In the 1980s, I interviewed the American astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan was not only a research scientist who had worked on Nasa's Mariner flybys of Mars, he was also a prolific science populariser, most famous for his blockbuster TV series, Cosmos. And he was a science fiction writer, whose novel Contact was made into a movie. I started by asking Sagan what he preferred: science or science fiction? Without hesitation, he replied: "Science." I asked him why. "Because science is stranger than science fiction."

If this was true two decades ago, it is doubly, triply, true today. Among other things, we have discovered that 98% of the universe is in some mysterious, invisible form; that there are bacteria that live happily in boiling water on the sea floor and in rocks kilometres below our feet; and that the microscopic building blocks of our bodies may very well be tiny violin-like "strings" vibrating in a space-time of 10 dimensions. The discovery that we live in a universe far stranger than anything we could possibly have imagined poses a problem for science fiction writers, whose stock-in-trade is, of course, imagining what the future will bring and the impact it will have on us.

Geoff Ryman thinks that a lot of science fiction writers, faced by this difficulty, may have given up, and that a lot of science fiction  particularly what appears on TV and film  is little more than cowboys in space. In a courageous and innovative attempt to get genuine frontier science back into science fiction, he has teamed up writers with scientists so they can be brought up to speed on the latest developments and those developments can inform their fiction. The result is a highly engaging and fascinating collection of short stories, each with an enlightening afterword by the story's scientific midwife.

In an ensemble such as this it is possible to mention only the stories that stand out. Among them  and particularly topical as the Large Hadron Collider hurtles subatomic particles around its 27-kilometre circumference  is Paul Cornell's vision of a super-super-LHC which encircles the entire Earth. I expect that sooner or later physicists will come up with a smarter  and more compact  way of accelerating the building blocks of matter, perhaps by surfing them on high-power laser beams, but I love the grandeur of Cornell's vision of a beam pipe spanning oceans and mountains and deserts, and dividing the Earth in two like a hi-tech metal equator.

Ryman himself imagines a future in which people "life-blog", not merely laying down a diary of their thoughts but actually recording sense impressions from their eyes and ears and touch, so that you can "sit with them, read with them, drink with them, hell, even pee with them". "I bet it's like this for angels," one of Ryman's characters observes. It is by means of fragmentary life-blogs that we see things from the point of view of a Mars explorer who has stumbled upon a cache of mysterious metal cylinders buried in the rust-red dust. She spends her life puzzling over whether the strange spiral markings on each cylinder are natural or artificial, the product of an extinct intelligence on the red planet.

In a story reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's heartbreaking novel Never Let Me Go, Michael Arditti explores the psychological problems of knowing you are a clone created by desperate parents to replace  and improve on  a lost child. Chaz Brenchley investigates the world of "townships", seeding the world's nutrient-deficient oceans with iron to stimulate the growth of plankton which will suck greenhouse-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Adam Roberts imagines an inventor who finds a way of feeding the world's poor by engineering people's hair to photosynthesise and so soak up "food" directly from the sun. Incredibly, in an attempt to do something like this, scientists have already integrated spinach into computer chips.

Of all the stories, however, the one that sticks in my mind  perhaps because it is the best written  is, ironically, the least scientific. In a corner of a gloomy Catholic chapel, in the shadow of a Bellini Madonna, Patricia Duncker's heroine sees a vision of stars and galaxies whirling in infinite space, a scientific revelation in the most unscientific of settings. "There, captured forever in the cloak of the Madonna, blazed the universe itself, darkness visible; radio waves strong as lighthouse beams swept the church."

I confess I have not read science fiction for years, but this thought-provoking collection reminded me why I used to like it so much. I enjoyed it immensely, and I certainly hope that Ryman gets the opportunity to repeat his experiment. Eventually, one hopes, science fiction will regain its rightful place  as once again stranger than science.

Marcus Chown is the author of We Need to Talk About Kelvin (Faber).