Edward Bellamy: philosophical science fiction

The golden age of science fiction is the name given to the period between 1940 and 1965. The same years are also considered the golden age of cinema. The previous years of the genre, on the other hand, are usually seen as clearly inferior, mainly pulp fiction, and it's common to say that science fiction was in an incipient state, that it had barely emerged from the mists of literary prehistory.

This would be clearly wrong. During those years there were noteworthy works, such as the first version of Murray Leinster's The forgotten planet (1920-21); R.U.R. by Karel Capek (1920), with the first appearance of the word robot; Zamyatin's We (1921), which influenced Aldous Huxley and George Orwell; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932); and towards the end of this period, Out of the silent planet by C.S. Lewis (1938).

Artificial life is not here

Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast)

Last spring, the media published the news that a scientific team had replaced the smallest chromosome of a yeast cell by a synthetic chromosome, built from the nucleic acid sequence of the replaced chromosome with a few changes, such as the elimination of a section. Once added to the yeast genome, the synthetic chromosome seemed to work correctly.

The headline of the article linked above is meaningful: Scientists Move Closer to Inventing Artificial Life. As it is worded, it seems to imply that we are close to building artificial life. But is this true? Or is this one of those typical overstatements of the media?

In the scientific parlance, artificial life may have two very different meanings: