Nostalgia For The Future

In the 1960s, we were too impatient to wait for the future.  We had to have it now.  The Americans and the Russians were racing to the Moon.  In Britain, we had TSR-2 and Concorde, and in TV ads men in white coats sold us washing powder and alien robots sold us powdered instant mashed potato.  Even ice lollies were space-age ice lollies.  Not only was the Zoom lolly shaped like a rocket ship, with three differently-coloured stages, in 1963 or thereabouts a space-age card was secreted between lolly and wrapper.  I was just getting into science fiction, and was an avid follower of both the space race and Fireball XL5: I had to have a complete set of those cards.  It was one of the first of many obsessions.  I had little pocket money, and there are only so many ice-creams you can eat even when you're eight or nine, but I hit on a cunning plan.  We lived close to the village shop, and one day I noticed that someone had discarded not only a Zoom wrapper in the bin outside, but also the free space-age card.  After that, I checked that bin every day, braving angry wasps to peel open sugar-sticky wrappers in search of those precious cards.  I never did get the full set, but I sent away for the free album and carefully glued my collection inside.  It vanished long ago, and the row of cottage where I lived and that village shop have vanished too.  The future isn't what it once was, but what is?

What I Did On My Holidays

Nothing much gets done in the publishing business, in August.  Editors and agents are out of town; authors who still retain any shred of common sense should take some time off too.  The populations of towns in the industrial heartlands used to relocate en mass to slightly sunnier, coastal towns for their summer holidays.  In Scotland, cities still have trades fortnights, when tradespeople all go on holiday at the same time.  August is the publishing industry's trade holiday.  Try to take time off in any other month, and a massive, and massively urgent, copy edit of that novel you submitted several months ago is liable to turn up just as you're packing your bags.

I clearly don't have any common sense.  I've just delivered a novel, but instead of relocating, I've stayed in town.  London in August is half-deserted.  Families have loaded up their people carriers and 4x4s and vanished beyond the M25, or entrained through the Channel Tunnel for France and Italy, Spain and Portugal.  Away from the centre of town, streets have the somnolent, dust-blown air of an earlier, car-free decade.  You can hear birdsong.  Nothing much moves.  Even the Olympics hasn't really disturbed the tranquillity.  It's my favourite time of year.

And besides I've been working.  Editing a collection of short stories for publication next year, and preparing for Kindle, with my co-author Kim Newman, our post-alien invasion novella, Prisoners of the Action. The terrific cover is by award-winning artist and make-up maven Dave Elsey, and for those of you who aren't on holiday, it's available now.

Coming Soon

(Illustration by Dave Elsey)

Housekeeping

Karyl drove ever westward, crossing the long trough of Palatine Linea and the southernmost edge of the bright frosts flung across half Dione’s globe in wispy swirling patterns by explosive venting from deep fractures, created when ammonia-water melted by residual heat in the lithosphere had intruded on pockets of methane and nitrogen clatherates. After ten days or so, he stopped at the garden habitat of the Fifer-Targ clan and was woken in the middle of the night: the ships of the Brazilian and European joint expedition were on the move, breaking orbit around Mimas and heading out for different moons. Members of the clan were packing and rounding up livestock, following a plan they’d worked up for just this eventuality, preparing to leave their big, tented habitat for shelters. They refused Karyl’s offer of help, so he wished them luck and left them to it and drove off. It was night out on the surface, too. The habitat had been built in short string of low craters created when several vent pits had collapsed, with all the lights switched on inside, its domes shone like a string of glass beads in the black moonscape under Saturn and the swathes of fixed stars, a target that dwindled behind Karyl and quickly sank below the horizon.

He picked his way across the moonscape by the mellow light of Saturnshine. He had suppressed the urge to call Dana and ask if she was all right. Maybe later he’d call her mother, who had been somewhat sympathetic to him. Right now, he needed to work out what he was going to do. He avoided roads and cut directly north-east, towards the southern end of Latium Chasma. One of his caches was tucked into the east wall of the chasma; he could pitch camp there and find out what was happening and figure things out. Wait things out for four or five weeks if he had to, or load up with supplies and follow the chasma’s long straight trough north, into the fractured labyrinth of Tibur Chasmata, where there were any number of hiding places.

(From 'Karyl's War'.)

An extract from a Quiet War story that's only available in an ebook, Stories From the Quiet War, at a price that wouldn't buy you a small (sorry, regular) coffee in Starbucks.

I've been making some minor adjustments to the three ebooks I've published (the other two are a novelette, City of the Dead, and a collection, Little Machines), so they'll play nicely (I hope) with the new generation of Kindles. A few minor typos and transcription errors have also been excised.  Housekeeping tasks that make me appreciate the support of a publisher - I'd rather be writing than coding HTML, and trying to figure out why table of contents tags are stable on one platform but not on another.  But Kim Newman and I are planning to release another Kindle single soon - our novella 'Prisoners of the Action', which appeared in print some years ago in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ellen Datlow. The links are to the US editions, by the way; the UK editions can be found in the list of ebooks to the right.

Reading Matters

Now that I've turned in the novel, I can spend some time reading (an activity that for any writer is as important as hammering the keyboard).  First up, Andy Duncan's fine collection of esoteric Americana, The Pottawatomie Giant and other Stories, and Samuel R Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of the Spiders: enormous, enormously challenging because of its frank depictions of polymorphous perversity, thematically congruent with his examinations of the responsibilities of freedom in Trouble on Triton: an Ambiguous Heterotropia and Dhalgren, and a moving, beautifully humane story of a partnership that endures the hopes and hazards of the next seventy years.

Giant Steps Are What We Take

It's forty-three years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, but their footprints are still preserved in the lunar dust.  In High-resolution images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter their tracks around the Lunar Module and the science packages they deployed show up as dark trails in the Lunar soil.  With no wind or water to erode them, they'll last a long time, but not forever.  Bombardment by micrometeorites will erode them at a rate of about a millimetre per million years; eventually, after ten to a hundred million years, they'll be ground down into the surrounding soil.  Space archaeologists are already making plans to preserve them.

In his terrific new book, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert MacFarlane describes walking alongside 5000 year old human footprints preserved in silt in Morecombe Bay.  Volcanic ash in Laetoli, Tanzania, preserved the footprints of Australopithecus afarensis individuals some 3.6 million years ago (there's a nice diorama of this in the New York Museum of Natural History).  There are many trackways of dinosaurs much older, including 250 million year old prints left by a cat-sized dinosauromorph, an early ancestor of dinosaurs, preserved in what was once the mud of the floodplain of a large meandering river.  And the oldest known animal tracks are around 585 million years old, created by a tiny, unknown, soft-bodied creature that's left no other trace.  We humans have some way to go to match that record.

Evening's Empires

So I've been working on this novel, Evening's Empires, for the past 18 months, and I've just finished the final version.  Or at least, the version that's sent to my editor (squirted down the tubes of the internet, rather than rehearsing the old rituals of realising that I'd run out of paper and/or laser-printer toner).  After this, there will be the editor's comments to deal with (and, usually, another so-called polishing draft), and then the copy-edit, the proofs . . .  But the part where I spend a long time alone in a room, trying to work out what my characters are doing, and why, is over.  For this one, at least.

It's the fourth novel in the Quiet War series, and the last for a while.  There are still stories to be told, I think, about the Black Fleet, the empire of the Trues, and ordinary life in the long golden age of the Great Expansion, but for now it's time for something else.

A few alternative titles:

Hari's Game
Kabadiwallah
The Last Voyage of Pabuji's Gift
Forgotten Things
Bring Me the Head of Dr Gagarian
These Ruins Are Inhabited
When the Saints
Human History

This Thing's The Play . . .

. . . that I wrote, with Anne Billson, Sean Hogan, Maureen McHugh, Stephen Volk, and ringmaster Kim Newman, who provided the frame and linkage for the five stories in the portmanteau piece.  It's enormous fun to be part of this project; we've just done the read-through with a great bunch of actors, and now it's time to fine-tune for rehearsals.  A very different experience from the usual sit-alone-in-a-room-in-front-of-a-screen stuff.

The Hallowe'en Sessions's run is 29 October - 3 November at the Leicester Square Theatre, London.  Tickets £15 full price, £12 concessions, available for booking now.  Here's the blurb:

A group of mental patients gather for a therapy session to each recount the terrifying events that caused them to lose their minds. But is their mysterious therapist all she appears to be, and will her course of treatment prove to be kill or cure?

