Lifebooks

She was a small, slight woman not much older than Hari, the sleeves of her oversized quilted jacket cuffed back to her elbows. She yawned when Rav started to explain who Hari was and how he had ended up in Fei Shen, said every transient had some kind of bad luck story and none of them were very interesting.

‘Use this, kid,’ she told Hari, and threw a package at him.

His bios caught it, ran it through a sandbox to check for hidden djinns, implemented the simple trait it contained. Layers of information settled through him. Map and phone functions, a ticker that showed the slow, steady unravelling of his store of credit. The hours left before he had to go to work for the city, or find a way of leaving it.

He thanked the woman (her tag was a wireframe cube that contained a clear blue flame and no readable information, not even her name); she shrugged inside her jacket.

This was in a dark little shop where thick, heavy True lifebooks, bound in metal or manskin or shimmering polymers, were chained to wooden presses. A single volume was spreadeagled on a lectern, its pages wider than the span of Hari’s arms and printed with double columns of elegant handwritten script as black as the outer dark. Intricate and colourful illustrations framed the tall initial letters of the first words of every paragraph, and at the top of the right-hand page a woman with a burning gaze and bright yellow hair looked out of a window, talking about something that no doubt had been important in the long ago, when she had been alive.

From Evening's Empires

Hard Problems

I'm often labelled as a writer of hard science fiction, and frankly it's a label I don't much like, and think isn't of much use. Its strict sense defines a kind of fiction that takes the actual world seriously, tries not to violate known laws (and signals violently if it does), and builds convincing stories about actual discoveries, actual science, with as little fakery as possible.

Trouble is, it's come to imply difficulty, something arid and arduous, something crabbed and restricted, and of limited appeal to anyone who isn't a stone science junkie who knows her muon from her pion, the difference between RNA and DNA coding, and the meaning of every acronym NASA has ever coined. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there can be too much emphasis on the science and not enough on the fiction, on the weight of cold fact rather than flights of imagination. Too often, so-called hard science fiction strives to be dully convincing, and forgets to be amazing.

And in any case, the definition is mostly redundant. Any fiction about the world as it is, rather than the world we imagine it might be, sticks to the facts. Isn't much of the enterprise of modernist fiction about realism - about the accurate replication not only of the external world, but also of the inner world, the world of the mind? And aren't we living in a world that's driven by science and technology? Isn't the present too often framed as being 'just like science fiction'? Which is to say, just like science fiction in the movies, which is rooted in science fiction from the 1950s.

The world as we know it is one thing; science fiction should be about something more. Should use the known as a jump ramp into implied spaces and possibilities. Should respond to the weirdness of actual science rather than reusing received notions and used genre furniture. Should be irresponsible. Should stop arguing with itself. Should fly.

Links 17/05/13

While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth's moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission's Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.210 statute miles or 35.744 kilometers). That was the farthest total distance for any NASA vehicle driving on a world other than Earth until yesterday.


In Earth orbit (seen by almost everyone on the internet, but worth repeating), the best cover of a David Bowie song ever.

On Earth, a drowned Argentinian town emerges from the waters twenty-five years later.

Scientists discover a lost continent off the coast of Brazil.

And the sunken medieval town of Dunwich ('Britain's Atlantis')  is mapped in detail by acoustic imaging.

Florence - City Of Industry

The Palazzo Taddei was a four-square building with an imposing frontage of blocks of untrimmed golden sandstone. Windowless, it loomed out of the smoggy darkness of the Via de Ginori like a fortress wall. It was eight o'clock, but even at this late hour, when most honest citizens should have been bed, a small crowd was gathered at the Palazzo's great round gate. Niccolo and Pasquale had to use their elbows and knees to push through to the front.

Niccolo had a word with the sergeant in command of the unit of the city militia which kept a space before the gate, handing over a cigar with a smile. The sergeant shook Niccolo's hand and spoke into the brass trumpet of a speaking-tube beside the gate. With a sudden arthritic creaking the dozen wooden leaves of the gate began to draw back into their sockets. A ragged opening widened into a circle. One of the upper leaves stuck, like the last tooth in an old man's jaw, and although a servant appeared and gave it a hearty shove to try and force it, Niccolo and Pasquale had to duck under it as the sergeant waved them through.

Pasquale turned to watch as the gate closed up with a rattle of chained weights that in falling recompressed the spring mechanism, regaining all the energy used to open the gate except that lost through heat or noise.  Successful merchants like Taddei were in love with such devices, which signified status in the way that sponsoring an altarpiece or fresco had once done. There were tall mirrors of beaten silver on either side of the door, and Pasquale looked himself up and down before hurrying to catch up with Niccolo Machiavegli, crossing the marble floor of the sumptuous entrance hall and following the journalist through an open door into the loggia that ran around the four sides of the central garden.

