A Story

The Trues had conquered Ceres, the Koronis Emirates, and half a hundred lesser kingdoms and republics, and as they began to probe the defences of Mars the Czarina dispatched twenty of her paladins to search for the armill of one of her ancestors, which was believed to augment the wisdom of its wearer and control secret caches of powerful weapons and squads of shellback troopers from the long ago.

After adventures in the deserts and mountains of the red planet, fighting bandits, dust ghouls, and rogue gene wizards and their monstrous offspring, the paladin was riding through the trackless forests of the Hellas Basin when she discovered a circular lake with a slim, bone-white tower rising from its centre. As she approached the slender bridge that arched between shore and tower, another rider came out of the trees and challenged her: a rogue paladin whose armour, like hers, had lost its devices and beacons to battle-damage and sandstorms. They drew their vorpal blades and spurred their chargers and flew at each other. Their chargers bit and mauled each other and collapsed; the paladins fought on into the night.

Sparks and flames from their clashing blades lit up the lake and the tower, and the red rain of their blood speckled the stones of the shore. Both were grievously wounded, but neither would yield. At last, the paladin dispatched her enemy with a killing thrust, but when she wrenched off his helmet she discovered that he was her own brother. As she wept over his body a man dressed in black furs appeared. He gathered her into his arms and carried her across the bridge, into the tower. She glimpsed the armill, a slim platinum bracelet set on a bolster inside a crystal reliquary; then its guardian carried her down a spiral stair to a basement room, stripped off her damaged armour, and lowered her into the casket of an ancient medical engine.

When the paladin woke, she was hungry and thirsty, and very weak. The room was dark, the stairs were blocked by rubble, her armour was gone. After she clawed her way out, she discovered that the tower was in ruins. There was no sign of the reliquary and its guardian, and the lake was dry and the forest all around was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps.

She had been asleep for a century.  Mars had fallen to the Trues. The Czarina and her family were long dead; her battalions and her ships were destroyed or scattered. The last paladin dug up the grave of the brother she had killed, put on his armour, and went out into the world and waged a long and terrible war against the conquerors of Mars. She was a fierce and relentless enemy, driven by remorse and guilt. She killed everyone who pursued her, including five suzerains, and raised an army of brigands and sacked the ancient capital. But nothing could atone for the mortal sin that had derailed her quest. When she and the tattered remnant of her army were at last cornered in the Labyrinth of the Night by five squadrons of elite shock troopers, she died with her dead brother’s name on her lips.

Homework

So I turned in the edited manuscript of Evening's Empires on Tuesday, and discussed the changes I'd made with my editors yesterday. As usual, I'd done rather more than fix glitches and inconsistencies they'd spotted -- it takes me a year to write a novel, and then it takes me three months to fix and polish it.  It's scheduled for publication on July 18th next year, twenty-five years after publication of my first novel with Gollancz, Four Hundred Billion Stars. I am as old as dirt.

I have been planning something for that 25th anniversary, by the way, with the help of the good people of PS Publishing. More about that soon.

Meanwhile, I'm researching the background of a story:
The interior of a Lun class ekranoplan;
Tropical kit worn by Russian naval officers;
What the topography of Venus would look like if its surface was cool enough to support liquid water;
Carboniferous megafauna . . .

I've been doing what amounts to homework for almost three decades. That hasn't got old, not at all.

Fast Stars

Supernovae are very violent events.  Very very very violent events.  Burning for just few days, a supernova emits as much light and other radiation as the sun will emit in its lifetime; so much light that it briefly outshines the combined luminosity of every other star in its galaxy.  There are two basic types of supernova: the first is triggered by the collapse of a supermassive star; the second by the reignition of nuclear fusion in a white dwarf star.  White dwarfs are the remnants of stars of average mass that have used up their hydrogen and, because the heat of fusion processes is no longer countering gravity, have collapsed into dense spheres of electron-degenerate matter and are slowly radiating away their stored energy (more massive stars collapse into even denser neutron stars).  But if a white dwarf is orbiting close to a companion star it can draw off and accumulate material until a runaway carbon fusion process ignites and destroys the white dwarf.  The properties and luminosity of these supernovae, called Type 1a, are so uniform that they can be used as standard candles to determine the distance to the galaxy in which they briefly flare.

