Blogs / Science Not Fiction

I can hardly imagine the challenges of having a low-functioning, developmentally delayed child. Last night’s episode of the Eleventh Hour tackles the difficult choices a parent with such a developmentally delayed child faces, and the hope and despair these parents experience.

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I almost laughed out loud at the start of last night’s episode of Knight Rider. Mike Traceur sat in KITT’s driver’s seat, reading a dossier, and watching football as he cruised down some scenic highway—and why not, when he’s got a car that can drive itself. Which is when it hit me: I’ve been writing about Knight Rider for weeks without looking into where we are on the whole self-driving car thing! I mean, a car that drives itself has to come before a talking car in the pantheon of useful technology, right?

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We’re a few weeks into the fall season, when new shows are either picked up for a full season — or join the ranks of the cancelled. So which shows are a franchise-in-waiting and which shows have had their brief lives snuffed out? Sci Fi Wire has the complete list, but here at SNF, we’re glad to see Sanctuary has done well, and Eleventh Hour appears to be pulling its weight.

As noted over on 80 Beats, scientists using the Spitzer space telescope have found strong evidence that Epsilon Eridani has a solar system not unlike our own, with rocky planets orbiting in the inner solar system and gas giants orbiting further out.

Science fiction writers must have breathed a collective sigh of relief, as Epsilon Eridani has been used in countless novels, short stories, TV shows, and movies as the location of more-or-less Earth like planets. Nothing dates a science fiction story like the cold hand of reality, such as when Mars was revealed to be a cratered desert with not a canal in sight, or when the clouds of Venus were shown to be concealing a lethal landscape of shattered rock, rather than lush jungle swamps.

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The folks over at Television Without Pity write snarky recaps of television shows that range from pop-phenom American Idol to critical darling Mad Men; the recaps are often more fun than the actual program (for whatever reason, they have had difficulty putting science fiction shows into the mix, with some famously unreadable reviews of Doctor Who for example, but their Eureka recappers are pretty good.) In the video above, they do nice job of dissecting the trailer for the much-anticipated Watchman movie, adapted from the influential graphic novel of the same name.

Network shows aren’t exactly known for their subtlety, but the Eleventh Hour last night managed to navigate the complicated issues surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMO’s), taking potshots at biotech firms, big agribusiness, and folks who fetishize food labeled “natural” in equal measure.

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Maybe it was the success of The Matrix, or maybe it was the age of the Internet that did it, but in the last 10 years, it’s no longer flying cars or fast-talking robots that symbolize the world of the future. No, these days it’s the ability to almost touch piles of data that has become the sine qua non of quality futuristic imaginings.  Case in point, Minority Report. The high point of that film (for me, anyway) had to be when Tom Cruise dons his info gloves and commences a magnificent danse du data, shuffling through the visions of the precogs accompanied by the strains of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Down here in small screen land, Knight Rider’s writers make data manipulation a staple of the show.

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My colleague Eliza Strickland over on 80 Beats has a post about researchers who want to build a new world of out of buckypaper, a superstrong material that has applications ranging from an airplane construction material to lightweight display screens.

There’s some online buzz wondering if this material would be strong enough to make the space elevator a reality. If you haven’t heard the term, a space elevator is a cable or ribbon that extends about 100,000 km into space from an anchor point on the equator. Glorified elevators car shuffle cargo and people in and out of orbit, eliminating all that mucking about with dangerous rockets and with the ability to move payloads for a minute fraction of the cost of current boosters. A space elevator could make a lot of big space projects — like orbiting solar power plants — suddenly very doable. The idea was first thought of over a century ago, and most notably popularized by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise. In recent years, interest was renewed with a new (and much more practical) elevator design pioneered by Brad Edwards .

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On Friday’s episode of Sanctuary, Magnus and her team were faced with tracking down a thief with the ability to squeeze into the narrowest of spaces. Suspicious of a pipe that may have been used to make a getaway, our intrepid heroes break out a ROV — remotely operated vehicle — to peer where they can not.

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The most excellent Kevin Grazier stopped by DISCOVER’s offices today — turns out that apart from being the science advisor to Battlestar Galactica and Eureka, he actually has a day job! Kevin works on the Cassini mission at JPL (hence a work-related trip out east.) Kevin also has been doing some interesting research that could upset the conventional wisdom regarding the role of Jupiter in the history of the solar system.

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Ah, the beach episode, a classic of the 1980s crime fighter genre, brought to vivid life in last night’s episode of Knight Rider, when Mike Traceur must infiltrate a band of (what else?) surfing mercenaries to locate a missing secret agent. Fortunately, an episode on the beach creates a perfect opportunity to bust out what has to be one of the coolest, if not always the most useful, things a super car can do, which is go into submarine mode. In last night’s episode a rocket actually blasted KITT off a cliff and into the water. Kitt’s shielding protected Traceur and this week’s sidekick, Zoe Chae, and he made a mid-air transformation to Aqua-KITT. Safe below the waves, Traceur and Chae pondered their next course of action.The episode got me wondering: Could we actually build a submarine car? As you can see from the video clip (skip ahead to 2:35 in the video): yes.

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For all the giant exploding Death Stars in SciFi, its really the mundane devices that stay with us for years after. Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver, Picard’s replicator, and Spock’s tricorder have at least as much resonance for us as any gigantic space laser that ever turned a plot. In Knight Rider, our resident crime fighters rely pretty heavily on KITT’s ability to find people. He accesses a government database — usually the DMV — and then connects to various surveillance cameras in the area (Knight Rider crooks do tend to like Vegas casinos). The ability to access closed-circuit cameras aside, what’s really amazing here is KITT’s ability to digitally match photos to a moving image. For modern law enforcement and software search companies, that’s something of a holy grail.

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Looking for some fresh science fiction? The Fast Forward series of anthologies, published by Pyr, prides itself on featuring original stories from science-fiction heavyweights. I love Gardner Dozois‘ annual The Year’s Best Science Fiction collections, but sometimes its great to get something really new, and Fast Forward doesn’t disappoint.. The latest installment, Fast Forward 2, will be officially released next week (but Amazon claims it’s in stock now.) The FF2 author list includes Cory Doctorow, Ian McDonald, Mike Resnick and Pat Cadigan.

It’s a great collection, with a good mix of stories ranging from hard science fiction to near magic realism. Stand outs for me included “True Names,” a novella by Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum set in a post-post-post-human universe, and “An Eligible Boy,” written by Ian McDonald, that takes place in the mid-21st century India that McDonald has used as the backdrop for his 2004 book River of Gods.

City of Ember opened on Friday, a beautifully visualized adaption of the book of (almost) the same name. The eponymous city is actually the ultimate bunker, a settlement located in a vast underground cavern and designed to sustain a community for 200 years following the apocalypse. Unfortunately, more than 200 years have passed and the systems that sustain the city are beginning to break down, most notably the giant generator that is the sole source of electricity. This is a particular problem as the inhabitants are sealed in, with no memory of any existence beyond the boundaries of the city. The exit instructions eventually fall into the hands of two youngsters who must battle social inertia and a corrupt mayor to escape the coming darkness.

The ignorance of the population is actually the result of a deliberate decision by the city’s builders. In order to keep the population tucked safely away for 200 years, the builders decided to remove the temptation of the surface world by excluding any record of its existence–and to make sure curious inhabitants stay within the cavern, technologies such as batteries and candles are excluded as well, literally tethering would-be explorers to a power outlet.

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Last night CBS premiered it’s new science-fiction detective show, Eleventh Hour, which revolves around a scientist investigating misuses of science, accompanied by his FBI minder. The first episode focused on human cloning and the show deserves big kudos for wringing out a fresh take from what has become a very hackneyed topic in science fiction. The writer and producers managed this feat by actually sticking close to today’s science: most stories that incorporate reproductive cloning introduce a successfully created clone (whether a child or an adult) and go from there. The messy details of actually creating a clone are glossed over, or not mentioned at all. Not so on Eleventh Hour.

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