Beyond *Interstellar*: A Field Guide to Sci-Fi Lingo

Why is a towel the most useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can carry?

Bring your towel, and we can leave whenever you like.

But first:

"It's time we talked. About shoes and ships and sealing wax, but mostly about monoliths and malfunctioning computers."

— Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

TARS, CASE and KIPP: more than refrigerators

Interstellar has three robots: TARS, CASE and KIPP. In the 2008 script, TARS and its companions were more human-like. Christopher Nolan reshaped them into their present form so the robots would not upstage the human cast.

KIPP is named after the American theoretical physicist Kip Stephen Thorne, the film's executive producer and the man who designed its wormholes, black holes and other concepts.

In 1988 Thorne published a sensational paper arguing that a tunnel through spacetime, a "wormhole," might make it possible to travel back in time. For years he has worked to show the public how fascinating astrophysics can be.

As for TARS and CASE: TARS is a rearrangement of STAR, and if KIPP lends CASE its extra P, the letters spell SPACE. The three robots are, in effect, Star, Space and Kip.

Others think that TARS and CASE, put together, are a scrambled form of "tesseract," a four-dimensional hypercube.

The robots' artificial intelligence can already show humor and loyalty. During filming there really were people inside: voice actors hid in the boxes, and visual effects later erased any corner of them that slipped into view.

The hero's name honors astronaut Gordon Cooper

The hero of Interstellar is named Joseph A. Cooper, a tribute to the astronaut Gordon Cooper. Gordon Cooper flew in Project Mercury, America's first crewed spaceflight program, which began in 1959 with the aim of putting humans into Earth orbit.

In 1963 he flew the longest and last Mercury mission: 34 hours and 22 orbits of the Earth. It was the last solo spaceflight program in history, much like Cooper's solo plunge into the black hole in the film. Like the fictional Cooper, Gordon came from the Air Force and was an exceptional pilot. He died on October 4, ten years ago.

Gordon Cooper was the first American to sleep in space. Against that backdrop, even a dream becomes romantic. May he rest in peace.

The ship Endurance is named after an Antarctic expedition

Many readers will remember the Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton. After several Antarctic expeditions, in 1914 he sailed the steamship Endurance south, aiming to cross the Antarctic continent on foot.

The plan went wrong. Ice trapped the Endurance, and Shackleton's party had to climb onto an ice floe and drift with it. They later landed on an uninhabited island, and Shackleton led a few crewmen across mountains and sea to find help. In August 1916, two years after setting out, he found a whaling ship that rescued the whole expedition.

His Antarctic journey was like the space voyage in Interstellar: lonely, dangerous, full of hardship, with death close at every turn.

The film's spaceship takes the same name, Endurance.

Murphy's Law

Cooper's daughter is named after Murphy's Law. The film's version differs slightly from the usual one, though. In the film it means "whatever can happen will happen," while the law is normally stated as "anything that can go wrong will go wrong." Scientists call this the worst-case assumption.

Cooper's expedition to the planets illustrates both versions: whatever can go wrong goes wrong, and whatever is meant to happen happens.

Seen another way, giving a child that name is a romance of its own. A birth is a miracle, and also an inevitability. When it is your time to come, you will come.

Dylan Thomas turns 100

The poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is one of the most memorable things in Interstellar. Its author, Dylan Thomas, was born on October 27, 1914, so the film arrived just as the centenary of his birth came around.

The poem says that a dying man should not meekly accept his fate and walk into that "good night," meaning death. In Interstellar it becomes the struggle of humanity facing extinction, both as a species and as individuals.

The poem turns up all over pop culture, in the film Independence Day and in the games Assassin's Creed and League of Legends. In the British series Doctor Who, the Doctor quotes one of its lines: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The black hole is named after a legendary giant

The film's huge black hole is called Gargantua, meaning "giant." The name comes from the hero of the French writer Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is a Renaissance work, originally titled La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel. It tells the legend of a pair of giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. Chinese readers may know Gargantua better by another Chinese rendering of his name, Gao Kangda.

In short: a gigantic black hole.

Relativity

You do not need to understand relativity to follow Interstellar. Nor is it easy to explain its concepts in a single article.

But since the word comes up again and again in the film, and the physicist Kip Thorne was its executive producer, why not pick up his book Black Holes and Time Warps? It may be the most entertaining and readable of all the books on relativity.

You clicked on this article, after all. Why not?

Why does corn outlast everything else?

In a near-apocalypse, why is corn the last source of food and energy left?

Today the world grows more than 1 billion tons of corn a year. As early as the Qing dynasty, when corn spread widely across China, it played a vital part in the population growth of the time.

Corn's distinctive way of fixing carbon makes it more tolerant of heat, drought and low carbon dioxide levels. It is also a crop whose genetics scientists have learned to manipulate well. Remember the Irish potatoes mentioned in the film? They died out because they were too genetically uniform.

Of course, if the apocalypse is not a hot, dry one, corn may not save humanity either.

Corn also points to the beautiful planet the film lingers on: Saturn. If you can't work out why, the answer is below.

Parts of this section draw on The Science of Interstellar: Why Could Corn Become the "Doomsday Crop"?

The answer was on the bookshelf all along

The wall of bookshelves is the film's link between past and future. Look closer and the books glimpsed in passing may also carry the director's hidden meanings.

The technology site WIRED found nine Easter eggs on the shelves.

Among them are Stephen King's out-of-print The Stand, Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, Iain Banks's novel The Wasp Factory and a selection of T. S. Eliot's poems. Sadly, the Eliot selection on the shelf does not include Four Quartets, so you won't find his ideas about "time and the universe" in it.

Still, the film's themes of gravity, apocalypse, time and labyrinths were already in these books. Then again, some critics have said that for a film like Interstellar, a row of 2001: A Space Odyssey DVDs would have been enough.

Paying homage, to be honored in turn

Not everyone who enjoys Interstellar knows the name Stanley Kubrick.

A masterpiece is a work that every later work must measure itself against and that audiences keep reinterpreting, until another masterpiece overturns it.

You may already know that Nolan's Interstellar pays tribute to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The ring-shaped spaceship and the effects shots of the passage through the wormhole are obvious homages. The themes of 2001, from the primal meaning of life and super-intelligent computers to the search for a habitable place in the universe and humanity's final rebirth, all carry over into Interstellar.

The most interesting homage, though, is the design of the robots, whose proportions are said to follow the black monolith in 2001. In Kubrick's film the monolith is a relic of a higher intelligence, yet Nolan's look-alike robots are docile and obedient. It is the cold HAL 9000 of 2001 that seems more like a higher intelligence.

Interstellar says not one word about "who" placed the wormhole, and the hero is not the only "person" who falls into the five-dimensional space inside the black hole. That is Nolan's Easter egg.

If you have read some science fiction or watched some sci-fi films, or have a sci-fi fan friend who loves to evangelize, the terms below may come up often in your conversations. You may well have heard most of them already while watching Interstellar with that friend.

Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem and the two-dimensional foil

"Give time to civilization, not civilization to time."

— The Three-Body Problem

Let us start with the name you probably know best.

At a forum during China's Nebula Awards for science fiction, the organizers were surprised: in a world obsessed with looks, the fans who came chose to follow the plain-looking Liu Cixin. However handsome the young writers around him, wherever "Big Liu" was, the fans looked nowhere else.

His business card carries only his name, email address and mobile number. His title no longer needs printing: author of The Three-Body Problem.

Talking about science fiction today without mentioning The Three-Body Problem is like talking about recent films without mentioning Interstellar.

The five-dimensional hyperspace in Interstellar reminds readers of the "dimensional-reduction attack" in The Three-Body Problem. "Dimensionality reduction" originally means mapping data points from a high-dimensional space into a lower-dimensional one to make them easier to compute. In Big Liu's imagination, higher beings live in worlds with different dimensions from ours, and with a two-dimensional foil they can flatten three-dimensional space into two dimensions, a devastating blow.

Liu Cixin told a reporter from Vista Magazine that the black-hole part of Interstellar is closer to another Chinese science fiction novel, Flying to Sagittarius.

Flying to Sagittarius was published in 1979 by Zheng Wenguang, known as the "father of Chinese science fiction." It tells of three teenagers flung out of the solar system by an operating error, who finally return to Earth using a black hole's centrifugal force. Their five years adrift in outer space involve grief, loyalty and resolve, and touch on Einstein and humanity's coming of age.

Another science fiction book from 1979 shaped a whole generation of Chinese sci-fi fans: Little Smart Travels to the Future. Ye Yonglie's book may be no more than science fiction for young readers, yet the atomic hovercraft, TV watches, artificial moon, videophones and contact lenses it described have all come true. It is just that people today find it hard to say whether some of those imagined technologies, such as artificial eggs and artificial meat, are good or bad.

With the recent publication of The Three-Body Problem in English in the United States, another writer named Liu has come into view. Ken Liu translated the English edition, and is himself a science fiction writer who has won the Hugo, World Fantasy and Nebula awards. To set him apart from "Big Liu," fans call him "Little Liu."

Flying to Sagittarius: the 1979 People's Publishing House cover and the 2005 illustrated edition cover

Asimov and the Three Laws of Robotics

"First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."

Asimov may be the best test of who is a sci-fi fan and who isn't, at least before The Three-Body Problem caught on.

Asteroid 5020, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and two Asimov Awards are named after him. His greatest achievement may be the Three Laws of Robotics, which he set out in 1942.

As people began to imagine the future of robots, and as the picture of this "new species," modeled on humans in both looks and intelligence, grew clearer, a field of "machine ethics" gradually took shape in science fiction.

In later works Asimov added a "Zeroth Law": "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."

The laws have flaws. For one, they do not clearly draw the line between "human" and "robot." Yet 70 years on, both science fiction and the artificial intelligence slowly growing up around us still largely follow Asimov's Three Laws. Think of TARS's honesty and humor settings, and how it dropped into the black hole without a second thought, and you have the template for the robots in most feel-good sci-fi films today.

As artificial intelligence edges toward the singularity, whether the Three Laws fit reality is something Asimov could not have predicted 70 years ago.

Steampunk and cyberpunk: past and future

Despite their names, steampunk and cyberpunk are not a pair of has-been punk bands. They are two ways of imagining and extending the age of technology, one rooted in the past, the other in the future.

Steampunk was humanity's earliest and most concrete speculation about technology. After the steam revolution, people began to dream of a future driven by steam. The Nautilus of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas roams the floor of the Atlantic in the 19th century; the train in Night on the Galactic Railroad runs on tracks among the stars...

What future does our technology have? And what future can it bring us?

Cyberpunk's keywords are computers, monopoly and dystopia. It tells the story of the "brain in a vat," and it is also a hypothesis about social systems: the conflicts between power and the individual, and between technology and humanity. The cyborgs of Blade Runner ask the same question over and over: why?

Strip away the shell, and steampunk and cyberpunk tell the same story: human society, and its pride, fantasies, fear and greed about its own technology.

The wrench boy put down his toolbox and wiped sweat that wasn't there from his forehead. Inside his torso were wires, nimble metal joints and a power cell.

Saturn

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick sent the voyage to Jupiter, but in Clarke's novel the alien world was in fact Saturn. In the novel Clarke imagined an idea that NASA later turned into real practice: using Jupiter's gravity to speed up a spacecraft, saving fuel and giving it more acceleration. At the time, limited by the technology available, Kubrick chose the simpler Jupiter to show on screen. In Interstellar, Nolan finished what Kubrick left undone, giving many shots to the quiet beauty of Saturn's rings.

In ancient China Saturn was called Tianxing or Zhenxing. In Roman mythology Saturn is the god of agriculture; the Greeks called the same god Cronus. Corn, the last crop left in Interstellar, takes its name from the word Cronus.

Saturn's rings are made of countless tiny particles, most of them ice. Gaps run all through the rings; the larger ones are named the Cassini Division, the Encke Gap and so on. The swirling patterns are actually huge storms taking place on Mars.

An American award created for science fiction and horror film and television is also named after Saturn. It has been presented 40 times, and last year the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film went to Gravity.

For your trip: a time machine, the Nautilus or the Infinite Improbability Drive?

Of course, these vehicles do not exist in the same dimension.

In 1954 the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, was launched into the Thames. It was not the only one: humanity's first submarine was also called Nautilus. Both trace back to the 19th-century science fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. In Jules Verne's book, Captain Nemo sails the submarine Nautilus across the world's oceans, foreshadowing humanity's all-out drive to explore the unknown, whether the ocean, the center of the Earth, the sky or time itself.

H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine was not the first to propose "time travel," but some critics date the birth of science fiction to its publication, because Wells spent much of the novel's opening discussing scientific theory, a pattern that became a classic model for science fiction. Time travel that does not involve interstellar flight inevitably runs into the "grandfather paradox":

"Suppose you go back in time and kill your grandparents before your father is born. Because your grandparents are dead, your father will never exist; without your father, you will never be born; if you are never born, no one will kill your grandparents. But if no one kills your grandparents, will you exist, go back in time and kill them?"

René Barjavel posed this paradox in his 1943 novel Le Voyageur imprudent (Future Times Three).

Relativity gave time travel a new meaning: in space travel it shows up as the compression of time. Special relativity holds that "if a person travels close to the speed of light, time will stand still for him." That is why, in Interstellar, when father and daughter meet again many years later, the father is much younger than the daughter.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers another way to get somewhere fast: the Infinite Improbability Drive.

"An Infinite Improbability Drive can put a set of atoms into a state of infinite improbability, so that the atoms that make up the ship become entangled with atoms in any corner of the universe, allowing the ship to travel to any distant place."

Or you could try the Bad News Drive, the fastest engine in the universe, because bad news always travels fastest.

Even if you don't care for science fiction writers' deadpan jokes, or still can't see how improbability could be achieved, be sure to remember the words printed in large, friendly letters on the cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Don't Panic!"

A model of the Nautilus

Moore's Law

Moore's Law was put forward by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, after years of observation. It states that the number of transistors that fit on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every 24 months. The version now widely quoted is "doubling every 18 months."

Although some physicists have declared that Moore's Law will eventually break down completely, people still use it widely to describe the pace of technological progress.

After all, Moore's Law is not a law of science. What technology will look like in two years, five years or a hundred, who knows?

IBM's super chip

Board the TARDIS, and bring your screwdriver

No article about science fiction culture can skip the British series Doctor Who. It has been running for 51 years, since classic Doctor Who first aired in 1963. Over those 51 years we have lived through space crazes and sci-fi booms, and through slumps in both science fiction and space exploration.

Doctor Who is about a question we have dreamed about countless times since childhood: if you could run away to any time and place you liked, where would you go?

The Time Lord known as the Doctor makes that childhood dream come true. With the TARDIS, a time-and-space ship that "doesn't look very big," and a "sonic" screwdriver that makes strange noises, he has roamed the universe for a thousand years. He has been to the end of the universe and seen the origin of everything. Like the hero of any clichéd action film, he defeats evil and saves humanity, but our hero carries no gun, only a screwdriver and a case of hyperactivity.

Yes: an alien who saves humanity with a screwdriver. Doctor Who is science fiction, a story about love, humanity and the universe. For 51 years it has wrapped aliens, adventure and growing up around one core: what makes us human? What is beautiful about humanity?

Fifty-one years on, we look up at the stars and still wonder about the question our grandparents asked: if you could go to any time and any place in the universe, where would you choose?

Every story of adventure is also a story about coming "home."

42 is the answer to every question in the universe

The British writer Douglas Adams was not, strictly speaking, a science fiction writer, yet he wrote one of the greatest works in the genre's history, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. On the side, he wrote scripts for the science fiction series Doctor Who.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began as a BBC radio play and grew into a series of five novels, a TV series and a film of the same name. It also became one of the most important bodies of lore in pop culture.

On one level, of course, it follows the cosmic travels of an unlucky man named Arthur Dent. After his house is demolished and the girl he loves is carried off, Arthur, with nothing left but his towel, stumbles upon "the answer to life, the universe and everything": 42.

We Earthlings on this level have tried many ways to explain that answer, few of them convincing. A book, plenty of articles and a great many brain cells have gone into making sense of the number 42. All we know for now is that 42 is a magic number, the final answer, the way the world was meant to be.

On another level, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a fairly reliable encyclopedia of the universe.

"Two things have let The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy supplant the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom: 'First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.'"

Before you set off on a real journey through the universe, remember that 42 is the most important password in it. Bring your towel, and don't panic.

Before you set off, you can also try Googling "The Answer to Life, Universe and Everything." You may be pleasantly surprised.

Dungeons & Dragons, and "the iron armor remains!"

If 42 can't cure your panic, you can step entirely outside the universe we live in and build a complete world from scratch. Tolkien's Middle-earth, the world of Dungeons & Dragons that grew out of tabletop games, and the Jiuzhou world built jointly by a group of Chinese writers all create a space for the imagination somewhere between science fiction and myth.

These worlds have their own creation myths, strict rules for their races, and the adventure stories that grow from them. In the beginning, the Chinese Jiuzhou stories centered on an organization called Tianqu. Through times of chaos and times of peace, the heirs of Tianqu identified one another by the slogan "the iron armor remains" and the Tianqu ring.

Back then, the Jiuzhou setting gave rise to many fine works in different styles and genres. Although the writing team long ago scattered, once-ardent Jiuzhou readers can still find fellow fans in the sea of bits with the words "the iron armor remains."

Like "Don't Panic!", "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish," "Allen, get married, don't do drugs!" and "Do not go gentle into that good night," the phrase lets people who share a memory recognize one another.

It means no more than loving the same brand of handbag or the same line of phones, or writing code in the same language: it is just one of the many labels a person carries.

We take it as our sign, so that if we meet one day on a distant space station near Saturn, we won't pass each other by.

Our journey is to the stars and the sea, and also between the lines. Every story is, in the end, a metaphor for life.

Cover image from NASA