{"id":25130,"date":"2018-07-11T09:06:06","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T13:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=25130"},"modified":"2018-07-11T21:32:10","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T01:32:10","slug":"episode-71-of-eating-the-fantastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2018\/07\/11\/episode-71-of-eating-the-fantastic\/","title":{"rendered":"Join Arlan Andrews, Sr., Gregory Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Charles Sheffield for lunch\u2014in 1993!\u2014in a flashback episode of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Join me for lunch at the World Science Fiction Convention. No, not this<\/em> year\u2019s San Jose Worldcon, which won\u2019t happen until August. Or even last year\u2019s Worldcon in Helsinki. But the 1993 San Francisco Worldcon!<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how we\u2019re going to do that …<\/p>\n

Late last year, I repurposed a Science Forum I’d recorded for\u00a0Science Fiction Age<\/em>\u00a0magazine on March 1, 1994 into Episode 56 of Eating the Fantastic<\/a>.\u00a0You got to hear\u00a0Charles Sheffield and\u00a0Arlan Andrews, Sr. chatting over lunch at an Italian restaurant about the many ways the world might end. But for this episode, we’ll be going even\u00a0further\u00a0back into the past.<\/p>\n

On September 1, 1993, I shared lunch during the San Francisco Worldcon with not only Andrews and\u00a0Sheffield, but Gregory Benford and Geoffrey Landis as well. I thought it would be fun to bring together working\u00a0scientists to have them discuss over a meal everything wrong (and a few things which might be right) with how their profession is\u00a0portrayed in science fiction.<\/p>\n

I no longer have any idea which convention hotel restaurant we gathered in for our recording session, but we were\u00a0definitely eating—as you’ll be able to hear for yourself when a sizzling platter of something called a “Laredo” is put in\u00a0front of us and we worry about whether it’s safe to eat without burning ourselves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An edited transcript of this conversation was published in the January 1994 issue of\u00a0Science Fiction Age<\/em>. So who were this quartet of scientist\/science fiction writers when we recorded this Science Forum 25 years ago? Here’s how I described them in that issue—<\/p>\n

Gregory Benford is a professor of physics working at the University of California at Irvine, who has also written over a dozen SF novels. Arlan Andrew, Sr. is an executive at a national laboratory, who has worked in the White House Science Office in both the Bush and Clinton administrations. A longtime SF reader, Geoffrey Landis has long looked at the role of the scientist both as an experimentalist and as an SF writer. Charles Sheffield holds a Ph.D in theoretical physics and serves as Chief Scientist for the Earth Satellite Corporation. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I should add that during my years editing Science Fiction Age<\/em> magazine from 1992 through 2000, I published short fiction by each of them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We discussed how Gilligan’s Island<\/em> gave TV viewers the wrong idea about scientists, the ways in which most science fiction isn’t actually science fiction at all, but rather engineering<\/em> fiction, what’s wrong with portraying scientists as if they’re any different than non-scientists, why Stephen King’s The Stand<\/em> gave such a negative picture of science and technology, the dangers of letting governments control science, why real science, like real art, is work, the reason scientists need to be more aggressive about the ways in which they’re portrayed, and more.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how you can share some of that sizzling “Laredo” with us—<\/p>\n

1) Subscribe over at the iTunes store<\/a>, where I hope you’ll be tempted by some of the 70 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

2) Listen to the episode using the RSS feed of http:\/\/eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com\/rss<\/a> on the device of your choice.<\/p>\n

3) Or simple listen via the embed below.<\/p>\n