Short and sweet, at scifibookshelf.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Things are going to be a bit quiet around here while I thrash towards the end of the first draft. So here's a couple of cool videos as place markers. Both were created by Adrian Lark, and are flyover animations reconstructed from HiRise data, with an amazing resolution of 0.25 metres - around the size of an A4 sheet of paper. The first loops around part of the scarp at the base of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars - and the largest found so far in the Solar System.
The second floats around the edge the raised mound (a mountain some five kilometres high) in the centre of Gale Crater - note the tremendously varied terrain. Gale crater is one of the possible landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory, a large, robust rover scheduled for launch in 2011. One of its main mission goals is to determine if microbial life ever existed on the surface of Mars; Gale Crater is a prime target for this search because its mound contains clay-bearing layers at its base, with layers of oxygen- and sulphur-rich minerals above, and flowing water seems to have carved channels across the floor of the crater and into its wall.
(By the way, neither of these animations comes with a soundtrack. What would you choose?)
The second floats around the edge the raised mound (a mountain some five kilometres high) in the centre of Gale Crater - note the tremendously varied terrain. Gale crater is one of the possible landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory, a large, robust rover scheduled for launch in 2011. One of its main mission goals is to determine if microbial life ever existed on the surface of Mars; Gale Crater is a prime target for this search because its mound contains clay-bearing layers at its base, with layers of oxygen- and sulphur-rich minerals above, and flowing water seems to have carved channels across the floor of the crater and into its wall.
(By the way, neither of these animations comes with a soundtrack. What would you choose?)
Sunday, 14 March 2010
Picked this up for a fiver in a secondhand bookshop in Camden: a science-fiction anthology published by The Bodley Head Science Fiction Club in 1953, containing the first six stories of the longer American edition. What's interesting about the cover, apart from the lovely retro space hardware, is the depiction of a woman at the helm of a spaceship (or perhaps controlling lunar orbital traffic from a space station). I imagine she's toggling the radio to remind the space cowboy who's just buzzed her that he's violated about twenty navigational regs.
EDIT: Further thought - maybe the presence of a female space pilot/traffic controller in this old science-fiction illustration isn't so unusual; during the Second World War, just eight years in the past, when the book was published, women had taken on all kinds of roles previously considered the exclusive domain of men.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
As a break from the ongoing first-draft death march, went down to the Gagosian gallery in King's Cross last Saturday, to see Crash, an homage to JG Ballard. All Ballard's tropes - high rises, autopias, crashed aeroplanes, clinical depictions of sex, a strong dash of surrealism - were present. I particularly liked three strong photographic pieces: Cyprian Galliard's A View of Sighthill Cemetery, Florian Maier-Aichen's Untitled (Freeway Crash), and Tacita Dean's Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard). Also Jane and Louise Wilson's video installation, Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard, with its Kubrickian glides and pans of ruins of the Soviet space-age, and Roger Hiorns's Untitled, a pair of car engines encrusted with copper sulphate crystals (geddit?). Overall, though, I came away with the feeling that the term 'Ballardian' is in danger of becoming so diffuse as to lose any focus or edge it might once have. All high-rises aren't really 'Ballardian', are they? Surely only the ones in which feral yuppies grill joints of dead dog on their high-end barbecue kettles really count . . .
Across the road from the gallery was a car park on a piece of waste ground, something increasingly less common in London thanks to the property boom (although the current slump might reverse that). And in the middle of the car park was this brick shaft, like a steampunk missile silo, or the entrance to some forgotten subterranean kingdom. My faith in Ballard's visions of cities fatally infected with entropic dis-ease was instantly restored.
Across the road from the gallery was a car park on a piece of waste ground, something increasingly less common in London thanks to the property boom (although the current slump might reverse that). And in the middle of the car park was this brick shaft, like a steampunk missile silo, or the entrance to some forgotten subterranean kingdom. My faith in Ballard's visions of cities fatally infected with entropic dis-ease was instantly restored.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
A break from scribbling, always scribbling, to blurt out a few scraps of news:
I'll be attending the World Horror Convention in Brighton, where I'll be leading a creative writing workshop. Intensive fun for all (at least, that's the plan) - a few places left, I think, for those of you who already have memberships for the convention. I'll also be spending a couple of days at Eastercon, the British Science Fiction Association's annual gathering. Hope to see some of you there. Later in the year I'll be one of the guests of honour, along with Pat Cadigan and Paul Cornell, at Newcon 5, 'Northampton's only Science Fiction and Fantasy literary convention'. I guess we'll be talking about books, comics, and Doctor Who.
Just out, this fine anthology of short stories about alternate histories, edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates, who were kind enough to include one of my stories, 'A Very British History', which explains how the space race was really won. Appropriately enough, the US edition of the anthology has an alternate cover.
Coming soon, The Best of the Best New Horror, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones, who kindly included my proto-steampunk story 'The Temptation of Dr Stein'.
And my novella 'Crimes and Glory will feature in not one but two Best SF of the year anthologies, thanks to editors Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton, and it will also feature in AudioText's The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 2.
Enough already. Back to work . . .
UPDATE: in all the excitement, forgot to mention that issue #5 of the fine ezine Journey Planet (link to large .pdf), packed with all kinds of good stuff on alternate histories, features my story 'A Brief Guide to Other Histories'.
I'll be attending the World Horror Convention in Brighton, where I'll be leading a creative writing workshop. Intensive fun for all (at least, that's the plan) - a few places left, I think, for those of you who already have memberships for the convention. I'll also be spending a couple of days at Eastercon, the British Science Fiction Association's annual gathering. Hope to see some of you there. Later in the year I'll be one of the guests of honour, along with Pat Cadigan and Paul Cornell, at Newcon 5, 'Northampton's only Science Fiction and Fantasy literary convention'. I guess we'll be talking about books, comics, and Doctor Who.
Just out, this fine anthology of short stories about alternate histories, edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates, who were kind enough to include one of my stories, 'A Very British History', which explains how the space race was really won. Appropriately enough, the US edition of the anthology has an alternate cover.
Coming soon, The Best of the Best New Horror, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones, who kindly included my proto-steampunk story 'The Temptation of Dr Stein'.
And my novella 'Crimes and Glory will feature in not one but two Best SF of the year anthologies, thanks to editors Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton, and it will also feature in AudioText's The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 2.
Enough already. Back to work . . .
UPDATE: in all the excitement, forgot to mention that issue #5 of the fine ezine Journey Planet (link to large .pdf), packed with all kinds of good stuff on alternate histories, features my story 'A Brief Guide to Other Histories'.
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