Cigarette Burns and an award-winning team of horror/fantasy creators join forces to bring you a nightmarish evening filled with primal screams. Writers Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, Moriarty – The Hound of the D’Urbervilles), Stephen Volk (The Awakening, Ghost Watch), Anne Billson (Suckers, Stiff Lips) Paul McAuley (Fairyland, The Quiet War trilogy), Maura McHugh (Jennifer Wilde, Róisín Dubh) and director Sean Hogan (The Devil’s Business, Little Deaths) take you on a head trip through the darkest recesses of the human psyche, where no one – least of all the audience – escapes with their nerves or sanity intact…

Easy Travel To Other Worlds

Just received in the post, my contributor's copy of John Joseph Adams' anthology Other Worlds Than These, a collection of tales of travels to and from other histories and alternate realities.  It reprints my story, 'A Brief Guide To Other Histories', which shares the various interconnected histories of my novel Cowboy Angels.  You can find out more about the anthology here, and more about my story in a brief interview, one of seventeen between the editor and contributors.

Meanwhile, the last draft of Evening's Empires (or at least, the last before it's fired off to its editor) moves on, from Tannhauser Gate to a wheel habitat at the outer edge of the Saturn System.

And here's something randomly lovely: a flash choir in New York's Times Square, singing a new composition by Philip Glass (who provided much of the soundtrack for Evening's Empires) in honour of his 75th birthday.

Above Us Only Sky

McLean Fahnestock made 'Grand Finale', a compilation of all 135 shuttle launches, almost a year ago; it was a finalist in the Remix category of the 2012 Vimeo video awards. It's a celebration of the visceral power of rocket technology, but it's also a requiem. Watch right until the end. This is how tragedy enters global awareness: a babbling chorus gradually falling away until only a single voice is left.

Escape Routes

[My story, 'The Choice' won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short story.  I couldn't attend the award ceremony in Lawrence, Kansas, but Sheila Williams, the editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, kindly delivered this acceptance speech for me.]

When I was a teenager, living at the edge of a small town in the Cotswolds, England, I was a ferocious reader.  And what I mostly read was science fiction.  I read everything I could find in the public library, and in the library of my school (which possessed, for instance, a complete set of the works of H.G. Wells).  And I spent a significant fraction of my pocket money on paperbacks, new and old.  I hunted down caches of SF paperbacks in the backs of bookshops, on spinners in newsagent shops, in church sales.  And every week I scoured the trays of cheap, imported paperbacks and magazines that the local Woolworths set out on one of its counters.

I still have a few of those Woolworths books.  John Jakes’ The Asylum World.  Clifford Simak’s All The Traps of Earth.  And Theodore Sturgeon’s A Way Home, a Pyramid paperback edition of a short-story collection first published in the year that I was born, 1955, reprinted several times over the next decade.

The edition I have is the fourth printing, with the historically significant date July 1969.  I suppose I bought it a year or two later.  When I was 15, or 16.  In 1970, or 1971.  I’d read a lot of science fiction by then.  I was, by then, deep into the New Wave - Michael Moorcock and Joanna Russ, Tom Disch and Samuel R Delany, Keith Roberts and M John Harrison.  But I knew and loved Sturgeon’s work, and knew he was one of the authors on whose shoulders the New Wave guys were standing.  And one of those stories in the collection, the title story, spoke to me in the way that short stories can sometimes speak to us.  I felt a jolt of recognition, as I read it.  A thump in the secret chambers of my heart.

It wasn’t just that the protagonist was a young kid named Paul, although I was still young enough for that to seem significant.  And it wasn’t just that Paul, Paul Roundenbush, lived in a small town - in the Midwest, yes, and smaller and sleepier than my home town, but still. No, what really spoke to me was that, like me, Paul wanted to escape.

The story opens like this:
‘When Paul ran away from home, he met no one and saw nothing all the way to the highway.’

I wanted to leave home, too.  I was 15, or maybe 16.  Old enough to realise how small my home town was, to have some idea of the world beyond it.  Like Paul Roundenbush I was a smart, strange, dreamy kid.  A loner.  And like a lot of smart, dreamy, lonely kids who feel out of place in the place they grew up in, I read a lot of science fiction.  I’m sure that some of you feel a little jolt of recognition at this point.

In ‘A Way Home’, Paul, Paul Roundenbush, meets, or rather dreams of meeting, three possible future selves.  They’re exactly the kind of men a lonely kid eager to escape his small town would dream of becoming.  A millionaire with a glamourous wife and an expensive car and a glove box full of chocolate-covered cherries.  A hobo who lives outside the law and has travelled the whole wide world.  And an air ace exactly like a hero from a pulp story.

I never ran away, and neither does Paul Roundenbush, in the end, but with typically tender precision Sturgeon exactly nails the longing, the oceanic transcendental longing, of wanting to be somewhere else that almost all kids feel, at some point.  That I felt, very strongly, then, in 1970 or 1971, in that small Cotswolds town, when I found the Pyramid paperback edition of A Way Home in the Woolworths tray, under a slew of Spicy Detective Story magazines and remaindered hardbacks.

