Dead Futures

We're remaking the future all the time, here in the present.  As you grow older, you begin to lose track of the number of times you've seen what seemed like a solid, unchangeable, unchallengeable future murdered by what we later call history. I can think of at least four or five major hinge points in my lifetime, but I'm sure that many more, large and small, have flipped our timeline in unexpected directions.

Kennedy's assassination was the first big global news event I remember (sitting in front of the fire on a damp Saturday evening in November, hearing the BBC radio news report, aged 8, while my mother was ironing the weekly wash (here's a later TV bulletin on the same day)), but a couple of years before that Kennedy and Khrushchev had narrowly avoided a global nuclear war during the Cuba crisis and a future grimmer by far than any we've lived through.

The Apollo 11 moon landing killed every future with easy travel to other planets stone dead. As soon as Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar dust, the political point of the enterprise had been made.  Half a dozen missions followed, more or less because the hardware was in place, but that was it for manned space travel beyond Low Earth Orbit in the Twentieth Century. No wheel space station, no mission to Mars or beyond, none of the cool stuff in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Twenty years later, Germans were standing on top of the Berlin Wall, the beginning of the domino collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War and hundreds of fictional futures in which the US and Russia were locked in perpetual struggle.  And on 9/11 in the real 2001, the future was changed again, and we're still dealing with the effects.  Maybe the Arab Spring will be another game changer; as Zhou Enlai is supposed to have said when asked about the changes caused by the French Revolution, it's too soon to say.

Apollo 11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11 were all enacted live, on television, which is how we get our history these days.  That, and Twitter and other social platforms.  'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,' Roy Batty says, at the beginning of his soliloquy in Bladerunner. So have we all, Roy, without leaving our homes. That's a game-changer, too.

And these days everything in the world is connected to everything else.  You're a mouse click away from Armstrong's first footstep, or Times Square (as I type this, in London, it's raining, in Times Square). Less than two years after the fall of the Soviet Empire, a couple of hundred kilometres to the north of the Berlin Wall [EDIT, actually about five hundred kilometres southwest], in CERN, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web site.  The World Wide Web rendered thousands of fictional futures redundant, but created thousands more.  And that's the thing, if you're a science fiction writer.  Every future you create will be undermined by history sooner or later.  Usually sooner.  But science fiction isn't  - or shouldn't be - in the prophesy game.  It can be about realistic futures, but it isn't especially into realism.  It can parody present trends or inflate them into widescreen phantasies; it can contrast human stories with the pitiless scale of the universe. Most of all, it can tell us in as many ways as possible that the future will be different, wilder and stranger than we can imagine.

Update

So I've finished writing a couple of short stories, and the first draft of something for a secret project I'm not allowed to tell you about, quite yet. And now it's back to the novel, and the final pass before I send it off to my agent and my editor; this is the draft where every sentence is interrogated and everything that doesn't carry weight is cut, otherwise known as the slaughter of the darlings.

Meanwhile, you can find a new short story of mine, 'The Man', in the second issue of Arc Magazine, and another story, 'Antarctica Starts Here', is scheduled for publication in, I think, the October/November issue of Asimov's SF. And I've contributed a chapter to the mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse. Fightback!, due out in December.

This Saturday (the 9th), I'll be travelling to Cardiff to take part in the British Humanist Association's annual conference, where I'll be talking with Professor Gregory Claeys about the future. And later in the month, on Wednesday 27th, I'll be interviewed at the monthly meeting of the British Science Fiction Association, in the Cellar Bar of The Melton Mowbray Public House. 18 Holborn, London (map here). Entry is free, and non-members are welcome.

One Of Those Days In England With The Country Goin' Broke

Only Forward (redux)

The terror of the blank page, of wondering what comes after the next paragraph, the next sentence, is eliminated by writing something down. Even if it's the wrong sentence, the wrong paragraph. The trick is to keep moving. To get to the end of the first draft without looking back. All the bad stuff can be fixed, or eliminated. It isn't a waste of time. It contrasts with the good stuff - the stuff you got right. It shows you where you made all the easy and obvious decisions. If you finish a first draft and can't find much to cut, you're usually in trouble.

