May 2016 - discoverscifi.com

7 Science Fiction Books, and What They Taught Me.

May 7, 2016/4 Comments/in Insider /by Nick Webb

I admit it: I was a nerd growing up. Rather than go out and play football with my friends, I barricaded myself in my bedroom and played on my trusty Commodore 64. Instead of sports, I had computer games, movies, and books. Especially books. One time, an adult friend quizzed me for fun things to do with friends–I think she was trying to come up with ideas for one of her kids’ birthday parties. I said, “Read books”. She laughed, and teased me–“oh, hey guys, let’s go have a reading party!”

She laughed, but I didn’t see what was funny. It sounded like a perfectly reasonable party to me. Now that I’m an adult, that’s still my idea of the perfect birthday party: maybe friends come over, maybe they don’t, either way I hole up in my room with a giant chocolate cake and a good book.

As an author, my writing is shaped by the books I read. While my favorite genre to read as an adult is fantasy, my favorites growing up were science fiction, and that’s where I got my education in the language of fiction. SciFi feels like a native language to me. I feel fluent in it, at least compared to something like contemporary mysteries or thrillers. Since I grew up reading so many, that was the genre I felt most comfortable writing in, it having shaped my vocabulary, my thought patterns, my sentence structure–everything.

And so I give you four pivotal SciFi novels I read growing up, and three that I’m currently reading (or just finished).

In 1992 I had a revelation. That revelation was a small 5″x8″ book that had a Wookiee on the cover. Let’s face it. This is not the great American novel. But to my 13-year-old mind, this was the bees-knees. Return of the Jedi had come out ten years ago when I was a little kid, and I had been starved of new Star Wars material for the rest of my childhood. Enter Timothy Zahn and the Thrawn trilogy. It was amazing. It was glorious. It was everything I could have ever hoped a sequel trilogy would be. I even casted the entire trilogy–I think I had Jack Nicholson as Grand Admiral Thrawn. Yeah–I was a nerd. And what I learned from reading Heir to the Empire was that I was proud to be a nerd.

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov, taught me that not only can a novel be driven by a main character as a protagonist, it can also be told from the perspective of an institution, whether it be a family, like in 100 Years of Solitude, a tribe of people like The Silmarillion, or a pan-galactic organization that Asimov created in his brilliant series. In fact, I think his later works suffered a little because he shifted back to a traditional character point of view for the story, rather than sticking with his “Institution-as-protagonist” style he had going on with his first 3 Foundation books.
To this day I go back and refer to his series as a gold standard for telling a story that makes you root not only for an individual, but for a concept.

I grew up watching Star Trek, and later, as a teenager, I discovered Star Trek books. As with the extended Star Wars universe, I dove right in and read everything. My favorite was Peter David’s novel Vendetta, which continued the Borg storyline started in Next Generation’s The Best of Both Worlds. With Vendetta, I remember learning as a teenager that in the fight against evil, you must not become that which you fight against. That’s more of a life lesson rather than an influence on my writing, but I’ve found in retrospect that this theme is interwoven in a lot of my work.

I’m going to cheat a little and include a book that I shamefully did not read until I was an adult. I had already written a book, and while my wife was in surgery one day I passed the time by reading Ender’s Game. Wow. How had I missed reading this one as a teenager? What struck me about this book was that it was not just another SciFi novel about a character in a plot, rather, it was a book of ideas. The emotional climax for me came not at the big revelation at the end, but rather around the 2/3’s mark where Ender says something like, “In order to defeat my enemy, I have to understand him. And at the moment I truly know my enemy well enough to completely understand him, I find that I love him. And having loved him, I now have to kill him.” Wow. I know a book is good when it makes me want to write. I know a book is even better when it makes me want to quit writing forever. This was one of those books.

And now for three books that I’m reading now, or just finished recently.

Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson, was captivating. Firmly in the “hard SciFi” subgenre, I learned that you can dive deep into technical detail in a book, and still build a fair amount of suspense and tension. I think I got a graduate level education in orbital mechanics reading Seveneves–it was clear Neal had done his homework. For people that like actually science in their novels, I can’t recommend it enough.

