Let's talk science fiction for a bit. But first...
After finishing my duties in DC with NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC) - and giving some big-picture strategy talks, I had a rush of pod interviews about artificial intelligence (many focusing on the ill-advised "moratorium petition" that's circulating among some of the world's smartest folks.)
Just days ago I was interviewed for the Skeptics Society's Michael Shermer Podcast, mostly on the hot topic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Existential Threats - and my impudently unusual proposal for how to achieve that fabled 'soft landing.'
Anyway, let's turn to a field that's far better-grounded...
... sci-fi.
The second half of this posting will consist of a foreword I wrote for a way-cool spec-fic volume of stories by folks who know their science!
Before that...
== Sci-Fi Miscellany ==
Hey Dune fans who happen also to be fanatics for exquisite special editions. Here’s Frank Herbert’s masterpiece in gorgeous hardcover (in a fine tray) that's a feast for every sense. (Especially if you have Bene Gesserit psi powers.) And with my own special introduction material about Frank and his masterpiece.
I mean, I’ve had ‘special editions’ (and soon the long-awaited hardcover of Sundiver.) But nothing as lavish as this.
Sci Fi Snob reviews all six novels in my Uplift Universe (setting aside Existence). A very intelligent and thoughtful survey.
And from the sublime to...
Infinite Odyssey claims to be the first sci-fi magazine created completely with AI, based on human-inputted prompts like: "Write a unique 700-word story on the following topic, and the language will be mystical and engaging. Let the story end unexpectedly and tell the story from a 3rd person perspective…”
Alas, the example they give is stuff I’d give a C- in any beginner class. Sorry, at my clock speed, life is too short for this, at least for now. Their website offers the first volumes.
*Try the first chapter free, here.I think you you'll laugh! Oh, and note one trait of this tale that's rare in sci fi... you'll want the sci fi tech that these future folk take for granted! Though be careful what you wish for. Anyway, remember always to be many! (Addendum. The Postman came in 2nd for novella, then part II came in 2nd for novella the next year... followed by 2nd place for the novel Hugo. Worth noting? Ah well!)
== Way cool - while plausible(!) - escapism! ==
I wrote the foreword to a way-cool spec-fic volume of stories by folks who know their science! Just released: Inner Space & Outer Thoughts: Speculative Fiction from Caltech and JPL authors. (on Kindle and paperback).
Fact ignites fiction in this first-of-its-kind anthology of speculative tales by Caltech and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists, engineers, technologists, and students. Experts at the frontiers of their fields, along with renowned Caltech alumni such as David Brin, S. B. Divya, and Larry Niven, present stories about alien astrobiologists, AI parenthood, a quest to preserve our histories beyond the heat death of the universe, a heist to steal engineering secrets from an ancient monk-scientist, the recovery of a long-lost phase of the human life cycle, the demise of Earth’s first intelligent species—billions of years before the rise of humanity, and much more!
I’m told that when I was four years old, I saw Einstein play the violin. Much later, as a Caltech undergraduate, I got to discuss Roman history and Finnegan’s Wake with Murray Gell-Mann. Richard Feynman—famed for bongo-playing, painting, and safe-cracking—briefly stole my date at a student house dance. And the same lesson—one that I tell at each commencement speech—got reinforced every time I wandered hallways at Tech, poking into random doorways to ask: “Say, what are you doing here? And what else do you do?”
What lesson got reinforced?
Be many.
Never settle for zero-sum. None of us has to be just-one-thing.
Every top scientist I’ve been privileged to know—from Bruce Murray and Hannes Alfvén to Sarah Hrdy and Freeman Dyson—had an artistic sideline or hobby that he or she pursued with some passion. A sideline that invigorated their scientific work.
To be clear, I don’t claim “top” scientist rank, though I get some licks in. Still, the lesson took hold, especially when I started writing science fiction tales to vent pressure as a Caltech undergrad, then as an engineer, then UCSD grad student and postdoc. Whereupon at some point my own artistic “sideline” kind of took over—a tail wagging the dog.
Civilization apparently valued me more as a storyteller . . . and who am I to argue with civilization? But I digress.
In most such “community” anthologies, the reader must allow for widely varied skill levels. But what impressed me most about these authors, aside from their vivid imaginative range and depth of scientific speculation, is how each of them developed craft—handling well so many complex methods of fiction narrative. Tricks turning mere chains of letters into incantations that inject ideas, emotions, and thrills into readers’ willing brains! I expected this from my fully fledged and revered colleagues S. B. Divya and Larry Niven. But most of the other writers featured here—many of them first-timers—are already what we used to call “ready for prime time.”
Okay sure, in a volume like this one, you’re expecting gosh-wow extrapolations from the mundane here-and-now. And these techers are explorers! From cool what-if speculations about brain plasticity to the potential costs and losses that accompany immortality. From whimsical science counterfactuals to daunting, Dickean questionings of reality. Several stories offer ruminations about memory, while others ponder eschatology through godlike expanses of time.
Former CIT Professor Christof Koch collaborates in a gedankenexperiment about the implications of “split hemisphere” research that began long ago at Tech. There’s also a dollop of time travel here . . . along with some “don’t get cocky” lessons about how humanity may not be quite the pinnacle that we sometimes imagine. And sure, how could any cosmic- minded collection lack for confrontations with the co-star of almost every human drama. . . . Death?
In fact, the relationship between Caltech and science fiction stretches way back, almost to its beginning. Eric Temple Bell (1883–1960) was a professor and best-selling popularizer of mathematics. But under the pseudonym John Taine he also published rollicking SF tales, while leading a life of mystery that Constance Reid peeled back in her riveting book The Search for E. T. Bell. Frequent Caltech habitués Fred Hoyle and Leo Szilard wrote sci-fi and Robert Heinlein set parts of Glory Road on campus. Around 1970, I watched CIT Poet-in-Residence Richard Brautigan recite “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” which remains to this day the work that best expresses hope and optimism for decency in our AI soon-to-be heirs. Indeed, both that long heritage and this bold new volume illuminate the quandary and the vital role played by science-based science fiction.
Yes, we and the great enlightenment experiment have all benefited from the Popperian cycle of hypothesis, evidence gathering, modeling, and refinement through falsification that propels progress in our studies and our labs and across civilization. Without question, we must defend that process from those who are trying to discredit the very notion of objective reality. Facts exist! And despite Plato’s cynicism, we are getting ever better at climbing out of his damn cave.
Still, it’s clear—there must be something more.
How poor would we be without our other side? A part of us that begins each next step forward by posing what-if questions that cannot yet be checked or falsified? Or those other notions that seem brilliant because they’ll always remain counterfactual? Questions posed not just by sci-fi tales but all the other art forms that draw hard-nosed scientists to croon: “Okay . . . wow.”
Shan’t our reach exceed our grasp? Or, as one of the authors in this volume described his own process of reaching out: “If any of my stories turn out to be anything but pure fiction, I shall be dismayed by my own lack of imagination.”
Oh, do play your instruments, or paint, or whatever, after the sun goes down. Or string together those chains of black squiggles—the letters, words, sentences, and incantations that lure us into envisioning that which never was! And even what can never be. For one thing, it is only with such practice that we truly learn to tell the difference! Besides, something deep within us hungers for mysterious rustles beyond the campfire light.
And so, for now, suspend disbelief. Let words and notions and feelings flow like the magic that enthralled our ancestors. Only these songs and spells are for our time. For our scientific age.
Tomorrow, back in the lab, we’ll feel better empowered to perceive.
* The Caltech TechLit Creative Writing Club is sponsoring an event on campus May 20, in person and remote, with readings, discussions and signings of this anthology, Inner Space & Outer Thoughts.
