Links 14/09/13

A rather beautiful rigid-frame airship, the first since the 1940s, starts its test flights.

Typewriters and their authors.

“He explained that these articles are ‘an inter-mixture of fiction and fact’ and are ‘highly romanticized in order to give the story juice.’” Charles Bukowski's FBI file.

'A team of researchers at the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has found a way to self-assemble complex structures out of gel “bricks” smaller than a grain of salt. The new method could help solve one of the major challenges in tissue engineering: creating injectable components that self-assemble into intricately structured, biocompatible scaffolds at an injury site to help regrow human tissues.'

'[Ulrich Bernier's] group has isolated a few chemicals that are naturally present on human skin in trace quantities and appear to inhibit mosquitoes’ capability to smell and locate humans. If one of these chemicals—mostly likely one called 1-methylpiperzine, which has been the most successful so far—holds up in future tests and can be produced synthetically on a bigger scale, wearing it could be a way of rendering yourself effectively invisible to mosquitoes.'

Peak Chicken.

Scientists discover what 'seems to be the first example in nature of rotary motion with toothed gears' in juvenile plant hoppers.

Links 07/09/13

'For the past year, NASA has been working with Tethers Unlimited, a space technology development company based out of Bothell, Wash., to find a better way. The space agency just awarded Tethers Unlimited an additional $500,000 to continue developing SpiderFab, a robotic 3D printing and assembly system that could build structures larger than half a mile wide in orbit.'

 More NASA - the space agency has been crowd-sourcing ideas for asteroid missions.

A massive storm on Saturn pulled water- and ammonia-ice from the gas giant's depths.

Japanese trucker art.

Curiosity Mars Rover watches Phobos eclipse the sun:

Paris, Dione

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
 
Imaged by the Cassini spacecraft, the terminator of Saturn's moon Dione passes through Dido crater, with its central peak. Just above it, in sunlight, on the sub-Saturnian hemisphere of the little moon, are the twin craters Romulus and Remus (Romulus is the larger one). In The Quiet War, the city of Paris, Dione, runs down into Romulus crater on the slope of the rimwall shared with Remus crater.

Riddick

Richard B. Riddick, the shaven-headed silver-eyed antihero of Pitch Black and its sequels, is an exemplar of that hoary old SF trope - the competent man. Played by Vin Diesel, he's the last of a warrior race: brutal and uncompromising, with eyes modified so that he can see in the dark, he dominates every situation he finds himself in, is able to out-think every enemy. After a space-operatic sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick and an animated film, The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, failed to build on the first film's success, it seemed that the franchise was over. But neither Vin Diesel nor writer/director David Twohy were prepared to let it go: Riddick, as its name suggests, is a back-to-basics reboot.

Riddick has become the unwilling leader of the Necromonger cult. Betrayed into thinking that his home planet, Furya, has been rediscovered, he's abandoned on a deathworld, and attracts the attention of two groups of mercenary bounty-hunters - one simply out for the reward money, the other led by a man with a personal agenda - in an attempt to effect his escape.  It's a simple but effective three-act story in which Riddick and the franchise rediscover their mojo.  In the first part, Riddick makes like a barbarian version of Robinson Crusoe on Mars, battling alien predators and setting up camp; in the second, the viewpoint shifts the mercenaries as Riddick picks them off one by one; in the third, as in Pitch Black, the surviving players have to deal with a horde of monsters.

The tension occasionally slackens as the mercenaries squabble and wander about the landscape; the lone significant female character (Katee Sackhoff), despite her demonstrable toughness, is defined by male attention (and given an unnecessary shower scene); oblique references to previous films may confuse those who haven't seen them.  But there's plenty of good hard-edged dialogue, and Vin Diesel completely inhabits his anti-hero, setting his intricate plan for escape in motion, ghosting in and out of darkness and rain, and calmly pulling off a startling execution while chained up.

It's all good, old-fashioned B-movie fun, punched up with gory effects. And while it doesn't give any new insights or character development to its anti-hero, it's a shot in the arm for the franchise and a refreshing change from this summer's depressing parade of bloated blockbusters.

Links 30/08/13

'While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.
'“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.”'

A digital camera that mimics the selectivity of the human retina.

The world's only parasite museum.

Images from NASA's Chandra Observatory suggest that SagA*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, 'is apparently finding much of its food hard to swallow.'

Galaxies like grains of sand - a flight through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Twelve Tomorrows

On the newstands on September 17, this second collection of SF stories - including one of mine - from MIT Technology Review, with a cover by legendary artist Richard Powers.  Table of contents:

Q+A with Neal Stephenson
'Insistence of Vision' by David Brin
'The Mighty Mi Tok of Beijing' by Brian W. Aldiss
'In Sight' by Cheryl Rydbom
'Transitional Forms' by Paul McAuley
'Pathways' by Nancy Kress
'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' by Allen M. Steele
'The Revolution Will Not Be Refrigerated' by Ian McDonald
'The Cyborg and the Cemetery' by Nancy Fulda
'Bootstrap' by Kathleen Ann Goonan
'Zero for Conduct' by Greg Egan
Gallery - The Art of Richard Powers
'Pwnage' by Justina Robson
'Firebrand' by Peter Watts

Links 16/08/13

A few long-form pieces to read over the weekend:

'The peppered moth provides a textbook example of industrial melanism and its reversal. Once a classroom classic, then much criticised, and finally rehabilitated through further observation, the story also shows how real science works. The response of the creationist and “Intelligent Design” community provides a textbook example of a conspiracy theory in action, with cherry-picked quotations, allegations of collusion and fraud, and refusal to acknowledge new evidence.'

 Sophie McDougal explains why she hates strong female characters.

The secret history of G.I. Joe, Barbie, Darth Vader, and making war in children's culture. Part 1.  Part 2.

David Simon on Steve Earle.

Two moons passing in the Martian night:

N.B.

Aside from the odd photo and the weekly links page, I'll be blogging very infrequently for the next four weeks. I want to get a good portion of the second draft of the new novel done (and wouldn't mind finishing a short story, too), I have a business problem to resolve, and I need a holiday.  (Yes, I was just in Spain as a guest of the very good, hugely relaxed Celsius 232 festival, and had a terrific time in great company, but I'm planning a few days away that have nothing at all to do with the writing biz.)

Meanwhile, there are reviews of Evening's Empires here and here, and there's a Q&A conducted by my publishers about my first 25 years as a novelist over here. And at some point I'll post links to a book give-away . . .

[edit] Oh yes, and I've reviewed Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Links 09/08/13

'In 2015, a clone will spend a year on the International Space Station while his doppelgänger remains on Earth. Mark and Scott Kelly, the only identical twins who are also astronauts, have volunteered themselves for study, creating a unique opportunity to disentangle the health effects of space from those of genetics.'

Mars Explorer Barbie.

One day in the Solar System.

Recycling bins in London harvest MAC addresses from the smart phones of passers-by, identify the type of phone they're carrying, and track their movements.

'To honor the anniversary of Warhol’s birthday, August 6, 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum and EarthCam launched a collaborative project titled Figment, a live feed of Warhol's gravesite.'

Concept design for a robot that erases concrete buildings.

A beautiful minimalist Periodic Table.

There Are Doors (20)

Don't Prophesy With Your Pen

The Los Angeles Review of Books recently published an interview with Arthur C. Clarke, conducted by Tod Mesirow in 1995, that opens with a useful reminder that the one thing people associate with science fiction isn't the kind of thing that science fiction actually does. Asked why science fiction seems so prescient, Clarke says:

'Well, we musn't overdo this, because science fiction stories have covered almost every possibility, and, well, most impossibilities — obviously we're bound to have some pretty good direct hits as well as a lot of misses. But, that doesn't matter. Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says what if? — not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere — flying, space travel, all these things, but even there we missed really badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds had been — my late friend, Isaac Asimov, for example, had — but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd probably have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.'

Every science-fictional future sooner or later becomes an alternate history. Even those set in the near future, and which attempt to guess with reasonable accuracy what life will be like in, say, 2015, 2016. Especially those, actually. And the further away your story is set, the more likely it is that some 9/11 will send history hurtling off in an unexpected direction (someone once wrote a science-fictional trilogy about this). Even those science fictions which may have gotten some part of our present (their future) more or less right didn't predict it: they anticipated it. As Hero anticipated the steam engine (but not the Industrial Revolution). Or to put it another way, claiming that science fiction predicts the future is to unremember all the things it got wrong. And claiming that science fiction has failed to predict the ubiquity of, say, mobile phones and Angry Birds fails to understand what science fiction is actually about.

Which includes, yes, extrapolation.  But also includes a lot more, including wild and irresponsible speculation, satire of some present trend, dreams of utopias, nightmares of dystopias . . . The future is a blank page. It doesn't yet exist. Its worlds may be self-consistent, may be strongly rooted in our present, but they are not representations of reality. They are experiments questioning reality, testing its limits, asking awkward questions about it. So much more interesting that dull, dutiful prognostication.

Links 26/07/13

The glowing blue wave of death: '...an international team of researchers has found evidence of a “cascade” of death that spreads through an animal’s body through a special necrosis pathway, leaving a wake of dead cells in its procession, until the entire system collapses and expires. In the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, this wave of bodily destruction originates in the intestine and is accompanied by an intense burst of blue fluorescence when viewed with a camera equipped with a high brightness fluorescence filter cube, which allowed the researchers to visualize the worm’s destruction, the team reports in the journal PLoS Biology.'

'A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.'


A gallery of images of ants at war.

Brock Davis's Cucumber Killer Whale and Historic Explosions in Cauliflower.

The International Space Station photographed in transit across the Sun and the Moon.

The Earth imaged from Saturn.

The Earth and the Moon imaged from Mercury.

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
That evidence, which is detailed in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research, involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from South Africa. They have been named Diskagma buttonii, meaning "disc-shaped fragments of Andy Button," but it is unsure what the fossils were, the authors say.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-earth.html#jCp

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
That evidence, which is detailed in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research, involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from South Africa. They have been named Diskagma buttonii, meaning "disc-shaped fragments of Andy Button," but it is unsure what the fossils were, the authors say.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-earth.html#jC

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

All Best

Published today, the 30th volume of Gardner Dozois' annual selection of the year's best science fiction stories.  It includes two stories by me, but don't let that put you off.  Gardner says: 'Every year is special, because every year good new writers come along, and every year the older writers continue to do really good work. It's exciting to watch the field evolve, and I don't think the overall level of literary quality in science fiction has ever been higher-and I've been watching the field for a long time.'

Some fun facts:
Annual editions of this anthology have been published continuously since 1984. At a rough count, the series as a whole has contained about 9,500,000 words of fiction, by hundreds of different authors. It has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology seventeen times, more than any other anthology series in history. Gardner Dozois has won fifteen Hugo Awards as Year's Best Editor, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Robert Silverberg said of the series 'The Dozois book is the definitive historical record of the history of the science-fiction short story' and called it "a wondrous treasure trove of great stories and an archive that has immeasurable historical significance." George R.R. Martin said 'The best that science fiction has to offer, chosen by the most respected editor in the field.  A copy belongs on the shelf of every SF reader.'

 The table of contents can be found here.

Also out today from Infinivox, the fifth edition of Allan Kaster's audiobook anthology, The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction. Which, yes, includes one of my stories. More details about the anthology and its contents here. Oh, and it's also available as an ebook on Kindle and Nook.

Drafted

So I've just finished the first draft of the new novel, emitting a spurt of around 3500 words in a rattling crescendo this morning. I don't, as I've noted elsewhere, tend to follow a detailed outline with absolute fidelity, planning out every beat and then making sure that they are all ticked off in the right place. Instead, I have a rough shape, and a few notable features I know I need to visit, and a place where I think I'm going to end up, but everything between is a process of discovery. In other words, I do more of my thinking about writing while I'm writing than before I start.

As I try to keep rewriting to a minimum as I go along, preferring to keep a steady pace, to keep moving forward, the first draft is usually fairly messy, with contradictions and abrupt introductions of important points (although not, oddly, of important characters - they are the one thing I do think about before I begin). It doesn't matter. Everything can be fixed in the rewrites (and I have already accumulated a fair number of notes for the second draft). And sometimes it is important to fail. To find the way that leads forward by trying other ways first.

Anyway, I'm just back from signing copies of Evening's Empires in Forbidden Planet's London branch. I have to deal with the copy-edit of the reissue of the Confluence trilogy before I head out to Spain for the Celsius232 Festival. And then I'll begin again with the new novel, at the beginning.

The title of this one, by the way, is Something Coming Through. It's about aliens, and second chances.

Links 20/07/13

Chuck Wendig - So, You Just Had Your Book Published.  Ha ha ha. Oh.

'An intelligent knife that knows when it is cutting through cancerous tissue is being tested in three London hospitals.'

'Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.'

'A few Septembers back, on a Saturday afternoon, I took a long drive, from a leafy neighbourhood in Boston, Massachusetts, to the remotest parts of the outer solar system. I set out from Cambridge in a dusty, rented Volkswagen, with my co-pilot Andrew Youdin, a planet-formation theorist from the University of Colorado at Boulder. We drove north to Maine, aiming for Aroostook County, where, stretched along close to 100 miles of small towns, big farms and empty highway, you’ll find the world’s largest three-dimensional scale model of the solar system.'

Fly through a canyon on Mars.

Phobos over Mars.

Cover Space

Publishers spend a lot of time trying to get covers right: industry wisdom has it that a great cover snags the attention of casual browsers and boosts sales. That may change, if online sales of deadtree and ebooks continue to increase (although books will still need smart covers to stand out in those 'customers also bought these titles' ID parades), but at the moment, catching and holding that casual glance is one of the key parts of book marketing.

I think I've been pretty lucky with the covers for my Quiet War novels:

By Sidonie Beresford-Browne for the Gollancz hardcover/trade paperback covers, they are amongst my all-time favourites (and the cover of the US editions of the Pyr editions of The Quiet War and The Gardens of the Sun are pretty good too). But I'm aware that while spaceships and planets may be catnip to genre fans, they can be hugely powerful deterrents that underscore innate prejudices about the other-worldly skiffy nonsense for readers who aren't much acquainted with science fiction, or think they don't like it. Spaceships are, to many people, signifiers of brash escapism rather than serious intent.

As, indeed, can be any kind of painterly illustration. As Tim Kreider pointed out in a recent article in The New Yorker, 'children’s books, Y.A. literature, and genre fiction still have license to beguile their readers with gorgeous cover illustrations, but mature readers aren’t supposed to require such enticements. For serious literature to pander to us with cosmetic allurements would be somehow tacky, uncool.'

Kreider has some very smart things to say about what makes a good cover, and why so many covers look the same, and why the new minimalism is not always a good thing. He's a cartoonist, so his insights on cover design come from a different, sharper angle than those of most authors. He also celebrates the covers of science-fiction novels he read as a teenager, and his examples are good ones. So it's unfortunate that they're labelled (perhaps not by Kreider - I certainly hope not) as 'silly book covers'.  There were, and still are, plenty of terrible genre covers thrown together in haste with little skill or attention. But while the psychedelia of, say a Richard Powers' cover from the 1970s may be quaint, it isn't silly. It's the kind of thing that was, as Kreider points out, designed to wow. The problem is that not everyone wants to be wowed:

For serious literature to pander to us with cosmetic allurements would be somehow tacky, uncool. The more important a book is, the less likely there is to be anything at all on its cover (look at most editions of “Ulysses”). Even the ancient equivalents of summer blockbusters like Homer and “Beowulf” or the sex romps and gorefests of Shakespeare tend to get stodgy public-domain paintings on their covers. There are actual marketing hazards to making your book look too enjoyable—I wrote sixty-thousand-some words of prose, but because I threw in half a dozen cartoons and put a funny drawing on the cover, my would-be literary essays often get shelved in Graphic Novels or Humor. 

In UK SFF publishing, there are ongoing attempts at cross-over appeal with some titles, deploying bold graphics, reissuing classics in plainer covers, and so on. Gollancz have just produced a terrific example for Simon Ings' new novel, for instance. But most genre novels still have some kind of painterly representational element because that's what twangs the pleasure centres of genre fans. And novels set in space often still have spaceships on their covers, even if they're mostly about other things. And while they're no longer as boldly monolithic as those examples from 1970s British paperbacks I posted recently while they may be reduced to graphics, as in The Quiet War cover above, or depicted with delicate realism, as in the paperback cover of Al Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth, they're still spaceships, with all that entails.


That the kind of imaginative literature that builds on the great collective triumphs of science can be judged and dismissed because of its covers is a great shame. Not only because (of course) I want my books to be read as widely as possible, but also because it's kind of sad that here in the strange and unpredictable maelstrom of the twenty-first century people cling to the straight realism of modernism like ship-wrecked sailors, as if it is still the only way by which we can make sense of the world and the capabilities of the human mind.

Evening's Empires

Happy birthday, little book.

Out There

Last week my British publisher, Gollancz, dropped the price of the ebook version of The Quiet War to £1.99, to help promote the publication of Evening's Empires, the fourth novel in the Quiet War universe. Some American readers wanted to know whether they could get in on the deal, and I realised, to my chagrin, that I didn't know. So I thought it might be useful to make a list of what is available in the UK and the US - to keep things simple, I'll skirt around the more complicated issue of translations for now. Some of this information is available in the sidebar, by the way, but not all of it. So this, by way of clarification, is what's current as far as the Anglo-American axis goes:

First, in the UK, the following novels are definitely available as deadtree books:

Evening's Empires
In The Mouth of the Whale
Gardens of the Sun
The Quiet War
Cowboy Angels

Five titles from my back list - Four Hundred Billion Stars, Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale's Angel, and Fairyland - may still be available as paperbacks, but are I think mostly out of print.

All of the above are also available as ebooks in the UK. The rest of my back list as at present out of print, but I have plans to revive several titles as ebooks.

A short story collection, A Very British History, was published by PS Publishing in March, and is very much in print. And a single-volume anthology of the Confluence trilogy, with two associated stories tipped in, will be published by Gollancz in December.

In the US, only Gardens of the Sun, The Quiet War and Cowboy Angels are available as deadtree books. (Three other titles are still under contract with Tor, but have long been out of print, and haven't been turned into ebooks because, amongst other reasons, Tor have a vast pre-ebook-era backlist.) They are also available as ebooks - but as I discovered, they aren't available as the British versions. That's because I have a different publisher, Pyr, in the US, and while Gollancz was briefly able to release its ebook versions in the US, that ended when they sold US rights to Pyr. And that's why, I'm afraid, the price of The Quiet War hasn't dropped in the US: it's a special offer on the British ebook associated with a new novel coming out from my British publisher.

The five back list titles mentioned above are available as ebooks in the US, by the way, because I took back the rights after they went out of print in the US, and offered them to Gollancz. If you're confused at this point, I don't blame you.


Availability of books still reflects the old territories carved out by publishers in different countries.  British publishers claim the UK and most Commonwealth countries; US publishers the US and Canada. Back in the day, US readers would not have expected US editions of books to reflect the pricing of editions in British bookshops. Now that the internet connects everyone with everyone else, it isn't much of a stretch to imagine that someone in the US should be able to download a British edition of an ebook; but rights and territories, and the geolocatory vigilance of platforms like Amazon, prevent that.


Neither In the Mouth of the Whale or Evening's Empires have a US publishing deal.  At present, if American readers want to buy either novel, I can do no more than point them towards the Book Depository, which sells deadtree books with free worldwide shipping. And if they want the ebook versions, then I'm afraid it won't be possible (outwith spoofing your location) unless and until an American publisher buys the rights, or until Gollancz decides it can't sell them.

However, there are a few other ebooks which are available in both the US and UK (and in Canada and elsewhere). These are titles I published myself to Kindle Direct, including the stories 'City of the Dead'[, 'Dr Pretorious and the Lost Temple', and 'Prisoners of the Action', the short story collection Little Machines (originally published by PS publishing), and two collections of Quiet War short stories, Stories From The Quiet War and the latest, published just last week, Life After Wartime.

Links 13/07/13

The first exoplanet observed in colour is blue. Because of rains of molten glass.

New Horizons spacecraft spots Pluto and Charon.

Colorized History presents a terrific portrait of Charles Darwin.

Perspective view of the flanks of Olympus Mons, Mars.

All the pie and coffee in Twin Peaks:

Möbius Ship

Gajananvihari Pilot, the hero of Evening's Empires was born on a spaceship and spends most of his life aboard it; he escapes when it is hijacked, and his efforts to get it back form the spine of the novel's narrative. Because it's at the centre of the story, I wanted to make his ship distinctive, so gave it a (literal) twist.

It was a ring ship, Pabuji’s Gift, a broad ribbon caught in a circle five hundred metres across, with a twist that turned it into the single continuous surface of a Möbius strip. The ship’s motor hung from a web of tethers and spars at the centre of the ring; its hull was studded with the cubes and domes that contained workshops, utility bays, power units...

I drew inspiration (novelist's jargon for 'pretty much lifted the idea') from Californian artist Tim Hawkinson's extraordinary Möbius Ship, which I stumbled across in the wilds of the internet while I was planning the novel:

'...a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain’s all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale.'

At least, I though that was the entirety of my inspiration. But a couple of weeks ago, while I was looking for spaceship art on the covers of paperbacks on my double-stacked bookshelves, I found an image of a twisted town by artist John Berkey which may very well be an ancestor of Gajananvihari Pilot's ring ship: