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The first image taken by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration's newest weather satellite GOES-14. So what? you might think. There are zillions of photographs of Earth from space, and this one's not even in colour. Well, I strongly urge you to click over to the NASA site, and check out the resolution of the large version for a little dose of awe.

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Two, Chapter One

Uranus's axis of rotation is tipped at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic: while the other planets in the Solar System spin around the sun like tops, Uranus rolls around it like a ball. When the refugees from the Quiet War arrived, Uranus's south pole was aimed at the sun, and the retinue of moons rotating about its equator inscribed paths like the circles of an archery target, with the blue-green ice giant and its slender graphite rings at the bull's-eye. One by one, a ragtag procession of ships dropped around it and swung out around one or another of the five largest moons in spiralling periapsis raise manoeuvres to achieve a common equatorial orbit. An erratic and shell-shocked flock of the dispossessed cleaving close in the lonely dark, chattering each to each, trying to decide what to do next, where they should make their home, how long they should stay.

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WTF

Amazon's Area 51.

Cover Pimpage

My World Just Got A Little Weirder

Taking the human beatbox to a new level:

So Okay, Let's Raise The Bar

"The uses of technology figure large in [Margaret Atwood's] new novel, The Year of the Flood; it is a richly imagined vision of the near-future and is a sister volume to an earlier Booker-shortlisted work, Oryx and Crake. Indeed, some of the characters overlap. Here, through the eyes of two female characters, Toby and Ren, we learn of the days that lead up to a horrible pandemic that ravages humanity – forget coughs and sneezes, here people melt. There is enviro-religion, overweening science, hideous sex clubs, nightmare food, grotesque cosmetic surgery. And there are also bees.

"If any of this were to come from a male sci-fi author, one’s heart might, perhaps, sink a little; we have never been short of fictional futuristic dystopias to choose from. But the prolific and acclaimed Atwood – she won the Booker in 2000 with The Blind Assassin and has been shortlisted on several other occasions – brings colourful humanity, formidable intelligence, and also some sly satirical humour to this vision. And, as with The Handmaid’s Tale, this is not sci-fi. It is, to use her term, “speculative fiction’’."

I don’t see Sinclair McKay's silly, snobbish broadbrush generalisation as an insult. I see it as a challenge.

(Atwood isn't in any way to blame for this breathless panegyric - although I have to say that enviro-religon is hardly a new idea. Been there, done that. As have many others in the 'sci-fi' field. (Atwood has incoporated enviro-religion hymns in her novel. Spookily, there's a fragment (I wimped out on writing an entire hymn; kudos to Atwood for going the whole hog - and giving a book tour with actors and choir!) of an enviro-religion hymn in Gardens of the Sun - set to Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'. No melting people, though. So 1970s.))

SF Writers on SF Films

Adopting the format of Mark Morris's Cinema Macabre, the British Science Fiction Association's Martin Lewis asked a bunch of British SF authors to write about their favourite SF film. The resulting booklet has just been distributed to members of the BSFA. Non-members can read Adam Robert's essay here. As for my selection:

For anyone like me, born just after the hinge of the last century, there’s only one candidate for best science-fiction film. Some may make quirky or contrarian choices -- Dark Star, say, or Alien3 -- and there are certainly cogent arguments to be made for films like Blade Runner or Children of Men (which I reckon to be the best sf film of this century, so far), but my personal favourite is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'll put up my essay on the web site in due course. Meanwhile, here's Terry Gilliam's brilliant condensation of Kubrick and Clarke's masterpiece. To paraphrase Brian Aldiss, one of sf's (especially British sf's) best and most enduring themes is hubris clobbered by nemesis.

Gardens Of The Sun, Chapter 7 (ii)

The room where Yuli was being questioned was as bright and sterile as an operating theatre. White walls, white floor, a ceiling that burned with bright and even white light. No shadows anywhere. Everything lit with stark particularity. The girl was encased in a machine like a coffin or an iron lung of the long ago, with only her head showing. An MRI cap clamped over her shaven scalp. Her skin pale and perfect as porcelain. Her eyes large and green. The lids were taped open and a delicate apparatus dripped artificial tears so that her corneas wouldn't dry out, and her head was secured so that she had to stare at the memo space hanging above her, which was presently showing a slow parade of faces while a lilting voice asked her to identify them. She said nothing. Her jaw was clenched and a muscle jumped and jumped in her cheek. It was the only indication that she was suffering a tremendous white-hot bowel-ripping agony. The machine was playing on her nervous system like a concert pianist, subtle ever-changing variations and arpeggios that ensured that she could not grow accustomed to the pain.

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Gardens Of The Sun, Chapter 7 (i)

Sri Hong-Owen didn’t hear about it until a news bite hit the nets: a brief announcement that Avernus’s daughter Yuli had been taken into custody following a collaborative action between the civilian administration of Dione and the military, soundtracked over video of a tall young girl dressed in an orange jumpsuit and sitting at a table in a bare room with two burly marines behind her. Propaganda no doubt meant to dishearten the resistance. No details about how or where she had been captured, or whether she had given up anything useful about her mother. Sri tried to reach out to Arvam Peixoto, but couldn’t get past an aide who, even though the line was strongly encrypted, refused to give her any information ‘for obvious security reasons’.

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The Last Word On The Moon

Norman Mailer's Moonfire (Taschen Books), a compendium of Mailer's prose (from Life magazine articles and his book, Of A Fire On The Moon) and hundreds of digitally-restored photographs and maps. Limited to 1969 copies, a snip at $650. Or why not splash out for the special edition?

No. 1958–1969 LUNAR ROCK EDITION

• Marc Newson designed this special edition of only 12 copies
• Each copy comes with a unique specimen of lunar rock, ranging in weight from a slice of the moon at 0.4 grams to 30.34 grams, one of the largest lunar meteorites ever found on Earth
• Specifications and prices available on request

Red Queen's Race Part XXXIV

Hmm. Didn't take long for reality to catch up with this. Gene fabrication and fakery no longer the province of SF but crime fiction. Wonder how long it'll take the crime genre to catch on?

Gardens Of The Sun, Sixth Chapter

Loc Ifrahim deserved a world of his own. Instead, they gave him a junkyard full of dead ships.

When the war had kicked off, most of the Outer ships in the Saturn System had been killed by encounters with singleships or drones or mines. Now, robot tugs were locating and intercepting these hulks, modifying the long and erratic paths they traced around Saturn, and nudging them towards Dione, where they were parked in equatorial orbit to await the attentions of the salvage gangs.

A dozen agencies commissioned and loosely controlled by the Three Powers Authority were attempting to reconstruct damaged infrastructure in the Saturn System, find gainful employment for tens of thousands of displaced Outers, set up Quisling administrations and police forces, harness the skills of Outer gene wizards, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, and reboot the economy using a centralised command-and-control model. All this required a robust transport network, and because it was too expensive to build ships from scratch, repair and refurbishment of those damaged in the war was an essential part of post-war reconstruction planning. Loc Ifrahim was responsible for civilian oversight of the salvage operation, reporting directly to the TPA Economic Commission. A key role in work that was crucial to the success of the occupation. Nevertheless, he felt short-changed and slighted.

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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.

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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.

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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)