What kind of sensawunda do you want?

I was reading the latest copy of the BSFA's  Focus magazine this week.  The major articles focus on world-building this issue, and something Gaie Sebold said stuck with me.  She talked about being attacked by the "shiny".  What she meant was that the technology ran away with her storytelling, hijacking it and sometimes backing her writing into corners where she didn't want it to go.

I'm not attacked by the "shiny" in that way.  Although I, or my characters, would use a cool new piece of tech, I'm not likely to build a story around that gadget.  I'm far more likely to build a story around misuse of the tech, which is what I've done with the Panthera books.

That doesn't mean I don't have any interest in cutting-edge science.  To write the Panthera books I had to delve into DNA and epigenetics.  And delving into that world, finding out how creatures are created, is magical.  There are around twenty-three thousand genes in every human, and every one of those genes is in every cell in our bodies.  We have fifty trillion or so cells in our bodies, and each one of them is packed with DNA.  How can so much data be packed into such a tiny space?  To me that evokes a sense of wonder.

Look at how a fly dodges you swatting it.  How can it have a brain at such a tiny size?  And yet it does, one that controls flight dynamics, and drives reproduction and feeding behaviour.  Recent research into the brain has shown striking similarities between fly and human brains.  Just how can so much be crammed into the space of a pinhead?

This is the nano world that humans are only just starting to explore themselves.  But nature has been creating nano-structure architectures for centuries.  But how much SF explores the wonder of the natural world?  And yet it could be a rich vein for stories.  Time and again, when scientists set out to find the most efficient way to deal with a problem, it turns out that nature had it licked aeons ago.

We have learned to look at nature's structures for clues to how to tackle problems, but I still don't think we celebrate her enough.  That's what I've tried to do in the Panthera books, and no doubt will do in books yet unwritten in the future.  My sensawunda lies in the natural world.