Also Applies To Genre

"The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of the discipline to criticise the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence."

Clement Greenberg

(Quoted by Gabriel Josipovici in Whatever Happened To Modernism; requoted by Nicolas Lezard in his review.)

'Bruce Springsteen'

So I have a new short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', in the latest edition of Asimov's SF Magazine. It's one of the Jackaroo series that I've been working on for the past few years ('City of the Dead' is another), and is a kind of existential road trip that takes in a Chinese version of Las Vegas, aliens who collect human stories, and a mysterious necropolis.  Starts like this:

‘I like your philosophers,’ the alien said.  ‘Most were unintentional comedians, but a few
were on to something.  Baudrillard, for instance.’
    I said that I wasn’t familiar with Mr Baudrillard’s work.
    ‘His speculations about things standing for things that do not exist were relatively sophisticated.  Perhaps you will resurrect him one day.  He and I would talk about where his ideas fit in the spectrum of simulacrum theory.’
    I said it sounded interesting.
    ‘You are being polite because part of your profession is to listen to the confessions of strangers.  But you do not know what I am talking about, do you?  It does not matter.  I am mostly talking nonsense.  I am free-associating.  An effect of this interesting drink.’
    ‘Are you ready for another?’
    ‘This one is still working on me,’ the alien said.
    A shot glass of neat Seagram’s was balanced on top of his tank.  Somehow, elements of the whisky were making their way out of the glass and into whatever was inside. According to the alien, a teeny-tiny demon was influencing space-time, inflating the usual, vanishingly small chance that certain molecules would be somewhere outside the glass.  Not molecules of alcohol, but what he called congeners.  He was getting a buzz on the complex chemicals that gave the whisky its unique taste.

Eating Rites

Food in science fiction too often gets short thrift; its quality is inversely related to advances in technology. From the nutrition pills in Gernsbackian SF to the slabs of green and brown and orange paste in 2001: A Space Odyssey, food is often seen as no more than fuel.  The equivalent of those freeze-dried meals astronauts must massage into palatability with warm water. Dole yeast. Chicken Little. Food bricks. Crop algae. Syntho-steak. 'Take your protein pill and put your helmet on,' as ground control tells Major Tom. The future is food even faster than fast food.

Elsewhere, food is an exotic test of character, digestive system and morality. The trial-by-combat of the alien banquet in Iain M. Banks' Excession, for instance, or the talking beast which lugubriously points out its best cuts in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.  And sometimes food, or the lack of it, is the engine of the plot.  In Adam Roberts' By Light Alone, the majority of the world's population subsist on the photosynthetic nutrition of their hair; only the rich can indulge their base appetites. In Thomas M. Disch's magnificently bleak The Genocides, an alien food-crop overwhelms the Earth and threatens humanity with extinction. In Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, the hero, Severian, consumes not only the flesh of his lover, but also her memories in an anthropophagic rite that's a dark parody of Holy Communion.

But for the practising SF novelist, how people grow or get food, prepare food, and eat and share food, can be a useful shorthand.  A window on the ordinary unexamined life of the future, and the inner lives of its inhabitants. Severian, who grew up in a parsimonious Guild, frequently refers not only to food, but to times when he is forced to go hungry. Rick Deckard's wait for a meal at a noodle stall in Blade Runner not only tells us something about his character's loneliness, but also something about the crowded multiculturalism of 2019 Los Angeles. In The Matrix, the mucoid slop served aboard the hovercraft captained by Morpheus underscores the parlous state of free humans; it's so bad that the temptation of a tasty virtual steak is part of the deal with the devil made by a traitor. Soylent Green in Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room has nothing to do with the film verson's silly twist, but is a staple food in an overpopulated and undernourished world, made from (geddit?) soy beans and lentils, while the care with which the hero's ancient roommate tends his planters of herbs and onions tells us not only something about their value, but underscores his nostalgia for how things once were.

We're not only what we eat; we're also defined by how we eat it, and how much we value it. But our place at the top of the food chain isn't guaranteed.  As the crew of The Nostromo discovered during their last communal meal in Alien, sometimes we're the meat on something else's table.

