To create When It Changed, editor Geoff Ryman (author of the multiple award-winning novel Air), set up science fiction authors with scientists, and had them develop stories together. The awesome list of contributors includes Paul Cornell, Justin Robson, Liz Williams, Kit Reed, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod and Ryman himself. According to the publisher's Facebook page:

When It Changed is an attempt to put authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-introduce research ideas with literary concerns, and to re-forge the alloy that once made SF great. Composed collaboratively – through a series of visits and conversations between leading authors and practicing scientists – it offers fictionalised glimpses into the far corners of current research fields, be they in nanotechnology, invertebrate physiology, particle physics, or software archaeology. From Planck's Length (the smallest indivisible distance) to Plankton (potential saviours of the Earth's ecosystem), from virtual encounters between Witgenstein and Turing, to future civilisations torn asunder by different readings of the Standard Model, together these stories represent a literary 'experiment' in the true sense of the word, and endeavour to isolate a whole new strain of the SF bug.

Ryman told the news department at Manchester University, where he's based at the University's Center for New Writing:

We wanted to go out and locate what is fresh and new in the sciences, and gives writers a chance to work with researchers to come up with different, contemporary themes. When it Changed actively extends the scientific repertoire of fiction — all fiction, because we have mainstream writers as well. But it gave some of the best SF writers I know of a chance to work closely with a scientist. Some of the ideas they've come up with are mind-blowing ... round the world particle colliders, virtual research, or suits that heal their wearers. And the scientists get to comment or explain.

The book's launch party is tomorrow, Oct. 24, in Manchester, UK. We can't wait to see a copy! Too bad it's not out in the U.S. until April 1 next year.

1: Pump the atmosphere full of nanomachines to get "smart weather."

In Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, people seed the oceans and the upper atmosphere with tons of tiny floating machines, "invisible to the eye, harmless to people." They controlled the weather and fixed the climate by reflecting radiation here or absorbing it there. The machines made clouds appear and disappear and controlled ocean currents. And it works — for a while. The climate starts returning to pre-2050 conditions. But then the nanomachines stop obeying orders, and even create an obscene symbol off the Bay Of Biscay "that had to be airbrushed out of every satellite image." The scientists try to release even smarter nanomachines to deal with the first batch of nanomachines and — well, you can guess how well that turns out.

2: A ring of ice.

In the Stanislaw Lem novel Fiasco, scientists launch an artificial ring of ice into the atmosphere of the planet Quinta to reduce temperatures so the oceans will recede and more land mass will be available. The mass of the ice ring is equal to around 1 percent of the oceans' volume. The protagonists speculate that the ring was created by causing lightning in the upper atmosphere to create a kind of ice rail-gun that could shoot the ice up into orbit. This being a Stanislaw Lem novel, the whole thing falls apart due to political wrangling before it can be completed, so huge chunks of ice rain down onto the planet's equator in a never-ending torrent.

3: Use special bacteria.

In the story "Noah's Ark" by Narendra Desirazu, we find bacteria on Mars, with bizarre properties — it hibernates just below the freezing point of water, but when the water melts, the bacteria goes into frantic activity to get the water to refreeze. So scientists struggle with the effort to introduce the bacteria only to the icecaps and other areas where they want to reverse melting — without letting it get into, say, our oceans and stuff. Luckily, there's a happy but "ambivalent" ending.

4: Build a giant sunshade around the Earth.

We build huge space elevators and a massive sunshade in The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, causing the dawn light to look all trippy:

The dawn sky glowed innumerable shades of green, from lemon to duck-egg to almost blue, like the background colour in a Hindu painting, and turned slowly to a pure deep blue over ten minutes or more as he watched. He dozed again.

Also, Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise includes a ring of satellites and space stations linked together around a planet's equator by cables and other connectors, which becomes an unbroken wheel of tremendous stability — which presumably can reflect a lot of sunlight. And in Clarke's Childhood's End, the Overlords are able to use polarized fields to "make the sun go out" for a particular region of South Africa, to punish the residents for depriving the white minority of civil rights. And in Venus Of Dreams by Pamela Sargent, colonists cool the planet Venus by using a giant Parasol to shade the planet, plus bombarding the planet with ice asteroids.

5: Take Earth further away from the sun.

