Hari's Ship

He studied the ring ship’s familiar contours and landmarks as they grew closer. Spars and tethers anchoring the motor pod in the centre of the ring ship’s Möbius strip. Cubical modules and domes of various sizes scattered over the surface. The two big rectangular hatches of the starboard garages. The cluster of dish antennae where he’d done his first work on the ship’s skin, helping Nabhoj swap out a frozen servo. The workshop blister where he’d assembled much of Dr Gagarian’s experimental apparatus. The hatch for the garage that housed his utility pod, 09 Chaju, a tough little unit with pairs of articulated arms either side of the diamond blister of its canopy.  The hours he’d spent in the couch that took up most of the pod’s cramped cabin, ferrying and assembling components, welding . . .

From Evening's Empires.
 
They are an unfashionable trope in science fiction right now, but at this late stage in my career, when I should probably know better, I'm still writing about spaceships. Despite early consumption of much science fiction steeped in the romance of the Great Out There, I'm not really interested in the sky-filling giants and naval manoeuvres of old-style space opera and default SF. If I'm interested in them at all, if they're something more than a convenient mode of transport to actual landscapes revealed by actual spacecraft, the equivalent of the plane that takes the protagonist of a contemporary novel from London to New York, it's as a place where people work, where they live and make their living.

My father was in the Royal Navy, a sailor from the ship-building town of Belfast. Because my family lived in land-locked Stroud, in the Cotswolds, I didn't see him that often. And after he and my mother divorced I didn't see him at all. But there were always reminders of his work about the house. Postcards and aerograms from ports in post-colonial remnants in the British Empire. Carved giraffes and elephants from Kenya. A gaudy lamp from Hong-Kong, whose shade, decorated with sampans, revolved in the heat of its bulb. A weighty book about the sea and ships: I have forgotten its title, but can still recall its wine-dark cover and grainy photographs. I still have my father's hardback copy of Graf Spee, an account by Michael Powell of the World War 2 battle which he and Emric Pressburger filmed as The Battle of the River Plate; a film in which my father, who served on one of the frigates that stood in for the British WW2 ships, makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance. I remember watching him lay delicate gold leaf on the boat badge for the bridge of the ship on which he was serving. One year, when he was stationed at Portsmouth, my family lived in a rented bungalow in Portchester, hard by the shore, and I would watch the great grey ships across the water, fossick in the low-tide estuarine mud, and bring back shards of electronics from an unfenced military dump.

Hari, Gajananvihari Pilot, the hero of Evening's Empires, was born and brought up in his family's ship. It's the only life he knows until it is taken from him. When his family's ship is hijacked, and his family is kidnapped, or worse, Hari escapes. Stranded on a barren asteroid, he swears to get back everything he's lost.

Where do we get our ideas from?

A Short Taxonomy Of Spaceship Covers

After a little research, here's a list of credits for the 1970s SF paperback covers I put up in two previous posts. I haven't been able to identify the artist for one cover: Poul Anderson's The Trouble Twisters.  Does anyone know who created it?

Part 1
Equator, by Brian Aldiss - Bruce Pennington
The Trouble Twisters, by Poul Anderson - unknown
The Stars Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov - Chris Foss
The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov - Chris Foss
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov - Chris Foss
In The Ocean of Night, by Gregory Benford - Peter Andrew Jones
The Star Dwellers, by James Blish - Colin Hay
The Testament of Andros, by James Blish - Chris Foss
A Life for the Stars, by James Blish - Chris Foss
Triton, by Samuel R. Delany - Tony Roberts
Now Wait for Next Year, by Philip K Dick - Chris Foss
334, by Thomas M Disch - Tony Roberts

Part 2
All the Sounds of Fear, by Harlan Ellison - Chris Foss
Deathworld 2, by Harry Harrison - Eddie Jones
The Machine in Shaft Ten, by M John Harrison - Chris Foss
The Heaven Makers, by Frank Herbert - Bruce Pennington
The Best of Fritz Leiber - Tony Roberts
After Apollo, by Barry Malzberg - Tony Roberts
The Caltraps of Time, by David I Masson - Gordon C Davis
The View From the Stars, by Walter Miller - Chris Foss
A Hole in Space, by Larry Niven - Tony Roberts
West of the Sun, by Edgar Pangborn - Colin Hay
The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe - Jim Burns
Away and Beyond, by A.E.Van Vogt - Chris Foss

A few brief notes:

All the covers were scanned from books in my collection, and I bought almost all of them (the two exceptions are The Machine in Shaft Ten and The Caltraps of Time) in the 1970s. Back then, it seemed as if every other science fiction paperback had a spaceship on its cover; even though the proportion was probably somewhat less, spaceships were a major signifier, and catnip to my younger self.

You may have noticed that none of the covers are of books by women. There were plenty of women publishing science fiction novels and short story collections back then - Octavia E Butler, Suzette Haden Elgin, Ursula Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Anne McCaffery, Vonda McIntyre, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon), and Kate Wilhelm, for instance - but they didn't seem to get spaceships on their covers. They mostly got people instead. No doubt Freud would have something to say about that.

Chris Foss was the major SF cover artist of the 1970s. His massive spaceships and other machines -

- with their chunky realism and chequered and striped paintjobs, are instantly recognisable. I'm pretty sure that he was one of the influences on the generation of British writers who in the 1980s and 1990s started publishing the kind of science fiction that's become known as the New Space Opera. (One of those writers, Al Reynolds, has republished his review of Foss's book, Hardware, on his blog.)

Spaceships From 1970s British SF Paperbacks, Part 2

(I'll post artists' attributions for this and the previous set a little later. And yes, I know the machine on the cover of The Caltraps of Time might well be a futuristic jet fighter. Exception/rules/whatever.)

Links 29/06/13

Postcards of the Post Office Tower.

Natural sci-fi movie sets: photographs of the interiors of Icelandic lava tubes.

Patrick Cashin's photographs of transport tunnels under New York City.

The story of Manchester Baby, the world's first stored programme computer:

Q&A

Background: a few months ago, I did an email Q&A with Jonathan Wright, which was condensed into a short article just published in SFX magazine. The full Q&A is published here with Jonathan’s kind permission.


JW: Your new book "is set in the same far-flung future as his last few novels". Why did you want to tell a more intimate story this time around?

PM: The other Quiet War books have been about people caught up in big historical shifts. I needed several viewpoints because the stories spanned a lot of territory. For this last book I wanted to tell the story of someone whose life has been shaped by history - the history of his family, and the ruins of history - the history of the last three books - that clutter the Solar System. A simple story of someone trying to get back to his home, which someone else has stolen.

JW: "Throughout the novel we follow Hari's viewpoint". Was this a technical challenge as a writer?

Hari was raised aboard a ship, and has only been off it once before. Like any sailor, he's shaped by shipboard life and its customs and hierarchies. And while he's clever and capable and determined, he's also naive. Much like anyone else who leaves home for the first time. So the challenge was to tell the story from his point of view, and with his voice, while at the same time hinting that things aren't always the way he sees them.

JW: You upcoming PS collection: can you tell us a bit about this as well?

PM: Nick Gevers pointed out that my first novel Four Hundred Billion Stars, had been published 25 years ago, and thought it would be nice to bring out a collection of my best SF stories spanning that period. Nick and Peter Crowther, head honcho at PS Publishing, allowed me to make my own selection. It wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be, but I finally winnowed it down to 21 stories, running from one of my first, 'Little Ilya and Spider and Box', published in one of the early issues Interzone back in 1985, to 'The Choice', which won the Sturgeon Award last year. It's interesting - to me, anyway - that the first and last stories and several in between deal with escaping from the confines of home and family. It takes a while to gain the perspective needed to see the shape of your life and your work.

JW: 25 years of novelising, d'ya feel like an old fella? Actually, seriously, how does it feel to get this far? A lot fall by the wayside...

PM: I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and not out of choice. That's what you did. So I guess that, yes, I'm old. How do I feel, to still be writing and publishing? Grateful, I guess. Grateful and amazed to still have a voice, and a place. I still want to write the best book I can, every time. Even if it means writing a very different book than the one before. And I still have a few more books I want to write. And I still think I have things to learn, about writing. So that hasn't changed.

JW:  Is Brit SF healthier now than back then?

PM: Twenty-five years ago the lists of science fiction publishers were dominated by big American names.  And there weren't that many science-fiction books being published. Now, there are more books, by more British authors. But a lot of those books are fantasy, or so-called slipstream. Fantasy has grown; genre science fiction has dwindled somewhat. Which is a pity, and not just because it's what I write. Science grows ever more vigorous, our view of the universe ever more strange and complex. Society is shaped by technological changes. All of this should be stimulating science fiction, but too much of core science fiction - SF published as SF - seems to be talking to itself rather than engaging in dialogue with the world. That dialogue is going on elsewhere it seems.

JW: Your health: how is it? And did your health scare change your attitudes towards things at all?

PM: I've been very ill - I was diagnosed with bowel cancer two and a half years ago. Stage three, advanced, but not yet spread beyond its locus. Not quite terminal, although with only a 40% chance of survival over 5 years. I'm somewhat better now. In the acknowledgements at the end of Evening's Empires, I thank the surgical team and the chemotherapy team who saved my life [see preceding post - PM]. Without them I wouldn't have written Evening's Empires. Without them I wouldn't be around.

Cancer changes you - you can get better, but you can't go back. You're somewhere else. I'm still finding out where that is. Dennis Potter, when he was dying of pancreatic cancer, explained how every moment seemed much more significant, much richer. How the cherry blossom outside his window was the frothiest blossomiest blossom ever. I certainly felt that, at the time, when I didn't know how much time I had left.  I still feel something of it now. Oddly, the book I was writing when I was diagnosed, In The Mouth of the Whale, was in part about the consequences of trying to escape death. The burden of living a very long life. Now I feel even sorrier for poor Sri Hong-Owen now than I did before my diagnosis.

JW: You told me in Wales [at the SFX Weekender in February 2011 - PM] that it was difficult to write when in treatment... That must have been worrying.

PM: There's no such thing as light chemotherapy. You are poisoned to within a precise inch of your life as the doctors attempt to kill stray cancer cells without quite killing you. It was a world of very heavy gravity. I could write. I continued to write throughout the treatment, in fact, but it was . . . just a string of incidents really, without the backbone of narrative.

In my primary school class, there was a kid who could tell fantastic stories - the hero falls down a hole into a cave, is attacked by bats, falls into a stream, is washed over waterfall into another cave, finds treasure, is attacked by a bear, and so on. One thing after another. Great fun at the time, but shapeless. So while I continued to write, and as therapeutic as that might have been, it didn't produce anything with the shape or coherence of a novel.

I knew that I was getting better when I realised that the mass of stuff I'd produced was shapeless, and started over. Just as I was coming out of chemotherapy, I wrote a short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', and sold it to Asimov's. It felt incredibly good to be able to do that again. Then I went to Cornwall, and walked the coast route from Zennor to St Ives, on a beautiful sunny day. That also felt incredibly good.

JW: What next?

PM: I've re-edited the three Confluence books - the story of a world-changing hero, set in the very far future in a very strange world. 1200 manuscript pages. They're coming out in a single volume at the end of the year. I'm excited by that.

And I have ideas for two books set in the universe of my Jackaroo stories, in which aliens arrive on Earth to help, give humanity access to junk-littered worlds, and sit back and watch the fun. I'm working on the first of those right now. It's called Something Coming Through.

Without Whom

I'm not given to appending to the end of my novels the kind of effusive two- or three-page acknowledgements that are increasingly de rigueur, and seem include everyone the author has encountered during the writing process (I'm unfairly exaggerating, but not by much). So although the acknowledgements of Evening's Empires are only three short paragraphs, as far as I'm concerned they're rather longer than usual.

The chief reason is quite simple.  In October 2010 I was diagnosed with bowel cancer.  Although fairly advanced, it was still localised, and treatable by surgery and twelve rounds of chemotherapy.  All of which were free at point of delivery, by the way, thanks to the NHS. For seven months, I became a battleground between my own rebellious cells and the chemical weapons of modern medicine. Luckily, I remain in remission, and although I'm now a permanent resident of what the late, great Christopher Hitchens called Tumortown, I'm more or less recovered, and back at work.

The diagnosis came just after I had submitted the manuscript of In The Mouth of the Whale to my publishers, and I managed to deal with the editing process (including, as is my habit, a final draft) during the early stages of chemotherapy, before the cumulative effects of chemical warfare became too debilitating.  Evening's Empires is the first novel to have been conceived, completed, and published since then.  Hence my gratitude:

I have the great good luck to be able to thank a whole village of people who saved my life: Mr Austin O’Bichere, his surgical team, and the doctors, nurses and staff of the chemotherapy unit of University College Hospital.  My profound gratitude to all of them, and to my partner, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore.  If it hadn’t been for their treatment, care and support I would not have survived to write this novel.

My thanks also to Simon Spanton and Marcus Gipps for editing suggestions, Nick Austin for his thorough and lucid copy-editing, and Simon Kavanagh at the Mic Cheetham Literary Agency for his help, support, and coffee hit points.

I first read about the epic of Pabuji, and the Story of the She-Camels, in William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives.  The poem ‘I shall not coil my tangled hair . . .’ is adapted from a traditional song of the Baul minstrels of Bengal.  ‘On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances’ is a line from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem ‘On The Seashore.’

Spaceships From 1970s British SF Paperbacks, Part 1

Links 22/07/13

'On October 24, 2012, Bibi Mamana and her grandchildren were gathering firewood or picking okra outside their home. They may have been in a field. Perhaps it was a militant compound with a weapons depot. 2 missiles were fired, killing Mamana and up to 5 other people, injuring 6 to 8 of the children. Some other men, maybe 3, maybe militants, may have been caught in the blast. A house and a car may or may not have been destroyed. Either 3 cows or 1 buffalo and 2 goats were also killed. The drones remained overhead and 5 to 7 minutes after the first strike more missiles fell.

'This moment—the drones, the missiles, the people, the livestock—is a node in a vast network. It spans the globe, connecting villages to secret installations to office parks to seats of government. It reaches backwards for millenia and will resonate forwards for untold centuries. To trace it out completely is impossible. We are hampered by its size and by the fact that much of it is hidden behind classified protections and some of the rest is barely recorded at all.

'This is an attempt to understand the geography of a drone strike.'

'Mike's morning commute to the battlefield begins with his usual Egg McMuffin and black coffee from a McDonald's drive-through window in Alamogordo, New Mexico. After driving out of town in his Ford pickup, clearing a security checkpoint, and attending a daily briefing, he will be remote-controlling an MQ-9 Reaper drone 10,000 feet above Afghanistan.' Elijah Solomon Hurwitz's photo essay on the mundane lives of drone pilots.

'The United States’ entrance into the First World War in April 1917 marked Americans’ first truly organized attempt at keeping watch on its citizens.'

The graveyard of New York's old telephone booths.

'A sliver of wood coated with tin could make a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery.'  Ideal for your ecoconscious robots.

'3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand.' Ideal for your nanobots.

In Which I Get Reviewed

The first review of Evening's Empires, by Gary Wolfe, published in Locus Magazine (any typos down to me and my scanning software):

Paul McAuley's Quiet War series (The Quiet War, 2008; Gardens of the Sun, 2009; plus the discontinuous but related In the Mouth of the Whale in 2012, and a bunch of stories) are among the defining works of the notable renascence of solar system fiction in the last decade or so, and McAuley's evident passion for extrapolating the surface and subsurface details of the various gas-giant moons and myriad artificial habitats he calls "gardens" is a good indicator of the appeal of such settings: we have just enough hard astronomical data to understand the challenges for a hard SF writer, but with plenty of room for narrative tooling around. In Benford's playing-with-the-net-up metaphor, we at least have a good idea of where the net is, and writing planetary fiction about worlds that we know something about must seem like a kind of formal constraint, a kind of hard-SF version of sonnets or villanelles. At times, McAuley appeared so enamored with working out these settings that the detailed planetology interrupted his already complex, multiviewpoint narratives, but in Evening's Empires he uses the settings quite effectively as a backdrop for a classic revenge-and-redemption space opera focusing on a single character's quest, and which pointedly pays tribute to a broad swath of SF history. Part of the fun of reading it is name-checking those homages - section titles borrowed from Asimov, Clarke, Godwin, and Silverberg, locations named Trantor and Tannhauser Gate, a scene of man-apes capering before a giant monolith, even a couple of swooping flying-scooter chases worthy of Star Wars set pieces . . .
McAuley is having a good deal of fun laying out what amounts to a tribute to classic space opera, and Evening's Empires, while not lacking in the snazzy mise-en-scene spectacle or the philosophical debates of the earlier novels, is the most purely enjoyable straight adventure tale in the Quiet War series so far.

