Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days:
I'm going through one of my "I would kill for some new SF" phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having just read some startling New Fact [Black holes could be very small! Mercury isn't tide-locked! The Galilean moons are far more interesting than we thought!], would craft some thrilling tale intended to highlight whatever it was that the author had just learned.
I suspect this is mostly due to James's very... particular tastes in science fiction. But clearly, the solution here is to set up a new online magazine specializing in just this sort of thing-- James Nicoll's Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics, or some such. That'll get him all the stories he could ever want to read, and then some...
Of course, another issue, as noted in the comments, is that many of the recent discoveries in astrophysics aren't what you'd call plot-friendly, or, as one commenter put it: "tidally-locked super-Jovians with endless star-driven storms in their atmospheres of boiling rock are impressive scenery but you can't really use them as setting." But isn't this just a failure of imagination?
So, here's a Plot Suggestion Open Thread: Pick some recent discovery in astrophysics, and suggest a way to use it in an interesting SF story. You don't have to write the story (particularly not in my comments, Jonathan Vos Post), just the elevator pitch. There's got to be something interesting that could be done with an endless star-driven storm in an atmosphere of boiling rock-- what is it?
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I think the hexagonal storm on Saturn is just calling for some Burroughs-esqe tale of the bizarre civilization living on platforms suspended within the Saturnine polar clouds.
Hm, I was thinking of Edgar Rice Burroughs and not William S... though maybe the latter would make for an edgier take on things.
I always wanted to somehow use a gamma-ray-burst to destroy an enemy.
Using the usual SF universal-time and adding in space-time, someone with a hyperdrive could know of a distant burst long before it reaches a particular point, so the idea is to maneuver your enemy just ahead of the gamma-ray front.....
I agree with James Nicoll. Larry Niven led the way with black hole stories, and Bob Forward put patentable ideas in stories -- and filed the patents in time. The next half-generation included the killer B's, who also incorporated new science, hot off the presses. Greg Egan still does (and often builds interactive graphics on his web site to demonstrate the underlying quantum mechanics or general relativity). PSeveral authors use Computer Science as the cutting edge science, and several use nanotechnology and biology. But I agree with Chad that Astrophysics (and even Planetary Science) seems under-represented.
I'm not going to give any stories away free here, but my mind fills with story ideas when I read something (to pick press releases from this week) such as:
(1) "Whether an element is a solid, a liquid or a gas depends on how its atoms interact with each other. But how they interact with other substances, such as gold, acts as a proxy for that behaviour. Dr Eichler's previous work has established a graph that describes this proxy. Although he cannot be sure, there is a good chance that if you could make ununbium in large quantities, it would not only be metallic, but would also be a gas at room temperature."
[short-lived gaseous radioactive metal robot...]
(2) "COROT has provided its first image of a giant planet orbiting another star and the first bit of 'seismic' information on a far away, Sun-like star- with unexpected accuracy. The unanticipated level of accuracy of this raw data shows that COROT will be able to see rocky planets - perhaps even as small as Earth - and possibly provide an indication of their chemical composition."
[which have composition indicating civilization]
(3) "Researchers working with high-precision planetary radars, including the Goldstone Solar System Radar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have discovered strong evidence that the planet Mercury has a molten core. The finding explains a more than three-decade old planetary mystery that began with the flight of JPL's Mariner 10 spacecraft."
[Drilling to the core of Mercury]
(4) "For the first time, scientists have found that water ice lies at variable depths over small-scale patches on the Red Planet. The discovery draws a much more detailed picture of underground ice on Mars than was previously available. "We find the top layer of soil has a huge effect on the water ice in the ground," says Joshua Bandfield, a research specialist in Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration and sole author of the paper. His findings come from data sent back to Earth by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter."
[fractal distribution of Mars colonies]
"Analysis of Hubble observations of the massive globular cluster NGC 2808 provides evidence that it has three generations of stars that formed early in the cluster's life. This is a major upset for conventional theories as astronomers have long thought that globular star clusters had a single "baby boom" of stars early in their lives and then settled down into a long, quiet middle age.
New observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have overturned conventional ideas about the early life of some massive globular clusters, showing that they can go through several periods of intense stellar formation rather than the previously accepted single burst. The analysis of Hubble data from the massive globular cluster NGC 2808 provides evidence that star birth occurred over three generations early in the cluster's life.
"We had never imagined that anything like this could happen," said Giampaolo Piotto of the University of Padua in Italy and leader of the team that made the discovery. "This is a complete shock."
[or are these remnants of tiny galaxies, with old civilizations still inside?]
(5) Dark Matter May Be Easier To Find With New VERITAS Telescope Array
Science Daily -- Scientists in the Northern Hemisphere have opened a new window on the universe allowing them to explore and understand the cosmos at a much higher level of precision than was previously available. Think of it as acquiring a new pair of glasses that allow you to see more clearly. These new "glasses" are VERITAS, (the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System), a major new ground-based gamma-ray observatory, designed to provide an in-depth examination of the universe.
Dark matter distribution is not the same as baryonic matter, due to dark matter civilizations, such as photino birds...]
But I've found that Science Fiction book editors and even some magazi8ne editors are so slow to respond to submissions, and the payments are so small, that I don't bother to submit the stories that I write, anymore, in glaring violation of Heinlein's 5 laws.
Whereas edited prestigious online Math and Physics web domains are fast, and science conferences usually accept even my goofiest papers. So I "give it away free" as math or science theory, and await a younger generation to write the stories on all the cool ideas, even my own. My teenaged son was being groomed for this, and did write with me and my wife, but his being the youngest American this year to be accepted to a top-10 law school interrupted that plan.
So many of the stories were already done (or at least sent to magazine slushpiles) back when the current crop of astrophysical discoveries was still speculative. Creatures living on gas giants, on the crusts of neutron stars, blah blah blah. Even creatures made of weakly-interacting dark matter...
On the interstellar-doom tip, it would be nice to remake "A Slight Case of Sunstroke" with microlensing objects and the appropriate caustics.
Today's news/story pitch:
Biggest, brightest, supernova reported
BERKELEY, Calif., May 7 (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers say an exploding star first observed in September has become the largest and most luminous supernova ever seen.
University of California-Berkeley astronomers said the supernova might be the first example of a type of massive exploding star rare today, but probably common during the very early universe.
Unlike typical supernovas that reach a peak brightness in days to a few weeks, SN2006gy took 70 days to reach full brightness and today, nearly eight months later, it still is as bright as a typical supernova at its peak.
UC-Berkeley post-doctoral fellows Nathan Smith and David Pooley estimate the star's mass at between 100 and 200 times that of the sun.
"This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova," said Smith, who led a team of astronomers from UC-Berkeley and the University of Texas. "That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get -- about 150 times that of our sun. We've never seen that before."
The research is to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
[biggest industrial accident ever seen by humans]
"I think the hexagonal storm on Saturn is just calling for some Burroughs-esqe tale of the bizarre civilization living on platforms suspended within the Saturnine polar clouds."
You just know, of course, that somewhere a Saturn-like planet has been investigated by an intelligent hexagonally-symmetric race, resulting in wonderment at a 'Face' on the planet constructed by an unknown alien lifeform. The hexagonal scientists try to debunk this, saying it's just an atmospheric quirk caused by rotation, but the cranks just cry coverup.