So Okay, Let's Raise The Bar

"The uses of technology figure large in [Margaret Atwood's] new novel, The Year of the Flood; it is a richly imagined vision of the near-future and is a sister volume to an earlier Booker-shortlisted work, Oryx and Crake. Indeed, some of the characters overlap. Here, through the eyes of two female characters, Toby and Ren, we learn of the days that lead up to a horrible pandemic that ravages humanity – forget coughs and sneezes, here people melt. There is enviro-religion, overweening science, hideous sex clubs, nightmare food, grotesque cosmetic surgery. And there are also bees.

"If any of this were to come from a male sci-fi author, one’s heart might, perhaps, sink a little; we have never been short of fictional futuristic dystopias to choose from. But the prolific and acclaimed Atwood – she won the Booker in 2000 with The Blind Assassin and has been shortlisted on several other occasions – brings colourful humanity, formidable intelligence, and also some sly satirical humour to this vision. And, as with The Handmaid’s Tale, this is not sci-fi. It is, to use her term, “speculative fiction’’."

I don’t see Sinclair McKay's silly, snobbish broadbrush generalisation as an insult. I see it as a challenge.

(Atwood isn't in any way to blame for this breathless panegyric - although I have to say that enviro-religon is hardly a new idea. Been there, done that. As have many others in the 'sci-fi' field. (Atwood has incoporated enviro-religion hymns in her novel. Spookily, there's a fragment (I wimped out on writing an entire hymn; kudos to Atwood for going the whole hog - and giving a book tour with actors and choir!) of an enviro-religion hymn in Gardens of the Sun - set to Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'. No melting people, though. So 1970s.))

SF Writers on SF Films

Adopting the format of Mark Morris's Cinema Macabre, the British Science Fiction Association's Martin Lewis asked a bunch of British SF authors to write about their favourite SF film. The resulting booklet has just been distributed to members of the BSFA. Non-members can read Adam Robert's essay here. As for my selection:

For anyone like me, born just after the hinge of the last century, there’s only one candidate for best science-fiction film. Some may make quirky or contrarian choices -- Dark Star, say, or Alien3 -- and there are certainly cogent arguments to be made for films like Blade Runner or Children of Men (which I reckon to be the best sf film of this century, so far), but my personal favourite is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'll put up my essay on the web site in due course. Meanwhile, here's Terry Gilliam's brilliant condensation of Kubrick and Clarke's masterpiece. To paraphrase Brian Aldiss, one of sf's (especially British sf's) best and most enduring themes is hubris clobbered by nemesis.

Gardens Of The Sun, Chapter 7 (ii)

The room where Yuli was being questioned was as bright and sterile as an operating theatre. White walls, white floor, a ceiling that burned with bright and even white light. No shadows anywhere. Everything lit with stark particularity. The girl was encased in a machine like a coffin or an iron lung of the long ago, with only her head showing. An MRI cap clamped over her shaven scalp. Her skin pale and perfect as porcelain. Her eyes large and green. The lids were taped open and a delicate apparatus dripped artificial tears so that her corneas wouldn't dry out, and her head was secured so that she had to stare at the memo space hanging above her, which was presently showing a slow parade of faces while a lilting voice asked her to identify them. She said nothing. Her jaw was clenched and a muscle jumped and jumped in her cheek. It was the only indication that she was suffering a tremendous white-hot bowel-ripping agony. The machine was playing on her nervous system like a concert pianist, subtle ever-changing variations and arpeggios that ensured that she could not grow accustomed to the pain.

READ MORE . . .

Gardens Of The Sun, Chapter 7 (i)

Sri Hong-Owen didn’t hear about it until a news bite hit the nets: a brief announcement that Avernus’s daughter Yuli had been taken into custody following a collaborative action between the civilian administration of Dione and the military, soundtracked over video of a tall young girl dressed in an orange jumpsuit and sitting at a table in a bare room with two burly marines behind her. Propaganda no doubt meant to dishearten the resistance. No details about how or where she had been captured, or whether she had given up anything useful about her mother. Sri tried to reach out to Arvam Peixoto, but couldn’t get past an aide who, even though the line was strongly encrypted, refused to give her any information ‘for obvious security reasons’.

READ MORE...

The Last Word On The Moon

Norman Mailer's Moonfire (Taschen Books), a compendium of Mailer's prose (from Life magazine articles and his book, Of A Fire On The Moon) and hundreds of digitally-restored photographs and maps. Limited to 1969 copies, a snip at $650. Or why not splash out for the special edition?

No. 1958–1969 LUNAR ROCK EDITION

• Marc Newson designed this special edition of only 12 copies
• Each copy comes with a unique specimen of lunar rock, ranging in weight from a slice of the moon at 0.4 grams to 30.34 grams, one of the largest lunar meteorites ever found on Earth
• Specifications and prices available on request

Red Queen's Race Part XXXIV

Hmm. Didn't take long for reality to catch up with this. Gene fabrication and fakery no longer the province of SF but crime fiction. Wonder how long it'll take the crime genre to catch on?

Gardens Of The Sun, Sixth Chapter

Loc Ifrahim deserved a world of his own. Instead, they gave him a junkyard full of dead ships.

When the war had kicked off, most of the Outer ships in the Saturn System had been killed by encounters with singleships or drones or mines. Now, robot tugs were locating and intercepting these hulks, modifying the long and erratic paths they traced around Saturn, and nudging them towards Dione, where they were parked in equatorial orbit to await the attentions of the salvage gangs.

A dozen agencies commissioned and loosely controlled by the Three Powers Authority were attempting to reconstruct damaged infrastructure in the Saturn System, find gainful employment for tens of thousands of displaced Outers, set up Quisling administrations and police forces, harness the skills of Outer gene wizards, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, and reboot the economy using a centralised command-and-control model. All this required a robust transport network, and because it was too expensive to build ships from scratch, repair and refurbishment of those damaged in the war was an essential part of post-war reconstruction planning. Loc Ifrahim was responsible for civilian oversight of the salvage operation, reporting directly to the TPA Economic Commission. A key role in work that was crucial to the success of the occupation. Nevertheless, he felt short-changed and slighted.

Read More . . .

Gardens Of The Sun, Fifth Chapter

Every day, the Brazilians brought more people to the dead city. Their search parties spread out across the face of Dione, entering and securing every garden habitat, oasis, and shelter, rounding up the inhabitants and transporting them to Paris for processing: a brief interrogation, confirmation of identity, injection with a subdermal tag. An industrial process, inflexible but efficient. The city’s net and every copy of its data base had been destroyed or corrupted during the war, but the Brazilians had assembled a list of malcontents by trawling news boards, public forums and private discussion groups, personal mailboxes, and registers in the nets of cities that had survived the war unscathed. Anyone who had ever been a member of any civic agency, had served on Paris’s council or any of its committees, or had spoken out against reconciliation with Earth, whether in private or in public, was dispatched to the maximum-security jail, formerly the city’s correctional facility and now much expanded. Of the rest, pregnant women and women or men nursing babies were sent to a maternity camp; everyone else was told that they could either work for the Three Powers Authority or spend the rest of their lives in a prison camp.