Currently, I’m working my way through The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey. This series has it all, and I wish I had written it–that’s how I know a book is not just good, but amazing. The science is accurate and plausible. The characters are exquisitely developed. The world built into something that feels gritty and organic and real. I can see why this made it to TV, and I’ve spent many late nights the past few weeks trying to sneak one more chapter in before bed.
What have I learned from reading the Expanse? Like Seveneves, it is possible to use plausible, accurate science in a space-based SciFi novel, and still tell a fast-paced story with urgency, excitement, and grit.

The last series I want to recommend is not strictly SciFi, but more of a Fantasy with Science Fiction elements. The Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, while clearly a Fantasy, is actually quite firmly grounded in the “science” of the universe he’s writing in–something he calls the Cosmere. But what Sanderson excels at is world building. The level of detail is amazing, and yet he presents it all in a way that doesn’t distract from the story and slow the pace. I’ve never felt bogged down in the story–at the end of every chapter, I have to read the next one.

Which SciFi novels have stayed with you? Which ones have you learned from? Which ones left you in awe?

Interspecies Communication

I first met Sammy Davis, Junior, when I was nine. At the edge of the kitchen counter, he waited, a gray house lizard—what we in the Philippines called butiki. No bigger than my father’s index finger, half of him was a thin, twitching tail that tapered to a point.

Butiki

Sammy Davis was a similar specimen of Hemidactylus frenatus that my mother and father discovered long ago in their first apartment near España Boulevard in Manila. He had kept the moths and mosquitos at bay, and so they’d tolerated, then befriended him.

Now, several years later, my father approached Junior, making a series of clicks with his tongue, his hand outstretched with a pinch of boiled rice. My mother continued nibbling at her steamed chicken while my seven-year-old brother watched with a kind of stunned, frightened look in his eyes.

Still clicking–a quick click-click-click, pause, repeat–my father carefully set down the pinch of rice about two inches away, while the lizard watched with rotating eyes.

It took about half a minute while the lizard twitched his tail, swung his head first this way, then that–before he darted forward and snapped up the rice, swallowed, then darted away down the vertical side of the counter.

Triumphant, my father offered another pinch of rice.

Click-click-click.

Junior poked his head over the edge, scrambled to the rice, and gobbled it up.

Click-click-click.

koko-a-talking-gorilla

Koko, a lowland gorilla trained by Dr. Penny Patterson, is said to comprehend over one thousand signs from American Sign Language and to understand and respond to a spoken vocabulary of over two thousand English words. Beyond that, Koko is reported to have invented her own signs to communicate new thoughts: for example, describing a ring by combining “finger” and “bracelet” into the new word “finger-bracelet.”

Kanzi, a bonobo, has been using a specialized keyboard with symbols on the keys to communicate with the team of primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, using a vocabulary of six hundred words.

Alex

Alex, an African Grey, was shown by Dr. Irene Pepperberg to understand over a hundred English words and could identify various colors and shapes.

Nim

A controversial project in the 1970s saw a baby chimpanzee named Neam Chimpsky—“Nim,” for short—taken from his mother just days after birth at a primate research center. Behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace aimed to raise Nim as a human child, placing him with human families who strove to teach him a form of American Sign Language. Despite a sad end, when researchers attempted to re-integrate him unsuccessfully with other chimpanzees, Nim learned to sign in three- and four-word sentences:

Apple me eat.

Drink me Nim.

Finish hug Nim.

Give me eat.

Hug me Nim.

Tickle me Nim.

Yogurt Nim eat.

Banana eat me Nim.

Me eat drink more.

Tickle me Nim play.

Dolphin

In a NASA-funded experiment with a bottlenose dolphin named Peter, neuroscientist John C. Lilly tried to prove his theory that dolphins could learn language via constant human contact. Over ten weeks, Margaret Howe, his research assistant, spent day and night with Peter.

Dolphins can make human-sounding noises via their blowholes, and Margaret’s goal was for Peter to mimic sounds that he heard.

Over time, Peter could pronounce a rough version of several words, including “hello,” “we,” “one,” “triangle,” “diamond,” and “ball.” His favorites:

Hello, Margaret

Play, play, play

Disturbingly, Peter got emotionally attached to and aggressive with Margaret, circling around her, nibbling her, and jamming himself against her legs. The behavior escalated, and he was quickly re-instated with other dolphins until he had calmed down enough to be re-introduced to Margaret.

