Links 29/03/13

Huge panorama of Gale Crater created by Andrew Bodrov from images taken by the Curiosity rover.

A fish with a see-through head.

Duckpenisgate.

'To feed their young, females grow an extra layer of skin that's rich in fats. The young scrape this skin off with their teeth and eat it. To help them, they have a specialised set of teeth adapted to the job, which are replaced by more pointed adult teeth as they get older.'

And in other news, Unlikely Worlds's tweets have been listed by Time magazine as one of the best 140 Twitter feeds of 2013.

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A Day In The Life

 'But what do you really do?' is up there with 'Do you write under your own name?' and 'I've never read any of your books' as one of the most common responses when I tell people who ask me what I do what I do.

What I did today is start work at 9 am by scribbling changes all over the print-out of a draft of a short piece about watching the first ever episode of Doctor Who, add the changes into the electronic version, reread it on screen and make a few more changes, and then email it off.  That was the first hour accounted for.  I won't get paid for it by the way,  but for once I'm happy to violate the rule that money should always flow towards the author because the profits from the book (I hope) it'll appear in are going to charity.

After that, it was back to the first draft of the new novel.  1000 words before lunch, then a walk around my usual route - I live in Islington, one of the most built-up and populous parts of London, but manage to fit in three parks - and back in front of the computer for another 500 words.  I like to write 1500 words, or about five pages each and every day until I have a complete draft.  And then I start editing and rewriting, and rediting and rerewriting . . .

Sometimes it only takes an hour or two; sometimes it takes all day.  And if it's going really slowly, I'll take a walk earlier, to think about writing while thinking about something else.  Today, I finished at around 3.30, and then started to read through an old story someone wants to republish; so far, it hasn't needed much in the way of titivation.  And now, at just after 5 pm, I'm writing this.

So that's mostly what I really do.  I write.  Although today was a bit out of the ordinary, because ten copies of my new collection of short stories, A Very British History, were delivered.  Here are three of them:

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Something For The Weekend

So I'll be in Bradford for the annual science fiction bash, Eastercon, this coming weekend. This is what I'll be doing in between admiring monumental Victorian architecture and trying not to buy too many books.

Friday     5pm     "PS Publishing"
Yorkshire’s very own specialist publisher gets Eastercon underway with an event to launch new books by five of the UK’s leading SF and Fantasy writers. "Universes" by Stephen Baxter. "Starship Seasons" by Eric Brown. A Very British History" by Paul McAuley. "Martian Sands" by Lavie Tidhar. "Growing Pains" by Ian Whates.
Get 'em while they're hot.

Saturday     10am     "Editing - the truth, the myth and the rule of the red pen"
 What do editors do anyway, and why is it necessary? What's it like to be edited? Practical experience and observations on how to edit, and how to be edited. Bella Pagan moderates Janine Ashbless, Naomi Foyle, Paul McAuley and Mercurio D Rivera.
Ever tried to self-publish? There you go.

Saturday     11am     "Sensory Overload"
Why stop at five senses? There are many other senses in the natural world, more available through technology, and even more in SF and Fantasy. Our panel explore. With Dr Bob, Simon Ings, Roz Kaveney, Paul McAuley, and Walter Jon Williams.
Which sense apps would you buy?

Saturday     9pm     "Five Years: The End of the World Panel"    
Recent apocalypses have been a disappointment, but what would happen if there was a guaranteed, proven end-of-the-world coming in five years. What would happen to society? Nigel Furlong, Chris Beckett, Janet Edwards, Paul McAuley and Philip Palmer discuss the consequences.
David Bowie already covered this, but I think I can add a personal perspective.

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Links 22/03/13

Voyager* 1 has become the first man-made object to exit the heliosphere and reach interstellar space. Oh, wait, it hasn't quite left yet. xkcd keeps count. But since it was launched in 1977 it has certainly travelled a long way: it's currently more than 18.5 billion kilometres from the sun, 124 astronomical units, or just 17 light hours or 0.002 light years. Space is big.

