Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (8)

RIP Alexander McQueen

Trout

(I've been writing all day. Sometimes it flows, sometimes you have to push. Today, there was a lot of pushing. So rather than post nothing at all, here's a review of an imaginary anthology of imaginary stories by an imaginary writer never lost for words, published a few years ago on April 1st at The SF Site.)

The Pan-Galactic Circus: Selected Stories by Kilgore Trout. NESFA Press, $28.00.

He is the most important writer of our genre, and the most infuriatingly obscure. Even Kilgore Trout did not know how many of his stories were published. He might, when his juices were flowing, write five or six a day (after all, this was a man who could complete a 60,000 word novel in the same time): all uncorrected first drafts, all of which he sent off without retaining carbon copies to dubious publishers who might, if he was lucky, return miniscule payments, but almost never complementary copies. Trout's own estimates ranged between 1000 -- 2000 published short stories; Old Bingo alone knows how many more simply vanished in the rancid offices of skin magazine publishers such as the notorious World Classics Library, or in the labyrinths of the Postal Service.

Despite his ease in a genre which is essentially American, Trout was born in the British island colony of Bermuda, in 1907. After the family moved to Dayton, Ohio, Trout became a naturalized American, graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School, and promptly vanished into America's seething void. He drifted through dozens of jobs, always menial, always temporary, writing science fiction in his spare time yet knowing almost nothing about it. Like Joe Di Maggio, he was a Natural. For most of his life, like an eccentric yet eternally hopeful astronomer beaming morse code to the stars, Trout sent his fictions into the ether, shucking ideas as casually as ordinary folk shuck skin cells. He married three times; his only son, Leo, served in Vietnam and then vanished too, renouncing his country and his father. And then, toward the end of Trout's life, things came good. He fell under the wing of the eccentric philanthropist, Eliot Rosewater, and some of his 209 novels began to be reprinted in respectable editions, beginning with Dell's brave reissue of Venus on the Half-Shell in 1975. His star grew. He became a cult, and then a movement. His fictions were proven to calm the distressed and help the most anguished souls make sense of the world, and shortly before his death he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

He is our Swift, our Voltaire, our Kipling. The satire of his tender, humane comic infernos rage against the follies of the twentieth century like no other; the faux-naive wisdom of his wise aliens is minted from genuine coin. And yet we will never know the true breadth of his work. Although there have been several anthologies published before (almost none of them overlapping contents), all have been flawed. For instance, the exhaustive phonetic anaysis of Professor Pierre Versins has proven without doubt that, with the exception of the eponymous story, all of stories collected in The Meaning of Life were faked up by a well known sf hack to meet the demand for the Troutian fictive panacea.

So it is a tribute to the meticulous work of the NESFA Press team that all of the stories collected in The Pan-Galactic Circus pass Versins' stringent tests. Here, patiently riddled from mountains of foxed and tattered skin magazines of the '50's and '60's is a pure seam of Trout. Only a few, such as the frothy 'The Meaning of Life' and the Rabelasian tragedy of 'The Dancing Fool', have been collected before. Beautifully presented, with the most exhaustive bibiliography yet compiled, this is the most essential collection of the decade.

Advance Notice

I've already posted the front of the cover for the Pyr edition of Gardens of the Sun; but here's the whole thing, front and back, ready for publication in March. Thanks once again to artist Sparth for such a dynamic and imposing piece of 'spaceship epicness' artwork. He's working on the cover for the Pyr edition of Cowboy Angels, out later this year, and the rough I've seen is pretty damn good too.

Readers can sample a big chunk of the novel for free. Here's the the first chapter, followed by a link to the rest:

A hundred murdered ships swung around Saturn in endless ellipses. Slender freighters and sturdy tugs. Shuttles that had once woven continuous and ever-changing paths between the inhabited moons. Spidery surface-to-orbit gigs. The golden crescent of a clipper, built by a cooperative just two years ago to ply between Saturn and Jupiter, falling like a forlorn fairy-tale moon past the glorious arch of the ring system. Casualties of a war recently ended.

Most were superficially intact but hopelessly compromised, AIs driven insane by demons disseminated by Brazilian spies, fusion motors and control and life-support systems toasted by microwave bursts or EMP mines. In the frantic hours after their ships had been killed, surviving crews and passengers had attempted to make repairs or signal for help with lasers pried from dead comms packages, or had composed with varying degrees of resignation, despair and anger last messages to their families and friends. In the freezing dark of her sleeping niche, aboard a freighter sliding past the butterscotch bands at Saturn’s equator, the poet Lexis Parrander had written in blood on the blank screen of her slate We are the dead.

They were the dead. No one responded to the distress signals they aimed at the inhabited moons or the ships of the enemy. Some zipped themselves into sleeping niches and took overdoses, or opened veins at their wrists, or fastened plastic bags over their heads. Others, hoping to survive until rescue came, pulled on pressure suits and willed themselves into the deep, slow sleep of hibernation. In one ship people fought and killed each other because there were not enough pressure suits to go around. In another, they huddled around an impedance heater lashed up from cable and fuel cells, a futile last stand against the advance of the implacable cold.

Many of the ships, fleeing towards Uranus when they’d been killed, had planned to pick up speed by gravity-assist manoeuvres around Saturn. Now they traced lonely paths that took them close around the gas giant and flung them out past the ring system and the orbits of the inner moons before reaching apogee and falling back. A few travelled even further outwards, past the orbits of Titan, Hyperion, or even Iapetus.

And here was the black arrowhead of a Brazilian singleship approaching the farthest point of an orbit that was steeply inclined above the equatorial plane and had taken it more than twenty million kilometres from Saturn, into the lonely realm where scattered swarms of tiny moons traced long and eccentric paths. Inside its sleek hull, a trickle charge from a lithium-ion battery kept its coffin-sized lifesystem at 4̊ Centigrade, and its mortally wounded pilot slept beyond the reach of any dream.

A spark of fusion flame flared in the starry black aft of the singleship. A ship was approaching: a robot tug that was mostly fuel tank and motor, drawing near and matching the eccentric axial spin of the crippled singleship with firecracker bursts from clusters of attitude jets until the two ships spun together like comically disproportionate but precisely synchronised ice-skaters. The tug sidled closer and made hard contact, docking with latches along the midline of the singleship’s flat belly. After running through a series of diagnostic checks, the tug killed its burden’s spin and turned it through a hundred and eighty degrees and fired up its big fusion motor. The blue-white spear of the exhaust stretched kilometres beyond the coupled ships, altering their delta vee and their high, wide orbit, pushing them towards Dione and rendezvous with the flagship of the Greater Brazilian fleet.

More after the jump...

Quiddity

At some point that day, Hitler returned to the relative comfort of his two-story farmhouse billet, opened this hardbound volume, and laid claim to its content in a notably timid hand, scribbling his name and place and date in the upper-right-hand corner of the inside cover in a space no larger than that of a postage stamp.

Eighty years later, Osborne's book attests to its frontline service. Blunted and brown, the corners curl inward like dried lemon rind. The spine dangles precariously from frayed linen tendons, exposing the thread-laced signatures like so many rows of rope-bound bones . . . When I opened this fragile volume in the Rare Book Reading Room in the Library of Congress, with the muffled sounds of late-morning traffic wafting through the hushed silence, a fine grit drizzled from its pages.

Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's Private Library

Eeeee!

So I was going to write something about ebooks, beginning with a note about the ongoing evolutionary process and Apple’s iPad, the latest but certainly not the last ereader to emerge from the thrashing recombinatory process of that particular gene pool, and then moving on to write about how this would affect the profession of writing - which is where I got bogged down in mechanics and economics that, frankly, bored me. And while I was still thinking about that, there was a brief but vicious turf war between Amazon and the publisher Macmillan in the US, in which Amazon delisted all of Macmillan’s titles, only to back down after a couple of days, possibly because it realised that hurting authors and readers didn’t make for good PR.

The spat was ostensibly over pricing, but actually it was about market control. Essentially, Amazon wants to become both wholesaler and bookseller, and to dictate recommended retail price of the stuff it sells. Macmillan, wanting to keep control of the stuff it produces, expects Amazon to act as an agency, supplying books to customers at prices dictated by Macmillan. There have been plenty of good analyses on various authors’ blogs of what happened and what it means; go check out these links if you want more detail.

It’s clear from the comments on those blog pieces is that an awful lot of people think that Amazon is the reader’s friend. No, it isn’t. Yes, it supplies a vast range of books at attractive prices: and in the case of ebooks delivers them to the reader’s Kindle directly and quickly. But it is also a very big capitalist enterprise that wants, quite naturally, to maximise profits and undercut the business models of its rivals. And it wants to do that selling as many Kindles as possible, by tempting customers with deeply discounted prices on ebooks and locking them into its supply chain.

It also became clear that many readers think that ebooks are too expensive. It doesn’t cost much to produce or to distribute them, the argument goes; in fact, duplicating ebooks is virtually free. So why aren’t they as cheap - if not cheaper - than paperbacks? Three reasons.

First, printing and distribution costs are a much smaller percentage of a book’s retail price than many imagine, and all the production work needed to publish a regular book - editing, design, typesetting, marketing and publicity - is also needed to produce an ebook. Second, publishers’ profit margins are a very small percentage of a book’s RRP. If they’re cut much further, the entire present-day publishing model will collapse.* Some think that will be a Good Thing, in the same way that some cock-eyed optimists thought the Internet would be full of nothing but stimulating creativity, high-minded democratic discourse, rainbows, and puppies; imagine trying to sort the good stuff from the fire-hydrant flood of the indifferent and bad if all authors were forced to self-publish through the kind of monopolistic content supplier that Amazon so dearly wants to become. Amongst other things, publishers are useful - albeit not always accurate - filters.

And third, books aren’t that expensive. No, really. My first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was published in1988, a paperback original in the US, a hardback in the UK. The hardback was published by Gollancz, and most of the print run was sold to libraries (it was had one of the last of Gollancz’s famous yellow dust jackets, designed for easy recognition by browsers). Its RRP was £11.95, and that was the price you paid in every bookshop in the land, under the old net book agreement. My most recent book, Gardens of the Sun, was also published by Gollancz, in 2009. The RRP of the hardback is £18.99. Compared to the 1988 price, that’s cheap. The retail price index of 2009, the best measure of high-street inflation, is about twice that of 1988, so the RRP of the 2009 hardback, at 1988 prices, should be £23.61. But wait - there’s no longer a net book agreement. Booksellers don’t have to sell the book at the RRP, and many don’t. Amazon sells it at £12.28. And then there’s the trade paperback edition - same content, published at same time, at an RRP of £14.99, discounted by Amazon to £8.99. Much less than the price of the hardback of my first novel, even without taking inflation into account. What a deal!

It’s a slightly different story when it comes to paperbacks. Hardback prices haven’t kept pace with inflation; paperback prices have. Back in the late 1980s, Gollancz didn’t publish paperbacks, but it licensed publication of a paperback edition of Four Hundred Billion Stars to Orbit. The RRP of that paperback, published in 1990, was £3.50. Gollancz reissued the title in paperback in 2009 at a RRP of £7.99, an increase that’s slightly greater than the increase in the retail price index. Still, you can buy a copy at the discounted price of £5.56, roughly the same as the adjusted-for-inflation price of the 1990 paperback.

So, books are already a good deal. Especially if you consider that newspapers have more than tripled in price over the same period. The only way ebooks can really make a big difference to readers’ pockets is if the price at publication is the same or less than the price of the mass-market paperback. That’s what Amazon wants; to get rid of the pricing structure that allows publishers to charge a bit more (but much less than they used to charge) to readers who want to get hold of a title when it first comes out. And that will cut into publisher’s margins, which means that books will have to be produced more cheaply, and most authors will have to take big cuts in payment. Boo-hoo, you might say. Why don’t they do it for free? For, you know, the love of writing. Simple. Authors want to write the best book they can. They can only do that if they have the time and space to do it properly. And the simplest way of ensuring they get that, at the moment, is if their books are sold for what they’re worth, not as content-bait. And if you’re not convinced by that, remember this, dear reader: you get what you pay for.

*the current publishing model is probably going to collapse anyway, but hopefully it's going to collapse slowly, and into a new and useful form, rather than rubble.

EDIT 02/02/10: this is also worth reading.

Currently reading: Hitler's Private Library, by Timothy W. Ryback (and yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of linking to Amazon, but it helps to pay for the blog).

Public Service Announcement

Some may call this Hugo Award pimpage, and maybe it is, but I'd like to suggest that I'm doing the SF community a service.

It's that time of year when nominations for Hugos are made, and I want to ask people who are able to vote - people who attended last year's WorldCon in Montreal, and supporting and attending members of this year's WorldCon in Melbourne - to vote for one of my novels. You see, I've never been on the short list for a fiction Hugo. Oh, my pal Kim Newman and I were shortlisted for the Hugo for best dramatic presentation, short-form, for our presentation of the Hugo ceremony in 2005, but none of my fiction has ever been shortlisted for a Hugo. And that's a shame.

Not for me, you understand. I can live with it. But listen: the fact that I haven't been shortlisted for a fiction award reflects badly on all the great authors who've never been shortlisted for a fiction Hugo either. People like J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Lester Del Rey, M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock, Tim Powers, Peter Straub, AE van Vogt. I mean, think about it. I really don't deserve to be in their company.

So listen up. Here's what can be done to remedy this terribly embarrassing situation. I have it on good authority that because it wasn't published in the USA until 2009 and because it didn't make the short list last year, the eligibility extension bylaw of the Hugo Awards allows my novel The Quiet War to be eligible for nomination for best novel in this year's Hugo Awards. So if you liked it enough to nominate it last year, please, think about doing so again. And if you've read it and liked it, but haven't yet nominated it, why not give it a shot? You could also nominate Gardens of the Sun, too, of course. Just in case.

I know that my continued failure to be shortlisted is an amazing honour. But really, I'm not worthy.

PS This novella is eligible too.

Exozoo

I really do like this list of the top fifteen fascinating exoplanets an awful lot. Not only for the pretty pictures (although they are awfully seductive) and the neatly encapsulated biographies (although they do contain some neat and startling stuff), but also because it shows how much we've learned since the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasus b, aka Bellerophon, was detected in 1995. As of this date, we know of some 429 extrasolar planets. They orbit main sequence stars, red dwarfs, binary stars, pulsars. We know of several stars with more than one planet - solar systems like our own. Most are the size of Jupiter and many orbit close to their parent star, but that's not surprising, given that current detection techniques favour finding that kind of planet. But as the list shows, there's enough variety to begin to create a rudimentary taxonomy of planets in other solar systems, and to understand how they formed and what they might look like.

And I'm especially interested in that, because I'm writing a novel set in and around planets of a particular nearby star, and I'd much rather have some data to ground my speculations than make up stuff out of whole cloth. When I started reading SF, in the 1960s, there were an awful lot of stories set on alien planets, but the planets were all much the same. They were all mostly habitable, all mostly extreme variations on Earth's geographical, climatological and ecological features; only a few writers, notably Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, and Larry Niven, tried to create wholly exotic yet believable alien worlds. It's a very different game now.

Something Old

(I'm trying to ramp up the first draft of a new novel right now. So in lieu of a post on e-books, which I haven't had the time to finish, here's a brief note on a Soviet-era SF novel, originally published in F&SF.)

Sannikov Land by Vladimir Obruchev, 1926.

If you like lost world novels, I guarantee that this obscure Russian classic will press all your buttons. There are encounters with prehistoric megafauna, beautiful and willing savage women, war between stone-age tribes, weird shamanistic rites, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and a boy's own enthusiasm for bagging big game. It's true that the characters are indistinguishably wooden mouthpieces for the author's opinions and the plot is pure pulp, but those faults are redeemed by the novel's rigorous scientific sensibility.

Obruchev was a geologist and academician, high in the former USSR's scientific hierarchy (amongst other things he had a mineral, a mountain, and a crater on the Moon named after him). His descriptions of the harsh beauty of the Russian Arctic Circle, and of the privations experienced by his explorers, are crammed with telling detail; given the abundance of frozen mammoths in Siberia, one suspects that he may have been drawing on experience when recommending roast mammoth trunk as a particular delicacy. There are lyrical infodumps about geology and prehistoric fauna; the lost land, nestled in a vast Arctic volcano, is drawn with evocative vermisilitude.

Sannikov Land has been long out-of-print -- the edition I have is an English translation published in 1955 by the Foreign Languages Publishing Association of Moscow -- and as one of a series of 'Soviet Literature for Young People', it was a small part of the former USSR's Cold War arsenal. When it was published, it was probably illegal, or at least ever-so slightly dangerous, to own it in the USA, so it may be hard to find. But believe me, the search will be worthwhile. I'm off to look for Obruchev's other scientific romance, Plutonia. It's a hollow-earth story, and I can't wait to read it.*

*I eventually tracked down a copy owned by China Mieville. He hadn't read Sannikov Land, so we made an equitable trade.

Murderous George

(It's not really Werner Hertzog, of course, but it is a clever and very funny parody. To appreciate it properly, you probably need to have seen his documentary Grizzly Man, in which Hertzog contrasts his view of nature as grim, unreasoning and full of horror with the unbalanced optimism of the self-styled grizzly man, Timothy Treadwell, who was eaten by one of the bears he mistakenly believed he was protecting. Come to think of it, this isn't so much a parody: it's a hard SF version of the children's story.)

My Books

As far as I’m concerned, a novel is finished when I type the last full stop of the last sentence of the last draft. But it’s also the beginning of another process. The manuscript goes off to the editor and comes back with suggestions for changes and corrections and fixes; when those have been dealt with, there’s the copy-editing and proofreading stages to go through. After that, the file goes off to the printers, where the novel becomes a mass-produced object. What was once a singular object is duplicated, multiplied. Turned into the books in the bookshops, and the warehouses of the internet merchants. The books in the hands of readers. And the complimentary copies that arrive at the author’s door in hefty courier boxes internally armoured with plastic membrane.

The complimentary copies arrive long after that final full stop was typed, and sometimes many years after the vague pricking of the first ideas that slowly grew, sentence by sentence, page by page, into the fully-fledged novel. The actual book seems to bear little relation to that solitary activity: the days and weeks and months spent alone in front of the computer screen or bent over a MSS, blemishing its crisp laser-printed pages with red ink. A time already receeding in memory, because I’m at work on my next novel, or at least, thinking about how to get started. The paper brick of the published book is like a memento or postcard from some half-remembered holiday of another lifetime.

And it also, despite the many drafts, the editing and copy-editing and proofreading, contains mistakes. Typographic errors, clumsy phrasing and factual goofs that will need to be corrected for the paperback and other editions. So at some point the thing has to be opened and read: a grim but necessary process.

Meanwhile, the book is out there, in the world. While I was writing it, I was in charge. But now it’s out of my control. It has a life of its own. It’s interrogated in reviews. I see copies in bookshops (and must supress the urge to turn it face out). Very occasionally I see a copy in the hands of a reader (and must supress the urge to introduce myself). I dedicate and sign copies at bookshop events and at conventions: I even make my mark in the dusty copies disinterred one by one from a suitcase or rucksack by dealers, who ask for ‘just the signature’. For the value of a book is increased by the presence of the author’s signature on the flyleaf: the signature that’s a personalising touch for readers who like or even love the book for what it contains - for its story and characters - also turns it into a fetish object for collectors of first editions.

First publication is not the end of the story of the book. Afterwards, there’s the mass-market paperback, and, over the years, a trickle of foreign editions and (sometimes) new editions from the original publisher. They mount up. Like many authors, I have shelves packed with my own books (none of them signed - do any authors sign their own copies of their own books?). And there are also the anthologies which contain one of my stories, and the books by other people, for which I’ve written an introduction . . . And I have extra copies of all of my books, too.


Most of each book’s first edition is given away, and so are some of the paperbacks. But what to do with the rest of the paperbacks, not to mention the complimentary copies of the American edition, and of the foreign reprints? Some are stacked under the bookshelves in my study, but that marginal space filled up long ago. Some are shelved in a cupboard, and the cupboard is also full. The rest are in boxes in my office, in other cupboards, at the bottom of wardrobes, under beds. It’s said that you can’t have too many books. But I’m beginning to think that I may have too many copies of my own books. Or maybe I need to board up the attic, and turn it into a book depository...

Pirated

There's a lot of fuss about pirating scanned and electronic copies of books right now. And it's not an activity I condone. Sharing a book with friends is one thing; turning a profit on illigitimately obtained copies is quite another. But the image above is of a very special case of piracy involving one of my short stories.

Some ten years ago, the French newspaper Le Monde published as fold-out supplements several long science-fiction stories. One of them was mine: 'Second Skin'. A couple of months after it was published, I was invited to a small sf convention in France, and came across an entrepreneur selling for a few francs each little pamphlets he'd made up from those supplements. The pages are handcut and bound in handcut blue card, and pasted to the front were cutouts of what I assume is the advertisment for the supplement.

Strictly speaking, I suppose, it isn't a pirated edition. I'd already been paid for the reprint of the story. The entrepreneur had paid for copies of the newspaper, and enhanced the value of supplement. He turned a small profit from his labours and I received several copies of a unique artifact. Result: a small increase in human happiness.

Blish

If history teaches us one thing, it’s that almost all authors writing now will be forgotten in a hundred years time, and even if their books linger in some vast long-tail electronic library, few will read them. Most authors, and most books, achieve obscurity far sooner than that, of course, but best-selling status is no guarantee of long-term survival. A hundred years ago, Marie Correlli was the most widely-read author of her time, so wealthy that she paid for restoration of many properties in her adopted home of Stratford-upon-Avon and imported a gondola and a gondolier from Venice, so that she could be poled about the Avon. But who now reads A Mighty Atom or The Sorrows of Satan?

