After the interview with Peggy Kolm, blogger at Biology in Science Fiction, I have sent some questions to Malin Sandström, who is bringing science news to the Swedish part of the blogosphere at Vetenskapsnytt. Sorry that it has taken me so long to get around to posting this!
What came first, your interest in science or in science fiction? To what extent are they aspects of the same interest?
I am actually not sure. Probably I did not make that clear division between "science" and "fiction" when I started reading books, but I definitely had more opportunities to nurture my interest in science. The first science fiction I remember reading and can place in time was Gibson, and then I might have been... eleven? twelve? Old enough not to be immediately evicted from the "grownups" section of the library, at least.
Of course these interests have parts in common. I think the underlying theme in good science and good science fiction is partly the same; neat logical threads between known things, nevertheless leading to the unexpected unknowns. And science often makes for good stories, even if it is not usually framed in that way. Reading a scientific paper with "story-teller" eyes can be quite revealing, and it also gives you a few pointers on how to improve your own papers.
In your experience, do scientists read science fiction?
I'd guess more do than are willing to admit it ;-) But sadly, I'd also say that most scientists I have met seem to read very little apart from their academic litterature. (Makes you wonder how many get all the way down the Contents page of Nature to read Futures... I'd love to see those reading statistics.) The few booklovers I've met among my collegues are quite often sf readers, though. And if you go from my part of the field - natural sciences - to the more interactive and reflecting social sciences, I'd expect to find more readers, hopefully also more sf devotees.
What is the role of science fiction for the communication of science? Is it useful, is it negligible, or is it just a source of misconceptions?
It can be useful, but I think you would have to pick and choose rather carefully to avoid misconceptions and get an overarching theme together to communicate the science you want. But as a medium for communicating the excitement of science and pointing out ways to think about science, it has a lot of potential. For instance, what will individual identity mean if we ever will be able to produce human clones? If we add prostheses and improvements to our bodies and psyches, at what point are we no longer human? These questions are still inching their way into the general public discussion, but they've been in the books and short stories for more than twenty years.
What do you think about the portrayal of scientists in science fiction? In other forms of literature?
I actually have no set opinion on this any longer. I'd normally go with my gut reflex and say "bad! All stereotypes!", but I was at a seminar at the PCST-10 conference i Malmö last week where they discussed the development of the portrayal of scientists in the culture, and they had a lot of positive counter-examples for both sf and general literature. Let's just say it varies, and it is getting better - but the scientists I know are definitely more normal :-)
If you read Swedish, make sure to check out Vetenskapsnytt!
Showing posts with label science and science fiction interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science and science fiction interviews. Show all posts
Friday, July 11, 2008
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Interview with Peggy Kolm
This is the next installment in my series of interviews with interesting people about the relationship between science and science fiction. After the interview with Peter Watts I'm interested to see what other biologists say. Who can be more qualified to talk about this than Peggy Kolm, of the Biology in Science Fiction blog.
What came first: your interest in science fiction or your interest in biology? What is the relationship between the two interests?
That's a tough question, since I've been interested in both since I was in elementary school. I think, though, that my interest in science probably came first, since I went through a long Nancy Drew phase before I really got into science fiction. What drew me to science fiction was mix of science and adventure. I gobbled up the descriptions of space ships orbiting black holes and aliens, and that, in turn sparked my interest in learning more about the real science.
You have been blogging about biology in science fiction since 2006. Have you learned or discovered anything interesting by doing this, that you would like to share?
Before I started my blog, I didn't really read that much new science fiction. I purchased the occasional copy of Asimov's or the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and a few end-of-the-year "best of" anthologies, but most of my reading was from used book stores, which put my knowledge of science fiction novels at least a decade behind the times. Once I started blogging, I realized there was a lot of great fiction that I hadn't even heard of, let alone read. As a happy coincidence one of the major developments of the past few years is the expanding availability of fiction
online. I still prefer reading old-fashioned paper books, but e-books have helped get me up to speed with what's been published in the past few years. My "want to read" list is still pretty long, but at least know I know what books to look for.
How well do you think science fiction needs to be founded in real science? What is the relationship between idea and story?
I think that the story - the characters and the narrative - is the most important part of any story, science fiction or otherwise. If the story is engaging and entertaining I find it easy to overlook scientific absurdities. However when the science or technology, rather than character development, is the central element of the story, it's more important to me that the science is plausible. That's especially true when the science is something we're close to achieving, or have actually already achieved - I am much less bothered by faster-than-light drives and travel by wormhole than implausible genetics or cloning. But maybe that's my biology bias showing.
Do you think biology is under-appreciated or under-represented in science fiction or in the sf community?
I do think that biology is often unfairly considered a less "hard" basis for science fiction than physics. That seems to have been slowly changing over the past 20 years or so, as genetic engineering has become routine and cloning of humans has gone from being pure speculation to a likely reality. I suspect that the increase in biology-based science fiction in recent years is also due to the fact that there are more writers with backgrounds in the biological sciences now than there ever have been. (Has anyone actually done a survey? I'd hate to think it was just my imagination.) I'd like to think that trend will continue.
Find more at Biology in Science Fiction .
What came first: your interest in science fiction or your interest in biology? What is the relationship between the two interests?
That's a tough question, since I've been interested in both since I was in elementary school. I think, though, that my interest in science probably came first, since I went through a long Nancy Drew phase before I really got into science fiction. What drew me to science fiction was mix of science and adventure. I gobbled up the descriptions of space ships orbiting black holes and aliens, and that, in turn sparked my interest in learning more about the real science.
You have been blogging about biology in science fiction since 2006. Have you learned or discovered anything interesting by doing this, that you would like to share?
Before I started my blog, I didn't really read that much new science fiction. I purchased the occasional copy of Asimov's or the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and a few end-of-the-year "best of" anthologies, but most of my reading was from used book stores, which put my knowledge of science fiction novels at least a decade behind the times. Once I started blogging, I realized there was a lot of great fiction that I hadn't even heard of, let alone read. As a happy coincidence one of the major developments of the past few years is the expanding availability of fiction
online. I still prefer reading old-fashioned paper books, but e-books have helped get me up to speed with what's been published in the past few years. My "want to read" list is still pretty long, but at least know I know what books to look for.
How well do you think science fiction needs to be founded in real science? What is the relationship between idea and story?
I think that the story - the characters and the narrative - is the most important part of any story, science fiction or otherwise. If the story is engaging and entertaining I find it easy to overlook scientific absurdities. However when the science or technology, rather than character development, is the central element of the story, it's more important to me that the science is plausible. That's especially true when the science is something we're close to achieving, or have actually already achieved - I am much less bothered by faster-than-light drives and travel by wormhole than implausible genetics or cloning. But maybe that's my biology bias showing.
Do you think biology is under-appreciated or under-represented in science fiction or in the sf community?
I do think that biology is often unfairly considered a less "hard" basis for science fiction than physics. That seems to have been slowly changing over the past 20 years or so, as genetic engineering has become routine and cloning of humans has gone from being pure speculation to a likely reality. I suspect that the increase in biology-based science fiction in recent years is also due to the fact that there are more writers with backgrounds in the biological sciences now than there ever have been. (Has anyone actually done a survey? I'd hate to think it was just my imagination.) I'd like to think that trend will continue.
Find more at Biology in Science Fiction .
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Interview with Jo Walton
Jo Walton recently mentioned her problems with writing science fiction: she knows too much and not enough science. Many people have suggested solutions for the particular example she discusses in this text, but the general questions about the connection between science and science fiction is exactly what I've been exploring in these interviews (see what Mike Brotherton, Alastair Reynolds and Peter Watts had to say).
Here follow the questions (that's the parts in bold face, obviously) and the answers from Jo Walton.
You stated that you know too much but not enough science to be able to write science fiction. How do you think about the science in the science fiction that you read?
If I'm picking holes in the science it's either ridiculous or the book
is annoying me for other reasons. I find if I like the story and the
characters enough, I'll forgive it anything but the most egregious
things, but if those things aren't working for me, I'll start picking
holes in the science. Sometimes even if I do like a book I'll ask my
husband how plausible something is, if it strikes me as either wildly
unlikely or totally cool. A lot of people complain about the science
in The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, for instance, whereas my problem with it was the psychology. People don't act like that.
Do you think that the science in science fiction can be an obstacle to readers as well as writers?
Yes. I think reading the science is one of the
"SF reading protocols" Delany talks about. A Physics major once returned The Forever War by Joe Haldeman saying he stopped reading it because he couldn't figure out the tachyon drive. (One might answer that if he could figure it out he'd be rich and we'd have extra-solar colonies!) But really a science fiction reader just breezes right past the tachyon drive because it's not what the book's about. The tachyon drive is a little signal saying "We have FTL travel and extra solar colonies. Moving right along to the interesting stuff..." Even if he could have learned that reading protocol though, he'd have been one of those people who nitpick about windmills on Mars. I suspect the more science you know, the more this is a problem until all you can read is Hal Clement and Carl Frederick.
And then from the other end you get readers like my aunt who interpret everything as metaphor. Someone reviewed Kelly Link and said they couldn't understand what the zombies stood for. Sometimes a zombie is just a zombie... there are things you can read that way, but that's
not the way to bet.
In your experience, are there readers who get their ideas about science primarily from science fiction? What does science fiction contribute to the understanding or misunderstanding of science (disregarding the fact that a very small part of the population actually reads sf)?
I'm one of them. I don't have any post O Level science education -- in Britain you have to specialise early. So I haven't studied any science since I was fourteen, and then only physics and chemistry. Everything I know about science I know from SF, and from my husband reading Nature and synopsising the cool bits.
One of the problems this has caused me is what I call "past shock", when you find out where science and technology actually is and you can't believe how primitive we are. For instance, I assumed for years that Apollo 11 had got to the technology of Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon", and I was horrified when I found out the space shuttle was the first spaceship to have an airlock. I'd been reading about airlocks for a long long time!
Another problem is when I come to write SF everything I know is second hand. I hate that. When I was whining about this on my livejournal someone suggested that what I should do is actually get a science education now. I'm thinking about looking into that. I'm in North America now, where there are "Physics for Poets" courses, not Britain where it would mean starting over again having made different decisions at 14.
Generally though, it's positive. I mean when the newspapers started having very serious discussions about the ethics of cloning, I was incredulous. Hadn't they read Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh?
I don't think you can learn all that much specific science from any one piece of SF, though there are some pieces of Clarke and Heinlein that really seem as if they're teaching you solid engineering. But if you read a lot of random SF from all periods you are thinking about the ideas of science. There are certain SF givens which might well be wrong and which you might learn wrong, but generally if SF writers are working from actual science and not from other SF (so they're not me!) then if you read a lot of random SF you're going to pick up some random science. Certainly you'll pick up the SF way of looking at the world as something that changes and has possibilities. A lot of people who don't read SF tend to think that the world has always been the same and always will be, and even if they read history there's a tendency to think that the world is leading to an inevitable and better now. SF encourages a way of seeing where we are as a point on a line that extends in both directions. SF teaches you the future isn't going to be the same as the past and the present, and that there are multiple possible futures and choices matter.
Then there's the other thing where you get sci-fi movie simplifications of things making their way into public consciousness, so you have people thinking about cloning who haven't read Cyteen but have seen Jurassic Park. That can be a problem. I heard that in movies they deliberately get the science wrong.
I have the feeling that the scientists in science fiction are more nuanced than in the rest of our popular culture. Is the mad scientist stereotype dead in science fiction, or just transformed into something else?
A mad scientist is a cheap way of doing some plot things quickly. They're usually a cop out the same as any randomly mad person in fiction -- "Nobody would do that! That's mad!" "OK, well, the character is mad!"
Written SF has moved on from having cheap cliche characters, mostly.
Thinking about it, I can't think what I've read recently that has scientist characters of any kind. Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain and sequels do. Alistair Reynolds's Pushing Ice. Chris Moriarty's Spin Control. But I think it's less usual to have scientists at all, most SF these days isn't about people creating a new technology or whatever, it's about people living with the consequences.
More about Jo Walton and her writing on her own web site.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Interview with Peter Watts
Here's a new interview about the connections between science fiction and real science. This time Peter Watts answers the questions. The first time I really noticed his name was last summer, when Nature had an issue with special focus on science fiction. If I had been following the awards better I would have known that Blindsight was nominated for the Hugo last year. Peter Watts is a marine biologist. He lives in Ontario.
Here are my questions, and Peter's answers. Read all of these interviews together, and you will have something similar to the "Mind Melds" at SF Signal, only different.
What is the relationship between your own interest in science and in science fiction? You said in Nature that they bit you at the same time, through a freind's aquarium and a CBC dramatization of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea but to what extent are they aspects of the same interest?
They're pretty much flip sides of the same thing. In one case I'm performing a thought experiment, in the other a real one, but in both cases I'm looking at available data and trying to figure out where they lead. The difference with writing sf is that you don't have to fellate various funding agencies to pick up the tab; you don't have to twist your research proposal around to suit whatever agenda the politicians of the day deem to be "important" research. You can take on much bigger, much more profound issues. And not least, you don't have to actually know all that much about what you're exploring. You don't have to spend ten years building painstaking expertise in the lachrymal secretions of herring gulls (or whatever you've locked yourself into) before you can play around. You are, after all writing fiction. Nobody holds you to the same standard.
