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Nonfiction Spacetime and human spaghetti BLOCKBUSTER SCIENCE The Real Science in Science Fiction By David Siegel Bernstein 336 pp. Prometheus Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen As any devotee of science fiction can tell you, what makes the genre so beloved is its ability to inspire Man to think beyond his grubby, mundane world and consider what lies beyond. To ponder his existence and his place in the universe. To hope for a better future and inspire him to develop the technology to create it. Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein (1818) – a masterpiece of both horror and science fiction – gave the world a timeless warning about what can happen when scientists try to play God and tamper with the very nature of life. One can only imagine what she’d think about the cloning and genetic engineering achieved by science today. When Jules Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, could he have conceived of a future where actual high-tech submarines like Captain Nemo’s Naut...