Links 19/10/13

'We live in an odd place and an odd time, amid things that know that they exist and that can reflect upon that, even in the dimmest, most birdlike way. And this needs more explaining than we are at present willing to give it. The question of how the brain produces the feeling of subjective experience, the so-called "hard problem", is a conundrum so intractable that one scientist I know refuses even to discuss it at the dinner table.'

A new law of biology: All mammals pee for about 21 seconds.

Skull 5: 'The spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor that died nearly two million years ago has forced scientists to rethink the story of early human evolution.'

Great example of the extended phenotype: 'Bats that nest inside curled-up leaves may be getting an extra benefit from their homes: the tubular roosts act as acoustic horns, amplifying the social calls that the mammals use to keep their close-knit family groups together.'

A newly discovered giant virus 'definitively bridges the gap between viruses and cells - a gap that was proclaimed as dogma at the very outset of modern virology back in the 1950s.'

Space-born jellyfish hate life on Earth.

The Beautiful Mars tumblr (hat tip to Christina Scholz). 

Pro Bono

So science writer DN Lee was asked to be guest writer on a commercial blog, asked whether there would be any payment, and politely declined when she was told that she was expected to provide her services for free in exchange for 'exposure'. To which the editor replied, 'Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore?' But that wasn't the end of her trouble - she wrote a scathingly funny piece about it for her Scientific American blog, and SciAm pulled it because 'it wasn't about science' (later amended to 'we weren't sure really happened').*

Meanwhile, Philip Hensher was asked by a Cambridge professor to write a foreword; when Hensher declined because there would be no payment, the professor called him 'priggish and ungracious'. And later, after Hensher published an article about it, the professor doubled down in a letter, pointing out that a) Hensher would have been paid, actually, in books, and b) he and other writers should, like academics 'give freely of their time' and contribute 'to the common good of our culture.' Hey, academics - first, don't confuse books with actual payment for services, and second, even though they spend a lot of time along in book-lined rooms, writers aren't actually university academics. They don't have a salary; they have to pay for their offices, and lighting and heating, and all the rest. Oh, and that stuff you think you're doing for free? You're paid to do that. Or at least, that's how it worked when I was in academia.

These are two extreme examples of the kind of entitlement writers sometimes encounter when asked to work for free. Usually, the people who do the asking know they're reaching out for a favour, and completely understand when the writer politely turns them down.  But sometimes they think that they're doing the writer a favour, and get all huffy when refused. Perhaps because they think that writing or giving a speech or appearing on a panel at a conference isn't actually work, or because they reckon that writers should give back something because other people have bought their books.

In fact, most writers do work for free now and then. Especially when they have a book coming out. If you are a mid-list author and your publisher doesn't have a marketing budget for your book, you'll buckle down and do what it takes to get the word out there. But working without pay eats into the time you need to spend doing work to earn a living, so you have to carefully pick and choose what you can and cannot do. Sometimes you'll do it because the person who asked you the favour is a friend or has previously boosted your signal; sometimes you'll do it because it supports a good cause; sometimes you'll do it because it looks like fun. I contributed a short piece to a collection of essays about Doctor Who because it supports a charity that does good work in an area that has personally affected me (and also as payback for the enjoyment I got out of Doctor Who as a kid). And on Monday I'll be appearing on a panel during a symposium on starships at the Royal Astronomical Society because the meeting should be suitably mind-expanding, and also because admission is free.

That last is important. There are honourable exceptions, but too often writers will discover that the prestigious literary festival to which they were invited expects them to perform for free. The festival has big-money sponsors, the organisers are paid, the owners of the festival's venue are paid, celebrity guests receive appearance fees, and the audience pays for admission, but none of the money trickles down to the poor bloody writers. Or that speech or reading they were asked to give for free? It will be delivered to a paying audience. And that's when it stops looking like 'exposure', and a lot more like 'exploitation.' Artists, actors, photographers and musicians report the same trend.

Genre writers may not get the same kind of exposure, but at least they aren't so often exploited. Most SF/F writers aren't paid when they appear at conventions, either, and the convention's guests of honour usually only get expenses and free accommodation. But although most conventions charge a membership fee, they are run by volunteers and rarely turn a profit. It's cheerfully ramshackle, sometimes disintegrates noisily, but mostly works. And although the number of books sold probably doesn't justify the time and expense of attending, you can at least moan about it with your peers.

*[UPDATE: SciAm have now done the right thing by Dr Lee and restored her blog entry.]

Yet Another Blog Post About Not Blog Posting

Things have been a bit quiet around here. I have a post about science-fiction taxonomy and seagulls to write, another about why the 'Hard SF' subgenre is no longer relevant, and so on, but right now I need to get some work done. First, there's the ongoing novel. I'm nearing the end of the second draft now. Usually, the first draft is a race to get the story - the sequence of events - down; the second attempts to get the narrative sorted out - how those events relate to each other, how they're told and shaped, and the voice in which they're told. (The third draft will try to make sure that every sentence is the right shape and logically follows from its predecessor, but let's not go there yet.) Getting the voice right is pretty important as there are two protagonists; getting the structure right is tricky, as one story begins before the other kicks in and the first catches up with the second as they're told in alternating chapters.

