Avatar

In 1912, a pencil-sharpener salesman named Edgar Rice Burroughs published in a short novel ‘Under the Moons of Mars’ in All-Story Magazine. Republished in longer form in 1917, as A Princess of Mars, it was the first in the Barsoom series, kickstarted the planetary romance genre, and imprinted science fiction with a set of primitive but deeply felt tropes. James Cameroon’s Avatar is nothing less than a return to the primal urges of full-blown planetary romance in the style of Burroughs, Ralph Milne Farley, Homer Eon Flint and Otis Adelbert Kline: a glorious romp through the wonders and perils of an alien world, and a love story featuring a nearly naked alien princess. If you were a fifteen year old kid living in the 1970s and grokking sf, Tarzan of the Apes, and prog rock, a glimpse of Avatar in big-screen 3D and SurroundSound would blow your everloving mind.

Let’s get the story out of the way first. It’s 2154, a mining colony on Pandora, the Earth-like moon of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri-A, source of a vital mineral, unobtanium (a nice, geeky joke: we could have done with a few more). Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-Marine who volunteers to take the place of his dead twin brother as a driver of an avatar, a hybrid creature fettled up from human DNA and the DNA of the Na’vi, the blue-skinned ten-foot tall natives of Pandora. Sully is part of the science team, led by Sigourney Weaver’s Grace Augustine, that’s using the avatars to study and negotiate with the Na’vi; after his avatar is separated from the others, Sully encounters a Na’vi female, Neytiri, and is accepted into her clan, a major scientific coup. But Sully’s loyalty is torn between the scientists and the Na’vi, and former Marine Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of the colony’s security, who plans to evict the Na’vi clan from their home, which inconveniently sits on a motherlode of unobtanium. Quaritch promises Sully that if he can deal with the Na’vi, he’ll get treatment to restore use of his legs; but Sully has fallen for the Na’vi way of life, and with Neytiri . . .

Well, you get the idea. Like the pulp planetary romances, Avatar’s story is achingly simple and laid on with broad strokes. In the first half Sully gets to learn survival skills; in the second, he gets to use them; threaded through his pilgrim’s progress is a plunkingly obvious allegory about greed and uncontrolled capitalism destroying nature’s harmony, and a love story across the divide between two species. The bond between Sully and Na’vi is undeniably affecting, in parts, but it’s also in parts silly and sentimental, the characterisation and dialogue (especially Colonel Quaritch’s - GI Joe had better lines) is basic, the plot twists are utterly predictable, and the film lacks the heart and human qualities of smaller scale sf films like Moon or District 9. But what you take home from Avatar isn’t so much the story as the setting. And the setting, and its rendering, is amazing. Stunning.

There’s a nice scene near the beginning of this very long film where Sully first drives the body of his avatar, and realises that he can walk again, and breaks free from the technicians and the base and joyfully canters through a garden of native plants: that sense of freedom and awe is evoked over and again as the camera floats and zooms through Pandora’s forest. The 3D is crystal-clear and Cameron seamlessly blends live action characters, CG motion-capture characters and CG scenery, using a computer-camera system that allows him to zoom in and twist around anybody and anything. And Pandora itself is the best and most fully-detailed rendering of an alien world ever seen, a forest reimagined as a coral reef, with drifting medusa-like seeds, barracuda-like wolves, shark-like tigers, hammerheaded buffalo. . . In short, an entire, self-consistent biome packed with eye kicks and explored in beautiful and thrilling set pieces: Na’vi leading Sully through the luminescent galaxy of the night-time forest; the ascent of a chain of floating rocks to a floating mountain peak (straight from one of Roger Dean’s album covers); an aerial battle amongst those same floating mountains between helicopters and lumbering transports and a flock of warriors mounted on manta-ray dragons. . . And so on, and so on.

Sure, Cameron has spent enough money to reforest half of the Amazon Basin on a film with a by-the-numbers story that mixes tropes from ancient pulp fiction and the greatest hits from his previous work. But it also conjures, over and again, that heady, full-blown, good old-fashioned sense of wonder: it is, shamelessly, gleefully, a science fiction epic. What it isn’t, is a groundbreaking film, in the way that 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Wars were. But it is a major envelope-pushing advance in terms of what is now possible. Because what’s possible now, thanks to the techniques Cameron has developed, is that anything we can think of can be thrown up on the cinema screen. Think about that: anything at all.

(Xposted to Pyr-o-mania)

Science/Fiction

I used to be a scientist, and (on the principle of write about what you’re interested in rather than write about what you know) a fair number of my novels feature scientists. Here’s one, in The Secret of Life, thinking about science:

There are no mysteries, Mariella thinks, only unrevealed truths. If people will only do a little work, will subject themselves to a little discipline, a little effort, then they too can understand, they too will be amazed not by mystery but by truth. But they don't. Science has built a vast edifice of thought that reaches out to the furthest ends of the Universe, all the way back in time to the first femtosecond of the Universe's creation, all the way forward to matter's final end in the dissolution of protons, a hundred billion years from now. A cathedral of thought built by the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of minds, the greatest achievement of humanity. But most will not even acknowledge it, much less try to understand it.

She still remembers the casual slights and sneers of certain pompous arts students at Cambridge. The moneyed as oblivious to their wealth as fish to water, interested only in maintaining the status quo, with braying upper middle class students their eager collaborators. Proud in their ignorance of science, yet scornful of those who were not interested in the minutia of Renaissance art, opera, or the intricacies of their social seasons. Mariella knows now that their scorn was based on fear. To them, scientists are useful but dangerous, and so must be kept in their place, like Morlocks in the engine-room of the world. And most people take their cue from their leaders, believe that science is a conspiracy only the initiated few can understand, something to be feared. It is partly the fault of mediocre scientists, of course, who react to criticism like spoiled priests fearful of unfrocking, but it is mostly the fault of those who in their ignorance set themselves as the legislators of science, and those, their prejudices set in stone, who have declared themselves to be its moral superiors.

Now, Mariella has a massive chip on her shoulder (she would say she’s evenly balanced, with massive chips on both shoulders), but she also has a point. I was reminded of her the other day, while reading this interesting interview with sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard on the psychology of climate change denial:

‘Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able. Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.’

The problems Norgaard refers to are the kind most often featured in SF stories and novels, and the kind of science deployed to solve them is too often highly simplified. You know the kind of thing: lone geniuses who go against the grain of current thinking; oddballs who stumble upon a new paradigm, like a metal-detecting hobbyist lucking out on a hoard of Roman gold; science advanced by epiphanies that explode with the frequency of flashguns at a film premiere (and in films, often require really fast typing to defuse some last-minute knucklebiting threat involving overflux in the intertubes that would otherwise create deadly feedback in everyone’s hypothalami).

But most science is mostly a cooperative, slow, patient accretive process. Even stone geniuses like Newton famously acknowledged that they couldn’t have got where they did without standing on the shoulders of giants (Newton, who was not the nicest of men, may have been poking fun at his height-challenged rival Leibniz, but it’s still a valid point). And an awful lot of science isn’t about the sudden apprehension of a universal truth, but the gainsaying of alternate explanations for an observed phenomenon or fact - such as this nugget of recent research, which doesn’t prove that methane on Mars (which is constantly destroyed by chemical processes in Martian soil, so must also be constantly produced by some as yet unknown agency) was produced by Martian bacteria, but eliminates the idea that it is created by passage of meteorite through the Martian atmosphere, making the possibility of the bacterial origin of methane slightly more likely.

Of course, this kind of science isn’t much use in the construction of stories in which heroes slice through the Gordian knot of some world-threatening problem, or make some world-changing discovery. But it’s the kind of science that serious SF should at least acknowledge - just as any kind of serious fiction should acknowledge the complexity of the happening world, and the knotty and often ambiguous moral choices real people have to make.

Heroes simplify the world. Sometimes this is useful and good, at those moments in history when a binary choice - black or white, yes or no - must be made. But many problems - like climate change - aren’t easily solved. The information is complicated and the choices we have to make aren’t easy: none of them will allow us to continue to live in the way we’ve been living. Easier then, more comforting, to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, or that it has nothing to do with us, or it can be solved - at a stroke - by brute geoengineering. But not necessarily useful, or right. Not science, but science fantasy.

Now It Can Be Told

Cowboy Angels is to be published in the US by Pyr, probably late 2010. I'm very pleased, of course - especially as its secret title is Look For America and a fair chunk of it riffs off the fun and games of the Bush 2 era.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (7)

Writers who locate themselves outside the science-fiction genre tend to employ the dystopian mode when they write about the future. They don’t think of it as a real place - somewhere you can get to from here, somewhere that can be plausibly mapped and explored, somewhere that’s as varied and contradictory as the present. No, for them it’s a convenient blank screen on which they can project burlesques and dreadful warnings about the awful consequences of technological progress or the failure of a cherished ideology or the triumph of its antithesis. A place where the fears of the present are scaled up to nightmarish proportions.

In Britain, from the Second World War onwards, the best dystopian writing has been inflected with black comedy. Its futures are as seedy and down-at-heel; its tyrannies may be ruthless and absolute, but it’s underlain by the kind of petty rule-making and make-do-and-mend bureaucratic muddle that infected every British institution during and after the war. In the end, there isn’t much difference between 1984's Ministry of Truth and Brazil’s Ministry of Information (or, come to that, the real Ministry of Information).

Case in point: Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome: A Love Story. First published in 1941, its depiction of how the lives of the inhabitants of a sleepy Gloucestershire village are shattered when the neighbouring aerodrome takes control combines a comic coming-of-age story with an allegory about fascism. The narrator, Roy, is an orphan raised by the village’s Rector and his wife. Roy enjoys the uncomplicated life of the village, revolving around pub, church, and the feudal authority of the Squire, but also admires the aerodrome’s power and ruthless efficiency, and this ambivalence is exposed and reflected in every twist of the complex, soap-operatic plot. After the Rector is shot by Roy’s friend the Flight-Lieutenant during a machine-gun demonstration at the village Agricultural Show (‘I say, Roy, something rather rotten has happened. I’m afraid I’ve potted your old man.’), Roy is revolted by the brusque unfeeling funeral address by the aerodrome’s Air Vice-Marshall (imagine Peter Cook playing General Jack D. Ripper), but takes advantage of situation to get married to his sweetheart. Roy’s happiness is short-lived: he’s rapidly entangled in a love-triangle involving himself, his wife, and the Flight Lieutenant that’s complicated by the secret of his origins - which is also the key to the ideology of the Air Vice-Marshall, who takes Roy under his wing after Roy, at the urging of his sweetheart, joins up.

As Michael Moorcock points out in his introduction to the current Vintage edition of the novel, the violent and arrogant behaviour of the airmen in The Aerodrome is clearly modelled on Nazi Blackshirts, but the novel may also have been written in reaction the H.G. Wells’s Things to Come, in which global peace is maintained by a technocratic elite inspired by a mysterious airman. But although Warner was deeply suspicious of claims that science could solve all human problems, he was also a committed left-winger who at Oxford was part of W.H Auden and C. Day Lewis’s circle, and his portrayal of the village’s bucolic life is not suffused with the kind of rosy nostalgia peddled by reactionaries who love to quote Orwell out of context. There’s much drunkenness and casual violence, and the villagers accept the authority of the aerodrome with the same baffled, slightly resentful passivity with which they accepted the feudal authority of the Squire; Warner convincingly argues that it’s this very English quality (‘Mustn’t grumble.’) that makes us peculiarly susceptible to totalitarian rule.

After Roy joins the aerodrome’s cadres, the Air Vice-Marshall gives a long speech that parodies not only the power fantasies of German National Socialism, but also the kind of the technocratic solutions proposed by Wells and other left-wing intellectuals in the 1930s (or, indeed, a troubling number of science fiction novels):

‘Remember that we expect from you conduct of quite a different order from that of the mass of mankind. Your actions, when off duty, may appear and indeed should appear wholly irresponsible. Your purpose - to escape the bondage of time, to obtain mastery over yourselves, and thus over your environment - must never waver. You will discover, if you do not know already, from the course which have been arranged for you, the necessity for what we in this Force are in process of becoming, a new and more adequate race of men.
‘Please do not imagine, gentlemen, that I am speaking wildly. I mean precisely what I say and in course of time you will come to understand me more than you do at present... Science will show you that in our species the period of physical evolution is over. There remains the evolution, or rather the transformation, of consciousness and will, the escape from time, the mastery of self, a task which has in fact been attempted with some success by individuals at various periods, but which is now to be attempted by us all.’

There’s a great deal of calculating advice about dealing with women, too, which Roy fortunately ignores. The human mess of a second love-triangle, involving Roy, the Flight-Lieutenant, and Eusticia, the wife of the aerodrome’s chief scientist, and his discovery of the circumstances of his birth and the identity of his parents, brings him to a crux in which he rejects the Air Vice-Marshall’s ideology:

I began to see that this life, in spite of its drunkenness and its inefficiency, was wider and deeper than the activity in which we were constricted by the iron compulsion of the Air Vice-Marshal's ambition. It was a life whose very vagueness concealed a wealth of opportunity, whose uncertainty called for adventure, whose aspects were innumerable and varied as the changes of light and colour throughout the year. It was a life whose unwieldiness was the consequence of its immensity. No skill could precisely calculate the effects of any action, and all action was dangerous.

At the end, after the Air Vice-Marshall’s dreams of power are curtailed by a very human act of revenge, and Roy realises that although the new order has been broken, the old order could never be restored. Like all good dystopian novels, The Aerodrome doesn’t describe in any kind of detail the new world that rises out of the ashes of the old, but its last pages, and its thrillingly beautiful last line, exactly catch the postwar idealism that swept Churchill from office and put in his place Attlee’s Labour government, which promised to build a New Jerusalem on the ruins of the old order. That it didn’t succeed, (although it did, amongst other things, create the National Health Service), is also prefigured in Warner’s fine dystopian allegory.

Random Linkage 05/12/09

Huge gallery of the best science images from 2009.

Astronomers witness biggest star explosion
'Astronomers have watched the violent death of what was probably the most massive star ever detected. The supernova explosion, which lasted for months, is thought to have generated more than 50 Suns' worth (10^32 kilograms) of different elements, which may one day go on to make new solar systems.'
UPDATED: Original now paywalled. Try here instead.

Why Humans Outlive Apes
'In spite of their genetic similarity to humans, chimpanzees and great apes have maximum lifespans that rarely exceed 50 years. The difference, explains USC Davis School of Gerontology Professor Caleb Finch, is that as humans evolved genes that enabled them to better adjust to levels of infection and inflammation and to the high cholesterol levels of their meat rich diets.'

Do mice with two mothers spell the end for men?
'If you believe some reports, the future of humanity is a super race of genetically-engineered women who can reproduce without men.'

Another World

The orange dot circled and labelled 'B' is a planet circling the Sun-like star GJ 758, seen by the light it emits. It's a big planet, between 10-40 times the mass of Jupiter, and is at a temperature of around 320 degrees Centigrade. Its orbit is very likely eccentric, like Pluto's, and it's about the same distance from its star as Neptune is from the sun, so it isn't being warmed by insolation. Either it's relatively young and at the low end of the estimated mass range, and is emitting heat as it contracts, or it's fairly large and much older - a smallish brown dwarf. The other dot, labelled 'C' may be another planet, or a background star, or an imaging glitch.

It was spotted during the first run of a new adaptive optics instrument that eliminates atmospheric interference of Earth-based telescopic images and is part of a survey programme searching for extra-solar planets. Wonder what else it will find?

Universe Today has more info; a preview of the paper describing the observations is here.

ReBooting Britain

My short article on first, simple steps to make cities greener, and many others on ReBooting Britain, in Wired UK.

Robert Holdstock 1948-2009

A generous and convivial friend, a wonderful author whose novels are vivid and deeply felt evocations of the myths and quotidian reality of the ancient world, and all-round good bloke. Gone too soon and greatly missed.

UPDATE: for those interested, tributes and messages of condolence can be found at his website.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (6)

Another Science Fiction: An Intersection of Art and Technology in the Early Space Race

On industrial trade magazine covers and ads from the days when science was the Way Forward, and the law of unintended consequences had yet to be invented.

(via Big Dumb Object)

Dunes In Winter

The HiRise camera package on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter continues to send back stunningly beautiful images of complex and unexpected textures on the Martian surface. The image above, looking like nothing so much as a finely sculptured high-end chocolate dessert, is of dunes inside a crater in the Southern hemisphere. It's currently winter, in the Southern hemisphere of Mars, and the sheen on the smooth east-facing slopes, sheltered from the sun, is either water or carbon dioxide frost. The intricate scrolls and furls of the west-facing slopes is due to modification by southerly and northerly winds of ridges sculpted by prevailing westerly winds.

You can find a high-resolution image, a close-up of the latticed dunes, and more information here; Boston Globe's the Big Picture has a great gallery here. In the past decade, HiRise's vast catalogue of images and images and data from Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Express, the MRO, the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the Phoenix Lander, have rendered every novel and non-fiction book about Mars out-of-date to some degree or other. Time for a new wave, perhaps...

Random Linkage 28/11/09

First Black Holes May Have Incubated in Giant, Starlike Cocoons
'The first large black holes in the universe likely formed and grew deep inside gigantic, starlike cocoons that smothered their powerful x-ray radiation and prevented surrounding gases from being blown away, says a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.'

Dark power: Grand designs for interstellar travel
'No one disputes that building a ship powered by black holes or dark matter would be a formidable task. Yet remarkably there seems to be nothing in our present understanding of physics to prevent us from making either of them. What's more, Crane believes that feasibility studies like his touch on questions in cosmology that other research hasn't considered.'

Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime
'Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.'

NASA to develop haptic air-typing spacesuit gloves
'NASA is considering plans to integrate haptic vibro feedback and Halting State style
air-writing accelerometer capability into spacesuit gloves.'
(Why not just use chip-enhanced mindpower?)

Recommendations Wanted

Amazon have given me three GBP credit to spend on MP3 downloads. Gosh. What should I buy?

Comfortably Numb

I find myself becoming mildly obsessed with this Pink Floyd song. It's extremely well known - probably their best-known song in fact, up there in best plank-spanking polls and so on - but flew way under my radar when it was first released in 1979; although the hippy living in the flat beneath mine back in Bristol had it on constant replay I was so not into the whole concept album thing back then, and I've never seen the film. But I was boxset-streaming The Sopranos from start to finish recently , and a snippet of 'Comfortably Numb' (the live version with Van Morrison, from The Departed soundtrack) was playing in Christopher Moltisanti's SUV just before he crashed. Since then, I've been listening to various versions, and finding that the dialogue between a doctor and a pop star who needs chemical enhancement to get going has been helping me find my way inside a character who had previously been frustratingly opaque. Underneath the bombast, there's a fragile wistfulness, a longing for things lost, a revelation half-glimpsed and barely understood. Perfect for the posthuman condition I'm trying to evoke.

So far I like this version best. If only for the flowering-medusa-spaceship thing, and the crowd's transcendent rapture.

Random Linkage 21/11/09

'Hobbits' Are a New Human Species, According to Statistical Analysis of Fossils
'Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York have confirmed that Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease. Using statistical analysis on skeletal remains of a well-preserved female specimen, researchers determined the "hobbit" to be a distinct species and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans.'

Fossil hunters unearth galloping, dinosaur-eating crocodiles in Sahara
'Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of primitive crocodiles that "galloped" on land and patrolled the broad rivers that coursed through north Africa one hundred million years ago.'

Nanotechnology Team Discover How to Capture Tumor Cells in Bloodstream
'A team led by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) researchers on the cutting edge of nanotechnology has found a way to capture tumor cells in the bloodstream that could dramatically improve earlier cancer diagnosis and prevent deadly metastasis.'

'Vampire Star': Ticking Stellar Time Bomb Identified
'Using ESO's Very Large Telescope and its ability to obtain images as sharp as if taken from space, astronomers have made the first time-lapse movie of a rather unusual shell ejected by a "vampire star," which in November 2000 underwent an outburst after gulping down part of its companion's matter. This enabled astronomers to determine the distance and intrinsic brightness of the outbursting object.'

'Frankenstein' fix lets asteroid mission cheat death
'The beleaguered Hayabusa asteroid probe is back on track to return to Earth after a clever workaround coaxed one of its ion engines back to life.
'The recovery is yet another reversal of fortune for the Japanese spacecraft, which has been plagued with problems since its visit to asteroid Itokawa in 2005.'

Second Extrication Drive Yields Slight Progress
'Spirit successfully completed the first step of its planned two-step motion on Sol 2090 (Nov.19).
'After spinning the wheels for the equivalent of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) in the forward direction, the center of the rover moved approximately 12 millimeters (0.5 inch) forward, 7 millimeters (0.3 inch) to the left and about 4 millimeters (0.2 inch) down. The rover tilt changed by about 0.1 degree. Small forward motion was observed with the non-operable right front wheel, and the left front wheel showed indications of climbing, despite the center of the rover moving downward. These motions are too small to establish any trends at this time.'

Give Me More: Augmented Reality from EPFL+ECAL Lab
'Artistic animations float across the pages of a timeless book about the Swiss countryside. Banknotes prove strangely seductive. Your head is suddenly engulfed in clouds and your clothes ooze bubbles. This is the world of Give Me More, an Augmented Reality (AR) exhibit by Switzerland’s EPFL+ECAL Lab, premiering in the U.S. at swissnex San Francisco.'

The Illustrated Man: How LED Tattoos Could Make Your Skin a Screen
'The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.
'New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.'

What If Earth Had Rings Like Saturn?

2001: A Who Odyssey

Secret Histories

A few years ago, Jonathan Lethem published an essay in The Village Voice, ‘Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’, in which he decried the close-mindedness of the genre and sketched an alternate history in which Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow won the Nebula instead of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama in 1973, leading to a reconciliation between sf and the rest of literature and the mutual enrichment of both. Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have an argument with that idea in their anthology The Secret History of Science Fiction, selecting stories by authors on both sides of the divide to illustrate their thesis that the so-called boundary between sf and ‘mainstream’ literature has long been blurred and hard to define: sf authors can turn in well-honed stories that match the best in ‘mainstream’ literature (hate that term, but it’s convenient and everyone knows what it means), while mainstream authors can be as adept at using the tropes of sf and fantasy as genre writers. In short, Lethem’s alternate history is a true history, albeit unrecognised.

All of which is true, and has certainly been true for all kinds of crossover and slipstream works since 1973, if not much earlier. But you can find a different kind of secret history of sf in another book, Sin-a-rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties, which collects together all kinds of lurid covers and essays by publishers and authors, including one by Robert Silverberg in which he describes how he wrote 150 softcore sleaze novels in five years for fun and profit. Harlan Ellison and Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote sleaze novels, too; so did mystery writer Donald Westlake, and a number of other well-known authors. At the time, Silverberg explains, ‘A dozen or so magazines for which I had been writing regularly ceased publication overnight; and as for the tiny market for s-f novels . . . it suddenly became so tight that unless you were one of the first-magnitude stars like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov you were out of luck.’ Silverberg turned to the sleaze trade as a way of earning a living, and discovered that it was also a valuable apprenticeship: ‘It isn’t just that I earned enough by writing them to pay for that big house and my trips to Europe. I developed and honed important professional skills, too, while I was pounding out all those books.’

Sf publishing has always been a chancy, hand-to-mouth affair for most. It imploded again in the early 1980s, and there are signs that it’s about to implode again. And because they can’t hope for sinecure positions in creative writing in universities (although that’s changing, now), sf writers have always been ready to turn their hands and minds to the kind of writing that can be churned out quickly and profitably. In the golden age of the pulps, the 1940s and 1950s, sf authors like James Blish or Frederik Pohl were capable of banging out one story for Amazing in the morning and another for Stirring Sports Stories in the afternoon (and barely made a living at it - see for instance Pohl’s fine memoir The Way the Future Was, or the roman-a-clef opening of Blish’s Jack of Eagles, in which the penniless hero pours tea on his cornflakes because he can’t afford milk). While Silverberg et al were working in the titillation trade in the US, over here in the UK Michael Moorcock was editing New Worlds with one hand and writing Sexton Blake adventures with the other, while many of his contemporaries were writing westerns, biker novels and, yes, sexploitation novels. A little later, Kim Newman and Neil Gaiman worked for the British soft porn magazine Knave. And sf writers today are also working in comics and graphic novels, novels based on role-playing games (Kim Newman and a slew of authors associated with Interzone in the 1990s wrote innovative and highly successful short stories novels for Games Workshop), film tie-ins . . .

These days, of course, there are plenty of sf writers who didn’t come up through pulps, or via sf fandom. But it was in the febrile arena of pulp sf that many tropes and imagery in common sf toolkit was generated and shared and elaborated upon (apart from all those ideas invented by HG Wells and Jules Verne). And while sf can sometimes aspire to the condition of literature, just as literature can sometimes aspire to the condition of sf, and while there are plenty of so-called literary qualities which all writers should aspire to master, and every kind of bad writing in whatever field should be rightly despised, there are values outside of the literary canon that have their own intrinsic worth.

The themes and tropes of sf have become part of pop culture and the happening world. Most of the writers in the sf genre use them as if they were real, most writers outside it use them metaphorically or allegorically. Both can produce works of lasting value, but one is looking forward, and the other is looking back. Think of these two secret histories as poles of a magnet, with sf inhabiting the field lines stretched between them: a continuum in which the only borderlines are those writers choose to draw around themselves.

The Road

There's a lot to admire in director John Hillcoat's film version of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalypse novel The Road. Two unnamed and unashamedly emblematic figures, father and son, trudge southwards through ruined cities and ashy landscapes where after some undefined but global catastrophe every last thing is dead save for a few human survivors. Hillcoat, production designer Chris Kennedy and Director of Photography Javier Aguirresarobe have conjured a convincingly bleak and monochromatic mis-en-scene that favours the use of real locations ravaged by natural and manmade traumas rather than CGI. Vigo Mortensen is suitably grim and determined as a father oscillating between extremes of love and harrowing dread, widowed by a wife who committed suicide because she believed living was worse than death, and pledged to protecting his young son even if it means killing him. Kodi Smit-McPhee projects a frail and innocent goodness, touchingly trusting and generous, all but overwhelmed by a terrifying world racked by earthquakes and fire storms, and haunted by desperate thieves and gangs of cannibals. Flashbacks to scenes with the man's wife (Charlize Theron) underscore the desperation and near hopelessness of his plight.

Yet the film doesn't quite gel. McCarthy's novel braids the man's Robinson Crusoe-like ingenuity with the bond between father and son whose survival is the survival of hope in a world otherwise bereft. The novel's spare, precise prose is predicated on an intimate knowledge of the workings of the world that informs every page; its deceptively simple story of survival is a grim game of consequences. Early on, the man and boy are almost caught by a gang of roving cannibals and must flee, losing almost all they possess. They forge on, starving and desperate, until the man takes a near fatal risk by breaking into a house which turns out to be the lair of another cannibal gang that keeps a larder of living victims in a cellar. And so on, and so on. But the film, although a reverent interpretation, is more like a series of formal tableaux than a coherent narrative -- stark and beautifully rendered tableaux to be sure, but lacking continuity. The unending search for food and shelter that forms one of the novel's central threads is all but lost - Hillcote relies instead on an intermittent voiceover and a plangent but irritatingly overplayed score to underscore their predicament - and there's little tension or genuine sense of peril in the action scenes. Instead, the focus is kept on the relationship between father and son, which while beautifully and often tenderly depicted, is touched a little too often by naked sentiment. It's by no means a bad film, and there's considerable power in its devastating and unflinchingly bleak portrayal of a world utterly plundered and ruined - a world our own world may contain in embryo - and in the hopefully simplicity of its last image. But it's slighter and less involving than it wants to be, perhaps because - as too often with films like this - it pays so much respectful attention to its prize-winning, critically-acclaimed source that it fails to deliver the kind of vigour and originality that infused another parable of harsh Old Testament morality: Hillcoat's previous film, The Proposition.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (5)

Random Linkage 14/11/09

LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon
'The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.
'Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.
'NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.'
(When it starts to crack really bad puns, you can tell when the group mind of NASA is really excited, and quite right too. How long before some high-end Hollywood restaurant is selling Moon water at $1 million a bottle?)

Spirit Begins Extraction Process
On Monday, November 16, 2009, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will begin the much-anticipated, weeks-long process of extricating itself from a patch of powdery soil that stopped it in its tracks six months ago. It will begin by driving forward to the north, following its tracks out, even though its right front wheel is broken and immobilized.
(The rover driving team have about four months to get their brave little toaster free of the sandpit before winter comes and its power levels drop.)

Ghostly 'Spokes' Puff Out From Saturn's Rings
Massive, bright clouds of tiny ice particles hover above the darkened rings of Saturn in an image captured by the Cassini spacecraft on Sept. 22, 2009, around the time of Saturn's equinox.

Bizarre Lives Of Bone-eating Worms
'It sounds like a classic horror story -- eyeless, mouthless worms lurk in the dark, settling onto dead animals and sending out green "roots" to devour their bones. In fact, such worms do exist in the deep sea. They were first discovered in 2002 by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), who were using a robot submarine to explore Monterey Canyon. But that wasn't the end of the story. After "planting" several dead whales on the seafloor, a team of biologists recently announced that as many as 15 different species of boneworms may live in Monterey Bay alone.'
(Now imagine them growing bigger, and crawling out of the sea...)

12 claustrophobic space capsules

A joyride through the nanoscale

Science Fiction that Isn't Science Fiction (4)

Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade—novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.

Nader Elhefnawy does a very credible job of tracking the rise and fall of the technothriller, drawing a straight line from Edisonades of the nineteenth Century, though H.G. Wells' The War in the Air, Heinlein&Co, to Clancy and those other guys.

While video games remain a robust market for these tales (partly because of their lesser dependence on credible plots) the fading of the military techno-thriller from television and film roughly tracked the course taken by the novels, up to their even more complete disappearance.

No kidding about video games; they've thoroughly absorbed and reengineered technothriller tropes; the best are sophisticated and melancholy studies of the loneliness of the long distance warrior.

When I Was A Scientist

Last night I dreamed I was in a laboratory again.

We all have a particular anxiety dream that we return to over and again. Mine is about being unable to get together the various things required to maintain the clone I looked after, on and off, for twenty years. It's a natural clone of a simple freshwater animal, green hydra, distant relative of corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish. That's it in the photo above - some of you may remember it from university or school biology classes. It's about a half a centimetre long, and has a simple body plan: a tube constructed from an outer ectoderm and inner gastroderm, both mostly one cell thick and separated by an acellular mesoglea (the jelly in jellyfish). At one end is a mouth ringed by tentacles that contain four different kinds of nematoblasts, cells with capsules that explode when triggered, enjecting prey with poison and wrapping barbed coils around them. At the other is a foot by which it adheres to a suitable substrate. Green hydra are an example of a mutualistic symbiosis. They contain, in gastrodermal digestive cells, populations of single-celled Chlorella algae. The algae supply the animal with nutrition; the animal provides the algae with shelter, and nutrients they need to grow.

Hydra can reproduce asexually by budding, which is what the specimen in the photo is doing; eventually that bud at its waist will develop tentacles and a mouth and pinch off from its parent and take up an independent existence. And that means you can clone up from a single specimen a population of genetically identical individuals, ideal for use in experiments. I used to grow thousands of them for my research, which investigated how the intimate relationship between these two very different organisms was regulated.

Hydra aren't difficult to grow. You keep them in artificial pond water made up with simple chemicals, supply them with light and a constant temperature between 15 and 20 degrees Centigrade, feed them with freshly-hatched brine shrimp, and keep the Pyrex trays in which they grow nice and clean. My dream, the one I return to (or which returns to me) is that I can't quite manage this routine. I've forgotten to hatch the brine shrimp, or forgotten to clean the trays after feeding, or I don't have any artificial pond water and the chemicals to make it are missing, or there's something wrong with the incubator cabinets that keep the trays of hydra at the right temperature . . . And I wake up in that state of unresolved anxiety we all have, from time to time.

Other people dream of missing planes or trains, or being unable to find their way out of or into a building, or of arriving at a concert of business meeting without a stitch of clothing. I used to dream about exams, although not in the way that most people do - of having to take an exam without knowing anything about the subject. No, I used to dream about invigilating exams, another part of my former job. That went away after a while, but I still dream about culturing hydra, even though I quit science more than thirteen years ago. Funny, isn't it, what sticks in the mind?

Tranquility Base

Now the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter has settled into its mapping orbit just 50 kilometres above the Moon's surface, it has been returning some spectacular images of the Apollo landing sites. Above is a close-up of an image of the the Apollo 11 site, just released by NASA. It's about 150 metres across, with the LEM landing stage and the pads of its legs clearly visible, as well as the various compenents of the science package. And, of course, the tracks left Armstrong and Aldrin, showing how close they stayed to their home on the Moon in the few hours they spent outside, reminding me all over again of watching them in the early hours of that July morning forty years ago.

More Spaceship Goodness

Hey, it's the cover for the US edition of Gardens of the Sun, scheduled for publication in March 2010. Kudos to artist Sparth and hero editor Lou Anders.

Leipzig, 1989

In 2002, I was one of the guests of honour at a science-fiction convention in Leipzig. I had a fine old time. My hosts took me and the other guests to the top of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal War Memorial, the largest war memorial in Europe, and held a celebratory dinner in Auerbach’s Keller, the cellar restaurant where Goethe is supposed to have received inspiration for Faust. I visited the monumental train station, too, and the church of St Thomas, where Bach was cantor, and where he is buried (a choir was rehearsing one of his cantos: a spine-tingling moment). My hosts also took me to the Nikolai Church, in the heart of the medieval part of the city, and showed me the former Stasi headquarters, partly converted to a nightclub, past which, in the last days of East Germany, candle-carrying citizens had walked once a week, risking their freedom in peaceful protest against the communist regime. The Nikolai Church and the story of the Monday demonstrations and those candle-lit walks left a lasting impression on me, and got me interested in nonviolent protest, something I'd later work into some of my fiction.

The fall of the Berlin Wall didn't begin in Berlin; it began in Leipzig, with those peaceful protestors. In 1989, prayers for peace, a regular Monday-night event in the Nikolai Church, became so swollen by citizens dissatisfied with the Communist government that nonviolent demonstrations began to be held in the nearby Karl Marx Square. Towards the end of October, over 320,000 people gathered in nonviolent protest - more than half the population of the city - and by then similar protests were being held in squares of other cities in East Germany: an inexorable tide of protest that led to the toppling of the wall, the end of the East German government, and the eventual reunification of Germany. Nonviolence doesn't always succeed, of course, but even when it's beaten down by determined and ruthless opponents, it can leave behind the seeds for change. In 1968, student protests in Warsaw and the Prague Spring were swiftly subdued; yet afterwards, as Michel Gorbachev admitted, nothing was the same again. The Soviets and their puppet governments had lost credibility, and the support of the people. When they were challenged again, twenty years later, they fell apart.

Where do science fiction writers get their ideas? Isn't it obvious?

Random Linkage 07/11/09

Data from Kaguya's prime mission to the Moon has been released
'Yesterday, the Japanese space agency announced the public release of the data from the primary mission of the Kaguya (a.k.a. SELENE) lunar orbiter. The release covers the period from December 21, 2007 to October 31, 2008, and includes data from all of the science instruments (which excludes the HD camera, not a science instrument). This release formally opens up the data for use by all scientists and enthusiasts around the world, not just the Kaguya science team, and will be a rich resource for lunar scientists.'

Speed Limit To The Pace Of Evolution, Biologists Say
'Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a theoretical model that informs the understanding of evolution and determines how quickly an organism will evolve using a catalogue of "evolutionary speed limits." The model provides quantitative predictions for the speed of evolution on various "fitness landscapes," the dynamic and varied conditions under which bacteria, viruses and even humans adapt.'

Mass extinction blamed on fiery fountains of coal
'FOSSIL fuels have a new crime to live down. A frenzy of hydrocarbon burning at the end of the Permian period may have led to the most devastating mass extinction Earth has ever seen, as explosive encounters between magma and coal released more carbon dioxide in the course of a few years than in all of human history.'

Neutered HIV Virus Delivers Treatment to Fatally Ill Boys
'Researchers may have taken a step towards curing the rare, inherited brain disease made famous by the movie Lorenzo’s Oil–and also towards ushering a new era of gene therapy. To help two young boys suffering from the disease, researchers tried an experimental treatment using a deactivated version of the HIV virus. The virus delivered working copies of a gene to stem cells from the patients’ bone marrows. The HIV virus, stripped of genetic material that makes it toxic, integrates permanently into the DNA of cells it enters, scientists said. That means the modified gene remains in the blood-forming stem cells for the life of the patient.'

Widescreen Mars

A stunning portfolio of images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Hi-Rise camera, selected by the Boston Globe's Big Picture.

