Adventures in Hyperreality

I posted a couple of lists of worthwhile science fiction and fantasy books a little while back, and was gratified by the degree of knowledgeability and enthusiasm displayed by the commentariat. I left those two lists incomplete, and thanks to numerous suggestions have been able to finish them off and have just posted them on the cobwebby web site (which I really must do something about, soon; it’s really showing its age). They were generated for a short, intense creative writing course I’ll be teaching next week. The idea is to provide a list of books anyone with an interest in science fiction and/or fantasy might consider interesting, worthwhile, or even essential. There aren’t any titles less than twenty-five years old because I planned to ask the people taking the course to generate short lists of their own. Lists of books - or anything else - they’ve found inspiring.

That ‘anything else’ brings me to another pair of lists, got up by M. John Harrison over at his blog around about the same time I was working up mine. They’re far more catholic than mine, don’t have an artificial end point, and include all kinds of stuff in addition to books: David Bowie’s 'Diamond Dogs' for instance, and Tom Waits’s ‘What’s He Building’. I stuck up a link to the video of the latter because I was going to write something appreciative about those lists, but then life (okay, mostly a big block of copy-editing) intervened and more than a week has passed. Anyhow, MJH’s lists are seriously playful, crammed as they are with ‘stuff that turned me on when I read it or watched it; or which still turns me on now’, and embody the kind of stuff that gets incorporated into writers’ creative juices. In a later post, MJH lays out another good boundary-demolishing, viewpoint-skewing thesis - a lot of the stuff in the happening world, from L’Oreal ads to Lewis Hamilton’s career, are fantasies as carefully constructed as any triple-decker post-Tolkein magical kings’n’queens commercial fantasy novel. Hyperreality rules.

Oh, and found over on John Crowley’s blog, here’s another great reading list: non-fiction books any good fantasy writer should study and absorb, structured around the topic of ‘Cultures We Really Evolved that are Stranger Than Any You can Think of.’ We need to be reminded as often as possible that the world is stranger than we can imagine.

Sidewise

The 2008 Sidewise Awards will be presented at Anticipation, the 67th Worldcon, to be held in Montreal, Canada from August 6-10, 2009. The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were established in 1995 to recognize excellence in alternate history fiction. The winners are selected from a panel of judges that currently includes Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stuart Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.

Short Form:
"A Brief Guide to Other Histories," by Paul J. McAuley (Postscripts #15)
"G-Men," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)
"Night Bird Soaring," by T.L. Morganfield (Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Autumn/08)
"The People's Machine," by Tobias Buckell (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)
"Poison Victory," by Albert E. Cowdrey (F&SF, 07/08)
"Sacrifice," by Mary Rosenblum (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)

Long Form:
The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann (Snowbooks/Tor, 2009)
The Dragon's Nine Sons, by Chris Roberson (Solaris)
Half a Crown, by Jo Walton (Tor)
Nation, by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins/Doubleday UK)
Swiftly, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

Sightings

Just noticed that Subterranean Press have posted the first part of my novella 'Crimes and Glory' in their online magazine. Meanwhile, over at The New Yorker, there's J.G. Ballard's absolutely positively last story (as opposed to the last-ever-Ballard story published earlier in the Guardian (and earlier still in Interzone). The New Yorker published a science-fiction story by Gail Hareven last week. Build on this trend: send them your best stories!

The Twenty-First Century So Far

Pyr PS

Hero editor Lou Anders has just let me know that you can pre-order the US edition of The Quiet War from a well-known online bookseller. Hey. It's good to be back.

Holding Pattern

I'm currently hip-deep in copy-editing Gardens of the Sun and posts will be a bit sparse in the next couple of weeks, so in the great blog tradition here are a few links to some good stuff:

The Guardian has published J.G. Ballard's last short story - as David Pringle notes elsewhere, only 13 years after it was first published in Interzone.

I know I bang on rather a lot about the sheer awe of the pictures of Saturn and its rings and retinue of moons transmitted by the Cassini probe, but here are three especially fabulous collections, selected by Alan Taylor at the Boston Globe.

Futurist visions of the future (via the ever-reliable Bruce Sterling).

Deja vu all over again: 1976 Swine Flu Propaganda:

Free Ticket

I'm taking part in a panel, 'Building a Sci-Fi/Fantasy World', in the Literature Lab sessions associated with the Sci-Fi London film festival. It's on at 2.20 pm on Monday May 4 at the Apollo Cinema, Picadilly Circus London. And I have a free ticket to give away. If you want to come along, email me at PJC[insert my last name]@gmail.com and give me your name, and I'll make sure the comp ticket is waiting for you at the door.

UPDATE: ...and it's gone!

USSA

'This is the voice of Communist government speaking. Today, Communist forces have completed the occupation of your country. The United States no longer exists. It is now the Union of Soviet States of America. Long live the USSA!'

Man, I wish I'd known about this when I was writing Cowboy Angels . . . A 1960s comic book about America under the Reds - sponsored by the Catholic Church and approved by J. Edgar Hoover! Via Infinite Thought.

Reality V. The Future

Regents Canal, King's Cross

First Past The Goldilocks Test?

The lightest exoplanet yet has been discovered around the red dwarf star Gliese 581 - and even better, refined measurements suggest that the orbit of one of its companions, Gliese 581 d, is within the habitable zone. Although, at around the size of Neptune, Gliese 581 d is too large to be a rocky planet like Earth, it may well be an ice giant that wandered inwards, and could be covered with a deep ocean - 'the first serious "water world" candidate.' What days!

A Message From Our Sponsors

Like a quite a few blogspot users, I've been marked by a robot as being a possible evil robot, intent on flooding the intertubes with spam. If the blog locks or turns off in the next couple of weeks, or starts displaying alarming notices, that's why. Meanwhile, I hope you don't mind going through a word verification step before posting; I set it up to stop the real evil robots wasting my time.

Welcome to the twenty-first century...

Uh-Oh

Ancient reefs recently exposed in Mexico show that sea levels can rise by as much as 10 feet in half a century. (Abstract for original paper here - needs a subscription to read all of it).

'Humanity Would Largely Look Like A Forest Of Quiet Semiconductor Trees.'

Anders Sandberg examines the energetic costs of the ultimate in sustainable living.

(Via Oliver Morton's Heliophage.)

(Hmm, kind of reminds me of William Hjortsberg's Grey Matters.)

J.G. Ballard

Just learned that J.G. Ballard has died. It isn't unexpected, because he has been ill for some years, but it's still a major shock and a major loss. According to the BBC news, he was a 'cult' author - whatever that means. He was one of the few people to fully understand the second half of the twentieth century, and how it continues to shape the future.

UPDATE: obituaries by David Pringle in the Guardian, Christopher Priest in the Financial Times; others in the Telegraph, and the Times. Tributes and links collected at Ballardian.com.

ALSO: Clute on Ballard.

