Some of Gibson’s most fascinating comments were about how our era would be thought about by people in the far future. If the Victorians are known for their denial of the reality of sex, Gibson said, we will be known for our odd fixation with distinguishing real from virtual reality. This comment resonated with me on many different levels. Just a couple weeks before, I had lunch with Craig Mundie, the head of Microsoft Research, prior to a talk he gave at Northwestern. He told us about some new directions they are taking one of their hottest products, the Kinect. The Kinect is a camera for the Xbox gaming system that can see things in 3D. One of their new endeavors with this camera is to allow you to create 3D avatars that move and talk as you are in real time, so you can have very realistic virtual meet-ups. This is now available on the Xbox as Avatar Kinect. The second direction is the real time generation of 3D models of the world around you as you sweep the Kinect around by hand, called Kinect Fusion. With this model of the world around you, you can start to meld real and virtual in some very fun ways. In one of his demos, Mundie waved a Kinect around a clay vase on a nearby table. We instantly got an accurate 3D model up on the screen – exciting and impressive from a $150 gizmo. I’ve had to create 3D models of stuff in my own research, and that’s involved hardware about 100 times more expensive. Even more impressive, Mundie next had the projected image of the 3D model of the vase start to spin, then stuck his hands out in front of the Kinect and used movements of his hand to sculpt it, potter-like. It was wild. All that was needed to complete the trip was a quick 3D print of the result. Further demos showed other ways in which the line between reality and virtuality was being blurred, and it all brought me back to the confluence of real and virtual worlds so well envisioned by the show I advised during its brief life, Caprica.

Gibson’s right. We haven’t yet moved beyond our need to identify what belongs to what when it comes to digital and physical worlds, so we constantly consecrate it with our language. Ironically, some of that very language was created by him: “cyberspace,” a word Gibson coined in his story “Burning Chrome” in 1982. During the conversation today, led by fellow faculty member and author Bill Savage, Gibson said he’s less interested in its rise than to see it die out. He sees its use as a hallmark of our distancing ourselves from who we are as mediated by computer technology. He thinks the term is starting to go out of use, and he’s happy about that — in his view, there’s no need for a word about a space that we are constantly moving through the coordinates of, as we do each time we go on to twitter, facebook, google+, and other digital extensions of self. It’s not cyberspace anymore: it’s our space.

It seemed inevitable that a question about The Singularity would be put to Gibson in the Q&A. Sure enough, it was the final note, and Gibson dispatched it with typical incisiveness. The Singularity, he said, is the Geek Rapture. The world will not change in that way. Like our gradual entrance into cyberspace, now complete enough that marking this world with a separate term seems quaint, Gibson said we will eventually find ourselves sitting on the other side of a whole bunch of cool hardware. But, he feels our belief that it will be a sudden, quasi-religious transformation (perhaps with Cylon guns blazing?) is positively 4th century in its thinking.

The idea behind Drew Magary’s great new book is simple: aging, as it turns out, is caused by one gene. Shut that gene off and you stop aging; accidents and disease are still a problem, but you’ve cured death by natural causes. Now compound that discovery with the fact that any person who gets the Cure simply stops aging. People don’t become younger, they just don’t get older, frozen at their “Cure age.” What happens next?

In an effort to find out, Magary takes us through the life of John Farrell, a New York lawyer who gets the Cure for aging at the age of 29 in the year 2019. From that point on, things go rather poorly for John and the rest of humanity. As one might expect, curing aging doesn’t cure social ills, over-population, ennui, or a host of other human hangups. Mark Frauenfelder has an excellent synopsis of the book over at boingboing.net, and I share his opinions about the book’s bleak tone and high quality.

Magary’s argument through the text is essentially this: death creates meaning. Not mortality, but guaranteed natural death due to aging. The idea that no matter what you do, how you live your life, the concept that you will be born, mature, grow old, and die creates human meaning. Magary has a point: from the riddle of the Sphinx to Tyler Durden to the final books of Harry Potter, aging and death seem to be at the epicenter of human thought. I don’t deny him that at any moment any one of us could meet a tragic end. Life is precious in part because it is not meant to last.

But here is where I struggle. The Postmortal is not about a post-mortal society, it is about a post-aging society. Lots and lots and lots of people die in Magary’s vision. In fact, he seems to argue that in the absence of death, people will not only seek death but will create circumstances that create death and thereby, create meaning. It is only when Farrell’s life is most in peril that he finds purpose in existence. But Farrell is never immortal, no one is. So my question is: is the process of aging as meaningful as the condition of being mortal?

This question vexed me, because I know a great many people who have aged with grace. They wear wizened white beards or crinkled smiles that highlight eyes behind inch-thick spectacles. Some people are just awesome at being old. They have custom canes and smoke ivory pipes and say saucy things that only they can get away with. To reference Harry Potter again, Voldemort, Mr.Flees-From-Death himself, is contrasted with Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall, both of whom are walking idealizations of what the aging process should look like.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? They are idealizations.

Reality presents a grimmer picture. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and a laundry list of other late-onset diseases savage the body just enough that modern medicine can step in to keep the heart beating and the organs limping along while the mind deteriorates to the point of nothingness. Aging in the modern era is about slow unstoppable loss – of hearing, of memory, of mobility, of continence, of dignity. What part of that process creates meaning in our lives? Or is it that to get the benefits of death, we must past through the fires of desperate and futile attempts to prevent it?

Magary’s vision is encapsulated by a character who appears at the end of the book. She is a prostitute who wants to die. She had her age frozen at 18 and, as a result, is seen as a perpetual teen mentally. That is, her additional decades on the planet have done nothing to shape her perspective, beyond making her more cynical. And so it is with everyone else on post-Cure Earth. In Magary’s mind, the stop of physical aging is the stop of maturation.

In this sense, I suspect Magary’s indictment is not of those like Aubrey de Grey who seek the end of aging, but of those who resist maturation. Magary’s values are essentially conservative. It isn’t until the main character is about to die that he realizes what matters: namely, his son (out of wedlock), getting married, and protecting an unborn life. Life in the post-aging world is plagued by those who devalue marriage, childbearing, and religion. Yup, even the secular “Church of Man” is shown to be the “right” answer by the end of the novel. While I don’t deny that these are all valuable pursuits (substituting religion for the broader philosophy of the examined life) I do deny that they would be annihilated by agelessness.

Human beings do not settle down because they age anymore than people have quarter-life or midlife or three-quarter life crises because they age. People are content or discontent based on the life they are currently living. I find it fascinating that Dumbledore and Ms. McGonagall are both single as they approach the sunset of life. Both are examples of doing precisely what Magary critiques, pursuing one’s passions while putting commitment and reproduction on hold. As it so happens, one can live a life of value to humanity, one can, in fact, contribute to the greater good, without maturing and aging as he prescribes. Only if Dumbledore and McGonagall didn’t have to age, one could argue they could have become master magicians and raised a family, had they so chosen. Why aging creates more options in Magary’s mind, I’m not quite sure.

Death, I don’t deny, creates meaning. Finitude and limits give us something against which to define our existence. But my meaning is not created by the knowledge that I will die at the ripe old age of 98 but simply by the knowledge that I will die. Maybe I’ll get lucky and live to be 500 only to be obliterated during an alien invasion. Or maybe I have a tumor right now and will be gone before this time next year. I don’t know. But knowing when we will die, be it young or old, has never been what created meaning. And gray hairs and crows feet have never been the cause of wisdom, merely the first signs of the very high cost of living long enough to acquire it.

Personally, I like the idea of having 100 years of wisdom and experience in the youthful body of a 29 year old. But maybe I’m not old enough to know better yet.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Even today, Ball points out, societal and cultural debate is pervaded by the belief that technology is intrinsically perverting and thus carries certain penalty. Views that human cloning will be used for social engineering, eradicating one gender or resurrecting undesirable figures from the past, for example, all reflect age-old fears about the consequences of meddling in the ‘unnatural’. Ball warns that, as there is no global ban on human reproductive cloning, there is a strong chance that it will happen. It is thus likely to become a de facto reality without the well-informed debate it deserves.

Let’s unpack that little nugget, because it contains two very important points.

The first point is that many of our fears about advancing science and biotechnology related to the body trigger fundamental, core cultural fears. Leon Kass calls this the “Yuck” reaction, or, more eloquently, “Wisdom from Repugnance.” Kass’ argument is that we are naturally repelled by abhorrent ideas, like torturing babies and eating people. As regular readers of Science Not Fiction know, eating people isn’t always bad.

Well, as it turns out, Leon Kass’ argument that we should trust our gut when it says, “yuck!” is a pretty terrible way to do ethics. Why? Because what is “yuck” to me might be “yum” to you. And we’re back to not knowing if doing something ethically questionable, like cloning people, is morally permissible. Unnatural at least explains why so many people say “yuck” to modifying humans; it is a lesson we’ve been told over and over for millennia in myths and religion.

