As others see us

If you ever read Ansible you are familiar with Dave Langford's ongoing collection of quotes about how the outside world percieves fandom: "As Others See Us".

I just found a sample of my own, from a list of Toronto's Literary Events:

And for the not-so-serious (young adult) reader, this weekend marks the annual Ad Astra conference, featuring sci-fi writers like husband-wife duo Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta.

I'm going there. Does it mean that I belong among the "not-so-serious (young adult)" readers? Well, I'm not that old. And I'm not terribly serious all the time, despite my tendency to take myself a little to seriously. Still, I think those who put together this list share the unfortunate notion that fantastic literature is just escapistic and probably mostly for kids anyway -- partly true, but far from a complete picture and missing most of the interesting parts.

Yet another SETI idea

This time it's neutrinos from alien physics experiments. I have my doubts about this one. It has to be strong enough to be possible to see at astronomical distances, and we have to be able to distinguish it as a point like source that goes off and on -- it's difficult enough to distinguish any extrasolar neutrino sources as it is, and if it's not on all the time it might just be missed. But who knows what we'll discover with IceCube? It's certainly an entertaining thought.

On a listserv I subscribe to, someone associated this news story to the Stanislaw Lem novel His Master's Voice. I haven't read that one (yet).

From the fringe of fanzine fandom

My nose is running, my head feels too heavy for my neck, and I feel alternatingly too hot or too cold. Nice. At least I have a new issue of Banana Wings to entertain me, between the long spells when I do nothing but stare out the window.

In case you don't know, Banana Wings is a well known fanzine (edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer) with readers and contributors from all around the world. Fanzine fandom consists of people who communicate through eachother's fanzines -- it is a virtual community surviving from the time before the www, when all mail was snail mail and you had to publish on paper if you wanted to publish anything. It is not directly transferrable to the internet, it has it's own culture with expectations and conventions and survives as a distinct mode of conversation. Of course, nowadays many fanzines are also available for download from eFanzines.com.

From the previous paragraph you can see that I'm not expecting everyone of my readers to know about these things.

In the beginning, when I was new in the world of fanzine fandom, I used lots of fan slang and obscure references in everything I wrote. I wanted to show that I was on the inside, that I was one of the initiated. After a while, when the newness of fanzine making had worn off, my focus shifted from showing off to communicating. I also realized that fanzine fandom was very small, and that I didn't want to scare away newcomers who had not yet discovered that they were interested in deciphering the jargon.

Nowadays when I write I'm trying to address everyone: the experienced fans as well as the neos or proto-fans. By "proto-fans" I mean science fiction (including fantasy, of course) readers who might be interested in fandom but who don't know that yet. I love fandom, fan culture and fan history, but I love science fiction and meeting people even more. I want to build bridges between people I think could have something in common, and I want to promote an exchange of thoughts and ideas about science fiction (again, including fantasy). At the same time I really want to be a involved in fandom.

Reading the editorial of this issue of Banana Wings, it's also obvious to me that I'm not as involved in It All as I sometimes try to be. I have missed the discussion about "Core Fandom" that is mentioned (it has taken place in some other fanzines, which I know of but haven't read), and I don't know "The Eminent Peter Weston's theory about handing out fanzines at conventions". I try in periods to sample what I find at eFanzines.com, but I have two problems with that: I usually don't find them suitable for reading on the computer screen, and I don't want to waste printing resources at work. This means that to get into the habit of really reading fanzines, I would have to get my own printer -- or make myself take a memory stick to a copy shop to print things. At the moment, I'm just sometimes printing sample pages, or compressing them to two or four pages per page (and double-sided of course) to save paper, or not reading fanzines at all.

I'm happy when I get dead tree fanzines in the mail. Especially when they bring with them a feeling that fandom is alive, which Banana Wings does (despite expressing a sligth pessimism about the whole thing). A letter column that takes up ten pages! There is the conversation.

And yes, I'm making a fanzine to bring to Ad Astra.

Talk like a physicist day!

Today is pi day (3.14), Albert Einstein's birthday, and talk like a physicist day. I'm a physicist, so I guess I talk like one all the time, but anyway.

Because I have friends who understand what I mean, I have the habit of asking people for their boundary conditions when I want to make plans together with them. And when i didn't know the English word "slide" at the playground, I asked what to call the thing that is like an inclined plane. Some think that's funny.

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.

Another favourite blog

I just realized that I didn't have Futurismic in my link list. It should be there! It's a blog for "near-future science fiction and fact", with posts about all kinds of weird new technologies and comments about fiction. Also, every Friday they post a list of new free fiction online, so you have something to read over the weekend (well, if that ever is a problem). Since I imagine that most of my readers just subscribe to the RSS feed and never see my sidebar, I'm mentioning this in this post as well.

I'm not very good at maintaining my blogroll. Perhaps I should do something about it. But then again, who cares?

My schedule at Ad Astra

Just in case someone who reads this blog is going to Ad Astra, I'll post my appearances in the program here. And also, of course, because Important People usually do that, and I want to be like them ;-)

Bad Science in the Movies (Sat 1:00 PM) Exactly what you would think. I don't think it's necessary to fight against or be angry at bad science on the silver screen, but it's fun as a starting point for thinking about how things really work.

Team Banzai (Sat 3:00 PM) Scientists get questions from the audience. If we can answer them, they will learn something, and if we cannot, we will learn something.

Through Rose-Tinted Goggles (Sun 12:00 PM) I will moderate a panel about the roots of steampunk.

Looking for a Few Good Fen (Sun 2:00 PM) How to make people feel like members and help make a convention work, instead of just buying a ticket and expect to be entertained. Always interesting.

Of course I will do what I can to bring a new issue of my fanzine (hmm, and maybe in the process also write some locs to other fanzines...)

Remember the WMAP conspiracy!

Yesterday the result of the analysis of five years of WMAP data were released (earlier results were based on three years of data). WMAP is the satellite detector that is mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation. From the pattern of tiny fluctuations in the temperature of this radiation we can learn a lot about the universe and how it evolved.

One piece of folklore among physicists is the initials of Stephen Hawking that can be found by the ever pattern finding human eye slightly to the left of the center of the picture. (Actually it looks more like S'H, or S'K, but anyway.) This is a good starting point for conspiracy theories. Especially over a couple of beers.

Blowing fuses, blowing snow

This week I worked three days in the lab. This involves lifting and carrying water cubes (20 litre water filled soft plastic bottles in cardboard boxes), climbing up and down the detector structure, reaching inside the structure to connect sensors to the detectors, and so on. Very physical work. I love it.

But of course there is also the inevitable frustrations involved in working with hardware. Short circuits, missing parts, leaks, and the usual delays. And did we leave the valve closed or open? I hate it when I notice that I could have avoided or prevented these things if I had thought about everything in advance. I want to do things right! Ah, well, I have to learn to deal with it.

At least we were lucky to get out on the roads when the latest snow storm had already passed and the roads had been cleared. No problems at all. Not like that time when it took us 12 hours to get there (instead of the usual 7 or so). Every trip is a little adventure!

Just before I left I had a massive attack of home sickness. I miss my friends and family in Sweden. I spent some time in the car thinking about my situation here on the wrong side of the Atlantic. At least I have husband and child with me, it could be worse. I'm really quite happy here, the only bad thing is the distance to the people I most want to be with. Should I go back after completing one year, or should I stay here?

---
What the water cubes are for? Neutron shielding of course. See my post here, where I talked about neutron contamination in the context of another experiment.