Is it really science fiction, ‘A Way Home’?  It was first published in a science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and Sturgeon was best known as a science-fiction writer.  But because almost everything happens in Paul’s imagination, because its movement is small and close and personal, it reads as a straight literary story.  Maybe it bounced from Colliers before finding a home in Amazing.  Or from the Saturday Evening Post.  But its theme is the theme of many science fiction stories.  A yearning to move out, always further out.  To become more than you are.  And also the flipside of that yearning: the return home after long voyages to strange harbours, and knowing yourself, and where you came from, for the first time.  As in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, for instance.  Or James Blish’s short story ‘Watershed’. And many others.

I’ve published eighteen novels and more than eighty stories, and I know that it’s a theme that I’ve returned to over and again.  It is, definitely, the theme of ‘The Choice’.  Its young protagonist, Lucas, doesn’t want to leave home, does all he can to stay, until circumstances force him to make a hard decision.  But I think that it shares, absolutely, the same concerns, the same movements of the human heart, as ‘A Way Home’.

And for that reason, beyond all the usual reasons, I’m amazingly proud and happy that ‘The Choice’ has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.  I would like to thank Sheila Williams and Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for publishing it, and the award’s judges for choosing it.  And most of all I would like to thank Theodore Sturgeon, for his stories, for showing me how.

Militarisation

Occasionally, one of my short stories is reprinted in an anthology.  Here are the the latest two, both with a common theme.  War & Space: Recent Combat, which reprints 'Rats of the System'.  And SF Wars, which reprints 'Winning Peace'.

Oh, that perennial topic of SF, war.  War as a condition of being human.  Or of being intelligent.  War as a plot device - a quick and dirty way of putting everything to hazard.  Wars asserting human territoriality in a universe that frankly doesn't care - turning the entire solar system, or the entire galaxy, into a battlefield (now there's hubris).  Wars fought on the assumption that western capitalism is the best and only model for civilisation that we have.  Wars refighting Vietnam on bug planets.  The twentieth century stamping its combat boot into the face of humanity, forever.  It's heartening that a fair few of the stories in these collections argue against these assumptions, or don't take them at face value.

 I seem to have been writing a fair bit about war, recently.  Or rather, about failed attempts to avoid war, and about the aftermath of war.  Readers of The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun and In The Mouth of the Whale will know that I'm not especially interested in generals and admirals, and the tactics of epic space battles.  'Rats of the System' is a quick little story about two mismatched people trying to escape an implacable pursuer; 'Winning Peace' is about two former enemies finding a common cause.  And right now, I'm finishing a novel in a post-war, posthuman future without a space battle or space marine in sight.  Heading out of the world-city Ophir to the semiautonomous free zone of Tannhauser Gate.

Local Colour

I've reached that stage, in the final push to finish Evening's Empires, where in addition to cutting cutting cutting I have to keep going into the office to jot down sentences that have to be inserted somewhere:

Most of her family were traders from Ceres and most of them were still there, she said, selling biologics to each other.  'My mother brought back dogs.  Do you know dogs?'

Caviar

I'm very pleased to announce that my story, 'The Choice', has won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.  Congratulations to Charlie Jane Anders, and to Ken Liu, whose stories 'Six Days, Three Months', and 'The Paper Menagerie', won second and third place.  The winners are selected each year by a jury of experts, from stories nominated by a wide range of reviewers, serious readers, and editors.  I'm thrilled that they've chosen my story this year.

I won't be able to go to the award ceremony, over in Lawrence, Kansas, but Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov's, which published 'The Choice', will accept on my behalf.  I've been to Lawrence once before, way back in the twentieth century, when Fairyland won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.  It's a pretty intense experience.  As well as the award ceremony, there's a short-story workshop, panels, and a visit to the University of Kansas's huge science-fiction library (enlarged since my visit by, amongst other things, Sturgeon's manuscripts and books).  Fred Pohl, who's a jury member, and his wife, Betty Anne Hull, gave me a lift back to the airport.  As we drove through endless fields of Kansas corn, I got Fred to sing a verse of 'Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin'' - you know, the one about corn being as high as an elephant's eye.  Science fiction takes you to places stranger than you can imagine.

If you're interested, you can read part of 'The Choice' for free, here.  It's available in various Best SF collections, too, and will be including in an upcoming audio-book anthology.

