Hello everyone!
My apologies for being a day late with today’s newsletter - the episode took far longer than expected to create, but I hope you enjoy it!
This week on The Cosmic Companion, we take a look at the history of science fiction and talk about how these stories enrich the soil from which science grows, advancing our species to our future among the stars. We will be talking with Jenny Curtis and Chris Porter from the new hit podcast, Solar, starring Helen Hunt.
Science fiction - stories set in worlds where science has changed society for good or bad, plays a central role in the development of society and culture. This genre has, in one form or another, been a part of the human psyche since antiquity...
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Join us next week, as we head off, Exploring the Milky Way Galaxy. We will welcome Dr. Joe Pesce to the show, talking about the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Make sure to join us, starting on 7 June.
Clear skies!
James
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transcript (cont.)
Roughly 1,800 years ago, the Assyrian author Lucian of Samosata wrote True Histories — a story involving space travel, parodying tales of Homer and others. Caught up by whirlwinds during a journey at sea, the characters in this story find themselves on the Moon. There, they are caught up in a war between the kings of the Sun and Moon, over control of Venus. I can name dozens of movies with plot lines worse than this one.
In 1638, The Man in the Moon, the first known work of science fiction in English, was written by a bishop named Francis Godwin, being published following the death of the author. The protagonist in this tale, Domingo Gonsales, flies to the Moon in a spaceship powered by wild geese. They were probably honking all the way.
While these early sci-fi tales depended on natural forces like wild winds or geese with a penchant for space travel to carry the story, the last great ingredient for modern science fiction — technology — would first be seen in a novel printed in 1818.
On a rainy afternoon two years prior, 20-year-old writer Mary Shelley was sharing a house with her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and his physician, John Polidori. The group formulated a challenge to see which of them could write the most engaging story.
The first work of modern science fiction — Frankenstein — rose that day, like the creature at the center of the story. Incidentally, Polidori’s entry, The Vampyre, became a horror classic. Percy Shelley — the best-known writer of the group at the time, was the literary also-ran.
As the American Civil War wound down, science fiction was heating up with works from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Verne produced a trio of masterworks over just a few years. Journey to the Center of the Earth, released n 1864, was followed by From the Earth to the Moon the following year. These were topped off by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1869.
Technology was detailed in stories by Verne, while Wells focused more on using the storyline to advance lightly disguised social commentary. The Time Machine by Wells is largely a critique of English class society of his era.
Amazing Stories magazine, founded in 1926, gave birth to the pulp fiction format (which has surprisingly little to do with Quintin Tarantino). This was the first major publication ever devoted exclusively to science fiction.
On Halloween night 1938, tales of an invasion of Martians landing in New Jersey resulted in a number of people panicking, calling police and military to save them from alien invaders. The War of The Worlds had shown the power of science fiction over the human zeitgeist.
In 1940, a budding young science fiction author named Isaac Asimov published his fifth story — Ring Around the Sun, in the pulp classic Future Fiction. Asimov would go on to write more than 500 books during his lifetime, but this work is usually considered the first great science fiction story focused on our parent star.
Today, Solar, a new science fiction podcast, tells the story of a stranded crew on a mission to the region of space near the Sun. We talk with Jenny Curtis and Chris Porter about this exciting new series.
In 1945, the stories of Arthur C. Clarke told of radio waves bouncing between satellites. Today, communication satellites make regular use of this technology.
The atomic explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki that same year made clear both the power and dangers of scientific advances. This led to the great, really, really terrible, movies of the 1950’s and 60’s, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, not to mention Godzilla.
Star Trek aired its first episode in September 1966, changing science fiction forever. The effect this series had on real-life science cannot be overstated. The first space shuttle (designed for atmospheric tests) was even named Enterprise in honor of this classic television series.
The communicators imagined in this timeline preceded cellular phones, and the mobile Personal Access Display Devices, or PADDs, used by Captain Picard and others bear a striking resemblance to the iPads of today.
Anything is possible on the holodeck, where people interact with intelligent avatars, playing active roles in stories which unfold around them. Virtual environments are now being developed using augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Such systems could be the next great medium for storytelling after television and video games, allowing viewers to become part of a tale.
While Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, like Verne before him, kept careful watch on the science in his stories, the other great sci-fi franchise of the 1970’s, Star Wars, were reminiscent of the stories of Wells — moral tales with only the slightest explanation of underlying technology.
The great science fiction writers of the modern age, including Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler are still pushing the limits of human imaginations today.
As the wealth gap grows and technology advances, cyberpunk sci-fi now explores dystopian worlds at the junction of abject poverty and high technology. Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a hot new genre in a rapidly warming world.
These stories not only entertain and inspire science, they also help us answer some of the greatest questions we, as a society, will face in the coming years — “Once artificial intelligence reaches sentience, would it have ‘human rights?’” “What are the benefits — and dangers — of human cloning?” “How might advances in technology affect rights to privacy and due process?” (Minority Report, anyone?)
Science fiction is the way we dream, paving the way for real-world science.
Join us next week, as we head off, Exploring the Milky Way Galaxy. We will welcome Dr. Joe Pesce to the show, talking about the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Make sure to join us, starting on 7 June.
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James
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