The Only Thing That Went Through The Mind Of The Bowl Of Petunias As It Fell Was Oh No, Not Again.

Just when you think you’re out, they drag you back in. I really didn’t want to write anything else about literary and genre fiction for a while, but then I saw this piece by novelist Edward Docx on the failings on genre fiction. This kind of thing has been hashed and rehashed too many times, mostly to no good purpose. I really shouldn’t rise to Mr Docx’s bait, but I can’t help myself. My excuse is that while it’s a lazy and trite little piece of mischief, Mr Docx does hit on a couple of truths. As for the rest, not only does he use the tired, dishonest method of using the failings of a couple of bestselling authors -- in this case Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson -- to dismiss an entire genre, he also drags up the old high v. low art argument but fails to support his case. We get some anatomisation of ‘bad’ genre writing, but nothing to explain why literary fiction is so superior:

I'd love to end this piece by dealing with the fallacies of relativism, exposing the other misconceptions surrounding both genre and literary fiction (class needs tackling) and then round the whole thing off with a series of extracts from any number of fine contemporary novelists whom I love – Franzen, Coetzee, Hollinghurst, Amis, Mantel, Proux, Ishiguro, Roth – to illustrate again the happy, rich and textured difference. But there's simply not enough space.

Back when I was a university lecturer, clever but lazy students would sometimes try this Fermat’s Last Theorem gambit in their essays: an automatic D-. Actually, I’m glad he didn’t tackle class. Don’t get me started on class, the English publishing industry, and the stultification of the English literary novel. I don’t have enough time.

Mr Docx does though, make a useful point about how the conventions of genre fiction can cause a kind of thinning of the prose:

...even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That's the way writing works and lots of people who don't write novels don't seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

Or rather, he makes half a point, because this is really a rather nice description of bad genre writing: following the tramlines of convention, furnishing the plot with tropes and images from the used furniture store, cliched characterisation. James Wood, in How Fiction Works, makes a far better fist of this kind of argument:

...the complaint that realism is no more than a grammar or set of rules that obscures life is generally a better description of le Carré or P.D. James than it is of Flaubert or George Eliot or Isherwood: when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerism and often pretty lifeless techniques. The efficiency of the thriller genre takes just what it needs from the much less efficient Flaubert or Isherwood, and throws away what made those writers truly alive.

But this, of course, is precisely what any genre writer with any kind of self-awareness and ambition should be struggling against. Bad genre writers pander to the expectations of their readers; good genre writers subvert those expectations; great genre writers, like Philip K Dick, J.G. Ballard, or John Crowley, transcend them, completely rewriting conventions or using them for their own ends. And while there may not be any genre writers who can match, sentence for sentence, literary writers at the top of their game -- Saul Bellow, say, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- there are certainly a good number who can match the middle ranks of their literary counterparts. Who aren’t content with utilitarian prose and (quoting Wood again) “selection of detail [that] is merely the quorum necessary to convince the reader that this is ‘real’, that ‘it really happened’”, but want to bring life to their pages by selecting the best possible words in the best possible order. It would have been useful if Mr Docx had quoted from those writers, and explained why he thought them still not up to the mark. But that would have involved actual thought rather than reflex derision.

We’ve been on the receiving end of criticism or condemnation of too many people who, like Mr Docx, simply haven’t read widely enough. It makes us defensive. It raises our hackles. Which brings me to Mr Docx’s other useful point, which is that many genre writers aren’t content with popularity (although some of us aren’t content for the opposite reason): they are jealous of the critical acclaim won by literary fiction, and so tend to dismiss its values.

Science-fiction writers and fans aren’t immune to this: when an outsider points out legitimate faults in some piece of SF, they have a tendency to misuse Sturgeon’s Law by asserting that 90% of everything is crap, or claiming some kind exceptionalism – SF writers are allowed to skimp on characterisation because they have to build entire worlds. And so on, and so on, none of it especially useful. Of course, the flip side of genre defensiveness are pieces like Mr Docx’s, in which literary writers complain that they don’t get no respect, bad is driving out good, and only the true cognoscenti appreciate them. Under the skin, writers of all kinds are rather more similar than Mr Docx can ever bring himself to admit.

Context

'A man in court dress cannot walk the streets of London without being pelted by the mob . . . the Londoners hoot the king and the royal family when they appear in public.'
Casanova, 1746 (quoted in Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography).

Perspective

Earth from the cupola of the ISS.

Earth from the Moon

Earth and the Moon, acquired by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter while in orbit around Mars, at a distance of 142 million kilometres.

Earth from the surface of Mars, acquired by the Spirit rover.

Earth from Saturn, acquired by the Cassini orbiter, at a distance of more than one billion kilometres.

Earth from the edge of the Solar System, acquired by Voyager 1, at a distance of more than 6000 million kilometres.

'That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. ' Carl Sagan

Something Just Happened

'How nice,' Peter Handke remarks, in an interview with Die Zeit, 'literature would be without all of these journalistic, family and society novels . . . Eruptions are needed, a controlled letting go, not this prescription-like writing.' And in a limpid essay in The New York Times, Haruki Murakami suggests that neorealistic literature - the novelist as chronicler of the age, providing a tidy, humanised view of a big picture his readers can all agree on - has had its day. Things have changed, hinging on two events. One hopeful: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the swift crumbling of the Soviet empire. One dreadful: the fall of the two towers on September 11 2001.

These two acts of destruction, which played out on either side of the millennial turning point with such vastly different momentum in each case, appear to have combined into a single pair that greatly transformed our mentality . . .

Let’s call the world we actually have now Reality A and the world that we might have had if 9/11 had never happened Reality B. Then we can’t help but notice that the world of Reality B appears to be realer and more rational than the world of Reality A. To put it in different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not “chaos”?

What kind of meaning can fiction have in an age like this? What kind of purpose can it serve? In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?

Asking how novelists should respond to this - as they must, or else fall silent or become irrelevant - Murakami observes that his kind of fiction, the kind once called (amongst other things) magical realism, the kind which doesn't always faithfully follow the tramlines of known reality, is now no longer an -ism. It isn't off to the side. It's part of the main event.

As a science-fiction writer, I find Murakami's ideas incredibly interesting. And hopeful. Or rather, potentially hopeful. For something similar should have happened to science fiction, shouldn't it? After all, catastrophes and sudden shifts in perception are part of its stock in trade. But instead of confronting Reality A, the genre has, in the first decade of the 21st century, too often turned to its own comforting version of Reality B: retreating into pleasant little pulpish daydreams in which starships still effortlessly span a galaxy where a guy can turn a profit, or where technology is as controllable as clockwork and the actions of individuals can still make a mark on history. Meanwhile, they grumble, 'mainstream' writers are grabbing ideas from the genre and doing terrible things to them without acknowledging the source. As if permission could be somehow given, or withheld.

I prefer the point of view of William Gibson, who has pointed out that the only way to tackle the place we're in now is to use the science-fiction toolkit - the tropes, images and metaphor developed from the crude flint hammers of pulp by decades of cooperative effort and argument. If other writers are using the science-fiction toolkit to evolve new kinds of stories in the present's different air, that's exactly what we should be doing, too. Forget the past. Especially the pasts of all those great glorious science-fiction futures, lost when it all changed. Look again at the future. Embrace change. Let go. If only. If only.

SF v. the Reality Lords

From Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, a footnote that nails the dichotomy between 'mainstream' literature and SF:

The conventional high-culture repudiation of SF - its stigmatization of the purely formulaic (which reflects the original sin of the form in its origin in the pulps), complaints about the absence of complex and psychologically "interesting" characters (a position which does not seem to have kept pace with the postcontemporary crisis of the "centred subject"), a yearning for original literary styles which ignores the stylistic variations of modern SF (as Philip K. Dick's defamiliarization of spoken American) - is probably not a matter of personal taste, nor is it to be addressed by way of purely aesthetic arguments, such as the attempt to assimilate selected SF works to the canon as such. We must here identify a kind of generic revulsion, in which this form and narrative discourse is the object of psychic resistance as a whole and the target of a kind of literary "reality principle". For such readers, in other words, the Bourdieu-style rationalizations which rescue high literary forms from the guilty associations on unproductiveness and sheer diversion and which endow them with socially acknowledged justification, are here absent.

In other words, attempts to appeal to the gatekeepers of the high literary citadel by pointing out that SF is firmly rooted in the present, that it extrapolates and amplifies current nightmares and obsessions, or that it explores alternate social structure through utopian or dystopian constructions, are, even though valid, pointless. Not only because there's no chance of success, but also because who wants the career arc of archetypal neorealists like Ian McEwan (from supple postmodern fabulist to shuttered reactionary self-crucified by the iron nails of didactic social realism and (again, from Jameson) "the great empiricist maxim, nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses")? Better to turn away from that and address the great luminous question that SF should make its own: what do you mean by reality, anyway?

The Cafe Wall Illusion

Back at the end of the 1970s, when I was finishing my PhD at Bristol University, the exterior of a cafe close to the university had a black and white tile decoration that gave the illusion of being distorted from the true. One of Professor Richard Gregory's research team spotted it, and it became the subject of a famous paper, Border Locking and the Cafe Wall Illusion.

Just recently, I noticed that a local barbershop had been given a makeover, which included tiling that nicely shows the wedge distortion of the cafe wall illusion:




In their paper, Gregory et al described experiments which locked down the parameters that evoked the illusion, and proposed a model, border-locking theory, that suggested the functional mechanisms in the human eye that generated it. A nice example of how observation of something unusual in the everyday and close examination and dissection of what it is and how it works can uncover an underlying fundamental truth. Science in action!

ET v. Shadow Life

A media advisory note posted by NASA yesterday about a news conference 'to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life' loosed the cats of speculation on the pigeons of improbability. Had NASA received a signal from passing ETs? Spotted signs of life on an exoplanet? Discovered that some kind of photosynthetic process was depleting hydrogen, acetylene and ethane in Titan's atmosphere? Found a fossil on Mars? Calmer voices, having checked out the research pedigrees of the scientists involved, suggested something more Earth-bound, but potentially very exciting: the discovery of microoorganisms with an alternative, arsenic-based metabolism: hints at a shadow biosphere.

Why is this important? Well, because they are neighbours in the periodic table, arsenic shares many chemical properties as phosphorous, and phosphorous is an essential element for life as we know it: amongst other things, it is at the heart of molecules that store and transfer energy, and helps to form the backbone of RNA and DNA. Arsenic is a poison to many organisms because it interferes with phosphorous biochemistry, but although the bonds it forms are weaker, it could also substitute for phosphorous; in other words, there may be organisms with biochemistries based on arsenic rather than phosphorous, forming a shadow biosphere in parallel with our own. Several of the scientists mentioned in NASA's note have been searching for signatures of that shadow biosphere like that, in places like Mono Lake, California, which have higher than average concentrations of arsenic. If they've found evidence for it, there are all kinds of implications, not least that life may have evolved more than once on Earth. And that's genuinely exciting.

By the way, I published a short story about searching for a shadow biosphere last year. 'Shadow Life' is still online, at Discover magazine's site. Read it now, before science overtakes it tomorrow!

Epigraph

Man has only one life, and must live it so that he does not recall with pain and regret the aimless lost years, and does not blush with shame over his mean and trivial past, so that when he dies he can say, ‘All my life has been devoted to the struggle for the liberation of mankind.’
Nikolai Ostrovsky: How the Steel Was Tempered

Quant insuff.

John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, is an entertaining account of the economic crash that uses farce as its narrative model and, for the economically-illiterate (most of us), unriddles those mysterious instruments (CDOs, CDSs, SPVs, junk bonds, sub-prime mortgages) used by finance industry's Masters of the Universe to create what appeared to be a casino filled with fruit machines that spewed a jackpot at every tug of the handle. I don't buy into his theory that it all started with the collapse of communism, which freed the West of the need to emulate communism's cradle-to-grave care and let loose unbridled libertarian capitalism, but it's an interesting thesis that would make a good SF story (Gardens of the Sun is a somewhat similar story of triumphalist hubris trashed by nemesis, but required the unity of a despotic government to work). But his dissection of the root cause of the crash is masterly. Briefly, it was caused by underestimation of risk, because of overreliance on equations devised by the clever maths PhDs (quants) hired by the banks. The quants devised nice, tidy equations which they applied without taking into account of the real world's messiness, and the inability of most people to make rational assessments of risk:

Most of this exemplifies what I would argue is the most common mistake of very smart people: the assumption that other people's minds work in the same way theirs do. To non-exonomists, the mathematically based models and assumptions of rational conduct which permeate the field often have the appearance at best of toys, entertaining but by definition of limited utility; at worst, they can seem wilful delusions, determinedly ignoring reality.

Gosh, Lanchester could be talking about science fiction - the Analog school of storytelling that irritates the hell out of me with its childish just-so logic; the armchair critics who complain that characters don't behave logically or consistently while failing to notice, all around them, the blooming, buzzing confusion of ordinary life.

La Guerre Tranquille

Before I completely forget (I'm insanely busy, trying to nail down the third draft of the ongoing, which is past the midpoint now, thanks), here's the fine cover of the French edition of The Quiet War, the second Sparth cover for the same novel (see also the US edition). Lucky or what? It was published on Friday; my French publisher handed me a copy the day before, at the Gollancz party. Poking around on the French Amazon site, I found that the mass-market paperback edition of Glyphes (aka Mind's Eye) was released last month. The cover for that is pretty good too; it refers to the family history which gets Alfie Flowers in a lot of trouble.

More Product

The guy in the picture is Stephen Jones, editor extraordinaire, and the poster he's holding is for his latest book, a mosaic novel by various hands (including Pat Cadigan, Michael Marshall Smith, Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee, Jay Russell, Kim Newman, and, er, me) in various modes that documents the onset and consequences of, yes, a zombie apocalypse. Different, quirky, fun, and out now.

An Interesting Question...

... asked on episode 19 of the Coode Street podcast. Why have none of the authors associated with Radical Hard SF won a Hugo?

Housekeeping

I've just spent a couple of hours tidying up my website, which hasn't been touched since Gardens of the Sun was first published last year; it suffered from inattention after I started blogging, just as the blogging has suffered ever since I started tweeting. Haven't done anything fancy, just cleared out some crufty links and extraneous material. Still have to fix a few links here and there. What it really needs is a complete redesign. I set it up way, way back in 1995 (or was it 1994?) using basic HTML coding, and haven't really done anything to it since. Now it's really showing its age. Am wondering whether to find someone who can do a nice clean simple design, or leave it as a repository for stories and other stuff I've released into the wild. After the advent of social media, do people even look at author's websites any more?

Notes From The Anthropocene

As global warming melts the Siberian permafrost, mammoth ivory becomes increasingly fashionable:

With an estimated 150m corpses under the permafrost, stocks are unlikely to run out soon, and thanks to global warming (every cloud . . .) they are becoming increasingly easy to reach. Meanwhile, a report in the Pachyderm journal offers the ringing endorsement that mammoth ivory could "reduce demand for elephant ivory from Africa. Probably."

The old-school energy industry wants to capitalise on the opening of the Northwest Passage by building nuclear-powered icebreakers that could transport cargoes of liquified natural gas through Arctic ice. What could possibly go wrong?

Autopia experiences its hottest day on record.

Muscle To The Monorail

At first glance, this Google-sponsored project to develop a muscle-powered monorail system, based on a New Zealand amusement-park ride, looks like a silly parody of the worst kind of kooky Kalifornian keep-fit utopianism. As an article in Wired points out, it doesn't seem to do anything that bicycles can't do better, and besides, ugh, public transport.

It's certainly not anything like the kind of futuristic transport systems we were promised back in the 1960s, when the last hurrah of Gernsbackian ideology promised all kinds of amazing machines powered by electricity too cheap to be worth metering. But the future isn't what it used to be - it's gnarlier, more diverse, extremely uneven. In the age of post-peak oil, this kind of low-impact technology is beginning to seem more plausible than, say, nuclear-powered supersonic stratosphere cruisers. And even if it doesn't find any application in the regreened cities of Earth, I reckon it would be ideal for tootling around the forest canopy of a domed moon colony - far better than the usual golf carts, although it would be a challenge to stage a pod-based chase scene.

Book Marks

We didn't have many books in the house where I grew up, and because I couldn't afford to buy enough paperbacks to feed my science-fiction habit, most of my reading material came from the local library. It was modern, well-lighted, and amply stocked; when I had exhausted its science-fiction collection, I moved on to what we inside the genre call mainstream novels (starting, as I recall, with John Updike's Rabbit Redux, which hooked me because of the odd and arresting title, and the fact that it began on the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing). And it was amongst the mainstream novels that I first encountered tracks of the library-book annotators: readers who couldn't keep their thoughts to themselves, victims of a kind of literary Tourette's syndrome that compelled them to underscore words, sentences, and whole paragraphs, and sprinkle the margins with pointless exclamation marks and remarks.

It always annoyed me; always struck me as a pernicious form of vandalism. I valued books because they were an important part of my life and I possessed so few of my own. And besides, why should I care what strangers thought about the books I'd chosen to read? Their jotted egoblurts annoyingly snagged my attention, and were never interesting, polarised between so true! and utter rubbish! Accumulating my own library, it never occurred to me to jot my own thoughts in the books I owned. Even when I had a regular gig reviewing for Interzone magazine, I wrote notes on sheets of scrap paper as I went along, keyed to page and line, rather than scribble in the margins of review copies. So reading this excellent article about author's libraries and the value of annotation, has given me pause for thought. Can it be true that all this time I've been denying posterity the opportunity to peer into my thoughts? Why, I haven't even signed any of the copies of my own books that I keep on my ego shelves . . .

Dude, Where's My Human-Powered Ornithopter?

Right here. Leonardo would be thrilled. Pasquale would be appalled.

Teleportation

My latest time-sink on the internet is Joe McMichael's Globe Genie. It's a clever and simple idea: click on the shuffle button, and it transports you to one of the millions of locations stored in Google Earth. While jumping around the USA, wondering if I'll come across a road I've driven down, it occurred to me that its randomness is a story generator. Where are those people going? Who lives in that house? What's he building, in there? You're on an empty road in Gilt Edge, Tennessee. Why? And happens next? What links Jumonville Road, Hopwood, PA and Los Robles Boulevard, Sacramento, CA? Also, why do so many people own RVs?

The Return Of The Living Dead

Just received in the post, my author's copy of John Joseph Adams's anthology The Living Dead 2. Includes my invasion-of-the-Boltzmann-Brain-zombies story 'The Thought War' and forty-three (yes, forty-three) other tales of the undead dead. Check it out!

Plumbing

Now I'm working on the third draft of the ongoing, I have to keep in mind the cardinal rule of world-building: details are useful only if they have some kind of interaction or intersection with the protagonist, which is to say, something to do with the narrative. In science fiction novels, as in fantasy and historical fiction, nothing should be taken for granted, of course. Otherwise the novel will suffer from the flattening effect of genre: of sharing too much stock furniture with other, similar fictions. So there’s a temptation to tip in explanations for everything, to show that you’ve built your world from the ground up. But good world building always implies more than’s on the page. You want to make your protagonist's world as vivid as possible, to highlight all that's strange and unique; but you don't want to bury the story in endless detail and explanation. So unless it's something the protagonist notices, something he has to deal with, something he wants or needs or something that can help him get what he needs, and so on, it's extraneous. It's plumbing. You know it’s there, but unless it goes wrong you don’t need to worry about it.

Maps For New Territory

As far as I'm concerned there are two ways of writing a short story. First, there's the epiphanic, where more or less the whole package arrives in your head and is unpacked by writing it down. It doesn't happen often, but I'm always thrilled when it does. 'Little Lost Robot' and 'The Thought War' happened like that. The second is much more like work. I start with an idea, usually a character and a situation, an opening scene, and proceed from there. It's like exploring new territory without a map. You stumble into cul-de-sacs and pitfalls, and waste time picking up nuggets that turn out to be iron pyrites instead of the motherlode, but you travel on in the hope of finding a fabulous view or something rare and unexpected around the next corner. And sometimes scenes or ideas you discard become the seeds for a second story. What started out as exploration becomes cartography.

That's how the Quiet War series of stories evolved, and eventually turned into two novels (with a third on the way, but it's bad luck to talk about that right now). If I were brighter and more organised, novels and stories would have dovetailed neatly together. As it was, the stories turned out to be trial runs for the novels. Maybe I'll do better next time, with what some have started calling the Jackaroo stories, in which an alien species makes contact with the people of Earth after a short sharp global conflict, and hand them the keys to a bunch of planetary systems orbiting red dwarf stars and linked by wormholes. What does humanity do with this gift? What does the gift do to humanity? And what's the catch?

So far, there are just six stories.* But I'm beginning to wonder if it's time to get down and deal with the big picture.

*‘Dust’, Forbidden Planets, edited by Peter Crowther, Daw, 2006
 ‘Making Peace’, The New Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, HarperCollins, 2007
 ‘Adventure’, Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, 2008
'City of the Dead' Postscripts, 2008
 ‘Crimes and Glory’, Subterranean Magazine, 2009
‘The Choice’, Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011

EDIT: Of the above stories, only 'Crimes and Glory' is available online, here. Of the Quiet War stories, 'Reef' was available via my author's page at the Orion site, but was lost after a redesign; you might be able to find it using the wayback machine or similar. I'm thinking of putting up one on my web site's fiction archive. Any preferences?
EDIT 2: I totally forgot to include 'City of the Dead'. Corrected now. I'd like to think it's because I'm hip-deep in a third draft, but really it's down to stupidity. Thanks to Miles for pointing out the error!

Quiet War Stories

Ram Gowda emailed to ask if I had a list of stories related to The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. I thought I'd put it up here rather than on the increasingly out-of-date website, which badly needs a major overhaul. I set it up in the mid-1990s, using a basic HTML scripting programme, and it is really showing its age; must get around to making it look twenty-first century when I'm less distracted. Or pay someone to do it for me. Meanwhile, here are the stories, with the usual caveat that they were published piecemeal over a decade, and represent the first iteration of the Quiet War universe. Portions of several of them have been folded into Gardens of the Sun, in highly modified forms.

'Second Skin' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 1997
'Sea Change, With Monsters' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 1998
'The Gardens of Saturn' Interzone, 1998
'Reef' Sky Life, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, Harcourt Brace, 2000
'Making History' PS Publishing, 2000
'The Passenger' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2002
'The Assassination of Faustino Malarte' Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2002
‘Dead Men Walking’ Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 2006
‘Incomers’ The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Viking, 2008

More Best

Just received my author's copies of Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, so here's a bit of pimpage for it. Thirty-one stories, including one by me, 'Crimes and Glory', pretty good for under a tenner.

Crystal Palace And Me

My visit to the dinosaur models in Crystal Palace Park wasn't my first encounter with Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition. When I was born, my family lived in a cottage rented from Sir John Stanley Marling, 4th Baronet of Stanley Park and Sedbury Park. To mark the event, he gave my mother ten shillings, to invest on my behalf. Even in Stroud, which in the mid-1950s was still coming to terms with the twentieth century, acts of noblesse oblige like this weren't exactly usual. But Sir John came from a old family, with deep roots in the area.

They made their fortune in wool, the main industry in that part of the Cotswolds for several centuries. His great-grandfather, Sir Samuel Marling, the first Baronet, was one of the people responsible for founding the grammar school, Marling School, I later attended. Before that, I was at Selsley Primary School, which was associated with the church Sir Samuel built for the village, next door to the family seat. Most of the church's stained class was by William Morris & Co; it was Morris's first real commission, with contributions from Philip Webb, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and George Campfield. And in the field behind the church was a lone pillar; made of Cornish granite, it was bought by Sir Samuel Marling at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, where he had a display of his woollen cloth.

Those Victorians had a long reach . . .

The Terrible Lizards Of Penge

Last Saturday I travelled along the new East London overground line from Dalston to Crystal Palace Park, in the unglamorous South London suburb of Penge, to see some famous dinosaurs. The park was constructed to provide a permanent site for Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, which for six months housed the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The board of directors wanted to include a feature 'containing a collection of full-sized models of the Animals and plants of certain geological periods', including the first life-sized representations of newly-discovered dinosaurs. They got their wish, and it is a monument not only to Victorian science, but also to a famous scientific feud.


The board of directors first asked Dr Hilary Mantell, who had discovered and named the second known species of dinosaur, Iguanodon, and had amassed a huge collection of fossils, to supervise construction of the models. But Mantell, after suffering years of pain from a serious injury to his back, was dying. He declined the honour, and it passed to his great rival, Professor Richard Owen. Owen was a formidably talented and ambitious anatomist, and by all accounts an implacably ruthless and dislikeable man.

Although Mantell had championed the idea of a group of ancient, large, reptile-like animals, it was Owen who had recognised their defining characteristic - fused sacral vertebrae which allowed the huge animals to move about on land - and named them: dinosaur, from deinos 'terrible' and sauros 'lizard'. But this wasn't enough for Owen, who despite his formidable talent appears to have suffered from a gigantic inferiority complex. He'd spent years attempting to destroy Mantell's reputation, rubbishing his scientific papers, and trying unsuccessfully to prevent the Royal Society from awarding him the prestigious Royal Medal (there's a wonderful description of their feud in Deborah Cadbury's The Dinosaur Hunters: Owen as a mustachio-twirling monster of ego, Mantell as a romantic hero beset by impossible odds). But now Owen had triumphed: his enemy's fatal weakness had given him a wonderful opportunity to present his ideas for public consumption. Mantell died before the park was completed, and his twisted lower spine ended up as a gruesome trophy in the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, where Owen had the position of Hunterian Professor. You couldn't make it up.

And so, with the help of the director of the fossil department at Crystal Palace, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Owen set to immortalising his ideas about dinosaur anatomy in cast iron and concrete. Unfortunately, many of those ideas were completely wrong. To be fair to Owen, he was making guesses from a small and incomplete selection of fossils. But he also believed that any progression in animal evolution was due to divine laws set in place by God the Creator, argued that all animals were variations on an ideal type, and refused to countenance any evidence that he might be wrong. So while Mantell had come to believe from his examination of later fossil finds that Iguanodon had shortened forelimbs and could stand upright to browse on tree branches, in agreement with modern interpretations, Owen depicted Iguanodon and several other dinosaur species as clumsy, dog-like quadrapeds (both he and Mantell mistook Iguanodon's hooked thumb for a horn). Before the turn of the century, a more enlightened scientific community regarded the models as a horrible embarrassment. Today, they look positively antediluvian: quaint relics of a more primitive era of science; props from some sci-fi adventure quota quickie.


Still, other models, such as those of plesiosaurs and several species of early mammals, were more accurate, and in its day the park was a roaring success, and helped drive the mania for dinosaurs that persists to this day. Owen went on to found the Natural History Museum, and to suffer from a severe reversal in his reputation when he clashed with Thomas Huxley and other supporters of evolution by natural selection. The Crystal Palace burned down in 1936; Owens' and Hawkin's models, recently restored, are still imposing and fascinating. If you get the chance, they're well worth a visit.

I've Got Your Uncanny Valley, Right Here

Penance

It's Friday, so hey, have a free short story. Three hundred words, including a nod to one of James Blish's pantropy stories. It was originally published in New Scientist last year, in a science-fiction special section edited by Kim Stanley Robinson. Somewhere inside it, maybe, is the seed for a novel.

Penance

It’s December. Midsummer. The sun barely dipping below the horizon at midnight, and like everyone else Rongomaiwhe Namakin has white-nights fever, cat-napping, staying up around the clock. There’s so much to do! A dragon-sized machine is laying freshly made topsoil along the Tuvula river, and Rongomaiwhe and her crew are planting a strip forest of Dahurian larch and dwarf willow. And when they aren’t working, they hike up the river or across wet black rock fields. White mountains float against the pure blue sky. A wild rugged land still mostly untouched. A kingdom of snow and rock and wind.

