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Synchrotron Gets Sci-Fi Writer In Residence
kandela writes "CBC News is reporting that Nebula and Hugo award winning author Robert J. Sawyer is to become the first-ever writer in residence at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron facility (see also their media release). Sawyer will spend two months at the facility, where he is hoping to be inspired by the everyday grind of scientists, 'I spent a lot of time visiting science labs over the years, but it's always the VIP tour,' he said in an interview Wednesday. 'You are in and you are out in a couple of hours, and everyone has shown you all the things they want you to see but none of the day-to-day grind of the work as well. I want to get the flavour of that.' As a scientist who has worked at synchrotron facilities (and occasional sci-fi writer myself (page 4)), I'm excited to see what a professional can do with that environment for inspiration."
...it will take him to 'synch' up...
...where he is hoping to be inspired by the everyday grind of scientists
What, reading papers, crunching numbers, writing papers and browsing Slashdot? Hmm...think I've already read that story.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Obviously the purpose of books is to draw us out of our own day-to-day grind into a universe consisting of... more day-to-day grinds? Right.
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Ok, Kandela. If you're "Daniel Cotton", let me be one of the ones to tell you - that was fscking brilliant! I haven't been so pleasantly smacked in the face by a short story in a very long time. That bit of fiction is a much bigger story than that of some writer trying to get inspired... and yes, I admit it - I've never heard of Robert J. Sawyer, though I've got on the order of 19 untouched copies of "Asimov's" piled up from between the onset of presbyopia and the procurement of reading glasses(it was hard to admit that need).
I've worked at a synchrotron, and...
oh my god is it boring. This would seem like a good idea for about 3 days.
Shouldn't all science fiction writers have some firsthand experience with science, ideally from an actual involvement with science? Well, maybe or maybe not. But more disturbing is the prevalence of people with no knowledge of science in the business of so-called science journalism. Of course, a few months in a science lab won't cure what ails most science writers. But it would be better than nothing, which is apparently the status quo.
There's a certain usefulness to being familiar with what a science lab is like and the daily operations of scientific research, but that's not central to science fiction writing.
It is clear, though, that some science fiction writers have no understanding of scientific principles, and some certainly do. When science plays a visible role in a sci-fi story, particularly when the author is intending for the story to be not far from reality, the difference is really clear.
As far as I've seen, there are almost no science journalists that know a bit of science. As they say on the Internet, nearly all science news stories are full of fail.
from that linked wikipedia entry.
His interest in consciousness studies is also apparent in his WWW trilogy, beginning with Wake, which deals with the spontaneous emergence of consciousness in the infrastructure of the World Wide Web.
Why does this sound familiar
So whois the brilliant scifi writer again?
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[Citation Please]
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I've only read one Sawyer book, Mindscan.
From what I can see, he likes to get ideas from the public. And I will say there were a couple of cool ideas in that book...but the book itself was horrible.
The emotions were canned, the story forced and the characters unsympathetic. It degenerated into just-plain-silly at times with blatant attempts to be 'socially relevant' with all the subtlety of hammering a railroad spike with a hippo.
I'm not kidding when I say that it almost felt like a 7th grader who just watched Outer Limits sat down and wrote a book for his end-of-the-week project.
I'm hoping his other work is better.
That concept is older than old. Heck, computers randomly gaining sentience was done by Heinlein in 1966 and I doubt he was the first. Going from a single computer gaining sentience to a network of computers does not make it brilliant.
I beg to differ. The difference between Shirow's version and everyone else is the entity was not created by humans. A data trojan inadvertantly interacted with random data on the web in the same way a molecule interacted with others to form DNA.
This is very different from "AI's gone wild" a-la heinlein or t-1000.
The real mark of brilliance in such areas is how you actually treat the subject and what interesting sub-questions you bring to light. There are a hundred different ways to cover some basic ideas and every single one of them can be utterly unique.
and Shirow covers this entire area better as well if you examine the bulk of his work.
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I'm not kidding when I say that it almost felt like a 7th grader who just watched Outer Limits sat down and wrote a book for his end-of-the-week project.
I nominate this for the slap-down of the week.
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From from my own experience doing research at a synchrotron, I call tell you there is nothing "day to day" about it. We get roughly one week to do as much as humanly possible in an environment which drains you (16+ hour days under high fluorescent lighting with the incessant hum of vacuum pumps and machinery).
The scientific environment is electric. Things get done - ideas flourish and are crushed in minutes as a gaggle of intelligent scientists throw ideas around and call on their years of experience. Copious amounts of coffee are consumed and everyone stands there silent when the a-ha moment arrives and all the hard work comes together.
It might be hard for an outsider to appreciate this, and there is a chance this isn't the norm when it comes to the average synchrotron experience.
You didn't win that Hugo Award, did you? ;)
Don't sugar crystals open a portal to a giant gummy bears dimension?
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Gordon Freeman is yet another Hollywood douche, who is patiently failing upwards.
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I grew up in this town.
It's winter there now. And it's F&#$%#$@'n Cold.
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I heard him on the CBC once. I haven't heard someone so full of himself for quite some time.