But sometimes, like a misfiring firework, Type 1a supernovae sputter out before they reach peak luminosity.  A new computer simulation model suggests that these failed supernovae contain multiple ignition points that expand the white dwarf too quickly and prevent full detonation of the star.  Instead, there's an asymmetric explosion, something like a rocket jet.  The kick of this explosion could, apparently, accelerate the white dwarf to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second, enough to rip it out of orbit around its companion star, or even to turn it into a hypervelocity star travelling at a speed that would enable it to escape from the Milky Way.  Imagine weaponising a supernova, turning a white dwarf into a bullet of electron-degenerate matter with the mass of the sun . . .

And if that isn't weird enough, it's not the only way that hypervelocity stars can be created.  Stars orbiting close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way accelerate as they swing around it.  Here's a neat simulation of the actual stars tracing their orbits:



If a multiple star system swings too close to the black hole, one of its members could gain enough momentum to escape its orbit, and zoom away at high speeds.  When I wrote about this in Eternal Light, back in 1991, this was just a hypothesis. Since then, the Hubble telescope has spotted a massive hypervelocity star heading out from the galactic centre at some 2.6 million kilometres per hour, three times the sun's velocity as it traces its orbit around the galaxy. You really don't need to make it up . . .

Edge of Infinity

Just as I send the edited manuscript of Evening's Empires via the ether to my publishers, the doorbell ring ring rings on this damp darkening November afternoon - it's the Fedex guy, delivering my author's copy of Edge of Infinity, an anthology of stories about the next stage in the space age.  Edited by Jonathan Strahan, it features a baker's dozen of stories by a knockout selection of stellar authors, and, er, me:

1. Introduction, Jonathan Strahan
2. The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi, Pat Cadigan
3. The Deeps of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear
4. Drive, James S.A. Corey
5. The Road to NPS, Sandra McDonald & Stephen D. Covey
6. Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh, John Barnes
7. Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden, Paul McAuley
8. Safety Tests, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
9. Bricks, Sticks, Straw, Gwyneth Jones
10. Tyche and the Ants, Hannu Rajaniemi
11. Obelisk, Stephen Baxter
12. Vainglory, Alastair Reynolds
13. Water Rights, An Owomayela
14. The Peak of Eternal Light, Bruce Sterling

All the stories have their own take on what it might be like to live out there, in the rich, diverse and dynamic Solar System revealed by several generations of robot explorers, from the Pioneers to Cassini-Huygens, New Horizons, and Dawn.  My story, 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, the Potter's Garden', is a little tale of ordinary life set in the Quiet War's solar system, several decades after the war and its aftermath described in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.  It's the beginning of a long golden afternoon in history, with peace on Earth and in the heavens, and humanity spreading into the Solar System and heads out towards exoplanets circling near stars.  And a civil servant in Egypt receives an invitation to her father's funeral in a little settlement on Saturn's icy moon Dione . . .

English Stained Glass, The Cloisters, New York

Space dragon holds up a chalice so that his astronaut pal, armed with a power scroll, can chastise the devil alien trapped inside it.

Exomemory

On their own, single cells of cellular slime moulds are closely similar to amoebae, naked blobs of protoplasm enclosed in a cytoplasmic membrane, wandering through the water films around soil particles and leaf litter.  But when they get together, they start to express a variety of complex behaviours and structures.  They aggregate into networks of threads or into big slug-like blobs that act as a single organism, and during sexual reproduction differentiate into complex sporangia.  And they also secrete mucous trails that act as a kind of exomemory, helping them navigate through their environment and locate food.  They lack a nervous system, but display a kind of intelligence.  Like ants (which create scent-based forage trails), like human beings, they are able to create a form of external notation about their history.  A kind of writing.  Maps.  Diaries.  Epic slime-mould odysseys.

For the past two years I've been laying down my own trail, a sequence of about 130,000 words in the form of a novel, Evening's Empires, and travelling over it again and again, altering and refining it, draft upon draft.  I've now just about finished the final stage of editing (I'm taking a break from hunting down adverbs, querying their usefulness, and eliminating them if they don't pass muster).  Next week, the manuscript goes back to my editor, who'll pass it on to the copy editor for a close reading that will query every word.  When I've responded to that, the novel will be set in type and pass through the proofreading stage, a last chance to comb out errors, and then it will go into production.  And at last join that part of the human exomemory, vast and very nearly measureless, located in bookshops, libraries, and book-like electronic devices.

Let's Put The Future Behind Us*

I was going to write about realism and space fiction, and at some point I will, but something I discovered via SF Signal (which does a nice job of aggregating all kinds of links to science fiction and fantasy stuff) got under my skin this morning, and it's an itch I can't resist scratching.

Over on the web site of the Science Fiction Writers of America, author and astronomy professor Michael Brotherton published a list of ten hard science fiction novels that have stood the test of time.  I don't want to pick an argument with Michael Brotherton, specifically.  The ten books he's chosen are all solid, often award-winning novels from science fiction's rich and storied history, and he gives good and interesting reasons for selecting them.  He knows his science fiction, and he knows his science.  The problem isn't that there's anything wrong with the list he's generated using his criteria, apart from one obvious thing I'll get to in a minute, but that it exemplifies the way science fiction is all too often backward looking.  The problem is with the criteria.  Specifically with that cute little phrase 'stood the test of time.'

The oldest novel on the list is Hal Clement's A Mission of Gravity, serialised in 1953; the most recent is Carl Sagan's Contact, from 1985.  It's true that everything on the list has stood the test of time, but science has moved on.  A lot.  Three of the novels deal with problems in Newtonian physics; two with using radio astronomy to contact aliens; two more with relativistic dilation effects.  Given their vintage, none deal with or could be expected to deal with anything approaching the current bleeding edge of science - the new cosmology, brane theory, string theory, dark matter, nanotechnology, quantum computing, most modern biotechnological techniques, and on and on.   The list isn't a bad list (except for the obvious problem), but like too many lists of its kind - and science fiction fans and writers love to produce lists - it was produced by looking backwards, not forward, by framing the selective criteria to include a bunch of the usual suspects and to exclude anything even remotely recent.

It also, and now I'm getting to the obvious problem, does not include any hard sf novels by women, or by writers of colour.  At all.  Michael Brotherton does acknowledge this, and names some writers he might have included if he wasn't looking backwards.  He also mentions some writers whose careers began after 1985, and notes, again quite rightly, that 'a field this rich can’t be captured in a top ten list.'  Absolutely.  But it doesn't stop people making lists, all too often generated by criteria that exclude much of science fiction's current variety.  So here's an idea.  Why not frame your lists to exclude the obvious suspects?  Why not make lists of ten great hard sf novels by women, or by non-Western writers?  Or how about twenty mindblowing hard sf novels of the twenty-first century?  Here are a few to get you going on the latter: Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder, Justina Robson's Natural History, M. John Harrison's Light, Tricia Sullivan's Maul. Any others?

*title filched from Jack Womack's fine satirical novel about post-Soviet Russia

Two Stories

Two stories in particular stayed with him. In one, a young woman on Saturn’s giant moon Titan discovered one of the fabled gardens created by the great gene wizard Avernus, hidden inside a bubble habitat buried at the bottom of a deep rift. When she cycled through its airlock the young woman found that it still lovely and perfect centuries after the gene wizard’s death: groves of slender birch trees standing amongst black rocks and lawns of thick black moss, lit by bright chandeliers. But as she walked through it, it began to die. Chandelier light dimmed to an eldritch glow. Her p-suit boots left white prints in the moss that began to grow like puddles of spilt milk. The fresh green leaves of the birches around her darkened, turned red, and began to fall, a red snow fluttering down across the dying, piebald lawns. And the paper-white bark of the trees began to darken too, turning black as soot. The young woman realised that she had triggered the garden’s death, that she had become Avernus’s collaborator in a work of art. That she was the sole witness to its transient beauty. The spills of white widening across the floor. The red leaves fluttering down. The skeletons of the leafless trees blackening as if consumed by an invisible fire. She sat in the middle of the garden, aching with sorrow and wonder and awe.

The second story began in a holy city threatened with invasion by a True battle fleet.  The city's two priest-kings burned the sole copy of the sacred book at the heart of their religion, so that it would not fall into the hands of the infidels, and divided their people into two groups and fled into the Kuiper belt. The priest-kings had memorised every word in the book; each established a refuge where the children and children’s children of their followers learned the sacred text by heart. But as generation succeeded generation errors crept into the memorised text, subtly changing it, subtly changing the creed and customs of the religion. A million years passed. At last, the long, slow orbits of the icy kobolds of the refuges brought them close.  After first contact the two groups immediately declared war, each convinced the other was a nest of heretics, and the bitter battles left no survivors.

Just Like Science Fiction

A genre is a warehouse of tropes.  No, it's like an Ikea catalogue. You could use it to furnish a house.  Or it's like one of those old Sears Roebuck catalogues: you could use it to furnish a life.  But no matter how much you rearrange the furniture, you can't escape the feeling that the house you've built is no more than a variation of all the other houses furnished by the same catalogue.  It's a roomy old catalogue, but it's much smaller than the world.

Some of the items you can order from the science-fiction catalogue aren't quite ready for the real world.  They may seem plausible or possible, but they're unrealised possibilities, golden vapourware.  Others are tick marks on a fantasy wishlist.  But there are items that were once golden vapourware that have escaped from the pages of the genre catalogue.  Space stations and satellites and spacecraft.  Cyberspace and robots.  They are part of the furniture of the happening world.  And the world continues to find new uses for them, and their importance to us continues to change, just as they continue to change us.  A science-fiction writer can choose to deal with them as if they were still no more than catalogue images, as if robots (for instance) are still no more clanking, vaguely human-shaped metaphors for oppressed workers, or machines too powerful to control, or unfallen humans, or silver-metal lovers.  But she would be looking backwards, or inwards.  She wouldn't be writing about the future; she wouldn't even be writing about the present.  She would be writing a fantasy polder about some future of days long past.

Here's an idea: why not write about them as they are now, or as they might become? Why not write about robots that are extensions of ourselves, in our blood, at the bottom of the ocean, falling past the heliopause? Why not write about killer drones, panopticon drones, soft robots, robots on Mars, robots swinging around Saturn's rings and moon, microscopic robots, surgical robots, cockroach robots, robot cockroaches, swarming robots, hive robots, spam robots, robots that connect to satellites and plot your route through the world, robots that live in your phone and help you live your life, wave-rider robots. . .

Push what they are, what they can to do, how they are changing us, as hard and as fast as you can.  Turn them into metaphors for the way we live, the way we might live, new angles on the human condition.  Mash them.  Mutate them.  Make them dance.  Make them sing.

Just like science fiction.

Let's All Get Real

Back in May, Arthur Krystal published a piece in The New Yorker attempting to put some clear blue water between genre and literary fiction.  Lev Grossman presented a slew of exceptions to Krystal's arguments, and suggested that Krystal's so-called clear-cut division was falsified by writers working from the edge of genres outward, and the many recent literary novels that found their own uses for genre tropes and narrative vitality.  If there is a border, it's porous in both directions.  And now Krystal had revisited his argument in another New Yorker piece, asserting that genre is basically commercial fiction, while literature is art, baby, with a capital A, its carapace glimmering with ambiguity, its heart pumping the rich blood of 'felt life'.

I was planning to write something about Krystal's circular logic and claims of exceptionalism re literary fiction, but by the time I started to think about getting around to it, several people smarter than me had already cut him down.  We've been here before, far too many times.  It's like man-made climate change: there are the facts on the ground, and there are the arguments that those who want to deny those facts or claim they aren't important trot out time and again, no matter how many times they're proven to be based on partial data or to be just plain wrong.  It's necessary to engage with splitters like Krystal, I guess, and maybe it's even useful . . . but it's getting old.

Still, a short passage in Krystal's piece does have the sting of (partial) truth:

...perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us.

I was trying to figure out how to link this to a new essay by Paul Kincaid, in which he returns to his argument about a growing sense of exhaustion in the science-fiction field, and suggests that the problem lies in the heartland of science fiction.  Which I think is more or less congruous with what we might call 'commercial' science fiction - those novels which make up the bulk of publishers' lists, and which tend to be self-contained polders which either have little connection with the present, or simplify its complex ambiguities to stirring tales of right and wrong, light and dark, heroes and villains.  And which tend to consist of rearrangements of genre furniture that are sometimes elegant, but don't contain any new tropes, and usually don't examine in any radical way the premises on which they are founded.

Krystal's piece pulls that old trick of judging literary fiction by its best examples, and genre fiction by its worst.  And too much criticism within the science-fiction field doesn't distinguish between commercial sf, which is trying to construct new and engaging stories within a defined framework, and the edgier stuff, which is trying to do something else.  One of the things Paul Kincaid is trying to do, I think, is attempting to work out what that distinction means. It's good, useful stuff.  I don't agree with all of it.  I certainly think, like Kincaid, that too much science fiction looks 'inward', but I wouldn't make a strong distinction between science fiction that attempts to revitalise genre tropes and science fiction that attempts to inject new ideas for 'outside'; some of those tropes have escaped into the real world, and by engaging with them and using them to discover new meanings science fiction is in dialogue with both its own ideas and with the real.  But it's laying the groundwork for all kinds of debates that stimulate writers and readers, and refresh the field and widen its possibilities, and crack open the limitations and boundaries (too often self-imposed) that, according to critics like Krystal, consign genre fiction to the outer dark of the second-rate.

Found Poetry

Found while trawling the internets, a brief article on manipulating photons, which might have implications in creating nanoscale circuitry. I'm not really interested in the workings of 'entirely new class of devices that use light instead of electricity' that could be used in 'applications ranging from accelerators and microscopes to speedier on-chip communications'.  Too mundane.  But wouldn't it be lovely to write a story, or even a sentence, that sings with the found poetry of synthetic magnetism, photonic crystals, breaking time-reversal symmetry, photon control?

Edna Sharrow

 

Edna Sharrow was born in Glastonbury on All Souls Day, 1876. Claiming to be the last true black witch, she became a supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s and fled her homeland after a failed attempt to turn the gold reserves of the Bank of England into iron pyrites.

She survived the last days of Hitler's bunker and kidnap attempts by the KGB, the CIA, and Mossad, returned to London in the 1960s, and drew a circle of protection around herself in a ground floor flat in Essex Road, Islington.

She's been there ever since, living on spiders, woodlice, and pallid tendrils of ivy that curl through the rotten courses of mortar of the kitchen wall. A few weeks ago, a young crack addict broke into the flat, hoping to find something he could sell for his next fix. Edna patched the broken pane in the front door with cardboard charged with a sly charm. An open invitation to another desperate chancer.

She'd forgotten how good fresh meat tasted. After another meal, she'll be ready to go back into the world.

Next Episode Here

Bait (Ori)

The drones flew east at a steady six hundred kph, twenty-six of them, each separated from each by five kilometres. At last the supervisor spoke, said that the predators had left the ship. And soon afterwards the drones were on station, above the pale eye of a semi-permanent storm embedded in laminar flows and intricate swirls. Ori began to fly doglegs from point to point, a small part of a pattern woven across ten thousand square kilometres of sky, and broke out the signal package and began to broadcast. Electronic noise, false radar images, chatter. All low-level and fragmented, as if leaking past corrupt shielding, a honey-pot simulation designed to lure in enemy probes. Bait.

An hour passed, and another hour. The predators were on station now, moving in wide and random circles beyond the drones’ honeypot. The supervisor spoke at intervals, telling the jockeys to stay frosty, chiding one or another of them if they exceeded error parameters.

And, in the south, a star fell.

It fell in a long curve, arcing in above the cloudscape. It was small and faint and white, suddenly flaring blood-red and winking out. For several seconds nothing else happened. Then new stars appeared amongst the fixed stars. Two sets of them, moving quickly towards each other in short brief arcs, radiating out from opposing central points, passing in opposite directions, flaring, vanishing. All in perfect silence and without registering on any of the drone’s senses. Whatever it was, it was happening beyond the planet’s atmosphere: Ori used a simple triangulation method to determine that it was slightly over fifteen thousand kilometres away.

And more of these patterns were appearing all over the black sky in the south and east, tiny and bright and sharp and distinct. Ori, still flying her drone point to point with mindless regularity because she hadn’t been told to do anything else, imagined opposing fleets of ships firing at each other as they passed. A hundred of them, two hundred. Guttering out one by one until the sky was quiet again. Then something flared dead ahead, a little way above the area where the enemy was expected to enter the atmosphere. It brightened and spread, a kind of gauzy grid of faint electric-blue lines defining a loose net that was growing across the sky, dividing it into cells hundreds of kilometres across. It was the defence net, generated by forts orbiting at the inner edge of the rings.

Soon, tiny lights began to swarm inside the net’s grid, swirling and darting here and there with quick and seemingly aimless agitation. Lights in a particular patch of black sky would turn towards each other and suddenly swarm together and there’d be a terrific flare and when it faded the net in that part of the sky would be dimmer. And while this was happening, stars began to fall. Some fell straight down. Others corkscrewed violently. Some flared and expanded into pale blotches that dropped ragged clusters of tiny tumbling contrails and went out; others vanished below the horizon. Little bursts of radio noise, hardly distinguishable from the fraying crackle of lightning storms. Blips of high-energy particles. X-rays and gamma rays, intense fluxes of neutrons.

‘Here we go,’ the supervisor said. ‘Stay on station. Whatever happens, do not deviate.’

The enemy had arrived.

From In the Mouth of the Whale

A Sneeze Heard Around The World

It's probably not the best idea to read, as I did, David Quammen's Spillover while suffering from a cold caught on a transatlantic flight.  Spillover is a pacy, punchy book about zoonoses, the diseases we catch from animals; several - SARS, for instance, or the H5N1 virus which caused bird flu - are respiratory diseases whose spread was amplified by air travel.  As human beings disrupt natural ecosystems, we encounter new infections, and quickly disperse them across the world.  Spillover's accounts of Ebola, HIV, SARS, H5N1and other actual or potential pandemics are gripping scientific detective stories about isolating and identifying disease organisms, tracking paths of infection back to the first victims, discovering how they became infected, and identifying the animal species - often bats or monkeys - in which the disease originated.

Quammen, who works for the National Geographic, has done an immense amount of fieldwork, observing researchers catch fruit bats in Pakistan, trekking through forests in the Congo in search of gorillas and chimpanzees infected with ebola, spelunking in a bat- and python-infested cave where tourists contracted Marburg disease, visiting the laboratory in which old tissue specimens were found to contain the first known example of the HIV virus.  There's a long, entirely ficticious account of how HIV may have spread in the colonial Congo, but for the most part Quammen scrupulously sticks to the science, and his lucid accounts of human loss and the scramble to contain outbreaks of horrific and deadly diseases hardly need embellishment.  It's terrific, sobering stuff, the raw material of a dozen possible apocalypses.

As far as viruses and other disease organisms are concerned, the seven billion human beings presently alive are a vast warm, wet reservoir of mucous membranes and the cytoplasmic machinery they need to reproduce.  We live in densely populated cities that enhance the spread of infection between individuals, and transport infections across the entire globe.  We have not separated ourselves from the natural world; we are one of its ecosystems.  Indeed, as Quammen observes, 'there is no 'natural world', it's a bad and artificial phrase.  There is only the world.  Humankind is part of that world, as are the ebolaviruses, as are the influenzas and the HIVs, as are the Nipah and Hendra and SARS, as are chimpanzees and bats and palm civets and bar-headed geese, as is the next murderous virus - the one we haven't yet detected.'

We can't escape diseases because they and we are inextricably embedded in the global environment. Our only advantage is that we are smart - smart enough to be able to detect and identify new diseases, and contain them before they can spread.  It's a constant battle - a new virulent coronavirus (SARS is another) has recently caused a handful of deaths, and has the potential to spread more widely.  So far we're winning the race.  We've equipped ourselves with a global network of dedicated lab scientists and field workers armed with techniques than can rapidly isolate disease organisms, sequence their DNA and RNA, and identify their weak spots.  But we can't ever stop running.  Our civilisation is now obligately dependent on molecular biology.

There Are Doors (18)

Random And Wildly Beautiful Patterns (Isak)

Maui wasn’t much different from the farm rock where I’d spent my early childhood. A dwarf planet about three hundred kilometres across, just large enough to have been pulled into a sphere by its own gravity: a rough ball of water ice accreted around a core of silicate rocks, contaminated with pockets of methane and nitrogen ices, coated in layers of primordial carbonaceous material and spattered with craters, one so big that material excavated by the impact covered half Maui’s surface with a lightly cratered debris shield. Two fragments lofted by that impact still circled Maui’s equator, a pair of moonlets kindled into sullen slow-burning miniature suns by Quick construction machines during the short-lived world-building era immediately after their seedship had arrived at Fomalhaut.

The Quick machines had extensively gardened the worldlet too, planting vacuum organisms in seemingly random and wildly beautiful patterns utterly unlike the square fields of my foster-family’s farm. Huge tangles of ropes, crustose pavements, clusters of tall spires, fluted columns and smooth domes, forests of wire. Mostly in shades of black but enlivened here and there with splashes and flecks of vivid reds or yellows, sprawled across crater floors, climbing walls and spilling their rims, spreading across intercrater plains, sending pseudohyphae into the icy regolith to mine carbonaceous tars, growing slowly but steadily in the faint light of Fomalhaut and Maui’s two swift-moving mini-suns.

Once, when the Quick had been the sole inhabitants of the Fomalhaut system, these gardens had covered the entire surface of the worldlet, inhabited by only a few contemplative eremites. Now, they were scarred by tents built to house refugees, the monolithic cubes of fusion generators, landing stages, materiel dumps, missile emplacements, strip mines, refineries, and maker blocks. My transit pod was flying above a region scraped down to clean bright water ice when my security delivered a message. Report to the Redactor Svern when you are finished.

From In The Mouth Of The Whale

In Paperback

These days, 'publication day' is a somewhat nebulous concept, but anyway, although it has been available from Amazon for a little while*, today is the official publication day of the mass-market paperback edition of In The Mouth of the Whale.

Happy birthday, little book.  I hope those who go looking for you are able to find you; and I hope that some people who didn't know about you will find you too.

For the curious, there's more information here, along with some extracts.

*Edit - have been reminded that you can also buy it here, with free worldwide delivery.

Only The Terrapins Did Not Die (Sri)

The Child had an early familiarity with death. She kept a small menagerie of animals collected from the wild places inside the town limits or bought in the market. She had a tank of terrapins, several tanks of river fish. She had an ant farm sandwiched between two plates of glass. She collected several species of stick insect from the forest, and bought a baby sloth from a mestizo boy in the market, but it died because she couldn’t figure out how to wean it. Most of her animals died, sooner or later. One day her fish would be all alive-o in their tanks; the next they’d be floating belly up. The ants deserted their maze. One by one, the stick insects dropped to the bottoms of their wire-mesh cages, as stiff and dry in death as the twigs they had emulated in life. Only the terrapins did not die, no matter how often she forgot to feed them, or how fetid the green soup of their little pond became.

