What are some real scientific areas that would make good fiction?

December 19, 2004 8:44 PM

I have to write something fictional about science that involves REAL science (as opposed to fake science, i.e. "Star Wars"). Since I'm a non-science person, what are some areas of science that are full of good story possibilities? [Note: many people are already doing DNA and cloning.] Thanks!
posted by adrober to (20 comments total)

Well, you could poke around in the archives of Wired...
posted by Vidiot at 8:51 PM on December 19, 2004

If you're looking for inspiration, try "Stories of you Life, and Others" by Ted Chiang. He is really good at making stories that are, sort of, science fiction. Sort of what-if masterpieces.

A story that might be right up your alley is the last one. It's about a university that experiments with tinkering with people's minds to give them visual aphasia, essentially the inability to "notice" attractivenes in others. It's done through a series of interviews if I recall correctly.

Other stories include a story about building the tower of babel (and succeeding to reach the heavens, sort of), a story based on the idea that the concept of naming things (in hebrew) could give them life, a rather strange story about an encounter with aliens who don't necessarily perceive time linearly like we do, a story about a man who through the application of a medical test learns to modify his body's chemistry and mental states, etc. It's good stuff.

Not that I'm advocating stealing his ideas, rather that I think he brings a very fresh start to sci-fi in that his stories are just stories, they're not (necessarily) about star ships, aliens, warp fields, what have you, but they often have at their core some mathematical or scientific idea.
posted by RustyBrooks at 8:53 PM on December 19, 2004

There's no sharp line between real science and fake science. There's stuff everybody working in that field accepts as true, there's stuff some people working in that field accept as true, there's a lot of stuff the people working in that field accept as "could be true" or "is probably true under specific circumstances". That last group is the group you want to use; It includes stuff like timetravel, wormholes, teleportation, etc. No lightsabres I'm afraid though.
posted by fvw at 9:03 PM on December 19, 2004

Some random ideas... Metals/compounds with unusual properties, viruses that do weird things, carnivorous plants, mirror matter, and my personal favourite, synesthesia.
posted by greatgefilte at 9:32 PM on December 19, 2004

Nanotech.
posted by rushmc at 10:16 PM on December 19, 2004

Climate!
posted by prettyboyfloyd at 10:17 PM on December 19, 2004

how about a kind of hippopotamus which operates on an efficient fuel-cell and revolutionizes mass transit
posted by clockzero at 10:35 PM on December 19, 2004

If you dig around in the MeFi archives, you'll find the story about the guy (a teenager, no less) who built a nuclear reactor in his back yard - should be an interesting story to start with.
posted by NekulturnY at 1:25 AM on December 20, 2004

You can riff off of the holographic principle. Information density cannot exceed a fixed boundary. If you try to exceed this boundary, you get a blackhole.

In the realm of fiction, it might be the first clue that our universe is just a supercomputer.
posted by vacapinta at 1:26 AM on December 20, 2004

How about electronic tagging of humans, ie chips under the skin rather than tagging of criminals (though it could also be used for that) - there's something about this in the latest economist I think. You could quite easily base a socially driven story around it conflicting with religious beliefs, for example.
Perhaps microgeneration gives you some ideas; that is, having generators at your neighbourhood or home level, connected to the grid, and any social/economic effects this might have.
posted by biffa at 3:24 AM on December 20, 2004

Go to your local library and look through back issues of New Scientist and Scientific American. Both do longer articles targeted at the (educated) general public. Sure, lots of articles are boring, but I'd guess that if you flipped through a couple a five years of either, you could get a plot idea or twelve.
posted by bonehead at 6:48 AM on December 20, 2004

Plasma!

My dad's a particle physicist who works with plasma sheeting. He was giving a presentation on using a sheet on plasma on the wing of a plane to reduce friction and therefore save on fuel. As an aside, he suggested that if you took a spinning disk and covered the bottom with a plasma sheet and tossed in some gyroscopic controls, you'd have a flying saucer.

The next week, NASA asked him to apply for top secret Clarence.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:08 AM on December 20, 2004

D'oh. clearance even. That's what I get for trusting spill chock.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:09 AM on December 20, 2004

I read a bad book recently that had an interesting sci-fi theme of drug-resistant bacteria and the policies of drug companies that allowed antibiotics to be overused and overprescribed, thus leading to a weird plague-like epidemic of standard bacterial infections. Plagues are always good source material. Other suggestions: RFID & implants [as biffa says], weird apocalyptic digital privacy breaches at a world level, parthenogenesis, wormholes, boutique animals, monoculture farming pitfalls, robot monkeys [of course!] and future panopticon scenarios.
posted by jessamyn at 7:50 AM on December 20, 2004

I suppose it all depends how far you can get from Real Science. Ok Star Wars is out, but what about Star Wars?

Off the top of my head, and not all are appropriate:

Room-temperature super-conductors, pervasive computing and strong AI are all on the horizon. So is some really funky genetic manipulation that leaves cloning (which is just a new way of making identical twins) in the dust.

Genetic-modification-as-artform (There's already at least one artist messing around with transgenic art. Extrapolate.)

Non-lethal weaponry, and it's long-term effects (eg you've got a weapon that blinds soldiers, rather than killing them. What's going to be the societal effect of thousands of blind soldiers returning from war?)

Asteroid impact. Climate change. Genetic doping in sport. Habitat loss.

A little further out, consider being able to mess with a basic property of matter/the universe. Friction, inertia, speed of light, entropy. Being able to selectively alter one of these would have all kinds of consequences.

Going backwards instead of forwards, there's the alternate history genre. Consider the Roman Empire with movable type and phonographs. Or Victorians with aircraft and antibiotics.

On preview: I want to hear more about the career of Top Secret Clarence.
posted by Leon at 7:51 AM on December 20, 2004

adrober, you wouldn't by any chance be doing this for the Sloan Foundation Grant, would you?

If you aren't, then I would highly recommend searching for items related to that, as it's an entire program devoted to non-fantasy science writing.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:51 AM on December 20, 2004

There's a lot to choose from.

Nanotechology stories pretty much write themselves, although I have yet to read a good one. Its usually "oh my god, its gotten out of control!!"

AI. Look up Cog and umm Psych? These are two famous AI projects. You can extrapolate from there.

Longevity is pretty hot now. It might be a challenge to write about this as it doesnt lend itself to much of a story considering where its at right now. I guess a good writer can pull it off.

Proto-humans, like the "hobbits" which just made the news. Dialogue might be a problem.

You might want to check out some back issues or the web pages of Popular Science, Scientific American, etc.
posted by skallas at 9:15 AM on December 20, 2004

The next week, NASA asked him to apply for top secret Clarence.

For a moment I wondered whether he's stumbled on the top secret Project Capra. That would certainly make NASA's funding worthwhile.
posted by biffa at 10:33 AM on December 20, 2004

Go to your local library and look through back issues of New Scientist and Scientific American.

Discover magazine should also be available at your local library; it's well written and full of interesting stories. You might start with the January 2004 issue, on the top 100 science stories for 2003. (I guarantee that you'll never have heard of at least half of these, and you may well wonder why newspapers don't regularly cover such fascinating topics.)

Or just buy the current copy at a newstand, and skim at your leisure.
posted by WestCoaster at 10:47 AM on December 20, 2004

XQUZYPHYR---you hit the nail on the head; this is for Sloan, and I think all these ideas are really interesting--I'll have to type many of them into Google since I don't know much about any of them. But thanks everyone! If my movie gets made, I'll invite you to the premiere.
posted by adrober at 4:20 PM on December 20, 2004