I think some of the best stories could come from the dialogue between Sawyer and the scientists at CLS. As to the need for a writer to have a backgroud in science, I think we've seen benefits to a writer having it or not. Did you ever see the bibliography of Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton? Now there was a science based story. Other writers haven't had a formal training but an aptitude in the sciences that have led to future predictions that have come true. At the heart of good SF is the story and I have read all of Sawyers works and find him to be one of the most distinctive writers I have read. Here's looking for a future Sawyer novel based at CLS.
I wouldn't bother reading his other books then. People keep buying me Robert Sawyer books as presents as I think the Galaxy bookshop (Sydney's big SF shop) recommends him if you like hard SF. I wish they wouldn't. I agree with the comments about his characters and his Canadian inferiority complex is just plain annoying.
Maybe fans of Michael Crichton's characterisation will appreciate Sawyer's works.
I've read three of his other books: The Terminal Experiment, Flashfoward, and Calculating God -- Hoping that maybe they would get better. But sadly, they don't.
He takes far too many of his scene descriptions directly from public spaces. If you've ever lived in Toronto, you know the exact locations he's talking about, and you really wish he would shut up about it, and stop using the word Toronto. He goes into such inane detail that you know which subway stop to get off at, how many blocks over to walk, and which side of the street to be on to be standing right where his cardboard characters uttered something absolutely obvious, and then go over to Pizza^H^H^H^H^HFood Food for all their dietary needs.
I have to put in a word of praise for my friends at the CLS Outreach Office, who do a creative job of explaining the complexities of synchrotron science to a popular audience. Their work with high school students is a really amazing ongoing project.
I am not familiar with this author, but I can hardly wait to read a novel populated with my CLS colleagues!
He's not totally incompetent. Some of his stuff is second rate. The book which won the undeserved Hugo (Hominids), for instance. A lot of it, though, is just plain bad. _Rollback_... a lot of hand-wringing and emoting topped off with an old man's wish fulfillment fantasy. The first volume of (God save us, a trilogy) "Wake"... some good concepts, terrible execution.
He's built a publicity machine based on being a top _Canadian_ SF writer. But if he were American, he'd be lost in the midlist.
Yeah, I've read Flashforward and Calculating God. Both good ideas, both poorly written. As you say, very dislikeable cardboard characters, and plots that are pretty miserable.
...and Robert E. Howard never journeyed more than fifty miles away from his hometown in Texas.
There's a certain school of writer (and reader, too, apparently) that craves that super-deluxe gritty no-don't-make-it-a-blue-beaker-real-chemists-would-never-use-a-blue-beaker work-a-day realism, and then there are those focused on the human condition, complex themes, and imaginative notions no one has ever put to paper before. Not saying the twain can't meet, but life is short...
isn't a Synchrotron one of the early particle accelerators, like a poor mans LHC?
Synchrotrons have been around for over 50 years but they are hardly a poor man's LHC. Different types of accelerators are useful for different types of experiments and synchrotrons have been steadily improving in the energy levels. In fact, the LHC is composed of a collection of different parts one of which is a synchrotron see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_Synchrotron_Booster .
In general, there are three most common types of accelerators which have been used since the 1930s. All three are still in use for productive research today. The simplest accelerators in basic design are linear accelerators. They use a series of electromagnets to accelerate a particle down a a straight tube to a target. The largest of which is the SLAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Linear_Accelerator_Center ) which is about 2 miles (about 3 km) long. However, particles can only go through a linear accelerator once. The second type of accelerator tries to solve this problem. These accelerators are cyclotrons and they try to repeatedly spin particles in a circle constantly accelerating them. However, as the particles move faster they begin to spiral outwards and create other problems. Synchrotrons use clever timing and modifications of the electromagnetic fields to compensate for this and in some cases even take advantage of it. All these types of article accelerators (and few other types more rarely) are still in use to perform research. Different types of questions call for different types of accelerators (among other issues different accelerators accelerate different types of particles). The synchrotron in question is the Canadian Light Source Synchrotron which was completed in 2004 and is thus very current and has done some cutting edge research. So it is by no means at all a "poor man's LHC."
If real scientists were better writers then it'd be easier for the science journalists to copy-and-paste from their technical papers and conference presentations to tell the real story. There would be more appreciation for science if those conducting it could espouse their hypothesis and experiment results with the eloquence and clarity of professional writers, but the fact is that writing and science are two different proficiencies that are rare to be found within a single individual (both require time and energy to learn how to do well) so the result is that real science writing is plagued by the miss-communication that results when two professionals that don't understand what each other do have to deal with each other.
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If real scientists were better writers then it'd be easier for the science journalists to copy-and-paste from their technical papers and conference presentations to tell the real story.
Easier, but still basically impossible. Scientists write for a specialized audience that's defined by having a background in the field, and journalists for the most part don't have that background. In fact, for science writing to be at fault, we would have to assume that science journalists are at least trying to understand the articles. From what I've seen, most of them barely get through the press release and don't care what their interview subjects say.
I'm not going to claim that most scientists are good writers, but many scientists are. Scientists shouldn't be faulted if publications meant for their peers can't be understood by journalists with no working knowledge of the field. The alternative to this system would be for each journal article to recap the field's entire progress to date, solely for the benefit of laypeople and journalists who haven't been paying attention.
Sounds like the plot for Galatea 2.2. Ah, humanist-in-residence or writer-in-residence, it's all the same: where can I sign up?