The down side, of course, is that you have to fellate your readers, who can be a much tougher lot to figure out. And you have to simultaneously fellate your publishers, who as far as I can tell don't have much real insight into what the readers want (at least, they pretty much wrote Blindsight off as dead coming out of the gate, which in retrospect was not a particularly good read on the market). Also, of course -- because you're not an expert on the subject of your thought experiment -- you're a lot more likely to get it wrong.
But that can be a feature as much as a bug; scientists who write science fiction tend to lose their extrapolative imaginations when writing about their own field of expertise, because they know too many arcane reasons why any particular scenario wouldn't work according to the current model. It straightjackets them. Vernor Vinge and Robert Forward show much less imagination in their extrapolation of computer tech than in other aspects of their work, whereas folks like Gibson and Delany -- with no science background at all-- seem far more prescient. In my own case, the bona-fide experts who seem to find my stuff most inspirational don't hail from the marine
biology crowd at all, but from the AI community-- an area in which my expertise is, shall we charitably say, limited. Go figure.
Do you think that science fiction is mostly helpful for promoting
scientific ideas, or does it multiply the misconceptions? Does this matter at all?
It depends on whether you include televised, cinematic, and gaming sf in your definition of "science fiction". If you only consider the written form, then it's a mixed bag -- some authors are fabulous at raising awareness, others only feed the misconceptions -- but it doesn't really matter because nobody's reading that stuff anyway any more. We are, as Jeff Vandermeer put it, "in the last days of literacy".
But if you widen the net to include sf tv, movies and games, well, everybody watches that stuff-- and very little, if any of it, does anything to promote scientific ideas. Old-time Star Trek played around with the occasional nifty concept in its day, but deteriorated into unforgiveable cheese back before the turn of the century. Stargate and its ilk-- at least, those episodes I've seen-- are utter crap. The most substantive shows out there-- Battlestar Galactica, which is fucking brilliant, and the short-lived Firefly, which was at least pretty clever-- earned their stripes by pretty much ignoring science entirely, and focusing on human and philosophical issues (and Firefly did a major disservice to scientific verisimilitude by pushing the whole old-west metaphor way past the breaking point. I mean seriously: in what universe does it make sense to move whole herds of cows between planets, rather than transporting frozen embryos?) And while I love the sf gaming scene as much as anybody-- I'm a big Half-Life fan, and BioShock swept me away-- the science in those things shooters is pretty pathetic.
(That said, the way Freeman's ex-supervisor treats him in Half-Life is a pretty decent reflection of a lot of prof/grad-student relationships I've seen...)
So, bottom line: No. Nobody reads the stuff that does, on occasion, treat science seriously, and the stuff everyone devours shows no real respect for science.
Actually, let me back up a bit: I've been unexpectedly impressed with the new "Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles" series. It's far from a perfect show-- there are some significant internal inconsistencies, and there was some really stupid biology in a couple of eps-- but they've also had some remarkably decent biology snuck in around the edges on occasion. It's the only show I can think of that makes explicit and ongoing reference to things like Vinge's Singularity and Moore's Law; it's full of literary and historical references to everything from Lord of the Flies to that
eighteenth-century fake chess-playing automaton, "The Turk". None of this is cutting-edge-- I mean, Vinge wrote his essay in "The Coming Technological Singularity" 1993-- but that only makes it all the more remarkable that other shows haven't dealt with such things. So I hope that series comes back. I think it shows promise.
Does the way science and the Scientist is depicted in popular culture influence how scientists think about themselves and what they are doing? In your experience, does science fiction have any influence on science?
In my direct experience, not so much. There are the usual tales of all the people who got the whole aerospace bug from sixties Star Trek and grew up to work at NASA, but Star Trek-- for that matter, most science fiction-- is not generally about scientists. There's that sf think-tank SIGMA that Bear, Niven, and Pournelle among others part of; they consult with government muckety-mucks on everything from SDI to nuclear waste disposal. But that's sf informing politics, not science.
Of course, there are myriad cases where some skiffy writer imagines this that or the other piece of future, only to have something like it appear thereafter in the real world-- but I think you'd be hard-pressed to claim that one inspired the other. Would the submarine remain uninvented if Jules Verne hadn't done "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"? Would Second Life not exist if "Snow Crash" had never been written? I'm told that the AI elements of one of my novels inspired some guy down in Lawrence Livermore Labs to think about his own work in new ways, but I'd be surprised if that drove anything approaching a breakthrough, let alone one that wouldn't have occured otherwise. Correlation is not always causation; I think it's more likely that sf writers keep tabs on where science is going anyway, and sometimes manage to beat science to the punch.
This is not to say that science is never informed by science fiction, just that it happens far less often than the coincidence of prediciton/realisation might suggest. Maybe it's analagous to smokers and lung cancer: Statistically, tumours bloom in smokers so much more often than nonsmokers that there's gotta be some kind of link-- but when you zoom in on individuals, you can never be sure that this particular cancer wouldn't happened even if the victim never puffed in his life. There are just too many confounds.
In my experience, biology is the hot science now. Many physicists talk about biological applications of physics. But how is it in the science fiction field? At a recent convention there was a panel of scientists, answering questions from the audience. They were all physicists and astronomers, but noone seemed to think that something was missing. Is physics (and astronomy -- also physics) the essential science? Do you get the feeling that biology and biological ideas get less attention in science fiction than physics and astronomy?
Certainly that's been the case traditionally, but I don't think it applies any more. Biology is the headline science of the twenty-first century so far, and I think that's being reflected in the more recent sf to come down the pike (mine, for example). If con panels still emphasise physics and astronomy, perhaps that reflects the "graying of fandom" we keep hearing about; perhaps panels are disproportionately populated by the TwenCen old guard who haven't caught up with the times yet.
That was all for this time. See Peter Watt's own website for more information about him and his books.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Interview with Alastair Reynolds
It has been a while, but here's the next installment in my series of interviews about the relationship between science and science fiction. I could have done it in a strict and scientific way, with the goal to find out and quantify how scientists and authors think about these things. You will notice that I have chosen to do it more like a conversation, with personal questions carrying assumptions and opinions in themselves. More fun for me, and still interesting for you!
This time I have sent questions to Alastair Reynolds, author of six novels published with striking cover images of space ships and planets (or republished with a stylish abstract cover). He has a PhD in astronomy and used to work for ESA, but is now a full-time author. I first met him when he was a guest of honour at a convention in Uppsala.
Here are my questions, with answers from Alastair Reynolds.
Someone asked me if reading science fiction has influenced my choice of career. I'm not sure, actually. What about you, what are your thoughts about the relationship between your interest in science and science fiction?
I doubt that I can easily untangle which came first. I was interested in anything to do with space, and science, and the future, from a very early age. My impulse to be a scientist, and my impulse to write SF, both came out of that same drive. Certainly as I got older, I found that SF was one of the places where I was at least exposed to scientific concepts, even if I didn't have them fully explained until I looked elsewhere. Things like "weightlessness", "gas giant", "heat death of the universe". And some of the first science books I read were among the pop science texts of Asimov and Clarke, which led me into reading other non-fiction works.
What do you think: does science fiction have any effect on the public understanding of science, or is it only people of a scientific mindset who read sf anyway?
I think if SF has had any effect on the public understanding of science, it's probably been a detrimental one so far. I mean, what is the key image of the scientist in popular culture? It's Doctor Frankenstein, meddling in things he ought not to. Too often the face of science that SF presents to the world is a negative one, of hubris, of experiments going wrong and ending the world. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I don't know if I'd say that it's exclusively people of a scientific mindset who read SF, but I would say that SF appeals to the questioning mind, and people of that persuasion are likely to be the ones who have the best grasp of scientific issues, among the general public. Certainly if you have a very non-questioning mindset, you're unlikely to be drawn to science as a field of interest.
What is your experience of the image of science fiction among scientists? While you were still combining a scientific career with writing, what did the people around you think of it? Did you ever get strange reactions?
My experience was much more positive than I might have imagined. It opened far more doors than it closed. In fact, colleagues whom I had never suspected of liking - or even tolerating - SF, came up to me and opened up about their interests, the books they had read and what they thought of them. That's not to say that there aren't scientists who dislike SF, but by and large I didn't meet too many of them.
Do you ever feel that the science fiction community has special expectations from you as a scientist by training? What do you think about the science fiction image of the scientist as hero?
I think the assumption is that if you come from a scientific background, you're only interested in nuts-and-bolts Hard SF, the kind where every statement has to be backed up by a page full of calculations. I can't think of anything more boring and futile, quite honestly. I do like some Hard SF - in fact I like a lot of it - but I'm just as enthused by the likes of Jonathan Carroll or China Mieville as I am by the usual hardcore suspects. I'm also resigned to the fact that everything I write will be examined through a critical filter of Hard SF assumptions - like, it's a given that I'm not interested in characterisation, or don't place a high premium on style or subtext, simply because other Hard SF writers don't. I am interested in these things, massively so.
