The Science in The Fiction

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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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'.

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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

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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.

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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/

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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/

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