The Futurama episode "Crimes Of The Hot" is like a smorgasbord of global-warming solutions. We learn that humans stopped global warming in the 21st century by bombarding the oceans with ice from space. And now that the planet is heating up again, due to the emissions from unsafe robots, there are a few solutions, including a giant space mirror (which goes awry) and shutting down all the robots. But in the end, the easiest solution is to have all the robots emit their exhaust at once, sending the planet further away from the sun — and giving us an extra week in each year, which can be Robot Party Week!

And in the novel The Circle: A Science Fiction Thriller by Harold R. Watson, the High Rulers Of Earth decide to haul the planet away from the sun to put it into a deep freeze for one year. At the end of that time, they'll return Earth to its original orbit. As some of the planet's icy covering melts, it'll have the effect of restoring the ozone layer, and after about five years, enough vegetation will have grown to make the planet habitable again. Suuuure.

6: Hack The Human Genome

It's a radical solution, but it might be the only way. In the story "Dear Abbey" by Terry Bisson, a group of radical environmentalists come up with a plan:

Dear Abbey is a radical, long-range plan for saving the environment that will make Ted Kaczynski look like Mother Teresa. It involves an alarmingly complex but theoretically possible piece of genetic engineering that will, let us say, severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the environment. Severe being the operative modifier. You can't call it terrorism because no one will be killed, directly at least, and no one will even know for sure what is happening until it has been operating for at least a decade, by which time it will be too late to undo it. The human cost will be high but not nearly as high as the cost of doing nothing, or of simply continuing with the kind of pointless stunts for which the environmental movement is known.

7: Restart the Gulf Stream

Kim Stanley Robinson is the champion of depicting environmental disasters and geo-hacking projects, and his environmental thrillers Forty Signs Of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below deal with the disastrous effects of global warming. Among other things, Fifty Degrees includes scientists trying to restart the stalled Gulf Stream. The ice caps melt completely, and in the winter, Washington, D.C. hits fifty degrees below. So an enormous fleet of ships ventures out to dump millions of tons of ice into the ocean in the hopes of rebooting the Gulf Stream. A fleet of 3,500 oil tankers is available to transport the salt, and five hundred million metric tons of salt is needed — about two years' worth of total world production.

8: Shut down all our technology

I'm still not entirely sure what happened at the end of last year's "remake" (quotation marks are necessary here) of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Keanu/Klaatu was going to unleash nanomachines to disassemble everything on Earth, because that would save the planet. You know that makes sense! And then he changed his mind and did some kind of EMP-ish thing that made all electricity go out and all technology stop working. So the human race was allowed to survive, but with no technology. Keanu is merciful! All hail Keanu!

9: Open a big hole.

Global warming? No problem! Just open a dimensional gateway and pump all the extra heat somewhere else. That's the scheme that a science whiz comes up with in the Stargate Atlantis episode "Brain Storm" (featuring Bill Nye the Science Guy, among other luminaries.) Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and the gathering of eminent scientists is in danger of freezing to death.


Also, in the Syfy movie Lost City Raiders, the world is flooded due to global warming. And the Catholic Church has the answer — an ancient hole in the ground, which will drain off all the excess water to... somewhere. But you need to find the secret hidden keys to open it. It all makes perfect sense!

10: Kill the aliens who are causing the problem in the first place.

But of course, you know deep down that global warming can't really be the result of our own completely harmless activities. There must be aliens behind it — probably evil dinosaur aliens. In the Syfy original TV movie, Heatstroke, it turns out that dinosaur people have been secretly working to pump out greenhouse gases to raise our planet's temperature and prepare the way for their invasion. But the U.S. government knows about this and sends a secret taskforce (why not a whole army? Budget constraints, I guess) to stop them. The aliens are operating on a tropical island, where an ex-swimsuit model just happens to be shooting a new calendar. It's like synergy! Oh, and there's also The Arrival directed by David Twohy, where Charlie Sheen discovers that weird double-jointed aliens are producing greenhouse gases to mess us up and transform our planet. Good thing it's Charlie Sheen, then.


Oh, and the Silurians in Doctor Who And The Silurians also have a similar idea about raising the planet's temperature, but they don't get very far with it.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. This post also would have been a lot harder to write without the never-ending awesomeness that is Technovelgy.com.

Though I was a fierce reader of scifi novels as a teenager, wolfing down John Varley, Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg, Clifford D. Simak and many others, I gave it up when I went to college. I think I had some misguided idea that scifi was for kids, and as a grownup English Ph.D. student I should be devoting myself to Dylan Thomas and post-structuralist theory. I strayed from literature occasionally, reading some Octavia Butler and a Star Trek novel, telling myself I was doing it merely to understand pop culture. It's not that I loved it – I just studied the stuff.

I became a professor, but drifted away from academia to become an alternative journalist. As the editor of the book review section of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, hundreds of books crossed my desk, their gray covers stamped "advance copy" and "uncorrected proof." That was how I found Newton's Wake, which was prominently billed as a space opera.

It had been a long time since I'd read scifi in a way you might call serious, rather than studying it as some kind of social symptom. I picked up the book, read the first page, and was intrigued enough to keep it through two apartments and two jobs – and finally read it after I'd returned from a year-long fellowship at MIT where I'd immersed myself in science self-education.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say MacLeod gave me pleasure in reading scifi again. Partly that's because his ideas were so meaty – debates over separatist nationalism were deeply embedded in a crazed adventure story about "rapture fuckers" with nano brains and combat archaeologists teleporting through a series of heists across the galaxy. I was in love. In short order, I read every single MacLeod book I could get my hands on, then replunged into scifi lit with what could only be described as a burning need.

I had missed it for so long! Now the shelves in my office bulge with science fiction novels. They're ongoing testimony to my love, reawakened by a novel about Scottish pirates on another planet.

As a huge admirer of both Stross and mutant economist Paul Krugman, it's particularly fangasmic to see Krugman analyzing Stross' Merchant Princes novels from an economic standpoint. In the Merchant Princes books, a clan from a medieval world learns to walk between universes and becomes obscenely rich by smuggling drugs where the DEA can't go and bringing back high-tech toys from America. As Krugman notes, this is a common fantasy in science fiction: the idea of bringing first-world technology and standards of living to the third world. Krugman adds:

But what makes Stross’s version different from everyone else’s is that he’s noticed something: the fantasy thought experiment, in which someone brings modern science and technology to a backward society, isn’t a fantasy. It is, instead, something that’s been tried all across the very real Third World, as businessmen and aid workers fanned out across nations in which the typical person, two generations ago, lived no better than a medieval peasant. And you know what? Modernization turns out to be pretty hard to do.

Krugman's post is well worth reading, and so are analyses by fellow Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod and economic commentator Brad DeLong. Actually, the whole Stross seminar is well worth devouring. Check it out. [Crooked Timber]

Our protagonist is Ferguson, a former God Squad thug-turned-detective trying to repent for his violent past by being the most ethical police officer he can. When Catholics start turning up dead in Edinburgh, he has to overcome his anti-religious prejudices to puzzle out a Protestant plot that stretches back centuries — and that has something to do with a group of evangelical Christian robots who live in a Creationist amusement park in New Zealand.

Ferguson's prejudices, it turns out, are not just the result of his staunch atheism. He also has much to learn about the subjectivity of the so-called KIs, or kinetic intelligences, who work and live among humans. Though the Faith Wars may have purged Christian souls from politics, they created new "souls" in the bodies of military robots who somehow attained sentience on the battlefields. These KIs have been transferred out of their dangerous, soldier bodies and into delicate frames that look like miniature Tripods from War of the Worlds. Still others exist in humanoid bodies, shunned by biological humans who find their artificial faces disturbing due to the uncanny valley effect.

Just as humans returning from war are often wracked by a lifetime of traumatic memories and injuries, so too are the KIs. Especially the ones who have been literally transferred into new bodies and rejected by the people they fought to protect. As Ferguson and his KI partner Skulk begin to unravel the mystery of the Catholic murders, they must come to grips with the possibility that robots have inherited the religious wrath of the humans who died beside them in battle. And they've taken to religious terrorism just as they've taken to consciousness. There is something brilliant in MacLeod's idea that when robots achieve human-style intelligence that they'll become as irrational as humans too.

There's no word yet on when the US release date will be for this fascinating novel, so if you're outside the UK you're going to have to special order it. Which is too bad, because this is precisely the kind of book that US audiences need to be reading. Quite simply, it's a story of a future where religion has lost its hold on politics and yet ethical values have survived — even among atheists.

