One Hundred Futures

In the post today, a copy of Futures From Nature, an anthology of 100 of short short stories first published in Nature. You can read my contribution, ‘Meat’, here.

In The Cut

Yesterday, visited the Tate Modern to see Doris Salcedo’s installation. One of my favourite walks, through Islington and down St John Street past Smithfield, Little Britain, and St Paul’s Cathedral, and across the Thames on the wobbly bridge. Like a descent back through the centuries, from Islington’s nineteenth century suburb and Georgian squares, down to the twelfth century when Smithfield was ‘Smoothfield’, where horses were sold, and St
Bartholomew’s Hospital was founded, and on to the timeless river.

Salcedo’s installation is a riverine crack that runs down the floor of the huge Turbine
Hall. Impressive in execution, cunningly made so that the bottom can’t be seen, but dwarfed by its surroundings, and rather too obviously a construct, with its new wire grid and fresh concrete. The barabarian in me thought that it might be imporoved by jets of vapour spouting at unpredictable intervals, and perhaps some Lovecraftian tentacles grabbing at art-lovers, who seemed unsure how to react, mostly getting photographed straddling it, or dipping the tip of their shoe into the narrow void. No one fell in while I was there.

Cyberyarn

'A stitch, in essence, is a pixel.'

Back To The Future

I rewatched Children of Men the other day and enjoyed it as much if not more (because I could pay more attention to the scrupulous texture) the second time around. One of my movies of the decade, so far. In one of the extras, the philosopher/critic Savoj Zizek (who is always good value) commented that what was happening in the background of the movie was more important than what was foregrounded. I think that’s true for all good science fiction.

From The Tightrope

Richard Ford, one of the modern masters of the short story gives a masterclass:

Great stories are congeries of plan, vigour, will and application, but also of luck and error and intuition and even, God knows, sudden inspiration, for all of which there is no key, and in the midst of which things often just happen - a fact that should make us like stories even better for their life-mimicking knack of seeming to come out of nowhere, thereby fortifying our faith in art and life’s mystery.

Do Tell

I now have the power to scan - and here's the cover rough for the mass market paperback of Players, which my publishers reckon is solidly commercial (and who am I to argue?). There's a crossbow in it, but it's also about MMOPRGs. And hubris.

Reading: Dylan's Chronicles (soundtrack:The Bootleg Series Volume 1). Rereading: Alastair Reynolds's Absolution Gap.

Peace Breaks Out

I’ve just finished the final draft of The Quiet War, and must now contemplate the next, which is presently called Outer Dark. But now I have to go off and write an introduction to a collection of stories about AI...

Elsewhere, Paul Kincaid is pleased by the health of the short story market, Jeff Vandemeer is unimpressed by mere comptence. And Mark Lawson, post-Booker Prize, feels that authors can choose between ‘the smooth and brightly lit genre path that winds through entertainment, optimism and simplicity’ to ‘adulation, mansions and fame’ (yeah: right), or the ‘dark and densely tangled’ path of yer actual literature, which leads to ‘bleakness, experiment and sentiments which many will consider unspeakable or unreadable’. No wonder the poor dears of the literary field need champagne-fuelled award parties to cheer them up. They really do suffer for their art, you know.

The Actual

I’ve been so busy with the ongoing that I quite forgot to mention the 30th anniversary of the end of Cowboy Angels, but here’s a photograph of one of the featured events from that crucial day; of course, you’ll have to read the novel to find out how it fits in.

And here’s something completely different - the graphics and onboard sounds of the tracking instruments of the Cassini-Huygen’s probe during its descent to the surface of Titan. Which is where my head is currently at.

Credo

James Wood, in a review of Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, published in The New Yorker:

Fiction, for Roth, is not what Plato thought mimesis was: an imitation of an imitation. Fiction was a rival life, a ‘counterlife’, to use the title of one of Roth’s greatest novels, and this is why his work has managed so brilliantly the paradox of being at once playfully artful and seriously real.

Eye Spy

Watching you, watching me.

Weather Report

It’s winter, in the northern hemisphere of Titan. The temperature is a frosty minus 180 degrees Centigrade, and methane/ethane rain is gently falling and filling the lakes.

Information Wants To Be Free

This week I've mostly been blowing things up on Dione. But I have posted a couple of new extracts of Cowboy Angels over on the website - you can now read the prologue and first three chapters for free.

Currently listening to: Closer, Joy Division; The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, Bob Dylan; Icky Thump, The White Stripes.

The Hot Breath of the Future

Uh-oh.

The Chill Hand of Mortality

In an interview published in The New Yorker, part of the publicity for his new novel Exit Ghost, Philip Roth says this:

. . . at this stage of the game I’d much rather spend my reading time - as I have been doing - revisiting, for the last time around, other writers, like Conrad and Hemingway and Faulkner and Turgenev.

So now, in addition to books (some as yet unwritten) I haven’t yet read, books I don’t ever want to or need to read, and books I’ve read but won’t ever read again, I have to look forward to a time when I have to concentrate on books I really must reread, one last time, before it’s too late. At least, if I’m carried off in the middle of rereading one of my favourites, I won’t have to worry about never knowing how it ends.

In the same issue, Louis Menand beautifully evokes that old, still-potent romance:

. . . I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road.

Before The Fall

While researching Cowboy Angels, I spent a lot of time figuring out what Manhattan might have looked like before it was settled by any humans. Eric Sanderson's project came a little too late, and would have saved me a lot of trouble...

(Thanks to Jack Womack for the link.)

Rorschach Moon

Iapetus close-up.

Heads or Tails

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, which attempted to apply quantum mechanical equations to both the subatomic world and the macroscopic world we ordinarily inhabit. It’s long been accepted that subatomic particles like electrons or photons exist as both wave and particle until collapsed when an observer makes a measurement; Everett’s proposal that hawks, handsaws, and human beings also exist in a multitude of simultaneous states - parallel worlds - has been much more contentious. But now, at a meeting at Oxford University, reported in the latest issue of New Scientist (you need to be a subscriber to read the full report, but Peter Byrne has blogged the meeting for Scientific American), David Deutsch and his colleagues claim that ‘key equations of quantum mechanics arise from the mathematics of parallel worlds’. Or to put it another way, if they’re right - and it’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence - every time we make a decision, the universe really does split into two parallel branches. Coin-tossing may never be the same again.

Desperate Fun...

...was had by all at a small party to wet the head of Cowboy Angels, in the Phoenix Artist Club. Copies should now be out in the wild; head straight past the 3 for 2 tables to the shelves towards the back of the bookshop, where authors are democratically ranked in alphabetical order.

London's New Forbidden Zone...

...has a very long, very blue boundary.

Seriously Weird

Among the science-fictional paradigms named in the mundane SF crowd’s fatwah are time-travel and parallel universes. David Toomey’s The New Time Travellers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics is a superb examination of ideas that are gaining serious scientific attention, including the possibility that time travel and the multiple worlds theory are two sides of the same coin. The kind of stuff, in fact, that helped me put in some solid foundations to the multiverse of Cowboy Angels.