AH YES, I REMEMBER IT WELL

OK, so I’m dating myself quoting a song from the musical Gigi, but if you remember the scene from the movie, old lovers Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold sing their memories of the time they first fell in love. Of course, each remembers it very differently.

The process of memory has been and still remains mysterious, but there’s a lot of research ongoing in the field.

Brain cells, or neurons, essentially send messages by sparking to other neurons. Even as far back as the 1970’s it was discovered that there are certain neurons in the hippocampus (a structure deep within the lower part of the brain) that appear to be directly connected to our location in space. Researchers have called these “place cells”, because specific neurons will fire according to a specific location, and others will even fire in correlation to the direction travelled. New research has discovered comparable neurons associated with time sequences (quickly dubbed “time cells”). The lead author of the new study, Dr. Howard Eichenbaum from the Center for Memory and Brain at Boston University, revealed that not only did particular neurons of the hippocampus capture frozen moments of a sequence of events, but certain cells also marked out the gap of time between two separated events. The cells could reset that gap if the delay between the events was changed. Now I’m dying to find out how those neurons differentiate between events that seem to be short (like spending time with a lover) and events that seem to take forever (like spending time with the boss).

On a more general level, it’s been known for some time that the brain does most of its data storage during the night, while we sleep. A study released earlier this year involved volunteers who were asked to memorize 40 pairs of words, or perform some other memory task. Some were told that they’d be tested on the task ten hours later. Some were allowed to sleep before the test. As expected, the volunteers who caught some shuteye did better on the test, but the ones who really stood out were the ones who slept and knew they’d be tested. Obviously the brain treats information differently if it knows that information will be needed at some future time. So some advice to guys in a new relationship: understand that in twenty years your lady is going to expect you to remember the dress she was wearing when you first met. Maybe your brain will cooperate, and save you from the glare of death down the road.

One thing is clear to me: research into the process of memory will never be complete until it can explain why my wife can recall every detail of events I can’t even swear actually happened, and she always turns out to be right.

IF YOU CAN DREAM IT

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the connection between science and science fiction, as well as what distinguishes SF from fantasy. Of course science fiction has to have a basis in scientific reality, most will say. No unicorns or fairies (tell that to Anne McCaffrey, Roger Zelazny and others), no magic (forgetting Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) No gods, demons, leprechauns, dragons…you can carry the list as far as you like, and you’ll probably find exceptions to all of them in good, solid works of science fiction.

Many stalwarts would say that science fiction shouldn’t contain anything considered impossible by current scientific knowledge. Which rules out faster-than-light travel and time travel, two of the genre’s most persistent tropes (and dumps some of the past century’s best SF into the trash compactor). Some would say SF writers should extrapolate from current technology, rather than invent dazzling gizmos with no idea how they could possibly work. I can only say that such stick-in-the-muds must never have heard Walt Disney’s philosophy: “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Let’s remember that there are a lot of research projects around today that owe their existence to something someone saw in an episode of Star Trek.

It’s a delight to see some of the fantastic world-building that writers like Larry Niven and Canada’s Karl Schroeder can produce while playing with (and adhering to) the laws of physics. But I also get a kick out of voyagers who travel by wormhole or transporter beam.

So much depends on what we consider to be the purpose of science fiction. Canadian SF writer Robert J. Sawyer has told me, and many others, that SF is a literature of allegory and thereby a vehicle for commentary on contemporary society. I certainly agree that’s one of its primary functions, and when Pierre Boulle wrote La planete de singes (inspiration for the Planet Of The Apes movies) I doubt that he was much concerned about whether or not it was physiologically possible for apes to talk.

Am I saying that science fiction shouldn’t have any rules? No. I just think the genre is better served by not getting hung up on definitions, laws, edicts, preconceptions, or any of the other things that hamstring the imagination. Because, above all, science fiction is fiction of the imagination. It shows us where we might be going, and lets us decide whether we really want to go there. And it shows us ourselves as we are, though its mirror often requires a little deciphering.

I think those are the more important core values of what we call science fiction, rather than a set of rules that’s bound to change with each new leap forward in human knowledge.

Maybe that’s why it’s called fiction.

NEWS EVERY WRITER WANTS TO HEAR

It’s been a good week. On Tuesday I was told that my first novel had been accepted for publication. On Thursday I signed the contract.

My novel Dead Air isn’t science fiction—it’s a story about a morning radio show host who’s life is already falling apart when he begins to suffer harassment from an unknown source. As nasty pranks escalate into outright attempts on his life, he struggles to cope with the threat and find out who wants him dead. Before they succeed!

I wrote the novel while I was hosting a radio morning show myself, and the scenario is plausibly unnerving. It’s going to be published by Scrivener Press of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, a small press that does good work and has high standards. Scrivener Press is also the publisher of my friend and mentor, Sean Costello. It’s a perfect fit for Dead Air because the novel is set in Sudbury. The only downside is that Dead Air won’t be released until the fall of 2012, so you (and I) have a long year to wait before we can hold a copy in our hands.

On Sunday I was gratified to learn that my short story “Once Upon A Midnight” has been accepted for the upcoming anthology In Poe’s Shadow from Dark Opus Press. It’s a dark-humour story inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, about a woman having relationship problems while she’s working at a storage and research centre for deadly bio-agents. I’m not sure when that anthology will see print. There’s a chance you’ve already read the story—I had it available for download here on the website, but I’ve taken it down as a courtesy to the folks at Dark Opus. Now you’ll have to buy the book.

I’ve been meaning to make audio versions of my free stories available on this site for some time, and I finally got around to recording my story “No Walls”. So now you can read it online, download a PDF version, or listen to the MP3 recording. The audio is in two parts, available from the “No Walls” page. I hope you enjoy it.

Yes, it’s been a good week. Now if I only had time to get some writing done!

A STITCH IN TIME--WILL TIME TRAVEL EVER BE POSSIBLE?

One of the most popular tropes in science fiction is the idea of time travel. Wouldn’t it be great if we could witness the heyday of the Roman Empire? Or even the dinosaurs? Or jump ahead to a future time to find out how our great-grandkids’ grandchildren turn out? One of the best-known early fictional treatments of the idea is H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and one of the most popular recent efforts is Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, but the concept has inspired countless novels, movies, and TV shows.

So will time travel ever be possible?

In a sense, jumping into the future just requires us to go somewhere at really high speed, because of the effects of relativity. In Orson Scott Card’s book Speaker For The Dead his main character, Ender Wiggin, exists in a world more than 3000 years after his birth, but has aged only 36 years because he’s spent so much of his life travelling between stars at near light speed. But is that really time travel? After all, you can never go back! What we really want is a way to go back and forth in time, isn’t it?

The idea doesn’t belong to fiction alone—lots of legitimate scientists have looked into it. The laws of physics don’t rule it out, and there are some phenomena that might do the trick.

One such is a wormhole in space—kind of like a black hole, but with an entrance and an exit. Star Trek fans will remember a wormhole as the setting for the series Deep Space Nine, but a wormhole might provide a shortcut through time as well as space.

Some scientists are even trying to make time machines. One of those is Dr. Ronald Mallett at the University of Connecticut. Mallett’s concept involves making a circular beam of high-energy light that would stir empty space like a spoon in a cup of coffee, making it theoretically possible for a particle in that space to travel faster than light and, hopefully, into the past. Mallett isn’t saying he’ll be able to send humans physically into the past, but perhaps information at least. There are advocates of time travel who believe that information is enough: that we might be able to experience other eras through a kind of virtual reality using information from those other times.

So far, the concepts that do appear theoretically possible have their drawbacks. A wormhole couldn’t take you back to a time before the wormhole existed. Similarly, Mallett’s time machine wouldn’t allow matter or information to travel to a time earlier than the moment the machine was switched on. Does that make his machine useless to the impatient types among us? Not really. The moment Dr. Mallett gets his machine working, he might be flooded with messages from people in the future (or even himself) trying to contact our time. That could be pretty useful.

One of the questions most deeply-ingrained into the human psyche is: what if I had done something differently? How would my life have turned out? From there it becomes: what if the world had done something differently? That question has generated a whole sub-genre of SF: the alternate history story.

That’s why even if time travel never becomes a reality, for science fiction it will always be necessary just the same.