SF and the History of Science

Looking at my shelves I'm surprised I don't have more alternate history the panel describes.

Fiction: The Conrad series by Leo Frankowski is, for the first couple of books, an interesting take on a modern engineer going to Poland just prior to the Mongol invasions. In particular I remember being impressed by how useful concrete would have been in that era. The books get wackier and more misogynistic as they go on though.

The Lord Darcy series replaces Physics knowledge with Magic knowledge to excellent effect. Plus they are just fantastic Holmes' tributes.

The recent series by Naomi Novik, the Temeraire series (Pern meets Patrick O'Brien), adds Dragons to the Napoleonic wars, but takes them seriously (i.e. no Magic is invoked, just advanced Zoology). They are also excellent quick reads.

Non-Fiction:
Asimov is the king and his best book, by far, is Asimov's New Guide to Science. Last revised in 1984 it attempts to review the entire history of science through that date. Of course it can't be comprehensive, especially in the 20th century, but it comes as close as I could imagine a 750 page book coming. One of my five favorite books of all time, and a book any science generalist should own. In particular because of its focus on the people behind the discoveries and the environments and cultures they were working in. If you haven't read it, get it and read it before Boskone and you'll be well prepared.

I have no training in the history and philosophy of science, but I find myself in a position of teaching it lately, so I've been trying to find good readable resources for me AND for my students for a couple of years now.

A really great book on the history of science that I've come across recently is called "Making Modern Science". And for a readable scholarly tome on the idea of scientific progress, there is Cohen's "Revolution in Science".

For philosophy I recommend "Reading the Book of Nature" by Kosso. It lays out the important issues in phil-of-sci without a whole lot of philosophy mumbo-jumbo, which I find unbearable.

As far as historical fiction - I just finished "Measuring the World" by Daniel Kehlmann which is about Gauss and Humbolt, and I found it a really enjoyable read. Nothing much "SF"y about it, though.

There was a series published a few (more than 5, less than 10 IIRC) years ago, where the premise was that Isaac Newton's great discoveries came from his alchemical research, rather than scientific. (Or something along those lines.) I never read them, but it seems like a cool idea.

Googling "Newton alchemy book sf" tells me that it's The Age of Unreason by J. Gregory Keyes. The amazon.com summary makes it look like the sort of alt-hist (although this is more alt-physics) you hate (too many actual-historical characters).

Does the Discworld count as "good alternate-cosmology books in which different pre-scientific worldviews turn out to be correct?"

I think that Phillip Pullman is an interesting view of magic (or spirituality, or something) AS science, which I guess counts.

R. Scott Bakker ("That which comes before") has an interesting world where a man brought up in a purely logical culture (not really science, but maybe good enough) goes into the rest of the world where magic exists, and is trying to make sense of it. That's not a big part of the story, or even that character, but it's an interesting sub plot I think. (Note, the series is only 2 books long so far, and not nearly done. Also the books are long.)

Where the historical fiction is concerned, you really need to be looking at alternate history. So more Eric Brace and Harry Turtledove than Patrick O'Brian.

Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss (yeah, that guy) teamed up on a book called "The Two Georges" where America never split off from Britain, and the book is a caper based in the 20th century. This is not a plot point in the book, but unless you're in a hurry/on official business, the people fly by dirigible. It struck me as a good example of cultural influences on technology development (the era is late-20th century Victorian).

Problem is, most of the titles I can think of don't focus on technological development, but those changes are addressed in the books. Or they put the plot in motion ("Guns of the South" has the CSA win by way of AK-47s brought to them from the future).

The Aristotelian physics sf book is Garfinkle's Celestial Matters. I found it pretty fun, with an ending that was kinda of "meh". The whole books is played straight, kind of like something Tim Power's would write.

Speaking of Power's, one could argue that The Anubis Gates fit in this category, as there is a techno-babble explanation for the time travel in addition to the, um, other explanation. The book itself is fun, swashbuckling even, with wild imagery and complicated plotting.

As for non-fiction, the more time I spend in science, the less I think that most of the non-fiction I read is correct. There is a tendency to gloss over a lot of how bandwagons and general groupthink can cause people to move in a direction (right or wrong). Too much of non-fiction has science progressing in the usual Whig theory history way, onward and onward, upward and upward.

John Gribbin's "The Scientists" is one of the more comprehensive, readable surveys of science I've read in many years. It lends itself to reading cover to cover or episodically by jumping around.

The several thousand pages (8 1/2 x 11 pages, I mean) of my subdomain
http://magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline.html
are a combined History of Science and History of Science Fiction.

I started out making a chronology of Science Fiction, "The Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide" which Google ranks #4 for "Science Fiction", as an alternative ordering of the analysis alphabetically I had, covering over 9,000 authors of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror; and my breakdowns by country, by subgenre, by film/TV connection, and the like.

