Random Linkage 24/10/09

Smart rat 'Hobbie-J' produced by over-expressing a gene that helps brain cells communicate
‘Over-expressing a gene that lets brain cells communicate just a fraction of a second longer makes a smarter rat, report researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and East China Normal University.’

Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again
‘In the summer of 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse sniffed the floor curiously. It didn’t seem to care that a fiber-optic cable was threaded through its skull. Nor did it seem to mind that the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.’

Killer Algae: Key Player In Mass Extinctions
‘Supervolcanoes and cosmic impacts get all the terrible glory for causing mass extinctions, but a new theory suggests lowly algae may be the killer behind the world's great species annihilations.’

Giant Impact Near India — Not Mexico — May Have Killed Dinosaurs
'A huge, mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater ever found on Earth. And if a new study is right, this impact may supercede the one that created the Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula as what may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers have been studying a 500-kilometer-wide (300-mile-wide) depression on the Indian Ocean seafloor which was likely created by a bolide perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter. Such an event would have triggered worldwide climate changes, including intensified volcanism, that led to mass extinction.'

New Concept May Enhance Earth-Mars Communication
‘Direct communication between Earth and Mars can be strongly disturbed and even blocked by the Sun for weeks at a time, cutting off any future human mission to the Red Planet. An ESA engineer working with engineers in the UK may have found a solution using a new type of orbit combined with continuous-thrust ion propulsion.’

Moon scientist arrested on spy charges
'A US scientist who had high-level security clearance and was a principal investigator on a current NASA Moon mission has been arrested for attempted espionage.'
(It's not every day that Nature features an espionage story; still, it would be even better if he'd been arrested on the Moon.)

Serving Your Space Porn Needs Since 2006

The Big Picture has posted a stunning selection of images taken by the Cassini orbiter during Saturn's equinox. Do I need to tell you to get over there right away and check them out?

Yesterday's Future Today

Here's an exciting example of cutting edge medical science, combining a clever molecular biology technique with a race-against-time detective story:

In a dramatic illustration of the power of emerging genetic technologies, Yale University researchers have reported making a clinical diagnosis for the first time using comprehensive DNA sequencing of all the protein-coding genes in the genome. The information changed the course of treatment of a baby boy suffering from symptoms of dehydration thousands of miles away in Turkey.

The baby boy presented symptoms that suggested he was suffering from a genetic condition affecting the way his kidneys functioned. Researchers extracted DNA from a small blood sample and applied a technique, whole exome sequencing, that analyses the small percentage of the genome that contains exons. Exons are stretches of DNA in genes that code for the sequences of amino acids that make up proteins. In eukaroyotes (basically, any organism with a cell nucleus), exons are separated by long stretches of DNA, introns, that don't code for amino acids in proteins. Genomes also contain huge amounts of so-called junk DNA between functioning genes, as well various other kinds of non-amino acid coding DNA. As a result, the DNA that codes for proteins makes up just 1% of the human genome, so a technique that exclusively reads exons saves a lot of time and money, and can quickly and accurately pinpoint mutations.

To cut a long story short, the researchers found that the mutation wasn't, as first suspected, the one that causes a rare condition known as Bartter syndrome, but affected a gene that regulates uptake of chloride and water by cells lining the gastrointestinal tract. Since most (but not all) genetic diseases are caused by mutations in the exome, this has all kinds of implications for fast, rapid, and accurate diagnosis of many diseases, and could help unravel the kind of complex syndromes that Dr Gregory House deals with on a weekly basis.

I'm especially interested in this not only because it is a very clever and neat technique, but it's also a powerful illustration that the future is a lot closer than we think. Or in this instance, than I thought. One of the characters in The Quiet War used a similar technique to diagnose a problem with a microalgal culture essential for the quickening of a biome. Macy Minnot applied a belt-and-braces approach I assumed would be commonplace in her present, our future: a comprehensive reading not only of the entire genome of the recalcitrant microalgal species, but also of its proteome (the complete array of structural and functional proteins in a cell). A little crude compared to the finer focus of exome sequencing, maybe, but able to capture a holistic snapshot of everything going on inside a cell, including all kinds of regulatory functions coded in non-exomic DNA. And by a funny little coincidence pinpointing a problem with another kind of transport gene, this one regulating uptake of phosphate.

Ballardian

'These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.'

There She Blows

Remember LCROSS? A rocket stage and a space probe crashing into a crater at the Moon's south pole one after the other? The huge plume that should have been visible from Earth, and should have provided evidence for or against the presence of water ice in the achingly cold permanent shadows inside the crater? I know, I know, it was a bust. No big plume, no instant results. It all happened so long ago, all of ten days, and the world has moved on.


Well, turns out there was a plume after all, created by the impact of the rocket stage. There it is, inside the circle, right on the money. An actual spaceship (kind of) impact! According to one of the scientists on the project, “Within the range of model predictions we made, the ejecta brightness appears to be at the low end of our predictions." So it wasn't visible from Earth, or the Hubble telescope, but there it is all the same, captured by the LCROSS probe as it rode in towards its own impact. LCROSS captured spectrographic data too, and so did the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which went on to map the thermal footprint of the impacts. Scientists are analysing it. Some time soon, maybe early in November, they may have some preliminary results.

And right there is one of the problems with trying to get people interested in science, in the age of One-Click shopping. News cycles grow shorter and shorter. We want our instant fix even more instantly. Superinstantly. Hyperinstantly. But actual science is slow and painstaking. It takes time, to look at the evidence. It takes more time to work out what it means. You give people two impacts on the Moon, one right after the other. I mean, really, how much more excitement can you take? But there's no big plume and no instant answer. Pundits begin to predict a moondoggle and complain that the project was overhyped and too hastily staged. And meanwhile, the truth grows stealthily and slowly towards the light. But when it emerges, especially if it's equivocal, will it be reported?

Oh, by the way, 32 new exoplanets found.

Random Linkage 17/10/09

New view reveals how DNA fits into cell
'Cells are tidy packers, cramming DNA into nuclei to create a tangle-free, dense ball with pieces that are still accessible, researchers report October 9 in Science. The findings, based on a new three-dimensional view of the whole human genome, solve a long-standing biological mystery and may lead to a deeper understanding of how genes operate.'
(A beautiful and painstaking piece of research - my favourite biology story of the year, so far).

New Type Of Flying Reptile: Darwin's Pterodactyl Preyed On Flying Dinosaurs
'An international group of researchers from the University of Leicester (UK), and the Geological Institute, Beijing (China) has identified a new type of flying reptile, providing the first clear evidence of an unusual and controversial type of evolution.'

Sniffer bees

Asteroid Is Actually A Protoplanet, Study Of First High-resolution Images Of Pallas Confirms
'Britney E. Schmidt, a UCLA doctoral student in the department of Earth and space sciences, wasn't sure what she'd glean from images of the asteroid Pallas taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But she hoped to settle at least one burning question: Was Pallas, the second-largest asteroid, actually in that gray area between an asteroid and a small planet?'

First black hole for light created on Earth
'An electromagnetic "black hole Movie Camera" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time.
'The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.'

Physicists Calculate Number of Universes in the Multiverse
'If we live in a multiverse, it's reasonable to ask how many other distinguishable universes we may share it with. Now physicists have an answer.'
(And it isn't 42.)

The Chemistry of Information Addictions
(Go on. Click. You know you want to.)

Earth And Moon As Seen From Mars

Snapped by HiRise. Howdy, neighbour!

Xposted to Pyr-o-mania

The Prehistory Of The Quiet War

The Quiet War has just been the subject of io9's first book club feature. Someone asked me to provide a list of the short stories that preceded the novels, and I thought it might be useful to post it here, too. Originally, I just wanted to make use of various exotic settings in the outer reaches of the Solar System; later the stories became a trial run for the novels, which modify a background history that was rather unevenly developed in the stories (moral: always have a plan, rather than making it up as you go along). Also, gosh, I've been thinking about this stuff, on and off, for more than a dozen years.

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

Nostalgia For The First Space Age

Life has a very cool gallery of photographs of the packaging of space-age toys from the 1960s, from a flying saucer with 'real space noise' to a 'smoking space man' (how times have changed). There's also a friction-powered atomic rocket, possibly a solution to the problem of how to get to other planets quickly. You'd need a really big strip of carpet to charge it up, though.

Picture above is a scan of the box of one of my collection of reproduction toys - can't afford the real thing, alas...

Interplanetary Travel

National Geographic has posted a great zoomable map detailing the first fifty years of the conquest, sorry, exploration, of the Solar System by robots. If you want to expand your mind, check out the graphic at the bottom, which shows where long-range probes are right now. New Horizons, on its way to Pluto, has recently crossed the orbit of Saturn. Much further out, past the orbit of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, are Pioneers 10 and 11 and the two Voyagers. Voyager 1 is 10 billion miles from the Sun, 10 times more distant than New Horizons's present position: it's the most distant man-made object, and it's still, just, inside the Solar System. Space is big.

(Link via Universe Today.)

Commercial Break

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich and Sci-Fi London are presenting the premiere of a new SF-based planetarium show on October 23rd. Buying a ticket gets you into the observatories galleries, too, and access to all kinds of supporting events, including a panel featuring Jaine Fenn, Tom Hunter, Paul Graham Raven, Alastair Reynolds, and me. We'll be discussing 'whether science fiction authors are wasting their time writing about interplanetary travel, space colonisation and the spread of mankind across the universe given everything science has taught us about the realities, possibilities and costs of doing so.' Gosh, are we?

And next year, in May, I'll be teaching a course on writing SF and Fantasy (you at the back, boy, stop sniggering) at Kingston University. Short, intensive, and hopefully as much fun as this year.

Random Linkage 10/10/09

'Trash Can' Nuclear Reactors Could Power Human Outpost On Moon Or Mars
‘NASA has made a series of critical strides toward the development of new nuclear reactors the size of a trash can that could power a human outpost on the moon or Mars.’
(Or small communities in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan.)

Trips to Mars in 39 Days
‘Using traditional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars – at quickest — lasts 6 months. But a new rocket tested successfully last week could potentially cut down travel time to the Red Planet to just 39 days. The Ad Astra Rocket Company tested a plasma rocket called the VASIMR VX-200 engine, which ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. "It's the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now," says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra. The company has also signed an agreement with NASA to test a 200-kilowatt VASIMR engine on the International Space Station in 2013.’

Massive MESSENGER Mercury Mosaic
'Just in time for MESSENGER's third flyby comes a mosaic from the second flyby! This absolutely enormous mosaic of Mercury's globe represents 66 individual narrow-angle camera frames on Mercury captured by MESSENGER as it departed from its second encounter. Its departure view on its recent, third flyby would have been basically the same if it had not been in safe mode. The mosaic was assembled by Cassini imaging team member Jason Perry in his free time, and I hereby thank him for the four days of effort that it took him to establish a control network that would make his software behave and assemble this gorgeous view. I'm glad he could do it because it was way beyond my expertise! Now does anybody else want to dive into the Planetary Data System for the color data taken using the wide-angle camera during departure so we can produce a nice color version of this view? There was a 3-by-3 WAC color mosaic at about the same time...'
(If this doesn't inspire you to write some Mercury-based fiction, I don't know what will.)

Blasted into space from a giant air gun
'When Jules Verne wrote about a gigantic gun that could be used to launch people into space in the 19th century, no one expected it to become a reality. Now physicist John Hunter has outlined the design of such a gun that he says could slash the cost of putting cargo into orbit.'

Pumpkin cannon could be ultimate big-boy toy*
'John Gill tucks a gray pumpkin under his arm and climbs to the top of a rusty ladder. He opens a hatch on the side of a steel pipe, drops the pumpkin inside and sprays it with magenta paint.
'"So we can find it later," he says.'
(Via Neatorama.)
*(No kidding.)

Where It's At

Tom Waits provides the answer to that old chestnut, 'Where do you get your ideas?'

"You know how it is," he says. "If you're a writer you know that the stories don't come to you, you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were. And then when the record label would send me on tour, I always resisted checking into the usual places. I'd step off the bus and look for the hotels named after presidents." Hotels named after presidents, he argues, guarantee a certain grubby authenticity. "The Taft!" Waits says with relish. "You could usually rely on finding a Taft in every town. Take me to the Taft! You walk in and there they are: the old men in the lobby."

Wham!

Just watched the coverage of the impact of the LCROSS spacecraft on the Moon, following the impact, a few minutes earlier, of the Centaur rocket stage it had been shepherding. The impacts, in a permanently shadowed part of a crater at the Moon's south pole, have thrown up plumes of material; measurements of the plumes are being analysed right now to see if they contain any water. If they do, it's good news for those who want to press ahead with a return of manned landings to the Moon; if they don't, it could mean that there aren't any ice deposits in those shadow regions after all, or that LCROSS and the rocket stage hit dry spots. In any case, it's a tremendous techical achievement.

What struck me was the enormous gap between the behaviour of the NASA scientists and their fictional counterparts in films and TV shows. No fevered arguments between brilliant mavericks and unimaginative bureaucrats about last-minute make-or-break adjustments to the spacecraft's trajectory; no nervous breakdowns based on flashbacks to childhood trauma; no instant and triumphant cry that millions of tons of water had been found. In short, no drama, just quiet and calm competence, a short round of applause when LCROSS hit its target, and a brief subdued talking heads panel.

Well, that's reality. But what's also real is a couple of spacecraft slamming into the Moon within a few minutes of each other with pinpoint precision and at twice the speed of a bullet, throwing plumes of debris ten kilometres above the surface. The future of manned missions to the Moon hangs into the balance. And the official TV presentation has all the excitement of the opening of a new telephone sales centre on the Watford Ring Road. I'm being a little unfair - there were plenty of press releases, and NASA Ames put on a show for impact night - but given the general public's indifference, and NASA's reliance on tax dollars, it's a shame that its own coverage was so low key. Surely there must be some way of sexing up the work of its scientists without distorting it?

One Ring To Bind Them

All over the news right now is what is probably going to be #1 in a long list of Things I Wish Had Been Discovered Before I Started Writing The Quiet War And Gardens Of The Sun.

Discovered by the Spitzer space telescope and visible only in infrared light is a vast ring tilted at twenty-six degrees to the Saturn's equatorial plane - the plane in which the more familiar ring system and the inner moons orbit. It's very very big, this ring, circling Saturn at a distance of 13 million kilometres: if you look at Saturn from Earth, imagine that it's sitting inside a ring that is twice the apparent diameter of the full Moon. Factor in the relative distances of the Moon and Saturn, (384,000 kilometres v. the minimal distance, at opposition, of roughly 1300,000,000 kilometers), and you'll realise that this is a very big structure indeed: the biggest known ring in the Solar System

It's very big, but it's also very tenuous. More tenuous than even the vacuum inside electronic vacuum tubes: there are on average twenty grains of icy dust in each cubic kilometre of this giant ring. For good reason, its discoverers are calling it the Ghost Ring. It's no coincidence that it shares the same orbital inclination and distance as Saturn's moon Phoebe; it's almost certainly composed of material knocked off that small and eccentric moon by meteoritic impacts. Phoebe is an odd little moon; not only is its orbit steeply inclined, it's also retrograde - it travels in the opposite direction to the inner moons. Images taken by the Cassini orbiter as it passed Phoebe on its approach to Saturn show an irregular and heavily cratered body, with slivers of bright ice showing through a dark outer crust of carbonaceous material. It's similar in composition to Kuiper Belt Objects, in fact, and was probably captured by Saturn when something perturbed its orbit and it wandered in towards the Sun.


There's speculation that the material in the Ghost Ring has contributed to the distinctive colouration of the outermost of the large moons, Iapetus. Famously, Iapetus is bright on one side and dark on the other, a property spotted by the man who discovered it, Giovanni Domenico Cassini, in the seventeenth century. Now, it seems that the dark sooty material from the ring has been swept up by Iapetus's leading hemisphere over a couple of billion years.


But is the Ghost Ring really the largest ring in the Solar System? Saturn has many other small irregular moons in wide eccentric orbits. Most belong to collisional families and are probably fragments from a larger body that was shattered by some impact after it was captured by Saturn's gravity: the Inuit Group; the Norse Group; and the Gallic Group. Phoebe belongs to the Norse Group. The moons in the Gallic Group orbit even further out. Could they, too, have generated a ghost ring?

A Film I'd Dearly Love To See

Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself, an argument assembled from film clips that use actual locations in LA. Plays on the festival/arthouse circuit, will probably never surface on DVD because of copyright issues, alas.

Random Linkage 03/10/09

Dawn Journal: Good performance means a longer stay at Vesta!
'Dawn is celebrating the second anniversary of leaving its home planet by engaging in the same function it has performed most of its time in space: with the utmost patience, it is using its ion propulsion system to gradually modify its orbit around the Sun.'

MESSENGER Gains Critical Gravity Assist for Mercury Orbital Observations
‘MESSENGER successfully flew by Mercury yesterday, gaining a critical gravity assist that will enable it to enter orbit about Mercury in 2011 and capturing images of five percent of the planet never before seen. With more than 90 percent of the planet’s surface already imaged, MESSENGER’s science team had drafted an ambitious observation campaign designed to tease out additional details from features uncovered during the first two flybys. But an unexpected signal loss prior to closest approach hampered those plans.’
(Nice images, despite the glitch.)

Cosmic Rays Hit 50-Year High. Galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high, new data from a NASA spacecraft indicates.
'"In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19 percent beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," said Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions."'

Increase in sea levels due to global warming could lead to 'ghost states'
'Global warming could create "ghost states" with governments in exile ruling over scattered citizens and land that has been abandoned to rising seas, an expert said yesterday.'

Clues To Reversing Aging Of Human Muscle Discovered
'A study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has identified critical biochemical pathways linked to the aging of human muscle. By manipulating these pathways, the researchers were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself.'

Swedish parents win right to name sprog 'Q'
'The parents of a Jämtland boy have emerged triumphant from the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court, aka Regeringsrätten, and may henceforth legally refer to the sprog as "Q".'

More Martian Ramblings

Soon after posting a short note on Paul Davies's proposal about getting to Mars cheaply by staging one-way missions, I ran into my friend Oliver Morton, who pointed me towards a post on his Mainly Martian blog that with takes apart Davies's claims in meticulous detail. Oliver is a Mars-head from way back - his book, Mapping Mars, is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of observation and exploration of the red planet - and his demolition job is pretty comprehensive. Cutting out a return vehicle wouldn't lower the cost of the mission by as much as Davies suggests; if the one-way trip isn't a suicide mission, the Mars explorers will have to set up a permanent base camp under extreme and arduous conditions, and will need continuous resupply from Earth for the forseeable future; the 'lifeboat' argument for space colonisation elides the uncomfortable fact that most people will be left behind. And so on.

All in all, it's a bracing dose of realism. If there is a cheap way of going to Mars, a one-way trip isn't the way to do it. (Still, as an irresponsible SF writer, I feel there's plenty of fictional traction in the scenario. I've already dabbled in it, as the background story of one of the secondary characters in The Secret of Life; now I'm wondering what would happen if, say, there was a privately funded one-way mission to Mars that had to rely on viewers' ratings to keep its astronauts resupplied: a Robinson-Crusoe-On-Mars reality show. Or suppose a one-way mission made a go of it with the help of a substantial resupply programme, and fifty years later their descendants were faced with the bill...).

I do take issue, though, with Oliver's last point:

Human Mars exploration is indeed a fine goal, and it is quite possible that fairly early on there will be some who elect to stay. But the only real argument for doing it sooner or rather than later is the selfish one of wanting to see/participate in it personally. I can appreciate that, but I don't think it's a compelling policy point. There are a lot of other big exciting projects to inspire us -- a new energy infrastructure for the world, the millennium development goals, in pure science the development of telescopes for characterising the atmospheres and possible biospheres of exoplanets.

Yes, going to Mars as soon as possible for personal reasons isn't a compelling reason (even if you are a zillionaire who can fund the entire caper). And yes, there are plenty of other ways to spend the money. But I'm not convinced that funding of expensive space missions diverts essential resources from more pressing problems here on Earth. It's a straw man argument that's been around since the Apollo missions, and there's no evidence that cash cut from NASA funds goes to humanitarian aid or other scientific projects instead; either it goes elsewhere in the overloaded federal budget, or it simply isn't spent. And it isn't as if all that money is blasted into orbit, never to return. Most of it stays right here. It's spent on research and development, on construction of infrastructure, and on the salaries of the thousands of men and women who are involved in supporting manned missions in every kind of way. And if manned missions are cut out of the NASA programme, then all that expertise is lost, and so is the momentum.

The International Space Station is due to be decomissioned in a few years; if it is, that will put an end to the need for manned missions to low Earth orbit. And although there's talk about going to the Moon, we've already been there, and the main rationale for returning is that it would be a staging post or training ground for the Big Leap Outwards. Given that funds are limited, why not start planning and working towards that Big Leap now, with missions to Near Earth asteroids, a round trip around Venus, and maybe a mission to Phobos, rather than a diversion to the Moon? The romantic in me would like to think that kind of thing might be possible in my life time, at least . . .

Xposted to Pyr-o-mania

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Five

Sri Hong-Owen was walking a transect of the rim forest early one morning, collecting hand crabs for a population survey, when Euclides Peixoto called her out of the blue. He told her that there’d been a little trouble she should know about, back on Earth, and read out a brief official announcement about a successful action against a nest of criminals in Antarctica who had been in flagrant breach of the new regulations controlling scientific research. Survivors had been arrested and transported to Tierra del Fuego; their laboratories had been destroyed.

‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but there it is,’ Euclides said, not sounding sorry at all.

‘Alder. Is he one of the survivors?’

READ MORE . . .

Another Commercial Break

Gardens of the Sun is amongst the deluge of books published on this Super Thursday. So why not head out to your favourite bookshop, go straight past the piles of stuff by TV personalities towards the quiet calm of the SF section, and do the right thing? Readers in the US might like to know, if they don't already, that The Quiet War is available for download to their Kindles.

I'll be posting the last extract from Gardens of the Sun tomorrow: a long chapter that will bring us to the end of the third section, and the midway of the book.

The World Turns

I'm currently rewatching The Sopranos. Frank Sinatra's version of this lovely bittersweet Kurt Weill/Maxwell Anderson song plays over a montage at the opening of the first episode of the second season. But this is just as good. They knew a thing or two about life, those old guys. Durante puts all of his into this.

Bit of a place marker. Busy.

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Four

April, the Foyn Coast of Graham Land, the Antarctic Peninsula. Winter beginning, the days dying back. The sun nearing the end of its short, low arc across the eastern horizon of the Weddel Sea, falling behind the Brazilian frigate, formerly the Admiral João Nachtergaele, now named for the murdered green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos. The bristling superstructure of the frigate silhouetted against the bloody flare of the sunset as it sleeked in towards the coast, navigating by radar and GPS, cutting through brash ice and shouldering aside small table bergs.

READ MORE . . .

(Ihe last post in this series, a long chapter that will take us to the midpoint of the novel, will go up on Friday, the day after the UK publication date.)

Just In Case You Weren't Certain That The Future Is Already Here

Why complain that aircars aren't clogging our skies when you can buy a DNA synthesiser on eBay?

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Random Linkage 26/09/09

An Odyssey From the Bronx to Saturn’s Rings
'Shadows lengthened to stretch thousands of miles across the planet’s famous rings this summer as they slowly tilted edge-on to the Sun, which they do every 15 years, casting into sharp relief every bump and wiggle and warp in the buttery and wafer-thin bands that are the solar system’s most popular scenic attraction.
'"From her metaphorical perch on the bridge of the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn for five years, Carolyn Porco, who heads the camera team, is ecstatic about the view. “It’s another one of those things that make you pinch yourself and say, ‘Boy am I lucky to be around now,’ ” Dr. Porco said. “For the first time in 400 years, we’re seeing Saturn’s rings in three dimensions.”'

US to deploy 'optionally manned' hover-dirigible in 2011
'The US military will deploy an "optionally manned" 250-foot surveillance airship to Afghanistan by the middle of 2011, according to reports. The dirigible spy-ship will be able to lurk high above Afghan battlefields for up to three weeks at a time, relaying information to ground commanders.'
(Battlefields? What battlefields? Oh right, the entire country is a battlefield.)

New Vista Of Milky Way Center Unveiled
'A dramatic new vista of the center of the Milky Way galaxy from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory exposes new levels of the complexity and intrigue in the Galactic center. The mosaic of 88 Chandra pointings represents a freeze-frame of the spectacle of stellar evolution, from bright young stars to black holes, in a crowded, hostile environment dominated by a central, supermassive black hole.'

Craters Show 1970s Viking Lander Missed Martian Ice by Inches
'Meteorites that crashed into the Martian surface last year exposed buried ice to the digital eyes of NASA spacecraft.
'Scientists have used those images to deduce that there is a lot more ice on Mars — and that it’s closer to the equator — than previously thought. In fact, subterranean Martian ice should extend all the way down beyond 48 degrees of latitude, according to the model, which was published in Science Thursday.'
(It's as if some agency reimagined Mars since the 1970s.)

Scientists hail new species of feathered dinosaurs
'The new dinosaur fossils, disclosed on Friday, representing five different species from two different rock sequences in north-eastern China, all have feathers or feather-like structures.
'The new finds are "indisputably" older than archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, which scientists claim provides exceptional evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.'

163 new species found in Asia
'A gecko with spots like a leopard and a fanged frog that preys on birds are among more than 160 new species that have been discovered along the Mekong River but which face the threat of extinction as a result of climate change.'
(Taxonomy was once a sedate occuptaion; now it’s like staging triage in a big city hospital.)

Music inspired by radio waves from Saturn’s rings
(Via Discover.)

Cocoon Cooker Grows Meat and Fish from Heated Animal Cells
'Here's a food-related invention that is even weirder than the notorious Beanzawave: The Cocoon, a concept cooker that grows meat and fish from heated animal cells in a process that looks disturbingly similar to magic animal growing capsules.'
(The black market in 'grow-your-own-celebrity-meat' capsules will start up about a week after this hits the shops.)

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Three



After the publicity tour was cancelled Frankie Fuente went home to the state of Paiuí, where he planned to buy a share in a carnaúba palm plantation and spend the rest of his life watching other people make money for him. Cash Baker went back to the academy, and teaching.

At first, little seemed to have changed. There was a month of mourning after the state funeral of the president -- flags at half-mast, black armbands, water instead of wine served at meals in the officers’ mess. In a short address at his inauguration, the new president, Armand Nabuco, promised a smooth transition and a continuation of the policies that had made Greater Brazil a power for good in an imperfect world. Flare-ups in wildsider activity in the Andes, the Great Desert, and along the border of the northern territories were quickly suppressed; renewed calls for independence by banned nationalist groups like the Freedom Riders came to nothing; anti-government posters were torn down, graffiti was scrubbed away, links to clandestine sites on the net were purged. And then, the day after the official period of mourning ended, the Office for Strategic Services removed thousands of civil servants and government officials from their posts, and it was announced that General Arvam Peixoto, leader of the expeditionary force at Saturn and acting head of the Three Powers Authority, would be returning to Earth after he had handed over command to Euclides Peixoto.