The second point is that we should be discussing these ideas like rational adults. Biotechnology is progressing at a rate and in ways that are so rapid as to be unpredictable. I make lots of educated guesses and suppositions, but none of what I write here is a prediction or a guarantee. My interest is in figuring out whether or not something like cloning is ethically permissible if we’re ever able to do it. As Ball notes, there is no current global ban on cloning. There is, as it stands, no global ban on most of the transhumanist issues, from eugenics to cognitive enhancers to A.I. to nano-implants. These possible technologies strain the very foundations of many of our philosophies and cultural institutions. If the lack of a global ban means the technology is likely inevitable, we better figure out how to go about things correctly.

Debate and discussion are essential to making good decisions. Recognizing our old, deep seated prejudices and biases, such as those against technology and making people, is equally essential. Simply because something is unnatural does not mean it is immoral. But that’s where the discussion starts, not where it ends ends.

Image of Book Cover via Bodley Head

A strange additional element of the social dimension of science operating in this comment is a certain fixation with credit among scientists, nicely expressed by Kissinger in his “There is no politics quite as vicious as academic politics, because there is so little at stake.” In doing science, few things cause more grief than arguments over who contributed what to a scientific study, and what order the authors names should have on some publication. The suggestion that Feynman got his idea from elsewhere will immediately incite a credit fight among supporters and detractors; the fact that the source was literature just adds another dimension to this fight.

Colin Milburn also talks about barriers in the humanities to properly understanding the interactions between narrative fiction and bench work in the laboratory. One of these is the idea of narrative fiction having organic unity that doesn’t take well to decomposition into the most adaptable and usable parts from a scientific perspective.

Despite these barriers from both sides, it’s clear that there’s lots of ideas flowing from science fiction into science itself. Milburn suggests we think of science fiction as being repurposed and remixed into lab bench practice through three different kinds of “mods“. The first is the blueprint mod where some discrete part of science fiction is used as a blue print for something in real life. He gives the example of Second Life, which was a blue print mod from the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.” The second is the supplementary mod, where the originating sci-fi has elements of technical impossibility to it, so it can’t be taken into the lab without some substantial modifications. Teleportation is an example of this: the quantum entanglement underlying recent examples can only occur with zero-mass states of atoms, which is to say pure information, a bit of a problem for applying it to people a la Star Trek even with the most strenuous of diets.  The third is the speculative mod. Here science projects its future possibilities using the language of sci-fi. Milburn gives Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” as an example of one of these mods.

As Milburn’s categorization of the ways in which fictional narratives about science and technology get put into practice percolates in my mind, I see a rich stream of case studies in my own work and those of my colleagues. It would be good if the result of looking at scientific practice through the lens of these ideas would be to nudge these two creative enterprises — work at the bench, and the crafting of stories — a bit closer together. Perhaps in the future scientists will have workshops (modshops?) with story creators in a similar way in which business execs collaborate with creatives to get people thinking outside of their usual constraints.

Other links: The science-humanities gap is often discussed with reference to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Interdisciplinary programs that combine art and science studies attempt to heal the divide: here’s a discussion of some work on that.

The Bradbury panel featured Bradbury talking to his biographer, Sam Weller. I’m just going to share select quotes from his remarks. These are in order, but incomplete.

“The Internet to me is a great big goddamn stupid bore.”

“I got a call from a man who wanted to publish my books on the Internet. I told him, prick up your ears and go to hell.”

[Bradbury has met most, if not all, of the Apollo and Gemini astronauts.]

“All those astronauts had read the Martian Chronicles. When they were young men, they read my books and decided they wanted to become astronauts.”

“[Twilight Zone creator] Rod Serling came to my house many years ago, he didn’t know anything about writing science fiction and fantasy. So I took him down to my basement and gave him copies of books by Richard Matheson, copies of books by Henry Kuttner, copies of books written by Roald Dahl and by John Collier, and a couple of books by myself. And Rod Serling forgot he read all those books, and when he wrote the program, he copied some of the ideas without telling me. So we got into a big argument, so finally I walked away from the Rod Serling show. He had a great show, but he forgot the basis of the show were all the books I gave him by all my friends.”

[* Thanks to commenter John Joseph Adams for figuring this one out.]

“I read comic strips all my life I have all of Prince Valiant put away. I have all of Buck Rogers put away, too. I put away those starting when I was 19 years old. So my background in becoming a writer was falling in love with comic strips.”

“I read the comic strips, I learned how to write.”

“My favorite that’s in the paper every day is called Mutts.”

[Bradbury is a tireless advocate for free public libraries.]

“When I left high school, I had all my grades to go to college, but I had no money. I decided I will not worry about getting money to go to college, I will educate myself. I walked down the street, I walked into the library, for three days a week, for 10 years, and educate myself. It’s all free, that’s the great thing about libraries. When I was 28 years old, I graduated from library.”

“We have to reinvest in space travel. We should never have left the moon. We have to go back to the moon and build a firm base there, so we can take off from there to the planet Mars. We have to become the Martians. I tell you to become the Martians. We have to civilize Mars, build a whole civilization on Mars, and then move out 300 years from now, into the universe, and when we do that, we have the chance of living forever. Our future is investing right now in space travel. Money should be given to NASA to build the rockets to go back to the moon.”

“It’s been 90 god-damned incredible years.”

“Every day I’ve loved it. Because I’ve remained a boy. The man you see here is a 12-year-old boy, and the boy is still having fun.”

“You remain invested in your inner child by exploding every day. You don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about the past, you just explode. If you are dynamic, you don’t have to worry about what it is you are. I’ve remained a boy, because boys run everywhere, they never look back, they run everywhere, they keep running running running. That’s me, the running boy.”

[Weller asked: Do you have any regrets?]

“I regret that I didn’t have more time with Bo Derek.”

“She came up to me in a train station in Paris 30 years ago and said ‘Mr. Bradbury?’, I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I love you,’ I said ‘Who are you?’ She said. ‘My name is Bo Derrick Derek.” She said, “Mr. Bradbury will you travel on the train with me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I will.’”

“Mel Gibson owns the [movie] rights to Fahrenheit 451. Did you see him on TV last week? Right now he’s not doing a thing with Fahrenheit 451.”

“I’ve got a new book of short stories, I’m working on, that will be published next Christmas. The title of it is Juggernaut, a book of 20 new short stories, which will be published next Christmas.”

All of the authors on the panel write in genre-bending styles, but they use the technique differently, and their reasons for doing it vary, too. Novik said her motivation for crossing the streams was simple: “It’s absolutely for short attention spans. The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup theory.”

Daryl Gregory, author of The Devil’s Alphabet (“transcription divergence syndrome” turns residents of small town into three different kinds of monsters—sci-fi/small-town drama), said it allows authors to reach out to more readers: “It lets you combine things and bring someone into something new. If they know dragons but not regency fiction, you can bring them in.”

Messing with genre came more serendipitously to Justin Cronin, author of the bestseller The Passage (immunity-boosting drug made from bat virus turns humans into vampirish things; apocalypse ensues), the movie rights to which were bought by Ridley Scott. Cronin said he used to write “regular fiction,” but then questioned it when his 9-year-old daughter became concerned it might be boring. So he planned The Passage in consultation with her. “The one rule we had was ‘be interesting.’ That was the goal. The Passage is a combination of all genres, everything I loved. Adventure novels, post-apocalyptic stories, Westerns, thrillers, Poe, in a big happy bag. You put ideas together, they have idea sex.”

So fusing genres is inclusive, sexy, and fit for the short-attention-spanned. But it’s not all smiles and sunshine.

China Miéville, creator of the Lovecraft-inspired New Weird style, said the “aesthetic arithmetic” didn’t always wind up as described by Novik. “Awesome plus awesome is not always two awesomes. Sometimes it’s an abomination. Like Reese’s Peanut Butter cups.” (Apparently, taste in confections is a pretty subjective thing.) He said that the mashup style is not as new as it’s sometimes thought, and sometimes it’s just “gimmicky marketing…It’s the classic Hollywood formula: it’s dinosaur love story; it’s steampunk cookery.”

And other panelists came up with a couple of combinations that should never be perpetrated upon the reading public: young-adult erotica and driver’s ed books with unreliable narrators.

Launch Pad 2010 Attendees

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

The workshop’s mission is to:

…teach writers of all types about modern science, primarily astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences. We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists.

