The Science in The Fiction

• William Bains on Dark Ecology in 'Shroud'

  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 messageEmail: [email protected]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

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• Nicholas Keating Casbarro on World-Building in 'Vitalerium'

  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 messageEmail: [email protected]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

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• Chris Kulp on Artificial Intelligence in 'Lost Origins'

  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 messageEmail: [email protected]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

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• Adrian Tchaikovsky on Dark Ecology in 'Shroud'

  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 messageEmail: [email protected]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

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• Julius Csotonyi on Dark Ecology in 'Dark Eden' - Part 2

  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 messageEmail: [email protected]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

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