Gardens Of The Sun - Cover Copy

The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, founded by descendants of refugees from Earth’s repressive regimes, the Outers, have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union, and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earth’s forces loot their cities and settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the ‘Outer problem.’

But Earth’s victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by the Outers’ greatest genius, Avernus, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isn’t as easy as he thought. And on Earth, in Greater Brazil, the democratic traditions preserved and elaborated by the Outers have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them.

Meanwhile, in the outer reaches of the Solar System, a rag-taggle group of refugees struggle to preserve the last of the old ideals. And on Triton, fanatical members of a cabal prepare for a final battle that threatens to shatter the future of the human species.

After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war -- especially the victors.

Star Trek: The Next Next Generation

Down into town today to see a preview showing of the new Star Trek film, the eleventh, and a major reboot of the series. I've always had a soft spot for the original flavour Star Trek - along with Doctor Who and Thunderbirds, it was an important part of my media landscape when I was growing up. So I was relieved to discover that the reboot dutifully hit all the major nostalgia points while cleverly subverting its predecessors.

The plot involves time-travel, branching universes, and the usual one-dimensional villain (a rogue Romulan called Nero - presumably because he burns down the Rome of the old franchise). Eager to avenge the death of his wife and his planet, Nero attacks a Federation starship and leaves Kirk growing up to be 'a genius-level repeat offender' without a father or any particular direction until he meets up with Uhuru and Captain Pike and joins Star Fleet Academy. So in one stroke, things are changed forever; the previous ten films and six TV series are consigned to the dustbin of an alternate history. Kirk and Spock first cross blades when Kirk is suspended after breaking the rules by reprogramming the famous Kobayashi Maru test. When a crisis looms and the fleet is dispatched, fellow cadet Leonard McCoy sneaks Kirk aboard the Enterprise, and thereafter the tearaway Kirk begins to explore his potential and exert his authority.

The heart of the original Star Trek was the friendship between Kirk and Spock, and both Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock) convey the storied essence of their characters while bringing some subtle variations into the mix. The ensemble of supporting characters is pretty good too: Zoe Sanatana's Uhuru has more to do than answer the phone; Karl Urban is a very credible McCoy; Simon Pegg successfully plays a broadly comical Scotty. There are plenty of iconic moments to please the fans; the plot is reliably daft and full of holes; the physics is as dodgy as ever; an ice planet features the usual monsters with no ecological rational. State-of-the-art SFX renders the space battles dizzyingly kinetic, and with a lot of story and introductions to pack into a little over two hours the pace is often frenetic. There's a short scene when we track a hapless crew member who's sucked out of an exploding corridor into the vacuum of space, and the view expands to take in other drifting bodies in sudden silence; a few more moments like that would have been nice. And it would good, too, if we could finally get away from the plot cliche in which the hero has to prove himself worthy of his father - in Kirk's case, not only his dead father, but the father-figure of Captain Pike, and the uber-father of the Academy. Been there, done that, got the Starship Troopers T-shirt.

But despite the cliches and Bad Science, there's a lot more wit and sass in this space operatic reboot than in most of its too-often ponderous predecessors, and you're left with a sense that the franchise is ready to head off into new and unexpected directions. And also, in my case, having seen Winona Ryder play Spock's mother, feeling rather old.

There Are Doors (15)

In Bradford for Eastercon, I stayed in the Hilton in the city centre, which meant that when I was in my room I couldn't see the Hilton's somewhat shabby box, or the multistorey carpark next door to it, but had a good view of the very fine Victorian town hall. I didn't have much time for sight-seeing, but did manage to sneak a couple of hours of early-morning exploration around the cathedral and the heart of the town; despite some despoilation (and the huge hole right in the heart of the city, which someone told me was fifteen years old), there was plenty of good Victorian stuff to admire, including what looked like a Gothic reimagining of a Florentine palazzo (appropriately enough: many Florentine bankers built their fortunes on wool exported from Yorkshire and the Cotswolds).

The size and ornamentation of these doors and gates gives some idea of the municipal pride and wealth of days gone by.

Keep Watching The Skies

Incoming.

Hanging Out At Easter

So I'm getting ready to head north to Bradford and Eastercon, the big annual British SF convention, where I'll be taking part in a few panels, hosting the BSFA Awards with Kim Newman (we also do weddings and bar mitzvahs, rates surprisingly reasonable), generally hanging out, and hopefully seeing something of Bradford's sturdy Victorian architecture. To add a note of randomness to my weekend, the first reader of this blog to find me and mention Unlikely Worlds will win a copy of the new edition of Eternal Light. Don't be shy.

So It's Come To This (Part 3)

Okay, here's my attempt to come up with a list of essential fantasy and horror books, and this is where I definitely need some help. I read pretty widely in my formative years (the list contains my desert island book - not the Lieber, above, although that does contain one of my favourite short stories, 'Smoke Ghost'), but there are definite gaps in my education, especially regarding ‘high fantasy’. At the moment, the list stands at 44 titles; I need six more to complete it. What am I missing? What books by people like Andre Norton, Knutter and Moore, Tanith Lee, Dianne Wynne Jones, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Abraham Merrit, Robert Bloch, Terry Brooks, Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp (amongst others) should I include? Am I right to leave out Edgar Rice Burroughs? If not, is Tarzan the Ape-Man a better bet than A Warlord of Mars?

Same rules as before: only one book per author, not-quite-arbitrary cut-off date of 1984. And remember that this is associated with teaching creative writing in SF and fantasy, and an attempt to give some kind of thematic perspective to the genres. Which is why both lists begin with the same book:


Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
Tales of Mystery and Imagination EDGAR ALLAN POE 1838
A Christmas Carol CHARLES DICKENS 1843
Jane Eyre CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1847
The Hunting of the Snark LEWIS CARROLL 1876
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1886
The Well At The World’s End WILLIAM MORRIS 1896
Dracula BRAM STOKER 1897
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary MR JAMES 1904
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things LAFCADIO HEARN 1904
The Wind in the Willows KENNETH GRAHAME 1908
Jurgen JAMES BRANCH CABELL 1919
A Voyage to Arcturus DAVID LINDSAY 1920
The King of Elfland’s Daughter LORD DUNSANY 1924
The Trial FRANZ KAFKA 1925
Lud-in-the-Mist HOPE MIRRLEES 1926
Orlando VIRGINIA WOOLF 1928
The Big Sleep RAYMOND CHANDLER 1939
The Outsider and Others HP LOVECRAFT 1939
Gormenghast MERVYN PEAKE 1946
Night’s Black Agents FRITZ LEIBER JR 1947
The Sword of Rhiannon LEIGH BRACKETT 1953
Conan the Barbarian ROBERT E HOWARD collected 1954
The Lord of the Rings JRR TOLKEIN 1954-5
The Once and Future King TH WHITE 1958
The Haunting of Hill House SHIRLEY JACKSON 1959
The Wierdstone of Brinsingamen ALAN GARNER 1960
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase JOAN AIKEN 1962
Something Wicked This Way Comes RAY BRADBURY 1963
The Book of Imaginary Beings JORGE LUIS BORGES 1967
Ice ANA CAVAN 1967
One Hundred Years of Solitude GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 1967
Earthsea URSULA LE GUIN 1968-1972
Jirel of Joiry CL MOORE collected 1969
Grendel JOHN GARDNER 1971
The Pastel City M JOHN HARRISON 1971
Carrie STEPHEN KING 1974
Peace GENE WOLFE 1975
Gloriana, or the Unfulfill’d Queen MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1978
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories ANGELA CARTER 1979
Little, Big JOHN CROWLEY 1981
The Anubis Gates TIM POWERS 1983
The Colour of Magic TERRY PRATCHETT 1983
Mythago Wood ROBERT HOLDSTOCK 1984

