Robert Holdstock 1948-2009

A generous and convivial friend, a wonderful author whose novels are vivid and deeply felt evocations of the myths and quotidian reality of the ancient world, and all-round good bloke. Gone too soon and greatly missed.

UPDATE: for those interested, tributes and messages of condolence can be found at his website.

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Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (6)

Another Science Fiction: An Intersection of Art and Technology in the Early Space Race

On industrial trade magazine covers and ads from the days when science was the Way Forward, and the law of unintended consequences had yet to be invented.

(via Big Dumb Object)

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Dunes In Winter

The HiRise camera package on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter continues to send back stunningly beautiful images of complex and unexpected textures on the Martian surface. The image above, looking like nothing so much as a finely sculptured high-end chocolate dessert, is of dunes inside a crater in the Southern hemisphere. It's currently winter, in the Southern hemisphere of Mars, and the sheen on the smooth east-facing slopes, sheltered from the sun, is either water or carbon dioxide frost. The intricate scrolls and furls of the west-facing slopes is due to modification by southerly and northerly winds of ridges sculpted by prevailing westerly winds.

You can find a high-resolution image, a close-up of the latticed dunes, and more information here; Boston Globe's the Big Picture has a great gallery here. In the past decade, HiRise's vast catalogue of images and images and data from Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Express, the MRO, the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the Phoenix Lander, have rendered every novel and non-fiction book about Mars out-of-date to some degree or other. Time for a new wave, perhaps...

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Random Linkage 28/11/09

First Black Holes May Have Incubated in Giant, Starlike Cocoons
'The first large black holes in the universe likely formed and grew deep inside gigantic, starlike cocoons that smothered their powerful x-ray radiation and prevented surrounding gases from being blown away, says a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.'

Dark power: Grand designs for interstellar travel
'No one disputes that building a ship powered by black holes or dark matter would be a formidable task. Yet remarkably there seems to be nothing in our present understanding of physics to prevent us from making either of them. What's more, Crane believes that feasibility studies like his touch on questions in cosmology that other research hasn't considered.'

Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime
'Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.'

NASA to develop haptic air-typing spacesuit gloves
'NASA is considering plans to integrate haptic vibro feedback and Halting State style
air-writing accelerometer capability into spacesuit gloves.'
(Why not just use chip-enhanced mindpower?)

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Recommendations Wanted

Amazon have given me three GBP credit to spend on MP3 downloads. Gosh. What should I buy?

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Comfortably Numb

I find myself becoming mildly obsessed with this Pink Floyd song. It's extremely well known - probably their best-known song in fact, up there in best plank-spanking polls and so on - but flew way under my radar when it was first released in 1979; although the hippy living in the flat beneath mine back in Bristol had it on constant replay I was so not into the whole concept album thing back then, and I've never seen the film. But I was boxset-streaming The Sopranos from start to finish recently , and a snippet of 'Comfortably Numb' (the live version with Van Morrison, from The Departed soundtrack) was playing in Christopher Moltisanti's SUV just before he crashed. Since then, I've been listening to various versions, and finding that the dialogue between a doctor and a pop star who needs chemical enhancement to get going has been helping me find my way inside a character who had previously been frustratingly opaque. Underneath the bombast, there's a fragile wistfulness, a longing for things lost, a revelation half-glimpsed and barely understood. Perfect for the posthuman condition I'm trying to evoke.

So far I like this version best. If only for the flowering-medusa-spaceship thing, and the crowd's transcendent rapture.

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Random Linkage 21/11/09

'Hobbits' Are a New Human Species, According to Statistical Analysis of Fossils
'Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York have confirmed that Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease. Using statistical analysis on skeletal remains of a well-preserved female specimen, researchers determined the "hobbit" to be a distinct species and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans.'

Fossil hunters unearth galloping, dinosaur-eating crocodiles in Sahara
'Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of primitive crocodiles that "galloped" on land and patrolled the broad rivers that coursed through north Africa one hundred million years ago.'

Nanotechnology Team Discover How to Capture Tumor Cells in Bloodstream
'A team led by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) researchers on the cutting edge of nanotechnology has found a way to capture tumor cells in the bloodstream that could dramatically improve earlier cancer diagnosis and prevent deadly metastasis.'

'Vampire Star': Ticking Stellar Time Bomb Identified
'Using ESO's Very Large Telescope and its ability to obtain images as sharp as if taken from space, astronomers have made the first time-lapse movie of a rather unusual shell ejected by a "vampire star," which in November 2000 underwent an outburst after gulping down part of its companion's matter. This enabled astronomers to determine the distance and intrinsic brightness of the outbursting object.'

'Frankenstein' fix lets asteroid mission cheat death
'The beleaguered Hayabusa asteroid probe is back on track to return to Earth after a clever workaround coaxed one of its ion engines back to life.
'The recovery is yet another reversal of fortune for the Japanese spacecraft, which has been plagued with problems since its visit to asteroid Itokawa in 2005.'

Second Extrication Drive Yields Slight Progress
'Spirit successfully completed the first step of its planned two-step motion on Sol 2090 (Nov.19).
'After spinning the wheels for the equivalent of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) in the forward direction, the center of the rover moved approximately 12 millimeters (0.5 inch) forward, 7 millimeters (0.3 inch) to the left and about 4 millimeters (0.2 inch) down. The rover tilt changed by about 0.1 degree. Small forward motion was observed with the non-operable right front wheel, and the left front wheel showed indications of climbing, despite the center of the rover moving downward. These motions are too small to establish any trends at this time.'

Give Me More: Augmented Reality from EPFL+ECAL Lab
'Artistic animations float across the pages of a timeless book about the Swiss countryside. Banknotes prove strangely seductive. Your head is suddenly engulfed in clouds and your clothes ooze bubbles. This is the world of Give Me More, an Augmented Reality (AR) exhibit by Switzerland’s EPFL+ECAL Lab, premiering in the U.S. at swissnex San Francisco.'

The Illustrated Man: How LED Tattoos Could Make Your Skin a Screen
'The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.
'New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.'

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What If Earth Had Rings Like Saturn?

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2001: A Who Odyssey

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Secret Histories

A few years ago, Jonathan Lethem published an essay in The Village Voice, ‘Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’, in which he decried the close-mindedness of the genre and sketched an alternate history in which Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow won the Nebula instead of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama in 1973, leading to a reconciliation between sf and the rest of literature and the mutual enrichment of both. Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have an argument with that idea in their anthology The Secret History of Science Fiction, selecting stories by authors on both sides of the divide to illustrate their thesis that the so-called boundary between sf and ‘mainstream’ literature has long been blurred and hard to define: sf authors can turn in well-honed stories that match the best in ‘mainstream’ literature (hate that term, but it’s convenient and everyone knows what it means), while mainstream authors can be as adept at using the tropes of sf and fantasy as genre writers. In short, Lethem’s alternate history is a true history, albeit unrecognised.

All of which is true, and has certainly been true for all kinds of crossover and slipstream works since 1973, if not much earlier. But you can find a different kind of secret history of sf in another book, Sin-a-rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties, which collects together all kinds of lurid covers and essays by publishers and authors, including one by Robert Silverberg in which he describes how he wrote 150 softcore sleaze novels in five years for fun and profit. Harlan Ellison and Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote sleaze novels, too; so did mystery writer Donald Westlake, and a number of other well-known authors. At the time, Silverberg explains, ‘A dozen or so magazines for which I had been writing regularly ceased publication overnight; and as for the tiny market for s-f novels . . . it suddenly became so tight that unless you were one of the first-magnitude stars like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov you were out of luck.’ Silverberg turned to the sleaze trade as a way of earning a living, and discovered that it was also a valuable apprenticeship: ‘It isn’t just that I earned enough by writing them to pay for that big house and my trips to Europe. I developed and honed important professional skills, too, while I was pounding out all those books.’

Sf publishing has always been a chancy, hand-to-mouth affair for most. It imploded again in the early 1980s, and there are signs that it’s about to implode again. And because they can’t hope for sinecure positions in creative writing in universities (although that’s changing, now), sf writers have always been ready to turn their hands and minds to the kind of writing that can be churned out quickly and profitably. In the golden age of the pulps, the 1940s and 1950s, sf authors like James Blish or Frederik Pohl were capable of banging out one story for Amazing in the morning and another for Stirring Sports Stories in the afternoon (and barely made a living at it - see for instance Pohl’s fine memoir The Way the Future Was, or the roman-a-clef opening of Blish’s Jack of Eagles, in which the penniless hero pours tea on his cornflakes because he can’t afford milk). While Silverberg et al were working in the titillation trade in the US, over here in the UK Michael Moorcock was editing New Worlds with one hand and writing Sexton Blake adventures with the other, while many of his contemporaries were writing westerns, biker novels and, yes, sexploitation novels. A little later, Kim Newman and Neil Gaiman worked for the British soft porn magazine Knave. And sf writers today are also working in comics and graphic novels, novels based on role-playing games (Kim Newman and a slew of authors associated with Interzone in the 1990s wrote innovative and highly successful short stories novels for Games Workshop), film tie-ins . . .

