Inner Space and Outer Thoughts: Speculative Fiction from Caltech and JPL Authors
[Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign thank you foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign welcome to this author reading and Q a and celebration of caltech's first science fiction Anthology Inner Space and outer thoughts speculative fiction from Caltech and JPL authors edited by caltech's creative writing Club techlet I'm Rachel Kinsel a Caltech PhD candidate in Biochemistry and molecular biophysics recently defended and officially graduating in June I'm also the editor-in-chief of this Anthology and author of two contributed stories featuring neuroscientist protagonists entitled teaspoons and the Bittersweet magic of neuroplasticity first I would like to thank my fellow editors and all of our authors who donated their stories generously to this project to support the club I'd also like to thank our sponsors caltech's Office of the President the graduate student council and the student investment fund for making the book and this event possible when I started my Graduate Studies at Caltech I was surprised to find that there was no creative writing Club so I sent out an email blast to my fellow students to see if anyone was interested in starting one we began as a group of about 15 who got together once a month for collaborative writing peer critique and Domino's Pizza in the spring of 2020 at the start of the covid-19 pandemic some of us experimentalists found ourselves stuck at home and so we decided to use the extra time to start creating caltech's first anthology of Science Fiction I didn't know what to expect when we sent out the call for submissions but it turned out that scientists write really unique and interesting science fiction I'd never read anything like it so here we are three years later an inner space and outer thoughts has finally come into the world this book is organized into five sections with different themes reflecting the scientific diversity of Caltech itself the first section the science of life and the life of science contains stories about biology bioengineering and stories featuring biologist protagonists Inner Space has stories about the Mind Ai and the nature of Consciousness such as brain bridging by Patrick house and Christoph Koch the chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for brain science in Seattle and a former professor of biology and Engineering here at Caltech the Anthology section life after Tech explores the influence of Technology on society in the not so distant future and through the turtle pond includes fantasy stories grounded in science such as a thousand thousand Pages which features a magic system based on dark photons and is written by a postdoctoral scholar of Theodore theoretical particle physics here at Caltech Alec savarama Krishnan but what would a book of stories from Caltech and JPL authors be without a section dedicated to astronomy and space for that I will read a brief excerpt of the book's introduction since its Inception in the 1930s jpl's many groundbreaking engineering advances and space missions have been a source of inspiration for science fiction authors throughout the world in 1979 Voyager images revealed active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon this led to speculation of subsurface oceans and a revolution in thinking about habitability in the solar system and continues to drive science Mission planning today JPL scientists engineered designs that enabled Rovers to survive the seven minutes of Terror entry descent and Landing sequence and arrive safely on Mars from controlled thrusters for Viking in 1976 to the airbag soft Landing technique employed for Pathfinder in 1997 to the sky crane maneuver used for curiosity in 2012 and again for perseverance in 2021. in the Anthology section outer thoughts Caltech and GPL scientists and staff along with former Caltech student Larry Niven use fiction instead of Rovers to explore the universe and get to know its many life forms the book concludes with the conclusion of the universe itself in Olivia Pardo's degenerates a hopeful tale of an intelligent machine tasked with transmitting our universe's knowledge into the background radiation of the next universe this Anthology contains stories diverse and scientific theme and even in genre some were conceived in a conventional word processor While others first lines were scribbled in the margin of a laboratory notebook some of the authors are full-time writers While others juggle their beloved Hobby and research careers but all of these stories were inspired in some way by what their authors learned during their time at Caltech or JPL today you'll hear nine of the authors share about their stories and the science behind them our first reader is s b Divya the Hugo and nebula nominated author of meru and machine hood and a recent nebula finalist for her novelet two hands wrapped in gold her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and she is a former editor of Escape pod the weekly Science Fiction podcast Divya holds degrees in computational neuroscience and Signal processing she worked for 20 years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author born in pondicherry India Divya now resides in Southern California with her spouse child and two fur babies as a Caltech Alum bs96 she has been a wonderful mentor to the members of the techlet creative writing Club in an interview for caltex Tucker magazine Divya once said speculative fiction is really constructed in the same way that a science experiment is we come up with a hypothesis we test that hypothesis through narrative analyze it and present our conclusion all as part of the storytelling process every speculative fiction author is a scientist in the lab of their own head you can learn more about her at www.sbw.com or on Twitter as at devious tweets today Divya will be reading from her story microbiota and the masses a love story please join me in welcoming to the stage SB Divia [Applause] um good evening everyone thank you Rachel so much for the kind introduction um tonight I'm going to read a sample from the beginning of my contribution to the Anthology and then I'll speak a little bit about what inspired the story and my process microbiota and the masses a love story the sense of Earth loam pollen compost the exhalation of leaves permeated the inside of Moana shivaram's airtight home she stood near the southeast corner and misted the novice bromeliads the epiphytes clutched the trunk of an elephant ear tree its canopy stretching up to the clear smart window paned roof and shading everything below Moana whispered to the plants I must hear little babies you're safe with me but you must grow those roots with her isolated life these would be her only children she walked Barefoot to the sunny Citrus Grove in the western side of the house the soil beneath her feet changed from cool and moist to hard and gritty EBS buzzed among the flowers she hummed in harmony a carnatic love song about two birds that was a century old the heady perfume of orange and lime blossoms