So there's that, and then there's this -

- the proofs of the Confluence omnibus - three novels and two stories, 940 pages. It's due out in February next year by the way; my publishers and I decided it would be a good idea to put a little distance between it and Evening's Empires, and I don't have anything else coming out in 2014. In the morning I'm working on the new novel, and in the afternoon I'm reading every. single. word. of the proofs, and in the evening I'm working on a couple of other small tasks. So for the  next couple of weeks, not much time for much else.

Links 04/10/13

'Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system, a sizzling, Jupiter-like world known as Kepler-7b.'

A periodic table of the exoplanet 'zoo'.

Space beer! Made with moondust. And beer.

'A huge cluster of jellyfish forced the Oskarshamn plant, the site of one of the world's largest nuclear reactors, to shut down by clogging the pipes conducting cool water to the turbines.'

JEROS, the Jellyfish Robot Elimination Swarm.

'Roboy has a four-foot-tall human shape and a set of “muscles” inspired by the human musculoskeletal system. The plastic muscles work together via electrical motors and artificial tendons. Tendon-driven systems like Roboy mimic the flexible mechanics of biology, and could result in a new class of robots that are lighter, safer, and move in a more natural way.'

Links 27/09/13

'The Tommy Westphall Multiverse is a thought exercise, a parlor game writ large. And it’s tailor made for pop culture obsessives.'

Volume 1 of the Richard Feynman Lectures on Physics is now available free online. Volumes 2 and 3 are to follow.

'In 1881, Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, had a problem: the volume of data coming into his observatory was exceeding his staff’s ability to analyze it. He also had doubts about his staff’s competence–especially that of his assistant, who Pickering dubbed inefficient at cataloging. So he did what any scientist of the latter 19th century would have done: he fired his male assistant and replaced him with his maid, Williamina Fleming. Fleming proved so adept at computing and copying that she would work at Harvard for 34 years–eventually managing a large staff of assistants.

'So began an era in Harvard Observatory history where women—more than 80 during Pickering’s tenure, from 1877 to his death in 1919— worked for the director, computing and cataloging data. Some of these women would produce significant work on their own; some would even earn a certain level of fame among followers of female scientists. But the majority are remembered not individually but collectively, by the moniker Pickering's Harem.'

'The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash together to create them, on a timescale where even oceans that exist for tens of millions of years can disappear leaving only the subtlest of geological traces.'

'Whole solar systems are needed to generate life, not just terrestrial planets with water.'

The Kawasaki Warehouse amusement game park in Japan 'has been designed as a historical replica of Kowloon ‘Walled’ City, capitalising on the enduring fascination with the lawless metropolis ever since its demolishment in 1980s.'

Green Martians

From an essay over at 3quarksdaily, discussing Mars-colonisation booster Robert Zubrin's claims that 'radical environmentalists' are bent on suppressing progress in favour of protecting 'a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity:'

'As we reflect upon our environmental challenges, two poles therefore define our actions. On the one hand is the ascetic modesty of sustainability, on the other the hubristic desire to colonize the galaxy. In some ways Mars colonization may seem the more immediately attractive solution as it come with all the thrill of a technical challenge and the allure of subsequent conquest.'

I explored this in the first two Quiet War books and (not to spoil the ending) it seems to me that it's a false dichotomy; it isn't a question of either creating a sustainable civilisation or going to Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System. And while one can imagine, as I did, that in certain extreme circumstances some kind of Gaian religion might come to dominate politics, at the moment the balance is tipped far in the opposite direction. Right now on lifeboat Earth we're burning the furniture and decking for fuel, and looking the other way as water laps over the gunwhales.

The human species hasn't yet learned how to use technology responsibly, and we're still discovering that the biomes we're despoiling are packed with intricate interconnections that can't be easily reproduced. As the failed attempt in Biosphere 2 showed, we aren't yet up to the task of creating a fully self-contained ecosystem here on Earth, let alone in a space city on Mars. Both sides have a lot to teach each other: the kind of knowledge acquired from stewardship of increasingly fragile environments on Earth will be essential for creating the gardens of Mars; the kinds of technology needed to survive in extreme environments and recycle everything with as close to 100% efficiency as possible will have all kinds of uses here on Earth.

Or are Martians supposed to live off imported rations inside charmless cans while strip-mining the Hellas Basin (and if Earth is wrecked, who will they be selling their Martian ores to)? I admire Zubrin's passion, but I'm dismayed by the way he's directing it at straw men.

