The Quiet War, Chapter 7

Macy immersed herself in her work, staying in her lab as much as possible so that she wouldn’t run into either Ursula Freye or Speller Twain, and tried to forget about what had happened. Tried to forget that Speller Twain could come back at any time and do whatever he wanted to her. Ursula Freye was protected by her consanguinity, but the security chief had demonstrated that Macy was just a grunt whose life and career were at the mercy of the whims of her superiors.
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Home Alone

From the New Scientist:

A bug discovered deep in a goldmine and nicknamed "the bold traveller" has got astrobiologists buzzing with excitement. Its unique ability to live in complete isolation of any other living species suggests it could be the key to life on other planets.

Not only does this radically increase the odds for finding other life on the planets and moons of the Solar System, and elsewhere, but the solitary ecosystem of this little critter, which goes by the name of Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, is powered by radioactivity. Oh, and it's named after a Jules Verne novel.

They're no sand worms, and writing rip-roaring space operas about little colonies of bacteria that uses the radioactive decay of uranium to extract carbon and nitrogen from rocks isn't going to be easy, but the idea that life is tough and finds a niche definitely chimes with SF's defiant romance with the universe.

The Quiet War, Chapter 6

It was all nonsense, Macy thought as she rode the tram through the night-time city back to the biome. She was angry and anxious and scared, and now that the ordeal was over, anger was winning out. It was all nonsense. All of it. There was no conspiracy. Manny Vargo had died because of some awful but unambiguous medical accident. There were a thousand reasons why his slate could have gone missing, from bureaucratic error to simple theft. And Ursula Freye had taken those two completely unrelated facts, her lover’s death and the missing slate, and had forced a connection, and had kept adding other connections, selecting what suited her and rejecting anything contradictory until she’d caged herself in a paranoid fantasy.

And she wants to put me in that cage, Macy thought. She and her fox-faced friend. Speller Twain and that devious little creep Loc Ifrahim. They all want to use me in this joint fantasy of theirs.
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Dig It

It's a wet and miserable day outside, but this - a bunch of white English people performing the theme song of Shaft on ukuleles - cheered me up immensely.

More Dead Wood Promo

Fast Forward 2, an unthemed anthology of original shories, including one of mine, is out now. And there's free stuff on the interweb to promote it: editor Lou Anders' introduction, and 'Catherine Drew', Paul Cornell's dashing tale of derring-do in a Solar System dominated by the British Empire.

In other news, there's an early review of The Quiet War in the Guardian, Eternal Light is due to be republished in April 2009, as part of Gollancz's classic space opera series, and some of my other novels are slated for publication in uniform paperback editions later in the year. Hey.

The Quiet War, Chapter 5

Two days later Macy rode a tram to the free zone at the northern edge of Rainbow Bridge. She’d visited the city twice before, but each time it had been to attend official functions -- a kind of reception where she and the rest of the crew had been exhibited like exotic animals, and a theatre piece involving musicians, dancers, tableaux and projections in what had been billed as an interpretation of universal creation myths. Macy had recognised a couple of fragments from Genesis, but the symbolism of most of the performance had been impenetrable, the music had sounded like a train-wreck, and she’d had a hard time staying awake. So despite her forebodings about the enterprise, she felt an exhilarating mix of anticipation and liberation as she rode through the city on her own.
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The Quiet War, Chapter 4(ii)

It was going to be difficult. Not just because of Emmanuel Vargo’s death, although that was bad enough, but also because Euclides Peixoto had taken over the day-to-day running of the construction crew. And although he was good at making speeches and flattering diplomats and representatives of Callisto’s government, Euclides Peixoto knew nothing about ecosystem engineering and had never shown any interest in the design of the biome or in the training of the crew. That hadn’t prevented him from telling Emmanuel Vargo how to do his job on more than one occasion. His ignorance about ecosystem engineering was perfectly matched by his lack of talent in people management, and like many men born into privilege and protected by that same privilege from the consequences of failure, he had no time for the advice of people he believed to be his inferiors.
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Scenery

When you're flying from moon to moon in the Saturn System you're never short of beautiful views.

The Quiet War, Chapter 4(i)

Much later, Macy Minnot would come to believe that Emmanuel Vargo had been the first casualty of the war. But when she first heard about the ecosystem engineer’s death she thought that it was nothing more sinister than bad luck. A freak medical mishap. An accident.

Like Macy and the rest of the construction crew, Emmanuel Vargo spent the twelve-week voyage from Earth to Jupiter in the deep sleep of artificial hibernation, drugged and chilled and consuming a minimal amount of oxygen and water while the Brazilian cargo ship fell through eight hundred million kilometres of sunlit black vacuum. He was still asleep when the ship went into orbit around Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter’s four large Galilean moons, and first-class passengers and hibernation coffins and cargo pods were offloaded onto a tug that descended to the port, a cluttered slab cantilevered above a dusty plain west of the city of Rainbow Bridge. The tug touched down on a scorched landing apron with the lumbering delicacy of a hippopotamus attempting ballet. A mobile crane unlatched from the tug’s cargo frame the truck-sized pod that contained the hibernation coffins and transported it to a pressurised hangar where the coffins were extracted one by one and loaded onto flatbed carts that trundled through subsurface tunnels to the medical facility at the edge of the port. That was where Emmanuel Vargo began to wake, and that was where he died.
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Welcome To The Future

You come boiling off the flight from hell, two hours delayed out of Heathrow, another hour stacked over O'Hare, some rugrat kicking the back of your seat throughout, and a fat drunk snoring on your shoulder. You're anxious to make your connection with a domestic flight, but first you have to pass through this:

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror. MORE AFTER THE JUMP:

Have a nice day...

The Quiet War, Chapter 3

It was the most important funeral to have been held in Brasília for more than twenty years. The avenues around the Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida were clogged with limousines and flitters. Drivers and security details eyed each other with professional interest. Drones wove amongst treetops. Helicopters beat wide circles under the hot blue sky. Wolves prowled the long park, Eixo Monumental, and half the city was paralysed by interlocking rings of security.
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Born Under A Wandering Star

It seems out that the sun may have wandered far from where it was first formed. So in one sense we're all hobos.

For some reason, thinking of SF novels about the hobo life, I forgot all about James Blish's Cities In Flight series, which describes an interstellar civilisation in which cities use antigravity motors to wrench themselves free from Earth and soar through the Galaxy, looking for work. Which was pretty dumb of me, especially as I provided a blurb for the SF Masterworks edition: 'An outrageous imaginative coup . . . Crammed with high adventure yet illuminated by a searching intelligence, this four-part epic completely reinvented the traditions of space opera'.

Buddy, Can You Spare A Byte?

One of many sites with advice for would-be professional indigents. Apparently panhandling is now a career-path.

Don't confuse panhandlers with hobos by the way. Hobos have their own code, and their own handchalked version of email. Not to mention their own national convention.

(Many writers are fascinated by tramps and hobos, possibly because most have a lurking dread about ending up on the streets. This is one of my favourite novels about falling from the world above into the world below. There are of course many others, although I'm hard-pressed to think of an SF example. Maybe William Gibson's Virtual Light fits the bill, although its protagonists really inhabit a kind of pirate utopia.)

The Quiet War, Chapter 2

Cash Baker was just twenty-six, with eight years’ service in the Greater Brazilian Air Defence Force, when he was selected for the J-2 singleship test programme. From inauspiciously ordinary origins in a hardscrabble city in the badlands of East Texas he’d risen through the ranks with astonishing speed. Luckily, he’d received as good an education as anyone in his neck of the woods could reasonably expect, and one of his teachers had spotted his preternatural mathematical ability and given him extra tutoring and steered him towards the Air Defence Force. He scraped into the top percentile in the induction tests, was streamed straight into basic pilot-training at the academy in Monterrey, and a year later, on a hot, thundery day in August, marched at the head of the graduation parade for the class of 2210. He started out flying fat-bellied Tapir-L4s on supply missions to remote camps of the Wreckers Corps east of the Great Lakes, was quickly promoted to the combat wing of the 114th Squadron, flying fast, deadly little Raptors, and distinguished himself in a string of air-support missions during the campaign fought by General Arvam Peixoto’s Third Division, clearing bandit settlements in and around the ruins of Chicago.
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The Quiet War, Chapter 1

Every Monday and Friday until its publication on October 16, I'll post chapters from my new novel, The Quiet War, at the website. Here's the first:

Every day the boys woke when the lights came on at 0600. They showered and dressed, made their beds and policed the dormitory, endured inspection by one of their lectors. Breakfast was a dollop of maize gruel and a thimble of green tea. They ate quickly, each boy facing one of his brothers across the long table, no sound but the scrape of plastic spoons on plastic bowls. There were fourteen of them, tall and pale and slender as skinned saplings. Blue-eyed. Their naked scalps shone in the cold light as they bent over their scant repast. At two thousand six hundred days old they were fully grown but with traces of adolescent awkwardness yet remaining. They wore grey paper shirts and trousers, plastic sandals. Red numbers were printed on their shirts, front and back. The numbers were not sequential because more than half their original complement had been culled during the early stages of the programme. READ MORE...

