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Marty speaks to Nicholas Keating Casborro about the hard-scrabble, dystopian world portrayed in his book 'Vitalerium: Descent into the Void'. This is a far future space opera where faster than light travel is made possible by the exotic substance that serves as the title of the book, where humans have spread across multiple planets, where the politics are cynical, street life is vicious, human life disposable, and corruption endemic. This episode is lighter on the science and heavier on the fiction; we discuss some of the technology essential to this world, but our focus is on the world-building, politics, religion and characters Nick has created in the Vitalerium universe.

https://atmospherepress.com/books/vitalerium-descent-into-the-void-by-nicholas-keating-casbarro/

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Chris Kulp is a professional physicist and science fiction author, who has won the Mike Resnick award for his first published story ‘What Would You Pay for a Second Chance’. We talk about his second novel ‘Lost Origins’, a space opera where Earth is regarded as a myth by a galactic civilization peopled by humans and androids. Our conversation goes from a sci-fi story about artificial intelligence to one that explains how current AI models work, what they can and can't do, what they might do in the future. We also chat about Chris’ research in nonlinear dynamics and the use of AI in shaping the behaviour of complex networks.

https://chriskulp.com/

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Adrian Tchaikovsky is a bestselling British author whose work has taken the science fiction world by storm since his seminal sci-fi novel Children of Time, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. Its sequel Children of Ruin won the equally prestigious British Science Fiction Association or BSFA award in 2019, and after the publication of the third book in the series Children of Memory, those books won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023. He’s also won 4 other BSFA awards for his novels and short fiction, and this year 2 of his books Alien Clay and Service Model are up for both the Hugo Award and the Locus Award!

In this conversation we discuss his latest book Shroud, which happens to dovetail nicely along the theme of Dark Ecology that we’ve been discussing since our interviews with Chris Becket and Julius Csotonyi about Dark Eden. We talk about the exotic planetary environment and the aliens he’s invented in Shroud, whose neural architecture and sensorium share the same electromagnetic modality, making for the kind of collective intelligence and consciousness that Adrian often creates and wrestles with in his work. We also discuss theory of mind in hedgehogs, the social relations of mantis shrimp, bird intelligence and a few other things that have come to be signature topics in Adrian’s science fiction.

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thescienceinthefiction@gmail.com

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