Forty Years Ago Today

Apollo 17 descent stage imaged by the lunar rover camera after the ascent stage lifted off at 5.55 PM EST December 14th 1972.

Links 13/12/12

'She's not what you'd call pretty, but she is definitely distinctive.' Specialist facial anthropologist Dr Susan Hayes has reconstructed the face of Homo floresiensis, otherwise known as the 'Hobbit' or 'Flores Man' from the skull of the type specimen, LB1.  LB1 was a woman, and about 30 years old when she died.

Scientists have discovered that cells shed in human urine can be transformed into the precursors of brain cells.

On Mars, the Opportunity rover is investigating a patch of light-toned rock that may consist of clays altered by 'the kind of water you can drink'.

The Cassini spacecraft has imaged a river of hydrocarbons four hundred kilometres long at Titan's north pole, flowing into Ligeia Mare.

A Very British History, Table Of Contents

I have two books scheduled for publication next year. One is a novel, Evening's Empires; the other is a 'Best of' retrospective collection of short stories spanning (good grief) a little over twenty-five years, from PS Publishing. Here's the table of contents:

'Little Ilya and Spider and Box' (1985)
'The Temporary King' (1987)
‘Cross Road Blues' (1991)
‘Gene Wars' (1991)
'Prison Dreams' (1992)
'Children of the Revolution' (1993)
'Recording Angel' (1995)
'Second Skin' (1997)
‘All Tomorrow's Parties' (1997)
'17' (1998)
'Sea Change, With Monsters' (1998)
'How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen' (1999)
'A Very British History' (2000)
 'The Two Dicks' (2001)
‘Meat’ (2005)
‘Rocket Boy’ (2007)
‘The Thought War’ (2008)
‘City of the Dead’ (2008)
‘Little Lost Robot’ (2008)
‘Shadow Life’ (2009)
‘The Choice’ (2011)

There'll also be a limited signed edition, and a special lettered edition, with extra material, including an introduction by Alastair Reynolds.  And the cover will be by Jim Burns.

The Sublime

This is one of my current favourite images taken by the spacecraft Cassini. It's a magnificent panoroma with Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in the foreground, with the icy moon Dione behind it.  Titan's diameter is about 3000 kilometres; Dione's is about 1000 kilometers, but it appears much smaller here because it's further away. If you click to embiggen the image you'll see that Titan is haloed by the upper fringe of its frigid atmosphere of nitrogen leavened with methane and a smoggy mix of hydrocarbons.  Saturn and the ring system are in the background, with the shadow of the ring system thrown across Saturn's southern hemisphere - the sun is beyond the upper left-hand corner of the image.  You can find a high-resolution version of the image here.

The image was taken a year ago, December 22 2011.  After a seven year voyage, with flybys past Venus, Earth, and Jupiter, Cassini entered orbit around Saturn on July 1 2004. The Huygens probe that piggybacked on Cassini landed on Titan's surface soon afterwards, and Cassini has been doing science and taking fabulous images ever since. As I've said many times, much of the inspiration for The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun comes from images taken by a plutonium-powered robot swinging in ever-changing orbits amongst the moons and rings of the second-biggest gas giant in the solar system.

Heaven Is A Place

On the evening of his second day in the Gulf of Ten Billion Blossoms, Rhea, Rickasht Chandrasekaran fell in with a crew who were taking a last break before heading out from the Saturn system to Uranus. This was in the guesthouse in one of the steep little villages that stepped up from the shore of the long lake. Rickasht had reached the village late in the evening, tired and exhilarated after a long hike along a trail that switchbacked through dense semitropical forest, and had been given the last bed. The crew were a boisterous and talkative group of young men and women who sat in a circle on cushions and shaped stones on the guesthouse’s terrace, passing food back and forth and squirting wine into each other’s mouths and making toasts. Several small children ran about. A man was nursing a baby. A woman played a dulcimer, and led a small group in songs that predated the colonisation of the Outer System. Rhythmic handclaps. Laughter. A torrent of happy chatter.

Rickasht found he didn’t mind the crowd, the noise. He could disappear inside it. Nothing was expected of him. He smiled and nodded as two young, earnest men told him that they were going to tent over and landscape an embayment in one of the long, deep canyons that cut the icy surface of Uranus’s largest moon, Titania. The crew’s engineers were already out there, supervising the big construction machines that were pouring the tent’s foundations and fabricating the struts and panes of its diamond-fullerene roof. The people here were mostly gardeners and farmers. It was a working holiday, the two men told Rickasht; they were studying the Gulf’s ecosystems, the kelp forests in its lake, the forests that climbed its walls, the heaths and sedge bogs of its upper reaches. The crew's small tent and its simple biome was the beginning of an ambitious plan to tent the deep, long canyon section by section, and create a garden several dozen kilometres wide and more than five hundred kilometres long. The usual mad ambition of outers, limited only by their imagination.

After a little while he noticed one woman in particular, neat and compact and quiet, long black hair teased into a cascade of ringlets. Almost certainly from Earth, Rickasht thought, and felt a pulse of the old familiar ache in his belly. She noticed his attention and smiled at him, and he looked away, pierced by stupid guilt, then looked back again.

Her name was Nisha Minnot-Varma. She had been born on Mars, the Hellas Basin tent. She’d come out to the Saturn system three years ago, and now she was going further out, like the rest of her companions sinking all her credit and karma into the venture. They talked about adjusting to life in the Saturn system. They talked about Rickasht’s childhood on Earth, in Brasilia; he apologised for knowing very little about Greater Brazil’s rainforests and grassy plains and great rivers. They talked about his work in the reclamation plant in Paris, Dione. They talked about Nisha’s work: she was a microbiologist, had been one of the supervisors of the soil manufacturing plant in Camelot, Mimas. In a way, she said, they were both in the recycling business.

'You don’t need soil to farm, but it’s essential for stable ecosystems of any size. Everything passes through it at some point. . . I am amazed by what they have built here in the Gulf. It’s a huge mosaic, yet fully integrated. Hellas was much bigger, but not as stable. We had a severe crash when I was a child; there was talk of evacuation. We had to wear masks that absorbed the excess carbon dioxide for a whole year. I’ve learned so much here, and now I will put it to practical use. You probably think we are crazy,’ she said, looking at Rickasht sidelong.

Rickasht said something stupid about it being an adventure. She had large brown eyes, Nisha, and beautiful eyelashes. Slender hands, nails painted different shades of blue.

‘We will build a new world,’ she said. ‘A very exciting prospect.’

Rickasht said it was a brave thing to set up a home in the unknown; Nisha said that it was a frontier, yes, but not unknown.

‘There are more than ten thousand people in the Uranus system. Too many already for some of the first pioneers, they are striking out for the Kuiper belt. I find it amazing,’ Nisha said, ‘at how skilled we have become at making ourselves at home out here. Three centuries ago the Saturn system was the frontier. And now there are cities and settlements, farms and gardens, wonderful parklands like this. All carved from ice frozen hard as granite, carbonaceous tars, comet CHON . . . ’

‘And outside it’s still cold and airless and lifeless. And a stupid accident can kill you in an instant,’ Rickasht said, and immediately regretted it. Because he didn’t want to talk about that. A year later, and he still missed Jen every day, her absence was a great wound ripped into his side, but he was tired of talking about it, tired of people’s sympathy.

Nisha was saying something about the stark beauty of the moons, the time she’d walked out across Mimas’s surface the first time, and climbed a pressure ridge and stood for a long time looking out at the tumbled moonscape, under Saturn. She’d walked all the way around Mimas, had been to Enceladus and Iapetus and Titan.

‘I like to visit and study Avernus’s gardens,’ she said. ‘Do you know her work?’

Rickasht said that he’d heard of her, of course.

‘She hid on Titan during the Quiet War, and created several extraordinary gardens there. So simple, so elegant, so strange. She was born on Earth, yet she had a complete understanding of the landscapes of the moons.’

They drank a toast to the famous, long-dead gene wizard. Rickasht confessed that this was the first time he’d left Dione, almost his first time he’d been anywhere outside Paris. They talked about places he should visit, gardens and cities, the great mountains of Iapetus. Sharing a bag of wine, sitting so close Rickasht could feel her warmth. It was late, now. Many people had retired; most of those left where clustered around the dulcimer player. Rickasht tingled with anticipation, tried to formulate an invitation that wouldn’t sound crass or clumsy, and then a young woman ankled over and sat next to Nisha, draping an arm around her shoulders with casual familiarity, and he knew with a plunging sensation how stupid he’d been, and after he’d been introduced he stammered something about needing to sleep, and left.

But he couldn’t sleep, not in the shared dormitory. He couldn’t stay. He grabbed his day bag and set out up the village’s steep dark streets, finding his way by luminous dabs on the path and the yellow light of Saturn’s crescent, tipped beyond the high roof. He was drunk and angry, but when he reached the edge of the village he knew it would be crazy to try to find his way through the forest and the high bluffs, and crept under a great sprawling fig tree.

He woke early, from a silly muddled dream of searching for Jen through endless rooms of a rambling house a little like the villa of his parents, and climbed a steep trail beside a slow fat stream that trickled amongst boulders in a slanting ravine. Hauling himself along tethers in Rhea’s minimal gravity was almost like flying (he’d watched fliers rising in slow spirals on thermals above the lake, but hadn’t dared to rent wings). He paused at a deserted camp site to use its shittery, picked a couple of apple bananas and a handful of figs from bushes alongside the stream, perched on a shelf of pitted siderite to eat his breakfast, went on. Climbed a vertical stair of spikes jammed in the sheer face of a cliff, topped out on a broad belt of grassland, drifted onward for several kilometres.

He’d walk to the endcap, he told himself, and take one of the trains along the narrow- gauge railway on the far side back to the locks, and go home. Back to Dione. Back to Paris and the empty apartment full of dead things and memory traps, and his work.

There were no settlements on the strip of heath, and he saw no other people. The tether he’d been following soon ended, and he ankled on in the low gravity gait he’d learnt long ago, moving only from the knees down. The land rose and fell. Swales of tussock grass. Low thorny trees. Industrious bees working patches of small sweet-smelling flowers as yellow as Earth’s sun. A lone bird piping somewhere. His shame and self-disgust blew away on the warm breeze, dissolved in the quiet beauty of the land.

Late in the afternoon, he found a near-vertical path down to another village. A teahouse, little more than a canvas-roofed wooden platform jutted above the boulders tumbled along the shore of the lake. There were many like it along the lakeshore, but as Rickasht sipped his gyokuro he noticed the pleasant manner of the hostess as she talked to the other customers, the way she smiled at the badinage of her partner as he deftly fried snacks on a hotplate and boiled plump little savoury dumplings. The gyokuro was sweet and delicately perfumed and the food was simple but tasty, bamboo tubes hung under the edge of the roof gently clattered, and there was a tremendous view across the tall, slow waves of the lake to the hazy panorama of the green forests and white cliffs of the far side.

There was a flier high up there, a red mote gliding close to parallel to the pine trees along the edge of the cliffs.

Rickasht thought how much Jen would have liked this place, and the familiar pang was there and gone. Red lanterns under the canvas roof brightened as the chandelier light dimmed, and the hostess came over to Rickasht and asked if he would like more tea. He said why not, asked if there was a guesthouse in the village.

'I think I’ll stay a while.’

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.