Science and Fiction

This anthology contains fourteen intriguing stories by active research scientists and other writers trained in science. 

Science is at the heart of real science fiction, which is more than just westerns with ray guns or fantasy with spaceships. The people who do science and love science best are scientists. Scientists like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Fred Hoyle wrote some of the legendary tales of golden age science fiction.  Today there is a new generation of scientists writing science fiction informed with the expertise of their fields, from astrophysics to computer science, biochemistry to rocket science, quantum physics to genetics, speculating about what is possible in our universe. Here lies the sense of wonder only science can deliver. All the stories in this volume are supplemented by afterwords commenting on the science underlying each story.

Every age has characteristic inventions that change the world. In the 19^th century it was the steam engine and the train. For the 20^th, electric and gasoline power, aircraft, nuclear weapons, even ventures into space. Today, the planet is awash with electronic business, chatter and virtual-reality entertainment so brilliant that the division between real and simulated is hard to discern. But one new idea from the 19^th century has failed, so far, to enter reality—time travel, using machines to turn the time dimension into a two-way highway. Will it come true, as foreseen in science fiction? Might we expect visits to and from the future, sooner than from space? That is the Time Machine Hypothesis, examined here by futurist Damien Broderick, an award-winning writer and theorist of the genre of the future. Broderick homes in on the topic through the lens of science as well as fiction, exploring some fifty different time-travel scenarios and conundrums found in the science fiction literature and film.

This book is a new English translation of the classic science fiction story written in 1961 by Herbert W. Franke, widely held to be the most important German-language science-fiction writer.

A dead city on a distant planet, two groups of people trying to explore it. Step by step, they penetrate the outer ring with its ultra-modern technology, the half-ruined medieval city center and finally the mysterious center. But is the eerie city really dead? Suddenly the factories start working again, the automatons intervene, and somewhere in the background there is still something hidden that could perhaps awaken. But is it people or machines? Herbert W. Franke leads the reader into an oppressively strange world; only after the startling resolution does it become clear what lies behind the adventures of the intruders - not a cosmic strangeness, but a threatening development that could affect humans in the same way. Franke's novel is thus a parable of the evolution of all humans in the age of technical communication ...

This book offers a tour of “the known galaxy”, here defined as the region of interstellar space closest to Earth. The phrase “the known galaxy” has a particular resonance in science fiction, as it refers to the part of the Milky Way that from the perspective of a point in time centuries from now may have been explored and settled by human beings. In the known galaxy, there are gloomy ocean worlds illuminated by the light of exploding stars. There are worlds where precious gems could be as common as pebbles. There are planets eternally wandering between the stars like the Flying Dutchman. There are lava worlds, steam worlds, hot Jupiters, cold Jupiters and maybe even worlds like our Earth. The purpose of the book is to begin to give this region a sense of place, in the same way that Mars is now starting to be appreciated as a location rather than just a planet. In doing so, the book merges our current scientific knowledge of the known galaxy with speculative fiction and with older legends and myths.

A sense of place is the feeling that some locations have a special meaning. This emotional connection arises from a combination of cultural and environmental factors that make individuals care about a particular place. It is challenging to create a sense of place for distant locations that no human has visited and for which our current knowledge is limited. This book attempts to take a step in this direction, by dividing the known galaxy into a number of clearly described distinct regions, by providing scientific descriptions of the likely environmental conditions on the known planets of these regions, and by linking these planets to their literary and mythological context.

The book is aimed at fans of both science fact and science fiction. It combines a tour of real planets outside of our solar system with tales of their fictional counterparts. The combination of solid scientific facts and analysis with speculation and imagination will be appealing to readers who want to gain a feeling for these planets as places with a back story, rather than just as names somewhere out there in the sky.