READ MORE . . .

Spirit At Gusev Crater

Created by Doug Ellison using data from the Spirit rover and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, this fabulously detailed flyover sweeps across the Columbia Hills in the middle of a simulated dust storm, past the place where the brave little toaster is currently mired. The kind of detailed virtuality that will be as near to actually being on Mars that almost all of us will get* (more on that, soon); it can't be that long before there's a version where we can wander around the planet at will.

*unless you're Australian

Via Universe Today.

The Quiet War, American Style

Officially published today in the US. Maybe I should remind new readers that I posted a portion of the novel on my web site last year, as part of Earth and Other Unlikely Worlds's try-before-you-buy service. Same goes for Cowboy Angels, incidentally. Just seen a rough of the cover for Gardens of the Sun, also packed with space hardware goodness; hope to have some news of the US publication date realsoonnow.

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Two(ii)

The gig’s cabin was a fullerene shell perched on top of its motor platform, a claustrophobic closet with no room for seats or couches. Loc stood next to the pilot, with Berry Hong-Owen crammed in behind them, all three strapped into the webs of their crash harnesses and bulked out in pressure suits, globular helmets screwed on, as the frail craft arced halfway around Mimas in a free-fall trajectory.

The little moon was a ball of dirty water ice just under four hundred kilometres in diameter that had frozen all the way down to its silicate core soon after its formation: its ancient, unmodified surface was pocked and spattered by a chaos of craters of every size, like a boiling sea instantly turned to stone. Peering out of the gig’s slot-like window, it seemed to Loc that he was plunging headlong past a vast pale cliff printed with a random jumble of inky crescents and clefts and staves: slanting shadows cast by blocks and boulders, shadows cupped inside craters, shadows curving around crater rims. He’d patched a slow-release dose of a local smart drug, pandorph, before putting on his pressure suit. Yota McDonald had turned him on to it. It was cleaner and more effective than any of the military smart drugs they’d used back in the good old days before the war, when they’d brainstormed political and strategic scenarios for a government commission. It sharpened his perceptions and quickened his thoughts and gave him a crystalline god-like perspective, a necessary edge that would help him deal with Sri Hong-Owen, and it had the useful side effect of overlaying his usual anxiety and fright at being fired like a bullet across a hostile moonscape with a calm, semi-detached interest in the spectacular scenery unravelling beyond the gig’s window.

READ MORE . . .

Gillian Welch At The Newport Folk Festival

The entire set, courtesy of NPR. Man, I love the internet.

(Via Small Beer Press.)

Random Linkage 20/09/09

Moon is coldest known place in the solar system
'Poor Pluto. First it gets kicked out of the planet club, now it's not even the coldest place in the solar system. Dark craters near the moon's south pole have snatched that title – which is good news for the prospects of finding water ice on Earth's companion.'

Using Magnetism To Turn Drugs On And Off
'Many medical conditions, such as chronic pain, cancer and diabetes, require medications that cannot be taken orally, but must be dosed intermittently, on an as-needed basis, over a long period of time. A few delivery techniques have been developed, using an implanted heat source, an implanted electronic chip or other stimuli as an "on-off" switch to release the drugs into the body. But thus far, none of these methods can reliably do all that's needed: repeatedly turn dosing on and off, deliver consistent doses and adjust doses according to the patient's need.
'Researchers led by Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD of Children's Hospital Boston, funded by the National Institutes of Health, have devised a solution that combines magnetism with nanotechnology.'
(Ingenious - but what happens if the patient passes through a magnetic field at the wrong time? We’re not short of them, in the C21st. Cheap idea for a thriller: the hero has been implanted with a magnetically-controlled poison capsule, and has to chase down the villain while *avoiding* every magnetic field. Maybe involving Chev Chelios.)

Saturn's Turbulent 'Storm Alley' Sets Another Record
'The longest continuously observed thunderstorm in the solar system has been roiling Saturn’s atmosphere since mid-January and is still churning now, according to a presentation by a Cassini team scientist at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany.'

Tiny ancestor is T. rex blueprint
'A 3m-long dinosaur fossil from China which predates T. rex by 60 million years is a blueprint for the mighty carnivore, say researchers.'
(Some commentators have been claiming that it’s human-sized. Human-sized in the same way that a grizzly bear is human-sized.)

New Evidence of Dry Lake Beds on Mars
'Networks of giant polygonal troughs found in crater basins on Mars are cracks caused by evaporating lakes. These landforms had been attributed to thermal contractions in the Martian permafrost, similar to what the Phoenix lander explored near the north pole on the Red Planet. But these polygon-shaped cracks are too large to be caused by thermal contractions and provide further evidence of a warmer, wetter Martian past.'

The Incredible Ghost Fleet Off The Coast Of Singapore
'Off the coast of Singapore is a collection of ships larger than the U.S. and English navies just sitting idle, waiting out the recession. It's a spectacular image, capturing our bruised global economy better than any we've see thus far.'

Best McDonald’s Ad Ever
(At least, until the amniotronic version comes along.)

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Two(i)

Loc Ifrahim was up in the junkyard station, in orbit around Dione, when news of the death of the president of Greater Brazil splashed across the TPA net. It was a shock, but not unexpected. The woman had been almost two centuries old, and in her dotage. And she’d never recovered from the death of her husband. Still, she’d been a power, and now there was a vacuum, and various alliances in the great families would be manoeuvring to fill it as soon as possible after the state funeral. Loc began to calculate what it might mean for the TPA. What it might mean for him.

READ MORE . . .

Junk

Philip K Dick had a word for it: kipple. I think he may also have called it gubble at one point but he definitely called it kipple in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and a couple of other books I would check, but my paperback copies of his books are behind a bunch of other paperbacks because my fiction paperback shelves, for A - M at least, are double-ranked. I have too many books. Well, you can’t have too many books of course. No, the problem is that I don’t have enough space for all the books I have bought (I just bought another today, David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again). I have many metres of bookshelves, but I also have a lot of books. I don’t have enough room for them all. I don’t even have enough room for all of my books. That is, complimentary copies of the books I wrote, and anthologies in which I have a short story, and other people’s books for which I wrote introductions. Mass-market paperbacks of six of my books were published in the UK this month, a trade paperback of one of those titles is about to be published in the US, and another title will be published in hardback and trade paperback in the UK at the beginning of next month. I have been sent multiple copies of all of them. Not to mention two copies of the Nightshade Best SF and Fantasy of the Year, because its editor Jonathan Strahan, was kind enough to include one of my stories. Not to mention the books by other people that I’ve bought this month (seven, so far). Really, I have to admit, I have too many books. I’ve been trying to firefight the problem by getting rid of some of them. You keep books because you like them, individually and collectively, and because you think, one day, you might want to read them again. But this month I’ve been going through my books weeding out ones that I positively, definitely am not going to read again, because I already have too many books I haven’t yet read. So far, I’ve made three trips to the local charity shop, and I’ve just found a few more books I can bear to part with today. It helps, a little. But the books - and CDs and DVDs, don’t get me started on those - keep coming.

Not to mention all the other stuff that we all accumulate, that over time loses usefulness and context and becomes kipple. Not garbage - wrappers and wet lettuce leaves and coffee grounds - but ancient electronic gadgets and kitchenware, broken toys, old shoes, lone socks. And so on, and so forth. Stuff we should throw out or sell on eBay or give away but can’t because it still wakens a little emotional throb when we find it after a year or ten. I’ve just thrown out a computer mouse. It sat in a box for three years, it didn’t really work very well and besides, I have two other perfectly good computer mice. But I used it to write four novels, and it took some effort to get rid of it. Ditto the two dozen Zip discs from the back of a desk drawer. I don’t even have a Zip drive any more. And all of the data on them is archived and backed up elsewhere. Why did I keep them?

At least I haven’t yet been driven to rent storage space. Before the recession bit, according to this excellent article, most rented storage space contained stuff people didn’t need, but couldn’t bear to throw away.

“There’s a lot of junk stored in our properties,” Ronald L. Havner Jr., Public Storage’s chief executive, told a symposium in New York in June. Walking through his company’s facilities around the country, he explained, “I’ve sometimes said that we could put a torch to this building and it would have zero effect on the local economy — because that’s how much junk is stored in our properties.”

But now, with in the US (and probably here, too, on a smaller scale), more and more people are renting storage spaces because they have lost their homes and need a space to park the stuff of their lives while they regroup, or are being rented by endangered businesses, for the same reason.

By shaking up the composition of renters, and their reasons for renting, the recession could be quietly tilting the character of American storage closer to what it was originally: a pragmatic solution to a sudden loss of space, rather than a convenient way of dealing with, or putting off dealing with, an excess of stuff.

Puts my own little problem in stark perspective. Anyway, before I go down the storage space route, I should really get around to building some shelves in my loft...

Eight Easy Pieces

The latest issue of New Scientist includes a fine essay on British science fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson and eight slivers of flash fiction by Stephen Baxter, Nicola Griffith, Ken Macleod, Ian McDonald, Justina Robson, Geoff Ryman, Ian Watson and, er, me. Best of all, you can read all of it here, for free. Oh, and there's a competition, too.

Mars Now!

While gloom increases about the new NASA budget, widely feared to be too low to fund plans to a return of astronauts to the Moon by 2020, there's been some bullish noises about reconfiguring plans to send manned missions to Mars.

First, there's been a revival of Fred Singer's 'Ph-D project', which suggested establishing a forward base on one of Mars's two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, before landing astronauts on the planet. It would be economic in terms of fuel, would provide a platform that would allow astronauts to control rovers on the surface of the planet in real time, and would enhance our knowledge of small bodies. The possibility that the moons may harbour ice deposits and could have collected material blasted off Mars by large impacts are enticing bonuses. And Russia's Fobos-Grunt mission, which plans to study Phobos in detail and land on its surface a probe that will return a soil sample to Earth, could pave the way for manned missions. (We'd better make up our minds relatively quickly; the orbits of both Phobos and Deimos and decaying, and in only ten million years the moons will enter the atmosphere and break up and bombard with surface of Mars with debris.)

Second, Paul Davies has an even more radical suggestion to cut costs: send explorers to Mars on a one-way ticket, and begin colonisation of the planet without any prelimary and expensive round-trip manned missions. Supplies could be sent ahead in robot landers; costs would be slashed by 80%; there is, he claims, 'no shortage of eager scientists, young and old, who say they would accept a one-way ticket'. Anyone who's read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars will feel a definite tingle of recognition; although the pioneers in Robinson's novel were preceeded by manned expeditions rather than a horde of versatile robot explorers, the ethos is the same. As, no doubt, would be the human complications. It's hard to believe that Davies and his supports will overcome NASA's cumbersome caution (although maybe the Chinese would be more receptive), but I thought this raison d'etre very fine:

'A worldwide project to create a second home for humankind elsewhere in the solar system would be the greatest adventure our species has embarked upon since walking out of Africa 100,000 years ago, and provide a unifying influence unparalleled in history.'

And after Mars, why not the moons of Jupiter and Saturn?

Xposted to Pyr-o-mania.

Look For America

A hard rain is currently falling over London, like a Wagnerian prelude to autumn. 'As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus etc etc.' I'm posting this because it cheered me up on this dreary day:

David Bowie's version of Simon & Garfunkel's America, a perennial in my Top Ten favourite songs, from the Concert For New York City late in September 2001. Love the Kurt Weill vibe. (I think I've already mentioned, somewhere or other here, that Cowboy Angels' original title was Look For America, but hell, I'll mention it again.) (Thanks to Jack Womack for the link.)

Upcoming: I'll be appearing, along with Jaine Fenne, Tom Hunter, Paul Raven, and Alastair Reynolds at Sci-Fi London's Oktoberfest, on a panel about whether it's worthwhile, these days, writing about space travel. At, get this, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, on October 23rd. And I'll also be part of a group signing at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, on Saturday November 14th, 12.30 - 2pm. Other victims include David Devereux, Adam Roberts, Justina Robson, and Chris Wooding.

Currently reading: Bldgblog Book: Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures. Currently listening to: 'We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River', Richmond Fontaine.

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter One

‘What you still haven’t learned after all this time,’ Frankie Fuente told Cash Baker, ‘is how to relax.’

‘I’m pretty relaxed right now,’ Cash said. ‘Maybe you should take a picture to remind yourself what it looks like.'

‘What you are right now is the exact opposite of relaxed. You’re wired so tight I could nail your head to one end of a plank and your feet to the other and play a tune on you. And you know what? You’re like that all the time.’

READ MORE . . .

Random Linkage

A Boy For Every Girl? Not Even Close: Scientists Trace Evolution Of Butterflies Infected With Deadly Bacteria
'"We were surprised at the speed with which change in sex ratio could occur," said Emily Hornett of the University of Liverpool. "Between 1886 and 1894 in Fiji, the male-killing bacterium rose from 50 percent to over 90 percent frequency, changing the sex ratio from 2:1 to 10:1."'
(Here’s your real-life precedent for female-only utopias.)

LCROSS Mission Selects Crater Cabeus A As Target for October 9 Impact
'NASA announced this morning that the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission has selected the target for its planned impact. The selected crater is Cabeus A, which is centered on the lunar nearside at 82.2 degrees south, 39.1 degrees west. The actual target site is offset from the crater's center to the north, within a permanently shadowed area. Data from Lunar Prospector suggests that the targeted part of the crater could contain as much as two percent water in the upper meter of soil.'

Dandelion rubber
'Most natural rubber comes from rubber trees in Southeast Asia, but this source is now underthreat from a fungus. Researchers [at the Fraunhofer-Instituts für Molekularbiologie und Angewandte Oekologiehave] optimized the Russian dandelion to make it suitable for large-scale rubber production.'

Physicists propose 'Schrödinger's virus' experiment
'Suspending a cat between life and death is one of the best-known thought experiments in quantum mechanics. Now researchers from Germany and Spain are proposing a real experiment to probe whether a virus can exist in a superposition of two quantum states. Such superpositions are typically the domain of smaller, inanimate objects such as atoms. But the team believes that their technique, using finely tuned lasers, will soon allow for the superposition of something much
closer to a living organism.'

Plasmobots
'Though not famed for their intellect, single-celled organisms have already demonstrated a surprising degree of intelligence. Now a team at the University of the West of England (UWE) has secured £228,000 in funding to turn these organisms into engineering robots.'
(Isn’t this kind of how Blood Music started?)

Astronomers spot space shuttle’s massive leak


'Sky watchers across North America witnessed a strange event on Wednesday night. As space shuttle Discovery glided silently overhead, the orbiter sprouted a flamboyant comet-like tail.'

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Two, Chapter Five

The motor crew had worked up detailed plans for the exploration of Neptune and several of the dwarf planets at the edge of the Kuiper Belt, but after the expedition to the Pluto System returned to Miranda the Free Outers voted against further trips. Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was a highly promising piece of real estate, to be sure, but it had been comprehensively mapped by human visitors and robot probes, and at present Neptune was on the opposite side of the Solar System. There was no urgent need to go there just yet, and it would be a waste of resources and time better used to improve and expand the settlement on Miranda, and to equip the rest of the Free Outers' little fleet with the fast-fusion motor.

Newt Jones wasn't disheartened by the vote against further expeditions. In fact, he was energised by defeat, convinced that sooner rather than later he would be proven right. He worked long hours on the conversion programme, discussed refinements to the design of the motor with his crew of tech wizards. Macy Minnot returned to her work with the biome crew, tweaking and improving and enriching the habitat's ecosystem. And then, just sixty days after the expedition returned, everything changed.

Read More . . .

More Tireless Self-Promotion

Yep, another book. The UK mass-market paperback of The Quiet War, officially published today. The hardback cover was pretty cool; this one's even cooler. Do I need to tell you to do the right thing by it?

And - yet again - there's more! Cowboy Angels has been rendered into an eBook. You can buy it via WH Smiths or Waterstones. And I've just received copies of the US edition of The Quiet War, and the UK hardback of Gardens of the Sun, both of which look pretty damn fine.

Currently reading: John Carey's biography of William Golding; The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Just watched: District 9.

Coming Soon

Reminiscent of a classic Chris Foss cover or an outtake from 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is an artist's impression of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's new uncrewed supply ship, the H-II transfer vehicle, approaching the International Space Station. The HTV is to be the payload of the first of Japan's new heavy-lifting rocket, due to be launched this month. And Japan isn't the only player in the ISS supply business - see New Scientist for more details.

(The ISS really is a big beast - to give you an idea of scale, the HTV is 10 meters long, and the Soyuz spacecraft (the station's lifeboat) docked at bottom left is about the same size. Cost aside, it really seems like a dumb idea to shut it down in 2015-16.)

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Two, Chapter Four

The spy woke slowly and painfully, trapped in the stiff embrace of his pressure suit, inside the coffin-sized confines of the dropshell. He felt as if he’d been beaten by experts and afterwards staked out in the scorching heat of some desert on Earth. Bruised to the bone, joints stiff and swollen. A black headache pulsing like a poisonous spider inside the tender jelly of his brain. His tongue a shrivelled corpse glued to the floor of its foul tomb. He sipped tasteless recycled water through a tube and wincingly plugged into the dropshell’s myopic sensorium. He’d slept for seventy-two days and now Rhea was directly ahead, a bright pockmarked globe hanging beyond the broad hoop of the rings and the bulge of Saturn’s equator.

READ MORE . . .

EDIT: bad link fixed - thanks Jean-Daniel!

Into The Night

While browsing Emily Lakdawaller’s inestimable blog at the Planetary Society’s site the other day, I came across this great list of active planetary probes - where they are and what they are doing in various parts of the Solar System. What really caught my attention was the entry right at the end of the list: a reminder that the two Voyager probes are still going strong.

Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977 on Grand Tour trajectories that took advantage of a favourable alignment of the outer planets. I was in the middle of my Ph.D studies back then; the space shuttle prototype Endeavour flew for the first time; Elvis died; and Star Wars was released. In 1979 both Voyagers swung past Jupiter, discovering volcanoes on Io and evidence for an ocean beneath the surface of Europa. I gained my Ph.D that year and began my first stint of postdoctoral research; Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister; Sid Vicious died in New York; Y.M.C.A. was the best-selling single in the UK. The next year Voyager 1 reached Saturn and swung past Titan to investigate the moon’s dense atmosphere, a manoeuver that flung it out of the plane of the ecliptic and ended its planetary tour (instead of flying past Titan, it could have gone on to reach Pluto, in hindsight a better option, but back then we didn’t know that Pluto had three moons and an active atmosphere).

Voyager 2 reached Saturn in 1981, the year I started work in the University of California, Los Angeles. Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer married; President Reagan was shot in a failed assassination attempt; the first personal computer was launched by IBM. In 1986, when Voyager 2 swung past Uranus and discovered that one of its moons, Miranda, looked as if it had been shattered and badly reconstructed, I was working in Oxford University, Chernobyl blew its top, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated soon after launch, and Phil Collins won a Grammy. Not a great year, all in all. Voyager 2 reached Neptune in 1989, discovering evidence for active geysers on the ice giant’s largest moon, Triton. In the same year I moved to St Andrew’s University in Scotland to take up my first (and last) real job after a decade of scraping by on postdoctoral grants; the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Empire began to crumble away; George Bush the First succeeded Ronald Reagan as US President; the Chinese pro-democracy movement was crushed at Tiananmen Square; the first full episode of The Simpsons was screened.

Twenty years later, The Simpsons is still going; I’ve written a bunch of short stories and two novels that have made extensive use of images of the outer planets and their moons taken by Voyager 1 and 2; and the two probes are still sending data back to Earth. Voyager 1 is 110 Astronomical Units - 16.5 billion kilometres - from the sun, beyond the Kuiper Belt and every known large body in the Solar System apart from long-term comets; Voyager 2 is presently some 90 AU from the sun. Both probes have passed through the termination shock point, where the velocity of solar wind particles falls below its speed of sound and becomes subsonic. At some point, as yet unknown, they will pass through the heliopause where the flow of solar wind particles is halted by pressure of gases in the interstellar medium, and enter true interstellar space. They will continue to transmit data about the Solar System’s boundary until they no longer have enough power to run any instruments, around 2025, 48 years after they were launched. They’ll continue to fall through interstellar space (unless they are intercepted by alien probes) until, after a couple of billion years or so, their fabric finally disintegrates. They carry with them greetings from Earth, including two golden phonograph records (remember them?) containing images and sounds from Earth. One of the musical tracks is Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting blues lament, ‘Dark Was Night, Cold Was The Ground.’ Never as dark, nor as cold, on Earth, as the long night through which Voyager 1 and 2 are sailing.



(Clip from Wim Wenders' contribution to Martin Scorsese's The Blues; Ry Cooder used Johnson's music in his soundtrack for Wenders' Paris, Texas, released in 1984, two years before Voyager 2 reached Uranus.)

Xposted at Pyr-o-mania.

Deadly Beauty

I love this set of beautifully accurate glass sculptures of pathogenic viruses (above: smallpox), created by Luke Jerram. Viruses are basically weaponised DNA (or RNA), so simple that they're not even considered to be alive, but they have an intricate beauty that these pieces fully reveal. There's an example on display at the Wellcome Collection (one of my favourite museums in London) and he has a solo show at the Smithfield Gallery, London, opening September 22nd. (Via Carl Zimmer.)

Your Moment Of Zen

A 'mutual event' involving Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea, via the Planetary Society blog, where Emily Lakdawalla has posted a set of amazing animations based on multiple images taken by Cassini. Check 'em out!

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Two, Chapter Three

Pluto was currently approaching perihelion. Its highly elliptical orbit was not only carrying it inside the orbit of Neptune; it was also about as close to Uranus as it would ever get -- currently, the ice giant and the dwarf planet were separated by less than two billion kilometres. As far as the Free Outers were concerned, there would never be a better time to pay a visit.

The expedition consisted of two ships equipped with fast-fusion motors, Newt Jones's and Macy Minnot's tug Elephant and the shuttle Out of Eden, carrying twenty-four people, six of them children. The presence of children another reminder to Macy that space was the Outers' natural habitat: not something to be endured or survived but the place where they lived, so they saw no problem in taking their children off on a voyage into the unknown in ships powered by incompletely tested motors. Of course, the older children had more experience of ships and moonscapes than Macy, and could probably cope with any emergency better than she. And the Pluto System wasn't exactly terra incognita, for it had been visited and mapped and sampled by robot probes and human explorers over the past two centuries. Even so, the dwarf planets of the outer dark were strange and incompletely understood, and a long way from anywhere else if something went wrong; Macy admired the Outers' fearless can-do attitude and didn't doubt their competence, but she knew that this wasn't exactly a stroll in the park.

READ MORE . . .

All Of These Worlds Are Yours . . .

. . . is the title of an essay I wrote about new discoveries in the Saturn System, just published in Clarkesworld magazine. It starts like this:

On July 1 2004, seven years after its launch, the Cassini spacecraft crossed the plane of Saturn's ring system. Its chunky body, wrapped in gold-colored Kapton insulation and crowned by the dish of its high-gain antennae, bristled with instrumentation; an independent instrument package, the Huygens probe, clung to it like a limpet. After falling through the gap between the F and G rings, it fired up its engines for ninety-six minutes, skimming just 100,000 kilometers above Saturn's cloud tops as it ended its interplanetary trajectory and inserted itself into an elliptical orbit.

I had some small personal interest in Cassini's success. In the year it was launched, 1997, I published a short story, "Second Skin", set on Proteus, a tiny moon of Neptune: it described an attempt to assassinate an enigmatic but fearsomely accomplished gene wizard, and was the overture to a long love affair with the outer regions of the Solar System. I wrote eight more stories that shared the same future history, and began to plan a pair of novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, about life in the outer regions of the solar system . . .

READ ON . . .

Also, there are books to be won. And wait! There's more! Although the official publication date is a little under three weeks away, you can now buy the Pyr edition of The Quiet War via Amazon.com.

Son Of Cover Pimpage

All five of these fine titles are published today in a new uniform edition. Buy the set! And if you already have them, well, they'll make a great present. EDIT: the cover for Red Dust is actually red in real life; messing about with colour values hasn't made any improvement, alas...

(When Fairyland was first published, I suggested that the silhouette of a certain magic castle in a certain large theme park outside Paris could be used on the cover, because a large part of the action in the second section takes place in its ruins. Unfortunately, the large media corporation which owns the theme park and others like it around the world had copyrighted the image of the chateau, and because you don't mess with the mouse, we went for another concept instead. And now the new paperback sports a fine cover with an evocative angle on an even more famous Parisian landmark.)

When It Changed

There are, at bottom, two kinds of sf disaster novels. In the first, the disaster is so complete and overwhelming, and so sudden, that it forms a distinct and abrupt break with its past (our present). There is a before, and there is an after, and after the before everything is changed. Some sf novels (Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, for instance, or John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids or Stephen Baxter’s Flood) deal with the break itself, and the aftermath. Civilisation is wrecked, more or less noisily, messily, and quickly. A comet hits the Earth; there’s a nuclear war or a plague or an outbreak of grey goo; the sun flares. Things fall apart and a plucky few survivors begin the hard task of starting over; not rebuilding the civilisation that’s been lost, but creating something new. In a rare few novels, notably Ballard’s early work (aside from his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, which is a far more conventional disaster narrative) - The Drought; The Drowned World; The Crystal World - the characters embrace and internalise the disaster. They are not the founding fathers of a new kind of civilisation; they are the last of the humanity, accepting with various kinds of grace or resentment their doom. But for the most part, sf writers view catastrophe as a chance to start over. Even in many sf novels that don’t deal with directly with disaster, some kind of radical break with the present is implied. It is a part of the back story. Things changed sometime in the past, but the effects of those changes are implied. They are absorbed into the texture of the novel.

The second kind of sf disaster novel is less dramatic. The catastrophe is not caused by one thing but is woven from many causes. And these do not cause an abrupt change and a clean break with the past, but drive a slow and complex process of transformation with an unclear endpoint. They are, in other words, heightened versions of what’s happening right now - Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, my own Fairyland. They tends towards the satiric mode; lean towards the dystopian but don’t entirely embrace it. I’m thinking about writing another one.

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Two, Chapter Two

The spy spent more than four hundred days looking for Zi Lei on Iapetus. It should have been easy to find her. There were only ten thousand indigenous inhabitants, plus a few hundred people who'd fled from other moons or had been stranded there by the war. And he knew where she'd been born: the farm at Grandoyne Crater that her family still owned, the very first place he visited. Her family welcomed him warmly, for he was a friend who'd known her when she'd been living in Paris, Dione, someone who could tell them what she had been doing before the war and how she had escaped from prison when it had started. But they claimed that they did not know where she was now and said that they'd lost contact with her when she'd left Iapetus more than five years ago.

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