'We’ve seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program.' 

'Today's asteroids might once have been "more like cowpats".'

Discovery of microbes living in basalt rock 500 metres beneath the sea bed of Washington state may mean that the oceanic crust contains 'the first major ecosystem on Earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight.'

*For some reason - the end of a long working day; I'm an idiot - I originally typed Viking 1. Viking's lander is still on Mars, and its orbiter is still circling the red planet (although since it can no longer adjust its orbit, it will crash onto the surface in 2019).

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A Very British History

As previously noted, my new short story collection, A Very British History, will be published at the end of this month. There will be a standard or trade edition, and a signed, limited edition with endpaper artwork by Jim Burns and additional material in a separate slim book, all in a slipcase.  The table of contents of the standard edition can be found here; the limited edition also includes two short stories, Karl and the Ogre, and Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World, and a biographical essay, My Secret Super Power. Both the trade edition and the limited edition are available for preorder; there will be only 100 copies of limited edition, so if you want to grab one, you'd better be quick.

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Robinson Crusoe On Mars

An astronaut crash lands on Mars, and must learn to survive on its inhospitable surface with only a monkey for company. And then the aliens arrive...

It sounds like pulp hokum, but in fact it's much more interesting, a serious attempt to depict actual space travel, and actual conditions on the Red Planet. There are no canals or ancient civilisations, no mighty minds bent on conquering Earth or kidnapping Santa Claus, no rock snakes. Instead, as in George Pal's earlier Conquest of Space, Mars is a bleak desert world, lacking almost all the resources required for human survival. There are aliens, yes, but like the astronaut they are visitors.

But while Conquest of Space dates from the dawn in space travel, in 1955, Robinson Crusoe on Mars was disadvantaged by being made in 1964. American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts were preparing to go to the moon; within a year Mariner 4 would beam back pictures of the Martian surface, bleak and cratered and utterly lifeless, with an atmosphere thinner than previously suspected. All science fiction dates, but Robinson Crusoe on Mars was very swiftly overtaken by reality, and has dwindled in the rearview mirror of history into little more than a cult curiosity.

That's a shame, because there's an awful lot to like. The story of survival, adapted with full acknowledgement from Defoe's original by screenwriter Ib Melchior, is strong and compelling.  Much of it was filmed in Death Valley; with red skies matted in, the landscapes in which astronaut Commander 'Kit' Draper (Paul Manatee) struggles to survive are vastly bleak and bear more than a glancing resemblance to real Martian scenes imaged by probes and rovers. And Manatee gives a fine performance of a genuine hero, given to moments of despair and self-doubt, but resourceful, thoughtful and likeable, determined to make a go of it even though there appears to be no hope of rescue.

Draper and Dan McReady (Adam West) are surveying Mars from orbit when their spacecraft is fatally damaged by an encounter with an erratic planetoid. They eject in separate escape capsules and crash-land in a harsh landscape where fireballs blow about like dust devils.  Draper survives, and discovers that although McReady was killed on impact, their pet monkey, Mona, is still alive. Like Crusoe he learns how to live off the land and create a bubble of civilisation in the midst of indifferently hostile nature; like Crusoe, his idyll is interrupted by a violent intrusion, in this case aliens who have come to Mars to mine minerals using slave labour. But while the film's realism is ruptured by the appearance of alien ships equipped with rock-blasting ray guns, it doesn't turn into a pulp shoot-out or a crude assertion of human superiority, but becomes something much more interesting.

One of the slaves (Victor Lundin, in Biblical Egyptian wig, loincloth and sandals) escapes; Draper christens him Friday and removes his shackles; they strike up an alliance that, despite their complete lack of any common language, soon turns into deep friendship, rather than the master-servant relationship of Defoe's original. Draper is very much an American hero, a Navy astronaut who hangs the Stars and Stripes outside the entrance to his cave shelter and plays Yankee Doodle Dandy on a home-made flute, but he doesn't attempt to imprint his own values on Friday, and although he's equipped with a revolver he never resorts to violence, and learns that the key to survival is cooperation and trust. Like the Apollo astronauts, he comes in peace, for all mankind: a useful reminder that not all science fiction stories need to be resolved by gunplay and spectacular explosions, but can aspire to something more adult, more human.

