The English Moon

Exactly four hundred years ago, on July 26 1609, the English astronomer Thomas Harriot turned his primitive telescope, a Dutch 'trunke', on the full Moon above Syon House in what is now West London, and made the above sketch. It doesn't look like much, but it's not only the first known sketch of the surface features of the Moon; it's also the first known sketch of astronomical features seen through a telescope - Galileo would begin drawing features on the Moon four months later. Over the next year, Harriot made detailed maps of what he could see of the Moon's geography and helped to usher in a revolution in human thought: heavenly bodies like the Moon were no longer remote lights, but places with local habitations, and names.


He lived a life eminently worthy of novelisation - he was a mathematician who worked for Sir Walter Raleigh, giving tutorials in navigation to Raleigh and his captains, helping to design their ships, and sailing to America on an expedition, where he spent time with the Algonquin Indians. When he returned to England, he worked for Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, popularly known as the Wizard Earl, because of his interest in science and alchemy - he knew the infamous astrologer John Dee, as well as Christopher Marlowe and John Donne. Possibly, Harriot was a member of the 'School of Night' mentioned in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost. In any event, he helped to tutor the Earl's children in the pleasantly stimulating company of other mathematicians and scientists at Syon House, run by the Earl's cousin, Sir Thomas Percy. Sir Thomas was involved in the Gunpowder Plot; after he and the leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, beseiged at Holbeache House in Warwickshire, were killed by a marksman with a single bullet, Harriot was briefly imprisoned, and the Earl of Northumberland was locked up in the Tower of London for seventeen years. Harriot returned to his studies, making the first observations of sunspots and founding the 'English' school of algebra, but remained obscure because he published little in his lifetime. Unlike the poor and vigorously ambitious Galileo, he enjoyed the leisurely life of an English gentleman, sharing his findings only with his close colleagues and his sponsors. He died in 1621 of skin cancer - some have speculated that it was caused by the tobacco popularised by Raleigh. A crater is named in his honour, on the far side of the Moon, first mapped in the 1960s by machines beyond the wildest dreams of the School of Night.

You can see Thomas Harriot's drawings, and much else, at a new exhibition at the Science Museum, London.

We See Them Differently

New Scientist on celebrity neurons:

Apparently not content with a talk show, a monthly glossy and, well, mega-stardom, Oprah Winfrey has also penetrated the human brain. When people see her picture or hear her name, specialised "Oprah neurons" fire away, new research suggests.

Other public figures shouldn't be jealous. Our heads are also flush with cells attuned to Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, and even Saddam Hussein.

Uh-oh. As soon as the PR industry gets wind of this someone will fund a programme to work out how to insert customised celebrity neurons into our brains. Or in the case of Saddam and other WoT notorieties, delete them.

In Living 3D

Now this is cute:

A new scanning technique allows expectant mothers to hold a life-size model of their unborn, developing child.
Data from ultrasound, CT and MRI scans are converted into 3D models, which can then be 'printed' as a plastic representation of the developing baby.

(From New Scientist.)

Although it could be taken too far: imagine growing up with representations of your foetal self in jars lovingly preserved amongst family photos. Wonder if it could be scaled up to model organs too? A 3D model of your brain would make a great desk ornament. Or why not model your heart, for the ultimate Valentine Day's gift?

Son Of Advertisments For Myself

Above is the finished cover of the US edition of The Quiet War, published by Pyr on September 22 ; just had word that hero editor Lou Anders has bought Gardens of the Sun too. Over here in the UK, the trade paperback of The Quiet War is about sold out, but there are still a few copies of the hardback to be had. But be not afraid: the mass-market paperback with be published September 10. I've just returned the corrected proofs of Gardens of the Sun to Gollancz; that's scheduled for October. I've seen a rough of the very lovely cover; hope to get hold of a copy of the finished version soon.

Personal Best

Here's a very simple but cool idea. SF Signal asked a bunch of people (including me) a cunningly constructed question: What are some of your favorite short stories in sf/f/h and what makes them so memorable? They've just posted a slew of excellent recommendations and thoughtful analyses, with links to free online versions of many of the selections. A great wiki-style anthology, bursting with all kinds of good stuff.

The Plot Thickens . . .

Last seen on the Kessel run, swinging past Io with its crew mostly incapacitated and its electrical systems frying in the radiation belts, but still hoping to unload its string on the Jovian metallic hydrogen smelting plants . . .

Here We Go Again

The remants of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, torn apart by Jupiter's gravity, slammed into Jupiter's atmosphere between July 16 and 22 1994. Fifteen years later:

An amateur Australian astronomer looking through his backyard telescope has discovered that a large comet or asteroid has crashed into Jupiter, creating a hole the size of the Earth in the planet's atmosphere.

Accident? Coincidence? Some sinister anti-Jovian plot?

The Next Forty Years

As far as I'm concerned, the answer to the question of the future of space flight is simple. Mars. Mars Mars Mars Mars Mars. We should reboot and redraw the plans abandoned when the Apollo programme was terminated, and we should send a manned mission to Mars. Not because it's easy; because it's hard. Not because the Russians (or Chinese) might get there first. Cold War imperatives like that died when the Berlin Wall came down. No, we should send an international mission, for all humankind.

NASA, despite its ongoing budget problems and the planned withdrawal from service of the shuttle in 2010, is still the leading space agency. That the Russians have retained a robust system for achieving Low Earth Orbit is a tribute to its designers - the Soyuz family of spacecraft has its roots in the time of Apollo. And although there are plans to send a robot spacecraft to Phobos, Russia hasn't launched any interplanetary missions since the failed Mars 96 mission. There are Japanese, Chinese and Indian space agencies, not to mention the Europeans, too. Maybe one or more of these will pull off something astounding. And both the Japanese and Indian space agencies have made noises about manned missions to the Moon, but so far these are still in the golden vapourware stage. Only NASA has proven technology for sending human beings beyond Earth orbit, and landing them on the Moon. And NASA is at present the only serious player when it comes to mounting a manned interplanetary mission.

Right now, NASA is going through what can most kindly be characterised as a period of consolidation. In Charles Bolden, a retired general and former astronaut, it has a new leader who is widely considered to be a champion of human spaceflight. But President Obama has ordered a wide-ranging review of NASA's activities, and there are already deep cuts in the ubmanned space exploration programme. This, and severe cost-overrun problems with the Mars Science Laboratory, the next generation Mars Rover equipped with tools to search for signs of past and present life, and scheduled to be launched in 2011 has already led to the cancellation of the 2020 Europa Jupiter mission. The MSL and other unmanned robot explorers are heavier and far more complicated than their predecessors because they need to mimic the capabilities of human explorers. So as far as Mars is concerned, why not collapse the two programmes into one, and send humans to Mars by 2030?

Right now, NASA has no firm plans to do that, only good intentions. Instead, it's focusing on a return to the Moon, using the Orion/Ares I/Ares V transportation system - the Constellation programme. This is a beefy launch system that can boost a large payload into low Earth orbit, or send a four-person crew to the Moon, in the Orion crew exploration vehicle. In other words, it's a programme that will give NASA the capabilities it had forty years ago. Sure, Orion is larger and more robust than Apollo, but apart from an extended mission profile and a larger crew it won't do anything that Apollo couldn't do. I don't think that means it should be cancelled in favour of a vigorous push for a manned Mars mission. Too much has been invested in the Constellation programme; we need a large booster to shift materials into Earth orbit; it's important to go back to the Moon if only to prove to ourselves that we can. But I don't think that the second stage of the programme, establishing a permanent presence on the Moon, is in any way necessary. If you want to learn how to live on Mars, go to Mars. Instead, Orion could be used as a stepping stone for deep space missions to Near Earth Objects - asteroids that at some point in their orbit intersect Earth's. This would pave the way for a manned mission to establish a forward base on Phobos (check out Geoffrey A. Landis's Footsteps to Mars for more details), a stopping-off point and a supply base for a mission to the surface of the red planet.

Impossibly ambitious? Foolishly optimistic? Maybe. A waste of money better spent on problems right here on Earth? These guys don't think so. And hey, there are always going to be problems here on Earth, and most of the money will stay right here, employing an army of specialists and engineers, stimulating new technologies. There's been a large amount of looking back, these past weeks, and regret for what might have been, if the Apollo programme hadn't been abandoned. Let's not make the same mistake again.

Forty Years Ago Today...

. . . or early tomorrow morning, if like me you were in the UK when the Eagle landed. You can follow the final stages of mission in real time, or replay the whole thing, at wechoosethemoon.org.

More Shocking Truth

'. . . satellite beams back "All shook up."'

The Shocking Truth Behind The Previous Post

Apollo Redux

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed Apollo landing sites. These aren't even at the full resolution that the LRO's imaging system is capable of, but clearly show LEM descent modules, scientific instruments, and even, in one case, a trail left by the astronauts. First time these sites have been seen in forty years, and a fine reminder that the moonlandings we're celebrating actually happened and left artifacts that may, in the Lunar vacuum, last hundreds of thousands of years.

Apollo 11 - The Big Picture

A terrific set of high resolution photographs of the Apollo 11 mission. No, I don't think I'll ever get tired of this.

iHobo

Okay, so this iPhone app for applying hobo signs in augmented reality is golden vapourware right now, but it's such a great idea someone is bound to build it. Meanwhile, there must be a zillion fictional uses for variations on this theme.

Road To The Stars

A historical document fallen through a wormhole from an alternate universe: 1957 Soviet film from director Pavel Klushantsev, which starts out as a biopic of space pioneer Tsiolkvskiy, and in its final section ( around 24 minutes in) depicts in amazingly realistic detail the launch of the first man into space, construction of the first space station in orbit around Earth, the first manned landing on the Moon, and glimpses of expeditions to Mars, Venus, and Saturn. May have been an influence on Kubrick - some shots in Road to the Stars are pretty much duplicated in 2001.

(Link via Kosmograd)

Russian moon-lander drops towards Clavius Crater.

Let's Get Away From This Model Of Space Flight

Because it's like building an ocean liner to cross the Atlantic and setting fire to it when you reach New York.

Found While Mindlessly Trawling The Internet

Tang Fei, 17, describes the electric shock therapy he was tricked into having to cure internet 'addiction' .

Twenty-first century version of this.

Tranquility Base

An interactive page on the NASA website, with panoramic views around the Apollo 11 landing site. No, I haven't been saturated by the coverage yet.

Wiggling Around Darwin

This item about a panel at Readercon, 'Is Darwinism Too Good For SF?' has been itching away in my mind ever since I read about it on the excellent Biology in Science Fiction blog:

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to generate an exhaustive list of the container-load of SF inspired by and exploring various consequences of the theory of natural selection, while Peggy, who maintains the Biology in SF blog, neatly skewered the confusion between theory and application. As a former biologist and practising SF writer, I'm more interested in the notion of 'wiggle room' within Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. Is there any, and can it be exploited?

Darwin proposed a simple, elegant and powerful explanation ('How extremely stupid for me not to have thought of that!' Thomas Huxley said ruefully, after reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species) for the way that new species evolve. Inheritable variations in a population, tested at each succeeding generation by the ability of individuals to survive long enough to reproduce, would over long periods of time cause the emergence* of new species better fitted than their ancestors to survive and exploit their environment.

Darwin presented a mass of patiently accumulated and sifted evidence to buttress his arguments, but they were by no means complete. One of the most powerful deductions of his theory is that all life on Earth arose from a single simple ancestral form. At the time he published On the Origin of Species, the oldest known fossils, from the Silurian, included complex animals like tribolites. Where, his critics demanded, were the simpler forms his theory suggested? Well, later discoveries of simpler flora and fauna in older rocks, solved his famous dilemma. Likewise, modern genetics provided a mechanism of inheritance of characteristics, as well as ways in which variability could arise - either by mutations in genes, or from the transfer of genes between populations and between species. The fusion of Darwin's ideas with genetics created the modern evolutionary synthesis. To date, it has proven extremely robust, but that doesn't mean that the intricacies of the mechanism of natural selection and evolution are fully understood, or that alternative theories have been totally swept aside.

Biologists consider evolution by natural selection to be a fact. But there are still plenty of things for evolutionary biologists to argue about. Is evolution steady-state, or can it accelerate in certain circumstances? Is gene transfer more important than mutation? What is the role of symbiosis and symbiogenesis? Is every phenotypical feature of an organism due to selection? Is evolution predictable? Plenty of wiggle-room there, I suggest, for the SF writer (and plenty of SF writers have exploited it).

Then there are the alternatives to Darwinism. Some aren't scientific - Creationism being the most obvious, along with its slightly subtler cousin, Intelligent Design. I can't think, offhand, of any SF stories or novels built on the concept that God created the world and everything in it six thousand years ago, but there are quite a few SF works that play around with notions of Intelligent Design. 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, or David Brin's Uplift series. Sure, the godlike creators are aliens rather than some invisible and undefined creator, but they do direct and guide evolution, and bootstrap complexity by injecting intelligence and self-awareness into other species. And isn't genetic engineering and creation of artificial life a form of Intelligent Design? (Imagine biologists of a species evolved from, say, bears, trying to make sense of post genetic-engineering flora and fauna in ten million years time.)

There are other alternatives too - vitalism, panspermia, the theory of formative causation, to name but three. I don't think that any of them hold a candle to neoDarwinism, but that doesn't mean that they can't be used as jumping-off points for some kind of speculative fiction. After all, there are plenty of stories about non-Newtonian universes . . .


*A clumsy circumlocation to avoid that contentious term, 'create'. In 1863, long mired in controversy, Darwin ruefully wrote to the botanist Joseph Hooker: 'But I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process.' A sentence which generated this famous footnote: 'On the same subject my father wrote in 1871: "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo stillmore complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.'

Eriksson's 2020

Interactive design tech speculative fiction. Will novels look this like this, in 2020?

(Via Bruce Sterling.)

One Small Step...

. . . towards a manned European spacecraft. Maybe. Much as I'm pleased to think the world's largest economic bloc might be gearing up for a manned space programme, I have to ask what this not-even-off-the drawing-board Advanced Re-entry Vehicle is for. Unless very heavily modified, the Ariane 5 delivery system will be able to push it into low Earth orbit, no more. That would allow it to rendezvous with the International Space Station - a logical destination since the ARV is a modification of the unmanned space freighter already being used to deliver supplies to the ISS. But the Euro-ARV won't be ready to fly until 2025 at the earliest, and the ISS is scheduled to be retired in 2015. Could it be that Eurocrats are formulating plans for repurposing the ISS? There's already been talk about moving it into a higher orbit, or somehow drifting it outward to the Moon, or even sawing off and modifying modules to turn them into interplanetary spacecraft. Maybe Stephen Baxter was onto something when he wrote this . . .

From The Old, Weird...

Two of my favourite musicians. They make a guest appearance in Cowboy Angels.

Happy Birthday, America

Advertisments For Myself, Part Whatever

I was interviewed for BBC Radio 4's Leading Edge as part of its investigation into public engagment with science. You can listen to the programme here (might not be available to people outside the UK).

And I have a short short story in the July/August issue of Discover magazine, as does Bruce Sterling. Despite a fairly elastic brief, we somehow both ended up writing about the end of Big Science. Are we onto something? Bruce's story is of course far wittier, but here's how mine begins (it's called 'Shadow Life' by the way):

It all started when Jack scored on eBay a multichannel femtospectrometer from a probe that never, in the end, went to Mars...

Moonhead

A live jam* by Pink Floyd in the BBC studios during coverage of the Apollo 11 landing (by then, even the BBC had bought into the 60s). I watched the BBC coverage, but don't remember this - I assume it was transmitted after the LEM touched down and my sister, brother and I went to bed. A few hours later, my mother shook us awake: because Armstrong and Aldrin couldn't sleep, the moonwalk had been brought forward to 4 am British time.

An article in today's Guardian describes how the BBC nearly missed the crucial moment:

"I stayed in the studio, because I had nothing else to do, listening to the air-to-ground transmissions from Houston," says Burke [one of the presenters, long with Patrick Moore and [EDIT, see comments] Cliff Michelmore]. "And after about half an hour, Armstrong and Aldrin started doing the kind of thing you do if you're going to get out. So I went upstairs and said to the guys, 'Look - they're going to get out.' They all said, 'No they're not - the flight plan says they're not.' I said, 'Well, they're doing all the things they'd do if that was about to happen.'"

You can imagine the next bit being enacted amid a sea of paper cups and discarded scripts, in standard-issue BBC accents. "There was a long pause, and somebody said, 'You do understand that this means us broadcasting all night?' This had never happened before in the history of television. I said, 'Well, you know, if you want to cover it ...'

"They said, 'OK - but if we stay open and nothing happens, you'll never work again.' So we did it, and we had to go to Alexandra Palace." A car was called, and Burke sped to north London, where he readied himself to talk the viewing public through the images that would soon be relayed to Earth.

*EDIT The audio is a recording of the live jam; the video is a collage of various lunar excursions.

A Little Gosh Wow

I've been out and about this week, first to a Physics For Fiction meeting at Imperial College, organised by Dave Clements, in which scientists met and mingled with science-fiction writers, and gave a variety of excellent talks about their work. Great fun, especially when I got to talking with Subu Mohanty about his work on brown dwarfs. Today, I was at the World Conference of Science Journalists to take part in a panel organised by Oliver Morton. The centre of London drenched in sunlight under a hot blue sky and Westminster Abbey looked like bleached coral by Max Ernst: a cover for J.G. Ballard's Drought.

Seen at the Physics For Fiction meeting:

An HD movie of the (deliberate) crash of the Japanese probe Kaguya (Selene) on the surface of the Moon.

An animation of the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Galaxy. Watch SO-2 and SO-16. When these two stars swing in close around Sag A* they're moving fast.

Belatedly

'This Saturday is the BSFA/SF Foundation joint AGM day, featuring talks, panels, and the AGMs for both organisations. The guests are Paul Kincaid for the SFF, and Nick Harkaway for the BSFA. Attendance is free, and the AGMs are conveniently positioned to give non-members a long lunch break. The AGM is once again at Conway Hall, and all events will take place in the small hall on the ground floor.

Timetable:
10:00 SFF speaker Welcome
10:05 BSFA Panel – Launch of the British Science Fiction and Fantasy Survey 2009: chaired by Niall Harrison, and featuring Nick Harkaway, Paul Kincaid, Juliet McKenna, Kit Whitfield, and Paul McAuley
11:00 SFF Guest – Paul Kincaid
12:00 BSFA AGM
12:30 Lunch break
13:30 SFF AGM
14:00 BSFA Guest – Nick Harkaway
15:00 SFF Closing Panel – tba
16:00 BSFA speaker Closes'

The BSFA panel will be discussing 'writerly identity — how writers perceive their work; how others perceive it; how that changes, or doesn’t, over time and from place to place.' Something to do with being a British science fiction or fantasy writer, apparently. I have no idea what I'm going to say about that, yet. But I'm listening to this, to get in the mood.

EDIT: Ask four writers about whether they feel they're British writers, and what that means to them, and you get four different answers. My answer for what it's worth, was that there aren't really any 'British' writers - there are English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish writers, all with fairly distinct identities. And obviously I've inherited a mess of cultural and historical stuff to do with being 'English', but as a science-fiction writer, I also have to get past my mammalian preconceptions (and those of a carbon-based lifeform too, as Nick Harkaway pointed out). And then, as you do, when discussing 'British' SF and fantasy, we ended up talking about American SF and fantasy, and how our stuff is different from theirs. Not something American writers tend to worry about - but then American SF is the dominant form of modern SF (even if it was invented by an immigrant from Luxembourg).

Beyond Apollo

Yesterday evening, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter went into orbit around the Moon, just four and a half days after launch. As LRO's orbit is adjusted and its instruments are switched on, its sister probe, LCROSS, is entering a wide Earth orbit; in October, the rocket stage to which it is attached will crash into the Moon's south pole, and LCROSS will pass through the debris cloud and check for signs of water vapour that might be lofted from ice preserved in permanent shadow before it, too, crashes.

The two probes were designed to be the first step in a programme that would culminate in a new generation of manned missions to the Moon. Given the current economic crisis and Obama's reported ambivalence towards lunar and interplanetary exploration, that programme is currently in some doubt, but in my mind there's no question that humans will return to the Moon as some point. Other people doubt this, however. In last week's Observer, Robin McKie wrote that:

The Apollo moon missions were to herald a new dawn of space exploration, of lunar bases, manned missions to Mars, and more. But in the decades since - and after the Shuttle disasters - America's appetite for interplanetary flight dwindled. The moon landings marked not the beginning, but the end, of our space dreams.

He makes some cogent points. The Apollo programme cost as much as a small war. It can be considered as nothing more than a Cold War stunt, having no real purpose but to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Afterwards NASA scaled back ambitions to establish a permanent moon base and send a manned mission to Mars, concentrating instead on work in low Earth orbit that relied on the space shuttle, with its dreadful safety record. And now the space shuttle has reached the end of its useful life, the American manned space programme 'hangs by a thread'.

It's a pretty damming view, but it's also a partial view. McKie quotes just two 'experts' on the matter. One, Gerard De Groot, is a historian with an infamously jaundiced view of the Apollo adventure; his claim that the Apollo programme now 'seems as strange as stuffing fraternity brothers into phone booths, swallowing goldfish or listening to the 1910 Fruitgum Company,' is no more than amusing hyperbole - forty years on, we're lacking a slew of books on phone-booth stuffing, or detailed analysis of the lyrics of 'Goody Goody Gumdrops.' The other, Professor Amitai Etzioni, is a sociologist best known for his work on communitarianism, with a sideline in criticising the space race; his claim that 'If you look at 100-year-old maps of the moon in old encyclopedias, you can see they are not that different from the maps we have made after Apollo' misses the point that we know less about the surface of the Moon than we do of Mars. The HiRise orbiter has mapped Mars with a resolution of 30 centimetres; the best resolution of the lunar surface obtainable by Earth-based telescopes is half a kilometre and by previous generations of lunar orbiters some twenty metres.

That's LRO's principal mission: to provide maps of the lunar surface with a resolution equivalent to the HiRise orbiter, and to search out places where future explorers can land safely. If LCROSS finds evidence of lunar ice frozen in shadows at the south pole, it will mean that any permanent base may be able to tap native supplies. Of course, lunar exploration won't be cheap. But the Apollo programme cost less than the Viet Nam war, that war was less costly, month by month, than the Iraq conflict, and the recent bail-out of US banks overshadows them all, costing more than the Lousianna Purchase, the New Deal, WW2, the Marshall plan, the Korean war, the Apollo moonshots, Viet Nam, the Savings&Loan crisis, and Iraq combined. Cost is relative; relatively, Apollo cost very little (LRO cost even less of course - about the same as the annual amount Brazilians spend on cosmetics). And even if the US is at present reluctant to commit funds to manned exploration of the Moon, it isn't the only player in space. On the same day that LRO entered lunar orbit, India announced plans to launch its first manned orbital flight, and gave itself a deadline of landing a man on the Moon by 2020. Some may considered manned space exploration a magnificent and transient folly; I'm on the side of the dreamers. And even if the science and historical significance of landing on the Moon fades into obscurity, the Apollo will have left us with one lasting legacy: the idea that our home planet is but a small, fragile and precious island of life in an immensity of space that dwarfs all human divisions.

Other Life

I was getting up this morning when something hit the curtains still closed over the bedroom window and a fearsome scrabbling and twitching and thumping commenced - it was a swift that had flown through the open window and, like a fly or a bee, was consistently hitting glass instead of the gap through which it had come. Because it was partly entangled with the curtain it took only a moment to grasp its dry frantic body and drop it into the air outside; it tumbled briefly and then caught itself in midair and winged away.

A writer of 'mundane' or 'literary' fiction might use this incident as the beginning or end of a conventionally epiphanic short story. But what use is this sudden random intrusion of otherness to a science fiction writer? How to fit the inexplicable into the cosy metric frame of conventional sf stories, in which everything has its place, and all is transparent? It's something I've been wrestling with ever since I started writing my second novel, Secret Harmonies (Of The Fall, in the US), in which the tensions in an interstellar colony were laid bare by an inexplicable disappearance. I'm still wrestling with it more than twenty years later.

Architect's Brother

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison's vision of re-gooding the world.

Adam Curtis

The introduction to 'It Felt Like A Kiss'. From his blog. Major stuff. Curtis has made some extraordinary explorations of the undercurrents of power in Western civilisation of the second half of the twentieth century

Going In

I seem to have posted a fair few Moon-based posts at the moment - no particular reason except the upcoming 40th anniversary of the first manned moon-landing is focusing all kinds of attention on our sister world. And then there's this, the last high-definition images taken at one-minute intervals by Japan's Kaguya (Selene) probe as it powered in towards impact at Gill Crater, strung out here in a Flash animation (click on the arrow to flip to the next in sequence). Spaceship crashes are the stuff of cliche in SF novels; here's the real thing.

Destination: Moon

Apollo 11 tweets.

On The Beach

Unambiguous evidence that Shalabatana Vallis on Mars was once occupied by a lake fed by a broad delta - a pretty big lake too (about the size of Lake Champlain). Lasted beyond the point when Mars was supposed to have cooled after its brief warm wet period, so it looks like climatological models might need revised. Long gone now, of course, but what might be found in those fossil beaches and sediment fans?

A Ghost I Became

Singer-songwriters and poets completely inhabit their art. They create it and then they recreate it in public, over and again. Novelists, on the other hand, design their work and build it word by word, decorate it and move in fixtures and fittings that give an illusion of habitation and a history, and then they move out so that the readers can move in. Some ghostly trace of the author remains, but it’s the reader who thoroughly inhabits the novel.

(I dreamed that my friend Steve Jones and I were in a cantina or old-fashioned hotel, the kind with a bar and dance-floor off the lobby, and Bob Dylan was there, singing someone else’s song (it might have been ‘Desperado’). Afterwards, he came over and sat down with us. He was wearing a red and white shirt with pearl snaps, and high-waisted black pants and cowboy boots and he looked at us and when we couldn’t think of anything to say (because what can you say, to Bob Dylan) he shook his head slightly and stood up and walked off. In the kind of l’esprit de l’escalier reverie you have between dreaming and waking, I tried to explain to him how writing a novel was different to writing a song; I’m sure I’m paraphrasing someone or other).

IRL

A major plot point of Players happens in real life (I'm not claiming anything - it was only a matter of time).

Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual

All you need to fix up that vintage rocket you bought in a garage sale, right here.

Via Bad Astronomy (which has a great post on ripples in Saturn's rings, too).

Just finished a story about zombies and the Royal family. It's almost the weekend, the sun is shining, reckon I'll take the rest of the day off.

Moon Shadow

Saturn is approaching equinox, when the sun will stand directly above its equator and ring system. This means that the moons and moonlets embedded in the rings are presently casting long shadows, and the Cassini probe has been capturing beautiful images of them - as above, where the tiny moon Pan, orbiting in the Enke Gap, casts a slender shadow across the A Ring. There's video too.

All Your Images Are Belong To Us

American family discovers they're in a Simpson's episode.

Still, at least they were offered a bottle of wine, rather than threatened with a law suit:

So Long, Selene

The Japanese probe Kaguya (Selene) has been orbiting the Moon since October 2007, and sending back gigabytes of information, including amazing HD videos like this one of Earth setting (you can find more here). It's now reached the end of its mission and will crash onto the Moon's surface at 18.30 GMT today, hitting the lower right segment of the nearside, at the edge of the Moon's unlit portion. But that's not the end of the probe's scientific usefulness: the scar left by its impact will be monitored to see how solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts will alter the exposed regolith over time. And it isn't the end of the new wave of Moon exploration, either. India's Chandrayaan-1 probe is still in Lunar orbit, and will be joined by not one but two US probes later this year. No-one has announced plans to return human beings to the moon yet, but it's only a matter of time...

UPDATE: first image of impact posted here.

Another Country

It's all Syd Field's fault. In 1979 he published a 'how-to' book on screenplays, based on his course in Sherman Oaks Experimental College, that first codified the three act structure of modern films - setup, confrontation, resolution - along with the carefully timed plot points on which the narrative turns. With added flourishes, this story arc dominates film narrative, and because film is the major fictional medium of the twentieth and (so far) twenty-first centuries, it has fed back into the novel form too (along with 'do you earn a living from writing?' and 'do you write under your own name?', 'how many books have you sold to the movie business?' is one of the most common questions asked of authors).

Fairyland's structure is a deliberate burlesque of the three-act structure. Sure, there are three acts. Sure, they follow Field's pernicious formula. But they aren't narrated from the point of view of what would be the traditional hero - in this case, a frighteningly bright little girl who achieves godhood, and along the way bestows consciousness on a select group of genetically engineered servants. Instead, the first and third acts are told from the viewpoint of a bit-player who's caught up in the little girl's cunning plans, and the second, while featuring our hapless hero, Alex Sharkey, is told from the point of view of an aid worker in Paris's bidonvilles. The 'real' story happens in the interstices of their stories; I was still, and still am, interested in people caught up in history, rather than the people who, supposedly, make history.

Fairyland was written in 1995, using a background I elaborated, in true SF tradition, in several short stories and novellas (collected in the out-of-print Invisible Country). I had decided to quit academia, and this freed me up to have as much irresponsible fun as possible with cutting-edge biology. It was also, very deliberately, set in London, Paris, and Albania, to get away, however briefly, from the American hegonomy. And it was my first near-future novel, which allowed me to warp and pour in as much as I knew of the present. Which is why, perhaps, it's written in the present tense (as are The Secret of Life and White Devils, which with Fairyland form a loose trilogy about biotech-dominated near futures)

It won a couple of prizes, which meant a lot to me then, if only because by the time they were announced I was a freelance writer. It was one of the first biopunk (or - tip of the hat to Paul di Filippo, ribofunk) SF novels. And it started out in London, not far from where I'm typing this, in the Ladies Smoking Room of the former Midland Hotel at St Pancras (which ten years later I visited, in its glorious decrepitude), where now, as in the novel, Eurostar trains set out for the continent.

And now, it's due to be reissued for the second time. You can read an extract here, or buy the first reissue (why not?) here.

The Day Today

New York. June 6, 1944. ALLIED ARMIES LAND ON COAST OF FRANCE. GREAT INVASION OF CONTINENT BEGINS.

Shatner!

The latest b3ta challenge.

(Eds: That's enough stuff about Shatner for a month or two.)

The Day Today

After a spending a couple of hours working on the proofs of the US edition of The Quiet War, I ambled out into the sunshine to exercise my democratic rights in the European Parliament election. And a couple of hours later, I'll be off to catch the train to Cheltenham, where I'm taking part in the science festival (tickets are still available for the talk, I'm told, and I'll be signing in the book tent afterwards - if you're in the area, why not drop by?).

I'll be talking about the future of animal testing, and while researching that came across this neat bit of work: refabbing a virus so that it infects and destroys cancerous liver cells, but is recognised and destroyed by any healthy cells it infects. Talk about your smart bullet. It works by adding to the virus binding sites for a particular form of microRNA: in normal liver cells the microRNA binds to those sites and deactivates the virus - much like the antibodies that nearly did for the hemonauts' submarine - and Raquel Welch - in Fantastic Voyage, that early essay in medical nanotechnology. But - this is the neat trick - cancerous liver cells don't produce the microRNA so the virus isn't disabled and can multiply freely inside them, and ultimately kill them.

MicroRNAs are turning out to be crucial in controlling the internal metabolic climates of cells by regulating gene activation and activity of messenger RNA, the go-between molecular vital for the translation of code in the gene into protein. They were first identified in the early 1990s, but not named until the turn of the century, and their function and variety, and their role in the feedback loops that control gene transcription and cell function, is only beginning to be explored. I've just finished proofing the new paperback edition of Fairyland, which features psychotropic viruses that target specific neurons. It doesn't take much imagination to work up all kinds of psychotropic viral functions involving microRNAs. A virus that attacks neurons in which activity of a specific microRNA is suppressed to allow transcription of proteins involved with formation of short-term (or long-term) memory, for instance: temporary amnesia caught like the common cold . . .

Currently reading (when not reading proofs of my own stuff) Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, and A.S. Byatt's The Children's Hour. Currently listening to: The Felice Brothers' Yonder Is The Clock, and the Dangermouse/Sparklehorse/David Lynch collaboration, Dark Night Of The Soul.

Titan's Indian Summer

Summer on Titan lasts more than seven years. The Cassini probe has been monitoring changes in the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon for three and a half years, and now, with equinox approaching, the seasons are about to turn in the southern hemisphere. But images from Cassini's last flyby of Saturn's largest moon show that clouds of liquid methane formed by convection driven by the heat of the sun (just as rain clouds are formed on Earth) are dispersing more slowly than expected and autumn may prove to be warmer and wetter than climate models predicted. Those models are based on very partial and incomplete data, of course, but isn't it amazing that we have learned so much about this strange smog-shrouded moon so quickly? Before Cassini's arrival we didn't even know whether the surface of Titan was solid, or covered from pole to pole in oceans of liquid methane and ethane. Now, we're receiving regular updates on changes in its weather.

Mapped Out

A new favourite in the category of 'shops I can't afford to go in'. Check out the 'celestial charts' section - such as this beauty.

I Squeak Therefore I Am

Sticking the human FOXP2 gene in mice is a good start - next, chimpanzees?

Human Footprints

'Inspired by our 10th anniversary, the Earth Observatory has pulled together a special series of NASA satellite images documenting how our world has changed during the previous decade.'

Watch Dubai grow in Sim City style. See the Arul Sea dry up. Watch the late-summer extent of Arctic sea ice shrink.

Some of thing we can do may be big, but they aren't clever.

My Dark Angel

The best way to build a career in genre fiction is to find a groove and stick with it. Write an open-ended series about a jazz/blues/reggae-loving detective with a permanent life crisis. Write a ten volume fantasy trilogy. And then do it again. Write a series of novels and stories set in a future history. The last is how I started out, but after a bunch of short stories and three novels (400 Billion Stars, Secret Harmonies, Eternal Light), I veered off into the left-field with the Chinese-Messiah-on-Mars chop-socky epic Red Dust. And I followed that up with Pasquale’s Angel, an alternate history novel set in Florence in the early sixteenth century, a couple of decades after Leonardo da Vinci kickstarted an Industrial Revolution.

I’d long had an ambition to write something about Leonardo da Vinci, if only because I was fascinated by his undisciplined genius, and more than half in love with the cloudy myths that obscured the realities of his life (if you want a bracing antidote to those myths, try Charles Nicholl’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind, or Serge Bramly’s Leonardo: The Artist and the Man). He didn’t see any boundaries between arts and science, an attitude that was catnip to a novelist whose day job was a scientific research, and who’d had to make a choice between science and the arts at a tender age. That was the prevailing attitude of his age, of course, but Leonardo also seemed to be a man out of time, dreaming of technologies impossible to realise with contemporary materials and power sources. Any SF writer worth their salt must surely sympathise.

As it turned out, for much of the novel, Leonardo is a shadowy, mythic figure raised above and isolated from the world he’s created - you don’t need to be a critic to unriddle that metaphor. If there’s one consistent thread in my work, it’s identification with those caught up in plots that are larger than they ever understand: and so here, as our hero hooks up with consulting detective Niccolo Machiavegli, prowls the mean streets and tries to foil a filthy Spanish plot to bring down the government of his city state.

Did I also mention that it’s a noir novel?

I had a lot of fun writing it, and even more fun researching it. Luckily, one of the greatest living Leonardo scholars, Martin Kemp, was working in St Andrews University at the time, which meant that I had access to a couple of shelves of research material in the library. I never did dare to approach Professor Kemp about my funny little idea, though. And I’ve still never visited Florence. One day, one day . . . But it won’t be the same as the Florence of my mind, with its dark satanic mills, and acetylene-lit streets crowded with every kind of vaporetto.

I like the cover of the new paperback a lot. Although I also very much like the cover of the original hardback and paperback, in which Jim Burns captured Pasquale to the life; authors often dislike seeing renderings by others of their hero and heroine because they don’t match up with their internal pictures. In this case, Jim read my mind with perfect fidelity.

Uncommonly Good

It's a wet Wednesday here in Londontown, but this - William Shattner, Joe Jackson, and the Ben Folds Five covering Pulp's 'Common People' - cheered me up no end.

'Crimes And Glory'

Over the past month, Subterranean Press have been posting episodes of my novella 'Crimes and Glory' in their online magazine. The final episode's now up.

Upcoming Appearance

Cheltenham Science Festival, June 3rd

BEYOND ANIMAL RESEARCH
S27 Town Hall 6.30 – 7.30pm £7 (£6)
Most scientists and governments agree
that testing on animals should be avoided
wherever possible, and in the UK it is a legal
requirement. Could there be a time when
scientists might finally be able to give up
testing on animals altogether? Cell biologist
Kelly BéruBé, Catherine Gayle from the
Virtual Physiological Human project and
science fiction writer Paul McAuley join New
Scientist Editor Roger Highfield to explore
animal alternatives now and for the future.

In association with New Scientist

Twas In Another Lifetime

This past week I have been mostly commuting to Kingston University, to give a four-day intensive workshop on writing science fiction and fantasy (kudos to Adam, Chloe, Gary, Ian, Loraine, Luke, Melanie and Ruth for their patience and enthusiasm; tip of the hat to Steve Jones for his motivational talk), and reading the proofs of the paperback reissue of Red Dust, due out in September. I wrote it in 1992. I'd been in St Andrews for almost three years. I'd moved out of the bleak university flat to a cottage on a hilltop overlooking the Eden Estuary, and I was insanely busy with research and teaching. As I remember it, the bulk of the writing was done over one summer, working for an hour or two every evening at a big desk in a big study with the windows boarded up; the builders who'd been putting in replacement windows had made a mistake measuring up the ones for the study, and it took a while to get new ones made. It's a fast-paced manga-style story of a revolution on a terraformed Mars that's slowly dying, and dominated by a capitalist version of mainland Chinese culture. All kinds of stuff went into its making: Elvis and his movies, westerns, yak lore, weird ecologies, totipotent viruses that unpacked memories and posthuman abilities into those they infected. Those viruses would reappear in Fairyland, but first I had to write Pasquale's Angel, which I'm just about to start proofing.

Clouds Of Stars

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Sheer beauty. (I'm currently proofing Eternal Light for paperback reissue; much of it is set at the centre of the Galaxy.)

Ono-Sendai VII Not Included

Chris Nakashima-Brown reviews the William Gibson Aviator Briefcase.

My Current State Of Mind

(I have five manuscripts to proofread and a creative writing course to teach next week, and I've a short story I'm itching to write.)

Wanting Gyrocopters, Getting V2s

Third in a series of posts in which Jack Womack is assembling an alternate history of the days of future past.

Never Ending Sun

One week of summer in the Arctic. Music by Avi Hochberg. Via Neatorama

Adventures in Hyperreality

I posted a couple of lists of worthwhile science fiction and fantasy books a little while back, and was gratified by the degree of knowledgeability and enthusiasm displayed by the commentariat. I left those two lists incomplete, and thanks to numerous suggestions have been able to finish them off and have just posted them on the cobwebby web site (which I really must do something about, soon; it’s really showing its age). They were generated for a short, intense creative writing course I’ll be teaching next week. The idea is to provide a list of books anyone with an interest in science fiction and/or fantasy might consider interesting, worthwhile, or even essential. There aren’t any titles less than twenty-five years old because I planned to ask the people taking the course to generate short lists of their own. Lists of books - or anything else - they’ve found inspiring.

That ‘anything else’ brings me to another pair of lists, got up by M. John Harrison over at his blog around about the same time I was working up mine. They’re far more catholic than mine, don’t have an artificial end point, and include all kinds of stuff in addition to books: David Bowie’s 'Diamond Dogs' for instance, and Tom Waits’s ‘What’s He Building’. I stuck up a link to the video of the latter because I was going to write something appreciative about those lists, but then life (okay, mostly a big block of copy-editing) intervened and more than a week has passed. Anyhow, MJH’s lists are seriously playful, crammed as they are with ‘stuff that turned me on when I read it or watched it; or which still turns me on now’, and embody the kind of stuff that gets incorporated into writers’ creative juices. In a later post, MJH lays out another good boundary-demolishing, viewpoint-skewing thesis - a lot of the stuff in the happening world, from L’Oreal ads to Lewis Hamilton’s career, are fantasies as carefully constructed as any triple-decker post-Tolkein magical kings’n’queens commercial fantasy novel. Hyperreality rules.

Oh, and found over on John Crowley’s blog, here’s another great reading list: non-fiction books any good fantasy writer should study and absorb, structured around the topic of ‘Cultures We Really Evolved that are Stranger Than Any You can Think of.’ We need to be reminded as often as possible that the world is stranger than we can imagine.

Sidewise

The 2008 Sidewise Awards will be presented at Anticipation, the 67th Worldcon, to be held in Montreal, Canada from August 6-10, 2009. The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were established in 1995 to recognize excellence in alternate history fiction. The winners are selected from a panel of judges that currently includes Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stuart Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.

Short Form:
"A Brief Guide to Other Histories," by Paul J. McAuley (Postscripts #15)
"G-Men," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)
"Night Bird Soaring," by T.L. Morganfield (Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Autumn/08)
"The People's Machine," by Tobias Buckell (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)
"Poison Victory," by Albert E. Cowdrey (F&SF, 07/08)
"Sacrifice," by Mary Rosenblum (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)

Long Form:
The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann (Snowbooks/Tor, 2009)
The Dragon's Nine Sons, by Chris Roberson (Solaris)
Half a Crown, by Jo Walton (Tor)
Nation, by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins/Doubleday UK)
Swiftly, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

Sightings

Just noticed that Subterranean Press have posted the first part of my novella 'Crimes and Glory' in their online magazine. Meanwhile, over at The New Yorker, there's J.G. Ballard's absolutely positively last story (as opposed to the last-ever-Ballard story published earlier in the Guardian (and earlier still in Interzone). The New Yorker published a science-fiction story by Gail Hareven last week. Build on this trend: send them your best stories!

The Twenty-First Century So Far

Pyr PS

Hero editor Lou Anders has just let me know that you can pre-order the US edition of The Quiet War from a well-known online bookseller. Hey. It's good to be back.

Holding Pattern

I'm currently hip-deep in copy-editing Gardens of the Sun and posts will be a bit sparse in the next couple of weeks, so in the great blog tradition here are a few links to some good stuff:

The Guardian has published J.G. Ballard's last short story - as David Pringle notes elsewhere, only 13 years after it was first published in Interzone.

I know I bang on rather a lot about the sheer awe of the pictures of Saturn and its rings and retinue of moons transmitted by the Cassini probe, but here are three especially fabulous collections, selected by Alan Taylor at the Boston Globe.

Futurist visions of the future (via the ever-reliable Bruce Sterling).

Deja vu all over again: 1976 Swine Flu Propaganda:

Free Ticket

I'm taking part in a panel, 'Building a Sci-Fi/Fantasy World', in the Literature Lab sessions associated with the Sci-Fi London film festival. It's on at 2.20 pm on Monday May 4 at the Apollo Cinema, Picadilly Circus London. And I have a free ticket to give away. If you want to come along, email me at PJC[insert my last name]@gmail.com and give me your name, and I'll make sure the comp ticket is waiting for you at the door.

UPDATE: ...and it's gone!

USSA

'This is the voice of Communist government speaking. Today, Communist forces have completed the occupation of your country. The United States no longer exists. It is now the Union of Soviet States of America. Long live the USSA!'

Man, I wish I'd known about this when I was writing Cowboy Angels . . . A 1960s comic book about America under the Reds - sponsored by the Catholic Church and approved by J. Edgar Hoover! Via Infinite Thought.

Reality V. The Future

Regents Canal, King's Cross

First Past The Goldilocks Test?

The lightest exoplanet yet has been discovered around the red dwarf star Gliese 581 - and even better, refined measurements suggest that the orbit of one of its companions, Gliese 581 d, is within the habitable zone. Although, at around the size of Neptune, Gliese 581 d is too large to be a rocky planet like Earth, it may well be an ice giant that wandered inwards, and could be covered with a deep ocean - 'the first serious "water world" candidate.' What days!

A Message From Our Sponsors

Like a quite a few blogspot users, I've been marked by a robot as being a possible evil robot, intent on flooding the intertubes with spam. If the blog locks or turns off in the next couple of weeks, or starts displaying alarming notices, that's why. Meanwhile, I hope you don't mind going through a word verification step before posting; I set it up to stop the real evil robots wasting my time.

Welcome to the twenty-first century...

Uh-Oh

Ancient reefs recently exposed in Mexico show that sea levels can rise by as much as 10 feet in half a century. (Abstract for original paper here - needs a subscription to read all of it).

'Humanity Would Largely Look Like A Forest Of Quiet Semiconductor Trees.'

Anders Sandberg examines the energetic costs of the ultimate in sustainable living.

(Via Oliver Morton's Heliophage.)

(Hmm, kind of reminds me of William Hjortsberg's Grey Matters.)

J.G. Ballard

Just learned that J.G. Ballard has died. It isn't unexpected, because he has been ill for some years, but it's still a major shock and a major loss. According to the BBC news, he was a 'cult' author - whatever that means. He was one of the few people to fully understand the second half of the twentieth century, and how it continues to shape the future.

UPDATE: obituaries by David Pringle in the Guardian, Christopher Priest in the Financial Times; others in the Telegraph, and the Times. Tributes and links collected at Ballardian.com.

ALSO: Clute on Ballard.

Gardens Of The Sun - Cover Copy

The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, founded by descendants of refugees from Earth’s repressive regimes, the Outers, have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union, and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earth’s forces loot their cities and settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the ‘Outer problem.’

But Earth’s victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by the Outers’ greatest genius, Avernus, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isn’t as easy as he thought. And on Earth, in Greater Brazil, the democratic traditions preserved and elaborated by the Outers have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them.

Meanwhile, in the outer reaches of the Solar System, a rag-taggle group of refugees struggle to preserve the last of the old ideals. And on Triton, fanatical members of a cabal prepare for a final battle that threatens to shatter the future of the human species.

After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war -- especially the victors.

Star Trek: The Next Next Generation

Down into town today to see a preview showing of the new Star Trek film, the eleventh, and a major reboot of the series. I've always had a soft spot for the original flavour Star Trek - along with Doctor Who and Thunderbirds, it was an important part of my media landscape when I was growing up. So I was relieved to discover that the reboot dutifully hit all the major nostalgia points while cleverly subverting its predecessors.

The plot involves time-travel, branching universes, and the usual one-dimensional villain (a rogue Romulan called Nero - presumably because he burns down the Rome of the old franchise). Eager to avenge the death of his wife and his planet, Nero attacks a Federation starship and leaves Kirk growing up to be 'a genius-level repeat offender' without a father or any particular direction until he meets up with Uhuru and Captain Pike and joins Star Fleet Academy. So in one stroke, things are changed forever; the previous ten films and six TV series are consigned to the dustbin of an alternate history. Kirk and Spock first cross blades when Kirk is suspended after breaking the rules by reprogramming the famous Kobayashi Maru test. When a crisis looms and the fleet is dispatched, fellow cadet Leonard McCoy sneaks Kirk aboard the Enterprise, and thereafter the tearaway Kirk begins to explore his potential and exert his authority.

The heart of the original Star Trek was the friendship between Kirk and Spock, and both Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock) convey the storied essence of their characters while bringing some subtle variations into the mix. The ensemble of supporting characters is pretty good too: Zoe Sanatana's Uhuru has more to do than answer the phone; Karl Urban is a very credible McCoy; Simon Pegg successfully plays a broadly comical Scotty. There are plenty of iconic moments to please the fans; the plot is reliably daft and full of holes; the physics is as dodgy as ever; an ice planet features the usual monsters with no ecological rational. State-of-the-art SFX renders the space battles dizzyingly kinetic, and with a lot of story and introductions to pack into a little over two hours the pace is often frenetic. There's a short scene when we track a hapless crew member who's sucked out of an exploding corridor into the vacuum of space, and the view expands to take in other drifting bodies in sudden silence; a few more moments like that would have been nice. And it would good, too, if we could finally get away from the plot cliche in which the hero has to prove himself worthy of his father - in Kirk's case, not only his dead father, but the father-figure of Captain Pike, and the uber-father of the Academy. Been there, done that, got the Starship Troopers T-shirt.

But despite the cliches and Bad Science, there's a lot more wit and sass in this space operatic reboot than in most of its too-often ponderous predecessors, and you're left with a sense that the franchise is ready to head off into new and unexpected directions. And also, in my case, having seen Winona Ryder play Spock's mother, feeling rather old.

There Are Doors (15)

In Bradford for Eastercon, I stayed in the Hilton in the city centre, which meant that when I was in my room I couldn't see the Hilton's somewhat shabby box, or the multistorey carpark next door to it, but had a good view of the very fine Victorian town hall. I didn't have much time for sight-seeing, but did manage to sneak a couple of hours of early-morning exploration around the cathedral and the heart of the town; despite some despoilation (and the huge hole right in the heart of the city, which someone told me was fifteen years old), there was plenty of good Victorian stuff to admire, including what looked like a Gothic reimagining of a Florentine palazzo (appropriately enough: many Florentine bankers built their fortunes on wool exported from Yorkshire and the Cotswolds).

The size and ornamentation of these doors and gates gives some idea of the municipal pride and wealth of days gone by.

Keep Watching The Skies

Incoming.