Every alien species and ecosystem in science fiction is by definition purely speculative. For the story to work the author makes it all up. This in itself is not Bad Biology™ in the same vein as Phake Physics™. In Phake Physics™, the author allows one or two impossible technologies or phenomena to exist such as Faster Than Light (FTL) travel or communications to allow the story to unfold as s/he wishes. It is entirely possible to write good Sci-Fi w/o violating the known laws of physics. To be sure, it puts serious constraints upon the storyline, but as a number of authors have shown, it is possible and still have a great story. I myself did this in my two published Sci-Fi novels. But even really solid writers of Sci-Fi who work to avoid too much Phake Physic™ very often blow it when it comes to biology, leading to Bad Biology™.
Perhaps some examples will help elucidate?
Larry Niven was one those authors who wrote hard sci-fi, sometimes allowing one or two impossible technologies, but otherwise kept to real physics. But in one of his story lines, he introduces the concept of the Ring World, an artificial habitat that literally girds a star with a ring that rotates faster than its orbital distance would dictate to create a centrifugal force to mimic gravity. But in so doing, he failed to note that such an object would be unstable. He got mocked and heckled for it by students at MIT who had performed the analysis. In response, Niven wrote a novel of a Smoke Ring around a star, in which a gas giant was leaking atmosphere sufficient to create a ring of gas in its orbital wake. Presumably, other planets in orbit around the star would “shepherd” the gas to contain it in the ring. All of this is solid astronomical physics.
But Larry Niven, despite having a minor in psychology, was primarily educated as a mathematician, not a biologist. When he very imaginatively populated his smoke ring with “integral trees”, a nod to his educational background, he correctly noted that there would be a differential orbital velocity of the gas leading to the tall/long trees experiencing tidal forces to align the trees along a radial from the parent star and also differential winds at the ends of the tree. So far, so good. But the odd Bad Biology™ phenomena was his imagined solution to the problem that was bound to occasionally occur in which the tree would venture too far from the densest region of the smoke ring, past the tree line so to speak. But his trees did a very UNLIKELY thing to save themselves, involving a symbiotic relationship with an insect like species that cut the trees in half, sacrificing half the tree to save the other half.
Why is this Bad Biology™, because evolution does not find the most complicated solution, but the most likely at each step along the way. Long before a plant would have evolved to be a tall tree, it would be a smaller plant, one that would have evolved far less expensive means of maintaining its position in the smoke ring, such as curling up its leaves on one end of the tree to cause differential drag in the differential wind to pull it back to denser air. Admittedly, this wouldn’t have allowed for as dramatic loss of human life as the poor souls who were on the wrong end of the tree in Niven’s story, but it would have been better biology.
Another example of Bad Biology™ I find even more egregious are the sand worms in Herbert’s Dune. A basic tenet of ecosystems is that each level lower in food chain must have a much larger total biomass than the one above. This is basic. Yet Herbert violates it in his description of Arrakis as a desert of mostly parched sand dunes, no vegetation. Quite simply, a single sand worm uses more energy traveling through the sand hunting for a single meal, than it could possibly get from such a meal, no lush vegetation to feed the thousands of large herbivores that such an apex predator would need to feed upon. Herbert has literally flipped the biomass pyramid on its head.
In Avatar, the ecosystem could not possibly have evolved naturally as described… as I’ve previously written about. It would have to have been a genetically engineered ecosystem including the intelligent “natives”, yet the film never once discusses this obvious issue.
In my own writing, having a very strong background in both physics and biology, I have sought to avoid such mistakes.
After a long career in Silicon Valley high tech, one would expect to have many amusing and not so amusing anecdotes. For a woman in tech, one also experiences a great deal of negative events due to tech bro misogyny. Before you claim they don’t happen, read on. Each of these events was real.
