Apollo Redux

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed Apollo landing sites. These aren't even at the full resolution that the LRO's imaging system is capable of, but clearly show LEM descent modules, scientific instruments, and even, in one case, a trail left by the astronauts. First time these sites have been seen in forty years, and a fine reminder that the moonlandings we're celebrating actually happened and left artifacts that may, in the Lunar vacuum, last hundreds of thousands of years.

Apollo 11 - The Big Picture

A terrific set of high resolution photographs of the Apollo 11 mission. No, I don't think I'll ever get tired of this.

iHobo

Okay, so this iPhone app for applying hobo signs in augmented reality is golden vapourware right now, but it's such a great idea someone is bound to build it. Meanwhile, there must be a zillion fictional uses for variations on this theme.

Road To The Stars

A historical document fallen through a wormhole from an alternate universe: 1957 Soviet film from director Pavel Klushantsev, which starts out as a biopic of space pioneer Tsiolkvskiy, and in its final section ( around 24 minutes in) depicts in amazingly realistic detail the launch of the first man into space, construction of the first space station in orbit around Earth, the first manned landing on the Moon, and glimpses of expeditions to Mars, Venus, and Saturn. May have been an influence on Kubrick - some shots in Road to the Stars are pretty much duplicated in 2001.

(Link via Kosmograd)

Russian moon-lander drops towards Clavius Crater.

Let's Get Away From This Model Of Space Flight

Because it's like building an ocean liner to cross the Atlantic and setting fire to it when you reach New York.

Found While Mindlessly Trawling The Internet

Tang Fei, 17, describes the electric shock therapy he was tricked into having to cure internet 'addiction' .

Twenty-first century version of this.

Tranquility Base

An interactive page on the NASA website, with panoramic views around the Apollo 11 landing site. No, I haven't been saturated by the coverage yet.

Wiggling Around Darwin

This item about a panel at Readercon, 'Is Darwinism Too Good For SF?' has been itching away in my mind ever since I read about it on the excellent Biology in Science Fiction blog:

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to generate an exhaustive list of the container-load of SF inspired by and exploring various consequences of the theory of natural selection, while Peggy, who maintains the Biology in SF blog, neatly skewered the confusion between theory and application. As a former biologist and practising SF writer, I'm more interested in the notion of 'wiggle room' within Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. Is there any, and can it be exploited?

Darwin proposed a simple, elegant and powerful explanation ('How extremely stupid for me not to have thought of that!' Thomas Huxley said ruefully, after reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species) for the way that new species evolve. Inheritable variations in a population, tested at each succeeding generation by the ability of individuals to survive long enough to reproduce, would over long periods of time cause the emergence* of new species better fitted than their ancestors to survive and exploit their environment.

Darwin presented a mass of patiently accumulated and sifted evidence to buttress his arguments, but they were by no means complete. One of the most powerful deductions of his theory is that all life on Earth arose from a single simple ancestral form. At the time he published On the Origin of Species, the oldest known fossils, from the Silurian, included complex animals like tribolites. Where, his critics demanded, were the simpler forms his theory suggested? Well, later discoveries of simpler flora and fauna in older rocks, solved his famous dilemma. Likewise, modern genetics provided a mechanism of inheritance of characteristics, as well as ways in which variability could arise - either by mutations in genes, or from the transfer of genes between populations and between species. The fusion of Darwin's ideas with genetics created the modern evolutionary synthesis. To date, it has proven extremely robust, but that doesn't mean that the intricacies of the mechanism of natural selection and evolution are fully understood, or that alternative theories have been totally swept aside.

Biologists consider evolution by natural selection to be a fact. But there are still plenty of things for evolutionary biologists to argue about. Is evolution steady-state, or can it accelerate in certain circumstances? Is gene transfer more important than mutation? What is the role of symbiosis and symbiogenesis? Is every phenotypical feature of an organism due to selection? Is evolution predictable? Plenty of wiggle-room there, I suggest, for the SF writer (and plenty of SF writers have exploited it).