2012

Fulfills every expectation of a Roland Emmerich disaster flick: big, noisy, national monuments in the firing line, totally infused with Emmerich's talent for presenting spectacular CGI destruction as flatly as Powerpoint, and killing billions of people and failing to make you care for any of them. But if it's dumb spectacle you want, he's your man, there's a nice twist in the story, and I can't help but having a sneaking regard for a film whose hero is a failed SF writer.

Most interesting aspect of these films, for me, is the use of found media footage to titivate the mise en scene. We're already in the middle of an apocalypse, and like the frog in the pot on the stove, don't realise the water is growing fatally warm.

Bonus Awful Warning: the Stephen Somers remake of When Worlds Collide due next year: 'Alpha Centauri is on a collision course for Earth, and mass hysteria of biblical proportions breaks out in the streets...'

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (3)

Roland Emmerich’s 2012 claims to be inspired by ancient Mayan prophecies, but with its lovingly detailed CGI shots of the destruction of the temples of Mammon and saving of a small band of the blessed, it’s actually square in the Christian apocalyptic tradition - something that’s almost as old as Christianity itself. The last book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation (also known as Apocalypse, from the verb apokalypto, to reveal), was written towards the end of the first century AD. It’s a visionary warning of the End Times, when the damned will flock to the AntiChrist, the Earth will be visited with every kind of destruction, and true believers will at last ascend into the infinite bliss of the New Jerusalem. Outbreaks of apocalypse fever have swept through Christianity ever since, peaking around 1500, when dozens of sects proclaimed the coming of the End Times (see Norman Cohen’s The Pursuit of the Millennium), and again around the end of the last century. Millions of premillennialists (especially Evangelical Christians in the United States; one of the Founding Fathers, Cotton Mather, was an ardent premillennialist) still expect at any moment to experience the Rapture of bodily ascent into Heaven as a prelude to the harrowing of Earth by a returned Christ.


This apocalypse is the subject of Victorian painter John Martin’s ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’ (above); this, and other huge, sensationalist canvases, were allegedly inspired by commercial dioramas animated by use of artificial lighting - precursors of present-day blockbuster movies. While Martin’s themes were biblical, most of the apocalypses in Hollywood movies are secular,with nuclear war, asteroids, or Arnold Swarzenegger as substitutes for God’s wrath. But an outfit outside the Hollywood machine, Cloud Ten Pictures, has been making movies for a Christian audience that deploy the tropes of premillennialism with deadly seriousness. They’ve produced a trilogy based on the bestselling Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a literal portrayal of the End Times of the premillennialists, as well as several thrillers that share the same post-Rapture setting, as well as the same villain, UN President Nicolae Carpathia, aka the AntiChrist (played by Gordon Currie - what must his fan mail be like?): Revelation, Apocalypse, and Tribulation (starring Gary Busey and featuring Margot Kidder and Mr T as, er, Mr T).

They look like science fiction, or science thrillers, but they aren't. As far as the people who made them and their intended audience are concerned, they embody a literal truth.

Plume Run

The Cassini Orbiter completed its seventh close encounter with Saturn's small but highly active moon Enceladus yesterday, passing within a hundred kilometres of the south pole and ploughing through the plumes of water ice fired into space by some as yet unknown process deep beneath the surface. For much of the pass, Cassini was using various instruments to sample the plume, but it took pictures before and after the encounter; Emily Lakdwalla has pasted a couple of the best images in her blog over at the Planetary Society's site, including one of fissured and folded terrain that reminds me all over again that despite its small size, just five hundred kilometres in diameter, Enceldaus possesses an extremely varied and geologically active surface. It's easy to imagine climbing one of those ridges and looking out at a tangle of long, low bright hills snaking towards the sharply curved horizon . . .

Random Linkage 31/10/09

Symbiosis by Jelte van Abbema
'Dutch designer Jelte van Abbema won the €10,000 Rado Prize at the Dutch Design Awards last week for a body of work including Symbiosis, an experimental project that involved printing with bacteria.'

Detecting Life-Friendly Moons
'Forty years ago, the Apollo astronauts traipsed across our Moon, making it "inhabited" for the first time – albeit for only two and half hours. A bona-fide habitable moon has never been found, but astronomers are considering how we might find one around distant stars.'

Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy
'Mysterious radio blips that come from apparently empty regions of space may be the voices of long-dead stars.'

Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life
'The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record. However, the causes of its origin have been the subject of debate for decades, and the question of what was the trigger for the single cell microorganisms to assemble and organize into multicellular organisms has remained unanswered until now.'

Tiny banner ads attached to flies generate buzz
'A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.'

Zombie Creatures: What Happens When Animals Are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master?
'From fungi to flies, some parasitic species have figured out how to control their host's behavior to get what they need. See what happens when bugs go really bad.'

Solar Power Footprint

See it? That little black square in the middle of Saudi Arabia? It's 231 kilometres on a side, covering some fifty-three thousand square kilometres. That's the total area of solar panels needed to supply global electricity needs at its current rate of consumption, some 2 trillion Watts. Calculated by Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert of Chicago University, in an open letter that corrects global-warming denying innumeracy in Superfreakonomics.

(via Carl Zimmer)

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (2)

At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected with his past. He could only look sternly at Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.

From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him. Grimness was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.

By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.

In this scene from Thomas Hardy’s third published novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Knight, a geologist, has just saved the woman he loves and now finds himself hanging from a precarious ledge high on a Cornish seacliff. It's not only the prototypical cliffhanger, dutifully replicated in just about every Hollywood action film; it's also an early instance of another kind of vertiginous thrill: the abrupt contrast between ordinary human life and deep time that creates the famous 'sense of wonder' science fictional affect.

Hardy is best known for his Wessex novels, which mythologise a large swathe of south and south-west England where rural life embedded in landscape and its rhythms and seasons is undergoing changes forced by industrialisation. But at the time of writing A Pair of Blue Eyes, the early 1870s, Britain was in the throes of a scientific revolution too. Darwin's evolutionary theories threatened to displace mankind from the centre of creation; and geology and paleontology were opening up vast backward and abyssal vistas of time. Confronted by the dead gaze of the trilobite, Knight is immediately plunged into a vivid vision of scenes from the history of life on Earth that wouldn't be out of place in an SF novel:

Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts--perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon--all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines--alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.

Hardy and other late Victorian novelists were concerned with both human individuality and the problems thrown up by industrialisation, urbanisation and scientific revolution. But after modernism overwhelmed the realists, and rejected the authority of science along with that of God and government, SF moved in to take up arguments and themes that have only just been rediscovered by the mainstream.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction

Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.

