Scientific Journeys 1: To the Stars

On 21st February 2026, the Cosmic Stories blog will celebrate the fifth anniversary of the first two posts on this blog. In those five years, new entries have appeared at least once every two weeks, with occasional extras and guest posts. I have plenty more topics lined up to discuss (although suggestions are always welcome) but I thought I’d use this opportunity to launch a series of occasional posts from research scientists and others with scientific and technical backgrounds about how science fiction has influenced them, their research, their teaching, or their relationship with science. These will generally be released between regular blog posts and on an irregular basis. However I’m going to use creator’s privilege to put my own science fiction journey in a little biographical history first.

Scientific Journeys 1: To the Stars

Author: Elizabeth Stanway

Science fiction wasn’t something I consciously chose to engage with. It was pervasive during my childhood - indeed, I was born in what is occasionally called the Star Wars microgeneration, between the release of A New Hope in 1977 and The Return of the Jedi in 1983. Children's programming on television in the UK when I was young included the animated series Ulysses 31 and Transformers (both broadcast for the first time in the UK in 1985), The Mysterious Cities of Gold (which included aliens and ancient lost technologies despite its setting in conquistador South America), Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Ewoks, Droids and Thunderbirds 2086 (all first broadcast in the UK in 1986), as well as more family oriented examples such as Doctor Who (until 1989) and The Adventure Game (1980-1986, in which celebrities attempted to escape from what we would now recognise as a series of escape rooms, under the guidance of alien dragons).

Other television series such as Terrahawks (1983), The Tripods (1984-5), Benji, Zax and the Alien Prince (1984), The Girl from Tomorrow (1991), Dark Season (1991), The Tomorrow People (1992-5) and Escape from Jupiter (1995) also came along as I was still at an impressionable age. James Bond, Superman, Star Trek and Star Wars movies were bank holiday staples. At the same time, I was a voracious reader, and I remember my mother reading to us at bedtime, from about the age of 6 or 7, with choices including The Hobbit, Chronicles of Narnia and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (my siblings were a little older, but this still feels like a surprising choice!). 

From the early 1990s onwards, while I was still at school, BBC Two dedicated its 6pm early evening slot to television and film science fiction. This exposed me to Star Trek (1966), Thunderbirds (1965), Stingray (1964), Captain Scarlet (1967), Quantum Leap (1989), Battlestar Galactica (1978) and many others, as well as causing many arguments over the choice between SF and the early evening news. Our family’s first VCR was purchased to avert further conflicts when our routine of Brownies, Guides and Scouts on Wednesday evenings proved to clash with the first BBC broadcasts of the brand new Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1990.

On the other hand, we were also avid watchers of television documentaries, ranging from history and culture to science strands such as Horizon, Equinox and The Sky at Night, and even Open University programmes (in the absence of any children's programming!). Science was always part of the world around us, and I remember frequent visits to the Science Museum in London (as well as local museums and a remarkable number of steam railways).

So for me, science and science fiction were never fully separate - they were both part of the world I grew up in. Nor was I primarily a fan of one thing over another: I read and watched so many different things, that, despite concentrating more on certain series at times, I have always been a science fiction generalist.

By the time I started studying Natural Sciences at University, I had read my way through huge amounts of epic fantasy, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern and most of my Dad’s collection (and the local library’s) of Wyndham, Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, as well as more Star Trek and Doctor Who novels than any rational person should contemplate. I had also collected so many books in my small room that my parents had to arrange structural repairs for damage caused (so they said, in any case) by the weight. As a result, when first encountering the second law of thermodynamics (entropy increases) as a student, my first thought was of Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question (short story, 1956).

However, while science fiction interested me, excited me and opened my eyes to the potential distant horizons of science, providing an escapism that anyone who struggles to fit into the world around them needs, I think it’s fair to say that I was at least as influenced by science documentaries and by the mathematical elegance and satisfaction I saw in the ability of Physics to explain how the world works.