The summer of 1976, I’m looking for a job and see an ad for an entry level lab assistant at a small bio-tech start-up company. I apply… and then never hear back. I call the company to follow-up. The woman I reach then tells me, “Oh, that job is reserved for a man.” This is a shocking admission given that such a practice had been unlawful since 1964’s Equal Opportunity Act was passed. I told the woman as much and politely ‘demanded’ an interview which was granted. During the interview, the man tries to justify the male only requirement saying that the job requires one to lift heavy lab trays. I retort, “How much do you think a child weighs? And the lab tray isn’t squirming!” Several months pass and I get a rejection letter stating that they had filled the position with a young man who was more “qualified”.
It was a decade later that I learned that the term “qualified” was Human Relations code for someone with a penis.
–
in the mid-80s, I get a letter from a law firm telling me that I’m eligible for a payout from a lawsuit filed against a very large high tech company I had applied at. It turns out that the company had knowingly discriminated against women in tech and managerial position hiring. I had never even gotten an interview.
–
I had read an article that expounded on an experiment in which identical resumes had been sent out, half with a man’s name, and half with a woman’s name. The ones with a man’s name got many more calls for interviews. As an experience technologist and supervisor, looking for a new job, I saw an opportunity to test this for myself. I sent out at random two different versions of my resume, identical in ever way save that half use my name, “Candice H. Brown” (this was before I met my husband), the other half used intitials “C. H. Brown”. Sure enough, C.H. Brown got a lot more calls for interviews. But one of those phone calls was quite revealing.
“Hello, Brown Residence”
“May I speak with your husband?”
“I’m not married.”
“Ummm… I’m trying to reach C. H. Brown…”
“This is she.”
A moment of stunned silence then… Click, line goes dead.
–
I’m interviewing at a semiconductor company for a hands-on managerial job wearing an expensive skirted business suit and heels. The hiring manager who is definitely taller than 6′ quick marches toward where he says he will conduct the interview, leaving me in his wake running to keep up, knowing that my 5’7″ shorter legs and hobbled by those heels made it difficult and embarrassing to do so. He then takes a short-cut through a plumbing chase behind a clean room, filled with pipes of fluids, gasses, and chemical tanks as an obstacle course, still at a quick march. Having been in such chases many times before, I manage, barely, to keep up. In his office, he tries to trip me up with trick questions regarding tech. But most egregiously, he asks me, “How many days a month are you sick?” For those not quick to understand this question, he is asking me how many days a month I’m likely to be having my period and making the assumption that that will interfere with my work productivity. Later, when I tell the woman in HR that I had no more interest in the position, that I would not willingly work for that man and why, she literally blanched white.
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I’m interviewing for a managerial job at a large very well known computer company. I can tell the people I would be reporting to were favorably impressed and would likely hire me. Then I get an interview with a few of the engineers who would be reporting to me should I take the job. It became VERY clear that they were all tech bros and sneered at the idea of reporting to a woman. I declined the opportunity. A manager who does not have the respect of their subordinates will not succeed.
–
I’m interviewing for a job in a small shop when the manager blurts out, “You’re quite accomplished – for a woman.” End of interview.
Prof. Imus Crank had cornered several graduate students in the hallway of the Universe City’s cosmology department. None of them were his students, but the three students had been warned that they had to be polite to Dr. Crank by their advisors, given that Dr. Crank’s tenure protected him from all administrative efforts to have him removed from his post as the head of the department.
“So, it is obvious that the Big Bang is simply a result of the Big Rip that came before it and will happen again until all the dark energy that drives it is exhausted. As dark energy drives space time expansion to the Big Rip, the quantum vacuum fluctuations will generate virtual pairs of subatomic particles which will then be ripped apart from each other, failing to self-annihilate, gaining energy and mass from the very dark energy driving the space time expansion. They will still find other subatomic particles to combine with and annihilate, but now they will release high energy gamma photos which will then be converted to stable baryonic matter, populating the next expansive big bang”.
As he wound down in his explication on hallway whiteboard, the students quietly slipped away unnoticed, with knowing smirks.
Planet hunting used to focus on our own solar system. But since 1995, planet hunters have been finding planets orbiting other stars, called exoplanets. But doing so isn’t easy. There are five ways to find planets:
5 Ways to Find a Planet
Radial Velocity. Watching for Wobble. 1086 planets discovered.
Transit. Searching for Shadows. 4163 planets discovered.
Direct Imaging. Taking Pictures. 68 planets discovered.
Gravitational Microlensing. Light in a Gravity Lens. 210 planets discovered.
All of them work best on big planets, as in gas giants, in close orbits with their star. Thus, most of the exoplanets discovered so far have been gas giants that are close to their star. A few terrestrial (rocky) exoplanets have found in the habitable zone of their star. But those few have mostly been found around smaller red dwarf stars. It’s important to note that with current astronomic instruments, finding moons in orbit around gas giants isn’t really possible.
There is a natural tendency to assume that what we observe is what exists. Thus, science fiction writers tended to model their imagined star systems based on our own. But since 1995, sci-fi writers have had knowledge of other exoplanets. Thus, it was inevitable that they would start to imagine systems more like those being discovered by the planet hunters. And, indeed, according to a recent study, this has occurred.
However, keep that important note I mentioned earlier in mind. Using our current list of exoplanets may mislead sci-fi writers. Our system has LOTS of moons, some almost as big as the Earth. We have not yet seen such in other systems. But if our system is any guide, in a Bayesian way, there may be lots of them in other systems. This is why I felt, as I was thinking about the issue, that in the decades and centuries to come, we would discover this to be true. And given that they are likely to out number singletons or double planets (like our Earth/Moon or more accurately, Terra/Luna), I imagined that the best candidates for future terraforming and colonization would be “moons” orbiting smaller gas giants in the habitable zones of G type stars.
This is important. Our ecosystems here on Earth have evolved to thrive on a world with a rotational period of roughly 24 hours, and an orbital period of roughly 8760 hours. The star needs to be a G class star so that the habitable zone would give a planet an orbit of roughly the right length. Get too far away from that and it may not thrive or even survive. So, in my first novel, All The Stars Are Suns, there was a search for such exomoons having such characteristics. In my second novel, Ravens Rook, I set the story in one such G class star system with three worlds in orbit around a small gas giant.
Puranen, E. J., Finer, E., Helling, C. and Smith, V. A. (2024). Science fiction media representations of exoplanets: portrayals of changing astronomical discoveries JCOM 23(01), A04. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.23010204
In the movies and in TV shows, the film script calls for an “establishing shot” to tell the viewer where or when the action following takes place. For night scenes, its almost always a full moon. Statistically speaking, since a full moon only occurs once every twenty nine and a half days, it should only be full one out of thirty or so times. But, it’s always a full moon. It would be “ok” if the film was about a werewolf or a serial killer who only stalks their prey on the full moon, but that’s not the case for most of these instances. It might even be “ok” if it weren’t that the film then shows the same full moon for events that happen a week later in the story. Say what? The moon should then be a half waning moon only just rising around midnight. But no, it’s still a full moon. As though to really drive the astronomically knowledgeable viewer like me crazy, sometimes the image is mirrored, flipped right to left. It is instantly glaringly, recognizably, wrong and pulls one out of the story.
This isn’t the only astonomical sin film makers make. Another is found in the one genre that one would think that the filmakers would have science advisors to keep them from making, Science Fiction. How many times have you seen our intrepid space farers looking out a view screen of their space ship out in interplanetary space or just in orbit around Earth, at our own star, the sun, and it is presented as yellow? Wrong! Our star is white in space.
The reason we see the sun as yellow down here on the ground is the same reason that the sky may be blue, Raleigh Scattering. Our atmosphere differentially scatters shorter wavelengths, those toward the blue, more than the long wavelengths. So, looking up at the sun, much of the blue light of the normally white star is scattered away to make the sky blue, leaving its color complement, yellow light. At sunset and sunrise, the light goes through even more atmosphere at the slant angle, scattering even more light turning the sun orange or even red. But in space, that star, our sun, is pure white in a black sky with no visible stars. The stars being washed out by the glare.
