Slashdot Mirror
Scientifically Accurate Sci-Fi for High-Schoolers?
Raul654 asks: "A member of my immediate family is a biology teacher at an all-girls high school. For some years, she's been giving her students the option to earn extra credit by reading a science-related book. What scientifically accurate science fiction books would you recommend for high school readers?"
No, Hard-SF takes very few liberties with respect to science, then examines the ramifications of it. It's as close to real science as possible while still allowing a couple semi-scientific ideas for the fiction element. But even then the SF elements aren't magical constructs, like neutronium armor or antimatter fountains or a human-AI sprouting up on a 486. IT can be very realistic and scientifically grounded.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
You're after a genre called Hard Sci-Fi. Perhaps check out Stephen Baxter's stuff for starters?
Some hard SF:
_ Steel
Greg Egan - Diaspora, Permutation City, Schild's Ladder, or his short story collections such as Axiomatic or Luminous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series
Here's a good source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction
Stephen Baxter & David Brin are also popular authors.
While Egan tends to cover a lot of speculative technology or concepts, novels generally will be more about plot & character rather than science. If this is for a science class, I'd recommend picking up a good pop-sci book. A few that come to mind:
Richard Dawkins: Climbing Mount Improbable, River Out of Eden, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Blind Watchmaker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
Jared Diamond: Guns Germs & Steel - great book combining history, anthropology, biology to explain how humanity diverged into such technologically disparate cultures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and
Live simply, that others may simply live. -Gandhi
Arthur C. Clarke books are often very true to science. One of my favourites is Rendevouz with Rama . The first in a trilogy about the encounter of enormous spaceships all of a sudden found racing through our solar system.
Also Isaac Asimovs books are nice. Try starting with I, Robot , which has a much better story than the movie they made.
If you want a scientifically accurate book, you know where to find it. If you want a work of fiction, you also know where to find it.
Science fiction is first and foremost fiction. The point of science fiction is to speculate about the future, and that nearly always involves technology that is not invented yet, and might never be invented, such as interstellar travel, fusion energy, real artificial intelligence, lightsabres, human cloning, rampant genetic engineering, force-fields, wormholes, nanotechnology, etc. The only exception to this is if the story is about a society after the fall of civilization (i.e. post-cataclysmic, due to nuclear war, overpopulation, pollution, etc...), and it's mostly about vikings riding Harley-Davidson motorbikes raiding nearby villages for women and booze, or something like that (see also Kevin Costners Waterworld).
Even fiction that is not set in the future, tends to include speculative technologies and methods. Just look at CSI, James Bond, etc... If a book does not contain speculative science, chances are that it will not contain any science at all. It will be about other things, such as people, love, crime, war, or something like that.
If what you are after is something that is scientifically accurate and entertaining, but not necessarily fiction, I would introduce them to Richard Feynman. (I'm sure there are other good authors, e.g. Stephen Hawking has a good reputation, but he talks about stuff so far above our heads that it's hard to gain any understanding from it). (I realize none of these authors excel in biology. So maybe you should ask somebody else for suggestions there...)
In short: just forget about it. You won't find a fiction book that teaches you science, any more than you will find a science book with a good plot. The best you can hope for is a fiction book that inspires you about the possibilities of science, and a science book that is both entertaining and correct.
I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Raul654 might just be this Raul654. I don't think he's a student at an all-girls high school.
I'm not a biologist, but I can explain it.
Imagine you've released 3 groups of people into a room. Babies, 10 year olds, and professional basketball players. If you graph height vs how many people are that height, you'll see 3 humps. One about 2 feet, the second about 4 feet, and the third other 6 feet. But very few at 3 and 5 feet.
That's what the graph in Jurassic Park was supposed to look like, because the dinos were released in batches. Instead they saw one big hump. So to continue the analogy, where did so many 3 foot and 5 foot high people come from? That's how Ian knew they must be breeding.
I second Egan. Quarantine was the first hard SF I had read (and have read many times since). Permutation City is also great, Diaspora, hell they are all great. He weaves the hard science into straightforward(ish), easy to understand prose (the tech notes are there for the 'ish' stuff). And as you mention, he throws philosophy into the bargain. Highly recommended, 5 out of 5 stars from me.
Try Michael Crichton... he exhaustively researches his books, and the science in them stretches a bit beyond what we can do now, but not to the point where it is unbelieveable. Also, this stretches from physics (Timeline) to Biology (Jurassic Park, Next). Highly recommended
Orson Scott Card - The Ender Saga... consider the fact that he wrote this ages ago... then read about everything he came up with based off of quantum entanglement and AI and the stretches he makes with technology... its a really fun read.
I'm a big fan of Greg Bear's books, they tend to have interesting stories with a hard-sf basis in fact.
But really, there are a lot of authors listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction that I would recommend.
-Styopa
Physicist John Cramer has written two hard-SF books: Twistor and Einstein's Bridge. Both are good. Einstein's Bridge has the added benefit of describing Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in lay-man's terms that nearly any bright high school kid should understand.
I recommend Australian writer Greg Egan.
Don't forget Hal Clement, who to a certain extent defined the 'hard science' SF genre. Mission of Gravity, Close to Critical, Still River... he's particularly well suited for assigned reading because his books tend to be structured as puzzles: here is a strange situation, what are the consequences of this?