The person who runs Launch Pad, Mike Brotherton, is a wizard at using sci-fi as a vehicle to teach actual science (or, in his own words, he’s a wizard at funding his own science-fiction habit).  A few years ago he received NSF funding to compile ”Diamonds in the Sky” — an anthology of hard science-fiction stories that also can be used by physics and astronomy teachers as a vehicle to teach real science. Some of the stories are quite good and worth the read. Perhaps we’ll see “Diamonds in the Sky II”  in the not-too-distant future, populated with stories from former Launch Pad attendees!

Launch Pad 2011 and 2012 are funded, and there’s still time to apply for next year!

I felt compelled to give it a chance, however, after flipping to the authors’ page and realizing, to my great relief, that I was dealing with actual scientists. Scientists with a wry sense of humor and penchant for science fiction, as I soon found out. Having listened to (or slept through) my fair share of biology lectures during college, I was curious to see how they would approach such a complex topic–and, more importantly, how helpful their “tips” would turn out to be. I’m happy to report that not only have they written one of the most entertaining, succinct guides to biotechnology and cloning, they have also provided an exhaustive guide on how to best your clone—surely a pressing question for anyone reading this blog.Kurpinski and Johnson do a bang-up job of explaining the nitty-gritty of complex concepts like RNA transcription, epigenetics, and genetic variation in terms that are both easy to follow (without being insultingly simple), and a hoot to read–something I can’t say for the vast majority of textbooks that I’ve suffered through. It doesn’t hurt that they generously pepper their descriptions with clever analogies and examples from sci-fi favorites to help drive home the point.

Even if you’re not too keen on the underlying science, the authors have plenty more on tap, including chapters debunking the most common misconceptions about cloning and biotech (and there are plenty) and outlining the merits of “bioenhancements” (think buffing up your physique or attaining extended life). As befits the general tongue-in-cheek tone of the book, these chapters are equal parts hard science and nerdy conjecture, trading laughs in some instances for hard looks at the moral implications of genetic engineering in others. Indeed, while the authors are generally bullish about the prospects for biotechnology to ameliorate our lives, they urge caution when it comes to taking genetic “tinkering” to its limits.

The book loses a little bit of steam, somewhat unfortunately (given the title), when it offers advice on how to actually defeat your clone. It’s not that it fails to make good on its promise; it actually does so to a fault. Where the other chapters consistently felt snappy and engrossing, this one sometimes felt a little more formulaic, even forced. While it is chock full of helpful suggestions on how to recognize and beat virtually every type of clone you might face, it can start to read like a long list of science-tinged “Fight Club”-esque tips. They could have easily eliminated half of the chapter without losing any of its potency.

How to Defeat is essentially a book about the myths, promises, and potential pitfalls of biotechnology (particularly the threat posed by a cantankerous clone), it also happens to be a solid, and solidly geektastic, primer on genetics, molecular, and synthetic biology. If you ever wanted to learn more about cloning and biotechnology without having to crack open a textbook or highbrow journal, you won’t find a more compact and enjoyable read.

Image: Amazon

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.

It’s a great collection, with a good mix of stories ranging from hard science fiction to near magic realism. Stand outs for me included “True Names,” a novella by Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum set in a post-post-post-human universe, and “An Eligible Boy,” written by Ian McDonald, that takes place in the mid-21st century India that McDonald has used as the backdrop for his 2004 book River of Gods.

So, that settled, what’s the beginning and middle of the book like? Awesome. Despite its length at 960 pages, the fast pacing of the book is reminiscent of Stephenson’s earlier, shorter, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. However, he also takes the time and room to delve into subjects ranging from orbital mechanics to Plato’s Theory of Forms. The book revolves around the adventures of a young scholar called Erasmas, who has lived most of his life within the confines of a millennia-old order mostly devoted to theoretical research. When an enigmatic and unexpected arrival settles into orbit around his world, Erasmas’ life is turned upside down.

The book’s release is well timed, coinciding with the activation of the big daddy of particle accelerators, the Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider is part of a quest to understand just how arbitrary are the laws of physics–a question that becomes significant within Anathem.

