It happens. Companies competing to monetize space? Yeah, that’s Boeing vs. Space-X at least, with the latter winning now, but don’t forget European, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other companies. Star Trek communicators? Smart phones can do almost everything Captain Kirk’s device could, although he never had AI on it and you can. (In fact, it will soon be on new iPhones whether you want it or not!) Comsats? Arthur C. Clarke predicted them, but he couldn’t have imagined Elon Musk littering valuable real estate in Earth’s orbital space with his clouds of tiny comsats. Worldwide pandemics? Michael Crichton imagined an alien one in the Andromeda Strain, but Covid proved that human beings can manage to create that without any help from aliens. (And Covid was even bioengineered if you believe it came from that lab in Wuhan, China.)

Surviving a worldwide plague was the theme of The Last Humans, the first novel in my trilogy, “The Last Humans.” It’s yet another example of sci-fi becoming sci-fact, as discussed in the NY Times (9/10/2024) article “10,000 Feet Up, Scientists Found Hundreds of Airborne Microbes,” with the subtitle “Hints that winds may help spread diseases around the world.” That novel’s prediction that a US enemy’s bioengineered virus now unfortunately seems entirely possible. It also means that even the short propagation time it took for Covid to infect the planet can even be shortened quite a bit as the contagion rides in the prevailing winds…like in the novel! Who knows what contagions our enemies are cooking up right now? I made an extrapolation from current science to create a story…and a warning, but we might not be lucky enough to be saved by new vaccine technology (mRNA) in the future. Or will anti-vaxers come to power and ban all vaccines like Robert Kennedy Jr. wants, giving humanity a death sentence if any future contagion is unleashed?

Of course, warnings from sci-fi don’t need to become sci-fact to be useful. Another warning in that first novel of my trilogy (with repercussions there and in the two following novels) was about water management and how massive fires make it even more difficult. 2024 is beginning to look like it will be the worst year in Earth’s history for climate problems, but it was already bad in 2019 when the first novel was published…bad enough for me to make some bold predictions!

Another example of sci-fi becoming sci-fact: I generally treat AI as a technology that’s helpful for humans in my sci-fi tales, but not always. Current AI might be artificial, but it’s not intelligence. True AI can be damn scary (just consider HAL in 2001 and the machines’ takeover in the Terminator series). In combination with other technologies, it might become even scarier. (A. B. Carolan’s Mind Games considers androids with ESP. Now that’s scary!)

Sci-fi plots often are extrapolations of current science…or even the same current science used in an evil manner. The threat of nuclear war, an old one, is often a theme. It’s considered in the third novel of my trilogy, Menace from Moscow. Perhaps we should pay more attention to these warnings from sci-fi authors?

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

“The Last Humans” trilogy. A bioengineered virus spreads around Earth and kills billions. An ex-USN SAR and LA County Sheriff’s forensics diver survives and creates a future for her blended family after many adventures in what’s left of the US and two countries overseas. These three post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels The Last Humans, A New Dawn, and Menace from Moscow, blend together warnings about global warming, biological and nuclear warfare, and failed political systems like fascism that will make you wonder about humanity’s future. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The first novel is also available in print format.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Far too often!

The Star Wars series turned me off with its very first film (whatever number that was in their all-too-cute numbering scheme). I knew immediately that it was basically a fantasy filled with references to Japanese ninjas, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s characters (even the names!), and Isaac Asimov’s plot devices (the Foundation). Where were the lawyers at that time who went after plagiarists? (Or the ones even now?) Jedi warriors and fairy-tale princesses with light sabers? C’mon! (Okay, I’ll admit the music was interesting, but I liked that composer a lot more when he was leading the Boston Pops.)

Frank Herbert’s Dune series is even worse as sci-fi but at least it was in book form long before Hollywood screenwriters took a break from writing terrible scripts (e.g. Star Wars!) and tried to adapt those novels to the silver screen (a new Marvel Comics-like version is about to come out). Herbert’s books were already pure fantasy (forget that damn Hugo because it’s also given for fantasy!) filled with magic, mysticism, sandworms, and that miraculous spice existing only on one arid world, a coveted and moneymaking substance that Ponce de Leon might have searched for in Florida if he could get past DeSantis’s anti-immigrant Gestapo. (I’m sure Ron would have arrested him and sent him to New York if that fascist Florida governor and huge presidential primary loser had been around back then.) The Dune series is just more fantasy, whether in book or movie format. (The movies have been worse than the books, but that’s almost always the case!)

Too many people (a majority who have never read a book, by the way…if they can read—Trump can’t) conflate fantasy with sci-fi, and authors and screenwriters exploit them by adding a few starships and blasters to Harry Potter and call it sci-fi. (A silly author like Margaret Atwood might pardon their sins by calling it all “speculative fiction,” of course; she’s become rich peddling her fantasies.) That’s the formula for creating a sci-fi classic, right? Wrong!

Science fiction, sci-fi for short, even if you accept A. C. Clarke’s claim that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic (consider Ugh the Caveman finding some time-traveler’s smart phone, basically a little computer!), must be some sort of reasonable extrapolation of current science. Comsats were created by Clarke in his fiction long before Elon Musk littered near-earth orbits with his space junk! Sure, the farther into the future an author goes with his story, the more bold the extrapolation has to be, and it all often approaches Clarke’s limit. But science fiction stories nowadays have generally ceased to be a logical extensions of current science, stories that often contain clear violations of known physical laws, which is what fantasy does (and all the examples above, I might add).

I read very little fantasy now—I graduated from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter on Mars stories with their Jedi warriors and beautiful egg-laying princesses decades ago. (For all their sophistication, I guess those Martians didn’t have IVF; and John Carter probably never realized an egg back on Earth was already a chicken, so he couldn’t apply that lesson learned to Martian females’ eggs!) I especially avoid fantasy stories if their authors claim they’re sci-fi. (You can comment on this post and tell me if you agree or disagree.)

Or, you might want to read some sci-fi classics written by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others (even some of mine?) to see how good sci-fi can be when it’s not conflated with fantasy! (By the way, the best sci-fi authors, like me, are ex-scientists. When they’re not, they can easily confuse fantasy with sci-fi!)

***

Comments are always welcome. (Just follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, I might send you an ESP-transmitted whack with my light saber!)

“Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection.” There are three complete sci-fi novels in this one inexpensive bundle. The first, Survivors of the Chaos, will seem a bit too close for comfort to what’s going on in the US and the world today. The last leads into the novel Rogue Planet and the Dr, Carlos short stories. (The first book represents well deserved mockery of the current Iranian regime; for the second collection, see the list of free downloadable PDFs on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) These are “evergreen books” (as entertaining, fresh, and hopefully still profound now as on the day I finished their manuscripts), but sci-fi in general can never get old, can it?

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

The general public often misunderstands the progress of science, at best buying into the standard explanation that a theory is constructed to explain a lot of data and then tested over time as more data accumulates to prove the theory right or wrong, ad infinitum. That’s the so-called “scientific method,” and any child in a basic science course might hear or read that much without really experiencing it or understand what it means.

I suppose that explanation is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn’t consider the role of imagination, even among scientists—children are brainwashed to believe that advances just flow from cold, experimental facts, if that. The reality is that a theory originates because one or more imaginative people look at data and say, “How do I explain this?”, and then go about imagining an explanation. (Some people polish that up by calling it “creative thinking,” but imagination is the better word!) Same for new data especially if it contradicts aspects of an old theory.

We should perhaps consider sci-fi as an important way to use imagination as an effective tool to stimulate all creative thinking, a filter for determining what might be possible, which is why so many scientists (or ex-scientists who are still thinking like scientists) read (and even write) good sci-fi. Extrapolation of current science, often far into the future, is what makes that tool so effective. (I’m excluding fantasy and space-opera authors here, especially screenwriters, who rarely worry about contradicting even current science: “Full stop, Mr. Sulu!” or “Warp 9, Mr. Sulu!” are examples of their foolishness; ninja-like warriors fighting with light sabers are others; time-travel romances and cannibalistic ETs; etc., etc. In fact, most of what Margaret Atwood called “speculative fiction” is excluded!) The sci-fi author has to be prepared to win a few and lose a few, though. (Phasers were very much like today’s smart phones; but the transporter is beyond the impossible, albeit necessary for screenwriting purposes in Star Trek.)

I began writing the “Chaos Chronicles” trilogy, my version of Asimov’s Foundation  trilogy, long before my first novel Full Medical was published. (All three novels of that trilogy are bundled now—see below.) Unlike my hero Asimov, who basically swept FTL-travel and ETs under the rug (the first simply is accomplished by “jumps through hyperspace” and is never explained beyond that; the lack of the second is eventually explained in the extended Foundation series as a trick performed by the time-travelers in End of Eternity, but time travel is never explained), as a physicist I worked harder on my extrapolations than Asimov the biochemist wanted to do, at least for the FTL-travel and certainly for ETs. (The ETs might eventually be explained by congressional inquiries actually studying UFO phenomena! One should probably ignore the “mummified ETs” in Peru that excite the Mexican government, and certainly all the tales of abduction and seduction UFO nuts prattle about.)

A few weeks ago in this blog, I wrote an obit for an old professor of mine, James Hartle. (No, he wasn’t any more an ET than I am, but he sure was a hell of lot more intelligent.) Some of his work was with Hawking, and that motivated me when writing my sci-fi trilogy to consider what’s now called the multiverse, the idea that our Universe is only one among many quantum states of an infinite collection of universes. (Much later, this was the basis for my novel A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, a sci-fi rom-com.) I also knew something about zero-point energy. In standard quantum electrodynamics, that’s what allows a froth of virtual photons to give spin to the electron, for example, and the idea has been extended to the entire zoo of elementary particles, including the mysterious Higgs particle, that are, after all, just quantum states themselves (perhaps of only one particle?). In other words, there could be virtual universes as well.

(more…)

(Note: While science and sci-fi writing motivated this post, some readers might find the following material offensive. Tough.)

The U.S. president wanted a Space Force. The U.S. military capitulated. And the U.S. Congress gave it to him on December 20. Sounds neat. Does it make sense?

Traditionally the USAF took care of most things happening above the Earth’s surface, including spy satellites and whatever secret weapons are up there (yep, and they’re just as dangerous as the U.N.’s black helicopters that will invade the U.S.). Astronauts have generally been a mix of USAF and Navy pilots, discounting civilian scientists, so there was already a lot of overlap with other services. And the U.S. NASA wasn’t above getting into the militaristic aspects either. So forget tradition. Maybe we should call a spade a spade? The military is in space, so maybe we should admit it and wrap it up in one tidy package?

Is there some savings to be had? Even if the answer were yes, that’s probably not an argument most reasonable persons would make…or believe. The current administration will have created a trillion dollar U.S. debt very soon, so what’s a few more dollars here and there? A precedent might be the moving of the Coast Guard into Homeland Security, but the creation of Homeland Security also increased federal bureaucracy and incompetence (not to mention murderous enforcement on the southern border where thousand of illegals are invading). Maybe they should have put anything to do with protecting the U.S., including what’s now in Space Force, into Homeland Security? Isn’t Space Force about protecting the homeland and not invading ETs or killer asteroids? U.S. of A., uber alles!

Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Smaller isn’t either. (Seems like the Goldilocks Principle needs to be applied here, but the Pentagon’s good ole boys would never listen to a girl.) And where does the Earth’s atmosphere become space? Where does it end and space start? I can’t wait for scramjet technology, where intercontinental flights hop and skip across the atmosphere, going from the USAF’s domain to the USSF’s and back. Who will have authority over those flights? Or might that be the FSA (not to be confused with the Russian equivalent of the FBI) instead of the FAA?

(more…)

Most sci-fi readers and writers are familiar with the Fermi paradox, summarized by the question in the title, and the associated Drake equation that tried to resolve it. For those who are not, let me review that history first before going on to discuss a different take on the Drake equation that I found interesting.

The Fermi paradox first appears in my sci-fi books in the second book of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” In Sing a Samba Galactica, Earth colonists on New Haven, an E-type planet in the 82 Eridani system, have evidence for some local ETs and try to figure out how to communicate with them. Here’s the excerpt:

***

They had an informal meeting in the bachelors’ dining area.  Takahashi watched as Malenkov, ever the showman, pinged his beer mug with a laser pointer and then stood on top of a chair.

“At Los Alamos, in 1950,” he began, in his best orator’s voice, “the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, as well as other physicists working on the atomic bomb project, this provocative question:  If life is so common in the universe, where are they?”

Malenkov waited for some chuckles to subside, gulped some beer, and continued.

“Fermi noted there are plenty of stars older than our sun.  If life were so plentiful, it would have begun on planets around these stars billions of years before it began on Earth.  In that case, shouldn’t Earth have been visited or colonized by a race much older than our own?  Even with slow means of space travel like what we used to come to New Haven, a civilization with a will to homestead could settle a large fraction of the galaxy in a million years or so.”

Malenkov looked out at his audience.  Takahashi, sitting in the cafeteria’s front row, smiled at him.  So which one of us is Holmes and which one Watson?

(more…)

Sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card is the new casualty in the cultural wars that roil across our country.  For those readers who don’t know him, he is the author of Ender’s Game, now considered by many to be a sci-fi classic.  It’s the story about a special boy who is trained to manage flotillas of starships in a war against ETs that are more hive-like than human.  The movie is scheduled for release in November, and therein lies the problem: gay groups are calling for its boycott.  Mr. Card, a Mormon, has a long history of being against homosexuality and same-sex marriage—hence the question in the title of this post.

I often ask myself this question about my own work.  In the latest installment in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder, one of the themes is Castilblanco’s anti-gun views.  I wrote most of this before the Newtown Massacre in Connecticut because my anti-gun views were well developed much earlier, starting with the Kennedy, King, and Lennon assassinations, and the attempted assassination of Reagan.

(more…)

Human beings are wonderfully complex, so it’s interesting that sci-fi writers love to write about computers developing near-human characteristics (I’m guilty too—see The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan—FYI: this is a free download on Amazon starting tomorrow, June 28, through July 2; also, Odri’s starship in Sing a Samba Galactica is just another member of the crew).  But, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine an AI computer program capable of modeling the emotional ingredients that influence human decision making.  (I suppose you could argue that you don’t want emotions influencing the computer’s thinking because they so often get humans in trouble, but that’s another issue.)

Last week I was struck by the stock market’s reaction to Bernanke’s announcement that the Fed was going to halt their stimulus policies and, in particular, let interest rates rise to a self-sustaining  and steady-state level.  The best way to describe it is that it was an “oh-my-God” reaction of Wall Street and the rest of the financial world to an abrupt change in the rules of the game.  Ignoring the fact that we can’t model these emotional responses (part of the problem), we still should wonder why.  Why is it that human beings have knee-jerk emotional reactions to outside stimuli that can send their world into a vortex of disaster?

(more…)

Scott, a frequent commenter to my blog posts, stated in one of his comments, the following:  “It almost seems like you have to be a scientist or almost one to write good SF today!”  At the risk of taking him out of context, this is the theme of today’s post.  To paraphrase Scott, how do we reconcile a scientist’s no-nonsense focused pursuit of good data and elegant theories with the creativity and imagination of a master storyteller?  Is there cause and effect here?  Or, do we just have the synergistic nexus of two different personality traits.

(more…)

Einstein’s special theory of relativity differs from ordinary Galilean relativity in that the scientist who ended up looking like a beat poet made the assumption that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames.  That and the key word “inertial” makes the theory “special,” as opposed to “general.”  (This is an over-simplification—the general theory is really a non-quantum theory of gravity, generalizing Newtonian gravity).  Back in September, physicists associated with the Italian Opera experiment shook the world in announcing that Einstein’s assumption was incorrect.  A sensor detected CERN-emitted neutrinos 453 miles away—the distance divided by the time lag gives a velocity.

Scientists hit the hooch, refusing to believe the results.  As an ex-scientist, I did too.  Over a century of experiments had confirmed Einstein’s assumption (it’s still true in the general theory, by the way).  I had a number of people ask me about the experiment.  Some even said, “Wow, Einstein was wrong!”  My response was, “Let’s wait and see.”  One experiment doesn’t overturn a theory—repeated experimental confirmation is required.  The lesson learned here is that, whether he was right or wrong, Eisnstein was just a very able theoretician.  Experiments determine the physics and the scientific method always prevails—theories have to be tested.  In this case, the disbelief spurred experimentalists to check the Opera results.

(more…)

Like many children, I admired various sports figures.  Roy Campanella, Brooklyn Dodgers’ catcher, was a role model.  I played that position and later admired the man for his tenacity and courage in facing his paralysis after an auto accident.  I also became a Dodgers fan and was overjoyed when they moved to L.A.   K. C. Jones and Bill Russell were favorites at the University of San Francisco and I followed their careers to the Boston Celtics where I became a fan, even though I was on the West Coast.  The historic confrontations between Russell and Chamberlain were more exciting than the gunfight between the Earps and the Clantons.

I can’t remember seeing any of these three athletes drink or smoke, or reading about their philandering ways in the national media.  A simpler, more innocent time?  Perhaps.  Steroids in baseball were far in the future.  Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant were too.  Nevertheless, I can imagine how devastating it might be for a young boy or girl to see and hear about the decline of one of their sports heroes.  It must be at least as stressful as that first kiss or that first dance.

(more…)