Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
The Uplift War (1987) is a SF novel by David Brin and part of the Uplift Universe. It portraits a fictional future universe where species evolve with the help of more developed ones that help them in the “uplifting” process,…
Read more
That SF has often inspired astrophysicists and theoretical scientists is not something that should come as a surprise. After all, space elevators, while first theorised by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, were made famous by Arthur C. Clarke in his…
Read more
Otherwise said: how to store your (terabyte) data on a DNA string. Amazing, isn’t it? The first time I’ve heard about this deceptively simple idea was last year on the New Yorker, in a article by Andrew Marantz “Petri-Dish Pop“,…
Read more
Latest articles published on Serious Wonder, all of them devoted to space missions, present or future. UNDER THE KRAKEN SEA – A NASA SUBMARINE ON TITAN – February, 13 2015 DAWN MISSION UPDATE: CLOSING IN ON CERES – January, 24…
Read more
Neptune’s Brood (2013) is a SF novel by Charles Stross. The story is set in the same universe of Saturn’s Children, but 5000 years later and with different characters. It features clones, bank-employed historians, assassins and the fantastic water-world of…
Read more
Birth is certainly one of the most emotionally charged phenomena in nature, and a star makes no exception. For much as humans tend to think about space objects as eternal, they are not – they have a start and an…
Read more
Written in 1983 and adapted into a movie in 1989, Pet Sematary is by any standard one of the more frightening books I ever put my hands on. I recently had a go at it again, and albeit I knew the story by heart for…
Read more
One thing I have not paid (so far) the right amount of attention is all artwork produced by NASA, and with that I mean not only the beautiful posters done in occasion of space missions – which are truly beautiful…
Read more
Yes, “on” it is the correct preposition. It’s not the continent I’m talking about; it is the Jupiter’s moon with the same name. Why so? Because NASA just got extra-money for its 2016 budget (of $18.5 billion dollars, i.e. half…
Read more
Blood Music (1985) by Greg Bear, originally published as a novelette in the SF magazine Analog, portrays the frightening experiment of a biotechnologist who creates nanobots out of his lymphocytes and injects them into his body. As expected, they multiply, change…
Read more