Rongomaiwhe’s great-grandparents were early victims of global warming. When its Pacific islands were swamped by rising sea levels, their nation sold its carbon credits and moved to a refuge in New Zealand, which escaped much of the consequences of violent climate change. A succession of canny leaders preserved tribal unity and invested heavily inecological engineering. Rongomaiwhe’s parents helped to quicken a new ecosystem on Howe Island after shifts in ocean currents increased the average temperature by a full ten degrees. Now Rongomaiwhe is part of a rainbow coalition of the young and willing, taking on the challenge of greening the shores of the thawing Antarctic Peninsula.

She knows how lucky she is. More than half the Earth’s population huddle in slums along the new coastlines, permanently unemployed, forcibly sterilised, subsisting on dole yeast. And she is making a new world, and planning to start a family when she and her fiancé marry this winter. That’s why, once a week, she does penance. Plugs into the remote working network, flows into a robot thousands of kilometres away, in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Brings the machine online and gets to work, planting a windbreak of tweaked yuccas for what will be an oasis, with the vast, level desert of Kansas stretched all around.

Martian Ice

A meteorite hits the ejecta apron of a crater high in the Northern Martian hemisphere and opens a small blue eye of ice. It happened some time between April 2004 and January 2010, the dates when two different robot spacecraft photographed the same spot.

Splice

I was pleasantly surprised by this small-budget but intellectually ambitious bioshock film. Directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube), who also co-wrote the script with Antoinette Terry Bryant, it's a variation on the Frankenstein mythos that combines an exploration of a skewed form of parenthood with human reactions to the uncanny valley. The plot, in brief: Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Adrian Brody) are romantically entangled partners who run a bioscience lab owned by a large pharmaceutical company. After creating fairly simple multicellular artificial organisms, they want to step up their research into genetic recombination by using human genes, but the parent company wants them to isolate the genes for a potent protein produced by their organisms. Faced with loss of independence, they go ahead with the experiment anyway, and create a fast-growing neotenous organism that develops from something like a naked kiwi to a female humanoid creature, Dren. As both Elsa and Clive form strong emotional bonds with their strange step-daughter, their company supervisor begins to suspect that they're hiding a secret, and Dren continues to change in unexpected ways . . .

Okay, set out as baldly as that, it doesn't seem any different from a couple of dozen things-we-weren't-meant-to-know horror stories. But the basic scaffolding of the plot exfoliates in all kinds of interesting, unexpected, and genuinely unsettling ways, and its ideas are nicely undercut by a knowing humour: this is a serious film that doesn't take itself too seriously. Both Elsa and Clive both have complicated reactions to their creation, oscillating between hubris, fear, and fatal attraction, exposing emotional weakenesses in themselves and their relationship; Elsa in particular has problems coming to terms with her creation, thanks to a childhood crippled by an uncaring mother. Her developing attachment to Dren is creepily ambiguous, and there's some good satire on the problems of parenthood as Dren races through all the stages of childhood and adolescence to a seriously problematic maturity.

The science behind Dren's creation contains a fair measure of handwavium, but Elsa and Clive are portrayed as scientists driven by ambition and inquisitiveness rather than haphazard craziness, and their lab has a cluttered authenticity. It's nice to see researchers using mini-centrifuges, Eppendorf pipettes, and gel electrophoresis rather than simply peering down microscopes: someone has obviously done a bit of homework. I liked the alarmingly temperamental plumbing of the artificial womb, too. Best of all is the design of Dren. Played at maturity by Delphine Chaneac with an eerie physicality that complements Greg Nicotero's and Howard Bergera's seamless mix of makeup, prostheses and digital manipulation, she's a genuinely weird and beautiful chimera, and some of the best scenes in the film explore her volatile mix of fear, vulnerability, frustration and outbursts of wild exuberance.

So, while the story may be familiar, Natali's angle of attack is refreshingly different, his low-key direction mostly eschews sensationalism yet delivers some nice shocks, and the intelligent script is complemented by some fine acting. And although the last act devolves towards creature-feature frights and alarms, it's just about redeemed by a final scene that has a chillingly spare ambiguity. Like Dren, it's a hybrid whose beauty is more than the sum of its parts.

Rocks

The image above is a composite compiled by the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla, handily showing the relative sizes of all the asteroids and comets that have been visited by spacecraft to date. Check out the full-size version here. The largest by far is Lutetia, which the Dawn* spacecraft has just zipped past, on its way to even larger targets - Vesta in 2011-12 and Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, in 2015. Vesta is about four times the size of Lutetia; Ceres, at an average 950 kilometres in diameter, is seven times larger. If it orbited Saturn it would be the gas giant's sixth largest moon (it's just a little bit smaller than Tethys), and is classified as a dwarf planet rather than an asteroid. Both Vesta and Ceres are massive enough to have been pulled into a spherical shape by their own gravity, and both are differentiated bodies with metallic cores and stony crusts. Vesta's surface is mostly rock, modified by flows of lava; Ceres is surfaced with water ice and clays and carbonates, and it's possible that there's an ocean of liquid water beneath its crust.

Asteroids are fantastically varied objects. Those imaged close-up all seem mostly similar, spattered with craters large and small, and with dusty intercrater plains. But while Eros, Ida and Itokawra are stony asteroids composed of iron and magnesium silicates, Mathilde is coated in primitive carbonaceous compounds, and tiny Braille is composed of olivine and pyroxene (Gaspara's composition appears to be midway between Braille and the stony asteroids). Lutetia is presently classified as a M-type asteroid; its dusty surface may cover a chunk of nickel-iron and other metals derived from the core of a larger body shattered during the early history of the Solar System. Itokawa, visited by the Hayabusa probe, which recently returned to Earth after a difficult five-year journey, is a rock pile, with a surface of dust and boulders mostly unmarked by impact craters.


Hard to think of making any kind of comfortable living on or in something as frankly ugly as that, but it's easy to think of tenting over a small crater of one of the other asteroids, or burrowing into their surfaces, or hanging sealed tenement buildings at the edges of cliffs. Smaller asteroids could be completely built over - mini-Trantors. (Many small asteroids are rock piles like Itokawa, putting paid to the cherished sf idea of manufacturing a habitat by hollowing out a small rock with a few nuclear bombs.) Although the total mass in the asteroid belt is just 4% of the mass of the Moon, the surface area is far greater. At an average diameter of around 130 kilometres, Lutetia has a surface area of some 31000 square kilometres, one and a half times the size of Wales. Plenty of room for settlements and cities. Tiny disputatious kingdoms and empires brought together and flung apart by orbital mechanics, trading with each other and with Earth and Mars, chasing after comets for water and organics . . . It's been done before, of course. Many times. But I can't help thinking that it may be time to do it again.

*EDIT My bad - it was the Rosetta spacecraft that zipped past Lutetia, on its way to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Dawn is, however, on course for Vesta and Ceres. Hat-tip to Phil, for pointing out my confusion.

