Pro Bono

So science writer DN Lee was asked to be guest writer on a commercial blog, asked whether there would be any payment, and politely declined when she was told that she was expected to provide her services for free in exchange for 'exposure'. To which the editor replied, 'Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore?' But that wasn't the end of her trouble - she wrote a scathingly funny piece about it for her Scientific American blog, and SciAm pulled it because 'it wasn't about science' (later amended to 'we weren't sure really happened').*

Meanwhile, Philip Hensher was asked by a Cambridge professor to write a foreword; when Hensher declined because there would be no payment, the professor called him 'priggish and ungracious'. And later, after Hensher published an article about it, the professor doubled down in a letter, pointing out that a) Hensher would have been paid, actually, in books, and b) he and other writers should, like academics 'give freely of their time' and contribute 'to the common good of our culture.' Hey, academics - first, don't confuse books with actual payment for services, and second, even though they spend a lot of time along in book-lined rooms, writers aren't actually university academics. They don't have a salary; they have to pay for their offices, and lighting and heating, and all the rest. Oh, and that stuff you think you're doing for free? You're paid to do that. Or at least, that's how it worked when I was in academia.

These are two extreme examples of the kind of entitlement writers sometimes encounter when asked to work for free. Usually, the people who do the asking know they're reaching out for a favour, and completely understand when the writer politely turns them down.  But sometimes they think that they're doing the writer a favour, and get all huffy when refused. Perhaps because they think that writing or giving a speech or appearing on a panel at a conference isn't actually work, or because they reckon that writers should give back something because other people have bought their books.

In fact, most writers do work for free now and then. Especially when they have a book coming out. If you are a mid-list author and your publisher doesn't have a marketing budget for your book, you'll buckle down and do what it takes to get the word out there. But working without pay eats into the time you need to spend doing work to earn a living, so you have to carefully pick and choose what you can and cannot do. Sometimes you'll do it because the person who asked you the favour is a friend or has previously boosted your signal; sometimes you'll do it because it supports a good cause; sometimes you'll do it because it looks like fun. I contributed a short piece to a collection of essays about Doctor Who because it supports a charity that does good work in an area that has personally affected me (and also as payback for the enjoyment I got out of Doctor Who as a kid). And on Monday I'll be appearing on a panel during a symposium on starships at the Royal Astronomical Society because the meeting should be suitably mind-expanding, and also because admission is free.

That last is important. There are honourable exceptions, but too often writers will discover that the prestigious literary festival to which they were invited expects them to perform for free. The festival has big-money sponsors, the organisers are paid, the owners of the festival's venue are paid, celebrity guests receive appearance fees, and the audience pays for admission, but none of the money trickles down to the poor bloody writers. Or that speech or reading they were asked to give for free? It will be delivered to a paying audience. And that's when it stops looking like 'exposure', and a lot more like 'exploitation.' Artists, actors, photographers and musicians report the same trend.

Genre writers may not get the same kind of exposure, but at least they aren't so often exploited. Most SF/F writers aren't paid when they appear at conventions, either, and the convention's guests of honour usually only get expenses and free accommodation. But although most conventions charge a membership fee, they are run by volunteers and rarely turn a profit. It's cheerfully ramshackle, sometimes disintegrates noisily, but mostly works. And although the number of books sold probably doesn't justify the time and expense of attending, you can at least moan about it with your peers.

*[UPDATE: SciAm have now done the right thing by Dr Lee and restored her blog entry.]

Yet Another Blog Post About Not Blog Posting

Things have been a bit quiet around here. I have a post about science-fiction taxonomy and seagulls to write, another about why the 'Hard SF' subgenre is no longer relevant, and so on, but right now I need to get some work done. First, there's the ongoing novel. I'm nearing the end of the second draft now. Usually, the first draft is a race to get the story - the sequence of events - down; the second attempts to get the narrative sorted out - how those events relate to each other, how they're told and shaped, and the voice in which they're told. (The third draft will try to make sure that every sentence is the right shape and logically follows from its predecessor, but let's not go there yet.) Getting the voice right is pretty important as there are two protagonists; getting the structure right is tricky, as one story begins before the other kicks in and the first catches up with the second as they're told in alternating chapters.

So there's that, and then there's this -

- the proofs of the Confluence omnibus - three novels and two stories, 940 pages. It's due out in February next year by the way; my publishers and I decided it would be a good idea to put a little distance between it and Evening's Empires, and I don't have anything else coming out in 2014. In the morning I'm working on the new novel, and in the afternoon I'm reading every. single. word. of the proofs, and in the evening I'm working on a couple of other small tasks. So for the  next couple of weeks, not much time for much else.

Links 04/10/13

'Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system, a sizzling, Jupiter-like world known as Kepler-7b.'

A periodic table of the exoplanet 'zoo'.

Space beer! Made with moondust. And beer.

'A huge cluster of jellyfish forced the Oskarshamn plant, the site of one of the world's largest nuclear reactors, to shut down by clogging the pipes conducting cool water to the turbines.'

JEROS, the Jellyfish Robot Elimination Swarm.

'Roboy has a four-foot-tall human shape and a set of “muscles” inspired by the human musculoskeletal system. The plastic muscles work together via electrical motors and artificial tendons. Tendon-driven systems like Roboy mimic the flexible mechanics of biology, and could result in a new class of robots that are lighter, safer, and move in a more natural way.'

Links 27/09/13

'The Tommy Westphall Multiverse is a thought exercise, a parlor game writ large. And it’s tailor made for pop culture obsessives.'

Volume 1 of the Richard Feynman Lectures on Physics is now available free online. Volumes 2 and 3 are to follow.