filled her up and made her blood sing along this was home this and not the traditional Jasmine and rose gardens of Bangalore this where her eyes didn't water nor her nose itch diffuse sunlight shown through the smart Windows paneling the walls one rectangle stuck out like a cloudy diamond in an otherwise glittering pendant Moanna pulled her tablet from her pocket brought up the diagnostic software Red Letters delivered bad news faults in the air and light filters the latter mattered little the plants would get enough Sun from the functional pains the former though meant that outside air had infiltrated the house moana's throat closed her heart raced stay calm but her hands wouldn't listen clutching each other fingers twisting like Vines around branches she couldn't breathe all those microbes she imagined them invading her sanctum those wriggly single-celled prokaryotes she shuddered dropped to the ground lay prone her cheek touched beloved dirt safe dirt inhale exhale again she tilted her face lowered her tongue and licked the potent Esters of her domestic biome worked their magic taking over the hamster wheels in her brain and applying the brakes her hands unclenched shoulder blades fell back heart slowed stupid brain we can deal with this the EBS agreed yes yes yes they sang oena went to her Supply Closet the air filter mask inside looked like an insectoid alien tinted plastic across the eyes and three jutting cylinders over the mouth and nose areas Moana pulled it on the Clean Air lacked the comforting odors of home but at least she was protected she sealed the offending window pane with heavy plastic and duct tape then rolled the sensor cart over good all Air now flowed from the inside out as it should she sent a message to Smart Windows Incorporated requesting a repair person and marking the issue urgent and if you want to find out what happens next you'll have to read it in the anthology so most of my stories begin with a what if question which is long storied in the world of speculative fiction in this case the question in my mind was what if you could live in a sealed house that produced the perfect microbiome for your body's health from there I started to think about who would live in this house and why they would want to and I came up with this character with an autoimmune deficiency now for the record I'm going to say that I wrote the story in 2016 so four years before the pandemic and before the entire world understood what it means to isolate for their protection at the time I was thinking so many people are potentially vulnerable and that would be a good reason for this character to need an isolated sealed environment another thing I was thinking about as I was researching the story is phytor remediation and bioremediation which are ways of using plants and microbes to clean up pollution in our environment as I was researching this it helped me develop the plot of the story in some of the twists and turns and without giving too much away I'll say that the fresh water supplies and lakes around Bangalore are quite polluted from industrial runoff and pesticides and so bioremediation seems like a great way to potentially make these bodies of water safe for people to drink but also if you are living in a sealed contained environment you're going to need ways to deal with your own waste or else find ways to pump it out I really enjoy trying to get as many details as I can correct even though this is fiction I am making things up but it's nice to get the science that bears upon reality as accurate as I can so I called upon my network of friends especially my Caltech alumni and I asked if anybody knew someone who's working in these fields and lo and behold people hooked me up with a couple of environmental Engineers they were kind enough to read the story they pointed out some simple errors I'd made as well as some more complex ones I was really fascinated by Archaea and I was hoping to use those somewhere in the in the story but they pointed out that archaic do not live in fresh water only salt water and I didn't want to move my story to a coastal location so so I went with flagobacterium spliced in with um candida jeans now I have heard people say that science fiction is often very dry especially you know quote unquote hard science fiction that's based in science and I wanted to show that it doesn't have to be that it can be lyrical and a great example and a person who's writing I was inspired by shortly before I drafted this is the writer Alice B Sheldon who wrote Under the pseudonym James tiptree Jr because the time she was writing many people thought that women Couldn't Write science fiction and she definitely proved them wrong we've come a long way since then but maybe not as far as you might think about five years ago someone came up to me at a convention and told me that he didn't usually buy science fiction from women but he was very glad he picked up my book and it was quite good so I thanked him for the compliment even though it felt a little backhanded um but I'm very glad in this Anthology to see that we have contributors of all genders and also on this campus that we have reached much more Equitable distributions while I was here during my undergraduate I studied physics and astronomy initially and then I switched to computational Neuroscience so I got a pretty broad exposure to different subjects which allows me to comfortably as they say discover a little knowledge which is a little dangerous thing do a lot of research read a lot of abstracts but more importantly I think The Wider you cast your net the more interesting the ideas that will spark in the imagination I don't think you have to have a science or technical background to write good science fiction I know plenty of authors who don't but that said all stories are shaped by an individual's experience which means that scientists and Engineers bring their unique experiences to their writing and I hope to see a lot more of these kinds of crossover projects between different types of creatives both those doing research in the labs and those writing interesting stories and with that thank you so much for techlet for inviting me to this contribution and all of you for attending tonight [Applause] thank you and give you a story again is microbiota and the mass is a love story so if you want to read the end you'll have to check out the book all right um next I would like to welcome one of my fellow Anthology editors and one of the first members of the chocolate Club Sam Clemens Sam will read an excerpt imagining a world where science and engineering have removed the boundary between the biological and the mechanical and have bent nature to one man's will Sam graduated from Caltech two years ago with a doctorate in bioengineering and now writes software to support biological research at Illumina you can find him on Twitter as at Clements Sam please welcome Sam Clemons [Applause] hello everybody thank you for coming I'm going to read an excerpt from un's second law of evolutionary design when the stories are contributed for that can lead a little bit of context to