As I moved deeper into the past, there was eventually no term "science fiction" or recognized genre. So I asked: what would the equivalent of a SF fan then have read? I mean, in an earlier century, what would an inquisitive literate educated person have been reading in natural Philosophy, Theology, Math, Art, Literature. Who were the Big Names who shaped that era, both intellectually and by changing the mundane world.

I can't summarize the 10,000,000 or so words that I've had published and/or posted online in the 12 years since I launched my web domain magicdragon.com

But that's a place to start, and I'd appreciate your looking there, and perhaps informing the panel of what is there that you like, in the serb site that's getting over 15,000,000 hits per year.

Also, say hello to Brother Guy Consolmagno. I spoke with him at length at the Planetary Science conference of the AAS in Pasadena, and at caltech's Athenaeum. He gave me a hard problem to research, in science fiction history crossed with science history. Do let him know that I'm still researching. It was a great question, and I've been consulting equally appreciative but baffled experts.

http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/01/locus-reviews-stephen-baxter-a…

"Here are the two most important things to keep in mind about future histories: they aren't histories, and they aren't about the future. They are, however, wonderfully architectonic Christmas trees on which to hang a variety of tales of the sort that Patrick Parrinder once described as "epic fables" - stories which imply, describe, or contribute to a much vaster meta-narrative which may or may not ever be fully outlined by the author, or ever completed. As such, and as Heinlein and Asimov discovered decades ago, they provide an ingenious means of mediating between two of SF's apparently contradictory imperatives: the desire for neatly plotted adventure stories on a human scale (which was pretty much all the early pulp magazines could handle), and the yearning for vast intractable vistas of space and time - SF's own version of the sublime, rooted in starscapes rather than the landscapes of an earlier generation. The old pulp writers tried to convey this sublimity by simply proclaiming it, hammering us with phrases like 'infinite depths of space' (or sometimes 'depths of infinite space'), 'inconceivable leagues of space', 'the infinite void's eternal night' (these are all taken from only a couple of pages of Edmond Hamilton's 'The Star Stealers'), but only a few writers tried to cast the far future as a literal universal history. The most famous, of course, was Olaf Stapledon, whose Last and First Men and Star Maker provided a grand enough template for hundreds of tales (it's always surprised me that so few later writers tried to set tales in Stapledon's universe), but he came flat up against the opposite problem: namely, that history is long on plots but short on plot, and that no matter how awe-inspiring the vision, a single chronicle covering millions of years doesn't really satisfy the needs of readers who simply want to know if the engineer can squeeze enough power out of the hyperdrive engines to outrun the onrushing space pirates (a situation which actually shows up in one of the stories in Alastair Reynolds's Galactic North)...."

Hi Chad -- That's a massive question. First place to check might be here-- http://www.hssonline.org/teach_res/ -- where you'll see them say from the top, "Thousands of books have been written on the history of Western science." The tricky part anymore is that "a good overview of the origin of scientific thought" leads to scholars working on defining what "scientific thought" is in historical context, and who decides where to start the clock, where to claim an origin point. So it was a lot easier to ask your question 50 years ago when the answer was "the West" and "the scientific revolution." But anyway, the History of Science Society ought to provide more references than you'd want.

For a non-fiction history of science, you should check out "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." It basically goes over the development of nuclear physics to after the WWII, while situating the science in a political and intellectual context. Plus, it won the pulitzer, so you know its a good read.

Also, Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is full of tasty bits of history of science, especially earth science.

You need to cram the history AND the philosophy of science, in the four weeks before Boskone? Good luck with that...

Is there something else that gives a good overview of the origin of scientific thought?

The most fundamental work in these fields is Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic, to explain how we get from magical thinking to a scientific world-view; but that's not really glib enough to give you the talking-points you need for Boskone. Given the time constraint, you could do worse than to look through the Asimov Guide to Science mentioned above.

You need to cram the history AND the philosophy of science, in the four weeks before Boskone? Good luck with that...

Well, I don't need to... I mean, it's not like they'll have me flogged if I say something silly at the panel. (Guy Consolmagno's a Jesuit, not a Dominican...)

It'd be nice to know more about these issues in general, though, and this is a bit of impetus to get me to read some serious books for a change.

Is there something else that gives a good overview of the origin of scientific thought?

If you want something that goes over the development of modern scientific thought in the Western world, a good book is The Revolution in Science 1500-1750 by A. Rupert Hall. It is probably more scholarly and thorough than you need for a Boskone panel, but it's only 370 pages, and totally free of Kuhnian nonsense.

Charles L. Harness's short story, "The New Reality" is somewhat along these lines. What happens if you destroy a photon?

Isaac Asimov (as usual) has some good introductory books; his History of Physics in particular.

Reading James Burke's Connections would be a very good basic introduction to the sorts of things that go on, and it's really fun at having lots of tags to toss to panelists.

I'm aware of, but haven't read (and don't remember the title of) a book in which Aristotelian physics holds.

Now that Boskone is safely over, I finally remembered: this is probably Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters.