Signing Off For 2009

Sung by Judy Garland to Margaret O'Brien in the 1944 film Meet Me In St Louis. If you think this is just a tad miserablist, check out the original lyrics:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork,
Next year we will all be living in New York.

No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.

But at least we all will be together, if the Fates allow,
From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Garland and director Vincent Minnelli pressured songwriter Hugh Martin into changing the lyrics; later, Frank Sinatra had him revise the line 'Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow' to 'Hang a shining star upon the highest bough', the version probably best known now. But this is the original and best, poignant yet imbued with a fragile hope, and absolutely perfect in its historical context. America was at war. When the song was released as a single, it was a huge hit with US troops; when Judy Garland sang it to soldiers in the Hollywood Canteen, many were reduced to tears.

So, I'm done for the year, apart from some fettling on notes for a future project. Take care. Business resumes in the Year We Make Contact.

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Science Top Ten

In some respects the past ten years haven’t been great, as far as science is concerned. George W. Bush announced an ambitious plan to send a manned mission to Mars, but provided no money. In 2003 the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Using intelligent design, anti-evolutionary forces tried to smuggle their untruths in school curricula. There was a popular and sometimes hysterical campaign against the MMR vaccine, based on a single discredited study, that resulted in outbreaks of measles in the US and UK as herd immunity declined. Despite an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence, climate-change skeptics claimed that there was no link between anthropogenically-generated carbon dioxide and global warming or denied that any warming was taking place, and mounted ad hominem attacks on climate scientists. Although their case is largely supported by myths and untruths rebutted by many sources, rather than papers in peer-reviewed journals, millions chose to believe them and 2009 was dubbed 'the year of the skeptic'. And just this month the UK government announced swingeing cuts in the funding of scientific research.

But to counterbalance all this gloom, there was a plethora of fantastic scientific discoveries and advances, too. Here’s my personal top ten.

10. Research into medical use of stem cells, which can renew themselves through division and differentiate into all kinds of specialised cells, was attacked by prolife groups in the US because although it promised to be the basis of many new medical treatments, it depended in part on harvesting cells from aborted fetuses. However, recent research has shown that cells taken from adults can be deprogrammed and returned to a primal state from which they can be encouraged to develop into muscle, skin or brain cells and used in research or to replace damaged or diseased tissues.

9. Pluto lost its planetary status after many objects similar to it were discovered in the Kuiper Belt, some sharing the region through which it orbits. Despite its debased status, Earth-based observations suggest that Pluto is more active than previously believed: it possesses a thin, transitory atmosphere replenished during the summer by geysers of nitrogen gas, and unlike Earth's atmosphere temperatures rise with altitude.

8. The BioBricks Foundation has developed a catalogue of standardised biological parts that treats the genetically-based properties of organisms as plug-and-play features. Researchers, many of them citizen scientists, can order off-the-shelf modules and insert them into their organism of choice, offering the potential of fast, cheap, open-wetware genetic engineering.

7. Paleontologists discovered in late Devonian rocks a fossil that bridges the transition between fish and amphibians, and underscores the predictive powers of evolutionary science. Named Tiktaalik roseae, it possesses fins whose bone patterns share features with tetrapod limbs - the basis of animal life on land, an incredibly important part in the jigsaw of the evolution of life on Earth.

6. After a long hiatus, the Large Hadron Collider is now up and running, and smashing protons together at energies not seen in the universe since the Big Bang. I'd put it higher up the list if I was as interested in fundamental particles and the deepest laws of nature as I should be, but it's definitely a impressive example of international cooperation.


5. The first exoplanets were discovered towards the end of the twentieth century, but in the past few years the first images of planets around other stars have been captured. One, roughly the size of Jupiter, orbits Fomalhaut (pictured); three more orbit the star HR 8799; another orbits the young star Beta Pictoris. Astronomers have even predicted the weather on two hot gas giants - since they are tidally locked to their stars but display even temperatures across their day- and night-sides, they must be racked by roaring winds that drive all the way around their circumferences and redistribute heat from their day-sides.


4. The two rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars and quickly discovered unequivocal evidence that there had once been liquid water on the surface. High-resolution images taken by the HiRISE instrument of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed deposits on the beds of ancient dry lakes, and the shoreline of an ancient ocean that capped the northern hemisphere. And the Phoenix surveyor landed near the north pole and tasted Martian ice, and imaged what may have been blobs of liquid water on its legs (pictured). Phoenix succumbed to the Martian winter but the MRO is still working in orbit, and the two rovers are still active on the surface, although Spirit has become stuck in a sand trap and may not be able to escape. The Moon’s soil, previously thought to be bone-dry, was found to contain traces of water, thought to be produced by interaction of hydrogen ions in the solar wind and oxygen in minerals. And last month the LCROSS mission crashed a rocket stage and a probe into a permanently shadowed crater at the Moon’s south pole and produced a plume of material that contained water; there’s an unknown amount of water ice trapped in those shadows, and at -240 degrees centigrade they're the coldest known places in the Solar System.

3. New research on an ancient hominin species, Ardipithecus ramidus, discovered in 1994, has suggested that it may be the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimpanzees. And the hominin family tree had been extended by the discovery, in caves in a small and remote island in Java, the bones of a new species, Homo floresiensi, that was just a metre high, and lived as recently as 8000 years ago. A draft genome of our extinct near cousins Homo neanderthalensis has been produced, and shows that they shared with us the FOXP2 gene, implicated in language skills.

2. The Cassini-Huygens probe entered into orbit around Saturn and began to send thousands of stunning images and reams of data back to Earth. The Huygens probe successfully landed on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and revealed that it was surprisingly Earthlike, with riverine valleys and pebbles of ice scattered across what may have been a dry lake bed. Later, Cassini mapped Titan’s previously hidden surface and discovered lakes of liquid methane and ethane, and a hydrological cycle, including rain and fog, much like Earth’s, albeit based on liquid hydrocarbons rather than water. And Cassini also discovered that Enceladus, a moon just 500 kilometres across, was spewing jets of water ice and vapour from cracks in its south pole (pictured), hinting that liquid water lay beneath the tiny moon’s frozen surface.

1. In 2001, academic researchers in the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and Craig Venter’s biomedical research company, Celera, put aside their
differences and published the first drafts of the complete human genome. One surprise was the paltry number of protein coding genes; another was the amount of so-called junk DNA, and the fact it wasn’t randomly distributed across the genome but tended to cluster around functional genes, suggesting some as yet unknown function; yet another was more than 100 genes seem to be bacterial in origin, acquired by some kind of horizontal transfer. The first drafts also showed that humans are 99.9% identical, and there is no scientific basis for precise racial categorisation. Since then, refinements have filled in gaps, and all kinds of functions have been to assigned to genes, ushering in a new biomedical era.

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Random Linkage 19/12/09

Glint of Sunlight Confirms Liquid in Northern Lake District of Titan
'NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft has captured the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan, confirming the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, lake-shaped basins. '

Enceladus plume is half ice
'As much as 50% of the plume shooting out of geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus could be ice, a researcher revealed yesterday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.'
(No misty caves, then, but this doesn't rule out liquid water - unless the clatherate champions are right...)

Searching for Activity on Saturn’s Mid-size Moons
'Like midnight taggers, Saturn’s moons Dione, Tethys, Mimas and Rhea may be spraying their unique signatures all over Saturn’s environment when no one’s looking. Or maybe not; they’ve never been caught in the act, unlike their sibling moon Enceladus, which has been repeatedly observed shooting a dramatic plume of ice vapor high above its surface.
'Other than Enceladus, there are just a handful of active moons in the solar system. Icy geysers shoot from the surface of Neptune’s Triton and Jupiter’s Io is wildly alive with molten sulfur volcanoes. There is some evidence that Jupiter’s Europa may be active, and a future mission is being planned to take a closer look. These rare worlds provide a window on the processes that shape different planetary environments.'
(Well, you can count out Rhea, actually - that’s officially as dead as a doornail. But if there is any evidence of activity on the other large inner moons, it changes the entire game (and makes the need for a new mission to Saturn even more urgent)).

Hubble Finds Smallest Kuiper Belt Object Ever Seen
'Like finding a needle in a haystack, the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the smallest object ever seen in visible light in the Kuiper Belt. While Hubble didn't image this KBO directly, its detection is still quite impressive. The object is only 975 meters (3,200 feet)across and a whopping 6.7 billion kilometers (4.2 billion miles) away. The smallest Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) seen previously in reflected light is roughly 48 km (30 miles) across, or 50 times larger. This provides the first observational evidence for a population of comet-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt.'

Astronomers Find Super-Earth Orbiting Red Dwarf Star; May Have Atmosphere
'Astronomers announced that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. They found the distant planet with a small fleet of ground-based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have in their backyards. Although the super-Earth is too hot to sustain life, the discovery shows that current, ground-based technologies are capable of finding almost-Earth-sized planets in warm, life-friendly orbits.'
(Atmosphere is most likely a raging hell of superheated steam, but it’s still an impressive result. How hard would it be for backyard astronomers to set up their own networks and search for exoEarths?)

Mammals May Be Nearly Half Way Toward Mass Extinction
'If the planet is headed for another mass extinction like the previous five, each of which wiped out more than 75 percent of all species on the planet, then North American mammals are one-fifth to one-half the way there, according to a University of California, Berkeley, and Pennsylvania State University analysis.'
(Next: either the age of the birds, or the return of the reptiles. And this before climate change really kicks in.)

Probabilistic assessment of sea level during the last interglacial stage
'With polar temperatures ~3–5 ̊C warmer than today, the last interglacial stage (~125 kyr ago) serves as a partial analogue for 1–2 ̊C global warming scenarios. Geological records from several sites indicate that local sea levels during the last interglacial were higher than today, but because local sea levels differ from global sea level, accurately reconstructing past global sea level requires an integrated analysis of globally distributed data sets. Here we present an extensive compilation of local sea level indicators and a statistical approach for estimating global sea level, local sea levels, ice sheet volumes and their associated uncertainties. We find a 95% probability that global sea level peaked at least 6.6 m higher than today during the last interglacial; it is likely (67% probability) to have exceeded 8.0 m but is unlikely (33% probability) to have exceeded 9.4 m. When global sea level was close to its current level (?-10 m), the millennial average rate of global sea level rise is very likely to have exceeded 5.6 m kyr-1 but is unlikely to have exceeded 9.2 m kyr-1. Our analysis extends previous last interglacial sea level studies by integrating literature observations within a probabilistic framework that accounts for the physics of sea level change. The results highlight the long-term vulnerability of ice sheets to even relatively low levels of sustained global warming.'
(In other words, don’t buy property less than 6 metres above present sea level. But do buy a boat. Oh yeah, currently some 145 million people live within one metre of current sea levels.)

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Fiction/Science

The old pulp versions of scientists - the lone self-funded genius, with or without a daughter and her usefully heroic boyfriend, or the muscular university academic as adept at fighting administrators as villains chasing the unobtanium only he can find, or the geek working in undisturbed obscurity in some academic institution who stumbles on some Big Secret - no longer cut the mustard, realitywise. Now that most of science’s low-hanging fruit has been picked, few important questions still unsolved can't be cracked unless you deploy teams of scientists using extremely expensive toys. Big problems require big science, underwritten by one or more governments: the Hadron collider, the Hubble telescope, the Cassini probe, the ranks of automated sequencers used to decode the human genome. And the huge budgets and complex equipment deployed by big science require teams of administrators, technicians, engineers and computer programmers as well as cadres of scientists. Published papers are no longer the work of one or two authors, but of twenty, or a hundred, or five hundred (the current record holder appears to be a physics paper with 2512 authors*).

So real stories about current science might best be framed as soap-operatic epics about political wrangling between the principle investigators, intrigues and jealousies amongst their minions, and desperate races between rival teams to be first to acquire and publish important results that crucially illuminates an important problem. Or, since big, government-funded civilian science is shadowed by government-funded military research and science funded by big business, the kind of research that flourishes outside the public gaze, you could write truly baroque contemporary Cold-War-style espionage thrillers about dark- or stealth-net science that’s gone way over the edge of rationality. Or, pushing current trends just a little, how about underworld science (Afghani druglords diversifying into biotech), or open-source science (citizen scientists getting hold of powerful and easy to use technologies based on the BioBricks principle), or virtual science (using computer modelling and virtual worlds to uncover truths through heuristic best-fit guesses rather than experimental testing)?

And then there’s the dystopian zero of anti-science science, in which the deniers, anti-Darwinists, flat-Earthers and their allies and camp followers have triumphed, shut down the laboratories and universities, and rolled back history to a point way before the Age of Enlightenment . . .


*Aleph et al. 2006. Precision electroweak measurements on the Z resonance. Physics Reports, 427[5-6]: 257-454.

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Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (8)

A short non-canonical list:

The Alteration - Kingsley Amis
Queen Victoria's Bomb - Ronald W. Clarke
SS GB - Len Deighton
Revelation Day - Brendan DuBois
Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde - Louis Geoffroy
Fatherland - Robert Harris
White Lotus - John Hershey
Aristopia - Castello Holoford
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle - Vladimir Nabokov
If: A Jacobite Fantasy - Charles Petrie
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
The Indians Won - Martin Cruz Smith

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Finding the Plot

I've been slowly gathering bits and pieces - characters, situations, images, emotional registers, background data - for a new novel, and now I'm trying to piece things together, and give the various strands trajectories, velocities, and a common destination. As usual, I have several strong pictures of various events along the way, but don't have much idea of what binds them together. That'll come later, out of the behaviour of the characters and their reactions to the situations and problems they find themselves in.

Hopefully, anyhow. I always find this a messy, murky process, and I have no doubt that I'll end up groping my way down several dead ends that have to be thrown away and recycled before I see a clear way through from beginning to end. I do have a rough shape of the novel, though. It looks a bit like this (Alika and Japer are the two protagonists; the child, the Clade, the Ghosts and the mystery guest (?) are Powers):

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Random Linkage 12/12/09

Reddish Dust and Ice Migration Darken Saturn’s Moon Iapetus
'New views of Saturn’s moon Iapetus accompany papers that detail how reddish dust swept up on the moon’s orbit around Saturn and migrating ice can explain the bizarre, yin-yang-patterned surface.'

Phobos and Deimos Together At Last!
'ESA's Mars Express orbiter took images last month of Mars two moons, Phobos and Deimos. This is the first time the moons have been imaged together in high resolution, but as Emily Lakdawalla points out on Planetary Blog, not the first time the two have been imaged together: the Spirit rover did it back in 2005! But these new image definitely provide a ‘wow’ factor, as well as helping to validate and refine existing orbit models of the two moons.'

Super-Massive Black Holes Observed at the Center of Galaxies
'An international team of scientists has observed four super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, which may provide new information on how these central black hole systems operate.'

Galaxy Collision Switches on Black Hole
'This composite image of data from three different telescopes shows an ongoing collision between two galaxies, NGC 6872 and IC 4970. X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in purple, while Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared data is red and optical data from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) is colored red, green and blue.'

Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Turns Wheels, Opportunity Rests at Rare Martian Rock
'The Mars Exploration Rovers managed to make history and uncover history in November – and that put both Spirit and Opportunity in the planetary exploration spotlight during the 71st month of an overland expedition that was supposed to be a three-month tour.'
(Opportunity roves on, but it looks like poor Spirit may be permanently stuck now it's lost use of another wheel.)

Bacteria Engineered to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Liquid Fuel
'Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.
'In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.'

Dinosaurs diversified before spreading around the world
'Fossils found in the US state of New Mexico are providing strong evidence that dinosaurs originated in what is now South America, and had already evolved into three main groups before spreading around the world.'

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Avatar

In 1912, a pencil-sharpener salesman named Edgar Rice Burroughs published in a short novel ‘Under the Moons of Mars’ in All-Story Magazine. Republished in longer form in 1917, as A Princess of Mars, it was the first in the Barsoom series, kickstarted the planetary romance genre, and imprinted science fiction with a set of primitive but deeply felt tropes. James Cameroon’s Avatar is nothing less than a return to the primal urges of full-blown planetary romance in the style of Burroughs, Ralph Milne Farley, Homer Eon Flint and Otis Adelbert Kline: a glorious romp through the wonders and perils of an alien world, and a love story featuring a nearly naked alien princess. If you were a fifteen year old kid living in the 1970s and grokking sf, Tarzan of the Apes, and prog rock, a glimpse of Avatar in big-screen 3D and SurroundSound would blow your everloving mind.

Let’s get the story out of the way first. It’s 2154, a mining colony on Pandora, the Earth-like moon of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri-A, source of a vital mineral, unobtanium (a nice, geeky joke: we could have done with a few more). Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-Marine who volunteers to take the place of his dead twin brother as a driver of an avatar, a hybrid creature fettled up from human DNA and the DNA of the Na’vi, the blue-skinned ten-foot tall natives of Pandora. Sully is part of the science team, led by Sigourney Weaver’s Grace Augustine, that’s using the avatars to study and negotiate with the Na’vi; after his avatar is separated from the others, Sully encounters a Na’vi female, Neytiri, and is accepted into her clan, a major scientific coup. But Sully’s loyalty is torn between the scientists and the Na’vi, and former Marine Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of the colony’s security, who plans to evict the Na’vi clan from their home, which inconveniently sits on a motherlode of unobtanium. Quaritch promises Sully that if he can deal with the Na’vi, he’ll get treatment to restore use of his legs; but Sully has fallen for the Na’vi way of life, and with Neytiri . . .

Well, you get the idea. Like the pulp planetary romances, Avatar’s story is achingly simple and laid on with broad strokes. In the first half Sully gets to learn survival skills; in the second, he gets to use them; threaded through his pilgrim’s progress is a plunkingly obvious allegory about greed and uncontrolled capitalism destroying nature’s harmony, and a love story across the divide between two species. The bond between Sully and Na’vi is undeniably affecting, in parts, but it’s also in parts silly and sentimental, the characterisation and dialogue (especially Colonel Quaritch’s - GI Joe had better lines) is basic, the plot twists are utterly predictable, and the film lacks the heart and human qualities of smaller scale sf films like Moon or District 9. But what you take home from Avatar isn’t so much the story as the setting. And the setting, and its rendering, is amazing. Stunning.

There’s a nice scene near the beginning of this very long film where Sully first drives the body of his avatar, and realises that he can walk again, and breaks free from the technicians and the base and joyfully canters through a garden of native plants: that sense of freedom and awe is evoked over and again as the camera floats and zooms through Pandora’s forest. The 3D is crystal-clear and Cameron seamlessly blends live action characters, CG motion-capture characters and CG scenery, using a computer-camera system that allows him to zoom in and twist around anybody and anything. And Pandora itself is the best and most fully-detailed rendering of an alien world ever seen, a forest reimagined as a coral reef, with drifting medusa-like seeds, barracuda-like wolves, shark-like tigers, hammerheaded buffalo. . . In short, an entire, self-consistent biome packed with eye kicks and explored in beautiful and thrilling set pieces: Na’vi leading Sully through the luminescent galaxy of the night-time forest; the ascent of a chain of floating rocks to a floating mountain peak (straight from one of Roger Dean’s album covers); an aerial battle amongst those same floating mountains between helicopters and lumbering transports and a flock of warriors mounted on manta-ray dragons. . . And so on, and so on.

Sure, Cameron has spent enough money to reforest half of the Amazon Basin on a film with a by-the-numbers story that mixes tropes from ancient pulp fiction and the greatest hits from his previous work. But it also conjures, over and again, that heady, full-blown, good old-fashioned sense of wonder: it is, shamelessly, gleefully, a science fiction epic. What it isn’t, is a groundbreaking film, in the way that 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Wars were. But it is a major envelope-pushing advance in terms of what is now possible. Because what’s possible now, thanks to the techniques Cameron has developed, is that anything we can think of can be thrown up on the cinema screen. Think about that: anything at all.

(Xposted to Pyr-o-mania)

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Science/Fiction

I used to be a scientist, and (on the principle of write about what you’re interested in rather than write about what you know) a fair number of my novels feature scientists. Here’s one, in The Secret of Life, thinking about science:

There are no mysteries, Mariella thinks, only unrevealed truths. If people will only do a little work, will subject themselves to a little discipline, a little effort, then they too can understand, they too will be amazed not by mystery but by truth. But they don't. Science has built a vast edifice of thought that reaches out to the furthest ends of the Universe, all the way back in time to the first femtosecond of the Universe's creation, all the way forward to matter's final end in the dissolution of protons, a hundred billion years from now. A cathedral of thought built by the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of minds, the greatest achievement of humanity. But most will not even acknowledge it, much less try to understand it.

She still remembers the casual slights and sneers of certain pompous arts students at Cambridge. The moneyed as oblivious to their wealth as fish to water, interested only in maintaining the status quo, with braying upper middle class students their eager collaborators. Proud in their ignorance of science, yet scornful of those who were not interested in the minutia of Renaissance art, opera, or the intricacies of their social seasons. Mariella knows now that their scorn was based on fear. To them, scientists are useful but dangerous, and so must be kept in their place, like Morlocks in the engine-room of the world. And most people take their cue from their leaders, believe that science is a conspiracy only the initiated few can understand, something to be feared. It is partly the fault of mediocre scientists, of course, who react to criticism like spoiled priests fearful of unfrocking, but it is mostly the fault of those who in their ignorance set themselves as the legislators of science, and those, their prejudices set in stone, who have declared themselves to be its moral superiors.

Now, Mariella has a massive chip on her shoulder (she would say she’s evenly balanced, with massive chips on both shoulders), but she also has a point. I was reminded of her the other day, while reading this interesting interview with sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard on the psychology of climate change denial:

‘Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able. Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.’

The problems Norgaard refers to are the kind most often featured in SF stories and novels, and the kind of science deployed to solve them is too often highly simplified. You know the kind of thing: lone geniuses who go against the grain of current thinking; oddballs who stumble upon a new paradigm, like a metal-detecting hobbyist lucking out on a hoard of Roman gold; science advanced by epiphanies that explode with the frequency of flashguns at a film premiere (and in films, often require really fast typing to defuse some last-minute knucklebiting threat involving overflux in the intertubes that would otherwise create deadly feedback in everyone’s hypothalami).

But most science is mostly a cooperative, slow, patient accretive process. Even stone geniuses like Newton famously acknowledged that they couldn’t have got where they did without standing on the shoulders of giants (Newton, who was not the nicest of men, may have been poking fun at his height-challenged rival Leibniz, but it’s still a valid point). And an awful lot of science isn’t about the sudden apprehension of a universal truth, but the gainsaying of alternate explanations for an observed phenomenon or fact - such as this nugget of recent research, which doesn’t prove that methane on Mars (which is constantly destroyed by chemical processes in Martian soil, so must also be constantly produced by some as yet unknown agency) was produced by Martian bacteria, but eliminates the idea that it is created by passage of meteorite through the Martian atmosphere, making the possibility of the bacterial origin of methane slightly more likely.

Of course, this kind of science isn’t much use in the construction of stories in which heroes slice through the Gordian knot of some world-threatening problem, or make some world-changing discovery. But it’s the kind of science that serious SF should at least acknowledge - just as any kind of serious fiction should acknowledge the complexity of the happening world, and the knotty and often ambiguous moral choices real people have to make.

