[Note: This can be considered a continuation of last Thursday’s post.]

Arthur C. Clarke’s quote is a good way to start this article: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is more than a glib remark from an old sci-fi writer. It is an important statement about technology.

Imagine a caveman from Earth’s prehistory holding a smart phone. He can’t call anyone and no one can call him, but he can hit a video replay icon, see the video unfolding, and drop the phone as if it were black magic. (He might react the same way with a mirror, of course.)

If we can’t explain something, we call it magic…or something fancier to make our ignorance more palatable. That’s how the phrases “dark energy” and “dark matter” came into existence—physicists are very inventive about hiding their ignorance. I don’t think they’d consider themselves in the same class as Ugh the caveman, but I don’t see much difference sometimes—Clarke probably wouldn’t either. (Of course, I could be wrong. For years I thought the Higgs field was just a mathematical device to generate spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory of Salam and Weinberg.)

Dark energy and dark matter express our ignorance about how to explain certain observed phenomena, though. It’s a bit different when we consider phenomena that seems to be more blatant about contradicting known physical laws. There’s magic in the extrapolation of the former needed to create good sci-fi stories. That magic differs from that used in fantasy stories. The boundaries are fuzzy, though, between these two situations.

Paranormal activity—the use of psi powers—has been featured in fantasy and sci-fi stories for a while. Unlike dark energy and dark matter, which was invented to “explain” some observed phenomena, paranormal activity has never been observed. That amounts to a double whammy against it.

Like time travel, I haven’t included psi powers very much in my sci-fi, in spite of a long-standing tradition of sci-fi authors of using it as a plot device. I generally consider psi powers to be more in the realm of fantasy. Yet in the three books of The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, I include psi powers as a plot device, and in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second book, I consider time travel. Let me fall back on Mr. Clarke’s quote, though, to put both back in the hard sci-fi realm in order to assuage my guilt.

A.B. Carolan’s new book Mind Games goes farther. We have robots, but the androids go beyond commercial robots available today—these don’t exist either. So what does A.B. do? He writes about trying  to give androids psi powers. And he plops this down in the hard sci-fi universe I created.

Considering the aforementioned collection, I suppose he’s justified. The story is another sci-fi mystery for young adults where the main character Della wants to find out who murdered her adopted father. He had always told her to hide her powers, but she needs to use them all to solve the mystery.

Is this sci-fi or fantasy? Maybe those labels don’t matter. The main question might be: Is it a good story? You can read it and tell me via your reviews or emails.

I generally prefer a scientist’s approach in my sci-fi writing, taking known science and extrapolating it far beyond where a practicing scientist might go (any extrapolation is always dangerous), without contradicting current knowledge. Maybe the psi powers in A.B.’s book and my own are more an application of Clarke’s point of view than J.K. Rowling’s, more akin to physicists dark energy and dark matter and an expression of our wonder and ignorance about what might be true. Not fake science, just wild extrapolation far beyond what’s now known so that the science just seems like magic. Is Ugh the caveman smiling?

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Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Penny Castro is on a forensic dive off the SoCal coast for the LA County Sheriff’s Department. When she surfaces, she finds her fellow deputies and a witness dead from a virulent contagion. Follow her adventures as she struggles to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in print on Amazon and in your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them for it). This novel was published by Black Opal Books. Visit their website to see a treasure trove of great reads. Support small presses and their authors.

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

As a scientist, I dealt with many equations. As a full-time writer, not so much. Many people know Newton’s F = ma. That equation, and its rotational form, τ = Iα, appear in Survivors of the Chaos (the first novel contained in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection). That’s about it for equations in my fiction.

Some people might think that Einstein’s equation linking the curvature tensor of space and time to the matter-energy tensor in General Relativity is the most important one in science, or Maxwell’s equation for the electromagnetic field (tensor form so it’s just one equation). The latter certainly has more application in our everyday lives than the former, if that’s important.

The most important equation, though, is exp (i π) + 1 = 0.

exp (i π) is usually written differently—e to the i times π—but I use the less common form to avoid superscripts. The functional notation exp ( . ) is shorthand for the irrational number e raised to some power. Here i is the imaginary unit that is the square root of -1; all complex numbers can be written in the form a + bi where a and b are real numbers. exp (i π) can be written that way too: cos(π) + i sin(π). The symbol π is the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter, and some readers might remember that cos(π) = -1 and sin(π) = 0.

