Links 07/12/12

A global view of the lights of Earth's cities, assembled from images taken by the NASA-NOAA Suomi satellite.

Images of new craters on Mars created by the impact of two tungsten blocks and the cruise stage of the Mars Science Laboratory.

The crater formed when the Apollo 14 S-IVB stage was intentionally impacted into the Moon. The locations of other Apollo-related Lunar impact sites are listed here.

The rock sculptures of Michael Grab use gravity as glue.

The working group on the Anthropocene.

The Cranes of London

I can see two tower cranes from the window of the room where I write. At night, one fades into the darkness, leaving behind a solitary red star fixed above the horizon; the stalk of the other rises from a spotlit construction site like a rocket gantry. The image of cranes as Martian fighting machines, signalling to each other across the simmering basin of the occupied city, is obvious and more than a little trite, I guess. But it's still startling to turn a corner in central London, as I did yesterday, and be confronted by a boarded construction site with a crane looming over a deep pit where once some solid, respectable Victorian office building stood. Part of the boom in high-rise building that's significantly altering the city's skyline. Volumes of air solidify into real estate stacked inside shimmering glass curtain walls. A restless re-imagining of the city that reminds its scurrying inhabitants of their own transcience.

Science/Fiction

To mimic this architectural complexity in their engineered tissues, the researchers embedded a mixture of brain cells taken from the primary cortex of rats into sheets of hydrogel. They also included components of the extracellular matrix, which provides structural support and helps regulate cell behavior.

Those sheets were then stacked in layers, which can be sealed together using light to crosslink hydrogels. By covering layers of gels with plastic photomasks of varying shapes, the researchers could control how much of the gel was exposed to light, thus controlling the 3-D shape of the multilayer tissue construct. 

'Precisely Engineering 3-D Brain Tissues', MIT News (2012)
 

"This brain isn't frozen," said Tiga-belas indignantly. "It's been laminated. We stiffened it with celluprime and then we veneered it down, about seven thousand layers. Each one has plastic of at least two molecules thickness. This mouse can't spoil. As a matter of fact, this mouse is going to keep on thinking forever. He won't think much, unless we put the voltage on him, but he'll think. And he can't spoil..."

 'Think Blue, Count Two', Cordwainer Smith (1963)

An Experiment

After finishing Evening's Empires, I find I'm not quite done with the Quiet War universe, or future history, or whatever you want to call it. Evening's Empires is the fourth (and, I think, the last) Quiet War novel, and although it's thematically related to In The Mouth of the Whale it's a stand-alone. Those two novels are set about 1500 years after the diptych* of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun; there's a lot of history scanted in between, including the golden age of the Great Expansion and the rise and fall of the True Empire. After posting a couple of stories extracted from Evening's Empires, I've decided to write a few more. Condensed stories. Quick sketches. Fables. Tall tales. Experiments. Glimpses of ordinary lives in strange places.

I hope to post one every week. The first two are already up. I had a lot of fun writing them and hope to write at least ten more. That's twelve stories in twelve weeks - a season's worth. When I've finished, I should, with a couple of much longer pieces, have enough for a short ebook. That's the plan. That's the challenge.

I think that anyone who's starting out writing should find exercises like this useful. Think carefully about what you want to write - a character sketch, a situation, a dialogue - and then get it down in a couple of hundred words. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two. Stick closely to the original idea; omit all that's inessential; write straight through from the beginning to the end and only then go back and start cutting and tweaking.  If it doesn't work, try again. As with reading, a great deal of writing uses skills that can only be improved by practice.


*A diptych is essentially a trilogy with the difficult middle volume omitted.

Ghost Of The Holloway

As Saturn’s icy moons swung around the gas giant, their leading faces were bombarded with high-energy electrons that over thousands upon thousands of years compacted the original surfaces of fluffy water-ice grains to hard-packed ice. Human beings following paths around the moons had altered their surfaces, too. Over the centuries, walkers wore down the ice and created holloways that in the most heavily-trafficked parts were depressed a metre or more beneath the original surface. Sunken paths or grooves with branching tributaries that linked present walkers to all the walkers of the past.

The equator of every large moon was girdled with at least one holloway, worn by countless people who trekked around them on wanderjahrs, seeking adventure or enlightenment, or escaping from the noisy crush of civilisation. There were races to circumnavigate the moons by foot, while others engaged on solitary pilgrimages. Sky Saxena was one such pilgrim, a clever, headstrong man in his early twenties. After fleeing from his family and the obligations of his inheritance, he had decided to impose shape and order on his life by attempting to walk around the largest of Saturn’s regular, icy moons – Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus. A quest only a celebrated few had completed since the Saturn system had first been settled more than four centuries ago.

Sky had set out from Camelot, Mimas, twenty-two days ago, travelling east. A straight path girdling the little moon’s equator would have been a little more than twelve hundred kilometres long, but there were no straight paths because Mimas’s frozen surface preserved the cratering caused by the period of heavy bombardment, and one especially large crater, Herschel, was about a third of Mimas’s diameter and floored with a chaos of ridges and tabular mounts and canyonlands that circled a gigantic central peak. There was no easy route across it, and despite the help of his suit’s eidolon Sky discovered that he had spent six hours trekking down a long and crooked canyon that ended in high cliffs impossible to climb. It was night. His air was low, barely enough to make it back to the shelter he’d set out from that morning, and a fault in the lifepack’s catalytic purger meant that the partial pressure of carbon dioxide was building to critical levels. Faint and dizzy, with twenty kilometres still to go, he sat on a block of pitted ice under the pitiless stars, and by starlight saw a shadowy figure beckoning to him from the top of a steep slope of tumbled ice blocks, and heard a faint voice on the common channel.

Come with me if you want to live.

With the last reserves of his strength and resolve, Sky followed the figure across a series of ridges like frozen waves to the lee of a cliff. There was a narrow passage, an airlock hatch, and a small, utilitarian shelter beyond: cell-like rooms off an H of short corridors dimly lit by failing lamps, the air chill and stale but breathable. Sky’s rescuer was an old man with a shock of white hair and a bent back who moved restlessly amongst the shadows, instructing Sky on how to link his p-suit’s lifepack with the shelter’s antique machinery, showing him where ration packs were stored. The shelter dated from the Quiet War, according to the old man, built by the resistance to the occupying powers from Earth three centuries ago.

After he had eaten, Sky sat in a slingbed in one of the little rooms, and fell asleep listening to the old man’s stories of the war. When he woke, he was quite alone. The old man was gone, although his p-suit remained in the airlock’s dressing frame, with his name, Leonardo Santos, stencilled across its stout, scarred chestplate.

When Sky told the story of his rescue at his next stop, a farm tent, there was a short silence as the farmers studied him, and then one of them said that he’d been rescued by a ghost.

‘My mother told me that he had been a Greater Brazilian trooper in the old war,’ she said. ‘He and his comrades massacred twenty resistance fighters, and after the war he became a hermit, living in one of the old shelters, helping travellers. He died at least two hundred years ago, but people still claim to glimpse him now and then. He’s said to have led several people to safety after they became lost in the canyonland, but you’re the first to have met him that I know of.’

There were rational explanations, of course. Sky thought long and hard about them as he walked on the next day. He had been suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, and the old man had been an hallucination, or some kind of dream. In reality, his p-suit’s eidolon had led to the shelter, or perhaps the eidolon of the old man’s p-suit had somehow reached out to him. But whether he found the shelter himself, or whether he had been led to it, Sky knew that owed the old man his life, and knew now that there was no need to define himself by solitary pilgrimages, no need to become a kind of wandering ghost. He was too proud to return to his family, not yet, but knew that he could find some good and useful work in the cities and settlements of the Saturn system, and walked on along the holloway in long bounding strides, light as a bird in the minimal gravity, the rugged little moon wheeling away beneath his boots.

Links 30/11/12

'At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.'  After days of fevered media speculation, NASA gets around to killing a rumour with the facts.

NASA hasn't found plastic beads on Mars, either.

On the other hand, the Messenger spacecraft has identified water-ice and organic material in permanently shadowed regions at the north pole of sunblasted Mercury.

'Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?' Talking of internet rumours, a long article in the New York Times about a lone, eccentric scientist who may have discovered the key to immortality in a species of jellyfish, is swiftly and thoroughly critiqued.

Apparently, my story 'The Choice' didn't win an award I didn't know it was shortlisted for.  Oh well.

Still, in his roundup of the best science-fiction novels of the year, Adam Roberts says some nice things about In The Mouth of the Whale and picks M. John Harrison's Empty Space as his book of the year. Mine too.

This is not a Rubik's Cube.

But these are fish.

Operation Deep Sounding

Cash was falling free through Saturn’s vast skies at a steep angle, making slow S-turns to bleed off excess velocity. He eyeballed Vera Jackson’s singleship falling ahead of him, about fifty kilometres to the east, looked for and failed to find any sign of the pod dropped by the shuttle, uploaded a status check to mission control and acknowledged the congratulations of the mission commander.

‘On my mark,’ Vera said, and counted down from ten.

Cash deployed his drogue parachutes at zero and there was a thump and a tremendous corkscrewing jerk as the parachutes swung him around and checked his forward momentum, and then he was falling nose down through a vast clear ocean of hydrogen and helium at just under a hundred kilometres an hour, in a prevailing air current that was taking him eastwards at about five times that speed. In about ten hours, if he kept falling at his present rate, he would reach the beginning of the amorphous boundary between the gaseous atmosphere and the deep ocean of hot metallic hydrogen that lay beneath, although long before then the singleship would have been crushed and scorched to a cinder by tremendous pressures and temperatures. Not even tough, heavily shielded robot probes had ever penetrated to more than half the depth of the gaseous phase of Saturn’s atmosphere. The two singleships would fall for only three hours, dropping through the liquid-water zone before igniting their motors and departing.

If everything went well, they’d pass close to their target. And even if they missed it, the packages they planned to release contained autonomous drones that could ride the winds of Saturn for months while they tracked it down and searched for other anomalies. Meanwhile, Cash had a few moments to enjoy the tremendous panorama wrapped around him. It was early morning. The sky was deep indigo and seemingly infinite, the sun a tiny flattened disc that glowered at the hazy horizon, the centre of concentric shells of bloody light that rose towards zenith. In every direction, the crystalline hydrogen atmosphere stretched for thousands of kilometres, broken only by a few wisps of cloud formed from frozen ammonia, looking just like ordinary cirrus cloud and tinged pink by dawn light. He felt like a king of this whole wide world, an emperor of air, and told Vera that this place was definitely made for flying.

‘I hear that,’ Vera said.  ‘Check out the storm. We’re right in the pipe.’

Below, halfway to the eastern horizon, a creamy ocean of cloud rifted apart around the storm’s great oval eye. With interrupted arcs of cloud and clear air curved around it, it looked much like a hurricane back on Earth. In fact, everything seemed eerily familiar. Blue sky, white clouds, the sun gaining a golden hue as it lifted above the horizon. It took an effort to remember that the distance to the horizon was more than ten times that on Earth. That the storm was two thousand kilometres across. That the sky was hydrogen and helium a thousand kilometres deep, with cloud layers of ammonium ice above and decks of ammonium hydrosulphide and ammonium-rich water-ice and water-droplet clouds below, endlessly blowing around this vast world.

From The Quiet War (2008)

Image taken by the Cassini spacecraft on November 27th.  More here.

Meteorphagy

So apparently the Mars rover Curiosity has found something very interesting in the soil it scooped up in Gale crater, but we won't know what it is until the science crew have finished double- and triple-checking their results. The consensus is that it is some kind of organic material, and over on his blog my pal Oliver Morton points out that this isn't unexpected, given that have been meteors delivering organic matter to the surface of Mars for billions of years.

Meanwhile, scientists studying Lake Vida in Antarctica have discovered a rich bacterial ecosystem in its frigid, briny water, considerably extending the definition of 'hospitable to life'. At -13 °C, Lake Vida has been locked beneath a cap of ice twenty metres thick for almost three thousand years, permanently dark and lacking free oxygen. Without light and photosynthesis, the microbes need some other energy source. It's possible that they can utilise energy produced by chemical reactions between the briny water and iron-rich sediments, so that, unlike most ecosystems on Earth, they don't need organic material ultimately produced by capturing sunlight.  Which has obvious implications for the kinds of life that may exist in brines that might be found deep beneath the Martian surface, or in the cold and sunless oceans under the icy surfaces of moons like Jupiter's Europa, Saturn's Enceladus, or Neptune's Triton. But it's also possible that the microbes have been ekeing out a living by scavenging a bare residue of dissolved carbon compounds.  Which makes me wonder if there might not be icy worldlets in the outer reaches of the solar system, or in dust and debris belts around other stars, whose subsurface oceans are intermittently penetrated by meteorites. As the ice around the impact site seals over, there's a sudden blooming of life as microbes and other organisms - meteorphages - compete for organic material dissolving in the frigid brine, frantically growing and reproducing until the material is exhausted. The brief meteor spring is over, and everything switches to survival mode and shuts down, waiting for the next impact in a thousand or ten thousand years . . .

Photographing The Future

It's easy to see or to photograph the past: just look up at the night sky. Because of the immense distances and because light can travel at no more than 299, 792, 458 metres per second, everything you see up there is a message from the past. Our views of the Moon from Earth are 1.28 seconds in the past. The Sun is, on average, 8 minutes 17 seconds in the past. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 years 80 days in the past. And so on. The deeper you look into the sky, the deeper you look into the history of the universe.

But photographing the future is much harder. I've been trying to capture scenes illuminated by future light using a large format camera at maximum aperture in a completely darkened box subject to different temperatures, pre-exposure protocols, etc, but so far I haven't been able to resolve anything. It isn't because there's a lack of light - of information. It's there, but it's scattered, and each photon is subject to interference from uncertainty 'ghosting'. As a result, almost everything we think we perceive is due to pareidolia, as our brains try to impose order on vague and random structures mostly drowned in lightfog. So far, our few glimpses of the future have been little more than consensual hallucinations, which is why I think my naive photographic experiments, sponsored by the Mundane Science Fiction Society, are important. After all, to paraphrase the motto of the society, it is important to prevent imagination from influencing the truth about what hasn't yet happened.

 The future, earlier today.

Barbara Allen And Sweet Billie

When Barbara Allen stopped at Ceres to sell a load of janky machinery ripped from a derelict biome cored through a small rock-pile, she was visited by an eidolon of her first lover, Sweet Billie, who told her that he was dying. And she decided, what the hell, to pay him a visit. She’d grown up with him in the domes of New Old London, Pallas, they’d run away together to become junk peddlers, and she still had unresolved issues about the way he’d treated her while they’d been celebrating their first real coup on Tannhauser Gate, twenty years ago. When they’d been very young and everything had been new and intense, and love had so easily turned to hate, and they’d broken their partnership and each had sworn never to see the other again. And that was the first thing she told him, when she reached his dying bed on a terrace overlooking the cold blue waters of the Piazzi Sea.

‘The way you looked at other women when you were with me, it broke my heart,’ she said. ‘The way you looked at them, and praised their beauty. And the way you danced with them.’

‘I remember how cruel and foolish I was,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I invited you here. I lost you, and I’ve bitterly regretted it every day, and now I’m dying I want to beg for your forgiveness.’

He was gaunt and naked, and the right side of his body had been transformed into coralline stone by mites he’d caught while fossicking in some old ruin in the outer belt.

‘You’re right about one thing,’ Barbara said.  ‘You’re dying. But you will have to die without my forgiveness.’

And she turned and left him and caught a rail car that travelled halfway around the little world, back to the elevator head in Stumptown. But she hadn’t gone more than a hundred kilometres when Sweet Billie’s eidolon appeared, and told her that he was dead. And she felt something cold and dark break apart inside her, and started crying. By the time she reached Sumptown, her right arm was paralysed and her skin was cold and growing hard and scaly. Within two months, she died of the same mite sickness.

Some said that Sweet Billie had infected her, either in revenge for her heartlessness, or out of foolish and selfish love, so that they would finally be together. Others said that Barbara had broken quarantine protocol and deliberately infected herself, out of remorse. She died, they said, calling for her dead lover, and was buried next to him in the great old graveyard on the cold stone plain beyond the domes of New Old London. And on her grave they planted a sunflower vacuum organism, and on Sweet Billie’s grave a vacuum organism that somewhat resembled a red briar. And in the long cold years the two vacuum organisms grew slowly and surely together, and twined in a true lovers’ knot, the sunflower and the red briar.

But others said that was no more than an old song from the long ago, and that Barbara Allen did not fall ill after she left her old lover’s death bed, but went up and out to search for salvage amongst the thousand thousand ruins of the belt, and either died in some accident, alone and unmarked, or made her fortune and bought an exoship and set out for one of the far colonies around a distant star, and is travelling still, dreamlessly asleep in a glass coffin.

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.