Decaying To Mere Fact

Where do writers get their short-story ideas?  Seven years ago I was a speaker on a panel about the future, at an event organised by the Royal Society and the ICA.  You know: science and the arts.  One of the topics we kicked around was the synthesis of meat using some kind of nanotech device that would be as cheap and easy to use as a microwave.  Synthetic meat is hardly a new idea, in science fiction.  Vat-grown chicken helps to feed the overpopulated world of Fredrik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, published in 1953, for instance.  But there's an old rule of thumb that you can generate stories by thinking about who might be hurt or threatened by new technology, and when I was heading home after the event, walking past the bouncers outside a throbbing nightclub, it struck me that if celebrity stalkers found a use for cheap meat makers, then celebrities might need to take elaborate countermeasures.

I turned this notion into a short story that was published in Nature.  You can read it here.  Seven years later, a couple of things I stumbled across in the same week suggest that the future, or what I like to call the consensual present, has caught up with that little story.  First, there's the news that Madonna employs a sterilisation team, because she's worried about fans getting hold of her DNA.  And in an article on the manufacture of artificial meat, there's the following exchange between the author and a scientist:

"Could you make fake panda?"
"Sure."
"What about human?"
"Don't go there."

As far as I'm concerned, Madonna isn't paranoid, but prescient.

Shortly Appearing

This Wednesday, I'm the guest at the monthly meeting of the British Science Fiction Association, where I'll be interviewed by award-winning critic Paul Kincaid.  It's free, starts at 7.00 pm, and takes place in the Cellar Bar of the Melton Mowbray pub, 18 Holborn, London.  There'll be a raffle, apparently; I'll bring some of my books, for prizes.  More details, and a map, here.

Show Time

I'm not a huge fan of that commonplace tyranny of the writing manual, 'show don't tell.'  Avoid exposition and other forms of authorial narrative.  View scenes only through the camera of close third person.  Don't tell the reader that a character is brave, or foolhardy, or tired: show the character performing some action that illustrates the point.  Always dramatize.

Novels aren't movies, which unless they resort to clunky exposition in dialogue, are more or less all show.  But novels can use allusion and metaphor, condense time and action, generalise, describe internal psychological states.  And too often, in a novel, showing takes longer than telling.  'She was afraid' is better than 'She clasped her hands tightly together to stop them shaking.'  Neither are especially satisfactory, but at least the first is short and to the point.  (Of course, evoking the psychological state without resorting to physical symptoms is better still.)  Which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with dramatisation, or the vivid illustrative action.  A narrative that explains everything leaves no room for the reader; it would be as tedious as a story in which every action is described, moment by moment.  And it's important to keep the character in focus, to see and feel a scene through her eyes, her reactions.

Something I'm reminding myself page by page, paragraph by paragraph, as I press on with the final draft of Evening's Empires.  Here, for instance, is a pretty bad bit of tell not show:

Tamonash Pilot, Hari’s uncle, his father’s younger brother, was about the same age now as Aakash had been when he’d passed over.  A stocky old man with a hawkish profile and bristling white eyebrows, dressed in simple black coveralls, so closely resembling Aakash that it was a shock to see him waiting in the bustle and flow of the elevator terminal.

There are all kinds of things wrong with this, but what's especially wrong is that I'm not only telling myself what's happening, using information the protagonist doesn't yet know, but I'm telling it back to front. My first drafts are, shamefully, littered with place-holders like this.  This is closer to a final version:

When he followed Bo out of the booming elevator from the docks, Hari saw his father standing in the bustle and flow of the dispersing passengers.  A stocky old man with the familiar hawkish profile and bristling white eyebrows, but clean-shaven, dressed in black coveralls.  Smiling now, holding out his hands, saying, ‘Gajananvihari!  Nephew!  How good it is to meet you at last!  I am Tamonash.  Welcome to Down Town.  Welcome to Ophir.’

Followed by a chunk of exposition that gets past the whole awkward and overly-familiar getting-to-know-you scene as quickly as possible.  I guess the main rule is, whatever works.

Travellers' Tales

I've just sold a story to editor Jonathan Strahan's Edge of Infinity, an anthology of tales set in various versions of a settled, industrialised Solar System.  Mine, 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, The Potter's Field' shares the setting of the Quiet War future history: a trio of tall stories framed by a journey from Egypt to Saturn's moon Dione, made by a woman invited to memorialise her dead father.  Not quite the last Quiet War fiction.  This week I've been on Vesta and its artificial moon; next week I'll be in the world city, Ophir, as I slowly fine-tune the last draft of Evening's Empires.  Another traveller's tale.  Science fiction is a literature of the restless and displaced.

