Liquid Water On Mars

Well, maybe. Within a couple of days of each other, reports of two possible evidence for liquid water on the red planet. The first shows blobs on the legs of the Phoenix lander that grew and changed shape and position, just like drops of water. The second suggests that a recently-formed gully that resembles those carved by running water may have been created by brines bursting from a point in the surface. The surface of Mars is colder than the freezing point of water, but high concentrations of chemicals - perchlorates in the case of the droplets on the Phoenix lander; ferric sulphate in the case of the brines that may have formed the gully - could act as anti-freeze and reduce the evaporation rate. So much for Bradbury's crystalline canals - this stuff would be more like the sludge that leaks out of toxic waste dumps.

Unfortunately, the concentrations of salts necessary to keep water liquid at minus seventy degrees Centigrade would rule out the possibility of life as we know it. "If you tried to put any kind of life-form you can imagine on Earth in a brine solution of that sort, the water would be sucked out of the cells," according to Phoenix mission leader Peter Smith. Yeah, but what about life as we don't (yet) know it?

Meanwhile, the Dawn probe has just swung past Mars on its way to the asteroid Vesta, boosting its velocity and fractionally slowing the planet.

"The flyby will cause Mars to slow in its orbit enough that after one year, its position will be off by about the width of an atom. If you add that up, it will take about 180 million years for Mars to be out of position by one inch (2.5 cm)," Rayman said. "We appreciate Mars making that sacrifice so Dawn can conduct its exciting mission of discovery in the asteroid belt."

The things we humans can do.

Shameless Fun

Make your own here (via Posthuman Blues).

Free Matter

My introduction to the US edition of Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days has been posted over on the Pyr blog. And I've posted a short biographical essay on my web site - it was originally published in Postscripts 15. Share and enjoy.

Old Wine; New Bottles

I'm very pleased with the cover for the mass-market paperback of The Quiet War; it's been redesigned for the smaller format, but cleverly retains all the design elements of the cover of the hardback/trade paperback. I've also received covers for new editions of Four Hundred Billion Stars, Eternal Light, Red Dust, and Pasquale's Angel, which are scheduled for publication in September. They're still being tweaked, but once they're finalised I'll post them here. I have no shame. Eternal Light is also being reprinted in April, as part of Gollancz's space opera promotion. I don't know. You spend what seems like an age, waiting for one of your books to be republished, and then two editions come along at once...

Instant Architecture (3)

This old Routemaster, parked in a corner a car park off Brick Lane, has been converted into a restaurant (a vegan restaurant, hence the groan-inducing pun in the name), kitchen downstairs, dining space upstairs (and outside, when the weather's more clement). As far as I know, it's the only such example in London; you'd think there'd be more.

Introducing

In the post today, complimentary copies of two book for which I wrote introductions: the anthology We Think Therefore We Are (see below) and Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days, which collects together seven stories set in the near-future India of River of Gods. Like an establishment known for its fine wine, Mr McDonald needs no bush hung in front of his enterprise to attract eager customers, but I was flattered to be asked, and glad to oblige. I'm a huge admirer of his work and think he hit a new personal best with River of Gods, and the stories in Cyberabad Days are equally good. Check 'em out.

Ongoing

When not frolicking in the snow, checking out steampunk shops, and visiting fearless editor Ellen Datlow while she was laid up in hospital (a good precis of her adventures can be found here; she's been released back into the wild now, I'm pleased to say), I've been doing the odd spot of writing. I finished, finally, a fairly long story, and Gardner Dozois has bought it for the issue of Subterranean Press's magazine that he's guest-editing. Gardner tells me that the issue should start running in March, and includes stories by Joe Lansdale, Carrie Vaughn, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams, Ted Kosmatka, Lucius Shepard's story from Songs of the Dying Earth (Gardner's Jack Vance tribute anthology), a Lucifer Jones story by Mike Resnick, and an audio from Elizabeth Bear, as well as the usual features. Hey.

My contribution is called 'Crime and Glory' and it was one of those stories that did not come easily. Some do, and it's lovely when it happens. This was a bloody affair, with much hacking and cursing and backtracking until, finally, I turned the plot inside out and everything clicked into place and began to flow, despite the narrator's blustering evasions and refusal to face up to what she was really about. And hard on the heels of that, I started in on the editing and polishing of Gardens of the Sun. Luckily, my editor had only a few points, and all of them are good. But I'm still compelled to go through it sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, to make sure that every word is the right word, and counts. As far as I'm concerned, writing is all about rewriting.

Embroidered Graffiti

Brick Lane, London.

When Giants Walked The Earth

Via The Bowery Boys, 25 random nicknames of 19th Century New Yorkers. I'd take high fantasy novels much more seriously if they featured characters like Boiled Oyster Malloy, Mallet Murphy, or Mock Duck.

Instant Architecture (2)

Tube train carriage used as offices, behind A Child of the Jago shop, Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch.

Heavy Weather

Yes, snow was general all over London yesterday (that’s the view in my local park early in the afternoon, above), and for a little while everything more or less came to a stop.


On Titan, it may be raining right now, although at around minus 180 degrees Centigrade the rain is far colder than our snow. It’s liquid methane and ethane, and infrared pictures from Cassini showing the same area of Titan’s northern hemisphere in 2004 and 2005 have not only captured rainclouds, but also show one large lake expanding, and a whole cluster of smaller lakes appearing after what must have been a cloudbusting rainstorm. You can find a full report and links to the original pictures here. Before Cassini arrived at Saturn we had no idea what the surface of Titan looked like; now we’re beginning to understand the moon’s climatological cycles.

The past few months have been a jackpot as far as capturing extraterrestrial weather is concerned. The Phoenix lander spotted snow falling on Mars, while astronomers using the Spitzer telescope have detected changes in the infrared signature of planet HD 80606b, a superJupiter gas giant that orbits a star 190 light years from Earth. HD 80606b’s orbit is highly elliptical, and as it swings in close past its star it receives a huge heat pulse: the image below was generated by a computer model, showing a hurricane of supersonic winds heated to over 12000 degrees Centigrade racing towards the (blue) nightside of the gas giant. Which kind of puts our recent little weather event into perspective.

Passing It On

I made a small contribution to this compilation of answers to the question 'What's the best writing advice you ever received and who gave it to you?' Interestingly, a couple of the answers reveal far more about the writers than they might suppose...

Instant Architecture

Shop in a shipping container, Bemerton Street, North London.

Updike At Rest

The news is pretty much universal. Rightly so.

I realise that I've been reading his stuff for almost forty years.* I first found it in Stroud Library, when I started to explore books that weren’t shelved in the science fiction section, and came across Rabbit Redux:

Men emerge pale from the little printing shop at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. In winter, Pine Street at this hour is dark, darkness presses down early from the mountain that hangs above the stagnant city of Brewer; but now in summer the granite kerbs starred with mica and the row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and grey milk-bottles and the sooty ginkgo trees and the baking kerbside cars wince beneath the brilliance like a frozen explosion.

I went on from there to read most all of his novels and a good deal of his short fiction and his nonfiction (this wasn’t an easy task, given his famously prodigious output). Even in the least of his novels, his fabulously limpid prose is shot through with a fastidious particularity. It taught me a lot about writing, and observation, and the telling detail. He made us see the everyday world afresh, and he portrayed with unpitying sympathy and deft and lapidary precision the mores and milieu of white, middle America in the last half of the twentieth century. His four Rabbit novels (Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit At Rest) rightly belong in the canon; his Bech stories are a fine and funny portrait of his alter ego, a Jewish author suffering an immense block after early success; The Centaur is an excellent portrait of a nascent writer and childhood in rural America in the 1940s. He was sympathetic to science fiction: Toward The End Of Time is set in a near-future dystopia; Roger’s Version is contains a very fine visionary exploration of a mathematical search for God’s existence. And any writer interested in the short form should study his stories. Two collections I’d especially recommend are Pigeon Feathers and Museums & Women.

The New York Times’s obituary quotes his answer to a question put to him by The Paris Review, asking about his decision to shun the New York spotlight: “Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

I didn’t live in Kansas, but I was that boy.


* Added later. Rabbit Redux was published here in 1972, so I guess that dates my first encounter.

Even later, Ed Champion interviews Updike (main event starts three minutes in).

Boats Against The Current, Borne Ceaselessly Into The Past

It pretty much rained the whole weekend, here in London, so I stayed in and worked on the ongoing project, which I hope to be able to tell you about soon, and indulged in some shameless and enjoyable nostalgia, watching a double-bill DVD of two 1960s rarities. The first, The London Nobody Knows, is a documentary based on the eponymous book by Geoffrey Fletcher. Fletcher wrote the script, Norman Cohen directed, and James Mason is the effortlessly sympathetic guide, strolling around the parts of London tourists generally don't see, and which would soon mostly be swept aside by modernisation. It takes in a disused music hall once frequented by Walter Sickert, ancient railway yards, buskers, street markets, an eel and mash pie shop and the site of one of Jack the Ripper's murders in a backyard in unreconstructed Spitalfields, and juxtaposes swinging London scenes with some shockingly visceral squalor. A small gem, and essential viewing for anyone interested in London.

It's paired with Les Bicyclettes De Belsize, a short, silly, but charming musical set in Hampstead rather than neighbouring Belsize, in which a boy on a bicycle crashes into a billboard, falls in love with the model it depicts, and sets out to find her. The catchy title song was a hit for Englebert Humperdinck.

Bonus link - a short colour film from 1935, showing the Thames when it was still a working river.

The Possible Emergence Of Post-HyperCapitalist Economics

In computer games, which already have a global economy, albeit largely virtual at the moment.

Another List, Yadda Yadda

Robert Thompson asked me to contribute to his Fantasy Book Critic's 2008 Review/2009 Preview feature, and the piece, shorter than those of the other, alarmingly well-read, contributors because I simply didn't have to time to read as much as I would have liked, last year, has now been posted. I have no idea what I am thinking about, in the alarmingly dour photograph. Don't even go there.

BSFA Award Nominations

Best Novel
Flood by Stephen Baxter
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod
Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Best Short Fiction
"Exhalation" by Ted Chiang (Eclipse 2)
"Crystal Nights" by Greg Egan (Interzone 215)
"Little Lost Robot" by Paul McAuley (Interzone 217)
"Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment" by M. Rickert (F&SF, Oct/Nov 2008)

Best Non-Fiction
"Physics for Amnesia" by John Clute (talk given at the Gresham College Symposium "Science Fiction as a Literary Genre")
Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films by Roz Kaveney (I.B. Tauris)
What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid (Beccon)
Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn (Wesleyan)

Best Artwork
Cover of Subterfuge, ed. Ian Whates, by Andy Bigwood
Cover of Flood by Stephen Baxter, by Blacksheep
Cover of Swiftly by Adam Roberts, by Blacksheep
Cover of Murky Depths 4, by Vincent Chong
Cover of Interzone 218, by Warwick Fraser Coombe

Andy Cox has kindly put up pdfs of my story 'Little Lost Robot' and Greg Egan's story 'Crystal Nights' at the TTA Press site. Thanks to all who nominated me!

The View From Orbit, Yesterday

Picture taken by the Geoeye-1 satellite, via Popsci.com.

Untitled

Like most people who won the emigration lottery and didn’t sell their prize to one of the big corporations or to a redistribution agency, or give it away to a relative who either deserved it or wanted it more than they did, or have it stolen by a jealous neighbour, a spouse or a child or a random stranger (UN statistics showed that more than four per cent of emigration lottery winners were murdered or disappeared), or simply put it away for a day that never came and meanwhile got on with their lives in the ruins of Earth (and it was still possible to live a life more or less ordinary after the economic collapses, wars, radical climate events, and all the other mess and madness: even after the Jackaroo pitched up and gave us access to a wormhole network linking some fifteen M class red dwarf stars in exchange for rights to the outer planets of the Solar System, for the most part, for most people, life went on as it always did, the ordinary little human joys and tragedies, people falling in love or out of love, marrying, having children, burying their parents, worrying about being passed over for promotion or losing their job or the lump in their breast or the blood in the toilet bowl) -- like everyone, in other words, who won the emigration lottery and believed that it was their chance to get out from under whatever muddle or plight they were in and start over (more UN statistics: thirty-six per cent of married lottery winners divorced within two months), Jason Singleton and Everett Hughes wanted to change their lives for the better. They wanted more than the same old same old, although that’s what most people get. People think that by relocating themselves to another planet, the ultimate in exoticisism, they can radically change their lives, but they always forget that they bring their lives with them. Accountants ship out dreaming of adventure and find work as accountants; police become police, or bodyguards to high-end corporados or wealthy gangsters; farmers settle down on some patch of land on coastal plain west of Port of Plenty or on one of the thousands of rocks in the various reefs that orbit various stars in the network, and so on, and so forth. But Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton were both in their early twenties, and as far as they were concerned anything was possible. They wanted to get rich. They wanted to be famous. Why not? They’d already been touched by stupendous good fortune when they’d won tickets to new and better lives amongst the stars. After that, anything seemed possible.

Blue Monday

Allegedly, it's the gloomiest day of the year (the sky hailed on me today, so I'm not arguing). So here are some Doctor Who chases, Benny Hill style, to cheer us up.

Blast Of Silence

A month ago, I posted a quick review of an odd little early 19060s noir, Who Killed Teddy Bear?, shot largely on location in New York. I promised that I'd publish my review of Blast of Silence, another 1960s noir, also shot on location in New York. It appeared in Crime Time 54, and you can read the whole magazine here. My review starts at the bottom of page 41, after a nice piece on Fu Manchu films by Kim Newman.

Briefly

I'm busy with a particularly gnarly piece of work right now, so as a place marker here are some scientist action figures. From left to right: Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Nikola Tesla. I don't know if Madame Curie is glow-in-the-dark, whether Charles Darwin really did play Hamlet, or why Tesla looks like Edgar Allan Poe, but they're kind of cute all the same. Which other scientists deserve a figure? First on my list would be Galileo, whose made his first observations of Jupiter's moons four hundred years ago, and was the prime mover in displacing us from the centre of the universe.

Special bonus link: The Handsome Family perform Tesla's Hotel Room.

Out Today

It's a collection of new stories about Artificial Intelligence, edited by the inestimable Peter Crowther. (For what it's worth, I wrote the introduction.)

UPDATE: Can't find a TOC anywhere on t'web, and I tidied away the copies of the stories I was given, but authors include Stephen Baxter, Brian Stableford, Eric Brown, James Lovegrave, Adam Roberts, Tony Ballantyne, Steven Utley, Marly Youmans, Robert Reed, Paul Di Filippo, Patrick O'Leary, Garry Kilworth, Keith Brooke, Ian Watson, and Chris Roberson. A pretty cool bunch.

Your Moment Of Zen

At Christmas, two versions of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' occupied the first and second place in the UK singles chart. The number one slot was taken by X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke; in second place, thanks to an internet campaign, was the lovely and haunting version by Jeff Buckley (Cohen's version came in a number 36). But more lovely than even Jeff Buckley's version of 'Hallelujah' is this song by his father, Tim Buckley, first aired on, of all places, The Monkees TV show (that's Micky Dolenz's voice introducing him).

Now I really must get back to work...

The Little Robots That Could

The rovers Spirit and Opportunity* were successfully delivered to Mars five years ago today. Designed to last just three months, after surviving dust storms and hibernating through five winters of freezing temperatures and low sunlight the solar-powered robot explorers are still going strong (although thanks to a faulty wheel Spirit is now forced to forge on backwards). As NASA proudly reports:

The rovers have made important discoveries about wet and violent environments on ancient Mars. They also have returned a quarter-million images, driven more than 21 kilometers (13 miles), climbed a mountain, descended into craters, struggled with sand traps and aging hardware, survived dust storms, and relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. To date, the rovers remain operational for new campaigns the team has planned for them.

It's a fantastic achievement. And let's not forget that while the two little robots have been climbing mountains and descending into craters and crossing sand dunes, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft is still working away in orbit, on its third two-year extension of its original mission, ESA's Mars Express has just celebrated its fifth year, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has recently completed its primary, two-year science mission, taking high-resolution photographs of Mars's surface (including shots of Spirit and Opportunity, and a great photograph of the descent of this year's lander, Phoenix).

Yeah, it would wonderful to see the first astronaut (or taikonaut) stepping onto the surface of Mars. And I hope I'll be around to see it, despite arguments that NASA should focus on the Moon rather than Mars in the near future. Meanwhile, the two brave little rovers and their robot companions are doing some wonderful science, and have helped immeasurably in turning Mars from a remote blood-red dot in the sky to a real world crammed with real wonders.

UPDATE: Well, Spirit landed on January 4. Opportunity followed three weeks later on January 25.

Fireworks Over London

The last burst of this rather fantastic display was just visible from where I live.

Turn Turn Turn

A Happy New Year to all my readers.

The future's as uncertain as ever (luckily enough for me, or I'd be out of business); let's hope that it won't be anything like this (via Jack Womack), but more like this.

Getting Personal

I was reading through the proofs of my short story ‘The Thought War’, which is included in Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 3, when I received an email from Gardener Dozois, who wants to use two of my stories, ‘Incomers’ and ‘The City of the Dead’ in The Year’s Best Science Fiction 26. Gosh.

I was amused to note that the introduction to ‘The Thought War’ asserted that I was living in Scotland, a meme that’s proving rather difficult to eradicate. It’s true, I used to live in Scotland, but I moved to London when I quit my job, more than twelve years ago (the longest continuous period I’ve ever lived anywhere; I was born in Stroud and lived there for seventeen years, but spent one year in the middle of my childhood elsewhere). Again: gosh.

Author’s bios are odd little packages of information. Those of established writers generally list their bestselling novels and prizes they have won: proof of pedigree. Those of new authors often list previous jobs (the more exotic the better) to make them seem like a regular citizen of the world. Some attempt humour; a few even succeed. One of the best of the latter is Jonathan Lethem’s bio for his first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music:

Jonathan Lethem was born in the sixties, watched television in the seventies, and started writing in the eighties.

Neat, huh? Almost all bios note where the author currently lives. Often it’s the only piece of personal information - something that has no bearing on the novel in hand unless it’s actually set in the author’s home town. My current bio is unexceptional. It lists the the prizes I’ve won, and mentions that I’m a former scientist (although that in no way qualifies me to write science fiction), and that I live in London. Although only three of my novels have been set in London, and I wasn’t living in London when I wrote the first of those, Fairyland. No, at the time, I was living in Scotland.

UPDATE: 'City of the Dead' will be included in Infinivox's audiobook "year's best" anthology, The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction.

Spotted In Cambridge

Christmas Card

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Tom Waits.

Happy Holidays.

Forty Years On

Oliver Morton's excellent op-ed piece in the New York Times.

On This Day, Forty Years Ago

'And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, and a Merry Christmas to all of you, all of you on this good Earth.' John Borman, Commander Apollo 8.

Beyond Coffee

In the commentary section of the science journal, Nature, a group of academics go cyberpunk, and call for serious consideration of the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs to make students smarter:

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself.

After the Cold War, the IQ race ...

Updike On Mars

Via io9, John Updike's National Geographic article on Mars. With plenty of fine photos. (But why didn't they ask Kim Stanley Robinson?)

