Links 17/05/13

While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth's moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission's Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.210 statute miles or 35.744 kilometers). That was the farthest total distance for any NASA vehicle driving on a world other than Earth until yesterday.


In Earth orbit (seen by almost everyone on the internet, but worth repeating), the best cover of a David Bowie song ever.

On Earth, a drowned Argentinian town emerges from the waters twenty-five years later.

Scientists discover a lost continent off the coast of Brazil.

And the sunken medieval town of Dunwich ('Britain's Atlantis')  is mapped in detail by acoustic imaging.

Florence - City Of Industry

The Palazzo Taddei was a four-square building with an imposing frontage of blocks of untrimmed golden sandstone. Windowless, it loomed out of the smoggy darkness of the Via de Ginori like a fortress wall. It was eight o'clock, but even at this late hour, when most honest citizens should have been bed, a small crowd was gathered at the Palazzo's great round gate. Niccolo and Pasquale had to use their elbows and knees to push through to the front.

Niccolo had a word with the sergeant in command of the unit of the city militia which kept a space before the gate, handing over a cigar with a smile. The sergeant shook Niccolo's hand and spoke into the brass trumpet of a speaking-tube beside the gate. With a sudden arthritic creaking the dozen wooden leaves of the gate began to draw back into their sockets. A ragged opening widened into a circle. One of the upper leaves stuck, like the last tooth in an old man's jaw, and although a servant appeared and gave it a hearty shove to try and force it, Niccolo and Pasquale had to duck under it as the sergeant waved them through.

Pasquale turned to watch as the gate closed up with a rattle of chained weights that in falling recompressed the spring mechanism, regaining all the energy used to open the gate except that lost through heat or noise.  Successful merchants like Taddei were in love with such devices, which signified status in the way that sponsoring an altarpiece or fresco had once done. There were tall mirrors of beaten silver on either side of the door, and Pasquale looked himself up and down before hurrying to catch up with Niccolo Machiavegli, crossing the marble floor of the sumptuous entrance hall and following the journalist through an open door into the loggia that ran around the four sides of the central garden.

There's a lot of fuss about a certain novel about Renaissance Florence that's just been published, so I thought I'd revisit one of my favourite earlier novels, Pasquale's Angel. It's set in Florence in the early sixteenth century, a city transformed by the inventions of the Great Engineer and in the throes of a great industrial revolution. Pasquale is a painter's apprentice, fallen in with the journalist Niccolo Machiavegli and about to become entangled in a plot to steal the Great Engineer's secrets. There's a recent paperback, but I think it's mostly fallen out of print, and there's also an ebook (this link leads to the Kindle version, but there are others). Not yet available in the US, I'm afraid, but we're working on that.

Pirates Of The Asteroids

Montage by Emily Lakdawalla. Data from NASA / JPL / JHUAPL / UMD / JAXA / ESA / OSIRIS team / Russian Academy of Sciences / China National Space Agency. Processed by Emily Lakdawalla, Daniel Machacek, Ted Stryk, Gordan Ugarkovic.

This cool montage shows most of the various asteroids, moonlets and comets imaged by spacecraft (Vesta is excluded, because it is so much larger than everything else). A tiny sampling of the multitude of worlds amongst which Evening's Empires is set, for most of it takes place in the asteroid belt:

More than ten thousand gardens and habitats constructed from materials mined from rocks and comets orbited within in the main belt; there were more than a million and a half rocks with a diameter of more than a kilometre. A few, like Vesta and Pallas and Hygiea, had diameters of several hundred kilometres; Ceres was almost a thousand kilometres across. There were cratered rubble-piles blanketed in deep layers of dust and debris. There were mountains of nickel-iron, stony mountains of pyroxene, olivines and feldspar. There were rocks rich in tarry carbonaceous tars, clays and water ice. Some orbited in loose groups, or in more closely associated families of fragments created by catastrophic shatterings of parent bodies, but most traced solitary paths, separated by an average distance twice that between the Earth and the Moon, everything moving, everything constantly changing its position relative to everything else.

That's the territory in which Gajananvihari Pilot searches for his lost ship and family. As in the other novels in the Quiet War universe, habitations are either heavily modified or completely artificial, gardens and world cities and wildernesses laden with the vast wreckage of fifteen hundred years of history and teeming with all kinds of people. Some of them are barely human.  Some are, yes, pirates.

Links 10/05/13

Downer: Toxic perchlorate and gypsum dust may prevent human settlement of Mars.

Meanwhile, here are some moths driving a tiny robot car.


"He concedes that the freezing of his grandfather was ‘a bit of an experiment.'" Very good longform piece on the practical problems of cryonics, and its historical precedents.

Electric sails, a new form of interplanetary (and possibly interstellar) propulsion.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place-- the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs.These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster is only 625 million years old. The white dwarfs are being polluted by asteroid-like debris falling onto them.

Finally, in 1968 the Howard Johnsons restaurant chain presented its interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

An Education

Hari was schooled in every aspect of the family trade by Agrata and his two brothers, received a patchwork education in philosophical truths and methods from his father and various travelling scholars, and played with the children of passengers and specialists in the many disused volumes of his family’s ship. It was a ring ship, Pabuji’s Gift, a broad ribbon caught in a circle five hundred metres across, with a twist that turned it into the single continuous surface of a Möbius strip. The ship’s motor hung from a web of tethers and spars at the centre of the ring; its hull was studded with the cubes and domes that contained workshops, utility bays, power units, an industrial maker, and the giant centrifuges, light chromatographs, and cultures of half-life nematodes and tailored bacteria; its interior was partitioned into cargo holds, garages for gigs and the big machines used in salvage work, and the lifesystem. Much of this space was unused.  The ship could support more than a thousand people, but even when Hari’s father had been alive it had never carried more than a tenth of that number.

Hari and the children of passengers and specialist crews had the run of the empty cargo holds, habitats and modules, the mazes of ducts and serviceways. A world parallel to the world of the adults, with a social structure equally complicated, possessing its own traditions and myths, rivalries and challenges, fads and fashions. Endless games of tig on one voyage; hide-and-seek on another. One year, Hari organised flyball matches inside a cylinder turfed with halflife grass; when interest in that began to wane, he divided the children into troops that fought each other for possession of tagged locations scattered through the ship.

He was fifteen, then. Tall and slender, glossy black hair done up in corn rows woven with glass beads. Even though every adult – everyone over the age of twenty – still seemed impossibly old, adulthood was no longer mysterious and unattainable, but a condition he was advancing towards day by day. He knew that he would soon have to give up childish games and shoulder his share of the family’s work. He was beginning to understand the limits of his life, beginning to realise how small his world really was, how little it counted in the grand scheme of things.

From Evening's Empires

Into The Dark

In the first film of the regooded Star Trek franchise, director JJ Abrams not only rebooted the series but also rebooted the universe, diverting younger versions of the crew of the starship Enterprise into an alternate history that was a clever blend of the familiar and the unexpected.  In the second film, Star Trek: Into Darkness, that sideways jog is used to deliver a new twist on an old episode in the Enterprise's storied history, darkening it with current fears of terrorism and its challenge to liberal democracy.

Superhumanly strong and capable secret agent John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch, dressed in black and mixing Sherlock Holmes's arrogant superiority with Shakespearean villainy) blows up a Federation records archive in 23rd Century London, then (borrowing a move from The Godfather, Part 3) attacks top-ranking officers when they gather to discuss the incident, killing James Kirk's mentor Christopher Pike.  Kirk (Chris Pine, who has really grown into his role, and looks extraordinarily like the young William Shatner) accepts a mission from Machievellian admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) to chase Harrison to his hiding place in Klingon territory: an action that might precipitate war and alter the very nature of the peaceful Federation.  But neither Kirk's mission nor his quarry are what they seem...

To say much more would be to enter spoiler territory.  It's a fast-paced old-fashioned space-opera adventure that contrasts Kirk's impetuosity with Spock's (Zachary Quinto) rigorous control (once again, their friendship is tested by Spock's insistence on following regulations to the letter), and the similarities and differences between Kirk's and Harrison's thirst for revenge.  As with the first film, the narrative is salted with references to the original series, and the franchise's version of physics is warped and upgraded to suit the plot.  (Like that of the Looney Tunes cartoons, Star Trek's physics deliberately rewrites or ignores actual physics - complaining that spaceships don't fall out of orbit when they lose power is like complaining that gravity isn't dependent on perception, and people can't run beyond the edge of a cliff as long as they don't realise they've done it.)  Transporters can now zap people from planet to planet, although no one but the villain makes use of that ability; at one point Kirk, bucketing along at warp speed in the Enterprise, phones Scotty, dozens of light years away in a nightclub back on Earth, to impart crucial information.  But although it's an efficient blockbuster thrill ride in which Abrams once again demonstrates his skill at choreographing complex action sequences, and regular characters are each given a crucial part in the unfolding action, the hectic pace and the narrative clockwork that drives the story from set piece to set piece is exhaustingly relentless.  Decisions are made on the fly; Spock and Uhura must work out a kink in their relationship while flying in a shuttle craft towards a Klingon outpost; Leonard Nimoy literally phones in his performance; there's no attempt to show us what a warlike Federation would be like, how bad, how different, it would be from the current model.  Like Wile E. Coyote running past a cliff edge, the story survives by momentum alone - when it stops, and you are finally able to think about it, it falls down.

And yet, despite the soundless fury of spaceship battles and the chaos of collapsing cities, the film never quite loses sight of the franchise's strongest virtues.  Benedict Cumberbatch delivers an imposing performance as the superhumanly brilliant and ruthless villain, but at the centre of the film, as in the original series, is the relationship between Kirk and Spock, a sparring match between heart and head grumpily refereed by Dr McCoy.  Kirk grows from headstrong, irresponsible adventurer to a leader capable of inspiring and drawing on the abilities of his comrades, and deepens and cements his relationship with Spock, and at the end we are returned to the beginning.  And given that we've been shown how this new history can play intricate variations on old stories, we're prepared to sign up for the duration - in the hope, next time, of something a little less frantic, a little more substantial.

Links 03/05/13

In 1908, an explosion as powerful as an atom bomb knocked down millions of trees in the forests around the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, in Russia. Although it was believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteor or comet, no trace of cosmic debris has ever been found.  Until now.

Here's your personal airship.

Here's your writer's grenade.

Ever wondered what Earth's geophysical features would sound like if transposed onto vinyl? The Flat Earth Society has the answer.

Data Loss

'We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities.  The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space; great expanses of nothing in which significant persons and events float.'
Teju Cole, Open City

CERN is currently engaged in a bit of electronic archaeology: attempting to recreate the first web page every made. The earliest version they have found so far is from November 1992; older versions were rewritten without first caching backups. It's somehow liberating to think that even in the great sleepless communal panopticon of the internet, historically important documents can be forgotten and lost, that as in the happening world its past can slowly be unremembered, and become the actual past.

Limited

Using one of the lesser-known superpowers the jobbing author must develop - being able to reproduce my author's autograph as quickly and accurately as possible - I've just personalised the signing sheets for the limited edition of my new short story collection, A Very British History. Since it's a proper limited edition, it wasn't a tremendously onerous task: there were only a tad over 200 sheets to be inked.  Now all I need to do is pack them off to PS Publishing. The finished books should be available in a few weeks.

The illustration on the signature sheet is a close-up of part of Jim Burns's wonderful wrap-around cover.  The limited edition is slip-cased, with a separate volume containing two additional stories, ‘Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World’ and ‘Karl and the Ogre’, and an autobiographical essay, 'My Secret Super Power.’  And if you don't want to splash out on a limited edition, some copies of the jacketed hardcover, containing 21 science fiction stories, from my beginnings in Interzone magazine back in the 1980s to 2011's award-winning 'The Choice', are still available.

Links 26/04/13

'Over the past few years, advances in genetic technology have opened a window into the amazingly populous and powerful world of microbial life in and around the human body—the normal community of bacteria, fungi and viruses that makes up what scientists call the microbiome. It’s Big Science, involving vast international research partnerships, leading edge DNA sequencing technology and datasets on a scale to make supercomputers cringe. It also promises the biggest turnaround in medical thinking in 150 years, replacing the single-minded focus on microbes as the enemy with a broader view that they are also our essential allies.'

 Insects Au Gratin - 3-D printed food made from ground, edible insects.

Scientists have barcoded ants to monitor their career choices.

A sea anemone starts swimming to escape a starfish:

Jackson's Reef

Jackson’s Reef was a froth of bubble habitats wrapped around a shaped sliver of rock some ten kilometres long. Half its volume was ravaged, open to vacuum; the rest had devolved to low-diversity, low-energy ecosystems dominated by tough, slow-growing chlorophytes, blue-green algae, and archaebacteria. There were hundreds of similar bodies within the Belt and beyond; Jackson’s Reef was distinguished from all the others by its eccentric, long-period orbit.

It had once been the centre of the Golden Mean, a kingdom of gardens and settlements in the outer belt that had flourished several centuries before the rise of the True Empire. When they’d been deposed by a vicious civil war, the last members of its ruling family had hastily converted their capital city into a multigeneration starship and aimed it at 61 Cygni, but its mass drivers had failed before it could acquire solar escape velocity. It had become trapped in a cometary orbit with a period of more than six hundred years, taking it out above the plane of the ecliptic and across the Kuiper belt to the edge of the Oort cloud before swinging back towards the sun. Its original inhabitants were either dead or long gone by the time it first returned to the Belt. A crew of rovers laid claim to it, tried and failed to revive its ruined biomes, abandoned the project. And now it was returning to the Belt for the second time, and Nabhomani and Nabhoj had devised a plan to strip out salvageable machinery and artifacts, and mine what was left of its ecosystem for useful biologics and unique genomes.

From Evening's Empires

Links 19/04/13

You wait for a potentially Earth-like planet and two come along at once.  In the same system.

Fossilised iron-loving bacteria may contain the signature left by a supernova.

How do you clear space debris from Earth orbit?  With space harpoons, of course.

'There were once were two planets, new to the galaxy and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years ago, and took roughly the same shape. Both were blistered with volcanoes and etched with watercourses; both circled the same yellow dwarf star—close enough to be warmed by it, but not so close as to be blasted to a cinder. Had an alien astronomer swivelled his telescope toward them in those days, he might have found them equally promising—nurseries in the making. They were large enough to hold their gases close, swaddling themselves in atmosphere; small enough to stay solid, never swelling into gaseous giants. They were “Goldilocks planets,” our own astronomers would say: just right for life.'

 Russian enthusiasts may have spotted the Mars 3 lander in a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image.

 Nano space-suits for insects.

A Day In The Life

Let me start by declaring an interest. A couple of decades ago, Kim Newman and I were touting an anthology of original stories to my then editor at Gollancz, the late, great Richard Evans. We had a potent weapon in our armoury: a submission by Ian R MacLeod, one of the best alternate history stories we'd ever read.  The anthology, In Dreams, was eventually published, and didn't do half as well as its contributors deserved, but now Ian MacLeod's story has found new life as a TV play in the second series of Sky Arts' Playhouse Presents...

It's 1991. John Lennon is fifty, living in a rented room in Birmingham, and at a new low point in his life.  He been forced to take up menial work by his local Job Centre, and his nemesis, the Beatles, are about to start a Greatest Hits tour ('obviously the solo careers are up the kazoo again'). Forever known as the guy who left the Beatles (during a blazing row in 1962, over whether or not they should cover Gerry and the Pacemaker's 'How Do You Do It'), history has rolled on without him. The Beatles never were toppermost of the poppermost, and Lennon is on his uppers, licking envelopes for a living, sustained by roll-up fags and his sarcastic wit, struggling to stay out of the clutches of the Snodgrasses, with their suburban bungalows and 2.4 children, their yuppie phones, and their dead imaginations.

Adapted by David Quantick, it's a marvellous piece of ventriloquism, a poignant, funny, surrealistic commentary on the struggle against conformity, and regret for the life not lived, the consequences of a moment and a choice made long ago. Ian Hart, who played the young Lennon in Backbeat and The Hours and Times, perfectly captures the voice and vulnerable defiance of an aging Lennon who never was, a man out of time; Martin Carr provides musical cues from the Beatles' alternate career; David Blair's direction jigsaws warmly-lit snippets from the past into the cold blue present. It's a story in which nothing really happens, yet it closes on a marvellous moment of affirmation. It's one of the best science fiction dramas you're likely to see this year.

It Was Twenty-Five Years Ago Today....

My first novel, published as a paperback original in the US by Del Rey, in 1988. Still in print, in the UK at least.

Oblivion

The moon has been shattered by vicious alien invaders, the Scavengers, and Earth has been ruined by the all-out nuclear war that defeated them.  Most of the surviving human beings have decamped for Saturn's moon, Titan.  Only a small clean-up crew is left behind, using drones to defend massive machines that process seawater into fusion fuel from the roving remnants of the Scavenger army.  Jack (Tom Cruise) is a drone repairman, assisted by his partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) and mission controller Sally (Melissa Leo).  Both Jack and Victoria have had their memories wiped as a security precaution, but Jack is increasingly troubled by dreams of life on Earth before the Scavengers came . . .

If that sounds like an over-elaborate and implausible set up (how did the human race manage to build huge machines and initiate a deep-space colonisation programme after an apocalyptic war? why leave Earth in the first place? why Titan, of all places? why drain Earth's oceans for fusion fuel when most of the moons of Saturn are mostly water?), that's because it really is a set up.  After rescuing the pilot of a crashed spacecraft (Olga Kurylenko), Jack begins to uncover the truth - which is, unfortunately, only slightly less implausible than the cover story, owes a big debt to Philip K. Dick and a bunch of SF films I won't mention because spoilers, and is full of the usual logic holes that allow for heroic gestures and explosions.

Still, the ruin porn of the devastated Earth is lovely to look at, especially on an IMAX screen, and while the story slowly unfolds you can pass the time spotting homages and allusions to Wall-E, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others.  And even though it devolves into a derivative, two-fisted actioner and gives neither Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman enough to do, it is at least a widescreen SF film that is knowingly SF.  What a shame that, like so many big budget SF shoot-em-ups, it lost its sense of humour somewhere in the production process.

Links 05/04/13

Beats piping: 'Telepathic control of another person's body is a small step closer. By linking the technologies of two brain/computer interfaces, human volunteers were able to trigger movement in a rat's tail using their minds.'

'Researchers in Japan used MRI scans to reveal the images that people were seeing as they entered into an early stage of sleep.' 60% certain that those things you're counting are sheep.

Possible bad news for the search for signs of life on Mars: 'Wind, not water, deposited most of the sediments in the layered Martian mountain NASA's Curiosity rover was sent to study, suggests an analysis of observations from orbit. If the rover confirms this scenario when it reaches the mountain next year, it could spell trouble for its chances of finding organic material there.'


Possible good news for the search for signs of life on Titan: 'A laboratory experiment at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., simulating the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan suggests complex organic chemistry that could eventually lead to the building blocks of life extends lower in the atmosphere than previously thought.'

Evening's Empires Cover

A dramatic interpretation by Sidonie Beresford-Browne. Yes, that's Vesta, in the foreground. The novel is due to be published on July 18th.

Links 29/03/13

Huge panorama of Gale Crater created by Andrew Bodrov from images taken by the Curiosity rover.

A fish with a see-through head.

Duckpenisgate.

'To feed their young, females grow an extra layer of skin that's rich in fats. The young scrape this skin off with their teeth and eat it. To help them, they have a specialised set of teeth adapted to the job, which are replaced by more pointed adult teeth as they get older.'

And in other news, Unlikely Worlds's tweets have been listed by Time magazine as one of the best 140 Twitter feeds of 2013.

A Day In The Life

 'But what do you really do?' is up there with 'Do you write under your own name?' and 'I've never read any of your books' as one of the most common responses when I tell people who ask me what I do what I do.

What I did today is start work at 9 am by scribbling changes all over the print-out of a draft of a short piece about watching the first ever episode of Doctor Who, add the changes into the electronic version, reread it on screen and make a few more changes, and then email it off.  That was the first hour accounted for.  I won't get paid for it by the way,  but for once I'm happy to violate the rule that money should always flow towards the author because the profits from the book (I hope) it'll appear in are going to charity.

After that, it was back to the first draft of the new novel.  1000 words before lunch, then a walk around my usual route - I live in Islington, one of the most built-up and populous parts of London, but manage to fit in three parks - and back in front of the computer for another 500 words.  I like to write 1500 words, or about five pages each and every day until I have a complete draft.  And then I start editing and rewriting, and rediting and rerewriting . . .

Sometimes it only takes an hour or two; sometimes it takes all day.  And if it's going really slowly, I'll take a walk earlier, to think about writing while thinking about something else.  Today, I finished at around 3.30, and then started to read through an old story someone wants to republish; so far, it hasn't needed much in the way of titivation.  And now, at just after 5 pm, I'm writing this.

So that's mostly what I really do.  I write.  Although today was a bit out of the ordinary, because ten copies of my new collection of short stories, A Very British History, were delivered.  Here are three of them:

Something For The Weekend

So I'll be in Bradford for the annual science fiction bash, Eastercon, this coming weekend. This is what I'll be doing in between admiring monumental Victorian architecture and trying not to buy too many books.

Friday     5pm     "PS Publishing"
Yorkshire’s very own specialist publisher gets Eastercon underway with an event to launch new books by five of the UK’s leading SF and Fantasy writers. "Universes" by Stephen Baxter. "Starship Seasons" by Eric Brown. A Very British History" by Paul McAuley. "Martian Sands" by Lavie Tidhar. "Growing Pains" by Ian Whates.
Get 'em while they're hot.

Saturday     10am     "Editing - the truth, the myth and the rule of the red pen"
 What do editors do anyway, and why is it necessary? What's it like to be edited? Practical experience and observations on how to edit, and how to be edited. Bella Pagan moderates Janine Ashbless, Naomi Foyle, Paul McAuley and Mercurio D Rivera.
Ever tried to self-publish? There you go.

Saturday     11am     "Sensory Overload"
Why stop at five senses? There are many other senses in the natural world, more available through technology, and even more in SF and Fantasy. Our panel explore. With Dr Bob, Simon Ings, Roz Kaveney, Paul McAuley, and Walter Jon Williams.
Which sense apps would you buy?

Saturday     9pm     "Five Years: The End of the World Panel"    
Recent apocalypses have been a disappointment, but what would happen if there was a guaranteed, proven end-of-the-world coming in five years. What would happen to society? Nigel Furlong, Chris Beckett, Janet Edwards, Paul McAuley and Philip Palmer discuss the consequences.
David Bowie already covered this, but I think I can add a personal perspective.

Links 22/03/13

Voyager* 1 has become the first man-made object to exit the heliosphere and reach interstellar space. Oh, wait, it hasn't quite left yet. xkcd keeps count. But since it was launched in 1977 it has certainly travelled a long way: it's currently more than 18.5 billion kilometres from the sun, 124 astronomical units, or just 17 light hours or 0.002 light years. Space is big.

'We’ve seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program.' 

'Today's asteroids might once have been "more like cowpats".'

Discovery of microbes living in basalt rock 500 metres beneath the sea bed of Washington state may mean that the oceanic crust contains 'the first major ecosystem on Earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight.'

*For some reason - the end of a long working day; I'm an idiot - I originally typed Viking 1. Viking's lander is still on Mars, and its orbiter is still circling the red planet (although since it can no longer adjust its orbit, it will crash onto the surface in 2019).

A Very British History

As previously noted, my new short story collection, A Very British History, will be published at the end of this month. There will be a standard or trade edition, and a signed, limited edition with endpaper artwork by Jim Burns and additional material in a separate slim book, all in a slipcase.  The table of contents of the standard edition can be found here; the limited edition also includes two short stories, Karl and the Ogre, and Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World, and a biographical essay, My Secret Super Power. Both the trade edition and the limited edition are available for preorder; there will be only 100 copies of limited edition, so if you want to grab one, you'd better be quick.

Robinson Crusoe On Mars

An astronaut crash lands on Mars, and must learn to survive on its inhospitable surface with only a monkey for company. And then the aliens arrive...

It sounds like pulp hokum, but in fact it's much more interesting, a serious attempt to depict actual space travel, and actual conditions on the Red Planet. There are no canals or ancient civilisations, no mighty minds bent on conquering Earth or kidnapping Santa Claus, no rock snakes. Instead, as in George Pal's earlier Conquest of Space, Mars is a bleak desert world, lacking almost all the resources required for human survival. There are aliens, yes, but like the astronaut they are visitors.

But while Conquest of Space dates from the dawn in space travel, in 1955, Robinson Crusoe on Mars was disadvantaged by being made in 1964. American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts were preparing to go to the moon; within a year Mariner 4 would beam back pictures of the Martian surface, bleak and cratered and utterly lifeless, with an atmosphere thinner than previously suspected. All science fiction dates, but Robinson Crusoe on Mars was very swiftly overtaken by reality, and has dwindled in the rearview mirror of history into little more than a cult curiosity.

That's a shame, because there's an awful lot to like. The story of survival, adapted with full acknowledgement from Defoe's original by screenwriter Ib Melchior, is strong and compelling.  Much of it was filmed in Death Valley; with red skies matted in, the landscapes in which astronaut Commander 'Kit' Draper (Paul Manatee) struggles to survive are vastly bleak and bear more than a glancing resemblance to real Martian scenes imaged by probes and rovers. And Manatee gives a fine performance of a genuine hero, given to moments of despair and self-doubt, but resourceful, thoughtful and likeable, determined to make a go of it even though there appears to be no hope of rescue.

Draper and Dan McReady (Adam West) are surveying Mars from orbit when their spacecraft is fatally damaged by an encounter with an erratic planetoid. They eject in separate escape capsules and crash-land in a harsh landscape where fireballs blow about like dust devils.  Draper survives, and discovers that although McReady was killed on impact, their pet monkey, Mona, is still alive. Like Crusoe he learns how to live off the land and create a bubble of civilisation in the midst of indifferently hostile nature; like Crusoe, his idyll is interrupted by a violent intrusion, in this case aliens who have come to Mars to mine minerals using slave labour. But while the film's realism is ruptured by the appearance of alien ships equipped with rock-blasting ray guns, it doesn't turn into a pulp shoot-out or a crude assertion of human superiority, but becomes something much more interesting.

One of the slaves (Victor Lundin, in Biblical Egyptian wig, loincloth and sandals) escapes; Draper christens him Friday and removes his shackles; they strike up an alliance that, despite their complete lack of any common language, soon turns into deep friendship, rather than the master-servant relationship of Defoe's original. Draper is very much an American hero, a Navy astronaut who hangs the Stars and Stripes outside the entrance to his cave shelter and plays Yankee Doodle Dandy on a home-made flute, but he doesn't attempt to imprint his own values on Friday, and although he's equipped with a revolver he never resorts to violence, and learns that the key to survival is cooperation and trust. Like the Apollo astronauts, he comes in peace, for all mankind: a useful reminder that not all science fiction stories need to be resolved by gunplay and spectacular explosions, but can aspire to something more adult, more human.

There Are Doors (19)

New Maps Of Heaven

So now Mercury, the last unmapped planet, has been completely surveyed by the Messenger robot spacecraft (how I love being able to type those last two words in a nonfiction sentence). Mercury’s geology is rich and varied, and there are unexpected caches of water ice in permanently shadowed polar craters, but there are no traces of ancient civilisation, no monoliths, no monsters. There are still plenty of places that haven’t been surveyed - most of the asteroid belt and all of the Kuiper belt, for instance, and the Pluto system (although New Horizons is on course for a flyby in 2015) - but the known is inexorably rolling out across what were once blank spaces where monsters of the imagination could freely roam. The canals of Mars are no more. There are no dripping wet jungles on Venus; no dinosaurs. What is a science-fiction writer to do?

Well, you can refuse reality, of course. You can cast your story into the dark backward and abyss of time, as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett did, on ancient diluvian Mars. You can transplant them onto exotic exoplanets. Or you can simply ignore the facts of the case, as I’ve just done for my contribution to an anthology of stories about the Old Venus, for editors George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois. Or you can try to square up to reality, and deal with the real Solar System, which turns out to be far more dynamic and varied than we once thought. There are volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io; methane rain, rivers and lakes, and vast dunes of frozen hydrocarbons, on Saturn’s Titan. Geysers of water ice erupting from the south pole of Saturn’s Enceladus, and geysers of nitrogen snow on Neptune’s Triton.

And there are also places in the Solar System that resist mapping: the pocket seas that power Enceladus’s geysers, or the world-girdling oceans beneath the surfaces of Europa, Callisto, Titan, Triton, and perhaps even Pluto. Where monsters weirder than anything we can imagine might plough the dark currents. Or where some strange microbial ecosystem might flourish, as in the caves beneath the Nullarbor Plain of Australia, or perhaps in sealed Antarctic lakes.

For where once we dreamed of intelligences greater than ours scrutinizing our affairs, or of ethereal crystalline cities, we now can only hope for some pocket of extremophile bacteria in a warm damp stratum of Martian rock. But while reality has overwritten the old tropes, there new kinds of stories than can be told. Stories that make use of the actual maps, the actual landscapes. What would it be like to stand on a wrinkle ridge on Saturn’s ice-clad moon Dione? What would it mean, to introduce a human scale, a human perspective? If you place a person in such a landscape, you must ask all kinds of questions. Who is she? How did she get there, and what is she doing? If she has made her home there, if she is not a Robinson Crusoe on Dione or Enceledus or Titan, you also have to ask questions about the society she inhabits, the way the people she lives amongst organise themselves. How do they survive in such inhospitable conditions. How does living there affect them? What are their dreams, their ambitions? What is ordinary life like, out there? What do we mean by ordinary, anyway? There’s something still unmapped.

Incoming

"While the use of genetically engineered dolls in combat games in near-future Holland poses profound ethical questions, their liberated cousins threaten to alter the nature of human existence; on an artificial world beyond the edge of the Milky Way, one of the last humans triggers a revolution amongst alien races abandoned there by her ancestors; in the ocean of Europa, a hunter confronts a monster with its own agenda; in ‘The Two Dicks’, bestselling author Philip K. Dick has a life-changing meeting with President Nixon; while in ‘Cross Road Blues’ the fate of American history hinges on the career of an itinerant blues musician; and in the Sturgeon Award-winning novella ‘The Choice’, two young men make very different decisions about how they will come to terms with a world transformed by climate change and alien interference.

"Selected by the author himself from his output across over a quarter of a century, this landmark collection contains the very finest science fiction stories by one of Britain’s foremost masters of the genre. From sharply satirical alternate histories to explorations of the outer edges of biotechnology, from tales of extravagant far futures to visions of the transformative challenges of deep space, they showcase the reach and restless intelligence of a writer Publishers Weekly has praised as being ‘one of the field’s finest practitioners’."

The terrific cover is by Jim Burns, illustrating my Quiet War story 'Sea Change, With Monsters.' 
 
It's scheduled to be published at the end of March (I'll be at Eastercon, signing copies), but you can preorder it from PS Publishing now. There will be a signed limited edition with extra stories, an autobiographical essay, and endpaper art by Jim Burns, too.

Links 08/03/13

'Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia's Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual 'curtains' of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes.

The research team says this analysis shows that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

The research team says this analysis shows that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

'The research team says . . . that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.'

Anyone interested in exobiology will have noticed that organisms able to live in salt-water rich in ammonia without any input from light-driven photosynthesis might be suited to conditions believed to be found in oceans beneath the surface of moons in the outer Solar System.  Astronomer Mike Brown has just posted a long, three-part description of research that suggests the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa is rich in salts subducted from the ocean known to exist beneath its surface, and that the chemistry of the leading hemisphere of the moon is further modified by sulphur that has been lofted into orbit by the volcanoes of Io:

'Ever wonder what it would taste like if you could lick the icy surface of Jupiter’s Europa? The answer may be that it would taste a lotlike that last mouthful of water that you accidentally drank when you wereswimming at the beach on your last vacation. Just don’t take too long of a taste. At nearly 300 degrees (F) below zero your tongue will stick fast.'

A shorter take on the significance of the work can be found here: basically, Europa's ocean may closely resemble the salty oceans of Earth.

Back on Earth, Russian scientists have discovered life in the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica. Permanently capped by ice four miles thick, isolated from any inputs from the surface for up to 15 million years, the lake appears to harbour bacterial life new to science.

'Preliminary analysis of water samples collected from the lake revealed a species of bacteria not belonging to any known subkingdoms."We call it unidentified and 'unclassified' life," the team's leader, Sergei Bulat of the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, told Russian news agency RIA Novosti. The bacteria's DNA was less than 86% similar to known bacterial DNA, indicating that it was a new species, Bulat said.'

[Edit 10/03/13 The  head of the genetics laboratory that's studying the samples has issued a swift rebuttal stating that the 'unknown organisms' are in fact lab contaminants.]

Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia's Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual 'curtains' of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

Life

Where is the clear story line? Who am I supposed to identify with? Why are these characters so inconsistent? Where are the sympathetic characters? Why is the world-building so . . . random? What's the theme? What are the stakes? What's the idea? Why did it end so abruptly? Did anyone learn anything?

Links 01/03/13

'Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able todetect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical studyof Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detectoxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-likeplanet orbiting a Sun-like star.'  White dwarfs continue to radiate for a long time. Any Earth-like planet orbiting one could be very, very old...

Helicoprion, a shark from the early Permian with a single spiral tooth, shaped like a buzzsaw.

Remote sensing in rats.  'It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg.  But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.'

'I sometimes wonder if the success of books such as Twilight and Fifty Shades is itself a form of mass PTSD or Stockholm syndrome—a reaction to the ubiquity of violence against women and to the way in which stories of sexual violence, real or feigned, have become a culturally accepted form of entertainment; and a reaction to the often intolerable pressures of living in a world where power is still mostly in the hands of men.'  Elizabeth Hand on women in fiction who fight back.

Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-future-evidence-extraterrestrial-life-dying.html#jCp

Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-future-evidence-extraterrestrial-life-dying.html#jCp

The Pulse

I've been playing Philip Glass's Symphony No. 9 a lot recently. He's probably better known for his film, opera, and ballet scores, and small-scale instrumental pieces with his ensemble, but he's also written string quartets and ten full-scale symphonies, beginning in his late fifties with the 'Low' symphony, which explored variations on the music of David Bowie's album Low.

Bowie gave me my first introduction to Glass. Thanks to the world memory of the internet I can date it precisely: 20th May 1979. Bowie was hosting a Radio 1 programme, I am a DJ, presenting a selection of favourite and significant music. He played Danny Kaye's 'Inchworm' (a song he claims as a major influence, forming the template, for instance, for 'Ashes to Ashes'), commenting on the use of counting in a song, and then played an excerpt from Glass's score for the opera Einstein on the Beach, 'Trial/Prison', in which the narrator recites short text over a pulsing electronic organ while the ensemble counts off the beats.

The juxtaposition of the two pieces of music caught my attention, but I didn't really think of Glass's music again until I saw the film Koyaanisqatsi in Los Angeles, at Laemmle's Royal theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard, May 1983, and my mind was, as they say, blown.  I mean, coming to Koyaanisqatsi without any preconceptions of what it was like was pretty much mind-blowing anyway, but I was also an alien living and working in Los Angeles and much of the imagery had a direct resonance.  As did the pulsing score: I immediately bought a tape, and played it to death driving the freeways and surface streets of LA, and it's still one of my favourite pieces of music. The penultimate section, 'Prophesies', is prime Glass Pulse:



The same short cadence is repeated over and over, until suddenly (at about 08.46) there's a small but utterly devastating time change, a sudden shift of focus and emotional colour. It's a signature of his work: his Symphony No. 9 opens with yet another variation of the Pulse.

I've been writing and publishing for somewhat less than the interval between Koyaanisqatsi and Symphony No.9, but if I've learnt one thing it's that you develop signature themes, tropes and ideas, prose structures and story forms, that define your style. That's the palette you have; the palette you get to play with. Glass's music reminds me that isn't a trap; reminds me that simple and powerful ideas can contain infinite variations, if you look hard enough.

Blurbed

Of Evening's Empires, my publisher says:

A young man stands on a barren asteroid. His ship has been stolen, his family kidnapped or worse, and all he has on his side is a semi-intelligent spacesuit. The only member of the crew to escape, Hari has barely been off his ship before. It was his birthplace, his home and his future.

He's going to get it back.

A neat hook into the beginning of the story. A teasing fragment of exposition. A hint of narrative direction. I've been shown some cover roughs. They're very good too.


Meanwhile, I'm finishing a story for a themed anthology of stories set on the old, wet, habitable Venus. Some stories come easily. This one took a while to reveal what it was really about: it was necessary to write a kind of condensed novel, a biography of the hero, and then to strip out everything that wasn't relevant. Which revealed amongst other things that the story wasn't about the hero, after all. As usual, when I have trouble moving a story forward it's because I've started in the wrong place.

It's a kind of planetary romance, a kind of adventure, a kind of detective story. Stories about scientific discovery are often cast in the form of detective stories because they seem to share an obvious narrative structure - something happens, and despite difficulties, diversions and obstructions, the hero uncovers clues and pieces them together to form a narrative that explains the why and the how - but on close examination the analogy often breaks down. The fit isn't exact. My story is in part about the stories science tells itself, and why they are sometimes wrong, or point in the wrong direction. There are monsters, too, and an ekranoplan, and a new Cold War. It's called 'Planet of Fear.' That's one thing I didn't have to change, at least.

