Back in June, during the week I attended the Starry Heaven workshop in Flagstaff, organizer extraordinaire Sarah K. Castle put together a little panel discussion on the interactions between science fiction and actual science. Titled "Science + Fantasy = Science Fiction," the panel brought seven scientists and writers together to talk about how science inspires science fiction and vice versa.

Besides Sarah, who is both geologist and SF writer, the participants included writer Bradley P. Beaulieu (brad_beaulieu), writer and futurist Brenda Cooper (bjcooper), biologist and computer scientist Dan Greenspan (blog), biologist and physiologist Stan "Bud" Lindstedt, and science historian David S.F. Portree ("Beyond Apollo").

Everyone's five- to seven-minute presentations were fascinating, and I wish I had time and memory sufficient to recap them all. Instead, though, I've been meaning for a couple of months now to post the loose notes I wrote up for my little presentation. Here they are:

Here, as they investigate Hasta's ability to teleport objects, they talk about magic and science:

"I wonder what the cost will turn out to be," said Hasta, sitting back on the track and stretching her arms.

Ivan had finished setting up the blocks again and moved back to squat next to her. "The cost of what?" he asked.

Hasta regarded him through narrowed eyes. "The cost of this magic. In all the books, the magic never comes for free. There's always a cost."

"Like a dragon demanding a pound of flesh," Ivan said, chuckling, "or our souls starting to rot inside us?"

"Something like that."

He shook his head. "This isn't magic," he said. "It's just physics. It has to be. There's an energy expenditure, obviously, but maybe that's just why we feel tired and wrung out afterwards. Like when you exercise to build muscle."

"Moving a grown man half a mile? I paid attention in physics, Ivan. That takes a lot of energy."

"Sure it does," Ivan said, "but there are plenty of ways to hack around that requirement. What else do you think physics is?"

"Physics is hacking?"

"Totally. See, a hack is basically just a shortcut for getting something done, so you don't have to waste a lot of time and effort on it. Or resources. Like, you might hack into a record company's servers so you don't have to waste resources buying their music."

"You might," Hasta said.

"Hypothetically," Ivan granted. "Or you might write some code that monitors all a bank's transactions and diverts the rounded-off fractions of cents into a secret account. Those would be different kinds of computer hacks."

"Sure," said Hasta, motioning for him to keep going already.

"Okay, then you have what I think of as reality hacks, which are tricks the smartest of us monkeys have been figuring out for all of recorded history. Like, I could never move a giant boulder by myself, no matter how hard I pushed against it. I just physically can't muster enough force. But if I employ the hack we call a lever, suddenly my pathetic amount of force is multiplied. In fact, there's an immutable formula you can work out that tells you exactly how much extra force you get depending on the length of the lever and the distance of each end from the fulcrum. With the right lever positioned correctly, I can move that boulder!"

"That's basic physics," Hasta said. "But I guess I never really thought of it as a hack before."

"We hack reality in so many ways, it isn't even funny," Ivan said. "Levers and pulleys and screws to multiply force. Optics to bend light the way we want it to go. Turbines to generate electricity, and water, wind, and fossil-fuel power to turn the turbines. Conductors to move the electrons from one place to another. Battery chemistry to store and release that energy. Airfoils for lift so we can ply the atmosphere. Clever hacks, every one of them, all designed to save us time and effort and make our lives easier."

I see scientists as the ultimate hackers—women and men who work hard to figure out how the physical world around us works, so they can then take that knowledge and find shortcuts for performing tasks we want and need done more easily than we could otherwise do them.

That's where I get the inspiration for a lot of the different ideas I end up using in my fiction. What do I want or need done more easily? What sorts of things would make my life easier or better? Maybe I'm an avid hiker, and I'd like to be able to go out into the wilderness for days on end without worrying about how I'm going to carry in all the food I need. Well, I can imagine that maybe there's a way I could engineer my body to use chlorophyll like a plant does to convert sunlight into sugar.

Maybe when I get back from my hike, there's a black tie wine bar science gala that's black tie only, and it would sure make my life easier if I didn't have to run back home and change into my tuxedo. Well, maybe I can imagine a way that my hiking clothes were made out of reprogrammable fabric, and by downloading an open-source pattern from the Internet I can tell my clothing to change color and shape until I have on the proper evening wear without having to change.

Maybe at that black tie gala my friend Greg tells me about a book he's read recently that sounds really great—like say Nation by Terry Pratchett—and I'd like to be able to start reading it tonight without worrying about trying to find an open bookstore. Maybe I can imagine a way that I could read books on a screen instead of... Well, actually, that happened last night, and within three minutes I had bought the book and downloaded it to my iPhone.

Now, the trick to good science fiction is to not just make these wish fulfillment stories. The trick is to know enough about the way the world works, and the way people work, to make some guesses about how your fictional invention would affect the world in unexpected ways, and not just in the way you originally intend. Like, what would it be like to live in a world of people with green skin who didn't necessarily have to grow food or slaughter animals to get nutrition. What would happen to farmers? How would people migrate and where would they live. (Hint: Maybe chlorophyll people really wouldn't want to live in Chicago, where we can go a full month during the winter without seeing the sun.) And what other scientific advances and social changes, both good and bad, would be necessary in order to support that change?

The bottom line for me is that writing science fiction is my way of hacking reality, and by imagining the world I would like to live in, I hope I'm helping to inspire the people who are actually smart and dedicated enough to make that world real.

I was going to catch up on more of the week at the workshop yesterday, but Michael Jackson died and took Farrah Fawcett and most of the internet with him. You live on earth. You know.

On Tuesday, Brad Beaulieu made us all eggs benedict with crabmeat for breakfast. This was somewhat suspicious, given that he was first on the critique schedule for the day, but I don't think any of us actually changed our comments because of the fantastic food. Most of us joked about it, though.

My first-fifty was the fourth and last to go under the scalpel that day. I got a ton of very helpful feedback. There were elements of the book that I was very happy to hear that people were responding to, I got confirmation that the bits I suspected were big problems really were big problems, and then I heard just oodles of impressions and misimpressions that helped me see where I was setting the wrong expectations, where I was being unclear or vague, or where I was just being silly. Leaving the critique session, my mind was already whirring, working on how best to integrate the feedback I received into the next draft. I was very happy with the way it all went.

From this remove, some of the days begin to blur together, but I think I'm pretty safe in saying that we returned to the balcony at the Zane Grey Ballroom to enjoy beer in the open air at an even greater altitude than that of street-level Flagstaff. That happened almost every night.

On Wednesday, we began convening in smaller groups to do dissections of full novel manuscripts—or, at least, of whatever portion of those manuscripts does exist. That's been going on in groups of three or four ever since. Each of us was assigned two full manuscripts to read, and in turn had two participants read our own full manuscript. My session took place this morning at Macy's Coffee. Eugene Myers and Rob Ziegler gave me an incredible thorough, helpful, and encouraging critique of my 70,000 words so far. When this book sells, I will owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

To hop back a couple of nights, now, on Wednesday evening we had a group viewing of Cloverfield. The movie was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. I found it well-made and effective for what it was, and of course it's always fun to see a city you know well get destroyed by a giant monster. It shared a lot of plot elements with one of my favorite little movies, the 1988 Anthony Edwards thriller Miracle Mile, but of course was a very different film. I jumped when the first explosion hit.

For Thursday evening, which would be last night, Sarah Kelly set up a Meet the Authors event at the Wine Loft in downtown Flagstaff. gregvaneekhout was featured prominently in an Arizona Daily Sun article promoting the event, in fact. Six of us sat on a panel of sorts and answered questions about our writing that we had come up with ourselves and given to Sarah. The audience actually outnumbered the panel, and they had good, solid questions for us when we had run out of our own questions. From there we shifted our base of operations to the Beaver Street Brewery.

This morning before my critique session, Greg and I rounded up what equipment and food supplies we had in our apartment and hosted a banana pancake breakfast for the women staying in this same building with us. (Most of the men are staying in another place across town.) This was greatly aided, and in fact suggested, by the two boxes of pancake mix we found in our cupboards, and by the bottle of imitation maple syrup in the fridge. I think the pancakes were a hit!

Around noon (actually a bit later because on my way back from my critique session at Macy's I realized I had left my leather coat on my chair and ran back only to find that the coat was gone and hadn't been turned in but thank goodness Rob Ziegler had grabbed it for me before he left), we convened as a group briefly so that Mike Kelly could photograph us for the obligatory Locus workshop pic. There is melancholy in the realization that things are winding down, but I'm starting to miss home a lot, and I can't wait to see my wife and dog tomorrow night. I'll be internalizing the stuff I learned this week for a while, and I'm really glad I was able to come.

P.S. Greg van Eekhout is best roommate! And his novel Norse Code rocks. Buy it.

Our second day of workshopping was much like the first. Four first-fifties were done over the course of the day, with a delicious catered lunch of quesadillas in between. Everyone seems to be settling in and getting more comfortable, though as a result the critiques went longer yesterday than they did on day one.

Afterward a handful of us went shopping for a few things that were lacking in the rooms here, including half-and-half, real coffee beans, toilet paper, and sufficient beer. Then most of us converged once more on the balcony at the Zane Grey Ballroom, where the beer, as I may have mentioned, is ridiculously cheap, at least by the standards I'm used to.

In the late evening, we convened back here for pizza (I'm not sure how, but I exercised unprecedented willpower in making a salad for myself instead), beer (did not abstain at all), and an informal discussion about certain aspects of the publishing industry. I would say more, but what happens at Starry Heaven stays at Starry Heaven. If we decide it should stay at Starry Heaven.

This morning we're all heading over to the house where most of the men are staying, where Brad Beaulieu is making us breakfast. Then we'll stay there for our critique sessions. Today will be the last day of first-fifties, and my book is last. I haven't been very nervous until now, but I'm started to feel it a bit. I probably won't be able to eat a lot of lunch.

Tomorrow we begin breaking up into various groups of three for in-depth critiques of full novel manuscripts. That's when things really start to get intense! Can't wait.

The first official day of Starry Heaven went very well, I thought. We critiqued the first four of our twelve first-fifties. (For those curious, we spend the first three days looking at the first fifty pages of everyone's novel, on the theory that those pages have to be strong when they go to an editor or agent as a proposal.) Many helpful comments were offered and received, and there was a satisfying and comfortable lack of drama. Everyone here knew at least one other person prior to the workshop convening, and some of us knew a lot of the other participants. It looks to me like everyone is managing to fit in, which is good. (And we were all glad that E.C. Myers, who had the worst travel luck of any of us, finally managed to make it here late Saturday night. It was too bad that he missed dinner, though.)

Lunch yesterday was catered. We had delicious little baked burritos, spicy tomato soup, and chips and salsa. After the afternoon session, a few of us hauled our stacks of stuff still to read down to Macy's and sat around chatting as much as reading for a couple of hours. Then the whole gang convened the Zane Grey Ballroom at the Hotel Weatherford and milled about on the balcony listening to reggae from the festival down the street, and later watching police, fire, and ambulance converge on the crowd. I hope whoever had the emergency down there was okay. Also, we saw a few trucks equipped with snorkels pass by in the street below. (I wish I had one of those for my car in Chicago on Friday. The water in the depression under the Metra tracks at Foster and Ravenswood was well over my axles.)

A highlight for me at the Zane Grey was getting to meet Mike Kelly, our organizer Sarah K. Castle's husband. Mike is James Patrick Kelly's brother, and since I also (entirely coincidentally and unconnected to the science fiction world) know Dan Kelly from Brooklyn, I have now met three of the Kelly brothers. My new goal in life is to collect all four! But quite apart from his Kelly family connections, Mike is a charming and fascinating fellow in his own right, a textbook-writing geologist who also designs interactive museum installations.

Oh, and the Zane Grey also had Lagunitas IPA on draft! $2.75 a pint!

After Zane Grey, we schooled over to the Black Bean Burrito Bar & Salsa Co. for a late dinner. Then it was home, where I crashed disappointingly early. Maybe they stay up later and drink more beer over in the other house. Going to have to find that out tonight.

Okay, now I'm going to put on the 2006 FourPlay String Quartet album Now to the Future (which frogworth kindly sent me) and get another critique written.