Courtesy of NASA comes a visualization showing how global temperatures have changed since 1880. According to NASA’s web site, this “color-coded map shows a progression of changing global surface temperatures from 1884 to 2012. Dark blue indicates areas cooler than average. Dark red indicates areas warmer than average.” And the difference between dark blue and dark red is about 7.2 degrees fahrenheit. NASA scientists note that “2012 was the ninth warmest of any year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. With the exception of 1998, the nine warmest years in the 132-year record all have occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the hottest years on record.” Copies of the video above and still shots can be freely downloaded from the NASA web site. To deepen your understanding of climate change, spend some time with Global Warming, a freeonline course from the University of Chicago.
It often seems, at least to me, that our culture is slowly sliding backward when it comes to science education. As a humanities person, my observations may not count for much, but I do find myself getting nostalgic for popular science communicators like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman; people who could appear in America’s living room and enthrall even the most hardened and recalcitrant of minds. Sagan’s influence peaked at the dawn of the culture wars, and it doesn’t seem like anyone could fill his shoes.
But several influential science communicators have made significant strides in bringing science to a popular audience in the past few decades. Among them is the very affable astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who takes Sagan’s mantle in the Cosmos reboot on Fox next year. There are media figures like NPR’s Ira Flatow, Bill Nye the Science Guy, sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, and Emmy-award-winning Tracy Day, co-founder of the World Science Festival. Physicist and popular science writer Brian Greene has done excellent work for NOVA, and scientific heavyweights Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins reach millions with popular books and media appearances.
Now imagine all these people on the same stage together, trading stories, jamming, riffing like great jazz musicians, like some Justice League of 21st century science lovers. Well, you don’t have to, because this happened, not on primetime television (alas), but at Arizona State University under the aegis of their “Origins Project,” whose mission is to foster interdisciplinary research, build scientific partnerships, and “raise the profile of origins-related issues and broaden scientific literacy.” Origins Project director Lawrence Krauss MC’ed the March 30th event, and the panel filled a 3,000-seat auditorium for a two-hour session that focuses on “the storytelling of science” (part one at top, part two above).
The event harnesses the slick, entertaining format of TED Talks to demonstrate how cutting-edge research can reach a wide audience eager for a fuller understanding of the physical universe. The first video up top opens with a quote from Michael Shermer: “Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.” The stories that the members of this exciting panel discussion tell are connected to physical reality through scientific evidence that—without artful and compelling narrative—can seem bewilderingly complex.
Today, digitally empowered to take, view, and share a photograph in the span of seconds, we think nothing of the phrase “ïnstant camera.” But to celebrated Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 after living almost his entire life in the Soviet Union, the technology came as a revelation. He had, of course, to use a primitive Polaroid camera, but, Tarkovsky being Tarkovsky, his aesthetic sense still came through its little square, self-developing frames loud and clear — or rather, it came through, rich, pensive, solemn, and autumnal.
In 2006, Thames & Hudson published Instant Light, a book collecting “a selection of color Polaroids the filmmaker took from 1979 to 1984 of his home, family, and friends in Russia and of places he visited in Italy,” and you can see some of these images on the blog Poemas del río Wang, or on this Facebook page.
The post quotes Tarkovsky’s friend Tonino Guerra, remembering the auteur’s Polaroid period: “In 1977, on my wedding ceremony in Moscow, Tarkovsky appeared with a Polaroid camera. He had just shortly discovered this instrument and used it with great pleasure among us. [ … ] Tarkovsky thought a lot about the ‘flight’ of time and wanted to do only one thing: to stop it — even if only for a moment, on the pictures of the Polaroid camera.”
Now that we find ourselves in a new wave of Polaroidism — you can even buy the cameras and their film at Urban Outfitters — we’d do well to study these pictures taken by a man who mastered their form just as thoroughly as he mastered cinema. And if you want evidence of the latter, look no further than our collection of Tarkovsky films free online.
Since 2009, the organization VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts has sought to bring balance to the representation of female authors in the literary world. As revealed by the 2010 controversy begun by author Jodi Picoult over the gushing treatment Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom received in the New York Times, the disparity, and the bias, are real. Author Jennifer Weiner chimed in as well, writing: “when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book.” This fracas—involving a number of mostly New York literati and the death of the term “chick lit”—didn’t split evenly down gender lines. Both male and female writers lined up to defend Picoult and Franzen, but it did open up legitimate questions about the old (mostly white) boys club that claims the upper echelons of literary fiction and the brass ring that is the New York Times book review.
What received no notice in the popular media during all this chatter was the place of women writers in genre fiction, which mostly lives outside the gates and rarely gets much notice from the critics (with the exception of a handful of “serious” writers and the Young Adult market). Well, there is a discussion about gender parity in the science fiction world taking place now on the blog of sci-fi critic and writer Ian Sales. Sales curates SF Mistressworks—a blog for women sci-fi writers—and after reviewing a 1975 anthology called Women of Wonder, he asked readers over at his blog to submit their favorite short fiction by women writers. His goal? To collect 100 stories and novellas as a counter to the classic, and almost wholly male-dominated collection, 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Isaac Asimov. You can read the full list of 100 over at Sales’ blog. Below, we’ve excerpted those stories that are freely available online. If you’re a science fiction fan and find yourself unable to name more than one or two female authors in the genre (everyone knows, for example, the fabulous Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood, pictured above), you might want to take a look at some of the great work you’ve missed out on.
Sales’ list spans several decades and, as he writes, demonstrates “a good spread of styles and themes and approaches across the genre.”
1 ‘The Fate of the Poseidonia’, Clare Winger Harris (1927, short story) online here
12 ‘The New You’, Kit Reed (1962, short story) online here
13 ‘The Putnam Tradition’, Sonya Dorman (1963, short story) online here
16 ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’, Pamela Zoline (1967, short story) online here
28 ‘The View from Endless Scarp’, Marta Randall (1978, short story) online here
51 ‘The Road to Jerusalem’, Mary Gentle (1991, short story) online here
71 ‘Captive Girl’, Jennifer Pelland (2006, short story) online here
79 ‘Spider the Artist’, Nnedi Okrafor (2008, short story) online here
81 ‘Eros, Philia, Agape’, Rachel Swirsky (2009, novelette) online here
82 ‘Non-Zero Probabilities’, NK Jemisin (2009, short story) online here
85 ‘Blood, Blood’, Abbey Mei Otis (2010, short story) online here and here
88 ‘Amaryllis’, Carrie Vaughn (2010, short story) online here
89 ‘I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno’, Vylar Kaftan (2010, short story) online here
91 ‘Six Months, Three Days’, Charlie Jane Anders (2011, short story) online here
93 ‘The Cartographer Bees and the Anarchist Wasps’, E Lily Yu (2011, short story) online here
94 ‘Silently and Very Fast’, Catherynne M Valente (2011, novella) online here, here and here
96 ‘A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel’, Yoon Ha Lee (2011, short story) online here
97 ‘Immersion’, Aliette de Bodard (2012, short story) online here
98 ‘The Lady Astronaut of Mars’, Mary Robinette Kowal (2012, novelette) online here
* Please note: an earlier version of this post was titled “The 100 Best Sci-Fi Stories by Women Writers (Read 20 for Free Online).” As this list’s curator, Ian Sales, points out unequivocally below, this is not meant to be a definitive “best of” in any sense. Our apologies for misreading his intentions.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