Another mistake made so often in SciFi films and TV shows is showing several large moons in the sky of some alien world. NO. Just no. Such a system would not be possible because it would not be stable. Another silly error is showing a large planet, perhaps because the alien world is a “moon” of that planet, with a ring tilted so as to be easily visible. Again, wrong. Consider our own system’s famous ringed planet Saturn. All of its “moons” are in the exact same plane as the ring. This is the most likely configuration on all such worlds. The means, at best, one might see the ring, not as tilted one, but as a straight line on either side of the planet, and only under special circumstances where the ring is backlit as the planet eclipses the star, which would only happen on the equinoxes of the planet.
I can’t tell you how often a SciFi film, or even a book, fails to keep track of the astronomical events in its sky such that it makes sense over the course of events in the story. For myself, when I wrote Raven’s Rook, I took extraordinary care to keep track of the local calendar and the astronomical ephemeris and to describe the sky accurately to that ephemeris, right down the red colored sun at sunrise through its very thick atmosphere.
Calling scientists Crazy is over the top… especially when trying to develop technology to revive extinct species that humans killed off. It just seems so… evil. What is driving him, and indeed so many of these Xtian evangelists to decry such efforts? Could it be that they hate the idea that humanity can take responsibility for our actions and reverse the damage? That science and biological technology is doing it and not “thoughts and prayers?”
If we are to repair the damage we are doing with over-hunting, over-fishing, habitat destruction, and climate change, we will NEED this technology.
And if we are to go to the stars, as we must, we will need to have exactly this kind of technology in our “seed ships” to resurrect not only the species needed to estabilish viable and stable ecosystems on bio-terraformed worlds, but to resurrect US!
This technology is what I wrote about in my two Sci-Fi novels, All The Stars Are Suns and Raven’s Rook. And this religious resistance to it is exactly what I describe in the first novel.
Science Fiction should be the one genre where writers can take bold stands. But this past year, Worldcon was held in China and the Hugo Awards committee did the unthinkable, censoring the work of authors who wrote about China by pulling their works from consideration. This wasn’t even with China’s interference, but voluntary, showing the world how self-censorship works. Instead of standing up for authors, they let us down.
My first novel, All The Stars Are Suns is partially set in China, two hundred years from now. Would my book have been censored, pulled from consideration, based on this alone?
But if I was, this would be my statement of where I stand on the issues. As a Citizen of the United States, we all have the right to state our opinions and positions without fear of government prosecution or persecution. If more people took the time to think through their positions and stated them clearly, there might be less political strife. Or at least, less vitriolic name calling. And who knows… if people like my thinking, maybe we can get our representatives to actually support them and craft legislation that does as well.
Politicians often post photos of themselves with their families, especially men, proving that they are ‘family men’, that is to say, that they are not gay, that they have sex with a woman and have sired 2.5 children. The photo often includes a dog or two, never a cat… a cat is seen as what gay men keep as pets. So, here’s my family photo, with my husband Jeff and daughter Liz with our dog, Reese, even though I’m not officially running for office, and I’m definitively not a straight man with a wife.
Bodily Autonomy and Medical Rights
The recent US Supreme Court has been making extremely bad decisions lately, the worse being Dobbs, which over turned Roe v Wade, throwing the lives and medical rights of women into chaos. I support a woman’s right to control her body and to her right to medical privacy, w/o reservation. This means I will fight any effort to curtail those rights and support legislation to guarantee access to abortion services as well as fertility services.
This last includes the rights for women who chose to be ova donors and or gestational surrogates, along with the rights of LGBT people to access these women’s services in family planning. I support changes in legislation to protect the rights of families who chose this route to building their families, along with changes to protect adoptive families from anti-LGBT discrimination.
A number of states have been attacking transsexuals and their right to access medical care. I support transsexuals of all ages access to medical care as they see fit, in consultation with their caregivers and medical providers. Hypocritically, those very same states (and party) have been just fine with allowing unwanted surgeries on intersex infants, long before they can give any kind of consent, informed or not, because, “God Forbid” that their parents and other adults should be uncomfortable with their confusing genitalia. Intersex children must be protected from these surgeries until they are of an age when they can make their own desires and needs known.
Housing Policy
We have seen home prices soar beyond the means of most young families and rents climbing such that most working adults take-home pay goes to pay it. Some find it impossible to pay it have have become homeless, living in cars or tents. Housing vouchers are a band-aid that only further drives rents upward. We need to encourage more housing construction. But there are other things we could be doing to help ease the problem. First, eliminate zoning laws that prohibit boarding houses. This will allow many young single people to live in decent rooms and be fed from the operators kitchen. Next, change zoning and tax laws to discourage the wealthy from hoarding housing in the form of second homes and short-term rentals. There are far more second homes than there are homeless in America.
Parents have the right to use their OWN money to educate their child in a private school if they so wish, but do NOT have a right to steal funds from public school systems through vouchers. I will fight any effort to divert funds from public schools via such.
Our school funding and administration systems are broken in many cases and fundamentally unfair. Wealthy communities have far better schools that poor ones due to the structure of using local tax bases. Funding should be flat fair, either on a statewide or on a national basis.
Special needs education needs funding, including the special needs of Gifted students. However, policies must be put into place to ensure that parents, or even teachers, do not “game” the system to take seats in limited gifted programs. On the flip side, gifted education programs must be REAL, not just so called “enrichment” programs that cheat actual gifted students of their needed curricula.
School curricula needs to be improved, and basic standards set. The problem with Common Core was that it didn’t go far enough, especially at the secondary school level, as it ignored science and history, two subjects that are essential for citizenship in a modern democratic society.
Secondary schools (High Schools) should NOT be boot camps for the military, as that is what Physical Education (P.E.) and sports is really all about. Schools should be schools, not sports clubs. Families that wish their children to participate in sports may use their own funds to support private sports clubs. The public taxpayer should not be forced to do so. Freed from having to spend such a large percentage of their budget on P.E. and after school sports coaches and infrastructure, they can allocate more resources and limited student time for academic subjects.
The recent return of the atavistic and nostalgic emphasis on cursive writing should be reversed. Block printing is needed and sufficient in our modern world. Typing is the skill that is most useful means of composing long form text for nearly all needs as an adult. The time spent learning cursive writing is time stolen from other subjects. As adults, they will soon abandon cursive as not useful to them.
The 2nd Amendment and the NRA has been Hijacked by the Gun Manufacturers. Until the US Supreme Court got it badly wrong in Hiller; it was understood by Originalists that the 2nd Amendment was about the rights of the STATES to form “well regulated militia”. When it was written, it was understood that a local militia was a law enforcement organization. As originally written the US Constitution could have been interpreted to say that only the Federal government had the right to form such. The 2nd Amendment thus fixed it so that the States, and by extension, via state laws, local governments like cities and counties, could also form armed law enforcement units. The 2nd was NEVER about the right of random individuals to arm themselves with military weapons of war.
Think.
At no time has there been an unfettered right to own artillery pieces or functioning bomber or fighter aircraft, complete with munitions. It’s not about random nut cases having the right to own functioning anti-tank rockets, or to place anti-personnel mines in one’s yard to ward of intruders. Allowing random nuts to own AR-15 rifles is NOT a right to form a militia of one member. And it certainly is NOT a “well regulated militia” (read: law enforcement organization).
Certain dangerous people should never be allowed access to guns of any type, thus the need for a well funded and enforced background check system at the Federal level. And military weapons like the AR-15, should NEVER be in the hands of the public. But it may be too late to stop them all, given how many are already in circulation. Thus, I support laws that limit their use save on regulated ranges by taxing ammunition, save that used on a sanctioned range or hunting ground, with each round fired accounted for, at an enormous rate… perhaps has high as $1,000 per cartridge, depending upon caliber and propellant load. Anyone buying more than is needed to load a small magazine of a pistol for registered self-defense hand-guns would set off red-flags and an investigation. Manufacture of disapproved weapons must be outlawed and any manufacturer trying to skirt the laws regarding them should face dissolution of the firm and heavy fines, as directed by the court.
Armed Services Reform
There has long been a problem with inter-service rivalries in the US Armed Services. There has also been some discussion about eliminating the Marines, reallocating their members to either the Navy or the Army as they best fit. However, instead of moving in that direction, the Air Force was split in two to form yet another unnecessary branch risibly called the Space Force and its members “Guardians”. It should be reversed post haste, along with disbanding the Marines. The Coast Guard and Navy should be merged as they are redundant. This will reduce inter-service issues and produce a better, more unified command structure. It will also reduce costs as separate bases will no longer be needed.
Foreign Relations
The world is a complex place with many players with conflicts and alliances in various states of seriousness and flux. It is important that the US State Department, the Armed Services Committees, and the Joint Chiefs of staff have the best intelligence we can provide to advise our policing making on a constant basis. However, there are some issues that have been more slow moving because of history, etc. These should be addressed.
Cuba
Is is long past time the US normalized relations with Cuba. If we can have China as a major trading partner with full diplomatic relations, we can certainly do so with Cuba.
Taiwan
The US, along with several other Western Pacific nations, must make it clear to China that aggression again Taiwan will not be tolerated. The Taiwanese people alone can decide their future relations with China.
North Korea
The US, in partnership with South Korea, must maintain vigilance against N. Korean aggression.
Russia
Russia is at war. Not only at war with Ukraine, but at war with the rest of Europe and their allies, including the United States. Their goal is revanchist, to recreate the Russian Empire which controlled at several points in history, all of Eastern Europe and half of Poland. The United Nations was formed with the goal of ending wars of conquest. The US must remain fully engaged with NATO against Russia’s expansionism. The US must support Ukraine with arms and intelligence. We cannot pretend that Russia is not already at war with the United States in an active Cool War whose strategic aims are social and economic disruption to force us to withdraw from Europe. The US must respond with the goal of both containment and withdrawal from Eastern Europe, all of Ukraine including Crimea, Moldova, Belarus, and Georgia.
Iran
Iran is in a cool war with the West, supplying proxies with weapons with which to disrupt supply lines, most particularly by attacking shipping in the Red Sea. The US and UK have responded appropriately to protect those shipping lanes. However, more diplomatic pressure should be brought to bear on other naval powers to protect shipping in the region. In addition, more economic pressure must be applied to Iran itself to counter their cool war aims.
For the past several years, I have been getting queries from head hunters, recruiters, for various positions, most of which are wildly inappropriately too low for my experience. Today, I got yet another from a head hunter for an Administrative Assistant position. I’ve even been sent such notices from a computerized system from website for those looking for jobs at start-ups. I have a theory about this.
My profile on these sites lists that I was CEO of two start-ups. But automated systems can’t actually UNDERSTAND text. My theory is that such systems do note that I have a female coded first name, “Candice”. And then see the key word “CEO” paired with such a woman’s name and from the machine learning samples make the leap and automatically associate “female” + “CEO” = “Administrative Assistant to the CEO” even when that is clearly NOT in the text.
A year ago, I got angry enough about it that I wrote to the database manager of the start-up related firm. He apologized and said that they would fix it. But a few weeks later, the same thing happened again. Their system, supposedly very good AI, still made the same association.
I have wondered. Do men listing their experience as CEO get this same treatment?
The recent execution of a man in Alabama using “nitrogen hypoxia” as set off a slew of bad faith and/or bad science arguments about this new “heinous” “experimental” method. Let’s start off by fully acknowledging that one could have legal and/or moral objections to any judicial killing. I know that I personally am of two minds about the subject. But this essay isn’t about that. It is about the SCIENCE and the HUMANENESS of the method.
Air is ~80% nitrogen and ~20 oxygen. We breath it all of the time. This new method is the single most HUMANE method one could use. It involved using air that has no oxygen. The nitrogen is the same nitrogen that NATURALLY occurs in the air we breath every moment of our lives. But with no oxygen, the brain first gets sleepy, then shuts down… and a few minutes later, dies. There is NO pain. No panic. Just going to sleep… and staying that way.
But opponents of the death penalty are playing on ignorance of the above, implying that somehow nitrogen is some new and painful poison, thus making this method of execution “cruel and unusual”. It is nothing of the sort.
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