Extra special bonus from the same issue, Gardner Dozois on my short story collection A Very British History:

I won't even pretend to be impartial about the work of Paul McAuley. I bought and published lots of it when I was editor of Asimov's and reprinted other stories in my Best of the Year series, both before and after my stint at Asimov's. Suffice it to say that I consider McAuley to be one of the two or three best writers working in SF today, and believe some of the stories collected in A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, especially "The Temporary King", "Gene Wars", "Recording Angel", "Second Skin", "17", "Sea Change, With Monsters", "City of the Dead", and "The Choice" to be among the best science fiction stories published by anyone in this period, not just the best of Paul McAuley.

Dr Gagarian

If you haven't already noticed, hey, I have a new novel, Evening's Empires, coming out in a bit under a month, and I'll be mentioning it here, now and then. Not only because I earn my living writing novels, but also because I'm pretty excited by this one, and want as many people as possible to read it. It's out on July 18, and while it would be a great idea to support your local bookshop, you can already preorder it on Amazon. Both the Kindle edition and the hardback are pretty good deals, but I don't mind if you order the trade paperback. What the heck.

It's not only an end (maybe not the end, but definitely an end, for now), after almost two decades or more, to my exploration of the universe of the Quiet War. It was written in rather special and difficult circumstances, as the acknowledgements at the end makes clear. But I'll talk about that another time. Next week, maybe. Meanwhile, here's a short extract about one of the characters.

Dr Gagarian was a tall skinny tick-tock person some three hundred years old. His jointed carapace of black fibrogen resembled an ambulatory pressure suit or an animated man-sized insect; his major organs had been replaced by machine equivalents; his brain was laced with neural nets that formed a kind of shadow mind that stored his every thought and reaction; his eyes were dull white stones in a leathery inexpressive face. A remote, forbidding figure. Inhuman, barely mammalian. In an age where there was very little philosophical investigation, and most of that was theoretical, he was an incredibly rare beast: an experimental physicist. For the past twenty years, he and his small crew of collaborators had been attempting to identify, measure and define changes in the fine grain of space-time caused by the passing of the Bright Moment. Pabuji’s Gift, whose exploration of remote ruins often took it far from the background noise of human civilisation, was an ideal platform for his latest experiments, and its store of ancient machines and the debris of half a hundred clades and cultures provided useful components for his experiment apparatus.

Nabhomani believed that Dr Gagarian was a charlatan. A magician disguised as a philosopher, consumed by a fantasy of mastering secret powers. Nabhoj and Agrata had little time for Dr Gagarian’s experiments, either. But Aakash was convinced that the tick-tock philosopher and his collaborators were engaged on a hugely important project.

‘We are able to make a living from mining the past because so many of the old technologies have been forgotten,’ he told Hari. ‘Baseliners have given up on philosophy, and posthuman clades prefer theory to application.  We live in an age that cannibalises its past because it has lost faith in its future. But with our help, Dr Gagarian and his friends will change that. We will be at the root of a great new flowering of practical philosophy. Think of what we will be able to do, once we master the principles that created the Bright Moment! New kinds of communication devices. Unlimited computational capacity within the metrical frame of space-time. New technologies, Hari.  New technologies and new ideas.’

'Will we be rich?’ Hari said.

‘Everyone will be enriched,’ Aakash said. ‘That’s the important thing. Everyone will benefit, and everyone will be enriched.’

Shaw And Superman

Before you start reading, and if you haven't yet seen the Superman reboot, Man of Steel, SPOILERS AHEAD.

Almost obscured by Man of Steel's very long, loud, and explody slugfest is a dialogue with a play more than a century old. That play, George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, is a verbose, mostly action-free romantic comedy with an examination of Nietzsche's ideas about the Ubermensche and the future evolution of mankind at its centre. Through the mouthpiece of the play's hotheaded hero, and a long dialogue between Don Juan and the Devil, Shaw argued that Supermen, with their superior intellects and ability to circumvent ordinary moral codes, could either become tyrants and dominate the mass of ordinary people, or do their best to elevate everyone. And the best way of elevating the entire human race was to use the same kind of selective breeding used to improve plants and animals. To that end, the institution of marriage should be abolished, so that men and women would be free to choose their ideal mate (oh, and property should be abolished too). The only true race of Supermen would be born from a collective utopia.

In Man of Steel's long prologue, we're shown that the inhabitants of Superman's home planet, Krypton, use cloning and selective breeding to maintain the purity of their race rather than improve it; towards the end of the film, Superman's nemesis, General Zod, forcefully declares that he was specifically bred to defend the ideal of Krypton, and will do anything in his power towards that end. Superman, however, is the first natural birth in millennia, the product of his parents' belief that chance and Shaw's version of free love may cure their society's static decadence.

According to his natural father, Superman's unique birthright may allow him to become a bridge between Kryptonians and humans, and produce something greater than either of them could produce by themselves. And although he's hobbled by his foster-father's warning to hide his unique powers, Superman wanders America, trying his best to do good - shown in flashbacks, these episodes, and those from Superman's childhood as he grows into his powers and absorbs human values, are the best part of the film. Clever, complex, and with some fine imagery, and a nice montage that shows Lois Lane doggedly uncovering the truth. Zod, on the other hand, claims to be above petty human morality; he's willing to commit genocide and found a new version of Krypton on a planet-wide pile of skulls. He's an unfettered exemplar of the popular conception of the Nietzschean Superman, ruthlessly pursuing ideals of racial purity and Lebensraum.

And this is where the film devolves into a grim and joyless empty spectacle; where Superman departs from Shaw's ideal. After the arrival of Zod and his crew, Superman must prove to the US military that he isn't just another enemy alien, and is soon embedded in the military-industrial complex. Zod should be pitiable - he can't help doing what he does because he was born that way - but instead his pulp villainy is cartoonishly one-dimensional, and his apocalyptic threat is an excuse to stage all-out warfare in Superman's home town of Smallville, and in Metropolis. At the end, Superman cops out and commits murder, and may also have committed genocide too. Just as it became necessary to destroy the town to save it, it becomes necessary for Superman to break his moral code to achieve a neat, uplifting ending for the film, and (having swept the mother of all 9/11s under the rug) a shameless reversion to the Golden Age romance.

Links 14/06/13

NASA research indicates hunks of frozen carbon dioxide -- dry ice -- may glide down some Martian sand dunes on cushions of gas similar to miniature hovercraft, plowing furrows as they go.




A 4-billion-pixel panorama from the Curiosity Mars Rover.


The “dark matter of life” describes microbes and even entire divisions of bacterial phyla that have evaded cultivation and have yet to be sequenced. We present a genome from the globally distributed but elusive candidate phylum TM6 and uncover its metabolic potential. TM6 was detected in a biofilm from a sink drain within a hospital restroom by analyzing cells using a highly automated single-cell genomics platform. We developed an approach for increasing throughput and effectively improving the likelihood of sampling rare events based on forming small random pools of single-flow–sorted cells, amplifying their DNA by multiple displacement amplification and sequencing all cells in the pool, creating a “mini-metagenome.” 

The Hawaiian bobtail squid has an alarm clock made of symbiotic bacteria.

Gesture Art

"The novel is a gesture art. We don’t need to know more about Mr Bingley’s body than that he’s ‘wonderfully handsome’, or (at first) that Hans Castorp looks like ‘an ordinary young man’. We couldn’t describe them to a police sketch artist and expect to get anything back. Gatsby, first spotted, is ‘standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr Gatsby himself’ – that’s it – while Daisy’s face is ‘sad and lovely with bright things in it’. We project, we fill in. Some writers hardly seem to give their characters bodies at all, or can’t make up their minds about them: Emma Bovary’s eyes are black in one chapter, in other chapters brown or blue."

 From Deborah Friedell's review of Lionel Shriver's Big Brother, London Review of Books.

The Masters Of The Measureless Mind

Children ran everywhere. Many wore masks. Two men stripped to the waist were stirring a cauldron of soup with wooden paddles. A woman was selling shaved ice in paper cones. A child was selling garlands of white flowers. A man was selling tea, deftly pouring it into white porcelain cups from the long spout of the pot he balanced on a pad on top of his head. Two ascetics went past, clad in their particoloured robes, tapping a slow beat on small drums tucked under their arms. A woman sat cross-legged, playing an unfretted spike fiddle. Another woman sang an atonal praisesong. There were pairs and trios and quartets of musicians spaced along the grassy verge at the edge of the beach, and men and women stopped to listen and then moved on. Banners hung from tall poles, rattling in the breeze off the lake. The silvery teardrop of a balloon floated high above the tents, reflecting the last of the sunlight, and in the basket hung beneath it a holy man sang a wailing prayer.

As he mingled with the gaudy parade, passing intricately crafted altars and shrines, breathing the odours of sandalwood and incense, woodsmoke and cooking, hearing strange musics drifting on the warm wind, Hari felt an unbounded delight at the rich variety of human imagination. He supposed that his father would have been dismayed by the unabashed veneration of imaginary sky ghosts, the endless elaboration of superstition, the flaunting of pointless scholarship, but it seemed to him that although these people had gathered to honour and exalt their various prophets and gods, what they were really celebrating was themselves. One of the itinerant philosophers who had taken passage on Pabuji’s Gift had once told Hari that small groups of like-minded people generated a gestalt, a group overmind or harmonic mindset that enhanced problem-solving, enhanced empathy, and reduced conflict. A useful survival trait, according to the philosopher, when the ancestors of all human beings had been a few bands of man-apes on the veldts of old Earth. Hari’s father had dismissed this and similar explanations of human behaviour as fairy-tales, but it was easy to imagine a kind of benevolent overmind permeating the encampment, binding everyone to a common purpose.

A small parade was coming down the road. Eight men holding poles on which was balanced a huge red skull with elongated, toothy jaws, followed by men beating drums or tossing firecrackers to the left and right, and a man who swigged a clear greasy liquid from a bottle and touched a burning torch to his lips and breathed out fire. As the crowds parted to let them pass, Hari saw the tent of the Masters of the Measureless Mind on the other side of the road, square and butter-yellow, just as Rav had described it. A black pennant strung from the top of its central pole snapped in the wind.