Mission of Gravity is probably his most famous book; an exploration of the planet Mesklin, a superheavy Earth-like world that spins so fast that although the surface gravity at the poles is 665g, at the equator it's only 3g. It's a little dated by today's standards, such as being a bit light on characterisation and having no female characters whatsoever, but is still a good read. And the science is as accurate as he could make it.
These are my favorite examples of the powerful social commentary possible with the vehicle of science fiction.
I'd agree, stick with the Hard SF authors. Nice little explanation and list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction One author missing from the list is Michael Flynn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn. His Firestar series might work for the school especially since the protagonist is a woman. Set in contemporary times, no-nonsense science, but with an actual plot. Though maybe not a hard SF author, McMaster-Bujold's early work (especially Mountains of Mourning) might appeal to young women who prefer something more character driven. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_McMaster_Bujold Others have mentioned Forward and Dragon's Egg.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
For hard sci-fi, I would recommend going with the following authors, who are accessible and pretty detail oriented: Hal Clement, Greg Bear, David Brin, Stephen Baxter...Maybe Joe Haldeman (though I really only recommend Forever War). In addition, Heinlein's juveniles are great reads, heavy in the science. But they were written for serialization the the BSA magazine Boy's Life...a girl might not find them as entertaining.
Robert L. Forward's stuff is generally based on principles that is theoretically possible but has never been implemented. _Dragon's Egg_ actually contains a theory section in an appendix.
Isaac Asimov is also generally very good about not braking any science laws, but tends to deemphasize the science and focus on characters, as does any good story, sci fi or otherwise.
Asimov, Sagan, and Hawking have all written very accessible non-fiction material as well.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/31/22 31228
The team of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and sometimes Stephen Barnes have produced several books/series which intelligently use ecological themes.
"Legacy of Heorot" and "Beowulf's Children" (Niven, Pournelle, Barnes) have as their prime villain (villain being defined as an entity whose aims clash with those of the humans) the grendels, a creature native to the planet a colonizing starship has reached. The colonists very sensibly initially occupy a single island which has relatively little native life on it due to a recent natural catastrophe; trouble arises when they become overconfident of their understanding of the local ecology, failing to realize that grendels act as their own alpha predators. By killing the local grendel they have ensured that *all* the local samlon, which would normally have been predated down to what might have been nuisance levels, will mature into grendels... A nice side issue is that one reason for the human failure to see the problem is that the best ecological experts have suffered "ice on the mind", a form of brain damage caused by expanding ice crystals in the brain during their arteficial hibernation - more grist for a biology class.
"The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand" (Niven, Pournelle) explore a world wherein a quirk of biology curses the intelligent aliens with perpetual population explosion, and the resultant atomic wars, runaway pollution and intense resource deficit only make the Darwinian struggle more acute; by the time humans come into contact with them, the Moties are individually and in small kin-groups amazingly more capable than Homo sapiens, but at the same time they are crippled by an inability to see beyond their local self-interest. The physics of the series allows two principal Just-Accept-It items, an instantaneous-jump Faster-Than-Light drive and a universally-absorbent energy field, but even here there are credible limitations on the technoloy; Alderson drives can only jump between points of equal stellar flux, and Langston Fields eventually must dissipate the energy they absorb. What really makes the series especially suitable for your friend's purposes is that the authors' examination of how deep and subtle the effects of breeding patterns on intelligent creatures, including their effect on ethics, has not been equalled in any other SF series I know of.
"Footfall" (Niven, Pournelle) is another First Contact novel, and despite the slight dating afforded by its Cold War milieu still easily one of the best (I like to think of it as an Alternate History in which the USSR survived longer than it did AND we were visited by aliens). As in the first series, no liberties whatsoever have been taken with physics - no FTL drive, nor any FTK communication. As in the second, the best part of the book is seeing how the biological origins of the aliens (and the humans!) informs their thinking, language, decision making, ethics, and of course how they misunderstand each other. The Traveler Fithp are herd animals, you see, and that has all kinds of consequences; for example, when they accept surrender thay think the whole herd has surrendered. What we call individualists they call rogues, i.e. insane, and they are not at all prepared to deal with a race where rogues approach being the norm; a resistance by a few humans is seen as a betrayal by the whole populace. The misunderstandings span large and small. For example, they *really* believe in law and order, including one of the characteristics they (nominally) share with us - they mate for life! It's really a good read, full of fast-paced action as well as some solid philosohical meat.
It's a little unclear whether you are only looking for SF based on biological themes or more general science is good; in either case Niven is the powerhouse of this team, and his solo work abounds with insight into physics (especially astrophysics) and ecology. The Ringworld series ("Ringworld", "The Ringworld Engineers", "Ringworld Throne" and "Ringworld's Children") are mostly cited for the physics of the Rin
Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, was the voyage through the universe documentary done in conjunction with PBS. Contact is the novel.
Have you read The Hot Zone? The book by Richard Preston? It has no such premise. I'm wondering if all of you people saw the movie Outbreak and imagined that while watching it you were reading a book.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
By Stansilaw Lem.
l ot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Pirx_the_Pi
Singularity Sky by Stross - pretty far out, but firm; they allow loophole-based FTL, but explain stuff that's currently being researched rather well.
Orion's Arm stuff -- this is the hardest of hard scifi I've ever seen, but most of it is incredibly far-future.
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Stephenson are both pretty firm, but have more tech than science stuff.
Contact, the movie based on a Carl Sagan book, is some fo the most scientific of science fiction; Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension is also resoundingly scientific -- especially odd but appropriate for a parody of the genre.