understand what's going on in this story our protagonist is a con man who's trying to steal valuable data from a clone sorry a clan of eccentric clones called The xiangs Who live on their own world that they built from scratch to serve their will at this point in the story Silas has survived his first critical encounter with this Youngs he has disguised himself as one of their clones so they don't know he is among them and he's been assigned to a Hut in the forest where he used to wait until he summoned again for his second encounter I tried passing time by meditating over Yuen Sue's laws and malabon's laws and the four gradient laws of free energy and all the other textbook theorems of evolutionary design but that hardly kept me occupied for more than a couple of hours eventually I just wandered into the forest and opened myself to its coastlines though it appeared quiet to eyes and ears the forest teamed with coastlines emanating from insects and other small animals mostly I tried pinging some with access requests many actively refused citing insufficient privileges a few opened themselves to me a swollen shimmering green beetle offered a dozen audio visual records of the forest annotated with timestamps and local census data a line of worker ants offered an API for resculpting the local soil a little black fly with big ground Wings turned out to be an access interface for a network of relay Bots I took the green beetles recordings and threw away everything but the Census Data it gave me some sense of the true scale of xiang's bioengineering project I counted 106 species 19 species of trees and shrubs 17 soil fungi 37 vertebrates 60 odd worms and just shy of 8 000 soil bacteria and other small single-celled organisms at roughly a couple billion base pairs of DNA for each animal species and a few million for each microbes that was more than a trillion bases of DNA in total of course most of that would hardly be modified maybe 99 so that only represented some 10 billion bases of actively modified engineer genetic material by a Shear nucleotide count it was equivalent to Xiang creating two or three new vertebrate species from scratch and that was just what Xiang put in this one Valley sometimes I forgot just how much time the songs had at their disposal I didn't particularly feel like contributing to this planet's biodiversity with my own spare time instead I gave a passing fly a haiku stolen from xiang's World at Yellow River the Haiku spread slowly a red squirrel skittered across a tree trunk to look at me and I wondered if they'd appreciated my poetry I spent the rest of the evening watching the Haiku Bounce Around the local network before petering out this wasn't just Idol grandiosity mind you yes writing poetry and watching it disperse artfully among the songbirds was good cover but more importantly I needed to see for myself how injected code would spread through xiang's server Network it would Doom so how does this relate to where we are now today as a graduate student here at Caltech up until a few years ago I worked in the laboratory of Richard Murray and there we did work that we called synthetic biology and that's really the science of our first steps towards the world described in this story now usually synthetic biologists think about making engineered organisms that do useful or interesting things that will we were used in either research or industrial production these would be things I would live in Vats or in Petri dishes something like that a few synthetic biologists have ventured into more field Deployable engineered organisms we've made things like uh biosensors so these would be organisms that you could seed in nature in a forest that would act as sort of canaries in the coal mine and tell us if something was wrong and there have been a couple of even more ambitious efforts that have been begun um Kevin edsfeld's Lab at MIT is a good example of this they're making mosquitoes of the species that carry malaria that are engineered with Gene drives that will drive maleness through the population and eventually render the species extinct or this is the plan so that's not particularly close yet to xiang's world but it is the first steps um also if you showed most synthetic biologists this story and asked is this what you're trying to make I think most would say no that's not the goal most scientists do love our biosphere and don't want to destroy it and override it with something completely new and they may not even want to risk that by releasing too much into the wild that said none of those kinds of programs or really any individual thing described in this book are verboten or taboo or forbidden though in some places they may be illegal but that leaves us in a bit of an awkward spot as a field where we don't quite know what we're driving for we know that we don't want to go too far but we also know that there are things we would like to do in our environment it would be useful for instance to have sensors in our environment that could detect environmental disturbances or new diseases proactively before they start infecting humans um it would be useful to have engineered constructs in the wild that can resist our perturbations and keep natural systems balanced or even just things we can put out there that will make the world safer for us to interfere to interface with to protect them from us so on that note I would suggest if there are any of you out there who are wondering what might be good points of Leverage to change the future what are what are questions you could input your own work into I think one important question is is xiang's world the kind of world we want to try to create or is it the kind of world we want to try to avoid what parts of it do we want to use and try to build ourselves and what parts of that world should we perhaps never make on Earth consider it thank you thank you Sam uh by the way Sam is brilliant at writing aliens um so you should check out some of his upcoming work all right our next speaker is Larry Niven Larry Niven is a grand master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy writers association and the legendary author of Ringworld the moat in God's eye and many other novels in his own words he entered Caltech 60 odd years ago with intent to become a nuclear physicist and flunked out after a year and a third he has Vivid memories of broken glassware in chemistry class he graduated from Washburn University and later accepted an honorary doctorate dealit he has been a published author for 56 years and loves science fiction conventions his work includes science fiction fantasy Comics graphic novels and television his Awards include locusts Hugo's nebulas cyan and others you can learn more about him at larryniven.net