Every author knows this, but most nuture a frail but stubborn fantasy that they’ll somehow dodge the bullet. Even those who don’t trouble the bestselling charts (ie most of us) hope that they will, like Herman Melville, who barely earned $10,000 from his books during his lifetime, achieve posthumous recognition. A vain and foolish hope, of course, but apart from the very few pragmatic authors who write only to pay the electricity bill it’s one most cling to. So it’s always a salutary lesson to discover that a favourite writer is slipping away into obscurity, which brings me to one of my favourite science-fiction authors, James Blish.


I was a big fan of Blish’s work back when I was at the age where I read almost nothing but science fiction. My other abiding interest was science, especially the biological sciences, and Blish, who worked as a technician in an Army medical lab during the Second World War, and studied zoology at Columbia University, not only understood how scientists thought and worked, but was one of the first sf authors to tackle the ramifications of molecular biology, genetics, and Darwinian evolution. And he put his biological knowledge to good use when he invented the science of pantropy, the deliberate modification of the standard human form to adapt it to conditions on other planets, and one of the stories that explores its implications, ‘Surface Tension’ (collected in The Seedling Stars), is one of my all-time favourites, and in its description of an unlikely spaceship toiling from puddle to puddle on a bleak waterworld, contains one of my all-time moments of pure sense of wonder:

Under the two moons of Hydrot, and under the eternal stars, the two-inch wooden spaceship and its microscopic cargo toiled down the slope towards the drying little rivulet.

I also delighted in the kind of obscure knowledge that salted Blish’s fiction, no more so than in his novels about the release of Satan and his hordes from Hell, and the apocalyptic war that follows, Black Easter and The Day After Judgement, in which magic is treated as an exact science.

At that time, the early seventies, most of Blish’s work could be found in the library, or in paperback. He was one of the major shapers of modern science fiction, and one of the first sf writers with a strong interest in literature and modernism (he admired and championed the work of James Joyce, which is why I ended up reading Ulysses at age seventeen, and doing my best to read Finnegans Wake). He was one of the authors of science fiction’s so-called Golden Age. He joined the Futurians, a feisty group of New York sf fans whose other members included Damon Knight, C.M. Kornbluth, and Fredrik Pohl. He was a regular contributor to the pulps who amped up his game and wrote a series of stories about cities flying about the galaxy like pollinating bees that he stitched into a novel, Earthman, Come Home: the cornerstone of the Okie series, and a major influence on the revivalists of space opera in the 1990s. Another novel, A Case of Conscience, won the Hugo for best novel in 1959. Several of his short stories are regarded as classics; he was one of the first serious science fiction critics; and he wrote the first original Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die, and numerous novelisations of the original TV scripts. And so on, and so on.

But now, a little over thirty years after his death, almost all of his books have fallen out of print; only the Okie series, collected as Cities in Flight, is readily available. It’s true that Blish never quite shook off his pulp origins, that his plots are driven by hectic action and incident, that his characters - even the redoubtable Major Amalfi, of the flying Okie city of New York, New York - aren’t as fully rounded as they should be, and tend to lapse into comic- book cliche. And it’s also true that his work could sometimes be acerbic and chilly, and that he didn’t wear his learning lightly, had no time for popular culture (he dismissed pop music as ‘Beatles and other Coleoptera’), and suffered a fall in the standard of his later work. But he doesn’t, I think, and not just because of the shiver of presentiment it engenders in me, deserve his present obscurity. Maybe in a few years, or ten, or a hundred, that will change.



Essential short stories:
‘A Work of Art’
‘Beep’
‘Common Time’
‘How Beautiful, With Banners’
‘Surface Tension’

Essential novels:
Jack of Eagles
Fallen Star

Cities in Flight:
They Shall Have Stars
A Life For the Stars
Earthman, Come Home
A Clash of Cymbals

After Such Knowledge:
Dr Mirabilis
A Case of Conscience
Black Easter
The Day After Judgement

UPDATE: NESFA Press, that haven of good deeds in a naughty world, have published two reprint collections of Blish's work, Flights of Eagles, and Works of Art.

Research

Influence

If influences catch you early in life, then I reckon I owe a good deal of my career to Burke Publishing Co, a London publishing firm so thoroughly vanished that I couldn't find them on Google (were they absorbed by one of the conglomerates, or did they just evaporate - does anyone know?). First, because they published Maguerite Desmurger's Stories From Greek History, one of the first books I owned. It was given to to me as the Vicar's Prize at my primary school (no big deal, this; there were only 40 children in the whole school, and sooner or later almost everyone of them won some kind of prize). I was nine. I still have it. And it's a lovely little book, retelling with wit and concision stories of Sparta and Croesus, the Medes and Persians, the Athenian philosphers, and Alexander the Great. It showed me that history wasn't a collection of dry facts, revealed the ancient world to be another country with its own customs and habits, and taught me how to shape a story, and how to use the telling detail. And in the story of Alexander, it introduced me to that classic trope, the tragic hero.


Burke also published Patrick Moore, the British amateur astronomer who has done more than anyone else in this country to popularise the science. His TV programme, The Sky at Night, was first broadcast in 1957 and he is still featured on it today; he was one of the BBC's commentators for the Apollo 11 moon landing; and he wrote juvenile science-fiction novels. And he was a prolific novelist. His first titles, beginning with The Master of the Moon (1952) were published by another long-lost outfit, the Hardback Museum Press, but Burke published the novels featuring his best-known hero, sixteen year old astronaut Maurice Grey (Mission to Mars, The Domes of Mars, The Voices of Mars, Raiders of Mars, Peril on Mars). I read them all, and everything else of Moore's that I could find in the local library. They are very old-fashioned (even for the 1950s and 1960s) tales of derring-do by upright British chaps, and the prose is at best serviceable, but they were, for their time, scientifically accurate and stirred in me the first feelings of that good old sense of wonder. How could I not resist something like this, the opening of Wanderer in Space?

It was full Earth. The brilliant, bluish radiance flooded down upon the bleak landscape of the moon, catching the tops of the crater-walls abd making the floors look like pools of ink; there were no half-lights, and everything was either brightly lit or else totally dark. The sky seemed ablaze with stars, shining steadily and without the slightest sign of twinkle.

By the way, the cover of Wanderer in Space is by well-known space artist David Hardy.

Traction

Some authors blast through their first drafts as if they're taking dictation. Shakespeare famously never blotted his copybook. William Golding wrote the first draft of his Booker-winning novel Rites of Passage in a month (although this was a break from the long and arduous task of completing Darkness Visible). Other authors patiently accrete their novels one polished chapter at a time until they're done. That's not for me. I labour away at a first draft for months and months and then more or less rip it up and start again. Luckily, I love revising.

Although I did once write the first draft of a novel in a month. A chapter a day every day until it was done. At the time it was a straight crime novel, set in the area where I lived. I did it for fun, but as I was an SF writer I didn't have anywhere to place it and I also had other books to write: books I'd already been paid to write. But after that first draft had been sitting in a folder for a couple of years, my then publishers arm-wrestled me into writing near future thrillers because they wanted to get out of the (according to them) dead-end no-hope SF business. So I took out the MSS and spent six months completely revising it, transcribing its setting to a near future London half-wrecked by terrorism, and it was published as Whole Wide World on September 9th 2001. So it goes.

Right now, I'm in the first stages of first draft limbo, which follows on from a long and shapeless period in which I made scads of notes and did about a metric ton of aimless research. And then I threw most of the notes and the research away, but at least it let me know what the thing isn't about. After that, I spent a few weeks footling around, trying out this and that move, trying to find the first foot- and handholds on the long climb upward to the nirvana of the last page.

Now, I have a rough idea of the shape of the plot. I've a fix on two of the main characters and after a couple of weeks I think I've got an idea or two about the third. For one thing, I know now that he's a first-person narrator, which after several false starts came as something of a surprise. Still, as John Cheever used to tell his creative writing students, you can't just jump into first-person narration; it has to be earned. Ahead of me lie all kinds of false starts, dead-ends, pointless detours, horrible mistakes, and futile attempts to avoid the sucking pits of cliche. One thing I've learned from writing novels is that writing the next one isn't easier. Wouldn't have it any other way.

Furnished Early In Books

It's a new year and a new decade (psychologically at least) so let's start over from the beginning. Here I am, aged three or thereabouts, being introduced to the world of books by my uncle (and also, if you look closely at his right hand, to cigarette smoking: the books took but the cigarettes didn't). Oh sure, it isn't the first book I encountered, but it's the first record of my book-addiction. I can't remember what that book is, and don't have the Bladerunner-style software to resolve the cover - is that a running dog, or the silhouette of a brontosaurus? Whatever it is, I'm fascinated by it. I'm hooked.

(It's summer 1958, in my grandmother's garden. More than fifty years ago. But the first commercial nuclear power station had begun operation in Britain two years before; it was a year after Francis Crick had laid out the 'central dogma' - the relationship between DNA, RNA, and proteins that underpins molecular biology - and the replication mechanism of DNA's double helix had just been confirmed by the Meselson-Stahl experiment; Christopher Cockerell had just unveiled the first hovercraft; there were more households owning TVs than radio-only households; IBM had just made its first computer; there were Russian and American satellites in orbit.

(In short, just as I was learning to enjoy and understand books, modernity was everywhere. It was only natural to grow up expecting aircars, unlimited electrical power, space stations, and moonbases to be just around the corner.)

Signing Off For 2009

Sung by Judy Garland to Margaret O'Brien in the 1944 film Meet Me In St Louis. If you think this is just a tad miserablist, check out the original lyrics:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork,
Next year we will all be living in New York.

No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.

But at least we all will be together, if the Fates allow,
From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Garland and director Vincent Minnelli pressured songwriter Hugh Martin into changing the lyrics; later, Frank Sinatra had him revise the line 'Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow' to 'Hang a shining star upon the highest bough', the version probably best known now. But this is the original and best, poignant yet imbued with a fragile hope, and absolutely perfect in its historical context. America was at war. When the song was released as a single, it was a huge hit with US troops; when Judy Garland sang it to soldiers in the Hollywood Canteen, many were reduced to tears.

So, I'm done for the year, apart from some fettling on notes for a future project. Take care. Business resumes in the Year We Make Contact.

Science Top Ten

In some respects the past ten years haven’t been great, as far as science is concerned. George W. Bush announced an ambitious plan to send a manned mission to Mars, but provided no money. In 2003 the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Using intelligent design, anti-evolutionary forces tried to smuggle their untruths in school curricula. There was a popular and sometimes hysterical campaign against the MMR vaccine, based on a single discredited study, that resulted in outbreaks of measles in the US and UK as herd immunity declined. Despite an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence, climate-change skeptics claimed that there was no link between anthropogenically-generated carbon dioxide and global warming or denied that any warming was taking place, and mounted ad hominem attacks on climate scientists. Although their case is largely supported by myths and untruths rebutted by many sources, rather than papers in peer-reviewed journals, millions chose to believe them and 2009 was dubbed 'the year of the skeptic'. And just this month the UK government announced swingeing cuts in the funding of scientific research.

