NED

A little over five years ago I was told that I had bowel cancer. This was in in an office half-full of broken furniture and with a view of a weedy car park, the former site of the Odeon and Paramount cinema. A conjunction of bathos and cheap symbolism that would be rightly edited out of any fiction. Five years on, the office, the building it was in, and the car park, are all gone. Erased by redevelopment. Five years on, after major surgery, seven months of chemotherapy and a small nervous collapse manifesting mostly in anxiety attacks, I'm still here. And I've just been told that my latest and hopefully last CT scan has shown no trace of the disease. Five years on, I'm not cured, because there is as yet no way of determining that a cancer patient is entirely free of cancer cells. But I am no longer in remission. I am, prosaically, inelegantly, happily, NED -- No Evidence of Disease.

For which I am of course, immensely grateful. To the NHS, and the staff of University College Hospital London, where I was treated. To my steadfast partner, and everyone who offered condolences and support. To all, again, thank you.

But after a brief surge of elation at the good news, in which, yes, the world did look more vivid and significant, as if leaving the cinema after watching a terrific and involving film, life resumes. Partly, this is because someone close to me is currently undergoing treatment for cancer. So cancer is still a very large part of my everyday life. But also because while having cancer is life-changing, no doubt, life goes on anyway. Other stuff insists on happening. The world inconsiderately does not pay full attention to you, and you are not continually bathed in the glorious light of revelation. Which is probably just as well, as it sounds awfully tiring.

But you are, of course, abruptly confronted with your own mortality, and the stark realisation that part of your body, that marvelous intricate communal cooperative which you've mostly taken for granted, has rebelled. Cells have regressed to an embryonic state. They are no longer cooperating. Instead, all they want to do is feed and divide. And given the chance, they will continue divide and spread until that marvelous cooperative collapses. They are so greedy for life that they don't care that their greed will kill you, and kill them too.

That knowledge is a continual low level dread, and the needling reminder that comes at odd moments in the day, and lies with you, unsleeping, at night: remember, you have cancer. And often it seems the other way around, a version of the old Russian joke. You don't have cancer. Cancer has you.

There are two narratives imposed on cancer patients by much of the media. There's the foot soldier in war against cancer, bravely battling the odds. And there's the stoic saint bravely facing her looming unavoidable fate. But if treating cancer is a battle, the patients aren't the foot soldiers. They're the battlefield. And while most of us would all like to aspire to the condition of sainthood, only some of us achieve it.

So, I was no foot soldier. I was a battleground. And, regrettably, I was no saint, either. I had a few low-key and somewhat sentimental and commonplace Damascene moments. I was privileged to witness the ability of my fellow patients to endure with dignity and humour (there's no darker humour than the humour of the chemo ward) the various indignities and travails of treatment. But mostly I tried to get on with my life, which meant that I continued to write books and stories and articles, travel when I could, pay the gas bills, so on, so forth. And maybe it was a selfish or unimaginative way of dealing with the situation, but hey. It mostly worked for me.

Five years on, then, I'm no longer a patient, but I am not cured. There is no cure. I am NED. I am still subject to survivorship statistics, although the odds have increased massively in my favour. Five years ago, my odds of surviving the next five years -- staying alive with or without evidence of cancer in my body -- were about 60%. Now, because most recurrences of cancer happen within five years of the original treatment, my odds of surviving the next five years are little different to those of everyone my age who hasn't had cancer.

That needling little reminder hasn't yet fallen silent. I doubt that it ever will. But it's now in the past tense. It no longer says, remember, you have cancer. It says instead remember, you had cancer. It's no longer a warning. It's a valediction.

The View From My Window Today

Low afternoon sunlight and leaf colour in London.

Upcoming, In Black And White

Two different views of life after the coming of the Jackaroo, those willfully enigmatic aliens who are here to help. Whatever that means.

First up, the paperback cover for Something Coming Through, scheduled for publication in January next year. Second, the cover for Into Everywhere, due out in March 2016. Just the draft version at the moment, but it can be found elsewhere in the internet so I thought I'd throw it up here.

More later, you bet.

Continuum

In the purest kind of science fiction, the characters are in service to the story, and the story, whether it's about exploring alien megastructures (Rendezvous With Rama) or dramatising the unforgiving nature of orbital dynamics ('The Cold Equations'), is strung on a spine of actual or extrapolated science. But the pure quill of so-called hard sf quickly shades into fictions with more human concerns which respect the scientific spirit but have a focus that's elsewhere. That may be more interested in changes in society driven by science and technology, and the moral dilemmas those changes create, than in the actual science. And that in turn shades into the kind of sf in which science, or the vocabulary of science, or science's angle of attack, is used to illustrate a moral dilemma or some aspect of the human condition present in the actual world. The kind of story that has begun to dominate the Hugo Awards; the kind of story that this year's iteration of the Sad Puppy group railed against. John Cho's 'The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere', for instance, or Rachel Swirsky's 'If You were a Dinosaur, My Love'. Humanist stories that appear to be the antithesis of hard sf, yet in fact respect the scientific rational and central importance of science in our culture as much as the purest, hardest hard sf. Stories that, like hard sf stories, are informed by the time in which they were written, for although scientific verities secured by empiric evidence may be immutable, the culture of science, because it's a human construct, is not.There's no us v. them. No central core that must be defended from impure outsiders. It's a continuum.

A Thing I Should Have Mentioned Earlier...

I'm taking part in the Gollancz Festival at Waterstone's London Piccadilly branch today, along with a small horde of other authors. It's sold out, but if you're coming along don't forget to bring or buy something for me to sign.

In other news, I appear to be working on a new novel. And I've sold a Jackaroo short story, 'Something Happened Here, But We Don't Know What It Was', to tor.com. It'll be published in summer next year. My short-story mojo has made a slight return. Not sure where it has been, but I'm glad that it's back and hope that it will stick around so I can do something with a few more ideas that have fallen on me in the past year. Paraphrasing John  Updike, writing short stories is like playing in the waves off a lovely beach; writing novels is like striking out across a choppy sea with no clear destination in sight.

The Martian

Not so much a review as a series of thoughts, so ... mild spoiler alert.

There have been stories about astronauts stranded on Mars before, of course. Short stories by Arthur C. Clarke and Theodore Sturgeon, Rex Gordon's novel No Man Friday, and the film Robinson Crusoe on Mars have all turned on various kinds of Martian shipwreck (and one of the characters in my novel The Secret of Life refused to leave the home she'd made on Mars when offered the chance of rescue). But The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott and based on the novel by Andy Weir, brings a couple of new ideas to the game.

It's a film whose beats are snaps of inspiration and the appliance of science. Unlike Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian doesn't dramatise the effects of solitude and the continual struggle for survival on its lone protagonist. Like his departed colleagues, who left him behind in the confusion of a dust storm, the stranded astronaut, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is a scientist, come to Mars not to fight monsters or set up a hotdog stand or moon about ancient crystal cities, but to do science. And he goes about the business of survival in a thoroughly intelligent, rational and convincing way, confronting each problem and sciencing the shit out of it. As on Mars, so on Earth. Once they realise that Watney is alive, NASA scientists and engineers begin to devise a way to rescue him, and like him they must work with what they have, within the immovable limitations of physics and orbital mechanics. As in Apollo 13, the ticking clocks of dwindling resources and orbital windows drive the drama; unlike Apollo 13, there are few glimpses of the hinterlands or interior lives of its protagonists. Its gaze is not unsympathetic, but is cool and vast, more comfortable with technical details than messy human lives.

That same gaze pans across vast panoramas of Mars as we now know it from the camera eyes of spacecraft in orbit and rovers and robot landers. Views from high above showing Watney driving across vast desolations in a Mars buggy are resonant with the Romantic sublime: the works of man lost in the enormous emptiness of nature. There's a wonderful Martian sunset, and a nice shot showing Watney sitting on a rocky ridge and looking out across the ochre landscape: part of a short passage in which in which, in a rare moment of introspection, he reflects that everywhere he goes is new territory, his every footprint the first.

