MY life, the universe, and everything

File 770, the acclaimed genre website, this morning posted an extended interview/profile of my writing career. I'll crib their introduction rather than adding yet more words:

Retired professional scientist Edward Lerner talks about a host of hard science fiction topics, plus his collaboration with Larry Niven, his participation in SIGMA, and his nonfiction column for Analog.

Check out, if you're curious (and really, given that you're already here, you know you are), Edward M. Lerner: Crafted Science, Convincing Characters.

InterstellarNet: Enigma -- a mystery (starts to be) revealed

I am delighted to announce the beginning of the release of InterstellarNet: Enigma. It's the latest -- and IMHO greatest -- of the InterstellarNet adventures. (And fair warning: this is a commercial post.)

Historian Joshua Matthews has landed a terrific new position, and with it the opportunity to write the definitive history of the Interstellar Commerce Union. In those annals, he plans to focus attention -- in his opinion, long overdue -- on the improbability that an interstellar community even exists.

But somehow, returning home from the party thrown to celebrate his good fortune, he has lost a month of his life. Everyone is certain he’s been away on an epic bender. And so, rather than promoted, he is disgraced, unemployed, unemployable ... and unaware just how lucky he actually was. 

The novel is already garnering some great comments. For one:

“When people talk about good hard SF -- rigorously extrapolated but still imbued with the classic sense-of-wonder -- they mean the work of Edward M. Lerner, the current master of the craft. InterstellarNet: Enigma is Lerner’s latest gem, and it’s up to his usual excellent standards; a winner all around.”

-- Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Red Planet Blues

You know how bunches of SF, like Star Trek, has bunches of alien civilizations that conveniently reside near one another (and to humans)? And how those civilizations often have similar enough tech to make their conflicts a fair (read: plot-worthy) fight? After the Great Silence of fifty years of SETI, how can one explain such scenarios except as authorial convenience/contrivance?

You may be too polite to ask, so I will: how do I explain the clustered intelligences that comprise the membership of my own InterstellarNet community?

I haven't. Till InterstellarNet Enigma ...

Nanotech and starships and fusion, oh my!

Over a recent twelve-day period I:

• gave a talk at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), followed by a behind-the-scenes tour of many of their projects involved with nanotech.
• took part in a 100 Year Starship Symposium and, in the process, was a panelist for Science Fiction Stories Night.
• attended a lecture on the state of fusion energy research, cosponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the National Electronics Museum.

Six days out of twelve immersed in cutting-edge science. Some days, I just love my job :-)

So what was all that about?

¿Que passa? (Maybe all of us)

What's happening? Lots! (It'll even, if you bear with me, explain that atrocious bilingual/pidgin-lingual pun.)

With the NSA's insatiable data hoovering at the top of the news, herewith a skeptical look at the perils of Big Data. From Technology Review, see "The Dictatorship of Data: Robert McNamara epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers." A key passage:

The use, abuse, and misuse of data by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War is a troubling lesson about the limitations of information as the world hurls toward the big-data era. The underlying data can be of poor quality. It can be biased. It can be misanalyzed or used misleadingly. And even more damning, data can fail to capture what it purports to quantify.

We are more susceptible than we may think to the “dictatorship of data”—that is, to letting the data govern us in ways that may do as much harm as good. The threat is that we will let ourselves be mindlessly bound by the output of our analyses even when we have reasonable grounds for suspecting that something is amiss. Education seems on the skids? Push standardized tests to measure performance and penalize teachers or schools. Want to prevent terrorism? Create layers of watch lists and no-fly lists in order to police the skies. Want to lose weight? Buy an app to count every calorie but eschew actual exercise.

That's not to say I'm unalterably opposed to Big Data or to dot-connecting searches for national-security threats. I'm not. I worry, however, about algorithm not sufficiently balanced with judgment. I worry about data used (and misused) for purposes other than why they were first collected.

And in a bit of good news (reported by BBC News, among many others), "FBI and Microsoft take down $500m-theft botnet Citadel." Why good? Because:

The Citadel network had remotely installed a keylogging program on about five million machines to steal data ...

The cybercriminals behind Citadel cashed in by using login and password details for online bank accounts stolen from compromised computers.

This method was used to steal cash from a huge number of banks including American Express, Bank of America, PayPal, HSBC, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo.

Time out(s)

I've opined on this blog that time travel is a science-fictional trope -- but that doesn't mean I disapprove. Tropes endure in literature (and not only in SF) because they support great storytelling. And so, on occasion, I indulge ...

If you visit here from an interest in my SF writing -- or if you're curious about it -- I thought I'd mention my new time-travel novella. (A few years ago I did a time-travel novel: Countdown to Armageddon.  Before that, my time-travel short story "Grandpa?" became the award-winning short film "The Grandfather Paradox.")

Anyway ... "Time Out" will appear in the January/February issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

(Or is appearing. Apropos of time travel, we Analog subscribers already have this issue in hand or e-reader. The cover date is the latest you might expect to encounter the print edition at a bookstore. To further muddle the timeline, in e-book outlets the issue will linger for months after the cover date.)

Searching the solar sytem's attic

Where is everyone?

That simple question is the essence of the Fermi Paradox, posed (if only, perhaps, apocryphally) by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi. More expansively: if life arises naturally on suitable planets, then why -- with so MANY stars around us -- hasn't intelligent life contacted or visited Earth? If aliens haven't, maybe the premise about life arising naturally and then intelligent life following naturally is suspect.

(Regular readers of this blog know that as an SF author I'm interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and in First Contact scenarios. This post is about one small aspect of the science of SETI. If you're curious about my fictional uses of SETI, check out my InterstellarNet series and Moonstruck posts.)

Traditional SETI, based on listening for radio signals, has been noticeable for its lack of success. It turns out listening isn't the only SETI option. There's a SETI offshoot called search for extraterrestrial artifacts (SETA). A subset of SETA is search for extraterrestrial vehicles (SETV). The dressed-up term for it is xenoarcheology. Like astrobiology, xenoarcheology is a science for which, to date, there is no proof of the existence of its subject matter.

Finding (or thinking one has found) physical evidence of aliens is an SF staple. Consider, for example, the black monoliths in the acclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I've always been partial to the cover at left, from James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars.



The SETV argument goes like this. Signaling across interstellar distances takes a lot of energy.  Sending that (expensive) signal yields a benefit only if someone hears it. Sending a space probe is much more energy efficient -- albeit slower -- than beaming across the light-years. The visiting probe can gather data independent of the tech level of any creatures in the visited solar system. The probe can also choose to announce itself with a locally transmitted signal. Proponents of SETV advise us to look around our solar system for alien spacecraft.

InterstellarNet: New Order

Updated 12-04-2023

Hurrah! Now back in print and electrons

Updated 07-29-2023

Temporarily out of print and electrons, but under contract for reissue.

Machiavellian?  That's kids' stuff!  Beware humanity's new neighbors ...

Machiavelli advised that, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." And he only schemed about petty squabbles between Italian city-states.

That brings me to InterstellarNet: New Order, the latest installment in my InterstellarNet future history.

Lost in my own head

Hmm .. I see it's been a while since I last posted. Been busy blogging elsewhere in conjunction with the release of InterstellarNet: Origins and working on a new novel, Energized.

The former is wrapping up, and as for the latter I just finished the first draft of a major section. It's time to try to get back to a routine.

Even in the throes of writing, I make time to surf (aka, take sanity breaks). Here are some recent finds in tune with this blog that I consider especially interesting:

InterstellarNet: Origins

Updated 12-04-2023

Hurrah! Now back in print and electrons

Updated 07-29-2023

Temporarily out of print and electrons, but under contract for reissue.

Some of my most popular novels are collaborations set in what colleague Larry Niven calls Known Space. KS brims with strange aliens and exotic locales, making it a great setting for storytelling.

Below the radar, I've been developing my own star-spanning series. The original InterstellarNet novelette, about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and First Contact -- ran in Analog in 2000. Related stories appeared in Analog, Artemis, and Jim Baen's Universe. But magazine issues go out of print, and readers keep emailing to ask where they can find one story or another. I've had no good answer --

Until now.

Are we alone? How about now?

How does life emerge from lifelessness?  How does intelligence emerge from totally instinctive life? Science's answer to both questions has been, "don't (yet) know."


There's a business-school axiom, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." The scientific version is, in essence, "If you can't reproduce it, you don't understand it." Or, at least, you can't know that you understand it.

And so, synthetic biologists want to move from describing what nature has offered to building organisms from scratch. When we can build cells totally from inanimate material (and assemble DNA, not splice the good parts from living cells), then we'll know that we really understand the molecular mechanisms of life.

At least life as the DNA-centric readers of this blog know it. Because maybe we have other readers. 

InterstellarNet redux

I haven't had much to say in this venue about my short fiction. However ...

I've set several stories in an alternate/future history that splits off from our familiar timeline in 2002. The triggering event: receipt of a radio signal from another solar system.

In episodes spanning more than a century, the InterstellarNet stories chronicle humanity’s discovery of its interstellar neighbors, the formation and evolution of a radio-based interstellar trading community, and the long-distance jockeying among species for advantage.

So: SETI, alternate and future history, aliens .... If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll understand that these stories reflect big interests of mine.

Over the years these stories have generated lots of reader mail (thanks!) and inquiries about further installments. One episode, "Creative Destruction," was in a year's-best anthology. So I'd like to use this space to announce the latest InterstellarNet installment, the novella "Calculating Minds."

It's currently (April/May issue) running in Jim Baen's Universe. And even if you don't subscribe, you can see the first half of the story here.