Then there are the alternatives to Darwinism. Some aren't scientific - Creationism being the most obvious, along with its slightly subtler cousin, Intelligent Design. I can't think, offhand, of any SF stories or novels built on the concept that God created the world and everything in it six thousand years ago, but there are quite a few SF works that play around with notions of Intelligent Design. 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, or David Brin's Uplift series. Sure, the godlike creators are aliens rather than some invisible and undefined creator, but they do direct and guide evolution, and bootstrap complexity by injecting intelligence and self-awareness into other species. And isn't genetic engineering and creation of artificial life a form of Intelligent Design? (Imagine biologists of a species evolved from, say, bears, trying to make sense of post genetic-engineering flora and fauna in ten million years time.)

There are other alternatives too - vitalism, panspermia, the theory of formative causation, to name but three. I don't think that any of them hold a candle to neoDarwinism, but that doesn't mean that they can't be used as jumping-off points for some kind of speculative fiction. After all, there are plenty of stories about non-Newtonian universes . . .


*A clumsy circumlocation to avoid that contentious term, 'create'. In 1863, long mired in controversy, Darwin ruefully wrote to the botanist Joseph Hooker: 'But I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process.' A sentence which generated this famous footnote: 'On the same subject my father wrote in 1871: "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo stillmore complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.'

Eriksson's 2020

Interactive design tech speculative fiction. Will novels look this like this, in 2020?

(Via Bruce Sterling.)

One Small Step...

. . . towards a manned European spacecraft. Maybe. Much as I'm pleased to think the world's largest economic bloc might be gearing up for a manned space programme, I have to ask what this not-even-off-the drawing-board Advanced Re-entry Vehicle is for. Unless very heavily modified, the Ariane 5 delivery system will be able to push it into low Earth orbit, no more. That would allow it to rendezvous with the International Space Station - a logical destination since the ARV is a modification of the unmanned space freighter already being used to deliver supplies to the ISS. But the Euro-ARV won't be ready to fly until 2025 at the earliest, and the ISS is scheduled to be retired in 2015. Could it be that Eurocrats are formulating plans for repurposing the ISS? There's already been talk about moving it into a higher orbit, or somehow drifting it outward to the Moon, or even sawing off and modifying modules to turn them into interplanetary spacecraft. Maybe Stephen Baxter was onto something when he wrote this . . .

From The Old, Weird...

Two of my favourite musicians. They make a guest appearance in Cowboy Angels.

Happy Birthday, America

Advertisments For Myself, Part Whatever

I was interviewed for BBC Radio 4's Leading Edge as part of its investigation into public engagment with science. You can listen to the programme here (might not be available to people outside the UK).

And I have a short short story in the July/August issue of Discover magazine, as does Bruce Sterling. Despite a fairly elastic brief, we somehow both ended up writing about the end of Big Science. Are we onto something? Bruce's story is of course far wittier, but here's how mine begins (it's called 'Shadow Life' by the way):

It all started when Jack scored on eBay a multichannel femtospectrometer from a probe that never, in the end, went to Mars...

Moonhead

A live jam* by Pink Floyd in the BBC studios during coverage of the Apollo 11 landing (by then, even the BBC had bought into the 60s). I watched the BBC coverage, but don't remember this - I assume it was transmitted after the LEM touched down and my sister, brother and I went to bed. A few hours later, my mother shook us awake: because Armstrong and Aldrin couldn't sleep, the moonwalk had been brought forward to 4 am British time.

An article in today's Guardian describes how the BBC nearly missed the crucial moment:

"I stayed in the studio, because I had nothing else to do, listening to the air-to-ground transmissions from Houston," says Burke [one of the presenters, long with Patrick Moore and [EDIT, see comments] Cliff Michelmore]. "And after about half an hour, Armstrong and Aldrin started doing the kind of thing you do if you're going to get out. So I went upstairs and said to the guys, 'Look - they're going to get out.' They all said, 'No they're not - the flight plan says they're not.' I said, 'Well, they're doing all the things they'd do if that was about to happen.'"