Just Not Evenly Distributed

From an interview with Edward Burtynsky:

Manaugh: ... From the point of view of a photographer, then, it might seem equally interesting that there are now all sorts of new types of photographic systems on the rise -- quadcopter-mounted 3D scanners, drones, and even smart ammunition equipped with cameras that can loiter in an area taking aerial photographs. Simply on a technical level, I'm curious about where you see the future of photography going. Do you see a time when you're not going to be riding in a helicopter over Los Angeles but, instead, piloting a little drone that's flying around up there and taking photographs for you?

Burtynsky: I'm already doing it.

Twilley: You have a drone?

Burtynsky: Yeah.

Cover Art - Five Novelisations

We Are The Dead

The problem with adapting novels for film is usually what to leave out.  At first sight, David Cronenberg's solution for his adaptation of Don DeLillo's short novel Cosmopolis is to leave everything in.  And that's part of the problem; but the other part is the small yet crucial detail that Cronenberg does omit.

Before you read any further, by the way, there are spoilers ahead.  Massive, unavoidable SPOILERS.
 
In both novel and film, young hotshot billionaire Eric Packer decides to get a haircut, starting an odyssey across New York's grid, which, jammed by the motorcade of the US President, the funeral cortege of a Muslim rapper, and an anti-capitalist protest that culminates in a riot in Times Square, increasingly resembles the Hunger City of David Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs'.  Packer observes this human chaos from the coffin of his cork-lined (prousted), fully-equipped limousine, where he tracks his attempt to buy as much of the world's supply of yuan (yen, in the novel) as possible and receives visits from various experts who work for him, and an intimate medical examination.  Excursions include sexual dalliances with his art dealer and one of his bodyguards, a visit to a rave, and several encounters with his new, independently-wealthy wife.  Meanwhile, his currency speculation goes monstrously awry, and it becomes clear that someone wants to kill him.

Robert Patterson, formerly the world's most famous vampire, imbues Packer with a glacial, otherworldly glamour that reminded me more than a little of David Bowie's stranded alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth.  Another person trapped in the consequences of their meddling with the controls of the capitalist world-machine.  He spends most of the first half of the film wearing sunglasses, but even without them his gaze is inscrutable, barely human.  He's the epitome of capitalism, a maths whiz who made his money in the dot-com boom and parlayed it into a stratospheric fortune by playing the money markets with strategies most can't follow.  The kind of omnicompetent hero usually found in science-fiction novels, armoured by his wealth against the consequences of his manipulations, issuing demands to minions to purchase whatever catches his eye (he has already bought a Russian nuclear bomber; he wants to buy the Rothko chapel and install it in his apartment; there's room, apparently, next to the shooting range).  For much of the film, Packer and the camera are locked together inside the limousine while the New York streets flow past like glimpses of an alien planet on a spaceship's viewscreens.  In one of the best scenes, Packer and his theorist (played by Samantha Morton with just the right touch of steely eccentricity; all of the actors give fine performances) exchange quips and observations while waves of rioters break against the limo, but fail to do little more than cover it in graffiti scribble and tilt the level of the cocktail in Packer's glass.

Those quips and observations . . .  They're lifted straight from the pages of the novel, but they don't really work, as film dialogue.  Like Harold Pinter, DeLillo's dialogue puts its own spin on the repetition and circling flow of 'realistic' dialogue.  But while Pinter's dialogue, on the stage, is like a flurry of punches, DeLillo's, on the screen, is more like a kind of intellectual ping-pong.  The characters are far smarter than us, but the things they say aren't the things that people far smarter than us would say.  In the novel, this works, sort of, as a kind of parody of Packer's isolation from the actual world detachment.  It's all very postmodern, irony ironising itself with a knowing wink.  In the film, despite the best attempts by the actors to give it life, it often doesn't connect.  The characters don't connect with each other; the audience doesn't connect with the characters.  Its abiding flaw isn't pretentiousness, exactly; I admire Cronenberg's audacity in trying to portray the mindset of someone who has lost contact with the ordinary world and is, maybe, trying to find his way back in.  No, it's that Cronenberg doesn't make us care about the characters, or what's happening to them.  When Packer throws himself against the slopes of the man-mountain who gives him the news of the rapper's death, we don't believe his grief.  When his wife tells him she wants a divorce, we wonder how she managed to stick it out for so long.

