Tag: Science Fiction

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Fiction Science Club

Occupy Mars? Or the moon? It’s time for a reality check

Illustrations: Moon Village and Mars habitat
Artist's concepts show a moon village at left and a Mars habitat at right. (Left image: ESA. Right image: Team SEArch+/Apis Cor via NASA)

It’s an age-old debate in space circles: Should humanity’s first city on another world be built on the moon, or on Mars?

As recently as last year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk saw missions to the moon as a “distraction.” In a post to his X social-media platform, he declared that “we’re going straight to Mars.”

But last week, Musk said he’s changed his mind: “For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years,” he wrote on X.

How realistic is either option, particularly on a 10- to 20-year time frame? In a new book titled “Becoming Martian,” Rice University evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon lays out the possibilities as well as the perils that could make Musk’s job more challenging than he thinks.

“The more research I did on this topic, and the more labs I visited, and papers I read, and experts I spoke with, what became clear to me is that we have some pretty big gaps in our knowledge, in our understanding of what the reality would be like,” Solomon says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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Fiction Science Club

A fictional Grand Tour portrays Pluto as it really is

New Horizons view of Sputnik Planitia
NASA's New Horizons probe sent back a view of a Texas-sized ice sheet known as Sputnik Planitia. (Credit: NASA GSFC / SwRI / JHUAPL)

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that’s not all: New Horizons also forced Les Johnson to rewrite a novel.

The space scientist was tasked with taking notes that the famed science-fiction writer and editor Ben Bova left behind when he died in 2020, and turning them into a novel set on Pluto to close out Bova’s Grand Tour series of solar system tales.

In the material that Bova had written for “Pluto,” he described a rocky world with just a little bit of ice on it. But when Johnson sent those notes to planetary scientist Alan Stern, the New Horizons mission’s principal investigator, had to set him straight.

“His first comment back to me was, ‘We never found anything on Pluto that was anything like that,'” Johnson says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And so I realized at that point that I was going to have to go back and revise the science behind the story of the environment on Pluto.”

The result is one of the first works of fiction that provides detailed descriptions of Pluto’s true surroundings, right down to the orange-tinged ice sheet of Sputnik Planitia and the dark and dirty spot on Charon, Pluto’s largest moon.

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Fiction Science Club

Native American legends get woven into an alien tale

Petroglyphs showing a spiral and a horned figure carved into sandstone
Pictures carved into Utah sandstone call to mind the "Sky People" of ancient legends. (Courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey / Mark Milligan)

Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.

In a newly published novel titled “Hole in the Sky,” Cherokee science-fiction author Daniel H. Wilson blends those stories with up-to-date speculation about UFOs, now also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs, to deliver a fresh take on the classic tale of first contact with an alien civilization.

Wilson says the typical alien-invasion tale tends to parallel the real-life story of European settlement in the Americas.

“I love robot uprisings and alien invasions, and the more I thought about it, you realize that in an alien invasion, the aliens show up, and they usually want to extract our resources, take our land, our water, destroy our culture, enslave us,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “That’s kind of a really thinly veiled fear projection that what colonizers have done to Indigenous people will be done to our society. And so I started from there.”

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GeekWire

‘Game of Thrones’ creator traces his twists and turns

Neil Clarke and George R.R. Martin sitting at a table during Seattle Worldcon 2025 panel
George R.R. Martin takes part in a panel discussion at Seattle Worldcon 2025 as sci-fi editor Neil Clarke looks on. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

If you were to track the milestones in the career of George R.R. Martin, the science-fiction and fantasy writer whose knightly tales spawned HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” you’d have to include his twisted take on “The Pit and the Pendulum” in high school.

Martin — who famously killed off good-guy Ned Stark early in the “Game of Thrones” saga — recounted an early stage of his literary origin story during a panel session at Seattle Worldcon 2025, a prestigious science-fiction convention that wraps up today.

The spark for the story came when fellow sci-fi writer Isabel J. Kim told Martin that the father of a friend had lent her a 1966 yearbook from Martin’s high school, in hopes that the 76-year-old author would add a fresh signature over his class photo.