today Larry will be reading the green Marauder originally published in His Story collection the Draco Tavern set at a bar for interplanetary visitors to Earth please welcome Larry Nevin [Applause] I've always thought a story should speak for itself so I'm going to read you the whole thing I'm not comment very much I was tending bar alone that night the church sit through the interstellar liner had left Earth four days earlier taking most of my customers the Draco Tavern was nearly empty the man at the bar was drinking gin and tonic to glig gray and compact beings wearing Furs and three tones of green we're at a table with a chip sithra guide they drank vodka and consummate no ice no flavorings 404 Silver Tree had their bulky heavy environment tanks crowded around a bigger table these folks smoldering yellow pastries two tubes every so often I got them another jar of paste the man was talkative I got the idea he was trying to interview the bartender and owner of Earth's foremost multi-species Tavern hey not me he protested I'm not a reporter I'm Greg Norris with the Scientific American television show didn't I see you trying to interview the glig earlier I asked guilty we're doing a show on the formation of life on Earth I thought maybe I should shake a few things the glig Stith up Tuck he said that slowly but got it right have their own little Empire out here don't they Earth-like worlds a couple of hundred they must know quite a lot about how a world forms from an oxygen eating atmosphere he was careful with those polysyllabic words not quite sober then that doesn't mean they want to waste an evening lecturing the natives I said he nodded them they don't know anyway Architects on vacation they got me talking about my home life I don't know how they manage that he pushed his drink away I'd better switch to Espresso why would a thing like that shape be interested in my sex life and they kept asking me about territorial imperatives he stopped then turned to see what I was staring at three chips were just coming in one was in a floating couch with life support equipment attached I thought they all looked alike I said he said sorry I said I've had sithra in here for close to 30 years but I can't tell them apart they're all perfect physical specimens by all by after all by their own standards I never saw one like that I gave him his espresso then put three sparkers on a tray and went to the chips ship sithra table two were exactly like any other chipsetra 11 feet tall dressed in pouched belts and their own salmon colored exoskeletons and very much at their ease the chirps claimed to have settled the entire galaxy long ago meaning the useful planets the tidally locked oxygen walls that happened to Circle close around cool Red Dwarf Suns and they act like the reigning Queens of it whatever wherever they happen to be but the two seem to defer to the Third she was a foot shorter than they were her exoskeleton was clearly artificial as dangerous alloplastic bone horn on the outside tubes ran under the edges of the from the equipment in her floating couch her skin between the plates was more gray than red her head turned slowly as I came up she studied me bright-eyed with interest I asked sparkers as if the chipset there ever ordered anything else one of the others said yes serve the ethanol mix of your choice to yourself and the other native would you join us I waved noise over and he came at the jump he pulled up one of the high chairs I keep around to put a human face on a level with a chip citrus I went for another espresso and a scotch and soda and catching a soft imperative hoot from afarsal Sri a jar of yellow paste when I returned they were deep in conversation Rick Schumann always cried meat tells me she's nearly 2 billion years old I heard the doubt beneath his Delight the chief sithra could be the greatest Liars in the universe and how would we ever know Ruth didn't even have Andrew cellular probes when the church came spoke slowly in a throaty whisper but her translator box was standing boys a little flat pronunciation perfect I have circled the Galaxy numberless times and taped the tales of my travels for funds to feed my wonderlust much of my life has been spent at the edge of light speed under relativistic time compression so you see I am not nearly so old as that I pulled up another high chair you must have seen wonders beyond counting I said thinking my God a short shift sithra maybe it's true she's a different color too and her fingers are shorter maybe the species has actually changed since he was born she nodded slowly life never bores always there is change in the time I have been gone sat in his ring has been pulled into separate Rings making it even more magnificent what could have done that Tides from the moons and Earth has changed beyond recognition noise spilled a little of his coffee you were here when she said Earth's atmosphere earth's air was methane and ammonia and oxides of nitrogen and carbon the natives had sent messages across the interior story of space directing them toward yellow Suns of course but one of them there's one of their one of our ships passed through a beam and so we established contact we had to wear life support she rattled on all noise and I sat with our Jaws hanging and the gear was less comfortable then our Spaceport was a floating platform because Quakes were frequent and violent but it was worth it their cities noise said just a minute cities we've never dug up any trace of non-human cities until I just looked at him she said after 780 million years I should think not besides if they lived in the offshore shallows of the of an ocean already mildly salty if if the Quakes spared them their Tools in their city is still deteriorated rapidly their lives were short too but their memories were inherited death and change were accepted facts for them more than for most intelligent species their works of philosophy gained great currency among my people and spread to other species too noise wrestled with an innocent for tact and good manners and one how how could anything have evolved that far the Earth didn't even have an oxygen atmosphere life was just getting started they weren't even trilobites they had evolved us for as long as you have George said with composure life began on Earth one and a half billion years ago there were organic chemicals in abundance from passage of lightning through the reducing atmosphere intelligence evolved and presently built an impressive civilization they lived slowly of course their biochemistry was less energetic communication was difficult they were not stupid only slow I visited Earth three times and each time they had made more progress almost against his will nor his asked what did they look like she said small and soft and fragile much more so than yourselves I cannot say they were pretty but I grew to like them I would toast them according to your Customs she said they brought Beauty in their cities and Beauty in their philosophies and their works are in our libraries still they will not be forgotten she touched her sparker and so did her younger companions current flowed between her two claws through a nervous system she said I raised my glass and nudged noise with his elbow we drank to our predecessors noise lowered his cup and asked what happened to them they sensed worldwide disaster coming George said and they prepared but they thought it would be quakes they built cities to float on the ocean surface and lived in the undersides they never noticed the green scum growing in certain tidal pools by the time they knew the danger that the green scum was everywhere it used photosynthesis to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and the raw oxygen killed whatever it touched leaving fertilizer to feed the green scum the world was dying when we learned of the problem what could we do against a photosynthesis using skunk growing beneath the yellow dwarf star there was nothing in chip sithra libraries that would help we tried of course but we were unable to stop it the sky had turned an admittedly lovely transparent blue and the tide pools were green and the offshore cities were crumbling before we gave up the fight there was an attempt to transplant some of the natives to a suitable world but the biorhythm upset ruined their mating habits I have not been back since until now the depressing silence was broken by chori extra self well the Earth has greatly changed and of course your own Evolution began with the green plague I have heard Tales of humanity in it for my companions would you tell me something of your lives and we spoke of humankind but I couldn't seem to find much enthusiasm for it the anaerobic life that survived the Advent of photosynthesis synthesis includes gangrene and botulism and not much else I wondered what choice would find when next she came and whether she would have reason to toast our memory the end do I have more time probably not thank you all [Applause] what shall I do with this okay thank you all right to conclude the author reading portion of this event David Brin will share a brief message about the Anthology related to his forward by a video David Brin is a Caltech astrophysics alumnus BS 72 and an astrophysicist whose International best-selling novels include Earth existence the postman filmed in 1998 and Hugo Award winners star tied rising and the uplift War Dr Brynn serves on advisory boards such as NASA's Innovative advanced concepts program and speaks or consults on topics ranging from AI seti privacy and invention to National Security his non-fiction book about the information age the transparent Society one the freedom of speech Award of the American Library Association David has been a steadfast mentor to the techlet club and authored the Anthology forward in addition to contributing historic chrysalis a bone-rattling delve into the Hidden Monsters we might find lurking in our own genomes you can find him on Twitter at David Brin or at www.davidbrenn.com JPL community techlet for this incredible accomplishment the creation of their new volume Inner Space and outer thoughts a really substantial anthology of really substantial Talent I have to say that when I was an undergraduate at Caltech a long time ago I used to roam the halls and put my head in and talk to people you know even as August is Murray Gilman and Richard Feynman and one thing stood out uh that I later found out was true when I got my doctorate at UCSD when I worked for how to sell vein and that is that most of the best scientific and Technical people at their fields have an itch to have some kind of artistic sideline and often they're very very good at it Feynman with his painting in his Bongos and so on alphane wrote a science fiction novel and I found that this is more generally true than not now when I agreed to help edit um and at least look over all the stories and write it forward for this wonderful volume I did not expect the quality to be as high as I discovered it was most of the stories in here are professional grade and really some of them are really visionary so in any event that's it I just wanted to tune in and join the festivities and congratulate you all and by the way some of these some of these Bright Young colleagues are already at work at new things so hang in there and be optimistic about the future and keep that Caltech Spirit JPL Spirit going [Applause] all right at this time let's welcome to the stage our author panelists for the Q a session okay so we have with us today five authors Tatiana dobreva Richard Doyle Ashish mahabala and bernath and Olivia Pardo um three of these also served as editors for the Anthology and we'll speak a bit more about their scientific and Technical experience and how that helped shape their stories so I'm gonna pose a few questions to them first um and then after about 20 minutes or so we're gonna open up uh the floor for questions from the audience both our in-person audience you'll be coming to the mics in the center aisles here and also our virtual audience you can type your questions into the YouTube chat so first um panelists please introduce yourselves who are you what is or was your role at Caltech or JPL and let's just go in order here Tatiana hi everyone thanks for coming I'm Tatiana I worked at GPL as a signal processing engineer on one of the cube solid rights when they went to Mars I actually had a health event that happened to me so It reversed my goal and I came here as a PhD worked on medical engineering and now started my own company and I'm Richard Doyle writing is our James Doyle and I a couple years ago completed a 40-year career at JPL retired I'm still active as a consultant and that career was all about uh work at the intersection of space exploration and computer science I can bookend it as one of the earliest roles I had was technical group supervisor for artificial intelligence and when I wrapped it up I was the program manager for information data science my name is Ashish Mahaba I'm an astronomer and a computational scientist here at Caltech I've been working on large-scale Sky surveys for over 20 years and that put me in the Big Data domain at the time and have been shifting more and more towards machine learning which I have also been applying to early detection of cancer and planetary protection depardo I ideological and planetary science division here and my research is in the area of mineral physics so I basically studied the properties of materials under extreme conditions relevant to a variety of planetary environments here on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system and I'm Ann bernath I work in the I.T directorate at JPL so I'm not a scientist or an engineer so keep that in mind we're going to ask you questions um and I've been at JPL employee since 1980 and I was a contractor there in two years before that I've been around a long time all right um another question for each of the panelists how did your time at Caltech or JPL or your scientific training in general help shape your story and tell us a little bit about one of your stories in the Anthology and how that relates to your scientific background and we'll go in the same order um I would say that my time as both an engineer and also I would say a biologist I was on the bench for both of those professions is realizing um how noisy the world is even though we're trying to study it and manipulate it and that's made into some of my stories the emotional aspect of it and my one of my favorite projects that I worked on which was to get bad RNA out of cells that inspiration for the story replacement of those came for that the idea is that you cannot get rid of things that you struggle with or that are your weaknesses you can only kind of exchange them so that was inspired by some of the grad school work that I did in my story in the Anthology is called disentanglement and the premise is what would it be like to live until the end of the universe which actually turns out to be similar to Olivia's premise for her story and um what uh the the JPL um connection there that helped me conceive that story had to do with I was sitting in the 90s and the 2000s on what JPL calls the science and technology management Council and I was privileged to be learning sort of at the front line the discoveries that were emerging at that time about dark matter and dark energy and dark energy ends up playing a role in in my story and another thing that I explore in the story is Extreme loneliness and what is it like to be human if one is now not living in community my story is called Memoirs of a status quo and it is about a somewhat distant future not too distant where the Earth has shut itself out from communication from rest of the world and there are two beings one sentient Ai and another long lived human at an outpost who are keeping who are protecting the Earth from any outside influence and I want to tell you more it's a short story so otherwise it will just give things up so but it has many layers of philosophy and the astronomy part what I gained from my work here at Caltech is mainly how we convert long large things into smaller things by changing units so we say that a star that's nearest to our solar system is four light years away roughly and in that light year we have made a very large distance small and that's something that goes into that how it became very difficult for us to try to do anything with the outside world Etc and so that that's why the astronomy came in and the other aspect was related to AI so the sentient AI that is in there how it came about was some of the machine learning kind of things that I have been looking at my story is titled degenerates and it is about a network of computers the main character is one computer in particular who have been built to last until the end of the universe and in this story this end of the universe is brought about by essentially uh of the contraction of the entire universe into a point of Singularity and after this point there is a new universe created and all of the information all of the scientific knowledge and anthropogenic knowledge of that universe will be preserved through the work of these computers over the billions of years it takes to get to the end and transferred into the next universe but the stories setting was most influenced actually by my cosmology classes that I took in undergrad while I was earning my astronomy and astrophysics minor and these classes covered everything from the birth and death of stars including our own to the start and several possible ends of the universe and so even though my research area is something entirely different those cosmology classes had a pretty uh big impact but the work that I do here at Caltech and really the work that is done at research institutions everywhere I think was always in the back of my mind for this story and one of the motivations for it and that in that the knowledge that we generate is preserved and then accessible to the Future inhabitants of the next universe my story is encounter return to Titan I wrote this story back in 1990 way before the Cassini mission was even launched but I had the privilege of being around the scientists who were looking forward to all of the knowledge and and scientific discoveries that the mission would bring back to them so um I imagined you know how might I.T some program give them a richer experience almost like they were experiencing it themselves and of course I had to uh edit this story since now you know it really happened and the research you know exactly what happened when uh Cassini reached Titan so um I was influenced and wanted to rewrite this story like an homage to these to the engineers and the scientists for their their passion and excitement and thirst for knowledge so I was just kind of in a sponge absorbing all of their excitement thank you all right I'm going to direct this question first to Olivia uh can you describe one way in which your story deviated from scientific fact and why you decided to make that deviation yeah there were a lot of deviations maybe better described as speculations but I'll focus on one so the scenario in which uh the main character's Universe ends is a possible scenario of our universe though not the most favored one currently uh Doyle's is um uh but we could we can't rule it out um so uh the scenario in which uh my stories Universe ends is sometimes referred to as the big uh crunch where basically the universe is currently expanding eventually that will stop um and then contract back in on itself into a a crunch but the idea in the story that there will be creation of a future Universe after this crunch is definitely much more speculative we just we don't know enough about this beginning of our universe and the circumstances if there were any prior to the big bang and if those circumstances could be repeated to basically start the process over again um but I chose this version because to me it sounded the most hopeful in that even though one universe will end it it necessitates the beginning of of another one um and I think those undergrad cosmology classes that I mentioned kind of triggered like an existential crisis which is why why am I doing homework if there are these Unstoppable cosmological forces that are gonna we can't run from um but this big uh it's called a big bounce where there's a crunch and then it bounces back this idea combined with the plot of my story is at least my answer to those sort of existential questions and Richard same question for you okay yeah so as noted we have similar premise and we uh actually uh settled on different cosmologies within our stories um so in in my story um I use I utilized the one that's often called the heat death which is um you know there's there's evidence for it right now where the future of the universe is basically very bleak and it just unfolds over trillions of years into silence and and nothingness a essentially an asymptotic process so back to the question how did I reach Beyond scientific fact well of course what could be beyond that that's not even a well-defined question an asymptotic process that that unfolds over literally trillions and trillions of years contrasted would say the Big Bang where again it's just as mysterious what might have come before the Big Bang but at least there's a sharp boundary there to frame the frame the question which is not true of the heat death scenario and so um part of my story is imagining what might be Beyond and uh and this allowed me to explore one of my favorite themes in writing which is the interplay between physical and psychological reality and again that theme of you know the Bleak future with extreme isolation and loneliness what is it like to to be human under under those circumstances thank you all right for those of you who are also editors of the Anthology what was the most fun part of this process for you and what was the most valuable thing that you learned from the process whether that's you know as an editor as a writer yourself and so let's go first to Tatiana so Rachel and I were both editors and we are the Polar Opposites when it came to editing and I think that's honestly what made it a lot of fun um is making sure like how do we make the authors voices really stand out and so I think like working with her and like having this like very different type of approach I think made my stories a lot better so I think that was a really fun part just working with someone who's very different and like we just have a spectrum of different editors representing each story and I think that's what made them all really powerful so thank you Rachel thank you Richard yeah so one thing that kind of came home for me and being an editor as well as an author um you know as an author you understand the importance of critique and and revisions but being on the other side of that as an editor it helped drive home for me how the similarities between the critique process in any creative endeavor and what I was familiar with in my JPL career as the more formal peer review process which is essential to our our success and um you know that's how you achieve the best possible solutions and getting that kind of feedback stretches you beyond yourself your own your own abilities and even imagination when it comes to to being creative but it's an essential part of the process and that a creative person or an engineer has to Value greatly to be successful beyond that I just wanted to say also how delightful it's been to see the book come together and you know have the have the tangible book that you can hold in your hand I'm I'm a bit of all perhaps old-fashioned in the sense of I'm not entirely embracing the digital yet when it comes to I just love to hold a physical book in my hand and when we got to that point with the beautiful cover and appearing in Romans and elsewhere just just a great feeling Ashish yeah one thing that I really enjoyed about the editing process and simultaneously since I was also writer as it said I could look at it from both sides just the diverse attitudes that one can see for the same story and it particularly applies to short stories because there the background of the author has somehow intertwined with the story and there are some assumptions that the author is making whether they reach the different editors who are looking at that the different critics who are looking at that and that interplay I thought was really really good and useful to understand so I like breaking rules but there I understood how the different things about dialogues and characters and so on you may need to be a bit more subtle in breaking the rules trying to keep things still intact in terms of many things that people expect in order to make your story reach more people that was one of the things that I got out of all right what was your favorite story this is a question for each of you what is your favorite story from the Anthology that you didn't write and why tell them what to go read and let's start with Anne ah my favorite story and I have to read it off because it's a long title the homunculized guide resurrecting your loved one from their electronic ghosts by Carolee and I met her down backstage and that was exciting I love the premise that we are leaving something of ourselves in the digital world in the wires as she describes it and we often talk about our digital footprint out there but this really expands beyond that I also love the framing of the story as how-to instructions one might find in a website or server and it feels like to me both like fantasy and science fiction and it's just my kind of a story Olivia oh it was definitely really interesting to read Rich's disentanglement and see this other take on the end of the universe that really physically are complete opposite but it was really cool to see the similarities I think some of the themes that we both wound up writing about but other than that one my favorite was out of memory by Christine Moran because I just had so many questions like right after the first page about this world that was constructed in this story about digital memory and existing within a an in a digital memory World um and I was so excited and then quickly those feelings of excitement turned into something more Sinister and so it was just a really great story well I'm going to do a partial cop out here and say that I am going to reread all the stories and understand the different layers before we meet and when we meet next time I'll tell you the answer so when I've been rereading these stories I'm really getting to different layers in that and have been really enjoying that I'll leave it at that for now so I also love to live your story and I love the way she she explored the nutrient role of neutrinos for uh for imprinting information for the for the next universe I also want to acknowledge our three professional authors who you know we aspire to the craft that you you definitely show in all of your writing but I wanted to point to one story in particular that I really enjoyed and that's Alex Siva Rama krishnan's a thousand thousand pages I thought it was just a beautifully crafted story with a wonderful young protagonist good pacing good action it's a really well turned phrases in literary flourishes so and Alec we have a conversation that I think we need to start on Roger zelazny uh for me would be out of memory uh by Christine um it's a dark story and it's about identity motherhood uh and this you know predatory element that resides there and also just you know limited amount of resources and how you know how like the kind of the three of them fight for that so I think it's it's a good relatable story yes and um it's from the perspective of an AI so you've probably never read in a story that dealt with questions and of Parenthood with an AI protagonist so it's very very cool all right um we're gonna open up the floor now if anyone has questions um please come to the aisles to these two mics anything about science about these folks stories things you've heard tonight anything is fair game and I think for our first question we'll take one from the virtual audience okay uh the first question from the virtual audience is how much do the writers follow read or watch popular science fiction and what are their latest favorite books TV shows or films and how does that inform your fictional work Tatiana oh um not as much anymore but my favorite show is the expanse yeah well as much as I can find the time for viewing expanse is a great one black mirror is another one and and of course all all the Star Treks of course in terms of books I love Spanish law lames book and maybe some of the rule breaking that I like also comes from there the way he views things and does lots of different things I think my my author would be Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy even though I have never attempted to write a comedy I still greatly enjoy these books well the thing comes to mind is that we just finished watching the Grid it's a Korean Sci-Fi show it's about time travel and a putting a protective grid around the earth to protect it from solar flares so that was very very fun and exciting I'll answer this question too I really love reading science fiction that um sound you know future scientists as protagonists and really walks you through the problem solving and so I'm a really big fan of project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and the Martian I I just love the nerdiness of it um yeah all right do we have any anyone from the audience who would like to ask a question come on up to the mic so I'm curious as to how these ideas for stories come into your mind is it like boom Oh that would make a great story and the whole thing's there pretty much you got to fix some things but it's all there or is it like like kind of have an idea and then a year later it's like oh I've got another idea that can go with it what how does the process work for you guys does anyone want to answer first I can grab that one so yeah I mean sometimes an idea is just burning in your head and you don't have much choice about it you have to you have to turn it into a story and narrative but the other answer I can give is that once you're you've begun uh you know first draft it could be an amazing uh element to the creative process where sometimes the characters will lead you into into unexpected directions and you realize that where they're leading you is actually leading is actually creating a better story than the one you had in mind originally uh there's something there's a little bit mysterious about how that process works but I've talked to enough other authors and other creative people that it's it's a familiar part of being creative being led by the characters or something similar with other creative endeavors I had another story in the Anthology when you were not Jenny um I I don't know if you've talked about your inspiration behind that story it's a kind of like a time travel romance it's um it's very thrilling so how did you come up with the idea for that well I love time travel stories as I just I mentioned the grid is a time travel story but I always love time travel stories and I just wondered if I could have some kind of like do it differently like how did this time travel happen um and so I thought of you know the possibility that maybe someone could um go into someone's memories and through those memories sort of be there in the past through those memories and that's how it's that's the basis of the story and then I usually start hearing dialogue in my head first I always hear dialogue what what are characters saying to each other how and then asking the question is well why why would they need to do that how would people react why would they even know that this person came from the from the future that sort of thing so you just kept keep asking the questions why why why and uh and also like Rich says you always have the listen to your characters as you write them um they tell you what they're going to say next some a lot of times and Olivia I'm curious you talked a little bit about the inspiration for your story having to do with the overwhelming feeling of existential dread from some of these courses that you took on cosmology and astronomy but your story is very hopeful and it provides a way for the scientific knowledge that we collect day to day to not be lost you know to the void at the end of the universe but a way for that to continue on and um do you feel hopeful and like how did this inform the inspiration why did you go in a more optimistic direction for this story yeah I I think my story had a pretty long journey because my initial submission was much shorter and it was a usually when I have an inspiration to write it's about a very specific isolated feeling or image that I just need to get out and so I think what I submitted was definitely a feeling of maybe turmoil or loss it like windy and this computer has like doesn't know what he's talking about but um through the process of working with the editors we went back and forth to really develop an entire story for the computer and I honestly don't know if I knew that it was going to end up hopeful until until I got to the part where I was like okay I have to write an end like I knew there was a feeling of like being at peace that I wanted to have at the end but I wasn't sure if that feeling was going to be like an acceptance versus actual hope and so I think probably the tone of hope that it wound up taking was how I was feeling personally when I was writing it but maybe that could have turned out differently let's take another question yeah so when I started reading science fiction in the late late 60s um the the number of planets we knew about were you know limited to the solar system and now we have you know thousands and thousands of planets out there so I I I'm looking forward to reading this Anthology and I wonder if if anyone has dealt with the you know the first Contact scenario or or uh or or what this panel thinks about our prospects of of encountering uh you know a civilization that's actually Advanced or at least equivalent to ours Ashish do you want to take this one actually my story is about avoiding contact so in some sense it is about contact and this is about the Earth as I said which has frozen and decided to keep itself completely segregated from any contact and so we have these protectors near Jupiter and Saturn which are making sure that there is no contact or if there is some contact then we try to get something from there and be done with it so a slightly different take on that but Richard what about you yeah actually I'm gonna I'm gonna give an oblique answer to that also but on behalf of one of our other authors Sam clayman's who has a story called surely you're joking Czar blacks and I very much resonate with his his premise of his story which is pushing back on a kind of uh almost smug premise that you sometimes find in exobiology which is that if there is going to be life elsewhere it somehow has to experience the same series of happy accidents that occurred in our environment that led to life here and what seems incomplete about that premise is why can't in other and with given the the immense and possibilities out there why can't there be other series of happy accidents that lead that lead to other forms of life that we might be really hard put to even recognize his life so that's that's another and I want to give Sam credit for for jumping on that premise thanks let's take another online question another online question um have any of you taken creative writing classes at Caltech and have you written realistic short stories in the past and this is from a former writing professor at Caltech [Laughter] uh well you know of course Caltech is very science and engineering heavy um but of course some of you know we
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