Tag: Science Fiction

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Fiction Science Club

‘Observer’ blends way-out quantum science and fiction

The novel "Observer" plays off the idea that acts of observation give rise to the reality we observe. (Adobe Stock / Thapana Studio)

Do we each create our own reality? Could different observers create measurably different realities? It’s a fantastical line of thought that has sparked scientific inquiries as well — and now the science and the fiction has come together in a new novel titled “Observer.”

“The observer is actually the basis of the universe, so basically the novel and the scientific ideas are really a rethink of everything we know about time, space and indeed the universe itself,” stem-cell researcher Robert Lanza says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

Lanza’s co-author, Seattle science-fiction writer Nancy Kress, agrees that the novel takes aim at one of life’s greatest mysteries. “The novel is about how we understand reality, and nothing could be more important about that, because everything else is based on it,” she told me.

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Universe Today

Tech star supports a tribute to Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy

An artist's conception shows the Leonard Nimoy Memorial at Boston's Museum of Science. (Image Courtesy of Museum of Science)

Efforts to create a memorial celebrating the legacy of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played a pointy-eared alien named Spock on “Star Trek,” have shifted to warp speed nearly eight years after his death.

A six-figure contribution from Rich Miner, the co-founder of Android, is energizing the campaign to create an illuminated 20-foot-high sculpture depicting Spock’s famous “Live Long and Prosper” hand gesture. The sculpture would be placed at Boston’s Museum of Science, near the West End neighborhood where Nimoy grew up.

Nimoy’s daughter, Julie Nimoy, and her husband David Knight are working with the museum to hit a $500,000 fundraising goal for the project. Thanks to Miner’s contribution, Knight said that the stainless-steel monument, designed by artist Tom Stocker and sculptor David Phillips, could begin taking shape as early as this year.

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Fiction Science Club

Avatars return to the movies ⁠— and find a real-life foothold

In the form of a Na'vi avatar, Jake Sully rides an alien flying fish in "Avatar: The Way of Water." (20th Century Studios)

Thirteen years after the original “Avatar” movie came out, the idea of human minds inhabiting alien bodies is returning for an amped-up sequel ⁠— and since 2009, real-life efforts to create robotic avatars have advanced at least as much as computer-aided filmmaking has.

Oscar-winning director James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” returns to Pandora, a far-off exomoon where the peaceful, blue-skinned Na’vi people are menaced by human invaders who are capable of getting into their skin. The film is a visual mind-blower, combining elements of underwater documentaries, video games and the movie that earned Cameron his Oscar: “Titanic.”

The idea of a human taking charge of an alien body via virtual reality is pure science fiction — but if you replace the fictional Na’vi with a robot, you get the premise for the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, which gave out its top awards at the $10 million competition’s finals in November.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, we focus on the parallels between the science-fiction vision embodied in the Avatar movies and the future-tech vision that roboticists are pursuing through the Avatar XPRIZE and other efforts. Someday, robotic avatars could well transform space exploration as well as life back here on Earth.

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GeekWire

Greg Bear, 1951-2022: Author influenced the sci-fi world

Science-fiction author Greg Bear wrote more than 50 books. (GeekWire Photo)

Greg Bear, a Seattle science-fiction author who played a leading role in defining how global audiences saw future final frontiers, died Nov. 19 of complications following heart surgery.

Astrid Bear, the 71-year-old writer’s wife, said he died peacefully in a Seattle-area hospital. “He was not alone,” she wrote in a message to friends.

Born in San Diego, Greg Bear had his first short story published in 1967 and began writing full time in 1975. He wrote more than 50 books — including award-winning series, a Star Trek novel and a Star Wars novel, plus a trilogy set in the Halo video-game universe. His final novel, “The Unfinished Land,” was published last year.

Bear’s influence on the science-fiction community extended far beyond the written page: He was one of the founders of San Diego’s Comic-Con International and served a two-year stint as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, now known as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Bear was a guest on podcasts and talk shows including “The Daily Show,” and once appeared as himself in the “Funky Winkerbean” comic strip.

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Fiction Science Club

‘The Peripheral’ brings sci-fi prophet’s vision up to date

Chloe Grace Moretz stars in "The Peripheral," a video series based on William Gibson's novel. (Photo by Sophie Mutevelian / Prime Video)

The future may not be evenly distributed, but there’s a dystopia-inducing concentration of it in “The Peripheral,” a science-fiction novel by cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson.

Now the novel has been turned into a streaming-video series distributed on Amazon Prime Video, and it turns out that Gibson’s future is more like the present than it was when the book was published in 2014.

“We initiated our writers’ room three weeks before the pandemic hit and the country shut down,” series producer/writer Scott B. Smith recalls. “There’s something called ‘the Jackpot’ in the story, which involves a kind of multi-vector apocalypse. And we felt like we were watching that happening in real time.”

Smith discusses how his team created the screen version of “The Peripheral” — and how Gibson’s world of the future squares with the challenges of the present — in the latest episode of Fiction Science, a podcast that focuses on the intersection of science and technology with fiction and popular culture.

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Fiction Science Club

What octopus intelligence teaches us about AI and aliens

A deep-sea octopus lies amid the rocks on the Pacific Ocean floor off the coast of Oregon. (Photo: OOI-NSF / UW / CSSF)

Are intelligent aliens living among us? A newly published novel just might lead you to think so — and in this case, the aliens aren’t visitors from another planet.

Instead, they’re octopuses, the eight-legged denizens of the deep that are celebrated in movies (including the Oscar-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher”) and on the ice rink (thanks to the Kraken, the Seattle hockey team that’s getting set for its second NHL season.)

Ray Nayler, who wrote the novel titled “The Mountain in the Sea,” says he chose the octopus to serve as the designated alien for his science-fiction plot in part because it’s “a creature that has a structure totally different from ours, but in whom we recognize curiosity, which is what I think we find often most human in ourselves.”

Nayler doesn’t stop there: The promises and perils of artificial intelligence also figure prominently in the plot — in a way that sparks musings about how we’ll deal with AI, with kindred species on our planet, and perhaps eventually with extraterrestrial intelligence as well.

Dominic Sivitilli, a neuroscientist and astrobiologist at the University of Washington, says such musings are what led him to focus his studies on octopuses. “I suddenly had this model for what intelligence might look like, had it had a completely different evolutionary origin … possibly on another world, in another solar system,” he says. “And so they became a bit of a model to me for what extraterrestrial intelligence might end up looking like.”

Nayler and Sivitilli discuss animal intelligence, artificial intelligence and the prospects for cross-species communication in the latest episode of Fiction Science, a podcast that focuses on the intersection of science, technology, fiction and culture.

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GeekWire

Orbital Reef space station wins role in sci-fi movie

An artist’s conception shows the Orbital Reef space station. (Orbital Reef via Amazon)

The commercial space station that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has a hand in building, known as Orbital Reef. will be getting some Hollywood-level product placement years before it’s due to go into operation.

Blue Origin and the other partners in the Orbital Reef project today announced a cross-promotional deal with Centerboro Productions to portray the space outpost in an upcoming sci-fi movie titled “Helios.” The announcement was timed to coincide with this week’s International Astronautical Congress in Paris.

The movie is set in 2030, which is around the time Orbital Reef could become a reality — assuming that the funding from NASA and from commercial partners continues to flow.

“The film will tell the story of a spaceship, the Helios, and its crew during their urgent mission to the International Space Station,” a plot synopsis reads. “When a massive solar flare hits the station, it is up to astronomer and former NASA astronaut Jess Denver and Air Force Colonel Sam Adler to team up and save humanity.”

Orbital Reef is to be featured as a next-generation space station that serves as a critical resource for the Helios crew.

“We teamed up with Blue Origin to give moviegoers a thrilling but realistic depiction of the future of living and working in space and a coordinated response to a space weather emergency,” Patricia A. Beninati, who’s one of the film’s producers and writers as well as the president of Centerboro Productions, said in a news release.

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Fiction Science Club

True-life spy story gets an alien twist in sci-fi tale

The tale of the Glomar Explorer is the inspiration for "Three Miles Down." (U.S. Government Photo via National Security Archives)

What if one of the CIA’s most secretive and expensive Cold War operations was actually a cover story for an even more secretive, even more expensive operation … involving aliens?

That’s the question explored by science-fiction author Harry Turtledove in a new novel, “Three Miles Down.” The plot is only moderately wilder than the $800 million CIA operation on which it’s based: Project Azorian, which involved trying to raise a sunken Soviet sub from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

And as if a tale of aliens and the CIA isn’t wild enough, Turtledove works in references to the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, which was happening at the same time as Project Azorian. Turtledove says he couldn’t resist drawing parallels between the tumult of those times and today’s political tensions.

“There are enough parallels that it sort of leaps out at you, and you aren’t really being honest with yourself or your readers if you don’t,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, which focuses on the intersection of science and fiction. “The only real difference is, what’s going on now is so much worse.”

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Fiction Science Club

Star Trek keeps up to date with science — and society

Ethan Peck and Anson Mount as Spock and Captain Christopher Pike on "Strange New Worlds," (© 2022 CBS Studios Inc.)

Over the course of five decades, advances in space science and exploration have changed the Star Trek saga — but it’s obvious that the sci-fi TV show has changed the course of space exploration as well.

You need look no further than Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, who took inspiration from Star Trek to green-light talking computers and his very own Blue Origin space effort. The same goes for SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who’s mentioned in the same breath as the Wright Brothers in a “Star Trek: Discovery” episode.

“I can’t imagine a version of the world where Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos exist, for better or worse, however you feel about them, without Star Trek,” says Ryan Britt, the author of “Phasers on Stun,” a new book chronicling the history of the Star Trek sci-fi franchise.

“I’m not saying that those guys embody all of Star Trek’s ideals, because they may not,” Britt says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “But there is an audacity to space travel, whether it is from a government like NASA or another nation’s government that’s putting people in space, or if it’s from the private sector.”

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Fiction Science Club

‘Maurice on Mars’ brings black comedy to the Red Planet

"Maurice on Mars" takes place in a domed city on the Red Planet. (Cartuna / Comedy Central)

The world’s richest human wants to build a city on Mars: Fifty years ago, Elon Musk’s vision of our future on the Red Planet might have sounded like science fiction — but today, Musk is actually serious about the idea of using billions of dollars from ventures like SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network to finance the move to Mars.

“In looking in the long term, and saying what’s needed to create a city on Mars, well, one thing’s for sure: a lot of money,” Musk said back in 2015. “So we need things that will generate a lot of money.”

What kind of city would Musk want to see on Mars? His vision calls for a place that offers “everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to nightclubs” while getting rid of “special interests and coercion of politicians.” But what if cities on Mars turn out like cities on Earth, complete with wealth disparity, racism — and ambitious billionaires?

That’s the premise for “Maurice on Mars,” a darkly funny series of animated shorts created and written by comedian and TV writer Tim Barnes for Comedy Central’s Animated YouTube channel.

“I truly think that people often jump to that aspirational part of living on Mars,” Barnes says in the latest episode of Fiction Science, a podcast focusing on the intersection of science and fiction. “But the practical thing is that you’re going to need people to build stuff once you get there. So the working class, the underclass, I believe will be the first people on Mars to actually build the White House there.”

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