Some Remarks on In The Mouth of the Whale

It’s a stand-alone novel that’s set 1500 years after The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun and picks up the story of one of the players in the old drama: Sri Hong-Owen, a gene wizard who is her own greatest experimental subject.

Sri wants to live forever.  After a treatment that went badly wrong left her confined to a vat, she created a strange family from her own flesh and set off for the star Fomalhaut, to found her own empire in its great planetary ring. But history has overtaken her, as history always overtakes people who live too long. Her starship was damaged; she died; those of her children who survived have rebooted her by recreating her childhood.

Meanwhile, a posthuman group, the Quick, has reached Fomalhaut ahead of Sri and founded a new civilisation which fell to another group, the fierce and largely unmodified True, who enslaved the Quick and set up their own empire.  And now, as Sri’s starship approaches Fomalhaut, the True are fighting interlopers from another interstellar colony for control of the gas giant Cthuga, whose core may be the home of a vast strange intellect.

What else? There’s an outcast librarian who, with the help of his Quick servant, fights demons in fragments of a vast data base. The disappearance of one of the scions of a powerful family. Thistledown cities and an archipelago of engineered worldlets. A big dumb object floating in atmosphere of a gas giant planet, probing for signs of life. War in the air. A vivid dream of childhood that begins to unravel. A secret hidden in the cityscapes of a virtual library. The termitarial mindset of a cult that’s lasted 1500 years. Visions of cul-de-sacs in human evolution. The utility of intelligence. The cost of longevity, and that perennial problem of what to do for the rest of your life after you die . . .

Coming soon, as they say.

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Sense/Memory

Today's walking break took me along the Regents Canal to St Pancras, then back up through a scrappy neighbourhood north of Euston Road's hurricane of tin and carbon monoxide. Very quiet there, only a few cars parked up and the air heavy with sultry August heat, pavements dusty and brick walls radiating warmth, this specific combination twitching a vivid and vertiginous memory almost fifty years old of walking aimlessly along a half-remembered summer street close to the bungalow in Portchester my family rented for a year.

Writing a novel, someone wrote, is an act of memory. I'm halfway through the second draft of the ongoing, although much of it, so far, seems to be new stuff.

Some links:

A shooting star seen from orbit
An arrow-shaped cloud the size of Texas on Saturn's moon Titan.
Odyssey crater, Mars.
Vesta's wacky craters.

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Spaceships That Aren't Really Spaceships (1)

 
Miss Great Britain III

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Retromania

Just received in the post, a copy of a spiffy little hardback edition of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? done up in early 1960s Gollancz yellow-jacket style (inducing in me vertiginous nostalgia for the SF novels in like livery that I read way back when, when I first started reading SF), with a short introduction what I wrote.*  An honour to be asked; a joy to reread the novel, and rediscover how swift, and sad, and funny it is.

It's due out on the 1st of September, part of the 50th birthday celebrations of Gollancz's science-fiction and fantasy line.  Four other SF novels and five fantasy novels will be published in the same format at the same time.  They were chosen by readers from a short list of eligible** titles.  You can find the listings and other details here.

*readers old enough to remember searching out Gollancz yellowbacks in their local libraries will get the reference at once
**that is, titles to which Gollancz have the hardback rights

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Red Remembered Hills

 

Credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / Damien Bouic

The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have taken many panoramic pictures of the Martian landscapes they've traversed, but I think that this is one of the loveliest.  (To see it full-size, check out the entry in the Planetary Society's blog, where I found it; a variation on the same scene can be found here.)  It's a view taken by Opportunity two days ago, looking across the western foothills of the rim of Endeavour Crater, and it's lovely for two reasons.

The first, for those who have been following the progress of the rovers since they landed on Mars more than seven years ago, is that this is the end of a small but epic journey of some 21 kilometres that began in 2008, after Opportunity left Victoria Crater.  All that time, driving backwards because one of her front wheels is jammed, the rover has traversed a landscape of rippled sand and exposed plates of rock, interrupted by the occasional smashed dish of a small crater.  Twenty-one kilometres - 13 miles - doesn't sound much.  A good afternoon's ramble.  But Opportunity is no bigger than a golf cart, is long past her warranty date (she was supposed to operate for only 90 Martian days, or sols), is being steered by remote control by operators on Earth, and the terrain, while it has been mapped and photographed by orbiting spacecraft, contains unknown perils and traps. While Opportunity was travelling, her sister rover, Spirit, became inextricably stuck in a patch of loose sand, and succumbed to the Martian winter after operating as a stationary science platform for more than a year.  Opportunity ploughed on, backwards.  At sol 2681 she finally reached Spirit Point, named after her sister rover and at the edge of a ridge known as Cape York.  Now she's ready to begin the science part of her fifth mission extension.  Endeavour Crater is some 22 kilometres across, much bigger than Victoria Crater.  The rock layers exposed by the impact that created it are deeper and older, and there are signs that some of the layers are clay-bearing phyllosilicates formed in the presence of water.

But the other reason it's an especially lovely view is that it is in many ways quite Earth-like.  The ridges may mark the edge of an impact crater (and the rocks in the foreground were thrown from another much small impact crater beyond the right-hand side of the photomosaic), but they have been eroded into soft shapes by millions of years of wind-blown sand, and they are also softened by the hazy atmosphere, giving a very familiar effect of a landscape fading into the distance.  Alien and familiar, they wouldn't look out of place in an Earthly desert. It's very easy to imagine standing there, and walking forward into the unknown.

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