You can imagine the next bit being enacted amid a sea of paper cups and discarded scripts, in standard-issue BBC accents. "There was a long pause, and somebody said, 'You do understand that this means us broadcasting all night?' This had never happened before in the history of television. I said, 'Well, you know, if you want to cover it ...'

"They said, 'OK - but if we stay open and nothing happens, you'll never work again.' So we did it, and we had to go to Alexandra Palace." A car was called, and Burke sped to north London, where he readied himself to talk the viewing public through the images that would soon be relayed to Earth.

*EDIT The audio is a recording of the live jam; the video is a collage of various lunar excursions.

A Little Gosh Wow

I've been out and about this week, first to a Physics For Fiction meeting at Imperial College, organised by Dave Clements, in which scientists met and mingled with science-fiction writers, and gave a variety of excellent talks about their work. Great fun, especially when I got to talking with Subu Mohanty about his work on brown dwarfs. Today, I was at the World Conference of Science Journalists to take part in a panel organised by Oliver Morton. The centre of London drenched in sunlight under a hot blue sky and Westminster Abbey looked like bleached coral by Max Ernst: a cover for J.G. Ballard's Drought.

Seen at the Physics For Fiction meeting:

An HD movie of the (deliberate) crash of the Japanese probe Kaguya (Selene) on the surface of the Moon.

An animation of the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Galaxy. Watch SO-2 and SO-16. When these two stars swing in close around Sag A* they're moving fast.

Belatedly

'This Saturday is the BSFA/SF Foundation joint AGM day, featuring talks, panels, and the AGMs for both organisations. The guests are Paul Kincaid for the SFF, and Nick Harkaway for the BSFA. Attendance is free, and the AGMs are conveniently positioned to give non-members a long lunch break. The AGM is once again at Conway Hall, and all events will take place in the small hall on the ground floor.

Timetable:
10:00 SFF speaker Welcome
10:05 BSFA Panel – Launch of the British Science Fiction and Fantasy Survey 2009: chaired by Niall Harrison, and featuring Nick Harkaway, Paul Kincaid, Juliet McKenna, Kit Whitfield, and Paul McAuley
11:00 SFF Guest – Paul Kincaid
12:00 BSFA AGM
12:30 Lunch break
13:30 SFF AGM
14:00 BSFA Guest – Nick Harkaway
15:00 SFF Closing Panel – tba
16:00 BSFA speaker Closes'

The BSFA panel will be discussing 'writerly identity — how writers perceive their work; how others perceive it; how that changes, or doesn’t, over time and from place to place.' Something to do with being a British science fiction or fantasy writer, apparently. I have no idea what I'm going to say about that, yet. But I'm listening to this, to get in the mood.

EDIT: Ask four writers about whether they feel they're British writers, and what that means to them, and you get four different answers. My answer for what it's worth, was that there aren't really any 'British' writers - there are English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish writers, all with fairly distinct identities. And obviously I've inherited a mess of cultural and historical stuff to do with being 'English', but as a science-fiction writer, I also have to get past my mammalian preconceptions (and those of a carbon-based lifeform too, as Nick Harkaway pointed out). And then, as you do, when discussing 'British' SF and fantasy, we ended up talking about American SF and fantasy, and how our stuff is different from theirs. Not something American writers tend to worry about - but then American SF is the dominant form of modern SF (even if it was invented by an immigrant from Luxembourg).

Beyond Apollo

Yesterday evening, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter went into orbit around the Moon, just four and a half days after launch. As LRO's orbit is adjusted and its instruments are switched on, its sister probe, LCROSS, is entering a wide Earth orbit; in October, the rocket stage to which it is attached will crash into the Moon's south pole, and LCROSS will pass through the debris cloud and check for signs of water vapour that might be lofted from ice preserved in permanent shadow before it, too, crashes.

The two probes were designed to be the first step in a programme that would culminate in a new generation of manned missions to the Moon. Given the current economic crisis and Obama's reported ambivalence towards lunar and interplanetary exploration, that programme is currently in some doubt, but in my mind there's no question that humans will return to the Moon as some point. Other people doubt this, however. In last week's Observer, Robin McKie wrote that:

The Apollo moon missions were to herald a new dawn of space exploration, of lunar bases, manned missions to Mars, and more. But in the decades since - and after the Shuttle disasters - America's appetite for interplanetary flight dwindled. The moon landings marked not the beginning, but the end, of our space dreams.