Unfortunately, after ten weeks, funding for the project ended, and Peter was shipped to another lab. Without Margaret, he apparently lost the will to live and refused to breathe, sinking to the bottom of his tank in what might be understood as suicide.

Butiki 2

Months later, I’m alone in the kitchen when I hear a clicking beside me.

There is Junior, his eyes two quivering balls of black, his tail flicking, right in the middle of the table.

Click-click-click.

I throw a rice grain at him, and he runs forward, catching it in his mouth and swallowing. I follow with several more.

Click-click.

Two clicks means “I’m done.” He twitches his tail one more time, turns, and is gone.

Big Ear

On August 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman was examining data from Ohio State University’s radio telescope, part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. He saw an anomaly in the data from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius in the 1.43GHz frequency. Most scientists agree that would be the most likely frequency an alien civilization would use to broadcast a signal. It was so amazing that Ehman circled it and wrote “Wow!” in the margin of the print-out. Up until then, the signal had resisted all explanation. The signal’s strength was represented on a scale of thirty-six intensity levels by the numerals 0-9, then A-Z. The 72-second signal formed a perfect bell curve:

6EQUJ5

We are here.

Wow_signal

Out there, beyond the furthest arms of our galaxy, our radio telescopes broadcast our own signals, our hopes and dreams, in a language we hope someone will understand.

Our spacecraft bear plaques engraved with drawings and symbols of ourselves in a form we hope someone will decipher.

And we listen, straining to hear beyond the noise of supernovae and neutron stars, to ascertain if there is indeed somebody out there.

adoptaspacecraftvoyager1

Click-click-click.

SAMUEL PERALTA is a physicist and storyteller. An Amazon bestselling author, he is also the creator and driving force behind the Future Chronicles series of speculative fiction anthologies, with 14 consecutive titles ranking at the top of the Amazon SF Bestseller lists, several hitting the overall Amazon Top 10 Bestsellers list. His own work has been recognized in Best American Science Fiction and included in the author community anthology for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer.

Samuel Peralta, creator of The Future Chronicles

This article was first published, in slightly different form, as the Foreword to Interspecies

https://www.amazon.com/Interspecies-Inlari-M-J-Kelley-ebook/dp/B01G7KON9U?tag=disscifi-20

Interspecies, a shared universe anthology

The Butterfly Effect

May 14, 2016/0 Comments/in Samuel Peralta, science and books, Books, Insider /by Samuel Peralta

“Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined… or one great figure… or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.”

— Philip K. Dick

Ray Bradbury’s classic short story A Sound of Thunder is the most reprinted science fiction story of all time. Set in the year 2055, a company offers time travelling safaris to the past, to the Cretaceous Era, to hunt a Tyrannosaurus rex.

The company takes great pains to choose targets that are about to die anyway, since the belief is that changes in the distant past could become an avalanche that changes everything. But despite all precautions, something goes utterly wrong—

Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, illustrated by Richard Corben (Topps Comics) 1993

Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?

Butterfly Effect
Samuel Peralta
Because your father stopped in Strandja park
to point out that whirligig of wings–blue
argus, he said, Ultraaricia
Anteros–you were dazzled forever.
Those wings wafted you here, ten thousand six
hundred kilometres away, to the
University of California,
Davis. Encyclopedia of Insects
in arm, you haul yourself up the stairwell
of Briggs Hall. Your frail sandal spindles on
the threshold–and you trip, a beautiful,
crippled Lycaenidaen specimen,
into the butterfly net of my arms.
Somewhere in Texas, a hurricane stirs.

Ultraaricia anteros

Besides the chaos theory reference, my free verse sonnet Butterfly Effect arose from many memories. Of my father writing a scientific monograph on moths and butterflies, and handing me a paper pamphlet of it, when I was young.

Of my fondness for the blue argus butterfly, from the family Lycaenidae, a specimen restricted to the Balkans in Europe.

Encyclopedia of Insects

Of seeing the Encyclopedia of Insects in a library, a bloody huge book.

And memories of the three years, I lived in Davis, California, where I won my first-ever literary prize, and where I first thought I was in love.

University of Davis, California

So here we are. Where we are now, what language we’re speaking, what foods we eat, what we believe in—all of these are based on a myriad of events happening in the past, just so. Accidents. Coincidences. Chance.

We don’t live in the world of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle because the Allied forces were victorious over the Axis powers in the Second World War.

From Amazon's production of "Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick

Amazon's production of The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

We don’t live in a world where Franklin D. Roosevelt was defeated in his third run for President of the United States, to be replaced by Charles Lindbergh, as in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.

But what if?

Speculative fiction itself is based on asking that question.

What if Pope John Paul I hadn't died after just a month in his office? What if the women's suffragist movement lost their battle for the right to vote? What if Steve Wozniak’s focus had turned to medical technology instead of personal computers? What if the Japanese and United States of America had allied to combat an expected Great Depression? What if Edward Jenner had died prematurely before developing a vaccine for smallpox?

butterfly-effect-1920x1200

The flap of such butterfly wings would surely have changed everything—lives, loves, the world as we know it.

Samuel Peralta, creator of The Future Chronicles

This article was first published, in slightly different form, as the Foreword to Alt.History 101

Alt.History 101, part of The Future Chronicles series of speculative fiction anthologies

FTL – Science Fiction’s Fudge Factor

May 20, 2016/2 Comments/in science and books, Books, Insider /by Jay Allan

Hyperspace, warp drive, folding space…over the years, authors have come up with lots of ways to travel faster than light, a virtual necessity if we are to portray any plausible kind of interstellar civilization. Yes, you can build a good story even with years of transit time between even close systems. Generation ships and crews in suspended animation can be interesting, and of course, we can restrict the action to a single solar system. The Expanse is a great example of this kind of action. But sooner or later we want to break away from the gentle warmth of Sol and explore the galaxy. And we need to leave light behind in our dust (cosmic dust) as we do.

This is where the fudging begins. Without turning this into a physics symposium, let’s just say that even the wildest imaginings of our knowledge of science tell us it is impossible to do this, especially for something like a spaceship full of human beings (as opposed to a few sub-particles). So what do we do? We make something up, of course.

Here is where we branch off in options. Some authors make considerable effort to create systems of faster than light travel that at least seem plausible (they’re not). Others don’t even worry about it. They may call it a hyper-jump or a Jaworsky Field (after the fictional inventor), but they don’t even try to explain how it functions. It can also be a naturally occurring phenomenon, a warp point, for example, or something manmade (possibly by ancient aliens now mysteriously vanished). But one way or another, we will get the spaceships from system to system.

Sometimes, however, there is method to the madness, though it is often driven by plot rather than science. For example, look at something like Star Trek. The Enterprise flits all across space, seemingly unconcerned with refueling or even maintenance, at least unless someone sneaks onboard and scrags the dilithium crystals. This is a great system when you want your ships to be able to get anywhere, to function at maximum efficiency even when they are lost and cut off. But what if you want the reality of travel to impose greater restrictions on your space fleet?

Other systems are based on more of a fixed system using point to point travel. I’ve used warp gates in my Crimson Worlds series. These largely unexplained natural phenomena allow travel back and forth between two systems that are lightyears apart. A system like this offers a number of advantages, especially for the writer of military science fiction. It takes space, in all its three dimensional glory, and reduces it to a series of connections. It rationalizes battle lines, and it creates a value structure for systems, making those with larger numbers of gates leading to cool places worth fighting over.

FTL systems can also be used to regulate the pace of travel and warfare in space. Perhaps ships can “jump” anywhere, without the need for warp gates or the like. But they can only go so far, and then they need to stop and refuel…and possibly have repairs done. This can drive the plot in a powerful way. Why is this backwater world so important? Why are there giant battleships in orbit? Because it is on the invasion route into the heart of a space empire! This can be used to create something akin to the “island hopping” campaigns of World War II, as fleets maneuver to secure bases along invasion routes.

So the next time you pick up a new space opera, stop and think about whether there was more than made up science in the author’s mind.

JAY ALLAN currently lives in New York City, and has been reading science fiction and fantasy for just about as long as he;s been reading. His tastes are fairly varied and eclectic, but favorites are military and dystopian science fiction and epic fantasy, usually a little bit gritty.

Jay writes a lot of science fiction with military themes, but also other SF and some fantasy as well, with complex characters and lots of backstory and action. He thinks world-building is the heart of science fiction and fantasy, and since that is what he's always been drawn to as a reader, that is what he writes.