And because she made herself useful around the hospital, working in the lab, running errands for the nurses and doctors, fetching water and food for patients, and so on, the Child was also familiar with the deep and powerful mystery of human death. One day she’d be chatting with an old woman; the next, the woman’s bed would be empty and stripped to its mattress. Late one sultry night, the Child delivered a bite of supper to her mother as she kept watch on a dying patient in a little room off one of the wards. She saw the man start in his solitary bed and try to rise on his elbows, toothless mouth snapping at the air, his eyes wide and fixed on something far beyond the limits of the room, the hospital, the town, the world. She saw her mother ease him down and talk to him soothingly and fold his hands around a rosary, saw him try to take a breath and fail, and try and fail again, and that was that. Her mother called the Child to her side and they said a prayer over the body. Then her mother rose, her shadow wheeling hugely across the wall and ceiling, and flung open the shutters of the window as if setting something free.

From In The Mouth of the Whale

There Are Doors (17)

O Death

Thirty-five years after they were launched, the two Voyager spacecraft are approaching the edge of the Solar System, where the solar wind breaks on the shore of interstellar space; at least one commentator believes that Voyager 1 has already exited the Solar System.  It is currently more than 18 trillion kilometres from the Earth, and it takes about 16 hours 47 minutes for its signal, travelling at the speed of light, to intersect Earth's orbit, but that's a mere scratch in terms of interstellar distances.  The width of the meniscus on a grain of beach sand compared to the breadth of the Pacific Ocean.  The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, 2200 times the distance Voyager 1 has travelled so far; Gliese 667, a triple-star system that possesses the best-known candidate for an Earth-like exoplanet, is 22.1 light years away; the supermassive black hole churning at the Galactic Centre is something like 27,000 light years distant.  Voyager 1 isn't aimed at any star in particular, but if it was heading towards Proxima Centauri, it would take almost 17,500 years to reach it.  And so on.

Much science fiction gets around the problem of interstellar distances by using wormholes, warp drives and other conveniences that turn stars into the equivalent of stops on a suburban railway line, or speeds at which relativistic time contraction shrinks the subjective length of voyages.  But if you stick to the Einsteinian speed limit and plausible velocities, travel across the great voids between stars becomes a serious act, with serious consequences.  It becomes, it seems to me, much like death.  Starships with cargoes of deep-frozen passengers are pharaonic tombs; those great generation starships, in which descendants of the original crews so often descend into barbarism and forget their purpose and destination, are obvious metaphors for rise and fall of civilisations; the uploaded minds of passengers will be expelled from their pocket heavens at voyage's end, refleshed, reborn.  Whether they are lumbering, hollowed-out asteroids or smart basketballs packed with nanotechnology and gene banks inscribed in imperishable quartz glass, starships are the equivalent of funeral barges:

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail darkly,
for we cannot steer, and have no port.

T.H.Lawrence, 'The Ship of Death'

There's a great deal of science fiction about death; or rather, there's a lot of science fiction about escaping or avoiding death.  About longevity and immortality, uplift and the Singularity and Omega Point gods and all the other Peter-Pan dreams of never dying, or rather - and I think this is the important point - never growing old.  There are many teenage heroes in science fiction, and some of them are well into their second century.  Maybe it's a Boomer thing, like blue jeans and the Beatles.  O, Death.  Won't you spare me over 'til another year?  And do you take Amex?

Anyway, one of the characters in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun is obsessed with trying to outwit death.  I hinted at the human cost of that obsession in those novels, and wanted to expand and elaborate on that theme, and to play with the image of the starship as a vessel of death and rebirth.  Amongst other things, trying to fit the two tropes together led to the writing of In The Mouth Of The Whale, in which the passenger of a starship relives her childhood as she is prepared for rebirth at the end of her long voyage, and finds history has moved on without her.  That's the trouble with being dead, even if it's a strategy for long-distance travel: you cede autonomy to the living.