'In 1881, Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, had a problem: the volume of data coming into his observatory was exceeding his staff’s ability to analyze it. He also had doubts about his staff’s competence–especially that of his assistant, who Pickering dubbed inefficient at cataloging. So he did what any scientist of the latter 19th century would have done: he fired his male assistant and replaced him with his maid, Williamina Fleming. Fleming proved so adept at computing and copying that she would work at Harvard for 34 years–eventually managing a large staff of assistants.

'So began an era in Harvard Observatory history where women—more than 80 during Pickering’s tenure, from 1877 to his death in 1919— worked for the director, computing and cataloging data. Some of these women would produce significant work on their own; some would even earn a certain level of fame among followers of female scientists. But the majority are remembered not individually but collectively, by the moniker Pickering's Harem.'

'The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash together to create them, on a timescale where even oceans that exist for tens of millions of years can disappear leaving only the subtlest of geological traces.'

'Whole solar systems are needed to generate life, not just terrestrial planets with water.'

The Kawasaki Warehouse amusement game park in Japan 'has been designed as a historical replica of Kowloon ‘Walled’ City, capitalising on the enduring fascination with the lawless metropolis ever since its demolishment in 1980s.'

Green Martians

From an essay over at 3quarksdaily, discussing Mars-colonisation booster Robert Zubrin's claims that 'radical environmentalists' are bent on suppressing progress in favour of protecting 'a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity:'

'As we reflect upon our environmental challenges, two poles therefore define our actions. On the one hand is the ascetic modesty of sustainability, on the other the hubristic desire to colonize the galaxy. In some ways Mars colonization may seem the more immediately attractive solution as it come with all the thrill of a technical challenge and the allure of subsequent conquest.'

I explored this in the first two Quiet War books and (not to spoil the ending) it seems to me that it's a false dichotomy; it isn't a question of either creating a sustainable civilisation or going to Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System. And while one can imagine, as I did, that in certain extreme circumstances some kind of Gaian religion might come to dominate politics, at the moment the balance is tipped far in the opposite direction. Right now on lifeboat Earth we're burning the furniture and decking for fuel, and looking the other way as water laps over the gunwhales.

The human species hasn't yet learned how to use technology responsibly, and we're still discovering that the biomes we're despoiling are packed with intricate interconnections that can't be easily reproduced. As the failed attempt in Biosphere 2 showed, we aren't yet up to the task of creating a fully self-contained ecosystem here on Earth, let alone in a space city on Mars. Both sides have a lot to teach each other: the kind of knowledge acquired from stewardship of increasingly fragile environments on Earth will be essential for creating the gardens of Mars; the kinds of technology needed to survive in extreme environments and recycle everything with as close to 100% efficiency as possible will have all kinds of uses here on Earth.

Or are Martians supposed to live off imported rations inside charmless cans while strip-mining the Hellas Basin (and if Earth is wrecked, who will they be selling their Martian ores to)? I admire Zubrin's passion, but I'm dismayed by the way he's directing it at straw men.

Short Stuff

Just arrived in the post: complimentary copies of the slightly delayed special limited edition of my short story collection A Very British History, from PS Publishing. I've written some short stories because I've been asked to; I've written rather more for the fun and joy of it. Some have turned out to be the preludes to novels, but my personal favourites are those which are complete and self-contained. You get an idea, or a character, or a situation, and you explore what it means, or why they are who they are, or how it resolves, all within the compass of a tightly organised narrative. They can be about a small change in a human heart, or the end of the world. They can be about anything and everything. They give you the chance to stretch your limits, to experiment, to take risks (to fall flat on your face.) I've written and published about a hundred; it would lovely if I could write at least a hundred more. Hopefully, some good ones.

But they can be pretty ephemeral things. Written, published, read (hopefully), gone. How many SF and fantasy stories are published every year? Hundreds, easily.  Maybe a thousand or more. And of those, how many last much longer than their first appearance in print? So I'm aware that I'm very lucky to have been allowed to select a bunch of my stories for this retrospective (1985 - 2022; let's optimistically call it the first half of my career) collection, and to have had them published by Peter Crowther and the rest of the PS team not only in a rather luxurious 'standard' format, but also in this rather sumptuous package.

At the top, front and back of the slipcase, with artwork by Jim Burns, illustrating 'The Choice.'  Below, at the right, the main collection, signed by me, with special endpapers.  You can find the table of contents here.  And to the left of it, a small extra volume containing two stories 'Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World' and 'Karl and the Ogre', and a biographical essay. The terrific cover is also by Jim Burns - I hadn't seen it before now. There aren't many copies available, so if you haven't yet ordered one yet, you had better hurry.

If you'd like tasters of my short fiction there are cheaper alternatives - although available only on Kindle, for now. Little Machines is an eclectic collection of science-fiction and some darker stuff.  And Stories From The Quiet War and Life After Wartime are shorter collections of stories associated with my Quiet War future history (I've given links to the UK branch of Amazon, but they're also available in the US and elsewhere.)

A Few Notes On Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

Pynchon's previous novel, Inherent Vice, was set in Los Angeles at the tail-end of the 1960s, a rambling comedic noir in which a stoner private eye. Doc Sportillo, became involved in a kind-of-or-maybe-not conspiracy after his ex-girlfriend disappeared. Bleeding Edge is a kind of thriller set in New York in 2001, just after the implosion of the dot-com bubble, in which decertified pistol-packing not-quite-divorced self-styled 'Bad Accountant' Maxine Tarnow tries to balance Upper-West-Side family life with an investigation into the dubious finances of hashslingrz, a computer security firm involved in 'Crypto work, countermeasures, heaven knows what-all.'  In Inherent Vice, ARPANET, the evolutionary precursory to the Internet, was Doc Sportillo's occasional oracle. Here, the vast epicycles of conspiracy bleed into the echo chambers of cyberspace, contaminating the primal innocence of its virtual utopias.

Although there, of course, a lot more to it than that, including mobsters, Russian gangsters, a vastly detailed virtual reality, Silicon Alley chancers and casualties, a manipulative operative who may or may not be a kind of time-travelling spy, a nasal forensics expert obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, 9/11, and so forth. As well as the usual plethora of jokes, songs and deliberately bad puns, and esoteric facts too weird to be fictional, and a vast cast of eccentrically-named eccentrics, all armed with conflicting ideas and opinions. It's a very talkative novel; Maxine's investigative techniques primarily involve conversation rather than interrogation, preferably over a nice long meal.

In a genre novel, there would be a steady accumulation of pertinent knowledge - plot tokens - leading to revelation and denouement. Here, the central villain, the tycoon who owns hashslingrz, Gabriel Ice (surely a nod to William Gibson's cyberspace fictions), mostly lurks in the shadows, and instead of answers Maxine's investigations yield an accumulating sense of vast and shadowy machineries half-glimpsed, plots and counterplots that melt away as soon as they're exposed to scrutiny, connections made but never followed up because there's always another connection to be made.

Pynchon's attempt to blend the actual outcome of an actual conspiracy into his umwelt almost works because he doesn't try to document it. It happens offstage, in the last quarter of the novel.  'Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to worse. All day long.' What we don't quite get, after the event, is the real sense of bad turning to worse - just talk about it, sometimes uncritically invoking truther conspiracies, advancing the theory that 9/11 was an emergent event that could be predicted but not prevented, seized by those in power as an excuse to scare and infantilise. Commercialised and claimed like the unmapped potentials of the Internet.

But besides all that, Bleeding Edge is a beautifully evocative love song to the city so good they named it twice, poised at the cusp between the dirty old New York and the regooded disneyfied version it has become. A city that back then was still a cacophony of cultures and cuisines and languages, where, despite the looming shadows, the tender quotidian and rich eccentricities of human life could yet flourish.

There Are Doors (XXI)

Links 14/09/13

A rather beautiful rigid-frame airship, the first since the 1940s, starts its test flights.

Typewriters and their authors.

“He explained that these articles are ‘an inter-mixture of fiction and fact’ and are ‘highly romanticized in order to give the story juice.’” Charles Bukowski's FBI file.

'A team of researchers at the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has found a way to self-assemble complex structures out of gel “bricks” smaller than a grain of salt. The new method could help solve one of the major challenges in tissue engineering: creating injectable components that self-assemble into intricately structured, biocompatible scaffolds at an injury site to help regrow human tissues.'

'[Ulrich Bernier's] group has isolated a few chemicals that are naturally present on human skin in trace quantities and appear to inhibit mosquitoes’ capability to smell and locate humans. If one of these chemicals—mostly likely one called 1-methylpiperzine, which has been the most successful so far—holds up in future tests and can be produced synthetically on a bigger scale, wearing it could be a way of rendering yourself effectively invisible to mosquitoes.'

Peak Chicken.

Scientists discover what 'seems to be the first example in nature of rotary motion with toothed gears' in juvenile plant hoppers.

Links 07/09/13

'For the past year, NASA has been working with Tethers Unlimited, a space technology development company based out of Bothell, Wash., to find a better way. The space agency just awarded Tethers Unlimited an additional $500,000 to continue developing SpiderFab, a robotic 3D printing and assembly system that could build structures larger than half a mile wide in orbit.'

 More NASA - the space agency has been crowd-sourcing ideas for asteroid missions.

A massive storm on Saturn pulled water- and ammonia-ice from the gas giant's depths.

Japanese trucker art.

Curiosity Mars Rover watches Phobos eclipse the sun:

Paris, Dione

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
 
Imaged by the Cassini spacecraft, the terminator of Saturn's moon Dione passes through Dido crater, with its central peak. Just above it, in sunlight, on the sub-Saturnian hemisphere of the little moon, are the twin craters Romulus and Remus (Romulus is the larger one). In The Quiet War, the city of Paris, Dione, runs down into Romulus crater on the slope of the rimwall shared with Remus crater.

Riddick

Richard B. Riddick, the shaven-headed silver-eyed antihero of Pitch Black and its sequels, is an exemplar of that hoary old SF trope - the competent man. Played by Vin Diesel, he's the last of a warrior race: brutal and uncompromising, with eyes modified so that he can see in the dark, he dominates every situation he finds himself in, is able to out-think every enemy. After a space-operatic sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick and an animated film, The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, failed to build on the first film's success, it seemed that the franchise was over. But neither Vin Diesel nor writer/director David Twohy were prepared to let it go: Riddick, as its name suggests, is a back-to-basics reboot.

Riddick has become the unwilling leader of the Necromonger cult. Betrayed into thinking that his home planet, Furya, has been rediscovered, he's abandoned on a deathworld, and attracts the attention of two groups of mercenary bounty-hunters - one simply out for the reward money, the other led by a man with a personal agenda - in an attempt to effect his escape.  It's a simple but effective three-act story in which Riddick and the franchise rediscover their mojo.  In the first part, Riddick makes like a barbarian version of Robinson Crusoe on Mars, battling alien predators and setting up camp; in the second, the viewpoint shifts the mercenaries as Riddick picks them off one by one; in the third, as in Pitch Black, the surviving players have to deal with a horde of monsters.