Chekhov's Pulse Laser Pistol

Chekhov's famous dictum about foreshadowing - "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act" and variations thereof - is of course complicated in science fiction because the reader needs to understand what kind of pistol it is, the level of technology implied by its capabilities, the various devices that make use of the same techniques and systems, their effect on the social contract, and so on and so forth.

If the pistol isn't a red herring, ignoring it after its introduction in a science fiction novel not only leaves a plot hole but also a gap in the fabric of its world. Of course, unless it's done with subtlety, wit and concision, worldbuilding can quickly become as tedious as a list of plumbing parts. Which is why, perhaps, so many science fiction novels fall back on a generic future with a common, consensual backdrop.  Worlds of secondhand furniture, drawn from easily recognisable histories. Ikea worlds whose products only sometimes require assembly, using easy-to-follow instructions and simple tools, and furnish scenarios as clean, utilitarian, and anonymous as catalogue illustrations. Where Chekhov's Pulse Laser Pistol is probably called Bob. Good old Bob. He's so familiar he's practically invisible. No need to describe him, or worry about the implications of how he got there, or the consequences of using him, in the last act. Along with everything else in the catalogue, he's a prop in a fantasy future shorn of actual context, much like pornography.

Links 15/02/13

All over the internets and every kind of news media: a large meteor streaking across the early morning sky of Western Siberia.  The New York Times has many video clips, and an explanation for the ubiquitous dashcams in Russian vehicles that took them:

Psychopaths are abundant on Russian roads. You best not cut anyone off or undertake some other type of maneuver that might inconvenience the 200-pound, six-foot-five brawling children you see on YouTube hopping out of their SUVs with their dukes up. They will go ballistic in a snap, drive in front of you, brake suddenly, block you off, jump out and run towards your vehicle. Next thing you start getting punches in your face because your didn’t roll up your windows, or getting pulled out of the car and beaten because you didn’t lock the doors.

These fights happen all the time and you can’t really press charges. Point to your broken nose or smashed windows all you want. The Russian courts don’t like verbal claims. They do, however, like to send people to jail for battery and property destruction if there’s definite video proof.

And here's an image of the meteor's vapour trail, taken from orbit.

Sort of related to intrusions from outer space, the uncanny valley of incredibly life-like David Bowie dolls.

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#jCp

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#jCp

The adventures of Florida Man.

Something Borrowed

It's that time of year when British authors and anyone else who makes a book - authors, illustrators, photographers, translators, editors of anthologies - receives their Public Lending Right payments for books lent in the library system.  Twenty-eight countries have a form of PLR.  In the UK, the amount earned by each registered title is based on payment of 6.2 pence per loan, and an estimate of the number of borrowings of each registered title using data from a number of typical libraries.

And very welcome it is too, for most recipients - although not for Horrible Histories author, Terry Deary.  He's the seventh most-borrowed children's author, and because the maximum PLR payment is capped at £6,600, to ensure that best-selling authors don't scoop up most of the pot. he reckons he's out of pocket by some £180,000. And that's not all:

'But never mind my selfish author perception – what about the bookshops? The libraries are doing nothing for the book industry. They give nothing back, whereas bookshops are selling the book, and the author and the publisher get paid, which is as it should be. What other entertainment do we expect to get for free?'

According to Deary, libraries are Victorian institutions which have outlived their usefulness, giving people the undeserved entitlement that books should be available at the expense of the book trade and the local councils which fund them.

It's pernicious stuff. Most authors, like me, don't earn anything like the amount Deary reckons he's lost thanks to the perfidious PLR scheme. In fact, the average earnings of British authors - and I'm average, in this respect - is somewhat less than the national average wage. So while the PLR payments may be peanuts to someone like Deary, they are an important source of income to many authors.  As are sales to libraries of hardback books. Back in the day, my publisher, Gollancz, made a good chunk of its income from selling hardbacks to libraries: the famous yellow jackets ensured that its crime and science fiction titles stood out on library shelves. For many midlist authors, sales to libraries are still important, and cutbacks in library funding are a serious threat to their careers.

Borrowing books and buying books are not mutually exclusive, and every book borrowed is not, as Mr Deary imagines, a lost sale. There's no basis for that kind of like-for-like calculation. As for his assertion that bookshops are closing down because libraries are giving away books for free, libraries and bookshops have managed to coexist for a century and a half. The trade in printed books is currently under threat not because of people borrowing books, but because they are buying more books online, and are increasingly buying more and more ebooks. The decline in the amount of money spent on books is due in no large part to the proliferation of massively discounted ebooks, with heavily promoted bestselling titles going for as little as 20 pence. It's this, rather than the 'free' books in libraries, which is threatening to devalue books.

Far from doing nothing for the booktrade, libraries buy massive quantities of books and through the PLR scheme pay authors a tithe on book borrowing, and most importantly they encourage reading. Many people who start out borrowing books from libraries got on to become lifelong readers and book-buyers. I type this in a room lined with about 3000 books, part of my personal library. A good proportion of the older titles are books I once borrowed from libraries, and bought so that I could read them again. Would I have become a writer without access to a library stuffed with books I could freely borrow? Probably.  But my local library was vastly enabling, because it fed my growing book-reading habit, and allowed me to graze on a vast selection of titles, and to read authors I might never otherwise have encountered, and generally provided me with a literary education.

In short, libraries are invaluable gateways, much like Mr Deary's rather wonderful Horrible History books. What a pity he doesn't see that.

Red Queen's Race

Getting hard to stay ahead.

From Nature's news blog:

 Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in living cells. These ‘genetic circuits’ could be used to track key moments in a cell’s life or, at the flick of a chemical switch, change a cell’s fate, the researchers say. Their results are described this week in Nature Biotechnology.


From Gardens of the Sun:

The window looked out across a huge spherical chamber carved out of the native ice and lit by a point source hung at the apex of its ceiling like a drop of incandescent blood. Its walls curved down to a floor creased with smooth ridges, and the top of each ridge was streaked with dark eddies and swirls and littered with dense copses of half-melted candles, phalanxes of tooth-like spikes, heaps of tangled wires or curled scrolls like spun sugar,meadows of brittle hairs, pods of paper-thin fins breaking out of the ice. All these growths stark black in the ruby light, apart from a large candle-copse close to the observation window that was clearly dying from the inside out, its lumpy spires crumbling into pale ash.
 
‘Vacuum organisms,’ Loc said. ‘A garden of vacuum organisms.’
 
He’d been expecting something truly exotic. A clone farm of superhuman babies. A wonderland full of weird plants and animals. A city of intelligent rats or raccoons. But these growths weren’t that much different from the vacuum organisms cultivated on the naked surface around every city and settlement on the moons of Saturn.
 
‘They look like vacuum organisms,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘But they are not. They are not constructed from bound nanotech, but are spun from intricate pseudo-proteinaceous polymers. I call them polychines. If commercial vacuum organisms are synthetic analogues of prokaryotes - bacteria, Mr Ifrahim - these are analogues of the ancestors of prokaryotes.’
 
‘You want to give me a lecture,’ Loc said. ‘It would be easier if you cut to the chase, and told me exactly why these things are worthless. They certainly look worthless.’
 
Sri Hong-Owen ignored his sally, and told him that the chamber contained a methane-hydrogen atmosphere at minus twenty degrees Centigrade, far warmer than Mimas’s ambient temperature. ‘As for the polychines, they do not possess a pseudocellular structure; nor are they generated by the systematic execution of a centralised set of encoded instructions. Instead, they are networks of self-catalysing metabolic cycles created by interactions between specific structures in their polymers.’
 
‘Like carpets, or suit-liners.’
 
‘Very good, Mr Ifrahim. But although halflife materials are self-repairing and can even grow when fed the correct substrate, they encode only a very simple set of on/off instructions and can express only one morphology. The polychines are far more versatile. They are non-binary logic engines that use a form of photosynthesis to transform simple chemicals to complex polymers. They can reproduce, and they can even exchange information, although that information is entirely analogue in form. And they possess a limited set of components which obey a limited set of self-organising rules capable of generating new instructions, and, therefore, new properties and even new forms. Once I completely understand how those rules operate in every possible combination, it will be possible to manipulate the polychines to produce predictable states.’

Human Mystery

Found in Ray Monk's huge, and hugely lucid, biography of Robert Oppenheimer, Inside the Centre, a contender for footnote of the year:

It is impossible to tell how much of this story is true. Can one believe that Oppenheimer deliberately dropped his suitcase, intending it to hit the woman? Did he really kiss her? And, perhaps most improbably of all: can one really imagine him travelling third class?

Links 08/02/13

'Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about . . .  Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.'  More here; abstract of paper here.

A small, two-wheeled robot has been driven by a male silkmoth to track down the sex pheromone usually given off by a female mate.

 “I’ll sleep with you, but I prefer my stories to yours.” Barriers to the spread of stories between human populations are stronger than those to the spread of genes.

A couple of fantastic photography projects:

Laurent Chehere: 'Flying Houses.'

Marc Wilson: 'The Last Stand'

Ruination Daze

In the last couple of decades, Detroit has become the unwilling poster child for late-stage post-industrial collapse. A city that was once the beating heart of the American car industry has become a real-life setting for fantasies of apocalypse. The desolation of its vast factories and assembly plants, theatres and department stores documented by aficionados of ruin porn. The urban prairies of what were once thriving inner-city residential areas returned to nature, grids of weed-grown streets and ruins interrupted only by the occasional surviving house, or the encampments of urban farmers. A laboratory for experiments in post-apocalyptic, post-industrial, post-technological science-fictional scenarios (after Detroit, after Hurricane Katrina, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren looks increasingly prescient).

Mark Binelli's The Last Days of Detroit, Motor Cars, Motown and the Collapse of an Industrial Giant, seeks to remind the reader to the people who still live there, and are seeking ways to regenerate their city. A former Detroit native (his family ran a business in the city, but lived, as he confesses, in the suburbs), he moved back into the heart of the city for three years, hoping 'to discover something new about the city - specifically, what happens to a once-great place after it has been used up and discarded? Who sticks around and tries to make things work again? And what sorts of newcomers are drawn to the place for similar reasons?'

Binelli, a reporter on the staff of Rolling Stone magazine, is an engaging writer who gives an insider's perspective on Detroit's long history and the complex interplay economic, political and social factors that caused its decline.  He's very good on the personalities of Detroit politicians, recent and historical scandals, and grand plans that all founder for one reason: 'No matter how dexterous or well-intentioned our elected officials, any plan to reinvent Detroit, or even adequately address the city's most fundamental crises, required the one thing Detroit lacked most of all: unimaginable amounts of money.'  And his portraits of ordinary citizens, of the artists and urban hipsters attracted Detroit's quasi-anarchistic freedom (and its huge spaces and cheap rents), of a school's urban farm, the fire department of one of Detroit's poorest neighbourhoods, and the human stories underlying a murder trial, are deft, acute and sympathetic. But what's lacking is an overall narrative that knits the various threads and voices together. Binelli's portrait of the city is affectionate and fair and honest, but scrappy; like the city itself, there's no centre. But as Binelli points out, there's no single cause to Detroit's malaise, and unlike fictional apocalypses, there's no easy solution either (apart from unimaginable amounts of cold hard cash), no way of reading in the runes of the ruins which version of the future will win out. And yet he surprises himself, and the reader, by ending on an optimistic note: the ruins may not be an endpoint after all, but part of an urban metabolic cycle. What's left is the kind of naive but very human hope with which the first citizens of Detroit promoted their dreams of coming grandeur. Can we imagine futures that aren't all grimdark urban nightmares or fantasies of posturban self-reliant homesteading, but ones in which our cities find some new purpose and are reborn afresh?

At Sea In The Sea Of Stories

Every year, Locus magazine asks its stable of critics and others for nominees for its recommended reading list. Anything that's recommended by at least two people gets to be included, and the list forms the basis for the magazine's awards ballot. I'm happy to say that In The Mouth of the Whale has been included in the best SF novel category, 'Bruce Springsteen' in best novelette (or stuff that's a little too long for a short story, but not long enough for a novella), and 'Antarctica Starts Here', 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, The Potter's Garden' and 'The Man' in best short story.  Which is very pleasing because, first, it's pretty much all the fiction I wrote last year, and second, I'm in the company of some pretty distinguished peers.

A nice little boost as I wrestle with plans and a detailed outline for the next novel, and plot out a story (or rather, a novelette) I've been commissioned to write for an anthology. The latter has to be written sooner rather than later, so until I've finished a first draft I'm putting the Quiet War instant fiction series into a very short hiatus. There are ten so far, and I still hope to bring that up to a round dozen, once I've finished with the seas of Venus.

Links 01/02/13

'Foster + Partners were responsible for the design of the base’s modular living units. These structures, pressured, inflatable capsules containing various living spaces, would be transported along with the 3D printer aboard a space rocket. Once landed, the tubular modules would be unpacked and inflated; the robot-controlled-printer would then print a regolith shell layer by layer directly over each lodging, effectively burying it in a thick protective crust of lunar soil.'  Beats shovelling lunar dirt over your inflatable hut by hand.

Talking of lunar dirt, NASA plans to use its Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot to extract water, air and fuel from the lunar regolith. Kind of like Moon, without the Helium 3.

The Road To Endeavour blog, which has been following the Opportunity rover's progress across the surface of Mars, has posted a nice piece on the 9th anniversary of its landing, 9 years on Barsoom.

 Meanwhile, out at Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft has been watching a gigantic planet-girdling storm choke on its own tail.

And back on Earth, we have to contend with a coffee apocalypse and the possibility that we've reached peak genius.

Same As It Ever Was

They sat, the man and the woman, in the middle of the narrow crescent of a white beach, looking out across calm blue water that stretched, punctuated here and there by low green islands. The sheer wall of the tent curving up, and beyond its lattice of huge diamond panes a low range of bare and dusty hills stretched across the near horizon, sharp against the black sky.

‘You remember this place,’ she said.

‘Of course I remember it,’ he said.

‘The last time we talked. When you tried to explain why you were leaving. And now . . .’

‘It hasn’t changed. The view. It hasn’t changed.’

‘Why should it change?’

‘There you are.’
‘We don’t need to talk about that again. We talked ourselves out the last time, years ago.’

‘And nothing has changed. But that’s all right. It’s what you are. What your family are.’

‘Did you come here to pick a fight with me?’

‘I came here to say goodbye.’

‘Because it’s part of the program. The thing of yours.’

‘Not just me. There are thirty-two others. Three ships, eleven souls in each ship.’

‘Souls.’

‘Some believe so. Souls, minds, personality clusters.’

‘Copies.’

‘We won’t think of ourselves as copies.’

‘Even though that’s what you are. What you’ll be. They’ll open your skull, pare down your brain micron by micron, and rip its structure and activity into a viron inside that little can of a ship. The process destroys the original, so all that’s left will be the copy. The ghost of a dead man.’

‘You can’t talk me out of it.’

‘I know. I never could talk you out of anything, and I’m not about to try now.’

‘So what are you trying to do?’

‘I don’t know. Introduce a note of realism into your fantasy, perhaps.’

‘I know what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘And even though you won’t admit it, I know it’s important.’

She didn’t reply. They sat quietly for a little while. The woman looking off at the view of the lake and the islands, the hills stark against the naked black sky. The man running white sand through his fingers, looking sideways at the woman. She had aged well. Slim as ever, hair white now, pure white hair in a bowl cut, lines of course, a certain stringiness at the throat, but the same squarish tip to her slender nose, the same small bow of a mouth, the mouth he’d once loved to kiss and rekiss.

He said, ‘Okay, I admit that this is part of it. Saying goodbye to your family and your friends. To the people who were important in your life. Who are important. Doing it, being able to do it, I admit: it’s a tick mark. But I would have come here anyway.’

She said, ‘You always did find it easy to say goodbye.’

‘Now who’s trying to pick a fight?’

‘You were never satisfied. Never content with what you had. You always wanted something else. My mother warned me, but I never listened.’

‘Your mother? I always thought she liked me.’

‘She liked you, but she knew you. My father didn’t like you, and didn’t care to think about why.’

‘Well. Maybe they were right.’

‘Don’t. Don’t . . . indulge me.’

Another silence. Small waves ran up to the beach, over and over. A bird slipped sideways on the warm breeze, dipping low over the water, gliding on.

‘I never asked for forgiveness. I always admitted that I was wrong to go. But I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t give you what you wanted kids, stability . . . I wanted more than that. Lovely though this place is, I was dying here,’ he said, smiling at his own hyperbole.

‘There are all kinds of cities and settlements right here on Callisto,’ she said. ‘And cities and settlements on Ganymede and Europa, too. Ten thousand gardens and habitats in the Belt. There’s Earth and the Moon. There’s Mars. Mercury. All the places further out, Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. Pluto and Charon, kobolds, the centaurs, the scattered disc . . . And that’s not enough?’

‘I guess not.’

‘I’m trying to understand.’

‘I’m trying to explain. I thought I had explained.’

‘It was a nice little speech. Leaving the cradle. The brave pioneers, the brave new worlds.’

‘Maybe it’s people. I think sometimes it’s that,’ the man says. ‘Everywhere you go, people are much the same. They make a big deal about little local differences in customs and protocols that really aren’t a big deal. And everywhere the same conversations about art and politics and the economy, the same gossip, the same ways of earning kudos . . . It’s all the same, everywhere. But out there, it’s blank. It’s new.’

‘Except other people are already out there, aren’t they? One of the first ships to light out, isn’t it headed where you’re headed?’

‘It’s old tech, that ship. A big, old, slow multigeneration ship that can’t make more than a fraction of a percent of light speed. It left more than a century ago, and we’ll overtake it inside a year after we launch. And we’ll get there centuries before it does. And that won’t be a problem because we don’t want what its crew and passengers want. They want the planet. The exoearth. We want the asteroid belts. The two belts, the comets . . .’

‘As if you couldn’t find a rock of your own here.’

‘And in ten or twenty years, the neighbours come calling. There’s nothing new, here. I don’t mean that’s a bad thing for you. You like things the way they are. But for me . . .’

‘You always had a low boredom threshold. I liked that, once upon a time. Your love of life, your fearlessness. The kid from Earth, coming all the way out here just because you wanted to see what it was like. You made everything into an adventure.’

‘We had some good times together, didn’t we?’

‘We had the wanderjahr.’

‘Driving along the equatorial mountains of Iapetus.’

‘Camelot, Mimas. Paris, Dione—’

‘We’ll always have Paris,’ he said, and smiled, but she didn’t understand the reference. ‘We had some high old times. But afterwards, I couldn’t hack it. Life here. I said I was sorry then. And I’m sorry now.’

‘No, you aren’t,’ she said neutrally. ‘You know your problem? You can’t change.’

‘I can’t change?’

‘You’re still that kid, looking for thrills. You haven’t grown up. You can’t grow up.’

‘If you ask me, it’s over-rated.’

‘Kids go on wanderjahrs because it helps them find out who they are,’ she said. ‘The experiences, the new places, the different people. It all gives a certain perspective. But you just liked to travel.’

‘Maybe I already knew who I was.’

‘You see? Same as you ever were.’

‘Not for long, according to you.’

She looked sideways at him. ‘Perhaps that’s why they chose you. People like you. People who can’t change. Perpetual adolescents.’

‘People who want adventure. Who are willing to risk everything to create something new.’

‘Say you get there. You survive the journey. Then what?’

‘We find CHON and metals, build the machines that build the really big construction machines. And we quicken kids, and teach them what to do. We’ll be like the guardians, the guides. And they’ll build new habitats and settlements, new cities. New ways of living around a new star.’

‘And then? When that gets old?’

‘There are always more stars. One thing about uploading into a viron, you don’t ever have to die. I’ll be have a front-row view of ten thousand years of history. A million years.’

‘Like anyone who hasn’t ever grown up, you really do fear death, don’t you?’

‘Uploading is dying, according to you.’

‘It’s a kind of death, but not the real death. And not real life either.’

‘Compared to this?’  The man gestured, meaning the lake and the islands, the trim little villages scattered around the rim of the tent.

‘People find who they are,’ the woman said. ‘They move on from childish things. Small things, ordinary things, everyday things, they become important. Hard things like raising kids become important. Work becomes important. My work on quantifying morality, you don’t think anything of it, but it’s not only important to me, it has mass, it has significance. It has made a significant contribution to setting a universal standard of kudos. Part of it is incorporated in every bourse in the system.’

‘I don’t mean to dismiss what you do.’

‘But you do. You did. You walked away from it. And now you’re walking away from everything else, into this awfully big adventure of yours. And you’ll keep running away.’

‘I’ll keep moving on. I’ll always want to find out what’s over the next horizon. And I will find out, too.’

‘You’ll keep on running. And never look back, never come home. Never stop to think why you’re running.’

‘I should have known that you wouldn’t understand.’

The woman studied him with a look of unquantifiable sadness. She said, ‘You are what you are. I am what I am. And sometimes I tend to slip into the formal mode of academic discourse when it isn’t appropriate. I’m sorry.’

When she stood, the man reached for her, saying, ‘I’m not angry or anything. Listen, I have a couple or three hours before the flitter leaves for Rainbow Bridge. We could hang out here a while, call up a picnic, maybe, you know, say goodbye properly . . .’

The woman laughed. ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ she said, and turned and walked off across the breast of the little island, its rabbit-cropped turf and scattered trees vivid and green against the black sky and Jupiter’s slanted pastel crescent.

‘The front-row view of a million years of history,’ the man called out, but the warm wind took his words and the woman walked on to the little skiff beached on the far side of the island, to her home, to the life she’d made.

Evening's Empires - Some Key Words

Gajananvihari Pilot. Pabuji's Gift. Kabadiwallahs. The iconography of the Bright Moment. Microscopic jitter. Tick-tock philosophers. Head doctors. Dacoits. Discorporate tankies. Ascetic minstrels. Skull feeders. Spire builders. The Free People. 207061 Themba. The forests of Vesta. Chandelier cities. Ophir, the world-city, a.k.a. The Caves of Steel. Free People. Fei Shen, the Flying Mountain, a.k.a Wufen Shan, the Fifth Sacred Mountain, a.k.a. First New Shanghai. Monoliths. Tannhauser Gate. The Republic of Arden. The ten thousand collectives of Europa. The Commonwealth of Sugar Mountain. The Memory Whole. Seraphs. Waypoints. The Great Expansion. The True Empire. Vacuum organisms. Cratered rubble-piles blanketed in deep layers of dust and debris, mountains of nickel-iron, stony mountains of pyroxene, olivines and feldspar, rocks rich in tarry carbonaceous tars, clays and water ice. Pirates of the asteroids.