Of course, this being a MacLeod novel, there is also a healthy dose of pure adventurous fun, too. We follow the thread of our murder mystery up and down space elevators, as well as in and out of goth clubs packed with hot tranny girls and high tech DJs during Edinburgh's famous Fringe Festival. A pleasingly spicy mashup of wise politics and smartass ethics, The Night Sessions is both hard to resist and hard to put down.

The Night Sessions [via Amazon.uk]

According to Publisher's Weekly, the anthology features:

Near-future paradigm shifts in everything from race relations (in Ted Kosmatka's vivid and moving “N-Words,” where cloned Neanderthals encounter violent hatred from Homo sapiens) to the morality of uploaded consciousness (in Blake Charlton's clumsy but charming “Endosymbiont”), with varying success. The hero of Jay Lake's “The Future by Degrees” invents an energy-saving thermal superconductor only to be pursued by corporations protecting their business, with predictable results. Pepper, the mercenary hero of Tobias S. Buckell's Crystal Rain, refuses to assassinate a dictator in the morally contrived “Resistance.” Considerably more powerful is Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's “Spider the Artist,” which combines African folk tales and advanced robotics in a chilling story about a rising social conscience in the Nigerian oil fields.

I can't wait to dig into it!

Seeds of Change [via Amazon]

Why did you decide to move from far-future tales like Learning the World to near-future ones like The Execution Channel? Do you think that near-future writing is more politically or socially relevant?

I decided that after writing the Engines of Light trilogy, then Newton's Wake and Learning the World, I'd done everything I wanted to do, for the moment, in space opera; and meanwhile had accumulated a whole new decade's worth of fury about the world as it is now and the way it's going. Certainly near-future writing can make more immediate political comment, but far-future tales can be just as direct. Learning the World raises as a question the possibility that we may have, as Darwin put it, 'a secure future of great length'. Which, if you think about its implications for the present, is fairly political, because the default assumption is that we don't.

Do you think near-future novels are considered more "literary" than far-future ones by readers and critics?

That's what I've found - The Execution Channel has had more mainstream reviews than any of my other novels. But it isn't so much near-future as a matter of writing SF while appearing to write something else - well, the mainstream writers are writing something else! But I wanted to write something that looked like a techothriller but keeps faith with SF - a book where the lab doesn't burn down at the end. But not to worry, I'll be back to the far future sometime, if we're spared (as we say in Scotland).

Are there any political philosophers you consider to be science fictional? I'm thinking of how Karl Marx talks a lot about things happening in his future Utopia - fishing in the afternoon and philosophizing in the evening and all that. But there's obviously a lot of these sorts of speculations going on in any political philosophy that cares about the future. Any political theory or theorist in particular that you find compelling as SF?

Actually, Marx talks very little about future society. Even that famous quote comes from an unpublished work. Marx's most science-fictional vision is of 'the automatic factory' - for Marx, reducing the amount of time spent in boring, unfulfilling work is the basis for human freedom. Freedom begins when the working day ends. It's all very current and it's all right there in Capital. I've speculated elsewhere that Marx's approach to society - look at what's emerging, look at the technology, look at the underlying conflicts that these bring out - may have in some vulgarised form actually inspired the emergence of science fiction itself. Science fiction is an adventure playground in the materialist conception of history.

But in my own case, the political philosophers whose ideas most directly give rise to SF are the libertarians. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia more or less compels you to think science-fictionally: how would this work? (Or not work, as the case may be.) You start imagining a crazy quilt of societies, and for me it was not far from there to something like Norlonto in The Star Fraction. Then there are the ecologists, but I can only imagine dystopias about them ...

When is science fiction a form of political intervention?

That's a tricky one. At one extreme, the answer could be 'almost always' because by presenting any picture at all of the future (or other possible worlds, or alien civilizations, etc) the writer is making certain assumptions about what can and can't change in society and in human (or human-like) behaviour. At the other, the answer could be 'only when it's written by mainstream writers' because only they tend to have the approach of 'Hmm, let's address an issue of pressing current concern using this garish prop set and crude tool-kit left lying around by science fiction' and produce some crass, clunky polemic. But seriously, I suppose the answer depends on the intention of the writer, which can be more, or less, conscious and more, or less subtle. These are different axes, by the way! The book I'm reading at the moment, Paul McAuley's Cowboy Angels, is a good example of being both conscious and subtle.

Image from the cover of MacLeod's first novel (set in a near future!), The Star Fraction.