I hardly ever watch a film version of a book I love because my mental images from the book get mangled by the film maker’s vision. There’s also the problem of changes to the plot, since film and novels are entirely different kinds of media. The outliers, though, are interesting (and I sure did love Bladerunner). And when I heard that AppleTV would do Asimov’s Foundation books, I resolved to watch because I was satisfied there was no way on Earth my book images would conflict with what a filmmaker might do. How could anyone possibly produce a film version of these books?

Judging from the comments I see online, a lot of people realize how remote the AppleTV series is from the source. But here we get into something interesting about the nature of science fiction, and it’s something I have been thinking about since reading Keith Cooper’s book Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact. For the streaming variant of Foundation is visually gorgeous, and it pulls a lot of taut issues out of what I can only describe as the shell or scaffolding of the Asimov titles. Good science fiction is organic, and can grow into productive new directions.

A case in point: The ‘moonshrikes.’ They may not be in the books, but what a marvelous addition to the story. These winged creatures the size of elephants take advantage of another science fictional setting, a ‘double planet,’ two worlds so tightly bound that their atmospheres mix. You may remember Robert Forward playing around with this idea in his novel Rocheworld (1990), and to my knowledge that is the fictional origin of what appears to be a configuration well within the laws of physics. In the streaming Foundation, a scene where Hari Seldon watches moonshrikes leaping off cliffs to soar into the sky and graze on the sister world is pure magic.

Keith Cooper is all about explaining how this kind of magic works, and he goes at the task in both literary and filmed science fiction. Because the topic is the connection between real worlds and imagined ones, he dwells on that variant of science fiction called ‘hard SF’ to distinguish it from fantasy. As we’ve seen recently in talking about neutron stars and possible life forms there, the key is to imagine something that seems fantastic and demonstrate that it is inherently plausible. Asimov could do this, as could Clarke, as could Heinlein, and of course the genre continues into Benford, Baxter, Vinge, Reynolds, Niven and so on.

Image: The moonshrikes take wing. Credit: AppleTV / Art of VFX.

It’s hard to know where to stop with lists like that (and yes, I should mention Brin and Bear and many more), but the point is, this is the major thrust of science fiction, and while AppleTV’s Foundation takes off on explorations far from the novels, its lush filmography contains within it concepts that have been shrewdly imagined and presented with lavish attention to detail. Other worlds, as Keith Cooper will remind us in his fine book, are inescapably alien, yet they can be (at least to our imaginations, since we can’t directly see most of them yet) astonishingly beautiful. Cooper’s intuitive eye gets all that.

The rich history of science fiction, from the pulp era through to today’s multimedia extravaganzas, gets plenty of attention. I’m pleased to report that Cooper’s knowledge of SF history is deep and he moves with ease through its various eras. His method is to interview and quote numerous writers on the science behind their work, and numerous scientists on the origins of their interest. Thus Alison Sinclair, whose 1996 novel Blueheart takes place on an ocean world. Sinclair, a biochemist with a strong background in neuroscience, knows about the interplay between the real and the imagined.

Sinclair talks about how Blueheart’s ocean, being warmer and less salty than Earth’s oceans on average, is therefore less dense and floats atop a deeper layer of denser water. The aquatic life on Blueheart lives in that top layer, but when that life dies its remains, along with the nutrients those remains contain, would sink right to the bottom of the dense layer. She raises an additional point that on Earth, deep water is mixed with surface water by winds that drive surface water away from coasts, allowing deep water to well up, but with no continents on Blueheart there are no coasts, and with barely any land there’s no source of nutrients to replenish those that have sunk to the bottom.

Here is the science fictional crux, the hinge where an extrapolated problem is resolved through imaginative science. Sinclair, with an assist from author Tad Williams, will come up with a ‘false bottom,’ a layer of floating forests with a root system dense enough to act as a nutrient trap. It’s an ingenious solution if we don’t look too hard, because the question of how these floating thickets form in the first place when nutrients are in the oceanic deep still persists, but the extent to which writers trace their planet building backwards remains highly variable. It’s no small matter imagining an entire ecosystem over time.

The sheer variety of exoplanets we have thus far found and continue to hypothesize points to science fiction’s role in explaining research to the public. Thus Cooper delves deeply into desert worlds including the ultimate dry place, Frank Herbert’s Arrakis, from the universe he created in Dune (1965) and subsequent novels. Here he taps climatologists from the University of Bristol, where Alexander Farnsworth and team have modeled Arrakis, with Farnsworth noting that world-building creates huge ‘blue-sky’ questions. As he puts it, SF “…asks questions that probably wouldn’t be asked scientifically by anyone else.”

Solid point. Large, predatory creatures don’t work on desert worlds like Arrakis (there go the sand worms), but Arrakis does force us to consider how adaptation to extremely dry environments plays out. Added into the team’s simulations were author Herbert’s own maps of Arrakis, with seas of dunes at the equator and highlands in the mid-latitudes and polar regions, and the composition of its atmosphere. Herbert posits high levels of ozone, much of it produced by sand worms. Huge storms of the kind found in the novel do fit the Bristol model and lead Cooper into a discussion of Martian dust storms, factoring in surface heating and differences in albedo. All told, Dune is an example of a science fiction novel tat compels study because of the effort that went into its world building, and recent work helps us see when its details go awry.

Image: Judging from the comments of many scientists I’ve known, Frank Herbert’s Dune inspired more than a few careers that have led to exoplanet research. The publishing history is lengthy, but here’s the first appearance of the planet Arrakis in “Dune World,” the first half of the original novel, as serialized beginning with the December, 1963 issue of Analog.

The explosion of data on exoplanets, of which there were close to 6000 confirmed as Cooper was wrapping up his manuscript, has induced subtle shifts in science fiction that are acknowledged by writers as well as scientists (and the two not infrequently overlap). I think Cooper is on target as he points out that in the pre-exoplanet discovery era, Earth-like worlds were a bit easier to imagine and use as settings. But we still search for a true Earth analogue in vain.

…it’s probably fair to say that SF before the exoplanet discoveries of the 1990s was biased towards imagining worlds that were like something much closer to home. Alas, comfortably habitable worlds like Earth are, so far, in short supply. Instead, at best, we might be looking at habitable niches rather than whole welcoming worlds. Increasingly, more modern SF reflects this; think of the yin-yang world of unbearable heat and deathly cold from Charlie Jane Anders’s Locus award-winning 2019 novel The City in the Middle of the Night or the dark, cloud-smothered moon LV-426 in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) that has to be terraformed to be rendered habitable (although that example actually pre-dates the discovery of exoplanets).

Changes in the background ‘universe’ of a science fiction tale are hardly new. It was in 1928 that Edward E. ‘Doc’ Smith published The Skylark of Space, an award-winning tale which broached the idea that science fiction need not be confined to the Solar System. In the TV era, Star Trek reminded us of this when we suddenly had a show where the Earth was seldom mentioned. Both had some precursors, but the point is that SF adapts to known science but then can make startling imaginative jumps.

Thus novelist Stephen Baxter, a prolific writer with a background in mathematics and engineering:

’Now that we know planets are out there, it’s different because as a writer you’re exploring something that’s already defined to some extent scientifically, but it’s still very interesting…You know the science and might have some data, so you can use all that as opposed to either deriving it or just imagining it.”

What a terrific nexus for discovery and imagination. If you’re been reading science fiction for as long as I have, you’ll enjoy how famous fictional worlds map up against the discoveries we’re making with TESS and JWST. I found particular satisfaction in Cooper’s explorations of Larry Niven’s work, which clearly delights any number of scientists because of its imaginative forays within known physics and the sheer range of planetary settings he deploys.

No wonder fellow SF writers like Alastair Reynolds and Paul MacAuley cite him within these pages as an influence on their subsequent work. Niven, as McAuley points out, can meld Earth-like features with profound differences that breed utterly exotic locales. This is a man who has, after all, written (like Clement and Forward) about extreme environments for astrobiology (think of his The Integral Trees, for example, with hot Jupiters and neutron star life).

And then there’s Ringworld, with its star-encircling band of technology, and the race known as Pierson’s Puppeteers, developed across a range of stories and novels, who engineer a ‘Klemperer Rosette’ out of five worlds, one of them their home star. Each is at the point of a pentagon and all orbit a point with a common angular momentum. Their home world, Hearth, is an ‘ecumenopolis,’ a world-spanning city on the order of Asimov’s Trantor. Here again the fiction pushes the science to come up with explanations. Exoplanet scientist and blogger Alex Howe (NASA GSFC) explains his own interest:

“The Puppeteer’s Hearth is one of the things that keyed me in to the waste heat problem,” says Howe, who is a big fan of Niven: “I describe Larry Niven as re-inventing hard science fiction… not as SF that conforms strictly to known physics, but as SF that invents new physics or perhaps extrapolates from what we currently know, but applies it rigorously.”

Howe is an interesting example of the involvement of scientists with science fiction. A writer himself, he maintains his own blog devoted to the subject and has been working his way through all the classic work in the field. I’ve focused on SF in this review, but need to point out that Cooper’s work is equally strong coming in the non-fictional direction, with productive interviews with leading exoplanetologists. For now that we’re actually studying real planets around other stars, worlds like TOI-1452b, a habitable zone super-Earth around a binary, point to how fictional some of these actual planets seem.

So with known planets as a steadily growing database, we can compare and contrast the two approaches. Thus we meet Amaury Triaud (University of Birmingham), a co-discoverer of the exotic TRAPPIST-1 system and its seven small, rocky worlds. The scientist worked with Nature to coax Swiss SF writer Laurence Suhner into setting a story in that system.

Says Triaud: “If you were in your back garden with a telescope on one of these planets, you’d be able to actually see a city on one of the other planets.” Similarly, the snowball planet Gethen from Ursula le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is put through analysis by planetary scientist Adiv Paradise (University of Toronto). Thus we nudge into studies of Earth’s own history extrapolated into fictional planets that invoke entirely new questions.

Here’s Paradise on snowball planets and their fate. Must they one day thaw?

“If you have a planet that doesn’t have plate tectonics, and doesn’t have much volcanism, can the carbon dioxide still escape from the outside?… You might end up with a planet where all the carbon dioxide gets locked into the mantle, and volcanism shuts off and you end up with a runaway snowball that might suppress volcanism – we don’t fully understand the feedback between surface temperature and volcanism all that well. In that case, the snowball would become permanent, at least until the star becomes brighter and melts it.”

Cooper’s prose is supple, and it allows him to explain complicated concepts in terms that newcomers to the field will appreciate. Beyond the ‘snowball’ process, the carbonate-silicate cycle so critical to maintaining planetary climates gets a thorough workout, as does the significance of plate tectonics and the consequences if a world does not have this process. Through desert worlds to water worlds to star-hugging M-dwarf planets, we learn about how atmospheres evolve and the methods scientists are using to parse out their composition.

Image: NASA’s playful poster of the TRAPPIST-1 system as a travel destination. Credit: NASA.

Each world is its own story. I hope I’ve suggested the scope of this book and the excitement it conveys even to someone who has been immersed in both science fiction and exoplanetary science for decades. Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact would make a great primer for anyone looking to brush up on knowledge of this or that aspect of exoplanet discovery, and a useful entry point for those just wanting to explore where we are right now.

I also chuckle at the title. Amazing Stories was by consensus the first true science fiction magazine (1926). Analog, once Astounding with its various subtitles, used ‘Science Fiction – Science Fact’ on its cover (I remember taking heat from my brother in law about this, as he didn’t see much ‘fact’ in what I was reading. But then, he wasn’t an SF fan). As a collector of old science fiction magazines, I appreciate Keith Cooper’s nod in their direction.