The Science in The Fiction

Daniel H. Wilson always brings a Cherokee perspective into his work, but it’s fair to say his new book does this more than usual, pushing the techno-thriller genre into unique new territory which has been described as Techno-Traditional – infusing sci-fi techno-thriller with indigenous perspectives. 'Hole in the Sky' is an alien first contact story from a culture and history that has already experienced both the strangeness and the horror of first contact, with a foreign and incomprehensible entity. We discuss differences between Western and Indigenous approaches to science and technology, and differences in how to confront the unknown in a spiritual context. We talk about Cherokee Nation Reawakening mythology, ancient indigenous technology, the Spiro Mound, and what questions to ask if an alien invasion were imminent: What is it? How do we deal with it? How do we survive it? Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Chris Beckett returns to the show to talk about his book ‘America City’. Chris has written over 20 short stories and six novels, starting with The Holy Machine published in 2004 and including 'Dark Eden' for which he won the Arthur C. Clark Award in 2012. ‘America City’ describes the consequences of a refugee crisis resulting from climate change, and the slippery slope of propaganda used in service to political power. We talk about how prescient this book was, published in 2017 just after Donald Trump came to power and made the invasion of Canada a shockingly plausible future scenario. We discuss colonialism, herd mentality, the use of social media for propaganda, and the 'othering' of people both domestic and foreign. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

This is the second half of Marty's conversation about paleontology with science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer and paleo-artist Julius Csotonyi. They discuss their lives and careers as people with one foot in science and the other in arts, and the value of art to science. They also talk about speculative evolution and how the science of paleontology can inform exobiology - understanding how life evolved in in the deep past on Earth may teach us lessons about what life could be like in different environments on other planets. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Science fiction author and icon Robert J. Sawyer speaks with renowned paleo-artist Julius Csotonyi about their shared love of all things paleontological. They discuss Rob’s ‘Quintaglio Ascension’, a trilogy about a species of Nanotyrannus given the time and space to evolve intelligence and their own civilization outside our solar system. They tell us about some of the latest scientific developments in our changing view of dinosaurs, discussing whether and which dinos were warm- vs cold-blooded, avian and non-avian therapods, Opavinea, and the rise of new techniques that have allowed us to detect the colour of these ancient animals. They also talk about the state of science, politics and public education in facing the existential threats of our time, and what we owe to future generations. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Robert J. Sawyer returns to the show to discuss 'The Quintaglio Ascension', a trilogy composed of ‘Far-Seer’, ‘Fossil Hunter’ and ‘Foreigner’. We talk about his early writing in the 90’s, which indulged his love and passion for paleontology. This trilogy recapitulates the history of science with the stories of Galileo, Darwin and Freud. Each of these figures delivered blows to the narcissistic ego, which lends high stakes to a thought experiment about how different species may be well- or ill-suited to become intelligent and form a technological civilization - if dinosaurs were given the opportunity to evolve longer. We talk about the received wisdom that a cometary impact was the primary cause of the dinosaur extinction - which may not be as accurate as we once thought! We discuss changes in our understanding of Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus. Rob tells us about Dale Russell and his hypothetical Humanoid Dinosauroids, based on Troodon. Rob makes paleontology into a playground for speculative exobiology. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

This is the second half of our conversation with Micaiah Johnson continued from our last episode about necropolitics in Ned Beauman's 'Venomous Lumpsucker'. Micaiah is the author of the Ashtown duology, ‘The Space Between Worlds’ and ‘Those Beyond the Wall’, and we spoke to her about these books in episode 49, loosely on the topic of the Multiverse but more about the social and political aspects of a future dystopia divided by extreme inequality. Since that interview Micaiah has become Dr. Johnson, completing her PhD on those very subjects, and in this episode we focus on her PhD which is titled ‘The Unkilled: White Supremacy's Insidious Preservation of Black Lives'. Here we delve more deeply into social and political science to understand something about the dark underbelly of inequality, violence, and frankly evil which has permeated the foundations of our civilization, and continues to do so in a shockingly relevant moment as we see the eruption of American fascism today. This is a pretty intense conversation addressing some heavy topics, but Micaiah does so with the kind of bright passionate intelligence that it takes to sustain a long fight against the darkness. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

