by
Abstract
The World Science Fiction Convention draws scientists and writers to discuss scientific topics that will impact society in the not-so-distant future as well as to debate what form visiting aliens might take.
Vampires stalked the night. Barbarians and fairy princesses wandered the halls. Aliens appeared around odd corners. A dream? A nightmare? No, it was the 56th World Science Fiction Convention, called Bucconeer - the misspelling a deliberate play on convention - held August 5-9, 1998, in Baltimore, Maryland.
But there is much more than costumes to what science-fiction fans call a
worldcon, or world science-fiction convention. Since we are talking about
science fiction, some panels were related to science.
Want a quick overview of today's transplantation technology, and what's coming along in the future? There was a panel on that, with real live doctors and bioscientists. The future will not see, as most writers have assumed, an increasingly intense scramble to harvest organs from humans. Instead, we'll be growing replacement organs in vitro. Cadavers and living donors alike need not apply.
The panel "Emerging Infections: Past, Present, and Future" also
had a mixture of science experts and science-fiction writers. The panel
ranged widely, as might be expected from its name. For example, someone in
the audience asked about the sixth-century Yellow Death. But the panel
concludes that there is very little you can say about it beyond the obvious
fact that the affected individuals died of liver failure. Almost all
diseases converge on a handful of final common pathways - liver failure,
respiratory failure, fever, disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. And
years later, there is no way to tell which disease was responsible.
Who Are the Aliens?
If it's science fiction, of course, there must be aliens. But they will certainly not look like Star Trek's Worf, or the humanoid aliens so common even in written science fiction. Indeed, science-fiction author Roger McBride Allen opened a panel on what visiting aliens might look like by noting that the human norm is not normal at all: if we ever saw a nonhuman with fur only on the top of its head, that being would look very strange indeed. In contrast, Hal Clement, often considered the premier practitioner of scientifically rigorous ("hard") science fiction, observed that these aliens will be neither gaseous nor crystalline: gaseous molecules lack chemical complexity and crystals lack structural flexibility.
Functional morphologist Diane Kelly of Cornell University
suggested that any aliens visiting us are likely to be larger than cats, to
have a circulatory system, and to possess something resembling a head - the
fact that cephalization has occurred five distinct times in the course of
evolution shows that it is important. And science-fiction artist N. Taylor
Blanchard noted that the fact they are visiting us implies
they use machinery, which in turn implies some sort of manipulatory
appendage.
Blanchard's question about whether human-type intelligence requires any particular body form let Clement demonstrate the combination of rigor and creativity that characterizes his work. Yes, he said, human-type intelligence implies a manipulatory appendage. But not necessarily a permanent one. The aliens could have tentacles, joining several together to form a powerful hand or using them individually as several weaker ones. They might even have a multicellular amoeboid form that creates its manipulatory appendage at will.
Kelly elaborated on this by distinguishing between "hard bits" and
"soft bits." A manipulator with a skeleton, internal or external,
is fast and provides leverage. A tentacle, on the other hand, is slow but
powerful. (Think of a starfish opening a clam.) The exception is two
specialized squid tentacles, which are muscular hydrostats. Because they
are filled with water, they operate as constant-volume devices: a relatively
small contraction of the encircling muscles produces an essentially
instantaneous lengthening.
An audience question about non-carbon-based life forms sent Clement off in a
different direction. We ourselves are not carbon-based, he points out. We
are hydrogen-based: only the hydrogen bond can provide the sort of
intermediate-strength bonding required by our chemistry. But he recently
wrote a novel about a planet that was rather warm, with an average
temperature above the boiling point of water. For that planet, he invented a
truly carbon-based life form, with its chemistry based on fullerenes.
An audience question finally brought the panel back to humanoid aliens. Given the millions of more or less Earthlike planets believed by some astronomers to be out there, wouldn't at least one of them develop intelligent life similar to that of humans? Well, Blanchard responded, that depends on just what you mean by "similar." He said he might go so far as to grant a biped with two arms and a head. And, as Kelly pointed out, much of what we are is determined by evolutionary history, not by physics. You don't expect the same evolutionary accidents to occur somewhere else, so forget Worf and Quark.
Discoveries that Weren't
It's not just in its descriptions of aliens that science fiction relies on science, of course. A lot of science fiction likes to deal with cutting-edge scientific discoveries. The more cutting the better. But as another Bucconeer panel pointed out, some of those cutting-edge discoveries aren't. Discoveries, that is.
For example, physicist/novelist John Cramer of the University of
Washington pointed to the notorious case of N
rays in the early years of the century. Certain minerals supposedly gave
off rays that an aluminum prism could disperse into a characteristic
spectrum. A dark-adapted eye could then - just barely - detect these
spectral lines on a fluorescent screen. The only problem was that the lines
were equally "visible" whether the prism was there or not.
Richard Stoddart similarly mentioned polywater. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, people making ultrapure water according to the best available techniques ended up with minuscule samples that had highly unusual properties, such as elevated boiling points. One of the more plausible models was that the water had formed an extensive series of hydrogen bonds that linked the molecules into long chains. Only it turns out that silica is more soluble in water than had previously been realized, and that these samples were really solutions of sodium silicate: water glass. Which is certainly something very useful to know, but it isn't polywater.
Just in case anyone thought such cases were limited to the physical
sciences, an audience member mentioned that one of her colleagues
transfected an extra Hox gene into a chicken limb. When he got an
extra toe, he concluded that each toe was controlled by a separate
Hox gene. Somehow it never occurred to him that, with an extra copy
of the gene, the morphogenetic field might spread.
Sabrina Chase, who works with fullerenes at Ames Laboratory, pointed out that these are examples of "pathological science," discussed in a 1988 talk by Irving Langmuir (reprinted in Physics Today). The scientists involved were not trying to fool anyone. They simply fooled themselves. Which is very easy, Stoddart said, because the human eye and brain are designed to pick out patterns. The trick is to know which are really there and which are chance juxtapositions of random noise. Until we perfect that trick, we're going to keep making "discoveries" that aren't really there.
Bill Thomasson, originally trained as a biochemist, turned to science and medical writing 20 years ago. Since then he has written on everything from air motors to the effect of welfare reform on Medicaid. He has been reading science fiction for more than half a century, but did not attend his first convention until 1980.
Caleb Brown is an illustrator and biologist living in Montana. By day he drives a delivery van, and by night he draws pictures with his computer.
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and Analog Science Fiction and Fact - two of the top three science-fiction magazines, both from the same publisher. Both sites include tables of contents and cover illustrations, along with extensive links and forums. The Analog site also offers excepts from forthcoming stories and portions of the upcoming issue's book review column.
Locus Online - the site of the "Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field" includes news, letters, editorials, convention listings, and reviews of books, short fiction, magazines, and movies/TV. One reviewer has noted that so much of the print version's material appears here that the Web site will soon be competing with its parent.
Science Fiction Chronicle - Locus's only real competition. The Web site, however, has only book reviews from selected issues.
Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide - a well-organized list of over 5,000 links to Web science-fiction resources.
Science Fiction Resource Guide - another well-organized, and perhaps even more extensive, list of links to science-fiction-related Web sites.
SF Site - on-line magazine with reviews, news, interviews, and the most complete convention listings. Also hosts pages for several print magazines (including Asimov's and Analog) and those devoted to a number of authors.
SFF Net - a site supporting "fast-moving, intelligent conversation about genre literature of all kinds."
Websites mentioned in this article: