Science fiction has long tackled the biggest questions about the human condition: What is reality? What makes us human? What is consciousness?

So to Susan Schneider, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, sci-fi seemed a logical way to illustrate some of the existential conundrums of philosophers over the ages, from Plato to René Descartes to David Chalmers.

“Science fiction fires the imagination and can get across conceptual ideas and thought experiments, or scenarios, that test philosophical theories,” she says. “Consider Isaac Asimov and his stories about robots and what happens if they become conscious. What does that tell us about the notion of a person?”

In her new book, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2009), Schneider mines time travel, artificial intelligence, robot rights, teleportation, and genetic modification to discuss the nature of space and time, free will, transhumanism, the self, neuroethics, and reality.

Each chapter tackles a different philosophical question via essays by Schneider and academic colleagues with titles like “Could I be in a Matrix or a Computer Simulation?” and “Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report.” These discussions draw parallels between such sci-fi stalwarts as Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Brave New World, and philosophical classics like Plato’s The Republic and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.

The book sprang from a 2007 undergraduate Penn course of the same name, which she plans to resume in the 2010-2011 school year. The course grew of out of Schneider’s quest for a compelling way to introduce students to philosophy, plus her own research on the nexus of philosophy and cognitive science.

“Cognitive science regards thinking as computational. I examine how it shapes our understanding of the mind, the self, and consciousness,” says Schneider. “If both computers and humans arrive at answers in a computational manner, then how much of a difference is there between us and them? Not all philosophical questions involve cognitive science. But the area of philosophy I’m most interested in—the nature of our minds and thinking—is in constant dialogue with cognitive science.”

— Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

S.A.R.A.H.’s designer, Douglas Fargo, should take some cues from the Solar Decathlon, a biennial contest hosted by the U.S. Department of energy. This year, representatives from 20 teams have reconstructed their high-tech solar-powered houses on the National Mall in Washington D.C. for inspection by the public and judges alike. (See 80beats’ gallery of some of the houses.) Houses are scored on 10 criteria, from efficient appliances to market-worthiness.

Most of the houses share a few themes: They maximize the insulation to minimize heat and cool loss; they have large sections of walls that can be opened onto decks and patios to increase the amount of livable space in the house; they had ways to access appliances or climate controls remotely, whether from an iPhone app or an Internet connection; and all of them can, at the minimum, operate without electricity from the grid, though many generate excess power.

Each house has been carefully designed to suit their own regional cultures. The team from University of Louisiana, Lafayette produced BeauSoleil, a Cajun-style home that combined energy efficiency with the ability to resist hurricane-strength winds. The Illinois team’s Gable Home fits in with Midwestern farm architecture, and Team California’s Refract House is designed to take full advantage of the sunny but typically mild climate in the southern part of the state.

Team Germany’s house is an austere cube (it is German, after all) with a single large living space on the inside, but covered in solar panels on the outside. Much like S.A.R.A.H., furniture and appliances fold in and out so the room can change function from eating space to social area to sleeping area. The house was designed to maximize the power generating possibilities, and it can pump out twice as much electricity as it needs to operate. The technology is pretty expensive, and the unit cost of the German house was projected to be between $650,000 to $850,000.

Naturally, some of the houses are a little ambitious. The University of Kentucky’s house maintains its internal environment by monitoring weather from a university feed that updates at the zip code-level resolution.  The Iowa State house has a vacuum-sealed door, which seems to me would make it challenging to open when salespeople or evangelicals come knocking unexpectedly (then again, maybe that’s not such a bad thing).

All of the houses will be on display through October 18, so Washingtonians and D.C. tourists might consider stopping by to see these would-be S.A.R.A.H.s in the, uh, flesh.

Surrogates – which opens today – stars Bruce Willis as a police detective trying to track down the killer with a weapon that can disable avatars while simultaneously killing their users. While his avatar is younger, stronger and has a full head of hair, back home, he’s lost the connection with his wife, who only interacts as an avatar.

The cautionary tale looks at a technology that’s meant to give mobility and a new lease on life to the wheelchair-bound or hideously disfigured and has been usurped by a pleasure-seeking populace. Think Second Life on acid. It’s easier to shell-out money for an avatar than a gym membership.

The Touchstone Pictures production is based on the Top Shelf graphic novel from writer Robert Venditti and artist Brett Weldele. In fact, Venditti was inspired by the emerging obsession with plastic surgery and nascent experiments with mind-controlled computers as inspiration. What’s creepy is how plausible the conceit is given the mushrooming of cosmetic procedures, reality television and pervasive societal shallowness.

In the interests of streamlining, the film loses some of the nuance and humor of the graphic novel, though the special effects team does a wonderful job of re-imagining actors with the youthful Plasticine look of avatars. And it’ll probably make you think twice about scheduling that next Botox appointment.

— Science Not Fiction guest-blogger Susan Karlin

While the Prawns seem to have mastered DNA-detecting technology, it remains a bit beyond our reach out here in the real, human world. But that may be the next big frontier in biometrics. Because, let’s face it, the typical kinds of biometric security used in of the lairs of movie super-villains isn’t science-fiction anymore—it’s reality.

Fingerprint scan? We can do that on a laptop, or even a mere thumb drive. Palm scan? Pssh. Placing a hand on the scanner is passé. Retinal scan? Of course. Facial recognition? Voice recognition? Done and done. All of these different biometrics has been exploited by security companies trying to make money in a world where verifying authenticity is becoming an increasing problem. But the biological signature big business and national governments really want to capture is DNA. Unlike our faces and voices, it never changes. Unlike our fingerprints, it’s very difficult to fake. And except for identical twins, it’s totally unique to each individual (and it may soon be possible to distinguish even identical twins [pdf]). Because this technology would be so valuable, everyone from the Austrian national government to major corporations is toiling away (pdf) in their R&D departments to  develop a DNA biometric lock.

But fear not, defenders of privacy: Science is still reasonably far (pdf) from using DNA for a biometric lock. First, there’s the sampling problem. There was a time when the only way to get a useful DNA sample was to get a drop of blood or a swab of tissue from inside the person’s mouth. And while it would probably be fair to force Tom Cruise to prick his finger every time he wanted to gain entry to the Mindhead—err, the Scientology—err, his secret hideaway, useful DNA can be extracted from skin cells just by using a simple adhesive piece of paper. Still, not optimal for a lock and key device.

Then the DNA has to be amplified and sequenced. It’s a staple of Hollywood crime shows that DNA this process can be accomplished in a matter of minutes, but in reality it takes hours to run the polymerase chain reaction. Then the amplified DNA has to be sequenced, and only then can it be matched up to an encoded “lock” to see if the person can be admitted. Again, watching Tom Cruise stand fuming for three hours outside the fortress of solitude is a pleasing thought, but it’s not really going to happen.

Still, there are a number of other DNA-oriented tricks companies are trying. Applied DNA Sciences, a company in Stony Brook, NY, has discovered a way to layer plant DNA into one-of-a-kind objects, like art work, or antiques, that they swear will have no effect on the object. They also can layer the DNA into ink and toner, allowing the possibility of printing money or credit cards with a DNA signature that could be read with a special scanner.

Of course, the fast way to figure this stuff out would be to reverse-engineer some handy alien weapons and see just what makes the weapons work or not work. Did the human scientists in District 9 think of that? Well, that would be a spoiler, now wouldn’t it?

Via Hero Complex come these ingenious public service announcements and travel posters from a near future in which time travel is possible and robots are self-cleaning.  Designed by artist Amy Martin, the posters are $20 each and proceeds benefit 826LA, a non-profit writing center for kids 6 to 18.

Where common sense and the film divide is just how best to dodge an oncoming meteor. I wrote a while back on the idea of painting one side of the asteroid black while beaming heat onto it, causing the asteroid to shift course. It’s a neat idea, but not nearly as neat as the gravity tractor, not just because this approach is more elegant, but because there’s a British company called EADS Astrium that announced last week that they could actually build one if it were needed.

The idea for the tug first proposed by NASA scientists Edward Lu and Stanley Love in a paper in Nature in 2005. The pair realized that sure, we could change an asteroid’s course by docking a rocket onto the asteroid and pushing it, but landing on an asteroid is really hard: The asteroid is an extremely fast-moving target, and often it rotates asymmetrically around its axis, meaning that a lumpy part of the asteroid could smash a relatively teeny rocket in its rotational path. But, the scientists argued, the spaceship could hover 200 meters or more above the asteroid and use their mutual gravitational attraction to form a “towline” between the two. Then ship could use its own propulsion to slowly pull the asteroid to another course. It would have to push very gently to avoid breaking the bond and flying away, but over the course of 15 to 20 years, the asteroid could be persuaded to miss our planet.

