RIP 2013

After the global celebrations of an arbitrary point in the planet's orbit, a solipsistic entry about 2013 and me.

The big news as far as I'm concerned is that it's another year in which I didn't die of cancer. After being diagnosed with and being treated for cancer in 2010 I remain in remission.  Three years on, after it didn't look like I'd outlive Margaret Thatcher, I'm grateful that I'm still here, still able to work, and still being published.

I'm able to write this because of the intervention of the National Health Service, which was there when I needed it and provided - is still providing - care that's free at the point of demand. But for how much longer? Margaret Thatcher began to privatise public utilities and sell off public housing; her successor, John Major, privatised the railway system; the present government shows every sign of wanting to break up the NHS and privatise the profitable bits. And in 2013 it revealed that the so-called austerity measures that have impoverished the poor and disabled and disadvantaged are driven not so much by contingency but by ideology. When the present financial crisis ends, the government plans to continue to cut back public services and sell off the commons to multinational companies that offshore profits. Meanwhile, across the world, the richest 1% continues to accumulate wealth at the expense of the rest of us. The neofeudal society that backgrounded my Quiet War novels seems closer than ever.

The civil war in Syria, the NSA's hydra-headed snooping, extreme weather events and the ongoing sixth extinction ... Life in the early Anthropocene isn't getting any easier. But hey, there were some good stories of human resilience and generosity, too. An astronaut aboard the International Space Agency had a hit with an old David Bowie song. The Curiosity rover discovered that Mars once harboured conditions suitable for life as we know it; the Hubble telescope captured evidence that Jupiter's moon Europa is blasting plumes of water ice into space, hinting at the vast ocean beneath its icy shell; the Voyager 1 spacecraft reached interstellar space; the Chinese space agency delivered a lander and a rover to the surface of the Moon. The things we can do.

Apart from trips to Italy, where I was one of the guests of honour at DEEPCON 15, and to the Celsius 232 SF & Fantasy Festival in Avilés, Spain, I mostly hunkered down in my office and wrote. PS Publishing produced a collection of stories, A Very British History, from the past twenty-five years or so of my career. There's also a signed, slipcased limited edition with extra stories and artwork. Both are fine fat handsome books. In the early part of the year, I worked on revisions of three previously produced novels, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars, that form the Confluence trilogy. Copy editing and proof reading have been done; the rebooted trilogy will be published in an omnibus volume with two associated stories in February 2014. I also completed the last novel in the Quiet War sequence, Evening's Empires, which was published in September, and self-published a collection of previously published Quiet War stories and some new vignettes as a Kindle ebook, Life After Wartime. It's a nice way of giving new life to stories, this self-publishing business, and kind of fun, even though the learning curve is pretty steep. I'm planning to republish at least one novel as an ebook next year, but first need to find someone to do the heavy lifting of coding and publishing ebook on platforms other than Kindle.
 
I wrote a couple of short stories, too. One will be published in Old Venus, an anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin; the other is my contribution to the third in a series of portmanteau books about a global zombie war, edited by Stephen Jones. Oh, and my short story 'Transitional Forms' was published in the anthology Twelve Tomorrows, a special edition of MIT Technology Review.

I started developing the Quiet War sequence with a short story, 'Second Skin', which appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction way back in 1997. It's been a long road to Evening's Empires, and now it's time to take a new direction. Well, newish. This year, I signed a new contract with Gollancz for two novels that share the setting I've begun to explore with several short stories in the Jackaroo series, about the effect on humanity of the arrival of playfully enigmatic aliens. I'm presently scribbling revisions on the penultimate chapters of the first novel, Something Coming Through. I'll finish it early next year, and then get straight down to writing the second, Into Everywhere.

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions. As usual, I hope to read more books, and find ways of improving my own work. As usual, I'll probably fail at the latter, but hopefully I'll fail in interesting ways.

Happy New Year!

Ancient & Modern

So I was asked to recommend two science-fiction stories for National Short Story Day, one classic (published before 1960) and one modern. Here are my choices:

In the 1950s James Blish wrote a short series of stories, collected in The Seedling Stars, about what he called pantropy – radically engineering humans to enable them to live on alien worlds. ‘Surface Tension’ is the best of these, a classic tale of human grit and ingenuity, and an epic journey between two puddles. Offspring of the crew of a crashed spaceship have been shrunk to the size of protists so that they can survive in the ponds and lakes of the single muddy landmass of a water planet. Blish expertly describes a fierce microscopic world and the engineering feat of constructing a wooden spaceship that enables the colonists to pierce the surface tension of the sky of their little world, and the story contains one of the finest evocations of science fiction’s sense of wonder when the tiny astronauts first glimpse the night sky: ‘Under the two moons of Hydrot, and under the eternal stars, the two-inch spaceship and its microscopic cargo toiled down the slope towards the drying rivulet.’

Kelly Link is one of the best writers in contemporary science fiction and fantasy, blending tropes from a variety of genres into fresh and vivid fantastikas. In ‘Two Houses’ (2012), first published in an anthology celebrating the work of Ray Bradbury, the twelve passengers on a starship that has lost its sister ship to a cosmic accident are awakened from suspended animation to celebrate a birthday. They tell each other ghost stories, which the ship illustrates with virtual reality projections, and as the boundary between reality and fiction breaks down a very human story of loss slowly emerges. A beautifully mysterious story within a story.

The full list can be found here. Turns out that all the writers asked to contribute were men; it would be very interesting to repeat the exercise with the choices of women writers. What are your favourites?

Links 21/12/13

'The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.'

'“This discovery not only confirms the existence of Neanderthal burials in Western Europe, but also reveals a relatively sophisticated cognitive capacity to produce them,” explains William Rendu, the study’s lead author.'

 'An analysis of a Neanderthal's fossilised hyoid bone - a horseshoe-shaped structure in the neck - suggests the species had the ability to speak. This has been suspected since the 1989 discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid that looks just like a modern human's. But now computer modelling of how it works has shown this bone was also used in a very similar way.'

Christmas Cafes, by Alan Powdrill.

Christmas ornaments carved into skulls.

'Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8's historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon:'

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

Circulating Library

So posting shelfies is a thing now, and here's one of mine. It shows part of my collection of hardbacks and, to the far right and on the floor underneath the bottom shelf, some of my own books, as well as a run of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and about two metres of paperback anthologies.

There are other shelves, of course. The bookcase at the right of the photo mostly contains books about science fiction. In the office, there are also six shelves of double-stacked fiction paperbacks, a couple of shelves of science books and a shelf of oversized books. Not to mention three shelves of books about London, New York and Los Angeles. And then there are the books on the floor of the office, and the rest of the fiction paperbacks in a built-in bookcase on the landing, and the bookshelves in the living room where, amongst others, the graphic novels and books about music and films reside.

But any picture that somehow managed to include all the books in the house (including those in the kitchen, which aren't all cook books, and the various caches of books in the bedroom) would only be a snapshot of single moment in a dynamic ecology. Like universes, book collections expand, contract, or (like mine) achieve a kind of equilibrium.

Books arrive at a slower rate than when I used to regularly review for Interzone (one American publisher used to send me a mailsack stuffed with books every other month), but still they come. At first, they lodge on top of a blanket chest in the office (which also, now I think of it, contains some books on biology left over from my academic career), or on top of the bookcase in the photo. Some are read in the office; others flow downstairs to be read. And then they either leave the house for a charity shop or the tender mercy of a book dealer, or return to the top of the bookcase, where a couple of stacks await proper shelving. Anything that makes the shelves must first dislodge something already there; because there's no room for extra books, there has to be a strict one-in-one-out policy. Once there, they might last five or ten years before I decide that I'm never going to get around to rereading (or re-reading) them and weed them out, or they might become part of the permanent collection. The books that I know I can't ever bear to part with. The sedimentary bedrock whose deepest layer is almost fifty years old now. Sooner or later, all book collectors become librarians of their own lives.

Cry Uncle!

I first discovered J.P. Martin's Uncle books in the late 1960s, in my local library. I was an introverted teenager with a bad reading habit (I spent one rainy fortnight in Bognor Regis reading through about six feet of UFO books in the library - there must have been some serious UFO watchers, in Bognor). I had read everything on the science fiction shelves, and had begun to mine the rest of the adult fiction stacks, picking up whatever hooked my interest, from Beryl Bainbridge and John Updike to Angela Carter and Richard Brautigan. And these odd books with an elephant in a purple dressing-gown on the cover, apparently written for children but shelved with Thomas Mann and Carson McCullers.

Maybe a librarian decided that they were too subversive for children; or (I hope) maybe she thought that adults shouldn't miss out on the fun, and ordered two sets. But by whatever means, it was my great good luck that they ended up there, for here was an antic world that fully engaged the imagination, a kind of cross between Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster novels, and The Goon Show.

Based on stories that J.P.Martin, a Methodist minister, originally told to his children, the Uncle books describe the adventures of their eponymous hero, an immensely rich elephant who lives in a vast and rambling castle, Homestead, whose secrets and geography are unknown even to him:

...try to think of about a hundred skyscrapers all joined together and surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge over it, and you'll get some idea of it. The towers are of many colours, and there are bathing pools and garden among them, also switchback railways running from tower to tower, and water-chutes from top to bottom.

Many dwarfs live in the top storeys. They pay rent to Uncle every Saturday. It's only a farthing a week, but it mounts up when there are thousands of dwarfs.

A slingshot from Homestead's moat is a shantytown, Badfort, where Uncle's rivals guzzle Black Tom and constantly plot his downfall and humiliation. There's also a vast department store close by (possibly modelled on London's lost bazaar, Gamages), where everything is fantastically cheap, and a rival store where the unwary pay equally fantastic high prices. In this pocket universe of vivid contrasts, Uncle is a kind of benevolent dictator who isn't quite as bright as he likes to think he is (despite his BA). He's also something of a snob, but he engages the reader's sympathy because his considerable dignity and boldness is undercut by unexpected reversals and undeserved pratfalls and humiliations during his wars of attrition with his rivals in the shanty town of Badfort. It's a comedy of embarrassment and exasperation akin to Laurel and Hardy.

The first Uncle book I read, Uncle and the Treacle Trouble, was the fourth in the series; I immediately doubled back and read the other three, captivated by the surreal deadpan humour and the richness of Martin's imagined world, full of unmapped mysteries and underpinned by a zany logic. Somehow (probably because I left for university) I missed the last in the series, Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown, and while I kept an eye out for secondhand volumes they seemed to never turn up, and now first editions go for impressively high prices. The Uncle books are scarce, and there are a lot of Uncle fans, including a good number in the SF/F field. Although the first two books were recently reissued by the New York Review of Books in nice hardbacks, the others have long been out of print.

But now, at last, I have all six Uncle books inside the covers of a lovingly-produced omnibus, complete with Sir Quentin Blake's evocative ink-spattered illustrations, and with an introductory essay by James Martin Currey, J.P.Martin's grandson, essays by distinguished fans, and much else. The omnibus is the work of Marcus Gipps (disclosure: he's one of my editors at Gollancz), who funded publication with a Kickstarter campaign that was fully funded within four hours. The original plan was to produce 200 copies; in the end, 750 books have been printed for supporters, and another 750 are available in shops and online. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm about to dive back into Homeward's endless summer...

Links 14/12/13

On this day China's Chang'e Lunar Lander successfully touched down on the Moon at 13:11:18.695 GMT (8:11:18.695 EST). It's the first spacecraft to land on the Moon in 37 years. Here's an animation based on images taken by its landing camera during descent.

'NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed water vapor above the frigid south polar region of Jupiter's moon Europa, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon's surface.'

 'A new analysis of data from NASA's Galileo mission has revealed clay-type minerals at the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa that appear to have been delivered by a spectacular collision with an asteroid or comet. This is the first time such minerals have been detected on Europa's surface. The types of space rocks that deliver such minerals typically also often carry organic materials.'

'Cassini's recent close flybys are bringing into sharper focus a region in Titan's northern hemisphere that sparkles with almost all of the moon's seas and lakes. Scientists working with the spacecraft's radar instrument have put together the most detailed multi-image mosaic of that region to date. The image includes all the seas and most of the major lakes. Some of the flybys tracked over areas that previously were seen at a different angle, so researchers have been able to create a flyover of the area around Titan's largest and second largest seas, known as Kraken Mare and Ligeia Mare, respectively, and some of the nearby lakes.' 



'The Curiosity mission has achieved another milestone as scientists have determined that the rocks inside Gale Crater that were analyzed by the rover are very old – even on geologic time scales, but were exposed very recently. The achievement of utilizing in-situ age-dating methods using radiogenic and cosmogenic noble gases marks a first in planetary exploration.' 

Visit National Parks on other worlds.

Cold War Christmas Cards from the USSR.

Five Billion Years Of Solitude

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

On clear summer nights when I was quite young, I used to like to sit out on the lawn in an old chair and look up at the stars. There wasn't much light pollution back then, at the edge of the Cotswolds, so the sky was full of stars. And I'd wonder, as so many do, if a world much like Earth might be orbiting them, and if a boy much like me might be looking up at its night sky, and the insignificant star that was the Sun.

The profound question of whether we are alone in the Universe - if Earth and humankind are unique, or if there are many Earth-like worlds harbouring other forms of intelligent life - is the topic of Lee Billings's Five Billion Years of Solitude. 4.6 billion years after it was formed, Earth sits at the centre of a small expanding sphere of radio noise that might be detected by other civilisations, and astronomers have begun to catalogue a vast variety of exoplanets. Could any of them harbour life? What would it look like if they did? And is there anyone else out there, as lonely as we are?

Billings frames the history of the search for extrasolar planets and plans to search for Earth-like worlds within biographical portraits of planet hunters, from Frank Drake to rising star Sara Seager, who plans to use relatively cheap nanosatellites to monitor single stars for signs of transiting planets. I would have preferred a little more science rather than noveletish descriptions of what Billings's interviewees happened to be doing and wearing when he met them, and because all of them are American the work of astronomers from other countries is somewhat scanted. Michel Mayer, who led the team which discovered the first exoplanet, is given only a passing mention; the work of the HARPS project, a collaboration between a Swiss team led by Mayer and the European Southern Observatory's telescope in Chile, is presented in terms of competition with an American team rather than in its own right.

But these are minor quibbles. Billings expertly anatomises the difficulties in detecting the faint jitters in the motion of stars or the minute dimming in their luminosity that signals the presence of exoplanets, evokes the teeming variety of exoplanets so far discovered and the problems astronomers hunting for Earth-sized exoplanets must overcome.  He's very good, too, on the labyrinthine politics of NASA which have stalled the Terrestrial Planet Finder project, and the ongoing problems with the vastly expensive James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble. And his entanglement of the lives of the planet hunters with their work reminds us that their discoveries provide us with new and humbling perspectives on our place in the universe and the evanescence of our tenancy on this planet.

The universe is vast, and old. Billings uses the stump of a redwood tree in Frank Drake's backyard to provide a lovely and sobering lesson about deep time. Growth rings show that the tree was more than 2000 years old. During that time

'the Sun had scarcely budged in its 250-million-year orbit about the galactic center, and, considering its life span of billions of years, hadn't aged a day. Since their formation 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun and its planets have made perhaps eighteen galactic orbits - our solar system is eighteen "galactic years" old. When it was seventeen, redwood trees did not yet exist on Earth. When it was sixteen, simple organisms were taking their first tentative excursions from the sea to colonise the land. In fact, fossil evidence testified that for about fifteen of its eighteen galactic years, our planet had played host to little more than unicellular microbes and multicellular bacterial colonies, and was utterly devoid of anything so complicated as grass, trees, or animals, let alone beings capable of solving differential equations, building rockets, painting landscapes, writing symphonies, or feeling love.'

The first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet was made less only twenty years ago. Although more than a thousand have been discovered since then, it's a microscopic sample of the trillions believed to exist in our galaxy. A few are Earth-sized, but none found so far are known to be Earth-like, and we're still a long way from discovering evidence for life on another world, let alone any intelligent beings that might also be searching for traces of other life in the immense sea of stars. 'We're the product of millions of years of evolution,' Sara Seager says, 'but we don't have any time to waste.'

alt.shuttle

NASA's space shuttle programme was started when the Cold War began to grow hot: the first flights took place in the era of Cruise missiles, Protect and Survive, the doctrine of a winnable nuclear war uncovered by Robert Sheer's With Enough Shovels, The Day After, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Two Tribes'. The Soviet authorities realised that the shuttle had serious military uses, and decided to start their own programme. The spacecraft in the image above, Buran, is the only Soviet shuttle to have reached orbit. Launched in November 1988, it was unmanned, completed two orbits of the Earth, and landed under automatic guidance. There's more information about it here and here.

Within a year, history had overtaken the Buran programme. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the authorities realised that their space shuttle was an expensive dead end which could no longer be justified, and shut it down (the USA took somewhat longer to come to the same conclusion). Four shuttles were under construction at the time. One, nicknamed Ptichka (Little Bird), is stored in the Baikonur Cosmodrome alongside a non-flying prototype; another, Baikal, is parked on an airfield; the other two have been partially or completely dismantled. Two  prototypes are on public display: one in Gorky Park, Moscow; the other in the Technik Museum Speyer, Germany.

As for Buran, the only Soviet shuttle to have orbited the Earth, it was destroyed when the roof of the hangar in which it is was being stored at Baikonur collapsed. An ignominious end to the avatar of an alternate history which might have intensified the cold war in low Earth orbit, or which might have seen two kinds of space shuttles servicing the International Space Station, but which otherwise, let's face it, probably wouldn't have been very different to our own history.

Links 07/12/13

As the TV schedules fill up with seasonal specials, end-of-year best of's, and blockbuster films you've either avoided or already seen, here are a few episodes from Out of the Unknown, a fantastic series of SF plays the BBC screened in four series between 1965 and 1971. Helmed by Irene Shubik, many were adapted from original stories by leading US and UK authors of the day. Although most were wiped when the precious videotape on which they were recorded was reused, around twenty survive. So far, no one has released on official DVD collection, although bootlegs exist. And there's also YouTube:

Thirteen to Centaurus, by J.G. Ballard




The Machine Stops, by E.M.Forster




 
Tunnel Under The World, by Frederik Pohl




Some Lapse Of Time, by John Brunner




 No Place Like Earth, by John Wyndham

Work In Progress

Something Coming Through printed out, ready for annotation towards the fourth and final draft.

Livres En Français

Some titles from my backlist are now available in French as ebooks at very reasonable prices. Click images for links.

Links 30/11/13

'When a star explodes as a supernova, it shines brightly for a few weeks or months before fading away. Yet the material blasted outward from the explosion still glows hundreds or thousands of years later, forming a picturesque supernova remnant. What powers such long-lived brilliance?
'In the case of Tycho's supernova remnant, astronomers have discovered that a reverse shock wave racing inward at Mach 1000 (1000 times the speed of sound) is heating the remnant and causing it to emit X-ray light.'

'Moving entire stars rather than building spaceships would have certain benefits as a way of traveling through the galaxy. After all, it would mean taking your local environment with you on a millennial journey. Some have suggested it might therefore be an observable sign of highly advanced civilizations at work. But how would you move a star in the first place?'
 
'If life does exist anywhere else in the universe, it may only be fleeting. Now scientists are researching how signs of life might look on dying planets'

A tiny four-winged robot that mimics the movements of jellyfish to stay in the air.

The politics of Doctor Who.

The only ATMs in Antarctica.

XKCD: Oort Cloud.

Ongoing

I'm getting close to the end of the third draft of Something Coming Through, although the process is more like Zeno's Paradox than a sprint to the finishing line. The last chapter doesn't require much rewriting, but to get there I have to add new material and repurpose what's already been written. This is the draft where the narrative is finally pinned down, so the last chapters have to play out and reflect the consequences of all the changes I've made in the rest of the book. After this, I'll print out the manuscript and go over it again, concentrating on the flow of sentences and paragraphs rather than events, and then transcribe all the red ink scribbles into the electronic MSS.

Meanwhile, here are three newish anthologies that feature stories of mine. Click on the cover images for more information.

Links 23/11/13

"We are presenting a set of cheeses made using bacteria from the human body."