So It's Come To This (Part 2)

A big thank you to everyone who posted comments on my idiosyncratic list of what I consider to be essential SF works. It's given me a lot of food for thought - I'm certain that a second list, just as good, could be constructed from alternates. And why not? Mine is a fairly personal snapshot, and by no means definitive.

After due consideration, I've decided to add the following titles:

Herland CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN 1914
The Shockwave Rider JOHN BRUNNER 1975

I confess that I haven't read Herland, but it's commonly agreed to be an essential early feminist utopia and fits in with the pedagogic 'themes and echoes' side of the list. A lot of people came out for Brunner, which is pretty heartening considering most of his work is currently OOP. Rather than the people's favourite, Stand on Zanzibar, or Jagged Orbit, which both have considerable merit, I've gone for The Shockwave Rider, which is even more prescient than the first two.

I'll post my list of Fantasy and Horror titles tomorrow.

Upcoming

Pyr's Fall/Winter 2009/2010 season.

PS: Hero editor Lou Anders has just posted the cover of the US edition of The Quiet War over on the Pyr site. Spaceships!

Soyuz: The Next Generation

As the three-man Soyuz spaceship, now more than forty years old, begins to show its age*, there are reports about Russian plans to build a next-generation six-seater spacecraft that could not only reach Earth orbit, but also provide a shuttle service for an as yet golden-vapourware lunar orbit space station. BBC news has a concept picture: it doesn't much resemble the much-touted shuttle look-alike Kliper, but seems to be a rival for NASA's Orion, a mockup of which is just about to begin open-water testing. I hope this is for real - as far as I'm concerned, you can never have too many spaceships.

*A genuine seat-of-the-pants space emergency and it doesn't make the mainstream news? Maybe we're finally beginning to think that space travel is sort of routine . . .

Eternal Return

The new reprint of Eternal Light is published today, along with nine other titles in Gollancz’s space opera promotion.

It was first published in 1991, although I began working on it a couple of years before that - about twenty years ago, in fact. It still means a lot to me. I’d already published two novels and a short-story collection, but Eternal Light was a big step up: far more ambitious and, although nowhere near as long as the 600 page epics routinely turned out these days, fairly hefty for its day. I wrote it under fairly difficult and depressing personal circumstances, and in the middle of the first draft moved from Oxford to St Andrews, Scotland, to take up my first and last proper full-time job. So much of the writing was done in a corner of a dismal university flat, which I shared with a tribe of trilobite-sized silverfish, in the middle of my first Scottish winter, while grappling with teaching and trying to re-establish my research programme. Still, I persevered, typing away on my very first, and fabulously expensive, PC. I was fiercely ambitious, then, and the writing flowed, as Robert Frost put it, on its own melting, propelled by Mahler and Robert Johnson.

I wanted to write a new kind of space opera, punkishly incorporating and reimagining all the tropes from the various kinds of old space opera I’d loved to read as a teenager, starting in excavated ruins on an alien planet with a storm coming on, moving halfway across the galaxy to the supermassive black hole at its heart and stranger regions beyond, and returning to a transfigured Earth. Whether or not I succeeded isn’t for me to say, but rereading the first pages I detect a promising if not altogether refined vigour:

It began when the shock wave of a nearby supernova tore apart the red supergiant sun of the Alea home system, forcing ten thousand family nations to abandon their world and search for new homes amongst the packed stars of the Galaxy’s core. Or it began long after one Alea family had slaughtered most of the others and forced the rest to flee the core, when a binary star came too close to the black hole at the centre of the Galaxy. Or perhaps it began half a million years after that, when Alea infesting asteroids girdling the red dwarf star BD +20̊ 2465 destroyed a Greater Brazilian flyby drone as it shot through their adopted system. That’s where it began for Dorthy Yoshida, for instance, although it happened a dozen years before she was born . . .

Eternal Light was the first of my novels to be nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, it was on the short-list for the BSFA award (it lost both times, hey-ho), and it was my first US hardback. Twenty copies of the British hardback were numbered and signed before publication, although I don’t think they’re worth much more than ordinary signed editions; an unknown number were bound upside-down (again, nothing especially valuable), and there’s a rare alternate dust jacket - I have one, and gave another away in a competition: these may be the only survivors. And now it’s back!

In Perspective

Rooting around in the cellars of the web, I came across these beautiful depictions of the spacecraft that might have been used in the various manned missions to Mars planned over the past 45 years. Of course, the perennial cry of critics has been that missions like these would be fantastically expensive - far too expensive to contemplate doing it in the near future. But let's get those costs into perspective. President Obama has estimated that taxpayers will have to pay in the region of 2.3 trillion dollars to bail out the American banking system. It'll probably be more: this estimate was announced February and if we've learned one thing during the ongoing crisis it's that everything costs way more than any estimate. Even so, that's enough to fully fund five manned missions to Mars, assuming each costs around 450 billion dollars, the high end of estimated costs. Likewise, the cost of bailing out just two UK banks could fund three missions. Seems like a bargain to me.

A Bigger Splash

Mars is famously peppered with craters of all sizes. And like Earth, it's still encountering meteorites which are creating fresh craters on the surface; Mars's atmosphere is vanishingly thin compared to Earth's, and therefore offers less protection to incoming space debris. The team operating the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter have spotted a number of fresh craters since they've begun surveying the surface, and some appear to have excavated water-ice from beneath the surface in mid-latitude regions, suggesting that ice beneath the surface, known to exist around the north and south poles extends a fair way towards the equator: more evidence that Mars's inventory of water is much larger than many people expected. And if small meteorites can dig up ice, so can astronauts.

(Full story at Universe Today)

So It's Come To This

Yup, a list. While thinking about the SF and fantasy creative writing workshop, I came up with a personal list of essential SF titles. Only one title per author, and it ends at 1984 for not quite arbitrary reasons. I have 48 titles so far; anyone care to suggest two more to round the number up to 50? Novels or short-story collections are acceptable. (Yes, I have read them all.)