(April 7, 2013 update) I should have updated this page long ago. There are now two InterstellarNet novels (with "Calculating Minds," updated, become part of the first). As for the original, short-fiction forms, here is the up-to-date InterstellarNet story listing.

Steampunk SETI

It's been a while since I posted about METI (message to extraterrestrial intelligence.) METI is also called, among other things, active SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). In the subject line, I went for alliteration.

I found this article about early METI attempts very interesting. Crop triangles ... with 19th century technology, that made sense. (Don't get me started on the stoopidity of the movie Signs, whose aliens navigate across interstellar space but make crop circles to find their way around Earth.)

METI was simpler, of course, when its only aim was to shout out the fact of our existence. Why? Because any reply would tell us if we are alone. METI takes on a whole different context with the theoretical possibility ET could come visit, or that the Great Silence stems from (to choose one possible doom) kinetic-kill weapons hurled at any species imprudent enough to speak up. (Re the latter, a particularly chilling read is the Pellegrino/Zebrowski novel The Killing Star.)

Do I fear hostile aliens? No. Maybe (hopefully!) we'll find something like bacteria deep in the Martian permafrost or something like sponges or tube worms under Europa's ice -- but almost certainly, there's no extraterrestrial intelligence in this solar system. Looking farther afield, it's hard to imagine Sol system has anything worth the resources needed to steal it. That is: aliens can exploit the resources of their home system for a fraction of the time and energy they'd spend to cross interstellar distances (to gain access to Sol system's resources).

Still ...

I might be as quaintly naive as those early would-be message-senders. While I'm in favor of METI (using the latest technology, of course, not crop triangles), I say so presuming a deliberative, transparent, international, thoroughly vetted process.

Maybe next century.

The silence is deafening (Part I)

Or, if you prefer, where IS everyone?

I refer to the so-called Great Silence. If, as much conventional wisdom has it, a very large universe must have other intelligences in it somewhere, why haven't we heard from them? Their disinterest? Our colossal boringness? The impossibility of interstellar travel? Because high-tech civilizations inevitably destroy themselves? Because high-tech civilizations always evolve into a singularity?

In my last post I bemoaned humanity's fading interest in going into space. All the resources in the universe apparently fall short as an inducement. Finding someone else out there might kindle some interest. One can hope.

Let's start with the Drake Equation, a conceptual framework for estimating the number of communicating species out there. It's one guess multiplied by another multiplied by another ... not AN answer but a way to consider the probabilities. Putting aside how people guess at the various parameters (like the fraction of stars with life-friendly planets, and the fraction of those that develop technological civilizations), many estimates conclude with the prediction of SOME other beings out there.

It would surely shake up our routines if we were to connect with ETs. Only so far we haven't. Why?

Government doesn't think the search worthwhile. SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- lost federal funding years ago. Looking for microbes on Mars is something, and I enthusiastically support it, but I don't understand why government won't make a fraction of the same investment to listen for intelligence in nearby solar systems.

SETI presumes hypothetical other species are signaling us, either with intentionally beamed messages or the radio/television/radar leakage presumed of any advanced society. By the latter standard, humans began signaling more than a century ago with our earliest radio experiments. How far away such leakage can be detected is a function of instrument sensitivity and the data-processing smarts of the beings at the other end. (Earth's signals must be extracted from the loud background noise of the sun's natural radio emissions.)

With private funding the search continues, as with the Allen Telescope Array now under construction, backed by significant investment from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. (At last something useful comes of those Microsoft monopoly profits.)

In decades of listening, however sporadically, we've heard nothing. So some propose METI, Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence, also known as active SETI. Rather than hope the murmur of Earth's unavoidable radio emissions is overheard and answered, METI envisions beaming powerful signals at specific target stars.

Who is entitled to speak for humanity? Anyone who has time scheduled on a radio telescope? What can or should they say about us?

If there are extra-solar ETs and they're not talking, do they know something humans don't? Maybe shouting is a breach of decorum. Maybe those who shout bring hostile xenophobic aliens, or kinetic kill weapons, down on their heads. Scientist and SF author David Brin has thought about this far more than I (see SETI Search).

Or maybe they (whoever they are) are already here, merely not announcing themselves. If so, surely they'd tap into our Internet. The IETI (Invitation to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) folks ask any such visitors to speak up.

Are We Alone? is among the biggest of all questions Whatever the answer, that's major information.

Who might be out there fascinates me. How humanity would react to proof of aliens' existence fascinates me -- and it shows up in much of my fiction. To give examples, my novel Moonstruck deals with a near-future first contact -- of the they-show-up-one-day variety, not signals-based. My novelette "By the Rules" (which first appeared in Analog), on the other hand, is closer to the IETI mold. My InterstellarNet series (stories in multiple venues) opened with a SETI-contact story and continues to evolve (as the series name suggests) into an interstellar Internet. If you're curious, check out my website.

So is anyone out there? Lots of SF fans, if no one else, are eager to hear from you.