Perfume made from Lady Gaga's urine.

'Scientists have practically obliterated the ultimate symbol of maleness in DNA, the Y chromosome, and believe they may be able to do away with it completely.'

'An intact population of microorganisms that derive food and benefit from other organisms living in the intestine is required for optimal response to cancer therapy, according to a mouse study by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and their collaborators.'

 'On this sun-blasted tract of sand 14 miles south of Baker, molecular biologist and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter is field-testing a technology that he says will revolutionize the search for extraterrestrial life.
Not only does Venter say his invention will detect and decode DNA hiding in otherworldly soil or water samples — proving once and for all that we are not alone in the universe — it will beam that information back to Earth and allow scientists to reconstruct living copies in a biosafety facility.'

Roads Not Taken

I recently signed the contracts for Something Coming Through, and am nearing the end of the third draft. When it's published, it will be my twentieth novel. Which is some kind of achievement, I guess. Here are a few that didn't get finished, for various reasons. Every novelist will have similar stories of books scuttled because of bad timing, bad luck, or the realisation that there was a better novel to be written. On the whole, I think I've gotten off lightly.

Untitled sequel to Eternal Light - which would have been my fourth novel, until I realised, after writing a synopsis and a couple of chapters, that I had nothing useful to add to what had already been published. So I wrote something completely different - Red Dust, Tibetan cowboys on Mars - instead.

Pasquale's America - again, a synopis and a few chapters were written for this sequel to my Renaissance steampunk novel Pasquale's Angel, but I'd just changed publishers and couldn't get the rights back for Pasquale's Angel, so that, as they say, was that.

Alessi's Comet - a science fiction novel that was halfway through the first draft when my publishers decided they had no enthusiasm for publishing science fiction any more.

Gone Dead Train and Bad Genes.  Two thrillers. Gone Dead Train was a sequel to my surveillance thriller Whole Wide World, but I moved publishers (again) and had the same problem as with Pasquale's America. Bad Genes (terrible title) was a new direction that I gave up while halfway into the first draft when a publishing deal fell through. Hey ho.

The Disappeared was going to be the sequel to my MMORPG thriller Players, turned down by my then publisher.

Manswarm - an idea about a murder mystery set in a hyperpopulated London that never got further than a synopsis, because I decided to write The Quiet War instead. Good move.

London Endless - I've written several stories about Mr Carlyle, a long-lived private investigator with a great deal of knowledge about 'the matter of the dead'; I wrote a very detailed chapter-by-chapter synopsis for an American publishing deal that fell through when the enthusiastic editor lost his job because of bizarre publishing nonsense. The only orphan on this list I might return to, one day.

Links 16/11/13

While I slowly close in on the end of the third draft of the ongoing, some random stuff I encountered this week on the internets:

The moss mantis.

CV Dazzle make up which fools facial recognition algorithms.

'Reconstructing the rise of life during the period of Earth’s history when it first evolved is challenging. Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks are not only rare, but also almost always altered by hydrothermal and tectonic activity. A new study from a team including Carnegie’s Nora Noffke, a visiting investigator, and Robert Hazen revealed the well-preserved remnants of a complex ecosystem in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old sedimentary rock sequence in Australia.' 

 The first and last flight of Buran, the Soviet Union's space shuttle.

'Earlier this week, Nature got a rare glimpse of the National Wildlife Property Repository near Denver, a 1,200-square-metre warehouse where the US Fish and Wildlife Service stores 1.5 million items — most of which were seized by law enforcement when they were brought into the country illegally. It is an eerie place stacked with heads of tigers, bags of seahorses and boots made from crocodile skin.'

See also: The Whale Warehouse.

The evolution of Mars - 4 billion years in under two minutes:

My Grandfather's War

When I was born, the end of the First World War was much closer in time than the end of the Second World War is to us, now - a strange, sobering thought. And when I was growing up, there were still plenty of WW1 veterans alive. One of them was my grandfather, Albert Charles Austin. He joined the Sussex Yeomanry, and as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force fought in Palestine.  Here he is, with some of his comrades (the purple x is my mother's):

He fought in the Second or Third Battle of Gaza; afterwards he took a photograph of a disabled Mark 1 tank:

At one point he photographed Bedouin arms - flintlock rifles and pistols - abandoned, according to the writing on the back, in Gares Abud (possibly the village of Aboud):

And he was present at or shortly after the liberation of Jerusalem. Here's a photograph of Bab al-Amud, the Damascus Gate:

He was a Victorian, born before the first aeroplane flight in a shepherd's cottage on the Sussex Downs, one of eighteen children. And around the age of twenty he was taking part in a battle with tanks, and soon afterwards saw Jerusalem, then still largely contained within those walls without which, according to a hymn he must have sung in church, was that faraway green hill. But let's not romanticise his war too much. In May 1918, his regiment moved to France, and was involved in the Battle of the Somme of 1918.  And it was there, or soon afterwards, that he was taken prisoner, and spent the rest of the war in forced labour.

I'm vague about most details of his war service because he never talked about it. It marked him for the rest of his life: he was a taciturn, solitary man, and spent much of his time working alone, as a gardener. It marked his wife, my grandmother too, and their children, my uncle and my mother (who because of my father's war service had a deep interest in Lawrence of Arabia, but that's another story). Wars cast long shadows. But on this day I like to remember him pottering in his vegetable patch, in the green shade of a peaceful summer evening of the long ago. I like to think that digging was a kind of assertion. Not of victory, because that's too strong a word, too loaded, but of nothing more than his survival of history.

Links 09/11/11

So I wrote a review of Gravity for the Arc tumblr.

'Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed a unique and baffling object in the asteroid belt that looks like a rotating lawn sprinkler or badminton shuttlecock. While this object is on an asteroid-like orbit, it looks like a comet, and is sending out tails of dust into space.'


'This population of berry-shaped bacteria is so different from any other known bacteria, it has been classified as not only a new species, but also a new genus, the next level of classifying the diversity of life. Its discoverers named it Tersicoccus phoenicis. Tersi is from Latin for clean, like the room. Coccus, from Greek for berry, describes the bacterium's shape. The phoenicis part is for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, the spacecraft being prepared for launch in 2007 when the bacterium was first collected by test-swabbing the floor in the Florida clean room.'

'“What this means is, when you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler and Keck Observatory data.'


Kepler Orrery:



The sounds of interstellar space.

'What is the whales motivation? You dont know.' One-star Amazon reviews of Moby-Dick.  (via Hari Kunzra)

Links 01/11/13

Not a link as such - I'm appearing at the World Fantasy convention in Brighton this Saturday. I'll be signing books at a couple of launches, and doing a panel on 'Does SF have a future?' at 5pm. Say hi if you're attending.  Meanwhile:

New views of Titan reveal salt flats around its lakes, and the giant hydrocarbon dunes of the equatorial region dubbed ''Senkyo.''

'The United Nations is forming an "International Asteroid Warning Group" on the advice of an association of former astronauts, to share data about threatening asteroids. In a set of forthcoming recommendations, the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) will loosely outline the emergency steps that the UN's longstanding Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space must take if the asteroid warning group identifies an extinction-level space rock on a collision course with Earth. (The best option, according to ASE, would be to crash a spacecraft into the asteroid to knock it off course.)'

'A video based on topographical data of Mars taken by a European satellite gives Earth-dwellers an aerial view of the red planet's surface.'

'Six students from De Montfort University won first prize in the Off The Map challenge when they turned maps of seventeenth centuryLondon into a detailed 3D world.'

'Deep below the streets of New York City lie its vital organs—a water system, subways, railroads, tunnels, sewers, drains, and power and cable lines—in a vast, three-dimensional tangle. Penetrating this centuries-old underworld of caverns, squatters, and unmarked doors, William Langewiesche follows three men who constantly navigate its dangers: the subway-operations chief who dealt with the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the engineer in charge of three underground mega-projects, and the guy who, well, just loves exploring the dark, jerry-rigged heart of a great metropolis.'

Clear

'Did you ever go clear?' Leonard Cohen

So last week I got the results of a CT scan - my seventh since I was diagnosed with bowel cancer in October 2010. The tumour was surgically removed, but because it had grown through the bowel wall and invaded a single lymph node by the time symptoms had become become apparent, there was a strong chance (about 60%) that it would appear elsewhere.

As long as bowel and many other cancers are diagnosed early enough, it isn't the original tumour that kills you (and you aren't 'cured' when it's removed - XKCD has a very good explanation of this). No, it's most often the secondaries, created by metastasis. In the case of bowel cancer, these usually appear in the lungs or liver.  Presenting not as lung or liver cancer, but proliferating nodules similary to the primary tumour.  The problem is, doctors can't yet detect cancer cells floating free in the blood or lymph. That's why, after surgery, I was treated with chemotherapy: infused every two weeks or so with a carefully calibrated cocktail of chemicals that killed off dividing cells (before every treatment, you're weighed like a prize fighter).  It's rather like napalming a jungle to get rid of a few pesky insurgents. You don't know that they're there when you strike; you can't be certain you've killed them afterwards; you cause a lot of collateral damage. Most cells in the human body are eventually replaced by new ones; epithelial cells and cells in the marrow, generating various kinds of blood cells, amongst others, proliferate continuously. Until, that is, they are blasted with cytotoxic chemicals. During my treatment, blood platelet and white blood cell counts plummeted; I developed mouth and tongue ulcers, and various digestive upsets as cells lining my GI tract died and sloughed away. Other side effects included fatigue, memory loss and cognitive disfunction (chemobrain); I've been left with peripheral neuropathy in my feet and fingertips because one of the drugs, a platinum compound, attacked my sensory nerves. I also suffered side effects from the steroids and other drugs pumped into me to counter the side effects of the chemotherapy - although at least I was never stricken by nausea.

Oh, and I can't drink coffee now. So it goes.

Every six months, I was scanned: photocopied by multiple X-rays which were assembled into a 3D image and carefully examined to discover whether or not secondary tumours were growing elsewhere. You quickly get used to the minor ordeal of being infused with contrast dye and fed through a giant white doughnut that sounds alarmingly like a washing machine about to spin itself to fragments; you never get used to scanxiety, a clumsy but highly accurate neologism for the state of mind endured before the scan, and afterwards, while you wait for the results. Kind of like jumping out of a plane, and then waiting a week or so until you know the chute is going to open. Or not.

I've been lucky. Each scan has been clear; the latest is also clear, and hopefully will be my last. After three years, the statistical chance of secondary tumours arising in liver, lungs, or elsewhere is hugely reduced. I'll continue to have blood tests for a tumour marker, but if all goes well I will no longer need to be photocopied.

I'm not cured, of course. That milestone is declared after five years, although it's a notional date; there's still a small chance that the cancer could return after that. And after you've survived cancer you are in a different place. You've been betrayed at a cellular level; you've been rudely and violently confronted with your own mortality; you've undergone several years of anxiety and uncertainty and extremely high vigilance, worrying over small aches and pains that beforehand would have gone unremarked. You've changed. But after a war fought on your behalf, with your body as a battleground, you have survived. You can begin to make long-term plans again. You can take up your new life.

It's a good feeling.

Thor: The Dark World

Following on from Thor and The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World is the latest in Marvel's project to map its universe into film. Like the first Thunder God flick, it's a sword and ray-gun epic, using Clarke's third law to explain the Norse gods' powers and accoutrements as advanced technology (the rainbow bridge, Bifrost, is the entrance to a suite of wormholes, there are force fields, glancing references to nanotechnology and so on); unlike its predecessor, it's a ponderous epic, attempting to mesh the ongoing romance between scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) with a by-the-numbers struggle against a villain who threatens to end the universe by unleashing a powerful amorphous substance, red matter - sorry, aether - when the nine worlds align.

I liked the original Thor comics when I was a teenager; and I liked the first film, too, for its marvellous depiction of Asgard, Tom Hiddleston's mercurial Loki, and the vigour and charm of Hemsworth's Thor, a superhero who actually had fun with his powers and needed only to learn a little humility to come into his own. The sequel looks just as lovely, but is far more hectic, a space-opera version of Lord of the Rings coloured by Norse mythology.  Tom Hiddleston and Rene Russo (reprising her role as Odin's wife, Freya) give standout performances, but Hemsworth's Thor is dialed-down to gloomy king-in-waiting, for most of the film Portman's Foster is little more than a plot coupon, and Chris Eccelston's dark elf is a one-dimensional all-evil-all-of-the-time villain.  As if to make up for the thinness of the story, it's crammed with action and eye-kicks - notably a space ship smashing its way into the Hall of Asgard.  There's some nice business during a breakout from Asgard, and it does lighten up a little when Thor gets back to Earth (there are a couple of good jokes, and one that might have worked if the writers had bothered to look at a Tube map), but otherwise it rarely rises above your basic by-the-numbers universe-in-peril schtick.  Stick with the credits crawl: there's a teaser for the next in the sequence, and right at the end, after all the pixel wranglers and digital wizards, as if no room could be found for it amongst the thud and blunder, there's a small, quiet, human moment.  Fun to watch as long as you suspend all judgement, but in the end another triumph of CGI spectacle over actual story.

Links 19/10/13

'We live in an odd place and an odd time, amid things that know that they exist and that can reflect upon that, even in the dimmest, most birdlike way. And this needs more explaining than we are at present willing to give it. The question of how the brain produces the feeling of subjective experience, the so-called "hard problem", is a conundrum so intractable that one scientist I know refuses even to discuss it at the dinner table.'

A new law of biology: All mammals pee for about 21 seconds.

Skull 5: 'The spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor that died nearly two million years ago has forced scientists to rethink the story of early human evolution.'

Great example of the extended phenotype: 'Bats that nest inside curled-up leaves may be getting an extra benefit from their homes: the tubular roosts act as acoustic horns, amplifying the social calls that the mammals use to keep their close-knit family groups together.'

A newly discovered giant virus 'definitively bridges the gap between viruses and cells - a gap that was proclaimed as dogma at the very outset of modern virology back in the 1950s.'

Space-born jellyfish hate life on Earth.

The Beautiful Mars tumblr (hat tip to Christina Scholz). 

Pro Bono

So science writer DN Lee was asked to be guest writer on a commercial blog, asked whether there would be any payment, and politely declined when she was told that she was expected to provide her services for free in exchange for 'exposure'. To which the editor replied, 'Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore?' But that wasn't the end of her trouble - she wrote a scathingly funny piece about it for her Scientific American blog, and SciAm pulled it because 'it wasn't about science' (later amended to 'we weren't sure really happened').*

Meanwhile, Philip Hensher was asked by a Cambridge professor to write a foreword; when Hensher declined because there would be no payment, the professor called him 'priggish and ungracious'. And later, after Hensher published an article about it, the professor doubled down in a letter, pointing out that a) Hensher would have been paid, actually, in books, and b) he and other writers should, like academics 'give freely of their time' and contribute 'to the common good of our culture.' Hey, academics - first, don't confuse books with actual payment for services, and second, even though they spend a lot of time along in book-lined rooms, writers aren't actually university academics. They don't have a salary; they have to pay for their offices, and lighting and heating, and all the rest. Oh, and that stuff you think you're doing for free? You're paid to do that. Or at least, that's how it worked when I was in academia.

These are two extreme examples of the kind of entitlement writers sometimes encounter when asked to work for free. Usually, the people who do the asking know they're reaching out for a favour, and completely understand when the writer politely turns them down.  But sometimes they think that they're doing the writer a favour, and get all huffy when refused. Perhaps because they think that writing or giving a speech or appearing on a panel at a conference isn't actually work, or because they reckon that writers should give back something because other people have bought their books.

In fact, most writers do work for free now and then. Especially when they have a book coming out. If you are a mid-list author and your publisher doesn't have a marketing budget for your book, you'll buckle down and do what it takes to get the word out there. But working without pay eats into the time you need to spend doing work to earn a living, so you have to carefully pick and choose what you can and cannot do. Sometimes you'll do it because the person who asked you the favour is a friend or has previously boosted your signal; sometimes you'll do it because it supports a good cause; sometimes you'll do it because it looks like fun. I contributed a short piece to a collection of essays about Doctor Who because it supports a charity that does good work in an area that has personally affected me (and also as payback for the enjoyment I got out of Doctor Who as a kid). And on Monday I'll be appearing on a panel during a symposium on starships at the Royal Astronomical Society because the meeting should be suitably mind-expanding, and also because admission is free.

That last is important. There are honourable exceptions, but too often writers will discover that the prestigious literary festival to which they were invited expects them to perform for free. The festival has big-money sponsors, the organisers are paid, the owners of the festival's venue are paid, celebrity guests receive appearance fees, and the audience pays for admission, but none of the money trickles down to the poor bloody writers. Or that speech or reading they were asked to give for free? It will be delivered to a paying audience. And that's when it stops looking like 'exposure', and a lot more like 'exploitation.' Artists, actors, photographers and musicians report the same trend.

Genre writers may not get the same kind of exposure, but at least they aren't so often exploited. Most SF/F writers aren't paid when they appear at conventions, either, and the convention's guests of honour usually only get expenses and free accommodation. But although most conventions charge a membership fee, they are run by volunteers and rarely turn a profit. It's cheerfully ramshackle, sometimes disintegrates noisily, but mostly works. And although the number of books sold probably doesn't justify the time and expense of attending, you can at least moan about it with your peers.

*[UPDATE: SciAm have now done the right thing by Dr Lee and restored her blog entry.]

Yet Another Blog Post About Not Blog Posting

Things have been a bit quiet around here. I have a post about science-fiction taxonomy and seagulls to write, another about why the 'Hard SF' subgenre is no longer relevant, and so on, but right now I need to get some work done. First, there's the ongoing novel. I'm nearing the end of the second draft now. Usually, the first draft is a race to get the story - the sequence of events - down; the second attempts to get the narrative sorted out - how those events relate to each other, how they're told and shaped, and the voice in which they're told. (The third draft will try to make sure that every sentence is the right shape and logically follows from its predecessor, but let's not go there yet.) Getting the voice right is pretty important as there are two protagonists; getting the structure right is tricky, as one story begins before the other kicks in and the first catches up with the second as they're told in alternating chapters.

So there's that, and then there's this -

- the proofs of the Confluence omnibus - three novels and two stories, 940 pages. It's due out in February next year by the way; my publishers and I decided it would be a good idea to put a little distance between it and Evening's Empires, and I don't have anything else coming out in 2014. In the morning I'm working on the new novel, and in the afternoon I'm reading every. single. word. of the proofs, and in the evening I'm working on a couple of other small tasks. So for the  next couple of weeks, not much time for much else.

Links 04/10/13

'Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system, a sizzling, Jupiter-like world known as Kepler-7b.'

A periodic table of the exoplanet 'zoo'.

Space beer! Made with moondust. And beer.

'A huge cluster of jellyfish forced the Oskarshamn plant, the site of one of the world's largest nuclear reactors, to shut down by clogging the pipes conducting cool water to the turbines.'

JEROS, the Jellyfish Robot Elimination Swarm.

'Roboy has a four-foot-tall human shape and a set of “muscles” inspired by the human musculoskeletal system. The plastic muscles work together via electrical motors and artificial tendons. Tendon-driven systems like Roboy mimic the flexible mechanics of biology, and could result in a new class of robots that are lighter, safer, and move in a more natural way.'

Links 27/09/13

'The Tommy Westphall Multiverse is a thought exercise, a parlor game writ large. And it’s tailor made for pop culture obsessives.'

Volume 1 of the Richard Feynman Lectures on Physics is now available free online. Volumes 2 and 3 are to follow.

'In 1881, Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, had a problem: the volume of data coming into his observatory was exceeding his staff’s ability to analyze it. He also had doubts about his staff’s competence–especially that of his assistant, who Pickering dubbed inefficient at cataloging. So he did what any scientist of the latter 19th century would have done: he fired his male assistant and replaced him with his maid, Williamina Fleming. Fleming proved so adept at computing and copying that she would work at Harvard for 34 years–eventually managing a large staff of assistants.

'So began an era in Harvard Observatory history where women—more than 80 during Pickering’s tenure, from 1877 to his death in 1919— worked for the director, computing and cataloging data. Some of these women would produce significant work on their own; some would even earn a certain level of fame among followers of female scientists. But the majority are remembered not individually but collectively, by the moniker Pickering's Harem.'

