SCIENCE FICTION SHARES WITH
science a most important driver: a fascination with the possibilities of existence. As a theoretical physicist, my motivation for studying the universe has always been the wonder of what might be possible rather than what is practical. This makes me particularly sympathetic to the challenges facing science fiction writers. After all, perhaps the most significant difference between science and science fiction is that the former explores what is possible in our universe, and the latter what might be possible in any universe.

This is not to minimize the significance of this important distinction. The renowned physicist Richard Feynman once said that “science is imagination in a straitjacket.” It is wonderful to let one's imagination roam, but forcing our ideas to conform to the evidence of reality, and being willing to throw out ideas, even beautiful ones, if nature turns out not to use them, is hard even for those of us who spend our lives preparing to do just that.

In my own field of cosmology, for example, we have been forced, kicking and screaming, by the data to give up the comforting notion that the energy of empty space had a commonsense value, namely zero, and have instead had to come to grips with the fact that empty space contains the dominant energy in the universe, producing a kind of cosmic antigravity that will determine our ultimate future.

In this regard it is perhaps appropriate to suggest instead that science fiction is the literature where we keep the beautiful ideas and throw out the data .Â .Â . namely, where we are free to conjure new realities that conform to our ideas.

So it is that I am often unimpressed when people claim that science fiction anticipates science. It doesn't. The imagination of the natural world far exceeds that of even the most gifted science fiction writer. The really big advances in science are most often unforeseen, which is one of the things that makes science so fascinating and so much fun to be involved in. These include serendipitous discoveries like the antibiotic capability of penicillin, the weird behavior of the expanding universe I alluded to above, or even the overwhelming social revolution created by the World Wide Web.

When science fiction and science do converge, there is rarely a causal connection, but rather it is generally because creative people can come up with independent but similar solutions to well-known problems. Thus, for example, faced with the possibility that opening someone up to explore inside his or her body might be less desirable than probing metabolic processes from the outside, the writers of
Star Trek
invented the “tricorder,” whereas in the real world, scientists came up with ultrasound, CAT scans, and MRI machines. The latter were far more difficult to actually make work than the former of course, so it is not surprising that they arose later.

Of course there are periodically examples of science fiction inspiring real-life designers. The original flip cell phone was inspired by
Star Trek,
and the X-Prize Foundation now has a prize for someone to develop a real-life tricorder. But these are the exception, rather than the rule.

This is what makes the current anthology so intriguing and ambitious. In this collection of stories, science fiction writers, futurists, and technology writers have been challenged to come up with stories on the hairy edge of current realityâexploring possibilities that might actually spur useful collaborations with scientists and engineers to produce new technologies to deal with problems just beyond our current horizon. As Neal Stephenson put it when he founded Project Hieroglyph: the collection should involve a moratorium on “hackers, hyperspace and holocaust.” Namely, it should avoid the classic science fiction hooks: a dystopian future or technology so advanced that the world it describes bears little or no relation to our world.

The stories in this anthology range over a locus of possibilities that take up just where current science and technology hang. I suppose one had to expect at least one story about space travel, that area that engenders such disappointment among those who grew up with the agonizing technological coitus interruptus of the Apollo program. Gregory Benford's space-based saga may be mere wishful thinking, but a central facet of it revolves around technology that at least some entrepreneurs are taking seriouslyâmining asteroids for raw materials that might be used both to relieve scarcities here on Earth and to construct facilities in space. I wouldn't personally invest in this likelihoodâI just don't see a business model that actually worksâbut if you examine my real-life investments, it is not difficult to distinguish my business acumen from Warren Buffett's. And whatever one can say about the remarkable waste of resources associated with human space explorationâwhich gets in the way of doing good science at NASAâit is hard to argue that our future, if there is to be one, will in the long run expand beyond the confines of our planet.

More grounded, if you will forgive the pun, is Neal Stephenson's piece about building a twenty-kilometer tower on Earth. At first glance it seems to defy reason, but what
are
the actual limits of civil engineering? The Tower of Babel didn't work out well for anyone involved, but like the bulk of the Bible, that story was just a fairy tale, and a pretty boring one at that. What if one seriously contemplates such a project?

Are there any laws of physics that really make this impossible? This idea has spawned a collaboration with engineers at Arizona State University. Time will tell if it leaps from a sparkle in Stephenson's eye to reality. Other stories include subjects at the heart of modern science innovation, from neuroscience and memory storage to 3-D printers. Whatever skepticism one might bring to the likely success of such speculations for productively influencing ongoing scientific or engineering research, the true hallmark of good science fiction is, surprisingly perhaps, not based primarily on the science.

Too often we concentrate on the first word in
science fiction
and not the second. If a science fiction story is not dramatically compelling, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for readers to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in the action. In this sense, nothing distinguishes science fiction from the rest of fiction. All these literary works create a make-believe universe that has to be just real enough to make the dramatic tension that arises between the protagonists both convincing and compelling.

Many of the stories in this collection exemplify precisely this development of dramatic tension that turns potentially pale futuristic ideas into compelling pieces of fiction. For example, 3-D printing is a new technology that is already inspiring the public's imagination, from allowing fabrication of intricate mechanical devices in the third world to building human organs cell by cell. Cory Doctorow's beautiful story “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” however, pushes these ideas one step further by suggesting that 3-D printers could be put on the moon to create building materials that might one day be used by future colonists. What makes the story truly come alive, however, and allows one to suspend disbelief at the remarkable technological hurdles involved, is the deep friendship between three misfits who meet by accident as drug-addled Burning Man partygoers and who overcome personal demons and disease to build lives together.

Similarly, the emerging attempts to inject neuroscience more fully into the legal system, from the search for some form of lie detection that might actually work to serious efforts to anticipate behavior before it happens, are, for many of us, chilling developments. But perhaps nowhere near as chilling as Elizabeth Bear's “Covenant.” Taking the simple idea that eventually we may be able to alter neurophysiology sufficiently to change character, Bear goes inside the mind of a serial killer and inserts that concept in a gripping cat-and-mouse chase where prey and predator can be confused.

Science fiction has also often been a convenient method of projecting social insights in a way that avoids traditional stereotypes that produce emotional baggage that often otherwise distorts reality. Going back all the way to the nineteenth century, Edward Abbott's
Flatland
described a fictitious world of two-dimensional beings, where the highest form of social class, circles, were priests, and the lowest form, lines, were women. Women were dangerous because a line disappears when it is coming toward you and thus could pierce you, so separate entrances were needed for them in every building. In this way Abbott could satirize the Victorian subjugation of women without having to refer to any ongoing political issues.

So too in this collection one finds several stories, notably Madeline Ashby's “By the Time We Get to Arizona” and Karl Schroeder's “Degrees of Freedom,” that explore how future advanced technologyâin the case of Ashby's piece it is sensor technology and human-machine interfaces, and in Schroeder's it is the increasing sophistication of data analysis and retrieval on the Internetâcan nevertheless cast new light on current real-world problems. In Ashby's piece it is the constant fear that many illegal immigrants now feel in the United States about being “outed” and deported in spite of the fact that they may be productive members of our society, and in Schroeder's it is the time invariant struggle of the individual versus the stateâthe very thing that Rousseau talked about when he said we are all born free and yet will forever be in chains. But that struggle has taken on a new dimension in the virtual world of the Internet. As online interconnections grow, and the data on everything from our shopping preferences to our network of friends becomes accessible, those who can best utilize this information can best manipulate us.

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