And when Packer finally gets to the quaint old neighbourhood barbershop where he used to get his hair cut as a kid, while his driver and the barber bond over shared experiences driving cabs in NYC, Packer remains aloof.  Okay, the scene which satisfies his child-like concern about where limousines go, at night, is touching, but this delicacy is shattered by a botched volley from his would-be killer, a lead-in to the last twenty minutes, trapped now in a derelict room piled with dead cathode-ray monitors and other kibble rather than a high-spec limo and its icy blue touch-screens, while Packer and his murderer (Paul Giamatti, hooded with a ratty towel like a hobo monk) interrogate each others' motives, and the film finally gains a dimension of suspense.

And here's the thing that Cronenberg elided.  Not Packer's motive for destroying everything he's created, but his state of mind, at the end.  Or rather, his state of grace.  In the novel, in the first pages of the novel, we're told that Packer can't sleep.  That sleep eludes him.  'Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five.'  When he reaches that barbershop, in the novel, he not only touches base with who he once was, but he finds a place of safety.  A place where he can, and briefly does, sleep.  And after he wakes, when he's riding in the limousine again, he finds a film-shoot where several hundred naked people, in the style of Spencer Tunick, imitate the victims of some atrocity.  And he joins them, and finds his wife, and, it's made clear, in the novel, also finds himself.  In the film, his willed self-destruction is an extension of his megalomania.  In the novel, it becomes something else, something more like human life, rounded with a sleep.

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

The Eye of the Hydra

I've mentioned before that when I was a practising research scientist I investigated symbioses between animals and unicellular algae, and my chief experimental organism was the humble green hydra.  It's a freshwater coelenterate (a relative of jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals, which use specialised stinging cells, cnidocytes, to catch prey and to defend themselves and move about) that's easy to culture in the laboratory and reproduces by asexual budding, so in a relatively short time the researcher can grow up a large, cloned population (hydras can also reproduce sexually, but if they are kept in constant conditions it's a rare event).  It's also a wonderfully simple animal, with just two cell layers separated by an acellular mesoglea, a mouth ringed by tentacles at one end, and a foot, or pedicule, at the other, which adheres to the substrate.  There are relatively few types of cells, a simple nerve net, and that's about it.  So it's a useful lab model not only in the investigation of symbioses, but in all kinds of developmental studies, too.

Here's one of the most recent, and most interesting.  Researchers using a non-symbiotic species of hydra have discovered that its stinging cells exhibited a sensitivity to light - they are more likely to fire at low levels of light or in darkness, while bright light actually inhibits their firing.  That's interesting in its own right - hydra prey on water fleas and other small swimming animals, whose activity may correlate with the activity of the hydras' stinging cells.  But there's more.  That activity is regulated by a species of light-sensitive chemical, opsin, which is also found in the visual systems of higher animals, including mammals.  So although hydras don't have physical structures analogous to eyes, they are photosensitive, and that photosensitivity is regulated by a chemical that has a very similar function in the human eye.  The 'eye' of the common ancestor of hydras and the eyes of higher animals (fish, fowl, mammals, us) share a common pathway.

Parenthetically, it would be fun to examine to role of opsin in the behaviour of green hydra, which will migrate towards a bright light shone in one corner of their culture dish, presumably to maximise the photosynthetic output of their symbiotic algae.  It might also be interesting to discover if green hydra's feeding behaviour is diurnal, or if it is just as active feeding by day as at dusk, or night (the polyps of reef-forming corals seems to photosynthesise by day and feed by night, getting the best of both being a plant and a predator).

There's also an important evolutionary angle, as one of the researchers, Professor Todd Oakley, points out: "What good is half an eye? Even without eyes there are other functions for light sensitivity that we may not be thinking of."

This is precisely the problem that Charles Darwin raised in On The Origin of the Species, in a sentence that's often quoted by opponents of evolutionary theory:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

 Darwin went on to say (and this is the bit that his opponents often miss out):

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

On The Origin of the Species, 6th Edition, Chapter 6

Darwin goes on to describe examples of possible transitional forms.  The photosensitive 'eye' of the hydra is one such, and may help us understand 'how a nerve comes to be sensitive to light', one of the first steps in the evolution of the complex mechanism that is helping you read this.

Near, Far

Fiction about the near future, as many people have noted, is most often like a funhouse mirror of the present. It distorts and exaggerates our current fears and preoccupations; it takes current trends and pushes them as far as they'll go without breaking down into incoherence.  It's science fiction in its most purely satirical mode.  Like costume drama films, it contains the fingerprints of the time in which it was composed.  It doesn't go out of date; it loses context.  It's also becoming more and more difficult to do, as the present increasingly becomes its own self-engulfing parody.

