N.B.

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

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

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

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Links 09/08/13

'In 2015, a clone will spend a year on the International Space Station while his doppelgänger remains on Earth. Mark and Scott Kelly, the only identical twins who are also astronauts, have volunteered themselves for study, creating a unique opportunity to disentangle the health effects of space from those of genetics.'

Mars Explorer Barbie.

One day in the Solar System.

Recycling bins in London harvest MAC addresses from the smart phones of passers-by, identify the type of phone they're carrying, and track their movements.

'To honor the anniversary of Warhol’s birthday, August 6, 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum and EarthCam launched a collaborative project titled Figment, a live feed of Warhol's gravesite.'

Concept design for a robot that erases concrete buildings.

A beautiful minimalist Periodic Table.

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There Are Doors (20)

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Don't Prophesy With Your Pen

The Los Angeles Review of Books recently published an interview with Arthur C. Clarke, conducted by Tod Mesirow in 1995, that opens with a useful reminder that the one thing people associate with science fiction isn't the kind of thing that science fiction actually does. Asked why science fiction seems so prescient, Clarke says:

'Well, we musn't overdo this, because science fiction stories have covered almost every possibility, and, well, most impossibilities — obviously we're bound to have some pretty good direct hits as well as a lot of misses. But, that doesn't matter. Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says what if? — not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere — flying, space travel, all these things, but even there we missed really badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds had been — my late friend, Isaac Asimov, for example, had — but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd probably have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.'

Every science-fictional future sooner or later becomes an alternate history. Even those set in the near future, and which attempt to guess with reasonable accuracy what life will be like in, say, 2015, 2016. Especially those, actually. And the further away your story is set, the more likely it is that some 9/11 will send history hurtling off in an unexpected direction (someone once wrote a science-fictional trilogy about this). Even those science fictions which may have gotten some part of our present (their future) more or less right didn't predict it: they anticipated it. As Hero anticipated the steam engine (but not the Industrial Revolution). Or to put it another way, claiming that science fiction predicts the future is to unremember all the things it got wrong. And claiming that science fiction has failed to predict the ubiquity of, say, mobile phones and Angry Birds fails to understand what science fiction is actually about.

Which includes, yes, extrapolation.  But also includes a lot more, including wild and irresponsible speculation, satire of some present trend, dreams of utopias, nightmares of dystopias . . . The future is a blank page. It doesn't yet exist. Its worlds may be self-consistent, may be strongly rooted in our present, but they are not representations of reality. They are experiments questioning reality, testing its limits, asking awkward questions about it. So much more interesting that dull, dutiful prognostication.

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Links 26/07/13

The glowing blue wave of death: '...an international team of researchers has found evidence of a “cascade” of death that spreads through an animal’s body through a special necrosis pathway, leaving a wake of dead cells in its procession, until the entire system collapses and expires. In the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, this wave of bodily destruction originates in the intestine and is accompanied by an intense burst of blue fluorescence when viewed with a camera equipped with a high brightness fluorescence filter cube, which allowed the researchers to visualize the worm’s destruction, the team reports in the journal PLoS Biology.'

'A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.'


A gallery of images of ants at war.

Brock Davis's Cucumber Killer Whale and Historic Explosions in Cauliflower.

The International Space Station photographed in transit across the Sun and the Moon.

The Earth imaged from Saturn.

The Earth and the Moon imaged from Mercury.

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
That evidence, which is detailed in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research, involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from South Africa. They have been named Diskagma buttonii, meaning "disc-shaped fragments of Andy Button," but it is unsure what the fossils were, the authors say.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-earth.html#jCp

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old—at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.
That evidence, which is detailed in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research, involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from South Africa. They have been named Diskagma buttonii, meaning "disc-shaped fragments of Andy Button," but it is unsure what the fossils were, the authors say.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-earth.html#jC

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html#jCp

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All Best

Published today, the 30th volume of Gardner Dozois' annual selection of the year's best science fiction stories.  It includes two stories by me, but don't let that put you off.  Gardner says: 'Every year is special, because every year good new writers come along, and every year the older writers continue to do really good work. It's exciting to watch the field evolve, and I don't think the overall level of literary quality in science fiction has ever been higher-and I've been watching the field for a long time.'

Some fun facts:
Annual editions of this anthology have been published continuously since 1984. At a rough count, the series as a whole has contained about 9,500,000 words of fiction, by hundreds of different authors. It has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology seventeen times, more than any other anthology series in history. Gardner Dozois has won fifteen Hugo Awards as Year's Best Editor, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Robert Silverberg said of the series 'The Dozois book is the definitive historical record of the history of the science-fiction short story' and called it "a wondrous treasure trove of great stories and an archive that has immeasurable historical significance." George R.R. Martin said 'The best that science fiction has to offer, chosen by the most respected editor in the field.  A copy belongs on the shelf of every SF reader.'

 The table of contents can be found here.

Also out today from Infinivox, the fifth edition of Allan Kaster's audiobook anthology, The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction. Which, yes, includes one of my stories. More details about the anthology and its contents here. Oh, and it's also available as an ebook on Kindle and Nook.

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Drafted

So I've just finished the first draft of the new novel, emitting a spurt of around 3500 words in a rattling crescendo this morning. I don't, as I've noted elsewhere, tend to follow a detailed outline with absolute fidelity, planning out every beat and then making sure that they are all ticked off in the right place. Instead, I have a rough shape, and a few notable features I know I need to visit, and a place where I think I'm going to end up, but everything between is a process of discovery. In other words, I do more of my thinking about writing while I'm writing than before I start.

As I try to keep rewriting to a minimum as I go along, preferring to keep a steady pace, to keep moving forward, the first draft is usually fairly messy, with contradictions and abrupt introductions of important points (although not, oddly, of important characters - they are the one thing I do think about before I begin). It doesn't matter. Everything can be fixed in the rewrites (and I have already accumulated a fair number of notes for the second draft). And sometimes it is important to fail. To find the way that leads forward by trying other ways first.

Anyway, I'm just back from signing copies of Evening's Empires in Forbidden Planet's London branch. I have to deal with the copy-edit of the reissue of the Confluence trilogy before I head out to Spain for the Celsius232 Festival. And then I'll begin again with the new novel, at the beginning.

The title of this one, by the way, is Something Coming Through. It's about aliens, and second chances.

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