'The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash together to create them, on a timescale where even oceans that exist for tens of millions of years can disappear leaving only the subtlest of geological traces.'

'Whole solar systems are needed to generate life, not just terrestrial planets with water.'

The Kawasaki Warehouse amusement game park in Japan 'has been designed as a historical replica of Kowloon ‘Walled’ City, capitalising on the enduring fascination with the lawless metropolis ever since its demolishment in 1980s.'

Green Martians

From an essay over at 3quarksdaily, discussing Mars-colonisation booster Robert Zubrin's claims that 'radical environmentalists' are bent on suppressing progress in favour of protecting 'a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity:'

'As we reflect upon our environmental challenges, two poles therefore define our actions. On the one hand is the ascetic modesty of sustainability, on the other the hubristic desire to colonize the galaxy. In some ways Mars colonization may seem the more immediately attractive solution as it come with all the thrill of a technical challenge and the allure of subsequent conquest.'

I explored this in the first two Quiet War books and (not to spoil the ending) it seems to me that it's a false dichotomy; it isn't a question of either creating a sustainable civilisation or going to Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System. And while one can imagine, as I did, that in certain extreme circumstances some kind of Gaian religion might come to dominate politics, at the moment the balance is tipped far in the opposite direction. Right now on lifeboat Earth we're burning the furniture and decking for fuel, and looking the other way as water laps over the gunwhales.

The human species hasn't yet learned how to use technology responsibly, and we're still discovering that the biomes we're despoiling are packed with intricate interconnections that can't be easily reproduced. As the failed attempt in Biosphere 2 showed, we aren't yet up to the task of creating a fully self-contained ecosystem here on Earth, let alone in a space city on Mars. Both sides have a lot to teach each other: the kind of knowledge acquired from stewardship of increasingly fragile environments on Earth will be essential for creating the gardens of Mars; the kinds of technology needed to survive in extreme environments and recycle everything with as close to 100% efficiency as possible will have all kinds of uses here on Earth.

Or are Martians supposed to live off imported rations inside charmless cans while strip-mining the Hellas Basin (and if Earth is wrecked, who will they be selling their Martian ores to)? I admire Zubrin's passion, but I'm dismayed by the way he's directing it at straw men.

Short Stuff

Just arrived in the post: complimentary copies of the slightly delayed special limited edition of my short story collection A Very British History, from PS Publishing. I've written some short stories because I've been asked to; I've written rather more for the fun and joy of it. Some have turned out to be the preludes to novels, but my personal favourites are those which are complete and self-contained. You get an idea, or a character, or a situation, and you explore what it means, or why they are who they are, or how it resolves, all within the compass of a tightly organised narrative. They can be about a small change in a human heart, or the end of the world. They can be about anything and everything. They give you the chance to stretch your limits, to experiment, to take risks (to fall flat on your face.) I've written and published about a hundred; it would lovely if I could write at least a hundred more. Hopefully, some good ones.

But they can be pretty ephemeral things. Written, published, read (hopefully), gone. How many SF and fantasy stories are published every year? Hundreds, easily.  Maybe a thousand or more. And of those, how many last much longer than their first appearance in print? So I'm aware that I'm very lucky to have been allowed to select a bunch of my stories for this retrospective (1985 - 2022; let's optimistically call it the first half of my career) collection, and to have had them published by Peter Crowther and the rest of the PS team not only in a rather luxurious 'standard' format, but also in this rather sumptuous package.

At the top, front and back of the slipcase, with artwork by Jim Burns, illustrating 'The Choice.'  Below, at the right, the main collection, signed by me, with special endpapers.  You can find the table of contents here.  And to the left of it, a small extra volume containing two stories 'Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World' and 'Karl and the Ogre', and a biographical essay. The terrific cover is also by Jim Burns - I hadn't seen it before now. There aren't many copies available, so if you haven't yet ordered one yet, you had better hurry.

If you'd like tasters of my short fiction there are cheaper alternatives - although available only on Kindle, for now. Little Machines is an eclectic collection of science-fiction and some darker stuff.  And Stories From The Quiet War and Life After Wartime are shorter collections of stories associated with my Quiet War future history (I've given links to the UK branch of Amazon, but they're also available in the US and elsewhere.)

A Few Notes On Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

Pynchon's previous novel, Inherent Vice, was set in Los Angeles at the tail-end of the 1960s, a rambling comedic noir in which a stoner private eye. Doc Sportillo, became involved in a kind-of-or-maybe-not conspiracy after his ex-girlfriend disappeared. Bleeding Edge is a kind of thriller set in New York in 2001, just after the implosion of the dot-com bubble, in which decertified pistol-packing not-quite-divorced self-styled 'Bad Accountant' Maxine Tarnow tries to balance Upper-West-Side family life with an investigation into the dubious finances of hashslingrz, a computer security firm involved in 'Crypto work, countermeasures, heaven knows what-all.'  In Inherent Vice, ARPANET, the evolutionary precursory to the Internet, was Doc Sportillo's occasional oracle. Here, the vast epicycles of conspiracy bleed into the echo chambers of cyberspace, contaminating the primal innocence of its virtual utopias.

Although there, of course, a lot more to it than that, including mobsters, Russian gangsters, a vastly detailed virtual reality, Silicon Alley chancers and casualties, a manipulative operative who may or may not be a kind of time-travelling spy, a nasal forensics expert obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, 9/11, and so forth. As well as the usual plethora of jokes, songs and deliberately bad puns, and esoteric facts too weird to be fictional, and a vast cast of eccentrically-named eccentrics, all armed with conflicting ideas and opinions. It's a very talkative novel; Maxine's investigative techniques primarily involve conversation rather than interrogation, preferably over a nice long meal.

In a genre novel, there would be a steady accumulation of pertinent knowledge - plot tokens - leading to revelation and denouement. Here, the central villain, the tycoon who owns hashslingrz, Gabriel Ice (surely a nod to William Gibson's cyberspace fictions), mostly lurks in the shadows, and instead of answers Maxine's investigations yield an accumulating sense of vast and shadowy machineries half-glimpsed, plots and counterplots that melt away as soon as they're exposed to scrutiny, connections made but never followed up because there's always another connection to be made.

Pynchon's attempt to blend the actual outcome of an actual conspiracy into his umwelt almost works because he doesn't try to document it. It happens offstage, in the last quarter of the novel.  'Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to worse. All day long.' What we don't quite get, after the event, is the real sense of bad turning to worse - just talk about it, sometimes uncritically invoking truther conspiracies, advancing the theory that 9/11 was an emergent event that could be predicted but not prevented, seized by those in power as an excuse to scare and infantilise. Commercialised and claimed like the unmapped potentials of the Internet.

