The Big Idea

Frank Creed, longtime Internet pal of mine, is the creator of a unique dystopian world. Starting with Flashpoint , he spun forth a view of a future (starting in 2036) in which a one world government persecutes any who does not conform to its dictated, uniform, one-world culture. This persecution, quite naturally, focuses on devout Christians, because they refuse to conform. "Wait a minute! We've heard all this before!" someone might object. "Almost every story about the future from an Evangelical Christian runs like this...first there is the Rapture, then the Antichrist takes over the world, then Christians are horribly persecuted, then Jesus comes back, and blah, blah, blah. Overdone--thus boring." If you're thinking that, you're wrong. Frank does not run the standard apocalyptic script. The One State simply takes over, no Rapture is required. And the method the underground church uses to fight back? They go online...in genre, this series of t...

You can't really talk about space travel without addressing gravity. Not only have I written a short story called "Gravity" (included in the anthology Aquasynthesis --but the story isn't what you might think), I've noticed that gravity is dealt with rather poorly in standard science fiction universes...for example, in Star Trek, no one ever floats in microgravity when the ship pulls into orbit around a planet. In reality that had at least as much to do with the fact that the series was filmed on planet Earth than any futuristic talk of "gravity plating" or the generation of artificial gravity on board Enterprise. Actual weightlessness is dealt with a little bit in the extended Star Trek films (notably VI) and series (in several episodes of Enterprise), but isn't it interesting that every planet seems to have the same gravity? Just like almost all aliens speak English, there are rarely any planets in which a human would be much lighter or much hea...

As previously mentioned in my post Carb Loading for Superheroes , Superheroes are really the stuff of fantasy more than science fiction--though some superheroes come close to obeying the laws of Physics (I used Batman and Spiderman as examples), they still don't really account for all the energy required to perform their amazing feats of strength and prowess. But just as a huge increase in food intake could go a long way to explaining the how Spiderman leaps from building to building, a generous use of superconductors could make an Iron Man-type suit much more realistic. Superconductors transmit electricity down a wire with no loss due to electrical resistance. So it's possible to loop a superconductor, put a charge of DC current into it, and the current will go around and around the loop, effectively making a battery of near-perfect efficiency. The amount of current the wire can hold is mainly a function of its length, though current flowing in a loop will create a magneti...

Finding Angel and Seeking Unseen are sequels in my friend Kat's  story universe geared toward a young adult audience. She portrays magic as a special talent that each character has, a special skill that is stronger than any other magic he or she might be able to perform. Her tales center around the individual journeys of self-discovery for these characters—just as every person over time learns what he or she is best suited to do over time, her protagonists work to learn and develop their "talents." Kat's a fine writer and I've enjoyed the quality of her writing and character development for a long time. But what interests me for this post—the story idea that has my own creative juices flowing--is her decision to make her magic creatively compatible with science. In Finding Angel, Angel, whose special talent is, well... finding things...is described as learning to focus on moving air molecules to create lift in order to levitate objects. Or in a similar way, m...

Prometheus, the Ridley Scott prequel to the Aliens movies, features a male and female pair of scientists who persuade the Wayland Corporation to fund a trip to find aliens whom they believe were responsible for the creation of the human race—and possibly all life on Earth. According to the story, scientists know about these aliens from ancient artwork from all over the world that shows aliens interacting with humans—and which show a configuration of planetary bodies that points to a specific star system. (Warning—I commit some movie spoilers below—also this movie is rated R for a reason, though it is not far removed from PG13.) The scientists quickly find the aliens in question, whom they call “the Engineers,” but all of them are dead—or at least they seem so at first. It turns out there is no question that these creatures are our genetic ancestors, these creatures who seem to have killed themselves on a world that soon appears not to be their home planet, but rather some sort of bi...

Faith Awakened  is Grace Bridges's novel that puts her unique twist on a virtual world. I asked her how her work compares with The Matrix , which is probably the most widely-known story universe featuring virtual reality. She first made it clear to me that she came up with her story idea long before the Matrix ever came out, then she added: "The Matrix has Neo in the dream world and then he is woken up to reality, where he mostly remains. In Faith Awakened, both stories are told in parallel, alternating and do not meet until the end.  In the Matrix, the crux of the matter is when Neo takes the red pill, wakes up in the pod and is 'birthed' into the real world. In Faith Awakened, the turning point is when they ENTER virtual reality. My overarching concept is that God would be even more real to the people inside virtual reality; the spiritual world comes closer perhaps due to a certain level of sensory deprivation. The suits are sensory, but it can't re...

The Standard Model of Physics, according to my enthusiastic but amateur understanding, describes all the components of the universe in terms of fundamental particles. Every physical thing and every carrier of energy consist of particles. Matter is built of atoms composed of electrons (a fundamental particle) and neutrons and protons, which are themselves built of quarks, which are smaller fundamental particles. We see light as a beam but on the smallest scale light is composed of individual particles called photons. Likewise more esoteric   (I mean harder to observe) particles are conceived of as in effect bouncing back and forth among neutrons and protons in the nucleus of an atom, holding it together and giving it radioactive decay properties—through particles that account for the strong and weak nuclear forces. Why anyone ever called the Higgs Boson the “God particle” is a bit ridiculous. The Higgs Boson is considered to be the smallest fundamental bit of the Higgs Field t...