Just like in Italy, Science Fiction in Spain is somewhat rare due to the general conditions. Nevertheless, recently a show called El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Department of Time), has gained a lot of popularity.

The plot revolves around three agents that are recruited from different time periods in history in order to serve in the ministry in the present day. What hides inside the ministry is the only time machine possessed by humans… or so they think. The show revolves around a story line where time has to maintain unchanged while an American company is trying to steal the secrets of time travel… to apply it to stock trading of all things in the world.

Watch the show here

Additionally on the topic of American companies that steal technology; Timeless, the American show with a similar premise by NBC was sued by the creators of El Ministerio. NBC settled out of court. interesting to see some prescience in that aspect of Science Fiction writing too

I would like to talk briefly on one of my personal favorite Sci-fi novels, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and the ways in which machines are and aren’t a part of the universe that Herbert creates in that novel and in all the stories following it.

Machines are central to the space-faring humans of Herberts future world. Interplanetary travel is carried out on massive tubular ships called “Heighliners” Spice is harvested in crawling factories. The Fremen, natives of the planet Arrakis (the proper name for the titular planet), have created desert-proof outfits called “Stillsuits”, along with a host of other bits of tech that enable them to live in parts of their planet deemed uninhabitable by offworlders. In short, there is no lack of cool future technology for Sci-Fi fans to get excited about.

However, there are two very notable absences that make Herbert’s books stand out from many other works of science fiction. There are no computers or artificial intelligences of any kind and there are very few lasers or projectile weapons.

In regard to the former, the absence of computers is explained in-universe by a war between humans and AI that took place 10,000 years before the events of Herbert’s 1st book. The humans won this war, and proceeded to outlaw artificial intelligence of any kind, replacing it with humans trained to be computers themselves, called “mentats”. These individuals have all the processing power of a computer, if not more, and yet are still definitively human. They have received no cybernetic augmentation, but have rather had their minds cultivated from a young age to hone them into powerful computing forces.

In terms of lasers and guns, their absence is explained by the creation of personal body shields that keep fast-moving bullets from hitting the wearer and which, if hit by a laser, create a reaction that kills both the shooter and the shield-wearer. This means that most combat is done with body shields and bladed weapons. A very fun twist.

Herbert, as with most great science fiction writers, is as intentional about the technologies that he leaves out as the ones that he includes. Many readers of science fiction would expect to see computers and lasers in a future society such as the one Herbert creates, and I appreciate his leaving them out.

Also, if you’re interested in Herbert’s work, there’s a screening of Dune this Friday, hosted by the Bowdoin Film Society!

Space and the ocean share a lot of similarities. Both space and the ocean present abundant opportunity for human exploration and discovery. To prepare for space travel, NASA’s NEEMO simulation requires astronauts to live underwater for a several days. While, the universe is more vast and unintelligible than our ocean, the planets of our solar system have been mapped with higher resolution the sea floor. Fixated on pushing the limits of impossibility, we consistently look to space rather than investigating what remains undiscovered on earth. NOAA has an annual budget of 5 billion dollars, while NASA’s stands at nearly 23 billion as of 2020. Space travel may even be a barrier to deep sea exploration. While SF’s fascination with space has possibly contributed to the neglect of earthly exploration, the genre has had many love affairs with the sea. Giving more attention to underwater SF may help push sea exploration deeper into our collective unconscious. It could be the Marina Trench, not Mars, that holds the hospitable potential for holding future human populations. I found this link (https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/under_the_sea) on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. If you are interested in underwater SF, check out their list; it is expansive. The ocean deserves some love!

If you’re interested in seeing how people perceived the scientific revolutions that surrounded them during the Cold War, this blog might be of some interest to you. It’s a great collection of commercial sf artwork (movie posters, book covers, etc.) and documents of space-age era interior design, technology, and aesthetics. I think the whole thing strikes a really interesting balance between comfortably nostalgic and genuinely unnerving.

LINK! –> https://thevaultoftheatomicspaceage.tumblr.com/ <– LINK!

Hey folks.

I wanted to take a moment to share a Youtube channel that some of you may already know about. It’s called Kurzgesagt, and the work being produced by this animation studio in my opinion provides some of the best and most thought out explanations to theoretical science. Their videos cover a wide range of scientific and philosophical topics, such as the complexities of the immune system, realistic ways to combat climate change, and how to live your life with purpose. Often their videos focus on a central debate or topic relevant to present-day science to which they apply literature and expert opinions to formulate a set of answers to the video’s central question. But sometimes their topics get a bit more “what if”. For example, this channel exposed me to: the Fermi Paradox, the Dyson Sphere, uploaded consciousness, stellar engines, and other more SF-ey topics we’ve already talked about in this class.

To me, what is unique about this channel is rather than producing videos that simply outline ideas such as the Dyson Sphere, these people are like “no, what if humanity actually built a Dyson Sphere? How long would it take us? What resources would be necessary to construct such an engineering feat? When in the future could this idea actually become feasible?” Kurzgesagt takes far-fetched ideas and applies science, reason, and understanding to arrive at what they acknowledge is only Kurzgesagt’s answer to the question at hand. I wanted to share this with you all not only because they have some great videos explaining some pretty wild technological ideas (see links below), but their methodology behind video production is some of the most transparent I’ve seen on Youtube’s platform. They provide links to their papers, cite each one of their claims, and (in my opinion) are incredibly objective to the topic at hand. And when an opinion does arise, they are explicit in their video to say something like “based on what we’ve just shown you, this is what we think”. Kurzgesagt provides some of the best educational material regarding science on a platform that too often represents the epitome of misinformation. I encourage y’all to peruse their videos and find one that looks exciting. Oh, and their animation is likewise stellar.

Enjoy!

Dyson Sphere:

Fermi Paradox (there’s also a part 2):

Loneliness (one of their more holistic videos):

I would like to take a minute here to begin traveling down a line of reasoning that, I’m sure, will be a perennial one in this course; this being the ability of human beings to imagine what alien life would be like.

The nature of aliens is a question that appears all over science fiction literature, film, and television, with interpretations ranging from people in green body paint to giant pixelated amorphous blobs. The Kanamits of To Serve Man are – and I say this as somebody who thoroughly enjoyed the episode – a good example of a rather unimaginative take on alien life. They are simply tall humans with bulbous heads. Visual mediums like The Twilight Zoine seem to be more commonly guilty of such portrayals, partially because it is much easier to leave appearances up to the imagination in writing than it is in film or the visual arts.

I understand that, often, the physiological nature of the aliens is besides the point. For many works of science fiction, it is enough that they are signified as “other”, and that signifier can be as simple as a pair of antennae attached to a headband. This, paired with a narrative, is enough to let us know that, wherever the beings are from, it isn’t Earth. However, biologically speaking, I can think of no good reason that a species which developed on a planet other than ours should look too humanoid in nature. To me, visualizing aliens as such all to often reeks of an anthropocentric point of view that I find to be quite aggravating.

That, or a lower-than-optimal budget.

There are some exceptions to this viewpoint of mine. For example, it may be the case that an author wishes to explore the possibility that human life came from another planet. In which case, the inhabitants of that planet would likely look quite a bit like us. And yes, if aliens were to be subject to similar selective pressures as life on Earth, they could certainly evolve similar features to organisms on our planet. Fin-like organs, for example, would be useful in water on any planet. These are, however, specific exceptions and somewhat besides the point. Assuming that the alien life is truly alien and thus evolved on a planet far from Earth in response to a different set of selective pressures, to have them resemble life on Earth – especially human beings – too closely would be unrealistic and unimaginative.

Or would it? As I write this, I am reminded of the incredible diversity of life on this planet and the many and varied solutions that different species have developed to cope with many and varied selective pressures. The odds that some form of life on another planet might have evolved a similar solution to a similar challenge as has an Earth-creature are nonzero. So maybe it isn’t the plain fact of alien life being often portrayed as similar to life on Earth that’s getting to me, but the reasons for that trend. It often seems to occur due to a lack of interest in the nature of alien physiology and, though I am not at all saying that that is the most worthwhile question for science fiction to pursue, I do wish it were pursued more often.

This is why I am so excited by science fiction stories like Prott, which really take the time to delve into alien biology and to ask what alien physiology would really be like. Just how far from what we are used to would it be? Would we even recognize it as life? How would a human being react to the truly alien, to life different in every way to that which we are used to and understand? All these are wonderfully interesting questions that make for wonderfully interesting literature.