Cowboy Angels And The Old Weird

Cowboy Angels, now available in the US, describes a journey across a variety of alternate Americas; it's structured like a road movie, and like all good road movies it has a soundtrack.  Music features over and again in the narrative - the opening scene has Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming playing in the background, there’s more Dylan sprinkled here and there, a fond memory of some old dance tunes, and an anachronistic guest appearance by Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings. The music is more than decoration, more than texture.  It stands for something lost. Something that the hero, Adam Stone, is looking for, even though he doesn’t realise quite what he’s found, and how he can redeem it, until the closing pages.

A major influence on Cowboy Angels was Greil Marcus’s book Invisible Republic. It’s an extraordinary meditation on the Matter of America and its lost and shadow selves that widens out from an examination of the music that Dylan and the Band made together in the basement of the Band’s rented house in Woodstock, NY, where Dylan had retreated after his bruising World Tour with the Band in 1966 (the electrified passages of his concert were greeted with howls of derision and anger by folk fans; one famously called out ‘Judas’, to which a rattled Dylan replied, ‘I don't believe you . . . you're a liar,’ before turning to the Band as they gathered up the opening of "Like A Rolling Stone" and telling them to ‘play it fucking loud!’). The Basement Tapes may be the way into the central argument of Invisible Republic, but at the heart of the book is a collection of obscure folk music compiled and curated by Harry Smith and issued in 1952 as the Anthology of American Folk Music, described by Marcus as ‘an elaborate, dubiously legal bootleg, a compendium of recordings originally released on and generally forgotten by such still-active labels . . . [that was] the founding document of the American folk revival.’ Divided into three sections - ‘Ballads’, ‘Social Music’, and ‘Songs’ - it chronicles tales of archetypal murder, revenge and disaster, music of public celebration and appeals to God, and songs of ‘wishes and fears, difficulties and satisfactions that are, you know, as plain as day, but also, in the voices of those who are now singing, the work of demons - demons like your neighbours, your family, your lovers, yourself.’

Inspired by the cadence of a phrase ‘the old free America’ used by the poet Kenneth Rexroth ‘to describe the country he thought lay behind Carl Sandburg’s work’, Marcus named the territory that opens up out of Smith’s Anthology as the ‘old, weird America’. It is the territory where there still lives all that is strange and distinctive of the lost, gone world inhabited by the singers of the songs collected by Smith, and its capital is Smithville: ‘a mystical body of the republic, a kind of public secret: a declaration of what sort of wishes and fears lie behind any public act, a declaration of a weird but clearly recognisable America within the America of the exercise of institutional majoritarian power.’

This is the America that Adam Stone is searching for as he travels through alternate Americas and discovers a weird, secret world of conspiracies working within conspiracies, a world where the dead live again, a woman can be murdered over and again, the past is as mutable as the future and one is hand in hand with the other, and where a lost love can be rescued from death, if you are willing to pay the price.

The old singers, the traditional people whose end Dylan saw in the early 1960s, after they had been rediscovered by fans and brought out to play at the Newport Jazz Festival and other venues, were all gone by the time I first visited America in the early 1980s. But I was able to glimpse traces of their world while I was living in Los Angeles, and during visits in the years immediately after my stint as a legal alien. A world before the spread of strip malls, exurbias; before Clearwater and Fox News; before the corporate homogenisation of what seemed like an unquenchable abundance of deep history, of regional tradition and variety.

I remember on one visit driving in my hire car around the Beltway of Washington DC an hour after deplaning when Simon and Garfunkel’s 'America' came on the radio, and I was so lost in the gap between the yearning of the song, its personal resonances, and the actuality of driving in America that I missed my exit and had to park in a street sunk deep in twilight and the deep quiet dream of suburbia to gather my wits. (The secret name of Cowboy Angels, the original title vetoed by its publishers but surviving as the title of its central section, is Look For America.) I remember driving across the state line into North Carolina where fireworks were everywhere advertised for sale and the radio was suddenly full of bluegrass and hellfire preaching. I remember driving past the wreckage of an Antebellum house, of finding Raleigh-Durham airport full of Civil War reentactors (I have a memory that they carried their rifles onto the plane - it may be false, but those were certainly more innocent times).

Those were the days of Ronald Reagan, who if he did nothing else brought back to America the idea of hopefulness, who in his 1984 acceptance of the Republican Party nomination invoked the image of America as a city on a hill:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.

It's an image that, as Greil Marcus notes, may have been intended as a sign of American triumphalism, but three hundred years before was a warning, a prophecy of self-betrayal invoked by John Winthrop in 1630 to describe to his fellow Puritans what awaited them in the New World, and what would happen if they failed to meet its promise:

For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty vpon a Hill, the eies of all people are vppon vs: soe that if wee shall deale faslely with our god in thos worke wee haue vndertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from vs, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake euill of the ways of god and all professours for Gods sake; we shall shame the face of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses vopn vs tll wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing.

That doubled image of alternate Americas - the shining city as testament to glory or as a curse on failure - is at the heart of Cowboy Angels' story; the story of the kind of America Adam Stone’s America has become, and what he does about it.

Stonecutters

'Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, We do.'

My Grandmother's Photograph Album

One of the memes endlessly circulating the Sargasso of the internet is that the living now outnumber the dead.  It seems to be based on the exponential mathematics of the population explosion: if two people have three children, and if those children each have three children, and so on, and so on, then in only a few generations it's a mathematical inevitability that there will be more living descendants than dead ancestors.

But like too many simple ideas it has a fatal flaw: we tend to underestimate the numbers of the dead. One calculation, quoted in a debunking article published in the Scientific American, suggests that around 106 billion people have been born; since only 6 billion are currently alive, 94% of all people ever born are dead.  Or as Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick suggested in their foreword to the novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.'

An inspection of old photograph albums confirms this simple truth.  Here are the dead, in their multitudes.  They are dressed in antique costumes, stand in front of new cars, hold up babies.  They are often on holiday.

 

We know so little about them.  Many are nameless, now.  Yet they wait patiently for us.  They have plenty of time, after all.  The universe is still young: a little less than 14 billion years.  Whether it expires in a Big Crunch or subsides in a long Heat Death, many more billions of years stretch ahead.  We'll all be dead for far longer than our pre-birth non-existence.

 'Come on in. The water's fine.'

The World Transformed

Ramona Koval: Gabriel, you say that the two greatest post-war English novelists were William Golding and Muriel Spark. Why them?
Gabriel Josipovici: Again, I have a last chapter in which I say this is my view, I quite recognise that there are other views, I try to justify my view. My feeling when I first started reading the early novels of William Golding, that is the first four, Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and The Spire, was that I was in the same sort of universe as the universe of a Borges or even of a Kafka, that there was something...it seized me and shook me into a sort of recognition of the mystery of the world and gave me a sort of flashlight of awareness of that.
What he does in all these books is to lead you in to look at the world one way, and then with an extraordinary twist towards the end you're pulled out and recognise that this is actually the world inside somebody's head, and therefore the world itself is other than that thing that is inside the person's head. And this is most striking in Pincher Martin were this man is thrown up on a rock in the middle of the ocean, tries to survive Robinson Crusoe-like for a while, but gradually starts to feel there's something that isn't quite right with...I mean, not just the surroundings that are inimitable to life but that there is something peculiarly worrying about it.
And then comes the terrible shock that actually the configuration of these rocks is like that of his teeth as his tongue passes over them, that in a sense he is dying as he is drowning at the very moment that...the whole thing takes place in a moment in which he is drowning, and he tries desperately to hold on to life, and imagines this rock and everything else.
Muriel Spark in a different way I think does the same sort of thing, perhaps because of her Catholic conversion, this sense of suddenly seeing the world transformed, not as other people mostly see it, not as the novel mostly sees it. Her novels, again, are often leading to a point where we are made to see that things are not quite as we thought they were. So in one sense they are...and modernism itself is already a sort of detective story, but it is a detective story where there isn't an answer at the end.

From the transcript of an interview of Josipovici on Australia's ABC radio about his recent book Whatever Happened to Modernism? Link via This Space. (Although a silly article in the Guardian attempted to develop a spat between Josipovici and various eminences gris of English literature, his book has received a good number of approving reviews. He makes some very interesting points about common problems of structural and narrative constraints in fantasy and 'realistic' fiction, too.)

Judy And Mel

Serendipity

One of the more irritating strawmen arguments used against science-fiction writers is that because they didn’t spot (say) the way that mobile phones would transform society in the near future, they’re pretty much failures when it comes to the prediction lark. As if we’re supposed to be equipped with fission-powered crystal balls, or to somehow do better than futurologists who can draw on the resources of the multinational corporations they work for (and still get it wrong most of the time). It’s been raised yet again by Russell M Davies over at Wired UK, who claims that SF writers have given up on the future because they aren’t in the prediction business any more. Fellow columnist Warren Ellis does his best to knock it down by arguing that SF writers are more into hazy hand-waving extrapolation than hardcore prediction, but that’s not quite it, either. Here, by way of illustrating the kind of thing SF writers actually do when thinking about the future, is an example of my own so-called world building.

Some thirteen years ago, inspired by images captured by the two Voyager spacecraft and the Galileo and Cassini orbiters, I began a series of stories set in the outer reaches of the Solar System. A postwar scenario that eventually morphed and mutated into two novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. I wanted to explore the various, exotic, and unearthly moonscapes. I wanted to be as true as possible to reality, but I also wanted to measure them against some kind of human perspective.

I’m known, I guess, as a writer of so-called hard science fiction. Fiction that plays within the parameters established by current science, even if it pushes and distorts those parameters as hard and as far as possible. But very little science fiction is truly ‘hard’. For one thing, it’s fiction. It may be based on currently accepted scientific fact, but its tone and direction are shaped to some degree or other by the subjective judgements of the author. By bias, exaggeration, and whim.

And I think that’s necessary. Because if you try to work up any kind future history by logic alone, you’ll mostly likely end up some kind of sterile and hermetic thought experiment. Because as soon as you insert a figure into the hard reality of, say, the moonscape of Dione, you drag in the whole mess of human life and history. Who is she? Where is she from? What is she doing there and what does she want? An entire society springs up at her back as she treads down the dusty ice slope of some shattered crater, at the apex of a double shadow cast by saturnshine and attenuated sunlight. And unless it’s some kind of bubble utopia, rigidly bound by logic and as fragile as blown glass, that society is shaped, like ours, to some degree by chance. It’s full of frozen accidents, from the decimal system to the gauge of the railways system. Betamax v. VHS.  MiniDisc v. CD.  Why is this hard to understand? A whole subgenre of SF, alternate history, is based on the idea of history as accident.

So, when I started to build the society of the outer system, I did it partly by trying to work out the logic of how people could live there -- the kinds of technological fixes they’d need - and partly by trying to think my way inside of the heads of people who might live there. Trying to work out how they’d be affected by living inside a completely artificial environment surrounded by a hostile landscape that would kill them instantly if they made a mistake. Wondering if some kind of society based on the way contemporary scientists work and interact was viable. And quite frankly, sticking in all kinds of stuff I stumbled on more or less at random. That seemed to fit into the gestalt of my so-called future. Serendipity is a powerful, and powerfully underestimated, tool in the worldbuilding kit.

SF isn’t predictive. And it isn't utilitarian.  It isn’t about telling us what we should build, or where we are going. Claims otherwise are unhelpful. At best, it attempts to extrapolate from where we are now to some distance in the future - and the greater the distance, the greater the chance of deviation from what will happen. Especially in times like these, where it seems anything might happen at any moment. No, SF isn’t about what will happen. It’s about what might happen. The vast range of what-ifs, from wondering about what might happen if just one thing changes the day after tomorrow to full-blown satires and crazed mutant visions of cosmic apocalypses. It asks hard questions about the future, but it doesn’t promise definitive answers. Anyone who claims otherwise is speaking with a mouth stuffed with straw.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (9)

Draw a straight line from the novels of Douglas Adams, through early Ballard and the cosy catastrophes of John Wyndham, all the way back towards the early novels and stories of H.G. Wells. Pause at 1939, and you'll find R.C. Sherriff's The Hopkins Manuscript, an account of the end of Western civilisation after the Moon smashed into the Earth.  A foreword from the Imperial Research Press, Addis Ababa, sets the tone: the manuscript, ‘a thin, lonely cry of anguish from the gathering darkness of dying England’ is ‘almost valueless to the scholar and historian’, but seven hundred years after the smash, the story of its eponymous narrator is all that is left of what was once a great empire.

Sherriff expertly uses first-person narration to play on Hopkins’ blindness to his own faults. Cambridge-educated, living on a comfortable inheritance in a small village where he plays at gentleman farmer, he’s a Pooterish fellow hyperaware of his social status, preoccupied by small slights and setbacks, and obsessed with chicken breeding; yet there’s a genuine warmth to his character, and an abiding decency that deepens into something like heroism during the countdown towards cataclysm.  As a member of the Lunar Society, Hopkins is one of the first to learn of the impending disaster: his initial reaction is one of relief, for he feared the extraordinary meeting was about the ruinous expense of a new telescope he championed, and a melancholy dread of the End of Things is soon washed away as he continues his life in the village much as normal, his smug sense of superiority bolstered by his secret knowledge. After the revelation becomes public, announced in the village at a church service where many in the congregation mistake the vicar's news for an attempt to better his predecessors's fire and brimstone sermons, the narrative tension sharpens as the government attempts to prepare for the inevitable, and the clock ticks down to doomsday.

Sherriff’s sketches of preparations for disaster are crammed with telling and bathetic details. Hopkins briefly contemplates spending his last days in London, which ‘blazed with light as if it would squander its glittering wealth before it died’.  By day, people stockpile warm clothes and stout boots, wander about public places to no good purpose, and exhibit the ‘faint, pathetic smiles of brave passengers upon a sinking liner’; but at night, they fear to walk the streets despite the presence of soldiers and armed policemen, and there are rumours of banditry. Like the protagonists in The Day of the Triffids or The Death of Grass, 28 Days Later or Survivors, Hopkins yields to the atavistic English belief that cities are teeming pits of crime, while the countryside offers a chance at setting up one’s own pocket empire. He returns to his beloved village in time for a last cricket match, survives the hurricanes and floods that follow the impact, takes in the orphaned daughter and son of the local squire, shows unexpected resilience as he does his bit to help to restore civilisation. Sherriff rightly skimps the details of the reconstruction, generally the most tedious part of any disaster novel, and quickly introduces a new twist: it turns out that the Moon, ancient and hollow (a pseudoscientific theory used Wells in The First Men in the Moon) has collapsed into the Atlantic, bridging Europe and America. At first the new territory appears to be a desert of useless rubble, but then it’s discovered to be rich in minerals, and gas and oil reserves. Europe and America go to war over these riches. Like Toad of The Wind in the Willows, Hopkins has become a wiser and better man, but his incipient heroism has a tragic flaw: no one takes any notice of him. He gives a fine and passionate speech when the squire’s son decides to enlist, but it does no good.  England slowly empties; Hopkins retreats to London, where only a thousand or so people inhabit ruins like ghosts. His story ends on a note of quiet despair, amid rumours of a conquering army advancing from east.

Sherriff, better known as a playwright than a novelist, fought in the First World War and incorporated his experiences in his most famous play, Journey’s End. There are echoes of the themes of that play in The Hopkins Manuscript, and the novel’s account of the inability of ordinary people to look beyond their footling routines and little lives at the bigger picture have parallels with the period of appeasement before the outbreak of the Second World War. But it is above all a very fine catastrophe novel, its cynicism about human nature leavened by sympathetic comedy and shot through with images of otherworldly eeriness transforming quintessential English scenes:

The breathless glory of that rising moon robbed all terror from it and left me humbled and speechless: a blazing, golden mountain range that seemed to press the dark earth from it: clear rays of amber that caught the hills beyond the Manor House and crept down to drink the jet-black darkness of the valley - that flowed over the church and towards the cricket ground, emblazoning that shabby marquee and the threadbare bowling screens into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.

Old Tough New York

I first visited New York City in March 1983, towards the end of the tough old days when bale fires burned in the Bronx, subway cars were armoured in spraycan psychedelia, Times Square was packed with porn stores, teams of rats the size of cats, gentlemen, carried off babies, and in up-and-coming SoHo, Jon Jolcin had opened Protective Fashion, a store selling bulletproof garments to intrepid pioneers.  I had to take a picture (somewhat hastily - maybe I thought I was in a free-fire-zone).

 From the Vegetarian Times, 1984:

The merchandising comes with a $25 million insurance policy - just in case the garments fail to protect as advertised.

The most popular is the ski vest, which sells for $350.

Store owner Jon Jolcin formerly sold bulletproof clothing to the Israeli army before opening his store. Now, he's making more money than ever. "Unfortunately," he says wryly, "business is very good."

The building, at the corner of West Broadway and Watts Street, survives, although Protective Fashion is long gone.  It's an Oliver Peoples' now. selling designer eyeware.  So it goes.

17

I've posted a short story, 17, over on the web site. It was published a dozen years ago in Asimov's Science Fiction, and reprinted five years ago in a small-press collection, Little Machines, now more or less out-of-print. From the afterword:

Traditionally, the CVs of writers, particularly male American writers, are supposed to be stuffed with all kinds of oddball stints of manual labour. Blame Hemingway, I guess, who often wrote standing up because he thought that writing should aspire to the condition of work, and believed the old canard that you should only write about what you know. Personally, I think that sympathetic imagination is at least as important as experience, but the setting of this story is derived from one of my few stints of manual labour, when I worked in a paper recycling factory in the summer between leaving school and starting university. It wasn’t quite as harsh an environment as 17's, but it did have its own peculiar ecology, which I’ve only slightly exaggerated.

Reading Matters

Presented without comment, a list of some of the books I read and enjoyed this year:

Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson
Cheever: A Life - Blake Bailey
Surface Detail - Iain M Banks
Moxyland - Lauren Beukes
Good Girl Wants It Bad - Scott Bradfield
X'ed Out - Charles Burns
Point Omega - Don DeLillo
Zero History - William Gibson
A Life in Pictures - Alasdair Gray
The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
Estates - Lynsey Hanley
A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain - Owen Hatherley
Spirit - Gwyneth Jones
Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay - John Lanchester
The Dervish House - Ian McDonald
The Unofficial Countryside - Richard Mabey
Matterhorn - Karl Marlantes
London Calling - Barry Miles
Ground Control - Anna Minton
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
Hitler's Private Library - Timothy W Ryback
The Hopkins Manuscript - R.C. Sherriff
Just Kids - Patti Smith
Red Plenty - Francis Spufford
Lean On Pete - Willy Vlautin

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.