So there you have it: that most important equation just says that -1 + 1 = 0. “Big deal!” you might say. Well, it says that in a most beautiful and profound way, connecting the five most important numbers in mathematics. First 1, the first natural number, the numbers used in counting; second, 0, an important human invention signifying nothing, but also used as a placeholder, as in 1000; e and π, the two most important irrational numbers in the set of real numbers; and finally i, needed to create the complex numbers so important to scientists and engineers.

Why do these numbers link up this way? Maybe that’s not the right question. The better question: Isn’t the discovery that they do link up this way in one equation more important than any physical law ever discovered? There’s something immutable and unchangeable about this equation beyond any other in science.

Think about it. True science is empirical. Experimental data lead to “laws” like F = ma that explain many natural phenomena, but Newton’s law must be modified to explain special relativistic effects occurring at high velocities. There’s nothing empirical about exp (i π) + 1 = 0 at all. It would exist for some ETs living at the bottom of a methane ocean under huge pressures, or on a planet in the 82 Eridani star system (they’re there, and you can read about them in Sing a Zamba Galactica, novel #2 in the collection mentioned above). The symbols they might use in the equation could be different—maybe just sonograms—but that doesn’t matter.

That equation exists without any phenomena at all, and it can be considered a cornerstone of universal mathematics. It’s a mathematical tautology of the utmost importance.

Think about it this way: the equation connects natural numbers, integers, real numbers including two fundamental irrational numbers (ratios of integers are rational numbers), and complex numbers. The only thing that this equation doesn’t include are quaternions, the biggest set of numbers that includes them all that scientists sometimes use to describe three-dimensional rotations.

Now, isn’t that one beautiful equation?

***

Comments are always welcome.

Mind Games. You know A. B. Carolan as the writer of The Secret Lab and The Secret of the Urns. Those novels are sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and adults who are young at heart). In Mind Games, A. B. tells a new story that’s set a bit farther into the future than his first two books. Della Dos Toros is a young girl with psi powers living in the Dark Domes of the planet Sanctuary. Her adopted father doesn’t let her use those powers, but she must do so to find his killer. This story about ESP and androids adds another action-packed novel to the ABC Sci-Fi Mystery series. Available in both print and ebook versions.

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

NASA scientists have just confirmed that the brilliant fireball seen in the southern US corresponded to the crash landing of an alien spaceship containing four distinct species of ETs. The skeletal remains indicate different bone structures, one with four legs and two arms. Preliminary investigations also indicate four different variations on DNA components and/or handedness of key amino acids. Stay tuned for further information.

SpaceX’s success with the capsule with Ripley inside (the dummy filled with sensors, not Sigourney Weaver, star of the Alien trilogy) might represent a turning point for the US space program. Since the cancellation of the shuttle program, NASA has depended on the Russians to get astronauts into orbit. After the SpaceX success, that dependence might soon end.

In the bigger picture, another turning point has already occurred. When private companies began launching successful space missions, a paradigm shift occurred: NASA became the science group with astronauts and payloads as passengers, and private enterprise became the transportation agencies.

I’ve always assumed this change was inevitable. Let’s assume it is. Will it be good or bad? Tech companies grow bigger, more arrogant, and more international as time goes by. Capitalism without controls is always bad, but only Europe seems to be reining in the abuses of tech companies. The opportunities for space exploitation, i.e. exploration of space for financial gain like big petroleum companies exploring for oil, offer potentially great rewards and seem boundless, so the same might happen to the space tech companies.  They could get rich by spinning off lucrative enterprises that have wonderful products made extremely expensive because of their origins.

Is this pessimism unjustified? Hopefully yes. But pessimists have the advantage that, if things turn out better than expected, they can rejoice. Yet Murphy’s Law, or its extreme version, Sturgeon’s Law (look it up), justifies being pessimistic.

I explored corporate domination of outer space in the future with my novel Survivors of the Chaos (now part of The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a bargain ebook bundle of three novels). This is not uncommon in sci-fi or dystopian literature or movies (Avatar and Elysium are recent examples of the latter). My novel starts in a dystopian future where multinationals have their own mercenary armies controlling the chaos on Earth an their surrogates in space sponsoring all space projects and exploiting their findings. The book ends with three starships fleeing the chaotic Earth to colonize three planets in other star systems.

Such visions of the future are warnings created by pessimists, and these warnings are possible extrapolations of current conditions, including science and technology, of course. These stories are as old as sci-fi itself, but I find them more interesting than utopian drivel. Humans don’t have a good track record for creating utopias; they have a terrible one for creating dystopias and apocalyptic events. And, as science and technology progresses, the latter can become even worse.

***

Comments are always welcome.

Dystopia:

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. The three novels take the reader from a futuristic worldwide dystopia to the stars and far into the future. The second novel answers Fermi’s question, “Where are they?” The third shows how Humans and their ET friends battle a mad Human industrialist. The whole trilogy can be considered an homage to Dr. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy with ITUIP (International Trade Union of Independent Planets) playing the role of the Foundation, and the mad industrialist playing the role of the Mule. Lots of enjoyable sci-fi reading await you. Available on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc).

Post-apocalyptic:

And don’t miss The Last Humans. Last man alive? What about last woman alive? Penny Castro, LA County Sheriff’s Deputy and forensic diver, finds she isn’t alone, though—there are a few others who survive the contagion and want to kill her. And the remnants of a US government could be the greatest danger for her and the family she’s adopted. This post-apocalyptic thriller (yes, it’s also sci-fi) will be released by Black Opal Books in both ebook and print versions on March 30 and available at the publisher’s website, online retailers like Amazon and Smashwords and the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc), and bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it!). You can pre-order on both Amazon and Smashwords.

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

Like Asimov, Heinlein, and other sci-fi writers, I’m an ex-scientist who loves to tell stories—all Asimov’s stories were sci-fi, for example; mine are mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi. (To be fair, Dr. Asimov wrote some excellent sci-fi mysteries! He was also a fan of the mystery genre.) But Asimov might be better known to some readers for his non-fiction popular science books. I once thought of writing them too—it’s writing, after all, and I love to do it—but I was too hooked on fiction to write those kind of books.

Every now and then I occasionally write a blog post in the popular science category, though. I’ve been remiss in doing that, so let’s do one! I can never compete with Dr. Asimov in either sci-fi or popular science, but I’ll do my best.

Let’s talk about scientific scales. Much science in the twentieth century explored scales from the smallest to the largest, from the tiniest bits of matter to galaxies and clusters of galaxies at the far reaches of the cosmos. Astrophysics and cosmology connect the two extremes, and these connections are like good twists in a good mystery.

One might think the smallest scale is determined by quarks—those usually invisible particles that make up protons, neutrons, and a menagerie of strange particles, all organized by the special unitary group SU(8) as proposed by Murray Gell’Man. Instead, I’d propose it’s the Planck length, defined as follows: take the square root of Planck’s constant h multiplied by Newton’s gravitational constant G and divide by the cube of the velocity of light and twice pi (it’s a constant derived from fundamental constants). From the very definition you see that it connects quantum mechanics and gravity. In fact, it is believed to be the length where quantum gravity effects become important. Planck’s length is a very, very small fraction of the size of a proton, and it could very well define the granularity of space-time in our Universe.

The largest scale is the size of the Universe, of course. That’s finite, but it’s expanding, a bit too fast according to conventional theoretical astrophysics, which is a puzzle. Adding to that mystery is the existence of dark energy and dark matter that astrophysicists invented to explain other oddities (these are just names for things the scientists don’t really understand). The presence of dark energy and matter should make the Universe’s expansion slow down more!

We start realizing there’s a lot we don’t know about our Universe. In fact, we don’t even know whether it’s unique. Certain theories add metaverses, and there’s an infinite number of them. Some of those theories were created especially to provide science with dark energy and matter, or help in the quantization of gravity, a vexing problem for astrophysicists.

Infinite numbers of metaverses? An easy way to get at them is to realize that the Universe must have its own quantum state, so, according to the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, at each point on the Universe’s world-line winding around in some higher-dimensional continuum (usually ten dimensions), that quantum state splits up into an infinite number of states, ad infinitum. These many world-lines are called quantum histories. They’ve been used as objects as astrophysicists try to quantize gravity, starting with James Hartle and Stephen Hawking (Hartle was one of my professors at UC Santa Barbara).

All those metaverses, parallel states of our own Universe, lead us to question the concept of infinity itself. Some used to think the Universe was infinite and existed in a steady state, everything arranged neatly so that the more the Universe changed, the more it stayed the same. Let’s accept for the sake of argument that’s not true—i.e. the Universe is finite, although it’s certainly not in a steady state with its expansion. What happens at the other end of the scientific scale? Can we go smaller than the Planck length?

We describe the physical world with mathematics, mostly with real numbers or combinations of them (three space dimensions plus one time, for example). The set of real numbers is a larger infinity than the infinity of integers or even fractions constructed from them. But does the cosmos have to match the larger infinity of the real numbers? In other words, is space-time quantized and countable like fractions? Maybe with the Planck length as the size of a bit of Universe? We could think of these chunks as pixels in space-time. We could no longer say “space-time continuum” because it wouldn’t enjoy the continuity of a real-number based Universe. Every position in space-time would represent a four-dimensional cube—albeit a very small one, to be sure, but the Universe would then be finite at both ends of the size spectrum (technically at the lower end, it would be a countable infinity like integers and fractions).

I enjoy thinking about these questions. I wish someone would answer them!

***

Comments are always welcome!

“Reading Notes for The Last Humans.” This free PDF can be downloaded by visiting the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website. It’s designed to provide useful information to all readers about my new post-apocalyptic novel, and it contains a list of questions that will stimulate discussions in book reading clubs. The ebook is available now for pre-orders on Amazon and Smashwords, and it will be released in print and ebook versions by Black Opal Books on March 30.

While you’re on that web page, be sure to check out the other free PDFs that are available—these are all just a thanks to you for being a reader.

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

[Note from Steve: Not exactly a movie review…or is it a review of two?]

While I reviewed Andy Weir’s book (Oct. 16, 2015), I don’t think I reviewed the movie with Matt Damon, which I saw (readers can confirm that by perusing the movie review archive—I couldn’t find one). I’m sure I won’t see First Man. Ryan Gosling can’t compare to everyman Matt Damon, but that’s not the main point of this article. My intention is to compare the focus of these two movies.

Although The Martian is clearly fiction, both movies are fictional, the second being historical fiction, of course. They’re both about space exploration, the first about exploring Mars and the second about exploring Luna. That’s where the similarities end.

First Man focuses on the past, namely astronaut Neil Armstrong. It’s a screen biopic. Nothing against Armstrong, who has been made into a folk hero, but it’s the focus on the past that bothers me. The U.S. government has all but destroyed NASA. They shut down the shuttle program and didn’t replace it. We’ve been forced to pay Russia to haul our astronauts to the ISS. Now that Russia’s rockets are having problems (the last one failed and came close to killing a cosmonaut and astronaut), we are basically excluded from manned spaceflight for the present. All of this is due to ill-advised budget cutting by various administrations, and public opinion seems to have gone along with it, saying we can no longer afford space exploration. Many of us have shed a few tears—space is the last frontier, and our pioneering spirit is dead!

A similar thing happened to the SSC (“Superconducting Super Collider”), cancelled by Congress. We have ceded our lead in space exploration to the Europeans and Russia; we have ceded our lead in particle physics to the Europeans (CERN). Per capita, other countries are spending far more on non-military R&D than the U.S. Worse, that parallels huge U.S. increases in military R&D.

All that looks backward at an ignoble past where past glories are forgotten as scientific research takes a back seat. Sure, it was great to step on the moon in 1969, but can we swallow the bitter pill of knowing we couldn’t reproduce that feat now, even if there was a desire to do so?

The Martian has a more positive outlook. Forget about the moon. Let’s look to Mars and beyond. While the book and the movie still tells the tale of budget-cutting bureaucrats fighting those who want scientific progress, it shows that a few plucky heroes can still get it done! The Martian is positive and First Man is negative exactly for those reasons.

Of course, Weir’s story suffers the same failings as Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The latter has pages and pages of narrative about undersea flora and fauna. Excess narrative is characteristic of many 19^th century novels, from Moby Dick to Pride and Prejudice, and it’s damn boring. Weir’s narrative is too—worse than a manual for turning whale blubber into lamp oil (Moby Dick), it’s a manual for growing potatoes in human excrement.

But The Martian looks forward in a positive way that First Man can never do. That makes a big difference. Both movies are sad. First Man looks sadly back at NASA’s glory days. The Martian sadly reminds us of what might have been if our leaders weren’t so stupid. Yet looking forward is always better than looking backward. We can’t change the past, but maybe we can change the future? You don’t have to see either movie to make a choice here.

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Comments are always welcome!

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. One reviewer compared this novel to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series. The first part is about how an ET virus creates homo sapiens version 2.0 on Earth, though. The second is about how these new humans colonize Mars and discover a starship of ETs who sent the virus to Earth. The ebook is available on Amazon and Smashwords and all its affiliates.

In libris libertas!

[Note: It has come to my attention that my settings for comments to these blog posts were incorrect…probably since the last WordPress upgrade. They are now correct, so feel free to comment. I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.  Also, as an FYI, your comment has to be approved by me to avoid trolls who rant and use foul language, but I get an email for each potential comment, so that approval is usually quick. I check my WP spam folder on a regular basis too. I don’t mind differing opinions—it’s good to have discussions. I do mind strong and insulting language.]

Water is rarely mentioned in fiction unless it’s almost a main character (thirsty party lost in the desert, villain poisoning a water supply, lack of water on the moon, etc—writers, are you jotting down these ideas?). In Niven and Pournelle’s Fallen Angel, it is a main character, in the form of snow—lots of it produced by extreme weather. In London’s “To Build a Fire,” it’s the snow again. (Anyone suffering through recent blizzards in the high Sierras, Midwest, or Boston area will probably agree that snow can become a villain.)

I’m surprised there aren’t more apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels about extreme weather. Maybe The Wizard of Oz was the last one to be really famous, but that tornado in Kansas only had a cameo role. Tornados are spawned by thunderstorms—lots of water. I once saw a tornado in Kansas—it was impressive but far away on the horizon, so it seemed not to be such a villainous character. But it was soon raining like hell!

Drought has more than a cameo role in my new post-apocalyptic thriller, The Last Humans (scheduled for publishing in 2019), but it more enables the prose rather than being a main character. My protagonist, Penny Castro, is preoccupied with water.

First, she’s an ex-USN search and rescue diver who ends up recovering corpses for the LA County Sheriff’s Department—ponds, rivers, and the ocean are where she works as a CSI. Second, after the apocalypse (a bio-engineered contagion delivered by missiles), she spends a lot of her time searching for and collecting water just to survive, or to help others survive. Third, she wants to grow things—understandable when she can’t find much to eat except dog and cat food—so she needs more of it. And fourth, she hates water because her brother almost drowned her as a kid, but she met her fear head-on to become a champion high school swimmer and Navy diver.

California, even before the apocalypse, worried about having enough water. Desalination platforms dot the coast and pump fresh water to thirsty Californians. Survivors of the apocalypse become even thirstier when the platforms stop pumping and mountain snow packs diminish. Drought seems like a villain.

Fresh, potable water is, of course, a big deal. Life on Earth couldn’t exist without it. Lack of fresh, potable water is already a problem in many areas of the world—emphasis on “clean, potable.” Lack of water will become even a bigger problem over time. As often happens when a problem is big and no one can think of a solution, people ignore the problem.

In my novel, Penny Castro can’t ignore it. Even with not many people left in the world, those last humans still need water to survive. That’s a theme in the novel. The jury’s out on whether we can solve this problem in real life. Stay tuned.

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The Secret Lab (2^nd Ed). Four students on the International Space Station discover the origins of a mutant cat and uncover a conspiracy in a sci-fi mystery that’s sure to entertain young adults and adults who are young at heart. In a new second edition completely rewritten and reedited by Steven M. Moore’s collaborator A. B. Carolan. Now available in a print version (Create Space) as well as all ebook formats (Amazon and Smashwords).

From a review of the first edtion: “I will disclose this: I picked up The Secret Lab because of Mr. Paws, the intelligent cat. Yes, I could not resist the temptation to read the adventure of a sentient, mathematics inclined cat, told by Steven M. Moore. It exceeded my expectations. Mr. Paws is the result of a genetics experiment aboard a facility orbiting Earth in 2147. The cat and his newly found friends, a group of four smart teenagers, find themselves in an intrigue with corporate agendas, young curiosity, dangerous and ethically problematic research, relationships and their difficulties when coming of age. The complexity is enthralling, but the author also makes it easy to follow, using a light, natural style to tell us their story.”–Alfaniel Aldavan, in a Smashwords’ 5-star review

In libris libertas!

Those who are accustomed to my blog posts—minimally, an op-ed comment on current events on Tuesdays and something on reading, writing, or the publishing business on Thursdays—might find it strange that I’m placing this post here on a Tuesday. There’s a simple explanation: reading and understanding what we read are building blocks in the democratic foundation of our country.

A dear friend and I were talking over the holiday about reading “popular science” articles. These are supposedly designed so that an “intelligent layperson” can develop some understanding about an esoteric bit of science or technology. I complained about Scientific American’s overly detailed articles in fields I’d like to learn more about for my sci-fi writing. “Don’t worry about it,” said my friend. “They’ve dumbed down the articles now.”

Some translations are in order. First, there’s no such thing as “popular science” anymore. Science isn’t popular, from outright attacks on it by religious fanatics and politicians who are sycophants for Corporate America, unwilling or otherwise, to teachers telling students that they should study something else because science is too hard (especially egregious when a male teacher adds “…for girls”). In all age groups, many consider science and technology to be the root of all the problems society faces, and there are many others who encourage such an opinion.

Second, “intelligent layperson” is all too often another oxymoron nowadays. I’m not speaking to the obvious cases where someone believes dinosaurs and human beings coexisted and the world with all its wonderful diversity of flora and fauna was all created six thousand years ago. I’m talking about the average Joan or Joe who reads something but can’t understand what they’ve just read. Call it what you will, it’s an indictment against popular culture. At the critical lower levels in our educational systems, teachers over-emphasize getting through the words—understanding is secondary. Certain content is emphasized; there’s not much practice analyzing and digesting new content. Too many people read something that’s devoid of facts but don’t have the background or even common sense to know better.

Third, “dumbed down” is a nice way of saying that essay and book writers know all about the problems mentioned above and bend over backwards to compensate in order to get their message across. The latter is a struggle that’s becoming increasingly difficult, even for fiction writers, where “dumbed down” has destroyed serious literature.

Even if we get people to read with all the other distractions they have—streaming video, social media, video games, and so forth—getting them to understand what they are reading is a high hurdle to jump over. I’ve often read a review of a “popular science” book and asked myself, “Did the reviewer read the same book I did?” That would probably happen with fiction too, but I don’t bother to read those reviews unless I’m making excerpts for the PR and marketing of my own books.

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I loved those original Star Trek episodes because the best were based on sci-fi stories written by seasoned sci-fi writers, ones like Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison. They were often morality plays too, that is, good stories with some important themes mixed in. (Who could forget the message that racial prejudice is just plain stupid in the classic episode about the two black-and-white guys fighting on and on, one black on the left and white on the right, the other just the opposite?) These episodes often contained some sound scientific extrapolation too—your smart phone is a version of the Starfleet’s communicator, for example.

Episodes in the spinoff series, often written by screenwriters who had little training in science and often promoted pseudo-science, were much less entertaining if not downright distasteful. They were also just bad writers of sci-fi, starting a tradition that continues today. Generally speaking, of course, Hollywood fails at putting believable science into sci-fi and often creates pseudo-science in its screenplays. While maybe everyone knows Wiley Coyote can’t go over the cliff in an inverse-L-shaped path and finds it hilarious when he does so, is that any different than the Enterprise coming to a full-stop, thus violating Newton’s First Law? (What maybe that ether drag, created in theory by Maxwell and disproven by Einstein, suddenly reappears?) And Next Generation’s Counselor Cleavage reading minds is pretty farfetched and bordering on fantasy too. Of course, the Star Wars tales are also just fantasy episodes—they even have princes, princesses, and knights who fight with sabers (making them neon-colored with sizzles doesn’t make them more sci-fi-like—it just makes them silly).