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There Are Doors (19)

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New Maps Of Heaven

So now Mercury, the last unmapped planet, has been completely surveyed by the Messenger robot spacecraft (how I love being able to type those last two words in a nonfiction sentence). Mercury’s geology is rich and varied, and there are unexpected caches of water ice in permanently shadowed polar craters, but there are no traces of ancient civilisation, no monoliths, no monsters. There are still plenty of places that haven’t been surveyed - most of the asteroid belt and all of the Kuiper belt, for instance, and the Pluto system (although New Horizons is on course for a flyby in 2015) - but the known is inexorably rolling out across what were once blank spaces where monsters of the imagination could freely roam. The canals of Mars are no more. There are no dripping wet jungles on Venus; no dinosaurs. What is a science-fiction writer to do?

Well, you can refuse reality, of course. You can cast your story into the dark backward and abyss of time, as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett did, on ancient diluvian Mars. You can transplant them onto exotic exoplanets. Or you can simply ignore the facts of the case, as I’ve just done for my contribution to an anthology of stories about the Old Venus, for editors George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois. Or you can try to square up to reality, and deal with the real Solar System, which turns out to be far more dynamic and varied than we once thought. There are volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io; methane rain, rivers and lakes, and vast dunes of frozen hydrocarbons, on Saturn’s Titan. Geysers of water ice erupting from the south pole of Saturn’s Enceladus, and geysers of nitrogen snow on Neptune’s Triton.

And there are also places in the Solar System that resist mapping: the pocket seas that power Enceladus’s geysers, or the world-girdling oceans beneath the surfaces of Europa, Callisto, Titan, Triton, and perhaps even Pluto. Where monsters weirder than anything we can imagine might plough the dark currents. Or where some strange microbial ecosystem might flourish, as in the caves beneath the Nullarbor Plain of Australia, or perhaps in sealed Antarctic lakes.

For where once we dreamed of intelligences greater than ours scrutinizing our affairs, or of ethereal crystalline cities, we now can only hope for some pocket of extremophile bacteria in a warm damp stratum of Martian rock. But while reality has overwritten the old tropes, there new kinds of stories than can be told. Stories that make use of the actual maps, the actual landscapes. What would it be like to stand on a wrinkle ridge on Saturn’s ice-clad moon Dione? What would it mean, to introduce a human scale, a human perspective? If you place a person in such a landscape, you must ask all kinds of questions. Who is she? How did she get there, and what is she doing? If she has made her home there, if she is not a Robinson Crusoe on Dione or Enceledus or Titan, you also have to ask questions about the society she inhabits, the way the people she lives amongst organise themselves. How do they survive in such inhospitable conditions. How does living there affect them? What are their dreams, their ambitions? What is ordinary life like, out there? What do we mean by ordinary, anyway? There’s something still unmapped.

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Incoming

"While the use of genetically engineered dolls in combat games in near-future Holland poses profound ethical questions, their liberated cousins threaten to alter the nature of human existence; on an artificial world beyond the edge of the Milky Way, one of the last humans triggers a revolution amongst alien races abandoned there by her ancestors; in the ocean of Europa, a hunter confronts a monster with its own agenda; in ‘The Two Dicks’, bestselling author Philip K. Dick has a life-changing meeting with President Nixon; while in ‘Cross Road Blues’ the fate of American history hinges on the career of an itinerant blues musician; and in the Sturgeon Award-winning novella ‘The Choice’, two young men make very different decisions about how they will come to terms with a world transformed by climate change and alien interference.

