The Science in Science Fiction by Peter Nicholls

Softcover. Vintage 1987.

Synopsis: Starships, aliens, cyborgs, space cities, suspended animation, telekinesis - trappings of science fiction. Are they all fantasy? Or do such things have a grounding in "real" science, pointing the way to what will happen in the future?

The answer, of course, is yes. Long before atomic weapons, tanks, submarines, artificial satellites, and space travel, novelists like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne had put them in books.

And for nearly a hundred years other writers of science fiction have been stretching their imaginations-and ours -to encompass ever more bizarre possibilities, from alternate universes to invaders from outer space, some plausible, some downright weird. Just how real those possibilities may be is the subject of The Science in Science Fiction.

Here are the hard facts behind ideas from the novels of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke, and dozens of others— about time travel and the exploration of deep space, about psionics and biological engineering. How the universe began and how the world will end... the likelihood of extra-terrestrial life (and the forms it might take)...the mechanics of artificial intelligence... exotic power sources... UFOs and ancient astronauts-all these, and more, are dealt with. One chapter even notes the places where science fiction writers have got their science all wrong (and includes a list of famous bad predictions)!

This is, in short, an entertaining and wonderfully illustrated tour along-and occasionally beyond - the frontiers of contemporary science. It will delight all readers of science fiction, and may well make fans out of those skeptics who have hitherto preferred their science straight.