The Science in The Fiction

Marty Kurylowicz and Holly Carson

This is both a science and a science fiction podcast.  We dig deep into the biggest ideas in science fiction, using science to elevate the conversation about sci-fi, and sci-fi to promote science education, curiosity and vision.  We talk to science fiction authors about the science in their fiction, then talk to scientists about the same topic, and catalyze conversations between the two.  

  1. William Bains on Dark Ecology in 'Shroud'

    14 OCT

    William Bains on Dark Ecology in 'Shroud'

    Marty speaks with biochemist and astrobiologist William Bains on the topic of Dark Ecology, as a final chapter to our 4 previous episodes on this topic with Chris Beckett (Ep 56), Julius Csotonyi (Ep 57-58) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (Ep 59).  Dr. Bains is the author of “The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds”, and has earned degrees from the universities of Oxford, Warwick and Stanford, and has held positions at the University of Bath, MIT, Imperial College London, and in addition to founding a number of biotech start-up companies is now a senior research fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University in the UK.  William is exactly the kind of person we love to speak with on this show as his expertise really expands and deepens some of ideas we’ve been talking about in contemporary science fiction.  Some of his recent papers carry titles like  "Prospects for detecting signs of life on exoplanets in the JWST era" and  "Astrobiological implications of the stability and reactivity of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) in concentrated sulfuric acid".  So that’s the kind of thing we discuss in the following conversation.  In addition to expanding on the details of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s worldbuilding in Shroud, we talk about the WOW signal in astronomy, the incoming 3I/ATLAS extrasolar object, and new experiments in high throughput chemistry and biochemistry. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

    57 min
  2. Adrian Tchaikovsky on Dark Ecology in 'Shroud'

    17 JUL

    Adrian Tchaikovsky on Dark Ecology in 'Shroud'

    Adrian Tchaikovsky is a bestselling British author whose work has taken the science fiction world by storm since his seminal sci-fi novel Children of Time, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016.  Its sequel Children of Ruin won the equally prestigious British Science Fiction Association or BSFA award in 2019, and after the publication of the third book in the series Children of Memory, those books won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023.  He’s also won 4 other BSFA awards for his novels and short fiction, and this year 2 of his books Alien Clay and Service Model are up for both the Hugo Award and the Locus Award! In this conversation we discuss his latest book Shroud, which happens to dovetail nicely along the theme of Dark Ecology that we’ve been discussing since our interviews with Chris Becket and Julius Csotonyi about Dark Eden.  We talk about the exotic planetary environment and the aliens he’s invented in Shroud, whose neural architecture and sensorium share the same electromagnetic modality, making for the kind of collective intelligence and consciousness that Adrian often creates and wrestles with in his work. We also discuss theory of mind in hedgehogs, the social relations of mantis shrimp, bird intelligence and a few other things that have come to be signature topics in Adrian’s science fiction. Send us a message Email: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/

    1 hr

About

This is both a science and a science fiction podcast.  We dig deep into the biggest ideas in science fiction, using science to elevate the conversation about sci-fi, and sci-fi to promote science education, curiosity and vision.  We talk to science fiction authors about the science in their fiction, then talk to scientists about the same topic, and catalyze conversations between the two.  

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