The Pulse

I've been playing Philip Glass's Symphony No. 9 a lot recently. He's probably better known for his film, opera, and ballet scores, and small-scale instrumental pieces with his ensemble, but he's also written string quartets and ten full-scale symphonies, beginning in his late fifties with the 'Low' symphony, which explored variations on the music of David Bowie's album Low.

Bowie gave me my first introduction to Glass. Thanks to the world memory of the internet I can date it precisely: 20th May 1979. Bowie was hosting a Radio 1 programme, I am a DJ, presenting a selection of favourite and significant music. He played Danny Kaye's 'Inchworm' (a song he claims as a major influence, forming the template, for instance, for 'Ashes to Ashes'), commenting on the use of counting in a song, and then played an excerpt from Glass's score for the opera Einstein on the Beach, 'Trial/Prison', in which the narrator recites short text over a pulsing electronic organ while the ensemble counts off the beats.

The juxtaposition of the two pieces of music caught my attention, but I didn't really think of Glass's music again until I saw the film Koyaanisqatsi in Los Angeles, at Laemmle's Royal theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard, May 1983, and my mind was, as they say, blown.  I mean, coming to Koyaanisqatsi without any preconceptions of what it was like was pretty much mind-blowing anyway, but I was also an alien living and working in Los Angeles and much of the imagery had a direct resonance.  As did the pulsing score: I immediately bought a tape, and played it to death driving the freeways and surface streets of LA, and it's still one of my favourite pieces of music. The penultimate section, 'Prophesies', is prime Glass Pulse:



The same short cadence is repeated over and over, until suddenly (at about 08.46) there's a small but utterly devastating time change, a sudden shift of focus and emotional colour. It's a signature of his work: his Symphony No. 9 opens with yet another variation of the Pulse.

I've been writing and publishing for somewhat less than the interval between Koyaanisqatsi and Symphony No.9, but if I've learnt one thing it's that you develop signature themes, tropes and ideas, prose structures and story forms, that define your style. That's the palette you have; the palette you get to play with. Glass's music reminds me that isn't a trap; reminds me that simple and powerful ideas can contain infinite variations, if you look hard enough.

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Blurbed

Of Evening's Empires, my publisher says:

A young man stands on a barren asteroid. His ship has been stolen, his family kidnapped or worse, and all he has on his side is a semi-intelligent spacesuit. The only member of the crew to escape, Hari has barely been off his ship before. It was his birthplace, his home and his future.

He's going to get it back.

A neat hook into the beginning of the story. A teasing fragment of exposition. A hint of narrative direction. I've been shown some cover roughs. They're very good too.


Meanwhile, I'm finishing a story for a themed anthology of stories set on the old, wet, habitable Venus. Some stories come easily. This one took a while to reveal what it was really about: it was necessary to write a kind of condensed novel, a biography of the hero, and then to strip out everything that wasn't relevant. Which revealed amongst other things that the story wasn't about the hero, after all. As usual, when I have trouble moving a story forward it's because I've started in the wrong place.

It's a kind of planetary romance, a kind of adventure, a kind of detective story. Stories about scientific discovery are often cast in the form of detective stories because they seem to share an obvious narrative structure - something happens, and despite difficulties, diversions and obstructions, the hero uncovers clues and pieces them together to form a narrative that explains the why and the how - but on close examination the analogy often breaks down. The fit isn't exact. My story is in part about the stories science tells itself, and why they are sometimes wrong, or point in the wrong direction. There are monsters, too, and an ekranoplan, and a new Cold War. It's called 'Planet of Fear.' That's one thing I didn't have to change, at least.

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Chekhov's Pulse Laser Pistol

Chekhov's famous dictum about foreshadowing - "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act" and variations thereof - is of course complicated in science fiction because the reader needs to understand what kind of pistol it is, the level of technology implied by its capabilities, the various devices that make use of the same techniques and systems, their effect on the social contract, and so on and so forth.

If the pistol isn't a red herring, ignoring it after its introduction in a science fiction novel not only leaves a plot hole but also a gap in the fabric of its world. Of course, unless it's done with subtlety, wit and concision, worldbuilding can quickly become as tedious as a list of plumbing parts. Which is why, perhaps, so many science fiction novels fall back on a generic future with a common, consensual backdrop.  Worlds of secondhand furniture, drawn from easily recognisable histories. Ikea worlds whose products only sometimes require assembly, using easy-to-follow instructions and simple tools, and furnish scenarios as clean, utilitarian, and anonymous as catalogue illustrations. Where Chekhov's Pulse Laser Pistol is probably called Bob. Good old Bob. He's so familiar he's practically invisible. No need to describe him, or worry about the implications of how he got there, or the consequences of using him, in the last act. Along with everything else in the catalogue, he's a prop in a fantasy future shorn of actual context, much like pornography.

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Links 15/02/13

All over the internets and every kind of news media: a large meteor streaking across the early morning sky of Western Siberia.  The New York Times has many video clips, and an explanation for the ubiquitous dashcams in Russian vehicles that took them:

Psychopaths are abundant on Russian roads. You best not cut anyone off or undertake some other type of maneuver that might inconvenience the 200-pound, six-foot-five brawling children you see on YouTube hopping out of their SUVs with their dukes up. They will go ballistic in a snap, drive in front of you, brake suddenly, block you off, jump out and run towards your vehicle. Next thing you start getting punches in your face because your didn’t roll up your windows, or getting pulled out of the car and beaten because you didn’t lock the doors.

These fights happen all the time and you can’t really press charges. Point to your broken nose or smashed windows all you want. The Russian courts don’t like verbal claims. They do, however, like to send people to jail for battery and property destruction if there’s definite video proof.

And here's an image of the meteor's vapour trail, taken from orbit.

Sort of related to intrusions from outer space, the uncanny valley of incredibly life-like David Bowie dolls.

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#jCp

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Throughout her career, the famous biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) argued that the world of microorganisms has a much larger impact on the entire biosphere—the world of all living things—than scientists typically recognize. Now a team of scientists from universities around the world has collected and compiled the results of hundreds of studies, most from within the past decade, on animal-bacterial interactions, and have shown that Margulis was right. The combined results suggest that the evidence supporting Margulis' view has reached a tipping point, demanding that scientists reexamine some of the fundamental features of life through the lens of the complex, codependent relationships among bacteria and other very different life forms.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#jCp

The adventures of Florida Man.

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Something Borrowed

It's that time of year when British authors and anyone else who makes a book - authors, illustrators, photographers, translators, editors of anthologies - receives their Public Lending Right payments for books lent in the library system.  Twenty-eight countries have a form of PLR.  In the UK, the amount earned by each registered title is based on payment of 6.2 pence per loan, and an estimate of the number of borrowings of each registered title using data from a number of typical libraries.

And very welcome it is too, for most recipients - although not for Horrible Histories author, Terry Deary.  He's the seventh most-borrowed children's author, and because the maximum PLR payment is capped at £6,600, to ensure that best-selling authors don't scoop up most of the pot. he reckons he's out of pocket by some £180,000. And that's not all:

'But never mind my selfish author perception – what about the bookshops? The libraries are doing nothing for the book industry. They give nothing back, whereas bookshops are selling the book, and the author and the publisher get paid, which is as it should be. What other entertainment do we expect to get for free?'

According to Deary, libraries are Victorian institutions which have outlived their usefulness, giving people the undeserved entitlement that books should be available at the expense of the book trade and the local councils which fund them.

It's pernicious stuff. Most authors, like me, don't earn anything like the amount Deary reckons he's lost thanks to the perfidious PLR scheme. In fact, the average earnings of British authors - and I'm average, in this respect - is somewhat less than the national average wage. So while the PLR payments may be peanuts to someone like Deary, they are an important source of income to many authors.  As are sales to libraries of hardback books. Back in the day, my publisher, Gollancz, made a good chunk of its income from selling hardbacks to libraries: the famous yellow jackets ensured that its crime and science fiction titles stood out on library shelves. For many midlist authors, sales to libraries are still important, and cutbacks in library funding are a serious threat to their careers.

Borrowing books and buying books are not mutually exclusive, and every book borrowed is not, as Mr Deary imagines, a lost sale. There's no basis for that kind of like-for-like calculation. As for his assertion that bookshops are closing down because libraries are giving away books for free, libraries and bookshops have managed to coexist for a century and a half. The trade in printed books is currently under threat not because of people borrowing books, but because they are buying more books online, and are increasingly buying more and more ebooks. The decline in the amount of money spent on books is due in no large part to the proliferation of massively discounted ebooks, with heavily promoted bestselling titles going for as little as 20 pence. It's this, rather than the 'free' books in libraries, which is threatening to devalue books.

