Life As We Know It

It was a slow night at the Still Point. A little after midnight, Aeshma was thinking of closing up when an old man ankled up and slid onto one of the stools and asked for a shot of Bluewater Collective pear brandy.

'You still carry that stuff don’t you?’

‘This is the only bar in Paris that does,’ Aeshma said, although yo had to root around at the bottom of the racks before yo found the dusty bottle.

The old man closed his eyes after the first sip, saying at last, ‘That’s so like your classic Proustian moment it isn’t even funny.’

He was dressed in red leggings and a black jumper cinched with an antique utility belt. A narrow seamed face, white hair shaved at the sides to leave a crest along the top of his scalp, in the manner of pilots a century ago.

‘I thought I’d stop by, like I did in the old days,’ he said, after taking another sip from his tube of brandy. ‘See if this place was still here. And here it is, exactly as I remember it. Amazing.’

It was a small place, the bar, tucked into the corner of a cut-through in the low-rise neighbourhood of bars, teahouses, restaurants, theatres and song clubs around the Central Market. A bamboo and canvas shack with a counter of polished impact glass and four stools, a little hotplate on which Aeshma prepared snacks, and bottles racked in front of a big mirror, many labelled with the names of regular customers. Aeshma’s grandsire had rebuilt it after the war, and it had been handed down from sire to scion ever since.

The old man introduced himself, Herschel Wu, and said, ‘I guess you must be Aeshma’s kid. Yo’s scion, as you people have it.’

‘You knew my sire?’

‘About a hundred years ago. No, closer to a hundred fifty. Before the Quiet War.’

‘Then you knew my great-grand sire, Aeshma One. I am Aeshma Four.’

‘Yo didn’t call yoself “One”, but yeah. You look just like yo. I guess that isn’t surprising, the way you people do, but that robe of yours, that green leaf pattern, you wore one just like it. Aeshma, Aeshma One, is he still around?’

‘Yo died in the war.’

‘Yeah?  I’m sorry to hear it. A lot of people did. And those that didn’t, most of my friends and relatives, mostly just died of old age while I was away. Back then, before the war, I was a free trader. Mostly lived on my ship. But whenever I was in Paris I’d come here, shoot the shit with your great-grandsire, catch up on news, gossip, tips. And then the Greater Brazilians and the other political gangsters from Earth moved on the Outers, the Quiet War and all that, and some of us took off before they rounded us up or killed us. The Free Outers, we called ourselves. You heard of us, maybe.’

Aeshma shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It’s ancient history. We moved to Uranus at first, and then the Greater Brazilians caught up with us there, so we moved on to Neptune. And then to one of the Centaurs. Nepenthe. We built a nice little garden there. I raised a family, but my partner died and I got the itch to move on. Ended up doing a little tour of the Kuiper belt, which is why I’m here. A science jamboree wants me to talk about what I found out there, what some people call the progenitor bug. Maybe you’ve heard of it.’

Aeshma apologised again, saying that he didn’t keep up with science.

‘No reason why you should, I guess. What are you drinking, Aeshma?’

Aeshma hesitated.  He didn’t like the way Herschel Wu had referred to ‘you people’, as if androgyne neuters were a separate species of human being, suspected that he harboured an ancient prejudice to neuters and their cloned lineages Outers had mostly forgotten. But the old man was an old customer of the Still Point, he’d known Aeshma One, and beneath his bluster he seemed lonely and a little lost. So Aeshma said that he would also have a brandy, and dispensed a shot into a fresh tube and refreshed the old man’s, telling him it was on the house.

‘That’s mighty kind of you,’ the old man said, raising his tube. ‘To your great-grandsire.’

They talked about Aeshma One, and Paris in the old days, the days before the war, before the defeat of Earth’s Three Powers and the re-establishment of the Outers’ hegemony.

‘They tell me this is a golden age of peace and prosperity,’ Herschel Wu said.

Aeshma shrugged. ‘Business here is much as it always was.’

‘You always worked here?’

‘I helped my sire until yo retired, three years ago.’

‘And you’ve always lived on Dione, in Paris.’

‘Of course.’

‘Never went on a wanderjahr, took off on a whim to some other city, some other moon?’

‘We are happy here.  Life is good.  Why change it?’

‘Something I asked myself a hundred years ago,’ Herschel Wu said, ‘when I decided that I’d grown too comfortable, in Nepenthe. That I hadn’t seen all I needed to see. Some of us had been to Pluto, in the old days, and we went back. But there were already people there, and I decided to go further out.’

‘To the Kuiper belt.’

‘There are people in the Kuiper belt, now. But back then, not so much. I plotted a grand tour, skipping from kobold to kobold all the way to the far edge of the belt, sleeping out the transits. I had a good motor on my ship, but distances between kobolds are very large out at the edge, and I used minimum-energy courses to conserve reaction mass. I visited eight in all, over the course of a hundred years. And on one of them I found this,’ Herschel Wu said, and conjured a small sphere of translucent plastic between finger and thumb. ‘The progenitor bug. Go ahead, take a look. It’s laminated. Quite safe.’

Ghostly soap-bubble structures flashed inside the plastic sphere as Aeshma turned it in the glow of one of the star lanterns strung along the fringe of the bar’s canopy.

‘It’s a bacterial cell,’ Herschel Wu said. ‘A specimen of a very big, very strange, very old species of bacteria. They grow in a little subsurface sea I discovered in one of the kobolds I visited. Place almost as big as Pluto, with a moon as big as Pluto’s biggest moon. The sea’s rich in ammonia, kept just the right side of freezing by warmth from tidal friction and residual radioactive decay in the kobold’s core. And these big old bacteria live there. Although strictly speaking they’re not really bacteria. They use RNA instead of DNA, like some viruses, a zoo of short RNA strands in a cytoplasmic matrix. They cleave hydrogen from sulphides, use the energy to fix primordial inorganic carbon dissolved in the sea. And they grow very very slowly, divide once in maybe a hundred thousand years. The scientists are very excited by them. Some claim they are the progenitors of all life in the solar system. You know how life was supposed to have started on Mars?’

‘Not really.’

‘Mars is smaller than Earth, so it cooled more quickly after it formed, and life got started on it while Earth’s oceans were still boiling. And some of that life, Martian bacteria, fell to Earth inside rocks knocked off Mars by big impacts, and kick-started Earth’s biosphere. Also Europa’s. So you might say that we’re all Martians. But then I discovered these RNA bacteria, and now there’s an argument about whether they’re a separate evolutionary domain, or whether they’re the true progenitors of life in the Solar System, unchanged because there’s no evolutionary pressure to change, in their cold little sea. That’s what this jamboree’s all about,’ Herschel Wu said. ‘I’m one of the keynote speakers. Funny
how life turns out, uh?’

‘It’s quite a story,’ Aeshma said, and handed the plastic sphere back.

‘Isn’t it? And it’s better than most traveller’s tales because every word is true.’

They sipped their brandies and talked a little more about old days Aeshma knew only by hearsay. After the old man had gone, Aeshma closed up the bar and drifted home.

Halfway there, yo paused on a slender bridge that arched over the river that ran through the quiet, dark city. Yo was a little dizzy from the brandy, and the cool air above the black water was refreshing. Slow fat waves reflected the webs of little lights strung through the chestnut trees along the banks. Saturn’s big crescent gleamed through the tent’s panes, slanting above flat rooftops. Two people went by on the far bank, shadows under the constellations of the trees. One of them, a woman, laughed at something the other said.

Two lovers in Paris, under Saturn. Aeshma thought of fat, slow globs of slime floating in a frigid sea under the icy skin of a planetoid in the outer dark, undisturbed for billions of years until Herschel Wu came along.  Remote, ancient, strange, nothing at all to do with ordinary life, but why did yo find the thought of them so disturbing?

Aeshma lived in a commune with yo’s scion, yo’s sire, and the members of four other androgyne neuter lineages.  Yo perched on the edge of the sleeping niche of yo’s scion, watching the small child sleep. Three years old, cute as a bug, thumb socketed in yo’s mouth, stirring when Aeshma stroked yo’s fine blond hair. In the commons, Aeshma Three reheated some soup from the stockpot, asked about Aeshma’s day.

‘Oh, you know. The usual.’

Forty Years Ago Today

Apollo 17 descent stage imaged by the lunar rover camera after the ascent stage lifted off at 5.55 PM EST December 14th 1972.

Links 13/12/12

'She's not what you'd call pretty, but she is definitely distinctive.' Specialist facial anthropologist Dr Susan Hayes has reconstructed the face of Homo floresiensis, otherwise known as the 'Hobbit' or 'Flores Man' from the skull of the type specimen, LB1.  LB1 was a woman, and about 30 years old when she died.

Scientists have discovered that cells shed in human urine can be transformed into the precursors of brain cells.

On Mars, the Opportunity rover is investigating a patch of light-toned rock that may consist of clays altered by 'the kind of water you can drink'.

The Cassini spacecraft has imaged a river of hydrocarbons four hundred kilometres long at Titan's north pole, flowing into Ligeia Mare.

A Very British History, Table Of Contents

I have two books scheduled for publication next year. One is a novel, Evening's Empires; the other is a 'Best of' retrospective collection of short stories spanning (good grief) a little over twenty-five years, from PS Publishing. Here's the table of contents:

'Little Ilya and Spider and Box' (1985)
'The Temporary King' (1987)
‘Cross Road Blues' (1991)
‘Gene Wars' (1991)
'Prison Dreams' (1992)
'Children of the Revolution' (1993)
'Recording Angel' (1995)
'Second Skin' (1997)
‘All Tomorrow's Parties' (1997)
'17' (1998)
'Sea Change, With Monsters' (1998)
'How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen' (1999)
'A Very British History' (2000)
 'The Two Dicks' (2001)
‘Meat’ (2005)
‘Rocket Boy’ (2007)
‘The Thought War’ (2008)
‘City of the Dead’ (2008)
‘Little Lost Robot’ (2008)
‘Shadow Life’ (2009)
‘The Choice’ (2011)

There'll also be a limited signed edition, and a special lettered edition, with extra material, including an introduction by Alastair Reynolds.  And the cover will be by Jim Burns.

The Sublime

This is one of my current favourite images taken by the spacecraft Cassini. It's a magnificent panoroma with Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in the foreground, with the icy moon Dione behind it.  Titan's diameter is about 3000 kilometres; Dione's is about 1000 kilometers, but it appears much smaller here because it's further away. If you click to embiggen the image you'll see that Titan is haloed by the upper fringe of its frigid atmosphere of nitrogen leavened with methane and a smoggy mix of hydrocarbons.  Saturn and the ring system are in the background, with the shadow of the ring system thrown across Saturn's southern hemisphere - the sun is beyond the upper left-hand corner of the image.  You can find a high-resolution version of the image here.

The image was taken a year ago, December 22 2011.  After a seven year voyage, with flybys past Venus, Earth, and Jupiter, Cassini entered orbit around Saturn on July 1 2004. The Huygens probe that piggybacked on Cassini landed on Titan's surface soon afterwards, and Cassini has been doing science and taking fabulous images ever since. As I've said many times, much of the inspiration for The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun comes from images taken by a plutonium-powered robot swinging in ever-changing orbits amongst the moons and rings of the second-biggest gas giant in the solar system.

Heaven Is A Place

On the evening of his second day in the Gulf of Ten Billion Blossoms, Rhea, Rickasht Chandrasekaran fell in with a crew who were taking a last break before heading out from the Saturn system to Uranus. This was in the guesthouse in one of the steep little villages that stepped up from the shore of the long lake. Rickasht had reached the village late in the evening, tired and exhilarated after a long hike along a trail that switchbacked through dense semitropical forest, and had been given the last bed. The crew were a boisterous and talkative group of young men and women who sat in a circle on cushions and shaped stones on the guesthouse’s terrace, passing food back and forth and squirting wine into each other’s mouths and making toasts. Several small children ran about. A man was nursing a baby. A woman played a dulcimer, and led a small group in songs that predated the colonisation of the Outer System. Rhythmic handclaps. Laughter. A torrent of happy chatter.

Rickasht found he didn’t mind the crowd, the noise. He could disappear inside it. Nothing was expected of him. He smiled and nodded as two young, earnest men told him that they were going to tent over and landscape an embayment in one of the long, deep canyons that cut the icy surface of Uranus’s largest moon, Titania. The crew’s engineers were already out there, supervising the big construction machines that were pouring the tent’s foundations and fabricating the struts and panes of its diamond-fullerene roof. The people here were mostly gardeners and farmers. It was a working holiday, the two men told Rickasht; they were studying the Gulf’s ecosystems, the kelp forests in its lake, the forests that climbed its walls, the heaths and sedge bogs of its upper reaches. The crew's small tent and its simple biome was the beginning of an ambitious plan to tent the deep, long canyon section by section, and create a garden several dozen kilometres wide and more than five hundred kilometres long. The usual mad ambition of outers, limited only by their imagination.

After a little while he noticed one woman in particular, neat and compact and quiet, long black hair teased into a cascade of ringlets. Almost certainly from Earth, Rickasht thought, and felt a pulse of the old familiar ache in his belly. She noticed his attention and smiled at him, and he looked away, pierced by stupid guilt, then looked back again.

Her name was Nisha Minnot-Varma. She had been born on Mars, the Hellas Basin tent. She’d come out to the Saturn system three years ago, and now she was going further out, like the rest of her companions sinking all her credit and karma into the venture. They talked about adjusting to life in the Saturn system. They talked about Rickasht’s childhood on Earth, in Brasilia; he apologised for knowing very little about Greater Brazil’s rainforests and grassy plains and great rivers. They talked about his work in the reclamation plant in Paris, Dione. They talked about Nisha’s work: she was a microbiologist, had been one of the supervisors of the soil manufacturing plant in Camelot, Mimas. In a way, she said, they were both in the recycling business.

'You don’t need soil to farm, but it’s essential for stable ecosystems of any size. Everything passes through it at some point. . . I am amazed by what they have built here in the Gulf. It’s a huge mosaic, yet fully integrated. Hellas was much bigger, but not as stable. We had a severe crash when I was a child; there was talk of evacuation. We had to wear masks that absorbed the excess carbon dioxide for a whole year. I’ve learned so much here, and now I will put it to practical use. You probably think we are crazy,’ she said, looking at Rickasht sidelong.

Rickasht said something stupid about it being an adventure. She had large brown eyes, Nisha, and beautiful eyelashes. Slender hands, nails painted different shades of blue.

‘We will build a new world,’ she said. ‘A very exciting prospect.’

Rickasht said it was a brave thing to set up a home in the unknown; Nisha said that it was a frontier, yes, but not unknown.

‘There are more than ten thousand people in the Uranus system. Too many already for some of the first pioneers, they are striking out for the Kuiper belt. I find it amazing,’ Nisha said, ‘at how skilled we have become at making ourselves at home out here. Three centuries ago the Saturn system was the frontier. And now there are cities and settlements, farms and gardens, wonderful parklands like this. All carved from ice frozen hard as granite, carbonaceous tars, comet CHON . . . ’

‘And outside it’s still cold and airless and lifeless. And a stupid accident can kill you in an instant,’ Rickasht said, and immediately regretted it. Because he didn’t want to talk about that. A year later, and he still missed Jen every day, her absence was a great wound ripped into his side, but he was tired of talking about it, tired of people’s sympathy.

Nisha was saying something about the stark beauty of the moons, the time she’d walked out across Mimas’s surface the first time, and climbed a pressure ridge and stood for a long time looking out at the tumbled moonscape, under Saturn. She’d walked all the way around Mimas, had been to Enceladus and Iapetus and Titan.

‘I like to visit and study Avernus’s gardens,’ she said. ‘Do you know her work?’

Rickasht said that he’d heard of her, of course.

‘She hid on Titan during the Quiet War, and created several extraordinary gardens there. So simple, so elegant, so strange. She was born on Earth, yet she had a complete understanding of the landscapes of the moons.’

They drank a toast to the famous, long-dead gene wizard. Rickasht confessed that this was the first time he’d left Dione, almost his first time he’d been anywhere outside Paris. They talked about places he should visit, gardens and cities, the great mountains of Iapetus. Sharing a bag of wine, sitting so close Rickasht could feel her warmth. It was late, now. Many people had retired; most of those left where clustered around the dulcimer player. Rickasht tingled with anticipation, tried to formulate an invitation that wouldn’t sound crass or clumsy, and then a young woman ankled over and sat next to Nisha, draping an arm around her shoulders with casual familiarity, and he knew with a plunging sensation how stupid he’d been, and after he’d been introduced he stammered something about needing to sleep, and left.

But he couldn’t sleep, not in the shared dormitory. He couldn’t stay. He grabbed his day bag and set out up the village’s steep dark streets, finding his way by luminous dabs on the path and the yellow light of Saturn’s crescent, tipped beyond the high roof. He was drunk and angry, but when he reached the edge of the village he knew it would be crazy to try to find his way through the forest and the high bluffs, and crept under a great sprawling fig tree.

He woke early, from a silly muddled dream of searching for Jen through endless rooms of a rambling house a little like the villa of his parents, and climbed a steep trail beside a slow fat stream that trickled amongst boulders in a slanting ravine. Hauling himself along tethers in Rhea’s minimal gravity was almost like flying (he’d watched fliers rising in slow spirals on thermals above the lake, but hadn’t dared to rent wings). He paused at a deserted camp site to use its shittery, picked a couple of apple bananas and a handful of figs from bushes alongside the stream, perched on a shelf of pitted siderite to eat his breakfast, went on. Climbed a vertical stair of spikes jammed in the sheer face of a cliff, topped out on a broad belt of grassland, drifted onward for several kilometres.

He’d walk to the endcap, he told himself, and take one of the trains along the narrow- gauge railway on the far side back to the locks, and go home. Back to Dione. Back to Paris and the empty apartment full of dead things and memory traps, and his work.

There were no settlements on the strip of heath, and he saw no other people. The tether he’d been following soon ended, and he ankled on in the low gravity gait he’d learnt long ago, moving only from the knees down. The land rose and fell. Swales of tussock grass. Low thorny trees. Industrious bees working patches of small sweet-smelling flowers as yellow as Earth’s sun. A lone bird piping somewhere. His shame and self-disgust blew away on the warm breeze, dissolved in the quiet beauty of the land.

Late in the afternoon, he found a near-vertical path down to another village. A teahouse, little more than a canvas-roofed wooden platform jutted above the boulders tumbled along the shore of the lake. There were many like it along the lakeshore, but as Rickasht sipped his gyokuro he noticed the pleasant manner of the hostess as she talked to the other customers, the way she smiled at the badinage of her partner as he deftly fried snacks on a hotplate and boiled plump little savoury dumplings. The gyokuro was sweet and delicately perfumed and the food was simple but tasty, bamboo tubes hung under the edge of the roof gently clattered, and there was a tremendous view across the tall, slow waves of the lake to the hazy panorama of the green forests and white cliffs of the far side.

There was a flier high up there, a red mote gliding close to parallel to the pine trees along the edge of the cliffs.

Rickasht thought how much Jen would have liked this place, and the familiar pang was there and gone. Red lanterns under the canvas roof brightened as the chandelier light dimmed, and the hostess came over to Rickasht and asked if he would like more tea. He said why not, asked if there was a guesthouse in the village.

'I think I’ll stay a while.’

Links 07/12/12

A global view of the lights of Earth's cities, assembled from images taken by the NASA-NOAA Suomi satellite.

Images of new craters on Mars created by the impact of two tungsten blocks and the cruise stage of the Mars Science Laboratory.

The crater formed when the Apollo 14 S-IVB stage was intentionally impacted into the Moon. The locations of other Apollo-related Lunar impact sites are listed here.

The rock sculptures of Michael Grab use gravity as glue.

The working group on the Anthropocene.

The Cranes of London

I can see two tower cranes from the window of the room where I write. At night, one fades into the darkness, leaving behind a solitary red star fixed above the horizon; the stalk of the other rises from a spotlit construction site like a rocket gantry. The image of cranes as Martian fighting machines, signalling to each other across the simmering basin of the occupied city, is obvious and more than a little trite, I guess. But it's still startling to turn a corner in central London, as I did yesterday, and be confronted by a boarded construction site with a crane looming over a deep pit where once some solid, respectable Victorian office building stood. Part of the boom in high-rise building that's significantly altering the city's skyline. Volumes of air solidify into real estate stacked inside shimmering glass curtain walls. A restless re-imagining of the city that reminds its scurrying inhabitants of their own transcience.

Science/Fiction

To mimic this architectural complexity in their engineered tissues, the researchers embedded a mixture of brain cells taken from the primary cortex of rats into sheets of hydrogel. They also included components of the extracellular matrix, which provides structural support and helps regulate cell behavior.

Those sheets were then stacked in layers, which can be sealed together using light to crosslink hydrogels. By covering layers of gels with plastic photomasks of varying shapes, the researchers could control how much of the gel was exposed to light, thus controlling the 3-D shape of the multilayer tissue construct. 

'Precisely Engineering 3-D Brain Tissues', MIT News (2012)
 

"This brain isn't frozen," said Tiga-belas indignantly. "It's been laminated. We stiffened it with celluprime and then we veneered it down, about seven thousand layers. Each one has plastic of at least two molecules thickness. This mouse can't spoil. As a matter of fact, this mouse is going to keep on thinking forever. He won't think much, unless we put the voltage on him, but he'll think. And he can't spoil..."

 'Think Blue, Count Two', Cordwainer Smith (1963)

An Experiment

After finishing Evening's Empires, I find I'm not quite done with the Quiet War universe, or future history, or whatever you want to call it. Evening's Empires is the fourth (and, I think, the last) Quiet War novel, and although it's thematically related to In The Mouth of the Whale it's a stand-alone. Those two novels are set about 1500 years after the diptych* of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun; there's a lot of history scanted in between, including the golden age of the Great Expansion and the rise and fall of the True Empire. After posting a couple of stories extracted from Evening's Empires, I've decided to write a few more. Condensed stories. Quick sketches. Fables. Tall tales. Experiments. Glimpses of ordinary lives in strange places.

I hope to post one every week. The first two are already up. I had a lot of fun writing them and hope to write at least ten more. That's twelve stories in twelve weeks - a season's worth. When I've finished, I should, with a couple of much longer pieces, have enough for a short ebook. That's the plan. That's the challenge.

I think that anyone who's starting out writing should find exercises like this useful. Think carefully about what you want to write - a character sketch, a situation, a dialogue - and then get it down in a couple of hundred words. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two. Stick closely to the original idea; omit all that's inessential; write straight through from the beginning to the end and only then go back and start cutting and tweaking.  If it doesn't work, try again. As with reading, a great deal of writing uses skills that can only be improved by practice.


*A diptych is essentially a trilogy with the difficult middle volume omitted.

Ghost Of The Holloway

As Saturn’s icy moons swung around the gas giant, their leading faces were bombarded with high-energy electrons that over thousands upon thousands of years compacted the original surfaces of fluffy water-ice grains to hard-packed ice. Human beings following paths around the moons had altered their surfaces, too. Over the centuries, walkers wore down the ice and created holloways that in the most heavily-trafficked parts were depressed a metre or more beneath the original surface. Sunken paths or grooves with branching tributaries that linked present walkers to all the walkers of the past.

The equator of every large moon was girdled with at least one holloway, worn by countless people who trekked around them on wanderjahrs, seeking adventure or enlightenment, or escaping from the noisy crush of civilisation. There were races to circumnavigate the moons by foot, while others engaged on solitary pilgrimages. Sky Saxena was one such pilgrim, a clever, headstrong man in his early twenties. After fleeing from his family and the obligations of his inheritance, he had decided to impose shape and order on his life by attempting to walk around the largest of Saturn’s regular, icy moons – Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus. A quest only a celebrated few had completed since the Saturn system had first been settled more than four centuries ago.

Sky had set out from Camelot, Mimas, twenty-two days ago, travelling east. A straight path girdling the little moon’s equator would have been a little more than twelve hundred kilometres long, but there were no straight paths because Mimas’s frozen surface preserved the cratering caused by the period of heavy bombardment, and one especially large crater, Herschel, was about a third of Mimas’s diameter and floored with a chaos of ridges and tabular mounts and canyonlands that circled a gigantic central peak. There was no easy route across it, and despite the help of his suit’s eidolon Sky discovered that he had spent six hours trekking down a long and crooked canyon that ended in high cliffs impossible to climb. It was night. His air was low, barely enough to make it back to the shelter he’d set out from that morning, and a fault in the lifepack’s catalytic purger meant that the partial pressure of carbon dioxide was building to critical levels. Faint and dizzy, with twenty kilometres still to go, he sat on a block of pitted ice under the pitiless stars, and by starlight saw a shadowy figure beckoning to him from the top of a steep slope of tumbled ice blocks, and heard a faint voice on the common channel.

Come with me if you want to live.

With the last reserves of his strength and resolve, Sky followed the figure across a series of ridges like frozen waves to the lee of a cliff. There was a narrow passage, an airlock hatch, and a small, utilitarian shelter beyond: cell-like rooms off an H of short corridors dimly lit by failing lamps, the air chill and stale but breathable. Sky’s rescuer was an old man with a shock of white hair and a bent back who moved restlessly amongst the shadows, instructing Sky on how to link his p-suit’s lifepack with the shelter’s antique machinery, showing him where ration packs were stored. The shelter dated from the Quiet War, according to the old man, built by the resistance to the occupying powers from Earth three centuries ago.

After he had eaten, Sky sat in a slingbed in one of the little rooms, and fell asleep listening to the old man’s stories of the war. When he woke, he was quite alone. The old man was gone, although his p-suit remained in the airlock’s dressing frame, with his name, Leonardo Santos, stencilled across its stout, scarred chestplate.

When Sky told the story of his rescue at his next stop, a farm tent, there was a short silence as the farmers studied him, and then one of them said that he’d been rescued by a ghost.

‘My mother told me that he had been a Greater Brazilian trooper in the old war,’ she said. ‘He and his comrades massacred twenty resistance fighters, and after the war he became a hermit, living in one of the old shelters, helping travellers. He died at least two hundred years ago, but people still claim to glimpse him now and then. He’s said to have led several people to safety after they became lost in the canyonland, but you’re the first to have met him that I know of.’

There were rational explanations, of course. Sky thought long and hard about them as he walked on the next day. He had been suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, and the old man had been an hallucination, or some kind of dream. In reality, his p-suit’s eidolon had led to the shelter, or perhaps the eidolon of the old man’s p-suit had somehow reached out to him. But whether he found the shelter himself, or whether he had been led to it, Sky knew that owed the old man his life, and knew now that there was no need to define himself by solitary pilgrimages, no need to become a kind of wandering ghost. He was too proud to return to his family, not yet, but knew that he could find some good and useful work in the cities and settlements of the Saturn system, and walked on along the holloway in long bounding strides, light as a bird in the minimal gravity, the rugged little moon wheeling away beneath his boots.

Links 30/11/12

'At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.'  After days of fevered media speculation, NASA gets around to killing a rumour with the facts.

NASA hasn't found plastic beads on Mars, either.

On the other hand, the Messenger spacecraft has identified water-ice and organic material in permanently shadowed regions at the north pole of sunblasted Mercury.

'Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?' Talking of internet rumours, a long article in the New York Times about a lone, eccentric scientist who may have discovered the key to immortality in a species of jellyfish, is swiftly and thoroughly critiqued.

Apparently, my story 'The Choice' didn't win an award I didn't know it was shortlisted for.  Oh well.

Still, in his roundup of the best science-fiction novels of the year, Adam Roberts says some nice things about In The Mouth of the Whale and picks M. John Harrison's Empty Space as his book of the year. Mine too.

This is not a Rubik's Cube.

But these are fish.

Operation Deep Sounding

Cash was falling free through Saturn’s vast skies at a steep angle, making slow S-turns to bleed off excess velocity. He eyeballed Vera Jackson’s singleship falling ahead of him, about fifty kilometres to the east, looked for and failed to find any sign of the pod dropped by the shuttle, uploaded a status check to mission control and acknowledged the congratulations of the mission commander.

‘On my mark,’ Vera said, and counted down from ten.

Cash deployed his drogue parachutes at zero and there was a thump and a tremendous corkscrewing jerk as the parachutes swung him around and checked his forward momentum, and then he was falling nose down through a vast clear ocean of hydrogen and helium at just under a hundred kilometres an hour, in a prevailing air current that was taking him eastwards at about five times that speed. In about ten hours, if he kept falling at his present rate, he would reach the beginning of the amorphous boundary between the gaseous atmosphere and the deep ocean of hot metallic hydrogen that lay beneath, although long before then the singleship would have been crushed and scorched to a cinder by tremendous pressures and temperatures. Not even tough, heavily shielded robot probes had ever penetrated to more than half the depth of the gaseous phase of Saturn’s atmosphere. The two singleships would fall for only three hours, dropping through the liquid-water zone before igniting their motors and departing.

If everything went well, they’d pass close to their target. And even if they missed it, the packages they planned to release contained autonomous drones that could ride the winds of Saturn for months while they tracked it down and searched for other anomalies. Meanwhile, Cash had a few moments to enjoy the tremendous panorama wrapped around him. It was early morning. The sky was deep indigo and seemingly infinite, the sun a tiny flattened disc that glowered at the hazy horizon, the centre of concentric shells of bloody light that rose towards zenith. In every direction, the crystalline hydrogen atmosphere stretched for thousands of kilometres, broken only by a few wisps of cloud formed from frozen ammonia, looking just like ordinary cirrus cloud and tinged pink by dawn light. He felt like a king of this whole wide world, an emperor of air, and told Vera that this place was definitely made for flying.

‘I hear that,’ Vera said.  ‘Check out the storm. We’re right in the pipe.’

Below, halfway to the eastern horizon, a creamy ocean of cloud rifted apart around the storm’s great oval eye. With interrupted arcs of cloud and clear air curved around it, it looked much like a hurricane back on Earth. In fact, everything seemed eerily familiar. Blue sky, white clouds, the sun gaining a golden hue as it lifted above the horizon. It took an effort to remember that the distance to the horizon was more than ten times that on Earth. That the storm was two thousand kilometres across. That the sky was hydrogen and helium a thousand kilometres deep, with cloud layers of ammonium ice above and decks of ammonium hydrosulphide and ammonium-rich water-ice and water-droplet clouds below, endlessly blowing around this vast world.

From The Quiet War (2008)

Image taken by the Cassini spacecraft on November 27th.  More here.

Meteorphagy

So apparently the Mars rover Curiosity has found something very interesting in the soil it scooped up in Gale crater, but we won't know what it is until the science crew have finished double- and triple-checking their results. The consensus is that it is some kind of organic material, and over on his blog my pal Oliver Morton points out that this isn't unexpected, given that have been meteors delivering organic matter to the surface of Mars for billions of years.

Meanwhile, scientists studying Lake Vida in Antarctica have discovered a rich bacterial ecosystem in its frigid, briny water, considerably extending the definition of 'hospitable to life'. At -13 °C, Lake Vida has been locked beneath a cap of ice twenty metres thick for almost three thousand years, permanently dark and lacking free oxygen. Without light and photosynthesis, the microbes need some other energy source. It's possible that they can utilise energy produced by chemical reactions between the briny water and iron-rich sediments, so that, unlike most ecosystems on Earth, they don't need organic material ultimately produced by capturing sunlight.  Which has obvious implications for the kinds of life that may exist in brines that might be found deep beneath the Martian surface, or in the cold and sunless oceans under the icy surfaces of moons like Jupiter's Europa, Saturn's Enceladus, or Neptune's Triton. But it's also possible that the microbes have been ekeing out a living by scavenging a bare residue of dissolved carbon compounds.  Which makes me wonder if there might not be icy worldlets in the outer reaches of the solar system, or in dust and debris belts around other stars, whose subsurface oceans are intermittently penetrated by meteorites. As the ice around the impact site seals over, there's a sudden blooming of life as microbes and other organisms - meteorphages - compete for organic material dissolving in the frigid brine, frantically growing and reproducing until the material is exhausted. The brief meteor spring is over, and everything switches to survival mode and shuts down, waiting for the next impact in a thousand or ten thousand years . . .

Photographing The Future

It's easy to see or to photograph the past: just look up at the night sky. Because of the immense distances and because light can travel at no more than 299, 792, 458 metres per second, everything you see up there is a message from the past. Our views of the Moon from Earth are 1.28 seconds in the past. The Sun is, on average, 8 minutes 17 seconds in the past. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 years 80 days in the past. And so on. The deeper you look into the sky, the deeper you look into the history of the universe.

But photographing the future is much harder. I've been trying to capture scenes illuminated by future light using a large format camera at maximum aperture in a completely darkened box subject to different temperatures, pre-exposure protocols, etc, but so far I haven't been able to resolve anything. It isn't because there's a lack of light - of information. It's there, but it's scattered, and each photon is subject to interference from uncertainty 'ghosting'. As a result, almost everything we think we perceive is due to pareidolia, as our brains try to impose order on vague and random structures mostly drowned in lightfog. So far, our few glimpses of the future have been little more than consensual hallucinations, which is why I think my naive photographic experiments, sponsored by the Mundane Science Fiction Society, are important. After all, to paraphrase the motto of the society, it is important to prevent imagination from influencing the truth about what hasn't yet happened.

 The future, earlier today.

Barbara Allen And Sweet Billie

When Barbara Allen stopped at Ceres to sell a load of janky machinery ripped from a derelict biome cored through a small rock-pile, she was visited by an eidolon of her first lover, Sweet Billie, who told her that he was dying. And she decided, what the hell, to pay him a visit. She’d grown up with him in the domes of New Old London, Pallas, they’d run away together to become junk peddlers, and she still had unresolved issues about the way he’d treated her while they’d been celebrating their first real coup on Tannhauser Gate, twenty years ago. When they’d been very young and everything had been new and intense, and love had so easily turned to hate, and they’d broken their partnership and each had sworn never to see the other again. And that was the first thing she told him, when she reached his dying bed on a terrace overlooking the cold blue waters of the Piazzi Sea.

‘The way you looked at other women when you were with me, it broke my heart,’ she said. ‘The way you looked at them, and praised their beauty. And the way you danced with them.’

‘I remember how cruel and foolish I was,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I invited you here. I lost you, and I’ve bitterly regretted it every day, and now I’m dying I want to beg for your forgiveness.’

He was gaunt and naked, and the right side of his body had been transformed into coralline stone by mites he’d caught while fossicking in some old ruin in the outer belt.

‘You’re right about one thing,’ Barbara said.  ‘You’re dying. But you will have to die without my forgiveness.’

And she turned and left him and caught a rail car that travelled halfway around the little world, back to the elevator head in Stumptown. But she hadn’t gone more than a hundred kilometres when Sweet Billie’s eidolon appeared, and told her that he was dead. And she felt something cold and dark break apart inside her, and started crying. By the time she reached Sumptown, her right arm was paralysed and her skin was cold and growing hard and scaly. Within two months, she died of the same mite sickness.

Some said that Sweet Billie had infected her, either in revenge for her heartlessness, or out of foolish and selfish love, so that they would finally be together. Others said that Barbara had broken quarantine protocol and deliberately infected herself, out of remorse. She died, they said, calling for her dead lover, and was buried next to him in the great old graveyard on the cold stone plain beyond the domes of New Old London. And on her grave they planted a sunflower vacuum organism, and on Sweet Billie’s grave a vacuum organism that somewhat resembled a red briar. And in the long cold years the two vacuum organisms grew slowly and surely together, and twined in a true lovers’ knot, the sunflower and the red briar.

But others said that was no more than an old song from the long ago, and that Barbara Allen did not fall ill after she left her old lover’s death bed, but went up and out to search for salvage amongst the thousand thousand ruins of the belt, and either died in some accident, alone and unmarked, or made her fortune and bought an exoship and set out for one of the far colonies around a distant star, and is travelling still, dreamlessly asleep in a glass coffin.

A Story

The Trues had conquered Ceres, the Koronis Emirates, and half a hundred lesser kingdoms and republics, and as they began to probe the defences of Mars the Czarina dispatched twenty of her paladins to search for the armill of one of her ancestors, which was believed to augment the wisdom of its wearer and control secret caches of powerful weapons and squads of shellback troopers from the long ago.

After adventures in the deserts and mountains of the red planet, fighting bandits, dust ghouls, and rogue gene wizards and their monstrous offspring, the paladin was riding through the trackless forests of the Hellas Basin when she discovered a circular lake with a slim, bone-white tower rising from its centre. As she approached the slender bridge that arched between shore and tower, another rider came out of the trees and challenged her: a rogue paladin whose armour, like hers, had lost its devices and beacons to battle-damage and sandstorms. They drew their vorpal blades and spurred their chargers and flew at each other. Their chargers bit and mauled each other and collapsed; the paladins fought on into the night.

Sparks and flames from their clashing blades lit up the lake and the tower, and the red rain of their blood speckled the stones of the shore. Both were grievously wounded, but neither would yield. At last, the paladin dispatched her enemy with a killing thrust, but when she wrenched off his helmet she discovered that he was her own brother. As she wept over his body a man dressed in black furs appeared. He gathered her into his arms and carried her across the bridge, into the tower. She glimpsed the armill, a slim platinum bracelet set on a bolster inside a crystal reliquary; then its guardian carried her down a spiral stair to a basement room, stripped off her damaged armour, and lowered her into the casket of an ancient medical engine.

When the paladin woke, she was hungry and thirsty, and very weak. The room was dark, the stairs were blocked by rubble, her armour was gone. After she clawed her way out, she discovered that the tower was in ruins. There was no sign of the reliquary and its guardian, and the lake was dry and the forest all around was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps.

She had been asleep for a century.  Mars had fallen to the Trues. The Czarina and her family were long dead; her battalions and her ships were destroyed or scattered. The last paladin dug up the grave of the brother she had killed, put on his armour, and went out into the world and waged a long and terrible war against the conquerors of Mars. She was a fierce and relentless enemy, driven by remorse and guilt. She killed everyone who pursued her, including five suzerains, and raised an army of brigands and sacked the ancient capital. But nothing could atone for the mortal sin that had derailed her quest. When she and the tattered remnant of her army were at last cornered in the Labyrinth of the Night by five squadrons of elite shock troopers, she died with her dead brother’s name on her lips.

Homework

So I turned in the edited manuscript of Evening's Empires on Tuesday, and discussed the changes I'd made with my editors yesterday. As usual, I'd done rather more than fix glitches and inconsistencies they'd spotted -- it takes me a year to write a novel, and then it takes me three months to fix and polish it.  It's scheduled for publication on July 18th next year, twenty-five years after publication of my first novel with Gollancz, Four Hundred Billion Stars. I am as old as dirt.

I have been planning something for that 25th anniversary, by the way, with the help of the good people of PS Publishing. More about that soon.

Meanwhile, I'm researching the background of a story:
The interior of a Lun class ekranoplan;
Tropical kit worn by Russian naval officers;
What the topography of Venus would look like if its surface was cool enough to support liquid water;
Carboniferous megafauna . . .

I've been doing what amounts to homework for almost three decades. That hasn't got old, not at all.

Fast Stars

Supernovae are very violent events.  Very very very violent events.  Burning for just few days, a supernova emits as much light and other radiation as the sun will emit in its lifetime; so much light that it briefly outshines the combined luminosity of every other star in its galaxy.  There are two basic types of supernova: the first is triggered by the collapse of a supermassive star; the second by the reignition of nuclear fusion in a white dwarf star.  White dwarfs are the remnants of stars of average mass that have used up their hydrogen and, because the heat of fusion processes is no longer countering gravity, have collapsed into dense spheres of electron-degenerate matter and are slowly radiating away their stored energy (more massive stars collapse into even denser neutron stars).  But if a white dwarf is orbiting close to a companion star it can draw off and accumulate material until a runaway carbon fusion process ignites and destroys the white dwarf.  The properties and luminosity of these supernovae, called Type 1a, are so uniform that they can be used as standard candles to determine the distance to the galaxy in which they briefly flare.

But sometimes, like a misfiring firework, Type 1a supernovae sputter out before they reach peak luminosity.  A new computer simulation model suggests that these failed supernovae contain multiple ignition points that expand the white dwarf too quickly and prevent full detonation of the star.  Instead, there's an asymmetric explosion, something like a rocket jet.  The kick of this explosion could, apparently, accelerate the white dwarf to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second, enough to rip it out of orbit around its companion star, or even to turn it into a hypervelocity star travelling at a speed that would enable it to escape from the Milky Way.  Imagine weaponising a supernova, turning a white dwarf into a bullet of electron-degenerate matter with the mass of the sun . . .

And if that isn't weird enough, it's not the only way that hypervelocity stars can be created.  Stars orbiting close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way accelerate as they swing around it.  Here's a neat simulation of the actual stars tracing their orbits:



If a multiple star system swings too close to the black hole, one of its members could gain enough momentum to escape its orbit, and zoom away at high speeds.  When I wrote about this in Eternal Light, back in 1991, this was just a hypothesis. Since then, the Hubble telescope has spotted a massive hypervelocity star heading out from the galactic centre at some 2.6 million kilometres per hour, three times the sun's velocity as it traces its orbit around the galaxy. You really don't need to make it up . . .

Edge of Infinity

Just as I send the edited manuscript of Evening's Empires via the ether to my publishers, the doorbell ring ring rings on this damp darkening November afternoon - it's the Fedex guy, delivering my author's copy of Edge of Infinity, an anthology of stories about the next stage in the space age.  Edited by Jonathan Strahan, it features a baker's dozen of stories by a knockout selection of stellar authors, and, er, me:

1. Introduction, Jonathan Strahan
2. The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi, Pat Cadigan
3. The Deeps of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear
4. Drive, James S.A. Corey
5. The Road to NPS, Sandra McDonald & Stephen D. Covey
6. Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh, John Barnes
7. Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden, Paul McAuley
8. Safety Tests, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
9. Bricks, Sticks, Straw, Gwyneth Jones
10. Tyche and the Ants, Hannu Rajaniemi
11. Obelisk, Stephen Baxter
12. Vainglory, Alastair Reynolds
13. Water Rights, An Owomayela
14. The Peak of Eternal Light, Bruce Sterling

All the stories have their own take on what it might be like to live out there, in the rich, diverse and dynamic Solar System revealed by several generations of robot explorers, from the Pioneers to Cassini-Huygens, New Horizons, and Dawn.  My story, 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, the Potter's Garden', is a little tale of ordinary life set in the Quiet War's solar system, several decades after the war and its aftermath described in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.  It's the beginning of a long golden afternoon in history, with peace on Earth and in the heavens, and humanity spreading into the Solar System and heads out towards exoplanets circling near stars.  And a civil servant in Egypt receives an invitation to her father's funeral in a little settlement on Saturn's icy moon Dione . . .

English Stained Glass, The Cloisters, New York

Space dragon holds up a chalice so that his astronaut pal, armed with a power scroll, can chastise the devil alien trapped inside it.

Exomemory

On their own, single cells of cellular slime moulds are closely similar to amoebae, naked blobs of protoplasm enclosed in a cytoplasmic membrane, wandering through the water films around soil particles and leaf litter.  But when they get together, they start to express a variety of complex behaviours and structures.  They aggregate into networks of threads or into big slug-like blobs that act as a single organism, and during sexual reproduction differentiate into complex sporangia.  And they also secrete mucous trails that act as a kind of exomemory, helping them navigate through their environment and locate food.  They lack a nervous system, but display a kind of intelligence.  Like ants (which create scent-based forage trails), like human beings, they are able to create a form of external notation about their history.  A kind of writing.  Maps.  Diaries.  Epic slime-mould odysseys.

For the past two years I've been laying down my own trail, a sequence of about 130,000 words in the form of a novel, Evening's Empires, and travelling over it again and again, altering and refining it, draft upon draft.  I've now just about finished the final stage of editing (I'm taking a break from hunting down adverbs, querying their usefulness, and eliminating them if they don't pass muster).  Next week, the manuscript goes back to my editor, who'll pass it on to the copy editor for a close reading that will query every word.  When I've responded to that, the novel will be set in type and pass through the proofreading stage, a last chance to comb out errors, and then it will go into production.  And at last join that part of the human exomemory, vast and very nearly measureless, located in bookshops, libraries, and book-like electronic devices.

Let's Put The Future Behind Us*

I was going to write about realism and space fiction, and at some point I will, but something I discovered via SF Signal (which does a nice job of aggregating all kinds of links to science fiction and fantasy stuff) got under my skin this morning, and it's an itch I can't resist scratching.

Over on the web site of the Science Fiction Writers of America, author and astronomy professor Michael Brotherton published a list of ten hard science fiction novels that have stood the test of time.  I don't want to pick an argument with Michael Brotherton, specifically.  The ten books he's chosen are all solid, often award-winning novels from science fiction's rich and storied history, and he gives good and interesting reasons for selecting them.  He knows his science fiction, and he knows his science.  The problem isn't that there's anything wrong with the list he's generated using his criteria, apart from one obvious thing I'll get to in a minute, but that it exemplifies the way science fiction is all too often backward looking.  The problem is with the criteria.  Specifically with that cute little phrase 'stood the test of time.'

The oldest novel on the list is Hal Clement's A Mission of Gravity, serialised in 1953; the most recent is Carl Sagan's Contact, from 1985.  It's true that everything on the list has stood the test of time, but science has moved on.  A lot.  Three of the novels deal with problems in Newtonian physics; two with using radio astronomy to contact aliens; two more with relativistic dilation effects.  Given their vintage, none deal with or could be expected to deal with anything approaching the current bleeding edge of science - the new cosmology, brane theory, string theory, dark matter, nanotechnology, quantum computing, most modern biotechnological techniques, and on and on.   The list isn't a bad list (except for the obvious problem), but like too many lists of its kind - and science fiction fans and writers love to produce lists - it was produced by looking backwards, not forward, by framing the selective criteria to include a bunch of the usual suspects and to exclude anything even remotely recent.

It also, and now I'm getting to the obvious problem, does not include any hard sf novels by women, or by writers of colour.  At all.  Michael Brotherton does acknowledge this, and names some writers he might have included if he wasn't looking backwards.  He also mentions some writers whose careers began after 1985, and notes, again quite rightly, that 'a field this rich can’t be captured in a top ten list.'  Absolutely.  But it doesn't stop people making lists, all too often generated by criteria that exclude much of science fiction's current variety.  So here's an idea.  Why not frame your lists to exclude the obvious suspects?  Why not make lists of ten great hard sf novels by women, or by non-Western writers?  Or how about twenty mindblowing hard sf novels of the twenty-first century?  Here are a few to get you going on the latter: Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder, Justina Robson's Natural History, M. John Harrison's Light, Tricia Sullivan's Maul. Any others?

*title filched from Jack Womack's fine satirical novel about post-Soviet Russia

Two Stories

Two stories in particular stayed with him. In one, a young woman on Saturn’s giant moon Titan discovered one of the fabled gardens created by the great gene wizard Avernus, hidden inside a bubble habitat buried at the bottom of a deep rift. When she cycled through its airlock the young woman found that it still lovely and perfect centuries after the gene wizard’s death: groves of slender birch trees standing amongst black rocks and lawns of thick black moss, lit by bright chandeliers. But as she walked through it, it began to die. Chandelier light dimmed to an eldritch glow. Her p-suit boots left white prints in the moss that began to grow like puddles of spilt milk. The fresh green leaves of the birches around her darkened, turned red, and began to fall, a red snow fluttering down across the dying, piebald lawns. And the paper-white bark of the trees began to darken too, turning black as soot. The young woman realised that she had triggered the garden’s death, that she had become Avernus’s collaborator in a work of art. That she was the sole witness to its transient beauty. The spills of white widening across the floor. The red leaves fluttering down. The skeletons of the leafless trees blackening as if consumed by an invisible fire. She sat in the middle of the garden, aching with sorrow and wonder and awe.

The second story began in a holy city threatened with invasion by a True battle fleet.  The city's two priest-kings burned the sole copy of the sacred book at the heart of their religion, so that it would not fall into the hands of the infidels, and divided their people into two groups and fled into the Kuiper belt. The priest-kings had memorised every word in the book; each established a refuge where the children and children’s children of their followers learned the sacred text by heart. But as generation succeeded generation errors crept into the memorised text, subtly changing it, subtly changing the creed and customs of the religion. A million years passed. At last, the long, slow orbits of the icy kobolds of the refuges brought them close.  After first contact the two groups immediately declared war, each convinced the other was a nest of heretics, and the bitter battles left no survivors.

Just Like Science Fiction

A genre is a warehouse of tropes.  No, it's like an Ikea catalogue. You could use it to furnish a house.  Or it's like one of those old Sears Roebuck catalogues: you could use it to furnish a life.  But no matter how much you rearrange the furniture, you can't escape the feeling that the house you've built is no more than a variation of all the other houses furnished by the same catalogue.  It's a roomy old catalogue, but it's much smaller than the world.

Some of the items you can order from the science-fiction catalogue aren't quite ready for the real world.  They may seem plausible or possible, but they're unrealised possibilities, golden vapourware.  Others are tick marks on a fantasy wishlist.  But there are items that were once golden vapourware that have escaped from the pages of the genre catalogue.  Space stations and satellites and spacecraft.  Cyberspace and robots.  They are part of the furniture of the happening world.  And the world continues to find new uses for them, and their importance to us continues to change, just as they continue to change us.  A science-fiction writer can choose to deal with them as if they were still no more than catalogue images, as if robots (for instance) are still no more clanking, vaguely human-shaped metaphors for oppressed workers, or machines too powerful to control, or unfallen humans, or silver-metal lovers.  But she would be looking backwards, or inwards.  She wouldn't be writing about the future; she wouldn't even be writing about the present.  She would be writing a fantasy polder about some future of days long past.

Here's an idea: why not write about them as they are now, or as they might become? Why not write about robots that are extensions of ourselves, in our blood, at the bottom of the ocean, falling past the heliopause? Why not write about killer drones, panopticon drones, soft robots, robots on Mars, robots swinging around Saturn's rings and moon, microscopic robots, surgical robots, cockroach robots, robot cockroaches, swarming robots, hive robots, spam robots, robots that connect to satellites and plot your route through the world, robots that live in your phone and help you live your life, wave-rider robots. . .

Push what they are, what they can to do, how they are changing us, as hard and as fast as you can.  Turn them into metaphors for the way we live, the way we might live, new angles on the human condition.  Mash them.  Mutate them.  Make them dance.  Make them sing.

Just like science fiction.

Let's All Get Real

Back in May, Arthur Krystal published a piece in The New Yorker attempting to put some clear blue water between genre and literary fiction.  Lev Grossman presented a slew of exceptions to Krystal's arguments, and suggested that Krystal's so-called clear-cut division was falsified by writers working from the edge of genres outward, and the many recent literary novels that found their own uses for genre tropes and narrative vitality.  If there is a border, it's porous in both directions.  And now Krystal had revisited his argument in another New Yorker piece, asserting that genre is basically commercial fiction, while literature is art, baby, with a capital A, its carapace glimmering with ambiguity, its heart pumping the rich blood of 'felt life'.

I was planning to write something about Krystal's circular logic and claims of exceptionalism re literary fiction, but by the time I started to think about getting around to it, several people smarter than me had already cut him down.  We've been here before, far too many times.  It's like man-made climate change: there are the facts on the ground, and there are the arguments that those who want to deny those facts or claim they aren't important trot out time and again, no matter how many times they're proven to be based on partial data or to be just plain wrong.  It's necessary to engage with splitters like Krystal, I guess, and maybe it's even useful . . . but it's getting old.

Still, a short passage in Krystal's piece does have the sting of (partial) truth:

...perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us.

I was trying to figure out how to link this to a new essay by Paul Kincaid, in which he returns to his argument about a growing sense of exhaustion in the science-fiction field, and suggests that the problem lies in the heartland of science fiction.  Which I think is more or less congruous with what we might call 'commercial' science fiction - those novels which make up the bulk of publishers' lists, and which tend to be self-contained polders which either have little connection with the present, or simplify its complex ambiguities to stirring tales of right and wrong, light and dark, heroes and villains.  And which tend to consist of rearrangements of genre furniture that are sometimes elegant, but don't contain any new tropes, and usually don't examine in any radical way the premises on which they are founded.

Krystal's piece pulls that old trick of judging literary fiction by its best examples, and genre fiction by its worst.  And too much criticism within the science-fiction field doesn't distinguish between commercial sf, which is trying to construct new and engaging stories within a defined framework, and the edgier stuff, which is trying to do something else.  One of the things Paul Kincaid is trying to do, I think, is attempting to work out what that distinction means. It's good, useful stuff.  I don't agree with all of it.  I certainly think, like Kincaid, that too much science fiction looks 'inward', but I wouldn't make a strong distinction between science fiction that attempts to revitalise genre tropes and science fiction that attempts to inject new ideas for 'outside'; some of those tropes have escaped into the real world, and by engaging with them and using them to discover new meanings science fiction is in dialogue with both its own ideas and with the real.  But it's laying the groundwork for all kinds of debates that stimulate writers and readers, and refresh the field and widen its possibilities, and crack open the limitations and boundaries (too often self-imposed) that, according to critics like Krystal, consign genre fiction to the outer dark of the second-rate.

Found Poetry

Found while trawling the internets, a brief article on manipulating photons, which might have implications in creating nanoscale circuitry. I'm not really interested in the workings of 'entirely new class of devices that use light instead of electricity' that could be used in 'applications ranging from accelerators and microscopes to speedier on-chip communications'.  Too mundane.  But wouldn't it be lovely to write a story, or even a sentence, that sings with the found poetry of synthetic magnetism, photonic crystals, breaking time-reversal symmetry, photon control?

Edna Sharrow

 

Edna Sharrow was born in Glastonbury on All Souls Day, 1876. Claiming to be the last true black witch, she became a supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s and fled her homeland after a failed attempt to turn the gold reserves of the Bank of England into iron pyrites.

She survived the last days of Hitler's bunker and kidnap attempts by the KGB, the CIA, and Mossad, returned to London in the 1960s, and drew a circle of protection around herself in a ground floor flat in Essex Road, Islington.

She's been there ever since, living on spiders, woodlice, and pallid tendrils of ivy that curl through the rotten courses of mortar of the kitchen wall. A few weeks ago, a young crack addict broke into the flat, hoping to find something he could sell for his next fix. Edna patched the broken pane in the front door with cardboard charged with a sly charm. An open invitation to another desperate chancer.

She'd forgotten how good fresh meat tasted. After another meal, she'll be ready to go back into the world.

Next Episode Here

Bait (Ori)

The drones flew east at a steady six hundred kph, twenty-six of them, each separated from each by five kilometres. At last the supervisor spoke, said that the predators had left the ship. And soon afterwards the drones were on station, above the pale eye of a semi-permanent storm embedded in laminar flows and intricate swirls. Ori began to fly doglegs from point to point, a small part of a pattern woven across ten thousand square kilometres of sky, and broke out the signal package and began to broadcast. Electronic noise, false radar images, chatter. All low-level and fragmented, as if leaking past corrupt shielding, a honey-pot simulation designed to lure in enemy probes. Bait.

An hour passed, and another hour. The predators were on station now, moving in wide and random circles beyond the drones’ honeypot. The supervisor spoke at intervals, telling the jockeys to stay frosty, chiding one or another of them if they exceeded error parameters.

And, in the south, a star fell.

It fell in a long curve, arcing in above the cloudscape. It was small and faint and white, suddenly flaring blood-red and winking out. For several seconds nothing else happened. Then new stars appeared amongst the fixed stars. Two sets of them, moving quickly towards each other in short brief arcs, radiating out from opposing central points, passing in opposite directions, flaring, vanishing. All in perfect silence and without registering on any of the drone’s senses. Whatever it was, it was happening beyond the planet’s atmosphere: Ori used a simple triangulation method to determine that it was slightly over fifteen thousand kilometres away.

And more of these patterns were appearing all over the black sky in the south and east, tiny and bright and sharp and distinct. Ori, still flying her drone point to point with mindless regularity because she hadn’t been told to do anything else, imagined opposing fleets of ships firing at each other as they passed. A hundred of them, two hundred. Guttering out one by one until the sky was quiet again. Then something flared dead ahead, a little way above the area where the enemy was expected to enter the atmosphere. It brightened and spread, a kind of gauzy grid of faint electric-blue lines defining a loose net that was growing across the sky, dividing it into cells hundreds of kilometres across. It was the defence net, generated by forts orbiting at the inner edge of the rings.

Soon, tiny lights began to swarm inside the net’s grid, swirling and darting here and there with quick and seemingly aimless agitation. Lights in a particular patch of black sky would turn towards each other and suddenly swarm together and there’d be a terrific flare and when it faded the net in that part of the sky would be dimmer. And while this was happening, stars began to fall. Some fell straight down. Others corkscrewed violently. Some flared and expanded into pale blotches that dropped ragged clusters of tiny tumbling contrails and went out; others vanished below the horizon. Little bursts of radio noise, hardly distinguishable from the fraying crackle of lightning storms. Blips of high-energy particles. X-rays and gamma rays, intense fluxes of neutrons.

‘Here we go,’ the supervisor said. ‘Stay on station. Whatever happens, do not deviate.’

The enemy had arrived.

From In the Mouth of the Whale

A Sneeze Heard Around The World

It's probably not the best idea to read, as I did, David Quammen's Spillover while suffering from a cold caught on a transatlantic flight.  Spillover is a pacy, punchy book about zoonoses, the diseases we catch from animals; several - SARS, for instance, or the H5N1 virus which caused bird flu - are respiratory diseases whose spread was amplified by air travel.  As human beings disrupt natural ecosystems, we encounter new infections, and quickly disperse them across the world.  Spillover's accounts of Ebola, HIV, SARS, H5N1and other actual or potential pandemics are gripping scientific detective stories about isolating and identifying disease organisms, tracking paths of infection back to the first victims, discovering how they became infected, and identifying the animal species - often bats or monkeys - in which the disease originated.

Quammen, who works for the National Geographic, has done an immense amount of fieldwork, observing researchers catch fruit bats in Pakistan, trekking through forests in the Congo in search of gorillas and chimpanzees infected with ebola, spelunking in a bat- and python-infested cave where tourists contracted Marburg disease, visiting the laboratory in which old tissue specimens were found to contain the first known example of the HIV virus.  There's a long, entirely ficticious account of how HIV may have spread in the colonial Congo, but for the most part Quammen scrupulously sticks to the science, and his lucid accounts of human loss and the scramble to contain outbreaks of horrific and deadly diseases hardly need embellishment.  It's terrific, sobering stuff, the raw material of a dozen possible apocalypses.

As far as viruses and other disease organisms are concerned, the seven billion human beings presently alive are a vast warm, wet reservoir of mucous membranes and the cytoplasmic machinery they need to reproduce.  We live in densely populated cities that enhance the spread of infection between individuals, and transport infections across the entire globe.  We have not separated ourselves from the natural world; we are one of its ecosystems.  Indeed, as Quammen observes, 'there is no 'natural world', it's a bad and artificial phrase.  There is only the world.  Humankind is part of that world, as are the ebolaviruses, as are the influenzas and the HIVs, as are the Nipah and Hendra and SARS, as are chimpanzees and bats and palm civets and bar-headed geese, as is the next murderous virus - the one we haven't yet detected.'

We can't escape diseases because they and we are inextricably embedded in the global environment. Our only advantage is that we are smart - smart enough to be able to detect and identify new diseases, and contain them before they can spread.  It's a constant battle - a new virulent coronavirus (SARS is another) has recently caused a handful of deaths, and has the potential to spread more widely.  So far we're winning the race.  We've equipped ourselves with a global network of dedicated lab scientists and field workers armed with techniques than can rapidly isolate disease organisms, sequence their DNA and RNA, and identify their weak spots.  But we can't ever stop running.  Our civilisation is now obligately dependent on molecular biology.

There Are Doors (18)

Random And Wildly Beautiful Patterns (Isak)

Maui wasn’t much different from the farm rock where I’d spent my early childhood. A dwarf planet about three hundred kilometres across, just large enough to have been pulled into a sphere by its own gravity: a rough ball of water ice accreted around a core of silicate rocks, contaminated with pockets of methane and nitrogen ices, coated in layers of primordial carbonaceous material and spattered with craters, one so big that material excavated by the impact covered half Maui’s surface with a lightly cratered debris shield. Two fragments lofted by that impact still circled Maui’s equator, a pair of moonlets kindled into sullen slow-burning miniature suns by Quick construction machines during the short-lived world-building era immediately after their seedship had arrived at Fomalhaut.

The Quick machines had extensively gardened the worldlet too, planting vacuum organisms in seemingly random and wildly beautiful patterns utterly unlike the square fields of my foster-family’s farm. Huge tangles of ropes, crustose pavements, clusters of tall spires, fluted columns and smooth domes, forests of wire. Mostly in shades of black but enlivened here and there with splashes and flecks of vivid reds or yellows, sprawled across crater floors, climbing walls and spilling their rims, spreading across intercrater plains, sending pseudohyphae into the icy regolith to mine carbonaceous tars, growing slowly but steadily in the faint light of Fomalhaut and Maui’s two swift-moving mini-suns.

Once, when the Quick had been the sole inhabitants of the Fomalhaut system, these gardens had covered the entire surface of the worldlet, inhabited by only a few contemplative eremites. Now, they were scarred by tents built to house refugees, the monolithic cubes of fusion generators, landing stages, materiel dumps, missile emplacements, strip mines, refineries, and maker blocks. My transit pod was flying above a region scraped down to clean bright water ice when my security delivered a message. Report to the Redactor Svern when you are finished.

From In The Mouth Of The Whale

In Paperback

These days, 'publication day' is a somewhat nebulous concept, but anyway, although it has been available from Amazon for a little while*, today is the official publication day of the mass-market paperback edition of In The Mouth of the Whale.

Happy birthday, little book.  I hope those who go looking for you are able to find you; and I hope that some people who didn't know about you will find you too.

For the curious, there's more information here, along with some extracts.

*Edit - have been reminded that you can also buy it here, with free worldwide delivery.

Only The Terrapins Did Not Die (Sri)

The Child had an early familiarity with death. She kept a small menagerie of animals collected from the wild places inside the town limits or bought in the market. She had a tank of terrapins, several tanks of river fish. She had an ant farm sandwiched between two plates of glass. She collected several species of stick insect from the forest, and bought a baby sloth from a mestizo boy in the market, but it died because she couldn’t figure out how to wean it. Most of her animals died, sooner or later. One day her fish would be all alive-o in their tanks; the next they’d be floating belly up. The ants deserted their maze. One by one, the stick insects dropped to the bottoms of their wire-mesh cages, as stiff and dry in death as the twigs they had emulated in life. Only the terrapins did not die, no matter how often she forgot to feed them, or how fetid the green soup of their little pond became.

And because she made herself useful around the hospital, working in the lab, running errands for the nurses and doctors, fetching water and food for patients, and so on, the Child was also familiar with the deep and powerful mystery of human death. One day she’d be chatting with an old woman; the next, the woman’s bed would be empty and stripped to its mattress. Late one sultry night, the Child delivered a bite of supper to her mother as she kept watch on a dying patient in a little room off one of the wards. She saw the man start in his solitary bed and try to rise on his elbows, toothless mouth snapping at the air, his eyes wide and fixed on something far beyond the limits of the room, the hospital, the town, the world. She saw her mother ease him down and talk to him soothingly and fold his hands around a rosary, saw him try to take a breath and fail, and try and fail again, and that was that. Her mother called the Child to her side and they said a prayer over the body. Then her mother rose, her shadow wheeling hugely across the wall and ceiling, and flung open the shutters of the window as if setting something free.

From In The Mouth of the Whale

There Are Doors (17)

O Death

Thirty-five years after they were launched, the two Voyager spacecraft are approaching the edge of the Solar System, where the solar wind breaks on the shore of interstellar space; at least one commentator believes that Voyager 1 has already exited the Solar System.  It is currently more than 18 trillion kilometres from the Earth, and it takes about 16 hours 47 minutes for its signal, travelling at the speed of light, to intersect Earth's orbit, but that's a mere scratch in terms of interstellar distances.  The width of the meniscus on a grain of beach sand compared to the breadth of the Pacific Ocean.  The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, 2200 times the distance Voyager 1 has travelled so far; Gliese 667, a triple-star system that possesses the best-known candidate for an Earth-like exoplanet, is 22.1 light years away; the supermassive black hole churning at the Galactic Centre is something like 27,000 light years distant.  Voyager 1 isn't aimed at any star in particular, but if it was heading towards Proxima Centauri, it would take almost 17,500 years to reach it.  And so on.

Much science fiction gets around the problem of interstellar distances by using wormholes, warp drives and other conveniences that turn stars into the equivalent of stops on a suburban railway line, or speeds at which relativistic time contraction shrinks the subjective length of voyages.  But if you stick to the Einsteinian speed limit and plausible velocities, travel across the great voids between stars becomes a serious act, with serious consequences.  It becomes, it seems to me, much like death.  Starships with cargoes of deep-frozen passengers are pharaonic tombs; those great generation starships, in which descendants of the original crews so often descend into barbarism and forget their purpose and destination, are obvious metaphors for rise and fall of civilisations; the uploaded minds of passengers will be expelled from their pocket heavens at voyage's end, refleshed, reborn.  Whether they are lumbering, hollowed-out asteroids or smart basketballs packed with nanotechnology and gene banks inscribed in imperishable quartz glass, starships are the equivalent of funeral barges:

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail darkly,
for we cannot steer, and have no port.

T.H.Lawrence, 'The Ship of Death'

There's a great deal of science fiction about death; or rather, there's a lot of science fiction about escaping or avoiding death.  About longevity and immortality, uplift and the Singularity and Omega Point gods and all the other Peter-Pan dreams of never dying, or rather - and I think this is the important point - never growing old.  There are many teenage heroes in science fiction, and some of them are well into their second century.  Maybe it's a Boomer thing, like blue jeans and the Beatles.  O, Death.  Won't you spare me over 'til another year?  And do you take Amex?

Anyway, one of the characters in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun is obsessed with trying to outwit death.  I hinted at the human cost of that obsession in those novels, and wanted to expand and elaborate on that theme, and to play with the image of the starship as a vessel of death and rebirth.  Amongst other things, trying to fit the two tropes together led to the writing of In The Mouth Of The Whale, in which the passenger of a starship relives her childhood as she is prepared for rebirth at the end of her long voyage, and finds history has moved on without her.  That's the trouble with being dead, even if it's a strategy for long-distance travel: you cede autonomy to the living.

Rip It Up And Start Again

So critic Paul Kincaid took on a commission to write a review of this year's crop of best SF&F anthologies, and was dismayed by what he saw.  And after his review began to cause a bit of a stir, he amplified his thoughts in an interview, published in two parts.  It's all good, useful stuff.  Paul Kincaid is sincere, insightful, and very careful about articulating exactly what he means.  He's very careful, for instance, to point out that he doesn't think that SF is a dying genre.  But he does think that it is exhausted.  That it has reached a point of crisis.  That it has lost confidence in the future - or in presenting comprehensible futures.  Undermined by the feeling that 'the present [is] changing too rapidly for us to keep up with', it has reeled backwards, producing thinly-imagined futures based on unexamined second-hand furniture lifted from older sf.  Stories in which most of the sf tropes are mere decoration that if stripped out wouldn't much change the plots, and most of the science is based more on magical thinking than on actual cutting-edge research.

Like every genre, sf has always mined its past, of course, but Kincaid senses something new: a lack of passion.  A lack of edge.  Of danger.

Way back when, when I was writing Eternal Light, when the whole 'Radical Hard SF' and 'New Space Opera' thing was kicking off, I was part of a bunch of writers who, along with Interzone editor David Pringle, felt something similar.  If you were going to reuse the old tropes, we thought back then, you shouldn't take them at face value.  You should strip out their guts and rebuild them from the ground up.  You should weld in the new biology, the new physics, the new cosmology.  Punk it up.  I still think that.  The internet makes it much easier to keep up with what science is doing now (twenty years ago, I was working in a university, so unlike many of my contemporaries, I had a whole library of scientific literature to draw on; now, much of that stuff is just a few keystrokes away).  Ditto cutting-edge fashion, architecture, information technology . . .  The future is unfolding all around you, right here in the happening world of the present.

But as Kincaid points out, the present isn't a comfortable place, right now.  Which is perhaps why too many sf writers recoil from it, into cosy futures from days past.  And there's a professionalism in the genre now that wasn't much in evidence twenty years ago; perhaps people aren't inclined to take risks that might affect their brand.  It's certainly harder to publish a different kind of novel, every time, than it once was.  And let's face it, twenty years on, it's possible that I've become part of the problem.  I'm not sure what my 'brand' is, let alone how to nuture it, but it's possible, yes, that I've grown lazy and complacent.  That's why critics like Paul Kincaid are useful - to ask hard questions, to point out uncomfortable truths.  That's why we should take them seriously.  That's why, if they point out a problem, we shouldn't react defensively, but try to figure out how to solve it.  How to do better, next time.

All I know is that I wrote The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun because I was excited by images of the real landscapes of real moons captured by actual robot spacecraft, and wondered what it would be like live out there, and walk across those craters, those wrinkle ridges, and how it would change the people who did.  I wrote In The Mouth of the Whale because I wanted to mash the ur-trope of interstellar travel and colonisation with riffs on posthuman transcendentalism into an extended metaphor about death and rebirth.  And one of the seeds of Evening's Empires was a reaction to the ongoing denial of science in favour of the kind of magical thinking that has people reject vaccines for homeopathic pills.  'In good times magicians are laughed at,' Fritz Leiber wrote in his short story, 'Poor Superman'.  'They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.'

Which is kind of where we came in.

Buy These Books Or The Blog Gets It*

Two new books.  On the left, the mass-market paperback of In The Mouth Of The Whale.  Which is not a sequel to The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, but shares the same future history, and conflates the childhood of a character from those novels, the gene wizard Sri Hong Owen, with what happens to her when she arrives, after a long and difficult voyage, at the star Fomalhaut.  It is published on October 11th.
 
On the right, the mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback, which is, most definitely, the sequel to Zombie Apocalypse!  In the first novel, a zombie plague spreads after the tomb of an eighteenth century architect, Thomas Moreby, is disturbed; in the second, the human resistance begins to organise itself against the plans of Moreby and his undead army.  It's published on October 4th in the UK, and November 1st in the US; the table of contents can be found here.

*Not really. But it would nice if you did.

Statues In Science Fiction #1

'His favorite was the gigantic killer-eagle landing in the middle of the monoliths in the memorial for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen killed in World War II. The largest eagle, probably, in all Manhattan. His talons ripped apart what was surely the largest artichoke.'

'Angouleme', Thomas M. Disch