I’m just back from the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Oak Ridge, having made it through the Smokies on a rainy, chilly night that saw fog along the ridges and often down in the valleys. It was a haunting drive in ways, the low ceilings making for slow driving and the sense of being surrounded by unseen peaks and deep gorges that were always just out of view. I had hoped to meet with Les Johnson and Robert Kennedy at the latter’s house for the pre-conference festivities, but arrived too late and worn out to do anything but get to sleep.

The workshop was an intense, one-day affair (a good thing I got that sleep!) that started at 8:00 the next day and concluded about 10:40 that night, and judging from the discussion at the end, it will become a regular event. It was great to see old friends. Les and I last talked at Aosta two years ago. Claudio Maccone had come from Italy and would be lecturing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the Karhunen–Loève transform the following day (search this site under ‘KLT’ to get the rundown on the possible uses of the transform in SETI, although SETI was not, presumably, ORNL’s chief interest in the subject). Al Jackson was in from Texas, as was Richard Obousy, and Greg Matloff and C Bangs had come down from Brooklyn.

Image: Les Johnson introducing the workshop.

The Tennessee workshop grew out of conversations last summer at the Aosta conference between Les and Claudio, allowing for a schedule that made an excellent fit for Claudio’s US trip — he leaves Oak Ridge today (Thursday) for Stanford (he’ll be having meetings at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and will later be going to the SETI Institute). At the workshop, he discussed the gravitational lensing precursor mission concept called FOCAL that he has championed as a precursor to a true interstellar mission. 550 AU is one-half of a light week, 3.17 light days out, a useful distance at which to test a variety of interstellar technologies.

Communications Between the Stars

Claudio is pointing out that a model of the ‘naked Sun’ that derives 550 AU as the gravitational lensing distance doesn’t take into account solar corona effects that can distort imaging and communications, and the whole point of the mission is to use gravitational lensing to study what is on the other side of the Sun — to use the lensing phenomenon and a careful choice of departure directions for astronomical and perhaps SETI work. 1000 AU proves to be a better distance than 550 AU because of the coronal problem, and it’s interesting to note that the TAU Mission designed at JPL by the Meinels, a husband and wife team working in the 1980s, aimed at 1000 AU as well, although the Meinels had no knowledge of the gravitational lens.

TAU would have been flown using nuclear electric propulsion, and would have taken approximately 50 years to reach 1000 AU for studies of the heliosphere and the nearby interstellar medium, as well as improved parallax measurements of nearby stars. A true FOCAL mission like Maccone is proposing would be able to exploit the Solar lens for communications, allowing low bit error rates (BER) that conventional communications methods cannot touch. Thus we have the potential for communicating with an interstellar probe through a lensing mission that serves as a relay — in fact, you can get 8 light years out using a FOCAL relay before you show significant BER loss. And if you go into the deep future, the possibility of exploiting a similar lens relay around another star could allow the beginning of an ‘interstellar internet.’

And here’s an interesting point that came up in the discussions: Carl Sagan had hypothesized that gravitational lensing might be responsible for at least some of the thirty or so anomalous SETI signals that have never repeated (the famous WOW signal is the classic case in point). A non-repeating signal like this is conceivably the result of a low-powered transmitter occasionally having its gain boosted enormously by stellar focusing, all of this by sheer chance, so that what we pick up is simply a strong but unrepeated signal that tantalizes us as evidence for extraterrestrial technology. It’s an intriguing thought, but we have to fly a FOCAL mission at some point to find out whether the perceived benefits of the Solar lens are in fact exploitable. A FOCAL mission using tethered antennae inscribing Archimedean spirals to boost receiving capability is a project that might be flown using nuclear electric or solar sail technologies to investigate this.

Solar Sails Missions and Materials

Of course, with solar sails you start thinking about materials and how to deal with extraordinarily thin films. But as Greg Matloff pointed out, we’re coming off a banner year for solar sailing, with the launch of the Japanese IKAROS mission and, later, NASA’s NanoSail-D. IKAROS has been a stunning success, deployed as part of an interplanetary mission and able to demonstrate not just propulsion by sunlight but attitude control. Matloff pointed out that the hyper-thin solar panels deployed on the sail are continuing to work perfectly after a year, and their success may lead, eventually, to the Japanese launch of a solar power satellite that would explore options other than nuclear for meeting the nation’s intense power needs. What happened at Fukushima just underlines the need for space-based research on alternative power technologies. In any case, JAXA is on course for a sail-based mission to Jupiter later in the decade.

