Category: Uncategorized
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On the planet Shora, there are living rafts like trees that float, their root/branches extending through the water. These rafts grow for many years, building up soil that supports floating wildlife, like Noah’s ark. The Sharers tunnel into the huge “trunks” of the raft, and hide their genetic engineering cultures there. Amazingly, real floating meadows…
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In A Door into Ocean, there are no vertebrates; no creatures with a “backbone.” But invertebrates like cephalopods have evolved to fill every niche–even flying squid. And who needs a backbone (don’t miss this octopus climbing through the hole!) Most science-fictional ecosystems show only one creature of a type, like the giant sandworm. But on…
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This year is the 25th since publication of A Door into Ocean. Written during Reagan/Thatcher, with “the bomb” ten minutes away, A Door into Ocean asks: How can we defend our freedom yet remain human? A Door into Ocean won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, ahead of runners-up James Morrow’s This is How the…
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For a change of pace–some real experiments. What happens to microbes in space? I’ve reviewed NASA grants for bugs in micrograv, and lots of interesting things come out. Some bacteria grow faster in micrograv; and some pathogens get more virulent. Bacteria more readily form biofilms (such as these grown by my student). And antibiotic resistance…
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In Octavia Butler’s Dawn (Lilith’s Brood), an advanced star-faring species engineers itself to such “perfection” that it must kidnap other beings (including humans) to obtain their “imperfect” genes. Would humans ever do such a thing? Before colonization, the native American population (who actually traveled the farthest from Africa) were the least diverse genetically, the most…
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What if space-faring humans could evolve as a quasispecies? Could this be one way to adapt to a new planet? A quasispecies is a population of RNA viruses such as HIV (AIDS) or Hepatitis C. RNA genomes have high mutation rates; as high as 10% per base, for HIV. So the vast majority of progeny…
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A big problem for astronomers is the missing “dark matter” and “dark energy” unaccounted for when you add up all the known sources of matter and energy in the universe. But for life on Earth, we have a similar problem: Where are all the species? To detect a new species, we use polymerase chain reaction…
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Welcome to Ultraphyte, my first book blog. In my new book The Highest Frontier, student-athletes go out in space to Frontera College, where they discover how to save planet Earth. Their space habitat is run by a tribal casino and protected from ultraphytes (UV-photosynthesizing aliens) by Homeworld Security. The ultraphytes evolve like an RNA virus–which…
Joan Slonczewski 