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From BioSciFiWiki
The Biology in Science Fiction Wiki explores the use of science fiction to explore the latest ideas in life science.
What is evolution--past, present, and future?
What is a human being--and how will we face the DNA revolution?
Instructors: You are welcome to assign students to write their own science fiction stories and essays on this site. See for example student pages for BIOL 103 Index 2009.
The books listed here are used in the course Biology in Science Fiction, taught by microbiologist Joan Slonczewski at Kenyon College. Slonczewski’s forthcoming Frontera novel The Highest Frontier (Tor, 2011) explores future adventures in microbiology.
**Free sample: Chapters 1 - 9.
Contents |
The Time Machine
H.G. Wells, 1895
When the Time Traveler courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700--and everything had changed. In another, more utopian age, creatures called Eloi seemed to dwell together in perfect harmony. The Time Traveler thought he could study these marvelous beings, unearth their secrets and then return to his own time--until he discovered that his invention, his only avenue of escape, had been stolen.
Wells invites us to ask, how do humans evolve? What forces govern our evolution today? Could we give rise to descendents that lack humanity--or transcend it?
In the Arc Manor Classic edition, critical essays by Alexei and Cory Panshin, and by Paul Cook, help place The Time Machine in context. At the same time, they lead us to think how our assumptions of today may be challenged by the world of tomorrow.
Galápagos
Kurt Vonnegut, 1985
The extraordinary epic of evolution--and a response to The Time Machine. Galapagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave new, and totally different human race. Here, America's master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry-and all that is worth saving.
Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials
Wayne Douglas Barlowe, 1979
If science fiction were an ecosystem--how might all the aliens have evolved? Wayne Barlowe helped provide the answers for the film Avatar. Avatar director Cameron brought Barlowe on board early to help design his aliens.
In his classic Guide to the Aliens, Barlowe's brilliant portraits bring to life 50 aliens from science fiction literature: Larry Niven's Thrint and his Puppeteer, Arthur C. Clarke's Overlord, Frank Herbert's Steersman, Robert Silverburg's Sulidor and more. Humanoids, insectoids, reptillians-even protoplasmic, gaseous, and crystalline life forms-are all faithfully and naturalistically depicted so that you can now visualize what could only before be imagined.
Barlowe's aliens can be used to imagine divergence and convergence. Suppose you had the job of a taxonomist, trying to classify all the bewildering array of species in the Guide. How would you hypothesize their lineage and phylogeny?
Red Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson, 1986
For eons, windstorms have swept the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny. John Boone, Maya Toitovna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is to give Mars and Earth-like atmosphere. They place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planet's surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces. For there are those who will fight to the death to preserve the true Mars--to prevent Mars from ever being changed.
Yet the real pioneer colonists are not human, but microbes. Cosmic ray-resistant Deinococcus, dessication-resistant lichens, salt-tolerant halophiles--these will be the true "Areophytes," the first living organisms on Mars. (Unless, of course, Mars has native Areophytes already; as of today, we still don't know.)
Dune
Frank Herbert, 1965
More forbidding than Mars is the desert planet, Arrakis. And yet, Arrakis hosts a stunning array of life forms, including the immense sandworm. Dune begins the story of the man known as Muad'dib-and of a great family's ambition to bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream. To do this, they must join the Fremen, unconquerable people whose lives are adapted to the desert--and become addicted to its intoxicating “spice.”
A food web diagram from BIOL 103 compares the Dune ecosystem with that of a small Ohio town (Gambier).
A Technovelgy page explores how many of Herbert's imagined devices relate to technolgy today, forty years later.
A Door into Ocean
Joan Slonczewski, 1986
Shora was the desert’s opposite: completely covered in water. The Sharers dwell on living rafts, and live in balance with the ocean’s bizarre life forms. Sharers lived in peace with each other, and their world, using advanced “lifeshaping” technology to manipulate the genetics of other creatures and themselves. Their unique language lacks subject-object distinction; they cannot imagine giving in to a foreign control. But, from off-planet, the Sharers face a strong test of their resolve for peace. Can they repel armed invaders, without losing the values that define their world?
A Study Guide explores biological questions raised by this book, such as evolutionary divergence and convergence; genetic engineering of plants and animals;and same-sex human reproduction. The story illustrates authentic dynamics of nonviolent revolution, and shows how religious pacifism coexists with an evolutionary world view.
Jurassic Park
Michael Crighton, 1990
An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. The genetic relationship between dinosaurs and birds has been used to recreate the dinosaurs, from Triceratops to Tyrannosaurus. Now, one of mankind's most thrilling fantasies has come true. Creatures extinct for eons now roam Jurassic Park with their awesome presence and profound mystery and all the world can visit them--for a price. Until something goes wrong...
Brain Plague
Joan Slonczewski, 2000
What if alien microbes could give us whatever our brains imagined--at a price? Microbes take up residence in a human brain, offering to “extend” the brain’s capacities a thousand-fold. Artists, scientists, even financiers develop unprecedented capacities. But is the result less than human--or something more?
Dawn
Octavia Butler, 1987
The collapse of our biosphere could destroy the human race. What if an alien race chose to save us--for their own purpose? These intelligent, alien creature engineer themselves to perfection, to such a degree that they lose all genetic diversity. To change, adapt, and strengthen themselves, they must breed with other races; even inferior creatures such as ourselves. And the humans must assent, or face extinction.