Expecting Something Taller

So I finished the second draft of the new novel yesterday, and here it is, printed off. Hmm, 150,000 words plus doesn't look as big in the real world . . .

Now all I need is a break, and then a couple of red pens and a decent stretch of peace and quiet so that I can cut it into shape. Some people can compose and redraft and edit entire novels on screen. I need at least one go at an actual manuscript, with wide margins for notes and second- and third-thoughts. I started off writing on a manual typewriter, old habits die hard, and it's easier to spot goofs on the page than on the screen, for some reason. After that, there's at least one more on-screen draft before it's printed out again, and sent off to the publisher.

The title is a working title, by the way. Not yet officially approved. But I like it.

A Dark River Across the Sky

The Astronomy Picture of the Day site regularly throws up amazing images, but this one is especially amazing. A lane of dust about 500 light years away and spanning some 100 light years runs across the sky towards an area rich in stellar beauty: a fabulous backdrop for a space opera about clashing interstellar empires.

Helpless

So I finally got around to visiting Fiona Banner's installation at Tate Britain. And it's one of my most science-fictional experiences this year, and way more Ballardian than many of the pieces at Crash, the exhibition of art reflecting Ballardian themes and tropes staged by the Gagosian gallery.

Banner's installation is audaciously simple. A surreal magic trick. Two fighter planes are stranded in the atrium space of Tate Britain's Duveen gallery. A Jaguar is stranded upside down, paint stripped off its fuselage to leave a mirror finish. And a Sea Harrier is suspended nose-down from the ceiling from a single cable that pierces the skylight above, hanging like a trussed game-bird a handful of centimetres off the floor, its fuselage brushed with a faint pattern of feathers. Banner has form; she was commissioned to decorate the Tate's Christmas tree a few years ago, and hung it with scale models of every fighter plane currently in service. But this is a major step up. The two planes are bound, prone, helpless, yet they dominate the gallery space. Visitors tiptoe around them, marvelling at the gape of their afterburners, their lethal lines. There's a feeling of trespassing in the trophy room of a machine predator, or some futuristic armoury where decommissioned war robots crouch, waiting for their go codes, or a battlefield littered with machines beyond human comprehension. Children had a simpler, more innocent response, mind you: time and again they raced up to the suspended Sea Harrier and threw themselves under its nose, giggling and amazed at their own daring.

Flying Over Ontario Lacus

When Cassini first arrived at the Saturn, in 2004, we knew almost nothing about the surface of its largest moon, Titan. We didn't know if it was covered in oceans of liquid methane, or in drifts of waxy organic snow; we didn't know if it was smooth or if it had hills and mountains. We know a lot more now. We know, like Earth, it not only has hills and mountains (although of water ice rather than rock), but it also has vast fields of dunes (of tarry organics rather than sand) and rivers and lakes (of liquid ethane, propane and methane, rather than water).

And now the Cassini science team have produced this terrific short video showing what it's like to fly around the shoreline of Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in Titan's southern hemisphere. It's amazing in its own right, but if you've read The Quiet War or Gardens of the Sun, you'll understand why I'm knocked out by it.



At about 15000 square kilometres, Ontario Lacus is a little smaller than its terrestrial namesake, Lake Ontario (or about three-quarters the size of Wales). Like Lake Ontario, it has a meandering shoreline fretted with bays, inlets, and beaches; there's a river that feeds into it via a delta that looks exactly like deltas formed by rivers on Earth. And like terrestrial lakes, Ontario Lacus is undergoing seasonal changes, too.

Titan's years, like Saturn's, are about 29 years long. When Cassini arrived, it was summer in Titan's southern hemisphere. Now, the days are dwindling down to autumn. Cassini first imaged Ontario Lacus in 2004; since then, its shoreline has receded by about 10 kilometres. And in four years of measuring the lake's depth by radar, its level has gone down by about a metre. For although the summer temperature in the southern hemisphere is minus 180 Centigrade, that's warm enough to allow evaporation of liquid methane. But now the temperature is dropping, that evaporation will cease. Soon, perhaps, the evaporated methane will condense into clouds and fall as winter rains, and run down the hills in rivers, and replenish the lakes...

An Astronaut And His Mars-Adapted Dog

Explanation here. More great photos here.

Asteroid and Saturn

Imaged by the Rosetta spacecraft July10 2010.

Inception

Saw it last night but won't review it here as it's already being reviewed everywhere else. But will note just one thing: in dreams, where Inception is mostly set, no one uses mobile phones. Didn't realise this while watching the film, but afterwards, on the crowded and hot streets of the West End, where almost everyone was walking along talking into phones or gazing or pecking at little lighted screens in their hands, half in this world, half in cyberspace.

Der Stille Krieg

I'm pleased to announce publication of the German edition of The Quiet War, translated by Sara Riffel, with a space-battle-tastic cover by Stephan Martiniere. Meanwhile, I'm closing in on the end of the second draft of the new novel, in which I fix most major inconsistencies and rough patches, and realise what still needs to be put in, and what needs to be taken out. Onwards.

Extras

Little, Brown have announced that they're piloting eBook versions of certain novels with DVD-style extras. Some interesting ideas, but I feel they really don't go far enough. How about:

A 4000-hour long Andy Warhol style documentary showing the author's hands, typing out the novel.

A commentary track featuring author and editor.

Every draft of the novel.

A version of the novel in which every other word is redacted.

A Georges Perec remix in which every word containing the letter e is replaced with an equivalent.

A version of the novel which is twice as long, but contains nothing new or extra.

A version of the novel annotated with emoticons.

Video clips in which the people on which the characters are based explain what they would have really done.

Links to live video feeds from locations in the novel.

A mashup in which the novel's characters are replaced by characters from Pride and Prejudice.

The author's tax returns.

A map of the author's study.

All the material that ends up at the bottom of word-processing drafts (I believe Nicholson Baker actually did this).

A list of every book and newspaper and magazine article the author read during the period of composition, and URLs for every website visited.

A list of everything the author ate and drank during the period of composition.

The possibilities are endless!

It's All About Me

Well, not quite. The shortlist for the John W Campbell Memorial Award has been announced, and I'm very pleased to find that Gardens of the Sun is included. I have no chance of winning against some very impressive competition, but it's a honour, and all that.

I was asked to write about my favourite space opera novels and series; the results are here, along with some other great picks.

And in the mail today, Infinivox's spoken-word anthology The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction, which includes my story 'Crimes and Glory'.

Reverse Alchemy

Despite the ex cathedera tone of someone looking down from the heights of literature on the swampy plain of 'commercial fiction', Philip Reeve's diatribe against steampunk nails the abiding sin of all genres - too often the golden coin of originality is turned into a ton of commercial tin.

EDIT: Diatribe deleted on Reeve's site but still available here.

Ice and Fire

It's pretty much a golden age for exobiologists. Once the preserve of cranks, science fiction writers and supermarket tabloids, the search for evidence of life on other planets is may still be based on speculation and extrapolation rather than actual hard evidence, but it's now a sober and respectable area of legimate scientific research, covered soberly and respectfully in popular science magazines and broadsheet newspapers.

Latest headlines concern findings by the Cassini spacecraft: it seems that not only is hydrogen in Titan's atmosphere flowing down to the moon's surface and disappearing, but there's a distinct lack of acetylene at the surface, too; acetylene should be formed from methane and ethane and snow out onto the surface, but so far it hasn't been detected. Most likely, the disappearance of hydrogen and low levels of acetylene are due to some kind of catalytic chemical process, but exobiologists have pointed out that it could be the signature of some form of biological activity. The surface of Titan is far too cold to support any form of life that uses water as a solvent, but there's abundant liquid methane and ethane, which rains out of the atmosphere, carves rivers into the surface, and forms lakes and seas. Acetylene would be the best energy source for life based on liquid methane, which would consume hydrogen much as we consume oxygen. Right now, on Titan, some frigid, curious slime mould could be edging its way with infinite patience across a pebbly beach towards the Huygens lander, wondering if it's evidence for life above the eternal clouds.

Jupiter's moon Io is one the least likely venues for life in the Solar System. Although it's only a little larger than Earth's moon, it exhibits extremes of geological activity. Tidal effects stretch and flex its crust, and the resulting friction generates enough heat to power volcanoes that spew molten sulphur at temperatures of over 1600 degrees Centigrade. Areas between the volcanoes are covered with sulphur dioxide snow chilled to -130 degrees C, almost all water has long ago been driven off, and besides all that, it's drenched in Jupiter's radiation fields. But astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch has pointed out that Io would have possessed plenty of water when it first formed, and if life arose before the water was blasted away by Jupiter's radiation, it could have retreated underground, into rocks or even lava tubes, which would provide protection from radiation and conserve and moisture and nutrients (and would be ideal homes for any intrepid human colonists).

It's unlikely, but not impossible. Extremophile bacteria, the poster children of exobiology, exploit all kinds of forbidding niches on Earth, from hydrothermal vents to Antarctic dry valleys, and lithotrophic extremophiles extend the biosphere deep into the Earth's crust, obtaining energy from all kinds of organic and inorganic sources. The oddest example is Desulfurodis audaxviator, discovered in 2008 deep in a South African gold mine. It survives without light or oxygen, using energy generated by the radioactive decay of uranium and other elements in the surrounding rock to drive its thrifty metabolism. When you contemplate this microscopic, one-species, completely self-sufficient ecosystem, life on Io or Titan doesn't seem so unlikely after all.

O Brave New World

Surfacing from working on the ongoing (about halfway through the second draft, killing my darlings like there's no tomorrow), here's the cover for the UK mass-market paperback of Gardens of the Sun. It isn't published until August, but you can preorder it right now. The artwork is by the terrific space artist Don Dixon - how great is that? You can see the original here, and do check out everything else too, while you're there. It shows Uranus from the surface of Miranda, its strangest moon - and one of the strangest moons in the Solar System (which is saying a lot). From the novel:

Most of Uranus’s thirty-plus moons were small chunks of ice or carbonaceous material. One group orbited just outside the outer edge of the ring system; another occupied distant and irregular orbits, wanderers captured by Uranus’s gravitational field. And between these two shoals of tiny moons were five massive enough to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium, contracting into spheres under the force of their own gravitational fields. Four were much alike, balls of dirty ice wrapped around silicate cores, spattered with impact craters, dusted by dark materials flung outward by the chains of collisions that had created the ring system, fractured by varying degrees of ancient geological activity. But the smallest of the larger moons, Miranda, was not only the strangest of Uranus’s family of satellites, it was one of the strangest moons in the Solar System: a patchwork of cratered, banded and ridged terrains broken by mountainous ridges and monstrous fault canyons up to twenty kilometres deep, as if hammered together from pieces of half a dozen different bodies by some inept god who’d afterwards slashed and hacked at his botched creation in a fit of rage. An early theory about its formation suggested that it had been shattered several times by massive impacts and the larger fragments had randomly clumped together, exposing sections of the core in some places and sections of the original surface in others, but later research showed that its haphazard topography was the result of intense geological activity driven by tidal heating at a time in the deep past when it had possessed a far more eccentric orbit.

Stretched and kneaded every time it swung close around Uranus, Miranda had bubbled and blistered and cracked like a snowball wrapped around a hot coal. Eruptions of icy magma had flooded older terrain and created smooth plains. Coronae, huge domes edged with concentric patterns of ridges and grooves, had grown at the top of upwellings of warm ice that penetrated and deformed overlying strata. And after it had settled into its present orbit, it had cooled and frozen through and through. Its surface had contracted and tectonic activity had scored it with deep grabens formed by extensional faulting, while compressional strain had raised systems of ridges and valleys and thrown up escarpments several kilometres high.

This violent geological history had created a varied and chaotic moonscape that, patched with varied terrain, cut by the rifts and grooves of transition zones and gigantic scarps and grabens, provided a wealth of hiding places. The refugees elected to settle in the deep groove of a narrow chasm in the high northern latitudes, and put to work the two crews of construction robots they’d brought with them.

Gnarl

A picture of men at work. Two astronauts (Michael Good on the left, Garret Reisman on the right) peek through the windows of the aft flight deck of the space shuttle Atlantis, before heading off to install batteries and other equipment to the exterior of the International Space Station. Your average everyday experience, in low Earth orbit (can you name, off the top of your head, every astronaut who has spacewalked? Can you even hazard a guess at the number?* We shouldn't be complacent about the amazingly difficult, dangerous and technically awesome feat of building and maintaining and space station. It's still not exactly a routine human experience, but we have been a space-going species for a couple of generations, now).

What I'm especially interested in are the controls in the foreground (check out the full-resolution photo here). Not just the clunky electromechanical switches and joystick, set in battleship-grey utilitarian panels, although it does remind us that Atlantis is 34 years old, built when prog rock and flares were still in fashion, and personal computers, mobile phones, iPads and cyberspace weren't even science fictional concepts; and here we are in the future, with spaceships designed forty-odd years ago just reaching retirement, and how science-fictional is that? No, what's especially interesting is the human clutter, the solutions to work-a-day problems. The patches of blue velcro stuck at intervals on every surface. The propelling pencil on the right, with its velcro collar. The two lab timers, with cryptic felt-pen identifying codes. The Post-it notes. The human clutter - the gnarl, the telling details that bring a scene alive. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to dinner with Al Reynolds and French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré, who flew two missions on the Mir space station. One detail especially sticks in my mind. The Russians sent up fresh food to their space station in automated Progress resupply vehicles; when the airlock was opened after the Progress vehicle had docked, the unbearably evocative smell of apples, of the planet Earth, filled the air.

[edit] *a list of spacewalking astronauts

Composition

So right now I'm going backwards to go forwards with the second draft of the ongoing. Usually I like to press onward, ever onward, but I had a sudden blink of inspiration about the true nature of the kind of work one of the characters was doing before he became caught up in the plot, and rather than leave it until revision I unravelled an early chapter, dropped in a chunk of prose, and restitched it.

This is what happens when you don't spend a couple of months planning out a novel in every detail before writing it straight out. Which I understand is technically possible, but isn't for me. Much of the writing process in the first and second drafts is a process of discovery - or rather, a process of blundering about in a dark room, bumping into things while looking for a way out.

I do make lots of notes, actually, but usually ignore most of them because for me making notes is a Darwinian process of evolving and discarding possibilities. What's left for this project are lists of names, all kinds of notes and references on the evolution and structure of gas giants, brief portraits of various cities and odd little worldlets, and some chunks of the back stories of various characters that may or may not be threaded through the narrative. I also accumulate, like most writers who use word processors, a collection of sentences and paragraphs and entire scenes that drop below the fold.

She was still looking all around, drinking in fresh details in the view, when a second pod everted and the blunt triangle of the drone detached with a thump and flare of thrust that sent it flying away from the train.

At the same time, the child was attempting to make contact with the tutelary spirits of the river and forest. Her fantasy about the involvement of the river folk in the boy’s death had taken root and flourished.

Cactus skeleton. Fog spreads. Wonder at someone who can control weather.

And then he ducked away under the slanting barrel of the telescope and he was gone, and I could move again. The young woman beckoned to me, and I followed without thought or question through a doorway I had not noticed before, and found myself stumbling from the translation frame in the softly-lit room in the administration centre. The interview was over.

Sometimes it seems to me that what's left out is as important as what's left in.

Angels Over America

Hey, the new Pyr catalogue is out, so now I can tell you that Cowboy Angels will be published in the US of A in January 2011. The fabulous cover - my third by him - with a train exiting a Turing gate, is by Sparth. The retro lettering is great, too, and entirely appropriate: the novel is set in the 1980s, in a variety of Americas.

Where I'm At

Some weeks later, with pen, ink, scissors, paste, a decanter of sherry, and a vast reluctance, Mr Earbrass begins to revise TUH. This means, first, transposing passages, or reversing the order of their paragraphs, or crumpling them up furiously and throwing them in the waste-basket. After that there is rewriting. This is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have to think up new things just the same, but at the same time try not to remember the old ones. Before Mr Earbrass is through, at least one third of TUH will bear no resemblance to its original state.

Most novelists recognise something of themselves in the late great Edward Gorey's Mr Earbrass - written in 1953, The Unstrung Harp is still one of the funniest and truest descriptions of writing a novel. Revision isn't much easier with word processing, but I find it's a lot more fun than wrestling with the seemingly infinite snake of the first draft. I know now what my characters will and won't do, for instance. And it's a lot easier going along with what they want, than trying to push them in directions they don't like.

Meanwhile, I'm too distracted to do this blog much justice, but I'm still blurting out bits of nonsense over on Twitter. Uses a different part of the brain.

Above Us Only Sky

When I was at primary school in Gloucestershire, in the early 1960s, it was still unusual to see a contrail in the sky. The charter air travel industry, which transplanted British seaside culture to the Mediterranean, was in its infancy; transatlantic flights hadn't yet been multiplied by the demands of mass tourism. Now, thanks to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, the empty skies of my childhood have returned. In a single spasm, Eyjafjallajökull punched a plume of fine ash some eight kilometres into the stratosphere, and winds have spread it across most of Europe. Planes are grounded because the ash cloud hangs at the height at which they cruise, and volcanic ash ingested by jet engines is smelted into glass deposits that quickly choke them. Over London, no planes fly. The city's constant rumble is much diminished. The sky, blue and cloudless, is the province only of birds.

We live, some believe, in the anthropocene age, an era in which human beings have massively altered global ecosystems, and which may have begun with the invention of agriculture, but certainly accelerated during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and the oil-based economy of the twentieth and early twenty-first. But Earth's climate and geography, and human history, has also been shaped by more powerful processes. Volcanic activity has been implicated in the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, which wiped out more than 90% of marine species, and 70% of vetebrate animal species on land. The Toba supereruption between 69000 and 77000 years ago created a decade of global winter that could have caused the reduction in human numbers and the bottleneck in human evolution that marks our genomes to this day. Ashes and sulphur compounds injected into the stratosphere by volcanic activity is believed to have contributed to global cooling during the Little Ice Age between the 16th and mid 19th century, and the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused the Year Without Summer, ruining crops around the world and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths (and creating spectacular sunsets documented in paintings by Turner).

Eyjafjallajökull may have created all kinds of disruption to travellers, but compared to supervulcanism of the past, or to what might happen if the volcanic dome under Yellowstone Park lets go, it's a mere blip. An inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. A useful reminder that the nemesis which may clobber us won't necessarily be the product of our own hubris. Meanwhile, I'm off to enjoy a spot of peace and quiet while I can.

Eastercon 2010, the verbals

‘I could have emailed you,’ David Langford said, coming over to say hello after we’d spent some time working online at different tables in a bar. But even the science-fiction community hasn’t yet reached the point of total online immersion, which is why some 1200 people had gathered for the UK national sf convention, Eastercon. Last year, it was in the post-industrial fairyland of Bradford; this year it was back in Heathrow, in a massive hotel that looked like a cut-price brutalist version of the Baths of Caracalla, set on a dual carriageway that was cheek-by-jowl with a howling runway and lined with the kind of office buildings that get blown up in the Die Hard franchise. An exurbia for people in transit. A transport corridor where CCTV cameras outnumbered pedestrians. But while the setting may have been a hardcore Ballardian dystopia, it meant that, for a convention reasonably close to London, costs were kept down to an affordable level, and besides, few of us were there for the architecture or local ambience.

Eastercons have to cater for the multitudinous interests of a wide variety of fans -- and if enough of them are interested in (say) campanology, then a talk or workshop in campanology becomes, by syllogy, sf. Writers (like me) might grumble about the lack of programming about actual books, but they’re always reminded, when they arrive at the convention, that it’s run by fans for fans. And some of them, shock horror, don’t even care all that much about written sf (fortunately, an awful lot of them do). Suck it up, get with the programme.

This year, there was a definite etsy/steampunk vibe, but there was also a very strong and well-attended science stream, with panels and some excellent talks, quite a few by people outside the sf world -- always a good sign. I wasn’t there for the whole convention, so managed to go to only one item I wasn’t involved in, a barnstormer of a talk by The Economist's Oliver Morton on geoengineering. It followed hard on the heels of a talk by Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column for the Guardian. I would have liked to have gone to both, but had just done a 9.00 am panel and was still suffering from caffeine deficiency. So it goes.

What else? The book room was admirably full of stalls selling books, and there was a considerable small press presence, with signings and launches. I scored a reasonable copy of the original Penguin edition of Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (‘D’you think it could be my cactus that’s upsetting him’), a cheap paperback edition of Gertrude Friedberg’s The Revolving Boy (her first and only sf novel), and a copy of John Clute’s latest collection of criticism, Canary Fever. And there were, of course, plenty of random encounters and late-night conversations, which is, in the end, kind of the point of going. That, and Heathrow’s famous chicken-rat garden. I’d tell you about that, but really, you had to be there.