Bücher der Reihe Science and Fiction

The scientific and technical aspects underlying the plot - in particular space travel, robotics and self-replicating spacecraft - are introduced and discussed by the author in an extensive non-technical appendix.

There is a huge gulf between the real physics of space travel and the way it is commonly portrayed in movies and TV shows. That¿s not because space physics is difficult or obscure ¿ most of the details were understood by the end of the 18th century ¿ but because it can often be bafflingly counter-intuitive for a general audience. The purpose of this book isn¿t to criticize or debunk popular sci-fi depictions, which can be very entertaining, but to focus on how space physics really works. This is done with the aid of numerous practical illustrations taken from the works of serious science fiction authors ¿ from Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke to Larry Niven and Andy Weir ¿ who have taken positive pleasure in getting their scientific facts right.

Informative, entertaining and upbeat, this book continues Grazier and Cass's exploration of how technology, science, and scientists are portrayed in Hollywood productions.

The deaths have all the symptoms of some sort of plague, despite Europa's seemingly sterile environment.Besides providing thrills, a science section covers the very latest in undersea robotics, discussing the assets future explorers may have available for exploring subsurface oceans on moons including Europa, Enceladus and Titan.

It's set on the shores of Kraken Mare, the vast methane sea found high in the northern latitudes of Saturn's moon, Titan, in a future when humanity has spread throughout the solar system.

With a Foreword by Eureka Co-creator Jaime Paglia

In the 25th Century, the effects of overpopulation and global warming on Earth have led to the formation of human colonies on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System, yet the limited number of viable places forces humanity to look to the stars. A crash program has been developed to send Protos 1, a giant multigenerational star ship, to a newly discovered Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The plan is for awake crewmembers to run the ship and for people in suspended animation to be roused before planet fall to use their skills in exploration and colony formation. To fulfill the goals of the mission and ensure that the in-flight population does not deplete the limited resources, the Protos Mandate is set up to govern a tightly controlled social system for the duration of the journey, which will take several generations. But problems threaten to sabotage the mission during its launch and transit and what finally awaits the crewmembers shocks them in anunpredictable way. This novel chronicles the trials and tribulations of this epic first interstellar mission.The scientific appendix at the end of the book discusses the challenges of such an interstellar mission based on an extensive literature review and it links these challenges to specific episodes in the novel. Issues that are considered include interstellar propulsion systems, economic considerations of interstellar flight, psychological and sociological factors inherent in a multigenerational space mission, problems with suspended animation, current knowledge of exoplanets and issues related to colonizing a distant planet and the possible discovery of extraterrestrial life. A history of interstellar missions in science fiction is also reviewed.Nick Kanas is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, where he directed the group therapy training program. For over 20 years he conducted research on group therapy, and for nearly 20 years after that he was the Principal Investigator of NASA-funded research on astronauts and cosmonauts. He is the co-author of Space Psychology and Psychiatry, which won the 2004 International Academy of Astronautics Life Science Book Award, and the author of Humans in Space: The Psychological Hurdles, which won the 2016 International Academy of Astronautics Life Science Book Award.Dr. Kanas has presented talks on space psychology and on celestial mapping at several regional and Worldcon science fiction conventions. A Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (London), he has been an amateur astronomer for over 50 years and is an avid reader of science fiction. He is also the author of two non-fiction books (Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography and Solar System Maps: From Antiquity to the Space Age) and two science fiction novels (The New Martians andThe Protos Mandate), all publishedby Springer.

Beyond Human is an informative and accessible guide for all those interested in the developing sciences of genetic engineering, bio printing and human cloning.

For hundreds of years, philosophers, scientists and science fiction writers have pondered these questions and many more.In Holy Sci-Fi!, popular writer Paul Nahin explores the fertile and sometimes uneasy relationship between science fiction and religion.

Like many fields of science, the future of medicine is frequently predicted by the science fiction writers of today, very much as many of today's medical advances were presaged by science fiction stories of the past.

This book introduces and illustrates the emergent topic of space psychology in form of a science fiction novel. It details the real psychological issues that could affect a crew returning from a long-duration mission to Mars.

Yet, in the newly settled Simpac system, some unexpected and worrying anomalies begin cropping up, making an urgent expedition to the system necessary: is it the underlying data, the computations, or is some unknown entity tampering with the space colonization program?

This book offers a clearly written, entertaining and comprehensive source of medical information for both writers and readers of science fiction.

In this highly original book, Russell Blackford discusses the intersection of science fiction and humanity's moral imagination.

SAINT JOAN OF NEW YORK is a novel about a math prodigy who becomes obsessed with discovering the Theory of Everything. Joan Cooper, a 17-year-old genius traumatized by the death of her older sister, tries to rebuild her shattered world by studying string theory and the efforts to unify the laws of physics.

Broderick homes in on the topic through the lens of science as well as fiction, exploring some fifty different time-travel scenarios and conundrums found in the science fiction literature and film.

Exploring Science Through Science Fiction addresses these and other intriguing questions, using science fiction as a springboard for discussing fundamental science concepts and cutting-edge science research.

Carolyn's parents did not, after all, make genomics history by synthesizing her genome in a lab.

This book presents the reader with some of the earliest classic SF short stories - all of them published between 1858 and 1934, featuring both well-known and long-forgotten writers - dealing for the first time with topics to which science had (some) answers only at much later stages.

The Cold War saw scientists in East and West racing to create amazing new technologies, the like of which the world had never seen. Yet not everyone was taken by surprise. From super-powerful atomic weapons to rockets and space travel, readers of science fiction (SF) had seen it all before. Sometimes reality lived up to the SF vision, at other times it didn't. The hydrogen bomb was as terrifyingly destructive as anything in fiction, while real-world lasers didn't come close to the promise of the classic SF ray gun. Nevertheless, when the scientific Cold War culminated in the Strategic Defence Initiative of the 1980s, it was so science-fictional in its aspirations that the media dubbed it "Star Wars". This entertaining account, offering a plethora of little known facts and insights from previously classified military projects, shows how the real-world science of the Cold War followed in the footsteps of SF - and how the two together changed our perception of both science and scientists, and paved the way to the world we live in today.

It has been argued that science fiction (SF) gives a kind of weather forecast ¿ not the telling of a fortune but rather the rough feeling of what the future might be like. The intention in this book is to consider some of these bygone forecasts made by SF and to use this as a prism through which to view current developments in science and technology.In each of the ten main chapters - dealing in turn with antigravity, space travel, aliens, time travel, the nature of reality, invisibility, robots, means of transportation, augmentation of the human body, and, last but not least, mad scientists - common assumptions once made by the SF community about how the future would turn out are compared with our modern understanding of various scientific phenomena and, in some cases, with the industrial scaling of computational and technological breakthroughs.A further intention is to explain how the predictions and expectations of SF were rooted in the scientific orthodoxy of theirday, and use this to explore how our scientific understanding of various topics has developed over time, as well as to demonstrate how the ideas popularized in SF subsequently influenced working scientists. Since gaining a BSc in physics from the University of Bristol and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Manchester, Stephen Webb has worked in a variety of universities in the UK. He is a regular contributor to the Yearbook of Astronomy series and has published an undergraduate textbook on distance determination in astronomy and cosmology as well as several popular science books.

This riveting scientific novel combines adventure, love, suspense, magic, pathos, and mystery in a carefully woven plot that is full of unexpected twists and turns.

Today there is a new generation of scientists writing science fiction informed with the expertise of their fields, from astrophysics to computer science, biochemistry to rocket science, quantum physics to genetics, speculating about what is possible in our universe.