Despite the film's claim to verisimilitude, there are, inevitably, compromises made for dramatic purposes. The dust storm that kicks off the story is far more violent than any possible in Mars's thin atmosphere; Watney recovers an actual probe that landed near the landing site of his fictional expedition by digging it out of an unlikely dune, presumably deposited by similar storms. I appreciate the dramatic reason -- the excavation nicely parallels the unveiling of its Earthbound twin in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory warehouse -- but it misses an opportunity to show Watney finding it by navigating the rocky landscape where it actually landed, and which it extensively and famously imaged. Likewise, the region where he's stranded, Acidalia Planitia, contains some fantastic geology -- outflow channels where ancient floods have modified the landscape; tens of thousands of mounds that might be extinct mud volcanoes; huge boulder fields and areas of shattered blocks -- but while an actual expedition to the region would most definitely science the shit out them, they're never mentioned in the film. A pity, I think, as they could have been used to give a sense of Mars as a place with its own deep dynamic history.

But the film is after all called The Martian, not Mars. And its story of tribulation and dogged survival, of the triumph of one man's will, and of human ingenuity and cooperation, is upliftingly optimistic. No wonder, despite a subplot that depicts technicians outwitting NASA politicians, the agency has thrown its weight behind it. It not only shows us how it would be for humans to walk on Mars; it's also a hymn to the space industry's scientific and technical capability, and to the spirit of exploration.

News From Pluto

'If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top, but that’s what is actually there.' Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator

Hard To Be A God

Back in 1975, in a review of Thomas M. Disch's collection Getting Into Death, M. John Harrison highlighted a passage in one story, 'The Asian Shore', and excoriatingly compared its uncompromising realism with the airless constructions and frictionless problems and discourse of much contemporary SF. In the story, an American recently moved to Istanbul, haunted by an identity crisis, crosses the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city and comes across a boy crying by a public fountain. It's winter. The boy has been sent to collect water in two buckets, but he is shod in plastic slippers with a thong that must be grasped by the first and second toes. When he tries to walk, freezing water slops onto his feet, his numb toes lose his grip, and he cannot keep his slippers on. He can't leave them behind, and he can't leave the water buckets, either. But as far as the story's non-Turkish-speaking protagonist is concerned, the worst of it is the horror of his own helplessness:

He could not go up to the boy and ask him where he lived, lift him and carry him -- he was so small -- to his home. Nor could he scold the child's parents for having sent him out on this errand without proper shoes or winter clothes. He could not even take up the buckets and have the child lead him to his home. For each of these possibilities demanded that he be able to speak to the boy, and this he could not do.

Harrison's explication of that passage made a huge impression on me at the time; as far as I was concerned, it epitomised the division between genre science fiction and the ambitions of the New Wave. And I was strongly reminded of it while watching Aleksei German's film Hard To Be a God, just released on Blu-ray in the UK.

An adaptation of Arkady and Bros Strugatsky's science fiction novel, it's an epic drama the director planned over four decades, spent a dozen years making, and did not live to complete  -- the final post-production work was carried out by by his widow and his son. Filmed in black and white, it's set on an alien planet whose people and history are much like our own, except that its nascent Renaissance has been snuffed out by the persecution of intellectuals and artists by a violent sect, the Greys. Its inhabitants are imprisoned by squalor, violence and meaningless ritual. Crumbling buildings are swept by seething rain or muffled by fog, and mired in glutinous lakes of mud and shit through which everyone must struggle on their daily rounds.

The film's densely imagined, claustrophobic world is depicted in crowded, busy scenes that deliberately echo the paintings of Breugel pere and fils, and Heironymus Bosch (many of the extras were chosen for their resemblance to characters in their work), and the restless camera not only immerses the viewer in the action but also becomes a character in the film. Passers-by often turn to address it with complaints or knowing looks; it roves with a kind of avid detachment over faces and animals, corpses and atrocities, peers under tables or into corners of rooms while elsewhere something else is always going on. Passages are reminiscent of the films of Terry Gilliam (especially Jabberwocky), Sergei Eistenstein's Ivan the Terrible, and Elim Klimov's World War 2 masterpiece Come and See, but the sheer density of its world-building and its unblinking documentation of human folly and degradation are arresting, exhausting, and wholly unique.

This universal misery is watched and recorded by a small group of anthropologists from Earth. The film's narrative, recounted in elliptical episodes, centers on one of them, Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), who masquerades as a swordfighter descended from a local god. We are never shown the spaceship that brought him and his colleagues to this backward world, but he wears a crystal camera eye, his sword can effortlessly cut through armour, he plays jazz on a complicated clarinet, and affects an ironic detachment. He cuts off the ears of his enemies rather than killing them, and insists on a plentiful supply of hot water and white linen to set himself apart from the grimy, stinking locals, but gradually becomes mired in a struggle between the Greys and a rival sect, and an intricate sequence of betrayals. He wants to do good, but doesn't know how. He wants to stay aloof, but is forced to take violent action to defend himself. And it slowly becomes clear that his seprior powers can have no effect on the dead-end of the planet's civilisation: remove the Greys, and another sect will take its place; kill all the noblemen, and others equally violent and corrupt will take their place.

The parallels between the fantastical world of this compassionate, compelling, witty, intelligent film and our own are obvious; the contrast with much contemporary science fiction, with its super heroes, worlds designed to reward their protagonists, and simplistic morality plays, is as strong as it was forty years ago.

Cover Reveal

Science Friction

In the early 1970s, Samuel R. Delany and his ex-wife Marilyn Hacker edited four volumes of a little magazine, Quark. Original short stories and poetry. Speculative fiction. New Wave experiments in inner space. Stories by Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Joanna Russ, M John Harrison, Kate Wilhelm. An early piece by Christopher Priest. Cool stuff, and a nice little cross-section of science fiction at a certain node in its history. I have the first two volumes, and after a few years of failing to spot the other two at dealers' tables at SF conventions (not that I was looking very hard), I took the search online. A book dealer in New Jersey had a nice copy of Quark 3 at a keen price. I ordered and paid for it, he packaged and dispatched it . . . and somewhere between New Jersey and London, it went astray.

Translating an impulse into an order on some merchant's web page and arranging the paperless transfer of credit is largely friction free, apart from the mediation of touch pad or keyboard. But pressing the virtual BUY button sets in train a hugely complex set of processes in the physical world, involving two different postal services and two sets of customs, at least one air freight company and one of its planes and the plane's crew, a trans-Atlantic flight, various air traffic control systems, two airports . . . The kind of stuff glimpsed at the edges of the narrative of Castaway; the infrastructure hymned in John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay's Aerotropolis. We think about it when we shop online about as much as we think of abattoirs when we order a hamburger, which is to say hardly at all. Until something goes wrong, and the friction of actual things moving through the actual world makes itself known. And something did go wrong, in transit, with the copy of Quark 3 I ordered. I never did get the book, but because the transport system tracks objects via their unique codes I was able to find out that that it reached my local sorting office, which tried twice to deliver it . . . to a house number one digit different to mine.

It's a very twenty-first century experience, this kind of futile omnipotence: you can see where things went wrong, but only when it's too late to do anything about it. You have the information, but you can't use it to solve the problem because although the system allows you to be an observer, it doesn't allow you to be an agent. I know, because the bookseller kept a scan of the postage label, that the address was correct when he consigned the book to the maw of the machine. And I know that somewhere, somehow, the address changed. Perhaps either US or UK customs opened the package to check it, and slapped on a new label with a miskeyed address. Perhaps the label was subtly damaged, a smudge or rip changing the last digit of the house number from 8 to 9. Maybe, like the fly that falls into a teletype printer at the beginning of Brazil, and changes the name Tuttle to Buttle, there was an actual bug in the machine. In any case, no one was in on the two occasions, two weeks apart, when the postman tried to deliver the book to the wrong address. While-you-were-out cards were left, addressed to me; presumably, the home owner shrugged and threw them away. And when no one came to collect the book after the second delivery attempt, the sorting office sent it off to the depot that handles international mail, so that it could be returned to sender.

I know the dates of the attempted deliveries, and the date of return, but after that the trail goes cold. A month has passed. The book hasn't yet come back to the bookseller. I hope it does. It was - I hope it still is - a nice clean copy of a paperback more than forty years old. I wouldn't like to think that my stupid impulse to buy it consigned it like some hapless hero to a journey with no clear destination or way back; that the frictionless scratch of a little itch of desire, a momentary impulse that crossed the Atlantic at the speed of electricity, has been the undoing of a fragile innocent little memento of history and imagination.

Status Update

I've now consigned the much-scribbled-on copy-edited manuscript of Into Everywhere to my long-suffering editor. Into his actual hands, after I tramped through London's implacable August weather, enough rain that it was as if the waters of a new creation &tc, to Gollancz's new offices. Where I was told, at the front desk, that they don't accept packages, presumably because it's the twenty-first century, and it's all infopipes now. But however you deliver it, there's always a feeling that you haven't finished the novel so much as abandoned it -- even though you know that there comes a point where actual improvement gives way to mere tinkering, it's hard to tell, when you've been working on something so closely for so long, where that point actually is. Next up, in the march from vague notion to thingnicity: proofs and cover art. I've seen a cover rough already, and it looks rather good.

Meanwhile, I've sold two stories, one of which, will be my hundredth in print, more or less.* One, 'Rats Dream of the Future', to Asimov's Science Fiction; the other, 'Elves of Antarctica' to an anthology of original stories about climate change, Drowned Worlds, Wild Shores, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Not so much science fiction that last; not any more.



__________
*because amongst other things I'm counting two collaborations with Kim Newman

So Long, Dione

Although it was fairly flat compared to Iapetus, and lacked impressively large features like Tethys’s Ithica Chasma, or Rhea’s two great multi-ringed impact basins, Dione’s moonscapes were nevertheless highly differentiated. Satellite surveys and a century of exploration had not yet exhausted them; gypsy prospectors like Karyl could make a living from searching out volcanic deposits of phosphates and nitrates and sulphates, veins of breciated carbonaceous chondrite material from cometary impacts, and the remains of stony or iron meteorites.

It was a lonely life, sure, and often frustrating, with long dry spells when strike after strike uncovered nothing useful. But like all gamblers, the occasional reward drove him ever onward across Dione’s cratered plains and smooth plains, through the troughs and labyrinthine badlands. Sometimes, especially late in the afternoon, with low sunlight mingling with Saturn’s pastel glow and the moonscape curving away on every side glowing like beaten bronze and everything casting two shadows, one short and one long, like the hands of an old-fashioned clock, Karyl’s heart lifted and turned on a flood of happiness, as if he was the emperor of all he surveyed, the only witness to Dione’s pure, bleak, uncanny beauty.

Words from 'Karyl's War', Stories From The Quiet War.
Images from Cassini's last close encounter with Saturn's moon Dione, August 17, 2015. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.

Confluence Paperback

Published today: the hefty paperback edition of the reissued omnibus of the Confluence trilogy. Three novels and two related stories; 935 pages. As it says on the back:

Confluence - a long, narrow, man-made world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert. A world served by countless machines, inhabited by by ten thousand bloodlines who worship their absent creators.

This is the home of Yama, destined to become a clerk until the discovery of his singular ancestry. For Yama appears to be the last remaining sion of the Builders, able to control the secret machineries of the world.

Pursued by enemies who want to make use of his powers, Yama voyages down the length of the world to search for answers to the mysteries of his origin, and discover if he is to be its saviour, or its nemesis.

Two Men Looking For U.N.C.L.E.

Another day, another film that's the origin story of an old franchise rebooted for a new generation. But unlike Fantastic Four, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is an action film that instead of footling around with the laborious construction of a Macguffin delivers what's expected of it from the outset. In Cold War Berlin (Kennedy's 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech is on the TV, so it's 1963), CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB operative Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) duel over East German car mechanic Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), daughter of a missing atomic scientist (Udo, not the actual atomic scientist Edward). But when their bosses realise that Gaby's father is building a nuclear weapon for a gang of fascists, Solo and Kuryakin are forced to work together, helping Gaby to find her father and infiltrate the fascist organisation.

The story is a nod to the central trope of the TV series, where innocents routinely became entangled with Solo and Kuryakin's espionage underworld. The odd-couple pairing between suave former art thief Solo, and Kuryakin, a by-the-rule-book strongman with severe anger management issues, is enlivened Gaby's presence - from the outset it's made clear that she has her own particular skill-set, and she gets the best of Kuryakin in their flirtatious exchanges. Elizabeth Debicki is a fine villain, by turns smouldering and icy, the mostly Italian settings burst with sumptuous colour, the costumes are achingly stylish, the soundtrack is punchy, and Guy Ritchie directs the action setpieces with the style he honed on his two Sherlock Holmes films. It's very much an homage to period action films rather than a knowing pastiche.

It's unfortunate, then, that the chemistry between the two male leads doesn't quite gel. Exchanges meant to be snappy too often fall flat; Cavill's Solo is a little too ponderous (and his American drawl is startlingly similar to Christian Bale's in American Psycho - I kept expecting him to break into a short disquisition about the merits of Burt Bacharach). Hugh Grant, as a deceptively bumbling British spy chief, gets the better of both of male leads; Alicia Vikander's nimble and witty turn as Gaby outclasses them all. And because the film concentrates on how Solo and Kuryakin met and why U.N.C.L.E. was set up, the actual plot, with its chases and confrontations with playboy villains, ex-Nazis, double agents and atomic weaponry, is somewhat exiguous and implausible. It's understandable, I guess, that the setup of a fifty-year-old TV series needs to be explained to its young core audience (the film also gives a quick, clever reprise of the basics of the Cold War in its opening credits, and later illustrates the essentials of the Second World War - Adolph Hitler had a hand in it, apparently), but it's something that the original The Man From U.N.C.L.E. neither bothered with nor needed. An entertaining caper, lovely to look at, but one that left me wishing that it had spent more time on plot than setup, and found a better balance of substance and style.

New York, New York

Fantastic Four

I didn't have any great expectations when I saw a preview showing of Fantastic Four a couple of days ago, so at least I wasn't disappointed. A reboot of the 2005 film, apparently made so that Fox could hang on to the franchise, it makes some radical changes to the origin story of Marvel's first superhero team: Reed Richards, supergenius elastic man; Sue Storm, with the ability to become invisible and generate force fields; Johnny Storm, human torch; Ben Grimm, stone-clad golem. But none of the changes are improvements, and the film fails to weld together three different narrative sections into a coherent whole. It starts with a slice of Spielbergian wonder as schoolboy Reed hooks up with Ben while searching for an essential component for his teleportation device; then jumps forward a few years when Reed is recruited to a hothouse academy and falls for Sue Storm; and finally takes a turn into grimdark territory after the teleporter accesses the weird energies of an alter Earth, and transforms the four heroes and the villain (as in the comics, helpfully called Victor Von Doom).

The major problem is that this version of the Fantastic Four's origin story isn't as much fun as the original, in which Reed developed an interstellar spaceship that ran into trouble as soon as it left Earth, exposing Reed, Ben Grimm (who was piloting it) and Reed's fiance Sue and her brother Johnny to the radiation of the Van Allen belts. The 2005 film was a variation on this - exposure to cosmic radiation on Reed's privately-owned space station. In both, Reed's wealth gave them independence and allowed them to become celebrity heroes: having superpowers could be troublesome (especially for Ben Grimm, with the world's worst skin problem), and the four squabbled and fell out in the way all families do, but on the whole being one of the team was pretty swell.

Not so much in the new version (and here, I guess, mild SPOILERS), where the transformation doesn't happen until more than halfway through the film, and the four nascent superheroes become pawns of the military-industrial complex. Despite the lead actors' best efforts to breathe life into their characters, it's a disjointed mess, focusing on construction of the plot MacGuffin and gloomy moral quandaries at the expense of the bits where the superheroes strut their stuff and the crucial annealing of the four as a team. If only it would put an end to the formulaic origin story - hero gets power, fights villain they've accidentally created, establishes franchise identity - repeated across original film treatments and reboots. But it probably won't even succeed in that.

Comet Dirt

Credits: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS/DLR

It looks, someone responded when I posted the above to Twitter, like my back yard. It's actually the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, taken from a distance of nine metres by the Philae lander, at the very end of its descent after being released by the Rosetta comet chaser. The lander failed to anchor itself and in the comet's feeble gravity bounced off the surface several times, ending up wedged in the shadow of a low cliff. Without enough sunlight falling on its solar panels the little lander went into sleep mode after its battery power ran down, but recently woke again because the intensity of sunlight has increased as the comet makes its closest approach to the sun. A short while ago it transmitted a fat batch of data, just published, including that close-up of its first, very temporary landing site. Which does, yes, look like a patch of garden dirt. Or maybe the hardcore of a building-site car park. Or the surface of Mars, or of the Moon. Which either suggests (if you hate the idea of space exploration) that travel to other planets is a waste of time, or (if, like me, you geek out on planetary science) says something interesting about the universality of dirt. That there are similar geological processes on comets and planets that grind bedrock fine, and with the aid of gravity and wind (or the eruptive jets of comets) distribute the material in a more or less even blanket. That a comet isn't a simple ball of ice, but possesses dirt and boulders, cliffs with mass-wasted talus slopes, and even what look like rippled dunes.

But even outwith the fact that it's part of the rind of a comet, the dirt in the image isn't ordinary dirt, of course. It's mostly water ice. Pebbles and shards and grains of water ice frozen hard as rock, leavened with carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide ices, and tainted with a variety of toxic chemicals - hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanide, sulphur dioxide, carbon disulphide, formaldehyde, methyl isocyanate, acetone, propionaldehyde, acetamide . . . 'If you could smell the comet, you would probably wish that you hadn't,' as one of the Rosetta team wrote in the project's blog. But in that poisonous cocktail are compounds that probably played key roles in Earth's ancient prebiotic chemistry. You couldn't grow flowers in comet dirt (although if you were one of the Quiet War's Outers, you might seed a comet like this with vacuum organisms that would mine useful organics), yet it contains the stuff of life: stuff that may have seeded the Earth with necessary precursors. That patch of comet dirt is a reminder of where we came from.

A Very Pure Form Of Hunting

‘I’m not a hunter,’ Summer said, ‘but isn’t a crossbow an unusual choice of weapon?’

‘It’s a very pure form of hunting – you only get the chance of one shot, so you must make absolutely sure that it is the kill-shot. You say you are not a hunter, but isn’t that why you are here?’

Dirk Merrit was amused, and seemed to believe that he was in complete control.

Summer said, ‘Maybe you could show me the crossbow. The one you used to kill the cougar.’

Both Denise and Dirk Merrit looked at her. Then the man turned and walked around the central fireplace to a set of tall glass-fronted cabinets. He opened a door, lifted out a crossbow, and carried it back to where Summer and Denise stood. It was bigger than Summer had expected, modern and very definitely lethal, with a pistol grip and a skeletal stock. Dirk Merrit rested it on his forearm, explained that the bow part was called the prod and the prod was attached to the table or deck, that both the prod and the deck were made out of carbon-fibre composite, the weapon had a draw weight of one hundred fifty pounds and loosed a twenty-inch arrow at a velocity of two hundred feet per second.

‘You can attach a telescopic sight, but I never use one. The lethal range is less than a hundred yards, and I prefer to get as close as possible. I admit to being something of a purist. For instance, I use a goatsfoot lever rather than a powered winder to draw the string.’

Dirk Merrit explained that the arrow generally killed someone not by shock but by massive haemorrhage, so it was necessary for the marksman to have a good working knowledge of the anatomy of his prey, and to be able to think in three dimensions when placing his shot.

‘You might say that it is not so much a shot as a lethal incision.’

Summer said, ‘Someone?’

Dirk Merrit stared at her and she stared right back. The air between them seemed to hum. On the TV behind him, the Mad Max warrior was hacking his way through tangles of creepers that were more or less the same colour as Dirk Merit’s blood-capped eyes.

Summer said, ‘You said “someone”, not “something”.’

‘Mmmm. Did you know that it’s forbidden by Papal edict to use the crossbow against Christians?’

‘Are you saying that you only shoot Muslims, Mr Merrit?’

‘If I did, I’d hardly be likely to tell you, would I? Even in the current political climate.’

His smile was back in place, but he seemed wary now, no longer the master of his domain.

From Players

Farewell, Fantastic Pluto

I am older than the space age, although not by much. I was only a toddler when Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, was too young to take any notice of the news about Yuri Gagarin's path-breaking orbital flight four years later. But I have a very clear memory of seeing, on the black-and-white television set the teacher brought into the classroom of Selsley Primary School for the occasion, images of the Moon's surface transmitted by the robot craft Surveyor 1 after its soft landing on the Ocean of Storms. That was on June 2, 1966. A little over three years later I was woken by my mother in the middle of a summer night to see Neil Armstrong make his historic first step. I remember the images captured by Pioneer 10 as it sped through Jupiter's system, Viking 1's first glimpse of Mars's rock-strewn surface, the softly tinted picture of a frozen beach sent from Titan by the little Huygens lander. And a few days ago I watched on the same screen that I'm now typing this, via NASA TV's internet channel, the presentation of the first high resolution images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft. Less than sixty years after Sputnik the first era of solar system exploration is over . . .

More over at Strange Horizons.

Paper Work

Although I was doing some basic computer programming back in the early 1980s and bought my first desktop computer back in 1984, using it to write my second novel and finding that word processing was a huge improvement over working on my old electric typewriter, so on, so forth, I'm not a digital native. Didn't grow up with computers, let alone the internet; can't contribute anything to the debates about Scrivener v. Ulysses; still use notebooks for research and stray ideas, and scrap paper to unravel and re-ravel tricky sentences, jot down notes about the next day's work and for general doodling. And still find it tricky to copy edit and proof manuscripts on the screen, which is why, thanks to the patient tolerance of my editor, I'm currently working through the copy edit of Into Everywhere on an old-school printed manuscript with pencilled mark-up. Rereading the novel on actual pages reveals infelicities that somehow weren't apparent when working on various drafts on screen. And there's something satisfying about using pen, pencil and eraser to make changes, rather than fiddling with Microsoft Word's accursed change tracking system: something more immediate than tapping on keys. Something more like work. Perhaps because, not being a digital native, I still locate work in the real world. In the scratch of pen on paper, the flow of ink, the wobbly pressure of an eraser as it removes pencil marks. Also, and this is crucial, there's a definite shift in perception when I'm leaning over the page and looking down instead of looking straight ahead. It's somehow more engaging, makes it easier to displace the blooming buzzing confusion of the rest of the world, and tracking sentences word by word with the point of a pen instead of following a cursor sets up a rhythm that refines my concentration in a different way. Engages different muscles; different neural pathways. Maybe those pathways were laid down in the years I spent writing stuff down instead of looking at screens and tapping keys; maybe they're a hardwired response to a different perspective. Try it and see.

A Big Box Of Big Paperbacks

Advance copies of the Confluence paperback. Three novels. Two stories. One fat book.

Aviles, Spain

Macy Minnot Visits Charon

After some debate, Newt and two other volunteers took Elephant out of orbit and landed close to the equator. Newt stepped down to the surface, the fifth human being to set foot on Pluto, saying casually, ‘Well, here we are,’ and the three of them bounced around for an hour and set several drones tracking away across the frosty plain, then took off and caught up with Out of Eden as the shuttle went into orbit around Charon.

The dark surface of the smaller component of the binary system was divided between terrain cut by cobweb grooves and terrain pitted like the skin of a cantaloupe, all of it painted by broad, bright swathes of crystalline water ice and dusted with ammonium hydrate frosts in the shadows of crater rims: deep beneath Charon’s surface was a shallow ocean of ammonia-rich water that here and there squeezed up through subsurface cracks, erupted in cryogeysers that deposited swathes of fresh frost across the dark surface, marking it in tiger stripes.
 
The Free Outers agreed that Charon was a place where human beings could live, roofing over troughs and grooves, tunnelling down to the zone of liquid water. Everyone took turns to descend to the surface. Macy went down with Newt, following him out across a lightly cratered plain, the two of them bouncing along in especially insulated pressure suits to the site of the first probe to have landed on Charon, some eighty years ago. An instrument platform slung between three pairs of fat mesh wheels, it stood at the end of a wandering track where its little fission pack had finally run out of energy. Stranded in a charcoal desert struck with little craters whose floors glimmered with pale frost.  The close horizon circling around. The sun a brilliant star that even here, some 5.5 billion kilometres distant, so far away it took light more than five hours to span the distance, gave as much illumination as the full Moon, on Earth.  Pluto’s half-disc hung in the starry black sky, dim and grey in the faint light, capped white at the poles. The two dwarf planets were tidally locked face to face as they circled their common centre, Pluto waxing from full to gibbous to full again every six days.
 
Macy told Newt that it was a magnificent view, but she couldn’t imagine living here. ‘It’s going to get very cold and dark in winter.  And it will be hard to reach anywhere else.’
 
‘The new motor will make it easier than it used to be,’ Newt said. ‘Besides, it won’t be midwinter for more than a hundred years. And if we built habitats here, it will always be summer inside them.’
 
‘It’s so far away from anywhere else. Just this pair of frozen balls waltzing around each other and a couple of tiny chunks of tarry ice dancing attendance . . . ’
 
‘Is this your homesickness?’
 
‘This is something else. I feel like I’m a ghost in a stranger’s house.’
 
‘Right now, it is what it is,’ Newt said. ‘Sure, it’s empty and unmarked.  But so were Saturn’s moons when the pioneers arrived.’
 
‘Pioneers,’ Macy said. ‘There’s a lonely little word.’
 
‘That’s what we are, like it or not.’
 
The expedition explored Charon for ten days. They located tracts of carbonaceous material deposited by impacts with Kuiper Belt objects, and seeded them with vacuum organisms. They launched a satellite that would in time provide detailed topographical and geological maps. And then they began the long voyage back to Uranus. Everyone was bound close by their shared experience, and Macy felt that she was an integral part of the little band of adventurers now. She would never forget Earth, and she did not think that she could ever come to think of the stark and frigid moonscapes as any kind of home. But she was no longer a stranger, here in the outer dark.

From Gardens of the Sun (2009)

Players

I've just published one of my out-of-print backlist novels, Players, on Kindle. Like Mind's Eye, it has never before available in the US. And for the next two weeks it's available for just $1.99, or £1.28 in the UK.

Here's a bit of background:

Long ago, in a publishing company far away, I was for a brief period (apart from the science-fiction short stories I kept writing) labelled as a thriller writer. I'd published a big wild and weird biotech novel, White Devils, and after it had some moderate success my new publishers wanted more of the same.

Luckily, I was already in a day-after-tomorrow head space, and went on to write Mind's Eye, a contemporary thriller set in London and Iraq, and then a police procedural, Players. Mind's Eye, with its brain-zapping glyphs and deep secret history, wasn't exactly a straight thriller, and Players wasn't exactly a straight police procedural (it was based on a science fiction story, 'Before The Flood', collected in Little Machines), but my publisher reckoned that the weirdness threaded through their narratives wasn't quite weird enough to frighten readers who weren't familiar with science fiction.

I've always been a fan of science fiction and crime. And I'd already published two novels with elements of crime in their narratives: Pasquale's Angel, in which Machiavelli is a journalist/consulting detective in an alternate Renaissance Florence, and Whole Wide World, about a policeman investigating computer crime in a near-future London turned into a panopticon after a crippling terrorist attack. But Players, despite the posthuman ambitions of its wannabe serial killer and a plot that turns on a massively multiplayer online game (which back in 2007 was still a novelty), is a far more mainstream crime novel.

It's set in Oregon partly because I couldn't find a plausible way of fitting its scenario into a British locale, partly because it was inspired by an article about the ease of disposing of bodies in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and partly because I had the foolish idea that an American setting would make it easier to publish in the US - I had plans to write several more novels about its hero, Summer Ziegler, that, in the end, came to nothing, as publishing plans too often do. But I had a huge amount of fun writing and researching the novel: amongst other things, I got to hang out with police in Portland, and drive around the forests and hills of southern Oregon, scouting locations. And although I didn't get to write any more Summer Ziegler novels, I'm very pleased to be able to revive her first and only outing.

Choose Art

From John Harris's review of Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald:

It seems that Seeger probably did not try to cut through cables with an axe, but he did recount what had happened with the crestfallen conclusion: “I thought he had so much promise.” Others, by contrast, knew what time it was. In the folk magazine Sing Out!, the critic Paul Nelson compared the two musicians and announced his decision to leave one behind. “Rose-coloured glasses or a magnifying glass?” he wrote. “A nice guy who has subjugated his art through his continued insistence on a world that never was and never can be, or an angry, passionate poet who demands his art to be all?” He said of Newport: “It was a sad parting of the ways for many, myself included.” But then came the slam-dunk resolution: “I choose Dylan. I choose art.”

There Are Doors (23)

Wild Honey

Mel was in the warm dim crawlspace under the hive’s chimneys and stalactite combs, installing new harvesting frames, when the bees began to signal the presence of intruders. Irregular pulses of alarm code flashing through the net; older workers hustling towards the entrances to augment the guards; an urgent bass drone building.

Mel’s blood thrummed in sympathy. She went outside and with field glasses scanned the dun grassland. A witchy old woman  in a faded patched sundress standing in the shade of the nest’s spires, a few ride-along bees clinging in her long white hair. It was late in the afternoon, very hot. Sunlight lanced low out of a flawless blue sky. Trees and stubs of broken wall cast long shadows, and something twinkled in the far distance, a star of reflected light moving out on the old highway.

After a minute or so, the star resolved into Odd Sanders’s battered pickup, driving in a caul of dust ahead of an old army truck and a pod of trikes. Odd sometimes brought petitioners out into the city wilds, charging them for an introduction to the crazy old bee queen whose balm could cure all kinds of sickness. But petitioners usually didn’t ride trikes, and as the little convoy drew closer Mel glimpsed bandoleers across the chests of the trike riders, and rifles and ballistas strapped to their backs.

Foragers were already out, shuttling between the hive and a stand of black locust trees half a mile to the north. Mel could see in her mind’s eye the shape of their traffic laid across the landscape, could see a frail spike of scouts bending towards the highway, and yet again wished that she could use the hive’s network to send the bees where she wanted, and peer through their faceted eyes. She watched as the convoy stopped about a mile away, near the fieldstone chimney that marked where the house of an abandoned homestead had once stood. Almost at once, something lofted from the army truck and curved towards Mel, gathering a smoky comet-tail of bees as it approached.

'Wild Honey', Asimov's Science Fiction August 2015

Double Planet

With the spacecraft New Horizons on its final approach, Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, are very quickly becoming places. In the latest images, Pluto looks rather like a sketch of Mars as seen though Percival Lowell's telescope, with huge patches of dark and light shades, and the Earth's Moon apparently in orbit around it. In fact, because Charon is relatively large, and so close to Pluto, that the two bodies wobble around a common barycenter located just outside Pluto: a miniature double planet. Strange new worlds we're about to see up close for the first time.

Psychic Cure

Lisa hadn’t given psychics much thought before the Bad Trip, but after the neurology consultant told her that it was impossible to remove the eidolon without causing serious brain damage, she began, like a cancer patient who’d been given a terminal diagnosis, to search for cures outside mainstream medicine. Meditation and mindfulness. A sleep machine that was supposed to modify her alpha waves. And then she finally nerved herself to walk into the psychic parlour she passed every day on the way to work.

She waited until the place was about to close. Feeling, as she slipped inside, like a kid trespassing on a grouchy neighbour’s lawn. There was none of the paraphernalia – velvet drapes, antique furniture, wax-encrusted candelabra, batteries of crystals – she’d expected. Just two plastic stacking chairs either side of a small glass-topped table, recessed spotlights in the ceiling, a doorway screened with a waterfall of plain glass beads that clicked as a young man pushed through them. He wore a white shirt, black pants and wire-framed glasses, looking more like an architect or a college lecturer than someone who communed with alien spirits. Holding up a hand when Lisa began to explain why she was there, giving her a lingering look, saying that he could see that she was troubled, that she wanted help. It was her aura, he said. It was an unhealthy colour and had a swollen, lopsided look.

‘You have a guest with deep roots. How did it begin?’

She found herself explaining about the Bad Trip. The psychic listened attentively. He did not seem to judge her. When she finished talking there was a silence. Then he told her that understanding what possessed her was the first step on the road to self-knowledge.

‘That’s why I’m here.’

Lisa paid a hundred and forty dollars for an initial consultation. They sat either side of the table and the psychic took out a small parcel of silvery mylar cloth and unfolded it to reveal a pale, thumbnail-sized tessera. He centred it between them, told Lisa that he was going to evoke his familiar and that she should not be frightened.

'I’ve seen eidolons before,’ she said.

‘The Butcher can be intimidating to some people.’

‘The Butcher?’

‘It is what I call him,’ the young man said. ‘His actual name has no real human equivalent, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Lisa said, beginning to feel that she’d made a mistake.

The psychic told the lights to dim, touched the tessera. And his eidolon was suddenly there, filling the room like a faint fog of cigarette smoke. The psychic closed his eyes. His hands rested palms up on the table, thumb and forefinger pinched together. Lisa expected him to speak in a sonorous voice, channelling his spirit guide, offering nuggets of wisdom, asking leading questions. Instead, the fog began to thicken and coalesce behind him, and she had the brief impression of something larger than the room leaning in, looking down at her. Then the smoky fog blew away, vanishing beyond the walls of the dim little room, and the psychic stood with an abrupt motion that knocked over his chair.

‘Go,’ he said. He looked as if he had been punched hard in the stomach.

‘What about my reading? What did you see?’

There was a stinging metallic taste in Lisa’s mouth, a headache pulsing behind her eyes.

‘Just leave. Please. I can’t help you. I can’t . . .’

For a moment the young man stared at her, a look that was half longing, half revulsion, then turned on his heel and shouldered through the glass-bead curtain.

Don't It Always Seem To Go

So I rewatched Silent Running a couple of weeks ago, on Eureka's fine Blu-Ray reissue. The flaws are still there - notably, of course, and by the way for those who care SPOILER, the ridiculous length of time a crusading botanist takes to realise that plants fail to thrive without adequate illumination. But the spaceships and their geodesic domes look as lovely as ever (director Douglas Trumbull was of course one of the special photographic effects supervisors on 2001: A Space Odyssey), Bruce Dern's manic yet sympathetic performance is still terrific, the robots are even cuter than I remember, and its take-home message that the human species shouldn't trust capitalism to look after nature is still urgent.

Silent Running was released in 1972. A couple of years before, I first heard Joni Mitchell's 'Big Yellow Taxi', which struck me with such a thrill that I still remember the circumstances: sitting with my family at the square table, with its green oil cloth cover, in the kitchen of my great-aunt's boarding house in Bognor Regis, where we regularly stayed for our summer holidays. It was mid-August, 1970. A few days later, little further down the south coast, Joni Mitchell would close her set at the Isle of Wight Festival with the song. I was 15, keen on natural history. I knew about the damage cause by the Torrey Canyon disaster; I'd read Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!, John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, and other science-fictional Awful Warnings; there'd been the First Earth Day earlier that year, calling for greater awareness of damage to the environment and squandering of the planet's resources. And here was a sprightly pop song with the same message. 'Don't it always seem to go, That you don't know what you've got, Till it's gone.' Ecological disaster was very much in the air back then. We were beginning to realise that everything on the planet is connected to everything else.

Silent Running, in its title, and 'Big Yellow Taxi', in its lyrics ('Hey farmer farmer, put away that DDT now'), pay homage to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which documented the catastrophic effects of the indiscriminate use of pesticides on the environment. A little over fifty years after its publication, the bleak future suggested by the title of Carson's book is coming true: a paper just published provides strong evidence that Earth's sixth mass extinction event really is under way, driven not by geological or astronomical disasters, but by human activity.

The authors of the paper used fossil records to calculate a background extinction rate, and compared it with an estimate of what has been lost since 1900. In that time, nine vertebrate species should have become extinct by natural causes; instead, recorded extinctions are occurring at a hundred times the expected level, faster than at any time since the demise of the dinosaurs. Similar calculations have been criticised for overestimating differences from the background rate. But this new study uses highly conservative figures; although its conclusions are stark, the authors point out that actual rates of loss could be higher. As in the case of the Eastern Cougar, just now listed as extinct, it can take many decades between the last sighting and the official declaration that a species is gone.

It's been known for some time that a catastrophic level of extinction is imminent, driven by the expansion of the human race and our increasing utilisation of the Earth's resources. We account for one third of the total mass of all land vertebrates; our food animals make up much of the rest; wild animals account for just 5% total mass. Our cities and agriculture take up increasing amounts of land area, destroying natural habitats; we consume about forty per cent of the world's annual photosynthetic output; the carbon dioxide produced by our burning of fossil plants is irreversibly changing the planet's climate.

Not only are we at risk of losing large numbers of iconic and charismatic species, from tigers to Emperor penguins. We're also playing a giant and potentially lethal game of Jenga with the environment. Remove a keystone species, or reduce its numbers so that it's no longer influential, and the consequences ramify in unexpected and sometimes catastrophic ways. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the population of sea otters along the Californian coast was enormously reduced by the fur trade. Sea otters eat sea urchins, and in the absence of otters the urchins multiplied, gnawing away the holdfasts of giant kelp and destroying vast kelp forests where hundreds of other species lived. Multiply that by a hundred instances over the next few decades. That's where we're going if we aren't careful, because everything's connected.

Sea otters were saved from extinction by conservation measures introduced in the early twentieth century and the kelp forests have partly returned. And there's a consensus amongst scientists that it's possible to slow the current rate of loss and destruction. Partly, at least. But if action isn't taken, we will have to choose what to save and what to let go. Ecosystems will be regulated or replaced. Intervention will become the norm. Charismatic species will be tagged, monitored by drones, tailored so that they can live in cities or farmland. The last of Nature will be subsumed into the technosphere, confined to refugia. Gardens, parks, zoos. Biomes will be sheltered under geodesic domes, nurtured by cute robots. Trees will be preserved in tree museums. Don't it always seem to go.

Only Real

In her perceptive review of Paulo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, Sherryl Vint observes that 'As many critics have noted in a variety of contexts, as the 21st century unfolds, science fiction increasingly comes to seem like a realist rather than a speculative genre, documenting the pervasiveness of technology in daily life and conveying the affective experience of living through end times.' Like any inhabitant of the 21st century attuned to the hoofbeats of various kinds of war, the global increase in inequality, the sixth extinction, the slow-motion hydra-headed disaster of climate change, and all the other horsemen of the apocalypse, I get the implied irony. How bad are things? So bad they not only look a lot like science fiction. So terrible that reading science fiction is actually a useful prep for how to survive the darkness at the end of the tunnel.

But as a science fiction writer, I can't help thinking that the conflation of the actual 21st century with science fiction is not only something of a back-handed compliment, it's also a gross simplification of the kind of things science fiction can do. For one thing, it suggests that science fiction is increasingly defined by the dystopian mode, and that anything other than that is no more than a thought experiment. But while there are a good number of recent and notable examples of dystopias, especially in young adult fiction and by authors outwith the genre, the vast variety of science fiction hasn't yet collapsed into the singularity of day-after-tomorrow apocalyptic fiction. It's still possible to imagine near futures without road warriors, hypercapitalism, bird flu, or zombies. Futures which are as complicatedly and variously good and bad as the present, and futures that may not be likely or even probable, yet contain their own internal logic and also have something to say about the way we live now.

Science fiction has always been a speculative literature. Any realism it possesses isn't merely about precise and accurate representations of the world as it is, but also concerns the logical consistency of the other worlds it creates, whether or not they're directly spun from the present. Sherryl Vint qualifies 'realist' with 'realistic', but I think the quality of verisimilitude is more important.  Unlike literary realism, but somewhat like romanticism, science fiction attempts to present believable versions of the world as it might be, not as it actually is.

While Vint expertly anatomises the sources of The Water Knife's near future scenario, Bacigalupi points out in an interview quoted in the review, the speculative process that illustrates what we might be heading towards involves 'going two or three steps down the road beyond what you can actually report.' Realism in science fiction isn't an inherent quality. It's a tool.

Infolife

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed that we are no more than survival machines for our genes: 'gigantic lumbering robots' whose sole purpose, as far as our genes are concerned, is to successfully propagate them. And given that genes are made of DNA (apart from the genes of some viruses, which are made of single-stranded RNA), it's possible to think of Earth's biosphere as a huge DNA factory. Given that point of view, a number of interesting questions suggest themselves. Such as, how much DNA is there on the Earth?  How much information does the biosphere contain? How is that information divided between different groups of organisms? And, can the information processing capacity of the biome be calculated?

Three scientists have just published a paper that give some estimated answers to those questions. The lower bound for the estimate of total DNA in the biosphere is approximately 5 × 10¹⁰ tonnes (five followed by ten zeroes, if you're unfamiliar with scientific notation). This contains 5.3 × 10³¹ megabases, equivalent to the storage capacity of 10²¹ of the most powerful supercomputers. The Library of Congress has been estimated to contain a mere 3 × 10⁹ megabytes.

A great deal of that information, it turns out, is contained in plants - around 3.65 × 10³¹ Mb. Although prokaryotes (various kinds of bacteria) are more numerous than all the high organisms, each contains somewhat less DNA than an average plant or animal cell; nevertheless, prokaryotes contain a total of around 1.6 × 10³¹ Mb. Animals, including, of course, us, contain about a hundred times less information than plants, at about 4.24 × 10²⁹ Mb.  That's rather similar to the amount of information contained in viruses, around 3.95 × 10²⁹ Mb, and somewhat less than the amount of degraded or junk information contained in leaf litter, at around 7 × 10³⁰ Mb. Still, as the paper's authors remark, it's interesting that the various classes of organism each contain, within a couple of orders of magnitude, similar amounts of information.

As for processing capacity, all of the DNA in Earth's biosphere is estimated to transcribe stored information into nucleotides at around 10³⁹ NOPS (Nucleotide Operations per Second). That amount of processing power would need 10²² supercomputers, given that one of the biggest can process 10¹⁷ FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second).

All of that information, the paper suggests, gives one definition of the present carrying capacity of the Earth. It also defines the amount of information in a biosphere that gave rise to a species that was able to ask and answer such questions. Which poses another interesting question. Will the biospheres on life-bearing exoplanets need to be of a similar size, if they are to give rise to extra-terrestrial intelligence?

All Change

This month I have been mostly working on the edits for Into Everywhere. Which, because I still use WordPerfect means that, for the first time, the novel has been translated into industry standard Microsoft Word, and I have to grapple with Word's track change feature to find and deal with my editor's comments and suggested changes, and make any alternative changes of my own.

Track change is probably great if you are dealing with a multiauthor presentation document, a contract, or something of similar length. With a 140,000 word novel? Not so great. It's becoming standard practice to use it in book publishing because it is easy to follow who has made what change, allows layers of sidebar comments, and doesn't involve unwieldy piles of paper and and a set of different coloured pens, one of which is guaranteed to run out of ink halfway through. It's fast. It's kind of efficient (although its command structure sucks). But it also encourages the user to concentrate only on changes rather than the context in which they are embedded, and in a novel context is all, and in a strict sense, every sentence depends on every other sentence, because each reacts to or builds on, contradicts or enforces, its predecessor.

Track change, with its helpful marginal bars and coloured highlighting, privileges changes over the rest of the text. Which is of course sort of the point, because at its most basic editing is about pointing out glitches, omissions, inconsistencies and plain old mistakes, and making suggestions about fixing them. But changing one part of the text, sometimes even a word, can affect other parts of it - the parts you might not see while concentrating on nothing but the changes track change tracks.

Which is why I'm now reading through the entire manuscript, sentence by sentence. Partly trying to make sure that fixing problems highlighted by editing hasn't created other problems, partly polishing the text. Removing superfluous commas and adverbs, making sure sentences aren't back to front, checking that the things characters say are the kind of things they would say, so forth. It's terrifically useful to have others critique the text, but in the end, all writers should be the harshest editor of the thing that came out of their head.

Some Chapter Headings From The Forthcoming

Ghost In The Head
Wizards Of The Slime Planet
The Geek Police
Rogue Moon
Serious Throw-Weight
The Alien Market
The City Of The Dead
Colonel X
Road Dogs
Dry Salvages
Rain City
Old Dark House
Somewhat Resembling Venus
The Kōan Brothers
Deeper Than Sex
Pyramids Of The Ancients

Open Air, Olympic Park, London

Here, There And Everywhere

The web site has moved to a new and permanent address. I've added a bibliography, and if you poke around you can find the usual free stories, articles and extracts.

In other news, I have a few events coming up:

The first is on Friday May 23rd, 8.00 - 9.30 pm, at the new Greenwich Book Festival, with Tom Harper, Justina Robson, Sarah Lotz and Lavie Tidhar. Tickets on sale here.

On Saturday, June 6th, 3.00 pm, I'll be at the Stoke Newington Book Festival, talking about utopias and dystopias with John Clute, Farah Mendleson and Lavie Tidhar.

Finally, I'm one of the guests of honour at Edge-Lit 4, an all-day event on Saturday July 11th at Derby's QUAD.

The Persistence Of Memory

Fun With My Past

Back in the early years of this century, I was writing weird thrillers whose stories were set in the present or the near future, turning on warped applications of strange bits of science or technology - The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind's Eye and Players. They're mostly out-of-print now, so I've begun a small publishing project to revive them as ebooks.

First up is Mind's Eye, just published as a Kindle ebook. Like Fairyland, it's about entoptical phenomena, visual effects whose origin is within the eye or the optical pathways of the brain. Here, the discovery that entoptical forms developed by paleolithic shamen can trigger certain behaviours or reactions is contested by the secret services and the grandchildren of the explorers who first discovered them:

When Alfie Flowers chances on a strange piece of graffiti daubed on the window of a North London restaurant, it triggers a flashback to a childhood accident that left him with a peculiar form of epilepsy. Convinced that the elusive graffiti artist, 'Morph', possesses clues to his past, Alfie sets out to track him down. His search leads him to the mysterious Nomads Club, the rituals of a lost tribe, and a secret history of espionage and mind-altering patterns - glyphs - connected with the disappearance of his father. 

The source of the glyphs is hidden somewhere in the chaos of post-war Iraq. Deep inside an ancient network of caves lie powerful secrets sought by people with dangerous and sinister motives. People who are determined to do whatever it takes to prevent Alfie and the Nomads Club from interfering with their plans.

It's very specifically set in the time it was written, and Alfie Flowers lived around the corner from me, in a caravan in an old bus garage. His local pub is my local pub; a brief car chase includes the road (and its traffic-calming system) where I live. A couple of years after the novel was published, the ramshackle bus garage was demolished: squatting there now is a block of flats of the kind that seems to have been designed using Lego, with lots of glass and tiny balconies that inevitable contain a tiny table, two small folding chairs, and a high-end bicycle. The expanding bubble of the London property market is steadily eroding the London Alfie and I knew, but here, in this odd little thriller, it's 2004, and the old weird London still stands, hipsters do not yet stalk the streets of Dalston, and the ill-fated Iraq invasion hasn't collapsed into something even worse . . .

Days Of Their Lives

I'm about to send off the manuscript of Into Everywhere, the follow-up to Something Coming Through, to my editor.  In the brief afterglow of creation, before the business of editing, copy-editing, and dealing with proofs lands on my head, here's a short extract:

Like all tomb raiders, Lisa and Willie had eked out a living from sales of mundane finds while dreaming of discovering the kind of jackpot that would kickstart a new industry or technology and make them so rich that they would never have to work again. They sifted through the middens of abandoned hive rat nests: the fierce little creatures dug deep and sometimes brought up artefacts. They found their way into intact chambers where eidolons might kindle from shadows and lamplight. When everything else failed, they sank shafts into the mounds of collapsed tombs. Willie disliked digging. Not just because it was hard work, although that was a consideration, but because it disturbed what he called ‘the flow’.

The City of the Dead was a sargasso of history, according to him, with strange tides and currents, backwaters and eddies. Everything flowing into everything else.

If they found no intact tombs or abandoned nests, Willie preferred to dowse rather than dig. He would wander over the parched landscape with two lengths of copper wire twisted together in a Y, delicately pinching the two ends between thumbs and forefingers and narrowly watching the quiver and dip of the antenna. Circling a spot when it began to twitch, insisting that Lisa start digging if it violently see-sawed.

Willie’s dowsing had a surprisingly good hit rate – slightly better than chance, according to Lisa’s Chi-squared tests – but he preferred spelunking, and so did Lisa. Finding their way into spaces untouched for thousands of years, where the psychic traces of the creatures that had built it yet remained. She remembered spiral tombs augered into the earth. She remembered labyrinths of broken stone. She remembered one huge, cool, bottle-shaped chamber lit by a shaft of sunlight from a high crevice. As Willie had climbed down the swaying rope ladder, orange fronds clumped in the splash of sunlight on the floor had suddenly broke up and scurried into the safety of shadows. A kind of colonial beetle-thing that grew symbiotic plants on their shells. She remembered another chamber, this one long and low, where eidolons had exploded around them like bats: after they’d sold the tesserae that generated them, she and Willie had lived high on the hog for two months.

She remembered the time the truck’s LEAF battery had run out of charge at the western edge of the City of the Dead – thirty or forty kilometres from the nearest settlement, with the eroded range of mountains that marked the edge of the Badlands shimmering at the horizon. Willie had pulled his trail bike from the load bed and roared off with the battery strapped behind him. He’d said that he’d be directly back, but a day passed, and another, and there was no sign of him and Lisa couldn’t pick up a phone signal. She discovered that she didn’t mind being stranded. She had plenty of food, enough water to last a couple of weeks. She slept in the back of the truck’s crew cab during the day and watched the starry sky at night. Dissolved into the antique silence of the desert. Looking back, she’d never been happier.

On the fourth day, a hot wind out the south blew white sand from the crests of sand dunes. The sky grew milky, the sun faded to a dull smear, and the horizon closed in. The truck’s door seals couldn’t keep out the dust and Lisa had to tie a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. Everything covered with a fine white bloom. Her eyes itching.

Willie drove out of the tail end of the storm towards sunset. He’d been caught up in a business deal, he said, but it hadn’t panned out. Lisa didn’t bother to ask. It might have been a lead on Elder Culture ruins or a poker game, a girl or a spell in jail. In the morning they mounted the recharged LEAF battery and drove to Joe’s Corner, and bought water and food and went on.

Those were the days of their lives until they finally hit their jackpot. Until the Bad Trip.

Into The Vacant

There's no there out here. Back in the day, it was far worse than it is now.  It was being confined to a series of tubes or pipes, strings of intimate little rooms, voids, with an accentuated version of the existential airplane dread playing in your head 24/7 because outside a thin metal skin there was a killing vacuum and nothing else. At first, people were selected from a tiny cadre who piloted prototypes of flying machines and tried to find the edge between control and chaos. And even then, these archetypes of coolness in the face of were trained in simulations until they grew bored with the ritual and repetition, and were kept busy during the actuality with the minutiae of housekeeping in their little tin cans, and never traveled so far that they were ever out of sight of some spectacular view of Earth or Moon. But there's no there, here. Stars, if you squint, but hey, stars are stars. We made the ships bigger, turned them into ocean liners, but they were still strings of rooms, with endless etiquette numbing the nerve and thickening the air. So we made them bigger still, made them into worlds, and had to ask - what's the point of reaching any particular destination when all you need is to hand? But even when you go skiing on some alpine range in one of the cloud chambers, there's still that little hum of existential dread. You come into the resort bar tingling with cold and endorphins, and there on the TV is a report of a blowout. Six hundred dead, recovery craft deployed to recover the bodies from the void everyone spends their life not thinking about. And it's a thousand kilometres sternwards, and is the kind of thing that only happens once in a lifetime, according to the news thing, and your world doesn't have volcanoes or hurricanes unless someone gets a permit to order them up from environmental control, but still.  You think: what are we doing out here in the dark?

Happy Chappie

Mostly reviled by mainstream reviewers, Neill Blomkamp's third feature-length film turns out to be a charming picaresque story of a robot's coming-of-age. Set, like Blomkamp's District 9, in a near-future Johannesburg, the film starts out as a RoboCop homage, with an army of police robots tackling a crime wave in a by-the-numbers meathook urban dystopia. When a couple of hapless gangsters (Yo-Landi and Ninja, played by Die Antwoord rappers Yolandi and Ninja) fall foul of their terrifying boss, they have to come up with an impossibly huge amount of cash.  Their brilliantly stupid plan is to steal one of the robots and kidnap their designer, and use them to rob a bank. In a parallel story, the designer, Dev (Deon Wilson), has been attempting to develop a true AI; stymied by his boss, he has just stolen a damaged robot to experiment on when he's kidnapped by the gangsters.

So far, so B-movie, but the film kicks up a notch after the stolen robot, Chappie, is animated by Dev's AI program, rapidly develops from childhood through strutting rap gangster adolescence to adulthood, and tries to reconcile the opposing moral frameworks of his gangster parents and his creator. Yolandi and Ninja play Chappie's surrogate parents with broad but credible strokes; Hugh Jackman is a somewhat cartoonish embittered alpha male who plots to supplant Dev's robots with his own creation; Sigourney Weaver doesn't have enough to do as their boss. The story's mix of broad comedy, pathos and noisy violence is pretty uneven, doesn't always make sense (Yo-Landi and Ninja let Dev go after he's animated Chappie, even though he knows where they live), and reverts to B-movie cliche in the final showdown, a version of the three-way stand-off in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but with much bigger guns. But Blomkamp's direction is fluidly kinetic, there are some clever twists, and Chappie is a terrific CGI creation. He may lack a recognisable face, but the voicing and motion capture work of Blomkamp regular Sharlto Copley, and a script that nicely charts his intellectual and emotional development, create a wonderfully engaging and sympathetic character who is the human heart of this patchwork fable.

Magnolias Coming Through

This Strange, Old, Vast And Mostly Empty Planet

In Vic’s opinion, there was as yet no sign that humanity was going to change any time soon. People had come up and out, built cities, and begun to spread across the empty lands and explore the ruins, and they’d also brought all their old shit with them. A few had managed to reinvent themselves, but most hadn’t been able to escape what they already were. Accountants were accountants; estate agents were estate agents; drug dealers were drug dealers. Vic had been a raw constable in Birmingham when he’d won the emigration lottery, and here he was thirteen years later, a murder police unable to maintain any kind of long-term relationship. (‘Let’s face it,’ his ex had said when they’d met for a drink on the day their divorce papers went through, ‘neither of us are cut out for marriage.’ She had been trying to be kind, but it had still stung.) But even though he had long ago learned that reality fell far short of the ideal of justice, at least he still loved the job. On his good days, anyway. He wasn’t yet burned out. He still wanted to make things right by his dead, was still curious about people and this strange, old, vast and mostly empty planet.

From Something Coming Through