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Wednesday, 30 September 2009

The World Turns

Posted on 04:38 by Unknown


I'm currently rewatching The Sopranos. Frank Sinatra's version of this lovely bittersweet Kurt Weill/Maxwell Anderson song plays over a montage at the opening of the first episode of the second season. But this is just as good. They knew a thing or two about life, those old guys. Durante puts all of his into this.

Bit of a place marker. Busy.
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Monday, 28 September 2009

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Four

Posted on 01:11 by Unknown
April, the Foyn Coast of Graham Land, the Antarctic Peninsula. Winter beginning, the days dying back. The sun nearing the end of its short, low arc across the eastern horizon of the Weddel Sea, falling behind the Brazilian frigate, formerly the Admiral João Nachtergaele, now named for the murdered green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos. The bristling superstructure of the frigate silhouetted against the bloody flare of the sunset as it sleeked in towards the coast, navigating by radar and GPS, cutting through brash ice and shouldering aside small table bergs.
READ MORE . . .

(Ihe last post in this series, a long chapter that will take us to the midpoint of the novel, will go up on Friday, the day after the UK publication date.)
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Saturday, 26 September 2009

Just In Case You Weren't Certain That The Future Is Already Here

Posted on 06:31 by Unknown
Why complain that aircars aren't clogging our skies when you can buy a DNA synthesiser on eBay?

AB APPLIED BIOSYSTEMS 392 DNA/RNA SYNTHESIZER W/EXTRAS
Item condition: --

Price: US $2,750.00
Approximately £1,724.73
Buy It NowBuy It NowBuy It Now
You can also: Watch this item
Now watching in My eBay Now watching in My eBay

THIS ISA AB APPLIED BIOSYSTEMS 392 DNA/RNA SYNTHESIZER WITH MANUAL AND BOX OF EXTRA NEW FITTINGS UNIT POWERS UP UNABLE TO TEST CLEAN UNIT. Shipping on this item is 158.00 to the lower 48 states. If you are from overseas or Alaska or Hawaii please email me for a shipping quote. Please understand if it is going out of the country it can take between 3 and 6 weeks depending on customs. If it is not shown in the picture then it probably does not come with the item please email me if you have a question before purchasing. Paypal Is accepted All Items will be shipped out within 48 hours of purchase if it is a item that must be palletized I need a commercial address and phone number. If you have any problems with the item please email us so we can work the problem out
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Random Linkage 26/09/09

Posted on 03:55 by Unknown
An Odyssey From the Bronx to Saturn’s Rings
'Shadows lengthened to stretch thousands of miles across the planet’s famous rings this summer as they slowly tilted edge-on to the Sun, which they do every 15 years, casting into sharp relief every bump and wiggle and warp in the buttery and wafer-thin bands that are the solar system’s most popular scenic attraction.
'"From her metaphorical perch on the bridge of the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn for five years, Carolyn Porco, who heads the camera team, is ecstatic about the view. “It’s another one of those things that make you pinch yourself and say, ‘Boy am I lucky to be around now,’ ” Dr. Porco said. “For the first time in 400 years, we’re seeing Saturn’s rings in three dimensions.”'

US to deploy 'optionally manned' hover-dirigible in 2011
'The US military will deploy an "optionally manned" 250-foot surveillance airship to Afghanistan by the middle of 2011, according to reports. The dirigible spy-ship will be able to lurk high above Afghan battlefields for up to three weeks at a time, relaying information to ground commanders.'
(Battlefields? What battlefields? Oh right, the entire country is a battlefield.)

New Vista Of Milky Way Center Unveiled
'A dramatic new vista of the center of the Milky Way galaxy from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory exposes new levels of the complexity and intrigue in the Galactic center. The mosaic of 88 Chandra pointings represents a freeze-frame of the spectacle of stellar evolution, from bright young stars to black holes, in a crowded, hostile environment dominated by a central, supermassive black hole.'

Craters Show 1970s Viking Lander Missed Martian Ice by Inches
'Meteorites that crashed into the Martian surface last year exposed buried ice to the digital eyes of NASA spacecraft.
'Scientists have used those images to deduce that there is a lot more ice on Mars — and that it’s closer to the equator — than previously thought. In fact, subterranean Martian ice should extend all the way down beyond 48 degrees of latitude, according to the model, which was published in Science Thursday.'
(It's as if some agency reimagined Mars since the 1970s.)

Scientists hail new species of feathered dinosaurs
'The new dinosaur fossils, disclosed on Friday, representing five different species from two different rock sequences in north-eastern China, all have feathers or feather-like structures.
'The new finds are "indisputably" older than archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, which scientists claim provides exceptional evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.'

163 new species found in Asia
'A gecko with spots like a leopard and a fanged frog that preys on birds are among more than 160 new species that have been discovered along the Mekong River but which face the threat of extinction as a result of climate change.'
(Taxonomy was once a sedate occuptaion; now it’s like staging triage in a big city hospital.)

Music inspired by radio waves from Saturn’s rings
(Via Discover.)

Cocoon Cooker Grows Meat and Fish from Heated Animal Cells

'Here's a food-related invention that is even weirder than the notorious Beanzawave: The Cocoon, a concept cooker that grows meat and fish from heated animal cells in a process that looks disturbingly similar to magic animal growing capsules.'
(The black market in 'grow-your-own-celebrity-meat' capsules will start up about a week after this hits the shops.)
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Friday, 25 September 2009

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Three

Posted on 02:55 by Unknown

After the publicity tour was cancelled Frankie Fuente went home to the state of Paiuí, where he planned to buy a share in a carnaúba palm plantation and spend the rest of his life watching other people make money for him. Cash Baker went back to the academy, and teaching.

At first, little seemed to have changed. There was a month of mourning after the state funeral of the president -- flags at half-mast, black armbands, water instead of wine served at meals in the officers’ mess. In a short address at his inauguration, the new president, Armand Nabuco, promised a smooth transition and a continuation of the policies that had made Greater Brazil a power for good in an imperfect world. Flare-ups in wildsider activity in the Andes, the Great Desert, and along the border of the northern territories were quickly suppressed; renewed calls for independence by banned nationalist groups like the Freedom Riders came to nothing; anti-government posters were torn down, graffiti was scrubbed away, links to clandestine sites on the net were purged. And then, the day after the official period of mourning ended, the Office for Strategic Services removed thousands of civil servants and government officials from their posts, and it was announced that General Arvam Peixoto, leader of the expeditionary force at Saturn and acting head of the Three Powers Authority, would be returning to Earth after he had handed over command to Euclides Peixoto.

READ MORE . . .
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Thursday, 24 September 2009

Spirit At Gusev Crater

Posted on 06:32 by Unknown


Created by Doug Ellison using data from the Spirit rover and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, this fabulously detailed flyover sweeps across the Columbia Hills in the middle of a simulated dust storm, past the place where the brave little toaster is currently mired. The kind of detailed virtuality that will be as near to actually being on Mars that almost all of us will get* (more on that, soon); it can't be that long before there's a version where we can wander around the planet at will.

*unless you're Australian

Via Universe Today.
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Tuesday, 22 September 2009

The Quiet War, American Style

Posted on 07:44 by Unknown

Officially published today in the US. Maybe I should remind new readers that I posted a portion of the novel on my web site last year, as part of Earth and Other Unlikely Worlds's try-before-you-buy service. Same goes for Cowboy Angels, incidentally. Just seen a rough of the cover for Gardens of the Sun, also packed with space hardware goodness; hope to have some news of the US publication date realsoonnow.
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Monday, 21 September 2009

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Two(ii)

Posted on 01:20 by Unknown
The gig’s cabin was a fullerene shell perched on top of its motor platform, a claustrophobic closet with no room for seats or couches. Loc stood next to the pilot, with Berry Hong-Owen crammed in behind them, all three strapped into the webs of their crash harnesses and bulked out in pressure suits, globular helmets screwed on, as the frail craft arced halfway around Mimas in a free-fall trajectory.

The little moon was a ball of dirty water ice just under four hundred kilometres in diameter that had frozen all the way down to its silicate core soon after its formation: its ancient, unmodified surface was pocked and spattered by a chaos of craters of every size, like a boiling sea instantly turned to stone. Peering out of the gig’s slot-like window, it seemed to Loc that he was plunging headlong past a vast pale cliff printed with a random jumble of inky crescents and clefts and staves: slanting shadows cast by blocks and boulders, shadows cupped inside craters, shadows curving around crater rims. He’d patched a slow-release dose of a local smart drug, pandorph, before putting on his pressure suit. Yota McDonald had turned him on to it. It was cleaner and more effective than any of the military smart drugs they’d used back in the good old days before the war, when they’d brainstormed political and strategic scenarios for a government commission. It sharpened his perceptions and quickened his thoughts and gave him a crystalline god-like perspective, a necessary edge that would help him deal with Sri Hong-Owen, and it had the useful side effect of overlaying his usual anxiety and fright at being fired like a bullet across a hostile moonscape with a calm, semi-detached interest in the spectacular scenery unravelling beyond the gig’s window.

READ MORE . . .
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Sunday, 20 September 2009

Gillian Welch At The Newport Folk Festival

Posted on 10:16 by Unknown
The entire set, courtesy of NPR. Man, I love the internet.

(Via Small Beer Press.)
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Random Linkage 20/09/09

Posted on 08:22 by Unknown
Moon is coldest known place in the solar system
'Poor Pluto. First it gets kicked out of the planet club, now it's not even the coldest place in the solar system. Dark craters near the moon's south pole have snatched that title – which is good news for the prospects of finding water ice on Earth's companion.'

Using Magnetism To Turn Drugs On And Off
'Many medical conditions, such as chronic pain, cancer and diabetes, require medications that cannot be taken orally, but must be dosed intermittently, on an as-needed basis, over a long period of time. A few delivery techniques have been developed, using an implanted heat source, an implanted electronic chip or other stimuli as an "on-off" switch to release the drugs into the body. But thus far, none of these methods can reliably do all that's needed: repeatedly turn dosing on and off, deliver consistent doses and adjust doses according to the patient's need.
'Researchers led by Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD of Children's Hospital Boston, funded by the National Institutes of Health, have devised a solution that combines magnetism with nanotechnology.'
(Ingenious - but what happens if the patient passes through a magnetic field at the wrong time? We’re not short of them, in the C21st. Cheap idea for a thriller: the hero has been implanted with a magnetically-controlled poison capsule, and has to chase down the villain while *avoiding* every magnetic field. Maybe involving Chev Chelios.)

Saturn's Turbulent 'Storm Alley' Sets Another Record
'The longest continuously observed thunderstorm in the solar system has been roiling Saturn’s atmosphere since mid-January and is still churning now, according to a presentation by a Cassini team scientist at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany.'

Tiny ancestor is T. rex blueprint
'A 3m-long dinosaur fossil from China which predates T. rex by 60 million years is a blueprint for the mighty carnivore, say researchers.'
(Some commentators have been claiming that it’s human-sized. Human-sized in the same way that a grizzly bear is human-sized.)

New Evidence of Dry Lake Beds on Mars
'Networks of giant polygonal troughs found in crater basins on Mars are cracks caused by evaporating lakes. These landforms had been attributed to thermal contractions in the Martian permafrost, similar to what the Phoenix lander explored near the north pole on the Red Planet. But these polygon-shaped cracks are too large to be caused by thermal contractions and provide further evidence of a warmer, wetter Martian past.'

The Incredible Ghost Fleet Off The Coast Of Singapore
'Off the coast of Singapore is a collection of ships larger than the U.S. and English navies just sitting idle, waiting out the recession. It's a spectacular image, capturing our bruised global economy better than any we've see thus far.'

Best McDonald’s Ad Ever
(At least, until the amniotronic version comes along.)
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Friday, 18 September 2009

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter Two(i)

Posted on 01:29 by Unknown
Loc Ifrahim was up in the junkyard station, in orbit around Dione, when news of the death of the president of Greater Brazil splashed across the TPA net. It was a shock, but not unexpected. The woman had been almost two centuries old, and in her dotage. And she’d never recovered from the death of her husband. Still, she’d been a power, and now there was a vacuum, and various alliances in the great families would be manoeuvring to fill it as soon as possible after the state funeral. Loc began to calculate what it might mean for the TPA. What it might mean for him.

READ MORE . . .
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Thursday, 17 September 2009

Junk

Posted on 10:23 by Unknown
Philip K Dick had a word for it: kipple. I think he may also have called it gubble at one point but he definitely called it kipple in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and a couple of other books I would check, but my paperback copies of his books are behind a bunch of other paperbacks because my fiction paperback shelves, for A - M at least, are double-ranked. I have too many books. Well, you can’t have too many books of course. No, the problem is that I don’t have enough space for all the books I have bought (I just bought another today, David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again). I have many metres of bookshelves, but I also have a lot of books. I don’t have enough room for them all. I don’t even have enough room for all of my books. That is, complimentary copies of the books I wrote, and anthologies in which I have a short story, and other people’s books for which I wrote introductions. Mass-market paperbacks of six of my books were published in the UK this month, a trade paperback of one of those titles is about to be published in the US, and another title will be published in hardback and trade paperback in the UK at the beginning of next month. I have been sent multiple copies of all of them. Not to mention two copies of the Nightshade Best SF and Fantasy of the Year, because its editor Jonathan Strahan, was kind enough to include one of my stories. Not to mention the books by other people that I’ve bought this month (seven, so far). Really, I have to admit, I have too many books. I’ve been trying to firefight the problem by getting rid of some of them. You keep books because you like them, individually and collectively, and because you think, one day, you might want to read them again. But this month I’ve been going through my books weeding out ones that I positively, definitely am not going to read again, because I already have too many books I haven’t yet read. So far, I’ve made three trips to the local charity shop, and I’ve just found a few more books I can bear to part with today. It helps, a little. But the books - and CDs and DVDs, don’t get me started on those - keep coming.

Not to mention all the other stuff that we all accumulate, that over time loses usefulness and context and becomes kipple. Not garbage - wrappers and wet lettuce leaves and coffee grounds - but ancient electronic gadgets and kitchenware, broken toys, old shoes, lone socks. And so on, and so forth. Stuff we should throw out or sell on eBay or give away but can’t because it still wakens a little emotional throb when we find it after a year or ten. I’ve just thrown out a computer mouse. It sat in a box for three years, it didn’t really work very well and besides, I have two other perfectly good computer mice. But I used it to write four novels, and it took some effort to get rid of it. Ditto the two dozen Zip discs from the back of a desk drawer. I don’t even have a Zip drive any more. And all of the data on them is archived and backed up elsewhere. Why did I keep them?

At least I haven’t yet been driven to rent storage space. Before the recession bit, according to this excellent article, most rented storage space contained stuff people didn’t need, but couldn’t bear to throw away.
“There’s a lot of junk stored in our properties,” Ronald L. Havner Jr., Public Storage’s chief executive, told a symposium in New York in June. Walking through his company’s facilities around the country, he explained, “I’ve sometimes said that we could put a torch to this building and it would have zero effect on the local economy — because that’s how much junk is stored in our properties.”
But now, with in the US (and probably here, too, on a smaller scale), more and more people are renting storage spaces because they have lost their homes and need a space to park the stuff of their lives while they regroup, or are being rented by endangered businesses, for the same reason.
By shaking up the composition of renters, and their reasons for renting, the recession could be quietly tilting the character of American storage closer to what it was originally: a pragmatic solution to a sudden loss of space, rather than a convenient way of dealing with, or putting off dealing with, an excess of stuff.
Puts my own little problem in stark perspective. Anyway, before I go down the storage space route, I should really get around to building some shelves in my loft...
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Eight Easy Pieces

Posted on 03:19 by Unknown
The latest issue of New Scientist includes a fine essay on British science fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson and eight slivers of flash fiction by Stephen Baxter, Nicola Griffith, Ken Macleod, Ian McDonald, Justina Robson, Geoff Ryman, Ian Watson and, er, me. Best of all, you can read all of it here, for free. Oh, and there's a competition, too.
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Wednesday, 16 September 2009

Mars Now!

Posted on 12:20 by Unknown
While gloom increases about the new NASA budget, widely feared to be too low to fund plans to a return of astronauts to the Moon by 2020, there's been some bullish noises about reconfiguring plans to send manned missions to Mars.

First, there's been a revival of Fred Singer's 'Ph-D project', which suggested establishing a forward base on one of Mars's two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, before landing astronauts on the planet. It would be economic in terms of fuel, would provide a platform that would allow astronauts to control rovers on the surface of the planet in real time, and would enhance our knowledge of small bodies. The possibility that the moons may harbour ice deposits and could have collected material blasted off Mars by large impacts are enticing bonuses. And Russia's Fobos-Grunt mission, which plans to study Phobos in detail and land on its surface a probe that will return a soil sample to Earth, could pave the way for manned missions. (We'd better make up our minds relatively quickly; the orbits of both Phobos and Deimos and decaying, and in only ten million years the moons will enter the atmosphere and break up and bombard with surface of Mars with debris.)

Second, Paul Davies has an even more radical suggestion to cut costs: send explorers to Mars on a one-way ticket, and begin colonisation of the planet without any prelimary and expensive round-trip manned missions. Supplies could be sent ahead in robot landers; costs would be slashed by 80%; there is, he claims, 'no shortage of eager scientists, young and old, who say they would accept a one-way ticket'. Anyone who's read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars will feel a definite tingle of recognition; although the pioneers in Robinson's novel were preceeded by manned expeditions rather than a horde of versatile robot explorers, the ethos is the same. As, no doubt, would be the human complications. It's hard to believe that Davies and his supports will overcome NASA's cumbersome caution (although maybe the Chinese would be more receptive), but I thought this raison d'etre very fine:
'A worldwide project to create a second home for humankind elsewhere in the solar system would be the greatest adventure our species has embarked upon since walking out of Africa 100,000 years ago, and provide a unifying influence unparalleled in history.'
And after Mars, why not the moons of Jupiter and Saturn?

Xposted to Pyr-o-mania.
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Tuesday, 15 September 2009

Look For America

Posted on 12:05 by Unknown
A hard rain is currently falling over London, like a Wagnerian prelude to autumn. 'As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus etc etc.' I'm posting this because it cheered me up on this dreary day:

David Bowie's version of Simon & Garfunkel's America, a perennial in my Top Ten favourite songs, from the Concert For New York City late in September 2001. Love the Kurt Weill vibe. (I think I've already mentioned, somewhere or other here, that Cowboy Angels' original title was Look For America, but hell, I'll mention it again.) (Thanks to Jack Womack for the link.)

Upcoming: I'll be appearing, along with Jaine Fenne, Tom Hunter, Paul Raven, and Alastair Reynolds at Sci-Fi London's Oktoberfest, on a panel about whether it's worthwhile, these days, writing about space travel. At, get this, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, on October 23rd. And I'll also be part of a group signing at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, on Saturday November 14th, 12.30 - 2pm. Other victims include David Devereux, Adam Roberts, Justina Robson, and Chris Wooding.

Currently reading: Bldgblog Book: Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures. Currently listening to: 'We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River', Richmond Fontaine.
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Monday, 14 September 2009

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Three, Chapter One

Posted on 00:58 by Unknown
‘What you still haven’t learned after all this time,’ Frankie Fuente told Cash Baker, ‘is how to relax.’

‘I’m pretty relaxed right now,’ Cash said. ‘Maybe you should take a picture to remind yourself what it looks like.'

‘What you are right now is the exact opposite of relaxed. You’re wired so tight I could nail your head to one end of a plank and your feet to the other and play a tune on you. And you know what? You’re like that all the time.’

READ MORE . . .
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Saturday, 12 September 2009

Random Linkage

Posted on 09:08 by Unknown
A Boy For Every Girl? Not Even Close: Scientists Trace Evolution Of Butterflies Infected With Deadly Bacteria
'"We were surprised at the speed with which change in sex ratio could occur," said Emily Hornett of the University of Liverpool. "Between 1886 and 1894 in Fiji, the male-killing bacterium rose from 50 percent to over 90 percent frequency, changing the sex ratio from 2:1 to 10:1."'
(Here’s your real-life precedent for female-only utopias.)

LCROSS Mission Selects Crater Cabeus A As Target for October 9 Impact
'NASA announced this morning that the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission has selected the target for its planned impact. The selected crater is Cabeus A, which is centered on the lunar nearside at 82.2 degrees south, 39.1 degrees west. The actual target site is offset from the crater's center to the north, within a permanently shadowed area. Data from Lunar Prospector suggests that the targeted part of the crater could contain as much as two percent water in the upper meter of soil.'

Dandelion rubber
'Most natural rubber comes from rubber trees in Southeast Asia, but this source is now underthreat from a fungus. Researchers [at the Fraunhofer-Instituts für Molekularbiologie und Angewandte Oekologiehave] optimized the Russian dandelion to make it suitable for large-scale rubber production.'

Physicists propose 'Schrödinger's virus' experiment
'Suspending a cat between life and death is one of the best-known thought experiments in quantum mechanics. Now researchers from Germany and Spain are proposing a real experiment to probe whether a virus can exist in a superposition of two quantum states. Such superpositions are typically the domain of smaller, inanimate objects such as atoms. But the team believes that their technique, using finely tuned lasers, will soon allow for the superposition of something much
closer to a living organism.'

Plasmobots
'Though not famed for their intellect, single-celled organisms have already demonstrated a surprising degree of intelligence. Now a team at the University of the West of England (UWE) has secured £228,000 in funding to turn these organisms into engineering robots.'
(Isn’t this kind of how Blood Music started?)

Astronomers spot space shuttle’s massive leak


'Sky watchers across North America witnessed a strange event on Wednesday night. As space shuttle Discovery glided silently overhead, the orbiter sprouted a flamboyant comet-like tail.'
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Friday, 11 September 2009

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Two, Chapter Five

Posted on 00:31 by Unknown
The motor crew had worked up detailed plans for the exploration of Neptune and several of the dwarf planets at the edge of the Kuiper Belt, but after the expedition to the Pluto System returned to Miranda the Free Outers voted against further trips. Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was a highly promising piece of real estate, to be sure, but it had been comprehensively mapped by human visitors and robot probes, and at present Neptune was on the opposite side of the Solar System. There was no urgent need to go there just yet, and it would be a waste of resources and time better used to improve and expand the settlement on Miranda, and to equip the rest of the Free Outers' little fleet with the fast-fusion motor.

Newt Jones wasn't disheartened by the vote against further expeditions. In fact, he was energised by defeat, convinced that sooner rather than later he would be proven right. He worked long hours on the conversion programme, discussed refinements to the design of the motor with his crew of tech wizards. Macy Minnot returned to her work with the biome crew, tweaking and improving and enriching the habitat's ecosystem. And then, just sixty days after the expedition returned, everything changed.

Read More . . .
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Thursday, 10 September 2009

More Tireless Self-Promotion

Posted on 02:44 by Unknown

Yep, another book. The UK mass-market paperback of The Quiet War, officially published today. The hardback cover was pretty cool; this one's even cooler. Do I need to tell you to do the right thing by it?

And - yet again - there's more! Cowboy Angels has been rendered into an eBook. You can buy it via WH Smiths or Waterstones. And I've just received copies of the US edition of The Quiet War, and the UK hardback of Gardens of the Sun, both of which look pretty damn fine.

Currently reading: John Carey's biography of William Golding; The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Just watched: District 9.
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Tuesday, 8 September 2009

Coming Soon

Posted on 01:36 by Unknown
Reminiscent of a classic Chris Foss cover or an outtake from 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is an artist's impression of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's new uncrewed supply ship, the H-II transfer vehicle, approaching the International Space Station. The HTV is to be the payload of the first of Japan's new heavy-lifting rocket, due to be launched this month. And Japan isn't the only player in the ISS supply business - see New Scientist for more details.

(The ISS really is a big beast - to give you an idea of scale, the HTV is 10 meters long, and the Soyuz spacecraft (the station's lifeboat) docked at bottom left is about the same size. Cost aside, it really seems like a dumb idea to shut it down in 2015-16.)
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Monday, 7 September 2009

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Two, Chapter Four

Posted on 00:50 by Unknown
The spy woke slowly and painfully, trapped in the stiff embrace of his pressure suit, inside the coffin-sized confines of the dropshell. He felt as if he’d been beaten by experts and afterwards staked out in the scorching heat of some desert on Earth. Bruised to the bone, joints stiff and swollen. A black headache pulsing like a poisonous spider inside the tender jelly of his brain. His tongue a shrivelled corpse glued to the floor of its foul tomb. He sipped tasteless recycled water through a tube and wincingly plugged into the dropshell’s myopic sensorium. He’d slept for seventy-two days and now Rhea was directly ahead, a bright pockmarked globe hanging beyond the broad hoop of the rings and the bulge of Saturn’s equator.

READ MORE . . .

EDIT: bad link fixed - thanks Jean-Daniel!
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Sunday, 6 September 2009

Into The Night

Posted on 04:15 by Unknown
While browsing Emily Lakdawaller’s inestimable blog at the Planetary Society’s site the other day, I came across this great list of active planetary probes - where they are and what they are doing in various parts of the Solar System. What really caught my attention was the entry right at the end of the list: a reminder that the two Voyager probes are still going strong.

Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977 on Grand Tour trajectories that took advantage of a favourable alignment of the outer planets. I was in the middle of my Ph.D studies back then; the space shuttle prototype Endeavour flew for the first time; Elvis died; and Star Wars was released. In 1979 both Voyagers swung past Jupiter, discovering volcanoes on Io and evidence for an ocean beneath the surface of Europa. I gained my Ph.D that year and began my first stint of postdoctoral research; Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister; Sid Vicious died in New York; Y.M.C.A. was the best-selling single in the UK. The next year Voyager 1 reached Saturn and swung past Titan to investigate the moon’s dense atmosphere, a manoeuver that flung it out of the plane of the ecliptic and ended its planetary tour (instead of flying past Titan, it could have gone on to reach Pluto, in hindsight a better option, but back then we didn’t know that Pluto had three moons and an active atmosphere).

Voyager 2 reached Saturn in 1981, the year I started work in the University of California, Los Angeles. Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer married; President Reagan was shot in a failed assassination attempt; the first personal computer was launched by IBM. In 1986, when Voyager 2 swung past Uranus and discovered that one of its moons, Miranda, looked as if it had been shattered and badly reconstructed, I was working in Oxford University, Chernobyl blew its top, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated soon after launch, and Phil Collins won a Grammy. Not a great year, all in all. Voyager 2 reached Neptune in 1989, discovering evidence for active geysers on the ice giant’s largest moon, Triton. In the same year I moved to St Andrew’s University in Scotland to take up my first (and last) real job after a decade of scraping by on postdoctoral grants; the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Empire began to crumble away; George Bush the First succeeded Ronald Reagan as US President; the Chinese pro-democracy movement was crushed at Tiananmen Square; the first full episode of The Simpsons was screened.

Twenty years later, The Simpsons is still going; I’ve written a bunch of short stories and two novels that have made extensive use of images of the outer planets and their moons taken by Voyager 1 and 2; and the two probes are still sending data back to Earth. Voyager 1 is 110 Astronomical Units - 16.5 billion kilometres - from the sun, beyond the Kuiper Belt and every known large body in the Solar System apart from long-term comets; Voyager 2 is presently some 90 AU from the sun. Both probes have passed through the termination shock point, where the velocity of solar wind particles falls below its speed of sound and becomes subsonic. At some point, as yet unknown, they will pass through the heliopause where the flow of solar wind particles is halted by pressure of gases in the interstellar medium, and enter true interstellar space. They will continue to transmit data about the Solar System’s boundary until they no longer have enough power to run any instruments, around 2025, 48 years after they were launched. They’ll continue to fall through interstellar space (unless they are intercepted by alien probes) until, after a couple of billion years or so, their fabric finally disintegrates. They carry with them greetings from Earth, including two golden phonograph records (remember them?) containing images and sounds from Earth. One of the musical tracks is Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting blues lament, ‘Dark Was Night, Cold Was The Ground.’ Never as dark, nor as cold, on Earth, as the long night through which Voyager 1 and 2 are sailing.



(Clip from Wim Wenders' contribution to Martin Scorsese's The Blues; Ry Cooder used Johnson's music in his soundtrack for Wenders' Paris, Texas, released in 1984, two years before Voyager 2 reached Uranus.)

Xposted at Pyr-o-mania.
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Saturday, 5 September 2009

Deadly Beauty

Posted on 07:50 by Unknown
I love this set of beautifully accurate glass sculptures of pathogenic viruses (above: smallpox), created by Luke Jerram. Viruses are basically weaponised DNA (or RNA), so simple that they're not even considered to be alive, but they have an intricate beauty that these pieces fully reveal. There's an example on display at the Wellcome Collection (one of my favourite museums in London) and he has a solo show at the Smithfield Gallery, London, opening September 22nd. (Via Carl Zimmer.)
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Your Moment Of Zen

Posted on 06:19 by Unknown


A 'mutual event' involving Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea, via the Planetary Society blog, where Emily Lakdawalla has posted a set of amazing animations based on multiple images taken by Cassini. Check 'em out!
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Friday, 4 September 2009

Gardens Of The Sun, Part Two, Chapter Three

Posted on 01:50 by Unknown
Pluto was currently approaching perihelion. Its highly elliptical orbit was not only carrying it inside the orbit of Neptune; it was also about as close to Uranus as it would ever get -- currently, the ice giant and the dwarf planet were separated by less than two billion kilometres. As far as the Free Outers were concerned, there would never be a better time to pay a visit.

The expedition consisted of two ships equipped with fast-fusion motors, Newt Jones's and Macy Minnot's tug Elephant and the shuttle Out of Eden, carrying twenty-four people, six of them children. The presence of children another reminder to Macy that space was the Outers' natural habitat: not something to be endured or survived but the place where they lived, so they saw no problem in taking their children off on a voyage into the unknown in ships powered by incompletely tested motors. Of course, the older children had more experience of ships and moonscapes than Macy, and could probably cope with any emergency better than she. And the Pluto System wasn't exactly terra incognita, for it had been visited and mapped and sampled by robot probes and human explorers over the past two centuries. Even so, the dwarf planets of the outer dark were strange and incompletely understood, and a long way from anywhere else if something went wrong; Macy admired the Outers' fearless can-do attitude and didn't doubt their competence, but she knew that this wasn't exactly a stroll in the park.

READ MORE . . .
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Thursday, 3 September 2009

All Of These Worlds Are Yours . . .

Posted on 08:34 by Unknown
. . . is the title of an essay I wrote about new discoveries in the Saturn System, just published in Clarkesworld magazine. It starts like this:
On July 1 2004, seven years after its launch, the Cassini spacecraft crossed the plane of Saturn's ring system. Its chunky body, wrapped in gold-colored Kapton insulation and crowned by the dish of its high-gain antennae, bristled with instrumentation; an independent instrument package, the Huygens probe, clung to it like a limpet. After falling through the gap between the F and G rings, it fired up its engines for ninety-six minutes, skimming just 100,000 kilometers above Saturn's cloud tops as it ended its interplanetary trajectory and inserted itself into an elliptical orbit.

I had some small personal interest in Cassini's success. In the year it was launched, 1997, I published a short story, "Second Skin", set on Proteus, a tiny moon of Neptune: it described an attempt to assassinate an enigmatic but fearsomely accomplished gene wizard, and was the overture to a long love affair with the outer regions of the Solar System. I wrote eight more stories that shared the same future history, and began to plan a pair of novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, about life in the outer regions of the solar system . . .

READ ON . . .

Also, there are books to be won. And wait! There's more! Although the official publication date is a little under three weeks away, you can now buy the Pyr edition of The Quiet War via Amazon.com.

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Son Of Cover Pimpage

Posted on 01:04 by Unknown





All five of these fine titles are published today in a new uniform edition. Buy the set! And if you already have them, well, they'll make a great present. EDIT: the cover for Red Dust is actually red in real life; messing about with colour values hasn't made any improvement, alas...

(When Fairyland was first published, I suggested that the silhouette of a certain magic castle in a certain large theme park outside Paris could be used on the cover, because a large part of the action in the second section takes place in its ruins. Unfortunately, the large media corporation which owns the theme park and others like it around the world had copyrighted the image of the chateau, and because you don't mess with the mouse, we went for another concept instead. And now the new paperback sports a fine cover with an evocative angle on an even more famous Parisian landmark.)
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Wednesday, 2 September 2009

When It Changed

Posted on 11:03 by Unknown
There are, at bottom, two kinds of sf disaster novels. In the first, the disaster is so complete and overwhelming, and so sudden, that it forms a distinct and abrupt break with its past (our present). There is a before, and there is an after, and after the before everything is changed. Some sf novels (Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, for instance, or John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids or Stephen Baxter’s Flood) deal with the break itself, and the aftermath. Civilisation is wrecked, more or less noisily, messily, and quickly. A comet hits the Earth; there’s a nuclear war or a plague or an outbreak of grey goo; the sun flares. Things fall apart and a plucky few survivors begin the hard task of starting over; not rebuilding the civilisation that’s been lost, but creating something new. In a rare few novels, notably Ballard’s early work (aside from his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, which is a far more conventional disaster narrative) - The Drought; The Drowned World; The Crystal World - the characters embrace and internalise the disaster. They are not the founding fathers of a new kind of civilisation; they are the last of the humanity, accepting with various kinds of grace or resentment their doom. But for the most part, sf writers view catastrophe as a chance to start over. Even in many sf novels that don’t deal with directly with disaster, some kind of radical break with the present is implied. It is a part of the back story. Things changed sometime in the past, but the effects of those changes are implied. They are absorbed into the texture of the novel.

The second kind of sf disaster novel is less dramatic. The catastrophe is not caused by one thing but is woven from many causes. And these do not cause an abrupt change and a clean break with the past, but drive a slow and complex process of transformation with an unclear endpoint. They are, in other words, heightened versions of what’s happening right now - Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, my own Fairyland. They tends towards the satiric mode; lean towards the dystopian but don’t entirely embrace it. I’m thinking about writing another one.
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