The Science in The Fiction

This is our favorite kind of episode, hosting a conversation between e a science fiction author and a scientist, where each shares their work and expertise with the other to the benefit of both.  Stephen Gay is a science fiction author whose debut novel 'Night Owls - A Moon Colony Adventure' follows a quirky band of party kids in a near-future society on the moon.  Ben Feist is a compute...

This is part two of our conversation with Damien Walter, the science fiction guru.  He is the host of the Science Fiction Podcast and Science Fiction Facebook group.  He is also a critical thinker about culture, and a prophet of the emerging mythos of science fiction.  In our last episode we presented the part of our conversation about individual psychology as it relates to the structure and funct...

Damien Walter is one of the world’s foremost voices in critical thinking about science fiction as the emerging cultural mythos of our modern global civilization.  In this episode we discuss some of Damien’s ideas about the psychological function of story-telling, and what he calls the operating system of human consciousness.  We talk about how archetypal, meaningful stories have elements that reso...

Cory Doctorow has given us permission to play the first chapter of Red Team Blues directly on our podcast!  And as an added treat, the audio-book is read by none other than Will Wheaton, the actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek The Next Generation - a voice that you will instantly recognize.  It's pretty rare to hear excerpts from an author’s work directly on a podcast that discusses...

Marty and Holly sit down with Cory Doctorow, an author known not only for his near-future social and political science fiction, but also for his real-world journalism and activism.  We talk about society, politics and economics, discussing 3 of Doctorow’s most recent books.  'Red Team Blues' is his most recently published book, an anti-finance cryptocurrency and cybersecurity thriller; w...

Following up on our discussion of intelligent plants with Sue Burke in our last episode, we have invited Paco Calvo, a cognitive scientist and philosopher of biology, who speaks to us about his book 'Planta Sapiens'.  Paco is a cognitive scientist and philosopher of biology, who is known for his research in the field of plant cognition and intelligence. His interdisciplinary work combine...

In this episode we embark on a discussion of sci-fi botany, by way of Sue Burke’s novel 'Semiosis' and its sequel 'Interference'.  We talk about a lot of interesting and surprising properties of plant behaviour that you may not be aware of, and how Sue worked these ideas into her main character Steveland and his interaction with human colonists on a planet named Pax.  We talk a...

Marty and Holly finish up their discussion of 'Neverness' by David Zindell from the last two episodes, and then have a conversation about the books we'll be talking about over the course of the next few episodes.  Our next topic will be 'intelligent plants', so we discuss Sue Burke's 'Semiosis' and 'Interference' duology, ahead of our upcoming inte...

Marty has a conversation about David Zindell's 'Neverness' with Mark Mac Lean, professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia.  We talk about the poetic and philosophical use of mathematics as the engine of faster-than-light travel in the Neverness universe, and contemplate the relationship of mathematics to truth, beauty, perfection, and physical reality.  Along the...

Marty and Holly sit down with David Zindell, author of Neverness, a book full of big ideas in a far future civilization where Master Pilots manipulate mathematical reality to fenester their ships through the spacetime manifold. We talk to David about his literary influences and his vision of a deep sci-fi future with philosophical and spiritual depth.  We discuss philosophy, non-duality, conscious...

This is the second half of the conversation begun in our last episode, between science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer and zoologist Arik Kershenbaum.  We start with a quick re-cap on Boltzmann Brains and then spend quite a bit of time considering the problem of having a sample size of one, when it comes to the existence of life in the universe, as well as the existence of intelligent, technologic...

In this episode we present our first conversation between a science fiction author and a scientist, both of whom we’ve spoken to before.  We have with us Robert J. Sawyer, star of our very first interview in our second episode where we discussed his book The Oppenheimer Alternative, and Arik Kershenbaum who we spoke to in our last episode about his book A Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy.   We disc...

Following up on our interview with Julie Czerneda and continuing with the theme of exo-biology, in this episode Marty sits down with zoologist Arik Kershenbaum from Cambridge University, author of The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens – and Ourselves.  We talk about the science of evolution, and what it may have to tell us about exo-biology, by first establ...

Marty sits down with Canadian science fiction writer and biologist Julie Czerneda to discuss her book 'To Each This World'.  Our conversation is taken in the context of exo-biology, where considerations of universal biological laws may inform our understanding of alien life, if ever we are lucky enough to find it.  We talk about whether we are likely to be surprised or bored by how stran...

Marty and Holly discuss Robert J. Sawyer's Nebula Award-winning book The Terminal Experiment.  We talk about the possibility of uploading our minds into computers and/or replicating our physical brains, and think our way through philosophical issues about subjectivity and objectivity, materialism, identity and the teleporter dilemma.  We discuss whether self-awareness is different and special...

In this episode Marty sits down with Prof. Jaymie Matthews, astrophysicist from the University of British Columbia, to discuss the some of the solar physics in Robert J. Sawyer’s ‘The Oppenheimer Alternative’, as a follow up to our interview with Robert in Episode 2.  We cover a fair bit of ground with Dr. Matthews, who explains how his research career helped establish a new field of astronomy cal...

Marty and Holly sit down with Canadian science fiction superstar Robert J. Sawyer to talk about his book The Oppenheimer Alternative.  Robert tells us how he spun the mistaken prediction of the sun’s temperature by Hans Bethe (in 1939) into a science fiction tale where the great physicists of the 20th century save humanity from being vaporized by a solar instability.  We discuss Bethe and Einstein...

Marty and Holly describe what we'd like to do in this podcast.  We will talk to science fiction authors and scientists about topics in both hard and soft science fiction, from both the hard and soft sciences.  Our conversations will range from physics to psychology, from space to sociology.  We also like to talk science: Marty explains special relativity, and Holly explains thin film depositi...