In all honesty, I became an astronomer because I was fascinated by what we know about the Universe, not because of any SF-inspired ideas of reaching out into it.

However, from my undergraduate years onward, engaging with small online science fiction communities also made me realise that many science fiction fans were interested in how plausible their favourites were, and that I was interested in the same question. With the growth of social media, and as I developed my experience in astronomy, I became increasingly aware of how science was being portrayed and communicated to the public, and the huge amount of work being done in the area of science engagement and communication.

I have to admit though that it wasn’t until I had secured an academic lectureship that I had the confidence to really try to seriously consider how science fiction could be used for science communication to larger audiences. This was encouraged around 2014 when Jan Eldridge asked me to join her in delivering a science-of-SF talk to an undergraduate physics society in a pub in Auckland, New Zealand - the informal setting encouraged others passing by to stop and listen, so the talk reached a wider audience and engaged their interest.

By the time the University of Warwick founded an interdisciplinary Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability to explore the connections between conceptions of habitability and their communications in different disciplines in 2015, I was giving a range of science-of-SF talks, and in the years since I have published an astronomy paper on cosmic habitability evolution and several academic texts on representations of habitability and science in science fiction narratives. In all honesty, this has not been easy; the writing style and focus of papers in physics or astronomy and those in literary fiction analysis and science fiction studies are worlds apart - finding a middle ground where I could say what I wanted to say while writing something others wanted to read was challenging (and I have to thank people like Paul March-Russell, editor of Foundation, and the referee he selected, for not dismissing my Dan Dare article submission out of hand and meeting me half way on the revisions!).

In February 2021, following the publication of an academic book Doctor Who and Science (eds. Orthia & Harmes, 2020), to which I contributed a chapter on representations of Earth’s Moon, I decided to take the next step and start this blog. Writing academic articles on science fiction was fun (and I still do publish work in that area) but also time-consuming, a lot of hard work and requiring a lot of cognitive dissonance in adapting to disciplinary expectations. There also wasn’t a clear academic audience (or choice of academic journal) for work that didn’t just address media analysis or scientific accuracy but wanted to look at the connection between the two and how they influence one another. On the other hand, I felt that in the blog, I could clearly express the ideas I wanted to communicate to a wider audience of people who might be interested, teaching them a little physics and a little about SF, without significantly impacting my research time and goals in astrophysics. From the start I’ve been determined to be as rigorous and thorough as I can reasonably be, presenting things clearly and going beyond simple lists of examples, while posting regularly and normally restricting my SF research and writing to weekends, evenings and vacations. I won’t deny it’s been a challenge, and I’ve occasionally been no more than one entry ahead of my self-imposed publication schedule, but it has been enormously satisfying. I hope that others have also found it enjoyable.

So has science fiction shaped my scientific career? Well, maybe not directly, although in my own mind it is intertwined with science fact and science education, my skills and aptitudes. But I have to ask whether I’d ever have realised those skills and aptitudes if I hadn’t had my mind opened to the possibilities from my earliest memories.

Has science fiction shaped my outlook and worldview? Undoubtedly. Long before I decided on (astro)physics as a pathway, science fiction was opening my horizons and putting me in a world which showed how science could be applied in positive ways, to make a better world. It warned of the dangers that might lay ahead, but also offered hope that they were surmountable. It contributed to my fascination with how the world worked, and the idea that it was possible to strive beyond the status quo.

I am by no means the only science fiction fan amongst scientists and engineers of my acquaintance. Everyone’s story of what the genre means to them (whether that is a great deal or very little) is different. But this was mine.

Note:

If anyone working in, or with a background in, areas of science, education or technology would like to contribute a guest post either on some area related to their work, or a personal account such as this one, do please get in touch using the Cosmic Stories contact form. I don’t promise to publish everything, but I’d love to build a set of wider perspectives on the connections between science and science fiction!