Reverse Alchemy

Despite the ex cathedera tone of someone looking down from the heights of literature on the swampy plain of 'commercial fiction', Philip Reeve's diatribe against steampunk nails the abiding sin of all genres - too often the golden coin of originality is turned into a ton of commercial tin.

EDIT: Diatribe deleted on Reeve's site but still available here.

Ice and Fire

It's pretty much a golden age for exobiologists. Once the preserve of cranks, science fiction writers and supermarket tabloids, the search for evidence of life on other planets is may still be based on speculation and extrapolation rather than actual hard evidence, but it's now a sober and respectable area of legimate scientific research, covered soberly and respectfully in popular science magazines and broadsheet newspapers.

Latest headlines concern findings by the Cassini spacecraft: it seems that not only is hydrogen in Titan's atmosphere flowing down to the moon's surface and disappearing, but there's a distinct lack of acetylene at the surface, too; acetylene should be formed from methane and ethane and snow out onto the surface, but so far it hasn't been detected. Most likely, the disappearance of hydrogen and low levels of acetylene are due to some kind of catalytic chemical process, but exobiologists have pointed out that it could be the signature of some form of biological activity. The surface of Titan is far too cold to support any form of life that uses water as a solvent, but there's abundant liquid methane and ethane, which rains out of the atmosphere, carves rivers into the surface, and forms lakes and seas. Acetylene would be the best energy source for life based on liquid methane, which would consume hydrogen much as we consume oxygen. Right now, on Titan, some frigid, curious slime mould could be edging its way with infinite patience across a pebbly beach towards the Huygens lander, wondering if it's evidence for life above the eternal clouds.

Jupiter's moon Io is one the least likely venues for life in the Solar System. Although it's only a little larger than Earth's moon, it exhibits extremes of geological activity. Tidal effects stretch and flex its crust, and the resulting friction generates enough heat to power volcanoes that spew molten sulphur at temperatures of over 1600 degrees Centigrade. Areas between the volcanoes are covered with sulphur dioxide snow chilled to -130 degrees C, almost all water has long ago been driven off, and besides all that, it's drenched in Jupiter's radiation fields. But astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch has pointed out that Io would have possessed plenty of water when it first formed, and if life arose before the water was blasted away by Jupiter's radiation, it could have retreated underground, into rocks or even lava tubes, which would provide protection from radiation and conserve and moisture and nutrients (and would be ideal homes for any intrepid human colonists).

It's unlikely, but not impossible. Extremophile bacteria, the poster children of exobiology, exploit all kinds of forbidding niches on Earth, from hydrothermal vents to Antarctic dry valleys, and lithotrophic extremophiles extend the biosphere deep into the Earth's crust, obtaining energy from all kinds of organic and inorganic sources. The oddest example is Desulfurodis audaxviator, discovered in 2008 deep in a South African gold mine. It survives without light or oxygen, using energy generated by the radioactive decay of uranium and other elements in the surrounding rock to drive its thrifty metabolism. When you contemplate this microscopic, one-species, completely self-sufficient ecosystem, life on Io or Titan doesn't seem so unlikely after all.

O Brave New World

Surfacing from working on the ongoing (about halfway through the second draft, killing my darlings like there's no tomorrow), here's the cover for the UK mass-market paperback of Gardens of the Sun. It isn't published until August, but you can preorder it right now. The artwork is by the terrific space artist Don Dixon - how great is that? You can see the original here, and do check out everything else too, while you're there. It shows Uranus from the surface of Miranda, its strangest moon - and one of the strangest moons in the Solar System (which is saying a lot). From the novel:

Most of Uranus’s thirty-plus moons were small chunks of ice or carbonaceous material. One group orbited just outside the outer edge of the ring system; another occupied distant and irregular orbits, wanderers captured by Uranus’s gravitational field. And between these two shoals of tiny moons were five massive enough to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium, contracting into spheres under the force of their own gravitational fields. Four were much alike, balls of dirty ice wrapped around silicate cores, spattered with impact craters, dusted by dark materials flung outward by the chains of collisions that had created the ring system, fractured by varying degrees of ancient geological activity. But the smallest of the larger moons, Miranda, was not only the strangest of Uranus’s family of satellites, it was one of the strangest moons in the Solar System: a patchwork of cratered, banded and ridged terrains broken by mountainous ridges and monstrous fault canyons up to twenty kilometres deep, as if hammered together from pieces of half a dozen different bodies by some inept god who’d afterwards slashed and hacked at his botched creation in a fit of rage. An early theory about its formation suggested that it had been shattered several times by massive impacts and the larger fragments had randomly clumped together, exposing sections of the core in some places and sections of the original surface in others, but later research showed that its haphazard topography was the result of intense geological activity driven by tidal heating at a time in the deep past when it had possessed a far more eccentric orbit.

Stretched and kneaded every time it swung close around Uranus, Miranda had bubbled and blistered and cracked like a snowball wrapped around a hot coal. Eruptions of icy magma had flooded older terrain and created smooth plains. Coronae, huge domes edged with concentric patterns of ridges and grooves, had grown at the top of upwellings of warm ice that penetrated and deformed overlying strata. And after it had settled into its present orbit, it had cooled and frozen through and through. Its surface had contracted and tectonic activity had scored it with deep grabens formed by extensional faulting, while compressional strain had raised systems of ridges and valleys and thrown up escarpments several kilometres high.

This violent geological history had created a varied and chaotic moonscape that, patched with varied terrain, cut by the rifts and grooves of transition zones and gigantic scarps and grabens, provided a wealth of hiding places. The refugees elected to settle in the deep groove of a narrow chasm in the high northern latitudes, and put to work the two crews of construction robots they’d brought with them.

Gnarl

A picture of men at work. Two astronauts (Michael Good on the left, Garret Reisman on the right) peek through the windows of the aft flight deck of the space shuttle Atlantis, before heading off to install batteries and other equipment to the exterior of the International Space Station. Your average everyday experience, in low Earth orbit (can you name, off the top of your head, every astronaut who has spacewalked? Can you even hazard a guess at the number?* We shouldn't be complacent about the amazingly difficult, dangerous and technically awesome feat of building and maintaining and space station. It's still not exactly a routine human experience, but we have been a space-going species for a couple of generations, now).

What I'm especially interested in are the controls in the foreground (check out the full-resolution photo here). Not just the clunky electromechanical switches and joystick, set in battleship-grey utilitarian panels, although it does remind us that Atlantis is 34 years old, built when prog rock and flares were still in fashion, and personal computers, mobile phones, iPads and cyberspace weren't even science fictional concepts; and here we are in the future, with spaceships designed forty-odd years ago just reaching retirement, and how science-fictional is that? No, what's especially interesting is the human clutter, the solutions to work-a-day problems. The patches of blue velcro stuck at intervals on every surface. The propelling pencil on the right, with its velcro collar. The two lab timers, with cryptic felt-pen identifying codes. The Post-it notes. The human clutter - the gnarl, the telling details that bring a scene alive. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to dinner with Al Reynolds and French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré, who flew two missions on the Mir space station. One detail especially sticks in my mind. The Russians sent up fresh food to their space station in automated Progress resupply vehicles; when the airlock was opened after the Progress vehicle had docked, the unbearably evocative smell of apples, of the planet Earth, filled the air.

[edit] *a list of spacewalking astronauts

Composition

So right now I'm going backwards to go forwards with the second draft of the ongoing. Usually I like to press onward, ever onward, but I had a sudden blink of inspiration about the true nature of the kind of work one of the characters was doing before he became caught up in the plot, and rather than leave it until revision I unravelled an early chapter, dropped in a chunk of prose, and restitched it.

This is what happens when you don't spend a couple of months planning out a novel in every detail before writing it straight out. Which I understand is technically possible, but isn't for me. Much of the writing process in the first and second drafts is a process of discovery - or rather, a process of blundering about in a dark room, bumping into things while looking for a way out.

I do make lots of notes, actually, but usually ignore most of them because for me making notes is a Darwinian process of evolving and discarding possibilities. What's left for this project are lists of names, all kinds of notes and references on the evolution and structure of gas giants, brief portraits of various cities and odd little worldlets, and some chunks of the back stories of various characters that may or may not be threaded through the narrative. I also accumulate, like most writers who use word processors, a collection of sentences and paragraphs and entire scenes that drop below the fold.

She was still looking all around, drinking in fresh details in the view, when a second pod everted and the blunt triangle of the drone detached with a thump and flare of thrust that sent it flying away from the train.

At the same time, the child was attempting to make contact with the tutelary spirits of the river and forest. Her fantasy about the involvement of the river folk in the boy’s death had taken root and flourished.

Cactus skeleton. Fog spreads. Wonder at someone who can control weather.

And then he ducked away under the slanting barrel of the telescope and he was gone, and I could move again. The young woman beckoned to me, and I followed without thought or question through a doorway I had not noticed before, and found myself stumbling from the translation frame in the softly-lit room in the administration centre. The interview was over.

Sometimes it seems to me that what's left out is as important as what's left in.

Angels Over America

Hey, the new Pyr catalogue is out, so now I can tell you that Cowboy Angels will be published in the US of A in January 2011. The fabulous cover - my third by him - with a train exiting a Turing gate, is by Sparth. The retro lettering is great, too, and entirely appropriate: the novel is set in the 1980s, in a variety of Americas.

Where I'm At

Some weeks later, with pen, ink, scissors, paste, a decanter of sherry, and a vast reluctance, Mr Earbrass begins to revise TUH. This means, first, transposing passages, or reversing the order of their paragraphs, or crumpling them up furiously and throwing them in the waste-basket. After that there is rewriting. This is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have to think up new things just the same, but at the same time try not to remember the old ones. Before Mr Earbrass is through, at least one third of TUH will bear no resemblance to its original state.

Most novelists recognise something of themselves in the late great Edward Gorey's Mr Earbrass - written in 1953, The Unstrung Harp is still one of the funniest and truest descriptions of writing a novel. Revision isn't much easier with word processing, but I find it's a lot more fun than wrestling with the seemingly infinite snake of the first draft. I know now what my characters will and won't do, for instance. And it's a lot easier going along with what they want, than trying to push them in directions they don't like.

Meanwhile, I'm too distracted to do this blog much justice, but I'm still blurting out bits of nonsense over on Twitter. Uses a different part of the brain.

Above Us Only Sky

When I was at primary school in Gloucestershire, in the early 1960s, it was still unusual to see a contrail in the sky. The charter air travel industry, which transplanted British seaside culture to the Mediterranean, was in its infancy; transatlantic flights hadn't yet been multiplied by the demands of mass tourism. Now, thanks to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, the empty skies of my childhood have returned. In a single spasm, Eyjafjallajökull punched a plume of fine ash some eight kilometres into the stratosphere, and winds have spread it across most of Europe. Planes are grounded because the ash cloud hangs at the height at which they cruise, and volcanic ash ingested by jet engines is smelted into glass deposits that quickly choke them. Over London, no planes fly. The city's constant rumble is much diminished. The sky, blue and cloudless, is the province only of birds.

We live, some believe, in the anthropocene age, an era in which human beings have massively altered global ecosystems, and which may have begun with the invention of agriculture, but certainly accelerated during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and the oil-based economy of the twentieth and early twenty-first. But Earth's climate and geography, and human history, has also been shaped by more powerful processes. Volcanic activity has been implicated in the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, which wiped out more than 90% of marine species, and 70% of vetebrate animal species on land. The Toba supereruption between 69000 and 77000 years ago created a decade of global winter that could have caused the reduction in human numbers and the bottleneck in human evolution that marks our genomes to this day. Ashes and sulphur compounds injected into the stratosphere by volcanic activity is believed to have contributed to global cooling during the Little Ice Age between the 16th and mid 19th century, and the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused the Year Without Summer, ruining crops around the world and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths (and creating spectacular sunsets documented in paintings by Turner).

Eyjafjallajökull may have created all kinds of disruption to travellers, but compared to supervulcanism of the past, or to what might happen if the volcanic dome under Yellowstone Park lets go, it's a mere blip. An inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. A useful reminder that the nemesis which may clobber us won't necessarily be the product of our own hubris. Meanwhile, I'm off to enjoy a spot of peace and quiet while I can.

Eastercon 2010, the verbals

‘I could have emailed you,’ David Langford said, coming over to say hello after we’d spent some time working online at different tables in a bar. But even the science-fiction community hasn’t yet reached the point of total online immersion, which is why some 1200 people had gathered for the UK national sf convention, Eastercon. Last year, it was in the post-industrial fairyland of Bradford; this year it was back in Heathrow, in a massive hotel that looked like a cut-price brutalist version of the Baths of Caracalla, set on a dual carriageway that was cheek-by-jowl with a howling runway and lined with the kind of office buildings that get blown up in the Die Hard franchise. An exurbia for people in transit. A transport corridor where CCTV cameras outnumbered pedestrians. But while the setting may have been a hardcore Ballardian dystopia, it meant that, for a convention reasonably close to London, costs were kept down to an affordable level, and besides, few of us were there for the architecture or local ambience.

Eastercons have to cater for the multitudinous interests of a wide variety of fans -- and if enough of them are interested in (say) campanology, then a talk or workshop in campanology becomes, by syllogy, sf. Writers (like me) might grumble about the lack of programming about actual books, but they’re always reminded, when they arrive at the convention, that it’s run by fans for fans. And some of them, shock horror, don’t even care all that much about written sf (fortunately, an awful lot of them do). Suck it up, get with the programme.

This year, there was a definite etsy/steampunk vibe, but there was also a very strong and well-attended science stream, with panels and some excellent talks, quite a few by people outside the sf world -- always a good sign. I wasn’t there for the whole convention, so managed to go to only one item I wasn’t involved in, a barnstormer of a talk by The Economist's Oliver Morton on geoengineering. It followed hard on the heels of a talk by Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column for the Guardian. I would have liked to have gone to both, but had just done a 9.00 am panel and was still suffering from caffeine deficiency. So it goes.

What else? The book room was admirably full of stalls selling books, and there was a considerable small press presence, with signings and launches. I scored a reasonable copy of the original Penguin edition of Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (‘D’you think it could be my cactus that’s upsetting him’), a cheap paperback edition of Gertrude Friedberg’s The Revolving Boy (her first and only sf novel), and a copy of John Clute’s latest collection of criticism, Canary Fever. And there were, of course, plenty of random encounters and late-night conversations, which is, in the end, kind of the point of going. That, and Heathrow’s famous chicken-rat garden. I’d tell you about that, but really, you had to be there.

Heathrow, Eastercon, 2010

Convention hotel.


'I'll show you the life of the mind.'


Keep going.


Full coverage.


Better truth through advertising.


Instructions to cab drivers.


Do not feed the birds.

Interview

Short and sweet, at scifibookshelf.

On Mars

Things are going to be a bit quiet around here while I thrash towards the end of the first draft. So here's a couple of cool videos as place markers. Both were created by Adrian Lark, and are flyover animations reconstructed from HiRise data, with an amazing resolution of 0.25 metres - around the size of an A4 sheet of paper. The first loops around part of the scarp at the base of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars - and the largest found so far in the Solar System.



The second floats around the edge the raised mound (a mountain some five kilometres high) in the centre of Gale Crater - note the tremendously varied terrain. Gale crater is one of the possible landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory, a large, robust rover scheduled for launch in 2011. One of its main mission goals is to determine if microbial life ever existed on the surface of Mars; Gale Crater is a prime target for this search because its mound contains clay-bearing layers at its base, with layers of oxygen- and sulphur-rich minerals above, and flowing water seems to have carved channels across the floor of the crater and into its wall.



(By the way, neither of these animations comes with a soundtrack. What would you choose?)

Old School Future

Picked this up for a fiver in a secondhand bookshop in Camden: a science-fiction anthology published by The Bodley Head Science Fiction Club in 1953, containing the first six stories of the longer American edition. What's interesting about the cover, apart from the lovely retro space hardware, is the depiction of a woman at the helm of a spaceship (or perhaps controlling lunar orbital traffic from a space station). I imagine she's toggling the radio to remind the space cowboy who's just buzzed her that he's violated about twenty navigational regs.

EDIT: Further thought - maybe the presence of a female space pilot/traffic controller in this old science-fiction illustration isn't so unusual; during the Second World War, just eight years in the past, when the book was published, women had taken on all kinds of roles previously considered the exclusive domain of men.

Silo

As a break from the ongoing first-draft death march, went down to the Gagosian gallery in King's Cross last Saturday, to see Crash, an homage to JG Ballard. All Ballard's tropes - high rises, autopias, crashed aeroplanes, clinical depictions of sex, a strong dash of surrealism - were present. I particularly liked three strong photographic pieces: Cyprian Galliard's A View of Sighthill Cemetery, Florian Maier-Aichen's Untitled (Freeway Crash), and Tacita Dean's Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard). Also Jane and Louise Wilson's video installation, Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard, with its Kubrickian glides and pans of ruins of the Soviet space-age, and Roger Hiorns's Untitled, a pair of car engines encrusted with copper sulphate crystals (geddit?). Overall, though, I came away with the feeling that the term 'Ballardian' is in danger of becoming so diffuse as to lose any focus or edge it might once have. All high-rises aren't really 'Ballardian', are they? Surely only the ones in which feral yuppies grill joints of dead dog on their high-end barbecue kettles really count . . .

Across the road from the gallery was a car park on a piece of waste ground, something increasingly less common in London thanks to the property boom (although the current slump might reverse that). And in the middle of the car park was this brick shaft, like a steampunk missile silo, or the entrance to some forgotten subterranean kingdom. My faith in Ballard's visions of cities fatally infected with entropic dis-ease was instantly restored.

A Word From Our Sponsors

A break from scribbling, always scribbling, to blurt out a few scraps of news:

I'll be attending the World Horror Convention in Brighton, where I'll be leading a creative writing workshop. Intensive fun for all (at least, that's the plan) - a few places left, I think, for those of you who already have memberships for the convention. I'll also be spending a couple of days at Eastercon, the British Science Fiction Association's annual gathering. Hope to see some of you there. Later in the year I'll be one of the guests of honour, along with Pat Cadigan and Paul Cornell, at Newcon 5, 'Northampton's only Science Fiction and Fantasy literary convention'. I guess we'll be talking about books, comics, and Doctor Who.

Just out, this fine anthology of short stories about alternate histories, edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates, who were kind enough to include one of my stories, 'A Very British History', which explains how the space race was really won. Appropriately enough, the US edition of the anthology has an alternate cover.

Coming soon, The Best of the Best New Horror, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones, who kindly included my proto-steampunk story 'The Temptation of Dr Stein'.

And my novella 'Crimes and Glory will feature in not one but two Best SF of the year anthologies, thanks to editors Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton, and it will also feature in AudioText's The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 2.

Enough already. Back to work . . .

UPDATE: in all the excitement, forgot to mention that issue #5 of the fine ezine Journey Planet (link to large .pdf), packed with all kinds of good stuff on alternate histories, features my story 'A Brief Guide to Other Histories'.

Unimaginableness

'Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness.' Don DeLillo, Point Omega.

It holds for all fiction, of course. 'Real life' is always weirder and richer than fiction. There's more of it; it's raw and unfiltered. But science-fiction and fantasy writers are especially susceptible to the neurotic impulse to validate their imagined worlds by cramming in details and explanations and descriptions of the quotidian elements of life in their elsewheres - tours of the automatic creche, the air factory, the steam-driven information net, plumbing. There's a point quickly reached, with detail, that numbs the reader's sympathetic imagination and flattens the affect of the narrative. It's why all utopian fiction is basically unreadable.

Bangwallop.

Jake and Dinos Chapman
Bangwallop. By J&D Ballard, 2010
Book
Edition of 1000
19.4 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm

Creativity

'You take a pencil and you make a dark line. Then you make a light line. And together it's a good line.' Peter Falk, Wings of Desire.

A Random Pattern My iPlayer Just Made

'Tell It To Me' - Tom Waits
'One Little Song' - Gillian Welch
'Shout At The Devil' - Jah Wobble/Temple of Sound
'Mishima/Closing' - Philip Glass
'The Smile You Smile' - Van Morrison
'When It's Time For The Whipperpoorwill To Sing' - Anglin Brothers
'Softwear' - Jah Wobble
'Another The Letter' - Wire
'Color Of The Sun'- Willard Grant Conspiracy
'Small World' - Roddie Frame
'I Wish I Didn't Love You So' - Little Jimmy Scott
'Polly' - Nirvana

Mashup

I first saw this clever, funny, and subversive short video in the middle of the 1990s. It wasn't easy to find, but my friend Kim Newman had a fourth or fifth generation copy and I watched it a dozen times, maybe more. I loved it then, and I still love it.

It was a kind of secret, back then; now, it's famous for being one of the first examples of the video mashup genre. It was created by Todd Graham, recently interviewed here. He duped off copies of his work and hawked them around video stores and art galleries, but although word leaked out about this weird little piece of I-guess-you-had-to-call-it-video-art and it was copied and recopied and slowly spread around the world, it remained an underground hit, and never made the mainstream. Not only didn't we have a proper name for it; it lacked the kind of instant word-of-mouth distribution system YouTube and other internet video channels provide. These days, if you upload a clever bit of video and it goes viral, the buzz can give you an instant in with the media biz, a career move in the way that making TV ads once was, in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, in the predigital age, Todd Graham was hampered by being way ahead of his time, like a paperback novelist trying to make it big before Caxton. So it goes.

His second mashup, Blue Peanuts, was also on that old video. I think it's even funnier, because it shows just how scarily close the two reimaginings of small town America are.