The scientist's beautiful daughter. The crackpot inventor (see also: Here's one I made earlier). Science mostly proceeds by saltatory leaps (see also: Evolution). It came to me in a dream. It was like a bolt of lightning (see also: I work best when my life is in danger). We scientists are above your petty emotions. There's nothing algebra can't prove. Young scientists are always right; old scientists are almost always wrong (see also: What did Einstein ever do for us?). Argument by analogy. Argument by syllogistic fallacy. Argument in the pub (see also: Repeat what you just said). You can go directly from hypothesis to prototype. Scientists are in it for the money. Some ideas will be discovered only once in human history (see also: Mine! All mine!). Only my unique skills will make this experiment work (see also: magic). Important ideas are always accepted straight away. The importance of an hypothesis is inversely proportional to the number of experiments needed to test it. A car battery, a glass tube and the guts of an old radio: we're good to go. The element or biological derivative that's key to the existence of a star-spanning Empire is invariably found on just one planet (see also: unique chemical elements). Genes are basically Lego. Genetic mutation is always expressed via morphological change. The aliens did it.
Tuesday 29 November 2011
Monday 28 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 5
Posted on 08:46 by Unknown
Chapter 5 of In The Mouth Of The Whale is now up on the web site. If you want to start from the beginning, here's the link to Chapter 1.
In other news, my novelette 'The Choice' will appear in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 6. He's posted the table of contents on his blog; it includes stories by Stephen Baxter, Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, Margo Lanagan, Kelly Link, Geoff Ryman, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick . . . Looking forward to reading all of it.
Currently listening to: The Handsome Family, 'Flapping Your Broken Wings'
Currently reading: Christopher Priest's The Islanders
Currently writing: The epilogue to the next novel; a story for a new project.
Friday 25 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 4
Posted on 06:54 by Unknown
I've just posted Chapter 4 of my forthcoming novel to the web site If you're late to the game,why not catch up with Chapters 1, 2 and 3 first? Special bonus: a podcast of my short story 'Little Lost Robot.'
Currently listening to: Leon Redbone's 'Mr. Jelly Roll Baker'
Currently reading: Christopher Priest's The Islanders.
Currently writing: the long epilogue of the next novel.
Thursday 24 November 2011
Hugo
Posted on 12:32 by Unknown
The conjunction of 'family-friendly' and '3-D' is not auspicious, even if the film in question is directed by Martin Scorsese. But from the first shot, a kind of reverse of the famous flying scene in Peter Pan, with the viewpoint swooping over the crowded and crooked roofs of a snowy, early 1930s Paris, ducking under the eaves of the arched roof of a train terminus, and closing in on the eye of a boy peering through a chink in a clock face at the bustling life from which he, like the hunchback of Notre Dame, is excluded, Hugo establishes itself as a triumphant and lovingly crafted work imbued with Scorsese's passion for film and film history.
The boy, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), is an orphan. After his clockmaker father (Jude Law) died in a fire, Hugo fell into the care of his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone), and after his uncle disappeared he continued the work of maintaining the many clocks in the station. He lives in the wainscot world of the station's clock towers and hidden passages, snatching food from stalls and shops because he can't cash his uncle's salary cheques, avoiding the attention of the station's inspector, played by Sasha Baron Cohen as if Peter Cook was impersonating the child-snatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Hugo's only link with his dead father is a complex automaton found in disrepair in a museum storeroom. Hugo has been stealing the cogs and ratchets he needs to bring the automaton back to life from the station's toy shop; the irascible owner, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), catches him red-handed and confiscates his precious notebook containing vital sketches and plans, and the clockwork of the plot is set in motion.
Hugo enlists the help of Papa George's goddaughter, Isabelle (Cloe Grace Moretz) to retrieve the notebook; Isabelle is more than willing because she wants a real-life version of the adventures in the books she loves. When he discovers that she wears around her neck the heart-shaped key that's necessary to make the automaton work, Hugo is finally able to set the machine in motion. It draws a picture of an iconic moment in an old film Hugo's father described to him, and the pair become detectives into the life of Papa Georges. And it's here, as they delve into cinema history, that the film really comes to life. Moments from the great silent films spin around them; a film historian recalls a visit to the studio of a pioneering film maker, whose methods and techniques are recreated in loving detail (with a entirely apt cameo by Scorsese). The film maker is Papa Georges, of course, who has renounced his past after he was forced to sell his celluloid archive to a chemical firm, which melted them down to make moulded heels for women's shoes; the two children conspire to bring about his return to the public eye, a task that's complicated, as you might expect (but not exactly as you might expect) by the attentions of the station's inspector.
Adapted from Brian Selznick's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it's the kind of old-fashioned tale in which clues are found in libraries, the mission is not to save the world but to bring the past back to life, and the only villain is time. Its CGI and 3-D effects serve the story and contribute to the intricately furnished station set rather than punctuate the narrative with crude thrusts of shock and awe. There's plenty of steam, there are dizzy plunges and pursuits through the cogs and escarpments of huge clocks, and there's also the automaton. Does Hugo's fantastical embroidery of a real-life story (because the story of the film pioneer who disappeared, and (like many of his 'lost' films) was found again, is true) contain enough steampunk flourishes to win it a Hugo?
Wednesday 23 November 2011
Lynn Margulis
Posted on 06:19 by Unknown
Before I became a full-time writer, I worked as a scientist and university lecturer. Most of my research investigated the symbiotic relationships between animals and single-celled algae: how the sizes of populations of algae within animal cells were regulated, movement of photosynthetically-fixed carbon from algae to host animal, movement of ammonium and amino acids from host animal to algae, and so on. My chief research organism was green hydra, a common freshwater polyp that conveniently reproduces asexually by budding off new animals, so that uniform cloned populations can be grown in the laboratory (the image at the head of this piece is of a single green hydra digestive cell, with its population of symbiotic Chlorella algae clustered at the base of the cell), but I also worked on sea anemones and reef-forming corals.
I'm reminded of this by news of the death of Professor Lynn Margulis, who was one of the prominent workers in the symbiosis field. She was a friend and research associate of my Ph.D supervisor, Professor Sir David Smith, and I met her not only when she visited his labs, but at conferences in the UK and abroad. She was always a whirlwind of energy, promoting her ideas and probing everyone else's with intense acuity. She had forged a career at a time when women were in a minority in the sciences, and for years championed the highly unfashionable idea that mitochondria (the energy-generating organelles found in almost every cell of eukaryotic organisms) and plant chloroplasts (the organelles where photosynthesis takes place) had once been independent organisms that had established a symbiotic relationship with the ancestors of animals and of plants. This theory of symbiogenesis had been first advanced by K. S. Mereschkovsky and Ivan Wallin in the 1920s, but had passed into obscurity. Lynn Margulis dusted it down and supported it with evidence that pointed to the residual bacterial characteristics of the two types of organelles, and their possession of small amounts of DNA. That the symbiotic origin of both mitochondria and chloroplasts is now widely accepted is due almost entirely to Lynn Margulis's dogged and tireless work.
She advanced the idea that flagellae in animal cells were the remnants of bacterial symbionts with rather less success (one problem is that the whip-like flagellae don't possess any DNA), and her efforts to expand the idea that the central driver of evolution was symbiotic acquisition of new DNA rather than mutation of nuclear DNA likewise has not meet with much success. But she was also an early promotor of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, published papers in the then unfashionable field of exobiology, and her symbiogenesis theory is a cornerstone of the idea that symbiosis and other forms of cooperation have made important contributions to the evolution of life on Earth. I admired her hugely. Ava atque vale.
Monday 21 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 3
Posted on 08:41 by Unknown
Chapter 3 of In The Mouth of the Whale is now available here. The previous two chapters are here, and here. The next chapter will be posted on Friday 25th November.
Sunday 20 November 2011
An Analogy
Posted on 09:25 by Unknown
Came to me while I was watching Hearts of Darkness. At its best, science fiction's portrayal of the future is similar to the portrayal of the Viet Nam war in Apocalypse Now.
Friday 18 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 2
Posted on 04:14 by Unknown
Here's the second chapter of my new novel, In The Mouth Of The Whale. (The first chapter is here.) No spoilers here, for those who might want until the novel is released into the wild in January.
Currently listening to: Peg Leg Howell: 'Low Down Rounder Blues'
Currently reading: Don Delillo: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
Currently writing: the last chapters of the second draft of the fourth Quiet War novel
Wednesday 16 November 2011
Endorsing The Future
Posted on 09:23 by Unknown
This dates from the early 1980s, I think, back when hand-held computers you could program in BASIC were cutting edge. One small measure of how important Isaac Asimov was, as a cultural figure: he wasn't just the default face of American science fiction; he was also the default face of popular science writing. Now, as the newspapers and TV news keep reminding us, everything is like science fiction, so science-fiction writers are no longer needed to explain how amazing some bit of technological kit is, because we've come to expect the amazing. Now, we have hand-held computers with full-colour touch screens, wireless connectivity to the whole wide world, memories equivalent to the content of the Library of Congress, and magical AI assistants. And everyone takes them for granted. And it's kind of cool, because it means we really are living in the future. But what would be truly amazing, these days?
Monday 14 November 2011
In The Mouth Of The Whale, Chapter 1
Posted on 01:30 by Unknown
My new novel, In The Mouth of the Whale, is scheduled to be published in January next year. Following a long tradition, I'll be posting serial extracts every Monday and Friday from now until publication day. Here's the beginning of the first chapter:
When the Child was a child, a sturdy toddler not quite two years old, she and her mother moved to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the north-west corner of the Peixoto family’s territory in Greater Brazil. It was an old place, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, an old garrison town on the Rio Negro, serving an army base and a depot for workers in the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps. Civilians, mostly descendants of Indians and early settlers, lived in a skewed grid of apartment blocks and bungalows beneath the green breast of the Fortaleza hill. Senior army officers, supervisors, and government officials rented villas along the Praia Grande, where in the dry season between September and January a beach appeared at the edge of the river. There was an airfield and a solar farm to the north, two schools, a hotel and half a dozen bars, a scruffy futbol pitch, a big church built in the brutalist style of the mid-twenty- first century, and a hospital, where the Child’s mother, Maria Hong-Owen, had taken up the position of resident surgeon.
Read more here.
Saturday 12 November 2011
Also Applies To Genre
Posted on 04:11 by Unknown
"The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of the discipline to criticise the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence."Clement Greenberg
(Quoted by Gabriel Josipovici in Whatever Happened To Modernism; requoted by Nicolas Lezard in his review.)
Wednesday 9 November 2011
'Bruce Springsteen'
Posted on 08:58 by Unknown
So I have a new short story, 'Bruce Springsteen', in the latest edition of Asimov's SF Magazine. It's one of the Jackaroo series that I've been working on for the past few years ('City of the Dead' is another), and is a kind of existential road trip that takes in a Chinese version of Las Vegas, aliens who collect human stories, and a mysterious necropolis. Starts like this:
‘I like your philosophers,’ the alien said. ‘Most were unintentional comedians, but a few
were on to something. Baudrillard, for instance.’
I said that I wasn’t familiar with Mr Baudrillard’s work.
‘His speculations about things standing for things that do not exist were relatively sophisticated. Perhaps you will resurrect him one day. He and I would talk about where his ideas fit in the spectrum of simulacrum theory.’
I said it sounded interesting.
‘You are being polite because part of your profession is to listen to the confessions of strangers. But you do not know what I am talking about, do you? It does not matter. I am mostly talking nonsense. I am free-associating. An effect of this interesting drink.’
‘Are you ready for another?’
‘This one is still working on me,’ the alien said.
A shot glass of neat Seagram’s was balanced on top of his tank. Somehow, elements of the whisky were making their way out of the glass and into whatever was inside. According to the alien, a teeny-tiny demon was influencing space-time, inflating the usual, vanishingly small chance that certain molecules would be somewhere outside the glass. Not molecules of alcohol, but what he called congeners. He was getting a buzz on the complex chemicals that gave the whisky its unique taste.
Tuesday 8 November 2011
Eating Rites
Posted on 11:34 by Unknown
Food in science fiction too often gets short thrift; its quality is inversely related to advances in technology. From the nutrition pills in Gernsbackian SF to the slabs of green and brown and orange paste in 2001: A Space Odyssey, food is often seen as no more than fuel. The equivalent of those freeze-dried meals astronauts must massage into palatability with warm water. Dole yeast. Chicken Little. Food bricks. Crop algae. Syntho-steak. 'Take your protein pill and put your helmet on,' as ground control tells Major Tom. The future is food even faster than fast food.
Elsewhere, food is an exotic test of character, digestive system and morality. The trial-by-combat of the alien banquet in Iain M. Banks' Excession, for instance, or the talking beast which lugubriously points out its best cuts in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. And sometimes food, or the lack of it, is the engine of the plot. In Adam Roberts' By Light Alone, the majority of the world's population subsist on the photosynthetic nutrition of their hair; only the rich can indulge their base appetites. In Thomas M. Disch's magnificently bleak The Genocides, an alien food-crop overwhelms the Earth and threatens humanity with extinction. In Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, the hero, Severian, consumes not only the flesh of his lover, but also her memories in an anthropophagic rite that's a dark parody of Holy Communion.
But for the practising SF novelist, how people grow or get food, prepare food, and eat and share food, can be a useful shorthand. A window on the ordinary unexamined life of the future, and the inner lives of its inhabitants. Severian, who grew up in a parsimonious Guild, frequently refers not only to food, but to times when he is forced to go hungry. Rick Deckard's wait for a meal at a noodle stall in Blade Runner not only tells us something about his character's loneliness, but also something about the crowded multiculturalism of 2019 Los Angeles. In The Matrix, the mucoid slop served aboard the hovercraft captained by Morpheus underscores the parlous state of free humans; it's so bad that the temptation of a tasty virtual steak is part of the deal with the devil made by a traitor. Soylent Green in Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room has nothing to do with the film verson's silly twist, but is a staple food in an overpopulated and undernourished world, made from (geddit?) soy beans and lentils, while the care with which the hero's ancient roommate tends his planters of herbs and onions tells us not only something about their value, but underscores his nostalgia for how things once were.
We're not only what we eat; we're also defined by how we eat it, and how much we value it. But our place at the top of the food chain isn't guaranteed. As the crew of The Nostromo discovered during their last communal meal in Alien, sometimes we're the meat on something else's table.
(Thanks to those on Twitter who responded to my question about famous food moments in SF with some great examples. Soylent Green and That Scene in Alien were by far the most popular.)
Elsewhere, food is an exotic test of character, digestive system and morality. The trial-by-combat of the alien banquet in Iain M. Banks' Excession, for instance, or the talking beast which lugubriously points out its best cuts in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. And sometimes food, or the lack of it, is the engine of the plot. In Adam Roberts' By Light Alone, the majority of the world's population subsist on the photosynthetic nutrition of their hair; only the rich can indulge their base appetites. In Thomas M. Disch's magnificently bleak The Genocides, an alien food-crop overwhelms the Earth and threatens humanity with extinction. In Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, the hero, Severian, consumes not only the flesh of his lover, but also her memories in an anthropophagic rite that's a dark parody of Holy Communion.
But for the practising SF novelist, how people grow or get food, prepare food, and eat and share food, can be a useful shorthand. A window on the ordinary unexamined life of the future, and the inner lives of its inhabitants. Severian, who grew up in a parsimonious Guild, frequently refers not only to food, but to times when he is forced to go hungry. Rick Deckard's wait for a meal at a noodle stall in Blade Runner not only tells us something about his character's loneliness, but also something about the crowded multiculturalism of 2019 Los Angeles. In The Matrix, the mucoid slop served aboard the hovercraft captained by Morpheus underscores the parlous state of free humans; it's so bad that the temptation of a tasty virtual steak is part of the deal with the devil made by a traitor. Soylent Green in Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room has nothing to do with the film verson's silly twist, but is a staple food in an overpopulated and undernourished world, made from (geddit?) soy beans and lentils, while the care with which the hero's ancient roommate tends his planters of herbs and onions tells us not only something about their value, but underscores his nostalgia for how things once were.
We're not only what we eat; we're also defined by how we eat it, and how much we value it. But our place at the top of the food chain isn't guaranteed. As the crew of The Nostromo discovered during their last communal meal in Alien, sometimes we're the meat on something else's table.
(Thanks to those on Twitter who responded to my question about famous food moments in SF with some great examples. Soylent Green and That Scene in Alien were by far the most popular.)
Tuesday 1 November 2011
Aliens Among Us
Posted on 09:54 by Unknown
Out today, this anthology of stories about aliens, in which my little tale of an invasion of Boltzmann Brains appears along with stories by Stephen Baxter, Pat Cadigan, Karen Joy Fowler, Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick . . . You can find the table of contents here, with links to commentary, and some of the stories.
Once upon a time, most stories about aliens were space wars or first contact adventures set in the far future, or attempts to imagine the truly alien in truly alien settings. Most of the stories here are set in the present day, refracting human behaviour through the viewpoint of the Other, or using the Other to isolate and magnify some odd aspect of human behaviour. We have met the alien, and he is us.
Once upon a time, most stories about aliens were space wars or first contact adventures set in the far future, or attempts to imagine the truly alien in truly alien settings. Most of the stories here are set in the present day, refracting human behaviour through the viewpoint of the Other, or using the Other to isolate and magnify some odd aspect of human behaviour. We have met the alien, and he is us.
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