But to counterbalance all this gloom, there was a plethora of fantastic scientific discoveries and advances, too. Here’s my personal top ten.

10. Research into medical use of stem cells, which can renew themselves through division and differentiate into all kinds of specialised cells, was attacked by prolife groups in the US because although it promised to be the basis of many new medical treatments, it depended in part on harvesting cells from aborted fetuses. However, recent research has shown that cells taken from adults can be deprogrammed and returned to a primal state from which they can be encouraged to develop into muscle, skin or brain cells and used in research or to replace damaged or diseased tissues.

9. Pluto lost its planetary status after many objects similar to it were discovered in the Kuiper Belt, some sharing the region through which it orbits. Despite its debased status, Earth-based observations suggest that Pluto is more active than previously believed: it possesses a thin, transitory atmosphere replenished during the summer by geysers of nitrogen gas, and unlike Earth's atmosphere temperatures rise with altitude.

8. The BioBricks Foundation has developed a catalogue of standardised biological parts that treats the genetically-based properties of organisms as plug-and-play features. Researchers, many of them citizen scientists, can order off-the-shelf modules and insert them into their organism of choice, offering the potential of fast, cheap, open-wetware genetic engineering.

7. Paleontologists discovered in late Devonian rocks a fossil that bridges the transition between fish and amphibians, and underscores the predictive powers of evolutionary science. Named Tiktaalik roseae, it possesses fins whose bone patterns share features with tetrapod limbs - the basis of animal life on land, an incredibly important part in the jigsaw of the evolution of life on Earth.

6. After a long hiatus, the Large Hadron Collider is now up and running, and smashing protons together at energies not seen in the universe since the Big Bang. I'd put it higher up the list if I was as interested in fundamental particles and the deepest laws of nature as I should be, but it's definitely a impressive example of international cooperation.


5. The first exoplanets were discovered towards the end of the twentieth century, but in the past few years the first images of planets around other stars have been captured. One, roughly the size of Jupiter, orbits Fomalhaut (pictured); three more orbit the star HR 8799; another orbits the young star Beta Pictoris. Astronomers have even predicted the weather on two hot gas giants - since they are tidally locked to their stars but display even temperatures across their day- and night-sides, they must be racked by roaring winds that drive all the way around their circumferences and redistribute heat from their day-sides.


4. The two rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars and quickly discovered unequivocal evidence that there had once been liquid water on the surface. High-resolution images taken by the HiRISE instrument of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed deposits on the beds of ancient dry lakes, and the shoreline of an ancient ocean that capped the northern hemisphere. And the Phoenix surveyor landed near the north pole and tasted Martian ice, and imaged what may have been blobs of liquid water on its legs (pictured). Phoenix succumbed to the Martian winter but the MRO is still working in orbit, and the two rovers are still active on the surface, although Spirit has become stuck in a sand trap and may not be able to escape. The Moon’s soil, previously thought to be bone-dry, was found to contain traces of water, thought to be produced by interaction of hydrogen ions in the solar wind and oxygen in minerals. And last month the LCROSS mission crashed a rocket stage and a probe into a permanently shadowed crater at the Moon’s south pole and produced a plume of material that contained water; there’s an unknown amount of water ice trapped in those shadows, and at -240 degrees centigrade they're the coldest known places in the Solar System.

3. New research on an ancient hominin species, Ardipithecus ramidus, discovered in 1994, has suggested that it may be the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimpanzees. And the hominin family tree had been extended by the discovery, in caves in a small and remote island in Java, the bones of a new species, Homo floresiensi, that was just a metre high, and lived as recently as 8000 years ago. A draft genome of our extinct near cousins Homo neanderthalensis has been produced, and shows that they shared with us the FOXP2 gene, implicated in language skills.

2. The Cassini-Huygens probe entered into orbit around Saturn and began to send thousands of stunning images and reams of data back to Earth. The Huygens probe successfully landed on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and revealed that it was surprisingly Earthlike, with riverine valleys and pebbles of ice scattered across what may have been a dry lake bed. Later, Cassini mapped Titan’s previously hidden surface and discovered lakes of liquid methane and ethane, and a hydrological cycle, including rain and fog, much like Earth’s, albeit based on liquid hydrocarbons rather than water. And Cassini also discovered that Enceladus, a moon just 500 kilometres across, was spewing jets of water ice and vapour from cracks in its south pole (pictured), hinting that liquid water lay beneath the tiny moon’s frozen surface.

1. In 2001, academic researchers in the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and Craig Venter’s biomedical research company, Celera, put aside their
differences and published the first drafts of the complete human genome. One surprise was the paltry number of protein coding genes; another was the amount of so-called junk DNA, and the fact it wasn’t randomly distributed across the genome but tended to cluster around functional genes, suggesting some as yet unknown function; yet another was more than 100 genes seem to be bacterial in origin, acquired by some kind of horizontal transfer. The first drafts also showed that humans are 99.9% identical, and there is no scientific basis for precise racial categorisation. Since then, refinements have filled in gaps, and all kinds of functions have been to assigned to genes, ushering in a new biomedical era.

Random Linkage 19/12/09

Glint of Sunlight Confirms Liquid in Northern Lake District of Titan
'NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft has captured the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan, confirming the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, lake-shaped basins. '

Enceladus plume is half ice
'As much as 50% of the plume shooting out of geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus could be ice, a researcher revealed yesterday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.'
(No misty caves, then, but this doesn't rule out liquid water - unless the clatherate champions are right...)

Searching for Activity on Saturn’s Mid-size Moons
'Like midnight taggers, Saturn’s moons Dione, Tethys, Mimas and Rhea may be spraying their unique signatures all over Saturn’s environment when no one’s looking. Or maybe not; they’ve never been caught in the act, unlike their sibling moon Enceladus, which has been repeatedly observed shooting a dramatic plume of ice vapor high above its surface.
'Other than Enceladus, there are just a handful of active moons in the solar system. Icy geysers shoot from the surface of Neptune’s Triton and Jupiter’s Io is wildly alive with molten sulfur volcanoes. There is some evidence that Jupiter’s Europa may be active, and a future mission is being planned to take a closer look. These rare worlds provide a window on the processes that shape different planetary environments.'
(Well, you can count out Rhea, actually - that’s officially as dead as a doornail. But if there is any evidence of activity on the other large inner moons, it changes the entire game (and makes the need for a new mission to Saturn even more urgent)).

Hubble Finds Smallest Kuiper Belt Object Ever Seen
'Like finding a needle in a haystack, the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the smallest object ever seen in visible light in the Kuiper Belt. While Hubble didn't image this KBO directly, its detection is still quite impressive. The object is only 975 meters (3,200 feet)across and a whopping 6.7 billion kilometers (4.2 billion miles) away. The smallest Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) seen previously in reflected light is roughly 48 km (30 miles) across, or 50 times larger. This provides the first observational evidence for a population of comet-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt.'

Astronomers Find Super-Earth Orbiting Red Dwarf Star; May Have Atmosphere
'Astronomers announced that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. They found the distant planet with a small fleet of ground-based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have in their backyards. Although the super-Earth is too hot to sustain life, the discovery shows that current, ground-based technologies are capable of finding almost-Earth-sized planets in warm, life-friendly orbits.'
(Atmosphere is most likely a raging hell of superheated steam, but it’s still an impressive result. How hard would it be for backyard astronomers to set up their own networks and search for exoEarths?)

Mammals May Be Nearly Half Way Toward Mass Extinction
'If the planet is headed for another mass extinction like the previous five, each of which wiped out more than 75 percent of all species on the planet, then North American mammals are one-fifth to one-half the way there, according to a University of California, Berkeley, and Pennsylvania State University analysis.'
(Next: either the age of the birds, or the return of the reptiles. And this before climate change really kicks in.)

Probabilistic assessment of sea level during the last interglacial stage
'With polar temperatures ~3–5 ̊C warmer than today, the last interglacial stage (~125 kyr ago) serves as a partial analogue for 1–2 ̊C global warming scenarios. Geological records from several sites indicate that local sea levels during the last interglacial were higher than today, but because local sea levels differ from global sea level, accurately reconstructing past global sea level requires an integrated analysis of globally distributed data sets. Here we present an extensive compilation of local sea level indicators and a statistical approach for estimating global sea level, local sea levels, ice sheet volumes and their associated uncertainties. We find a 95% probability that global sea level peaked at least 6.6 m higher than today during the last interglacial; it is likely (67% probability) to have exceeded 8.0 m but is unlikely (33% probability) to have exceeded 9.4 m. When global sea level was close to its current level (?-10 m), the millennial average rate of global sea level rise is very likely to have exceeded 5.6 m kyr-1 but is unlikely to have exceeded 9.2 m kyr-1. Our analysis extends previous last interglacial sea level studies by integrating literature observations within a probabilistic framework that accounts for the physics of sea level change. The results highlight the long-term vulnerability of ice sheets to even relatively low levels of sustained global warming.'
(In other words, don’t buy property less than 6 metres above present sea level. But do buy a boat. Oh yeah, currently some 145 million people live within one metre of current sea levels.)

Fiction/Science

The old pulp versions of scientists - the lone self-funded genius, with or without a daughter and her usefully heroic boyfriend, or the muscular university academic as adept at fighting administrators as villains chasing the unobtanium only he can find, or the geek working in undisturbed obscurity in some academic institution who stumbles on some Big Secret - no longer cut the mustard, realitywise. Now that most of science’s low-hanging fruit has been picked, few important questions still unsolved can't be cracked unless you deploy teams of scientists using extremely expensive toys. Big problems require big science, underwritten by one or more governments: the Hadron collider, the Hubble telescope, the Cassini probe, the ranks of automated sequencers used to decode the human genome. And the huge budgets and complex equipment deployed by big science require teams of administrators, technicians, engineers and computer programmers as well as cadres of scientists. Published papers are no longer the work of one or two authors, but of twenty, or a hundred, or five hundred (the current record holder appears to be a physics paper with 2512 authors*).

So real stories about current science might best be framed as soap-operatic epics about political wrangling between the principle investigators, intrigues and jealousies amongst their minions, and desperate races between rival teams to be first to acquire and publish important results that crucially illuminates an important problem. Or, since big, government-funded civilian science is shadowed by government-funded military research and science funded by big business, the kind of research that flourishes outside the public gaze, you could write truly baroque contemporary Cold-War-style espionage thrillers about dark- or stealth-net science that’s gone way over the edge of rationality. Or, pushing current trends just a little, how about underworld science (Afghani druglords diversifying into biotech), or open-source science (citizen scientists getting hold of powerful and easy to use technologies based on the BioBricks principle), or virtual science (using computer modelling and virtual worlds to uncover truths through heuristic best-fit guesses rather than experimental testing)?

And then there’s the dystopian zero of anti-science science, in which the deniers, anti-Darwinists, flat-Earthers and their allies and camp followers have triumphed, shut down the laboratories and universities, and rolled back history to a point way before the Age of Enlightenment . . .


*Aleph et al. 2006. Precision electroweak measurements on the Z resonance. Physics Reports, 427[5-6]: 257-454.