Science In My Fiction

(Originally posted on Kickstarter)

In case you’re not on Twitter, or missed our mad excited tweeting last night: WE MADE IT! The Crossed Genres “Science in My Fiction” contest reached 100% of our goal last night!

Thank you so much to everyone who’s pledged so far. We were confident from the beginning that we’d make it, but it’s a huge worry behind us now that we’re there, and we can concentrate on having the contest results turn out brilliantly.

Of course, there are still 18 days left to the pledge drive! And the more pledges we get the better each copy will be! We know we’ll never get anywhere near these guys (and we say kudos to them, we were one of their earlier supporters), we’d love to reach the point where we can add artwork to the print copies! If you’d like to see the final versions even more impressive, please keep spreading the word. And thanks again to everyone who’s supported the contest so far!

First, there’s nothing new under the sun. Also, it’s all been done before. Furthermore, no matter how great something is, there’s always something out there cleverer or better equipped. Which begs the question: Why is humanity constantly reinventing wheels when we should be reverse-engineering Nature’s great works?

(If you were expecting, “Why bother?” this isn’t the blog you’re looking for.)

The truth is that scientists copy-cat Nature’s designs as a matter of course. Indeed, biomimetics is an unbeatable resource for anyone with a problem to solve. Self-cleaning, water-repellant paints were inspired by the humble lotus. Wind turbines stalled in low wind and suffered inefficiencies under ‘ideal’ conditions before they were remodeled after humpback whale flippers. Olympic swimmers now train in swimsuits designed with sharkskin in mind. Even Velcro, that space age classic, mimics the way burrs cling to dog fur.

Whatever the human endeavor, Nature has a design for that. Yet the question remains: If biomimicry is so great, why don’t we use it for everything? The short answer is ‘demand’. Specifically, there aren’t enough people clamoring for brilliant redesigns of everyday objects. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but market forces drive human innovation; industry only invests in progress when it’s profitable.

Of course, as climate change awareness spreads, more demand emerges for fuel-efficient cars and energy-efficient refrigerators, but that’s an example of necessity-driven change rather than informed choice or good planning. By the time people need something, its arrival is already too late. The challenge is to raise their expectations of industry.

But what will it take to make everyone demand winter coats that work as well as polar bear fur? Or that we repaint every building with photosynthetic solar skins that are pigmented to optimize light absorption? Or that we at least outfit skyscrapers with leaf-like solar panels that follow the sun across the sky? What will make everyone clamor for grooved roofs that channel water like thorny devils? And passive heating and ventilation for their homes and offices?

As it turns out, it doesn’t take much. Great stories can make people demand better things than they have, even before they need them. The clever and beautiful things storytellers imagine today can be the objects of marketplace obsession tomorrow, if only they introduce people to the concept and give them something good enough to look forward to.

(Originally posted at Kickstarter)

We’re thrilled to announce that artist Julie Dillon has agreed to create artwork for the cover of the print edition of the Science in My fiction contest winners!

Julie provided the artwork for the cover of Crossed Genres’ special LGBTQ issue which was released in November:

Julie’s done work for Wizards of the Coast, Paizo Publishing, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, Fantasy Flight Games, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, amongst others. She was my first choice to do the cover for the SiMF contest and I’m ecstatic she has time and is enthusiastic about it.

Remember, the print edition won’t be made unless we make our pledge goal! As of this writing we’re just $65 shy of our goal. Please help spread the word and push us over the top! Thanks!

A taxon (plural taxa) is a group of like organisms; a species or genus would be a taxon. Lazarus refers to the Gospel of John in the New Testament, in which Jesus Christ raises Lazarus of Bethany from the dead (John 11:1-46).

Hence, Lazarus Taxa: taxa from the dead. A Lazarus taxon is an animal which disappears from the earth (or at least from the fossil record), only to be rediscovered later.

One of the most famous Lazarus taxa is the coelacanth. The coelacanth is an odd-looking fish, considered an important stage in the evolutionary chain. Thought to have been extinct since the Cretaceous period, a live coelacanth was caught by fishermen off the coast of South Africa in 1938.

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Originally posted as a Kickstarter update.)

With 25 days left to the SiMF contest Kickstarter drive, we stand at $644 out of $750, or roughly 86%. That’s excellent, and we’re very confident we can make it the rest of the way! However, we’ve been at $644 for a full week now, and we’re getting nervous.

And besides, we don’t just want to barely reach our goal but sail past it! We want lots of people, TONS of people, to read these stories, which we know are going to be remarkable. We’ve been thinking since the beginning that we’d sweeten the benefits of pledging if we pass our goal, so in the hopes of encouraging people to spread the word and contribute:

1) For every $50 we reach above our initial goal, we will donate a print copy of the winners to a library, charity or reading program. Everyone who pledges (or has already pledged) will get to recommend a place for the donation(s) AND will have a vote when picking the final recipients!

2) If we reach at least $1000 total, we will commission black-and-white artwork for each of the 3 winning stories, that will go in the print and digital versions but not online – in other words, people who pledge will be the only ones who get to see them!

Please help us spread the word and encourage others to pledge! We have to reach our goal for any print copies to be made!

25 days and counting. Thanks to everyone who’s blogged, linked, tweeted or pledged so far!

Anyone who reads much scifi or fantasy, at some point reads a story set on a desert world, never mind that all single-biome planets are probably lifeless on the surface. To find life (or have a life) on a 100% desert world, we’re going to have to dig for it. Given the present state of Earth’s climate, it might be wise to start our excavations now.

Even if anthropogenic climate change isn’t a factor, we know from the fossil record that natural forces are perfectly capable of causing mass extinctions on Earth. Humans are hardly immune to the effects of disaster on that scale, so it’s worth considering what adaptations might be necessary if the surface of the planet we (or our characters) live upon should happen to be entirely inhospitable. A desert, in other words.

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