[Graham Storrs]

Neither “fiction”, “speculation”, nor “simulation” will do. “Science” is the correct word. Science is a process, a complicated set of activities that improve our understanding in an uniquely reliable way. Knowledge is often referred to as “scientific” when it has been developed through such a process and has come to be judged highly reliable because of it. However, this is just a shorthand to identify the knowledge’s provenance. What is going on today in focus fusion is a mixture of science and engineering.

There is a term, “visioneering”, used by W. Patrick McRay (in his book, “The Visioneers”) to describe a set of activities that are essentially political, but backed by sound science and engineering, which promote a particular technological vision of the future. He gives space habitats and nanotechnology as his two paradigm examples. I’m sure we have some “visioneering” going on around fusion in general at the moment – although we don’t have the very high-profile “visioneers” like Gerard O’Neill and Eric Drexler to push the fusion agenda.

[Graham Storrs]

Now *that’s* bucked me up for the day. Thanks 🙂

[Graham Storrs]

Wow, thanks, Dennis. That’s very kind of you.

I’ve heard of what the Heiroglyph guys are doing but that’s all – so I’m very glad to get the link.

I’ve just been to vote for your piece at Climate CoLab – which is a useful resource in itself. I hope it does a lot of awareness raising.

Cheers,

Graham.

[Graham Storrs]

Tempting, but I’ll pass. As a writer, the fewer sources of procrastination I have, the better! Besides, I hardly ever use facebook.

[Graham Storrs]

It’s a shame the story isn’t finished yet. It sounds interesting.

Actually, this forum has already been extremely useful for understanding the physical constraints on FF. Sadly I read the thread on the physical size of generators too late. My fist book has a 10KW generator down to the size of a filing cabinet by 2050!

[Graham Storrs]

Rezwan, I’m a sci-fi writer and I liked what you said about tying together fiction and reality. In my game writers often make some wild leap into crazily speculative realms – or even beyond. I did that with my time travel novels where the core piece of scientific fiction is a device for travelling into the past. But for the rest, I like to stay as grounded as possible and that means using current science and technology or just-over-the-horizon stuff like focus fusion. In effect, a gradient is established between real, solid science and the wild ideas at the other end. FF gets a lot of good press in my novels. In fact, it saves the world after peak oil hits 🙂

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