Surrogates—which opens September 25—features a world where people jack into robotic avatars and send the bots out into the world in their stead (trailer here). Not only was this Venditti’s freshman graphic novel, but it’s publisher Top Shelf’s first credit as a film producer.

“Bruce Willis is one of the few actors who can do the action sequences and personal moments,” Venditti told me during a break signing his novel at Comic-Con. “A big theme in the book is the relationship the main character has with his wife. He’s a police detective who can do his job without worrying about the hazards of his job. He’ll go home to his wife and she’ll only react with him through her surrogate, because she’s uncomfortable with aging. So it’s a strain on their marriage.”

The story (illustrated by Brett Weldele) mines the psychology of wanting to be something than who we are. Venditti got the idea from books on Internet addiction and TV shows like Extreme Makeover and Dr. 90210. But its theme was eerily prophetic.

“What would society be like if there was a technology that enabled us to stay in our homes and send these idealized versions of ourselves to the real world?” said Venditti. “Since I wrote the book in 2002, fans have sent me articles about some of this technology starting to take place,” such as long-distance surgery through robotic arms and electrodes that enable individuals to move items by thought. “Some sociology professors told me the used the book in their classrooms.”

His next project—The Homeland Directive, a political medical thriller out next summer, also from Top Shelf—examines another technology-oriented theme. “Do we live in a time when personal privacy and national security can coexist?” he said. “But that’s as much as I can tell you right now…”

One hopes he’s including a role for Willis—wouldn’t want to freeze out his big Hollywood connection.

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

“There was a day and time when authors didn’t worry about making technology work. You just had to have the spaceship work,” said Staffel. “These days, technology is changing at such a rapid rate, that the science-fiction writer has to compete with reality in a way they didn’t before. People also understand technology more so than in the past, so if it isn’t right, the reader will spot it.”

The panelists—Greg Bear (City at the End of Time), David Williams (Burning Skies), Dani and Eytan Kollin (The Unincorporated Man) and Kirsten Imani Kasai (Ice Song)—cited alternative energy sources, environmental decay, eventual development of quantum computing, and man/machine interfaces in military and biotech arenas as technologies with the most impact on society.

“Biotech is transforming everything,” said Bear. “It has resulted in the removal of the middleman between audience and creator. But removing teachers and experts from the throne is not always such a good thing.”

Williams mines the weaponization of outer space and cyberspace, and military application of civilian technology for ideas.

“The only thing that’s cooler than ‘x’ is blowing ‘x’ up,” he laughed. He also noted the acceleration of technology will redefine our lives and ourselves. “In the next few decades, the focus will be less on what kind of energy we have and more on how we use it, what we define as human, and huge segments of the population retreating into religious denial, because technology is coming at them so rapidly.”

In The Unincorporated Man, the Kollins brothers explore the economic implications of technology and true nature of freedom. That story chronicles the last unowned man in a world where humans have become incorporated and no longer own a majority of themselves.

“Economics is the study of how masses of humans behave with a series of rules and using it to predict behavior,” said Eytan. “What happens when you really understand this and can manipulate the human mind?”

“We simultaneously want to be freed by technology, but we are also terrified by it,” added Dani. “And we should be terrified. Technology offers better ways to live and quicker ways to kill. Even if we used technology to create the perfect world, we’d probably screw it up, because that’s the nature of the human condition. It’s in that middle ground that we get to write our stories.”

For research, the novelists relied on science journals, Google searches, and getting the appropriate scientist to vet their writing for accuracy. “A scientist writing science-fiction is still only a specialist in one area,” says Williams.

Even when the science is stretched, it still must adhere to the universe imagined in the story. “Even if it’s excellent research, you only need a nugget of it, because it’s fiction,” says Kasai. “You can create a separate new reality as long as you operate according to the rules of that new reality.”

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

This morning, io9 demonstrated that in addition to putting out an awe-inspiring blog every day, they could also put on a mind-expanding Comic Con panel.  With no Hollywood celebrities and just a couple of special guests, our favorite sci-fi bloggers ran through the TV shows, movies, comics and books of the past year that “blew our minds without blowing up any giant robots.”

Here are a few of their recommendations:

Moon -Duncan Jones’s new movie topped the list for both Annalee Newitz and Meredith Woerner.  Like a lot of the works recommended by the panel, Moon explores what it means to be human in a rapidly approaching era where humanity can be technologically upgraded or artificially created (note: this is not a spoiler, the lead character realizes very early in the film that he is a clone).

Julian Comstock – In this novel, Robert Charles Wilson depicts a 22nd century American that has sunk into barbarism and theocracy.  In response, the hero undermines the regime in part through trying to popularize ideas about Darwin in a world that has forgotten about science.

Rest -  What if someone invented a pill that meant no one would ever have to sleep, with no adverse side effects?  Panel guest Bonnie Burton from StarWars.com picked the Devil’s Due comic Rest, which explores this idea and its implications on society, the environment and mental health.

Wonton Soup – James Stokoe’s comic, recommended by Graeme McMillan, investigates what humans would do if they had to be out in space for a really long time.  Apparently the answers are get high and cook alien recipes.

Infoquake – io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders picked a series of novels by David Louis Edelman.   In Edelman’s future, people can hack and upgrade their own bodies and brains, impacting human relations in both the literal and business senses of the phrase.

Given the awesomeness of science non-fiction that year, I might almost expect it to be a down year for science fiction. Not so. 1969 had some good sci-fi—maybe not as good as landing on the moon, but damn good nonetheless.

It was, for example, the year Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut challenged the idea that sci-fi wasn’t an appropriate genre for high-brow “literary-fiction” writers, tradition that has carried forward to become the “counter factual” fiction (sci-fi by any other name…) of writers like Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon. It was also the year Ursula K. LeGuin explored gender and identity in Left Hand of Darkness, and Michael Crichton scared the bejesus out of everyone with his  mutated virus in The Andromeda Strain. Ray Bradbury published a collection of short stories in I Sing the Body Electric (the title story of which became The Electric Grandmother), and Isaac Asimov collected some of his best stories in Nightfall and other Stories.

In June of that year, TV watching geeks saw Captain Kirk set his phaser on stun for what they thought might be the last time (oh, what they didn’t know!) when Star Trek went off the air. Perhaps in mourning, ardent fans held the first Star Trek convention before the show was even canceled, in March 1969 at the Newark public library. The Doctor (you know Who) regenerated for just the second time as Patrick Troughton made way for the 1970 arrival of Jon Pertwee.

In movieland, sci-fi screenwriters would have a hard time following up Barbarella, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes, all of which came out in 1968. Gregory Peck struggled to rescue stranded astronauts Gene Hackman, Richard Crenna, and James Franciscus in Marooned, which came out four months after the moon landing. The novel that provided the basis for the movie actually used the single-occupant Mercury capsule, but Hollywood updated it for the Apollo era. The space station in the film is based on NASA’s early drawings for SkyLab. In some ways the movie was ahead of its time, as producers decided not to include a regular score and instead use a series of beeps and hums to evoke the isolation of space. (Turner Classic Movies will be airing Marooned at 1:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 21. Check local listings and set your Tivos!).

Tough to compete with actual space travel when you’re a science-fiction writer or producer, but still, not a bad year to be a nerd.

It’s now looking like I might get one sooner than you’d think.

We seem to be striding toward that particular future with impressive speed. One could make the case that laptops represent our first faltering steps in that direction, but I say Amazon’s Kindle represents the next leap forward. Wafer thin and with  its low battery consumption and low-eye-strain reflective surface, it marks a huge leap toward blending the benefits of paper with those of computers. But that’s only the beginning of what’s happening out there in Science Land.

First of all, the Kindle’s black-and-white E-Ink technology is already preparing to give way to color screens. Currently, each pixel in a Kindle is comprised of 60 tiny electronic balls, each with a black hemisphere and a white one. As described by New Scientist, in the color version, each ball will be replaced with four smaller balls of white, green, red, and blue, each of which is switched  “on” or “off” by a single transistor. Until recently, E-Ink couldn’t get transistors small enough to make this system work, but that changed last year. Now that the technology works, E-Ink expects to have color devices ready by the end of 2010.

But then there’s the battery obstacle. Batteries are a major problem for all portable devices, but if we want to thin, foldable computers, there’s going to have to be a solution to the big, bulky batteries we use now. E-Ink devices start off with an advantage in power use, because the balls only require electricity to change from one state to the other. When the Kindle is simply displaying a single page, it uses no electricity at all.

One future possibility for providing that small amount of power might be printable batteries. Yes, printable batteries. Not printable on your home ink jet, but still printable right onto paper. To make one, the manufacturers’ printer sandwiches a layer of carbon nanotubes between a layer of manganese oxide (the cathode) and a layer of zinc (the anode). Together they can produce 1.5 volts of electricity for short periods of time. In series the scientists can generate 3 volts, 4.5 volts, and so on. Granted, these batteries of have short lifetimes. The plan right now is to use them on RFID chips, animated posters, and snail mail greeting cards (do people still send those?).

But if the lifetime of printable batteries can be extended, then the Diamond Age scene becomes more and more feasible. Really, how many years away can it be?

Image from Wikipedia

Teaching a computer how to learn is a perennial topic in artificial intelligence research, and one that’s long been mined in science fiction. The moment when the computer demonstrates it has learned how to learn is usually a pretty significant moment in any story it’s in, not least because it is one of the Laws Of Science Fiction that once a computer has started to learn, it will continue to learn at an ever accelerating rate. (A corollary of this Law states that if the computer isn’t already self-aware, sentience will arise by the end of the next chapter or act at the very latest.) Interestingly, the “My God! It’s learnt how to learn!” moment seems to be dwelt on by movie and TV shows (Wargames, Colossus, Terminator 3) much more than it crops up in literary science fiction. In literary science fiction, artificial intelligence is often simply presented as fait accompli. So does anyone have recommendations for a good literary treatment of the birth of an A.I.? (Frederic Brown’s 1954 short-short story “Answer” is of course taken as a given classic of the genre).

With a foreword by DISCOVER’s very own Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, The Saucer Fleet dissects in great detail flying saucers from classic productions such as This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet and The Invaders, and looks at their impact on the audiences of the day. As well as a detailed synopses of the movie or show and extensive production notes giving the history and background of how each fictional saucer was brought to life, the authors also use frame-by-frame analyses to create engineering diagrams of saucer exteriors and interiors (often struggling with the fact that the interior set designers didn’t care overly much about matching up with the scale shown by the exterior models.) Dedicated model-builders can use these diagrams to build their own reproductions, but any science-fiction fan will get a kick out of seeing how much thought and effort went into designing these deceptively simple spacecraft that once thrilled or terrified audiences.

Today, as Blumberg describes, teratology as a science has come to mean the study of congenital malformations. (This is somewhat removed from Sanctuary’s broad menagerie of many different species, but teratology does have its roots firmly in the fantastic compendiums of monsters and freaks compiled in previous centuries. These contain many bizarre creatures that would be quite at home on the CGI sets of Sanctuary.) In his book, Blumberg argues that the breakthrough discoveries that unravelled the structure and coding of DNA in the 20th century were so dazzling that scientists ultimately became a little too quick to write off studying abnormalities. The thinking was that our bodies were a result of the blueprints laid down in our genes and encoded into our DNA. If a creature was born with an abnormality, without any novel mutation in its genetic code, then the abnormality was simply an error of development, a botched job of turning the plans coded in our DNA into an organism, with little scientific significance.

But in recent years the study of epigenetics has altered that thinking. What happens in the cell outside the DNA molecule can be as important, if not more, than anything that is coded into our DNA. What genes get activated and when is determined by a complex set of biochemical networks in our cells, the behavior of which can be modulated by a whole host of external factors, such as the presence or absence of this or that hormone. And thanks to the Human Genome Project and other projects that have sequenced different animal and plant genomes, we know that humans being are not human because our ancestors’ DNA mutated over and over to produce lots of really cool human-only genes. Rather, we operate with a collection of genes that is similar to the one possessed by many organisms. The key lies how those genes are expressed, so that the bones of a paw become elongated into fingers or a tail shrinks down to a few vestigial bones stuck on the end of our spines. This is why so many species can look radically different, and occupy different ecological niches (think bats versus kangaroos), and yet be based on the same basic body plan of skull-spine-tail-and-four-limbs. Changing how a gene is regulated is much easier than coming up with a brand new gene.

With this new view of how genes are regulated, abnormalities can be seen as much more than mistakes of little significance. Abnormalities indicate what kind of things are easy to change in an organism, and the range of change available to our biological machinery when faced with some evolutionary pressure. For example, if having two heads on one body suddenly conferred a marked advantage, it would be relatively easy to push evolution in that direction, as evidenced by the number of two-headed animals (and, rarely, human beings, such as the engaging Abby and Brittany Hensel twins) that have been born over the years. Hence, studying abnormal development can provide some real insight into how our bodies work and species arise.

This view also leads Blumberg to a philosophical position that Helen Magnus would approve of: developmental abnormalities are not failed attempts to express the otherwise perfect plan locked up inside an organism’s DNA. If this was true, it would suggest that those organisms are inherently different to ‘normal’ organisms, those that are apparently following their genetic blueprints faithfully. Life is not that simple, that binary. Instead, abnormalities simply represent points (albeit sometimes extreme points) along a range of natural variation that we all share. Because we all rely on epigenetic factors in our development, there is no singularly perfect plan that lies within our DNA, hence no sharp dividing line between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal;’ we are all bound in the commonality of our existence.

*The nice people at SciFi sent me a screener of the last two episodes, and I can tell you now the penultimate episode of Stargate Atlantis on January 2nd is one of their cleverest ever in terms of storytelling.

Alien landscapes

Science fiction magazine

Seventies Japan

[via Pink Tentacle]

The plot imagines that Einstein did not actually fail in his quest to develop a unified theory of everything. Instead, horrified by the atomic bomb and fearful of the uses to which his unified theory might be put, but unwilling to destroy his work completely, Einstein entrusts the theory to a few trusted students. Decades later, those students–now elderly physicists–start turning up dead as a malevolent entity tries to piece together the theory for its own ends. While visiting him in hospital, a former student of one of the physicists is entrusted with a clue to the location of Einstein’s final theory, sparking a cat and mouse chase to discover the deepest secrets of the universe–and in best Crichton fashion–the key to the destruction of humanity.

Bearing in mind that coming up with a real unified theory of everything would be a bit of a tall order, Alpert none the less had to come up with a reasonable fictional theory for Final Theory, a difficult trick given that it needed to be more-or-less compatible with the current standard model of particle physics, consonant with the hints researchers are garnering from the bleeding edge, and workable in terms of the physics and maths available to Einstein in the 1940s and 1950s. But Alpert pulls it off, giving the book a nice meaty finish instead of collapsing into anticlimactic technobabble. If you’re looking for something to sink your teeth into during these long winter evenings, give Final Theory a try.

With buzz already building for The Road, a post-apocalyptic movie starring Viggo Mortensen set to come out sometime in 2009, Science Not Fiction decided to take at look at some of our favorite after-the-end-of-the-world scenarios. I excluded the various incarnations of War of Worlds because the book is basically an extended flashback from the safety of a rebuilt future, and the movies are apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic. Similarly Independence Day and Deep Impact are about averting armageddon. Twelve Monkeys and Oryx and Crake have post-apocalyptic scenes, but the back bone of their narrative is firmly in the pre-apocalyptic world–the selections below are all about life in the no-holds-barred aftermath. So in chronological order:

1. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1950) Echoes of Walter Miller Jr.’s novel have popped up in science fiction for decades, notably in Babylon 5 and Anathem. Canticle features a monastic sect devoted to preserving technology in the centuries following the fall of civilization.
2. Lord of The Flies (1954). Set in the aftermath of a nuclear war* a group of boys are stranded on a tropical island. An allegory for the collapse of civilization as a whole, things soon turn ugly and shades of Lord of the Flies are found in many later post-apocalyptic works.
3. Mad Max (1979) Although the argument could be made that the sequels were better than the somewhat disjointed original (in particular Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), Mad Max’s iconic look and feel has been copied by countless other movies, in many ways defining the visual vocabulary of the post-apocalyptic.
4. The Day of The Triffids (BBC TV adaptation, 1981) Based on John Wyndham’s 1951 novel of the same name, The Day of The Triffids featured a double whammy–a nation struck by blindness and the escape of the deadly Triffid plants. The scenes of a deserted London inspired 28 Days Later, and the clacking noise made by approaching Triffids in the BBC adaptation became one of the scariest sounds ever.
5. Threads (1984) Continuing the BBC’s 1980’s love affair with the end of the world, Threads is an uncompromising and utterly bleak tale of life in a British city (Sheffield) before and after nuclear armageddon. Incorporating documentary style elements, the script pulled no punches and was noted for its technical accuracy, including the effects of a nuclear winter.
6. The Quiet Earth (1985) I mentioned this film before in Science Not Fiction’s list of the 10 Most Underrated Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies, but it deserves to appear again — a scientist awakes to find a world in which (almost) every human being has been mysteriously killed instantly.
7. The Postman (Original 1985 novel, not the Kevin Costner film adaptation) The movie version was weak, but the novel remains one of my favorite books. Without sugarcoating life in a destroyed United States, the book nonetheless is unusual among post-apocalyptic fiction for its moving and believable optimism.
8. Cherry 2000 (1986) Yes, it’s a classic B-movie. But this hero-quest romp had some standout touches, including the idea of a world that can’t afford anything new and the memorable and mentally unbalanced Lester (a sort of psychopathic self-help guru.)
9. 28 Days Later (2002) Confirming the fall of nuclear war and the rise of biological disaster as the standard route to a post-apocalypse, 28 Days Later also breathed new life into the zombie genre. A gripping and intelligent plot packed a huge emotional wallop.
10. I am Legend (2007 movie adaptation). Based on the 1954 novel, the amazing visual storytelling and convincing performance of Will Smith in an empty New York City knocked this tale of humanity’s twilight out of the park.

ETA *(Or not, there’s an alternative explanation for the precipitating events that force the boys’ original evacuation, see the comments below. But it still stands as a microcosm of life after global civilizational collapse)

His greatest strength was in his ability to imbue his novels with a sense of authenticity; The Andromeda Strain was littered with realistic screenshots and computer printouts and came with a detailed (and entirely fictional) bibliography. Jurassic Park has become the cultural point of reference for discussions about biotechnology, cloning and genetic engineering. If Crichton had a weakness, it was his fondness for the theme which repeats over and over in his novels: technological hubris. Some advanced technology is confidently promoted by scientists as progress toward a better world. Unexpected side effects or interactions that the scientists overlooked in their dash to the future manifest themselves, and things get pretty messy from that point on (and to be fair, usually a really fun read.) But each time, it is implied that anyone who is not an overreaching scientist or an idiot would have known to leave well enough alone.

In real life though, it’s not so easy to make that call. First, the hard truth is that every technology is something of a faustian bargain, that every technology ushers in the unexpected, for good and ill. This has been true for a long time: Socrates railed against the introduction of writing because of the damage it wreaked upon oral traditions. More recently, think of the cell phone. Being able to make a phone call almost anywhere at anytime certainly has its advantages, but also its disadvantages as some people find it impossible to take a break from work or their social whirl. Second, any mature, reliable, technology today is mature and reliable only because people have learned from a mountain of failures, some of which have been known to have pretty high body counts attached. Take the airplane. It’s about the safest way to travel long distances — now that we know about things like how metal fatigue damages jet planes, a lesson learned the hard way thanks to the in-flight disintegration of two de Havilland Comets. Progress always occurs against a backdrop of failure.

So sure, a few people might get eaten by dinosaurs. But Crichton never fast forwarded a decade or two, where there’d be a new dinosaur theme park—one with security systems that can’t be silently turned off by a single person and featuring creatures that are surgically neutered. Still, even though I’ll always take his warnings against hubris with a big pinch of salt, I will always enjoy his books, and be grateful to him for providing a vocabulary and frame of reference to discuss some of the real risks of modern technology.

Image: Screenshot from A&E’s television version of The Andromeda Strain.