New Maps Of Heaven

So now Mercury, the last unmapped planet, has been completely surveyed by the Messenger robot spacecraft (how I love being able to type those last two words in a nonfiction sentence). Mercury’s geology is rich and varied, and there are unexpected caches of water ice in permanently shadowed polar craters, but there are no traces of ancient civilisation, no monoliths, no monsters. There are still plenty of places that haven’t been surveyed - most of the asteroid belt and all of the Kuiper belt, for instance, and the Pluto system (although New Horizons is on course for a flyby in 2015) - but the known is inexorably rolling out across what were once blank spaces where monsters of the imagination could freely roam. The canals of Mars are no more. There are no dripping wet jungles on Venus; no dinosaurs. What is a science-fiction writer to do?

Well, you can refuse reality, of course. You can cast your story into the dark backward and abyss of time, as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett did, on ancient diluvian Mars. You can transplant them onto exotic exoplanets. Or you can simply ignore the facts of the case, as I’ve just done for my contribution to an anthology of stories about the Old Venus, for editors George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois. Or you can try to square up to reality, and deal with the real Solar System, which turns out to be far more dynamic and varied than we once thought. There are volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io; methane rain, rivers and lakes, and vast dunes of frozen hydrocarbons, on Saturn’s Titan. Geysers of water ice erupting from the south pole of Saturn’s Enceladus, and geysers of nitrogen snow on Neptune’s Triton.

And there are also places in the Solar System that resist mapping: the pocket seas that power Enceladus’s geysers, or the world-girdling oceans beneath the surfaces of Europa, Callisto, Titan, Triton, and perhaps even Pluto. Where monsters weirder than anything we can imagine might plough the dark currents. Or where some strange microbial ecosystem might flourish, as in the caves beneath the Nullarbor Plain of Australia, or perhaps in sealed Antarctic lakes.

For where once we dreamed of intelligences greater than ours scrutinizing our affairs, or of ethereal crystalline cities, we now can only hope for some pocket of extremophile bacteria in a warm damp stratum of Martian rock. But while reality has overwritten the old tropes, there new kinds of stories than can be told. Stories that make use of the actual maps, the actual landscapes. What would it be like to stand on a wrinkle ridge on Saturn’s ice-clad moon Dione? What would it mean, to introduce a human scale, a human perspective? If you place a person in such a landscape, you must ask all kinds of questions. Who is she? How did she get there, and what is she doing? If she has made her home there, if she is not a Robinson Crusoe on Dione or Enceledus or Titan, you also have to ask questions about the society she inhabits, the way the people she lives amongst organise themselves. How do they survive in such inhospitable conditions. How does living there affect them? What are their dreams, their ambitions? What is ordinary life like, out there? What do we mean by ordinary, anyway? There’s something still unmapped.

Incoming

"While the use of genetically engineered dolls in combat games in near-future Holland poses profound ethical questions, their liberated cousins threaten to alter the nature of human existence; on an artificial world beyond the edge of the Milky Way, one of the last humans triggers a revolution amongst alien races abandoned there by her ancestors; in the ocean of Europa, a hunter confronts a monster with its own agenda; in ‘The Two Dicks’, bestselling author Philip K. Dick has a life-changing meeting with President Nixon; while in ‘Cross Road Blues’ the fate of American history hinges on the career of an itinerant blues musician; and in the Sturgeon Award-winning novella ‘The Choice’, two young men make very different decisions about how they will come to terms with a world transformed by climate change and alien interference.

"Selected by the author himself from his output across over a quarter of a century, this landmark collection contains the very finest science fiction stories by one of Britain’s foremost masters of the genre. From sharply satirical alternate histories to explorations of the outer edges of biotechnology, from tales of extravagant far futures to visions of the transformative challenges of deep space, they showcase the reach and restless intelligence of a writer Publishers Weekly has praised as being ‘one of the field’s finest practitioners’."

The terrific cover is by Jim Burns, illustrating my Quiet War story 'Sea Change, With Monsters.' 
 
It's scheduled to be published at the end of March (I'll be at Eastercon, signing copies), but you can preorder it from PS Publishing now. There will be a signed limited edition with extra stories, an autobiographical essay, and endpaper art by Jim Burns, too.

Links 08/03/13

'Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia's Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual 'curtains' of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes.

The research team says this analysis shows that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

The research team says this analysis shows that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

'The research team says . . . that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.'

Anyone interested in exobiology will have noticed that organisms able to live in salt-water rich in ammonia without any input from light-driven photosynthesis might be suited to conditions believed to be found in oceans beneath the surface of moons in the outer Solar System.  Astronomer Mike Brown has just posted a long, three-part description of research that suggests the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa is rich in salts subducted from the ocean known to exist beneath its surface, and that the chemistry of the leading hemisphere of the moon is further modified by sulphur that has been lofted into orbit by the volcanoes of Io:

'Ever wonder what it would taste like if you could lick the icy surface of Jupiter’s Europa? The answer may be that it would taste a lotlike that last mouthful of water that you accidentally drank when you wereswimming at the beach on your last vacation. Just don’t take too long of a taste. At nearly 300 degrees (F) below zero your tongue will stick fast.'

A shorter take on the significance of the work can be found here: basically, Europa's ocean may closely resemble the salty oceans of Earth.

Back on Earth, Russian scientists have discovered life in the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica. Permanently capped by ice four miles thick, isolated from any inputs from the surface for up to 15 million years, the lake appears to harbour bacterial life new to science.

'Preliminary analysis of water samples collected from the lake revealed a species of bacteria not belonging to any known subkingdoms."We call it unidentified and 'unclassified' life," the team's leader, Sergei Bulat of the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, told Russian news agency RIA Novosti. The bacteria's DNA was less than 86% similar to known bacterial DNA, indicating that it was a new species, Bulat said.'

[Edit 10/03/13 The  head of the genetics laboratory that's studying the samples has issued a swift rebuttal stating that the 'unknown organisms' are in fact lab contaminants.]

Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia's Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual 'curtains' of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

Life

Where is the clear story line? Who am I supposed to identify with? Why are these characters so inconsistent? Where are the sympathetic characters? Why is the world-building so . . . random? What's the theme? What are the stakes? What's the idea? Why did it end so abruptly? Did anyone learn anything?

Links 01/03/13

'Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able todetect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical studyof Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detectoxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-likeplanet orbiting a Sun-like star.'  White dwarfs continue to radiate for a long time. Any Earth-like planet orbiting one could be very, very old...

Helicoprion, a shark from the early Permian with a single spiral tooth, shaped like a buzzsaw.

Remote sensing in rats.  'It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg.  But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.'

'I sometimes wonder if the success of books such as Twilight and Fifty Shades is itself a form of mass PTSD or Stockholm syndrome—a reaction to the ubiquity of violence against women and to the way in which stories of sexual violence, real or feigned, have become a culturally accepted form of entertainment; and a reaction to the often intolerable pressures of living in a world where power is still mostly in the hands of men.'  Elizabeth Hand on women in fiction who fight back.

Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-future-evidence-extraterrestrial-life-dying.html#jCp

Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-future-evidence-extraterrestrial-life-dying.html#jCp

The Pulse

I've been playing Philip Glass's Symphony No. 9 a lot recently. He's probably better known for his film, opera, and ballet scores, and small-scale instrumental pieces with his ensemble, but he's also written string quartets and ten full-scale symphonies, beginning in his late fifties with the 'Low' symphony, which explored variations on the music of David Bowie's album Low.

Bowie gave me my first introduction to Glass. Thanks to the world memory of the internet I can date it precisely: 20th May 1979. Bowie was hosting a Radio 1 programme, I am a DJ, presenting a selection of favourite and significant music. He played Danny Kaye's 'Inchworm' (a song he claims as a major influence, forming the template, for instance, for 'Ashes to Ashes'), commenting on the use of counting in a song, and then played an excerpt from Glass's score for the opera Einstein on the Beach, 'Trial/Prison', in which the narrator recites short text over a pulsing electronic organ while the ensemble counts off the beats.

The juxtaposition of the two pieces of music caught my attention, but I didn't really think of Glass's music again until I saw the film Koyaanisqatsi in Los Angeles, at Laemmle's Royal theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard, May 1983, and my mind was, as they say, blown.  I mean, coming to Koyaanisqatsi without any preconceptions of what it was like was pretty much mind-blowing anyway, but I was also an alien living and working in Los Angeles and much of the imagery had a direct resonance.  As did the pulsing score: I immediately bought a tape, and played it to death driving the freeways and surface streets of LA, and it's still one of my favourite pieces of music. The penultimate section, 'Prophesies', is prime Glass Pulse:



The same short cadence is repeated over and over, until suddenly (at about 08.46) there's a small but utterly devastating time change, a sudden shift of focus and emotional colour. It's a signature of his work: his Symphony No. 9 opens with yet another variation of the Pulse.

I've been writing and publishing for somewhat less than the interval between Koyaanisqatsi and Symphony No.9, but if I've learnt one thing it's that you develop signature themes, tropes and ideas, prose structures and story forms, that define your style. That's the palette you have; the palette you get to play with. Glass's music reminds me that isn't a trap; reminds me that simple and powerful ideas can contain infinite variations, if you look hard enough.

Blurbed

Of Evening's Empires, my publisher says:

A young man stands on a barren asteroid. His ship has been stolen, his family kidnapped or worse, and all he has on his side is a semi-intelligent spacesuit. The only member of the crew to escape, Hari has barely been off his ship before. It was his birthplace, his home and his future.

He's going to get it back.

A neat hook into the beginning of the story. A teasing fragment of exposition. A hint of narrative direction. I've been shown some cover roughs. They're very good too.


Meanwhile, I'm finishing a story for a themed anthology of stories set on the old, wet, habitable Venus. Some stories come easily. This one took a while to reveal what it was really about: it was necessary to write a kind of condensed novel, a biography of the hero, and then to strip out everything that wasn't relevant. Which revealed amongst other things that the story wasn't about the hero, after all. As usual, when I have trouble moving a story forward it's because I've started in the wrong place.

It's a kind of planetary romance, a kind of adventure, a kind of detective story. Stories about scientific discovery are often cast in the form of detective stories because they seem to share an obvious narrative structure - something happens, and despite difficulties, diversions and obstructions, the hero uncovers clues and pieces them together to form a narrative that explains the why and the how - but on close examination the analogy often breaks down. The fit isn't exact. My story is in part about the stories science tells itself, and why they are sometimes wrong, or point in the wrong direction. There are monsters, too, and an ekranoplan, and a new Cold War. It's called 'Planet of Fear.' That's one thing I didn't have to change, at least.

Chekhov's Pulse Laser Pistol

Chekhov's famous dictum about foreshadowing - "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act" and variations thereof - is of course complicated in science fiction because the reader needs to understand what kind of pistol it is, the level of technology implied by its capabilities, the various devices that make use of the same techniques and systems, their effect on the social contract, and so on and so forth.

If the pistol isn't a red herring, ignoring it after its introduction in a science fiction novel not only leaves a plot hole but also a gap in the fabric of its world. Of course, unless it's done with subtlety, wit and concision, worldbuilding can quickly become as tedious as a list of plumbing parts. Which is why, perhaps, so many science fiction novels fall back on a generic future with a common, consensual backdrop.  Worlds of secondhand furniture, drawn from easily recognisable histories. Ikea worlds whose products only sometimes require assembly, using easy-to-follow instructions and simple tools, and furnish scenarios as clean, utilitarian, and anonymous as catalogue illustrations. Where Chekhov's Pulse Laser Pistol is probably called Bob. Good old Bob. He's so familiar he's practically invisible. No need to describe him, or worry about the implications of how he got there, or the consequences of using him, in the last act. Along with everything else in the catalogue, he's a prop in a fantasy future shorn of actual context, much like pornography.

Links 15/02/13

All over the internets and every kind of news media: a large meteor streaking across the early morning sky of Western Siberia.  The New York Times has many video clips, and an explanation for the ubiquitous dashcams in Russian vehicles that took them:

Psychopaths are abundant on Russian roads. You best not cut anyone off or undertake some other type of maneuver that might inconvenience the 200-pound, six-foot-five brawling children you see on YouTube hopping out of their SUVs with their dukes up. They will go ballistic in a snap, drive in front of you, brake suddenly, block you off, jump out and run towards your vehicle. Next thing you start getting punches in your face because your didn’t roll up your windows, or getting pulled out of the car and beaten because you didn’t lock the doors.

These fights happen all the time and you can’t really press charges. Point to your broken nose or smashed windows all you want. The Russian courts don’t like verbal claims. They do, however, like to send people to jail for battery and property destruction if there’s definite video proof.

And here's an image of the meteor's vapour trail, taken from orbit.

Sort of related to intrusions from outer space, the uncanny valley of incredibly life-like David Bowie dolls.

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#jCp

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#jCp

The adventures of Florida Man.

Something Borrowed

It's that time of year when British authors and anyone else who makes a book - authors, illustrators, photographers, translators, editors of anthologies - receives their Public Lending Right payments for books lent in the library system.  Twenty-eight countries have a form of PLR.  In the UK, the amount earned by each registered title is based on payment of 6.2 pence per loan, and an estimate of the number of borrowings of each registered title using data from a number of typical libraries.

And very welcome it is too, for most recipients - although not for Horrible Histories author, Terry Deary.  He's the seventh most-borrowed children's author, and because the maximum PLR payment is capped at £6,600, to ensure that best-selling authors don't scoop up most of the pot. he reckons he's out of pocket by some £180,000. And that's not all:

'But never mind my selfish author perception – what about the bookshops? The libraries are doing nothing for the book industry. They give nothing back, whereas bookshops are selling the book, and the author and the publisher get paid, which is as it should be. What other entertainment do we expect to get for free?'

According to Deary, libraries are Victorian institutions which have outlived their usefulness, giving people the undeserved entitlement that books should be available at the expense of the book trade and the local councils which fund them.

It's pernicious stuff. Most authors, like me, don't earn anything like the amount Deary reckons he's lost thanks to the perfidious PLR scheme. In fact, the average earnings of British authors - and I'm average, in this respect - is somewhat less than the national average wage. So while the PLR payments may be peanuts to someone like Deary, they are an important source of income to many authors.  As are sales to libraries of hardback books. Back in the day, my publisher, Gollancz, made a good chunk of its income from selling hardbacks to libraries: the famous yellow jackets ensured that its crime and science fiction titles stood out on library shelves. For many midlist authors, sales to libraries are still important, and cutbacks in library funding are a serious threat to their careers.

Borrowing books and buying books are not mutually exclusive, and every book borrowed is not, as Mr Deary imagines, a lost sale. There's no basis for that kind of like-for-like calculation. As for his assertion that bookshops are closing down because libraries are giving away books for free, libraries and bookshops have managed to coexist for a century and a half. The trade in printed books is currently under threat not because of people borrowing books, but because they are buying more books online, and are increasingly buying more and more ebooks. The decline in the amount of money spent on books is due in no large part to the proliferation of massively discounted ebooks, with heavily promoted bestselling titles going for as little as 20 pence. It's this, rather than the 'free' books in libraries, which is threatening to devalue books.

Far from doing nothing for the booktrade, libraries buy massive quantities of books and through the PLR scheme pay authors a tithe on book borrowing, and most importantly they encourage reading. Many people who start out borrowing books from libraries got on to become lifelong readers and book-buyers. I type this in a room lined with about 3000 books, part of my personal library. A good proportion of the older titles are books I once borrowed from libraries, and bought so that I could read them again. Would I have become a writer without access to a library stuffed with books I could freely borrow? Probably.  But my local library was vastly enabling, because it fed my growing book-reading habit, and allowed me to graze on a vast selection of titles, and to read authors I might never otherwise have encountered, and generally provided me with a literary education.

In short, libraries are invaluable gateways, much like Mr Deary's rather wonderful Horrible History books. What a pity he doesn't see that.

Red Queen's Race

Getting hard to stay ahead.

From Nature's news blog:

 Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in living cells. These ‘genetic circuits’ could be used to track key moments in a cell’s life or, at the flick of a chemical switch, change a cell’s fate, the researchers say. Their results are described this week in Nature Biotechnology.


From Gardens of the Sun:

The window looked out across a huge spherical chamber carved out of the native ice and lit by a point source hung at the apex of its ceiling like a drop of incandescent blood. Its walls curved down to a floor creased with smooth ridges, and the top of each ridge was streaked with dark eddies and swirls and littered with dense copses of half-melted candles, phalanxes of tooth-like spikes, heaps of tangled wires or curled scrolls like spun sugar,meadows of brittle hairs, pods of paper-thin fins breaking out of the ice. All these growths stark black in the ruby light, apart from a large candle-copse close to the observation window that was clearly dying from the inside out, its lumpy spires crumbling into pale ash.
 
‘Vacuum organisms,’ Loc said. ‘A garden of vacuum organisms.’
 
He’d been expecting something truly exotic. A clone farm of superhuman babies. A wonderland full of weird plants and animals. A city of intelligent rats or raccoons. But these growths weren’t that much different from the vacuum organisms cultivated on the naked surface around every city and settlement on the moons of Saturn.
 
‘They look like vacuum organisms,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘But they are not. They are not constructed from bound nanotech, but are spun from intricate pseudo-proteinaceous polymers. I call them polychines. If commercial vacuum organisms are synthetic analogues of prokaryotes - bacteria, Mr Ifrahim - these are analogues of the ancestors of prokaryotes.’
 
‘You want to give me a lecture,’ Loc said. ‘It would be easier if you cut to the chase, and told me exactly why these things are worthless. They certainly look worthless.’
 
Sri Hong-Owen ignored his sally, and told him that the chamber contained a methane-hydrogen atmosphere at minus twenty degrees Centigrade, far warmer than Mimas’s ambient temperature. ‘As for the polychines, they do not possess a pseudocellular structure; nor are they generated by the systematic execution of a centralised set of encoded instructions. Instead, they are networks of self-catalysing metabolic cycles created by interactions between specific structures in their polymers.’
 
‘Like carpets, or suit-liners.’
 
‘Very good, Mr Ifrahim. But although halflife materials are self-repairing and can even grow when fed the correct substrate, they encode only a very simple set of on/off instructions and can express only one morphology. The polychines are far more versatile. They are non-binary logic engines that use a form of photosynthesis to transform simple chemicals to complex polymers. They can reproduce, and they can even exchange information, although that information is entirely analogue in form. And they possess a limited set of components which obey a limited set of self-organising rules capable of generating new instructions, and, therefore, new properties and even new forms. Once I completely understand how those rules operate in every possible combination, it will be possible to manipulate the polychines to produce predictable states.’

Human Mystery

Found in Ray Monk's huge, and hugely lucid, biography of Robert Oppenheimer, Inside the Centre, a contender for footnote of the year:

It is impossible to tell how much of this story is true. Can one believe that Oppenheimer deliberately dropped his suitcase, intending it to hit the woman? Did he really kiss her? And, perhaps most improbably of all: can one really imagine him travelling third class?

Links 08/02/13

'Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about . . .  Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.'  More here; abstract of paper here.

A small, two-wheeled robot has been driven by a male silkmoth to track down the sex pheromone usually given off by a female mate.

 “I’ll sleep with you, but I prefer my stories to yours.” Barriers to the spread of stories between human populations are stronger than those to the spread of genes.

A couple of fantastic photography projects:

Laurent Chehere: 'Flying Houses.'

Marc Wilson: 'The Last Stand'

Ruination Daze

In the last couple of decades, Detroit has become the unwilling poster child for late-stage post-industrial collapse. A city that was once the beating heart of the American car industry has become a real-life setting for fantasies of apocalypse. The desolation of its vast factories and assembly plants, theatres and department stores documented by aficionados of ruin porn. The urban prairies of what were once thriving inner-city residential areas returned to nature, grids of weed-grown streets and ruins interrupted only by the occasional surviving house, or the encampments of urban farmers. A laboratory for experiments in post-apocalyptic, post-industrial, post-technological science-fictional scenarios (after Detroit, after Hurricane Katrina, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren looks increasingly prescient).

Mark Binelli's The Last Days of Detroit, Motor Cars, Motown and the Collapse of an Industrial Giant, seeks to remind the reader to the people who still live there, and are seeking ways to regenerate their city. A former Detroit native (his family ran a business in the city, but lived, as he confesses, in the suburbs), he moved back into the heart of the city for three years, hoping 'to discover something new about the city - specifically, what happens to a once-great place after it has been used up and discarded? Who sticks around and tries to make things work again? And what sorts of newcomers are drawn to the place for similar reasons?'

Binelli, a reporter on the staff of Rolling Stone magazine, is an engaging writer who gives an insider's perspective on Detroit's long history and the complex interplay economic, political and social factors that caused its decline.  He's very good on the personalities of Detroit politicians, recent and historical scandals, and grand plans that all founder for one reason: 'No matter how dexterous or well-intentioned our elected officials, any plan to reinvent Detroit, or even adequately address the city's most fundamental crises, required the one thing Detroit lacked most of all: unimaginable amounts of money.'  And his portraits of ordinary citizens, of the artists and urban hipsters attracted Detroit's quasi-anarchistic freedom (and its huge spaces and cheap rents), of a school's urban farm, the fire department of one of Detroit's poorest neighbourhoods, and the human stories underlying a murder trial, are deft, acute and sympathetic. But what's lacking is an overall narrative that knits the various threads and voices together. Binelli's portrait of the city is affectionate and fair and honest, but scrappy; like the city itself, there's no centre. But as Binelli points out, there's no single cause to Detroit's malaise, and unlike fictional apocalypses, there's no easy solution either (apart from unimaginable amounts of cold hard cash), no way of reading in the runes of the ruins which version of the future will win out. And yet he surprises himself, and the reader, by ending on an optimistic note: the ruins may not be an endpoint after all, but part of an urban metabolic cycle. What's left is the kind of naive but very human hope with which the first citizens of Detroit promoted their dreams of coming grandeur. Can we imagine futures that aren't all grimdark urban nightmares or fantasies of posturban self-reliant homesteading, but ones in which our cities find some new purpose and are reborn afresh?

At Sea In The Sea Of Stories

Every year, Locus magazine asks its stable of critics and others for nominees for its recommended reading list. Anything that's recommended by at least two people gets to be included, and the list forms the basis for the magazine's awards ballot. I'm happy to say that In The Mouth of the Whale has been included in the best SF novel category, 'Bruce Springsteen' in best novelette (or stuff that's a little too long for a short story, but not long enough for a novella), and 'Antarctica Starts Here', 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, The Potter's Garden' and 'The Man' in best short story.  Which is very pleasing because, first, it's pretty much all the fiction I wrote last year, and second, I'm in the company of some pretty distinguished peers.

A nice little boost as I wrestle with plans and a detailed outline for the next novel, and plot out a story (or rather, a novelette) I've been commissioned to write for an anthology. The latter has to be written sooner rather than later, so until I've finished a first draft I'm putting the Quiet War instant fiction series into a very short hiatus. There are ten so far, and I still hope to bring that up to a round dozen, once I've finished with the seas of Venus.

Links 01/02/13

'Foster + Partners were responsible for the design of the base’s modular living units. These structures, pressured, inflatable capsules containing various living spaces, would be transported along with the 3D printer aboard a space rocket. Once landed, the tubular modules would be unpacked and inflated; the robot-controlled-printer would then print a regolith shell layer by layer directly over each lodging, effectively burying it in a thick protective crust of lunar soil.'  Beats shovelling lunar dirt over your inflatable hut by hand.

Talking of lunar dirt, NASA plans to use its Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot to extract water, air and fuel from the lunar regolith. Kind of like Moon, without the Helium 3.

The Road To Endeavour blog, which has been following the Opportunity rover's progress across the surface of Mars, has posted a nice piece on the 9th anniversary of its landing, 9 years on Barsoom.

 Meanwhile, out at Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft has been watching a gigantic planet-girdling storm choke on its own tail.

And back on Earth, we have to contend with a coffee apocalypse and the possibility that we've reached peak genius.

Same As It Ever Was

They sat, the man and the woman, in the middle of the narrow crescent of a white beach, looking out across calm blue water that stretched, punctuated here and there by low green islands. The sheer wall of the tent curving up, and beyond its lattice of huge diamond panes a low range of bare and dusty hills stretched across the near horizon, sharp against the black sky.

‘You remember this place,’ she said.

‘Of course I remember it,’ he said.

‘The last time we talked. When you tried to explain why you were leaving. And now . . .’

‘It hasn’t changed. The view. It hasn’t changed.’

‘Why should it change?’

‘There you are.’
‘We don’t need to talk about that again. We talked ourselves out the last time, years ago.’

‘And nothing has changed. But that’s all right. It’s what you are. What your family are.’

‘Did you come here to pick a fight with me?’

‘I came here to say goodbye.’

‘Because it’s part of the program. The thing of yours.’

‘Not just me. There are thirty-two others. Three ships, eleven souls in each ship.’

‘Souls.’

‘Some believe so. Souls, minds, personality clusters.’

‘Copies.’

‘We won’t think of ourselves as copies.’

‘Even though that’s what you are. What you’ll be. They’ll open your skull, pare down your brain micron by micron, and rip its structure and activity into a viron inside that little can of a ship. The process destroys the original, so all that’s left will be the copy. The ghost of a dead man.’

‘You can’t talk me out of it.’

‘I know. I never could talk you out of anything, and I’m not about to try now.’

‘So what are you trying to do?’

‘I don’t know. Introduce a note of realism into your fantasy, perhaps.’

‘I know what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘And even though you won’t admit it, I know it’s important.’

She didn’t reply. They sat quietly for a little while. The woman looking off at the view of the lake and the islands, the hills stark against the naked black sky. The man running white sand through his fingers, looking sideways at the woman. She had aged well. Slim as ever, hair white now, pure white hair in a bowl cut, lines of course, a certain stringiness at the throat, but the same squarish tip to her slender nose, the same small bow of a mouth, the mouth he’d once loved to kiss and rekiss.

He said, ‘Okay, I admit that this is part of it. Saying goodbye to your family and your friends. To the people who were important in your life. Who are important. Doing it, being able to do it, I admit: it’s a tick mark. But I would have come here anyway.’

She said, ‘You always did find it easy to say goodbye.’

‘Now who’s trying to pick a fight?’

‘You were never satisfied. Never content with what you had. You always wanted something else. My mother warned me, but I never listened.’

‘Your mother? I always thought she liked me.’

‘She liked you, but she knew you. My father didn’t like you, and didn’t care to think about why.’

‘Well. Maybe they were right.’

‘Don’t. Don’t . . . indulge me.’

Another silence. Small waves ran up to the beach, over and over. A bird slipped sideways on the warm breeze, dipping low over the water, gliding on.

‘I never asked for forgiveness. I always admitted that I was wrong to go. But I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t give you what you wanted kids, stability . . . I wanted more than that. Lovely though this place is, I was dying here,’ he said, smiling at his own hyperbole.

‘There are all kinds of cities and settlements right here on Callisto,’ she said. ‘And cities and settlements on Ganymede and Europa, too. Ten thousand gardens and habitats in the Belt. There’s Earth and the Moon. There’s Mars. Mercury. All the places further out, Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. Pluto and Charon, kobolds, the centaurs, the scattered disc . . . And that’s not enough?’

