Gardens Of The Sun, Fifth Chapter

Every day, the Brazilians brought more people to the dead city. Their search parties spread out across the face of Dione, entering and securing every garden habitat, oasis, and shelter, rounding up the inhabitants and transporting them to Paris for processing: a brief interrogation, confirmation of identity, injection with a subdermal tag. An industrial process, inflexible but efficient. The city’s net and every copy of its data base had been destroyed or corrupted during the war, but the Brazilians had assembled a list of malcontents by trawling news boards, public forums and private discussion groups, personal mailboxes, and registers in the nets of cities that had survived the war unscathed. Anyone who had ever been a member of any civic agency, had served on Paris’s council or any of its committees, or had spoken out against reconciliation with Earth, whether in private or in public, was dispatched to the maximum-security jail, formerly the city’s correctional facility and now much expanded. Of the rest, pregnant women and women or men nursing babies were sent to a maternity camp; everyone else was told that they could either work for the Three Powers Authority or spend the rest of their lives in a prison camp.

READ MORE . . .

Future Science

From Discover magazine, two short stories, one by me, the other by Bruce Sterling, both absolutely free:

Shadow Life: In the post-economic future, big-ticket science is dead and amateurs hunt aliens using gear scored cheap on eBay.

Open-Source Science: "If you can read a popular-science publication (and enjoy it), then you most likely have enough brainpower to help us make massive scientific breakthroughs..."

All Quantum Flux, All The Time

The Onion lets us in on the secret of writing best-selling science fiction. At last I know what I've been doing wrong, all these years.

(via Kim Newman)

Currently watching: Adam Curtis's It Felt Like A Kiss - a greatest hits compendium of the great chronicler's secret histories of the twentieth century (BBC iPlayer - not available outside the UK).

Currently reading: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice - psychedelic PI mischief in LA in 1970.

Currently suffering from: an awesome cold. It isn't swine flu, but it'll do until swine flu comes along.

Ring Strike

First, an amateur astronomer discovered a mysterious flux of energy on the surface of Venus. Then another amateur astronomer spotted the aftermath of a small asteroid or comet striking Jupiter's atmosphere. Now the Cassini orbiter has returned a spectacular image of the effect of an unknown body plunging through the underside of Saturn's F ring. The bright peak is ring material dragged beyond the ring-plane by the impact; the dark line stretching away at an oblique angle is the shadow of the peak cast across the F ring, stretched a long way out because Saturn is almost at equinox, with the ring system at right angles to the sun.

At one point in The Quiet War, a combat spacecraft plunges through Saturn's rings. I never thought that I'd be able to see what it would look like in real life . . .

Gardens Of The Sun, Fourth Chapter

Cash Baker was woken by degrees. Surfacing to a confusion of light and clamour, sinking back, surfacing again. He knew that he had been badly injured and that he was still gravely ill, but he didn’t remember what had happened. The surgeon in charge of his recovery and rehabilitation, Doctor Jésus McCaffery, told him that his singleship had been attacked by Outer drones. One of the drones had exploded close to his ship and a fragment of debris had punched through the ship’s hull and pierced Cash’s head. His ship had saved his life by putting him in hibernation; after he’d been rescued, Dr Jésus and his crew had kept him in an induced coma, repaired the damage by regrowing parts of his brain and modifying the artificial nervous system that had enabled him to fly combat singleships, and then brought him back to consciousness in a series of carefully managed steps.

READ MORE . . .

Pretty Polly

A great performance of the greatest of all murder ballads, by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Based on the English folk song, 'The Gosport Tragedy'. Virginia coal miner and banjo player Dock Boggs recorded the definitive version in the 1920s.

U2: Modern Toss

Cover for U2's The Joshua Tree, reimagined by Modern Toss for Beck's Music Inspired Art project, reducing Bono's pompous attempt at transcendence to a squawk of mundane frustration. I'm a big fan of the Modern Toss duo's wonkily drawn, silly, frequently violent, and sweary cartoons: dada satire applied to the frustrations of everyday life. They do film posters, too.

The Plains Of Titan

With so many detailed maps of so many planets and moons being produced by interplanetary probes, task groups in the International Astronomy Union responsible for assigning names to features have strip-mined myths, Greek and Roman literature, Shakespeare's plays, lists of distinguished artists and scientists, and so on, and so forth (complete list of sources here). Now, the IAU's Working Group for Planetary Nomenclature has just announced its approval of the use of the term planitia for the dark plains Cassini has mapped on Titan, with 'the theme "Names of planets from the Dune series of science fiction novels by American Author Frank Herbert (1920 - 1986)."'

And why not? After all, those dark plains are covered in strings of giant dunes, albeit ones composed of grains of frozen hydrocarbons rather than sand. A pity this wasn't done a little earlier, though - I could have dropped in a neat bit of science-fictional recursion into Gardens of the Sun. First to be named is Chusuk Planitia, located at 5.0S, 23.5W - it's at the righthand edge of this map of Titan, just below the equator, or close to the centre of the disc of Titan in the photo at the top.

Actually, Herbert isn't the first author to be honoured in this way. Titan also features Xanadu and Shangri-la.

(Via Universe Today)

Gardens Of The Sun, Third Chapter

Some fifty days after he’d defected, the spy at last returned to Paris, Dione.

It had not been an easy journey. He’d fallen from orbit in a stolen dropshell, skimming through a hole in the Brazilian surveillance-satellite network, landing inside a small impact crater in the high northern latitudes of Dione’s sub-saturnian hemisphere, walking away across a frozen, gently undulating plain. He was short of air and power and had to reach a shelter or an oasis as quickly as possible, knew that his former masters would be searching for him and that he faced disgrace and execution if he was captured, yet in those first hours of freedom his heart floated on a flood of joy. All around, beyond the shell of his pressure suit, with its intimate chorus of clicks and whirrs, the tide of his breathing and the thud of his pulse, the moonscape stretched silent and still, lovely in its emptiness. The dusty ground glimmering golden-brown in the long light of the low sun. Saturn’s swollen globe looming half-full above the curved horizon, bisected by the black scratch of the ringplane, which printed crisp shadows across smoggy bands of butterscotch and peach and caught fire with diamond light as it shot beyond the gas giant’s limb towards the tiny half-disc of one of the inner moons. He felt as if he was the emperor of all he surveyed. The only witness to this pure, uncanny beauty. And for the first time in his brief and strange life, master of his fate.

READ MORE . . .

Scramjet!

First flight of the X-51A scramjet demonstrator is now on track for early December while captive carriage tests on the NASA-operated B-52H mothership at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., are set to begin in October.

A joint effort by the U.S. Air Force, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, and Boeing, the hypersonic vehicle is designed to be the first air-breathing craft to demonstrate sustained speeds in excess of Mach 4 using a “logistically friendly” hydrocarbon fuel.

(via Aviation Week)

Needs a boost from a rocket stage to get going, way too slow to achieve low Earth orbit, and probably going to be used for long-range cruise missiles or something equally gung-ho but it's a start . . .

Gardens Of The Sun, First Chapter

Now online, in the fourth issue of Journey Planet.

Gardens Of The Sun

As with the last three novels, I'll be posting chapters from Gardens of the Sun over at the website every Monday and Friday all the way up to publication on October 1st.

I'm starting with the second chapter because I promised the first, short chapter as an exclusive to the good people at Journey Planet. I'll let you know when that's up. Meanwhile, you shouldn't have any problem starting here:

Sri Hong-Owen was on Janus, climbing the outer slope of a big crater stamped into the moon’s anti-saturnian hemisphere, when General Arvam Peixoto reached out to her. ‘Get back to the Glory of Gaia as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘I have a little job that requires your peculiar expertise.’

‘I have plenty of work here. Important work,’ Sri said, but she was speaking into dead air. The general had cut his end of the connection. She knew that if she tried to call back she wouldn’t be able to get past his snarky aides, and she also knew that she couldn’t risk the consequences of disobeying him: out here, in the aftermath of the Quiet War, Arvam Peixoto’s word was law. So she switched to the common channel and told the three members of her crew that she’d been recalled.

‘Drop whatever you’re doing and pack up. We’re leaving in an hour.’

‘We’re already on it, boss,’ Vander Reece said. ‘We got word too.’

‘Of course you did,’ Sri said, and switched off her comms.

READ MORE...

The Latest Twist

It seems that a few days before a small comet or asteroid hit Jupiter, something weird and violent happened at Venus. Volcano? Asteroid impact? The launch of the superweapon that took down the marshalling yards of the fleet Jovians were planning to use to invade our sister world?

Moon Over Frozen River

Caught Duncan Jones' Moon last week, and today saw Courtney Hunt's Frozen River. Two fine, low budget, low-key films about ordinary hard-working people caught up in strong moral dilemmas and forming unlikely partnerships, both realistic and unsentimental, but steeped in the kind of deeply felt human values that are missing from many bigger and noisier and hollower films.

In Moon, Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a mining technician confronted by a mystery -- a neat variation on a perennial SF theme -- that undermines his sense of identity and grip on reality. Its tropes echo classic 1970s films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running; its twists are expertly handled; Rockwell's portrayal of Sam, by turns assertive and exhausted, is affecting and assured. Frozen River is set firmly in the here and now, on the border between New York State and Canada. Melissa Leo (Detective Sergeant Kay Howard in the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street) plays mother-of-two Ray Eddy, who gets mixed up in cross-border people smuggling after her husband, a gambling addict, takes off with cash saved to buy a new trailer home. The script and direction by Courtney Hunt is tight and precise and merciless; Leo is terrific as a woman trying to hold everything together as her situation grows increasingly desperate and dangerous; Misty Upham is also terrific as her Mohawk partner-in-crime. I really liked both these films. Catch 'em if you can.