Heroes simplify the world. Sometimes this is useful and good, at those moments in history when a binary choice - black or white, yes or no - must be made. But many problems - like climate change - aren’t easily solved. The information is complicated and the choices we have to make aren’t easy: none of them will allow us to continue to live in the way we’ve been living. Easier then, more comforting, to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, or that it has nothing to do with us, or it can be solved - at a stroke - by brute geoengineering. But not necessarily useful, or right. Not science, but science fantasy.

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Now It Can Be Told

Cowboy Angels is to be published in the US by Pyr, probably late 2010. I'm very pleased, of course - especially as its secret title is Look For America and a fair chunk of it riffs off the fun and games of the Bush 2 era.

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Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (7)

Writers who locate themselves outside the science-fiction genre tend to employ the dystopian mode when they write about the future. They don’t think of it as a real place - somewhere you can get to from here, somewhere that can be plausibly mapped and explored, somewhere that’s as varied and contradictory as the present. No, for them it’s a convenient blank screen on which they can project burlesques and dreadful warnings about the awful consequences of technological progress or the failure of a cherished ideology or the triumph of its antithesis. A place where the fears of the present are scaled up to nightmarish proportions.

In Britain, from the Second World War onwards, the best dystopian writing has been inflected with black comedy. Its futures are as seedy and down-at-heel; its tyrannies may be ruthless and absolute, but it’s underlain by the kind of petty rule-making and make-do-and-mend bureaucratic muddle that infected every British institution during and after the war. In the end, there isn’t much difference between 1984's Ministry of Truth and Brazil’s Ministry of Information (or, come to that, the real Ministry of Information).

Case in point: Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome: A Love Story. First published in 1941, its depiction of how the lives of the inhabitants of a sleepy Gloucestershire village are shattered when the neighbouring aerodrome takes control combines a comic coming-of-age story with an allegory about fascism. The narrator, Roy, is an orphan raised by the village’s Rector and his wife. Roy enjoys the uncomplicated life of the village, revolving around pub, church, and the feudal authority of the Squire, but also admires the aerodrome’s power and ruthless efficiency, and this ambivalence is exposed and reflected in every twist of the complex, soap-operatic plot. After the Rector is shot by Roy’s friend the Flight-Lieutenant during a machine-gun demonstration at the village Agricultural Show (‘I say, Roy, something rather rotten has happened. I’m afraid I’ve potted your old man.’), Roy is revolted by the brusque unfeeling funeral address by the aerodrome’s Air Vice-Marshall (imagine Peter Cook playing General Jack D. Ripper), but takes advantage of situation to get married to his sweetheart. Roy’s happiness is short-lived: he’s rapidly entangled in a love-triangle involving himself, his wife, and the Flight Lieutenant that’s complicated by the secret of his origins - which is also the key to the ideology of the Air Vice-Marshall, who takes Roy under his wing after Roy, at the urging of his sweetheart, joins up.

As Michael Moorcock points out in his introduction to the current Vintage edition of the novel, the violent and arrogant behaviour of the airmen in The Aerodrome is clearly modelled on Nazi Blackshirts, but the novel may also have been written in reaction the H.G. Wells’s Things to Come, in which global peace is maintained by a technocratic elite inspired by a mysterious airman. But although Warner was deeply suspicious of claims that science could solve all human problems, he was also a committed left-winger who at Oxford was part of W.H Auden and C. Day Lewis’s circle, and his portrayal of the village’s bucolic life is not suffused with the kind of rosy nostalgia peddled by reactionaries who love to quote Orwell out of context. There’s much drunkenness and casual violence, and the villagers accept the authority of the aerodrome with the same baffled, slightly resentful passivity with which they accepted the feudal authority of the Squire; Warner convincingly argues that it’s this very English quality (‘Mustn’t grumble.’) that makes us peculiarly susceptible to totalitarian rule.

