I am still pinching myself.
The good folks from the Edinburgh Book Festival have invited me to get up on stage with one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, to discuss the importance of science fiction on science fact. The event is one of the ‘Science Meets Fiction’ series being sponsored by The Wellcome Trust.
I still recall my 25-year-old self being blown off my lab stool by Snowcrash, Stephenson’s third novel, which I devoured during incubations while slaving away over my one megabase of manual radioactive sequencing in graduate school in Seattle. After being introduced to my first ‘lab lit‘ novel, Cantor’s Dilemma by Carl Djerassi, around the same time, I hunted around and discovered that Stephenson had already written in that genre with Zodiac – a wonderful but little-known story about a pain-in-the-ass ecoterrorist chemist that I adore to this day. Since then I’ve read almost everything he’s written, including what I think might be his most ambitious, Anathem (my Nature review is available here).
The topic of my discussion with Mr Stephenson is an interesting one. I’m most well-known for my views on what science can offer fiction; what fiction can offer science is in some ways a more complex and intriguing proposition, touching as it does on the inspiring and firing of young imaginations. Although I currently champion the realism of the lab lit genre, it’s a little known biographical fact that for my entire childhood and adolescence I read pretty much nothing else but science fiction. I enjoyed all the greats, from Asimov to Zelazny, and my father subscribed to the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction, which I worshipped from cover to cover. Our family spent many evenings in the Seventies in front of the television watching Star Trek, Space 1999, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers and the like. I once wrote a book review of Have Space Suit – Will travel for a fifth grade English assignment, and the teacher marched me to the school library and made me show him the book, assuming that with a title like that, I must have made it up.
What has science fiction done for science? There are a lot of examples, of course. I still remember reading Robert Heinlein’s Friday, and being entranced by his description of sitting down in front of a computer and being able to search for any piece of knowledge in the universe. I now recognize this plot device as being indistinguishable from the internet and Google, but back then, I was so excited by Heinlein’s idea that, when I took my first computer classes in high school (black screen, glowing green block text, an entirely self-contained experience imprisoned by the few programmes contained within), I was bitterly disappointed with reality. Did Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Page or Sergey Brin read Heinlein? I have no idea. But the corpus of classic science fiction is filled with examples of fictional technology that eventually became fact.
I’d be delighted if you could attend this event in Edinburgh, which takes place during the height of Festival proper. The details are below. But in the meantime, I’d love to hear your favorite examples of science fictional notions that inspired real-life science or scientists of the future.
Jennifer Rohn and Neal Stephenson
Saturday 18 August
5:00pm – 6:00pm
ScottishPower Studio Theatre
Edinburgh, Scotland
£10.00, £8.00 concessions
August in Edinburgh you say? Hm…. *searches furiously for conferences in Edinburgh*
Congrats on the invitation. And now you’ve made me want to look out some Neal Stephenson. I too read a fair bit of Sci-Fi, mostly via the influence of an older brother who was into all things Asimov (sic), Heinlein, and the like. I still recall reading I, Robot and Starship Troopers, long before the movie versions were made… 🙂
Sigh…I spell it wrong every time. Thanks for that.
I think ‘Anathem’ is well worth a read, though it’s a bathtub drowner. I haven’t read ‘Snow Crash’ since the 90’s, but I’d like to see how it’s weathered. ‘Cryptonomicon’ is excellent. I own the entire Baroque Cycle, but haven’t yet had the time to read them. ‘Zodiac’ is very funny, but not much like his other stuff – not speculative or SF at all, pure lab lit. When I met Stephenson at SciFoo, he seemed a bit embarrassed by its existence.
Funnily enough I found a copy of Anathem yesterday in a charity shop, while I was buying thrillers to entertain a sick friend in hospital. I bought it and started to read. With its complexity, density of language and arcane religious cults it reminded me a lot of Dune.
Richard Wintle wrote:
Ditto for me. So long ago I can’t remember anything about either book…!
Paul Verhoeven’s film of Starship Troopers is actually something of a camp classic. I remember watching it in the late 90s with a roomful of my non-American-working-at-the-NIH buddies. Our unanimous take on it was that it was a none-too-subtle, but pretty funny, satire sending up Americans and American attitudes to their perceived enemies.
Oh wow – do you know if this is going to be recorded anywhere? I’m currently doing some research with NESTA on the links between science-fiction and innovation, and this sounds like it fits perfectly.
Congratulations, Jenny – what an opportunity! I look forward to reading about it
I don’t know if it will be recorded (but it hasn’t been mentioned, so probably not). I’ll let you know.
Thanks, Cath.
Henry, I thought Anathem was super. I reviewed it for everyone’s favorite journal starting with N, here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7221/full/456446a.html
…and? How did it go? Blog post PLZ!!!! 😀