But besides all that, Bleeding Edge is a beautifully evocative love song to the city so good they named it twice, poised at the cusp between the dirty old New York and the regooded disneyfied version it has become. A city that back then was still a cacophony of cultures and cuisines and languages, where, despite the looming shadows, the tender quotidian and rich eccentricities of human life could yet flourish.

There Are Doors (XXI)

Links 14/09/13

A rather beautiful rigid-frame airship, the first since the 1940s, starts its test flights.

Typewriters and their authors.

“He explained that these articles are ‘an inter-mixture of fiction and fact’ and are ‘highly romanticized in order to give the story juice.’” Charles Bukowski's FBI file.

'A team of researchers at the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has found a way to self-assemble complex structures out of gel “bricks” smaller than a grain of salt. The new method could help solve one of the major challenges in tissue engineering: creating injectable components that self-assemble into intricately structured, biocompatible scaffolds at an injury site to help regrow human tissues.'

'[Ulrich Bernier's] group has isolated a few chemicals that are naturally present on human skin in trace quantities and appear to inhibit mosquitoes’ capability to smell and locate humans. If one of these chemicals—mostly likely one called 1-methylpiperzine, which has been the most successful so far—holds up in future tests and can be produced synthetically on a bigger scale, wearing it could be a way of rendering yourself effectively invisible to mosquitoes.'

Peak Chicken.

Scientists discover what 'seems to be the first example in nature of rotary motion with toothed gears' in juvenile plant hoppers.

Links 07/09/13

'For the past year, NASA has been working with Tethers Unlimited, a space technology development company based out of Bothell, Wash., to find a better way. The space agency just awarded Tethers Unlimited an additional $500,000 to continue developing SpiderFab, a robotic 3D printing and assembly system that could build structures larger than half a mile wide in orbit.'

 More NASA - the space agency has been crowd-sourcing ideas for asteroid missions.

A massive storm on Saturn pulled water- and ammonia-ice from the gas giant's depths.

Japanese trucker art.

Curiosity Mars Rover watches Phobos eclipse the sun:

Paris, Dione

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
 
Imaged by the Cassini spacecraft, the terminator of Saturn's moon Dione passes through Dido crater, with its central peak. Just above it, in sunlight, on the sub-Saturnian hemisphere of the little moon, are the twin craters Romulus and Remus (Romulus is the larger one). In The Quiet War, the city of Paris, Dione, runs down into Romulus crater on the slope of the rimwall shared with Remus crater.

Riddick

Richard B. Riddick, the shaven-headed silver-eyed antihero of Pitch Black and its sequels, is an exemplar of that hoary old SF trope - the competent man. Played by Vin Diesel, he's the last of a warrior race: brutal and uncompromising, with eyes modified so that he can see in the dark, he dominates every situation he finds himself in, is able to out-think every enemy. After a space-operatic sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick and an animated film, The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, failed to build on the first film's success, it seemed that the franchise was over. But neither Vin Diesel nor writer/director David Twohy were prepared to let it go: Riddick, as its name suggests, is a back-to-basics reboot.

Riddick has become the unwilling leader of the Necromonger cult. Betrayed into thinking that his home planet, Furya, has been rediscovered, he's abandoned on a deathworld, and attracts the attention of two groups of mercenary bounty-hunters - one simply out for the reward money, the other led by a man with a personal agenda - in an attempt to effect his escape.  It's a simple but effective three-act story in which Riddick and the franchise rediscover their mojo.  In the first part, Riddick makes like a barbarian version of Robinson Crusoe on Mars, battling alien predators and setting up camp; in the second, the viewpoint shifts the mercenaries as Riddick picks them off one by one; in the third, as in Pitch Black, the surviving players have to deal with a horde of monsters.

The tension occasionally slackens as the mercenaries squabble and wander about the landscape; the lone significant female character (Katee Sackhoff), despite her demonstrable toughness, is defined by male attention (and given an unnecessary shower scene); oblique references to previous films may confuse those who haven't seen them.  But there's plenty of good hard-edged dialogue, and Vin Diesel completely inhabits his anti-hero, setting his intricate plan for escape in motion, ghosting in and out of darkness and rain, and calmly pulling off a startling execution while chained up.

It's all good, old-fashioned B-movie fun, punched up with gory effects. And while it doesn't give any new insights or character development to its anti-hero, it's a shot in the arm for the franchise and a refreshing change from this summer's depressing parade of bloated blockbusters.

Links 30/08/13

'While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.
'“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.”'

A digital camera that mimics the selectivity of the human retina.

The world's only parasite museum.

Images from NASA's Chandra Observatory suggest that SagA*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, 'is apparently finding much of its food hard to swallow.'

Galaxies like grains of sand - a flight through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Twelve Tomorrows

On the newstands on September 17, this second collection of SF stories - including one of mine - from MIT Technology Review, with a cover by legendary artist Richard Powers.  Table of contents:

Q+A with Neal Stephenson
'Insistence of Vision' by David Brin
'The Mighty Mi Tok of Beijing' by Brian W. Aldiss
'In Sight' by Cheryl Rydbom
'Transitional Forms' by Paul McAuley
'Pathways' by Nancy Kress
'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' by Allen M. Steele
'The Revolution Will Not Be Refrigerated' by Ian McDonald
'The Cyborg and the Cemetery' by Nancy Fulda
'Bootstrap' by Kathleen Ann Goonan
'Zero for Conduct' by Greg Egan
Gallery - The Art of Richard Powers
'Pwnage' by Justina Robson
'Firebrand' by Peter Watts

Links 16/08/13

A few long-form pieces to read over the weekend:

'The peppered moth provides a textbook example of industrial melanism and its reversal. Once a classroom classic, then much criticised, and finally rehabilitated through further observation, the story also shows how real science works. The response of the creationist and “Intelligent Design” community provides a textbook example of a conspiracy theory in action, with cherry-picked quotations, allegations of collusion and fraud, and refusal to acknowledge new evidence.'

 Sophie McDougal explains why she hates strong female characters.

The secret history of G.I. Joe, Barbie, Darth Vader, and making war in children's culture. Part 1.  Part 2.

David Simon on Steve Earle.

Two moons passing in the Martian night:

N.B.

Aside from the odd photo and the weekly links page, I'll be blogging very infrequently for the next four weeks. I want to get a good portion of the second draft of the new novel done (and wouldn't mind finishing a short story, too), I have a business problem to resolve, and I need a holiday.  (Yes, I was just in Spain as a guest of the very good, hugely relaxed Celsius 232 festival, and had a terrific time in great company, but I'm planning a few days away that have nothing at all to do with the writing biz.)

Meanwhile, there are reviews of Evening's Empires here and here, and there's a Q&A conducted by my publishers about my first 25 years as a novelist over here. And at some point I'll post links to a book give-away . . .

[edit] Oh yes, and I've reviewed Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood for The Los Angeles Review of Books.