(Thanks to those on Twitter who responded to my question about famous food moments in SF with some great examples. Soylent Green and That Scene in Alien were by far the most popular.)

Aliens Among Us

Out today, this anthology of stories about aliens, in which my little tale of an invasion of Boltzmann Brains appears along with stories by Stephen Baxter, Pat Cadigan, Karen Joy Fowler, Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick . . .  You can find the table of contents here, with links to commentary, and some of the stories.

Once upon a time, most stories about aliens were space wars or first contact adventures set in the far future, or attempts to imagine the truly alien in truly alien settings.  Most of the stories here are set in the present day, refracting human behaviour through the viewpoint of the Other, or using the Other to isolate and magnify some odd aspect of human behaviour.  We have met the alien, and he is us.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (13)

At first glance, the 1963 Penguin edition of Roy Lewis’s first and best-known novel is science fiction. After all, it says so on the cover: it was selected by Brian Aldiss, who in the early 1960s was editor of Penguin’s SF series. But The Evolution Man was first published in hardback as a non-genre novel with the title What We Did To Father, and its last reprinted edition wasn't labeled as SF either. Permeable things, genre boundaries.

Narrated by one of the sons of a Palaeolithic mad scientist, the eponymous evolution man, this short and wickedly funny novel compresses the story of the development of the technological and cultural inventions that shaped the evolution of Homo sapiens into the history of a couple of generations of a family in Palaeolithic Uganda. A good deal of the novel’s comedy springs from farcical scenes generated by compression (‘Good Gracious!’ [Father] gasped. ‘While I have been talking to you and not even thinking about it, I have made a most important invention: the heavy-duty hunting spear with the fire-hardened point!’) and the atemporal knowledge and speech patterns of the characters (‘The carnivora had turned on us because of a shortage of ungulate game in the region.’), but it’s also a pitch-perfect parody of the drawing-room novel transposed on to a vividly realised stone-age milieu. Like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, The Evolution Man belongs to the very English school of deadpan (and often deeply black) absurdist humour, and as in many great English comedies, the narrator, like Mr Pooter, William Brown, and Captain Mainwaring, has absolutely no sense of humour.  The novel’s best set-pieces, such as the narrator’s thorough besting by his future wife during his ham-handed attempt at courtship, turn on the refusal or failure of the object of the joke to see the funny side.

Although implacably opposed by the tree-dwelling Uncle Vanya (‘There was nothing wrong with the old Miocene’), Father institutes a programme of self-improvement with implacable logic and level-headed ingenuity.  He works out how to steal fire from a volcano, and in short order he and other members of the family invent cooking, spear-hunting, animal traps, representational art, the afterlife, and (when Father bans incest) courtship. As Father succinctly puts it, ‘ . . . nature isn’t necessarily on the side of the big battalions. Nature is on the side of the species with the technological edge on the other fellow.’

But progress isn’t without cost. Globe-hopping Uncle Ian is killed when he decides to imitate the efforts by one of his nephews to domesticate animals: ‘the horse he had tried to ride - to get to America the quicker - proved not to be a horse at all; it was a hipparion.’ Father’s enthusiastic application of his discovery of how to make fire causes a conflagration that burns out the horde’s hunting grounds and forces them to move. And his sons are dismayed when he starts to give away their technological edge to all and sundry, and decide that he and his latest idea must be suppressed. As in so many science fiction novels (to borrow a phrase from Brian Aldiss), hubris is clobbered by nemesis. Father becomes a victim of his most deadly invention: the Arms Race.

Reality Check

So I have just finished wincing my way through the proofs of In The Mouth of the Whale, and after using up what seemed to be about half a red ballpoint pen making corrections, I've turned them in to Gollancz.  And that's that, after almost two years.  The book is out of my head and out of my hands, and on its way to becoming a Thing, out there in the world.  I've also received a couple of the bound proofs that will be sent to potential reviewers: very nice they look, too.