Arthur C. Clarke?
Olaf Stapledon?
Stephen Baxter?
Nope. Friedrich Engels.

Via infinite thought

More Distraction

On Twitter.

51̊28'38"N 0̊00'00"E

To Greenwich and the Royal Observatory on Friday, to take part in a discussion about ‘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’. The answer to which is of course no, they are not, but I hope the various ramifications and byways my colleagues and I explored were sufficiently entertaining to the small but perfectly formed audience. The organisers may have been a tad optimistic to expect large audiences for the three panel discussions and the screening of Star Trek which were all running at the same time, but I can’t fault the location: our event took place in the circular library at the top of the observatory - the place where the telescope used to be housed, in fact. The round table at which we sat (with an inlay indicating true north) was directly beneath the dome that once opened to the night sky; there were some fine brass telescopes, astrolabes and other instruments in glass cabinets, and all kinds of wonderful books on the shelves running around the room.

The Royal Observatory is also the location of the Prime Meridian, where longitude is 0̊, the dividing line between east and west. Its location is arbitrary, defined by Sir George Airy in 1851, ratified by the International Meridian Conference in 1884 and observed by international convention (although not by everyone, to begin with; the French continued to use the Paris Meridian for a number of years). Appropriate then, that our panel discussion several times touched on the arbitrary division between science fiction that’s based on what’s possible, and science fiction that uses traditional but implausible tropes such as aliens and faster-than-light travel, reminiscent of a recent declaration by Margaret Atwood that she writes speculative fiction rather than science fiction, defining the difference between the two with her usual laser-like precision:

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see. We can do the lineage: Sci-fi descends from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; speculative fiction descends from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

I’m sort of sympathetic to Atwood’s need to avoid the science fiction tag (she believes that being defined as an SF writer would be the kiss of death to her career as a literary novelist), but her distinction between ‘speculative fiction’ and ‘sci-fi’ is not only as arbitrary as locating the Prime Meridian at 51̊28'38"N 0̊00'00"E, but is completely wrong-headed.

Obviously, novels about Martian invasions lie on the far side of the improbability, but it’s not always easy to predict what we’ll be able to do in the future. Who, in the nineteenth century, could have predicted that their great-great-grandchildren would be able to teleport photons, calculate the number of universes in the multiverse, or create black holes? These seem fantastical even now, yet they are as plausible as Verne’s deep-ocean submarine - if not more so, given that the Nautilus was coal-fired.

Wells’s The War of the Worlds is a realistic depiction of what we in the twenty-first century know must be a fantastical event - the invasion of Earth by Martians. We know now that the only Martians that might plausibly exist are some kind of bacteria or archaeobacteria because observations of the planet from orbit and from the surface have conclusively demonstrated that it is incapable of supporting advanced forms of life. But when Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, in 1898, there was a strong strand of scientific opinion that Mars was not only habitable, but inhabited. In 1877 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed patterns of lines on Mars which he called ‘caneli’ - channels. Twenty years later, Percival Lowell argued that these channels really were canals, part of an irrigation network built by an ancient civilisation to transport water from the polar caps. He and others also claimed to have observed seasonal advance and retreat of vegetation across the surface of Mars. In the late nineteenth century, then, it was not at all fantastical to write about Martians because belief that some kind of life existed on Mars was commonplace.

Of course, even though some scientists in the late nineteenth century believed that there might be Martians does not mean that, when it was published, The War of the Worlds could have been included in Atwood’s speculative fiction category. There was no absolute evidence that Martians existed; photographing or dissecting a Martian was not something that scientists could actually do. (Although the Martian heat-rays, then fantasy, now are not.) But it’s a trivial exercise to think of novels that were once ‘speculative fiction’ but are now ‘sci-fi’ simply because the science or universally held assumption on which their speculations were based has since been disproved. One of the tropes in Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood, is the creation of weird new hybrid species of animals and plants by genetic engineering. But while that seems a pretty probable development of current science, we can’t predict with absolute certainty that one day splicing parts of two different genomes together may be routine. We already know that genomes aren’t simple instruction manuals but are highly dynamic and packed with delicate checks and balances, and there’s now experimental evidence that rewinding evolution and deriving ancestral forms from modern genomes is far more difficult than was formerly believed. What was once rock-solid speculation too often melts into thin, thin air.

In any case, defining novels by a single characteristic - how realistic they are, how close they are to things we can actually do - is dangerously simplistic. The War of the Worlds is not just about a war of the worlds; at the heart of its narrative is a lesson in hubris founded on a powerful and unsettling scientific truth. Wells makes a famous comparison in the opening paragraph of his novel:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Wells studied biology under Thomas Huxley, who rejected current ideas of vitalism and strongly (and correctly) believed that all characteristics of living creatures could be explained by interactions between their constituent chemicals, and was a ferocious and famous supporter of Darwinism (he coined the term). And the idea that most strongly informs The War of the Worlds is not the possibility of life on other worlds, but Darwin’s theory of evolution. If life could evolve on Earth, Wells argues, then why not on Mars? And if there are two separate kingdoms of life, what would happen when one contacts the other?

The war of the worlds is not a war between Martians and men, but an extreme example of the struggle for existence that has shaped the evolution of every species on Earth. Human beings are incidental to the struggle. They are collateral damage. Wells has his Martians land in England when it is at the height of its pomp: the centre of the British Empire, the largest ever known; the epitome of industrial enterprise and scientific innovation. Yet the combined might of the British armed forces is swatted aside by the Martians, English civilisation is swiftly reduced to anarchy, and in the end the Martians are not defeated by microscopic bacilli to which, because they are from another world, they have not evolved resistance.

The epigraph of The War of the Worlds, taken from Kepler’s The Anatomy of Melancholy,* asks ‘how are all things made for man?’ Wells’ answer is that the world and all that is in it is not made for us at all; that the belief that, by divine right, we are masters of the world and the apex of creation is a false and dangerous illusion. That’s the heart of his novel, and we know that it is as true and real as television. Against that, the so-called difference between speculative fiction and sci-fi is trivial indeed.

*EDIT: Oops, actually a quotation from Kepler used by Burton in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, and then borrowed by Wells. Thanks to Cosma for spotting it.

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.