The crowd laughed at the contrast between the fresh-faced kid in the yearbook photo and Martin’s current bewhiskered visage — but seeing the yearbook reminded Martin of a story.

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Cosmic Books

‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ doubles up on Hugo Awards

Triptych featuring Timothee Chalamet in "Dune, Part Two," a Hugo Award trophy and characters from "Star Trek: Lower Decks"
"Dune: Part Two" (starring Timothee Chalamet, at left) and "Star Trek: Lower Decks" were among Hugo Award winners at Seattle Worldcon 2025. (Credits: Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. for "Dune: Part Two"; Alan Boyle for Hugo Award photo; CBS Studios for "Star Trek: Lower Decks")

“Star Trek: Lower Decks,” the animated Trek spinoff that focuses on Starfleet’s lower ranks, scored a double win tonight when this year’s Hugo Awards were handed out at the world’s premier convention for science-fiction authors and fans.

One of the episodes of the Paramount+ streaming series, titled “The New Next Generation,” won the Hugo for best short-form dramatic presentation at Seattle Worldcon 2025. And a choose-your-adventure graphic novel — titled “Star Trek: Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way” — took the prize for best graphic story or comic.

Series creator Mike McMahan accepted the award for the video episode in a video clip that was aired during the ceremony.

“I love being recognized by a community who have recommended so many good and weird books to me over the years,” he said. “I congratulate all the winners, but also all of those who support and work and represent, because it’s also in that direction that advancement and liberty and democracy will proceed.”

The writer for the graphic novel, Ryan North, thanked McMahan in turn for letting the team do a choose-your-adventure book. “Weird books are great,” North said. “That’s what I love about reading. The weirder the better.”

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GeekWire

Worldcon celebrates science fiction’s past and future

Illustration showing futuristic cartoon characters with Seattle Worldcon 2025 sign
Seattle Worldcon 2025 strikes a retro-futuristic theme. (Characters by Matt Youngmark / Logo by Rob Carlos)

Thousands of science fiction and fantasy fans will be going back to the future this week when Seattle plays host to Worldcon, the world’s premier sci-fi convention, for the first time since the Space Needle opened its doors.

“The Pacific Northwest is a great community of makers and doers and learners, and people really deeply engaged in speculative fiction and all that genre has to offer,” Kathy Bond, the chair of Seattle Worldcon 2025, told me. “We want to share that with the rest of our world community.”

Registered Worldcon members selected the site of the annual convention under the auspices of the World Science Fiction Society — a tradition that started with the first convention in New York City in 1939. Seattle’s organizers have been preparing for this week since 2017, when they sent in their initial bid to host Worldcon.

Bond, a volunteer who works as an attorney at her day job, became involved after attending her first Worldcon in 2015 in Spokane. “From there, I got it into my head that we could totally do this in Seattle,” Bond said.

The path hasn’t always been smooth: This spring, a controversy arose over the revelation that generative AI was used to glean information about prospective speakers. Bond issued an apology, and the organizers reworked the process for vetting Worldcon’s panelists — but the episode led some writers and fans to create a one-day alternative convention called ConCurrent Seattle, set for Aug. 14.

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Fiction Science Club

Climate-fiction thriller explores Florida’s flooded future

Detail from "Salvagia" book cover
The cover art for "Salvagia" features a semi-sentient boat and "atmo-breaker" rockets. (Artwork: Steve Thomas for Diversion Books)

How will technology — and society — adapt to the dramatic effects that climate change is expected to bring? Will necessity become the mother of invention in a world of rising seas? Will it be business as usual? Or will it be a little bit of both those scenarios?

A new sci-fi novel called “Salvagia” takes the third way: There are high-tech salvagers who make ends meet by dredging up artifacts from the flooded ruins of Miami. There are high-flying daredevils who race rockets through minefields of space junk.  And there are also greedy folks who dream of using massive machines to build high-rises on South Florida’s new coast.

Guess which ones are the bad guys.

The book’s author, Tim Chawaga, says he wanted to blend the glittery tech of our modern world with the gritty drama of a Florida noir crime novel. “I wanted it to be like street-level conversations about how individual people can use technology in more powerful ways,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

“It’s characters who are outsiders, outside of institutions, trying to build something else. … It’s not likely that they will achieve that in a meaningful and significant way. Maybe at best, incremental. And that feels very noirish to me,” he says.

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Fiction Science Club

Fiction outweighs fact in ‘Jurassic World’ dinosaur tale

Scarlett Johansson with film clapperboard in foreground
Scarlett Johansson gets ready to film a scene for "Jurassic World Rebirth." (Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures - © Universal Studios)

Nathan Myhrvold, a Seattle tech titan who also studies titanosaurs and other denizens of the dinosaur era, realizes that “Jurassic World Rebirth” is science fiction, not a documentary — nevertheless, he has a few bones to pick with the filmmakers.

“There are some lines that it would be silly to cross, but they did anyway,” says Myhrvold, who was Microsoft’s first chief technology officer back in the 1990s and is currently the CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures.

Paleontology is one of Myhrvold’s many interests, and he’s a co-author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers on the subject. He was inspired to get into dinosaur research almost 30 years ago, when he visited a “Jurassic Park” movie set at the invitation of director Steven Spielberg. That visit led to connections with leading paleontologists.

“At that point in my life, I was interested in dinosaurs, but I’d never been professionally or seriously, in a scientific sense, into dinosaurs,” Myhrvold recalls. “So, the movie was a little bit instrumental in me, just as a way of meeting a bunch of those people.”

On the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Myhrvold and University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz discuss how much scientists — and filmmakers — have learned about dinosaurs over the past three decades. And they also critique “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the latest offering in a multibillion-dollar movie franchise that was born back in 1993.

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Fiction Science Club

Dictators weaponize new technologies in fact and fiction

Illustration: Huge eye formed from ones and zeros
Surveillance tools and artificial intelligence are making life easier for Big Brother. (BigStock Illustration / Valery Brozhinsky)

When Ray Nayler began writing his science-fiction novel about a repressive regime powered by artificial intelligence, he didn’t expect the story to be as timely as it turned out to be. He really wishes it wasn’t.

“This is not a world that I think we should want to live in, and I would love it if it is a world that we completely avoid, and if the book seems in 10 to 20 years to be extraordinarily naive in its predictions,” Nayler says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

Nayler’s new novel, “Where the Axe Is Buried,” draws upon his experience working on international development in Russia and other former Soviet republics for the Peace Corps and the U.S. Foreign Service. “I added it up, and I’ve spent over a decade in authoritarian states,” he says. “And so I have, fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of experience with this problem.”

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Fiction Science Club

How humans can reinvent themselves for life in space

Robert Pattinson in a double role on an icy planet in "Mickey 17"
Robert Pattinson plays two "expendable" space travelers in "Mickey 17." ( Copyright: © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

Let’s face it: Space is a hostile environment for humans. Even on Mars, settlers might have a hard time coping with potentially lethal levels of radiation, scarce resources and reduced gravity.

In “Mickey 17” — a new sci-fi movie from Bong Joon Ho, the South Korean filmmaker who made his mark with “Parasite” — an expendable space traveler named Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is exposed over and over again to deadly risks. And every time he’s killed, the lab’s 3D printer just churns out another copy of Mickey.

“He’s dying to save mankind,” the movie’s poster proclaims.

While it’s possibly to create 3D-printed body parts for implantation, the idea of printing out a complete human body and restoring its backed-up memories is pure science fiction. Nevertheless, Christopher Mason, a Cornell University biomedical researcher who studies space-related health issues, is intrigued by the movie’s premise.

“If you could 3D print a body and perfectly reconstruct it, you could, in theory, learn a lot about a body that’s put in a more dangerous situation,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “I think the concept of the movie is actually quite interesting.”

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