Also seen: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. But even though it was reviewed after its Cannes showing, I'm embargoed from commenting on it until the week of its release. I had to sign a release to that effect at the screening, and a promise is a promise. What happens if I break it is unclear, but, you know, I can't be bothered to find out.

The English Moon

Exactly four hundred years ago, on July 26 1609, the English astronomer Thomas Harriot turned his primitive telescope, a Dutch 'trunke', on the full Moon above Syon House in what is now West London, and made the above sketch. It doesn't look like much, but it's not only the first known sketch of the surface features of the Moon; it's also the first known sketch of astronomical features seen through a telescope - Galileo would begin drawing features on the Moon four months later. Over the next year, Harriot made detailed maps of what he could see of the Moon's geography and helped to usher in a revolution in human thought: heavenly bodies like the Moon were no longer remote lights, but places with local habitations, and names.


He lived a life eminently worthy of novelisation - he was a mathematician who worked for Sir Walter Raleigh, giving tutorials in navigation to Raleigh and his captains, helping to design their ships, and sailing to America on an expedition, where he spent time with the Algonquin Indians. When he returned to England, he worked for Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, popularly known as the Wizard Earl, because of his interest in science and alchemy - he knew the infamous astrologer John Dee, as well as Christopher Marlowe and John Donne. Possibly, Harriot was a member of the 'School of Night' mentioned in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost. In any event, he helped to tutor the Earl's children in the pleasantly stimulating company of other mathematicians and scientists at Syon House, run by the Earl's cousin, Sir Thomas Percy. Sir Thomas was involved in the Gunpowder Plot; after he and the leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, beseiged at Holbeache House in Warwickshire, were killed by a marksman with a single bullet, Harriot was briefly imprisoned, and the Earl of Northumberland was locked up in the Tower of London for seventeen years. Harriot returned to his studies, making the first observations of sunspots and founding the 'English' school of algebra, but remained obscure because he published little in his lifetime. Unlike the poor and vigorously ambitious Galileo, he enjoyed the leisurely life of an English gentleman, sharing his findings only with his close colleagues and his sponsors. He died in 1621 of skin cancer - some have speculated that it was caused by the tobacco popularised by Raleigh. A crater is named in his honour, on the far side of the Moon, first mapped in the 1960s by machines beyond the wildest dreams of the School of Night.

You can see Thomas Harriot's drawings, and much else, at a new exhibition at the Science Museum, London.

We See Them Differently

New Scientist on celebrity neurons:

Apparently not content with a talk show, a monthly glossy and, well, mega-stardom, Oprah Winfrey has also penetrated the human brain. When people see her picture or hear her name, specialised "Oprah neurons" fire away, new research suggests.

Other public figures shouldn't be jealous. Our heads are also flush with cells attuned to Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, and even Saddam Hussein.

Uh-oh. As soon as the PR industry gets wind of this someone will fund a programme to work out how to insert customised celebrity neurons into our brains. Or in the case of Saddam and other WoT notorieties, delete them.

In Living 3D

Now this is cute:

A new scanning technique allows expectant mothers to hold a life-size model of their unborn, developing child.
Data from ultrasound, CT and MRI scans are converted into 3D models, which can then be 'printed' as a plastic representation of the developing baby.

(From New Scientist.)

Although it could be taken too far: imagine growing up with representations of your foetal self in jars lovingly preserved amongst family photos. Wonder if it could be scaled up to model organs too? A 3D model of your brain would make a great desk ornament. Or why not model your heart, for the ultimate Valentine Day's gift?

Son Of Advertisments For Myself

Above is the finished cover of the US edition of The Quiet War, published by Pyr on September 22 ; just had word that hero editor Lou Anders has bought Gardens of the Sun too. Over here in the UK, the trade paperback of The Quiet War is about sold out, but there are still a few copies of the hardback to be had. But be not afraid: the mass-market paperback with be published September 10. I've just returned the corrected proofs of Gardens of the Sun to Gollancz; that's scheduled for October. I've seen a rough of the very lovely cover; hope to get hold of a copy of the finished version soon.

Personal Best

Here's a very simple but cool idea. SF Signal asked a bunch of people (including me) a cunningly constructed question: What are some of your favorite short stories in sf/f/h and what makes them so memorable? They've just posted a slew of excellent recommendations and thoughtful analyses, with links to free online versions of many of the selections. A great wiki-style anthology, bursting with all kinds of good stuff.

The Plot Thickens . . .

Last seen on the Kessel run, swinging past Io with its crew mostly incapacitated and its electrical systems frying in the radiation belts, but still hoping to unload its string on the Jovian metallic hydrogen smelting plants . . .