The idea of a gravity tractor has been refined (PDF) by scientist Bong Wie, working at Arizona State University, who proposed the use of solar sails to eliminate the problem of fuel capacity on the satellite. (Love and Lu’s proposal relied on nuclear energy generators for power in their design.) Solar sails capture the momentum from photons of solar radiation to provide propulsion. By properly angling the sail (Wie proposes 35 degrees), the body of the space ship can be moved in the desired direction. The sail can take months to build up significant velocity, but since it has a long time to accomplish its tugboat-like task, this isn’t inherently a showstopper. That said, solar sail technology is still in its infancy—it’s only been tested on a very small scale by American and Japanese scientists in space—so it’s not ready for large-scale deployment just yet.

EADS Astrium’s design uses four ion thrusters of the sort used on Deep Space 1.  Each is aligned to keep the device hovering above the asteroid while gently pulling the asteroid via it’s gravitation “towline” off course. The ship will be 30 meters (about 98 feet) across and weigh about 10 tons. In news articles, Astrium representatives say they haven’t even built a prototype yet, but they’re convinced they can bang one out if necessary.

All of which puts us back to the question of whether there’s enough capacity to provide the necessary early warning to build and launch a gravity tractor in time to have it work. Since NASA currently tracks about 6,000 asteroids, of the 100,000 out there, I’m going to go with no.

Consultants like Newssift, ScoutLabs, and Jodange use complex algorithms to scan keywords in remarks about corporations made on Twitter and Facebook, then categorize them as positive or negative via filters—the companies say they can even parse sarcasm, slang, and other linguistic nuances. Filters can sift through levels of positivity/negativity, intensity. Some can also identify more influential opinions from those social-media hubs and tastemakers. As the tech becomes increasingly sophisticated, it may become more prevalent in standard search engines or predict future developments like stock price fluctuations.

Companies are interested in measure online opinion, of course, because the perception of the company or its products can have a strong effect on its chances for success. They’ve also used the approach to sort out technical or customer service glitches.

More casual users who don’t want to sink money into a professional system can tap simpler versions like Tweetfeel, Twendz, and Twitrratr for topic-based opinions.

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

Will we use metal in the future? What else would we build things out of? Might we use organic technology (machines and buildings made of or from biological organisms) instead?”
In The Graduate, that iconic film from 1967, bewildered 20-something Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) gets some career advice from a businessman who leans close and intones “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.” Benjamin didn’t follow that advice, but the rest of the world did, and in spades. By 1979, global production of plastic had exceeded that of steel and is still growing, reaching over 200 million tons this year. There’s no doubt that plastic will continue to play a major role in how we make things, but it won’t replace everything.

In some ways, plastic is the material of the future, the latest step in humanity’s long upward trek through the ages of stone, bronze, iron, and steel. The word “plastic” comes from Greek roots meaning “capable of being molded.” Compared to metals and other materials, plastic is infinitely versatile. With its ability to shape-shift and to take on different mechanical and optical properties, it shows up in a huge spectrum of applications from packaging and plumbing to toys, medical supplies, and computers. And unlike iron and steel, plastic doesn’t rust.

But plastic also has problems that will prevent it from replacing metals any time soon. Its very durability can be an issue. Discarded plastic objects can survive for centuries in garbage landfills without degrading, and plastic artifacts have been found polluting the oceans far distant from any land. Also, what doesn’t seem to be widely appreciated, the raw material to make plastic comes from a resource we need to conserve, petroleum.

On top of this, metals do some things better than plastic—just try cutting up an apple with a plastic knife. Copper and other metals are needed to conduct electricity through power grids; all plastic can do is insulate the current-carrying wires. However, plastic is making inroads relative to some materials such as wood, which is being replaced by plastic “lumber” in certain applications.

Plastic also offers a possible way to actually construct things using biotechnology. Unlike metals, which are classified as inorganic, plastics are organic; they’re made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, the same constituents as living things, which links plastic to biological products. For instance, under the right conditions, certain microorganisms can synthesize compounds called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). These display properties like those of artificial plastics, with the benefits that they’re not petroleum-based and are biodegradable. Researchers are investigating ways to mass-produce these bioplastics, for instance by bioengineering plants to create them.

If you want to speculate even further, way past the idea of growing plastic rather than making it in factories, think about the science-fictionish possibility of bioengineering plants to produce plastic exactly in a desired shape from a drinking cup to a house. Current biotechnology is far short of this possibility, but science fiction has a way of pointing to the future. If bioplastics are the materials breakthrough of the 21st century, houses grown from seeds may be the breakthrough of the 22nd.

I predict we’re going to look back at the release of the original, Swedish Let the Right One In as the vampires’ artistic high point.  I also predict that the release of the American version will mark the end of the whole bloody, sexy craze.

So what’s next for fans of the undead?  Zombies.

Anticipating public demand for a government response to the growing threat, mathematicians at the University of Ottawa have published an epidemiological model of an outbreak of zombie infection. [viaTalking Squid]

This comes just a few months after the Boston Police confirmed via Twitter that they would promptly inform the public in the event of a zombie attack.  [via Consumerist]

And we’re just one month away from the release of the new Woody Harrelson movie Zombieland.  I’m telling you, people.  Zombies.

Character X: Oh my god I can read minds! And move things with my brain! And start fires! And I’m suddenly becoming hella smart!

Scientist character responsible for explaining things:  Aha! Normally we only use 10 percent of our brains, but Character X is accessing the rest of his brain! Now s/he has super powers!

Me, watching: ARRGG!

Using even a pretty cursory knowledge of neuroscience, one thing is clear: We use our whole brain. We use different sections of it for motor control, for higher thought, for fight or flight reactions, and so on and so forth. When neuroscientists and their many colleagues test the brain to see which parts are doing what, they’re looking at the whole brain, not just 10 percent. So every time the meme pops up in even my favorite shows, I kind of go a little nuts. But I’ve always wondered: Where does this meme come from?

Frankly, there is no clear understanding of the source.  Maybe some people think we have a bunch of neurons that we’re not using, or that we can only use 10-percent of our brain at a given moment. Or maybe they’re looking at all that white matter in the pictures of brains, all that stuff that cushions the the gray matter, and wondering what that stuff does. But Discover blogger and columnist Carl Zimmer has a piece this month that offers one possible  explanation for the phenomenon:

In the mid-1800s researchers discovered cells in the brain that are not like neurons (the presumed active players of the brain) and called them glia, the Greek word for “glue.” Even though the brain contains about a trillion glia—10 times as many as there are neurons—the assumption was that those cells were nothing more than a passive support system. Today we know the name could not be more wrong.

So, roughly 150 years ago, scientists studying the brain wrote off 91 percent of our brain as mere glue for the more important neurons that do the actual thinking. We now understand that they were wrong, but this strikes me as the sort of fact that can seep into the general culture and then become very difficult to dislodge.  The fact that psychics and TV shows through the years have propagated the myth surely can’t help.

Anyway, I highly recommend reading Zimmer’s whole piece, as it is filled with his usual erudition. In short, he describes how scientists are making headway on solving the riddle of the glial cells. Among other tasks, they provide scaffolding for neurons, they insulate neurons, and they act like a kind of brain janitor, pruning dead or useless cells. Zimmer even cites Spanish neuroscientist Alfonso Araque who believes that certain glial cells assist with thinking and not just maintenance tasks for the lordly neurons.

And now that this idea is, once again, scientifically dispensed with, a plea to the writers and producers of sci-fi shows and movies who care about actual science: No more of the 10-percent-of-our-brain myth, please. There’s plenty of real mystery to support plots without using bogus ones.

It’s been worth the wait.

Since the probes started sending data back to Earth, scientists from JPL have been helping Kloor’s team turn it into the most accurate visual renderings of first few planets of the solar system anyone has ever seen. These reputedly amazing visuals will form the bread and butter of Quantum Quest, an animated, science-fiction, large-format film film that’s now been 12 years in the making.

Each rendering will be founded on contours developed from radar data, and then surfaced over with visual data, all merged together through CGI. And although the plot will feature a crew of talking neutrinos and photons taking a “solar safari” from the sun to Saturn’s moon Titan, all the space visuals, Kloor swears, will be real.

But unlike the real solar system, in Quantum Quest, there will be sound in space.

Naturally, this isn’t the sort of explosions and lasers we heard in Star Wars or Serenity. Quantum Quest aims for a more exacting standard of scientific precision (aside from the talking particles). I had a chance to talk to Kloor and his composer, Shawn Clement, in the midst of the madness of Comic-Con. First, he explained that the Huygens Probe did actually record sound (while it was in Titan’s atmosphere) and transmit it back to Earth.

But more of the film’s score is inspired by radio signals Cassini detected coming off the rings of Saturn, rather than actual sound. Of course, the human ear does not, as a rule, “hear” radio signals. To get around that, sound engineers “frequency shifted” the signals down into the audible range. Another challenge was that the sounds were also very long; they didn’t modulate quickly. So to get them into a format that could be used in a film, engineers compressed the signals into smaller packages. Kloor said these manipulations were necessary, but don’t alter the fundamental shape of the sound.

Clement never had to deal with any of this himself. He and the sound magicians at Skywalker Ranch, who are handling the background folio for the film,  got the samples already in audible form. To write the music, Clement started mucking around with the sounds in his synthesizer, but found that it wasn’t really working. So instead he went old-school and busted out a guitar and a violin.

“What I did with those was mimic those sounds a lot,” he said. “But I was able to manipulate that and do what I wanted to do. It worked out really, really well. You’re hearing those sounds and hearing them shift and change and eventually, by the end, you get the full orchestra.” Clement sent me a couple of clips of his music:

Neat-o space sounds inspired by radio waves from Saturn’s rings

After all these years, the film is finally due out in February 2010.

[MINOR SPOILER ALERT]

Wow.  Bleak.  Maybe I shouldn’t have watched all five episodes in one afternoon, but I haven’t been this depressed since Dark Knight.  What happened to the randy, swashbuckling Captain Jack that we loved?

On the SciNoFi front though, Torchwood gives us the opportunity to revisit the topic of eyeball spy cameras, last seen in an episode of Dollhouse this spring.  As Stephen noted in a post at that time, scientists have been working on plugging directly into the brain (in cats at least) to locate and interpret visual processing activity.

Interestingly, the Torchwood contact lenses appeared to be a much more basic technology: essentially small video cameras that could transmit images back to a laptop and also display text messages to the wearer.

Given how far we have to go in understanding the brain, a contact lens camera is probably a more straightforward and only marginally more detectable solution for this kind of surveillance.  Eyeball sized cameras are already commercially available.

If you don’t have  time to watch the video you can read recaps and quotes from the panel here, here, here, here and here.

Big thanks to Jennifer at SEE, to all of our panelists, and to the Bad Astronomer, who found time to moderate our panel while he wasn’t partying with Hollywood starlets (Phil – we kid because we love).

Before his TV writing career took off, Jaime Paglia, co-creator of SyFy’s number-one-rated show,  had a part-time gig as a program director of a science and technology public radio show called Cambridge Forum.

“It was this rare opportunity to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts where literally you have some of the greatest minds in science and technology,” Paglia told me in an interview recently. “Tim Berners-Lee, who literally invented the Internet, and Rodney Brooks, head of MIT robotics lab, the guy who made Sojourner, and who invented the Roomba in his spare time. Those guys, they see the world differently. There’s a unique way their brains work that allows them to be as creative as they are.”

These Cambridge geniuses eventually found their way into the show, if not as Nathan Stark or Douglas Fargo (Did you know he had a first name? I had to look it up), then at least as Walter Perkins or Carl Carlson. And Paglia also has another inspiration for scientific heroes: Dr. Donald Paglia, UCLA medical professor emeritus and Jaime’s dad.

The elder Paglia was very nearly the medical officer inside Biosphere 2, but decided he’d rather stick around and watch his son grow up some. Instead, Dr. Paglia served as the medical officer on the outside, and he even brought his family down to watch it get sealed for its two-year mission of self-sustainability. The idea of Biosphere 2 led directly to an episode of Eureka (”What About Bob?“) featuring a missing person inside a Biosphere-like place.

So, sometimes the science leads directly to a show, but Paglia says that story and science have about equal weight in driving the arc of a given episode.  Paglia and his team spend a lot of time with science magazines, blogs, and Web sites, and they track all their science and sci-fi ideas on the most important of all scientific tools: a white board.

“In Season One, we put all of our characters on one board, with episodes across the top, and for each one we wrote what we want to have happen to these characters,” Paglia said. “Meanwhile, we had a separate board with all the sci-fi ideas. We made a concerted effort, without being too on the nose, to tie what’s happening with the science to what’s happening to the characters.”

The heroes of Eureka strike a stark contrast with the scientific heroes on other shows, most especially those on Big Bang Theory. In that show, the scientists are depicted as so nerdy and unable to cope socially that one of the leads is assumed to have Asperger’s Syndrome by advocacy groups. Eureka’s main character may be everyman Sheriff Jack Carter, but the scientific heroes are both brilliant and reasonably well adjusted to social norms. For Paglia, that was a deliberate choice.

“It’s an attractive quality to be smart, and inventive,” Paglia said. “It’s not about biceps and perfect teeth. We wanted to turn things upside down in this town.”

But he still enjoys the contrast between the jock Carter and Eureka’s smarty-pants.

“Carter is very smart in a street-smart way; he has the ability to see the forest for the trees” he said. “While the scientists are so caught up in what they’re doing, they can’t see that, which was definitely a quality of some of the guys I was interviewing for Cambridge Forum. You could see [yourself saying], ‘I’ll bet you never know where your car keys are, you can’t be bothered by that, because you’re too busy creating new math.’”

▪ Jeff Smith, whose epic graphic novel Bone is on track to be released as a Warner Brothers movie, spent a year boning up on quantum physics fundamentals for his current comic serial RASL. “I love the new wave of theoretical physics,” he told SciNoFi. “I’m a devotee of Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, and Michio Kaku. It wasn’t a hardship to do the studying.”

The story mixes string theory, M theory and parallel universes with science conspiracy theories. “The glue between them is RASL, an inter-dimensional art thief,” he adds. “You have a guy with thermo-magnetic pads on his shoulders so he can step through parallel dimensions—add a shot of rye whiskey in his gut and he’s ready to go.”

▪ Boom! Studios’ ongoing comic series of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sold out so fast, it went into a second printing on the same day. It’s not an adaptation—rather, it features the full text of the original story spread across 24 issues. “We wanted to show fans how different the original story was from Blade Runner,” said Boom! CEO Ross Richie. “It delves into topics still relevant today: what does existence mean and if you’re not human, can you be recognized as a person?”

Legendary illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz—a Comic-Con special guest who earned a standing ovation at the end of his solo panel—did cover art for the first four issues. “We’re huge fans of his, so it was an opportunity to work with one of our heroes,” said Richie. Meanwhile, Sienkiewicz was such a hit with the Dick estate, they’re discussing future projects.

▪ Two Radical Publishing projects offer opposing takes on technology dependence. In writer Rick Remender’s and artist Greg Tocchini’s The Last Days of American Crime, the government broadcasts a signal that prevents humans from doing anything unlawful. In writer Steve Niles’ and artist Zid’s City of Dust, police have to adapt to old-school detective work when the technology they’ve come to rely on to solve crimes stops working.

▪ With The Stuff of Life (about DNA); T-Minus (the space race); and Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards (paleontology), Minneapolis artists Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon have forged a cottage industry illustrating comic-style books about science. Their next project is Evolution: The History of Life on Earth (Hill & Wang), written by Jay Hosler, an assistant professor of biology at Juniata College in Huntington, Penn. “All of our books are heavily vetted by real scientists making sure they’re accurate,” says Cannon.

▪ Jimmy Diggs—the “Jackie Robinson of Star Trek writers” who’s written the most freelance Star Trek episodes—just sold his first film, a Gothic horror Western called Sundown. He’s now writing Star Trek: Seven Deadly Sins for Simon & Schuster, slated for publication in March, based on his article in Star Trek: Communicator (the defunct fan-club mag). “It’s the story of seven villains, told from their perspectives, each representing one of the seven deadly sins of man,” he said.  “What intrigues me is how science and technology change the human condition—or how humans make it relevant to their lives.”

—SciNoFi special Comic-Con correspondent Susan Karlin