So let’s forget about Hollywood and move on to literature.  As a continuation of a previous article, “Does Fiction Have to Seem Real?” let me ask, “Does the science in sci-fi have to seem real?” I’m talking about hard sci-fi. That’s still a broad sub-genre. But consider the sub-sub-genres of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic. While I enjoyed Christopher’s No Blade of Grass, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Howey’s Wool, my kneejerk reaction to these books was that there was no real explanation of cause, only the effect. I’ve changed my mind a bit, though. The story in these books is found in the effect—hence the post in post-apocalyptic. My own post-apocalyptic efforts—Survivors of the Chaos and Full Medical are examples—discussed the causes much more than the three books named, but that was a personal choice because I put as much emphasis on the causes as the effects. In my upcoming The Last Humans (see the last pre-publication excerpt in my blog archive), I also focus on the effect, although the cause is mentioned, and I’m satisfied with the result.

Other hard sci-fi genres need a more detailed extrapolation of current science. Of course, the farther the extrapolation goes into the future, the more chance for error. Any scientist knows that extrapolation beyond real data is a dangerous game. Some things like interstellar drives and faster-than-light (FTL) starships or communication systems are far in the future, if they’re even possible. When that happens, the best solution is to get beyond the science and go on with the story. But human variants like the clones and mutants in my “Clones and Mutants Series,” the MECHs in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries,” or Humans 2.0 produced by an ET virus in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, have to be more plausible if only because they’re easier extrapolations of current science to events in the near future.

That’s why a scientist might feel more comfortable reading speculative fiction that doesn’t go far beyond current science and technology. For example, s/he might prefer Hogan’s Code of the Lifemaker to his Giants series, although the first book in that series sticks pretty close to current science and technology. Your opinion on how believable the futuristic science is might depend on your background too. When I read Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, I felt insulted that a sci-fi writer violated current physics (his solution to FTL was a varying speed of light, slower the farther away you are from galactic center, as if those central black holes did a lot more than expected). Obviously not enough sci-fi readers cared about that—he received a Hugo—but I think there’s a warning there: some readers will not tolerate a violation of known laws of physics, chemistry, or biology. But they might not have a problem with the unknown.

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Isaac Asimov in his extended Foundation series (it brings together the Foundation Trilogy, the robot novels, and The End of Eternity) commented toward the end during the search for Earth that humans’ home is an E-type planet with a very large moon. Some gas giants have even larger moons, of course, but Earth’s satisfies the Goldilocks Principle twice over: its distance from the Sun and its diameter are just right so that it just blocks the Sun. That occurs about every eighteen months on Earth, but most eclipses aren’t seen by many people because the Earth’s surface is 70% covered by water.

Eclipses have left their observers agog from prehistoric times to present day. Originally explained via magic and superstition, we now use the magic of technology to observe them. These observations have aided and will continue to aid us in understanding our home star. The eclipse of May 1919 confirmed a prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. While telescopes can now block the solar disk to study the sun’s corona and prominences, there’s something special about the moon doing it for us.

The eclipse occurred a week ago. Because the NYC area wasn’t in the path of totality, I decided to watch the totality multiple times with ABC’s reporters stationed along the totality path. Here are some notes (with annotations from yours truly) that I made during that experience:

The last cross-country total eclipse was 1776. I need to check that. If correct, that eclipse was the most patriotic one.

People were saying all viewers in the U.S. were at a “Woodstock for Nerds.” I was happier just seeing ordinary people, not Sheldons and Leonards, getting excited. Even the Great Denier of Science Fact seemed into it.

I’m not sure the two making their wedding vows during the eclipse got the wedding present they’d bargained for. It rained on them.

ABC’s left-clock announcing the “next totality” must have been created by a lover of oxymoronic phrases. There was no “next”; the moon’s shadow swept continuously across the country. They should have said “next report about totality” or something similar.

“Diamond ring”? Not a bad name, but that and the Bailey’s beads (named after astronomer Francis Bailey) are both due to the sun either peeking and/or diffracting through craters and valleys on the moon. Its limb isn’t smooth by any stretch of the imagination.

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