Some writers plan everything out. They know where they are going. They write a chapter, and the next, and the next, and at the end they more or less have the book they expected to get. I start with notes about characters and settings, not much else. A few high points. Some key scenes. The rough shape of the thing. The place where it begins; the place where it ends. I write to discover what it is I'm writing. I write to surprise myself. It can be wasteful. It can involve false starts and dead ends. But sometimes you only find the right direction after trying all the others first.

Please Stand By

Under The Paving Stones, The Forest

 

"Hawthorn bushes sprang up among them, and, protected by the briars and thorns from grazing animals, the suckers of elm-trees rose and flourished. Sapling ashes, oaks, sycamores, and horse-chestnuts, lifted their heads. Of old time the cattle would have eaten off the seed leaves with the grass so soon as they were out of the ground, but now most of the acorns that were dropped by birds, and the keys that were wafted by the wind, twirling as they floated, took root and grew into trees. By this time the brambles and briars had choked up and blocked the former roads, which were as impassable as the fields."

 

"No fields, indeed, remained, for where the ground was dry, the thorns, briars, brambles, and saplings already mentioned filled the space, and these thickets and the young trees had converted most part of the country into an immense forest. Where the ground was naturally moist, and the drains had become choked with willow roots, which, when confined in tubes, grow into a mass like the brush of a fox, sedges and flags and rushes covered it. Thorn bushes were there, too, but not so tall; they were hung with lichen. Besides the flags and reeds, vast quantities of the tallest cow-parsnips or "gicks" rose five or six feet high, and the willow herb with its stout stem, almost as woody as a shrub, filled every approach."

 "By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches, of course, had long since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that the water which should have run off down them stagnated, and presently spread out into the hollow places and by the corner of what had once been fields, forming marshes where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water."

Richard Jeffries, After London

Please Bear With Us While We Strive to Miss A Few Deadlines

Moon Dance

I found this lovely video of the setting for much of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun on Caleb Scharf's Life, Unbounded blog. It was made by Sander van der Berg, using  images taken by the Voyager spacecraft and the Cassini orbiter.  The miracle isn't only that we find such austere and inhuman vistas beautiful, but that we are also able to understand the interactions between mass, gravity and time that created them.

Worldbuilding Made Easy

I was in Lillehammer, Norway, a few years back.  It's probably most famous for being the site of the Winter Olympics in 1994, but it also possesses a very big and very fine open-air museum, Maihaugen, which contains a huge selection of vernacular Norwegian buildings.  The collection was started by a dentist, Anders Sandvig, in the late nineteenth century.  When it outgrew his garden, the city of Lillehammer gifted him with a permanent site.  Most are traditional rural structures, but there are several short streets of urban buildings, and a scattering of twentieth century houses.

The setting is lovely; the attention to detail comprehensive.  Everything is neatly labelled; everything is explained.  The traditional turf roofs provided good insulation and their weight stabilised the wooden buildings.  Most guttering and most tools were wooden because worked metal was expensive, and so on, and so forth.  It's a great museum, an idyllic simulacrum of a vanished way of life. It is, in short, an object lesson in worldbuilding.  A ready-made stage set for a fantasy trilogy.

But like all museums, you wouldn't mistake it for the real thing.  When you step inside one of the farmhouses, there's no sense of trespassing on someone's home, someone's life.  Everything is an exemplar: authentic, but without the individuality of human context.  Worldbuilding is, let's face it, isn't that difficult.  A few basic principles, a few rules, consistency, coherence . . .  Making it come alive, that's the hard part.  That's where the work really begins.

Soft City

News From Elsewhere

In December this year it will be forty years since human beings escaped low Earth orbit; forty years since the end of Apollo. But although there are no cities on the Moon, or expeditions to Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter, it's a golden age for space science. Just about every day I'm excited by a new piece of research, a new discovery, a new image of some sublime extraterrestrial landscape.

