Lake Deja Vu

The lead article in this week’s Nature, summarised on JPL’s site, confirms previous reports that there are presently lakes of what is presumably liquid methane and ethane on Titan. There are all kinds of lakes in all kinds of places, it seems. Some have been compared to flooded volcanic calderas, like Crater Lake in Oregon, which I visited a couple of years ago while doing research for Players, much of which is set in the forests of the southwest of that state; here’s a low rez photo to prove it. The island in the lake is called Wizard Island, and it’s another, smaller volcano inside the much larger one. With its panoramas of volcanic cones, and pumice fields, it’s a truly alien landscape for the British visitor; how strange and wonderful that it may be replicated in different materials on Titan, where a couple of my characters will shortly be playing a desperate game of hide and seek...

Dead Tyrant Storage

Last week, Richard Dawkins gave a refreshingly different reason why Saddam Hussein shouldn’t have been hung. His mention of using a time machine to retrieve Hitler for psychological study rang a very faint bell - didn’t someone write a short story on this theme?

In other news, ‘Dead Men Walking’ has been picked up by David Hartwell for his Best SF anthology. Gosh.

Elsewhere

As threatened, I’ve posted the first two and a half chapters of Players on my much neglected web site.