Edna Sharrow

 

Edna Sharrow was born in Glastonbury on All Souls Day, 1876. Claiming to be the last true black witch, she became a supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s and fled her homeland after a failed attempt to turn the gold reserves of the Bank of England into iron pyrites.

She survived the last days of Hitler's bunker and kidnap attempts by the KGB, the CIA, and Mossad, returned to London in the 1960s, and drew a circle of protection around herself in a ground floor flat in Essex Road, Islington.

She's been there ever since, living on spiders, woodlice, and pallid tendrils of ivy that curl through the rotten courses of mortar of the kitchen wall. A few weeks ago, a young crack addict broke into the flat, hoping to find something he could sell for his next fix. Edna patched the broken pane in the front door with cardboard charged with a sly charm. An open invitation to another desperate chancer.

She'd forgotten how good fresh meat tasted. After another meal, she'll be ready to go back into the world.

Next Episode Here

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Bait (Ori)

The drones flew east at a steady six hundred kph, twenty-six of them, each separated from each by five kilometres. At last the supervisor spoke, said that the predators had left the ship. And soon afterwards the drones were on station, above the pale eye of a semi-permanent storm embedded in laminar flows and intricate swirls. Ori began to fly doglegs from point to point, a small part of a pattern woven across ten thousand square kilometres of sky, and broke out the signal package and began to broadcast. Electronic noise, false radar images, chatter. All low-level and fragmented, as if leaking past corrupt shielding, a honey-pot simulation designed to lure in enemy probes. Bait.

An hour passed, and another hour. The predators were on station now, moving in wide and random circles beyond the drones’ honeypot. The supervisor spoke at intervals, telling the jockeys to stay frosty, chiding one or another of them if they exceeded error parameters.

And, in the south, a star fell.

It fell in a long curve, arcing in above the cloudscape. It was small and faint and white, suddenly flaring blood-red and winking out. For several seconds nothing else happened. Then new stars appeared amongst the fixed stars. Two sets of them, moving quickly towards each other in short brief arcs, radiating out from opposing central points, passing in opposite directions, flaring, vanishing. All in perfect silence and without registering on any of the drone’s senses. Whatever it was, it was happening beyond the planet’s atmosphere: Ori used a simple triangulation method to determine that it was slightly over fifteen thousand kilometres away.

And more of these patterns were appearing all over the black sky in the south and east, tiny and bright and sharp and distinct. Ori, still flying her drone point to point with mindless regularity because she hadn’t been told to do anything else, imagined opposing fleets of ships firing at each other as they passed. A hundred of them, two hundred. Guttering out one by one until the sky was quiet again. Then something flared dead ahead, a little way above the area where the enemy was expected to enter the atmosphere. It brightened and spread, a kind of gauzy grid of faint electric-blue lines defining a loose net that was growing across the sky, dividing it into cells hundreds of kilometres across. It was the defence net, generated by forts orbiting at the inner edge of the rings.

Soon, tiny lights began to swarm inside the net’s grid, swirling and darting here and there with quick and seemingly aimless agitation. Lights in a particular patch of black sky would turn towards each other and suddenly swarm together and there’d be a terrific flare and when it faded the net in that part of the sky would be dimmer. And while this was happening, stars began to fall. Some fell straight down. Others corkscrewed violently. Some flared and expanded into pale blotches that dropped ragged clusters of tiny tumbling contrails and went out; others vanished below the horizon. Little bursts of radio noise, hardly distinguishable from the fraying crackle of lightning storms. Blips of high-energy particles. X-rays and gamma rays, intense fluxes of neutrons.

‘Here we go,’ the supervisor said. ‘Stay on station. Whatever happens, do not deviate.’

The enemy had arrived.

From In the Mouth of the Whale

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A Sneeze Heard Around The World

It's probably not the best idea to read, as I did, David Quammen's Spillover while suffering from a cold caught on a transatlantic flight.  Spillover is a pacy, punchy book about zoonoses, the diseases we catch from animals; several - SARS, for instance, or the H5N1 virus which caused bird flu - are respiratory diseases whose spread was amplified by air travel.  As human beings disrupt natural ecosystems, we encounter new infections, and quickly disperse them across the world.  Spillover's accounts of Ebola, HIV, SARS, H5N1and other actual or potential pandemics are gripping scientific detective stories about isolating and identifying disease organisms, tracking paths of infection back to the first victims, discovering how they became infected, and identifying the animal species - often bats or monkeys - in which the disease originated.

Quammen, who works for the National Geographic, has done an immense amount of fieldwork, observing researchers catch fruit bats in Pakistan, trekking through forests in the Congo in search of gorillas and chimpanzees infected with ebola, spelunking in a bat- and python-infested cave where tourists contracted Marburg disease, visiting the laboratory in which old tissue specimens were found to contain the first known example of the HIV virus.  There's a long, entirely ficticious account of how HIV may have spread in the colonial Congo, but for the most part Quammen scrupulously sticks to the science, and his lucid accounts of human loss and the scramble to contain outbreaks of horrific and deadly diseases hardly need embellishment.  It's terrific, sobering stuff, the raw material of a dozen possible apocalypses.

As far as viruses and other disease organisms are concerned, the seven billion human beings presently alive are a vast warm, wet reservoir of mucous membranes and the cytoplasmic machinery they need to reproduce.  We live in densely populated cities that enhance the spread of infection between individuals, and transport infections across the entire globe.  We have not separated ourselves from the natural world; we are one of its ecosystems.  Indeed, as Quammen observes, 'there is no 'natural world', it's a bad and artificial phrase.  There is only the world.  Humankind is part of that world, as are the ebolaviruses, as are the influenzas and the HIVs, as are the Nipah and Hendra and SARS, as are chimpanzees and bats and palm civets and bar-headed geese, as is the next murderous virus - the one we haven't yet detected.'

We can't escape diseases because they and we are inextricably embedded in the global environment. Our only advantage is that we are smart - smart enough to be able to detect and identify new diseases, and contain them before they can spread.  It's a constant battle - a new virulent coronavirus (SARS is another) has recently caused a handful of deaths, and has the potential to spread more widely.  So far we're winning the race.  We've equipped ourselves with a global network of dedicated lab scientists and field workers armed with techniques than can rapidly isolate disease organisms, sequence their DNA and RNA, and identify their weak spots.  But we can't ever stop running.  Our civilisation is now obligately dependent on molecular biology.

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There Are Doors (18)

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Random And Wildly Beautiful Patterns (Isak)

Maui wasn’t much different from the farm rock where I’d spent my early childhood. A dwarf planet about three hundred kilometres across, just large enough to have been pulled into a sphere by its own gravity: a rough ball of water ice accreted around a core of silicate rocks, contaminated with pockets of methane and nitrogen ices, coated in layers of primordial carbonaceous material and spattered with craters, one so big that material excavated by the impact covered half Maui’s surface with a lightly cratered debris shield. Two fragments lofted by that impact still circled Maui’s equator, a pair of moonlets kindled into sullen slow-burning miniature suns by Quick construction machines during the short-lived world-building era immediately after their seedship had arrived at Fomalhaut.

The Quick machines had extensively gardened the worldlet too, planting vacuum organisms in seemingly random and wildly beautiful patterns utterly unlike the square fields of my foster-family’s farm. Huge tangles of ropes, crustose pavements, clusters of tall spires, fluted columns and smooth domes, forests of wire. Mostly in shades of black but enlivened here and there with splashes and flecks of vivid reds or yellows, sprawled across crater floors, climbing walls and spilling their rims, spreading across intercrater plains, sending pseudohyphae into the icy regolith to mine carbonaceous tars, growing slowly but steadily in the faint light of Fomalhaut and Maui’s two swift-moving mini-suns.

Once, when the Quick had been the sole inhabitants of the Fomalhaut system, these gardens had covered the entire surface of the worldlet, inhabited by only a few contemplative eremites. Now, they were scarred by tents built to house refugees, the monolithic cubes of fusion generators, landing stages, materiel dumps, missile emplacements, strip mines, refineries, and maker blocks. My transit pod was flying above a region scraped down to clean bright water ice when my security delivered a message. Report to the Redactor Svern when you are finished.

From In The Mouth Of The Whale

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In Paperback

These days, 'publication day' is a somewhat nebulous concept, but anyway, although it has been available from Amazon for a little while*, today is the official publication day of the mass-market paperback edition of In The Mouth of the Whale.

Happy birthday, little book.  I hope those who go looking for you are able to find you; and I hope that some people who didn't know about you will find you too.

For the curious, there's more information here, along with some extracts.

*Edit - have been reminded that you can also buy it here, with free worldwide delivery.

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Only The Terrapins Did Not Die (Sri)

The Child had an early familiarity with death. She kept a small menagerie of animals collected from the wild places inside the town limits or bought in the market. She had a tank of terrapins, several tanks of river fish. She had an ant farm sandwiched between two plates of glass. She collected several species of stick insect from the forest, and bought a baby sloth from a mestizo boy in the market, but it died because she couldn’t figure out how to wean it. Most of her animals died, sooner or later. One day her fish would be all alive-o in their tanks; the next they’d be floating belly up. The ants deserted their maze. One by one, the stick insects dropped to the bottoms of their wire-mesh cages, as stiff and dry in death as the twigs they had emulated in life. Only the terrapins did not die, no matter how often she forgot to feed them, or how fetid the green soup of their little pond became.

And because she made herself useful around the hospital, working in the lab, running errands for the nurses and doctors, fetching water and food for patients, and so on, the Child was also familiar with the deep and powerful mystery of human death. One day she’d be chatting with an old woman; the next, the woman’s bed would be empty and stripped to its mattress. Late one sultry night, the Child delivered a bite of supper to her mother as she kept watch on a dying patient in a little room off one of the wards. She saw the man start in his solitary bed and try to rise on his elbows, toothless mouth snapping at the air, his eyes wide and fixed on something far beyond the limits of the room, the hospital, the town, the world. She saw her mother ease him down and talk to him soothingly and fold his hands around a rosary, saw him try to take a breath and fail, and try and fail again, and that was that. Her mother called the Child to her side and they said a prayer over the body. Then her mother rose, her shadow wheeling hugely across the wall and ceiling, and flung open the shutters of the window as if setting something free.

From In The Mouth of the Whale

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There Are Doors (17)

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O Death

Thirty-five years after they were launched, the two Voyager spacecraft are approaching the edge of the Solar System, where the solar wind breaks on the shore of interstellar space; at least one commentator believes that Voyager 1 has already exited the Solar System.  It is currently more than 18 trillion kilometres from the Earth, and it takes about 16 hours 47 minutes for its signal, travelling at the speed of light, to intersect Earth's orbit, but that's a mere scratch in terms of interstellar distances.  The width of the meniscus on a grain of beach sand compared to the breadth of the Pacific Ocean.  The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, 2200 times the distance Voyager 1 has travelled so far; Gliese 667, a triple-star system that possesses the best-known candidate for an Earth-like exoplanet, is 22.1 light years away; the supermassive black hole churning at the Galactic Centre is something like 27,000 light years distant.  Voyager 1 isn't aimed at any star in particular, but if it was heading towards Proxima Centauri, it would take almost 17,500 years to reach it.  And so on.

Much science fiction gets around the problem of interstellar distances by using wormholes, warp drives and other conveniences that turn stars into the equivalent of stops on a suburban railway line, or speeds at which relativistic time contraction shrinks the subjective length of voyages.  But if you stick to the Einsteinian speed limit and plausible velocities, travel across the great voids between stars becomes a serious act, with serious consequences.  It becomes, it seems to me, much like death.  Starships with cargoes of deep-frozen passengers are pharaonic tombs; those great generation starships, in which descendants of the original crews so often descend into barbarism and forget their purpose and destination, are obvious metaphors for rise and fall of civilisations; the uploaded minds of passengers will be expelled from their pocket heavens at voyage's end, refleshed, reborn.  Whether they are lumbering, hollowed-out asteroids or smart basketballs packed with nanotechnology and gene banks inscribed in imperishable quartz glass, starships are the equivalent of funeral barges:

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail darkly,
for we cannot steer, and have no port.

T.H.Lawrence, 'The Ship of Death'

There's a great deal of science fiction about death; or rather, there's a lot of science fiction about escaping or avoiding death.  About longevity and immortality, uplift and the Singularity and Omega Point gods and all the other Peter-Pan dreams of never dying, or rather - and I think this is the important point - never growing old.  There are many teenage heroes in science fiction, and some of them are well into their second century.  Maybe it's a Boomer thing, like blue jeans and the Beatles.  O, Death.  Won't you spare me over 'til another year?  And do you take Amex?

Anyway, one of the characters in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun is obsessed with trying to outwit death.  I hinted at the human cost of that obsession in those novels, and wanted to expand and elaborate on that theme, and to play with the image of the starship as a vessel of death and rebirth.  Amongst other things, trying to fit the two tropes together led to the writing of In The Mouth Of The Whale, in which the passenger of a starship relives her childhood as she is prepared for rebirth at the end of her long voyage, and finds history has moved on without her.  That's the trouble with being dead, even if it's a strategy for long-distance travel: you cede autonomy to the living.

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Rip It Up And Start Again

So critic Paul Kincaid took on a commission to write a review of this year's crop of best SF&F anthologies, and was dismayed by what he saw.  And after his review began to cause a bit of a stir, he amplified his thoughts in an interview, published in two parts.  It's all good, useful stuff.  Paul Kincaid is sincere, insightful, and very careful about articulating exactly what he means.  He's very careful, for instance, to point out that he doesn't think that SF is a dying genre.  But he does think that it is exhausted.  That it has reached a point of crisis.  That it has lost confidence in the future - or in presenting comprehensible futures.  Undermined by the feeling that 'the present [is] changing too rapidly for us to keep up with', it has reeled backwards, producing thinly-imagined futures based on unexamined second-hand furniture lifted from older sf.  Stories in which most of the sf tropes are mere decoration that if stripped out wouldn't much change the plots, and most of the science is based more on magical thinking than on actual cutting-edge research.

Like every genre, sf has always mined its past, of course, but Kincaid senses something new: a lack of passion.  A lack of edge.  Of danger.

Way back when, when I was writing Eternal Light, when the whole 'Radical Hard SF' and 'New Space Opera' thing was kicking off, I was part of a bunch of writers who, along with Interzone editor David Pringle, felt something similar.  If you were going to reuse the old tropes, we thought back then, you shouldn't take them at face value.  You should strip out their guts and rebuild them from the ground up.  You should weld in the new biology, the new physics, the new cosmology.  Punk it up.  I still think that.  The internet makes it much easier to keep up with what science is doing now (twenty years ago, I was working in a university, so unlike many of my contemporaries, I had a whole library of scientific literature to draw on; now, much of that stuff is just a few keystrokes away).  Ditto cutting-edge fashion, architecture, information technology . . .  The future is unfolding all around you, right here in the happening world of the present.

But as Kincaid points out, the present isn't a comfortable place, right now.  Which is perhaps why too many sf writers recoil from it, into cosy futures from days past.  And there's a professionalism in the genre now that wasn't much in evidence twenty years ago; perhaps people aren't inclined to take risks that might affect their brand.  It's certainly harder to publish a different kind of novel, every time, than it once was.  And let's face it, twenty years on, it's possible that I've become part of the problem.  I'm not sure what my 'brand' is, let alone how to nuture it, but it's possible, yes, that I've grown lazy and complacent.  That's why critics like Paul Kincaid are useful - to ask hard questions, to point out uncomfortable truths.  That's why we should take them seriously.  That's why, if they point out a problem, we shouldn't react defensively, but try to figure out how to solve it.  How to do better, next time.

All I know is that I wrote The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun because I was excited by images of the real landscapes of real moons captured by actual robot spacecraft, and wondered what it would be like live out there, and walk across those craters, those wrinkle ridges, and how it would change the people who did.  I wrote In The Mouth of the Whale because I wanted to mash the ur-trope of interstellar travel and colonisation with riffs on posthuman transcendentalism into an extended metaphor about death and rebirth.  And one of the seeds of Evening's Empires was a reaction to the ongoing denial of science in favour of the kind of magical thinking that has people reject vaccines for homeopathic pills.  'In good times magicians are laughed at,' Fritz Leiber wrote in his short story, 'Poor Superman'.  'They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.'

Which is kind of where we came in.

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Buy These Books Or The Blog Gets It*

Two new books.  On the left, the mass-market paperback of In The Mouth Of The Whale.  Which is not a sequel to The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, but shares the same future history, and conflates the childhood of a character from those novels, the gene wizard Sri Hong Owen, with what happens to her when she arrives, after a long and difficult voyage, at the star Fomalhaut.  It is published on October 11th.
 
On the right, the mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback, which is, most definitely, the sequel to Zombie Apocalypse!  In the first novel, a zombie plague spreads after the tomb of an eighteenth century architect, Thomas Moreby, is disturbed; in the second, the human resistance begins to organise itself against the plans of Moreby and his undead army.  It's published on October 4th in the UK, and November 1st in the US; the table of contents can be found here.

*Not really. But it would nice if you did.

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