A couple of days ago, for instance, there was advance publicity for an astrophysics paper describing the computer simulation of trajectories of free-floating planets in star clusters. The investigators discovered that if the number of planets equalled the number of stars in the cluster, then over time some 6 - 8 per cent of the planets were captured by stars. Given that ejection of planets appears to pretty common during formation of planetary systems, not only is the Galaxy teeming with rogue planets, but many star systems may contain captured planets, distinguished by distant and eccentric orbits.  Far-fetched? We have an example of a similar mechanism right here in the Solar System.The outermost moons of Saturn are almost certainly captured bodies that were ejected from the Kuiper belt, out beyond Pluto's orbit, and were captured by Saturn as they migrated inwards.  These little moons possess distant, inclined and often irregular orbits.  They cluster in three groups - Inuit, Gallic and Norse - and the members of each group may well be fragments of a parent body that broke up.  The best known and largest irregular moon is Phoebe, a couple of hundred kilometres in diameter, orbiting in the opposite direction to the inner moons, and the source of dark material that forms Saturn's largest ring (which was unknown until a few years ago) and darkens the leading hemisphere of the ying-yang moon, Iapetus.

That dark ring was discovered by examination of data and images collected by the Cassini spacecraft, still in orbit around Saturn, and still working hard after entering orbit around Saturn some eight years ago. One of the Cassini team's latest discoveries is that one of the hydrocarbon lakes in the south polar region of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, appears to behave like a salt pan in Namibia; both are depressions that drain in the dry season and refill from below, fed by groundwater (or ground hydrocarbons, in the case of Titan's lake). Titan and Earth are the only bodies in the Solar System known to possess hydrological cycles. Although Earth's cycle is based on water, and Titan's on methane, ethane and propane, there amazing similarities. Cassini's extended missions have allowed it to observe seasonal changes in Titan's rain patterns and the size of its lakes, something a human-crewed mission would be hard-pressed to do, given that Saturn takes 29.7 years to complete an orbit, and seasons on the gas giant and Titan are correspondingly longer than seasons on Earth. But maybe somewhere on Titan there are dry salt pans, old, large, and very flat, like the Bonneville salt pans in Nevada, but composed of something like asphalt. Imagine the drag-racing possibilities...

Life On The Drift

The New Scientist reports that Japanese scientists have calculated that microbes riding rocks knocked off Earth could not only have seeded bodies in the solar system which may be able to support life, but could have seeded Earth-like exoplanets like Gliese 581d, too. At first glance, it's a perfect example of science-journalism catnip: DINOSAUR-KILLING ASTEROIDS! EXOPLANETS! ALIEN LIFE!. But the paper it cites, by Tesuya Hara and colleagues, is a serious examination of the probability that life on one planet could seed other hospitable planets and moons; an attempt to pin down some of the factors that make the old idea of panspermia possible.

Hard panspermia theory suggests that life originated in just one stellar system in the Galaxy about ten billion years ago, and spread out to planets around other stars, including Earth.  It assumes that life is unlikely to arise more than once, that big whacks like the dinosaur-killing Chixulub impact could knock debris off Earth's surface and into interplanetary space, and that microbes could survive inside rocks for the million-odd years it would take to drift to another star system.  Hara et al's paper suggests that more than one fragment of debris could reach stellar systems within twenty light years of the sun, and microbes might survive if those fragments were embedded in icy material like comets, which would shelter it from cosmic radiation.

It's a neat idea.  Doughtly little microbes minding their own business when they're suddenly knocked off Earth by a fiery cataclysm, snoozing away a million years inside a centimetre-long spaceship of solid rock, plunging into an alien ocean and getting busy with the business of evolution.  But like all ideas associated with panspermia, it is based on the very big assumption that abiogenesis, the spontaneous generation of life, is a highly unlikely event; an assumption that tends to degrade into an argument about First Cause that is as yet is impossible to answer because we have only one example of a life-bearing planet.  (And it's possible that life on Earth arose more than once, but other forms were wiped out by catastrophic impacts, or were out-competed by our very early ancestors, leaving only fossils or refuge populations surviving in niche habitats.  In that context, discovery of microbes with characteristics radically different from all other known species would be as important as discovery of life on another world.  That's why NASA made a big noise about the possible (and now largely discredited) discovery of a microbe that appeared to substitute arsenic for phosphorous in its metabolism.)

If we found life on Mars, and that life closely resembled life on Earth, then we'd certainly have to take the idea of panspermia (or at least its weaker cousin, exogenesis) within the solar system seriously.  But given that one estimate puts the number of Earth-like planets in the Galaxy at around ten billion, abiogenesis would have to be an extremely rare event for it to have occurred only once.  Martians may be from Earth (or we may be Martians), but despite the calculations of Hara et al about the probability of the chain of steps required to transfer life from one stellar system to another, it still seems most likely that if ever do meet any aliens, they'll be genuinely alien, products of a creation utterly separate from our own.

(Thanks to James Bradley for pointing me towards the article.)

I Am Stepney, I Am Peru

Jah Wobble reminds us that there's no need to use faux exoticism to evoke 'transcendence' or 'the sublime'.

The Human Absence

Maybe it's different now, but when I was learning to be a scientist I wasn't given any formal instruction in the art of writing a scientific paper - in how to write like a scientist.  The basic structure of a paper is easy enough to understand.  A summary, or abstract, describing in a few sentences the nature of the investigation and the results obtained.  An introduction, giving the background of the investigation, and the questions being investigated.  A section on methods and materials, or, How I Did It. Results, or, What I Found (here be graphs and tables). A Discussion of the significance of the results - do they answer the questions posed in the introduction, and what further questions to they pose? And finally, References: a list of papers quoted in the text.  So far, so good.  But more mysterious was the language of the paper.  Words you could use and words you couldn't, the detached tone, the dry precision, and most of all, the passive tense that removed all sense that anything had been thought or done by a human being.  You never say 'I' in a scientific paper.  You never say 'I boiled the frog.'  You say instead 'The frog was boiled'.    It was not so much what you should do, but what you shouldn't.  You learned by making mistakes which your supervisor and the referees of the paper corrected.

Adam Ruben gives a wonderful deconstruction of the process:

I asked for an example, and [my advisor] pointed to a sentence on the first page. “See that word?” he said. “Right there. That is not science.”
The word was “lone,” as in “PvPlm is the lone plasmepsin in the food vacuole of Plasmodium vivax.” It was a filthy word. A non-scientific word. A flowery word, a lyrical word, a word worthy of -- ugh -- an MFA student.
I hadn’t meant the word to be poetic. I had just used the word “only” five or six times, and I didn’t want to use it again. But in his mind, “lone” must have conjured images of PvPlm perched on a cliff’s edge, staring into the empty chasm, weeping gently for its aspartic protease companions. Oh, the good times they shared. Afternoons spent cleaving scissile bonds. Lazy mornings decomposing foreign proteins into their constituent amino acids at a nice, acidic pH. Alas, lone plasmepsin, those days are gone.
So I changed the word to “only.” And it hurt. Not because “lone” was some beautiful turn of phrase but because of the lesson I had learned: Any word beyond the expected set -- even a word as tame and innocuous as “lone” -- apparently doesn’t belong in science.

Never mind fiddling around with second-person narratives and unreliable narrators.  Imagine writing a short story - a novel - shorn of anything that shows the slightest quiver of emotion. A properly post-modern hard science-fiction construction in which the author becomes a committee of ghostly puppeteers, and his characters objects acted upon: 'It has been proposed that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.  This was investigated by introducing the subject into a location populated by family groups which each possessed unmarried daughters...'

Found Poetry

'Dead Stars' to guide spacecraft.

Of course, it's only a matter of time before it's incorporated into a GPS app to point you towards that hot new restaurant, and it will have become as invisibly prosaic as satellite technology.

We Come From Ballard Land

So next Friday, Easter, I'll be in a hotel just outside Heathrow airport, at Olympus 2012, the British National Science Fiction Convention. Mostly, I'll be hanging out in the book room or the bar (I like to think I'll be in my room, writing, but I'm easily distracted), and I hope to renew my acquaintance with the Heathrow chicken-rat farm, but I do have a few panels.  Two are on Friday.  The first on how science fiction has engaged with climate change, 'The Drowned World' (2012 is the 50th anniversary Ballard's novel; maybe we can spend 40 minutes discussing whether or not it's really about climate change); the second, 'Beyond Red Mars', about how our knowledge of the Solar System has changed in the twenty years since Kim Stanley Robinson's novel was  published.  I'm moderating that one, so will have to think up some questions to prod the panellists.  Name your favourite pet probe and explain why you think it's so cute, kind of thing.  Then on Saturday I'm taking part in a panel on 'The Fantastic Landscape' (perhaps we can make it a field trip), and on Sunday I'm down for 'Sequel-itis', or why it's such a terrible thing that Hollywood loves franchises (apart from Aliens and Alien 3, and The Dark Knight...).

Meanwhile, Evening's Empires slowly deepens. And I have a couple of short stories to write, and hope, soon, to have some good news about republishing the Confluence trilogy in one fat omnibus.

Human Architecture

The fundamentals of human life in these first cities did not differ greatly from ours today.  From the love of good food expertly cooked and enjoyed with friends and family, to the need to work and the pleasures of shopping, their daily live mirror ours...  By 2000 BC, as Mumford has said, 'most of the physical organs of the cities had been created.'  These were recognisably cities in the modern sense of the word.

P.D. Smith: Cities, A Guidebook For the Urban Age

If the fundamentals of human life, and the cities which reflect those fundamentals, have not changed in 4000 years, will they have changed 2000 or 4000 years in the future?  And how will those changes (if any) affect the cities our far-future descendants inhabit?

Here Comes Everybody

Pavane

Some books stay with you forever.  You encounter them at an impressionable age; they strike an inner resonance with uncanny accuracy; you can return to them again and again, and always find something new.  Keith Roberts' alternate history, Pavane, recently reissued by Old Earth Books and reviewed by Michael Dirda, is one of my personal favourites.  I found it in the Ace edition, with the terrific cover by Leo and Diane Dillon (above) that Old Earth Books have used in their reissue, in a Church jumble sale in the small Cotswold town where I grew up.  I was fourteen or fifteen.  Maybe sixteen.  The paperback was a couple of years old, sitting not amongst other books but amongst a scatter of bric-a-brac, an alien artifact from another world.  I was already a stone science-fiction reader, getting most of my fix from the local library.  We were poor.  I couldn't afford books, but bought what I could anyway.  And bought this, and read it, as I recall, in a single sitting, and then reread it again, in an attempt to understand it.

I'm still trying to understand it.  It changed the way I thought about science fiction.  Divided into measures than hand the narrative from character to character, it's the story of another history, in which the Catholic Church ruled England some four hundred years after the assassination of Queen Elizabeth the First, suppressing various technologies.  A world of steam road trains, hand presses, semaphore towers flashing signals across the land, the Inquisition at large, and revolution in the air.  An English novel: its setting, in and around Corfe Castle, evoked with lambent touches and imbued with English weather and tough English romance; its stories told in full-on tough, tragic mode. Its characters may shape its history but are also shaped by it, hurt by, die by it.  Unlike much of the stuff I was reading at the time, it presents no easy solutions; its world is not some puzzle easily solved but is as obdurate and hard-grained as the real world.  There is human muddle, human suffering, human triumph.

It showed me, I think, that science fiction stories did not need to be peopled with lords and ladies (as Roberts titles one of his measures), child-messiahs, orphans who just happened to fit the lock of their world as if oiled. That stories could be about ordinary people, yet reflect larger movements, larger stories.  It showed me that science fiction could aspire to the condition of literature.  I taught me about the telling detail; about how to evoke an entire world by observation of the particularity of things.  Roberts is very good at showing us how things work, by dropping in the exact image, and describing how people use them, and how they change the people who use them.  There are DNA-traces of Pavane in most of my novels, but most especially, I guess, Pasquale's Angel and Fairyland.  It's one of the books that makes me want to write better, even if I know I can never better it.

Form

“For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything had to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing”. Writing is more about destroying than creating.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle