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A Astronomy Cast Episode 469 Modern Sci-Fi for the Science Lever.

Welcome to Astronomy Cast for Weekly Facts Based Journey Through The Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kane. I'm the publisher of the Universe today with me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, the director of Technology and Citizen Science at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and

the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you doing, Fraser? Great.

So I guess we're going to give people some recommendations, some books we like, some ideas of stuff that we've been reading.

Hopefully this will set you up to be able to buy some gifts for the Science Lever in your family and that's what we're going to do.

Yes. The way I look at it is currently our world is quite literally if you're in California on fire.

Oh, yes. And given everything that's going on sometimes, it's just nice to completely escape into another reality.

And my alternate realities of choice tend to be science fiction fantasy and urban fantasy. So we're going to take you down those rides and talk about the ones that actually have like fairly reasonable science or are good enough that you should read them anyways.

Sounds good. Now how far back do we want to go? Like you said kind of modern sci-fi, you know, but I think we'll be pretty squishy about that.

Yeah, I'd like to try and stay as modern as possible to give some new writers growth, not that some of them that we're going to recommend need it.

But I saw this great quote. Are we? Yes, this is part of the episode now. Yes. I saw this great tweet the other day. I think it was by Emily Finke. She goes by Celix just about everywhere.

And if I'm quoting the right person, which I hope I am or I'm just a doofus, it was we need to stop worrying that if we don't recommend Tolkien and Heinlein to small space-loving kids that those authors will go away.

And those authors will go unread because that's not going to happen. So it's time to start saying here are new things written for the modern age that have the same more as that we have.

Go read these because a lot of the older stuff is just kind of like it's clearly a different time. Yes. So where do you want to start? What's a book that you've read fairly recently that you liked the science in it?

So this is actually the one that Susie wanted us to do the entire episode on the Bob verse. I am Legion. I am Bob is the first book in the series. And this is what I think that you've read as well.

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