Short Stuff

Just arrived in the post: complimentary copies of the slightly delayed special limited edition of my short story collection A Very British History, from PS Publishing. I've written some short stories because I've been asked to; I've written rather more for the fun and joy of it. Some have turned out to be the preludes to novels, but my personal favourites are those which are complete and self-contained. You get an idea, or a character, or a situation, and you explore what it means, or why they are who they are, or how it resolves, all within the compass of a tightly organised narrative. They can be about a small change in a human heart, or the end of the world. They can be about anything and everything. They give you the chance to stretch your limits, to experiment, to take risks (to fall flat on your face.) I've written and published about a hundred; it would lovely if I could write at least a hundred more. Hopefully, some good ones.

But they can be pretty ephemeral things. Written, published, read (hopefully), gone. How many SF and fantasy stories are published every year? Hundreds, easily.  Maybe a thousand or more. And of those, how many last much longer than their first appearance in print? So I'm aware that I'm very lucky to have been allowed to select a bunch of my stories for this retrospective (1985 - 2022; let's optimistically call it the first half of my career) collection, and to have had them published by Peter Crowther and the rest of the PS team not only in a rather luxurious 'standard' format, but also in this rather sumptuous package.

At the top, front and back of the slipcase, with artwork by Jim Burns, illustrating 'The Choice.'  Below, at the right, the main collection, signed by me, with special endpapers.  You can find the table of contents here.  And to the left of it, a small extra volume containing two stories 'Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World' and 'Karl and the Ogre', and a biographical essay. The terrific cover is also by Jim Burns - I hadn't seen it before now. There aren't many copies available, so if you haven't yet ordered one yet, you had better hurry.

If you'd like tasters of my short fiction there are cheaper alternatives - although available only on Kindle, for now. Little Machines is an eclectic collection of science-fiction and some darker stuff.  And Stories From The Quiet War and Life After Wartime are shorter collections of stories associated with my Quiet War future history (I've given links to the UK branch of Amazon, but they're also available in the US and elsewhere.)

A Few Notes On Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

Pynchon's previous novel, Inherent Vice, was set in Los Angeles at the tail-end of the 1960s, a rambling comedic noir in which a stoner private eye. Doc Sportillo, became involved in a kind-of-or-maybe-not conspiracy after his ex-girlfriend disappeared. Bleeding Edge is a kind of thriller set in New York in 2001, just after the implosion of the dot-com bubble, in which decertified pistol-packing not-quite-divorced self-styled 'Bad Accountant' Maxine Tarnow tries to balance Upper-West-Side family life with an investigation into the dubious finances of hashslingrz, a computer security firm involved in 'Crypto work, countermeasures, heaven knows what-all.'  In Inherent Vice, ARPANET, the evolutionary precursory to the Internet, was Doc Sportillo's occasional oracle. Here, the vast epicycles of conspiracy bleed into the echo chambers of cyberspace, contaminating the primal innocence of its virtual utopias.

Although there, of course, a lot more to it than that, including mobsters, Russian gangsters, a vastly detailed virtual reality, Silicon Alley chancers and casualties, a manipulative operative who may or may not be a kind of time-travelling spy, a nasal forensics expert obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, 9/11, and so forth. As well as the usual plethora of jokes, songs and deliberately bad puns, and esoteric facts too weird to be fictional, and a vast cast of eccentrically-named eccentrics, all armed with conflicting ideas and opinions. It's a very talkative novel; Maxine's investigative techniques primarily involve conversation rather than interrogation, preferably over a nice long meal.

In a genre novel, there would be a steady accumulation of pertinent knowledge - plot tokens - leading to revelation and denouement. Here, the central villain, the tycoon who owns hashslingrz, Gabriel Ice (surely a nod to William Gibson's cyberspace fictions), mostly lurks in the shadows, and instead of answers Maxine's investigations yield an accumulating sense of vast and shadowy machineries half-glimpsed, plots and counterplots that melt away as soon as they're exposed to scrutiny, connections made but never followed up because there's always another connection to be made.

Pynchon's attempt to blend the actual outcome of an actual conspiracy into his umwelt almost works because he doesn't try to document it. It happens offstage, in the last quarter of the novel.  'Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to worse. All day long.' What we don't quite get, after the event, is the real sense of bad turning to worse - just talk about it, sometimes uncritically invoking truther conspiracies, advancing the theory that 9/11 was an emergent event that could be predicted but not prevented, seized by those in power as an excuse to scare and infantilise. Commercialised and claimed like the unmapped potentials of the Internet.

But besides all that, Bleeding Edge is a beautifully evocative love song to the city so good they named it twice, poised at the cusp between the dirty old New York and the regooded disneyfied version it has become. A city that back then was still a cacophony of cultures and cuisines and languages, where, despite the looming shadows, the tender quotidian and rich eccentricities of human life could yet flourish.

There Are Doors (XXI)

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.