As a break from trying to read a novel word by word, sentence by sentence, I travelled down to Bristol for BristolCon, a one-day convention. Small but very buzzy, friendly, nicely organised (so you didn't notice all the organisation that went into it), mostly book-orientated, with plenty of writers present.  Met friends, attended a couple of panels, performed on a couple of panels, read the first two pages of In The Mouth of the Whale to an audience. And because it was a fine warm day, went on walkabout for an hour or so. I lived in Bristol in the 1970s (1973 - 1980), back when it was a black-and-white existential film, and returned every so often, but haven't been back  for, oh, at least ten years.  Long enough to feel like a ghost searching for my own past. Some of the places I remembered are still there; others aren't. George's bookshop at the top of Park Street, for instance, where one gloomy day, in a kind of wretched gallery at the top of the shop, under a rain-lashed skylight, I discovered an immaculate remaindered first edition of William Golding's The Pyramid God. A snip at £2, especially as I later got it signed, after Golding had received his Nobel, and his knighthood. Also gone: Revolver Records, where I spent far too much time and money, buying LPs made of grooved vinyl you played with diamond needles. It was a long time ago.

Alternate History

This is the first few pages of an alternate beginning to Gardens of the Sun, some 20,000 words which I ditched because a) it set up the dichotomy at the heart of the novel a little too clunkily and b) because I decided it would be better to tell the story of the long road to peace from the point of view of the characters who'd been dragged into events leading up to war in The Quiet War. Might publish it as part of an ebook collection one day.

Everywhere Karyl Mezhidov went, people were talking about war. One day, he stopped at a little oasis close to the Palatine Linea, in the south-east of the sub-saturnian hemisphere of Dione, and discovered that an extended family from Paris had taken up residence. Refugees.

Karyl would have wished them luck and moved right on, to another oasis or shelter, or to one of his caches of supplies, but he’d been out prospecting a long time, he was low on food and fuel, and besides, they seemed like nice people and it would have been rude to have turned down their offer of hospitality. So after he’d plugged his rolligon into the oasis’s grid, replenished its food maker with yeast base, and fixed a minor problem with the suspension of the rear off-side wheel, he spent a little time working up the details of a trade for some of the phosphates he’d extracted from a drift in exchange for the family’s hospitality, so neither side would have to short out on kudos. And when that was sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction, he sat down for the evening meal with the family and a woman who, like him, was passing through on her way to somewhere else.

They all sat around a rug spread by the stream that ran around the circumference of the oasis, in the shade of pines and firs, the oasis’s chandelier of sunlamps dimming down to twilight, and the tent’s big panes beginning to polarize; although the sun at Saturn delivered only four per cent of the insolation on Earth’s surface, and at this high southern latitude hung low even at noon, it was becoming brighter than the darkening interior. The oasis sat in a neat round crater with a slumped rim, so there was a good view across a cratered swale to a flat-topped hill, the edge of Adstratus Crater, that rose above the close, curved horizon against the black sky. The view kept drawing Karyl’s attention as he told his hosts a little about his prospecting work, and they told him the latest news from Paris, the increasing paranoia, the peace wardens who had been armed with pistols and were enforcing a raft of new regulations and zealously searching out dissenters. Because its mayor was at the forefront of opposition to the presence of ships from Earth in the Saturn System, everyone was convinced that Paris was going to be hit hard when the war began, and many citizens were leaving for settlements where they had family connections, or for untenanted oases like this one, planning to sit things out as best they could.

‘No one and no place will be safe anywhere on any of the moons,’ Shizuko, the family’s other guest, said scornfully. ‘Sure, they’ll go for the cities first. But when they have the cities under control, they’ll go after the big settlements, and then everyone else. Moving here, you’re just putting off the inevitable.’

Shizuko was a serious and intense young woman with a tall crest of red hair and bright yellow eyes. She disagreed loudly and volubly with almost everything the family said, and clearly thought that Karyl was a possible ally. Smiling at him now, saying that even gypsies like him wouldn’t be safe, asking him what he would do when the inevitable happened.

Everywhere he went, people were always asking him for his opinion about the war. Truth was, he didn’t have an opinion. Oh, he knew that it was inevitable. Ships of the Brazilian and European joint expedition had been in orbit around Mimas for months, the Pacific Community had set up a camp on Phoebe, at the outer edge of the Saturn System, and although there were all kinds of diplomatic discussions, although many cities had claimed neutrality, it was clear that the three great powers wanted to take control of the entire Saturn System. But if it was inevitable, then there wasn’t anything that could be done to stop it, and as far as he was concerned, he didn’t see why it should change things. Why would anyone be interested in what he did?