Far from doing nothing for the booktrade, libraries buy massive quantities of books and through the PLR scheme pay authors a tithe on book borrowing, and most importantly they encourage reading. Many people who start out borrowing books from libraries got on to become lifelong readers and book-buyers. I type this in a room lined with about 3000 books, part of my personal library. A good proportion of the older titles are books I once borrowed from libraries, and bought so that I could read them again. Would I have become a writer without access to a library stuffed with books I could freely borrow? Probably.  But my local library was vastly enabling, because it fed my growing book-reading habit, and allowed me to graze on a vast selection of titles, and to read authors I might never otherwise have encountered, and generally provided me with a literary education.

In short, libraries are invaluable gateways, much like Mr Deary's rather wonderful Horrible History books. What a pity he doesn't see that.

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Red Queen's Race

Getting hard to stay ahead.

From Nature's news blog:

 Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in living cells. These ‘genetic circuits’ could be used to track key moments in a cell’s life or, at the flick of a chemical switch, change a cell’s fate, the researchers say. Their results are described this week in Nature Biotechnology.


From Gardens of the Sun:

The window looked out across a huge spherical chamber carved out of the native ice and lit by a point source hung at the apex of its ceiling like a drop of incandescent blood. Its walls curved down to a floor creased with smooth ridges, and the top of each ridge was streaked with dark eddies and swirls and littered with dense copses of half-melted candles, phalanxes of tooth-like spikes, heaps of tangled wires or curled scrolls like spun sugar,meadows of brittle hairs, pods of paper-thin fins breaking out of the ice. All these growths stark black in the ruby light, apart from a large candle-copse close to the observation window that was clearly dying from the inside out, its lumpy spires crumbling into pale ash.
 
‘Vacuum organisms,’ Loc said. ‘A garden of vacuum organisms.’
 
He’d been expecting something truly exotic. A clone farm of superhuman babies. A wonderland full of weird plants and animals. A city of intelligent rats or raccoons. But these growths weren’t that much different from the vacuum organisms cultivated on the naked surface around every city and settlement on the moons of Saturn.
 
‘They look like vacuum organisms,’ Sri Hong-Owen said. ‘But they are not. They are not constructed from bound nanotech, but are spun from intricate pseudo-proteinaceous polymers. I call them polychines. If commercial vacuum organisms are synthetic analogues of prokaryotes - bacteria, Mr Ifrahim - these are analogues of the ancestors of prokaryotes.’
 
‘You want to give me a lecture,’ Loc said. ‘It would be easier if you cut to the chase, and told me exactly why these things are worthless. They certainly look worthless.’
 
Sri Hong-Owen ignored his sally, and told him that the chamber contained a methane-hydrogen atmosphere at minus twenty degrees Centigrade, far warmer than Mimas’s ambient temperature. ‘As for the polychines, they do not possess a pseudocellular structure; nor are they generated by the systematic execution of a centralised set of encoded instructions. Instead, they are networks of self-catalysing metabolic cycles created by interactions between specific structures in their polymers.’
 
‘Like carpets, or suit-liners.’
 
‘Very good, Mr Ifrahim. But although halflife materials are self-repairing and can even grow when fed the correct substrate, they encode only a very simple set of on/off instructions and can express only one morphology. The polychines are far more versatile. They are non-binary logic engines that use a form of photosynthesis to transform simple chemicals to complex polymers. They can reproduce, and they can even exchange information, although that information is entirely analogue in form. And they possess a limited set of components which obey a limited set of self-organising rules capable of generating new instructions, and, therefore, new properties and even new forms. Once I completely understand how those rules operate in every possible combination, it will be possible to manipulate the polychines to produce predictable states.’

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Human Mystery

Found in Ray Monk's huge, and hugely lucid, biography of Robert Oppenheimer, Inside the Centre, a contender for footnote of the year:

It is impossible to tell how much of this story is true. Can one believe that Oppenheimer deliberately dropped his suitcase, intending it to hit the woman? Did he really kiss her? And, perhaps most improbably of all: can one really imagine him travelling third class?

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Links 08/02/13

'Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about . . .  Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.'  More here; abstract of paper here.

A small, two-wheeled robot has been driven by a male silkmoth to track down the sex pheromone usually given off by a female mate.

 “I’ll sleep with you, but I prefer my stories to yours.” Barriers to the spread of stories between human populations are stronger than those to the spread of genes.

A couple of fantastic photography projects:

Laurent Chehere: 'Flying Houses.'

Marc Wilson: 'The Last Stand'

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Ruination Daze

In the last couple of decades, Detroit has become the unwilling poster child for late-stage post-industrial collapse. A city that was once the beating heart of the American car industry has become a real-life setting for fantasies of apocalypse. The desolation of its vast factories and assembly plants, theatres and department stores documented by aficionados of ruin porn. The urban prairies of what were once thriving inner-city residential areas returned to nature, grids of weed-grown streets and ruins interrupted only by the occasional surviving house, or the encampments of urban farmers. A laboratory for experiments in post-apocalyptic, post-industrial, post-technological science-fictional scenarios (after Detroit, after Hurricane Katrina, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren looks increasingly prescient).

Mark Binelli's The Last Days of Detroit, Motor Cars, Motown and the Collapse of an Industrial Giant, seeks to remind the reader to the people who still live there, and are seeking ways to regenerate their city. A former Detroit native (his family ran a business in the city, but lived, as he confesses, in the suburbs), he moved back into the heart of the city for three years, hoping 'to discover something new about the city - specifically, what happens to a once-great place after it has been used up and discarded? Who sticks around and tries to make things work again? And what sorts of newcomers are drawn to the place for similar reasons?'

Binelli, a reporter on the staff of Rolling Stone magazine, is an engaging writer who gives an insider's perspective on Detroit's long history and the complex interplay economic, political and social factors that caused its decline.  He's very good on the personalities of Detroit politicians, recent and historical scandals, and grand plans that all founder for one reason: 'No matter how dexterous or well-intentioned our elected officials, any plan to reinvent Detroit, or even adequately address the city's most fundamental crises, required the one thing Detroit lacked most of all: unimaginable amounts of money.'  And his portraits of ordinary citizens, of the artists and urban hipsters attracted Detroit's quasi-anarchistic freedom (and its huge spaces and cheap rents), of a school's urban farm, the fire department of one of Detroit's poorest neighbourhoods, and the human stories underlying a murder trial, are deft, acute and sympathetic. But what's lacking is an overall narrative that knits the various threads and voices together. Binelli's portrait of the city is affectionate and fair and honest, but scrappy; like the city itself, there's no centre. But as Binelli points out, there's no single cause to Detroit's malaise, and unlike fictional apocalypses, there's no easy solution either (apart from unimaginable amounts of cold hard cash), no way of reading in the runes of the ruins which version of the future will win out. And yet he surprises himself, and the reader, by ending on an optimistic note: the ruins may not be an endpoint after all, but part of an urban metabolic cycle. What's left is the kind of naive but very human hope with which the first citizens of Detroit promoted their dreams of coming grandeur. Can we imagine futures that aren't all grimdark urban nightmares or fantasies of posturban self-reliant homesteading, but ones in which our cities find some new purpose and are reborn afresh?

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At Sea In The Sea Of Stories

Every year, Locus magazine asks its stable of critics and others for nominees for its recommended reading list. Anything that's recommended by at least two people gets to be included, and the list forms the basis for the magazine's awards ballot. I'm happy to say that In The Mouth of the Whale has been included in the best SF novel category, 'Bruce Springsteen' in best novelette (or stuff that's a little too long for a short story, but not long enough for a novella), and 'Antarctica Starts Here', 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, The Potter's Garden' and 'The Man' in best short story.  Which is very pleasing because, first, it's pretty much all the fiction I wrote last year, and second, I'm in the company of some pretty distinguished peers.

A nice little boost as I wrestle with plans and a detailed outline for the next novel, and plot out a story (or rather, a novelette) I've been commissioned to write for an anthology. The latter has to be written sooner rather than later, so until I've finished a first draft I'm putting the Quiet War instant fiction series into a very short hiatus. There are ten so far, and I still hope to bring that up to a round dozen, once I've finished with the seas of Venus.

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Links 01/02/13

'Foster + Partners were responsible for the design of the base’s modular living units. These structures, pressured, inflatable capsules containing various living spaces, would be transported along with the 3D printer aboard a space rocket. Once landed, the tubular modules would be unpacked and inflated; the robot-controlled-printer would then print a regolith shell layer by layer directly over each lodging, effectively burying it in a thick protective crust of lunar soil.'  Beats shovelling lunar dirt over your inflatable hut by hand.

Talking of lunar dirt, NASA plans to use its Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot to extract water, air and fuel from the lunar regolith. Kind of like Moon, without the Helium 3.

The Road To Endeavour blog, which has been following the Opportunity rover's progress across the surface of Mars, has posted a nice piece on the 9th anniversary of its landing, 9 years on Barsoom.

 Meanwhile, out at Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft has been watching a gigantic planet-girdling storm choke on its own tail.

And back on Earth, we have to contend with a coffee apocalypse and the possibility that we've reached peak genius.

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