"Selected by the author himself from his output across over a quarter of a century, this landmark collection contains the very finest science fiction stories by one of Britain’s foremost masters of the genre. From sharply satirical alternate histories to explorations of the outer edges of biotechnology, from tales of extravagant far futures to visions of the transformative challenges of deep space, they showcase the reach and restless intelligence of a writer Publishers Weekly has praised as being ‘one of the field’s finest practitioners’."

The terrific cover is by Jim Burns, illustrating my Quiet War story 'Sea Change, With Monsters.' 
 
It's scheduled to be published at the end of March (I'll be at Eastercon, signing copies), but you can preorder it from PS Publishing now. There will be a signed limited edition with extra stories, an autobiographical essay, and endpaper art by Jim Burns, too.

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Links 08/03/13

'Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia's Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual 'curtains' of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes.

The research team says this analysis shows that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

The research team says this analysis shows that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

'The research team says . . . that the organisms make up the Weebubbie cave slime community make their living in a very unusual way – by oxidizing ammonia in the salty cave water – and are completely independent of sunlight and ecosystems on the surface.'

Anyone interested in exobiology will have noticed that organisms able to live in salt-water rich in ammonia without any input from light-driven photosynthesis might be suited to conditions believed to be found in oceans beneath the surface of moons in the outer Solar System.  Astronomer Mike Brown has just posted a long, three-part description of research that suggests the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa is rich in salts subducted from the ocean known to exist beneath its surface, and that the chemistry of the leading hemisphere of the moon is further modified by sulphur that has been lofted into orbit by the volcanoes of Io:

'Ever wonder what it would taste like if you could lick the icy surface of Jupiter’s Europa? The answer may be that it would taste a lotlike that last mouthful of water that you accidentally drank when you wereswimming at the beach on your last vacation. Just don’t take too long of a taste. At nearly 300 degrees (F) below zero your tongue will stick fast.'

A shorter take on the significance of the work can be found here: basically, Europa's ocean may closely resemble the salty oceans of Earth.

Back on Earth, Russian scientists have discovered life in the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica. Permanently capped by ice four miles thick, isolated from any inputs from the surface for up to 15 million years, the lake appears to harbour bacterial life new to science.

'Preliminary analysis of water samples collected from the lake revealed a species of bacteria not belonging to any known subkingdoms."We call it unidentified and 'unclassified' life," the team's leader, Sergei Bulat of the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, told Russian news agency RIA Novosti. The bacteria's DNA was less than 86% similar to known bacterial DNA, indicating that it was a new species, Bulat said.'

[Edit 10/03/13 The  head of the genetics laboratory that's studying the samples has issued a swift rebuttal stating that the 'unknown organisms' are in fact lab contaminants.]

Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia's Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual 'curtains' of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-strange-alien-slime-beneath-nullarbor.html#jCp

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Life

Where is the clear story line? Who am I supposed to identify with? Why are these characters so inconsistent? Where are the sympathetic characters? Why is the world-building so . . . random? What's the theme? What are the stakes? What's the idea? Why did it end so abruptly? Did anyone learn anything?

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Links 01/03/13

'Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able todetect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical studyof Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detectoxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-likeplanet orbiting a Sun-like star.'  White dwarfs continue to radiate for a long time. Any Earth-like planet orbiting one could be very, very old...

Helicoprion, a shark from the early Permian with a single spiral tooth, shaped like a buzzsaw.

Remote sensing in rats.  'It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg.  But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.'

'I sometimes wonder if the success of books such as Twilight and Fifty Shades is itself a form of mass PTSD or Stockholm syndrome—a reaction to the ubiquity of violence against women and to the way in which stories of sexual violence, real or feigned, have become a culturally accepted form of entertainment; and a reaction to the often intolerable pressures of living in a world where power is still mostly in the hands of men.'  Elizabeth Hand on women in fiction who fight back.

Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-future-evidence-extraterrestrial-life-dying.html#jCp

Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-future-evidence-extraterrestrial-life-dying.html#jCp

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