Maps For New Territory

As far as I'm concerned there are two ways of writing a short story. First, there's the epiphanic, where more or less the whole package arrives in your head and is unpacked by writing it down. It doesn't happen often, but I'm always thrilled when it does. 'Little Lost Robot' and 'The Thought War' happened like that. The second is much more like work. I start with an idea, usually a character and a situation, an opening scene, and proceed from there. It's like exploring new territory without a map. You stumble into cul-de-sacs and pitfalls, and waste time picking up nuggets that turn out to be iron pyrites instead of the motherlode, but you travel on in the hope of finding a fabulous view or something rare and unexpected around the next corner. And sometimes scenes or ideas you discard become the seeds for a second story. What started out as exploration becomes cartography.

That's how the Quiet War series of stories evolved, and eventually turned into two novels (with a third on the way, but it's bad luck to talk about that right now). If I were brighter and more organised, novels and stories would have dovetailed neatly together. As it was, the stories turned out to be trial runs for the novels. Maybe I'll do better next time, with what some have started calling the Jackaroo stories, in which an alien species makes contact with the people of Earth after a short sharp global conflict, and hand them the keys to a bunch of planetary systems orbiting red dwarf stars and linked by wormholes. What does humanity do with this gift? What does the gift do to humanity? And what's the catch?

So far, there are just six stories.* But I'm beginning to wonder if it's time to get down and deal with the big picture.

*‘Dust’, Forbidden Planets, edited by Peter Crowther, Daw, 2006
 ‘Making Peace’, The New Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, HarperCollins, 2007
 ‘Adventure’, Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, 2008
'City of the Dead' Postscripts, 2008
 ‘Crimes and Glory’, Subterranean Magazine, 2009
‘The Choice’, Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011

EDIT: Of the above stories, only 'Crimes and Glory' is available online, here. Of the Quiet War stories, 'Reef' was available via my author's page at the Orion site, but was lost after a redesign; you might be able to find it using the wayback machine or similar. I'm thinking of putting up one on my web site's fiction archive. Any preferences?
EDIT 2: I totally forgot to include 'City of the Dead'. Corrected now. I'd like to think it's because I'm hip-deep in a third draft, but really it's down to stupidity. Thanks to Miles for pointing out the error!

Quiet War Stories

Ram Gowda emailed to ask if I had a list of stories related to The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. I thought I'd put it up here rather than on the increasingly out-of-date website, which badly needs a major overhaul. I set it up in the mid-1990s, using a basic HTML scripting programme, and it is really showing its age; must get around to making it look twenty-first century when I'm less distracted. Or pay someone to do it for me. Meanwhile, here are the stories, with the usual caveat that they were published piecemeal over a decade, and represent the first iteration of the Quiet War universe. Portions of several of them have been folded into Gardens of the Sun, in highly modified forms.

'Second Skin' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 1997
'Sea Change, With Monsters' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 1998
'The Gardens of Saturn' Interzone, 1998
'Reef' Sky Life, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, Harcourt Brace, 2000
'Making History' PS Publishing, 2000
'The Passenger' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2002
'The Assassination of Faustino Malarte' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2002
‘Dead Men Walking’ Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2006
‘Incomers’ The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Viking, 2008

More Best

Just received my author's copies of Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, so here's a bit of pimpage for it. Thirty-one stories, including one by me, 'Crimes and Glory', pretty good for under a tenner.

Crystal Palace And Me

My visit to the dinosaur models in Crystal Palace Park wasn't my first encounter with Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition. When I was born, my family lived in a cottage rented from Sir John Stanley Marling, 4th Baronet of Stanley Park and Sedbury Park. To mark the event, he gave my mother ten shillings, to invest on my behalf. Even in Stroud, which in the mid-1950s was still coming to terms with the twentieth century, acts of noblesse oblige like this weren't exactly usual. But Sir John came from a old family, with deep roots in the area.

They made their fortune in wool, the main industry in that part of the Cotswolds for several centuries. His great-grandfather, Sir Samuel Marling, the first Baronet, was one of the people responsible for founding the grammar school, Marling School, I later attended. Before that, I was at Selsley Primary School, which was associated with the church Sir Samuel built for the village, next door to the family seat. Most of the church's stained class was by William Morris & Co; it was Morris's first real commission, with contributions from Philip Webb, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and George Campfield. And in the field behind the church was a lone pillar; made of Cornish granite, it was bought by Sir Samuel Marling at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, where he had a display of his woollen cloth.

Those Victorians had a long reach . . .

The Terrible Lizards Of Penge

Last Saturday I travelled along the new East London overground line from Dalston to Crystal Palace Park, in the unglamorous South London suburb of Penge, to see some famous dinosaurs. The park was constructed to provide a permanent site for Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, which for six months housed the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The board of directors wanted to include a feature 'containing a collection of full-sized models of the Animals and plants of certain geological periods', including the first life-sized representations of newly-discovered dinosaurs. They got their wish, and it is a monument not only to Victorian science, but also to a famous scientific feud.


The board of directors first asked Dr Hilary Mantell, who had discovered and named the second known species of dinosaur, Iguanodon, and had amassed a huge collection of fossils, to supervise construction of the models. But Mantell, after suffering years of pain from a serious injury to his back, was dying. He declined the honour, and it passed to his great rival, Professor Richard Owen. Owen was a formidably talented and ambitious anatomist, and by all accounts an implacably ruthless and dislikeable man.

Although Mantell had championed the idea of a group of ancient, large, reptile-like animals, it was Owen who had recognised their defining characteristic - fused sacral vertebrae which allowed the huge animals to move about on land - and named them: dinosaur, from deinos 'terrible' and sauros 'lizard'. But this wasn't enough for Owen, who despite his formidable talent appears to have suffered from a gigantic inferiority complex. He'd spent years attempting to destroy Mantell's reputation, rubbishing his scientific papers, and trying unsuccessfully to prevent the Royal Society from awarding him the prestigious Royal Medal (there's a wonderful description of their feud in Deborah Cadbury's The Dinosaur Hunters: Owen as a mustachio-twirling monster of ego, Mantell as a romantic hero beset by impossible odds). But now Owen had triumphed: his enemy's fatal weakness had given him a wonderful opportunity to present his ideas for public consumption. Mantell died before the park was completed, and his twisted lower spine ended up as a gruesome trophy in the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, where Owen had the position of Hunterian Professor. You couldn't make it up.

And so, with the help of the director of the fossil department at Crystal Palace, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Owen set to immortalising his ideas about dinosaur anatomy in cast iron and concrete. Unfortunately, many of those ideas were completely wrong. To be fair to Owen, he was making guesses from a small and incomplete selection of fossils. But he also believed that any progression in animal evolution was due to divine laws set in place by God the Creator, argued that all animals were variations on an ideal type, and refused to countenance any evidence that he might be wrong. So while Mantell had come to believe from his examination of later fossil finds that Iguanodon had shortened forelimbs and could stand upright to browse on tree branches, in agreement with modern interpretations, Owen depicted Iguanodon and several other dinosaur species as clumsy, dog-like quadrapeds (both he and Mantell mistook Iguanodon's hooked thumb for a horn). Before the turn of the century, a more enlightened scientific community regarded the models as a horrible embarrassment. Today, they look positively antediluvian: quaint relics of a more primitive era of science; props from some sci-fi adventure quota quickie.


Still, other models, such as those of plesiosaurs and several species of early mammals, were more accurate, and in its day the park was a roaring success, and helped drive the mania for dinosaurs that persists to this day. Owen went on to found the Natural History Museum, and to suffer from a severe reversal in his reputation when he clashed with Thomas Huxley and other supporters of evolution by natural selection. The Crystal Palace burned down in 1936; Owens' and Hawkin's models, recently restored, are still imposing and fascinating. If you get the chance, they're well worth a visit.

I've Got Your Uncanny Valley, Right Here

Penance

It's Friday, so hey, have a free short story. Three hundred words, including a nod to one of James Blish's pantropy stories. It was originally published in New Scientist last year, in a science-fiction special section edited by Kim Stanley Robinson. Somewhere inside it, maybe, is the seed for a novel.

Penance

It’s December. Midsummer. The sun barely dipping below the horizon at midnight, and like everyone else Rongomaiwhe Namakin has white-nights fever, cat-napping, staying up around the clock. There’s so much to do! A dragon-sized machine is laying freshly made topsoil along the Tuvula river, and Rongomaiwhe and her crew are planting a strip forest of Dahurian larch and dwarf willow. And when they aren’t working, they hike up the river or across wet black rock fields. White mountains float against the pure blue sky. A wild rugged land still mostly untouched. A kingdom of snow and rock and wind.

Rongomaiwhe’s great-grandparents were early victims of global warming. When its Pacific islands were swamped by rising sea levels, their nation sold its carbon credits and moved to a refuge in New Zealand, which escaped much of the consequences of violent climate change. A succession of canny leaders preserved tribal unity and invested heavily inecological engineering. Rongomaiwhe’s parents helped to quicken a new ecosystem on Howe Island after shifts in ocean currents increased the average temperature by a full ten degrees. Now Rongomaiwhe is part of a rainbow coalition of the young and willing, taking on the challenge of greening the shores of the thawing Antarctic Peninsula.

She knows how lucky she is. More than half the Earth’s population huddle in slums along the new coastlines, permanently unemployed, forcibly sterilised, subsisting on dole yeast. And she is making a new world, and planning to start a family when she and her fiancé marry this winter. That’s why, once a week, she does penance. Plugs into the remote working network, flows into a robot thousands of kilometres away, in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Brings the machine online and gets to work, planting a windbreak of tweaked yuccas for what will be an oasis, with the vast, level desert of Kansas stretched all around.

Martian Ice

A meteorite hits the ejecta apron of a crater high in the Northern Martian hemisphere and opens a small blue eye of ice. It happened some time between April 2004 and January 2010, the dates when two different robot spacecraft photographed the same spot.

Splice

I was pleasantly surprised by this small-budget but intellectually ambitious bioshock film. Directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube), who also co-wrote the script with Antoinette Terry Bryant, it's a variation on the Frankenstein mythos that combines an exploration of a skewed form of parenthood with human reactions to the uncanny valley. The plot, in brief: Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Adrian Brody) are romantically entangled partners who run a bioscience lab owned by a large pharmaceutical company. After creating fairly simple multicellular artificial organisms, they want to step up their research into genetic recombination by using human genes, but the parent company wants them to isolate the genes for a potent protein produced by their organisms. Faced with loss of independence, they go ahead with the experiment anyway, and create a fast-growing neotenous organism that develops from something like a naked kiwi to a female humanoid creature, Dren. As both Elsa and Clive form strong emotional bonds with their strange step-daughter, their company supervisor begins to suspect that they're hiding a secret, and Dren continues to change in unexpected ways . . .

Okay, set out as baldly as that, it doesn't seem any different from a couple of dozen things-we-weren't-meant-to-know horror stories. But the basic scaffolding of the plot exfoliates in all kinds of interesting, unexpected, and genuinely unsettling ways, and its ideas are nicely undercut by a knowing humour: this is a serious film that doesn't take itself too seriously. Both Elsa and Clive both have complicated reactions to their creation, oscillating between hubris, fear, and fatal attraction, exposing emotional weakenesses in themselves and their relationship; Elsa in particular has problems coming to terms with her creation, thanks to a childhood crippled by an uncaring mother. Her developing attachment to Dren is creepily ambiguous, and there's some good satire on the problems of parenthood as Dren races through all the stages of childhood and adolescence to a seriously problematic maturity.

The science behind Dren's creation contains a fair measure of handwavium, but Elsa and Clive are portrayed as scientists driven by ambition and inquisitiveness rather than haphazard craziness, and their lab has a cluttered authenticity. It's nice to see researchers using mini-centrifuges, Eppendorf pipettes, and gel electrophoresis rather than simply peering down microscopes: someone has obviously done a bit of homework. I liked the alarmingly temperamental plumbing of the artificial womb, too. Best of all is the design of Dren. Played at maturity by Delphine Chaneac with an eerie physicality that complements Greg Nicotero's and Howard Bergera's seamless mix of makeup, prostheses and digital manipulation, she's a genuinely weird and beautiful chimera, and some of the best scenes in the film explore her volatile mix of fear, vulnerability, frustration and outbursts of wild exuberance.

So, while the story may be familiar, Natali's angle of attack is refreshingly different, his low-key direction mostly eschews sensationalism yet delivers some nice shocks, and the intelligent script is complemented by some fine acting. And although the last act devolves towards creature-feature frights and alarms, it's just about redeemed by a final scene that has a chillingly spare ambiguity. Like Dren, it's a hybrid whose beauty is more than the sum of its parts.