The tension occasionally slackens as the mercenaries squabble and wander about the landscape; the lone significant female character (Katee Sackhoff), despite her demonstrable toughness, is defined by male attention (and given an unnecessary shower scene); oblique references to previous films may confuse those who haven't seen them.  But there's plenty of good hard-edged dialogue, and Vin Diesel completely inhabits his anti-hero, setting his intricate plan for escape in motion, ghosting in and out of darkness and rain, and calmly pulling off a startling execution while chained up.

It's all good, old-fashioned B-movie fun, punched up with gory effects. And while it doesn't give any new insights or character development to its anti-hero, it's a shot in the arm for the franchise and a refreshing change from this summer's depressing parade of bloated blockbusters.

Links 30/08/13

'While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.
'“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.”'

A digital camera that mimics the selectivity of the human retina.

The world's only parasite museum.

Images from NASA's Chandra Observatory suggest that SagA*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, 'is apparently finding much of its food hard to swallow.'

Galaxies like grains of sand - a flight through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Twelve Tomorrows

On the newstands on September 17, this second collection of SF stories - including one of mine - from MIT Technology Review, with a cover by legendary artist Richard Powers.  Table of contents:

Q+A with Neal Stephenson
'Insistence of Vision' by David Brin
'The Mighty Mi Tok of Beijing' by Brian W. Aldiss
'In Sight' by Cheryl Rydbom
'Transitional Forms' by Paul McAuley
'Pathways' by Nancy Kress
'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' by Allen M. Steele
'The Revolution Will Not Be Refrigerated' by Ian McDonald
'The Cyborg and the Cemetery' by Nancy Fulda
'Bootstrap' by Kathleen Ann Goonan
'Zero for Conduct' by Greg Egan
Gallery - The Art of Richard Powers
'Pwnage' by Justina Robson
'Firebrand' by Peter Watts

Links 16/08/13

A few long-form pieces to read over the weekend:

'The peppered moth provides a textbook example of industrial melanism and its reversal. Once a classroom classic, then much criticised, and finally rehabilitated through further observation, the story also shows how real science works. The response of the creationist and “Intelligent Design” community provides a textbook example of a conspiracy theory in action, with cherry-picked quotations, allegations of collusion and fraud, and refusal to acknowledge new evidence.'

 Sophie McDougal explains why she hates strong female characters.

The secret history of G.I. Joe, Barbie, Darth Vader, and making war in children's culture. Part 1.  Part 2.

David Simon on Steve Earle.

Two moons passing in the Martian night:

N.B.

Aside from the odd photo and the weekly links page, I'll be blogging very infrequently for the next four weeks. I want to get a good portion of the second draft of the new novel done (and wouldn't mind finishing a short story, too), I have a business problem to resolve, and I need a holiday.  (Yes, I was just in Spain as a guest of the very good, hugely relaxed Celsius 232 festival, and had a terrific time in great company, but I'm planning a few days away that have nothing at all to do with the writing biz.)

Meanwhile, there are reviews of Evening's Empires here and here, and there's a Q&A conducted by my publishers about my first 25 years as a novelist over here. And at some point I'll post links to a book give-away . . .

[edit] Oh yes, and I've reviewed Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Links 09/08/13

'In 2015, a clone will spend a year on the International Space Station while his doppelgänger remains on Earth. Mark and Scott Kelly, the only identical twins who are also astronauts, have volunteered themselves for study, creating a unique opportunity to disentangle the health effects of space from those of genetics.'

Mars Explorer Barbie.

One day in the Solar System.

Recycling bins in London harvest MAC addresses from the smart phones of passers-by, identify the type of phone they're carrying, and track their movements.

'To honor the anniversary of Warhol’s birthday, August 6, 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum and EarthCam launched a collaborative project titled Figment, a live feed of Warhol's gravesite.'

Concept design for a robot that erases concrete buildings.

A beautiful minimalist Periodic Table.

There Are Doors (20)

Don't Prophesy With Your Pen

The Los Angeles Review of Books recently published an interview with Arthur C. Clarke, conducted by Tod Mesirow in 1995, that opens with a useful reminder that the one thing people associate with science fiction isn't the kind of thing that science fiction actually does. Asked why science fiction seems so prescient, Clarke says:

'Well, we musn't overdo this, because science fiction stories have covered almost every possibility, and, well, most impossibilities — obviously we're bound to have some pretty good direct hits as well as a lot of misses. But, that doesn't matter. Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says what if? — not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere — flying, space travel, all these things, but even there we missed really badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds had been — my late friend, Isaac Asimov, for example, had — but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd probably have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.'

Every science-fictional future sooner or later becomes an alternate history. Even those set in the near future, and which attempt to guess with reasonable accuracy what life will be like in, say, 2015, 2016. Especially those, actually. And the further away your story is set, the more likely it is that some 9/11 will send history hurtling off in an unexpected direction (someone once wrote a science-fictional trilogy about this). Even those science fictions which may have gotten some part of our present (their future) more or less right didn't predict it: they anticipated it. As Hero anticipated the steam engine (but not the Industrial Revolution). Or to put it another way, claiming that science fiction predicts the future is to unremember all the things it got wrong. And claiming that science fiction has failed to predict the ubiquity of, say, mobile phones and Angry Birds fails to understand what science fiction is actually about.

Which includes, yes, extrapolation.  But also includes a lot more, including wild and irresponsible speculation, satire of some present trend, dreams of utopias, nightmares of dystopias . . . The future is a blank page. It doesn't yet exist. Its worlds may be self-consistent, may be strongly rooted in our present, but they are not representations of reality. They are experiments questioning reality, testing its limits, asking awkward questions about it. So much more interesting that dull, dutiful prognostication.

Links 26/07/13

The glowing blue wave of death: '...an international team of researchers has found evidence of a “cascade” of death that spreads through an animal’s body through a special necrosis pathway, leaving a wake of dead cells in its procession, until the entire system collapses and expires. In the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, this wave of bodily destruction originates in the intestine and is accompanied by an intense burst of blue fluorescence when viewed with a camera equipped with a high brightness fluorescence filter cube, which allowed the researchers to visualize the worm’s destruction, the team reports in the journal PLoS Biology.'

'A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.'


A gallery of images of ants at war.

Brock Davis's Cucumber Killer Whale and Historic Explosions in Cauliflower.

The International Space Station photographed in transit across the Sun and the Moon.

The Earth imaged from Saturn.

The Earth and the Moon imaged from Mercury.

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
That evidence, which is detailed in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research, involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from South Africa. They have been named Diskagma buttonii, meaning "disc-shaped fragments of Andy Button," but it is unsure what the fossils were, the authors say.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-earth.html#jCp

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
That evidence, which is detailed in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research, involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from South Africa. They have been named Diskagma buttonii, meaning "disc-shaped fragments of Andy Button," but it is unsure what the fossils were, the authors say.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-earth.html#jC

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

All Best

Published today, the 30th volume of Gardner Dozois' annual selection of the year's best science fiction stories.  It includes two stories by me, but don't let that put you off.  Gardner says: 'Every year is special, because every year good new writers come along, and every year the older writers continue to do really good work. It's exciting to watch the field evolve, and I don't think the overall level of literary quality in science fiction has ever been higher-and I've been watching the field for a long time.'

Some fun facts:
Annual editions of this anthology have been published continuously since 1984. At a rough count, the series as a whole has contained about 9,500,000 words of fiction, by hundreds of different authors. It has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology seventeen times, more than any other anthology series in history. Gardner Dozois has won fifteen Hugo Awards as Year's Best Editor, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Robert Silverberg said of the series 'The Dozois book is the definitive historical record of the history of the science-fiction short story' and called it "a wondrous treasure trove of great stories and an archive that has immeasurable historical significance." George R.R. Martin said 'The best that science fiction has to offer, chosen by the most respected editor in the field.  A copy belongs on the shelf of every SF reader.'

 The table of contents can be found here.

Also out today from Infinivox, the fifth edition of Allan Kaster's audiobook anthology, The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction. Which, yes, includes one of my stories. More details about the anthology and its contents here. Oh, and it's also available as an ebook on Kindle and Nook.

Drafted

So I've just finished the first draft of the new novel, emitting a spurt of around 3500 words in a rattling crescendo this morning. I don't, as I've noted elsewhere, tend to follow a detailed outline with absolute fidelity, planning out every beat and then making sure that they are all ticked off in the right place. Instead, I have a rough shape, and a few notable features I know I need to visit, and a place where I think I'm going to end up, but everything between is a process of discovery. In other words, I do more of my thinking about writing while I'm writing than before I start.

As I try to keep rewriting to a minimum as I go along, preferring to keep a steady pace, to keep moving forward, the first draft is usually fairly messy, with contradictions and abrupt introductions of important points (although not, oddly, of important characters - they are the one thing I do think about before I begin). It doesn't matter. Everything can be fixed in the rewrites (and I have already accumulated a fair number of notes for the second draft). And sometimes it is important to fail. To find the way that leads forward by trying other ways first.

Anyway, I'm just back from signing copies of Evening's Empires in Forbidden Planet's London branch. I have to deal with the copy-edit of the reissue of the Confluence trilogy before I head out to Spain for the Celsius232 Festival. And then I'll begin again with the new novel, at the beginning.

The title of this one, by the way, is Something Coming Through. It's about aliens, and second chances.

Links 20/07/13

Chuck Wendig - So, You Just Had Your Book Published.  Ha ha ha. Oh.

'An intelligent knife that knows when it is cutting through cancerous tissue is being tested in three London hospitals.'

'Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.'

'A few Septembers back, on a Saturday afternoon, I took a long drive, from a leafy neighbourhood in Boston, Massachusetts, to the remotest parts of the outer solar system. I set out from Cambridge in a dusty, rented Volkswagen, with my co-pilot Andrew Youdin, a planet-formation theorist from the University of Colorado at Boulder. We drove north to Maine, aiming for Aroostook County, where, stretched along close to 100 miles of small towns, big farms and empty highway, you’ll find the world’s largest three-dimensional scale model of the solar system.'

Fly through a canyon on Mars.

Phobos over Mars.

Cover Space

Publishers spend a lot of time trying to get covers right: industry wisdom has it that a great cover snags the attention of casual browsers and boosts sales. That may change, if online sales of deadtree and ebooks continue to increase (although books will still need smart covers to stand out in those 'customers also bought these titles' ID parades), but at the moment, catching and holding that casual glance is one of the key parts of book marketing.

I think I've been pretty lucky with the covers for my Quiet War novels:

By Sidonie Beresford-Browne for the Gollancz hardcover/trade paperback covers, they are amongst my all-time favourites (and the cover of the US editions of the Pyr editions of The Quiet War and The Gardens of the Sun are pretty good too). But I'm aware that while spaceships and planets may be catnip to genre fans, they can be hugely powerful deterrents that underscore innate prejudices about the other-worldly skiffy nonsense for readers who aren't much acquainted with science fiction, or think they don't like it. Spaceships are, to many people, signifiers of brash escapism rather than serious intent.

As, indeed, can be any kind of painterly illustration. As Tim Kreider pointed out in a recent article in The New Yorker, 'children’s books, Y.A. literature, and genre fiction still have license to beguile their readers with gorgeous cover illustrations, but mature readers aren’t supposed to require such enticements. For serious literature to pander to us with cosmetic allurements would be somehow tacky, uncool.'

Kreider has some very smart things to say about what makes a good cover, and why so many covers look the same, and why the new minimalism is not always a good thing. He's a cartoonist, so his insights on cover design come from a different, sharper angle than those of most authors. He also celebrates the covers of science-fiction novels he read as a teenager, and his examples are good ones. So it's unfortunate that they're labelled (perhaps not by Kreider - I certainly hope not) as 'silly book covers'.  There were, and still are, plenty of terrible genre covers thrown together in haste with little skill or attention. But while the psychedelia of, say a Richard Powers' cover from the 1970s may be quaint, it isn't silly. It's the kind of thing that was, as Kreider points out, designed to wow. The problem is that not everyone wants to be wowed:

For serious literature to pander to us with cosmetic allurements would be somehow tacky, uncool. The more important a book is, the less likely there is to be anything at all on its cover (look at most editions of “Ulysses”). Even the ancient equivalents of summer blockbusters like Homer and “Beowulf” or the sex romps and gorefests of Shakespeare tend to get stodgy public-domain paintings on their covers. There are actual marketing hazards to making your book look too enjoyable—I wrote sixty-thousand-some words of prose, but because I threw in half a dozen cartoons and put a funny drawing on the cover, my would-be literary essays often get shelved in Graphic Novels or Humor. 

In UK SFF publishing, there are ongoing attempts at cross-over appeal with some titles, deploying bold graphics, reissuing classics in plainer covers, and so on. Gollancz have just produced a terrific example for Simon Ings' new novel, for instance. But most genre novels still have some kind of painterly representational element because that's what twangs the pleasure centres of genre fans. And novels set in space often still have spaceships on their covers, even if they're mostly about other things. And while they're no longer as boldly monolithic as those examples from 1970s British paperbacks I posted recently while they may be reduced to graphics, as in The Quiet War cover above, or depicted with delicate realism, as in the paperback cover of Al Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth, they're still spaceships, with all that entails.


That the kind of imaginative literature that builds on the great collective triumphs of science can be judged and dismissed because of its covers is a great shame. Not only because (of course) I want my books to be read as widely as possible, but also because it's kind of sad that here in the strange and unpredictable maelstrom of the twenty-first century people cling to the straight realism of modernism like ship-wrecked sailors, as if it is still the only way by which we can make sense of the world and the capabilities of the human mind.

Evening's Empires

Happy birthday, little book.

Out There

Last week my British publisher, Gollancz, dropped the price of the ebook version of The Quiet War to £1.99, to help promote the publication of Evening's Empires, the fourth novel in the Quiet War universe. Some American readers wanted to know whether they could get in on the deal, and I realised, to my chagrin, that I didn't know. So I thought it might be useful to make a list of what is available in the UK and the US - to keep things simple, I'll skirt around the more complicated issue of translations for now. Some of this information is available in the sidebar, by the way, but not all of it. So this, by way of clarification, is what's current as far as the Anglo-American axis goes:

First, in the UK, the following novels are definitely available as deadtree books:

Evening's Empires
In The Mouth of the Whale
Gardens of the Sun
The Quiet War
Cowboy Angels

Five titles from my back list - Four Hundred Billion Stars, Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale's Angel, and Fairyland - may still be available as paperbacks, but are I think mostly out of print.

All of the above are also available as ebooks in the UK. The rest of my back list as at present out of print, but I have plans to revive several titles as ebooks.

A short story collection, A Very British History, was published by PS Publishing in March, and is very much in print. And a single-volume anthology of the Confluence trilogy, with two associated stories tipped in, will be published by Gollancz in December.

In the US, only Gardens of the Sun, The Quiet War and Cowboy Angels are available as deadtree books. (Three other titles are still under contract with Tor, but have long been out of print, and haven't been turned into ebooks because, amongst other reasons, Tor have a vast pre-ebook-era backlist.) They are also available as ebooks - but as I discovered, they aren't available as the British versions. That's because I have a different publisher, Pyr, in the US, and while Gollancz was briefly able to release its ebook versions in the US, that ended when they sold US rights to Pyr. And that's why, I'm afraid, the price of The Quiet War hasn't dropped in the US: it's a special offer on the British ebook associated with a new novel coming out from my British publisher.

The five back list titles mentioned above are available as ebooks in the US, by the way, because I took back the rights after they went out of print in the US, and offered them to Gollancz. If you're confused at this point, I don't blame you.


Availability of books still reflects the old territories carved out by publishers in different countries.  British publishers claim the UK and most Commonwealth countries; US publishers the US and Canada. Back in the day, US readers would not have expected US editions of books to reflect the pricing of editions in British bookshops. Now that the internet connects everyone with everyone else, it isn't much of a stretch to imagine that someone in the US should be able to download a British edition of an ebook; but rights and territories, and the geolocatory vigilance of platforms like Amazon, prevent that.


Neither In the Mouth of the Whale or Evening's Empires have a US publishing deal.  At present, if American readers want to buy either novel, I can do no more than point them towards the Book Depository, which sells deadtree books with free worldwide shipping. And if they want the ebook versions, then I'm afraid it won't be possible (outwith spoofing your location) unless and until an American publisher buys the rights, or until Gollancz decides it can't sell them.

However, there are a few other ebooks which are available in both the US and UK (and in Canada and elsewhere). These are titles I published myself to Kindle Direct, including the stories 'City of the Dead'[, 'Dr Pretorious and the Lost Temple', and 'Prisoners of the Action', the short story collection Little Machines (originally published by PS publishing), and two collections of Quiet War short stories, Stories From The Quiet War and the latest, published just last week, Life After Wartime.