He makes some cogent points. The Apollo programme cost as much as a small war. It can be considered as nothing more than a Cold War stunt, having no real purpose but to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Afterwards NASA scaled back ambitions to establish a permanent moon base and send a manned mission to Mars, concentrating instead on work in low Earth orbit that relied on the space shuttle, with its dreadful safety record. And now the space shuttle has reached the end of its useful life, the American manned space programme 'hangs by a thread'.

It's a pretty damming view, but it's also a partial view. McKie quotes just two 'experts' on the matter. One, Gerard De Groot, is a historian with an infamously jaundiced view of the Apollo adventure; his claim that the Apollo programme now 'seems as strange as stuffing fraternity brothers into phone booths, swallowing goldfish or listening to the 1910 Fruitgum Company,' is no more than amusing hyperbole - forty years on, we're lacking a slew of books on phone-booth stuffing, or detailed analysis of the lyrics of 'Goody Goody Gumdrops.' The other, Professor Amitai Etzioni, is a sociologist best known for his work on communitarianism, with a sideline in criticising the space race; his claim that 'If you look at 100-year-old maps of the moon in old encyclopedias, you can see they are not that different from the maps we have made after Apollo' misses the point that we know less about the surface of the Moon than we do of Mars. The HiRise orbiter has mapped Mars with a resolution of 30 centimetres; the best resolution of the lunar surface obtainable by Earth-based telescopes is half a kilometre and by previous generations of lunar orbiters some twenty metres.

That's LRO's principal mission: to provide maps of the lunar surface with a resolution equivalent to the HiRise orbiter, and to search out places where future explorers can land safely. If LCROSS finds evidence of lunar ice frozen in shadows at the south pole, it will mean that any permanent base may be able to tap native supplies. Of course, lunar exploration won't be cheap. But the Apollo programme cost less than the Viet Nam war, that war was less costly, month by month, than the Iraq conflict, and the recent bail-out of US banks overshadows them all, costing more than the Lousianna Purchase, the New Deal, WW2, the Marshall plan, the Korean war, the Apollo moonshots, Viet Nam, the Savings&Loan crisis, and Iraq combined. Cost is relative; relatively, Apollo cost very little (LRO cost even less of course - about the same as the annual amount Brazilians spend on cosmetics). And even if the US is at present reluctant to commit funds to manned exploration of the Moon, it isn't the only player in space. On the same day that LRO entered lunar orbit, India announced plans to launch its first manned orbital flight, and gave itself a deadline of landing a man on the Moon by 2020. Some may considered manned space exploration a magnificent and transient folly; I'm on the side of the dreamers. And even if the science and historical significance of landing on the Moon fades into obscurity, the Apollo will have left us with one lasting legacy: the idea that our home planet is but a small, fragile and precious island of life in an immensity of space that dwarfs all human divisions.

Other Life

I was getting up this morning when something hit the curtains still closed over the bedroom window and a fearsome scrabbling and twitching and thumping commenced - it was a swift that had flown through the open window and, like a fly or a bee, was consistently hitting glass instead of the gap through which it had come. Because it was partly entangled with the curtain it took only a moment to grasp its dry frantic body and drop it into the air outside; it tumbled briefly and then caught itself in midair and winged away.

A writer of 'mundane' or 'literary' fiction might use this incident as the beginning or end of a conventionally epiphanic short story. But what use is this sudden random intrusion of otherness to a science fiction writer? How to fit the inexplicable into the cosy metric frame of conventional sf stories, in which everything has its place, and all is transparent? It's something I've been wrestling with ever since I started writing my second novel, Secret Harmonies (Of The Fall, in the US), in which the tensions in an interstellar colony were laid bare by an inexplicable disappearance. I'm still wrestling with it more than twenty years later.

Architect's Brother

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison's vision of re-gooding the world.

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