I never start writing a science fiction book without first asking scientists a lot of extremely strange questions. My next novel – A Wall Is Also a Road, which comes out on 6 October – was a particularly tough case. I decided that my main character would be a cellular slime mould who is also a graduate student.
I certainly spent most of graduate school feeling like an amoeba. Why it’s high time we stopped anthropomorphising ants Gardenpath, the slime mould in question, is studying environmental science at a university that floats high above our galactic plane in a gaseous region known as the circumgalactic medium. You may not have heard of it, but this roughly spherical space is where the Magellanic clouds orbit – two dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way – along with rogue stars, planets and other chunks of random crap squirted out by Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy.
It’s full of all kinds of stuff that could support an advanced civilisation, from metals to water. Before I could even begin to imagine what Gardenpath looked like, I needed to understand where they live. So I called up Molly Peeples at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, whose lab made stunning simulations of the circumgalactic medium (you can see them on the web at foggie.science).
She gave me a tour of this distant region, which is full of spots where the swirling gas is warmer or colder, almost like weather. I decided that the slime moulds would experience the circumgalactic medium the way humans experience the atmosphere on Earth. Their single-celled bodies could be absolutely enormous in this low-pressure environment full of diffuse gases.
Living in this region of space would affect the slime moulds’ understanding of what is scientifically possible, too. That’s why Gardenpath’s fellow scholars think the galactic plane – where we live – is utterly lifeless and uninhabitable. Who could possibly survive in that radiation-saturated gravity well?
Gardenpath literally fumes when their professors scoff at their proposed area of study: a little planet inside one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. But they don’t express rage by emitting sound waves that agitate molecules in a soupy, thick atmosphere like we do. Instead, they spurt electrons, hormones and other chemicals, opening receptors in their membrane to receive answers.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