As for the scientist as hero - well, I haven't got much more time for that than the idea as scientist as villain. Both are exaggerated extremes which seek to obscure the uncomfortable idea that scientists are living breathing human beings, with all the fallibilties that come with the package. Scientists get stuff right some of the time and get stuff wrong other times. But they shouldn't be put on any kind moral pedestal.
This time I have sent questions to Alastair Reynolds, author of six novels published with striking cover images of space ships and planets (or republished with a stylish abstract cover). He has a PhD in astronomy and used to work for ESA, but is now a full-time author. I first met him when he was a guest of honour at a convention in Uppsala. Here are my questions, with answers from Alastair Reynolds.
Someone asked me if reading science fiction has influenced my choice of career. I'm not sure, actually. What about you, what are your thoughts about the relationship between your interest in science and science fiction?
I doubt that I can easily untangle which came first. I was interested in anything to do with space, and science, and the future, from a very early age. My impulse to be a scientist, and my impulse to write SF, both came out of that same drive. Certainly as I got older, I found that SF was one of the places where I was at least exposed to scientific concepts, even if I didn't have them fully explained until I looked elsewhere. Things like "weightlessness", "gas giant", "heat death of the universe". And some of the first science books I read were among the pop science texts of Asimov and Clarke, which led me into reading other non-fiction works.
What do you think: does science fiction have any effect on the public understanding of science, or is it only people of a scientific mindset who read sf anyway?
I think if SF has had any effect on the public understanding of science, it's probably been a detrimental one so far. I mean, what is the key image of the scientist in popular culture? It's Doctor Frankenstein, meddling in things he ought not to. Too often the face of science that SF presents to the world is a negative one, of hubris, of experiments going wrong and ending the world. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I don't know if I'd say that it's exclusively people of a scientific mindset who read SF, but I would say that SF appeals to the questioning mind, and people of that persuasion are likely to be the ones who have the best grasp of scientific issues, among the general public. Certainly if you have a very non-questioning mindset, you're unlikely to be drawn to science as a field of interest.
What is your experience of the image of science fiction among scientists? While you were still combining a scientific career with writing, what did the people around you think of it? Did you ever get strange reactions?
My experience was much more positive than I might have imagined. It opened far more doors than it closed. In fact, colleagues whom I had never suspected of liking - or even tolerating - SF, came up to me and opened up about their interests, the books they had read and what they thought of them. That's not to say that there aren't scientists who dislike SF, but by and large I didn't meet too many of them.
Do you ever feel that the science fiction community has special expectations from you as a scientist by training? What do you think about the science fiction image of the scientist as hero?
I think the assumption is that if you come from a scientific background, you're only interested in nuts-and-bolts Hard SF, the kind where every statement has to be backed up by a page full of calculations. I can't think of anything more boring and futile, quite honestly. I do like some Hard SF - in fact I like a lot of it - but I'm just as enthused by the likes of Jonathan Carroll or China Mieville as I am by the usual hardcore suspects. I'm also resigned to the fact that everything I write will be examined through a critical filter of Hard SF assumptions - like, it's a given that I'm not interested in characterisation, or don't place a high premium on style or subtext, simply because other Hard SF writers don't. I am interested in these things, massively so.
As for the scientist as hero - well, I haven't got much more time for that than the idea as scientist as villain. Both are exaggerated extremes which seek to obscure the uncomfortable idea that scientists are living breathing human beings, with all the fallibilties that come with the package. Scientists get stuff right some of the time and get stuff wrong other times. But they shouldn't be put on any kind moral pedestal.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Interview with Mike Brotherton
Update: added a final question with answer at the end.
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of interviews with interesting people about the relationship between science and science fiction. It will be fun to see various angles on it. Of course I do this mostly out of my own interest: I want to know what thoughts and experiences others have on this subject. At the same time, I hope that this will be of broader interest, and that my readers will appreciate it. Share and enjoy.
First out is Mike Brotherton, "Hard SF Writer" as he states on his blog. Mike is also an astronomer and a professor at the University of Wyoming.
Now: questions and answers!
Someone asked me if reading science fiction has influenced my choice of career. I'm not sure, actually. What about you, what are your thoughts about the relationship between your interest in science and science fiction?