There's a lot of fuss about a certain novel about Renaissance Florence that's just been published, so I thought I'd revisit one of my favourite earlier novels, Pasquale's Angel. It's set in Florence in the early sixteenth century, a city transformed by the inventions of the Great Engineer and in the throes of a great industrial revolution. Pasquale is a painter's apprentice, fallen in with the journalist Niccolo Machiavegli and about to become entangled in a plot to steal the Great Engineer's secrets. There's a recent paperback, but I think it's mostly fallen out of print, and there's also an ebook (this link leads to the Kindle version, but there are others). Not yet available in the US, I'm afraid, but we're working on that.

Pirates Of The Asteroids

Montage by Emily Lakdawalla. Data from NASA / JPL / JHUAPL / UMD / JAXA / ESA / OSIRIS team / Russian Academy of Sciences / China National Space Agency. Processed by Emily Lakdawalla, Daniel Machacek, Ted Stryk, Gordan Ugarkovic.

This cool montage shows most of the various asteroids, moonlets and comets imaged by spacecraft (Vesta is excluded, because it is so much larger than everything else). A tiny sampling of the multitude of worlds amongst which Evening's Empires is set, for most of it takes place in the asteroid belt:

More than ten thousand gardens and habitats constructed from materials mined from rocks and comets orbited within in the main belt; there were more than a million and a half rocks with a diameter of more than a kilometre. A few, like Vesta and Pallas and Hygiea, had diameters of several hundred kilometres; Ceres was almost a thousand kilometres across. There were cratered rubble-piles blanketed in deep layers of dust and debris. There were mountains of nickel-iron, stony mountains of pyroxene, olivines and feldspar. There were rocks rich in tarry carbonaceous tars, clays and water ice. Some orbited in loose groups, or in more closely associated families of fragments created by catastrophic shatterings of parent bodies, but most traced solitary paths, separated by an average distance twice that between the Earth and the Moon, everything moving, everything constantly changing its position relative to everything else.

That's the territory in which Gajananvihari Pilot searches for his lost ship and family. As in the other novels in the Quiet War universe, habitations are either heavily modified or completely artificial, gardens and world cities and wildernesses laden with the vast wreckage of fifteen hundred years of history and teeming with all kinds of people. Some of them are barely human.  Some are, yes, pirates.

Links 10/05/13

Downer: Toxic perchlorate and gypsum dust may prevent human settlement of Mars.

Meanwhile, here are some moths driving a tiny robot car.


"He concedes that the freezing of his grandfather was ‘a bit of an experiment.'" Very good longform piece on the practical problems of cryonics, and its historical precedents.

Electric sails, a new form of interplanetary (and possibly interstellar) propulsion.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place-- the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs.These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster is only 625 million years old. The white dwarfs are being polluted by asteroid-like debris falling onto them.

Finally, in 1968 the Howard Johnsons restaurant chain presented its interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

An Education

Hari was schooled in every aspect of the family trade by Agrata and his two brothers, received a patchwork education in philosophical truths and methods from his father and various travelling scholars, and played with the children of passengers and specialists in the many disused volumes of his family’s ship. It was a ring ship, Pabuji’s Gift, a broad ribbon caught in a circle five hundred metres across, with a twist that turned it into the single continuous surface of a Möbius strip. The ship’s motor hung from a web of tethers and spars at the centre of the ring; its hull was studded with the cubes and domes that contained workshops, utility bays, power units, an industrial maker, and the giant centrifuges, light chromatographs, and cultures of half-life nematodes and tailored bacteria; its interior was partitioned into cargo holds, garages for gigs and the big machines used in salvage work, and the lifesystem. Much of this space was unused.  The ship could support more than a thousand people, but even when Hari’s father had been alive it had never carried more than a tenth of that number.

Hari and the children of passengers and specialist crews had the run of the empty cargo holds, habitats and modules, the mazes of ducts and serviceways. A world parallel to the world of the adults, with a social structure equally complicated, possessing its own traditions and myths, rivalries and challenges, fads and fashions. Endless games of tig on one voyage; hide-and-seek on another. One year, Hari organised flyball matches inside a cylinder turfed with halflife grass; when interest in that began to wane, he divided the children into troops that fought each other for possession of tagged locations scattered through the ship.

He was fifteen, then. Tall and slender, glossy black hair done up in corn rows woven with glass beads. Even though every adult – everyone over the age of twenty – still seemed impossibly old, adulthood was no longer mysterious and unattainable, but a condition he was advancing towards day by day. He knew that he would soon have to give up childish games and shoulder his share of the family’s work. He was beginning to understand the limits of his life, beginning to realise how small his world really was, how little it counted in the grand scheme of things.

From Evening's Empires

Into The Dark

In the first film of the regooded Star Trek franchise, director JJ Abrams not only rebooted the series but also rebooted the universe, diverting younger versions of the crew of the starship Enterprise into an alternate history that was a clever blend of the familiar and the unexpected.  In the second film, Star Trek: Into Darkness, that sideways jog is used to deliver a new twist on an old episode in the Enterprise's storied history, darkening it with current fears of terrorism and its challenge to liberal democracy.

Superhumanly strong and capable secret agent John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch, dressed in black and mixing Sherlock Holmes's arrogant superiority with Shakespearean villainy) blows up a Federation records archive in 23rd Century London, then (borrowing a move from The Godfather, Part 3) attacks top-ranking officers when they gather to discuss the incident, killing James Kirk's mentor Christopher Pike.  Kirk (Chris Pine, who has really grown into his role, and looks extraordinarily like the young William Shatner) accepts a mission from Machievellian admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) to chase Harrison to his hiding place in Klingon territory: an action that might precipitate war and alter the very nature of the peaceful Federation.  But neither Kirk's mission nor his quarry are what they seem...

To say much more would be to enter spoiler territory.  It's a fast-paced old-fashioned space-opera adventure that contrasts Kirk's impetuosity with Spock's (Zachary Quinto) rigorous control (once again, their friendship is tested by Spock's insistence on following regulations to the letter), and the similarities and differences between Kirk's and Harrison's thirst for revenge.  As with the first film, the narrative is salted with references to the original series, and the franchise's version of physics is warped and upgraded to suit the plot.  (Like that of the Looney Tunes cartoons, Star Trek's physics deliberately rewrites or ignores actual physics - complaining that spaceships don't fall out of orbit when they lose power is like complaining that gravity isn't dependent on perception, and people can't run beyond the edge of a cliff as long as they don't realise they've done it.)  Transporters can now zap people from planet to planet, although no one but the villain makes use of that ability; at one point Kirk, bucketing along at warp speed in the Enterprise, phones Scotty, dozens of light years away in a nightclub back on Earth, to impart crucial information.  But although it's an efficient blockbuster thrill ride in which Abrams once again demonstrates his skill at choreographing complex action sequences, and regular characters are each given a crucial part in the unfolding action, the hectic pace and the narrative clockwork that drives the story from set piece to set piece is exhaustingly relentless.  Decisions are made on the fly; Spock and Uhura must work out a kink in their relationship while flying in a shuttle craft towards a Klingon outpost; Leonard Nimoy literally phones in his performance; there's no attempt to show us what a warlike Federation would be like, how bad, how different, it would be from the current model.  Like Wile E. Coyote running past a cliff edge, the story survives by momentum alone - when it stops, and you are finally able to think about it, it falls down.

And yet, despite the soundless fury of spaceship battles and the chaos of collapsing cities, the film never quite loses sight of the franchise's strongest virtues.  Benedict Cumberbatch delivers an imposing performance as the superhumanly brilliant and ruthless villain, but at the centre of the film, as in the original series, is the relationship between Kirk and Spock, a sparring match between heart and head grumpily refereed by Dr McCoy.  Kirk grows from headstrong, irresponsible adventurer to a leader capable of inspiring and drawing on the abilities of his comrades, and deepens and cements his relationship with Spock, and at the end we are returned to the beginning.  And given that we've been shown how this new history can play intricate variations on old stories, we're prepared to sign up for the duration - in the hope, next time, of something a little less frantic, a little more substantial.

Links 03/05/13

In 1908, an explosion as powerful as an atom bomb knocked down millions of trees in the forests around the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, in Russia. Although it was believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteor or comet, no trace of cosmic debris has ever been found.  Until now.

Here's your personal airship.

Here's your writer's grenade.

Ever wondered what Earth's geophysical features would sound like if transposed onto vinyl? The Flat Earth Society has the answer.

Data Loss

'We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities.  The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space; great expanses of nothing in which significant persons and events float.'
Teju Cole, Open City

CERN is currently engaged in a bit of electronic archaeology: attempting to recreate the first web page every made. The earliest version they have found so far is from November 1992; older versions were rewritten without first caching backups. It's somehow liberating to think that even in the great sleepless communal panopticon of the internet, historically important documents can be forgotten and lost, that as in the happening world its past can slowly be unremembered, and become the actual past.

