Greg R. Fishbone

Background

I am thrilled to have been selected to participate in this year’s Launch Pad program at the University of Wyoming. This event is run by Mike Brotherton, with initial funding from NASA and continuing support from the National Science Foundation. The mission is to help authors and editors get the science right in their works, to better inform and inspire readers.

I will be spending the week attending intensive lectures and hands-on activities in a real working observatory (weather permitting). My colleagues and I will then be able to put more science into our stories, more accurately, and spread knowledge to all of our readers.

This program will be especially helpful to me because the main character in my Galaxy Games series is an astronomer’s son, and major scenes take place in a mountaintop observatory just like the one we’ll be visiting in Wyoming. In fact, Laramie, Wyoming, has so much in common with my character’s fictional hometown of Platte Bluff, Nevada, that I feel like I’m actually there!

Day Zero: July 10th, 2011

I flew into Denver in the morning and met up with some fellow sci-fi authors including Eric James Stone, who just won a 2011 Nebula award. Then we all piled into a van bound for Laramie. As we crossed the state border, there was some awesome weather that reminded me of that stormchaser show where they drive a van into a tornado to see what will happen.

Later, the weather turned nice and we wandered around beautiful downtown Laramie. I even saw a man with a cowboy hat, which only ever happens on Halloween back in Boston.

Feeling inspired, I checked into my tiny dorm room on the campus of the University of Wyoming and wrote until I passed out. Then I woke up and wrote until it was time for class.

Day One: July 11th, 2011

It’s morning and I’m still here in Wyoming–it wasn’t a dream after all! Today we’re attending class in the brilliantly named Classroom Building.

In the Classroom Building we got our first introduction to the field of astronomy, which is the study of everything in the universe except for the teeny-tiny things that only happen on Earth. After some introductory information and housekeeping, Mike Brotherton introduced us to the scale of space and how mind-boggling enormous it is. If you were looking at one of those “you are here” maps at the mall, most of space would be so far off the map that it would actually be located in space.

It’s not just the incredible distances we can’t imagine but also the sizes. Stan Schmidt made it clear using mustard seeds and peppercorns to represent the planets. It really is silly to think that the little peppercorn we live on could be the center of the universe!

But as tiny as we are in the grand scheme of things, we have the ability to think and learn and ponder the size of the universe. We are a part of it, we draw meaning from it, and we give meaning to it. The sights in the sky would mean nothing without intelligent observers.

Jim Verley taught us about some popular misconceptions and the responsibility of authors to steer our readers away from them. There is a place in science fiction for fictitious science, but we have to be careful not to contradict what we know about actual science.

Then Jerry Oltion gave us some distinguishing differences between professional astronomy and amateur astronomy. From the root of the word, an amateur is someone who pursues an interest out of love for the subject matter, whether it becomes a profession or not. But by this definition, you’d hope that any professional also remains an amateur as well.

As we broke for dinner, the sky was dark with rain. Even as it cleared, the clouds lingered and made it seem iffy that we’d be able to see anything through Jerry’s small telescope in the dormitory parking lot.

Through gaps in the patchy clouds we peered through one of Jerry’s handmade telescope contraptions that featured a 20-inch mirror and sometimes required the use of a ladder to reach the eyepiece. With the naked eye there was only the Moon and a small number of stars visible but through the telescope were able to see:

• The Moon which, through the telescope lens, looks like a 3D object that you could reach out and touch. The mares and craters were amazing!
• Saturn with its rings and one of its moons (Titan)
• Albireo, a double star with two different colors, blue and gold
• Polaris, the North Star, which turns out to be a double star with two different magnitudes
• M3, a globular cluster with many, many, many pinpoint stars

And more! Not bad for a bunch of amateurs!

Tomorrow is another day. More updates to come!

Day 2: July 12, 2011

Another day in Laramie!  I now have a souvenir hat, a visitor’s guide, and an astronomy textbook!

The three topics we explored today constitute more of the basics: light, dust, and zero-gravity medicine.

Some cool things:

• We got to look through night-vision goggles, which turn infrared light into visible light. This means Night-vision goggles allow you to see flashes of IR light given off from a TV remote!
• In infrared vision, green trash bags become clear while glass becomes opaque. This means that an alien monster who only sees infrared light will find you easily if you hide in a trash bag, but will walk right by if you’ve snuck into the Popemobile!
• One of our fellow attendees is a board-certified cardiologist. This means that for the week he’s here, Laramie will finally have a board-certified cardiologist!

Danny Dale focused his lecture on infrared astronomy and dust, and it made me think of a new metaphor for authors. Just as dust particles absorb energy at certain wavelengths and reemit them over time, authors absorb information and experiences, hold them for a while, and reemit them into our work. Or maybe that’s just dumb.

For me, the highlight of the day was Henry Stratmann’s lecture on medicine and healthcare in space. As it turns out, space isn’t a very healthy place to be in. There are so many horrible things that can happen to a person in bizarre and graphic ways. And since writing is all about making many horrible things happen to your characters in bizarre and graphic ways, you could almost see the little lightbulbs going off above the heads of the authors in attendance. My poor Galaxy Games players are going to hate me for what I might end up putting them through!

Like yesterday, there was a lot of information but it was riveting. We ate dinner at an establishment that looked like it had once been an authentic old-time Western saloon, since converted to an all-vegetarian menu.

Day 3: July 13, 2011

Laramie fun facts*:

• The University of Wyoming is the highest altitude university in the United States. Official school motto: “University of Wyoming: We’re totally high!”
• Thomas Edison was inspired to invent the light bulb after fly-fishing in the Laramie River, where he caught a bulb-shaped fish with a tungsten filament that glowed when he applied electricity to its fins.
• Franklin Roosevelt made a 1936 campaign stop in Laramie to test out a new political slogan: “FDR is totally high!”
• The population of Laramie is about 30,000 people. The football stadium at the university has seats for about 29,000 fans. The other thousand have to fight for spots in front of strategic gaps in the fence.
• In 1868, the first mayor of Laramie quit after three weeks of battling in vain against gunslingers, outlaws, and wild football fans.
• Laramie is named for a 19th Century fur trapper named Jaque La Ramee, who died when his bulb-shaped fish ran out of batteries as he attempted to find his way back to camp.

*Some of these are only roughly based on actual facts.

I really am enjoying the mid-July climate, Old West architecture, and scenic beauty of Wyoming. The campus is made up of buildings mostly fronted with yellow and orange stone facades or brick, and the landscaping is dotted with moss-coated red-rock boulders and native wildflowers. It doesn’t look like any college campus I’ve ever seen back east.

Launch Pad seems to be getting better every day. Today we got a list of resources for writing hard science fiction, probably harder SF than what I write but very nice to have. Now that we’re supposed to have the basics down (ha!), we spent the day studying planets and stars. Particularly interesting to me were exoplanets, worlds orbiting stars other than our own, like the ones I have my characters travel to in the Galaxy Games series. Astronomers are learning more about these as hundreds of additional examples are added to the existing database, and it’s a very fast-moving area of study.

This was the night of our visit to WIRO, the Wyoming Infrared Observatory high above Laramie atop Mount Jelm. The weather that threatened to postpone our visit actually ended up providing us with an amazing lightning show.

There was much to see in the observatory building, the control room, the dome, and the telescope itself.

I wish I could rewrite the sections of The Challengers that take place in an observatory, just to insert a few little details of my visit to WIRO. All the research I did online was no substitute for just one evening under the dome.

Day 4: July 14, 2011

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to use this in my writing, but what happens to stars at the end of their lifetimes is fascinating. This includes the future fate of our own sun, which will someday swell into a red giant that might swallow up the Earth. Unless we figure out a way to move the Earth out of the way, assuming we’re still around in five billion years and have a lingering interest in our old homeworld.

Knowing about different types of stars and their life cycles will help me more immediately in populating the brackets of the Galaxy Games Tournament with interesting aliens from somewhat realistic worlds. One of the mantras of science fiction is that it’s okay to make things up as long as nobody can prove you wrong, but we are adding to our collective inventory of exoplanets so quickly that it’s going to be a challenge to keep up!

The highlight of Day 4 for me was Jim Verley’s lecture on the link between science education and science fiction. I have a great deal of interest in the field of education, and was inspired by Jim’s assertion that authors and filmmakers can educate and inspire readers with our depictions of science, or that we should at least avoid introducing stubborn misconceptions that get in the way of science education.

Day 5: July 15, 2011

On Day 5 we learned about galaxies, including the one we live in: The Milky Way. In science fiction, even when humans are able to travel huge distances between the stars, there’s rarely any reason to set a story in a whole other galaxy. Or to have beings from another galaxy visit us. The distances involved are so vast, it’s hard to justify the trip!

The most useful part of the lesson was the history of human inquiry into the size and shape of the Milky Way. As it turns out, you can’t see the shape of something very well when you are looking at it from the inside, especially when most of it is obscured by clouds of dust and gas. The refinement of tools and methods over hundreds of years has made it possible for us to picture the spiral shape we’re familiar with today, and even that is still being refined as more data comes in.

Super-interesting topics of the day included the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, the nature of galactic clusters (galaxies flock together like birds!), and a bit about dark matter. I took an astronomy course back in college, and some of what we’re learning is like unlocking things that were already buried in my brain, but we had no idea about dark matter or dark energy until more recently. We still don’t know exactly what the stuff is that makes up dark matter, which is crazy because that’s what makes up most of the universe we live in!

Another highlight of the day was Dr. Henry Stratmann talking about certain activities that humans can perform in space. It was fascinating, but also a bit depressing that there are so many challenges and limitations to realistic actions in low gravity. Especially sobering was the idea that children who grow up in reduced gravity might never be able to function normally back on Earth.

Another Launch Pad highlight was Stan Schmidt, editor of the science fiction magazine, Analog, giving us some examples from his own writing of how he came up with an developed an idea that spanned two novels. He didn’t just take a few then-current ideas in astronomy and speculate on their implications, but also put a lot of thought into the effects on the political and social structure of Earth.

In my earlier days, I wrote a lot of short science fiction and had a dream of someday being published in Analog. My writing has taken a different direction since then. I left the science fiction world in favor of the children’s book world and never really thought much about the career I might have had if I’d stayed in the realm of writing hard SF for adults. This week, I’ve been able to step into the little area where the world of children’s books intersects with the world of science fiction. It’s been an overwhelming experience and I’m greatly indebted to my Launch Pad colleagues for guiding me into their world. And to meet Stan Schmidt and have him ask me to submit a story to Analog was like a dream come true.

Day 6: July 16, 2011

On this last day of Launch Pad, when we are all so worn out and exhausted from having so many facts crammed into our heads, we finally reach the grand finale of the course: cosmology! It’s like a video camera panning back until it can take in the entire history of everything in the entire universe!

More to come!