I can't ever remember not liking science and anything that involved science, including science fiction. Discovering how things worked, the mysteries beyond the everyday, were always interlinked in my mind. When I was six, I wanted to be an astronomer or a paleontologist; that was the same age I first saw Star Trek. Furthermore, good scientific research requires imagination, which science fiction has in great abundance. Good science fiction, in my opinion, requires strong grounding in science.
What do you think: does science fiction have any effect on the
public understanding of science, or is it only people of a scientific mindset who read sf anyway?
Science fiction has a tremendous impact on the general public in movies and TV. The written form is more generally reaching the folks scientifically inclined, true, but it's important to realize that science fiction fans fill all sorts of technical roles in our society from scientists to computer support to engineering and more. These are the people who are in positions to make a lot of decisions about how technology is used and what demand there is for it, the movers and shakers if you will in our modern civilization. And without their support, and at least the positive appreciation of the more general public, support for science would wane and research dollars
would dwindle.
Science fiction can be more dangerous, in my opinion, than people appreciate. A steady diet of movies like Jurassic Park that consistently show scientists as arrogant and blithely releasing
dangers into our world does erode public support.
You teach a course on science and science fiction. What have you
learned from that? Any interesting experiences to share?
Teaching this class really helps me sharpen my critical eye about how to communicate science effectively, appreciating the rare times it's well done, and being frustrated at how often it isn't. I marvel at the ingenuity of some of my students, the love-inspired effort they sometimes apply. On the other end of the spectrum, I also realize just how many years I've put into learning the science and the writing both to do it as well as I do (which isn't badly, but I have
plenty of room for improvement).
One of the things I do in my class is have us watch the old classic DESTINATION MOON, a movie from the 1950s about a rocket that goes to the moon. Written by Robert Heinlein, the story was designed to educate the public about how very possible this feat was and to inspire support. It gets a lot of science right, and has a great scene with Woody Woodpecker explaining how rockets work, something that wasn't general knowledge to the extent it is today. I asked my students to write a scene doing the same thing, and got some nice relationships to more familiar experiences like released balloons and jetting squids. The more abstract the concept, the more important it
is to find comparisons to every day life, even if it seems impossible at first.
What do you think about the portrayal of scientists in sf. Do you recognize yourself?
There are some good and accurate portrayals. Ellie Arroway in CONTACT comes to mind. There are more and better examples in books; Gregory Benford's TIMESCAPE is a good one. I can see myself in those characters.
More often, they're nerdy guys in white lab coats and some kind of ridiculous stereotype (Dan Akroyd in MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN), or nearly the opposite, with Daryl Hanna's ROXANNE or Val Kilmer's super cool dude in REAL GENIUS. Beautiful people played as if the science is a secondary part of who they are, when the reality is nearly every scientist I know lives for science and loves it. We're so talented to get where we are, we could make a lot more money in a different
field, if we cared to. We don't, usually.
What about the portrayal of sf among scientists? Do you ever get
strange reactions if you tell people at work that you are going to a science fiction convention?
My department and campus at the University of Wyoming is generally supportive of my efforts, and I try hard to bring up the positive synergies between science and science fiction. I've gotten NASA and the National Science Foundation to fund some of my science-fiction-related outreach efforts (e.g., the Launch Pad astronomy workshop for writers, see www.launchpadworkshop.org). Bringing in grant money and bringing in high-profile visitors gets positive notice.
And just the same way I have some cachet at science fiction conventions for being the guy who also does real science, a lot of scientists are science fiction fans and they think it's cool that I write novels. Some of my biggest fans are scientific colleagues. The negative folks, the few there are, would actually have to read my books to be too critical and that's usually too much effort. When I travel to give science talks, I'm often asked to also give science fiction talks. The latter typically pull bigger audiences.
Writing takes a lot of time and effort. How do you balance it with work and the rest of your life? Do you have any special writing habits, or designated writing times?
The answer is that the balance is often imbalanced, where I emphasis one or the other for extended periods. The astronomy thing always gets some effort, but I do go months without writing seriously.
Once I start writing on a novel, I write 2-4 hours per day, 1000 words a day, nearly every day, and keep up the momentum through the completion of a first draft.
***
Again, If you want to know more about Mike Brotherton, here's his blog.
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of interviews with interesting people about the relationship between science and science fiction. It will be fun to see various angles on it. Of course I do this mostly out of my own interest: I want to know what thoughts and experiences others have on this subject. At the same time, I hope that this will be of broader interest, and that my readers will appreciate it. Share and enjoy.