Fiction about the far future, on the other hand, digs deep into the past.  Given all the problems of attempting to predict the near-future - black swans, non-linear dynamics, the law of unintended consequences - it certainly makes no sense in consciously trying to project any part of the present on to the far future.  Instead, writers suggest that archetypal human narratives and historical principles will survive every kind of technological change, and reappear in different forms.  James Blish's Cities in Flight series, for instance, is underpinned by the theories of Otto Spengler.  Isaac Asimov's Foundation series was inspired by Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Frank Herbert's Dune and Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun are different takes on Messianic figures.  Old-school space opera, with its palaces and empires, its sword-wielding heroes and princesses, echo Hollywood's romance with medieval history.  And so on, and so forth.  Like fantasy, the narratives of far-future science fiction are shaped by patterns of Story.  Unless you believe, like those who champion the technological Singularity (aka Rise of the Machines, or the Rapture of the Nerds), that the far future lies on the other side of an intellectual event horizon. That the far future will not only be impossible to predict, but also impossible to comprehend.  That it is an end to Story and the heat death of science fiction, and we cannot utter a single syllable about what follows.  But where's the fun in that?

Size Matters

This brilliantly simple graphic by Adam Grossman neatly illustrates how the scale of human achievement is dwarfed by the size of the galaxy.  We've been emitting radio transmissions for about a century now, and since they travel at the speed of light, the very first transmissions have reached a theoretical distance of one hundred light years from the Sun.  (As Emily Lakdawalla points out in the Planetary Society blogpost where I first found the graphic, the inverse square law means that those transmissions would be so incredibly attenuated as to be undetectable except by the magic of advanced alien technology.)  This means that all of the transmissions to date are contained within a sphere of two hundred light years' diameter.  The graphic shows just how small that is, compared to the size of the Galaxy - if you click to embiggen the image, you'll see that a little blue dot in the centre of the enlarged square: that's us, that's as far as we've reached out.

Space opera's central conceit is to imagine that human influence can extent across the entire breadth of the Galaxy.  Across billions of stars, and about 120,000 light years.  And cosmology operas imagine that humanity can influence the billions of galaxies beyond our own, the fate of the observable universe, and even multiverses beyond that.  Which is why, of course, breaking or getting around the Einsteinian lightspeed barrier is such a common trope, in space opera.  While some writers - Alastair Reynolds springs to mind - have cleverly incorporated the long spans of time required to traverse interstellar distances at sublight speeds into their plots, they usually (as far as I'm aware), limit themselves to so-called near-space.  Conventionally, that isn't much bigger than the volume of the little blue dot.  That image really brings home why it's so necessary to break the speed limit if you're going to have any kind of comprehensible galaxy-spanning plot, and introduce human dramas to the galaxy's vast stage.

Symbiosis

Way back in the 1990s, when I had a day job, I used to do research into plant/animal symbioses, and taught, amongst others things, an advanced course in symbiosis.  All eukyarotic organisms are the products of at least one symbiotic event.  The cells of animals, plants and fungi contain mitochondria, organelles that are, amongst other things, the source of most cellular chemical energy.  Mitochondria were once independent organisms, probably related to Proteobacteria, which entered into an endosymbiosis with the ancestor of eukaryotes - one of the defining steps in the evolution of life on Earth.

In addition to mitochondria, cells of algae and green plants also contain plastids, the organelles responsible for photosynthesis.  These, too, were once independent organisms, and now researchers believe they have identified the host and symbiont that are the ancestors of all species of algae and plants.  It's a hugely exciting piece of work, with equally huge implications.  DNA sequencing shows that the plastid of a species of glaucophyte, a small group of obscure, microscopic blue-green algae, retains genes associated with early cyanobacteria, the photosynthetic bacteria from which plastids are believed to have evolved.  Comparison with the gene maps of a variety of plastids suggests not only that all algae and plants evolved from a single symbiotic event, but also that another organism was involved: 'the DNA includes genes similar to those from ancient bacteria similar to the Chlamydiae bacteria.'  If the hypothesis is correct, the bacteria (which were probably some kind of parasite) have all but vanished, leaving only a few of their genes in plastids, a little like words from the languages of long-vanished civilisations that live on in English and other modern languages.  It isn't a unique phenomenon - one of the more unexpected results of the human genome project was the discovery that genes from retroviruses make up something like 8 per cent of the human genome.  We are the expression of texts from many sources.