These days, of course, there are plenty of sf writers who didn’t come up through pulps, or via sf fandom. But it was in the febrile arena of pulp sf that many tropes and imagery in common sf toolkit was generated and shared and elaborated upon (apart from all those ideas invented by HG Wells and Jules Verne). And while sf can sometimes aspire to the condition of literature, just as literature can sometimes aspire to the condition of sf, and while there are plenty of so-called literary qualities which all writers should aspire to master, and every kind of bad writing in whatever field should be rightly despised, there are values outside of the literary canon that have their own intrinsic worth.

The themes and tropes of sf have become part of pop culture and the happening world. Most of the writers in the sf genre use them as if they were real, most writers outside it use them metaphorically or allegorically. Both can produce works of lasting value, but one is looking forward, and the other is looking back. Think of these two secret histories as poles of a magnet, with sf inhabiting the field lines stretched between them: a continuum in which the only borderlines are those writers choose to draw around themselves.

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The Road

There's a lot to admire in director John Hillcoat's film version of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalypse novel The Road. Two unnamed and unashamedly emblematic figures, father and son, trudge southwards through ruined cities and ashy landscapes where after some undefined but global catastrophe every last thing is dead save for a few human survivors. Hillcoat, production designer Chris Kennedy and Director of Photography Javier Aguirresarobe have conjured a convincingly bleak and monochromatic mis-en-scene that favours the use of real locations ravaged by natural and manmade traumas rather than CGI. Vigo Mortensen is suitably grim and determined as a father oscillating between extremes of love and harrowing dread, widowed by a wife who committed suicide because she believed living was worse than death, and pledged to protecting his young son even if it means killing him. Kodi Smit-McPhee projects a frail and innocent goodness, touchingly trusting and generous, all but overwhelmed by a terrifying world racked by earthquakes and fire storms, and haunted by desperate thieves and gangs of cannibals. Flashbacks to scenes with the man's wife (Charlize Theron) underscore the desperation and near hopelessness of his plight.

Yet the film doesn't quite gel. McCarthy's novel braids the man's Robinson Crusoe-like ingenuity with the bond between father and son whose survival is the survival of hope in a world otherwise bereft. The novel's spare, precise prose is predicated on an intimate knowledge of the workings of the world that informs every page; its deceptively simple story of survival is a grim game of consequences. Early on, the man and boy are almost caught by a gang of roving cannibals and must flee, losing almost all they possess. They forge on, starving and desperate, until the man takes a near fatal risk by breaking into a house which turns out to be the lair of another cannibal gang that keeps a larder of living victims in a cellar. And so on, and so on. But the film, although a reverent interpretation, is more like a series of formal tableaux than a coherent narrative -- stark and beautifully rendered tableaux to be sure, but lacking continuity. The unending search for food and shelter that forms one of the novel's central threads is all but lost - Hillcote relies instead on an intermittent voiceover and a plangent but irritatingly overplayed score to underscore their predicament - and there's little tension or genuine sense of peril in the action scenes. Instead, the focus is kept on the relationship between father and son, which while beautifully and often tenderly depicted, is touched a little too often by naked sentiment. It's by no means a bad film, and there's considerable power in its devastating and unflinchingly bleak portrayal of a world utterly plundered and ruined - a world our own world may contain in embryo - and in the hopefully simplicity of its last image. But it's slighter and less involving than it wants to be, perhaps because - as too often with films like this - it pays so much respectful attention to its prize-winning, critically-acclaimed source that it fails to deliver the kind of vigour and originality that infused another parable of harsh Old Testament morality: Hillcoat's previous film, The Proposition.

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Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (5)

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Random Linkage 14/11/09

LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon
'The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.
'Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.
'NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.'
(When it starts to crack really bad puns, you can tell when the group mind of NASA is really excited, and quite right too. How long before some high-end Hollywood restaurant is selling Moon water at $1 million a bottle?)

Spirit Begins Extraction Process
On Monday, November 16, 2009, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will begin the much-anticipated, weeks-long process of extricating itself from a patch of powdery soil that stopped it in its tracks six months ago. It will begin by driving forward to the north, following its tracks out, even though its right front wheel is broken and immobilized.
(The rover driving team have about four months to get their brave little toaster free of the sandpit before winter comes and its power levels drop.)

Ghostly 'Spokes' Puff Out From Saturn's Rings
Massive, bright clouds of tiny ice particles hover above the darkened rings of Saturn in an image captured by the Cassini spacecraft on Sept. 22, 2009, around the time of Saturn's equinox.

Bizarre Lives Of Bone-eating Worms
'It sounds like a classic horror story -- eyeless, mouthless worms lurk in the dark, settling onto dead animals and sending out green "roots" to devour their bones. In fact, such worms do exist in the deep sea. They were first discovered in 2002 by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), who were using a robot submarine to explore Monterey Canyon. But that wasn't the end of the story. After "planting" several dead whales on the seafloor, a team of biologists recently announced that as many as 15 different species of boneworms may live in Monterey Bay alone.'
(Now imagine them growing bigger, and crawling out of the sea...)

12 claustrophobic space capsules

A joyride through the nanoscale

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Science Fiction that Isn't Science Fiction (4)

Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade—novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.

Nader Elhefnawy does a very credible job of tracking the rise and fall of the technothriller, drawing a straight line from Edisonades of the nineteenth Century, though H.G. Wells' The War in the Air, Heinlein&Co, to Clancy and those other guys.

While video games remain a robust market for these tales (partly because of their lesser dependence on credible plots) the fading of the military techno-thriller from television and film roughly tracked the course taken by the novels, up to their even more complete disappearance.

No kidding about video games; they've thoroughly absorbed and reengineered technothriller tropes; the best are sophisticated and melancholy studies of the loneliness of the long distance warrior.

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When I Was A Scientist

Last night I dreamed I was in a laboratory again.

We all have a particular anxiety dream that we return to over and again. Mine is about being unable to get together the various things required to maintain the clone I looked after, on and off, for twenty years. It's a natural clone of a simple freshwater animal, green hydra, distant relative of corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish. That's it in the photo above - some of you may remember it from university or school biology classes. It's about a half a centimetre long, and has a simple body plan: a tube constructed from an outer ectoderm and inner gastroderm, both mostly one cell thick and separated by an acellular mesoglea (the jelly in jellyfish). At one end is a mouth ringed by tentacles that contain four different kinds of nematoblasts, cells with capsules that explode when triggered, enjecting prey with poison and wrapping barbed coils around them. At the other is a foot by which it adheres to a suitable substrate. Green hydra are an example of a mutualistic symbiosis. They contain, in gastrodermal digestive cells, populations of single-celled Chlorella algae. The algae supply the animal with nutrition; the animal provides the algae with shelter, and nutrients they need to grow.

Hydra can reproduce asexually by budding, which is what the specimen in the photo is doing; eventually that bud at its waist will develop tentacles and a mouth and pinch off from its parent and take up an independent existence. And that means you can clone up from a single specimen a population of genetically identical individuals, ideal for use in experiments. I used to grow thousands of them for my research, which investigated how the intimate relationship between these two very different organisms was regulated.

Hydra aren't difficult to grow. You keep them in artificial pond water made up with simple chemicals, supply them with light and a constant temperature between 15 and 20 degrees Centigrade, feed them with freshly-hatched brine shrimp, and keep the Pyrex trays in which they grow nice and clean. My dream, the one I return to (or which returns to me) is that I can't quite manage this routine. I've forgotten to hatch the brine shrimp, or forgotten to clean the trays after feeding, or I don't have any artificial pond water and the chemicals to make it are missing, or there's something wrong with the incubator cabinets that keep the trays of hydra at the right temperature . . . And I wake up in that state of unresolved anxiety we all have, from time to time.

Other people dream of missing planes or trains, or being unable to find their way out of or into a building, or of arriving at a concert of business meeting without a stitch of clothing. I used to dream about exams, although not in the way that most people do - of having to take an exam without knowing anything about the subject. No, I used to dream about invigilating exams, another part of my former job. That went away after a while, but I still dream about culturing hydra, even though I quit science more than thirteen years ago. Funny, isn't it, what sticks in the mind?

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Tranquility Base

Now the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter has settled into its mapping orbit just 50 kilometres above the Moon's surface, it has been returning some spectacular images of the Apollo landing sites. Above is a close-up of an image of the the Apollo 11 site, just released by NASA. It's about 150 metres across, with the LEM landing stage and the pads of its legs clearly visible, as well as the various compenents of the science package. And, of course, the tracks left Armstrong and Aldrin, showing how close they stayed to their home on the Moon in the few hours they spent outside, reminding me all over again of watching them in the early hours of that July morning forty years ago.

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More Spaceship Goodness

Hey, it's the cover for the US edition of Gardens of the Sun, scheduled for publication in March 2010. Kudos to artist Sparth and hero editor Lou Anders.

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Leipzig, 1989

In 2002, I was one of the guests of honour at a science-fiction convention in Leipzig. I had a fine old time. My hosts took me and the other guests to the top of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal War Memorial, the largest war memorial in Europe, and held a celebratory dinner in Auerbach’s Keller, the cellar restaurant where Goethe is supposed to have received inspiration for Faust. I visited the monumental train station, too, and the church of St Thomas, where Bach was cantor, and where he is buried (a choir was rehearsing one of his cantos: a spine-tingling moment). My hosts also took me to the Nikolai Church, in the heart of the medieval part of the city, and showed me the former Stasi headquarters, partly converted to a nightclub, past which, in the last days of East Germany, candle-carrying citizens had walked once a week, risking their freedom in peaceful protest against the communist regime. The Nikolai Church and the story of the Monday demonstrations and those candle-lit walks left a lasting impression on me, and got me interested in nonviolent protest, something I'd later work into some of my fiction.

The fall of the Berlin Wall didn't begin in Berlin; it began in Leipzig, with those peaceful protestors. In 1989, prayers for peace, a regular Monday-night event in the Nikolai Church, became so swollen by citizens dissatisfied with the Communist government that nonviolent demonstrations began to be held in the nearby Karl Marx Square. Towards the end of October, over 320,000 people gathered in nonviolent protest - more than half the population of the city - and by then similar protests were being held in squares of other cities in East Germany: an inexorable tide of protest that led to the toppling of the wall, the end of the East German government, and the eventual reunification of Germany. Nonviolence doesn't always succeed, of course, but even when it's beaten down by determined and ruthless opponents, it can leave behind the seeds for change. In 1968, student protests in Warsaw and the Prague Spring were swiftly subdued; yet afterwards, as Michel Gorbachev admitted, nothing was the same again. The Soviets and their puppet governments had lost credibility, and the support of the people. When they were challenged again, twenty years later, they fell apart.

Where do science fiction writers get their ideas? Isn't it obvious?

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Random Linkage 07/11/09

Data from Kaguya's prime mission to the Moon has been released
'Yesterday, the Japanese space agency announced the public release of the data from the primary mission of the Kaguya (a.k.a. SELENE) lunar orbiter. The release covers the period from December 21, 2007 to October 31, 2008, and includes data from all of the science instruments (which excludes the HD camera, not a science instrument). This release formally opens up the data for use by all scientists and enthusiasts around the world, not just the Kaguya science team, and will be a rich resource for lunar scientists.'

Speed Limit To The Pace Of Evolution, Biologists Say
'Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a theoretical model that informs the understanding of evolution and determines how quickly an organism will evolve using a catalogue of "evolutionary speed limits." The model provides quantitative predictions for the speed of evolution on various "fitness landscapes," the dynamic and varied conditions under which bacteria, viruses and even humans adapt.'

Mass extinction blamed on fiery fountains of coal
'FOSSIL fuels have a new crime to live down. A frenzy of hydrocarbon burning at the end of the Permian period may have led to the most devastating mass extinction Earth has ever seen, as explosive encounters between magma and coal released more carbon dioxide in the course of a few years than in all of human history.'

Neutered HIV Virus Delivers Treatment to Fatally Ill Boys
'Researchers may have taken a step towards curing the rare, inherited brain disease made famous by the movie Lorenzo’s Oil–and also towards ushering a new era of gene therapy. To help two young boys suffering from the disease, researchers tried an experimental treatment using a deactivated version of the HIV virus. The virus delivered working copies of a gene to stem cells from the patients’ bone marrows. The HIV virus, stripped of genetic material that makes it toxic, integrates permanently into the DNA of cells it enters, scientists said. That means the modified gene remains in the blood-forming stem cells for the life of the patient.'

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Widescreen Mars

A stunning portfolio of images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Hi-Rise camera, selected by the Boston Globe's Big Picture.

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2012

Fulfills every expectation of a Roland Emmerich disaster flick: big, noisy, national monuments in the firing line, totally infused with Emmerich's talent for presenting spectacular CGI destruction as flatly as Powerpoint, and killing billions of people and failing to make you care for any of them. But if it's dumb spectacle you want, he's your man, there's a nice twist in the story, and I can't help but having a sneaking regard for a film whose hero is a failed SF writer.

Most interesting aspect of these films, for me, is the use of found media footage to titivate the mise en scene. We're already in the middle of an apocalypse, and like the frog in the pot on the stove, don't realise the water is growing fatally warm.

Bonus Awful Warning: the Stephen Somers remake of When Worlds Collide due next year: 'Alpha Centauri is on a collision course for Earth, and mass hysteria of biblical proportions breaks out in the streets...'

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Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (3)

Roland Emmerich’s 2012 claims to be inspired by ancient Mayan prophecies, but with its lovingly detailed CGI shots of the destruction of the temples of Mammon and saving of a small band of the blessed, it’s actually square in the Christian apocalyptic tradition - something that’s almost as old as Christianity itself. The last book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation (also known as Apocalypse, from the verb apokalypto, to reveal), was written towards the end of the first century AD. It’s a visionary warning of the End Times, when the damned will flock to the AntiChrist, the Earth will be visited with every kind of destruction, and true believers will at last ascend into the infinite bliss of the New Jerusalem. Outbreaks of apocalypse fever have swept through Christianity ever since, peaking around 1500, when dozens of sects proclaimed the coming of the End Times (see Norman Cohen’s The Pursuit of the Millennium), and again around the end of the last century. Millions of premillennialists (especially Evangelical Christians in the United States; one of the Founding Fathers, Cotton Mather, was an ardent premillennialist) still expect at any moment to experience the Rapture of bodily ascent into Heaven as a prelude to the harrowing of Earth by a returned Christ.


This apocalypse is the subject of Victorian painter John Martin’s ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’ (above); this, and other huge, sensationalist canvases, were allegedly inspired by commercial dioramas animated by use of artificial lighting - precursors of present-day blockbuster movies. While Martin’s themes were biblical, most of the apocalypses in Hollywood movies are secular,with nuclear war, asteroids, or Arnold Swarzenegger as substitutes for God’s wrath. But an outfit outside the Hollywood machine, Cloud Ten Pictures, has been making movies for a Christian audience that deploy the tropes of premillennialism with deadly seriousness. They’ve produced a trilogy based on the bestselling Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a literal portrayal of the End Times of the premillennialists, as well as several thrillers that share the same post-Rapture setting, as well as the same villain, UN President Nicolae Carpathia, aka the AntiChrist (played by Gordon Currie - what must his fan mail be like?): Revelation, Apocalypse, and Tribulation (starring Gary Busey and featuring Margot Kidder and Mr T as, er, Mr T).

They look like science fiction, or science thrillers, but they aren't. As far as the people who made them and their intended audience are concerned, they embody a literal truth.

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Plume Run

The Cassini Orbiter completed its seventh close encounter with Saturn's small but highly active moon Enceladus yesterday, passing within a hundred kilometres of the south pole and ploughing through the plumes of water ice fired into space by some as yet unknown process deep beneath the surface. For much of the pass, Cassini was using various instruments to sample the plume, but it took pictures before and after the encounter; Emily Lakdwalla has pasted a couple of the best images in her blog over at the Planetary Society's site, including one of fissured and folded terrain that reminds me all over again that despite its small size, just five hundred kilometres in diameter, Enceldaus possesses an extremely varied and geologically active surface. It's easy to imagine climbing one of those ridges and looking out at a tangle of long, low bright hills snaking towards the sharply curved horizon . . .

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