Adam Curtis

The introduction to 'It Felt Like A Kiss'. From his blog. Major stuff. Curtis has made some extraordinary explorations of the undercurrents of power in Western civilisation of the second half of the twentieth century

Going In

I seem to have posted a fair few Moon-based posts at the moment - no particular reason except the upcoming 40th anniversary of the first manned moon-landing is focusing all kinds of attention on our sister world. And then there's this, the last high-definition images taken at one-minute intervals by Japan's Kaguya (Selene) probe as it powered in towards impact at Gill Crater, strung out here in a Flash animation (click on the arrow to flip to the next in sequence). Spaceship crashes are the stuff of cliche in SF novels; here's the real thing.

Destination: Moon

Apollo 11 tweets.

On The Beach

Unambiguous evidence that Shalabatana Vallis on Mars was once occupied by a lake fed by a broad delta - a pretty big lake too (about the size of Lake Champlain). Lasted beyond the point when Mars was supposed to have cooled after its brief warm wet period, so it looks like climatological models might need revised. Long gone now, of course, but what might be found in those fossil beaches and sediment fans?

A Ghost I Became

Singer-songwriters and poets completely inhabit their art. They create it and then they recreate it in public, over and again. Novelists, on the other hand, design their work and build it word by word, decorate it and move in fixtures and fittings that give an illusion of habitation and a history, and then they move out so that the readers can move in. Some ghostly trace of the author remains, but it’s the reader who thoroughly inhabits the novel.

(I dreamed that my friend Steve Jones and I were in a cantina or old-fashioned hotel, the kind with a bar and dance-floor off the lobby, and Bob Dylan was there, singing someone else’s song (it might have been ‘Desperado’). Afterwards, he came over and sat down with us. He was wearing a red and white shirt with pearl snaps, and high-waisted black pants and cowboy boots and he looked at us and when we couldn’t think of anything to say (because what can you say, to Bob Dylan) he shook his head slightly and stood up and walked off. In the kind of l’esprit de l’escalier reverie you have between dreaming and waking, I tried to explain to him how writing a novel was different to writing a song; I’m sure I’m paraphrasing someone or other).

IRL

A major plot point of Players happens in real life (I'm not claiming anything - it was only a matter of time).

Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual

All you need to fix up that vintage rocket you bought in a garage sale, right here.

Via Bad Astronomy (which has a great post on ripples in Saturn's rings, too).

Just finished a story about zombies and the Royal family. It's almost the weekend, the sun is shining, reckon I'll take the rest of the day off.

Moon Shadow

Saturn is approaching equinox, when the sun will stand directly above its equator and ring system. This means that the moons and moonlets embedded in the rings are presently casting long shadows, and the Cassini probe has been capturing beautiful images of them - as above, where the tiny moon Pan, orbiting in the Enke Gap, casts a slender shadow across the A Ring. There's video too.

All Your Images Are Belong To Us

American family discovers they're in a Simpson's episode.

Still, at least they were offered a bottle of wine, rather than threatened with a law suit:

So Long, Selene

The Japanese probe Kaguya (Selene) has been orbiting the Moon since October 2007, and sending back gigabytes of information, including amazing HD videos like this one of Earth setting (you can find more here). It's now reached the end of its mission and will crash onto the Moon's surface at 18.30 GMT today, hitting the lower right segment of the nearside, at the edge of the Moon's unlit portion. But that's not the end of the probe's scientific usefulness: the scar left by its impact will be monitored to see how solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts will alter the exposed regolith over time. And it isn't the end of the new wave of Moon exploration, either. India's Chandrayaan-1 probe is still in Lunar orbit, and will be joined by not one but two US probes later this year. No-one has announced plans to return human beings to the moon yet, but it's only a matter of time...

UPDATE: first image of impact posted here.

Another Country

It's all Syd Field's fault. In 1979 he published a 'how-to' book on screenplays, based on his course in Sherman Oaks Experimental College, that first codified the three act structure of modern films - setup, confrontation, resolution - along with the carefully timed plot points on which the narrative turns. With added flourishes, this story arc dominates film narrative, and because film is the major fictional medium of the twentieth and (so far) twenty-first centuries, it has fed back into the novel form too (along with 'do you earn a living from writing?' and 'do you write under your own name?', 'how many books have you sold to the movie business?' is one of the most common questions asked of authors).