As to materials, beryllium has long been studied for sail use in inflatable, hollow-body sail concepts that Greg has explored in books like Deep Space Probes (Springer 2nd edition, 2005). One problem with it is that beryllium is a toxic poison, with all that implies for care in handling, but we do know that in the realm of high temperature metals studies, beryllium is a clear candidate. Graphene, though, gives you the best performance — in fact, Greg noted that graphene coupled with a close Solar pass could reduce trip time to Alpha Centauri to about 1000 years, about as fast a journey as it’s possible to make with a solar sail unaided by laser or microwave beaming.

Image: Greg Matloff runs through the promise, and the problems, of solar sailing.

We’re still talking futuristic concepts, given the fabulous cost of graphene today, and as far as laser or maser beamed sail concepts, we have issues like pointing and aiming. Matloff pointed out that we could not achieve the kind of tightly focused beam of sufficient power needed to fly such missions today. Laser technologies cost more than microwave, but are easier to collimate — the longer wavelength makes keeping the beam tight more of a challenge for the latter. Imagine the pointing and aiming problems involved in a concept like Robert Forward’s mission to Epsilon Eridani, where you have to deliver a beam to a sail that separates in Epsilon Eridani space to provide a deceleration option for the incoming spacecraft.

There’s much more to talk about but I’m running out of time this morning, so I’ll extend the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop into tomorrow. It’s important to discuss C Bangs’ thoughts on interstellar studies and art, as exemplified by her evocative work, and to get into Les Johnson’s presentation on the various concepts proposed for interstellar flight. Robert Kennedy (The Ultimax Group) offered up thoughts on a concept called ‘shell worlds’ that I had missed when they were presented in a JBIS paper not long ago. I’ve got the paper and supporting materials now and want to get these thoughts out there, as they’re fascinating.

So much to do. I want to cover Richard Obousy’s presentation on the state of the Icarus project as well, and touch on ideas that grew out of other papers and the discussion sessions. Astrophysicist Al Jackson gave me a copy of Sentinels: In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke (2010), in which is included a story he wrote with Howard Waldrop called “Sun’s Up” which I read last night after the drive back. I had quite a night, the story entering into my dreams to produce visions of a titanic Orion-class starship that rides a shockwave like no other. We’ll have to talk about all this tomorrow.

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Wednesday is a travel day for me, and one with little chance to do any posting here. I’ll leave you, then, with a quotation, and get back to normal posting tomorrow.

Interstellar travel is incredibly difficult, perhaps as difficult to us today as a flight to Mars would have appeared to Christopher Columbus or other would-be transoceanic navigators 500 years ago. Indeed, the ratio of the distance from Earth to Mars compared to Columbus’ voyage from Spain to the Caribbean — 80,000:1 — is roughly the same as the ratio of the distance to Alpha Centauri compared to a trip to Mars. Thus, the key missions required to establish humanity successively as a Type I, Type II, and Type III civilization all stand in similar relation to each other, and if the 500 years since Columbus have sufficed to multiply human capabilities to the point where we now can reach for Mars, so a similar span into the future might be expected to prepare us for the leap to the stars. Actually, it should not take so long, because with its much larger population of inventive minds and better means of communication, the Type II civilization that will spread throughout our solar system over the next several centuries should be able to generate technological progress at a considerably faster rate than was possible by the emerging Type I civilization of our recent past.

I’m all for breakthroughs in physics that will give us capabilities as yet unknown. We may well get them someday. But even without such, methods can already be seen in outline by which currently known physics and greatly developed and refined versions of currently understood engineering can get us to the stars. That development and refinement will occur as part and parcel of the process of maturation of humanity as a Type II species.

Robert Zubrin, Entering Space (2000), pp. 188-189.

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Kelvin Long and Richard Osborne have seen to it that the British Interplanetary Society’s conference on the highly influential science fiction writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon has gone off without a hitch. Here is their report from the event, a conference evidently as rife with speculation and far-future musings as anything the author himself ever penned.

by K.F. Long & R. Osborne, Symposium Chairmen

During the summer the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) played host to a symposium on World Ships, possibly the first such dedicated conference ever on these grand, long-term planning concepts. However, the most recent BIS symposium is on a topic that covers eons. There was no one who thought bigger and over longer timescales than the philosopher and writer Olaf Stapledon. Once again, the BIS has organized another first in history. On the 23rd of November members and visitors gathered to discuss the philosophy and literature of Stapledon in the context of today’s current space exploration activities. The session was organized for the purpose of facilitating wider exposure to his ideas and as a way to invite those who may never have heard of him to discover a gem in the literature of space exploration and science fiction.

William Olaf Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey, on the Wirral Peninsula near Liverpool, England, on the 10th of May 1886. He died on the 6th of September 1950. He spent much of his childhood growing up in Egypt. He obtained a BA Modern History, 1909, from Balliol College, Oxford and a PhD Philosophy University of Liverpool, 1925. His thesis was “A Modern Theory of Ethics”, later the subject of a book. He had worked as a teacher at the Manchester Grammar School and served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium during World War I. He was married to Agnes Zena Miller and together they had two children — their daughter Mary Sydney Stapledon and a son, John David Stapledon, whose nephew Jason Shenai attended the BIS symposium, much to the delight of all those present. Imagine having an actual Stapledon in the room. Many of the attendees felt elevated to a higher state of humanity this day. During the lunch Jason was presented with a small gift from the Society by Stephen Baxter, a well known science fiction author who has followed in the tradition of Stapledon and Clarke. Jason said he was really enjoying the day and found the experience moving. He said his entire family were appreciative for the event and the respect shown to his distant relative.

The BIS and Stapledon already have a long history together. On the 9th of October 1948 Stapledon gave a wonderful lecture to members of the society at the invitation of Arthur C.Clarke. It took place at St.Martin’s School, 107 Charing Cross Road, London. The BIS advert read: “In his opening lecture Dr.Stapledon will discuss the profound ethical, philosophical and religious questions which will undoubtedly arise from interplanetary exploration, the possibility of finding intelligent life on other worlds, colonization of planets, interstellar communication, and the possibility of telepathic communication”. Stapledon wrote many books in his life, including Odd John, Sirius, Worlds of Wonder, Darkness and Light. But it is for Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) that he is most famous. From these incredible books sprang a range of ideas such as planetary terraforming, genetic engineering, human evolution, transcendence, Dyson Spheres, interplanetary genocide, and the cosmic mind, to name just a few. Arguably the daring works of Stapledon are as important an influence on our culture as the works of William Shakespeare, and yet Stapledon is not very well known throughout the world.

Image (top): Olaf Stapledon. The second image is of Jason Shenai, a Stapledon relative, accepting a gift from the British Interplanetary Society as presented by Stephen Baxter. Credit: Kelvin Long.

Consciousness and Convergence

To discuss his work some Stapledon thinkers came together on this special day. Kelvin Long (co-Chairman) discussed the concept of “universal mentality” and asked if it was at least credible. He pointed to possible physical limitations in the human brain due to the way neurons and axons were ‘wired’ and said this had been foreseen in Stapledon’s literature. Long argued that to become more intelligent we would converge further with technology, Homo Sapiens becoming Homo Electronicus, as Clarke had called it. Long said this would bring about a coupling to the extent that minds could join and the idea of a group mentality or cosmic union would become feasible. He discussed our own self-awareness that we are conscious and indeed aware of each other. He referred to work by the physicist Freeman Dyson who had argued in his book Disturbing the Universe that mind does appear to play a role in reality. This includes the observer dependence in the quantum description of reality and the potential for all our observations being represented by the analogue of a quantum wave function. He discussed the Hawking-Hartle wave function of the Universe. Long also talked about the various cosmic co-incidences in the universe, such as the many physical constants just being right for life, or even intelligent life to form, so-called anthropic reasoning. He ended with a discussion on the laws of physics and in particular the special theory of relativity, which demands the constancy of the speed of light. He said this would place fundamental limitations on any universal mentality or indeed the Star Maker, on how ‘it’ communicates with those that inhabit the universe. He said this law would have to be broken in order for the ‘Supreme Moment of the Cosmos’ (a term from Star Maker) to ever be feasible for all of the inhabitants of the universe simultaneously.

Andy Sawyer had visited from the Science & Science Fiction Library Special Collections and Archive of the University of Liverpool. He spoke about “The Future and Stapledon’s Visions” and quoted from Last and First Men directly: “The romance of the far future, then, is the attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values”. He talked about many of the books and ideas that had influenced Stapledon’s work in some way, such as The March of Intellect (1829) which depicted fantastic modes of transport such as balloons and steam transport. He referred to George Griffith’s images from The Angel of the Revolution (1893) and Olga Romanoff (1894). Charles Green had even set a major long distance record in a balloon by flying a distance of 480 miles, a record not broken until 1907. These sorts of developments would have found their way into Stapledon’s perspective on the world. Sawyer said that Stapledon showed that the idea of flight was linked to that of change. The culture of the First Men’s 24th-century World-State is based, technologically and spiritually, on aircraft. Sawyer impressed the audience by putting up a time chart that Stapledon had constructed for Last and First Men, complete with colored lines. Later, Andy would talk about the good work being done by the University of Liverpool Science Fiction Foundation, founded in 1971 and supporting 30,000 books and magazines in the fields of science fiction and related genres. The collection includes the Olaf Stapledon Archive and the Eric Frank Russell and John Wyndham Archives.

Patrick Parrinder, a former Professor of English at the School of English & American Literature, University of Reading, discussed “The Earth is My Footstool: Wells, Stapledon, and the Idea of the Post-Human”. Parrinder referred to Stapledon’s early life in Egypt and suggested that his mythical avatar was the Sphinx. His fiction was the portal to the mysteries of cosmic existence, unraveling the Sphinx’s riddle of the transformations of the human animal, and it does this with a Sphinx-like abstraction from domestic emotions and personal relationships. He said the Eighteenth Men whose outlook dominates in Last and First Men and Last Men in London are, we are told, both human and animal in nature, like the old Egyptian deities with animal heads. He said that later H.G.Wells had also taken the Sphinx as his symbol in a substantial work of fiction, The Time Machine, which stands alone among Wells’ novels for its unremittingly bleak view of human destiny. Stapledon apparently claimed not to have read this book when he wrote Last and First Men. The talk covered so much ground and in such a scholarly way it is impossible to do it justice in this brief article and the above is merely a snapshot of what was covered.

Kelvin Long presented a paper on behalf of Greg Matloff, Emeritus Associate Professor and Adjunct Associate Professor, New York City College of Technology. This talk was one of the most fascinating presentations of the day and was on the subject of “Star Consciousness: An Alternative to Dark Matter”. Matloff had looked for an alternative to explain the dark matter problem and proposed the hypothesis that stars may be conscious, as an exercise in philosophical speculation in the spirit of Stapledon’s literature. He pointed to models of stellar radiation pressure and stellar winds which failed to account for the anomalous stellar velocities and instead proposed psychokinetic action, a principle claimed to be now demonstrated in quantum fluctuations. He also pointed towards Paranago’s discontinuity to explain how stars can adjust their galactic velocity. Cool, red stars were said to move around the galaxy faster than hot, blue stars. Molecules were also said to be rare or non-existent in the spectra of hot, blue stars. If stars were ever found to be conscious, this would present a problem for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in terms of how we communicate with them. The presentation ended by saying that Descartes argued in favor of a separation of consciousness from the physical world but possibly, the entire universe may be conscious.

Technology and Paradox

After lunch Richard Osborne (co-Chairman) and a member of the BIS Council, spoke about “Dyson Spheres”. These are hypothesized artificial habitats built around a star by a civilization with sufficiently advanced technology, able to capture as much as possible of the power output of the star. Osborne said the idea had originated in 1927 from J.D.Bernal but Stapledon had included a reference to the concept in his book Star Maker: “Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of sub-atomic energy.” The physicist Freeman Dyson, after whom the concept was named, worked on the idea in some detail in 1960, in a paper published in Science titled “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation”. Osborne described the various other spin-off concepts that had evolved from the original idea, including Dyson Swarms, Dyson Statite Bubbles and Dyson Shells. Other astroengineering megastructure concepts were described including Matrioshka Brains, Shkadov Thrusters, Klemplerer Rosettes, Alderson Disks and of course Ringworlds, now made famous by Larry Niven’s excellent novel of the same name.

Image: Richard Osborne presenting his work on Dyson Spheres. Credit: Kelvin Long.

Stephen Baxter then took the stage for an interesting discussion on “Where was Everybody? Olaf Stapledon & The Fermi Paradox”. He opened with a quote from Stapledon’s ‘Interplanetary Man’ lecture: “If, by one means or another, man does succeed in communicating with intelligent races in remote worlds, then the right aim will be to enter into mutual understanding and appreciation with them, for mutual enrichment and the further expression of the spirit. One can imagine some sort of cosmical community of worlds”. Baxter said that Stapledon had communicated with both H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke although it doesn’t appear that H.G. Wells had any influence on the work of Stapledon’s two key publications, Last and First Men and Star Maker. He described the Fermi paradox first presented by the Italian born physicist Enrico Fermi in the summer of 1950 and pointed out it is unlikely Stapledon heard of the paradox, as he sadly passed away in September of that same year. Baxter said that the Fermi Paradox had turned out to be a good organizing principle and a great plot generator for science fiction whilst also being a deepening paradox. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence had seen the discovery of exotic biologies on Earth, habitable realms in the solar system, the discovery of many exoplanets, the invention of multiple contact strategies, and yet there had been 50 years of silence. He said that most of the Fermi Paradox solutions tended to fall into one of three categories; ETI is here; ETI exists but has not communicated; ETI does not exist. Baxter said that both Fermi and Stapledon were cosmic thinkers but the visions of Stapledon were still not found to be consistent with the paradox that Fermi had seen that one afternoon in 1950.

Finally, Ian Crawford, a Reader in Planetary Science & Astrobiology from Birkbeck College, London, gave a masterful exposition on “Stapledon’s Interplanetary Man: A ‘Commonwealth of Worlds’ & The Ultimate Purpose of Space Colonization”. Crawford described the three main futures that Stapledon had defined; speedy (self-inflicted) annihilation, creation of a world-wide tyranny (implied stagnation), and the founding of a new kind of world where every body works for the good of the common human enterprise. But he said there are other possibilities Stapledon had not considered, such as the creation of tyrannies that may not result in technological stagnation and may still be compatible with space exploration. He said space exploration can still proceed without the prior creation of social or political utopias and pointed to Project Apollo as an example of how nation state competition had still led to progress in space.

Crawford also said that Stapledon appeared to downplay the economic and scientific motivations for space exploration, yet the former is important for maximizing human well-being and the latter is a key component of human intellectual development. He spoke about the race we appear to be in now, between cosmic fulfillment and cosmic death. A situation echoed by our current dilemma, to become a spacefaring civilization or face stagnation and decay. Crawford made the important point that in thinking about space exploration we had to justify why we want another planet and what we are going to do with it, given that we already have a planet and have not treated the Earth very well. He asked whether before we consider this question, we should consider what man ought to do first with himself. Crawford ended by pointing towards the September 2011 publication of “The Global Exploration Roadmap” by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group and said that if Stapledon were here today he would have approved of this as a sign of positive progress that humanity is starting to work together as a global community in the exploration of space.

Image: Ian Crawford discussing the possibilities in Stapledon’s fictional futures. Credit: Kelvin Long.

Kelvin Long rounded up the day with two quotes that he thought Stapledon would have approved of. The first was from Carl Sagan: “The Universe is not required to be in harmony with human ambitions”. The second was from William Hartmann: “Space exploration must be carried out in a way so as to reduce, not aggravate, tensions in human society”. In a foreword to an Orion Books reissue of Star Maker, science fiction writer Brian Aldiss said of Stapledon: “He is too challenging for comfort. The scientifically minded mistrust the reverence in the work; the religious shrink from the idea of a creator who neither loves nor has need of love from his creations”. It is well known that Arthur C. Clarke was influenced by Stapledon’s Last and First Men and he said: “No other book had a greater influence on my life…[It] and its successor Star Marker are the twin summits of [Stapledon's] literary career”. Clarke’s work had embraced hard science fiction but with an almost mystical tone to some of his stories. Long speculated that perhaps this is a good place to be for a writer, at the boundary between what we know to be true and what we can only speculate may be possible, the boundary between reality and imagination. As C.S.Lewis once said of Stapledon, he was a corking good writer. Now is the time for others to discover the literature of Olaf Stapledon, and the imagination that sprang from the dreams within his grand philosophy. It is fitting and proper to end an article on Olaf Stapledon by giving him the final word:

“Is it credible that our world should have two futures? I have seen them. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one dark, one bright; one the defeat of all man’s hopes, the betrayal of all his ideals, the other their hard-won triumph.”

Dr. William Olaf Stapledon, Darkness and the Light (1942)

A full article on the BIS symposium will be submitted to the society’s magazine Spaceflight. The papers from the symposium will appear in a special issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Stapledon’s work, especially Star Maker and Last and First Men, remains widely available.

