Category: Science


There’s a joke in science fiction writing communities that the advancement of science and technology makes science fiction harder. It’s a joke because SF is a genre that depends on the advancement of science and technology; but it’s also a joke because it’s kinda true. When your job is to describe the future, advancements can make it harder when fantastic things become more commonplace or turn out to be completely disproven. This can be glossed over sometimes — and in fact, many great science fiction stories depend on things both the authors and the audience know to be impossible — but for the most part good SF depends on staying both ahead of and within scientific understanding.

Sometimes, though, there’s an advancement that makes a big splash that makes it easier, not harder. Sometimes you don’t have to be more creative than the real world in order to stay ahead of it, simply because it opens up so many more possibilities than you’d had before. Creativity doesn’t lie in being completely new, but rather in recombining things in the real world.

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Unless you’re so far under a rock that you’re not even reading this blog in the first place, you’ve heard that a double strike of writers and actors has resulted in the effective shutdown of the movie and TV industry in the United States. This of course affects more than just writers and actors, as well as more than just US citizens; lots of people other than actors and writers work in these industries, and a staggering number of people will be indirectly affected by the lack of production in the meantime. (For an idea of how interconnected everything is, I suggest reading the famous essay, “I, Pencil.”)

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Longtime readers of this blog (not to mention those who know me on other forms of social media) are no doubt aware of my addiction to learning new stuff. Well, okay, maybe not any new things; I tend to stay away from celebrity gossip, sportsball statistics (to the endless disappointment of my lovely wife), and reality contest shows that don’t involve Gordon Ramsey.

But if there’s a book that combines science, technology, history, and writing prompts, I’m all over it. That’s at the top of my reading list. There’s no way I’d buy the book on a sale and then let it languish in my to-read pile for five years.

. . . okay, that’s what actually happened with The Knowledge. And yet, before I finished it, it was already one of my favorite books of all time, and at the top of my list of recommendations for anyone writing SF&F — and possibly even as a textbook in certain high school or higher education classes. It’s the best single source for teaching the history of science and technology I’ve ever seen, and it does so from the engaging and entertaining perspective of “Civilization has collapsed; what now?”

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