We welcome Micaiah Johnson back to the show, this time in her role as a PhD specialist on the topic of Necropolitics, which we tackled in our last episode on 'Venomous Lumpsucker' by Ned Beauman. This episode is the first half of our conversation, where Micaiah introduces us to the topic of Necropolitics and its origins from Foucault to Mbembe. She discusses how it pertains to Ned's book in terms of harmful practices of 'preservation' gone awry. We also talk about the tyranny of billionaires, Zohran Mamdani's win in New York, joyful hopelessness and the difference between doing good and being seen to do good. The second half of our conversation will continue in our next episode where we take a deep dive into Micaiah's PhD thesis 'The Unkilled: White Supremacy's Insidious Preservation of Black Lives'. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Ned Beauman is the author of 'Venomous Lumpsucker', a biting satire which examines the environmental and social consequences of capitalism run amok, and the dangerous absurdities that can result from using free-market mechanisms to solve the environmental problems we face today. We talk about the political and economic choices and mechanisms that determine which species are preserved and which species go extinct - hence 'necropolitics'. We talk about calibrating our economic and environmental values, about the importance of pragmatism and efficacy, about taking responsibility or fooling our selves and passing the buck to future generations. We also talk about what’s working, what’s going better than expected and having hope for the future. Ned Beauman's Website Venomous Lumpsucker : Beauman, Ned: Amazon.ca: Books Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman | Goodreads Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Marty speaks with biochemist and astrobiologist William Bains on the topic of Dark Ecology, as a final chapter to our 4 previous episodes on this topic with Chris Beckett (Ep 56), Julius Csotonyi (Ep 57-58) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (Ep 59). Dr. Bains is the author of “The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds”, and has earned degrees from the universities of Oxford, Warwick and Stanford, and has held positions at the University of Bath, MIT, Imperial College London, and in addition to founding a number of biotech start-up companies is now a senior research fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University in the UK. William is exactly the kind of person we love to speak with on this show as his expertise really expands and deepens some of ideas we’ve been talking about in contemporary science fiction. Some of his recent papers carry titles like "Prospects for detecting signs of life on exoplanets in the JWST era" and "Astrobiological implications of the stability and reactivity of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) in concentrated sulfuric acid". So that’s the kind of thing we discuss in the following conversation. In addition to expanding on the details of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s worldbuilding in Shroud, we talk about the WOW signal in astronomy, the incoming 3I/ATLAS extrasolar object, and new experiments in high throughput chemistry and biochemistry. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Marty speaks to Nicholas Keating Casborro about the hard-scrabble, dystopian world portrayed in his book 'Vitalerium: Descent into the Void'. This is a far future space opera where faster than light travel is made possible by the exotic substance that serves as the title of the book, where humans have spread across multiple planets, where the politics are cynical, street life is vicious, human life disposable, and corruption endemic. This episode is lighter on the science and heavier on the fiction; we discuss some of the technology essential to this world, but our focus is on the world-building, politics, religion and characters Nick has created in the Vitalerium universe. https://atmospherepress.com/books/vitalerium-descent-into-the-void-by-nicholas-keating-casbarro/ Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Chris Kulp is a professional physicist and science fiction author, who has won the Mike Resnick award for his first published story ‘What Would You Pay for a Second Chance’. We talk about his second novel ‘Lost Origins’, a space opera where Earth is regarded as a myth by a galactic civilization peopled by humans and androids. Our conversation goes from a sci-fi story about artificial intelligence to one that explains how current AI models work, what they can and can't do, what they might do in the future. We also chat about Chris’ research in nonlinear dynamics and the use of AI in shaping the behaviour of complex networks. https://chriskulp.com/ Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a bestselling British author whose work has taken the science fiction world by storm since his seminal sci-fi novel Children of Time, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. Its sequel Children of Ruin won the equally prestigious British Science Fiction Association or BSFA award in 2019, and after the publication of the third book in the series Children of Memory, those books won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023. He’s also won 4 other BSFA awards for his novels and short fiction, and this year 2 of his books Alien Clay and Service Model are up for both the Hugo Award and the Locus Award! In this conversation we discuss his latest book Shroud, which happens to dovetail nicely along the theme of Dark Ecology that we’ve been discussing since our interviews with Chris Becket and Julius Csotonyi about Dark Eden. We talk about the exotic planetary environment and the aliens he’s invented in Shroud, whose neural architecture and sensorium share the same electromagnetic modality, making for the kind of collective intelligence and consciousness that Adrian often creates and wrestles with in his work. We also discuss theory of mind in hedgehogs, the social relations of mantis shrimp, bird intelligence and a few other things that have come to be signature topics in Adrian’s science fiction. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

This is the second part of Marty's conversation with Julius Csotonyi about dark ecology in relation to the dark rogue world of Chris Beckett’s book 'Dark Eden'. We discuss the extraordinary existence of anoxygenic autotrophic bacteria that are capable of photosynthesis in the dark of the ocean floor! Julius describes the ecology of thermal vents and geothermal energy as it stems from a hot planetary core, and we speculate about the kinds of planets that could host a dark ecology. We learn about protective and accessory photosynthetic pigments and ancient archaea microbes and not only the Tree of Life, but the more convoluted Bush of Life! We talk about superorganisms and colonial organisms and social insects, plasmodial slime molds, mutualism, and how empathy and cooperation are the real superpowers of life. Finally we discuss how to imagine new possibilities for extraterrestrial life and how to hunt for exobiology using educated speculation and scientific creativity. https://www.csotonyi.com/ https://sierraclub.bc.ca/learn-to-draw-b-c-wildlife-series-with-julius-csotonyi-gift/ Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Julius Csotonyi is a thermal vent biologist with expertise on organisms that thrive on geothermal energy in the dark depths of the ocean where there is almost no light from the sun. He is also someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about ‘speculative biology’, imagining various exotic possibilities for the existence of life in extreme conditions that are very different from those we are used to on the surface of our planet. Our conversation is a follow-up to our previous episode with Chris Beckett, author of the 'Dark Eden' trilogy, so this is where we put some meat on the bones of the dark ecology which forms the setting of the 'Dark Eden' books. Julius is an absolutely delightful wealth of information, whose love of science radiates throughout our conversation. In this, the first half of our conversation, we talk about the evolution of bioluminescence and light sensing in organisms who live in the dark world on the ocean floor, the different biological strategies that make use of bioluminescence, anoxygenic phototrophs that use infrared radiation rather than visible light to drive photosynthesis in the dark (!) and how that might lead to new and different ideas about the origin of life on earth – and hence the possible origin of life on other worlds. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Holly and Marty speak with Chris Beckett about his Dark Eden trilogy, comprised of Dark Eden – which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2012, and was followed by Mother of Eden in 2015 and Daughter of Eden in 2016. Dark Eden has been described as “a superior piece of the theologically nuanced science fiction”, and is also a story about the development of human culture, religion and civilization. It stands out for its unique setting on a dark planet whose ecology is powered by geothermal forces rather than by a sun, and where a pair of marooned humans have given rise to a growing family of refugees who scrabble for survival in a dark forest filled with bioluminescent plants and animals. It’s a book you’ll never forget, and its characters will stay with you all your life. We also spend some time talking about his more recent book 'America City', a book written in 2017 about an unhinged American president who decides to invade Canada - disturbingly prophetic of recent events threatening the Canadian sovereignty. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Holly and Marty get together with their friend Susan MacKinnon to discuss the science fiction of Ursula K. LeGuin, literary icon of speculative fiction. We talk about her Hugo and Nebula winning books "The Left Hand of Darkness" and "The Dispossessed", which are among the most celebrated classics in science fiction. The first was a pioneering book about the impact of gender on civilization, describing an ambisexual society. The second is about anarchism as an ambiguous utopia in the context of capitalism, and describes some very deep and beautiful ideas about time and the foundations of physics. We also talk about LeGuin's short story "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas", a lasting parable about those whose suffering supports our society and how we confront or submit to that reality. We also chat about higher education, feminism, dresses with huge pockets and a some of the other books we're reading. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

This is part 2 of Marty's conversation with Douglas Phillips about his 'Quantum' Series of hard science fiction novels. In our last episode we talked about 'Quantum Space', and this time we discuss the next two books in the series, 'Quantum Void' and 'Quantum Time'. As before, today’s exchange focusses on the unifying theme of extra dimensions, in both space and time, and Douglas’ exploration of speculative ideas that push the envelope of modern physics. We discuss visiting aliens using extradimensional spatial distortion, imagining paranormal phenomena as a 3D consequence of 4D activity, and using 4D space a dumping ground for our pollution. We then go on to use a generalization of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to suggest a second, perpendicular dimension of time and how this leads to a coherent theory of time travel! Along the way we discuss anti-matter and whether it falls up or down, and how to probe for hints of new temporal physics in the physics of anti-hydrogen. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

This is one of those episodes that exemplifies what we try to do here on this show, going deep on some very big science ideas, and then going off the deep end to expand those ideas into the realm of fiction and making them even bigger! Marty has the great pleasure of speaking with Douglas Phillips, who has turned his wide range of scientific experience into the kinds of stories he’s always wanted to read​. Douglas has made a name for himself with his Quantum series of 5 books: Quantum Space, Quantum Void, Quantum Time, Quantum Entangled and Quantum Chaos – along with the prequel Quantum Incident. This is a conversation in two parts - in this episode we talk about Quantum Space, and in the next episode we'll talk about Quantum Void and mostly about Quantum Time. The unifying theme here is extra dimensions, in both space and time (!) and our conversation is an intellectual romp through speculative ideas that push the envelope of modern physics. To lay the groundwork we talk about the standard model of particle physics, superstring theory and neutrino oscillations, then we make the leap into the 4th dimension, and from there into the far reaches of outer space. Douglas Phillips: https://douglasphillipsbooks.com/ Quantum Space on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZY9T5Y5 Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

This is a rather special episode, and something of a delightful experiment. Barron Wenham is on of the smartest and most well-informed 10-year-olds you are ever likely to encounter - especially on the subjects of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. As an exercise in exploring big ideas, mind-blowing science and science fictional creative invention, Marty sat down with him to discuss the birth of the universe, the balance of matter and anti-matter, as well as some of the things we discussed with Dr. David Curtin in episodes 30 and 31 on Dark Matter. We also cover the black holes, white holes, the standard model of particle physics - right down to neutrinos and strange quarks - and Barron explains the theory of strange matter, which is a real thing! Barron also presents his own cosmological model that accounts for the accelerating expansion of the universe as well as the balance of matter and antimatter, and also his theory of super-matter in a brain-structured universe. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

Marty speaks with Dr. Henry Erlich, whose research career gave him a front seat to the development of DNA sequencing technology from its infancy in the 80’s, to the development of forensic applications in the criminal justice system in the 90’s and through to it’s maturity in Next Generation Sequencing methods now used to study evolutionary biology and the deep history of human and hominid evolution. His book is called 'Genetic Reconstruction of the Past - DNA analysis in Forensics and Human Evolution ', and its unifying theme is how we can now use DNA sequencing technology to study historical events, from the recent past in the case of forensic investigation of crimes, to the ancient past in studies of fossil remains to understand the evolution of the human species and the relationships among contemporary and extinct populations. We talk about the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), detecting sequence and length polymorphism, how DNA tests are used to identify individuals in forensic investigations, how they can be used to track relationships among human populations both ancient and contemporary, and how what we've learned using this technology may help us grow bigger, better, faster brains in our science fictional future. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/