Our current best theory of fundamental physics, the Standard Model, explains much behavior–such as how the atoms of carbon that make up much of your body were formed, or how molecules interact chemically–in terms of a relatively small number of forces and particles. Using the standard model, you can explain why takes 13.6 electron volts to ionize a hydrogen atom (that is, the amount of energy required to completely remove the single electron that orbits the nucleus of a hydrogen atom), and not, say, 12.8 electron volts, or 114.4 electron volts. Ionization energies are critically important to whole swathes of chemistry and physics, and if the ionization energy was different, we’d live in a different universe–or wouldn’t live at all, if the different laws of chemistry were incompatible with the evolution of life. The point is that many very important numbers that scientists routinely plug into their calculations are explainable and predictable in terms of the Standard Model, meaning that the mathematical logic of the Standard Model compels those numbers to be their specific values and no others, in much the same way that if you fix the length of two sides of a right-angle triangle, the length of the third side is also automatically fixed, and can be calculated from the Pythagoras Theorem. (In Anathem it’s is possible to produce so-called newmatter, which is made from atoms that have been created under the auspices of slightly tweaked physical laws and so have properties different from that of regular matter because they have different ionization energies and so on.)

However, there are some numbers which, even with the Standard Model, can not be explained in terms of other numbers or the internal logic of the Standard Model. These are known as the Parameters or Constants of the Standard Model and include things like the mass of the electron. These parameters must each be measured experimentally and together with the mathematical framework of the Standard Model, define the laws of particle physics as we know them. What physicists at the LHC and other places are trying to do is to put the Standard Model through the wringer, testing it at higher and higher energies in the hopes of seeing some clues to a simpler structure that may underlie the Standard Model, just as the Standard Model lies beneath the complicated rules of chemistry.

If it exists, this structure may show us that some Constants are constrained just as tightly as the ionization energy of hydrogen–or it may show us that these Constants are not a logical consequence of deeper laws of physics and mathematics, but arbitrarily emerged by accident during the big bang. In other words, is the universe they way it is because no other way is possible, or are the laws of physics just an accident of the history of the universe? If we went back in time and reran the big bang, would we be as likely to see a radically different universe emerge as our own? Stephenson deserves credit for his trademark skill of putting ideas as big as this one into a book that’s also a rattling good read.

It’s not often you see a video trailer for a book, but here one is, a promo for the eagerly anticipated Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I’m not quite sure what to make of the hockey jerseys, but I’m sure it’ll all make sense once I’ve read the book.

Incandescence follows two narrative threads: that of two bored citizens of the Amalgam, a conglomerate of civilizations that fill the Milky Way’s outer disc, and two nascent scientists who live deep in the galaxy’s inner bulge, an area that has been pretty much a no-go zone for the Amalgam for countless millennia. The nascent scientists, Zak and Roi, live in pre-industrial world (known as The Splinter) that is so bizarre that it’s initially hard to see how such a place could exist within our universe. But their world is threatened with disaster, and (aided by some of the very features that make The Splinter so bizzare) Zak and Roi find themselves pushed to discover that scientific jewel in the crown, the General Theory of Relativity. This is a tall order to pull off for a novel, both in terms of making it logically possible and in terms of creating a story that you will want to keep reading. Egan manages it though, and Incandescence sets a new bar for hard science fiction.

Egan is uncompromising about the science, and in places the discussion of various experiments can be a little tough to follow, not least because Egan insists on using Zak and Roi’s terms for the various directions that exist on The Splinter — instead of things like left/right, inward/outward, or even +x/-x, there is garm/sard, rarb/sharq and shomal/junub. But if you really want to get your teeth into it, Egan has built an incredibly detailed accompanying web site that explains much of the science and mathematics (although as I noted last week, General Relavitivity, which incorporates the effects of things like gravity, is a much tougher beastie, conceptually and mathematically, than Special Relativity, which deals with the simpler case of uniform motion and is largely accessible with high-school math and physics). There are a few spoilers on Egan’s site, so you may want to wait for at least few chapters in before turning to it, but it does contain an interactive simulation of the Null Chamber, a zero-gravity region of The Splinter. The simulation allows you to perform many of Zak and Roi’s experiments and see the counter-intuitive results for yourself without having to troop all the way to the galactic bulge. If you’re interested in thinking about just how weird the universe can be, and yet still be recognizable as something of a piece with our own experience, check out Incandescence.

The reason for the intro is because Stephenson is trying to deal with a particular habit that science fiction readers have picked up: the willingness (even desire) to be plunged into a book where you don’t know what any of the proper nouns mean or the nature of the world the characters inhabit, with the assumption that by chapter four or so things will begin to make sense.