Rocks

The image above is a composite compiled by the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla, handily showing the relative sizes of all the asteroids and comets that have been visited by spacecraft to date. Check out the full-size version here. The largest by far is Lutetia, which the Dawn* spacecraft has just zipped past, on its way to even larger targets - Vesta in 2011-12 and Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, in 2015. Vesta is about four times the size of Lutetia; Ceres, at an average 950 kilometres in diameter, is seven times larger. If it orbited Saturn it would be the gas giant's sixth largest moon (it's just a little bit smaller than Tethys), and is classified as a dwarf planet rather than an asteroid. Both Vesta and Ceres are massive enough to have been pulled into a spherical shape by their own gravity, and both are differentiated bodies with metallic cores and stony crusts. Vesta's surface is mostly rock, modified by flows of lava; Ceres is surfaced with water ice and clays and carbonates, and it's possible that there's an ocean of liquid water beneath its crust.

Asteroids are fantastically varied objects. Those imaged close-up all seem mostly similar, spattered with craters large and small, and with dusty intercrater plains. But while Eros, Ida and Itokawra are stony asteroids composed of iron and magnesium silicates, Mathilde is coated in primitive carbonaceous compounds, and tiny Braille is composed of olivine and pyroxene (Gaspara's composition appears to be midway between Braille and the stony asteroids). Lutetia is presently classified as a M-type asteroid; its dusty surface may cover a chunk of nickel-iron and other metals derived from the core of a larger body shattered during the early history of the Solar System. Itokawa, visited by the Hayabusa probe, which recently returned to Earth after a difficult five-year journey, is a rock pile, with a surface of dust and boulders mostly unmarked by impact craters.


Hard to think of making any kind of comfortable living on or in something as frankly ugly as that, but it's easy to think of tenting over a small crater of one of the other asteroids, or burrowing into their surfaces, or hanging sealed tenement buildings at the edges of cliffs. Smaller asteroids could be completely built over - mini-Trantors. (Many small asteroids are rock piles like Itokawa, putting paid to the cherished sf idea of manufacturing a habitat by hollowing out a small rock with a few nuclear bombs.) Although the total mass in the asteroid belt is just 4% of the mass of the Moon, the surface area is far greater. At an average diameter of around 130 kilometres, Lutetia has a surface area of some 31000 square kilometres, one and a half times the size of Wales. Plenty of room for settlements and cities. Tiny disputatious kingdoms and empires brought together and flung apart by orbital mechanics, trading with each other and with Earth and Mars, chasing after comets for water and organics . . . It's been done before, of course. Many times. But I can't help thinking that it may be time to do it again.

*EDIT My bad - it was the Rosetta spacecraft that zipped past Lutetia, on its way to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Dawn is, however, on course for Vesta and Ceres. Hat-tip to Phil, for pointing out my confusion.

Expecting Something Taller

So I finished the second draft of the new novel yesterday, and here it is, printed off. Hmm, 150,000 words plus doesn't look as big in the real world . . .

Now all I need is a break, and then a couple of red pens and a decent stretch of peace and quiet so that I can cut it into shape. Some people can compose and redraft and edit entire novels on screen. I need at least one go at an actual manuscript, with wide margins for notes and second- and third-thoughts. I started off writing on a manual typewriter, old habits die hard, and it's easier to spot goofs on the page than on the screen, for some reason. After that, there's at least one more on-screen draft before it's printed out again, and sent off to the publisher.

The title is a working title, by the way. Not yet officially approved. But I like it.

A Dark River Across the Sky

The Astronomy Picture of the Day site regularly throws up amazing images, but this one is especially amazing. A lane of dust about 500 light years away and spanning some 100 light years runs across the sky towards an area rich in stellar beauty: a fabulous backdrop for a space opera about clashing interstellar empires.

Helpless

So I finally got around to visiting Fiona Banner's installation at Tate Britain. And it's one of my most science-fictional experiences this year, and way more Ballardian than many of the pieces at Crash, the exhibition of art reflecting Ballardian themes and tropes staged by the Gagosian gallery.

Banner's installation is audaciously simple. A surreal magic trick. Two fighter planes are stranded in the atrium space of Tate Britain's Duveen gallery. A Jaguar is stranded upside down, paint stripped off its fuselage to leave a mirror finish. And a Sea Harrier is suspended nose-down from the ceiling from a single cable that pierces the skylight above, hanging like a trussed game-bird a handful of centimetres off the floor, its fuselage brushed with a faint pattern of feathers. Banner has form; she was commissioned to decorate the Tate's Christmas tree a few years ago, and hung it with scale models of every fighter plane currently in service. But this is a major step up. The two planes are bound, prone, helpless, yet they dominate the gallery space. Visitors tiptoe around them, marvelling at the gape of their afterburners, their lethal lines. There's a feeling of trespassing in the trophy room of a machine predator, or some futuristic armoury where decommissioned war robots crouch, waiting for their go codes, or a battlefield littered with machines beyond human comprehension. Children had a simpler, more innocent response, mind you: time and again they raced up to the suspended Sea Harrier and threw themselves under its nose, giggling and amazed at their own daring.

Flying Over Ontario Lacus

When Cassini first arrived at the Saturn, in 2004, we knew almost nothing about the surface of its largest moon, Titan. We didn't know if it was covered in oceans of liquid methane, or in drifts of waxy organic snow; we didn't know if it was smooth or if it had hills and mountains. We know a lot more now. We know, like Earth, it not only has hills and mountains (although of water ice rather than rock), but it also has vast fields of dunes (of tarry organics rather than sand) and rivers and lakes (of liquid ethane, propane and methane, rather than water).

And now the Cassini science team have produced this terrific short video showing what it's like to fly around the shoreline of Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in Titan's southern hemisphere. It's amazing in its own right, but if you've read The Quiet War or Gardens of the Sun, you'll understand why I'm knocked out by it.



At about 15000 square kilometres, Ontario Lacus is a little smaller than its terrestrial namesake, Lake Ontario (or about three-quarters the size of Wales). Like Lake Ontario, it has a meandering shoreline fretted with bays, inlets, and beaches; there's a river that feeds into it via a delta that looks exactly like deltas formed by rivers on Earth. And like terrestrial lakes, Ontario Lacus is undergoing seasonal changes, too.

Titan's years, like Saturn's, are about 29 years long. When Cassini arrived, it was summer in Titan's southern hemisphere. Now, the days are dwindling down to autumn. Cassini first imaged Ontario Lacus in 2004; since then, its shoreline has receded by about 10 kilometres. And in four years of measuring the lake's depth by radar, its level has gone down by about a metre. For although the summer temperature in the southern hemisphere is minus 180 Centigrade, that's warm enough to allow evaporation of liquid methane. But now the temperature is dropping, that evaporation will cease. Soon, perhaps, the evaporated methane will condense into clouds and fall as winter rains, and run down the hills in rivers, and replenish the lakes...

An Astronaut And His Mars-Adapted Dog

Explanation here. More great photos here.

Asteroid and Saturn

Imaged by the Rosetta spacecraft July10 2010.

Inception

Saw it last night but won't review it here as it's already being reviewed everywhere else. But will note just one thing: in dreams, where Inception is mostly set, no one uses mobile phones. Didn't realise this while watching the film, but afterwards, on the crowded and hot streets of the West End, where almost everyone was walking along talking into phones or gazing or pecking at little lighted screens in their hands, half in this world, half in cyberspace.

Der Stille Krieg

I'm pleased to announce publication of the German edition of The Quiet War, translated by Sara Riffel, with a space-battle-tastic cover by Stephan Martiniere. Meanwhile, I'm closing in on the end of the second draft of the new novel, in which I fix most major inconsistencies and rough patches, and realise what still needs to be put in, and what needs to be taken out. Onwards.

Extras

Little, Brown have announced that they're piloting eBook versions of certain novels with DVD-style extras. Some interesting ideas, but I feel they really don't go far enough. How about:

A 4000-hour long Andy Warhol style documentary showing the author's hands, typing out the novel.

A commentary track featuring author and editor.

Every draft of the novel.

A version of the novel in which every other word is redacted.

A Georges Perec remix in which every word containing the letter e is replaced with an equivalent.

A version of the novel which is twice as long, but contains nothing new or extra.

A version of the novel annotated with emoticons.

Video clips in which the people on which the characters are based explain what they would have really done.

Links to live video feeds from locations in the novel.

A mashup in which the novel's characters are replaced by characters from Pride and Prejudice.

The author's tax returns.

A map of the author's study.

All the material that ends up at the bottom of word-processing drafts (I believe Nicholson Baker actually did this).

A list of every book and newspaper and magazine article the author read during the period of composition, and URLs for every website visited.

A list of everything the author ate and drank during the period of composition.

The possibilities are endless!

It's All About Me

Well, not quite. The shortlist for the John W Campbell Memorial Award has been announced, and I'm very pleased to find that Gardens of the Sun is included. I have no chance of winning against some very impressive competition, but it's a honour, and all that.

I was asked to write about my favourite space opera novels and series; the results are here, along with some other great picks.

And in the mail today, Infinivox's spoken-word anthology The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction, which includes my story 'Crimes and Glory'.