‘I guess not.’

‘I’m trying to understand.’

‘I’m trying to explain. I thought I had explained.’

‘It was a nice little speech. Leaving the cradle. The brave pioneers, the brave new worlds.’

‘Maybe it’s people. I think sometimes it’s that,’ the man says. ‘Everywhere you go, people are much the same. They make a big deal about little local differences in customs and protocols that really aren’t a big deal. And everywhere the same conversations about art and politics and the economy, the same gossip, the same ways of earning kudos . . . It’s all the same, everywhere. But out there, it’s blank. It’s new.’

‘Except other people are already out there, aren’t they? One of the first ships to light out, isn’t it headed where you’re headed?’

‘It’s old tech, that ship. A big, old, slow multigeneration ship that can’t make more than a fraction of a percent of light speed. It left more than a century ago, and we’ll overtake it inside a year after we launch. And we’ll get there centuries before it does. And that won’t be a problem because we don’t want what its crew and passengers want. They want the planet. The exoearth. We want the asteroid belts. The two belts, the comets . . .’

‘As if you couldn’t find a rock of your own here.’

‘And in ten or twenty years, the neighbours come calling. There’s nothing new, here. I don’t mean that’s a bad thing for you. You like things the way they are. But for me . . .’

‘You always had a low boredom threshold. I liked that, once upon a time. Your love of life, your fearlessness. The kid from Earth, coming all the way out here just because you wanted to see what it was like. You made everything into an adventure.’

‘We had some good times together, didn’t we?’

‘We had the wanderjahr.’

‘Driving along the equatorial mountains of Iapetus.’

‘Camelot, Mimas. Paris, Dione—’

‘We’ll always have Paris,’ he said, and smiled, but she didn’t understand the reference. ‘We had some high old times. But afterwards, I couldn’t hack it. Life here. I said I was sorry then. And I’m sorry now.’

‘No, you aren’t,’ she said neutrally. ‘You know your problem? You can’t change.’

‘I can’t change?’

‘You’re still that kid, looking for thrills. You haven’t grown up. You can’t grow up.’

‘If you ask me, it’s over-rated.’

‘Kids go on wanderjahrs because it helps them find out who they are,’ she said. ‘The experiences, the new places, the different people. It all gives a certain perspective. But you just liked to travel.’

‘Maybe I already knew who I was.’

‘You see? Same as you ever were.’

‘Not for long, according to you.’

She looked sideways at him. ‘Perhaps that’s why they chose you. People like you. People who can’t change. Perpetual adolescents.’

‘People who want adventure. Who are willing to risk everything to create something new.’

‘Say you get there. You survive the journey. Then what?’

‘We find CHON and metals, build the machines that build the really big construction machines. And we quicken kids, and teach them what to do. We’ll be like the guardians, the guides. And they’ll build new habitats and settlements, new cities. New ways of living around a new star.’

‘And then? When that gets old?’

‘There are always more stars. One thing about uploading into a viron, you don’t ever have to die. I’ll be have a front-row view of ten thousand years of history. A million years.’

‘Like anyone who hasn’t ever grown up, you really do fear death, don’t you?’

‘Uploading is dying, according to you.’

‘It’s a kind of death, but not the real death. And not real life either.’

‘Compared to this?’  The man gestured, meaning the lake and the islands, the trim little villages scattered around the rim of the tent.

‘People find who they are,’ the woman said. ‘They move on from childish things. Small things, ordinary things, everyday things, they become important. Hard things like raising kids become important. Work becomes important. My work on quantifying morality, you don’t think anything of it, but it’s not only important to me, it has mass, it has significance. It has made a significant contribution to setting a universal standard of kudos. Part of it is incorporated in every bourse in the system.’

‘I don’t mean to dismiss what you do.’

‘But you do. You did. You walked away from it. And now you’re walking away from everything else, into this awfully big adventure of yours. And you’ll keep running away.’

‘I’ll keep moving on. I’ll always want to find out what’s over the next horizon. And I will find out, too.’

‘You’ll keep on running. And never look back, never come home. Never stop to think why you’re running.’

‘I should have known that you wouldn’t understand.’

The woman studied him with a look of unquantifiable sadness. She said, ‘You are what you are. I am what I am. And sometimes I tend to slip into the formal mode of academic discourse when it isn’t appropriate. I’m sorry.’

When she stood, the man reached for her, saying, ‘I’m not angry or anything. Listen, I have a couple or three hours before the flitter leaves for Rainbow Bridge. We could hang out here a while, call up a picnic, maybe, you know, say goodbye properly . . .’

The woman laughed. ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ she said, and turned and walked off across the breast of the little island, its rabbit-cropped turf and scattered trees vivid and green against the black sky and Jupiter’s slanted pastel crescent.

‘The front-row view of a million years of history,’ the man called out, but the warm wind took his words and the woman walked on to the little skiff beached on the far side of the island, to her home, to the life she’d made.

Evening's Empires - Some Key Words

Gajananvihari Pilot. Pabuji's Gift. Kabadiwallahs. The iconography of the Bright Moment. Microscopic jitter. Tick-tock philosophers. Head doctors. Dacoits. Discorporate tankies. Ascetic minstrels. Skull feeders. Spire builders. The Free People. 207061 Themba. The forests of Vesta. Chandelier cities. Ophir, the world-city, a.k.a. The Caves of Steel. Free People. Fei Shen, the Flying Mountain, a.k.a Wufen Shan, the Fifth Sacred Mountain, a.k.a. First New Shanghai. Monoliths. Tannhauser Gate. The Republic of Arden. The ten thousand collectives of Europa. The Commonwealth of Sugar Mountain. The Memory Whole. Seraphs. Waypoints. The Great Expansion. The True Empire. Vacuum organisms. Cratered rubble-piles blanketed in deep layers of dust and debris, mountains of nickel-iron, stony mountains of pyroxene, olivines and feldspar, rocks rich in tarry carbonaceous tars, clays and water ice. Pirates of the asteroids.

Links 25/01/13

Earth may be crashing through domain walls of dark matter.  And if it isn't, the leading theory for the composition of dark matter is almost certainly wrong.

On the other hand, the supergiant star Betelgeuse is definitely going to crash through 'a strange wall of interstellar dust' in 5000 years.

On Mars, the Curiosity rover has just taken its first images with its 'hand lens' camera at night.  And here's a nice little gallery of images from the first fifty years of robotic solar-system exploration.

Talking of robots, Project Phoenix proposes to use robot mechanics to recycle parts from orbiting satellites.  And Deep Space Industries plans to deploy flocks of tiny Firefly satellites to prospect for lodes of valuable metals on near-Earth asteroids, and to mine them with Dragonfly robots, which will each return 20-45 kilograms of material to Earth for study.  'DSI is also developing a space-based 3D printer called the MicroGravity Foundry, which would grind up asteroids, separate out the useful bits and fuse them into manufactured goods.'


The British Museum is about to open an exhibition of ice-age art.  According to Curator Dr Jill Cook, some of the works on display may have been created by a professional class or artists: 'Some of the things we have from digs are a bit rubbish; some of them almost look like apprentice pieces. But the best things are masterpieces and would have taken hundreds of hours to produce.'  (While I was researching Mind's Eye, by the way, Dr Cook gave me an invaluable tour of the British Museum's neolithic and palaeolithic stores; I was lucky enough to be able to take a very close look at some of these pieces.)

Dragon Lady

I knew who it was as soon as I saw her. She was a lot older, of course, and her hair, still glossy black, was no longer bowl-cut but brushed back and caught up in a long pigtail braided with gold wire, and she wore a sober grey spider-silk trouser suit rather than freefall coveralls. She had long nails, too, and her lips were dyed deep red to match. But it was Xiuli Tian, all right. I’d know her anywhere. Our dragon lady, our saviour, our nemesis.

I hadn’t seen her for more than thirty years. Closer to forty, really. She’d stolen a gig and hightailed it out of Charn, and here she was in the passenger terminal of the port of Al Yahar, the capital of the Koronis Emirates, talking with an equally expensively but much younger dressed woman as she skimmed past me. I half-raised a hand in greeting, a foolish reflex she fortunately did not notice, and she said something that made her companion laugh, and then she was gone.

It was Ruger Ridgley who gave her the nickname, after she’d spurned his attempt to get her into his sleeping niche. The stereotyping, and trying to hit on anything young and female: both were typical of Ruger. He was our systems engineer and somewhat older than the rest of us, and believed that gave him all kinds of unearned privileges.

‘If she doesn’t loosen up, that attitude of hers is going to cause friction,’ he told my partner, Krish, and Krish, who liked to play the diplomat, advised him to give her time to get used to her new home.

Xiuli Tian had been the last to join our kibbutz, signing up less than twenty days before we lit out for Charn. She claimed to know something about hydroponic work, but more importantly she had a chunk of credit that greatly enhanced our sinking fund and earned her the right to become a partner with a three hundred and fifty eighth share, the smallest of all of us, calculated from the time she’d spent working on planning and preparation (zero), her expertise (small), and her credit (substantial).

She was – or so we thought at the time – one of the wave of new immigrants to the Belt who were swarming up the new elevators and heading out to the Moon or Mercury or the Belt to find their fortunes, a rising demographic that would characterise what we’d come to call the Great Expansion. Our kibbutz was doing its bit in that rush into new territory. We were mostly first-generation Belters, born into families, crews and communes of Outers who’d migrated inwards after the Quiet War. Now, like our parents, we wanted to set up a place of our own. We’d been granted title on a lumpy rubble-pile asteroid, 2038615 Charn, hired a construction crew whose big machines had tented an equatorial crevasse and installed a basic lifesystem, and purchased a chunk of comet CHON, now a tiny, tarry moon of our rock, that would supply organic material and water. And then we moved in, forty-three of us including our new friend from Earth, Xiuli Tian, and got to work.

Xiuli was part of my crew, horticulture and landscaping. It immediately became clear that her hydroponic expertise was vestigial. She’d helped out on her parents’ farm back in Tasmania, she confessed, and hadn’t realised that what she’d learned back then wasn’t especially transferable. But she was a quick learner and a hard worker, putting in more hours than anyone else, signing up for all the tough, dirty, unpopular chores. She kept out of the sex and romance games of the unpartnered, hardly ever volunteered anything about herself or her life on Earth, and hardly took part in the struggle sessions where we thrashed out democratic solutions to every kind of problem, but pretty soon we accepted her as one of us. Quiet and unassertive, but tough and single-minded. Point her at a problem and she’d bang her head against it until she’d cracked it by sheer force.

I wonder what would have happened if it hadn’t been for the crash. Would she have settled down, partnered up, and started making babies like most of the rest of us? Or would her past have caught up with her anyway? One thing was certain, it was the crash that raised her up, and brought her down.

We’d used less than a tenth of the mass of our little CHON moon to establish a viable, fairly stable biosphere in our tent town. Five years after we’d moved in, we began to delicate work of break up and de-orbit the rest, planning to smear its primordial tars across a large percentage of Charn’s surface and grow photosynthetic vacuum organisms that would transform it into electrical power and novel polymers, room-temperature superconductors and quantum dots, and so on and so forth. But an explosive charge misfired and shattered a chunk into too many fragments, some of those fragments smacked into the surface outside the target area, and three struck our tent. Everyone got into a p-suit or a shelter in time. No one was killed. But the biosphere was wrecked. Our gardens, our farms, our tanks: all dead. And even worse, one of the fragments had smacked into our maker plant.

We’d been having problems with the farms in the past year, so our stores were too low to tide us over until we got things up and running again. And with all but one maker wrecked beyond repair, we couldn’t print enough food from CHON, which in any case was mostly smeared across Charn’s craters and lumpy plains. For a couple of days, it looked like we would have to sell Charn at a knock-down price, and return to our homes and hope we could scrape together enough credit and kudos to start over in five or ten years. A hard thing for young, ambitious, proud, independent people like us, a big hit on our pride and self-worth. And then, when everything seemed hopeless, when we met to talk about what we should do, Xiuli presented her inventory and her plan.

It was impressively detailed. And after a couple of days of analysis and failure testing, it looked like it might work. She was modest about her achievement, saying she had learned something about resource allocation in an old job, but showed some steel when she warned us that democracy would have to go during what she called the emergency. There was no time for debate, she said. Someone must take charge.

And we let her. Our dragon lady. We let her take over. And she saved us. Saved our pride, saved our commune, saved Charn. It was a hard year. Every calorie, every watt, had to be hoarded and doled out. We mostly lived on plastic food and vitamin supplements. We all lost mass, and spent most of our time working or sleeping, no time or energy for anything else. Three people died, and Xiuli and her cadres treated the bodies the way we'd treated every scrap of CHON we could scrape together. It came out, about the bodies, and things eased up a little after fifteen people decided to drop out, and ten more were exiled for what Xiuli called insurrection, but for two years it was touch and go. Xiuli kept us together. Whenever a problem cropped up, there she was, with a ready solution that we had to apply without argument or discussion. Whenever anyone complained, or failed to work hard enough, she decided on their punishment. That insurrection happened six months in, when she discovered that a family was hoarding food for their kids, and punished the parents and the kids. The insurrection was put down quickly and violently, and the rebels were given a choice: hard labour on short rations, or exile, and loss of their credit. They all left, but the resentment lingered, and never quite went away.

Xiuli seemed not to notice it. She thrived on hardship and she loved leadership. She didn’t even mind that we called her the Dragon Lady. I think she actually liked it.

When the vacuum organism farms yielded their first crops and things began to ease, it seemed natural and inevitable that Xiuli would lead the trade mission to Green Mansions, at that time the nearest garden to our rock. She drove a hard bargain, bringing back three reconditioned makers and luxuries like tea and chocolate we hadn’t been able to afford to make ourselves. Everyone got a share, but Xiuli’s cadre, her close friends and sycophants, got the lion’s share. It emphasised that we were no longer equal, might never be equal ever again.

There was more grumbling, and perhaps there might have been another insurrection, but then collision watch spotted a ship approaching. Xiuli made contact with it, and the next day she was gone, on the stolen gig. The ship changed course when it spotted the fleeing gig, but she managed to reach Tannhauser Gate ahead of it, and disappeared into the Autonomous Trading Zone.

The ship had been carrying two people from Earth: security from the corporado Xiuli had robbed. She had been working as a low-level administrator on a construction project in low Earth orbit, and one day had bugged out to the Belt with the chunk of credit she had used to buy her way in to our thing – credit, we soon discovered, which had been transferred out of our account an hour before she left Charn.

And that was the last we knew of our dragon lady. She had saved us, no doubt, but she had changed us, stamped her authority on our hearts and souls, and we never quite got over it. Partners split up; friendships ended. Tough things had been done during the hard years, and some of them could not be forgiven. Everyone who had been in Xiuli’s little cadre left. Ruger Ridgley left too, and two years later was found dead in a hostel in Tasmania: it seemed that he had been looking for Xiuli, and several people speculated that she’d found him before he’d found her. Three years after that, half of what was left of the kibbutz left to start another settlement, out in the Trojans. They called it Fresh Start.

Well, the rest of us are still here, and have prospered after our fashion. We are not what we wanted to be, perhaps, but we have tried to make the best of what we have become.

And here I am, making my way back home after visiting my old family, my old home, and there she is. The Dragon Lady. Xiuli Tian. I have checked the registry: she is travelling under the name Miao Liang, is about to board a highliner for Ceres. She owns a small vacuum-organism farm on Ceres, with a sideline in wine production. She is unpartnered but has a daughter, seems to lead a quietly respectable low-profile life.

If I were a different kind of person – if I were like poor Ruger, for instance – I might be tempted to turn her in: the warrant for her arrest is still outstanding. If this was another story, it would begin here: intrigue, blackmail, and after various thrilling twists, revenge and catharsis. But I am not interested in revenge, and besides, she saved me, and even though we split up (he became part of her cadre, and confessed to me that he’d briefly become her lover, too), she saved Krish, too. She was our leader, but we allowed her to lead us. She used us, yes; but we used her. We all made our choices, and we have to live with the consequences. We chose to save Charn rather than walk away, and we did save it. And some of us walked away anyway, because we were all changed by what we had to do.

No, she has her life, and I have mine. It is not cowardice to let her go: it’s good sense. The past is a dangerous place, and I have many millions of kilometres to traverse before I return to the place I helped to make, the place my friends and I are still trying to make good, the place we saved from her, after we let her do what she had to do to save us.