After Roy joins the aerodrome’s cadres, the Air Vice-Marshall gives a long speech that parodies not only the power fantasies of German National Socialism, but also the kind of the technocratic solutions proposed by Wells and other left-wing intellectuals in the 1930s (or, indeed, a troubling number of science fiction novels):

‘Remember that we expect from you conduct of quite a different order from that of the mass of mankind. Your actions, when off duty, may appear and indeed should appear wholly irresponsible. Your purpose - to escape the bondage of time, to obtain mastery over yourselves, and thus over your environment - must never waver. You will discover, if you do not know already, from the course which have been arranged for you, the necessity for what we in this Force are in process of becoming, a new and more adequate race of men.
‘Please do not imagine, gentlemen, that I am speaking wildly. I mean precisely what I say and in course of time you will come to understand me more than you do at present... Science will show you that in our species the period of physical evolution is over. There remains the evolution, or rather the transformation, of consciousness and will, the escape from time, the mastery of self, a task which has in fact been attempted with some success by individuals at various periods, but which is now to be attempted by us all.’

There’s a great deal of calculating advice about dealing with women, too, which Roy fortunately ignores. The human mess of a second love-triangle, involving Roy, the Flight-Lieutenant, and Eusticia, the wife of the aerodrome’s chief scientist, and his discovery of the circumstances of his birth and the identity of his parents, brings him to a crux in which he rejects the Air Vice-Marshall’s ideology:

I began to see that this life, in spite of its drunkenness and its inefficiency, was wider and deeper than the activity in which we were constricted by the iron compulsion of the Air Vice-Marshal's ambition. It was a life whose very vagueness concealed a wealth of opportunity, whose uncertainty called for adventure, whose aspects were innumerable and varied as the changes of light and colour throughout the year. It was a life whose unwieldiness was the consequence of its immensity. No skill could precisely calculate the effects of any action, and all action was dangerous.

At the end, after the Air Vice-Marshall’s dreams of power are curtailed by a very human act of revenge, and Roy realises that although the new order has been broken, the old order could never be restored. Like all good dystopian novels, The Aerodrome doesn’t describe in any kind of detail the new world that rises out of the ashes of the old, but its last pages, and its thrillingly beautiful last line, exactly catch the postwar idealism that swept Churchill from office and put in his place Attlee’s Labour government, which promised to build a New Jerusalem on the ruins of the old order. That it didn’t succeed, (although it did, amongst other things, create the National Health Service), is also prefigured in Warner’s fine dystopian allegory.

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Random Linkage 05/12/09

Huge gallery of the best science images from 2009.

Astronomers witness biggest star explosion
'Astronomers have watched the violent death of what was probably the most massive star ever detected. The supernova explosion, which lasted for months, is thought to have generated more than 50 Suns' worth (10^32 kilograms) of different elements, which may one day go on to make new solar systems.'
UPDATED: Original now paywalled. Try here instead.

Why Humans Outlive Apes
'In spite of their genetic similarity to humans, chimpanzees and great apes have maximum lifespans that rarely exceed 50 years. The difference, explains USC Davis School of Gerontology Professor Caleb Finch, is that as humans evolved genes that enabled them to better adjust to levels of infection and inflammation and to the high cholesterol levels of their meat rich diets.'

Do mice with two mothers spell the end for men?
'If you believe some reports, the future of humanity is a super race of genetically-engineered women who can reproduce without men.'

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Another World

The orange dot circled and labelled 'B' is a planet circling the Sun-like star GJ 758, seen by the light it emits. It's a big planet, between 10-40 times the mass of Jupiter, and is at a temperature of around 320 degrees Centigrade. Its orbit is very likely eccentric, like Pluto's, and it's about the same distance from its star as Neptune is from the sun, so it isn't being warmed by insolation. Either it's relatively young and at the low end of the estimated mass range, and is emitting heat as it contracts, or it's fairly large and much older - a smallish brown dwarf. The other dot, labelled 'C' may be another planet, or a background star, or an imaging glitch.

It was spotted during the first run of a new adaptive optics instrument that eliminates atmospheric interference of Earth-based telescopic images and is part of a survey programme searching for extra-solar planets. Wonder what else it will find?

Universe Today has more info; a preview of the paper describing the observations is here.

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ReBooting Britain

My short article on first, simple steps to make cities greener, and many others on ReBooting Britain, in Wired UK.

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