Actual science in science fiction

[james_davis_nicoll]

Not applied sciences, I mean, or feats of engineering but the actual process of science. Is this a suitable topic for SF, by which I mean "can it be the seed for a story?" Or maybe better yet, "how does one use it as the seed for a story?"

One example would be the Steerswoman books. I think part of what makes that possible is that the protagonist is discovering scientific models that we are already familiar with, so the author is not saddled with the problem of coming up with a new scientific model.

I am not fussy about "Yes, this was cutting edge science 200 years ago and it still is today" stories, where whatever bit of pop-science that made the cover of DISCOVER is still new and exciting centuries from now.

Comments

[rosefox]

Greg Bear's Blood Music comes to mind.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

That's applied biotechnology, I think.

There are some bits in GETA where one of the protagonists is trying to develop evolutionary biology, despite not having very important a piece of information.

There's something I imagine exists in real science, that little mental click when you turn the model half a degree and suddenly what looked like a handful of unrelated phenomena turn out to be related on a fudamental level. One of Stableford's recent books had that, when the protagonsit suddenly realizes everyone was making an incorrect assumption about the scale something was happening on.

[rosefox]

Blood Music has at least one of those little mental clicks that I recall off the top of my head. I can't think of any other books that feature such moments specifically in a scientific context, but I am reminded of a writeup I read recently on Apollo 13; I think those clicks are much more likely to happen when the thinker in question is under a lot of stress or pressure of some kind.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

To dig up the old standby: Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

ISTR Cryptonomicon (which I haven't read in a while, so take with note of caution) having a couple of those moments with one of the characters and mathematics, although I may be being too kind to an expository textdump.

[lcohen]

i recently saw a play, called humble boy, that referenced just such a click. or rather, the absence of same. "the eureka moment," i believe they called it.

[(Anonymous)]

GETA = Courtship Rite? Ken MacLeod used something similar in the backstory to the Croatan book. (What a peculiar trilogy, btw.)

What I wouldn't mind seeing is more interplay in the history and development of ideas. Might be why I respond so well to Delany's stuff. Ted Chiang had a sort of AH story that explored this rather well, I think, backwards-looking only because Chiang seems too honest to use faux-aliens (e.g. Sawyer's people in lizard masks).

How about a series of naturalists' journeys exploring an ecosystem? The first expeditions start with earlier ideas -- I was going to say "primitive", but they might be quite complex (and wrong) -- while later ones get closer to the truth. To make it more human, you might have periods of ideological backsliding, a la social Darwinism and anthropology, or Lysenkoism and botany. X-treme libertarian selfish gene types investigating something closer to Gaia than what exists on Earth, perhaps.

(I just realized: was that the effect you were trying for in the Green Door vignettes?)

Harder to do with interplanetary exploration, but I think still possible while keeping a semblance of scientific verisimiltude.

Carlos of "Halfway down the Danube", a blog