First out is Mike Brotherton, "Hard SF Writer" as he states on his blog. Mike is also an astronomer and a professor at the University of Wyoming.
Now: questions and answers!
Someone asked me if reading science fiction has influenced my choice of career. I'm not sure, actually. What about you, what are your thoughts about the relationship between your interest in science and science fiction?
I can't ever remember not liking science and anything that involved science, including science fiction. Discovering how things worked, the mysteries beyond the everyday, were always interlinked in my mind. When I was six, I wanted to be an astronomer or a paleontologist; that was the same age I first saw Star Trek. Furthermore, good scientific research requires imagination, which science fiction has in great abundance. Good science fiction, in my opinion, requires strong grounding in science.
What do you think: does science fiction have any effect on the
public understanding of science, or is it only people of a scientific mindset who read sf anyway?
Science fiction has a tremendous impact on the general public in movies and TV. The written form is more generally reaching the folks scientifically inclined, true, but it's important to realize that science fiction fans fill all sorts of technical roles in our society from scientists to computer support to engineering and more. These are the people who are in positions to make a lot of decisions about how technology is used and what demand there is for it, the movers and shakers if you will in our modern civilization. And without their support, and at least the positive appreciation of the more general public, support for science would wane and research dollars
would dwindle.
Science fiction can be more dangerous, in my opinion, than people appreciate. A steady diet of movies like Jurassic Park that consistently show scientists as arrogant and blithely releasing
dangers into our world does erode public support.
You teach a course on science and science fiction. What have you
learned from that? Any interesting experiences to share?
Teaching this class really helps me sharpen my critical eye about how to communicate science effectively, appreciating the rare times it's well done, and being frustrated at how often it isn't. I marvel at the ingenuity of some of my students, the love-inspired effort they sometimes apply. On the other end of the spectrum, I also realize just how many years I've put into learning the science and the writing both to do it as well as I do (which isn't badly, but I have
plenty of room for improvement).
One of the things I do in my class is have us watch the old classic DESTINATION MOON, a movie from the 1950s about a rocket that goes to the moon. Written by Robert Heinlein, the story was designed to educate the public about how very possible this feat was and to inspire support. It gets a lot of science right, and has a great scene with Woody Woodpecker explaining how rockets work, something that wasn't general knowledge to the extent it is today. I asked my students to write a scene doing the same thing, and got some nice relationships to more familiar experiences like released balloons and jetting squids. The more abstract the concept, the more important it
is to find comparisons to every day life, even if it seems impossible at first.
What do you think about the portrayal of scientists in sf. Do you recognize yourself?
There are some good and accurate portrayals. Ellie Arroway in CONTACT comes to mind. There are more and better examples in books; Gregory Benford's TIMESCAPE is a good one. I can see myself in those characters.
More often, they're nerdy guys in white lab coats and some kind of ridiculous stereotype (Dan Akroyd in MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN), or nearly the opposite, with Daryl Hanna's ROXANNE or Val Kilmer's super cool dude in REAL GENIUS. Beautiful people played as if the science is a secondary part of who they are, when the reality is nearly every scientist I know lives for science and loves it. We're so talented to get where we are, we could make a lot more money in a different
field, if we cared to. We don't, usually.
What about the portrayal of sf among scientists? Do you ever get
strange reactions if you tell people at work that you are going to a science fiction convention?
My department and campus at the University of Wyoming is generally supportive of my efforts, and I try hard to bring up the positive synergies between science and science fiction. I've gotten NASA and the National Science Foundation to fund some of my science-fiction-related outreach efforts (e.g., the Launch Pad astronomy workshop for writers, see www.launchpadworkshop.org). Bringing in grant money and bringing in high-profile visitors gets positive notice.
And just the same way I have some cachet at science fiction conventions for being the guy who also does real science, a lot of scientists are science fiction fans and they think it's cool that I write novels. Some of my biggest fans are scientific colleagues. The negative folks, the few there are, would actually have to read my books to be too critical and that's usually too much effort. When I travel to give science talks, I'm often asked to also give science fiction talks. The latter typically pull bigger audiences.
Writing takes a lot of time and effort. How do you balance it with work and the rest of your life? Do you have any special writing habits, or designated writing times?
The answer is that the balance is often imbalanced, where I emphasis one or the other for extended periods. The astronomy thing always gets some effort, but I do go months without writing seriously.
Once I start writing on a novel, I write 2-4 hours per day, 1000 words a day, nearly every day, and keep up the momentum through the completion of a first draft.
***
Again, If you want to know more about Mike Brotherton, here's his blog.
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