PS the photo of the sunset was, as mentioned here before, taken on my 50th birthday. It's the background picture on my computer.

Cold Is The New Hot

In other news, Cassini scientists believe that Titan may have active cryovolcanoes spewing a mix of water ammonia and methane. (I took a punt on depicting one of these in The Quiet War, so I'm biased towards hoping it's true.) So in addition to two moons with subsurface oceans (Europa and Enceladus), and two moons with icy geysers (Enceladus and Triton), there may be at least two moons with active volcanoes. What next?

Jigsaw Moon

More evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus harbours a subsurface ocean. Cassini imaging scientists have shown that the surface around the tiger stripe cracks at the little moon's south pole, the source of its icy jets, shows signs of changes over time:

The tiger stripes are analogous to the mid-ocean ridges on Earth's seafloor where volcanic material wells up and creates new crust. Using Cassini-based digital maps of the moon's south polar region, Helfenstein reconstructed a possible history of the tiger stripes by working backward in time and progressively snipping away older and older sections of the map, each time finding that the remaining sections fit together like puzzle pieces.

In other words, the surface there is pretty much like the surface of Europa, also suspected of possessing a subsurface ocean of liquid water. And where there's liquid water, of course, there could be life - and when the Cassini probe dived through the jets on one of its close flybys, it discovered a mix of organic molecules similar to those found in comets. So it looks like all the ingredients for life are there, in the little moon's warm soupy subsurface ocean. But as to whether there are any soup dragons . . .

EDIT - it's also possible that Europa's ocean may be much warmer than previously thought.

Who Killed Teddy Bear

A little belatedly, let me tell you about the strange little film, Who Killed Teddy Bear, I went to see on Wednesday in a screening theatre in Soho (publicity for the Region 2 DVD that slated for release in January). At the time of its release, in 1965, the British Board of Film Censors refused to certify it, which meant that it couldn’t be shown in British cinemas. One of the people who was working for the BBFC at the time was at the screening and told me before the film started that I would see exactly why it couldn't be cut for release - and he was right.

The story is pretty simple. Lawrence (Sal Mineo), a loner who looks after his brain-damaged sister and works as a bus-boy in a night club, has a crush on dolly-bird DJ Norah (Juliet Prowse). Norah is being spied on by a neighbour who pesters her with increasingly obscene phone calls, confides her troubles to her sympathetic boss (Elaine Strich), who urges her to report it to the police, and the case attracts the attention of Detective Dave Madden (Jan Murray), who is obsessed with the perversions and psychology of stalkers.

It's not so much images and scenes or dialog that would have appalled back then, although there is plenty of risky business - the flourish of a switchblade by a dissatisfied customer at the night club, the various scenes of Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse in their undies and closeups of Mineo working out in the gym in an attempt to get rid of his troubling lust (this was, by the way, a doomed attempt to persuade viewers that Mineo was a red-blooded American heterosexual), the lesbian pass made by Elaine Stritch, slow pans across literature on sexual perversions on Madden’s desk and scenes on 8th Avenue showing the wares in a dirty bookshop window and the posters of a grindhouse, and so on - but beyond all that the entire film is saturated with suppressed sexuality. There's the Tennesee Williams style relationship between Lawrence and his sister, who was brain-damaged after falling down the stairs when she glimpsed Lawrence having sex with an older woman; Madden’s obsession with sexual deviants (as one of his colleagues put it, after Madden calls sex perverts animals: 'We're all animals Dave. But there's a line, and you've crossed it.'), which spills over into his private life in disturbing ways: the banter between him and Norah is uncomfortable in all kinds of ways, and a nicely-judged cut between a shot of Madden listening to tapes of women describing their experiences of being stalked to a shot of his daughter hearing it through her bedroom door (was James Ellroy riffing on this on Blood On The Moon?). As for the story, it’s split between Lawrence, Norah, and Madden, but only one the narrative lines reaches any kind of climax. But in a way, story doesn't matter here. Subtext and theme are dominant; story just gets us from point to point. And the main reason why the film couldn't be rated is not just all the cheescake and deviancy - it's that it attempts to condemn the deviancy while subjecting it to loving, lingering closeups. Nevertheless, it’s a highly interesting film, not only as a document of its time, but also as a prime example of American primitive cinema in the great tradition of New York independent film-making. It was directed by Joseph Cates, who helped create the $64000 Question quiz show, went on to produce a slew of TV specials, including most of those starring Johnny Cash, and was father of Pheobe Cates, who featured in a famous WKTB-style voyeur scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Small coincidence: I recently reviewed another New York independent film, Blast of Silence, also themed around repression. I’ll post that here after it has been published.

Watching The Skies

Human migration patterns.

Year's End, Already

You can, if you want to, check out some of my best-of-the-year picks. Unlike most of the other people who responded, I didn't give any shout-outs to fiction, simply because I haven't read enough. I'm trying to remedy that now. Any suggestions?

Oliver Postgate, RIP

I was saddened to hear of the death of Oliver Postgate and touched by the (well-deserved) extent of the coverage. With artist and puppeteer Peter Firmin, he created several of the most memorable and best-loved children’s TV programme, including Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss and, best of all as far as I am concerned, The Clangers. These pink mice-like creatures, voiced by Swannee whistle, inhabited a small blue planet, burrowing into its crust through craters (covered with dustbin lids to protect them from meteorite strikes), subsisting on blue string pudding and soup produced at the moon’s core under the supervision of the Soup Dragon, and forming an inclusive community with variouswaifs and strays, including the Iron Chicken, mischievous froglets, animate musical notes, and a sentient cloud. Postgate was a gentle but principled subversive, and a marvellous storyteller:

... because we didn't have the money for elaborate equipment we had to rely on the basic hand-writing of animation, laboriously pushing along cardboard characters with a pin. Thus we were thrown back on the real staple of television: telling and showing a good story, carefully thought out and delivered in the right order for stacking in the viewer's mind. Come to think of it I must have produced some of the clumsiest animation ever to disgrace the television screen, but it didn't matter. The viewers didn't notice because they were enjoying the stories.

(More here)

The Clangers was a fine science-fictional ecological fable, conveying its message without ever becoming preachy. Many of its stories featured disruptions to the delicate ecology of the Clangers’ little world that were healed by cooperation and application of some common sense, and it used in its opening sequence the iconic picture of Earth’s lonely blue island of life, taken from the Apollo 8 command module as it orbited the Moon.

Readers from outside the United Kingdom who want to know more can find examples of his work here (including a clip from a Doctor Who episode in which the Master, the Doctor’s nemesis, appreciates the Clangers).

With Extra Ink

From our sponsors: may I point you towards Cold Tonnage, currently stocking signed hardbacks of The Quiet War.

More Nostalgia

This time, somewhat closer to the present, an online museum of sleeves for five and a quarter inch computer discs (hey, remember inches?).

Those Things That Come In Threes

After visiting the Cold War exhibition at the V&A, I've been fighting my way through Resistance: The Fall of Man, very much alt. Cold War SF. And I've just spotted this, posted on Bruce Sterling's blog: atompunk. (Ian McDonald and I were talking about Cold War SF as an alternative to steampunk at the Gollancz party a few months back; it must be in the air, like strontium-90 when I was but a baby).

Just in: cool Soviet Cold War snowmobiles via io9.

Not Yet Past

Visiting the Cold War Modern, Design 1945 - 1970 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, I was struck by not only how very much superior it was to the frankly thin and poorly thought-out Dan Dare exhibition at the Science Museum, but also by how much of the themes and tropes and obsessions of current SF were on display. Space travel obviously (opposing screens pitted 2001: A Space Odyssey against Solaris; and for those interested in the alternate history of the space race, there was on display a prototype of the Soviet Kretchet lunar excursion suit, which is plainly only a couple of evolutionary steps from the lobster suits of 1950s SF magazine covers), but also virtual reality, cyborgs, the rise of the machines, technology-driven utopianism, the fragility of this island Earth, and so on and so on. As far as mainstream SF, the past isn't yet past, as they say. Is this because the seeds of the one true future really were sown back then, between the end of World War Two and the beginning of glam rock, or because SF hasn't yet acknowledged that the stuff of its dreams is rooted in the anxieties of the great and dangerous rivalry between the world's two superpowers?

Earth Is An Alien Planet

Compilation of brief videos of an eerie and presently unclassified type of deep-sea squid.

Link via Pharyngula.

Beneluxcon

Last weekend I was one of the Guests of Honour at Beneluxcon 2008, a small, friendly SF convention. Beneluxcons are jointly run by the Belgian club, SFAN, and the Dutch NCSF(Nederlands Contactcentrum voor Sf); this year, it was the turn of the Dutch to host it, in Eindhoven. It was chaired with commendable calm and efficiency by Heidi van der Vloet; everyone seemed to know everyone else; the atmosphere was intensely relaxed. I shared GoH duties with Dutch writer Edith Eri Louw, and my schedule was fairly light: a couple of panels and a Guest of Honour speech (apologies once again to my audience for getting too excited by images of the moons of Saturn and speaking too quickly). I also discovered the delights of cinnamon-flavoured chocolate - a Dutch Christmas thing - and learned about Sinterklaas and his deeply disturbing helpers, in more ways than one, Zwarte Pieten, high cultural weirdness that hasn't yet been steamrollered by global capitalism.

Eindhoven is a metropolitan sprawl of former villages and a small town where throughways and parkways and ring roads tangle amongst a patchwork of obsessively neat Dutch suburbia and clumps and clusters of big office buildings and towers and high-tech plants - it’s the home of electronics manufacturer Philips. Some older buildings have survived modern redevelopment and bombing during the Second World War, such as this barn:


And just around the corner from the hotel was the Van Abbesmuseum, with an extension by Abel Cahen abutting the River Dommel:


I liked this old-fashioned garage too - signs like these would be collectors’ items in the UK:

There Are Doors (14)

Eindhoven, Holland.

More From Mars - Glaciers!

Glaciers have been spotted on Mars before, but these, perched on the edge of the Hellas Basin, buried under rocky rubble, which is why they haven't evaporated, are huge - the second-largest known source of water on Mars after the polar caps:

"Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and up to one-half-mile thick. And there are many more. In addition to their scientific value, they could be a source of water to support future exploration of Mars."

Alternate History

The Soviet space shuttle.

The Goldilocks Factor

More good news from space. Planets that sit in the 'not-too-hot not--too-cold' zones around other stars may be more common than we believed. Although Mars is the joker in the pack here - it sits inside the outer edge the Sun's habitable zone, but can't support life in its current state. Which makes it all the more urgent to find out if some kind of life emerged there in its early history, and what went wrong.

Next On Mars

NASA has announced four possible landing sites for the next Mars rover mission, the Mars Science Laboratory. It's all about clay.

Fried/Buzzed

Finishing a novel leaves you with something like jetlag. You think you're functioning normally, but your IQ and attention span are seriously out of whack. You go to make a cup of tea, put the cat in the kettle, throw the water out the door, and when you've sorted out that confusion, discover you've made a tasty beverage with a stock cube. Fish stock. Or as Edward Gorey has it in his wonderful The Unstrung Harp, or Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel:

The next day Mr Earbrass is conscious but very little more. He wanders through the house, leaving doors open and empty tea-cups on the floor. From time to time the thought occurs to him that he really ought to go out and dress, and he gets up several minutes later, only to sit down again in the first chair he comes to. The better part of a week will have elapsed before he has recovered enough to do anything more helpful.

After finishing and sending off Gardens of the Sun, I had a week much like that, and then, at the beginning of this month, in muscular commercial author fashion, started on my next project. Alas, I'm not much cop as a muscular commercial author. A few weeks later I find I've written some 20,000 words, which is the length of the piece I promised to deliver, but they're the wrong words in the wrong order, or the right words in the wrong order, or the right words in the right order in the wrong place. And after going nowhere very much the feeble rivulet of plot kind of runs out into the sands of ennui . . . But! This morning I realised what needed to be done, and went for a long walk to work out the finer points, came back and typed up a page of notes and reordered the salvagable bits and pieces and made notes for what's needed to link them together. Of course, now I'm about to fly off to a convention in Holland, but I reckon (if I'm not whistling in the dark) that I have sort of cracked it. All I need to so is write the damned thing, but that's the easy part. I hope.

Via John Joseph Adams at the Fantasy and Science Fiction site, this little test to find out which SF author you are. I'm Octavia Butler, which makes a weird kind of sense.

Edna Sharrow

I recently blogged a six-part illustrated short story, Edna Sharrow, here. I've now archived the story on the web site, under a Creative Commons license. You can find it by clicking the Fiction Archive link and scrolling down to the list of short stories. Or go straight to the first part. Enjoy!

Getting It Right

Hilary Mantell on the problems of word-processing fiction:

I remember how my first published book came together, back in the prehistoric typewriter age; I wrote it in longhand, typed it, then typed it again. This now seems both hideously laborious and pathetically inadequate. Now I pick away endlessly, balancing and rebalancing a paragraph, tuning and retuning it, trying to find some hidden note within it - and worry, a little, whether I'm privileging style over content, and all this tinkering is a substitute for fresh thought.

I haven't written anything of any length in longhand since school - for one thing my handwriting is appalling - but I did type my first novel out, three times (and because I'm not a touch typist I had retype a fair number of pages, because they had too many errors). So I migrated to word processing as soon as I could (1988, I believe: WordPerfect 4.2 on a two-disk system, one with the operating system, the other where you saved the text, because this was before hard drives were readily available on PCs; as it was the beast cost a cool £1000, and the printer another £1000, and this when the first and last new car I bought cost only twice as much).

But I do recognise the urge to endlessly fiddle with sentences and paragraphs and scenes, and often wonder if the thought processes used during composition of something using word-processing are more skittish and much shallower than when I used a typewriter. The work habit was certainly different back in those hunt-and-peck days. I would write three pages and if the last line of the third page of ended in the middle of a sentence I'd write the end of the sentence on a scrap of paper and type it up when beginning the next day. Now, of course, I aim to breast the tape of at least five pages a day, or 2000 words, when producing a first draft, not including all the fiddling and revision that happens before I get up steam. A more organic process than the mechanically linear three-pages-a-day routine, maybe, but as Mantell points out, perhaps a more neurotic one, too.

More from Mantell here...

Good News From Outer Space

These two photographs were taken by a small impactor just before it hit the lunar surface, apparently near Shackleton Crater at the south pole, after it was released by the Indian probe Chansrayaan 1 (via the Indian Space Research Organisation). That's a big first for India's space industry.

In other news, the Mars Rover Spirit has survived a bad dust storm and is up and running again. (Remember Spirit and Opportunity? They've been roaming the surface of Mars for four years now, long beyond the official date for the end of operation.)

More Gosh Wow

We knew exoplanets were out there, because of the slight variations in the brightness and orbital velocity of the stars they orbit. And in 2005 astronomers imaged a planet orbiting a brown dwarf star - a very young and hot Jupiter class planet) although it probably didn't form in the same way as the planets in the Solar System. And now, two seperate studies have imaged four exoplanets around two more stars. This is truly amazing stuff - real science fiction headline stuff. The first images were obtained by a team using the Gemini North telescope and W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. They blocked out the light of the target star, a massive young star named HR 8799, and were able to image in infra red three planets (the picture shows two of them; all are super-Jupiters) - the first pictures of another planetary system.


And a second team, using the Hubble telescope, have tracked another planet in the dust ring surrounding Fomalhaut (above), a massive star just twenty-five light years from Earth. The planet is about the size of Jupiter, and orbits a long way out, with a period of more than eight hundred years.

Now, none of these planets can support life (or at least life as we know it). HR 8799 is a young star and its planets are young too, just sixty million years old, still glowing with the heat of their formation (which makes them easier to spot). The planet around Fomalhaut is a little older, but still much younger than the Earth and the other planets around the Sun, and because Fomalhaut is a massive star it will burn through its hydrogen in just a billion years. But still.

So far we've tallied about 300 exoplanets. Now we've seen five of them directly. It isn't a stretch to imagine that we'll soon have an image of a planet orbiting in a star in the zone where liquid water - and life - can exist. And then, like Macy Minnot, in The Quiet War, who spends some time with a crew who are observing an Earth-like planet, we may for the first time see a pale blue dot like our own, with clouds and oceans and continents. Such times we live in. Such times.

UPDATE: This is a pretty good article on the search for Earth-like exoplanets.

Dude, Where's My Flying Car?

Here, sometime soon. Maybe.

This Just In

I'm pleased to announce that Pyr has bought The Quiet War for publication in the US. Hero editor Lou Anders tells me that it will probably hit the shops in September or October 2009.

I'm also pleased to announce that I'll be one of the guests of honour at NewCon 5 in Northampton, 26-27 2009, appearing with Pat Cadigan and Paul Cornell.

Gosh.

History Not Quite Repeating Itself

In the comments section of the previous post, Petey writes: ‘I've been meaning to ask you what the full list of Quiet War universe stories is.’

Glad you asked! There are ten of them, and here are their titles and where and when they first appeared.

‘Second Skin’ (Asimov's Science Fiction, 1997)
‘Sea Change, With Monsters’ (Asimov's Science Fiction, 1998)
‘The Gardens of Saturn' (Interzone, 1998)
‘Reef’ (Sky Life ed Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski Harcourt Brace, 2000)
‘Making History’ (PS Publishing, 2000)
‘The Passenger’ (Asimov's Science Fiction, 2002)
‘The Assassination of Faustino Malarte’ (Asimov's Science Fiction,2002)
Dead Men Walking’(Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2006)
‘Incomers’ (The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Viking, 2008)

So I’ve been working on this for about a dozen years now. Good grief. How times flies when you’re having fun.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it’s worth pointing out again: the history and universe of the Quiet War in the stories is not exactly congruent with the history and universe in The Quiet War. By the time I got around to thinking very hard about the novels, I realised that it would be very difficult toreconcile events and situations and backgrounds in a bunch of disparate stories written in fits and starts over a decade. Also, Cassini had started beaming back hundreds of detailed pictures and reams of information about Saturn and its moons that, while it didn’t exactly invalidate the stories, inspired a new take on them. (One reason I took so long to get around to writing the novels was because I wanted to find out what Cassini discovered, and I’m glad I did.) So I rewrote history in The Quiet War, and Gardens of the Sun, and although parts of the latter are based on heavily modified characters and situations that first appeared in a few of the stories, the events in the stories and the events in the novels are from closely related but different alternate histories.

[Addendum: two idiotic howlers. Thanks to a spot by Peter Holo, I corrected the title of 'The Assassination of Faustino Malarte' (not Augustin Malarte, as my mind keeps insisting), and when I cut and pasted the list I wrongly included 'The Secret of My Success', which isn't part of the Quiet War canon. Clearly, I need a longer holiday.]

Gosh Wow

An awesomely (and I rarely use this word) beautiful short film about the Cassini space mission.

Remembrance

Members of my family on my mother's side fought in Palestine in the First World War. They were from Suffolk, and after their regiment was incorporated into the 74th (Yeomanry) Division they fought with Lawrence of Arabia, and eventually liberated Jerusalem. One of them - I think it was my grandfather, but like many he never spoke of his war-time experiences - took photographs that my grandmother kept all her life.

A knocked-out tank, probably a casualty of the Third Battle of Gaza.

A truck carrying all kinds of junk. Is that part of an artillery piece?

Men waiting to cross a waterway - note the pith helmets.

Possibly The Germans

From a review of Radio On I've just written for Crime Time:


When I first saw it, in Bristol’s Arnolfini on its release in 1980, its atmosphere seemed to be exactly congruent with the times; emerging afterwards, it was suprising to discover that the world yet retained some colour.

Is there a word for the psychological colouration that we retain and apply to the happening world after seeing a film?

Bringing It All Back Home

'The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.' Frank Rich (via Daily Kos)

Deflector Shield

Here's a handy gadget that all spaceships will need: 'a system no bigger than a large desk that uses the same energy as an electric kettle' to deflect those pesky high-energy ions from solar flares that make manned spaceflights so hazardous. Invented by British scientists, who no doubt are now devising away to use the energy of cosmic rays to make tea.

A False Dichotomy

Following up from my post about the congruity between the Romantics and Science Fiction, I came across a review of Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science in today's Observer:

What's crucial is that in those days, society saw no gulf between the artist and the scientist. This point is important one. It makes it clear that CP Snow's assertion - that society is split into two basic irreconcilable cultures, science and the arts - lacks any pedigree and is, indeed, most likely a false dichotomy. As Holmes makes clear, 200 years ago, poets, writers and scientist shared a common vision of Nature. There is no reason why they should not do so again.

Well, yes.

Hmmm

Here’s something I came across today:

‘Emotionally it expressed an extreme assertion of the self and the value of individual experience (the "egotistical sublime"), together with the sense of the infinite and the transcendental. Socially, it championed progressive causes, though when these were concentrated it often produced a bitter, gloomy, and despairing outlook.’

Not an attempt at defining science fiction, but a quote from the entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature on the Romantic Movement. But the congruity seems pretty close to me.

Apocalypse Fashion

The way things are going, here in knife-ridden London, I expect to see these on the streets by spring.

Why I Have Been Quiet Lately

I've just sent the mss of GARDENS OF THE SUN to my agent and editor.

Because they deserve to suffer too.

Quantum Of Solace

Down into town yesterday to see the press showing (the first in the world - hey) of the new Bond, courtesy of Mr Kim Newman. Security as usual for these kind of things just below the level needed to get into the MI6 building: gone are the days when you wandered into some basement screening room in Soho, sans credentials, and munched on free crisps and drank free white wine the distributor had laid on in the hope that some kind of print publicity might be generated from the crowd of slightly shabby black-clad cineastes. It's an industrial process now, and the precautions are in place to keep out the pirates. Or so we're told.

The film kicks off in the middle of a car chase and doesn't much slow down or pause for breath for the next hour and three-quarters. Bond is still mourning Vespa, the girl he loved and who betrayed him in Casino Royale, but he's hardened and no longer the callow ingenue. Just as well, as he has a lot of ground to cover, and much action to survive: as far as I could tell, he sat down about twice and never slept (even on a trans-Atlantic red-eye he spent the entire flight standing at the bar in First Class, sipping martini cocktails). The action ranges across Europe, to Haiti and Bolivia, replete with car chases, boat chases, plane chases, and a lot of free running across rooftops, the stunts all good, and never marred by obvious CGI. As well as the traditional transcontinental locations and supersmart Wallpaper* hotels, there's the usual high tech trickery, this time involving turning mobile phones into tracking devices, and a briefing using a smart desktop, and Bond gets to sleep with a girl with the requisite kooky name (that's revealed only at the very end, one of the many nice touches in this smart production) and hook up with a tough and smart girl (Olga Kurylenko) whose personal mission parallels his; in one of the few quiet, human moments in the movie, he instructs her on how to make sure she doesn't mess up the kill she has to make. The plot is, of course, preposterous, but the story keeps everything moving so quickly it doesn't much matter. Speed, not thought, is the essence of these things.

French star Mathieu Amalric very good as the popeyed, snaggletoothed yet corrosively charming villain, part of a secret international organisation corrupting third-world countries for profit. Judi Dench is as usual very fine as M, and Daniel Craig, thoroughly inhabiting the part, has refined his blue-eyed Mr Death stare so it can now burn through a couple of inches of steel. His Bond is tougher than ever, and with little time to waste on quips or hanging about in night clubs or casinos, and has to be restrained from killing just about anyone who gets in his way. In short, this is a smart, tough Bond working in an Age of Terror where no motives are pure. Only a few people get out alive; no one gets out unscarred.

The Quiet War, Chapter 9

Sri Hong-Owen and her eldest son, Alder, travelled to Callisto in a small freighter, the Luís Inácio da Silva, that had been fitted with a prototype of the new fusion motor. It cut the record for transit between Earth and Jupiter by two-thirds, a fine demonstration of the Peixoto family’s technological prowess, and an important contribution to their elaborate and extensive sales pitch to the Callistans. Sri had a packed schedule: touring farms and factories and laboratories, meeting with the Callistan Senate and leading citizens of Rainbow Bridge, taking part in a ceremony to mark the first stage of the quickening of the biome’s lake, and so on and so forth. And she wanted to meet the gene wizard Avernus, too. First of all, though, she needed to straighten out the tangled business of the failed attempt at sabotage, the murder of Ursula Freye, and the defection of Macy Minnot, so she made room in her schedule for a meeting with the junior diplomat who seemed to be in the middle of it all.
READ MORE...

OMG Hoxton Hipsters Discover Steampunk

And of course they have a shop. And of course it's owned by the son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood (the cultural signifiers are so self-engulfing they look like a Klein bottle trying to swallow a Mobeius strip).

Publication Day

Although it's been on the shelves of Forbidden Planet and available from Amazon for a couple of days now, this is the official publication day of The Quiet War. I'll put up one last free chapter tomorrow, and if you scoot over to my author's page on the Orion site, you'll find a .pdf of an old school Quiet War story, 'Reef', free to download, as well as links to Amazon so you can, if you wish, buy the book. And if you want a first edition hardback, you'll have to be quick: as with so many books these days, the hardback printing run was fairly small (or 'exclusive' as they say in ad land).

Barrington Bayley

Just learnt that British SF's dark star died two days ago. A very fine writer whose work was playfully serious and packed with ideas and an anarchic surrealism that was both mordant and biting witty. He was often called an 'SF writer's SF writer' - much admired, but never achieving the kind of fame enjoyed by people with a quarter of his talent. He was also a consummate professional. Kim Newman and I published one of his short stories, 'Don't Leave Me', in our anthology In Dreams. A wonderful satire on the excesses of academic scholarship, it required extensive quotes from the eponymous track that was the subject of dissection by far-future scholars. Kim and I thought it word-perfect wonderful, but with some trepidation raised with Barry one possible difficulty - he would need to obtain copyright clearance. Barry assured us that it was no problem, and within a couple of weeks had sorted it out, paying for clearance to quote selected lyrics out of his own pocket. As we wrote in our introduction:

'We're particularly pleased to present one of his stories here, because, with novels such as The Zen Gun and The Rod of Light, he is a link between the fine old days of New Worlds' trippy gedanken experiments in literary speculative fiction and the ideological gurus of the current radical SF fringe.'

Ave.

The Nature Of The Catastrophe

Down to the Tate Modern to see the new work for the Turbine Hall - Dominique Gonazalez-Foerster’s TH.2058. The conceit is that it’s fifty years in the future; a strange and continuous rain has caused sculptures in public spaces to swell and grow, so they’ve been brought indoors; and human refugees seeking shelter from the rain sleep amongst them on ranks of bunk beds, entertained by a mashup of old sci-fi films, and SF novels and other admonitory texts about the future.





The Turbine Hall is a challenging space. The cleverly enlarged sculptures, in particular replicas of a Louise Bourgeois spider and a bright red Alexander Calder piece, lend structure to fill its stark volume, looming over the bunk beds, which are both domestic in scale and, in their repetition, industrial/commercial, like a supermarket storage area emptied by looters. As a narrative framework in which the audience can wander, and invent their own stories, it works well enough - the schoolchildren visiting it were definitely energised by it - but the concept itself seemed somewhat thin and sketchy. Why does the rain make the sculptures grow? Why do they increase in scale and kept their exact form - why don’t they swell or mutate? Where is the human detritus we associate with vast disasters, or the intricate detailing of fully worked futures, as in Children of Men?


Outside, walking west along the river, I saw a maintenance platform beside Blackfriars Bridge -like an amphibious refuge in some global flood, full of human clutter and detail, and life. It’s the last that was missing from the antiseptic tableau in the Turbine Hall. Still, even if it didn't fully engage me, I enjoyed witnessing the intrusion of a possible future into this public space, if only because I have a professional interest how it will stimulate discussion of SF tropes.

Also seen: copies of The Quiet War in the wild - in Forbidden Planet. Reader, I signed them.

The Quiet War, Chapter 8

Macy rode a tram into Rainbow Bridge, got on another tram and rode across the city, and took the escalator down into the free zone, floating on a mixture of anger and anxiety. As she moved through shadows and neon glow towards the bar, Jack Frost, passing people dressed for every kind of carnival, a tall figure wrapped in a red cloak and wearing a fox mask stepped out of a passageway and caught her arm and said, ‘She isn’t there.’
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The Creaking Hinges Of The World

Coming to the end of the ongoing, I'm able to slack off this weekend, for the first time in over a month. More work yet to be done, but the end is in sight. Here in London we've enjoyed beautiful autumn weather, warm temperatures and clear blue skies, and leaves tumbling down on mild breezes. Out and about on Friday evening, in my home patch, where many City workers live, restaurants and pubs were packed with suits charged with the desperate exuberance of soldiers back from the front. On Saturday, a ramble around Hampstead Heath, the breeze so slight only one person was attempting to put up a kite on Parliament Hill, and then down the hill to Camden, and Marine Ices (best ice cream in London). And today the local park was crowded with people, some shirtless, enjoying the sunshine, as people did in in the glorious August of 1914, before everything changed.

Autumn is my favourite season. You can feel the hinges of the world begin to turn, as the year winds up. Everything is changing; everything seems charged with potential. Especially now, when, thanks to the suits and the quants, the great engine of hypercapitalism has blown its valves and pistons, and everything is up in the air, and every kind of future is at hazard. Crisis frees the mind from habit. What better time to be a science fiction writer?

The Quiet War, Chapter 7

Macy immersed herself in her work, staying in her lab as much as possible so that she wouldn’t run into either Ursula Freye or Speller Twain, and tried to forget about what had happened. Tried to forget that Speller Twain could come back at any time and do whatever he wanted to her. Ursula Freye was protected by her consanguinity, but the security chief had demonstrated that Macy was just a grunt whose life and career were at the mercy of the whims of her superiors.
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Home Alone

From the New Scientist:

A bug discovered deep in a goldmine and nicknamed "the bold traveller" has got astrobiologists buzzing with excitement. Its unique ability to live in complete isolation of any other living species suggests it could be the key to life on other planets.

Not only does this radically increase the odds for finding other life on the planets and moons of the Solar System, and elsewhere, but the solitary ecosystem of this little critter, which goes by the name of Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, is powered by radioactivity. Oh, and it's named after a Jules Verne novel.

They're no sand worms, and writing rip-roaring space operas about little colonies of bacteria that uses the radioactive decay of uranium to extract carbon and nitrogen from rocks isn't going to be easy, but the idea that life is tough and finds a niche definitely chimes with SF's defiant romance with the universe.

The Quiet War, Chapter 6

It was all nonsense, Macy thought as she rode the tram through the night-time city back to the biome. She was angry and anxious and scared, and now that the ordeal was over, anger was winning out. It was all nonsense. All of it. There was no conspiracy. Manny Vargo had died because of some awful but unambiguous medical accident. There were a thousand reasons why his slate could have gone missing, from bureaucratic error to simple theft. And Ursula Freye had taken those two completely unrelated facts, her lover’s death and the missing slate, and had forced a connection, and had kept adding other connections, selecting what suited her and rejecting anything contradictory until she’d caged herself in a paranoid fantasy.

And she wants to put me in that cage, Macy thought. She and her fox-faced friend. Speller Twain and that devious little creep Loc Ifrahim. They all want to use me in this joint fantasy of theirs.
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Dig It

It's a wet and miserable day outside, but this - a bunch of white English people performing the theme song of Shaft on ukuleles - cheered me up immensely.

More Dead Wood Promo

Fast Forward 2, an unthemed anthology of original shories, including one of mine, is out now. And there's free stuff on the interweb to promote it: editor Lou Anders' introduction, and 'Catherine Drew', Paul Cornell's dashing tale of derring-do in a Solar System dominated by the British Empire.

In other news, there's an early review of The Quiet War in the Guardian, Eternal Light is due to be republished in April 2009, as part of Gollancz's classic space opera series, and some of my other novels are slated for publication in uniform paperback editions later in the year. Hey.