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| cover art by David B. Mattingly |
My first introduction to weird science fictional physics came in Asimov's novel The Gods Themselves. Asimov imagined an alternate universe where the laws of physics were different than what exists here in our universe. Asimov also made use of imaginary positronic brains for no better reason than to have a cool-sounding futuristic alternative to electronics.
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| The Cloud City of Stratos. |
Gravity nullifying materials such as Cavorite have long been used in some science fiction stories. If you want your spacecraft to more easily blast into outer space, simply shield it from the Earth's gravitational field.
Antimatter-powered space travel and antigravity were integral to the imagined future of Star Trek. Could floating cities such as Laputa and Stratos use materials with negative mass in order to defy gravity?
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| source |
Sci Fi stories that tackle the details of fictional science risk alienating readers. I recently commented on "Do I Wake or Dream?", a story by Frank Herbert that has annoyed many readers with its jargon-filled handwave account of how to create a conscious computer.
What about "Noise Level"? How did readers react to the fictional R&D program described in that story? Lucky for us, we have quantitative data from the 1950s.
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| story popularity analytics |
I get the feeling that given Campbell's background in physics, Astounding was something of a bastion of hard science fiction. Other Sci Fi magazines such as Galaxy moved in other directions and probably had a different kind of readership.
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| Announcement by John Campbell from the January 1953 issue of Astounding. |
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| cover art by Gordon Pawelka |
One Penny per Word
A details-oriented story such as "Noise Level" was popular with the science nerds who subscribed to Astounding while the technical details in "Do I wake of Dream?" only annoyed the readers of Galaxy. How could an editor like Campbell efficiently attract Sci Fi story writers who appealed to his readers? Beginning in April of 1953, Campbell began giving a monetary bonus to authors who were ranked as having the most popular story in each issue of Astounding.
In May of 1952, Thomas J. King and Robert Briggs published an article describing how to clone frogs by nuclear transplantation. The January 1953 issue of Astounding contained an article about human clones called "Un-Man". Sadly, "Un-Man" was written by Poul Anderson who had a background in physics, not biology.
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| from "Un-Man" |
In the text of "Un-Man", Anderson tells readers that "a gene is nothing but a set of giant protein molecules". In making this false claim, Anderson was probably under the influence of Alfred Mirsky, who erroneously believed that proteins, not DNA, made up the linear molecular filaments of chromosomes (for example, see THE COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE OF ISOLATED CHROMOSOMES).
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| Born Under Mars interior art by Dwight Morrow |
Antigravity in 1966
In the 1970s, when I entered into my personal golden age of science fiction, I was discovering re-runs of Star Trek and I read Born Under Mars by John Brunner. When I found antigravity technology in stories such as "The Cloud Minders" and Born Under Mars I was not surprised. I always assumed that devices such as Nomad and M-4 were able to float because of antigravity technology. In Born Under Mars, Brunner was concerned about his imagined Martians, human beings who had lived on Mars for many generations. The Martians could not easily survive on worlds with strong gravitational fields, particularly if they did not have a nulgee bed to sleep in.
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| whip torture |
Born Under Mars is set perhaps 1,000 years in our future. There have been almost no significant technological developments since the time of Einstein beyond the "natural" developments of a faster-than-light spaceship drive and related technologies such as that for artificial gravity control. Brunner does adopt for his story the existence a torture device, a whip, that directly stimulates pain sensory neurons without leaving any residual tissue damage. Sadly, the interior art for Born Under Mars depicts the Hi Tek™ neuronic whip as being a conventional whip.
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| cover art for the 1973 edition |
How will this brain boost be achieved? Brunner imagined a secretive conspiracy that reminds me of Asimov's saga of the Foundations, where the Super Secret™ Second Foundation must guide galactic civilization towards a better future. In Bunner's imagined future, as Humanity spreads outward into the galaxy, half of the expanding human civilization (a faction known as the Centaurs) has a rigid social structure, including a planned breeding program. However, nobody likes the tight-assed Centaurs. The other half of the galaxy is populated by the easy-going Bears. The plan is for the Centaurs to evolve a new type of superhuman by selective breeding, but then the new Super Genes™ will stolen and spread among the Bears.
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| in the Ekcolir Reality |
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| cover art by George Pawelka |
In the March 1953 issue of Astounding is Brunner's first story published in America, "Thou Good and Faithful", which is also a fun little story. It was the most popular story for readers of Astounding that month and also was the cover story for that issue.
"Thou Good and Faithful" has a great premise: that if we were to visit distant exoplanets, we should not be surprised to meet artificial lifeforms of alien design rather than biological creatures such as ourselves.
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| cover art by Henry Van Dongen |
Related reading: no artificial gravity, Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity" was serialized in the April, May, June and July 1953 issues of Astounding.
Next: Nirutam's revelations about Deep Time.
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