Links 13/07/13

The first exoplanet observed in colour is blue. Because of rains of molten glass.

New Horizons spacecraft spots Pluto and Charon.

Colorized History presents a terrific portrait of Charles Darwin.

Perspective view of the flanks of Olympus Mons, Mars.

All the pie and coffee in Twin Peaks:

Möbius Ship

Gajananvihari Pilot, the hero of Evening's Empires was born on a spaceship and spends most of his life aboard it; he escapes when it is hijacked, and his efforts to get it back form the spine of the novel's narrative. Because it's at the centre of the story, I wanted to make his ship distinctive, so gave it a (literal) twist.

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...

I drew inspiration (novelist's jargon for 'pretty much lifted the idea') from Californian artist Tim Hawkinson's extraordinary Möbius Ship, which I stumbled across in the wilds of the internet while I was planning the novel:

'...a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain’s all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale.'

At least, I though that was the entirety of my inspiration. But a couple of weeks ago, while I was looking for spaceship art on the covers of paperbacks on my double-stacked bookshelves, I found an image of a twisted town by artist John Berkey which may very well be an ancestor of Gajananvihari Pilot's ring ship:

Quiet War Offer

To celebrate next week's publication of Evening's Empires, the fourth novel set in the Quiet War universe, my publishers have temporarily slashed the price of the ebook of the first, The Quiet War. It's available on Kindle, iTunes, and hopefully elsewhere.

EDIT: My fault for not making this clear - this is an offer by Gollancz, associated with the publication of Evening's Empires in the UK next week. Unfortunately, the Gollancz ebook doesn't appear to be available in the US, where The Quiet War has a different publisher. Sorry about that. But if you follow me on Twitter there will be a competition next week, and anyone can enter.

The Master

The head doctor pointed Hari towards an ascetic hermit, reputedly the holiest man in the city.  He lived in a tree, one of the big coral trees that shaded the broad boulevard that circled the edge of the highest and largest of Ophir’s terraces.  He had not touched the ground for more than forty years.  He chewed the tree’s alkaloid-rich seeds and leaves and spoke with gods and monsters.  People made donations of food and water which he drew up in the same bucket he used to dispose of his wastes.

Hari and Rav stepped through circles of offerings and prayers spread around the tree. Hundreds of dip candles flickered in the green shade.  Aromatic smoke curled from incense sticks jammed into the rough bark of its branches and trunk.

‘You could leave the book here,’ Rav said.

‘I have to explain how I came by it,’ Hari said. ‘I have to explain my debt.’

He joined a small queue of penitents and paid a fee to a steward, who told him that he could have exactly ten minutes in the holy presence, inclusive of the time it took to climb up to him.

‘Those of true faith fly up the tree,’ the steward said. ‘Those who are merely curious find the way harder.  So balance and harmony are achieved.’

‘Do you also count the time it takes to climb back down?’ Rav said.

‘Of course not. But do not overstay your allotted time,’ the steward said. ‘Many want to see the master, and I control drones that will persuade you to leave more quickly than you thought possible.’

Another steward tried to sell to Hari a medal that would absorb the blessing of the hermit’s holy presence.  Rav was delighted by this, and told Hari to buy as many as possible. ‘Think of the armour they’ll make.’

Although there were ladders and ropeways strung up the tree’s broad trunk, it was a hard scramble in Ophir’s deepened gravity.  Hari was slick with sweat and his heart was jackhammering in his chest when he at last reached the crux between two high branches where the hermit sat cross-legged. A slender man dressed in a multicoloured patchwork coat, black hair hanging in ringlets around his thin, calm face.  His eyes were closed and he was chewing leaves, plucking them one after the other from a broken branch he held in one hand, milling them between strong yellow teeth and spitting out the pulp.  He did not open his eyes or in any way acknowledge Hari’s presence while Hari explained how the dead hermit Kinson Ib Kana had saved his life, a debt he hoped to pay by passing Kinson Ib Kana’s book to one of his fellow ascetics.

After Hari had finished speaking, he became aware of the small sounds around him. Wind moving through the drifts of leaves and bright red flowers. The buzz of an erratic traffic of live drones his bios identified as bees, the mingled noise of the city beyond. The hermit spat a dribble of green pulp and plucked another leaf and pushed it into his mouth. At last, a bell rang far below, signalling that Hari’s time was up, and he set the book in a hollow near the hermit’s feet, and climbed down to the deck, the ground.

‘Did you learn anything?’ Rav said.

‘Only that I am a fool,’ Hari said.  ‘But it’s done.’

‘We should have bought medals,’ Rav said. ‘I know I’ll regret it later.’

From Evening's Empires

Life After Wartime

So because I have a new novel, Evening's Empires, in the Quiet War sequence/universe/future history coming out real-soon-now, I've compiled a new collection of Quiet War stories.  From the introduction:

Two of the stories in this collection, ‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ and ‘Dead Men Walking’ are set in the period of Gardens of the Sun; ‘Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Running, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden’ is set a couple of decades afterwards, at the beginning of a long, slow, peaceful colonisation of the solar system. Most of the fourteen fragments or micro-fictions collected here are set in that golden age: snapshots of ordinary life in a hopeful future. Just one, ‘The Paladin’ hints at the end of that golden age, and a new cycle of turbulence and violence. The last two novels in the Quiet War sequence, In the Mouth of the Whale and Evening’s Empires, are set in the aftermath of the rise and fall of the True Empire, some 1500 years after the Quiet War. These stories are the deep background of their history.

Also includes the first chapter of Evening's Empires. Available on Kindle for the special price of just 77 British new pence, or 1.15 US dollars.

Also available: Stories From The Quiet War.

And by the way, Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione...' was first published in Jonathan Strahan's award-winning anthology Edge of Infinity, packed with great stories about the new solar system. Highly recommended to anyone who likes the Quiet War books.

Links 06/07/13

'...it seems that the chemistry that can take place in the cold clouds of gas of space is much more complex than we had predicted. Reactions that would be impossible under normal circumstances—simply because there's not enough energy to push them forward—can take place in cold gasses due to quantum mechanical effects. That's because one of the reactants (a hydrogen nucleus) can undergo quantum tunneling between two reactants.'

'Next year, relying on the effects of gravitational lensing, scientists will be able to examine the sun’s closest neighboring star—Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light-years away—and, notably, its solar system, if such a system exists. No planets have been detected thus far; if there are any, they are too small to see with conventional instruments. But when Proxima Centauri passes in front of a distant star in October, 2014, its gravity—and that of any orbiting bodies—will bend the light from that star. By analyzing the way the light bends around Proxima Centauri, scientists will be able to perceive whatever planets are nearby.
'An Italian space scientist, Claudio Maccone, believes that gravitational lensing could be used for something even more extraordinary: searching for radio signals from alien civilizations.'

Giant starfish with lasers, creepy robot babysitters, flying saucer tourism... The strange worlds of Japanese retro-futurism.

Vulcan veteoed: recently discovered 4th and 5th moons of Pluto officially named.

Stephen Van Vuuren has created an IMAX movie, In Saturn's Rings, by animating a million images taken by robot spacecraft. Here's the first teaser trailer:

The Other Half Of The Sky

One of the depressing things about the science-fiction scene here in the UK at the moment is that the proportion of women writing and publishing SF doesn't seem to have much increased from the fairly low level it was at when I started to buy SF books in the 1970s. The percentage of novels by women submitted to the Clarke Award this year was around 20% (and Farah Mendlesohn, who read many of them, reports that 'most of the books by women are simply not eligible however wide I draw the net'). The average over the past decade wasn't much higher, at around 30%.

Add to this recent incidences of crass sexism in the field, including reports of sexual harassment at conventions, multiple scandals in the Science Fiction Writers of America (here's a useful timeline), and a dumb post about the 'differences' between men and women genre writers on the blog of a publisher which is actually making some effort to publish new women sf writers . . .  There's a growing feeling that science fiction is becoming like one of those antediluvian golf clubs that excludes women so that flush-faced fifty-year-old boys can belly up to the bar and make dubious jokes, complain about political correctness and anyone who doesn't share their skin colour or political opinions, and bang on about imaginary triumphs from days long lost.

I don't want to be a member of that club. Tricia Sullivan points out that it's mostly women who are spending their time and energy pushing back against this stuff - 'I can count on one hand men who have done anything about this' - so for what it's worth, here's my first tiny contribution: an incomplete list of science fiction books by women that I think you should read. You should also check out Ian Sales' ongoing project, Mistressworks, and Nina Allan's excellent cross-genre list. Oh, and take a look at the anthology The Other Half of the Sky, from which I totally stole the title of this post: science-fiction stories about women, not exclusively by women. Meanwhile, the list (shaped by personal taste - let me know what I've missed):

Gill Alderman - The Archivist
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Lauren Beukes - Moxyland
Leigh Brackett - The Long Tomorrow
Octavia E. Butler - Parable Of The Sower
Pat Cadigan - Fools
Suzy McGee Charnas - Walk To The End Of The World
C.J. Cherryh - Downbelow Station
Jennifer Egan - A Visit From The Goon Squad
Eleanor Arnason - A Woman Of The Iron People
Carol Emshwiller - Carmen Dog
M.J. Engh - Arslan (a.k.a. A Wind from Bukhara)
Gertrude Friedberg - The Revolving Boy
Karen Joy Fowler - Sarah Canary
Patricia Geary - Strange Toys
Kathleen Anne Goonan - In Wartime
Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies And Others
Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong
Nalo Hopkinson - Brown Girl In The Ring
Mary Gentle - Golden Witchbreed
Molly Gloss - The Dazzle Of Day
Lisa Goldstein - Tourists
Kij Johnson - At The Mouth Of The River Of Bees: Stories
Gwyneth Jones - Spirit: or The Princess of Bois Dormant
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
M.J. Locke - Up Against It
Leigh Kennedy - The Journal Of Nicholas The American
Nancy Kress - Beggars In Spain
Katherine MacLean - The Missing Man
Maureen F. McHugh - After The Apocalypse
Judith Merril - The Best Of Judith Merril
Judith Moffett - Pennterra
Elizabeth Moon - The Speed Of Dark
C.L. Moore - Clash By Night And Other Stories
Pat Murphy - The City, Not Long After
Linda Nagata - Deception Well
Kit Reed - The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories
Justina Robson - Natural History
Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Diving Into The Wreck
Pamela Sargent - Cloned Lives
Josephine Saxton - Queen Of The States
Melissa Scott - Trouble And Her Friends
Tricia Sullivan - Lightborn
Sue Thomas - Correspondences
James Tiptree Jr (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon) - Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Lisa Tuttle - A Spaceship Made Of Stone And Other Stories
Joanna Russ - Picnic On Paradise
Joan Slonczewski - A Door Into Ocean
Joan D. Vinge - The Snow Queen
Kate Wilhelm - Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang
Liz Williams - Empire Of Bones
Pamela Zoline - The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories

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.)