Sci-Fi BookshelfWhich Science in Novels Is Real?

Real basis

• The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin, 2006), the science: the three-body problem really has no general analytic solution; but the real stars A and B of Alpha Centauri orbit each other about every 80 years, quite stably.

• The Dark Forest (Liu Cixin, 2008), the science: the Fermi paradox is a real scientific question; the “dark forest” is one literary explanation, and can be neither confirmed nor refuted.

• Death’s End (Liu Cixin, 2010), the science: gravitational waves were directly detected in 2015; broadcasting with them would take the mass of an astronomical body. Dimensional reduction attacks are fiction.

• The Wandering Earth (Liu Cixin, 2000), the science: the "Shkadov thruster" is a real proposal, but it pushes a whole star; moving a planet takes far more energy than humans have.

• Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 2004), the science: the Chicxulub impact at the end of the Cretaceous is real; whether dinosaurs would have evolved intelligence had it not happened, no one knows.

• Contraction (Liu Cixin, 1999), the science: whether the universe will contract again depends on dark energy; there is no physical basis for time running backward during contraction.

• The Mirror (Liu Cixin, 2004), the science: a full simulation of the universe would need more information than the universe can hold, bounded by the Bekenstein limit.

• Hear the Way at Dawn (Liu Cixin, 2002), the science: whether high-energy experiments could trigger vacuum decay has been seriously studied: cosmic rays have long had far more energy than any collider, and the universe is still fine.

• The Village Teacher (Liu Cixin, 2001), the science: silicon-based life is still only speculation; silicon chemistry is more monotonous than carbon's and less active in water.

• Cloud of Poems (Liu Cixin, 2003), the science: the storage needed to enumerate every possible poem far exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe, a case of information having a physical limit.

• Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke, 1973), the science: 2017’s ʻOumuamua, 2019’s Borisov and 2025’s 3I/ATLAS are real interstellar visitors, and all are natural objects.

• Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke, 1953), the science: the zoo hypothesis (Ball 1973) holds that alien civilizations might be deliberately avoiding us, one explanation of the Fermi paradox.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1968), the science: the AI HAL 9000 in the book is one of the first stories to take the machine “alignment” problem seriously.

• Foundation (Isaac Asimov, 1951), the science: statistical laws really can predict the behavior of large groups, but not of individuals; the faster-than-light jumps in the book are fictional.

• The Last Question (Isaac Asimov, 1956), the science: the second law of thermodynamics has no known exceptions; heat death is one of the leading predictions for the universe.

• The Gods Themselves (Isaac Asimov, 1972), the science: energy conservation and the stability of physical constants have been tested to extremely high precision; parallel universes with different physical laws are only speculation.

• The Black Cloud (Fred Hoyle, 1957), the science: Hoyle was a real astrophysicist. Interstellar clouds do contain complex organic molecules; several kinds have been found in Sagittarius B2.

• Story of Your Life (Ted Chiang, 1998), the science: Fermat’s principle of least time really can describe the path of light in terms of “purpose” rather than “cause”; whether language can change the perception of time is fiction.

• Solaris (Stanisław Lem, 1961), the science: the Gaia hypothesis and the ionic signaling of bacterial biofilms are real research; an entire planet’s ocean being one mind is fiction.

• Contact (Carl Sagan, 1985), the science: Sagan consulted the physicist Thorne for this book, which directly led to the 1988 paper on traversable wormholes.

• The Time Machine (H. G. Wells, 1895), the science: special relativity allows “travel to the future” (time dilation); going back to the past still has no workable proposal.

• —All You Zombies— (Robert A. Heinlein, 1959), the science: this is the most famous literary example of the bootstrap paradox; in physics, Deutsch’s self-consistency condition allows such closed loops to exist.

• Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon, 1937), the science: the physicist Dyson said explicitly that his 1960 idea of the “Dyson sphere” came from this book.

• Berserker (Fred Saberhagen, 1967), the science: Tipler estimated in 1980 that self-replicating probes could spread across the Milky Way in a few million years, which makes “why haven’t they come yet” harder to answer.

• Tau Zero (Poul Anderson, 1970), the science: the ramjet was proposed by Bussard in 1960; later calculations suggest its drag may exceed its thrust.

• Permutation City (Greg Egan, 1994), the science: whether a mind can be uploaded depends on whether consciousness is determined by information processing alone, which is still an open question.

• Schild’s Ladder (Greg Egan, 2002), the science: the theory of vacuum decay is real physics (Coleman 1977, Coleman and De Luccia 1980); a real vacuum bubble would expand at close to the speed of light.

• Simulacron-3 (Daniel F. Galouye, 1964), the science: Bostrom turned this question into a formal philosophical argument in 2003.

• Blindsight (Peter Watts, 2006), the science: “blindsight” is a real neurological phenomenon: people with damaged visual cortex say they can’t see, yet can accurately point to where an object is.

• Ringworld (Larry Niven, 1970), the science: readers soon worked out that a ringworld is dynamically unstable, and in his 1980 sequel Niven added attitude thrusters to it.

• The Martian (Andy Weir, 2011), the science: most of the book's calculations hold up, but Mars's atmosphere is only about 1% of Earth's, so the opening storm that topples a rocket could not actually happen.

• Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir, 2021), the science: Tau Ceti is about 12 light-years from us, and the book calculates relativistic time dilation correctly.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams, 1979), the science: "the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42" is a joke with no scientific meaning.

• A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge, 1999), the science: real variable stars change brightness far less extremely than this; the period-luminosity relation of Cepheid variables is used to measure cosmic distances.

• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (Jules Verne, 1870), the science: giant squid are real, and a living one was first filmed in the wild only in 2004.

• From the Earth to the Moon (Jules Verne, 1865), the science: the coincidences are striking: the book's projectile also leaves from Florida, carries three men, and in the sequel splashes down in the Pacific. But the projectile's acceleration would crush the passengers.

• Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984), the science: the book popularized the word “cyberspace”; today’s brain–computer interfaces already let paralyzed people type with their thoughts.

• Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1959), the science: intelligence is influenced by thousands of genes acting together, and no method yet exists to raise an adult's intelligence substantially.

• The Library of Babel (Jorge Luis Borges, 1941), the science: the story is often used to explain information and entropy: almost every possible combination is noise.

• Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818), the science: often called the first science fiction novel. "Animal electricity" experiments of the time inspired the author; the origin of life is still an open question.

• Proxima (Stephen Baxter, 2013), the science: the author wrote with what was known about Proxima Centauri at the time; in 2016 an Earth-like planet was indeed found around Proxima.

• Children of Ruin (Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2019), the science: the octopus’s distributed nervous system and color-changing ability are real; octopuses evolving language and civilization is fiction.

• Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2015), the science: the book’s account of a closed ecosystem slowly falling out of balance has real grounding (Biosphere 2); the planets of Tau Ceti are still only candidates, and the moon and life in the book are fictional.

Related research

These studies relate to this topic but are not direct proof of this page.

• Searching for interstellar signals: Two physicists suggested listening for alien signals with radio telescopes near hydrogen's 21 cm frequency, launching SETI.

  Source: Cocconi & Morrison, Nature 1959, "Searching for interstellar communications"

• Dyson sphere: A sufficiently advanced civilization might wrap its star, and we could find it through anomalous infrared radiation.

  Source: Dyson, Science 1960, "Search for artificial stellar sources of infrared radiation"

• Scale of civilizations: Sorts civilizations into three types by the energy they can use: planetary, stellar and galactic.

  Source: Kardashev, Soviet Astronomy 1964, "Transmission of information by extraterrestrial civilizations"

• Black holes evaporate: Quantum effects make black holes radiate energy slowly. Black holes are not eternal and will eventually evaporate.

  Source: Hawking, Nature 1974, "Black hole explosions?"

• Warp drive: General relativity allows a “warp bubble” that compresses space ahead and stretches it behind, but it needs negative energy that may not exist in reality.

  Source: Alcubierre, Classical and Quantum Gravity 1994, "The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity"

• Light sails to the stars: Pushing ultralight light sails with a ground-based laser array could accelerate probes to one fifth the speed of light.

  Source: Lubin, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 2016, "A roadmap to interstellar flight"

• Where are they?: If alien civilizations were common, they should already fill the galaxy. From this Hart argued that we may be the first.

  Source: Hart, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 1975, "An explanation for the absence of extraterrestrials on Earth"