So he shrugged and said that he hoped he’d be able to keep on working.

‘Do you really think they’ll let you or anyone else wander around? They’ll round you up,’ Shizuko said. The lamps set amongst the bowls of food spread on the rug put bright sparks in her yellow eyes as she looked at everyone around her. ‘All of you. Probably lock you up inside Paris, along with everyone else. If they don’t H-bomb the city first, that is, or drop a rock on it. If they do that, they’ll lock you up in a camp instead, or truck you off to Mimas or Rhea or Tethys. They’ll turn the entire system into a prison camp, no exceptions. So rather than trying to pretend that the war doesn’t have anything to do with you, you should be doing something about it, right now.’

‘We have already done something,’ David, the eldest family member said. ‘We have moved here.’

People lounging around the rug laughed, but Shizuko wasn’t going to be put off. She was one of those tedious people who went everywhere with an agenda at the forefront of their minds.

‘They already control the sky. Their ships are faster than our ships, they are armed with real weapons, and they are crammed with soldiers. Soon they’ll control the cities too. And then everything else. Despite what your mayor says, there’s nothing we can do about that - I see some of you are surprised to hear that hear that I agree with you, but it’s perfectly obvious. We can’t win this war, but we can win the peace. There aren’t many of them, and they are far from home. History teaches us that occupation of one country by another always ends in the defeat or retreat of the occupier. There are things we can do to hasten that,’ Shizuko said, and launched into a brief and efficient lecture about preparing for life after war, and strategies for making the lives of the invaders from Earth as uncomfortable as possible.

There was an embarrassed silence when she had finished. At last, David said, ‘Clearly you have your way, and we have ours.’

‘Trying to hide out here won’t work.’

‘We are not trying to hide. We are here. We make no secret of it to you or to anyone else.’

‘It doesn’t matter. They’ll come for you any way. They’ll take you away.’

‘No,’ David said. ‘We will resist them. Not like you, by sabotage, attacks on their soldiers, assassination, and so on. But by nonviolence. You shake your head. You think no doubt that it is no more than pacifism. It is not. It is a means of persuasion, just as violence is a means of persuasion. But instead of using force and causing suffering to defeat the enemy, we will use our minds, and win over the enemy by love.’

He was short, with a fringe of white hair around a liver-spotted pate, and a considerable belly spilling into the lap of his shorts. Clearly one of the original settlers, one of the people who had fled the Moon a hundred years ago, when Earth had made it clear that the Lunar refuges would be closed and their populations forcibly repatriated. Like Karyl’s grandfather, who had told him many stories of those hard times. The last time Karyl had exchanged messages with Rainbow Bridge, he’d been told that everyone was sitting tight and hoping for the best. Even though there was a ship from Earth in orbit around Callisto and it was obvious that what was going to happen here was going to happen there, too. He wondered now what it must be like to have lived so long that you found yourself caught up in the same kind of situation all over again. Clearly, it hadn’t caused David to lose hope. He spoke quietly but forcefully, and the people around him clearly agreed because they were nodding and smiling. He was not only an unreconstructed human being, with his pot belly and thatch of chest hair and crooked toe nails, he was also an old-fashioned patriarch -- a rarity in the patchwork of matriarchal societies of the Saturn System.

‘I’m sorry to hear it, because they’ll kill you,’ Shizuko said.

‘We are prepared for that,’ a woman nursing a baby said, with a sharp look that Shizuko met with a smile.

‘People will die, no doubt,’ David said. ‘But in the end, nonviolence is stronger than violence.’

Shizuko laughed and said that they had their way and she and her friends had hers, they’d see who would be more successful. ‘I know that you didn’t try nonviolence on your mayor, or if you did you had no luck.’

‘He isn’t our enemy,’ David said.

And there it was again, the divide between generations. Most of the pioneers and their children and grandchildren wanted nothing to do with war, and weren’t willing to fight against the enemy. But their great-grandchildren, the rising generation of Outers, were more aggressive because they believed that they had more to lose. They’d already been struggling to overcome the resistance of the older generations to expansion further outwards, to the moons of Uranus and Neptune and beyond. And now they wanted to confront the enemy head on, because the enemy wanted to put an end their dream of expansion before it had begun. For a hundred years, the Outer System had been more or less left alone as Earth recovered from the catastrophe of the Overturn: ecological crashes and climate change ten times worse than anthropogenic global warming, and wars and famines too. But now the three great powers of Earth had done much of the great work of reclamation and reconstruction they had turned their attention outwards, to the little utopian principalities of
the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Wanted to bring them under control before they spread into the outer dark, and changed themselves so radically that they would become, in effect, another human species. One with greater powers than unreconstructed humans, angels or devils who wouldn’t ever be bound by the laws of old Earth.

Karyl had heard the same arguments over and again ever since the first ship from Earth had arrived in the Saturn System, and nothing had changed. One side argued for the higher moral ground, whether it was pacifism or nonviolent resistance, citing the success of Gandhi, the fall of the Soviet empire, the Arab Spring, and so on; the other believed that the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had been right to assert that human beings were born perfectible, but would never be perfect, that violence was an indelible part of human nature that couldn’t be edited out without destroying all those qualities - fearless exploration, insatiable curiosity, creativity - necessary to the human spirit. And so the Outers were divided amongst themselves, and couldn’t agree what to do about the enemy, and so nothing was done. It was depressing, really, and so unnecessary. Even if the Outers did spread outward, and radically change themselves, it would have nothing to do with Earth. And if the great powers of Earth wanted access to the scientific knowledge that the Outers had preserved and accumulated in the last century, there was surely a way of trading it. Everything could be traded for everything else, after all. Karyl had tried out these arguments long before, on a woman he’d slept with while staying over in the garden habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, and she’d told him that the three great powers weren’t really going to war against the Outers - no, the Outers were the prize that Earth’s great powers were squabbling over amongst themselves. Once one looked liked winning the prize the others had to join in.

Whatever. Everyone around the rug argued amongst themselves and the chandelier and the moonscape dimmed down, and red and green and blue fireflies winked under the dark boughs of the firs and pines, and Karyl drank too much of the pine-sap mead that was being passed around, and when he woke early the next morning he had a bad headache that the traditional cure of breathing pure oxygen didn’t quite flush away. He was hoping to drive off without any fuss, but Shizuko came into the garage as he was performing some final checks on his rolligon. She was getting ready to leave too, she said, and asked him where he was heading next.

‘Oh, down the Palantine Linea, perhaps. Out in that direction, somewhere or other.’

Karyl was wary because it was clear that the woman was a member of the resistance, although it wasn’t called the resistance, but ‘our thing’ or ‘this thing of ours’. They were everywhere, trotting out their agenda, looking for recruits, asking favours.

Shizuko laughed. ‘It’s all right. I don’t intend to follow you. You have your prospecting, and I have business of my own. And I’m not going to try to recruit you. You’re from Callisto after all, and I hear that they’re a pretty conservative lot in the Jupiter System. Still, I have to admit that someone like you would be very useful. You gypsies know Dione like no one else, you have all kinds of hideaways and caches . . .’

She was standing close, with one hand on his arm, smiling down at him, her gaze warm and more golden, in the bright light of the garage, than yellow. Karyl felt a definite attraction to her, and wondered if she trying to seduce him, if she was wearing a pheromone or a hypnotic. Not that she’d need any biochemical help. It had been a long time since Karyl had slept with anyone, he’d been spending a lot of time out in the country these days, avoiding as much as possible all the nonsense about war. And she was quite a woman too, powerful and confident . . .

Shizuko laughed again, and broke the spell, and said again that she wouldn’t try to persuade him, but perhaps he could think hard about things. ‘And when it comes, as it will, when things change, as they will, remember that we need your help.’

‘What will you do?’

Shizuko’s gaze grew darkly serious. ‘I’ll fight them in any way I can.’

‘Well, I hope it doesn’t come to it.’

‘It will. It’s happening right now. Coming straight towards us. Can’t you feel it?’

Her grip had tightened on his arm and her face was close to his and he could feel her heat and was breathing in her spice. Then she stepped back and the spell was broken. She looked around at the bare walls of the garage and then lifted her tunic to reveal a small plastic tool tucked into the waistband of her shorts. A 9mm recoilless pistol made by a manufactory in Paris, Shizuko said. The same kind of weapon carried by the peace wardens there.

Karyl felt a cold shock cleave through him. He’d never seen a pistol before. It was like being confronted with a truly wild and deadly animal.

Shizuko told him that it shot explosive rounds. One was more than enough to kill a person. If they tried to capture her, she said, she would kill as many of them as she could and then kill herself, it was better to die free than live in chains.

So she was crazy, Karyl thought. Driven crazy by thinking about the war all the time, or already crazy and refusing to take her meds. Or just an extreme example of the way people thought, here. That was the difference between people from Saturn System and people like him. They thought themselves more radical, were more Adventurous. They though that people like him were reactionaries, clinging to old ways whose usefulness had long ended. But he liked his life. The life he had made.

He told Shizuko to take care, and she laughed and told him that she knew how to take care of herself because she had thought long and hard about it, she hoped he’d do the same.

He climbed into his rolligon, feeling a big surge of fear because he had to turn his back on the crazy woman and her venomous little tool, and managed to seal it up, and sat, quivering, in the big seat at the front of its bubble for a few minutes, until he’d calmed down. Then he started the rolligon up and drove through the inner doors and they closed behind him and the air was pumped out and the outer doors opened and he drove out into Dione’s late afternoon.

He should have felt elated at having escaped, free again to go anywhere he wanted without anyone telling him what he should do, but his bad feeling clung to him. He couldn’t help wondering what Shizuko had been doing down in the garage. Maybe just checking over her rolligon. Or maybe sticking a transponder on his. She had said that he would be useful, that he must know all kinds of hiding places. Maybe she wanted to see where he went so that she could make use of his places. Find his caches. Maybe she wanted to follow him . . .

Crazy thoughts feeding on each other like a knot of snakes. But she was crazy, so it was probably a good precaution to try to think like her, to figure out if she wanted something from him, what it was.

Still, he felt a touch of guilt and foolishness when he turned off the road, and cut east in a half-circle that took him back towards the oasis. It was late afternoon, and the sun hung low at the horizon, behind the rolligon, which chased its long shadow across smooth dusty ground where the small and large bowls of rimless craters were so brimful with blackness that they looked like holes punched through reality, with only the faintest gleam on their sunward crescents lending them any indication of dimension. Saturn, almost full, was bisected by the eastern horizon, like a fat man trying to get out of a pool, the narrow bright curve of the rings aimed almost straight up.

Four kilometers from the oasis, Karyl parked the rolligon and had the AI run a full scan on every radio channel and failed to find the beep of a transponder, then climbed into his pressure suit and clambered out of the lock and loped on a little way until the green gleam of the oasis appeared like a star on the curve of the horizon. He stood still and watched it for a little while, using the magnifying feature of his helmet’s faceplate. It was neatly fitted into the crater, the top of its coping wall level with the slumped rim, the polygonal elements of its hemispherical tent blankly shining with sunlight. Farm tubes packed with green plants under bright lights were half-sunk into the lobate apron off to one side, where ejecta melted by the heat of the impact that had formed the crater had settled and refrozen. Nothing moved out there: no sign of Shizuko’s rolligon. Maybe she had already left, heading west as she’d told him. Or maybe she was still trying to convert the family to her cause, or was working to pay off the debt of hospitality.

So at last, feeling angry now as well as foolish at the way the war had infected him with stupid paranoid thoughts, Karyl walked back to the rolligon and got in and turned it around and drove off out across Dione.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (12)

The wind that blew in their faces was cold, yet somehow stale. They were looking from a high terrace and there was a great landscape spread out below them.
Low down and near the horizon hung a great red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen.
C.S. Lewis The Magician's Nephew

Humanity

They fell silent once more, staring out of the black window, but they found only each other's faces in there and turned away.
Karin Fossum, Calling Out For You

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (11)

John Martin's Paradise Lost - Satan Presiding Over The Infernal Council.