From Evening's Empires

There Is A Light

I'd been a keen reader of the novels of Iain Banks - Banksie to all who knew him - several years before I met him. I'd read The Wasp Factory in 1985, and his other mainstream works as they appeared, although I didn't begin to read his science fiction until a little later because I was working on my own (inferior) version of regooded space opera and didn't want to be overwhelmed. He was a formidable writer. Confession: I still haven't read Consider Phlebas, so have that, at least, to look forward to. I first met him, glancingly, at a science fiction convention in Liverpool, in 1990. He was the guest of honour, trailed not just by fans but also by a documentary TV crew. I got to know him a little better when I moved to Scotland to take up a job at St Andrews University, and although I was more of an acquaintance than a friend he was always incredibly friendly whenever we met, and I always looked forward to seeing him.

He had that effect on people. He was a fierce and fearless champion of what he thought was right, and for all his self-deprecation was serious about his work, but he was also amusing, tolerant, witty, and overflowing with curiosity and good humour. As Simon Ings wrote, in his excellent appreciation, Iain had no side to him. What he was was what you got. I was lucky enough to interview him at the Hay Festival, once upon a time, and he treated his fans exactly as he treated the great and good of the literary world: as fellow human beings. Like all great writers, he was intensely interested in people, and (like Charles Dickens, like Stephen King) wrote about them and the worlds they inhabited with a clear, direct, colloquial and unmistakable voice.

I last talked to him a few weeks ago, and was glad of the chance; despite the mortal seriousness of his prognosis, he was still cheerful, and witty, and fully engaged. But I also remember another night, back in Scotland, in the 1990s, when Pat Cadigan and I gave readings at one of the Waterstones on Princes Street. Banksie turned up, quite unexpectedly, and took us out to dinner, and plied us with champagne ('because why not?'), and we all had a fine time, and that was how he was. A great writer, and a good and generous man, and now his big bright bold boisterous light has gone out, too soon, too soon.

Iain Menzies Banks, 1954 - 2013

Links 07/06/13

Should biohackers use Kickstarter to fund a project to create glow-in-the-dark plants?

Book-stacking, Japanese style.

Brad Goldpaint's fabulous photograph of the aurora borealis over Crater Lake, Oregon.

In Homebush Bay, just west of Sydney, a derelict ship supports a floating forest.

My Quiet War story 'Dead Men Walking' has been reprinted in Clarkesworld magazine. Read it here.

The Swarming Dead

We've had shambling zombies; we've had speedy feral zombies. Now the blockbuster film World War Z, based on the novel by Max Brooks, presents army-ant zombies laying waste to vast swathes of the planet. In this ambitious, big budget attempt to combine zombie flick tropes with a Contagion-style race-against-time search for the cure to a global plague, these undead aren't after the brains and flesh of the living: their sole purpose is to spread the disease that's transformed them, using superhuman speed and strength to chase down and bite new victims.

Unlike Contagion's slick juxtaposition of multiple viewpoints, World War Z's global disaster sticks close to its hero, UN troubleshooter Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt). When the zombie plague sweeps across the world, Lane manages to get his family to a safe berth on a fleet of ships anchored far from land, but in return must help a young scientist search for the source of the disease and a possible cure. The first half hour, with its focus on survival in a city where zombies and panicking citizens are running amok, is rather terrific, but the story quickly loses momentum as Pitt treks from place to place, brow furrowed, collecting plot coupons. There's a great cameo from David Morse as a renegade CIA agent caged in an overrun airbase for smuggling arms to North Korea (which stopped the plague spreading by defanging all of its citizens), and for a moment I hoped he'd partner up with Pitt and inject a little drama and oddball to-and-fro into the exposition, but no, Pitt is off on his solo quest again.  This time to Jerusalem, and then to a WHO health facility in Cardiff of all places, and the story's energy dissipates in a final section that appears to have been bolted on from a different film with a much lower budget, before abruptly ending.

Director Marc Forster marshals some impressive action scenes, notably zombies swarming like insects over a city's defences and a neat zombies-loose-on-a-plane bit, but these are interspersed between a great deal of solemn exposition, the global scope of the disaster is conveyed mainly by glimpses of news feeds and a single nuclear explosion, we're never really made to care about the fate of the hero's wife and kids (who are mostly written out of the second half of the film), and the PG-13 rating means that there's none of the mayhem and spatter you expect from a zombie film.  Apart from some shoot-em-up stuff, most of the action, like a post-Hayes code film, is above the waist, which leads to a risible moment as Pitt struggles to tug the business end of a crowbar from a downed zombie like a golfer lining up a difficult putt.  It's by no means the disaster that some are claiming, but despite its gloomy ambition, this hybrid fails to deliver a coherent story.

A Little History

(In case you haven't noticed, I have a new novel coming out soon. This is a bit of background. Also, it's my 1000th entry on the blog.)

One thing that's certain about the future: it will have more history than the present. Even if every record is somehow burned or wiped, all the events between now and then will have a weight, a gravity. They'll leave their mark.  In The Quiet War, I wanted to show how history trailed into the present of its future; how it affected those who lived there. So: some of Earth's wealthiest people escape grievous climatic changes and the resulting political chaos by setting up a refuge on the Moon. Later, their descendants, and the descendants of the technicians, engineers and other servants who maintained the refuge, move further outward, to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The resentments of those left behind on Earth, and the belief that the hard work done to rebuild shattered ecosystems lends them a moral superiority, are the tinder for a crusade against the Outers.

The Quiet War depicted the slow build-up towards outright war; the next novel, Gardens of the Sun, is about the consequences of Earth's victory. War is not a solution to a problem that can't be solved in any other way. It is not an end point; it does not reset history to a notional Year Zero. As the history of the twentieth century has shown, time and again, the violent assertion of power often causes new and unexpected problems.

The two novels follow the stories of five protagonists as they threaded through larger events; I wanted to give views from a variety of perspectives, and to show how human stories are affected by history, and how they can sometimes affect history.  In The Mouth of the Whale jumps forward 1500 years or so, and also jumps right out of the Solar System, but the colonists of the circumstellar rubble belt of Fomalhaut have not yet managed to escape history, although the stories of the three protagonists show how they try to transcend their circumstances.

And Evening's Empires, set around the time of In the Mouth of the Whale, but back in the Solar System, is the story of a single person, Gajananvihari Pilot. He has escaped the hijack of his family's ship, and although he's been stripped of everything he knows, although he's hardly ever left his ship before and knows almost nothing about the hundreds of little empires scattered across the asteroid belt, he's determined to get it back. And soon learns that his family's history is stranger than he thought, and entangled in the wider wreckage of human history.

The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun were designed as a diptych, but In the Mouth of the Whale and Evening's Empires are separate stories from the same history.  The four novels in the Quiet War universe are not episodes in an overarching story: there are connections and echoes, but no continuous narrative. But there is a theme.

The Caves Of Steel

The car ran at a leisurely fifty kilometres per hour along a track that clung to the overhead. Hari and Rav had it to themselves. They sat in the nose like kings of the world, sweeping through sector after sector, each separated from the next by a transparent bulkhead. A sea of white sand dunes. An intricate puzzle of lakes and forest. Thick, unbroken jungle. Old towns and palaces hung from the overhead; newer settlements were scattered across the floor. Banyan patches, strings of half-buried blockhouses, clumps of flimsy shacks circled by defensive walls, villages straggling around pele towers of various heights and degrees of ruin: remnants of the war games Trues had liked to play, great slaughters organised for the entertainment of jaded suzerains and optimates. One tower, at the centre of a craggy canyonland, was as big as a town, the concentric rings of defences around its base broken and pitted by the wounds of an ancient bombardment and overgrown by trees and a shawl of creepers from which a swirl of black birds rose as the car passed by high above, hurtling onwards around Ophir’s great curve, above towers and villages and towns and fields and wilderness, above woods and fields, above stretches of deadland stripped to the fullerene strands of the world-city’s rind.

All of this was contained in a habitable deck or shell fifty kilometres in diameter, wrapped around the nickel-iron keel on which Ophir had been founded. A surface area of eight thousand square kilometres. The overhead was more than a kilometre high, and there was weather beneath it. Shoals of wispy clouds; a dark rainstorm. Vast perspectives were interrupted by enormous bulkheads of diamond-fullerene composite pierced here and there by ship-sized airlocks through which rail cars and ground traffic passed.

Once, the rock at the centre of Ophir’s shell had been occupied by a single small, tented town and a scatter of vacuum-organism farms. And then the True Empire had absorbed it, and embarked on an insanely grand engineering project. Thousands of huge machines had processed primordial organic material mined from a score of comets, levelled the cratered terrain and covered it with densely woven layers of fullerene, and floated a shell a kilometre above this foundation, supported by bulkheads that divided the interior into a hundred segments, each landscaped with a different garden biome. A world-city. A monument to the Trues’ hubris.

It was the one of largest structures ever built in the Solar System, yet despite its adamantine foundations and bulkheads, and the deep layers of foamed fullerenes that formed the outer skin of its shell, it was hopelessly vulnerable. Its defence system of ablative lasers and swarms of bomblets and drones was sufficient to sweep and deflect debris from its orbital path, but offered no protection from a concerted attack.

The Trues had built Ophir as an act of ego and of defiance. To prove that they could; to prove that none of their enemies could challenge them. And their enemies had called it the City of the Caves of Steel because, like that ancient material, it was both massive and brittle. Collision with a single rock just a few tens of metres across would utterly destroy it. When the True Empire had at last fallen, the world-city had been spared only because a small majority of posthumans could not countenance the murder of several hundred thousand citizens. Five hundred years later, the descendants of those citizens were still forbidden to travel beyond the shell of the city’s overhead, and their numbers had been swollen by baseliners fleeing predatory dacoits and the capricious rule of posthuman clades. The magnificent folly of the True Empire had become a refuge and a prison.

From Evening's Empires

Links 31/05/13

Germany's national railway operator will soon be flying small drones over its tracks, bridges and stations to keep a watchful eye out for vandals spraying graffiti.

At North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, motion sensors, like those used for burglar alarms, go off every time someone enters an intensive care room. The sensor triggers a video camera, which transmits its images halfway around the world to India, where workers are checking to see if doctors and nurses are performing a critical procedure: washing their hands. 

"Killer robots" that could attack targets autonomously without a human pulling the trigger pose a threat to international stability and should be banned before they come into existence, the United Nations will be told by its human rights investigator this week.

Ed Stone has spent 36 years guiding the twin Voyager spacecraft through the Solar System. Next stop, interstellar space.

The next destination for the Opportunity Mars Rover.

Cape York in Opportunity's rear-view mirror.

Time lapse video of Curiosity Rover's first 281 Sols on Mars.

Life On The Rocks

25143 Itokawa. Credit & Copyright: ISAS, JAXA.
 
The standard science-fiction model, the received wisdom shared across hundreds of short stories and novels, is that people living in the asteroid belt will hollow out rocks with nuclear bombs or X-ray lasers and spin them up so centrifugal force will provide an analog of gravity to hold stuff to the inner surface.  Pump in an atmosphere, garden the interior, knock out a few windows, or kindle a fusion tube hung in the zero gravity of the spin axis, and you have a cosy home.

The problem with this old trope (apart from the minor inconvenience of having every stone and boulder on the surface of your asteroid flying off when you spin it up to a rate that would provide useful gravity), is that most asteroids don't appear to be solid monolithic bodies suitable for that kind of engineering.  Most seem to be lumpy piles of rock and dust, the larger ones held together by gravity and friction, the smaller ones held together by Van Der Waals forces (which explains why some smaller asteroids are rotating at speeds that should cause them to break up).  That most asteroids are rubble piles would explain why none larger than 200 metres across rotate faster than once every 2.2 hours; above that speed limit, rock piles would disintegrate.  Some smaller asteroids do spin faster than that, and are presumably solid all the way through, but if you hollowed them out they wouldn't provide much living space - although they would make nifty little spacecraft.  So unless you're prepared to melt an entire asteroid, to fuse it into a solid body, you'll have to come up with another solution.

Given all that, when I was writing Evening's Empires, largely set in the asteroid belt, I had to come up with a few alternatives to the old hollow-asteroid model. Tunnelling labyrinths through the impacted rinds of rock piles. Coring small asteroids down their spin axes, providing living space equivalent to a skyscraper a kilometre or more tall. Tenting over craters to create cities and gardens - there are plenty of craters on asteroids. Tenting an entire rock, gardening the surface with parklands, forests and wildernesses, and hanging cities from the ceiling (you'd have to have pretty good defence systems to take down anything liable to impact with your soap-bubble world, but let's posit that in a couple or three centuries every fragment of rock more than a metre in diameter has been mapped, and pebbles and dust have been cleared from the orbits of inhabited asteroids by robot scoopships). Or intercepting comets, and use the CHON stuff to spin bubble habitats of every size from tough fullerenes and diamond composites. Those are just a few ideas. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with others.

Links 24/05/13

'The temperature in the permafrost on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic is nearly as cold as that of the surface of Mars. So the recent discovery by a McGill University led team of scientists of a bacterium that is able to thrive at –15ºC, the coldest temperature ever reported for bacterial growth, is exciting.  The bacterium offers clues about some of the necessary preconditions for microbial life on both the Saturn moon Enceladus and Mars, where similar briny subzero conditions are thought to exist.'

A huge methane-based ecosystem has been discovered deep in the Atlantic ocean. 'Studies of this kind and of these communities help scientists understand how life thrives in harsh environments, and perhaps even on other planets.'

Forecast for Saturn's moon Titan: Wild weather could be ahead as seasons change from spring to northern summer, if two new models are correct. '"If you think being a weather forecaster on Earth is difficult, it can be even more challenging at Titan," said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.'

Meanwhile, back on Earth, a Dalek has been found at the bottom of a pond in Hampshire.

Lifebooks

She was a small, slight woman not much older than Hari, the sleeves of her oversized quilted jacket cuffed back to her elbows. She yawned when Rav started to explain who Hari was and how he had ended up in Fei Shen, said every transient had some kind of bad luck story and none of them were very interesting.

‘Use this, kid,’ she told Hari, and threw a package at him.

His bios caught it, ran it through a sandbox to check for hidden djinns, implemented the simple trait it contained. Layers of information settled through him. Map and phone functions, a ticker that showed the slow, steady unravelling of his store of credit. The hours left before he had to go to work for the city, or find a way of leaving it.

He thanked the woman (her tag was a wireframe cube that contained a clear blue flame and no readable information, not even her name); she shrugged inside her jacket.

This was in a dark little shop where thick, heavy True lifebooks, bound in metal or manskin or shimmering polymers, were chained to wooden presses. A single volume was spreadeagled on a lectern, its pages wider than the span of Hari’s arms and printed with double columns of elegant handwritten script as black as the outer dark. Intricate and colourful illustrations framed the tall initial letters of the first words of every paragraph, and at the top of the right-hand page a woman with a burning gaze and bright yellow hair looked out of a window, talking about something that no doubt had been important in the long ago, when she had been alive.

From Evening's Empires

Hard Problems

I'm often labelled as a writer of hard science fiction, and frankly it's a label I don't much like, and think isn't of much use. Its strict sense defines a kind of fiction that takes the actual world seriously, tries not to violate known laws (and signals violently if it does), and builds convincing stories about actual discoveries, actual science, with as little fakery as possible.

Trouble is, it's come to imply difficulty, something arid and arduous, something crabbed and restricted, and of limited appeal to anyone who isn't a stone science junkie who knows her muon from her pion, the difference between RNA and DNA coding, and the meaning of every acronym NASA has ever coined. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there can be too much emphasis on the science and not enough on the fiction, on the weight of cold fact rather than flights of imagination. Too often, so-called hard science fiction strives to be dully convincing, and forgets to be amazing.

And in any case, the definition is mostly redundant. Any fiction about the world as it is, rather than the world we imagine it might be, sticks to the facts. Isn't much of the enterprise of modernist fiction about realism - about the accurate replication not only of the external world, but also of the inner world, the world of the mind? And aren't we living in a world that's driven by science and technology? Isn't the present too often framed as being 'just like science fiction'? Which is to say, just like science fiction in the movies, which is rooted in science fiction from the 1950s.

The world as we know it is one thing; science fiction should be about something more. Should use the known as a jump ramp into implied spaces and possibilities. Should respond to the weirdness of actual science rather than reusing received notions and used genre furniture. Should be irresponsible. Should stop arguing with itself. Should fly.

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