Women Hard Science Fiction Writers

Mary Somerville (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The row about the lack of women hard science fiction writers has blown up yet again, with at least one female author saying that a publisher has told her they would not publish a hard science fiction novel by a woman. No other reason. It didn’t matter how good her book was, it was the fact that she was a woman that would get it automatically turned down.

How can that be, when the first hard science fiction novel was by a woman? Yes, I’m talking about Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, published in 1818. This novel was based on the then recent experiments demonstrating galvanism – or showing how to make a dead frog’s leg twitch by the application of some electricity.

[It is also interesting that about this time there were women making strides in mathematics. Everyone knows about Ada Lovelace, Bryon’s daughter who helped Charles Babbage with his work on computers. Less well known is her tutor, Mary Somerville. In her day she was so famous for her endeavours that she was invited to the coronations of both King George IV and Queen Victoria. I was therefore pleased to hear that Somerville College, Oxford University, has acquired a portrait of Ada Lovelace, when she was a child, to hang beside that of Mary Somerville in their extensive college library.]

Don’t get me wrong. There are women around today who are hard science fiction authors, but they are very far and few between. Depending on what your definition of hard science fiction entails, authors like C. J. Cherryh, Lois Bujold and James Tiptree (yes she was a woman) come to mind. But what worries me is that it seems to me women hard science fiction writers seem to be mainly of an older generation or passed on. There is of course Madeleine Ashby, Chris Moriaty and um…

So why are hard science fiction publishers seemingly shunning women more these days than in the past? And this is despite the efforts of people like Ian Sales to promote women science fiction writers more.

Well, you have to ask the publishers. All I’m going to say is that they are missing a crucial viewpoint of society, which means that hard science fiction will be biased towards the male interests.

But women have been here before in several different walks of life. In the case of women’s colleges at Oxford University… if I remember correctly, the five women’s colleges were consistently getting well above average results, so much so that the men’s colleges had to admit women in order to get back up the results’ league tables.

Realistically speaking, the fewer women that are published in hard science fiction, the better they have to be. Why do I think history will repeat itself, but this time in hard science fiction?

Power of Maths, underestimate not!

Leaf lamina. The leaf architecture probably arose multiple times in the plant lineage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Remember that business about plants using quantum mechanics to do photosynthesis i.e. make food from sunlight I wrote in an earlier blog? Well now comes the news that plants can do simple maths to work out how to store and release energy during the night, when there is no sunlight. See here. This is not science fiction. It’s reality.

And yet there is very little in the way of science fiction using plants. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham comes to mind. I seem to remember Orson Scott Card doing something, but not along these lines.

So here is an interesting opportunity for science fiction writers to write something interesting… yes, I’ve already written a short and am awaiting the result of a sub… it’s a long wait!

Maths, Science and Science Fiction

Mnemosyne with a mathematical formula. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maths in one form or another has been used to make quantitive predictions since the time of the ancient Babylonians. But when did maths start to be used to make predictions of new objects or phenomena?

John Couch Adams used mathematics (perturbation theory if you really want to know) to predict the position of Neptune by mid-September 1845. He communicated the results immediately to Challis at Cambridge and a month later to Airey the Astronomer Royal. Independently, Urbain Le Verrier also did and presented the results publicly in Paris to Academy of Sciences on 10th Nov 1845. It was these latter predictions that helped Galle at Berlin observatory find the planet. Needles to say there was quite a to-do about who actually predicted the planet first. Either way we can date the discovery of a new object by mathematics to as early as 1845.

And we’ve been predicting where unknown objects exist from the apparently errant behaviour of objects we know about ever since, right up to the modern day where we are predicting where planets are around in other solar systems.

What about mathematical prediction of phenomena? Well, we have look to 1900 and 1905. Max Planck, frustrated about the lack of his progress in solving what was known as the ultraviolet catastrophe or black body problem suggested a mathematical model that could fit the the known experimental evidence of his day. It was of course that electromagnetic energy could only be emitted in integer multiples of hf, where f is the frequency of the emission and h is the Planck constant, which of course means it can only be emitted in quanta, and quantum theory was born. At the time Planck did not think this was what happened in reality. It took a certain clerk in a Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein, working on the photoelectric effect to show these quanta were real physical entities.

Of course there been well documented examples since then of finding new phenomena by applying mathematical theories to physics and science.

These have been two great leaps in the way maths is applied to science, physics in particular. So what is the next leap? When will it happen? [Imagine picture of hungry cat waiting for scrumptious pussy meat!]

So what has all this got to do with science fiction (apart from the obvious giant leaps in maths leading the way to a vast improvement in the understanding of the sciences, which in turn, has form the basis for many stories in science fiction)?

There is the timing aspect of things. Science fiction such as exploring new places and unknown worlds, and commenting on the way our future is unfolding has and will always be with us. But science fiction built on potential technology advances and explaining how they work comes in waves that follow on from improvements in maths. The bigger the bound in maths, the bigger the bound in science.

I think we are due for a new leap in maths. I can’t put my finger on why I think so, just call is a gut feel… I think it might be something to do with the maths about maths , or meta-maths if you want to pedantic. When I’ve sussed it out, you can bet I’ll be writing a science fiction story about it! Well, what else would expect this gal do about it?

Ripple Effect…

Ripple effect on water. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For those that follow my blog, you will know about the official response to my short story, Ripple Effect about the british weather. If not see here first.

Oops – see here for a specially called meeting at the Meteorological Office. 

OK, it is not a meeting about the same topic as I had in my short story. Well writing science fiction about scientists talking about their specialist subject isn’t much fun to write, or read for that matter. However, both the fictional and the real meetings could end up with the same result… Oops indeed!