Updike On Mars

Via io9, John Updike's National Geographic article on Mars. With plenty of fine photos. (But why didn't they ask Kim Stanley Robinson?)

PS the photo of the sunset was, as mentioned here before, taken on my 50th birthday. It's the background picture on my computer.

Cold Is The New Hot

In other news, Cassini scientists believe that Titan may have active cryovolcanoes spewing a mix of water ammonia and methane. (I took a punt on depicting one of these in The Quiet War, so I'm biased towards hoping it's true.) So in addition to two moons with subsurface oceans (Europa and Enceladus), and two moons with icy geysers (Enceladus and Triton), there may be at least two moons with active volcanoes. What next?

Jigsaw Moon

More evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus harbours a subsurface ocean. Cassini imaging scientists have shown that the surface around the tiger stripe cracks at the little moon's south pole, the source of its icy jets, shows signs of changes over time:

The tiger stripes are analogous to the mid-ocean ridges on Earth's seafloor where volcanic material wells up and creates new crust. Using Cassini-based digital maps of the moon's south polar region, Helfenstein reconstructed a possible history of the tiger stripes by working backward in time and progressively snipping away older and older sections of the map, each time finding that the remaining sections fit together like puzzle pieces.

In other words, the surface there is pretty much like the surface of Europa, also suspected of possessing a subsurface ocean of liquid water. And where there's liquid water, of course, there could be life - and when the Cassini probe dived through the jets on one of its close flybys, it discovered a mix of organic molecules similar to those found in comets. So it looks like all the ingredients for life are there, in the little moon's warm soupy subsurface ocean. But as to whether there are any soup dragons . . .

EDIT - it's also possible that Europa's ocean may be much warmer than previously thought.

Who Killed Teddy Bear

A little belatedly, let me tell you about the strange little film, Who Killed Teddy Bear, I went to see on Wednesday in a screening theatre in Soho (publicity for the Region 2 DVD that slated for release in January). At the time of its release, in 1965, the British Board of Film Censors refused to certify it, which meant that it couldn’t be shown in British cinemas. One of the people who was working for the BBFC at the time was at the screening and told me before the film started that I would see exactly why it couldn't be cut for release - and he was right.

The story is pretty simple. Lawrence (Sal Mineo), a loner who looks after his brain-damaged sister and works as a bus-boy in a night club, has a crush on dolly-bird DJ Norah (Juliet Prowse). Norah is being spied on by a neighbour who pesters her with increasingly obscene phone calls, confides her troubles to her sympathetic boss (Elaine Strich), who urges her to report it to the police, and the case attracts the attention of Detective Dave Madden (Jan Murray), who is obsessed with the perversions and psychology of stalkers.

It's not so much images and scenes or dialog that would have appalled back then, although there is plenty of risky business - the flourish of a switchblade by a dissatisfied customer at the night club, the various scenes of Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse in their undies and closeups of Mineo working out in the gym in an attempt to get rid of his troubling lust (this was, by the way, a doomed attempt to persuade viewers that Mineo was a red-blooded American heterosexual), the lesbian pass made by Elaine Stritch, slow pans across literature on sexual perversions on Madden’s desk and scenes on 8th Avenue showing the wares in a dirty bookshop window and the posters of a grindhouse, and so on - but beyond all that the entire film is saturated with suppressed sexuality. There's the Tennesee Williams style relationship between Lawrence and his sister, who was brain-damaged after falling down the stairs when she glimpsed Lawrence having sex with an older woman; Madden’s obsession with sexual deviants (as one of his colleagues put it, after Madden calls sex perverts animals: 'We're all animals Dave. But there's a line, and you've crossed it.'), which spills over into his private life in disturbing ways: the banter between him and Norah is uncomfortable in all kinds of ways, and a nicely-judged cut between a shot of Madden listening to tapes of women describing their experiences of being stalked to a shot of his daughter hearing it through her bedroom door (was James Ellroy riffing on this on Blood On The Moon?). As for the story, it’s split between Lawrence, Norah, and Madden, but only one the narrative lines reaches any kind of climax. But in a way, story doesn't matter here. Subtext and theme are dominant; story just gets us from point to point. And the main reason why the film couldn't be rated is not just all the cheescake and deviancy - it's that it attempts to condemn the deviancy while subjecting it to loving, lingering closeups. Nevertheless, it’s a highly interesting film, not only as a document of its time, but also as a prime example of American primitive cinema in the great tradition of New York independent film-making. It was directed by Joseph Cates, who helped create the $64000 Question quiz show, went on to produce a slew of TV specials, including most of those starring Johnny Cash, and was father of Pheobe Cates, who featured in a famous WKTB-style voyeur scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Small coincidence: I recently reviewed another New York independent film, Blast of Silence, also themed around repression. I’ll post that here after it has been published.

Watching The Skies

Human migration patterns.

Year's End, Already

You can, if you want to, check out some of my best-of-the-year picks. Unlike most of the other people who responded, I didn't give any shout-outs to fiction, simply because I haven't read enough. I'm trying to remedy that now. Any suggestions?

Oliver Postgate, RIP

I was saddened to hear of the death of Oliver Postgate and touched by the (well-deserved) extent of the coverage. With artist and puppeteer Peter Firmin, he created several of the most memorable and best-loved children’s TV programme, including Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss and, best of all as far as I am concerned, The Clangers. These pink mice-like creatures, voiced by Swannee whistle, inhabited a small blue planet, burrowing into its crust through craters (covered with dustbin lids to protect them from meteorite strikes), subsisting on blue string pudding and soup produced at the moon’s core under the supervision of the Soup Dragon, and forming an inclusive community with variouswaifs and strays, including the Iron Chicken, mischievous froglets, animate musical notes, and a sentient cloud. Postgate was a gentle but principled subversive, and a marvellous storyteller:

... because we didn't have the money for elaborate equipment we had to rely on the basic hand-writing of animation, laboriously pushing along cardboard characters with a pin. Thus we were thrown back on the real staple of television: telling and showing a good story, carefully thought out and delivered in the right order for stacking in the viewer's mind. Come to think of it I must have produced some of the clumsiest animation ever to disgrace the television screen, but it didn't matter. The viewers didn't notice because they were enjoying the stories.

(More here)

The Clangers was a fine science-fictional ecological fable, conveying its message without ever becoming preachy. Many of its stories featured disruptions to the delicate ecology of the Clangers’ little world that were healed by cooperation and application of some common sense, and it used in its opening sequence the iconic picture of Earth’s lonely blue island of life, taken from the Apollo 8 command module as it orbited the Moon.

Readers from outside the United Kingdom who want to know more can find examples of his work here (including a clip from a Doctor Who episode in which the Master, the Doctor’s nemesis, appreciates the Clangers).

With Extra Ink

From our sponsors: may I point you towards Cold Tonnage, currently stocking signed hardbacks of The Quiet War.

More Nostalgia

This time, somewhat closer to the present, an online museum of sleeves for five and a quarter inch computer discs (hey, remember inches?).

Those Things That Come In Threes

After visiting the Cold War exhibition at the V&A, I've been fighting my way through Resistance: The Fall of Man, very much alt. Cold War SF. And I've just spotted this, posted on Bruce Sterling's blog: atompunk. (Ian McDonald and I were talking about Cold War SF as an alternative to steampunk at the Gollancz party a few months back; it must be in the air, like strontium-90 when I was but a baby).

Just in: cool Soviet Cold War snowmobiles via io9.

Not Yet Past

Visiting the Cold War Modern, Design 1945 - 1970 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, I was struck by not only how very much superior it was to the frankly thin and poorly thought-out Dan Dare exhibition at the Science Museum, but also by how much of the themes and tropes and obsessions of current SF were on display. Space travel obviously (opposing screens pitted 2001: A Space Odyssey against Solaris; and for those interested in the alternate history of the space race, there was on display a prototype of the Soviet Kretchet lunar excursion suit, which is plainly only a couple of evolutionary steps from the lobster suits of 1950s SF magazine covers), but also virtual reality, cyborgs, the rise of the machines, technology-driven utopianism, the fragility of this island Earth, and so on and so on. As far as mainstream SF, the past isn't yet past, as they say. Is this because the seeds of the one true future really were sown back then, between the end of World War Two and the beginning of glam rock, or because SF hasn't yet acknowledged that the stuff of its dreams is rooted in the anxieties of the great and dangerous rivalry between the world's two superpowers?

Earth Is An Alien Planet

Compilation of brief videos of an eerie and presently unclassified type of deep-sea squid.

Link via Pharyngula.

Beneluxcon

Last weekend I was one of the Guests of Honour at Beneluxcon 2008, a small, friendly SF convention. Beneluxcons are jointly run by the Belgian club, SFAN, and the Dutch NCSF(Nederlands Contactcentrum voor Sf); this year, it was the turn of the Dutch to host it, in Eindhoven. It was chaired with commendable calm and efficiency by Heidi van der Vloet; everyone seemed to know everyone else; the atmosphere was intensely relaxed. I shared GoH duties with Dutch writer Edith Eri Louw, and my schedule was fairly light: a couple of panels and a Guest of Honour speech (apologies once again to my audience for getting too excited by images of the moons of Saturn and speaking too quickly). I also discovered the delights of cinnamon-flavoured chocolate - a Dutch Christmas thing - and learned about Sinterklaas and his deeply disturbing helpers, in more ways than one, Zwarte Pieten, high cultural weirdness that hasn't yet been steamrollered by global capitalism.

Eindhoven is a metropolitan sprawl of former villages and a small town where throughways and parkways and ring roads tangle amongst a patchwork of obsessively neat Dutch suburbia and clumps and clusters of big office buildings and towers and high-tech plants - it’s the home of electronics manufacturer Philips. Some older buildings have survived modern redevelopment and bombing during the Second World War, such as this barn:


And just around the corner from the hotel was the Van Abbesmuseum, with an extension by Abel Cahen abutting the River Dommel:


I liked this old-fashioned garage too - signs like these would be collectors’ items in the UK:

There Are Doors (14)

Eindhoven, Holland.

More From Mars - Glaciers!

Glaciers have been spotted on Mars before, but these, perched on the edge of the Hellas Basin, buried under rocky rubble, which is why they haven't evaporated, are huge - the second-largest known source of water on Mars after the polar caps:

"Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and up to one-half-mile thick. And there are many more. In addition to their scientific value, they could be a source of water to support future exploration of Mars."

Alternate History

The Soviet space shuttle.

The Goldilocks Factor

More good news from space. Planets that sit in the 'not-too-hot not--too-cold' zones around other stars may be more common than we believed. Although Mars is the joker in the pack here - it sits inside the outer edge the Sun's habitable zone, but can't support life in its current state. Which makes it all the more urgent to find out if some kind of life emerged there in its early history, and what went wrong.

Next On Mars

NASA has announced four possible landing sites for the next Mars rover mission, the Mars Science Laboratory. It's all about clay.

Fried/Buzzed

Finishing a novel leaves you with something like jetlag. You think you're functioning normally, but your IQ and attention span are seriously out of whack. You go to make a cup of tea, put the cat in the kettle, throw the water out the door, and when you've sorted out that confusion, discover you've made a tasty beverage with a stock cube. Fish stock. Or as Edward Gorey has it in his wonderful The Unstrung Harp, or Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel:

The next day Mr Earbrass is conscious but very little more. He wanders through the house, leaving doors open and empty tea-cups on the floor. From time to time the thought occurs to him that he really ought to go out and dress, and he gets up several minutes later, only to sit down again in the first chair he comes to. The better part of a week will have elapsed before he has recovered enough to do anything more helpful.

After finishing and sending off Gardens of the Sun, I had a week much like that, and then, at the beginning of this month, in muscular commercial author fashion, started on my next project. Alas, I'm not much cop as a muscular commercial author. A few weeks later I find I've written some 20,000 words, which is the length of the piece I promised to deliver, but they're the wrong words in the wrong order, or the right words in the wrong order, or the right words in the right order in the wrong place. And after going nowhere very much the feeble rivulet of plot kind of runs out into the sands of ennui . . . But! This morning I realised what needed to be done, and went for a long walk to work out the finer points, came back and typed up a page of notes and reordered the salvagable bits and pieces and made notes for what's needed to link them together. Of course, now I'm about to fly off to a convention in Holland, but I reckon (if I'm not whistling in the dark) that I have sort of cracked it. All I need to so is write the damned thing, but that's the easy part. I hope.

Via John Joseph Adams at the Fantasy and Science Fiction site, this little test to find out which SF author you are. I'm Octavia Butler, which makes a weird kind of sense.

Edna Sharrow

I recently blogged a six-part illustrated short story, Edna Sharrow, here. I've now archived the story on the web site, under a Creative Commons license. You can find it by clicking the Fiction Archive link and scrolling down to the list of short stories. Or go straight to the first part. Enjoy!