Dead Wood Promo

I recently put up my short story 'A Brief Guide To Many Histories' on the website; now ManyBooks offer it in all kinds of formats under a Creative Commons license.

It's one of three new stories by me in Postscripts #15, the bumper all-SF issue of the magazine. The vanilla hardcover is already on the market, and Pete Crowther, maven of PS Publishing, tells me that the signed editions will be back from the printer in a week or so. Get 'em while they're hot!

Maybe Not So Smallish

Are the bookshelves of my local charity shop operating some kind of version of Douglas Adams's infinite improbability drive?

Today, I dropped into the shop and picked up a ex-library edition of Tom Disch's poetry collection Burn This. And a couple of hours later I learn, via Ed Champion, about this tribute.

There Are Doors (13)

On the far side of Smithfield Market Edna Sharrow can run no more and in the cool shade of a tree at the boundary of the churchyard turns to confront the girl who has followed her.

The girl is an ordinary girl. Slender. Grainy skin. Pale blue eyes and dirty blond hair scraped back. Dressed in a grey pyjama-like suit zipped up the front. Shoes like small white pillows. An unremarkable child of the stones, except that the black light burns within her.

Edna draws herself up and says that she will deal only with the master, not his familiar.
The girl shakes her head and says, He’s busy elsewhere, but I can help you. What is terrible is that she is not afraid. No, her look is one of pity. She says, I shouldn’t have sent you away. I should have helped you right away. But I was scared. I admit it. It’s my first time.

I don’t need your help, Edna says.

You poor old thing. You don’t know, do you. You don’t know that you’re dead.

And the black light beats around Edna like wings and she is falling away from the world. For a moment she catches hold of the tree and she remembers her mother holding her up in the sharp cold of a long ago Boxing Day, to see the hunt ride by.

Look at the pretty horses, she cries, and her heart leaps with the joy of the long-ago moment of lost innocence, and she falls through the door of the sky.

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Not By Fire

Hey, we’re still here. And my broadband connection has come back. So much for the naysayers who predicted the end of the world when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on. I guess they can come down from the mountaintops now, and dispense with the sackcloth and ashes.

Or maybe not, because so far the scientists at CERN are just testing their new toy. They don’t start smashing fundamental particles into each other at tremendous and possibly world-destroying energies (or not) until next month.

(If you want to know what might happen if the naysayers had been right, you might care to check out my short story ‘How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen’. Currently available here or in an audio version, until I get around to coding it I’m afraid. (Don’t worry, it has a happy ending.))

I was pleased by the blanket coverage of actual science in the media, but do find it rather worrying that the only way scientists can get any real attention these days is to be wrongly accused of plotting to blow up the world. If we keep up this inattention it really will be over for us, as a species because we need a whole bunch of cleverness to get us out the mess stupid applications of good ideas have gotten us into.

There Are Doors (12)

The shadowy army Mr Carlyle took from Edna Sharrow were ghostly shells cast off by people during moments of extreme emotion. Knots of terror and fear she’d used to intimidate and frighten and control. So it’s only fair, she thinks, to strip her enemy of his familiars and take from him everything he sheds in his last moments. To make what’s his hers.

She drifts south and east through Clerkenwell towards Smithfield Market. If he’s tracking her, she’ll lose him there, in the echoes of the charnel house it once was. Blindside him.

She’s so occupied with her plans that she doesn’t see the girl until she steps out of the shadow under St John’s Gate, as if from one world to another. Calling to Edna, apologising for sending her away, saying that she should have dealt with her at once.

Edna Sharrow draws on her last reserves, but the girl stands her ground. Black light beats around her, a hearth-heat that withers the laces that bind Edna’s soul, and Edna runs from it in a blind panic towards the sanctuary of the shambles.

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