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
Journey to the Centre of the Earth JULES VERNE 1863
After London RICHARD JEFFRIES 1885
The Time Machine HG WELLS 1895
The House on the Borderland WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON 1912
We YEVGENY ZAMIATIN 1924
Brave New World ALDOUS HUXLEY 1932
Star Maker OLAF STAPLEDON 1937
1984 GEORGE ORWELL 1949
I, Robot, ISAAC ASIMOV 1950
The Martian Chronicles RAY BRADBURY 1950
The Dying Earth JACK VANCE 1950
Childhood’s End ARTHUR C CLARKE 1953
The Space Merchants CM KORNBLUTH & FREDERIK POHL 1953
Tiger! Tiger! ALFRED BESTER 1956
The Death of Grass JOHN CHRISTOPHER 1956
The Seedling Stars JAMES BLISH 1957
The Midwich Cuckoos JOHN WYNDHAM 1957
Starship Troopers ROBERT A HEINLEIN 1959
A Canticle for Liebowitz WALTER M MILLER JR 1959
Solaris STANSLAW LEM 1961
Hothouse BRIAN ALDISS 1962
A Clockwork Orange ANTONY BURGESS 1962
Cat’s Cradle KURT VONNEGUT JR 1963
Martian Time-Slip PHILIP K DICK 1964
Dune FRANK HERBERT 1965
The Crystal World JG BALLARD 1966
Flowers For Algernon DANIEL KEYES 1966
Lord of Light ROGER ZELAZNY 1967
Nova SAMUEL R DELANY 1968
Pavane KEITH ROBERTS 1968
The Left Hand of Darkness URSULA K LE GUIN 1969
Roadside Picnic ARKADY AND BORIS STRUGATSKI 1969
334 THOMAS M DISCH 1972
Dying Inside ROBERT SILVERBERG 1972
The Fifth Head of Cerberus GENE WOLFE 1972
Ten Thousand Light Years From Home JAMES TIPTREE JR 1973
The Forever War JOE HALDEMAN 1974
Inverted World CHRISTOPHER PRIEST 1974
The Female Man JOANNA RUSS 1975
Arslan MJ ENGH 1976
The Ophiuchi Hotline JOHN VARLEY 1977
The Final Programme MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1968
Kindred OCTAVIA BUTLER 1979
Engine Summer JOHN CROWLEY 1979
Timescape GREGORY BENFORD 1980
Neuromancer WILLIAM GIBSON 1984
Divine Endurance GWYNETH JONES 1984

Next, 50 essential fantasy & horror titles . . .

SF and Fantasy Writing Workshop

I'm getting into the creative writing business:

Science Fiction and Fantasy: workshop for writers
Paul McAuley

• Monday 18 May 2009: 6pm-9pm
• Tuesday 19 May 2009: 6pm-9pm
• Wednesday 20 May 2009: 6pm-9pm
• Thursday 21 May 2009: 6pm-9pm

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Kingston University
Penrhyn Road
Kingston upon Thames
Surrey KT1 2EE

Stephen Jones, award-winning editor, writer and anthologist, will be making a guest appearance, helping me to explain how to get published and build a career (I need all the help I can get in the latter department, clearly). At £180 for four nights (£160 if you book before April 16th) it's a snip.

Constant Bubbling Caldrons

Cassini: the gift that keeps giving. Not only have scientists detected evidence for cryovolcanoes on Titan, they believe that one might be erupting right now. (When I was writing The Quiet War, I took a punt that there would be cryovolcanism on Titan, so I'm especially excited and pleased by this.)

Stranger Than Fiction (Slight Return)

I knew that the surveillance state in Whole Wide World would be overtaken by reality. I didn't realise how quickly it would happen!


Should you accidentally stare at a CCTV camera for too long: stay calm, police officers will arrive shortly and take you away to a secure area.

Set To Strauss

Space Shuttle docking rendezvous maneuver.

An Idea Of Scale

It’s hard to believe how far we are from anything else created by humankind. Except for our own, now-derelict third stage, nothing made by people or from the Earth — nothing — is within more than a billion miles of New Horizons.

(Via Bad Astronomy.)

All The News We Can Fit In A Window

From the always great Shorpy site, which features high-definition images of old photographs, an example of blogging, 1940s style.

The Death Of Grass

The world's leading crop scientists issued a stark warning that a deadly airborne fungus could devastate wheat harvests in poor countries and lead to famines and civil unrest over significant regions of central Asia and Africa.

Ug99 — so called because it was first seen in Uganda in 1999 — is a new variety of an old crop disease called "stem rust", which has already spread on the wind from Africa to Iran. It is particularly alarming because it can infect crops in just a few hours and vast clouds of invisible spores can be carried by the wind for hundreds of miles.

If there ever was a problem crying out for a biotech fix, this is it. Conventional cross-breeding to produce resistant varieties takes time, and is a Red Queen's race. The best long-term fix would be to cut our reliance on a handful of monoculture crops with very little genetic variance and a consequent high susceptibility to disease, but in the short term we'll have to bite the biotech bullet. Especially if (when) ug99 reaches North America. Or else get used to eating potatoes and seaweed (or each other).

Shaping up to be a hell of a century, isn't it?

Insert Disingenuous Remark Here

The short list for the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award:

Song of Time: Ian R. MacLeod - PS Publishing
The Quiet War: Paul McAuley – Gollancz
House of Suns: Alastair Reynolds – Gollancz
Anathem: Neal Stephenson – Atlantic
The Margarets: Sheri S. Tepper – Gollancz
Martin Martin’s on the Other Side: Mark Wernham – Jonathan Cape

The High Life

Via Universe Today, a report that Indian scientists have used a high-altitude balloon to send a sampling package into the stratosphere, and retrieved samples of live fungi and bacteria, including three previously unknown species of bacteria with higher than usual resistance to UV. Claims are being made that this is proof of the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe panspermia theory - that bacteria raining down from space seeded Earth with life. After all, these bacteria are unusual, and they were found in a region of the Earth's atmosphere that's not only next door to space, but also doesn't usually mix with lower layers where life might be expected to be found because it's sealed off by the topopause. Are these examples of Paul Davies' 'shadow life'?

Anyone who remembers claims that Martian bacteria were found in a meteorite retrieved from the Antarctic icesheet will know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Panspermia theories have gained respectability in recent years, but there's still no hard evidence for them - and the evidence needs to be diamond-hard. This isn't. Claims like this have been made before, and are still being debated (bacteria could reach the stratosphere when volcanoes loft dust into it, for instance). But it is very interesting. What are all those species of fungi and bacteria doing, way up high, at the edge of space? Are they active and continually present, or temporary visitors? Is there an ecosystem we don't know about?

EDIT: Just remembered that Robert Heinlein wrote a short story ('Goldfish Bowl') about giant insubstantial inhabitants of the stratosphere that were far in advance of human beings. Maybe those scientists should be a bit more careful when they're poking around up there.

Strange Days

Jack Womack is currently guest-blogging at William Gibson's joint. If you're into deep esoteric weirdness and practical demonstrations on why the past really is another country, stop by and check it out.

Bring It On

'The science fiction writers are going to be challenged to imagine the diversity that we could expect to find.' Debra Fischer, San Francisco State University, commenting on the Kepler space telescope.

If Kepler turns up a swarm of ringworlds flying out of the galaxy ahead of an exploding black hole, I'd agree. And I can't wait for the catalogues to start filling up with weird new worlds. The only challenge will be working out how to make full use of their reality.

All These New Worlds Could Be Yours

The Planetary Society, wise and generous to a fault, has put up a catalogue of known exoplanets. It's stuffed full of fact-based goodness, including planet sizes and orbital data, the type of star they orbit and its distance from the Solar System, and neat animations that show their orbits. So far, they list than 330; that number should increase considerably once the Kepler Mission goes live, and starts to detect Earth-sized planets around other stars.

Now I've turned in Gardens of the Sun, I'm beginning to think about the next novel. One of my ideas is building on the exploration and colonisation of the Solar System in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun by ramping up that future history's time-scale from decades to millennia, taking a hard look at the possibilities of interstellar colonisation and the adaptations human beings will need to make, and the consequences if human stock frays into a dozen or more species. This direction is kinda sorta implied in the two novels. If I go with it, I'll be ravaging the Planetary Society's catalogue and other places for hard data, but in any case I find this stuff intrinsically fascinating. Actual worlds, orbiting actual stars, real as the chair I'm sitting on.

Since handing over Gardens of the Sun to my editor, I've been wandering about in my usual post-parturition daze, although I did manage to somehow write a short article on my favourite science-fiction film for BSFA booklet (2001: A Space Odyssey), write a review for Foundation (which because it's for the journal of the very learned Science Fiction Foundation meant that I had to work up solid arguments for why I thought the novel in question worked or it didn't, and also involved checking up on William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland and The Night Land (some of you might be able to guess which novel I was reviewing)), and also blurt out a couple of very short stories, one of which might be good enough for publication. Do you need to know about my Grand Fun with wi-fi broadband, or the post-modern cold that deconstructed itself in my sinuses for a couple of weeks? Nah. Pretty soon, I'll get around to cleaning up the office and taking long pointless walks; then I know I'll be on the beginning of the long and roundabout process by which I begin to stalk the interstellar colonisation idea, or the thing that's been tickling my imagination for the past year or so, or something else completely. . .

Live From Space

NASA TV has a new channel which broadcasts live views from the International Space Station when the crew isn't working. Your best bet is to check it out between 6pm and 6am GMT. Follow this link and click on the Live Space Station Link tab to the right of the screen. (Via Universe Today.)

Taipei Theme Restaurants

Airplane, hospital, toilet, Hello Kitty . . . Wonder if there's a 2001 theme restaurant? You sit in a booth watched by a glowing camera eye, a solicitous voice assures you everything is fine and asks if you'd like to play chess or watch BBC 37, you eat pastel-coloured gloop on plastic trays, and the cabaret is an uplifting act by a black monolith.

Future Now

A couple of interesting links from the ever-reliable Science Daily site.

First up, a method of creating millions of functional synthetic ribosomes that can transcribe information coded in DNA and create functional proteins. A major step towards plug-and-play biology and artificial life.

Second, a way of trapping and storing and releasing photons in quantum donuts. "This has significant implications for the development of light based computing which would require an effective and reliable mechanism such as this to manipulate light." As the article says: Slow Glass!

Just to remind you that science-fiction writers don't always have to make stuff up.

Dread

Last month, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took time out from mapping the surface of Mars to take high-resolution photographs one of the red planet's two small moons, Diemos. Like Phobos, Diemos is probably a captured asteroid, and it's relatively small, with a semi-major axis of just 12 kilometres. Pictures just released show a smooth, reddish surface pockmarked with old and more recent craters. Apparently, the surface darkens and reddens when exposed to vacuum and sunlight, so the paler areas have been recently disturbed (in relative terms), either by impact or by material sliding down the slopes of ridges. Many asteroids probably look more or less like this; dusty desert mountains pitted and battered by impacts. The old science-fiction notion of hollowing them out into giant cities isn't viable - they're basically huge rubble piles cemented by gravity - but it would be easy enough to excavate cut-and cover tunnels in the dusty durface, or maybe throw up a tent over that sharp-rimmed crater in the centre. It's about two kilometres across, not a bad size for a town...

Girls Of The Golden Myth

The Good Sisters, Millie and Dolly, were a popular duo in the 1930s and 40s, singing in beautiful close harmony about the mythical American West. Their manager had them dress in cowboy outfits, claimed that they were from the little ol’ town of Muleshoe, Texas, and named them (after the Puccini opera) The Girls of the Golden West. They really were sisters, that much is true; but they were from East St. Louis, not Texas, and their real names were Mildred and Dorothy Goad. Nevertheless, accompanied by Dolly’s guitar, they sang like angels and had the rare ability to be able to yodel in harmony, became stars of the Boone County Jamboree and Midwestern Hayride, and recorded sixty-four tracks for RCA-Victor. They sang with plangent nostalgia for a West that had never quite been, already hazed by the silverlight of Hollywood.

Compare the wistful sentiment of ‘Let Me Sleep On The Edge of The Prairie’, in which the land provides a lovely grave site (albeit with the caveat ‘bury me deep, O so deep, that coyotes and wolves will not find me’), with the existential terror implicit in ‘O Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie’ (sung here by Carl T. Sprague). This ballad was one known to and sung by working cowboys, and first published by cattleman Jack Thorp, who spent some twenty years collecting cowboy songs and poems, in Songs of the Cowboys (1908). Based on a sailor’s ballad ‘The Ocean Burial’, aka ‘Bury Me Not In The Deep, Deep Sea’, a dying cowboy pleads with his companions not to abandon his body in the unpeopled wilderness, scared that the coyotes will harrow his bones, fearful that his soul will be forever trapped in that dreadful place. But his companions are practical men, and can’t spare the time or energy to heed 'his dying prayer’ and confess that they buried him where he died ‘in a narrow grave, just six by three’. It’s a stark, merciless vignette.

For the real cowboys, the prairies were as wide and boundless and as untameable as any ocean, a place they visited to work, but not to make any kind of home. For the Girls of the Golden West and others who burnished into the myth, the wilderness is analogous to Heaven; they’re content ‘to look up into those high mountains, until it’s time to arise once again’. The West of the myth is a place where ‘the deer and the antelope play, and seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day’; a boundless frontier blessed with abundant beauty where simple hard-working folk lived upright lives of enviable freedom and adventure. Within a generation, while men who’d worked the range yet lived, the myth supplanted reality. It would take a couple of generations more before the bones of historical reality would begin to work their way back to the surface.

The pulps of modern science fiction (H. Gernsback, prop) were coeval with the first great flowering of popular recorded music in the 1920s and 30s. But unlike the songs of the west, sf was shrouded in its own myths from the outset, and continued to add to them during the Golden Age of John W. Campbell Jr’s Astounding Stories. Those myths cling yet. The future is an homogenous place where technology works, and empowers those who comprehend it. Where scientific problems are best solved by iconoclasts who become deservedly rich and powerful because they precisely fill the hero-shaped holes in their stories. Where it’s the destiny of humanity to conquer the galaxy and lay low fearsome aliens, or prove to wise ancients that we are somehow unique - we laugh, we cry, we hiccup! Where there are a million worlds that will be all the better for a sturdy dose of Western capitalism. Where the means always justifies the ends, and death is optional. And so on, and so on.

A plethora of writers have attempted to counter the comforting fogs of myth with a bracing dash of reality, or subvert them with satire, or use their cover to smuggle in some uncomfortable truths. But even hard sf falls back on the seductive haze - how much easier it is, after all, to imagine that aliens have conveniently cached magic technology within easy reach, or that sturdy ships can flit from star to star in the blink of an eye. Small wonder, then, that we too often recoil from the inconvenient truths revealed by Actual Science, when we should rush eagerly to embrace them, and make them our own, and use them in all kinds of inventively subversive ways.

We are beginning to understand, thanks to the unblinking camera eyes of robot probes, exactly what Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn look like. We know that they can’t support a direct transposition of the old American frontier. We know that they are stranger and more exotic than we ever dreamed; that they will radically change anyone who attempts to live out there, and out old political models simply won’t do. The songs of the Golden Girls of the West are beautiful and beguiling, and the truth is as pitiless as the coyotes of the lone prairie. But I know which I prefer.

It Depends Where You're Standing

From its discovery in 1930 until 2006, Pluto was considered to be a planet; then the International Astronomical Union downgraded it to the status of minor or dwarf planet, causing an all-mighty ruckus. Now, politicians in the state of Illinois have decided enough is enough, and want to reinstate it as a planet - and have declared 13 March 'Pluto Day'. This isn't as crazy as declaring Pi to be exactly equal to 3; Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, who was born in Illinois. Insult Pluto; you insult all of Illinois.

Cradle Ceres

A few years ago I wrote a novel (The Secret of Life) that riffed on Paul Davis's hypothesis that the early Earth could have been seeded with life from Mars via rocks knocked off the red planet by big meteorite impacts while it was still warm and wet.

Now, Joop Houtkooper from the University of Giessen has suggested that the dwarf planet Ceres may have been the incubator of the Solar System's first life. Ceres may have retained a considerable amount of primordial water because it didn't suffer any large impacts immediately after it formed, would have cooled down more quickly than either Earth or Mars during the early history of the Solar System, so life could have started there first. And because it's a relatively small body, it doesn't take much of an impact to chip off life-bearing fragments that could have seeded Mars and Earth. (It occurs to me that it might have been some other dwarf planet that subsequently was shattered by some major impact, sending bacteria-ridden rocks in all directions.)

Not only that, but there might still be life on Ceres: like Europa, Ganymede, Triton, and a bunch of other icy moons, Ceres may have an internal ocean under its icy surface. Maybe those old pulp sf stories about tentacled beasties infesting asteroids weren't so far off the mark after all . . .

Mining For Gold

'Nowadays, keyboards and mice are the new ploughs and shears.'

I wrote about making a living by accumulating gold and other valuables in MMPORGs in my crime novel Players, published less than two years ago (I called it 'click farming' rather than 'gold farming'; same difference). It's an even bigger business now, and naturally enough most of the labour has mostly migrated to China, where it's cheapest. Wonder what these keyboard cowboys are going to do with all that processing power when gamers in the West can't afford to buy virtual wealth and prestige any more.

Lunar Koan

If a space probe crashes on the Moon and no one notices, did it really happen?

New Moon

The source of Saturn's tenuous G ring has just been discovered. The G ring is at the outer edge of the ring system, with only the E ring beyond. A couple of years ago, scientists discovered a partial arc of bright, icy dusty material at the ring's inner edge, and suspected that there must be a moon or moonlet embedded in it, as is the case with all other dusty rings and ring arcs. Now, they've confirmed that observations show a tiny moonlet is indeed embedded within the partial arc - the bright spot moving through the arc in the sequence of photos above, taken within ten minutes of each other.

It's too small for Cassini's cameras to resolve, but by comparing its brightness with a similar moonlet, Pallene, scientists reckon that it's just 500 metres across. Other measurements suggest that the moonlet is accompanied by debris between 1 and 100 metres across. Impacts of meteorites with this material and the moonlet would knock off dust to replenish the arc, which is about 250 kilometres across, and extends for about 150,000 kilometres, one sixth of the circumference of the rings.

The gravitational field of Mimas, which orbits just beyond the outer edge of the G ring, tugs the moonlet to and fro, and also keeps the ring arc together. Maybe tidal effects perturb that rubble too, causing collisions that create more dust. More complexity, but as always, it follows known physical laws. It isn't physics that limits our ideas of possible worlds; it's our imaginations.

UPDATE: Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society blog has a very good discussion of the new moon, and suggests that 'Cassini's beginning to venture into the murky terrain that separates "moons" from "ring particles."' And the Bad Astronomy blog has a great discussion that gets into the nitty-gritty details of how a moonlet can paint dust across the sky.

(Yes, I am a Saturn wonk.)

Summer On A Dwarf Planet

Everywhere we look, the Solar System is far more complex and exotic than we expected.

Take Pluto. Back when I started reading science fiction, and getting interested in astronomy, it was believed that Pluto was a lonely, deep-frozen ball of ice where nothing much happened. Now, we know that it orbits around a common centre shared with Charon, a body about half its size, while two small dark bodies, Hydra and Nix, orbit beyond the edge of a tenuous, dusty system of ring arcs - a compact toy of a system, as orderly and self-contained as an orrery. And we also know that Pluto has a thin atmosphere. It's been growing denser as the Pluto-Charon system swings through its closest approach to the Sun and surface ices warm and sublimate; and new results show that the atmosphere is warmer than expected because it contains about 0.5% methane, enough to cause a greenhouse effect (relatively warm, of course: it's still a chilly minus 180 degrees Centigrade). It's also warmer in the higher reaches of the atmosphere than near the surface, because sublimation of ices cools the surface while sunlight warms the resulting gases from the top down. When we get the same inversion effect here in London, smog is trapped under the warmer upper layer. Is there smog on Pluto, and if so, what is it made of? Still, pretty amazing that we can tell so much about a body so far away.

I was watching The Sky at Night yesterday, which had a nice bit on the Cassini orbiter's latest findings about Enceladus and Titan; there was also a piece on the various satellites currently orbiting the Moon, including the news ( to me) that the high-resolution camera aboard the Japanese SELENE (Kaguya) satellite had taken a picture of the Apollo 15 landing site. Turns out this happened last year, but I somehow missed it.



It's the pale blotch in the centre of the photo, visible because when the LEM return stage took off, its exhaust plume blew away dust on the surface, uncovering lighter material beneath. NASA is sending a new satellite, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, to the Moon later this year, with an even more powerful camera It's main mission os to study the poles, but it would very neat if it could take photographs of the Apollo 11 landing site, forty years on.

Watching The Watchmen

So, went to see it in preview, at the IMAX theatre. I wasn't as impressed as I expected to be, even though I discounted ninety per cent of the hype. There were some very good moments - the opening montage and the murder of the Comedian (Snyder's trademark slo-mo-during-moments-of-violence used to good effect, for once), a sequence in Vietnam, the prison riot, Dr Manhattan on Mars, and his origin myth - and the revised ending was smart and worked better than the original. But while obsessive fans may be reassured by the reverence with which the source material was treated, I thought it made for a plodding, discursive film, with far too many scenes of people talking to each other in dialogue that sounded like, well, dialogue, rather than urgent, felt conversations. Several of the actors clearly needed direction they weren't getting - most notably Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre, and Matthew Goode, playing playing smartest-man-in-the-world Adrian Veidt as a refugee from a one-hit wonder synth band. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian and Jackie Earl Haley as Rorschach were rather better, and Billy Cruddup's Dr Manhattan had a nicely wistful otherworldly vibe. Still, it's clear that Zack Synder is happier in the digital editing suite than working with actual actors. Despite the state-of-the art special effects (you really can film anything now), and a ton of reverential detail, there was no real feeling of excitement, just a string of set-pieces spaced by actors talking past each other and a pretty excruciating lovemaking scene. It's a faithful adaptation of a notoriously difficult-to-adapt graphic novel, but it makes for a so-so anti-superhero movie, rather than the great one we've been promised.

Heads Up

You can listen to readings of 'Little Lost Robot' and two other BSFA-nominated short stories on the excellent StarShipSofa site. Tip of the hat to Tony Smith.

Panopticon

Become a (virtual) Texas deputy:

"During the day watch for subjects on foot carrying large bags. During the night time hours watch for activity involving lights from the middle of the screen to the bottom."

People often ask writers where they get their ideas. Well...

Tony M.

Saw a preview of a Chilean film, Tony Manero, last night. Directed by Pablo Larrain, it's set in Chile in 1978, when Pinochet's dictatorship was at its height. Raul Perlata (Alfredo Castro) is a middle-aged loner obsessed with Tony Manero, John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever. His only ambition is to imitate his idol and to win by starring in a cabaret in a seedy cantina, and win Tony Manero lookalike contest staged by a TV programme. The fact that's he's over fifty and looks more like Al Pacino than John Travolta doesn't enter his head; he's prepared to do anything, including murder, to make his dream come true.

Unrelenting closeups and handheld camerawork track Raul as he moves with singleminded purpose through a broken and poverty-striken city where curfews are enforced by the army and police summarily execute anyone suspected of attempting to protest or undermine the dictatorship. Although there's a degree of black comedy in his attempts to transform a miniscule rotting stage into a facsimile of the glittering disco where Tony Manero strutted his stuff, this is essentially a bleak, Dostoevskian moral tale. Raul kills without remorse, starting with an old woman whom he rescues after she's attacked on the street. He helps her back to her flat; she rewards him with tin of time-expired tuna and boasts about the colour TV she owns and her dead husband, a naval officer; he smashes her skull with the tin and afterwards shares the tuna with her cat, and then steals the TV and hocks it to buy the glass bricks he needs to imitate Saturday Night Fever's illuminated disco floor. It's shocking, and perfectly apt. He also kills a projectionist and a cinema owner because the cinema has replaced Saturday Night Fever with Grease, and the scrapyard owner who tries to cheat him on the precious glass bricks. Throughout, he shows no emotion but rage, barely connects with the little troupe rehearsing for his cabaret turn, and is impotent with his girlfriend. Other characters are equally unconnected from each other; the cabaret owner is interested only in profit; a mother betrays her daughter to the secret police out of jealousy.

Not so much a savage satire on the desperate hunger for fame, then, as an uncomfortable and powerful dissection of the amoral atomisation of society under a fascist dictatorship. I'm still thinking about it.

2009 Hugo Awards

Everyone seems to be at it, so, following the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction, and to be faithful to my recent vow of shamelessness, let me remind you that you have until March 1st to nominate stuff for the 2009 Hugo and Campbell Awards. Anyone who's a member of this year's WorldCon, or who attended last year's bash, Denvention 3, is eligible to vote. You can do it online, or by post.

I have several eligible works:
The Quiet War (novel)
'Prisoners of the Action' (novella, written with Kim Newman, published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy)
'City of the Dead' (novelette, published in Postscripts 15)
'Adventure' (short story, published in Fast Forward 2)
'A Brief Guide to Other Histories' (short story, published in Postscripts 15)
'The Thought War' (short story, published in Postscripts 15)
'Little Lost Robot' (short story, Interzone)

Good grief. No wonder I'm exhausted.

You can find all kinds of nomination worthy stuff on the Locus Recommended Reading List, or there's this list on the SF Awards site.

Currently reading: The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane.
Currently listening to: anything by The Golden Girls of the West that I can find (which isn't a lot).
Will see this week: Watchmen. In IMAX.

A Little Stick of Blackpool Reich

Here's something I've never seen featured in one of those Nazis-win-WW2 alternate histories. Although, of course, there's this counterfactual. Or is it?

London Guerilla Knitting

“My yarn is as bad ass as your spray can.”

Hello World

I look up from my screen and find that it’s spring out there in the world: buds swelling on the cherry tree outside my office window; vivid drifts of crocuses in the parks; people crowding the tables outside cafes. A lovely surprise as I surface from more or less finishing the editing and polishing of Gardens of the Sun. Close and concentrated work that involves cleaning up little glitches in plot and character, checking for consistency in style, making sure that sentences aren’t inside out and that they are properly stressed and that each and every one counts for something, cutting out words repeated too close to each other, and fighting the war against cliche, otherwise known as extinguishing flickering log fires. Unless used for (usually comic) effect, cliches are a sure sign of slack writing. Prose, from Nabokovian elegance to the plain, well-wrought kind that’s sometimes called ‘transparent’ (and I’m a big fan of the latter, of guys like Robert Louis Stevenson and Elmore Leonard) should knock sparks off the reader’s imagination, surprise her, keep her guessing. But cliche-riddled prose is like white noise, or fog. You plod plod plod through it without really registering anything; it’s default fiction with a low level of ideation. Maybe the words are serviceable, but they aren’t apt.

So: revise, revise, revise. Polish, polish. You never really finish a novel - you just let it go. And I’m not quite done with Gardens of the Sun yet - it’s off to the copy editor next, and then it will come back to me, marked up and red-pencilled, and I’ll no doubt be dismayed by all the stuff I missed . . .

Liquid Water On Mars

Well, maybe. Within a couple of days of each other, reports of two possible evidence for liquid water on the red planet. The first shows blobs on the legs of the Phoenix lander that grew and changed shape and position, just like drops of water. The second suggests that a recently-formed gully that resembles those carved by running water may have been created by brines bursting from a point in the surface. The surface of Mars is colder than the freezing point of water, but high concentrations of chemicals - perchlorates in the case of the droplets on the Phoenix lander; ferric sulphate in the case of the brines that may have formed the gully - could act as anti-freeze and reduce the evaporation rate. So much for Bradbury's crystalline canals - this stuff would be more like the sludge that leaks out of toxic waste dumps.

Unfortunately, the concentrations of salts necessary to keep water liquid at minus seventy degrees Centigrade would rule out the possibility of life as we know it. "If you tried to put any kind of life-form you can imagine on Earth in a brine solution of that sort, the water would be sucked out of the cells," according to Phoenix mission leader Peter Smith. Yeah, but what about life as we don't (yet) know it?

Meanwhile, the Dawn probe has just swung past Mars on its way to the asteroid Vesta, boosting its velocity and fractionally slowing the planet.

"The flyby will cause Mars to slow in its orbit enough that after one year, its position will be off by about the width of an atom. If you add that up, it will take about 180 million years for Mars to be out of position by one inch (2.5 cm)," Rayman said. "We appreciate Mars making that sacrifice so Dawn can conduct its exciting mission of discovery in the asteroid belt."

The things we humans can do.

Shameless Fun

Make your own here (via Posthuman Blues).

Free Matter

My introduction to the US edition of Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days has been posted over on the Pyr blog. And I've posted a short biographical essay on my web site - it was originally published in Postscripts 15. Share and enjoy.

Old Wine; New Bottles

I'm very pleased with the cover for the mass-market paperback of The Quiet War; it's been redesigned for the smaller format, but cleverly retains all the design elements of the cover of the hardback/trade paperback. I've also received covers for new editions of Four Hundred Billion Stars, Eternal Light, Red Dust, and Pasquale's Angel, which are scheduled for publication in September. They're still being tweaked, but once they're finalised I'll post them here. I have no shame. Eternal Light is also being reprinted in April, as part of Gollancz's space opera promotion. I don't know. You spend what seems like an age, waiting for one of your books to be republished, and then two editions come along at once...

Instant Architecture (3)

This old Routemaster, parked in a corner a car park off Brick Lane, has been converted into a restaurant (a vegan restaurant, hence the groan-inducing pun in the name), kitchen downstairs, dining space upstairs (and outside, when the weather's more clement). As far as I know, it's the only such example in London; you'd think there'd be more.

Introducing

In the post today, complimentary copies of two book for which I wrote introductions: the anthology We Think Therefore We Are (see below) and Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days, which collects together seven stories set in the near-future India of River of Gods. Like an establishment known for its fine wine, Mr McDonald needs no bush hung in front of his enterprise to attract eager customers, but I was flattered to be asked, and glad to oblige. I'm a huge admirer of his work and think he hit a new personal best with River of Gods, and the stories in Cyberabad Days are equally good. Check 'em out.

Ongoing

When not frolicking in the snow, checking out steampunk shops, and visiting fearless editor Ellen Datlow while she was laid up in hospital (a good precis of her adventures can be found here; she's been released back into the wild now, I'm pleased to say), I've been doing the odd spot of writing. I finished, finally, a fairly long story, and Gardner Dozois has bought it for the issue of Subterranean Press's magazine that he's guest-editing. Gardner tells me that the issue should start running in March, and includes stories by Joe Lansdale, Carrie Vaughn, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams, Ted Kosmatka, Lucius Shepard's story from Songs of the Dying Earth (Gardner's Jack Vance tribute anthology), a Lucifer Jones story by Mike Resnick, and an audio from Elizabeth Bear, as well as the usual features. Hey.

My contribution is called 'Crime and Glory' and it was one of those stories that did not come easily. Some do, and it's lovely when it happens. This was a bloody affair, with much hacking and cursing and backtracking until, finally, I turned the plot inside out and everything clicked into place and began to flow, despite the narrator's blustering evasions and refusal to face up to what she was really about. And hard on the heels of that, I started in on the editing and polishing of Gardens of the Sun. Luckily, my editor had only a few points, and all of them are good. But I'm still compelled to go through it sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, to make sure that every word is the right word, and counts. As far as I'm concerned, writing is all about rewriting.

Embroidered Graffiti

Brick Lane, London.

When Giants Walked The Earth

Via The Bowery Boys, 25 random nicknames of 19th Century New Yorkers. I'd take high fantasy novels much more seriously if they featured characters like Boiled Oyster Malloy, Mallet Murphy, or Mock Duck.

Instant Architecture (2)

Tube train carriage used as offices, behind A Child of the Jago shop, Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch.

Heavy Weather

Yes, snow was general all over London yesterday (that’s the view in my local park early in the afternoon, above), and for a little while everything more or less came to a stop.


On Titan, it may be raining right now, although at around minus 180 degrees Centigrade the rain is far colder than our snow. It’s liquid methane and ethane, and infrared pictures from Cassini showing the same area of Titan’s northern hemisphere in 2004 and 2005 have not only captured rainclouds, but also show one large lake expanding, and a whole cluster of smaller lakes appearing after what must have been a cloudbusting rainstorm. You can find a full report and links to the original pictures here. Before Cassini arrived at Saturn we had no idea what the surface of Titan looked like; now we’re beginning to understand the moon’s climatological cycles.

The past few months have been a jackpot as far as capturing extraterrestrial weather is concerned. The Phoenix lander spotted snow falling on Mars, while astronomers using the Spitzer telescope have detected changes in the infrared signature of planet HD 80606b, a superJupiter gas giant that orbits a star 190 light years from Earth. HD 80606b’s orbit is highly elliptical, and as it swings in close past its star it receives a huge heat pulse: the image below was generated by a computer model, showing a hurricane of supersonic winds heated to over 12000 degrees Centigrade racing towards the (blue) nightside of the gas giant. Which kind of puts our recent little weather event into perspective.

Passing It On

I made a small contribution to this compilation of answers to the question 'What's the best writing advice you ever received and who gave it to you?' Interestingly, a couple of the answers reveal far more about the writers than they might suppose...

Instant Architecture

Shop in a shipping container, Bemerton Street, North London.