Now You See It

So I went on holiday again, this time to St Ives, Cornwall (1950s seaside ambience enhanced by its dinky branch-line, but with C21 food, and a fractal coast walk from Zennor I thoroughly recommend).  And now I'm working on a new draft of the next novel, and at any moment the proofs for In the Mouth of the Whale will arrive. My last chance to go through the text and remove anything unsightly.

Which reminds me about the recent ministorm about whether or not Fomalhaut b, the Jupiter-sized exoplanet imaged by the Hubble Telescope, a few years ago, actually exists. Scientists were able to trace Fomalhaut b's orbit from Hubble Telescope images from 2004 and 2008.  Now, new data seems to show that Fomalhaut b isn't where it should be, at the inner edge of the dust ring (where, supposedly, it is sweeping the edge clean and giving it the sharp profile that suggested the presence of a planet before Fomalhaut b was imaged), but seems to have wandered into the edge of the ring. One astronomer, Ray Jayawardhana, suggests this proves Fomalhaut b is an artifact; another, Paul Kallas, the lead investigator of the team which first identified Fomalhaut b, suggests it's due to use of a different Hubble imaging system, after the one that took the 2004 and 2008 images failed, something sort of backed up by a third astronomer, Christian Marois, who points out that since Fomalhaut b has an orbit with a period of some 800 years, it's highly unlikely that it would throw a substantial deviation so soon after it was discovered.

Jayawardhana and Kallas have a history of rivalry, but that won't determine the existence or otherwise of Fomalhaut b; only more measurements will. How different science would be if scientific truths were determined by force of will; it would be like . . . magic.
 
I have some small interest in this. Part of In the Mouth of the Whale is set in the inner edge of Fomalhaut's ring of dust; part of it is set on a ringed, Jupiter-sized gas giant just inside that inner edge. If Fomalhaut b turns out not to exist, then I guess I'll have to suggest that another planet just like it does, only we haven't discovered it yet. Meanwhile, as the very good report about the kerfuffle in Nature concludes:

For its part, Fomalhaut b seems to know what it's doing, even if no one else does.

There Are Doors (Slight Return)

Spotted in Bruges, by the side of a canal.

A Transect

When I get stuck on a plot point or find myself typing instead of writing, a walk usually clears my head and gets me thinking again. This is one of my longer walks, more or less due south to the Thames.

Under A Double Star

Into town today to talk for a couple of minutes on the BBC World Service about the recent discovery of a planet orbiting the Kepler-16 binary system. Both stars are smaller than the sun, one an orange K-type star, the other a red dwarf; the orbit of the planet, Kepler-16b, is similar to that of Venus; comparisons have been made to Star Wars' Tatooine (the hook on which so many news stories have been hung).  But Kepler-16b is about the size of Saturn, although with a higher density, suggesting that it possesses a core of ice or rock about half its diameter, enveloped in deep atmosphere at a chilly -100° C.  Not much chance for any carbon-based life like ours to see those double sunsets and sunrises, then, although it's possible that the planet's core might retain some heat and warm lower layers of its atmosphere, or that there might be a moon with an atmosphere that's both thick enough and with the right composition to generate a greenhouse effect.

Given that the Kepler spacecraft has discovered one planet around a stable binary star system, it's pretty likely that there are plenty more out there, and that some will be much more Earth-like than Kepler-16b. Perhaps there are even planets around triple-star systems; maybe even a planet or two orbiting a system with six suns, as in Isaac Asimov's short story 'Nightfall', where night is a rare and frightening event . . .

Well, it's nice to know that there are real-life equivalents of science-fictional scenarios.  Even better, we're beginning to understand that the universe is stranger than we can imagine.  Kepler-16b isn't the first explanet to be discovered orbiting a binary system.  There are two planets bigger than Jupiter orbiting the eclipsing binary NN Serpentis, 1700 light years away.  The stars, a red dwarf and a white dwarf, are believed to be a cataclysmic variable system, with the material drawn off from the red dwarf forming an accretion disc around the white dwarf.  When material from the disc falls on to the white dwarf, it triggers nuclear fusion and a cataclysmic outburst.  If enough material falls on to the white dwarf it could increase the interior density of the white dwarf, ignite runaway carbon fusion, and trigger a supernova. Imagine the view from a moon of one of those gas giants if that happens . . .

O Superman

‘In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.’

Fritz Leiber, ‘Poor Superman’

On Mars

Found in PC World magazine during research:

"Probably the most special day I've had as a rover [driver] was the day I built my first drive solo on Mars," [Ashley] Stroupe said. "We were on the plateau on Husband Hill, and we were driving along the edge to get imagery of the valley below. I parked us right on the edge and got a spectacular view."

"I remember looking at those tracks and realizing what they meant -- my first tracks on Mars, and the first tracks actually made by a woman driving on another planet," she said. "I am proud of it every time I see that panorama from the very top looking down at those tracks."

It's an especially powerful piece of empathy or projection because driving a rover is more like one of those ancient text-based computer games than Gran Turismo or Second Life.  The Mars rover team at JPL keep in contact with their machine viaNASA's Deep Space Network, and because their time on the network is limited and the round-trip for signals between Earth and Mars takes between 8 and 42 minutes, driving by direct law isn't possible. Instead, while the rover rests during the Martian night, its team of drivers and scientists plan out the next day's moves, code them, and test and retest them before uploading them. The rover then executes those moves the next day. Yet note how by the second sentence of Stroupe's description, the pronoun has changed from I to we.   Identification is complete. "We were on the plateau on Husband Hill..." We were on Mars...

Cover Me

Hey, here's the cover for In The Mouth of the Whale.  It's by Sidonie Beresford-Browne, and I like it a lot. There's a lot going on in the novel, but quite a bit of it involves spaceships (I know they have wings: they're on their way down into the atmosphere) and chunky worldlets and a gas giant.

The Hippity-Hop Theory of Writing

"Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock."

Ann Beattie (from The Paris Review)

Snark Hunting

I was away - a short break in Bruges.  Lovely, thanks.  And now I'm busy with the copy edit of In The Mouth of the Whale, dealing with queries and corrections raised by a fantastically sharp-eyed editor with a good and solidly old-fashioned (in the best sense of the world) grounding in grammar who has not only read every word and noted every punctuation mark of the MS, but has queried the correctness and value of each and every one too. It's the first time I've done this kind of thing entirely on screen.  For every other novel and story of mine, I transferred marks made on a printed MS to an electronic file; this time, I'm hunting for overstrikes and red-lined corrections with the help of the search-and-replace function, and recalling a little of the performance anxiety I felt when I transferred from typewriter to word processor. But I get to read the whole thing again, this time in physical form, when the proofs are delivered, and the thing moves another step closer to actuality.

Some Remarks on In The Mouth of the Whale

It’s a stand-alone novel that’s set 1500 years after The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun and picks up the story of one of the players in the old drama: Sri Hong-Owen, a gene wizard who is her own greatest experimental subject.

Sri wants to live forever.  After a treatment that went badly wrong left her confined to a vat, she created a strange family from her own flesh and set off for the star Fomalhaut, to found her own empire in its great planetary ring. But history has overtaken her, as history always overtakes people who live too long. Her starship was damaged; she died; those of her children who survived have rebooted her by recreating her childhood.

Meanwhile, a posthuman group, the Quick, has reached Fomalhaut ahead of Sri and founded a new civilisation which fell to another group, the fierce and largely unmodified True, who enslaved the Quick and set up their own empire.  And now, as Sri’s starship approaches Fomalhaut, the True are fighting interlopers from another interstellar colony for control of the gas giant Cthuga, whose core may be the home of a vast strange intellect.

What else? There’s an outcast librarian who, with the help of his Quick servant, fights demons in fragments of a vast data base. The disappearance of one of the scions of a powerful family. Thistledown cities and an archipelago of engineered worldlets. A big dumb object floating in atmosphere of a gas giant planet, probing for signs of life. War in the air. A vivid dream of childhood that begins to unravel. A secret hidden in the cityscapes of a virtual library. The termitarial mindset of a cult that’s lasted 1500 years. Visions of cul-de-sacs in human evolution. The utility of intelligence. The cost of longevity, and that perennial problem of what to do for the rest of your life after you die . . .

Coming soon, as they say.