(*) How recent? Available since September 2015, despite the 2016 copyright date. Of course, we SF aficionados are more open than most to the possibility of time travel :-) And to further muddy the temporal waters, this book would have had a place in my 2015 best reads summary if I hadn't wanted to post recommendations early within the recently concluded holiday shopping season. Of course there are still post-holiday clearance sales and (in theory) unspent gift cards ...
Stratmann is a cardiologist and an SF author, supremely qualified to have authored such a book. (Full disclosure: Henry and I are friends -- but that's not the reason for the rave review that follows.)
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| Check it out on Amazon |
All too often, the medical and biological content in science fiction is seriously incomplete or, worse, flat-out wrong. (There's also more than enough questionable physics, chemistry, and engineering in the genre, but, sometimes those do come out right. Historically, many more physicists and engineers than biologists and doctors have written SF.) If unrealistic portrayals of biology and medicine are the disease, then Using Medicine in Science Fiction is the cure.
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| The little molecule that could |
Using Medicine in Science Fiction is a meticulously researched book, one that you can't read without learning a great deal about a great many topics. It's also richly leavened with wry asides and sly genre references. SF fans will appreciate how it is liberally endowed with examples of medical topics as used (and abused) in a plethora of genre books, stories, comics, TV shows, and movies. (Another disclosure: a few of those references are to novels by Your Humble Blogger.) And if you're left wanting to know more, each chapter concludes with an extensive set of citations.
In summary: Using Medicine in Science Fiction: The SF Writer's Guide to Human Biology immediately earned a place of honor on my use-all-the-time reference shelf. Whether you read, view, or write SF -- or "merely" want better to understand the capabilities and limitations of the intricate mechanism that is (or could be) the human body -- this is a book well worth your attention.
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6 comments:
Ed, thanks for the review and recommendation. I've noted the gap in the availability of this sort of information. The survival question is often skipped in SF, although it is a major effort at NASA as you know. I've pondered whether a child born and raised in zero- would even develop a skeletal system that we would recognize? Would our Earth-formed structures adapt? I'll add this book to my resources.
My pleasure, Keith. There's a lot modern medicine doesn't yet understand about how our bodies behave under the conditions in which we evolved -- much less under wildly different conditions. So: Using Medicine in SF was an educational read aside from its (significant) value as a writing resource.
Happy new year, Sir.
I too thank you for your recommendation. Looks very impressive.
I hope it is written in plain enough to me.
Could I ask you if you know Japanese SF author Sakyo Komatsu' s "Day of Resurrection" a pandemic novel? (or digest movie "Virus")
It is old, addresses viroids before its discovery, but I love it very much.
Jaguar, thank you for your note. I hope you enjoy Using SF in Medicine. As for the novel and movie you named, I am not familiar with either.
Thank you very much, Sir.
I'm trying to purchase "Using Medicine in Science Fiction" on kindle,
but haven't complete yet. I continue.
Debating whether to make the purchase. Unfortunately, a number of inaccuracies and inapt metaphors in the sample (first) chapter left me dubious as to the overall value of the work. I'm hopeful that later chapters are better aligned to the author's expertise.
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