Links 10/05/13

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

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


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

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

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

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

An Education

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

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

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

From Evening's Empires

Into The Dark

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

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

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

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

Links 03/05/13

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

Here's your personal airship.

Here's your writer's grenade.

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

Data Loss

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

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

Limited

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

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

Links 26/04/13

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

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

Scientists have barcoded ants to monitor their career choices.

A sea anemone starts swimming to escape a starfish:

Jackson's Reef

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

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

From Evening's Empires

Links 19/04/13

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

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

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

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

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

 Nano space-suits for insects.

A Day In The Life

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

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

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

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

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

Oblivion

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

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

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

Links 05/04/13

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

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

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


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

Evening's Empires Cover

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

Links 29/03/13

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

A fish with a see-through head.

Duckpenisgate.

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

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

A Day In The Life

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

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

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

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

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

Something For The Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

Links 22/03/13

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

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

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

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

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

A Very British History

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

Robinson Crusoe On Mars

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

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

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

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

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

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