READ MORE . . .

Future Science

From Discover magazine, two short stories, one by me, the other by Bruce Sterling, both absolutely free:

Shadow Life: In the post-economic future, big-ticket science is dead and amateurs hunt aliens using gear scored cheap on eBay.

Open-Source Science: "If you can read a popular-science publication (and enjoy it), then you most likely have enough brainpower to help us make massive scientific breakthroughs..."

All Quantum Flux, All The Time

The Onion lets us in on the secret of writing best-selling science fiction. At last I know what I've been doing wrong, all these years.

(via Kim Newman)

Currently watching: Adam Curtis's It Felt Like A Kiss - a greatest hits compendium of the great chronicler's secret histories of the twentieth century (BBC iPlayer - not available outside the UK).

Currently reading: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice - psychedelic PI mischief in LA in 1970.

Currently suffering from: an awesome cold. It isn't swine flu, but it'll do until swine flu comes along.

Ring Strike

First, an amateur astronomer discovered a mysterious flux of energy on the surface of Venus. Then another amateur astronomer spotted the aftermath of a small asteroid or comet striking Jupiter's atmosphere. Now the Cassini orbiter has returned a spectacular image of the effect of an unknown body plunging through the underside of Saturn's F ring. The bright peak is ring material dragged beyond the ring-plane by the impact; the dark line stretching away at an oblique angle is the shadow of the peak cast across the F ring, stretched a long way out because Saturn is almost at equinox, with the ring system at right angles to the sun.

At one point in The Quiet War, a combat spacecraft plunges through Saturn's rings. I never thought that I'd be able to see what it would look like in real life . . .

Gardens Of The Sun, Fourth Chapter

Cash Baker was woken by degrees. Surfacing to a confusion of light and clamour, sinking back, surfacing again. He knew that he had been badly injured and that he was still gravely ill, but he didn’t remember what had happened. The surgeon in charge of his recovery and rehabilitation, Doctor Jésus McCaffery, told him that his singleship had been attacked by Outer drones. One of the drones had exploded close to his ship and a fragment of debris had punched through the ship’s hull and pierced Cash’s head. His ship had saved his life by putting him in hibernation; after he’d been rescued, Dr Jésus and his crew had kept him in an induced coma, repaired the damage by regrowing parts of his brain and modifying the artificial nervous system that had enabled him to fly combat singleships, and then brought him back to consciousness in a series of carefully managed steps.

READ MORE . . .

Pretty Polly

A great performance of the greatest of all murder ballads, by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Based on the English folk song, 'The Gosport Tragedy'. Virginia coal miner and banjo player Dock Boggs recorded the definitive version in the 1920s.

U2: Modern Toss

Cover for U2's The Joshua Tree, reimagined by Modern Toss for Beck's Music Inspired Art project, reducing Bono's pompous attempt at transcendence to a squawk of mundane frustration. I'm a big fan of the Modern Toss duo's wonkily drawn, silly, frequently violent, and sweary cartoons: dada satire applied to the frustrations of everyday life. They do film posters, too.

The Plains Of Titan

With so many detailed maps of so many planets and moons being produced by interplanetary probes, task groups in the International Astronomy Union responsible for assigning names to features have strip-mined myths, Greek and Roman literature, Shakespeare's plays, lists of distinguished artists and scientists, and so on, and so forth (complete list of sources here). Now, the IAU's Working Group for Planetary Nomenclature has just announced its approval of the use of the term planitia for the dark plains Cassini has mapped on Titan, with 'the theme "Names of planets from the Dune series of science fiction novels by American Author Frank Herbert (1920 - 1986)."'

And why not? After all, those dark plains are covered in strings of giant dunes, albeit ones composed of grains of frozen hydrocarbons rather than sand. A pity this wasn't done a little earlier, though - I could have dropped in a neat bit of science-fictional recursion into Gardens of the Sun. First to be named is Chusuk Planitia, located at 5.0S, 23.5W - it's at the righthand edge of this map of Titan, just below the equator, or close to the centre of the disc of Titan in the photo at the top.

Actually, Herbert isn't the first author to be honoured in this way. Titan also features Xanadu and Shangri-la.

(Via Universe Today)

Gardens Of The Sun, Third Chapter

Some fifty days after he’d defected, the spy at last returned to Paris, Dione.

It had not been an easy journey. He’d fallen from orbit in a stolen dropshell, skimming through a hole in the Brazilian surveillance-satellite network, landing inside a small impact crater in the high northern latitudes of Dione’s sub-saturnian hemisphere, walking away across a frozen, gently undulating plain. He was short of air and power and had to reach a shelter or an oasis as quickly as possible, knew that his former masters would be searching for him and that he faced disgrace and execution if he was captured, yet in those first hours of freedom his heart floated on a flood of joy. All around, beyond the shell of his pressure suit, with its intimate chorus of clicks and whirrs, the tide of his breathing and the thud of his pulse, the moonscape stretched silent and still, lovely in its emptiness. The dusty ground glimmering golden-brown in the long light of the low sun. Saturn’s swollen globe looming half-full above the curved horizon, bisected by the black scratch of the ringplane, which printed crisp shadows across smoggy bands of butterscotch and peach and caught fire with diamond light as it shot beyond the gas giant’s limb towards the tiny half-disc of one of the inner moons. He felt as if he was the emperor of all he surveyed. The only witness to this pure, uncanny beauty. And for the first time in his brief and strange life, master of his fate.

READ MORE . . .

Scramjet!

First flight of the X-51A scramjet demonstrator is now on track for early December while captive carriage tests on the NASA-operated B-52H mothership at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., are set to begin in October.

A joint effort by the U.S. Air Force, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, and Boeing, the hypersonic vehicle is designed to be the first air-breathing craft to demonstrate sustained speeds in excess of Mach 4 using a “logistically friendly” hydrocarbon fuel.

(via Aviation Week)

Needs a boost from a rocket stage to get going, way too slow to achieve low Earth orbit, and probably going to be used for long-range cruise missiles or something equally gung-ho but it's a start . . .

Gardens Of The Sun, First Chapter

Now online, in the fourth issue of Journey Planet.

Gardens Of The Sun

As with the last three novels, I'll be posting chapters from Gardens of the Sun over at the website every Monday and Friday all the way up to publication on October 1st.

I'm starting with the second chapter because I promised the first, short chapter as an exclusive to the good people at Journey Planet. I'll let you know when that's up. Meanwhile, you shouldn't have any problem starting here:

Sri Hong-Owen was on Janus, climbing the outer slope of a big crater stamped into the moon’s anti-saturnian hemisphere, when General Arvam Peixoto reached out to her. ‘Get back to the Glory of Gaia as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘I have a little job that requires your peculiar expertise.’

‘I have plenty of work here. Important work,’ Sri said, but she was speaking into dead air. The general had cut his end of the connection. She knew that if she tried to call back she wouldn’t be able to get past his snarky aides, and she also knew that she couldn’t risk the consequences of disobeying him: out here, in the aftermath of the Quiet War, Arvam Peixoto’s word was law. So she switched to the common channel and told the three members of her crew that she’d been recalled.

‘Drop whatever you’re doing and pack up. We’re leaving in an hour.’

‘We’re already on it, boss,’ Vander Reece said. ‘We got word too.’

‘Of course you did,’ Sri said, and switched off her comms.

READ MORE...

The Latest Twist

It seems that a few days before a small comet or asteroid hit Jupiter, something weird and violent happened at Venus. Volcano? Asteroid impact? The launch of the superweapon that took down the marshalling yards of the fleet Jovians were planning to use to invade our sister world?

Moon Over Frozen River

Caught Duncan Jones' Moon last week, and today saw Courtney Hunt's Frozen River. Two fine, low budget, low-key films about ordinary hard-working people caught up in strong moral dilemmas and forming unlikely partnerships, both realistic and unsentimental, but steeped in the kind of deeply felt human values that are missing from many bigger and noisier and hollower films.

In Moon, Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a mining technician confronted by a mystery -- a neat variation on a perennial SF theme -- that undermines his sense of identity and grip on reality. Its tropes echo classic 1970s films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running; its twists are expertly handled; Rockwell's portrayal of Sam, by turns assertive and exhausted, is affecting and assured. Frozen River is set firmly in the here and now, on the border between New York State and Canada. Melissa Leo (Detective Sergeant Kay Howard in the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street) plays mother-of-two Ray Eddy, who gets mixed up in cross-border people smuggling after her husband, a gambling addict, takes off with cash saved to buy a new trailer home. The script and direction by Courtney Hunt is tight and precise and merciless; Leo is terrific as a woman trying to hold everything together as her situation grows increasingly desperate and dangerous; Misty Upham is also terrific as her Mohawk partner-in-crime. I really liked both these films. Catch 'em if you can.

Also seen: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. But even though it was reviewed after its Cannes showing, I'm embargoed from commenting on it until the week of its release. I had to sign a release to that effect at the screening, and a promise is a promise. What happens if I break it is unclear, but, you know, I can't be bothered to find out.

The English Moon

Exactly four hundred years ago, on July 26 1609, the English astronomer Thomas Harriot turned his primitive telescope, a Dutch 'trunke', on the full Moon above Syon House in what is now West London, and made the above sketch. It doesn't look like much, but it's not only the first known sketch of the surface features of the Moon; it's also the first known sketch of astronomical features seen through a telescope - Galileo would begin drawing features on the Moon four months later. Over the next year, Harriot made detailed maps of what he could see of the Moon's geography and helped to usher in a revolution in human thought: heavenly bodies like the Moon were no longer remote lights, but places with local habitations, and names.


He lived a life eminently worthy of novelisation - he was a mathematician who worked for Sir Walter Raleigh, giving tutorials in navigation to Raleigh and his captains, helping to design their ships, and sailing to America on an expedition, where he spent time with the Algonquin Indians. When he returned to England, he worked for Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, popularly known as the Wizard Earl, because of his interest in science and alchemy - he knew the infamous astrologer John Dee, as well as Christopher Marlowe and John Donne. Possibly, Harriot was a member of the 'School of Night' mentioned in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost. In any event, he helped to tutor the Earl's children in the pleasantly stimulating company of other mathematicians and scientists at Syon House, run by the Earl's cousin, Sir Thomas Percy. Sir Thomas was involved in the Gunpowder Plot; after he and the leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, beseiged at Holbeache House in Warwickshire, were killed by a marksman with a single bullet, Harriot was briefly imprisoned, and the Earl of Northumberland was locked up in the Tower of London for seventeen years. Harriot returned to his studies, making the first observations of sunspots and founding the 'English' school of algebra, but remained obscure because he published little in his lifetime. Unlike the poor and vigorously ambitious Galileo, he enjoyed the leisurely life of an English gentleman, sharing his findings only with his close colleagues and his sponsors. He died in 1621 of skin cancer - some have speculated that it was caused by the tobacco popularised by Raleigh. A crater is named in his honour, on the far side of the Moon, first mapped in the 1960s by machines beyond the wildest dreams of the School of Night.

You can see Thomas Harriot's drawings, and much else, at a new exhibition at the Science Museum, London.

We See Them Differently

New Scientist on celebrity neurons:

Apparently not content with a talk show, a monthly glossy and, well, mega-stardom, Oprah Winfrey has also penetrated the human brain. When people see her picture or hear her name, specialised "Oprah neurons" fire away, new research suggests.

Other public figures shouldn't be jealous. Our heads are also flush with cells attuned to Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, and even Saddam Hussein.

Uh-oh. As soon as the PR industry gets wind of this someone will fund a programme to work out how to insert customised celebrity neurons into our brains. Or in the case of Saddam and other WoT notorieties, delete them.

In Living 3D

Now this is cute:

A new scanning technique allows expectant mothers to hold a life-size model of their unborn, developing child.
Data from ultrasound, CT and MRI scans are converted into 3D models, which can then be 'printed' as a plastic representation of the developing baby.

(From New Scientist.)

Although it could be taken too far: imagine growing up with representations of your foetal self in jars lovingly preserved amongst family photos. Wonder if it could be scaled up to model organs too? A 3D model of your brain would make a great desk ornament. Or why not model your heart, for the ultimate Valentine Day's gift?

Son Of Advertisments For Myself

Above is the finished cover of the US edition of The Quiet War, published by Pyr on September 22 ; just had word that hero editor Lou Anders has bought Gardens of the Sun too. Over here in the UK, the trade paperback of The Quiet War is about sold out, but there are still a few copies of the hardback to be had. But be not afraid: the mass-market paperback with be published September 10. I've just returned the corrected proofs of Gardens of the Sun to Gollancz; that's scheduled for October. I've seen a rough of the very lovely cover; hope to get hold of a copy of the finished version soon.

Personal Best

Here's a very simple but cool idea. SF Signal asked a bunch of people (including me) a cunningly constructed question: What are some of your favorite short stories in sf/f/h and what makes them so memorable? They've just posted a slew of excellent recommendations and thoughtful analyses, with links to free online versions of many of the selections. A great wiki-style anthology, bursting with all kinds of good stuff.

The Plot Thickens . . .

Last seen on the Kessel run, swinging past Io with its crew mostly incapacitated and its electrical systems frying in the radiation belts, but still hoping to unload its string on the Jovian metallic hydrogen smelting plants . . .

Here We Go Again

The remants of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, torn apart by Jupiter's gravity, slammed into Jupiter's atmosphere between July 16 and 22 1994. Fifteen years later:

An amateur Australian astronomer looking through his backyard telescope has discovered that a large comet or asteroid has crashed into Jupiter, creating a hole the size of the Earth in the planet's atmosphere.

Accident? Coincidence? Some sinister anti-Jovian plot?

The Next Forty Years

As far as I'm concerned, the answer to the question of the future of space flight is simple. Mars. Mars Mars Mars Mars Mars. We should reboot and redraw the plans abandoned when the Apollo programme was terminated, and we should send a manned mission to Mars. Not because it's easy; because it's hard. Not because the Russians (or Chinese) might get there first. Cold War imperatives like that died when the Berlin Wall came down. No, we should send an international mission, for all humankind.

NASA, despite its ongoing budget problems and the planned withdrawal from service of the shuttle in 2010, is still the leading space agency. That the Russians have retained a robust system for achieving Low Earth Orbit is a tribute to its designers - the Soyuz family of spacecraft has its roots in the time of Apollo. And although there are plans to send a robot spacecraft to Phobos, Russia hasn't launched any interplanetary missions since the failed Mars 96 mission. There are Japanese, Chinese and Indian space agencies, not to mention the Europeans, too. Maybe one or more of these will pull off something astounding. And both the Japanese and Indian space agencies have made noises about manned missions to the Moon, but so far these are still in the golden vapourware stage. Only NASA has proven technology for sending human beings beyond Earth orbit, and landing them on the Moon. And NASA is at present the only serious player when it comes to mounting a manned interplanetary mission.

Right now, NASA is going through what can most kindly be characterised as a period of consolidation. In Charles Bolden, a retired general and former astronaut, it has a new leader who is widely considered to be a champion of human spaceflight. But President Obama has ordered a wide-ranging review of NASA's activities, and there are already deep cuts in the ubmanned space exploration programme. This, and severe cost-overrun problems with the Mars Science Laboratory, the next generation Mars Rover equipped with tools to search for signs of past and present life, and scheduled to be launched in 2011 has already led to the cancellation of the 2020 Europa Jupiter mission. The MSL and other unmanned robot explorers are heavier and far more complicated than their predecessors because they need to mimic the capabilities of human explorers. So as far as Mars is concerned, why not collapse the two programmes into one, and send humans to Mars by 2030?

Right now, NASA has no firm plans to do that, only good intentions. Instead, it's focusing on a return to the Moon, using the Orion/Ares I/Ares V transportation system - the Constellation programme. This is a beefy launch system that can boost a large payload into low Earth orbit, or send a four-person crew to the Moon, in the Orion crew exploration vehicle. In other words, it's a programme that will give NASA the capabilities it had forty years ago. Sure, Orion is larger and more robust than Apollo, but apart from an extended mission profile and a larger crew it won't do anything that Apollo couldn't do. I don't think that means it should be cancelled in favour of a vigorous push for a manned Mars mission. Too much has been invested in the Constellation programme; we need a large booster to shift materials into Earth orbit; it's important to go back to the Moon if only to prove to ourselves that we can. But I don't think that the second stage of the programme, establishing a permanent presence on the Moon, is in any way necessary. If you want to learn how to live on Mars, go to Mars. Instead, Orion could be used as a stepping stone for deep space missions to Near Earth Objects - asteroids that at some point in their orbit intersect Earth's. This would pave the way for a manned mission to establish a forward base on Phobos (check out Geoffrey A. Landis's Footsteps to Mars for more details), a stopping-off point and a supply base for a mission to the surface of the red planet.

Impossibly ambitious? Foolishly optimistic? Maybe. A waste of money better spent on problems right here on Earth? These guys don't think so. And hey, there are always going to be problems here on Earth, and most of the money will stay right here, employing an army of specialists and engineers, stimulating new technologies. There's been a large amount of looking back, these past weeks, and regret for what might have been, if the Apollo programme hadn't been abandoned. Let's not make the same mistake again.

Forty Years Ago Today...

. . . or early tomorrow morning, if like me you were in the UK when the Eagle landed. You can follow the final stages of mission in real time, or replay the whole thing, at wechoosethemoon.org.

More Shocking Truth

'. . . satellite beams back "All shook up."'

The Shocking Truth Behind The Previous Post

Apollo Redux

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed Apollo landing sites. These aren't even at the full resolution that the LRO's imaging system is capable of, but clearly show LEM descent modules, scientific instruments, and even, in one case, a trail left by the astronauts. First time these sites have been seen in forty years, and a fine reminder that the moonlandings we're celebrating actually happened and left artifacts that may, in the Lunar vacuum, last hundreds of thousands of years.

Apollo 11 - The Big Picture

A terrific set of high resolution photographs of the Apollo 11 mission. No, I don't think I'll ever get tired of this.

iHobo

Okay, so this iPhone app for applying hobo signs in augmented reality is golden vapourware right now, but it's such a great idea someone is bound to build it. Meanwhile, there must be a zillion fictional uses for variations on this theme.

Road To The Stars

A historical document fallen through a wormhole from an alternate universe: 1957 Soviet film from director Pavel Klushantsev, which starts out as a biopic of space pioneer Tsiolkvskiy, and in its final section ( around 24 minutes in) depicts in amazingly realistic detail the launch of the first man into space, construction of the first space station in orbit around Earth, the first manned landing on the Moon, and glimpses of expeditions to Mars, Venus, and Saturn. May have been an influence on Kubrick - some shots in Road to the Stars are pretty much duplicated in 2001.

(Link via Kosmograd)

Russian moon-lander drops towards Clavius Crater.

Let's Get Away From This Model Of Space Flight

Because it's like building an ocean liner to cross the Atlantic and setting fire to it when you reach New York.

Found While Mindlessly Trawling The Internet

Tang Fei, 17, describes the electric shock therapy he was tricked into having to cure internet 'addiction' .

Twenty-first century version of this.

Tranquility Base

An interactive page on the NASA website, with panoramic views around the Apollo 11 landing site. No, I haven't been saturated by the coverage yet.

Wiggling Around Darwin

This item about a panel at Readercon, 'Is Darwinism Too Good For SF?' has been itching away in my mind ever since I read about it on the excellent Biology in Science Fiction blog:

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to generate an exhaustive list of the container-load of SF inspired by and exploring various consequences of the theory of natural selection, while Peggy, who maintains the Biology in SF blog, neatly skewered the confusion between theory and application. As a former biologist and practising SF writer, I'm more interested in the notion of 'wiggle room' within Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. Is there any, and can it be exploited?

Darwin proposed a simple, elegant and powerful explanation ('How extremely stupid for me not to have thought of that!' Thomas Huxley said ruefully, after reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species) for the way that new species evolve. Inheritable variations in a population, tested at each succeeding generation by the ability of individuals to survive long enough to reproduce, would over long periods of time cause the emergence* of new species better fitted than their ancestors to survive and exploit their environment.

Darwin presented a mass of patiently accumulated and sifted evidence to buttress his arguments, but they were by no means complete. One of the most powerful deductions of his theory is that all life on Earth arose from a single simple ancestral form. At the time he published On the Origin of Species, the oldest known fossils, from the Silurian, included complex animals like tribolites. Where, his critics demanded, were the simpler forms his theory suggested? Well, later discoveries of simpler flora and fauna in older rocks, solved his famous dilemma. Likewise, modern genetics provided a mechanism of inheritance of characteristics, as well as ways in which variability could arise - either by mutations in genes, or from the transfer of genes between populations and between species. The fusion of Darwin's ideas with genetics created the modern evolutionary synthesis. To date, it has proven extremely robust, but that doesn't mean that the intricacies of the mechanism of natural selection and evolution are fully understood, or that alternative theories have been totally swept aside.

Biologists consider evolution by natural selection to be a fact. But there are still plenty of things for evolutionary biologists to argue about. Is evolution steady-state, or can it accelerate in certain circumstances? Is gene transfer more important than mutation? What is the role of symbiosis and symbiogenesis? Is every phenotypical feature of an organism due to selection? Is evolution predictable? Plenty of wiggle-room there, I suggest, for the SF writer (and plenty of SF writers have exploited it).

Then there are the alternatives to Darwinism. Some aren't scientific - Creationism being the most obvious, along with its slightly subtler cousin, Intelligent Design. I can't think, offhand, of any SF stories or novels built on the concept that God created the world and everything in it six thousand years ago, but there are quite a few SF works that play around with notions of Intelligent Design. 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, or David Brin's Uplift series. Sure, the godlike creators are aliens rather than some invisible and undefined creator, but they do direct and guide evolution, and bootstrap complexity by injecting intelligence and self-awareness into other species. And isn't genetic engineering and creation of artificial life a form of Intelligent Design? (Imagine biologists of a species evolved from, say, bears, trying to make sense of post genetic-engineering flora and fauna in ten million years time.)

There are other alternatives too - vitalism, panspermia, the theory of formative causation, to name but three. I don't think that any of them hold a candle to neoDarwinism, but that doesn't mean that they can't be used as jumping-off points for some kind of speculative fiction. After all, there are plenty of stories about non-Newtonian universes . . .


*A clumsy circumlocation to avoid that contentious term, 'create'. In 1863, long mired in controversy, Darwin ruefully wrote to the botanist Joseph Hooker: 'But I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process.' A sentence which generated this famous footnote: 'On the same subject my father wrote in 1871: "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo stillmore complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.'

Eriksson's 2020

Interactive design tech speculative fiction. Will novels look this like this, in 2020?

(Via Bruce Sterling.)

One Small Step...

. . . towards a manned European spacecraft. Maybe. Much as I'm pleased to think the world's largest economic bloc might be gearing up for a manned space programme, I have to ask what this not-even-off-the drawing-board Advanced Re-entry Vehicle is for. Unless very heavily modified, the Ariane 5 delivery system will be able to push it into low Earth orbit, no more. That would allow it to rendezvous with the International Space Station - a logical destination since the ARV is a modification of the unmanned space freighter already being used to deliver supplies to the ISS. But the Euro-ARV won't be ready to fly until 2025 at the earliest, and the ISS is scheduled to be retired in 2015. Could it be that Eurocrats are formulating plans for repurposing the ISS? There's already been talk about moving it into a higher orbit, or somehow drifting it outward to the Moon, or even sawing off and modifying modules to turn them into interplanetary spacecraft. Maybe Stephen Baxter was onto something when he wrote this . . .

From The Old, Weird...

Two of my favourite musicians. They make a guest appearance in Cowboy Angels.

Happy Birthday, America

Advertisments For Myself, Part Whatever

I was interviewed for BBC Radio 4's Leading Edge as part of its investigation into public engagment with science. You can listen to the programme here (might not be available to people outside the UK).

And I have a short short story in the July/August issue of Discover magazine, as does Bruce Sterling. Despite a fairly elastic brief, we somehow both ended up writing about the end of Big Science. Are we onto something? Bruce's story is of course far wittier, but here's how mine begins (it's called 'Shadow Life' by the way):

It all started when Jack scored on eBay a multichannel femtospectrometer from a probe that never, in the end, went to Mars...

Moonhead

A live jam* by Pink Floyd in the BBC studios during coverage of the Apollo 11 landing (by then, even the BBC had bought into the 60s). I watched the BBC coverage, but don't remember this - I assume it was transmitted after the LEM touched down and my sister, brother and I went to bed. A few hours later, my mother shook us awake: because Armstrong and Aldrin couldn't sleep, the moonwalk had been brought forward to 4 am British time.

An article in today's Guardian describes how the BBC nearly missed the crucial moment:

"I stayed in the studio, because I had nothing else to do, listening to the air-to-ground transmissions from Houston," says Burke [one of the presenters, long with Patrick Moore and [EDIT, see comments] Cliff Michelmore]. "And after about half an hour, Armstrong and Aldrin started doing the kind of thing you do if you're going to get out. So I went upstairs and said to the guys, 'Look - they're going to get out.' They all said, 'No they're not - the flight plan says they're not.' I said, 'Well, they're doing all the things they'd do if that was about to happen.'"

You can imagine the next bit being enacted amid a sea of paper cups and discarded scripts, in standard-issue BBC accents. "There was a long pause, and somebody said, 'You do understand that this means us broadcasting all night?' This had never happened before in the history of television. I said, 'Well, you know, if you want to cover it ...'

"They said, 'OK - but if we stay open and nothing happens, you'll never work again.' So we did it, and we had to go to Alexandra Palace." A car was called, and Burke sped to north London, where he readied himself to talk the viewing public through the images that would soon be relayed to Earth.

*EDIT The audio is a recording of the live jam; the video is a collage of various lunar excursions.

A Little Gosh Wow

I've been out and about this week, first to a Physics For Fiction meeting at Imperial College, organised by Dave Clements, in which scientists met and mingled with science-fiction writers, and gave a variety of excellent talks about their work. Great fun, especially when I got to talking with Subu Mohanty about his work on brown dwarfs. Today, I was at the World Conference of Science Journalists to take part in a panel organised by Oliver Morton. The centre of London drenched in sunlight under a hot blue sky and Westminster Abbey looked like bleached coral by Max Ernst: a cover for J.G. Ballard's Drought.

Seen at the Physics For Fiction meeting:

An HD movie of the (deliberate) crash of the Japanese probe Kaguya (Selene) on the surface of the Moon.

An animation of the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Galaxy. Watch SO-2 and SO-16. When these two stars swing in close around Sag A* they're moving fast.

Belatedly

'This Saturday is the BSFA/SF Foundation joint AGM day, featuring talks, panels, and the AGMs for both organisations. The guests are Paul Kincaid for the SFF, and Nick Harkaway for the BSFA. Attendance is free, and the AGMs are conveniently positioned to give non-members a long lunch break. The AGM is once again at Conway Hall, and all events will take place in the small hall on the ground floor.

Timetable:
10:00 SFF speaker Welcome
10:05 BSFA Panel – Launch of the British Science Fiction and Fantasy Survey 2009: chaired by Niall Harrison, and featuring Nick Harkaway, Paul Kincaid, Juliet McKenna, Kit Whitfield, and Paul McAuley
11:00 SFF Guest – Paul Kincaid
12:00 BSFA AGM
12:30 Lunch break
13:30 SFF AGM
14:00 BSFA Guest – Nick Harkaway
15:00 SFF Closing Panel – tba
16:00 BSFA speaker Closes'

The BSFA panel will be discussing 'writerly identity — how writers perceive their work; how others perceive it; how that changes, or doesn’t, over time and from place to place.' Something to do with being a British science fiction or fantasy writer, apparently. I have no idea what I'm going to say about that, yet. But I'm listening to this, to get in the mood.

EDIT: Ask four writers about whether they feel they're British writers, and what that means to them, and you get four different answers. My answer for what it's worth, was that there aren't really any 'British' writers - there are English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish writers, all with fairly distinct identities. And obviously I've inherited a mess of cultural and historical stuff to do with being 'English', but as a science-fiction writer, I also have to get past my mammalian preconceptions (and those of a carbon-based lifeform too, as Nick Harkaway pointed out). And then, as you do, when discussing 'British' SF and fantasy, we ended up talking about American SF and fantasy, and how our stuff is different from theirs. Not something American writers tend to worry about - but then American SF is the dominant form of modern SF (even if it was invented by an immigrant from Luxembourg).

Beyond Apollo

Yesterday evening, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter went into orbit around the Moon, just four and a half days after launch. As LRO's orbit is adjusted and its instruments are switched on, its sister probe, LCROSS, is entering a wide Earth orbit; in October, the rocket stage to which it is attached will crash into the Moon's south pole, and LCROSS will pass through the debris cloud and check for signs of water vapour that might be lofted from ice preserved in permanent shadow before it, too, crashes.

The two probes were designed to be the first step in a programme that would culminate in a new generation of manned missions to the Moon. Given the current economic crisis and Obama's reported ambivalence towards lunar and interplanetary exploration, that programme is currently in some doubt, but in my mind there's no question that humans will return to the Moon as some point. Other people doubt this, however. In last week's Observer, Robin McKie wrote that:

The Apollo moon missions were to herald a new dawn of space exploration, of lunar bases, manned missions to Mars, and more. But in the decades since - and after the Shuttle disasters - America's appetite for interplanetary flight dwindled. The moon landings marked not the beginning, but the end, of our space dreams.

He makes some cogent points. The Apollo programme cost as much as a small war. It can be considered as nothing more than a Cold War stunt, having no real purpose but to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Afterwards NASA scaled back ambitions to establish a permanent moon base and send a manned mission to Mars, concentrating instead on work in low Earth orbit that relied on the space shuttle, with its dreadful safety record. And now the space shuttle has reached the end of its useful life, the American manned space programme 'hangs by a thread'.

It's a pretty damming view, but it's also a partial view. McKie quotes just two 'experts' on the matter. One, Gerard De Groot, is a historian with an infamously jaundiced view of the Apollo adventure; his claim that the Apollo programme now 'seems as strange as stuffing fraternity brothers into phone booths, swallowing goldfish or listening to the 1910 Fruitgum Company,' is no more than amusing hyperbole - forty years on, we're lacking a slew of books on phone-booth stuffing, or detailed analysis of the lyrics of 'Goody Goody Gumdrops.' The other, Professor Amitai Etzioni, is a sociologist best known for his work on communitarianism, with a sideline in criticising the space race; his claim that 'If you look at 100-year-old maps of the moon in old encyclopedias, you can see they are not that different from the maps we have made after Apollo' misses the point that we know less about the surface of the Moon than we do of Mars. The HiRise orbiter has mapped Mars with a resolution of 30 centimetres; the best resolution of the lunar surface obtainable by Earth-based telescopes is half a kilometre and by previous generations of lunar orbiters some twenty metres.

That's LRO's principal mission: to provide maps of the lunar surface with a resolution equivalent to the HiRise orbiter, and to search out places where future explorers can land safely. If LCROSS finds evidence of lunar ice frozen in shadows at the south pole, it will mean that any permanent base may be able to tap native supplies. Of course, lunar exploration won't be cheap. But the Apollo programme cost less than the Viet Nam war, that war was less costly, month by month, than the Iraq conflict, and the recent bail-out of US banks overshadows them all, costing more than the Lousianna Purchase, the New Deal, WW2, the Marshall plan, the Korean war, the Apollo moonshots, Viet Nam, the Savings&Loan crisis, and Iraq combined. Cost is relative; relatively, Apollo cost very little (LRO cost even less of course - about the same as the annual amount Brazilians spend on cosmetics). And even if the US is at present reluctant to commit funds to manned exploration of the Moon, it isn't the only player in space. On the same day that LRO entered lunar orbit, India announced plans to launch its first manned orbital flight, and gave itself a deadline of landing a man on the Moon by 2020. Some may considered manned space exploration a magnificent and transient folly; I'm on the side of the dreamers. And even if the science and historical significance of landing on the Moon fades into obscurity, the Apollo will have left us with one lasting legacy: the idea that our home planet is but a small, fragile and precious island of life in an immensity of space that dwarfs all human divisions.

Other Life

I was getting up this morning when something hit the curtains still closed over the bedroom window and a fearsome scrabbling and twitching and thumping commenced - it was a swift that had flown through the open window and, like a fly or a bee, was consistently hitting glass instead of the gap through which it had come. Because it was partly entangled with the curtain it took only a moment to grasp its dry frantic body and drop it into the air outside; it tumbled briefly and then caught itself in midair and winged away.

A writer of 'mundane' or 'literary' fiction might use this incident as the beginning or end of a conventionally epiphanic short story. But what use is this sudden random intrusion of otherness to a science fiction writer? How to fit the inexplicable into the cosy metric frame of conventional sf stories, in which everything has its place, and all is transparent? It's something I've been wrestling with ever since I started writing my second novel, Secret Harmonies (Of The Fall, in the US), in which the tensions in an interstellar colony were laid bare by an inexplicable disappearance. I'm still wrestling with it more than twenty years later.

Architect's Brother

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison's vision of re-gooding the world.

Adam Curtis

The introduction to 'It Felt Like A Kiss'. From his blog. Major stuff. Curtis has made some extraordinary explorations of the undercurrents of power in Western civilisation of the second half of the twentieth century

Going In

I seem to have posted a fair few Moon-based posts at the moment - no particular reason except the upcoming 40th anniversary of the first manned moon-landing is focusing all kinds of attention on our sister world. And then there's this, the last high-definition images taken at one-minute intervals by Japan's Kaguya (Selene) probe as it powered in towards impact at Gill Crater, strung out here in a Flash animation (click on the arrow to flip to the next in sequence). Spaceship crashes are the stuff of cliche in SF novels; here's the real thing.

Destination: Moon

Apollo 11 tweets.

On The Beach

Unambiguous evidence that Shalabatana Vallis on Mars was once occupied by a lake fed by a broad delta - a pretty big lake too (about the size of Lake Champlain). Lasted beyond the point when Mars was supposed to have cooled after its brief warm wet period, so it looks like climatological models might need revised. Long gone now, of course, but what might be found in those fossil beaches and sediment fans?

A Ghost I Became

Singer-songwriters and poets completely inhabit their art. They create it and then they recreate it in public, over and again. Novelists, on the other hand, design their work and build it word by word, decorate it and move in fixtures and fittings that give an illusion of habitation and a history, and then they move out so that the readers can move in. Some ghostly trace of the author remains, but it’s the reader who thoroughly inhabits the novel.

(I dreamed that my friend Steve Jones and I were in a cantina or old-fashioned hotel, the kind with a bar and dance-floor off the lobby, and Bob Dylan was there, singing someone else’s song (it might have been ‘Desperado’). Afterwards, he came over and sat down with us. He was wearing a red and white shirt with pearl snaps, and high-waisted black pants and cowboy boots and he looked at us and when we couldn’t think of anything to say (because what can you say, to Bob Dylan) he shook his head slightly and stood up and walked off. In the kind of l’esprit de l’escalier reverie you have between dreaming and waking, I tried to explain to him how writing a novel was different to writing a song; I’m sure I’m paraphrasing someone or other).

IRL

A major plot point of Players happens in real life (I'm not claiming anything - it was only a matter of time).

Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual

All you need to fix up that vintage rocket you bought in a garage sale, right here.

Via Bad Astronomy (which has a great post on ripples in Saturn's rings, too).

Just finished a story about zombies and the Royal family. It's almost the weekend, the sun is shining, reckon I'll take the rest of the day off.

Moon Shadow

Saturn is approaching equinox, when the sun will stand directly above its equator and ring system. This means that the moons and moonlets embedded in the rings are presently casting long shadows, and the Cassini probe has been capturing beautiful images of them - as above, where the tiny moon Pan, orbiting in the Enke Gap, casts a slender shadow across the A Ring. There's video too.

All Your Images Are Belong To Us

American family discovers they're in a Simpson's episode.

Still, at least they were offered a bottle of wine, rather than threatened with a law suit:

So Long, Selene

The Japanese probe Kaguya (Selene) has been orbiting the Moon since October 2007, and sending back gigabytes of information, including amazing HD videos like this one of Earth setting (you can find more here). It's now reached the end of its mission and will crash onto the Moon's surface at 18.30 GMT today, hitting the lower right segment of the nearside, at the edge of the Moon's unlit portion. But that's not the end of the probe's scientific usefulness: the scar left by its impact will be monitored to see how solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts will alter the exposed regolith over time. And it isn't the end of the new wave of Moon exploration, either. India's Chandrayaan-1 probe is still in Lunar orbit, and will be joined by not one but two US probes later this year. No-one has announced plans to return human beings to the moon yet, but it's only a matter of time...

UPDATE: first image of impact posted here.

Another Country

It's all Syd Field's fault. In 1979 he published a 'how-to' book on screenplays, based on his course in Sherman Oaks Experimental College, that first codified the three act structure of modern films - setup, confrontation, resolution - along with the carefully timed plot points on which the narrative turns. With added flourishes, this story arc dominates film narrative, and because film is the major fictional medium of the twentieth and (so far) twenty-first centuries, it has fed back into the novel form too (along with 'do you earn a living from writing?' and 'do you write under your own name?', 'how many books have you sold to the movie business?' is one of the most common questions asked of authors).

Fairyland's structure is a deliberate burlesque of the three-act structure. Sure, there are three acts. Sure, they follow Field's pernicious formula. But they aren't narrated from the point of view of what would be the traditional hero - in this case, a frighteningly bright little girl who achieves godhood, and along the way bestows consciousness on a select group of genetically engineered servants. Instead, the first and third acts are told from the viewpoint of a bit-player who's caught up in the little girl's cunning plans, and the second, while featuring our hapless hero, Alex Sharkey, is told from the point of view of an aid worker in Paris's bidonvilles. The 'real' story happens in the interstices of their stories; I was still, and still am, interested in people caught up in history, rather than the people who, supposedly, make history.

Fairyland was written in 1995, using a background I elaborated, in true SF tradition, in several short stories and novellas (collected in the out-of-print Invisible Country). I had decided to quit academia, and this freed me up to have as much irresponsible fun as possible with cutting-edge biology. It was also, very deliberately, set in London, Paris, and Albania, to get away, however briefly, from the American hegonomy. And it was my first near-future novel, which allowed me to warp and pour in as much as I knew of the present. Which is why, perhaps, it's written in the present tense (as are The Secret of Life and White Devils, which with Fairyland form a loose trilogy about biotech-dominated near futures)

It won a couple of prizes, which meant a lot to me then, if only because by the time they were announced I was a freelance writer. It was one of the first biopunk (or - tip of the hat to Paul di Filippo, ribofunk) SF novels. And it started out in London, not far from where I'm typing this, in the Ladies Smoking Room of the former Midland Hotel at St Pancras (which ten years later I visited, in its glorious decrepitude), where now, as in the novel, Eurostar trains set out for the continent.

And now, it's due to be reissued for the second time. You can read an extract here, or buy the first reissue (why not?) here.

The Day Today

New York. June 6, 1944. ALLIED ARMIES LAND ON COAST OF FRANCE. GREAT INVASION OF CONTINENT BEGINS.

Shatner!

The latest b3ta challenge.

(Eds: That's enough stuff about Shatner for a month or two.)

The Day Today

After a spending a couple of hours working on the proofs of the US edition of The Quiet War, I ambled out into the sunshine to exercise my democratic rights in the European Parliament election. And a couple of hours later, I'll be off to catch the train to Cheltenham, where I'm taking part in the science festival (tickets are still available for the talk, I'm told, and I'll be signing in the book tent afterwards - if you're in the area, why not drop by?).

I'll be talking about the future of animal testing, and while researching that came across this neat bit of work: refabbing a virus so that it infects and destroys cancerous liver cells, but is recognised and destroyed by any healthy cells it infects. Talk about your smart bullet. It works by adding to the virus binding sites for a particular form of microRNA: in normal liver cells the microRNA binds to those sites and deactivates the virus - much like the antibodies that nearly did for the hemonauts' submarine - and Raquel Welch - in Fantastic Voyage, that early essay in medical nanotechnology. But - this is the neat trick - cancerous liver cells don't produce the microRNA so the virus isn't disabled and can multiply freely inside them, and ultimately kill them.

MicroRNAs are turning out to be crucial in controlling the internal metabolic climates of cells by regulating gene activation and activity of messenger RNA, the go-between molecular vital for the translation of code in the gene into protein. They were first identified in the early 1990s, but not named until the turn of the century, and their function and variety, and their role in the feedback loops that control gene transcription and cell function, is only beginning to be explored. I've just finished proofing the new paperback edition of Fairyland, which features psychotropic viruses that target specific neurons. It doesn't take much imagination to work up all kinds of psychotropic viral functions involving microRNAs. A virus that attacks neurons in which activity of a specific microRNA is suppressed to allow transcription of proteins involved with formation of short-term (or long-term) memory, for instance: temporary amnesia caught like the common cold . . .

Currently reading (when not reading proofs of my own stuff) Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, and A.S. Byatt's The Children's Hour. Currently listening to: The Felice Brothers' Yonder Is The Clock, and the Dangermouse/Sparklehorse/David Lynch collaboration, Dark Night Of The Soul.

Titan's Indian Summer

Summer on Titan lasts more than seven years. The Cassini probe has been monitoring changes in the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon for three and a half years, and now, with equinox approaching, the seasons are about to turn in the southern hemisphere. But images from Cassini's last flyby of Saturn's largest moon show that clouds of liquid methane formed by convection driven by the heat of the sun (just as rain clouds are formed on Earth) are dispersing more slowly than expected and autumn may prove to be warmer and wetter than climate models predicted. Those models are based on very partial and incomplete data, of course, but isn't it amazing that we have learned so much about this strange smog-shrouded moon so quickly? Before Cassini's arrival we didn't even know whether the surface of Titan was solid, or covered from pole to pole in oceans of liquid methane and ethane. Now, we're receiving regular updates on changes in its weather.

Mapped Out

A new favourite in the category of 'shops I can't afford to go in'. Check out the 'celestial charts' section - such as this beauty.

I Squeak Therefore I Am

Sticking the human FOXP2 gene in mice is a good start - next, chimpanzees?

Human Footprints

'Inspired by our 10th anniversary, the Earth Observatory has pulled together a special series of NASA satellite images documenting how our world has changed during the previous decade.'

Watch Dubai grow in Sim City style. See the Arul Sea dry up. Watch the late-summer extent of Arctic sea ice shrink.

Some of thing we can do may be big, but they aren't clever.

My Dark Angel

The best way to build a career in genre fiction is to find a groove and stick with it. Write an open-ended series about a jazz/blues/reggae-loving detective with a permanent life crisis. Write a ten volume fantasy trilogy. And then do it again. Write a series of novels and stories set in a future history. The last is how I started out, but after a bunch of short stories and three novels (400 Billion Stars, Secret Harmonies, Eternal Light), I veered off into the left-field with the Chinese-Messiah-on-Mars chop-socky epic Red Dust. And I followed that up with Pasquale’s Angel, an alternate history novel set in Florence in the early sixteenth century, a couple of decades after Leonardo da Vinci kickstarted an Industrial Revolution.

I’d long had an ambition to write something about Leonardo da Vinci, if only because I was fascinated by his undisciplined genius, and more than half in love with the cloudy myths that obscured the realities of his life (if you want a bracing antidote to those myths, try Charles Nicholl’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind, or Serge Bramly’s Leonardo: The Artist and the Man). He didn’t see any boundaries between arts and science, an attitude that was catnip to a novelist whose day job was a scientific research, and who’d had to make a choice between science and the arts at a tender age. That was the prevailing attitude of his age, of course, but Leonardo also seemed to be a man out of time, dreaming of technologies impossible to realise with contemporary materials and power sources. Any SF writer worth their salt must surely sympathise.

As it turned out, for much of the novel, Leonardo is a shadowy, mythic figure raised above and isolated from the world he’s created - you don’t need to be a critic to unriddle that metaphor. If there’s one consistent thread in my work, it’s identification with those caught up in plots that are larger than they ever understand: and so here, as our hero hooks up with consulting detective Niccolo Machiavegli, prowls the mean streets and tries to foil a filthy Spanish plot to bring down the government of his city state.

Did I also mention that it’s a noir novel?

I had a lot of fun writing it, and even more fun researching it. Luckily, one of the greatest living Leonardo scholars, Martin Kemp, was working in St Andrews University at the time, which meant that I had access to a couple of shelves of research material in the library. I never did dare to approach Professor Kemp about my funny little idea, though. And I’ve still never visited Florence. One day, one day . . . But it won’t be the same as the Florence of my mind, with its dark satanic mills, and acetylene-lit streets crowded with every kind of vaporetto.

I like the cover of the new paperback a lot. Although I also very much like the cover of the original hardback and paperback, in which Jim Burns captured Pasquale to the life; authors often dislike seeing renderings by others of their hero and heroine because they don’t match up with their internal pictures. In this case, Jim read my mind with perfect fidelity.

Uncommonly Good

It's a wet Wednesday here in Londontown, but this - William Shattner, Joe Jackson, and the Ben Folds Five covering Pulp's 'Common People' - cheered me up no end.

'Crimes And Glory'

Over the past month, Subterranean Press have been posting episodes of my novella 'Crimes and Glory' in their online magazine. The final episode's now up.

Upcoming Appearance

Cheltenham Science Festival, June 3rd

BEYOND ANIMAL RESEARCH
S27 Town Hall 6.30 – 7.30pm £7 (£6)
Most scientists and governments agree
that testing on animals should be avoided
wherever possible, and in the UK it is a legal
requirement. Could there be a time when
scientists might finally be able to give up
testing on animals altogether? Cell biologist
Kelly BéruBé, Catherine Gayle from the
Virtual Physiological Human project and
science fiction writer Paul McAuley join New
Scientist Editor Roger Highfield to explore
animal alternatives now and for the future.

In association with New Scientist