I think this habit developed as a natural consequence to the growth of science fiction in the first half of the 20th century: after you’ve read a whole bunch of stories it becomes a) repetitive and b) ruins the suspension of disbelief to have characters wandering around for the first few chapters finding contrived excuses to explain things to each other — after in, in the modern world (pure science fiction land to someone of a hundred years past) we don’t go around explaining the operational principles of cellphones or ATMs to each other on a regular basis. Why would a passenger onboard an interstellar cruiser of the 26th century feel compelled to stroll down to the engine room to get a refresher lecture on how the faster-than-light drive doesn’t work too well near disruptions such as supernovas and, oh, by the way, what’s that bright light outside the starboard porthole? Much better to have the passenger react in the moment as if they already knew that stars going boom screw up travel plans, and have the reader figure out the FTL connection later. But I agree with Stephenson that this can be confusing to readers who haven’t been trained to accept on faith that the author will find a way to make everything make sense eventually: it’ll be interesting to see if this “cheat sheet” experiment works in helping to bridge the gap between writing for mainstream and science-fiction-aficionado audiences.

Most planets featured in science fiction tend to be rather generic. These planets are usually convenient celestial bodies upon which to pitch a narrative tent for a few scenes before the plot moves on. Generic planets also tend to be one-note, reflecting some particular environment on Earth. You have your ice-worlds, desert worlds, lava worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, city worlds, forest worlds (in particular, forests that look like those near the city of Vancouver), earthquake worlds, and so on.

But sometimes an author will create a world whose presence has a weight and ring of truth, a world that feels like it could happily go on existing on its own terms, with or without a protagonist or antagonist strolling around on its surface. Setting aside obviously artificial habitats like ring words or hollowed out asteroids, here are my top ten best science fiction planets, in chronological order:

1. Solaris (1961): You may or may not have liked the films, but Stanislaw Lem’s conception of a world so utterly alien that it defies any genuine human comprehension still resonates.
2. Dune (1965): Best Planet Ever. At first glance, it’s just one of those one-note desert worlds. But Frank Herbert created a complete ecosytem, deep geological history, and a complex native society to go with his sand-covered planet. Dune is no mere backdrop, it drives the plot of Herbert’s complex saga as inexorably as the law of gravity.
3. Annares (1974): Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed featured two worlds, a more-or-less straightforward analog for cold-war era Earth, and the far more interesting Annares, where settlers established an anarcho-syndicate-based society in a bid to be free from authoritarian government. LeGuin created a believable society for Annares—including the unpleasant side effects (such as intellectual conservatism) of trying to create a human utopia.
4. Mote Prime (1974): In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye, this is the homeworld of the Moties, a species that, due to cosmic happenstance, has been bottled up in its solar system ever since it evolved. Mote Prime is planet which has become a palimpsest, mutely testifying to the endless cycles of technological development and collapse experienced by the trapped Moties.
5. LV-426 (1979): The dread planet that featured briefly in Alien, and was the location for 1986′s Aliens. In both movies, LV-426 is perfectly portrayed as part of a cosmos utterly indifferent to human concerns, such as staying alive.
6. Dagobah (1980): The Star Wars franchise is a planet-producing machine: Tatooine, Yavin IV, Alderan, Hoth, Endor, Coruscant, Naboo, etc, etc. But Dagobah sticks out for its organic messiness and claustrophobic atmosphere that stands in contrast to the typical open spaces that provide the large stages for the movies’ space opera.
7. Lusitania (1986): The setting of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, Lusitania is the exception that proves the rule—it is fascinating not because it is a rich world, but because its ecosystem has so little diversity, and the implications that has for the book’s characters.
8. Red, Green and Blue Mars (1993-1996): Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy has become the standard against which all hard science fiction books about Mars are weighed. Beginning in the near future, with the founding of the first permanent outpost on the red planet, and continuing for two centuries as Mars is terraformed, Robinson’s Mars is a meticulously researched and believable fictional version of our solar system neighbor.
9. P2 (2004): P2 is a world orbiting the nearby Barnard’s star, and it is settled by fantastically advanced exiles from the solar system in Wil McCarthy’s Lost in Transmission. Unfortunately, all their technology can’t make up for some basic deficiencies in the carrying capacity of the Barnard system, and what happens to P2 is reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon, but on a planetary scale.
10. Nasqueron (2004): A gas giant, home of the maddeningly unconcerned Dwellers, and location of much of Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist. Nasqueron becomes not just the huge canvas the Banks requires for his sprawling tales, but also becomes an integral element in the plot, as the protagonist struggles to understand the Dwellers.

Image: promotional poster for Dune