Limited

Using one of the lesser-known superpowers the jobbing author must develop - being able to reproduce my author's autograph as quickly and accurately as possible - I've just personalised the signing sheets for the limited edition of my new short story collection, A Very British History. Since it's a proper limited edition, it wasn't a tremendously onerous task: there were only a tad over 200 sheets to be inked.  Now all I need to do is pack them off to PS Publishing. The finished books should be available in a few weeks.

The illustration on the signature sheet is a close-up of part of Jim Burns's wonderful wrap-around cover.  The limited edition is slip-cased, with a separate volume containing two additional stories, ‘Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World’ and ‘Karl and the Ogre’, and an autobiographical essay, 'My Secret Super Power.’  And if you don't want to splash out on a limited edition, some copies of the jacketed hardcover, containing 21 science fiction stories, from my beginnings in Interzone magazine back in the 1980s to 2011's award-winning 'The Choice', are still available.

Links 26/04/13

'Over the past few years, advances in genetic technology have opened a window into the amazingly populous and powerful world of microbial life in and around the human body—the normal community of bacteria, fungi and viruses that makes up what scientists call the microbiome. It’s Big Science, involving vast international research partnerships, leading edge DNA sequencing technology and datasets on a scale to make supercomputers cringe. It also promises the biggest turnaround in medical thinking in 150 years, replacing the single-minded focus on microbes as the enemy with a broader view that they are also our essential allies.'

 Insects Au Gratin - 3-D printed food made from ground, edible insects.

Scientists have barcoded ants to monitor their career choices.

A sea anemone starts swimming to escape a starfish:

Jackson's Reef

Jackson’s Reef was a froth of bubble habitats wrapped around a shaped sliver of rock some ten kilometres long. Half its volume was ravaged, open to vacuum; the rest had devolved to low-diversity, low-energy ecosystems dominated by tough, slow-growing chlorophytes, blue-green algae, and archaebacteria. There were hundreds of similar bodies within the Belt and beyond; Jackson’s Reef was distinguished from all the others by its eccentric, long-period orbit.

It had once been the centre of the Golden Mean, a kingdom of gardens and settlements in the outer belt that had flourished several centuries before the rise of the True Empire. When they’d been deposed by a vicious civil war, the last members of its ruling family had hastily converted their capital city into a multigeneration starship and aimed it at 61 Cygni, but its mass drivers had failed before it could acquire solar escape velocity. It had become trapped in a cometary orbit with a period of more than six hundred years, taking it out above the plane of the ecliptic and across the Kuiper belt to the edge of the Oort cloud before swinging back towards the sun. Its original inhabitants were either dead or long gone by the time it first returned to the Belt. A crew of rovers laid claim to it, tried and failed to revive its ruined biomes, abandoned the project. And now it was returning to the Belt for the second time, and Nabhomani and Nabhoj had devised a plan to strip out salvageable machinery and artifacts, and mine what was left of its ecosystem for useful biologics and unique genomes.

From Evening's Empires

Links 19/04/13

You wait for a potentially Earth-like planet and two come along at once.  In the same system.

Fossilised iron-loving bacteria may contain the signature left by a supernova.

How do you clear space debris from Earth orbit?  With space harpoons, of course.

'There were once were two planets, new to the galaxy and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years ago, and took roughly the same shape. Both were blistered with volcanoes and etched with watercourses; both circled the same yellow dwarf star—close enough to be warmed by it, but not so close as to be blasted to a cinder. Had an alien astronomer swivelled his telescope toward them in those days, he might have found them equally promising—nurseries in the making. They were large enough to hold their gases close, swaddling themselves in atmosphere; small enough to stay solid, never swelling into gaseous giants. They were “Goldilocks planets,” our own astronomers would say: just right for life.'

 Russian enthusiasts may have spotted the Mars 3 lander in a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image.

 Nano space-suits for insects.

A Day In The Life

Let me start by declaring an interest. A couple of decades ago, Kim Newman and I were touting an anthology of original stories to my then editor at Gollancz, the late, great Richard Evans. We had a potent weapon in our armoury: a submission by Ian R MacLeod, one of the best alternate history stories we'd ever read.  The anthology, In Dreams, was eventually published, and didn't do half as well as its contributors deserved, but now Ian MacLeod's story has found new life as a TV play in the second series of Sky Arts' Playhouse Presents...

It's 1991. John Lennon is fifty, living in a rented room in Birmingham, and at a new low point in his life.  He been forced to take up menial work by his local Job Centre, and his nemesis, the Beatles, are about to start a Greatest Hits tour ('obviously the solo careers are up the kazoo again'). Forever known as the guy who left the Beatles (during a blazing row in 1962, over whether or not they should cover Gerry and the Pacemaker's 'How Do You Do It'), history has rolled on without him. The Beatles never were toppermost of the poppermost, and Lennon is on his uppers, licking envelopes for a living, sustained by roll-up fags and his sarcastic wit, struggling to stay out of the clutches of the Snodgrasses, with their suburban bungalows and 2.4 children, their yuppie phones, and their dead imaginations.

Adapted by David Quantick, it's a marvellous piece of ventriloquism, a poignant, funny, surrealistic commentary on the struggle against conformity, and regret for the life not lived, the consequences of a moment and a choice made long ago. Ian Hart, who played the young Lennon in Backbeat and The Hours and Times, perfectly captures the voice and vulnerable defiance of an aging Lennon who never was, a man out of time; Martin Carr provides musical cues from the Beatles' alternate career; David Blair's direction jigsaws warmly-lit snippets from the past into the cold blue present. It's a story in which nothing really happens, yet it closes on a marvellous moment of affirmation. It's one of the best science fiction dramas you're likely to see this year.

It Was Twenty-Five Years Ago Today....

My first novel, published as a paperback original in the US by Del Rey, in 1988. Still in print, in the UK at least.

Oblivion

The moon has been shattered by vicious alien invaders, the Scavengers, and Earth has been ruined by the all-out nuclear war that defeated them.  Most of the surviving human beings have decamped for Saturn's moon, Titan.  Only a small clean-up crew is left behind, using drones to defend massive machines that process seawater into fusion fuel from the roving remnants of the Scavenger army.  Jack (Tom Cruise) is a drone repairman, assisted by his partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) and mission controller Sally (Melissa Leo).  Both Jack and Victoria have had their memories wiped as a security precaution, but Jack is increasingly troubled by dreams of life on Earth before the Scavengers came . . .

If that sounds like an over-elaborate and implausible set up (how did the human race manage to build huge machines and initiate a deep-space colonisation programme after an apocalyptic war? why leave Earth in the first place? why Titan, of all places? why drain Earth's oceans for fusion fuel when most of the moons of Saturn are mostly water?), that's because it really is a set up.  After rescuing the pilot of a crashed spacecraft (Olga Kurylenko), Jack begins to uncover the truth - which is, unfortunately, only slightly less implausible than the cover story, owes a big debt to Philip K. Dick and a bunch of SF films I won't mention because spoilers, and is full of the usual logic holes that allow for heroic gestures and explosions.

Still, the ruin porn of the devastated Earth is lovely to look at, especially on an IMAX screen, and while the story slowly unfolds you can pass the time spotting homages and allusions to Wall-E, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others.  And even though it devolves into a derivative, two-fisted actioner and gives neither Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman enough to do, it is at least a widescreen SF film that is knowingly SF.  What a shame that, like so many big budget SF shoot-em-ups, it lost its sense of humour somewhere in the production process.

Links 05/04/13

Beats piping: 'Telepathic control of another person's body is a small step closer. By linking the technologies of two brain/computer interfaces, human volunteers were able to trigger movement in a rat's tail using their minds.'

'Researchers in Japan used MRI scans to reveal the images that people were seeing as they entered into an early stage of sleep.' 60% certain that those things you're counting are sheep.

Possible bad news for the search for signs of life on Mars: 'Wind, not water, deposited most of the sediments in the layered Martian mountain NASA's Curiosity rover was sent to study, suggests an analysis of observations from orbit. If the rover confirms this scenario when it reaches the mountain next year, it could spell trouble for its chances of finding organic material there.'


Possible good news for the search for signs of life on Titan: 'A laboratory experiment at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., simulating the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan suggests complex organic chemistry that could eventually lead to the building blocks of life extends lower in the atmosphere than previously thought.'

Evening's Empires Cover

A dramatic interpretation by Sidonie Beresford-Browne. Yes, that's Vesta, in the foreground. The novel is due to be published on July 18th.

Links 29/03/13

Huge panorama of Gale Crater created by Andrew Bodrov from images taken by the Curiosity rover.

A fish with a see-through head.

Duckpenisgate.

'To feed their young, females grow an extra layer of skin that's rich in fats. The young scrape this skin off with their teeth and eat it. To help them, they have a specialised set of teeth adapted to the job, which are replaced by more pointed adult teeth as they get older.'

And in other news, Unlikely Worlds's tweets have been listed by Time magazine as one of the best 140 Twitter feeds of 2013.