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Science fiction has been much on my mind of late, particularly following the 100 Year Starship Symposium, where so many of the scientists I talked to mentioned novels and movies that had been influential in getting them into science. My friend Keith Cooper, editor of Astronomy Now and a fine science writer whose work I often cite in these pages, also shares an interest in SF, and it was natural enough that we fell into a conversation by email on how the genre relates to interstellar studies. Because while we would expect a natural synergy between science and science fiction, the genre’s cinematic and literary treatments are often at variance with each other. Why is this, and why are some elements of the interstellar idea easier to explore in writing than in film? Here are some thoughts (and memories) about science fiction’s role.

• Paul Gilster

Keith, you and I are both science fiction readers, although I’m enough old that I grew up in the heyday of Heinlein and all those great books for young people. I remember being in a book fair at my grade school where each class had tables set up with books that were considered appropriate for that grade level. I was in about third grade at the time, but I wandered over to the sixth grade table because I saw a hardcover copy of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy. I can still see that book’s cover, and feel the effect of that odd juxtaposition that Heinlein opened with — slavery in a far future society. At that point in my life, slavery was one of those things that were safely in the past, but of course Heinlein played with a lot of our expectations, as does SF in general.

I could muse on some of those early readings for a long time, but the other one that really lit up for me was Starman Jones, in which I learned the term ‘astrogation’ and started to think seriously about ships that went between the stars. Right around the same time I found Andre Norton’s Galactic Derelict — can still recall the cover of that one, too, and the vistas it opened up to me. The list goes on and on, but maybe you can see why I’m sort of dismayed by the current emphasis on movie science fiction. In fact, when I mention SF to a lot of people, the response almost automatically refers to cinematic treatments. I’ve always enjoyed these but found them far less compelling than science fiction in actual books! But then, I’m a bit of a throwback. I still enjoy listening to old radio shows more than watching contemporary television programming.

I’d like to get your read on an idea that Geoff Landis told me about when I interviewed him for Centauri Dreams some years ago. We had been talking about his book of short stories called Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities, in which there is a story about an all-female crew on its way to Delta Pavonis. It’s a two-decade trip, as I recall, and conditions aboard the ship are cramped to the point of excruciation. How the crew finds the will and the mental fortitude to make it through the journey are what the Landis story is about, but it’s also a meditation on a key idea, that interstellar journeys may well be possible one day, but that they’re going to be long and hard under the best of circumstances.

But talk to the general public about star journeys and you basically get the same thing: Star Trek. I sometimes wonder whether science fiction as shown on television and in the movies hasn’t completely over-emphasized the far future possibilities at the expense of a more realistic approach. Wouldn’t it be interesting to tell the SF story — or make the SF movie — that tried to be as credible with the science as Destination Moon was when dealing with a lunar journey? I for one would love to see a movie version of the attempt to build an enormous sail for beamed propulsion, or someone’s read on a true Bussard ramscoop vessel. Hollywood is supposed to be where all the imagination is, so why have all the SF starships been so similar to each other?

• Keith Cooper

Paul, I think part of the problem is that in Hollywood they look at spacecraft the same way I look at cars: they go for an aesthetic but don’t really understand what goes on underneath the hood. I remember J Michael Straczynski once commenting that police officers, lawyers and doctors are hired to advise on police, courtroom or medical/forensic dramas, but they rarely use scientists or genre authors on science fiction shows or movies. I’d love to see a big budget movie featuring interstellar travel using nuclear fusion, microwave beaming and solar sails as advised by someone like Marc Millis or Kelvin Long.

Straczynski’s Babylon 5 was my favourite show as a teenager, and still is. He gave us a station that rotated to create the effect of gravity via centrifugal force, just like an O’Neill colony. The massive Earth cruisers had rotating mid-sections, and the Starfury fighters featured four-pronged vectored thrust multi-engines that NASA have optioned as a possible real-life design in the future. In contrast to B5’s alien spacecraft, the human spacecraft had well thought out designs and made space flight look a little more difficult than is usually portrayed on TV. This is a theme I want to pick up on.

Recently there appeared an article on the Tor website entitled A Moral Argument for Hard Science Fiction by Madeline Ashby. She talks about the inaccurate depiction of computers and computer hacking on the big screen, placing them in the broader context of the general lack of understanding of science amongst the public and politicians. To quote from her article:

“Me, I blame Hackers. I don’t mean actual hackers. I mean Hackers, the 1995 piece of bad William Gibson fan-fic about kids who save their haxx0r reputations with rollerblades and holograms. And with it I’d like to blame all other depictions of hacking as easy, technology as simple, and science as the work of solitary geniuses awaiting quick flashes of divine inspiration.”

If we substitute ‘interstellar travel’ for the word ‘hackers’ I fear the problem still stands. Space travel is part of the furniture of SF and we need it to voyage to wondrous new worlds, but at the same time it can seem too easy. I love Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War for showing that the consequences of relativistic space travel can be difficult for the characters as they return home from each mission finding that time on Earth has progressed without them.

However, written SF can gloss over the realities of building starships too. In Peter F Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, a human civilisation that has had wormhole technology for hundreds of years (railroads passing through wormholes link planets, which is ingenious) builds its first starship to investigate a Dyson Sphere. After they become embroiled in an interstellar war with the denizens of the Dyson Sphere, the Commonwealth quickly start building bigger, better and faster starships, seemingly at will. I adore Hamilton’s work but the process of building the new starships seemed too easy to me. E E ‘Doc’ Smith used to do the same thing in his Lensman series.

I’m now in a quandary Paul. I love to watch the adventures of Han Solo or Captain Kirk galivanting around the Galaxy, but at the same time I yearn for more science over fantasy. What examples of SF are there that strike the right balance and depict space travel as something that is hard but achievable with effort, while yet continuing to have exciting adventures on strange new worlds?

• Paul Gilster

As I expected, Keith, we have many of the same enthusiasms. I do enjoy video treatments of science fiction but on a somewhat different level than written SF, but hey, I get a kick out of going back and reading old issues of Science Wonder and some of the early Astoundings as well. There’s something about that era and the way it interacted with the then current concept of the future that mesmerizes me. Anyway, we seem to be in a time when hard SF, with more emphasis on the science, is again competitive with the other strains of the genre. I am a great devotee of Gregory Benford’s work and think the Galactic Center series is the best treatment of the far future I’ve encountered. I have wonderful memories of the novella in IF back in 1972 that started it all off.

But maybe you’ve read Robert Forward’s Rocheworld, or the earlier, shorter work it was based on called Flight of the Dragonfly. Forward is one of my heroes for the insights he has given us into interstellar flight using known physics, but his fiction clanks a bit in terms of characterization even if the ideas he plays with are the kind of thing we discuss every day on Centauri Dreams. I’m betting laser sails and antimatter rocketry with a scrupulous attention to the physics are turning up in modern science fiction without my knowing it, because I’ve been so busy in the past ten years with the kind of work I’m doing now that I haven’t had the chance to keep pace with the field. We’re lucky here because the readers have always come up with book suggestions. Let’s see what they say.

Madeline Ashby makes sense to me, especially when she talks about depictions of hacking as “easy, technology as simple, and science as the work of solitary geniuses awaiting quick flashes of divine inspiration.” I don’t know about the hacking part because I’m not of the hacker mindset (though I envy people who hack in the true tradition of the world, meaning that they really get to understand how their computer and software work), but as far as science goes, when we depict the solitary geniuses waiting for inspiration, we’re not talking about a world that’s with us today. You look at major crowd-sourced projects like the Galaxy Zoo and realize how much science is being turned out by thousands of amateurs making a collaborative contribution. On the other end of the spectrum is something like the Large Hadron Collider, where vast numbers of highly-trained people turn up as co-authors on the papers generated by this enormous project.

The solitary inventor was the norm in Edison’s day, perhaps, but we see little of this today. I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone with a breakthrough idea, but we also need science fictional depictions of the way science works in today’s era of the particle accelerator and the federal grant. One of the things Greg Benford brings to the table is his intimate relationship with science through his own work in physics. He knows how the process works, where it is frustrating and where it can be exhilarating, and he’s done enough experimental physics to know how thorny are the problems of gaining the needed funding. But bear in mind that he and brother Jim have also found ways to test microwave beaming on a sail in a laboratory at relatively low cost, so this kind of thing does get done. I’d like to see more science fiction coming out of that kind of lab work.

As for movies, maybe James Cameron can be prevailed upon to try a different kind of starship one of these days. Or maybe Ridley Scott? Because if we’re talking movies, I’d love to see either of these men work up a screen treatment of Forward’s ideas in Rocheworld, taking a laser sail mission all the way to Barnard’s Star and solving the complex issues involved in deceleration and exploration. There’s a screen epic crying out to be made, and along the way it would introduce the general public to the concepts of interstellar flight by non-magical means.

Say, did you know that Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (I call it a trilogy because the next three novels came much later and I have to say I’m ambivalent about them) has been kicking around in the planning stages for one or another film studio for some years now? It would be fun to see what Hollywood made of it, but I’m a bit burned out with far future epics. Tell you what, let’s lobby for a beamed sail movie, and maybe also for Geoff Landis’ Mars Crossing to turn up in a movie version. We’d get two movies, one near-term, one much further out, each with an impeccable scientific pedigree. In the right hands, the results could be mesmerizing. How say you?

• Keith Cooper

Believe it or not Paul I’ve yet to read Benford, Landis or Forward; I’m well aware of their work but haven’t got around to them yet. Instead I’ve been ploughing through the ‘golden generation’ of UK SF authors from the past 20 years, such as Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan, Iain Banks, Neal Asher and others. British SF currently has a lot going for it and I strongly recommend these authors to you. What I would say, however, is that among this clutch of British authors I think there is a tendency to focus more on world-building with lots of great plot ideas exploring a range of issues from the social to the cosmic, rather than any urge to delve too deeply into the mechanics of spaceflight. There are exceptions of course, such as Stephen Baxter, and although I don’t think there is much wrong with the current direction of UK SF, that pioneering spirit of space travel so evident in the novels you describe Paul does seem to be sometimes missing.

What strikes me about your description of Landis’ and Forward’s work makes me think they rather enjoyed doing the calculations to make their space travel realistic. Certainly it is no coincidence that the trio of authors you mention all have an academic science background, allowing them to reach the rigorous level of detail required to not only fully get to grips with the propulsion systems they deploy in their books, but also derive fresh new ideas.

We may ask, how many of the creative types in Hollywood are tuned into where SF is pushing the envelope today? So much of Hollywood’s output seems to be 20 or 30 years behind the current trends in written SF. Perhaps what is needed is for some SF authors to cross the divide. Robert Sawyer, for example, has done it somewhat on television with the likes of FlashForward, but let’s see more. I don’t know if it is a reluctance on the side of the authors, or whether Hollywood is a closed-shop, but rather than making movies based on books without the involvement of the authors, let’s see some SF authors team up with a director and be given the opportunity to write an original script for Hollywood.

I’m not sure who that director could be – the idea of a Foundation movie potentially helmed by Roland Emmerich fills me with dread, James Cameron’s Avatar was more fantasy than hard SF, and as great as Alien and Bladerunner are, Ridley Scott has not displayed any empathy for hard SF (although he has picked up the rights to The Forever War, which if done right could make for a tremendous film). Perhaps Ron Howard, with his experience on Apollo 13, might be a good choice, or some other up and coming director?

Science fiction is perhaps the first, best testbed for future technologies. In its pages we can play out where these technologies can take us, the riches they can give us and the risks they pose. To continue to do so, we need more scientists with a passion for the genre and an eloquence to their prose to introduce us to detailed new ideas. The authors who follow them can then be let loose with these concepts, like kids in a candy store, picking ideas off the shelf and running with them, placing them in new and exciting settings. This is how SF has always operated, from Stapledon to Clarke to Baxter, or Asimov to Niven to Banks to the next generation of authors – where will they take us next?

• Paul Gilster

PG: We can only imagine where they’ll take us next. I see we’re both in heavy reading mode. Lately I’ve been going back to some of the classics and refreshing my memory, most recently with Asimov’s first three Foundation books, which is why the subject was on my mind earlier. And I see you’re deep in the Hamiltons, Baxters and Reynolds of this world. What’s happened to me is that many of the readers of Centauri Dreams have suggested authors — this is how I started reading Alastair Reynolds and Iain Banks, and although I haven’t gotten into his work yet, I’ll use your suggestion (and I’ve heard it from others) to start reading Peter Hamilton.

I always get a kick out of learning about authors that are new to me, and you’ve mentioned several in this exchange that I’ll need to get to know. Interstellar flight has always gotten us straight into the science fiction element because there are so many unknowns, so many approaches, and we can let the concepts fly in fiction and see where they lead us. The number of physicists and engineers who have related what they are doing to earlier science fiction novels and short stories is, well, astounding, and tells us that SF will always play the role you describe, as testbed for both scientific ideas and philosophical speculations. Let’s keep the lines of communication open as we both discover new authors and range through their universes.

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