Cosmic Stories Blog

Did humanity originate elsewhere? Why does Mars appear so prominently as the origin of the human race in science fiction?

A recurring aspiration in visions of the future is the idea that machines, and particularly robots, will come to dominate key aspects of our lives and societies.

Exploring space weather - an important problem both in science fiction and in our contemporary world.

Trial and error is an essential element of the scientific process, but it is seldom portrayed accurately in popular culture. Here we take a look at the relatively rare representations of less clear cut and more fallible scientific investigations.

One of the common uses of science fiction is to imagine the habitability of worlds very different from our own. Some famous science fiction narratives consider a desert as their setting, but how is human habitability envisaged in these worlds and how plausible are they?

World ships - planets which move under the deliberate control of their inhabitants or others - are a staple of science fiction. But how plausible are representations of world ships in SF, and why are they so popular?

Published in 1955, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star is an unusual take on the relationship between science, religion and science fiction. In this blog, we take a look at this story in detail.

The ability to control the weather has been one of the goals of science for decades - with limited success - and, inevitably, science fiction has explored its possibilities and possible consequences.

In the science fiction of the 1940s, 50s and 60s atomic power is ubiquitous, to the extent that it permeates domestic as well as industrial and military settings. But just how common is this atomic future in science fiction, and what can we learn from its rise and fall?

One of the key limitations in converting physics theories into practical technology is finding a material capable of taking the forces, temperatures or other physical requirements. Science fiction has, unsurprisingly, hypothesised a variety of such materials - with varying degrees of plausibility.

The threat to space travel presented by space junk - the debris left behind by earlier human activity - has long been recognised. Naturally, science fiction has not failed to explore both the threat and the potential dangers of ignoring it.

The asteroid belt is a collection of small rocky worlds, ranging in size from pebbles to the dwarf planet Ceres at almost a thousand kilometres across. Located in orbit between Mars and Jupiter they have been an important site in the imagination of both SF writers and scientists alike.

Exploring a 1950s short story and radio play which itself critiques the relationship between science and science fiction

One important role of science fiction is to provide an arena for thought-experiments, letting writers explore physics that cannot be placed in a real-world setting.

Anecdotal evidence of individual scientists inspired in their career choices by fiction has also been around since science fiction first emerged as a genre, however substantial studies into this phenomenon amongst professional astronomers have been limited.

Time travel is a wide-reaching topic in science fiction, but one recurring area of fascination is the predestination paradox - the idea that an event may only occur because of efforts to prevent it, or as a result of its own consequences.

Human settlement of space has been a given since the earliest science fiction stories were written. The High Frontier was an influential popular science book published in 1976 by an American physicist Gerard K O’Neill. The High Frontier had an enormous impact, and cylindrical space habitats have since acquired the name O’Neill Cylinders, both in fact and in fiction.

Supernovae, the explosions that end the lives of certain stars, are amongst the brightest and most dramatic events in the Universe. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they’ve attracted their fair degree of attention from the writers of science fiction.

One of the most evocative of human senses is our sense of smell. It is closely connected with memory recall, with the taste of food, and with the more “primitive” and instinctual regions of our hindbrains. Science fiction has explored odour - and in particular an oversensitivity to odours - in a number of ways.

Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, in his journeys through the Solar System, has given us a fascinating snapshot of how our understanding of solar system habitability has changed. Here I take a look at Saturn's moon system and its very different representations in 1953 and 2017.

A running theme in science fiction is the idea that alien races are willing and eager to talk to us, but this is not an assumption that has gone unchallenged in science fiction, or indeed in our wider culture.

The vision of space portrayed in near-future science fiction often speaks to the hopes and fears of contemporary society. Children’s SF in particular can influence the scientific and technical innovators who might bring such visions to fruition. This week we take a look at the coherent vision of human space utilisation presented in the recent animated television series Thunderbirds are Go.

Fermi’s Paradox - the lack of alien contact despite the a Universe that should be teeming with life - has excited the interest of scientists as well as philosophers, and some of the many possible solutions have been explored both by popular science writers and the writers of science fiction.

Most science fiction tells fundamentally human stories, on human timescales. However sometimes science fiction authors venture into the longer timescales on which cosmic evolution itself unfolds.