Fairyland's structure is a deliberate burlesque of the three-act structure. Sure, there are three acts. Sure, they follow Field's pernicious formula. But they aren't narrated from the point of view of what would be the traditional hero - in this case, a frighteningly bright little girl who achieves godhood, and along the way bestows consciousness on a select group of genetically engineered servants. Instead, the first and third acts are told from the viewpoint of a bit-player who's caught up in the little girl's cunning plans, and the second, while featuring our hapless hero, Alex Sharkey, is told from the point of view of an aid worker in Paris's bidonvilles. The 'real' story happens in the interstices of their stories; I was still, and still am, interested in people caught up in history, rather than the people who, supposedly, make history.

Fairyland was written in 1995, using a background I elaborated, in true SF tradition, in several short stories and novellas (collected in the out-of-print Invisible Country). I had decided to quit academia, and this freed me up to have as much irresponsible fun as possible with cutting-edge biology. It was also, very deliberately, set in London, Paris, and Albania, to get away, however briefly, from the American hegonomy. And it was my first near-future novel, which allowed me to warp and pour in as much as I knew of the present. Which is why, perhaps, it's written in the present tense (as are The Secret of Life and White Devils, which with Fairyland form a loose trilogy about biotech-dominated near futures)

It won a couple of prizes, which meant a lot to me then, if only because by the time they were announced I was a freelance writer. It was one of the first biopunk (or - tip of the hat to Paul di Filippo, ribofunk) SF novels. And it started out in London, not far from where I'm typing this, in the Ladies Smoking Room of the former Midland Hotel at St Pancras (which ten years later I visited, in its glorious decrepitude), where now, as in the novel, Eurostar trains set out for the continent.

And now, it's due to be reissued for the second time. You can read an extract here, or buy the first reissue (why not?) here.

The Day Today

New York. June 6, 1944. ALLIED ARMIES LAND ON COAST OF FRANCE. GREAT INVASION OF CONTINENT BEGINS.

Shatner!

The latest b3ta challenge.

(Eds: That's enough stuff about Shatner for a month or two.)

The Day Today

After a spending a couple of hours working on the proofs of the US edition of The Quiet War, I ambled out into the sunshine to exercise my democratic rights in the European Parliament election. And a couple of hours later, I'll be off to catch the train to Cheltenham, where I'm taking part in the science festival (tickets are still available for the talk, I'm told, and I'll be signing in the book tent afterwards - if you're in the area, why not drop by?).

I'll be talking about the future of animal testing, and while researching that came across this neat bit of work: refabbing a virus so that it infects and destroys cancerous liver cells, but is recognised and destroyed by any healthy cells it infects. Talk about your smart bullet. It works by adding to the virus binding sites for a particular form of microRNA: in normal liver cells the microRNA binds to those sites and deactivates the virus - much like the antibodies that nearly did for the hemonauts' submarine - and Raquel Welch - in Fantastic Voyage, that early essay in medical nanotechnology. But - this is the neat trick - cancerous liver cells don't produce the microRNA so the virus isn't disabled and can multiply freely inside them, and ultimately kill them.

MicroRNAs are turning out to be crucial in controlling the internal metabolic climates of cells by regulating gene activation and activity of messenger RNA, the go-between molecular vital for the translation of code in the gene into protein. They were first identified in the early 1990s, but not named until the turn of the century, and their function and variety, and their role in the feedback loops that control gene transcription and cell function, is only beginning to be explored. I've just finished proofing the new paperback edition of Fairyland, which features psychotropic viruses that target specific neurons. It doesn't take much imagination to work up all kinds of psychotropic viral functions involving microRNAs. A virus that attacks neurons in which activity of a specific microRNA is suppressed to allow transcription of proteins involved with formation of short-term (or long-term) memory, for instance: temporary amnesia caught like the common cold . . .

Currently reading (when not reading proofs of my own stuff) Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, and A.S. Byatt's The Children's Hour. Currently listening to: The Felice Brothers' Yonder Is The Clock, and the Dangermouse/Sparklehorse/David Lynch collaboration, Dark Night Of The Soul.

Titan's Indian Summer

Summer on Titan lasts more than seven years. The Cassini probe has been monitoring changes in the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon for three and a half years, and now, with equinox approaching, the seasons are about to turn in the southern hemisphere. But images from Cassini's last flyby of Saturn's largest moon show that clouds of liquid methane formed by convection driven by the heat of the sun (just as rain clouds are formed on Earth) are dispersing more slowly than expected and autumn may prove to be warmer and wetter than climate models predicted. Those models are based on very partial and incomplete data, of course, but isn't it amazing that we have learned so much about this strange smog-shrouded moon so quickly? Before Cassini's arrival we didn't even know whether the surface of Titan was solid, or covered from pole to pole in oceans of liquid methane and ethane. Now, we're receiving regular updates on changes in its weather.

Mapped Out

A new favourite in the category of 'shops I can't afford to go in'. Check out the 'celestial charts' section - such as this beauty.

I Squeak Therefore I Am

Sticking the human FOXP2 gene in mice is a good start - next, chimpanzees?

Human Footprints

'Inspired by our 10th anniversary, the Earth Observatory has pulled together a special series of NASA satellite images documenting how our world has changed during the previous decade.'

Watch Dubai grow in Sim City style. See the Arul Sea dry up. Watch the late-summer extent of Arctic sea ice shrink.

Some of thing we can do may be big, but they aren't clever.

My Dark Angel

The best way to build a career in genre fiction is to find a groove and stick with it. Write an open-ended series about a jazz/blues/reggae-loving detective with a permanent life crisis. Write a ten volume fantasy trilogy. And then do it again. Write a series of novels and stories set in a future history. The last is how I started out, but after a bunch of short stories and three novels (400 Billion Stars, Secret Harmonies, Eternal Light), I veered off into the left-field with the Chinese-Messiah-on-Mars chop-socky epic Red Dust. And I followed that up with Pasquale’s Angel, an alternate history novel set in Florence in the early sixteenth century, a couple of decades after Leonardo da Vinci kickstarted an Industrial Revolution.

I’d long had an ambition to write something about Leonardo da Vinci, if only because I was fascinated by his undisciplined genius, and more than half in love with the cloudy myths that obscured the realities of his life (if you want a bracing antidote to those myths, try Charles Nicholl’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind, or Serge Bramly’s Leonardo: The Artist and the Man). He didn’t see any boundaries between arts and science, an attitude that was catnip to a novelist whose day job was a scientific research, and who’d had to make a choice between science and the arts at a tender age. That was the prevailing attitude of his age, of course, but Leonardo also seemed to be a man out of time, dreaming of technologies impossible to realise with contemporary materials and power sources. Any SF writer worth their salt must surely sympathise.

As it turned out, for much of the novel, Leonardo is a shadowy, mythic figure raised above and isolated from the world he’s created - you don’t need to be a critic to unriddle that metaphor. If there’s one consistent thread in my work, it’s identification with those caught up in plots that are larger than they ever understand: and so here, as our hero hooks up with consulting detective Niccolo Machiavegli, prowls the mean streets and tries to foil a filthy Spanish plot to bring down the government of his city state.

Did I also mention that it’s a noir novel?

I had a lot of fun writing it, and even more fun researching it. Luckily, one of the greatest living Leonardo scholars, Martin Kemp, was working in St Andrews University at the time, which meant that I had access to a couple of shelves of research material in the library. I never did dare to approach Professor Kemp about my funny little idea, though. And I’ve still never visited Florence. One day, one day . . . But it won’t be the same as the Florence of my mind, with its dark satanic mills, and acetylene-lit streets crowded with every kind of vaporetto.

I like the cover of the new paperback a lot. Although I also very much like the cover of the original hardback and paperback, in which Jim Burns captured Pasquale to the life; authors often dislike seeing renderings by others of their hero and heroine because they don’t match up with their internal pictures. In this case, Jim read my mind with perfect fidelity.

Uncommonly Good

It's a wet Wednesday here in Londontown, but this - William Shattner, Joe Jackson, and the Ben Folds Five covering Pulp's 'Common People' - cheered me up no end.