Science fiction for scientists - Nature Physics

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Whether you are a scientist or a fan of science who enjoys a good science fiction story, I am here to bring you bad news, but also good news. The bad news is that in recent years the term science fiction has unfortunately come to include a great deal of what used to be called fantasy — ideas, devices and plots that defy or subvert our understanding of the Universe. From wizards and zombies to alien visitors, movies and television are overrun with the fantastic and the highly improbable. The good news reveals itself only when you turn away from the visual media and return to where science fiction began — on the printed page. For those of us to whom science fiction has always been about extrapolating, rather than violating, scientific notions, there is a recent wealth of new fiction based on our current understanding of the Universe and its laws. The current renaissance of what is called 'hard science fiction' (not meaning that it is difficult, but that it hews to a hard line that separates reality from fantasy) is being helped along by a group of astronomers and physicists who have penned stories that grow out of their own work. The modern beginnings of this trend might be traced to astrophysicist Fred Hoyle in England, and astronomer Robert S. Richardson (writing under the pen name Philip Latham) in the US in the 1950s.

Today, I count more than thirty scientists who are writing science fiction based on ideas that could be ripped out of the pages of Nature or The Astrophysical Journal. Besides the authors I will mention below, the list of astronomers who write science fiction also includes the former president of the American Astronomical Society, Craig Wheeler, NASA's Yoji Kondo (writing as Eric Kotani), and Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, just to pick a few examples.

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