicier food, perhaps because their air is dry, but also because their nasal passages tend to clog a bit in zero gravity. High gravity might mean leaving the sriracha sauce behind on Earth!

Popular Science had a cool article recently about how food would taste on other worlds. Have a look.

I suspect that the diversity of smells will probably be the most pronounced reminder that we’re not on Earth anymore. Close your eyes and recall the very different odours of a pine forest, a muddy marsh, a rose garden, an ocean beach, a field of clover, a city street after a summer rain. There are countless environments on Earth that your nose would immediately identify, and each of those unique scent signatures is made up of hundreds, possibly thousands, of elements, such as the breed of grass (freshly cut or not), the composition of the soil (rich humus or salty sand), flower fragrances (in bloom or not), the temperature of pine needles or mud (in sun or shade). Imagine how utterly different the odour of another world will be where every single living thing is a species never before encountered.

How does a writer even describe that? We usually have to fall back on comparisons to familiar fragrances and proclaim that the new smell is something like them.

The sun will feel different, too. You’ve noticed how, on a hazy summer day you can practically feel the sun crisping your skin, but on a bright spring afternoon you can easily get a sunburn without realizing it at all. Other planets will have suns that are smaller or larger, closer or farther away, redder or bluer, fiercely energetic or calmer than our own sun, with huge differences in their output of  ultraviolet and other radiation. What reaches the surface of the planet will also depend on the composition of the atmosphere, the water vapour (especially clouds), any ozone layer, reflection and refraction from water droplets or dust particles or ice crystals in the air, and the day/night cycle.

Then we come to the realm of sounds. The density, temperature, and moisture content of air all affect the speed that sound travels, to a degree. But remember how hard it is to locate the direction a sound is coming from when you’re in a fog? Snowfall mutes sounds. Rainfall masks sounds. Pressure changes on your ear drum can affect the pitch of a sound you hear (I especially notice this when I’m scuba diving and haven’t equalized the pressure in my ears often enough). And all of that is just how sounds we know are affected by conditions. What about sounds that are all new to us, because they’ve been created by unique environmental factors or bizarre forms of life? Again, we have to fall back on similes (“it made a sound like…”) to give the reader a reference for understanding. Quite a challenge to express something truly alien.

The most common fallback in portraying alien words is to use visual description: a violet sky smeared with golden cloud that sometimes obscures the giant red sun and smaller white sun that glide at different speeds from horizon to horizon. Yet, as authors, we can’t afford to describe anything too far from normal human experience—readers’ minds would rebel or, at the very least, would be badly distracted by trying to imagine the picture we’re painting (like when we’re having to explain how the green-skinned villain disappears into green shadows cast by the red sun but not the black shadows cast by the white sun).

All of this goes to explain why written and filmed depictions of alien worlds probably err on the conservative side. The scene-setting can’t get in the way of the story, and it will always fall short of reality anyway—the universe is a strange and exotic place. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth taking the journey with us.

We’re a whole lot cheaper than a ride with NASA.

WE DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING YET

Photo from National Geographic Society

A new discovery published this week in eLife and National Geographic has extended the human family tree. Anthropologists have found a new species of hominid that could be a stage in human evolution on the way to modern day Homo sapiens, or might just be a kind of cousin to our family line. The species has been named Homo naledi after the bones of about fifteen individuals were found in a nearly-inaccessible cave in South Africa called Rising Star (the word naledi means star in a local dialect). The story of their discovery is well worth reading. These pre-humans were small—about five feet tall and 100 pounds or so—and with skulls less than half the size of ours (including brains the size of an orange). Exactly where H. naledi fits into our history no one knows because scientists haven’t found a reliable way to date the bones. Their bodies have some features that are very much like modern humans, and others that are quite primitive, so they could be a kind of ‘missing link’ between Australopithecus afarensis and the much more humanlike Homo erectus that lived a million years later. Or they could be a relatively recent sideline species not directly our ancestors at all.

Just when we think we’ve got things figured out, some new discovery shakes it all up again.

Another example comes from 1977 when hydrothermal vents on the seafloor—often called black smokers—were first found to support thriving communities of living organisms. Huge colonies of crabs, lobsters, mussels, tubeworms and other species exist where no sunlight has ever reached thanks to chemosynthesis (as opposed to photosynthesis in plants) using the chemical energy of sulphide compounds released from within the Earth. Until then the accepted idea of how life began on our planet involved a mix of chemicals in the so-called “primordial soup” of the early oceans somehow combining into organic molecules. But now many scientists feel that the chemosynthetic bacteria of the black smokers—and especially single-celled organisms known as archaea—are not only the most ancient form of life on Earth, but also the most abundant.

Taking a science fiction writer’s perspective on such pivotal discoveries made me think of Mars.

Why?

Because data from modern Mars rovers and other spacecraft could easily lead us to believe that we’ve got the Red Planet and its history figured out. Sure, astronomer Percival Lowell was wrong when he thought he saw artificial canals on Mars in the early 1900’s. But that doesn’t mean there was never life there, or even advanced life. The generally accepted view is that there was abundant water on Mars in its early history, but the planet has been drying out for the past 3.5 billion years. Since the wetter period coincided with the time that the very first primitive single-celled life developed on Earth (archaea), it’s thought that any life that once existed on Mars must have been very basic. Never sophisticated, never intelligent, never conscious. (Here’s a good comparison of the geological timelines on the two planets.) But if scientists are still making discoveries on Earth that shake up our understanding of our own planet’s history, how much more could remain undiscovered on Mars? We’ve literally only scratched the surface.

Maybe intelligent life took three billion years to evolve on Earth, but that doesn’t mean it has to take that long everywhere. We still have a poor understanding of what consciousness really is and how it works, let alone how it develops. We assume that sentient life didn’t develop on Mars because we know how long it took on Earth and our photographs and rovers haven’t found any evidence of artificial constructs there. Since the surface of Mars is about equivalent to the entire land mass of Earth, it’s a little early to assume anything.

Maybe a Martian civilization did arise long ago and all obvious traces have been erased by erosion. Maybe they moved out into space and we’ll eventually discover their trail as we explore that territory ourselves. Or maybe they invented digital computing way back when and uploaded themselves into massive databanks powered by tapping into the planetary core. Perhaps millions upon millions of Martians still live within computer simulations like the characters in the Matrixmovies, except with no physical bodies at all. Sure, it might be a far-fetched science fiction scenario, but if there’s one thing science should teach us, it’s never to let ourselves get complacent.

New discoveries still happen all the time.

BRING ON THE WONDER

Close Encounters of the Third Kind from Columbia Pictures

Sales figures for books show that sales of science fiction and fantasy novels have been on the decline, and especially science fiction. It’s possible that the numbers are misleading because, in fact, genre novels like SFF do well in e-book form and e-book sales aren’t always tracked well. But why any decline at all? Aren’t we living in an age when science fiction is coming true?

Maybe that’s the problem. Could it be that some of the wonder has been lost?

I’m not pointing any fingers. Scientific knowledge has made great advances since the early days of SF. The effect of all that discovery on the fiction we love is mixed. Good stories sometimes get bogged down in scientific explanation. I suspect the SF readership has become more divided than ever between those who revel in details gleaned from articles in the latest Nature or Annals of Botany or Journal of Neuroscience, and the fans who start yawning when they run into a dense paragraph of technical terminology or math. Then too, there’s no question that the more we know about the universe, the more our imagination must be constrained by the facts. We do call it science fiction, after all. Good luck selling a new story that features beautiful Martian princesses who ride flying yachts (although if you change it to a fictional place and call it fantasy, you’ll have better odds). If your characters get around in a faster-than-light spacecraft, you’ll need a good explanation for why you’re right and Einstein was wrong. I suspect it’s easier to let magic explain everything (and less of a strain on readers who don’t have a PhD in physics).

Or maybe it’s that we see so many technological marvels everywhere we turn, we’re getting hard to impress. Our cell phones may not have the range of Captain Kirk’s communicator, but they can do a lot more. Prototype test cars can drive themselves—heck, yours might park itself already. Our fridges will soon be able to keep themselves stocked as nanotechnology and computer networking transform our household products. The space industry is populated by private companies instead of just governments, and almost ready for tourists.

Our sources of entertainment are advancing all the time, too. In the 1950’s and ‘60’s Arthur C. Clarke could take us to a lunar city in Earthlight or the moons of Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey and we’d be filled with awe. Ray Bradbury could describe a tourist expedition to the distant past and we would hear the “Sound of Thunder” from dinosaur feet. But now computer graphics have shown us hundreds of movie space scenes in perfect, eye-grabbing detail. There have been four Jurassic Parkmovies and even dinosaur-era time-travel series on TV (remember Terra Nova?) Film-making has changed a lot, too, from the long, slow pan across the mind-boggling starship of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the quick cuts and frenetic action of the Battlestar Galactica and Star Trekremakes. I was totally captivated when I first explored Rama with Clarke and the Ringworld with Larry Niven. But now you can experience some pretty amazing stuff at Disney World.

Does that mean that written SF is in a slump because it’s not possible to wow people anymore? I don’t think so.

It should be more fruitful than ever to feature stories on alien planets now that we actually know they exist, and have data on some really strange ones. Space flight will be more accessible to everyone in the not-too-distant future now that private industry is involved. Computer technology is advancing in ways almost no one foresaw, along with miniaturization and robotics. Not to mention genetic engineering and its stunning potential for good and for bad. All of these fields and more should provide fodder for incredible stories with a recognizable basis in current reality. The “wow” factor must be in making the reader immerse themselves in the world of the story, experiencing what the characters do and enjoying the thrill of potent new technology, bizarre worlds, exotic social structures and more without having to go back to university first.

After all, even every day life has moments of wonder and awe. How many more await us in the extraordinary realm that lies just beyond our view?

GOING UP...IN A SPACE ELEVATOR

Photo from thothx.com

A Canadian company has just received a US patent for a new invention. It made headlines because it’s big news. Big, as in, twenty kilometres tall. Thoth Technology of Pembroke, Ontario has designs to build a free-standing tower to the sky, not to touch the face of God, but to house a space elevator.

The reason for a space elevator is to remove the need for expensive and wasteful rockets to reach Earth orbit and, from there, the rest of outer space. The usual concept, as promoted by science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke and others, is to have a large terminus in a geo-stationary orbit (travelling at the same speed as the spin of the Earth so it remains over the same spot on the planet’s surface). From the terminus a cable would be lowered until it reached the ground (like Jack’s beanstalk in reverse). Then cargo and passengers would travel up and down the cable by magnetic or other means. That’s the plan put forward by the Japanese Obayashi Corporation in an announcement last year. They hope to build such an elevator by 2050. The biggest challenge to overcome is the cable, especially since their plans include extending the cable beyond geosynchronous orbit to a counterweight about a quarter of the way to the Moon. You probably can’t imagine the weight of a cable 96,000 kms long. I can’t either. In nanofibres made of Carbon 60 they might have a material with the strength to handle the load at a manageable weight, but so far such fibres have only been made in lengths of a few centimetres. Technology has some catching up to do.

The Thoth Technology plan is very different. Their scheme would involve building a twenty-kilometer-tall tower out of giant inflatable modules stacked on top of one another. Computers would control the inflation of individual gas cells within the modules to keep the whole thing balanced. In the face of a wind, for example, they would presumably increase the inflation on the leeward side and lean the tower into the wind. On top of the tower would be a runway from which space planes could take off and land. This would remove the need for the initial vertical portion of most rocket flights which uses up a third of their fuel.

That’s the advantage. The disadvantages?

Well, remember the last time you went to the airport to catch a flight? Now imagine all that plus a twenty kilometre elevator ride, after which you still wouldn’t be in space —you’d still have to catch a plane. Your luggage would just have twenty extra kilometres in which to get lost.

I imagine they’d be required to build it at least twenty kilometres from any inhabited area, just in case it ever did fall over. Not to mention fools dropping quarters from the observation deck.

And I keep trying to picture a pilot attempting a take-off from something like a gigantic version of one of those bouncing inflatable amusement rides for kiddies.

Personally, I think the original space elevator concept is more workable, in spite of the engineering challenges. But I’ve been wrong before. In any case, Thoth Technologies estimates it could cost five to ten billion US dollars to build their tower. That may be a little rich for Kickstarter. Possibly for Richard Branson, and even Elon Musk, too. On the other hand, if the current Canadian government loses the upcoming election, their successors would probably cancel plans to spend $29 billion on F35 fighter jets. Just sayin’.

They might even be able to subsidize some of the tower’s cost by incorporating a department store:

“Going up! Next floor: space toys, mining equipment, and women’s lingerie…” (A little flash of Sandra Bullock in Gravity there.)

THE SCIENCE FICTION TAKE

Writers get our ideas in different ways. We may not even know where an idea came from. But for science fiction writers it’s fun to take a look at the newest science stories and try a “science fiction take” on the story—imagine what kind of fictional tale could make use of the new facts. Here are a few examples:

The news story: The New Horizon spacecraft’s flyby of Pluto was the biggest space story of the past month. Although it will still take a long time for NASA to receive all of the data, we’ve learned that the surface of Pluto includes glaciers of nitrogen ice, as well as frozen methane and carbon monoxide. The mission has reawakened interest in the dwarf planet and how it came to be part of our solar system, with its wonky orbit so far from the sun (most of the time).

The science fiction take: Two centuries from now, human crews are mining nitrogen and methane on Pluto when it’s discovered that another body the size of a dwarf planet is swooping out of the far reaches of the Oort Cloud on a collision course for Pluto. Engineers try desperately to come up with a plan to deflect the newcomer, and colonists are just about to evacuate Pluto when the incoming planetoid slows down and it’s found to be home to an ancient race of explorers who use rogue planets to travel the galaxy.

The news story: Out of the nearly 2,000 planets that have now been discovered orbiting other stars, it seems as if every other week a new candidate is being named “most earth-like”. Generally that means that it’s a rocky planet (as opposed to a gas giant) orbiting a star not too different from our own sun in the “habitable zone” (not too hot, not too cold because it must have liquid water) and is somewhat close to the Earth in size. The most recent most earth-like is known as Kepler-452b, but here’s a good look at some of the best candidates by Scientific American.

The science fiction take: Fleeing an exhausted home planet, human colonists travel to colonize new planets called New Earth, Earth 2, and Terra Nova around other stars. But because of the impediments of slow space travel and a lack of resources among struggling new colonies, the planets lose touch with each other. On one of them, a catastrophe knocks the civilization down a few rungs and space technology (and knowledge) are lost. When progress once again permits the inhabitants to venture into space, they try to find planets like their own. The most promising candidate found is (drum roll please) the original Earth, refreshed and once again able to host its human children. (Awwww.)

The news story: In recent years, China and Russia have put a lot of effort into developing anti-satellite weapons, and have had no interest in negotiating the peaceful use of space, so the Obama administration in the US has budgeted $5 billion over the next five years to enhance the American military space program. “Space wars” could become a reality.

The science fiction take: An orbital war sparks and the major powers destroy each other’s satellites thereby killing all GPS systems and causing most telecommunications and the internet to collapse. The resulting financial fallout causes a full-blown global economic collapse too. The warmongers still have their conventional and nuclear weapons, but only those that can be guided without satellites. Devastated populations worldwide know who’s to blame, rise up against the makers of war, and forge new alliances, heralding an unprecedented era of peace (but poor availability of TV channels).

Call these ideas cheesy or dumb or maybe brilliant, I have no plans to write any of them into stories (at present). Some of them have probably already been done. The point is, it’s a good exercise for the imagination and it’s fun.

Try it yourself. There might be a science fiction writer lurking inside you. (And for heaven’s sake let him out, because it’s dark in there.)

SCIENCE FICTION FOR FUN OR ENLIGHTENMENT?

Childhood's End coming to the SyFy channel in December 2015.

What do you look for in science fiction? Pure fun? Escape? New knowledge?

My impression these days is that a lot of the SF being published is pure space opera, or quasi-paranormal scifi-fantasy, alternate history just for the steampunk gadgetry, or TV and movie series spinoffs. There’s nothing wrong with reading that’s just for fun—I choose it sometimes too, although I don’t feel inclined to write it.

Ideally, though, the escape SF provides is fun even when it’s dealing with something serious. It should be entertaining even as it compels us to learn something about ourselves. The SF novels with staying power do this well—they raise the genre to the level of provocative literature while still giving the inner child in us a big kick.

Classic SF from the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven often explored the “big crazy artefact”: Clarke’s mega-spaceship Rama or Niven’s Ringworld, Greg Bear’s Eonseries asteroid and, more recently, the Bowl Of Heaven from Niven and Benford. They set up a mind-boggling concept and then explored all of its dramatic possibilities while finding ways to reflect our human foibles and challenges. As if Newtonian and Einsteinian physics were a muse.

Then there were the sociological treatises of Isaac Asimov (the Foundation series) and Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed). Thought provoking, but still absorbing stories. And, of course, the outright cautionary novels like 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 which forced us to examine the implications of political and technological developments. These days, a good number of post-apocalyptic stories, like Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy follow the same path (as did Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). I could add Hugh Howey’s Wool series to the list.

Since the earliest days of the computer revolution, and especially the coming of the internet, there’s been a big trend from William Gibson, Charles Stross and others to examine technological saturation in society to extreme degrees, as well as the politics of surveillance and the death of privacy. In these books we face quandaries that we’ll have to face in real life very soon.

It’s interesting that Philip K. Dick’s stories, most featuring some form of altered reality, have inspired more movie treatments than any other SF author I can think of. Movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Adjustment Bureau haven’t always been that faithful to Dick’s original material, but they’ve provided food for thought along with the special effects and other movie magic.

Military SF from Robert Heinlein and others reflected and commented on military conflicts of their day. Modern examples include the Forever War series from Joe Haldeman and Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. Even stories about aliens like Stranger In A Strange Land and Clarke’s Childhood’s End ( now becoming a TV event) are mostly about humans. Educational, you could say, but math class never held my attention so well.

Then there are the “what if” novels that writers like Robert J. Sawyer do so well, tackling issues that are just on the horizon: what if rejuvenation treatments worked for one person but not their spouse? What if everyone in the world could get a glimpse of their future? What if the World Wide Web became self-aware? We can learn something about ourselves, our society, our priorities and morals from all of these, but they are so much more than intellectual exercises.

By all means enjoy a good romp in space, a clever time travel tale, or a Nazis-won-the-war alternate history. But don’t be afraid to order a richer fictional meal that’s brain food as well as comfort food. You might find it even more satisfying.

CLIMATE AND SCIENCE FICTION

Photo from Architecture 2030

Climatologist James Hansen of Columbia University has sounded the alarm: the rate of melting of Antarctic ice as recently measured means that, if rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide aren’t soon reversed, large coastal areas of the planet could be flooded within as little as fifty years due to increases in sea level as much as nine meters.

It’s not science fiction. If you live in a coastal city, you should be concerned, along with millions upon millions of the world’s citizens.

This is far faster and much more drastic than earlier predictions of sea level rise, and it’s based on a global average temperature increase of just 2 Celsius degrees. That figure could go much higher if something isn’t done soon to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. Yet when it comes to supporting solutions to the problem, governments lumber like dinosaurs in a tar pit (one of the sources of planet-heating fossil fuels perhaps?)

There are a number of web resources that show reputable assessments of how coastal population centres will suffer as sea levels rise. The NOAA has a good one here, and there’s a more complicated one here. National Geographic has a page to show what the world would be like if all of the ice melted, but that’s not likely to happen anytime soon (and even that won’t make you think you’re in a certain Kevin Costner movie). All of these will give you a chill, or possibly a thrill in a disaster-movie kind of way. Looking at them reminded me of all of the science fiction that has dealt with climate over the years.

One of the first to make an impact on me was J.G. Ballard’s The Wind From Nowhere, a 1961 novel that painted the terrible effects on human civilization of a non-stop hurricane force wind. It was probably one of the first books to get me hooked on apocalyptic scenarios. But it was far from alone. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction offers a pretty good overview of the SF written on the subject of climate disasters, and you can find other pop culture references here. Maybe we’re fascinated with the topic of weather disasters just because we’re obsessed with the weather. We talk about it every time we have nothing else urgent to say, and much of the rest of the time too. It’s so prevalent in fiction that “man vs. nature” is one of the four main types of conflict taught in every literature class. (In case you’ve forgotten, the others are man vs. man, man vs. society, and man vs. himself.)

Perhaps there’s a special poignancy in vicariously witnessing a human being’s struggle against something awesomely powerful for which he or she is not to blame. Ah, except this time there’s plenty of evidence that, collectively, we are to blame. The climate change James Hansen warns about isn’t caused by solar flares, or a black alien cloud that blocks the sun, or an asteroid strike. We’re doing it to ourselves, and to others. Each of us could do something to stop it, but we have to make that choice. Which means that the current climate scenario incorporates all four of the classic forms of conflict mentioned above.

That makes for a heck of a story, but it’s one I’d rather read than live, thanks very much.