All posts by Edward Willett

I'm a freelance writer in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. I've written more than 30 books (I've lost count) on a variety of topics. My nonfiction titles include books on computers, diseases, genetics, and the Iran-Iraq War, some for children and some for adults. I've also written several biographies for children, on individuals as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. I've loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a kid (thanks, Andre Norton, Madeleine L'Engle and Robert A. Heinlein!) and have also written young adult fantasy and science fiction. More recently I've turned to adult science fiction. My first adult SF novel, Lost in Translation, was published by Five Star in hardcover in 2005 and reprinted in paperback by DAW Books in 2006. My new SF novel for DAW, Marseguro, will be out in February, 2008. I write a weekly newspaper science column, I love good wine and good food, I'm married and have a daughter, and I'm a professional actor and singer when the opportunity presents itself, and act and sing just for fun when I can't find anyone to pay me for it. My website is at www.edwardwillett.com, and my blog is at edwardwillett.blogspot. com. And that is probably more about me than anyone could possibly want to know...
Blog

How much science knowledge do you need to write science fiction?

11 Comments

Tom Swift Cover On her blog, author Jo Walton laments that:

I can’t write science fiction because I know both too much and not enough science.

I know too much to spout total crap and not care, and I don’t know enough to inherently get it right. So I can write it and be sort of right and I need to get it checked.

(Via io9.)

But getting it checked, she goes on to complain, slows her down so much that she can lose momentum and be unable to write the story at all:

The way I write, I inclue as I go along and plot develops as I go along and background develops out of that, and my understanding of the world develops (even if lots of it doesn’t end up on the page) and if half of what I think turns out to be wrong then it just gets to the point where it isn’t worth doing in the first place. The people who know science suggest alternatives that totally screw up what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it, and I lose all confidence in it and decide I should stick to stuff I understand.

She then gives a specific example.

I know where she’s coming from: I got held up quite a bit on my most recent novel, Marseguro, while I tracked down the information I needed to ensure that my spaceship’s habitat ring rotated at the correct speed, given its diameter, to generate something approaching 1 G in the outermost layer–and that at the central core my characters could believably make the transition from non-rotating section to rotating section without getting their arms ripped off.

Non-SF writers never have to worry about stuff like that.

So: if you’re a writer, how much time do you devote to getting the science right, and if you’re a reader, how much accuracy do you demand? (Movies, of course, are a whole different kettle of fish where even non-SF films never get the physics right.)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]science fiction, books, writing, novels[/tags]

Blog

Old tech meets high tech in one-man sailing vessel

3 Comments

Project Green Jet proposed design

Although my primary diet as a young fiction-reader was science fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Andre Norton) and fantasy (Tolkien, Lewis, Lloyd Alexander), there was one most assuredly non-SF or F series that captured my imagination almost as much: Arthur Ransome‘s series of 12 books about English kids “messing about in boats,” which began with Swallows and Amazons (still in print after eight decades, and soon to be both a musical and a motion picture !).

Which is why this (very long) article from Gizmag on sailing in general and something called the Green Jet Project in particular caught my eye (via :

Green Jet uses automated systems controlling non-conventional sails to offer a glimpse of the future of sail – faster, more efficient, less labour intensive with minimal environmental impact. The vision is a superyacht sailed by one man with a touchscreen.

Several screens of interesting information later:

Hydraulic motors will pull the sail to its 55 metre height (top of the rig is 62m) in around 30 to 40 seconds and each sail can rotate through 160 degrees on a pivot point to best catch the wind. Navigation is touch-screen and simple, though the system that sails the boat is far from that, not to mention monitoring an array of weather information systems.

Designer Erik Sifrer is currently seeking backers for the project, which he expects would require more than 70 million euro and three to six years to bring to fruition.

A vast sailing vessel (57 metres, in this case) under the command of just a single person? There’s only one possible response to that vision, if you’re an Arthur Ransome reader: as Nancy Blackett would surely say, “Jibbooms and bobstays!”

(Image: Mides Design)

[tags]sailing,transportation,boats,automation[/tags]

Blog

One wandering planet can ruin your whole day

1 Comment

Mars striking Earth This blog is called Futurismic, but mostly we just talk about the near future. Let’s take a look at the far future…say, a few tens of millions of years down the road.

New studies suggest that after 40 million years or so, there’s a small but not insignificant chance–one or two percent–that the solar system will lose its stability, and, Velikovsky-like, start throwing whole planets off on wandering courses through the rest of the system, where they just might crash into ours. (Via NewScientistSpace.)

Although no one can say for sure what will happen beyond that, new calculations are now providing a rough guide to the more distant future. These suggest that there is a 1 to 2% chance that Mercury’s orbit will get seriously out of whack within the next 5 billion years.

This would tend to destabilise the whole inner solar system and could lead to a catastrophic collision between Earth and either Mercury or Mars, wiping out any life still present at that time.

In the case of a smash-up with Mars, for example, “all life gets extinguished immediately, and Earth glows at the temperature of a red giant star for about 1000 years”, says Gregory Laughlin, a co-author of one of the studies at the University of California in Santa Cruz, US.

Interestingly enough, it might not be the first time that has happened:

Many scientists think a Mars-sized object bashed into Earth in the early solar system, throwing out debris that eventually formed the Moon.

Earth was heated to thousands of degrees by the impact, with an ocean of lava covering its surface. A future replay of that event would be disastrous, Laughlin says.

That last quote qualifies, I think, for understatement of the year.

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech.)

[tags]solar system, astronomy, catastrophes, far future[/tags]

Blog

Universal translator a possibility?

6 Comments

Rosetta Stone replica Star Trek‘s various starship crews seldom have any trouble talking to aliens, thanks to a nifty device known as a “universal translator.” Although the universal translator was invented, like the transporter, simply because it was the only practical way to tell a story originally sold as “Wagon Train to the stars,” it might actually be possible to build one. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

So says Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US, who argues that no matter how alien a species might be, its language–even if it communicates via, say, scent–must still describe real objects in the real world, which means there must be an underlying universal code that, given enough knowledge about language and sufficient computing power, could be deciphered.

Deacon presented his idea on April 17 at the 2008 Astrobiology Science Conference in Santa Clara, California.

New Scientist notes:

Testing the theory might be tough because we would have to make contact with aliens advanced enough to engage in abstract thinking and the use of linguistic symbols. But Denise Herzing of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, US, points out that we might be able to test it by studying dolphins.

“Our work suggests that dolphins may be able to communicate using symbols,” Herzing told New Scientist. “The word’s not definitively in yet, but it’s totally possible that we might show universality by understanding dolphin language.”

New Scientist compares the proposed device to Douglas Adams‘s “babelfish,” a fish that translates languages. One hopes that if we do learn to understand dolphin language, the only thing they say to us, before decamping from the planet, isn’t “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]Star Trek,language,extraterrestrial intelligence,aliens[/tags]

Blog

Uncrashable cars…and one that definitely isn’t

1 Comment

Uncrashable Car graphic “Uncrashable” cars are the long-term promise of the largest road safety research project ever launched in Europe (Via Science Daily):

A truck exits suddenly from a side road, directly into your lane only dozens of metres ahead. Suddenly, your car issues a warning, starts applying the brakes and attempts to take evasive action. Realising impact is unavoidable; in-car safety systems pre-tension the safety belts and arm the airbag, timing its release to the second before impact.

The research project, called PReVENT, has 56 partners and a budget of more than €50 million, and it’s main focus is on relatively cheap and simple technologies like parking sensors and satellite navigation that can be adapted to enhance safety, but some of the more experimental systems being studied in some of its sub-projects, with catchy names like WILLWARN (which uses wireless communication with other vehicles to alert drivers about potentially dangerous situations), LATERALSAFE (which uses active sensing to eliminate the dangers of the blind spot) and COMPOSE, which can automatically brake if a pedestrian steps onto the road, or extend the bumper and raise the hood to keep occupants safer.

Some of these technologies could start to show up on cars within just a few years’ time. (Image: PReVENT.)

North American Eagle If, on the other hand, the idea of an uncrashable car somehow takes all the fun out of driving for you, you might want to follow up on this lead (Times Online via Gizmodo):

Are you fearless? Do you have razor-sharp reactions and the sponsor-friendly good looks of a young Robert Redford? Think you’ve got what it takes to drive a supersonic jet car at speeds of more than 800mph?

If so, you might be just the man (or woman) to take the wheel of the North American Eagle, a 42,500bhp jet car with everything it takes to smash the land speed record, says its maker, except one thing – a driver.

Last week the team behind a joint American-Canadian attempt to win the world record back from the British launched an open contest to find that person.

Read more about the team here, then send a 400-word e-mail listing your credentials and a photo of yourself to landspeedracing@gmail.com.

Tell ’em Futurismic sent you. (Image: landspeed.com.)

[tags]transportation, automobiles, safety[/tags]