Limited

Using one of the lesser-known superpowers the jobbing author must develop - being able to reproduce my author's autograph as quickly and accurately as possible - I've just personalised the signing sheets for the limited edition of my new short story collection, A Very British History. Since it's a proper limited edition, it wasn't a tremendously onerous task: there were only a tad over 200 sheets to be inked.  Now all I need to do is pack them off to PS Publishing. The finished books should be available in a few weeks.

The illustration on the signature sheet is a close-up of part of Jim Burns's wonderful wrap-around cover.  The limited edition is slip-cased, with a separate volume containing two additional stories, ‘Searching for Van Gogh at the End of the World’ and ‘Karl and the Ogre’, and an autobiographical essay, 'My Secret Super Power.’  And if you don't want to splash out on a limited edition, some copies of the jacketed hardcover, containing 21 science fiction stories, from my beginnings in Interzone magazine back in the 1980s to 2011's award-winning 'The Choice', are still available.

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Links 26/04/13

'Over the past few years, advances in genetic technology have opened a window into the amazingly populous and powerful world of microbial life in and around the human body—the normal community of bacteria, fungi and viruses that makes up what scientists call the microbiome. It’s Big Science, involving vast international research partnerships, leading edge DNA sequencing technology and datasets on a scale to make supercomputers cringe. It also promises the biggest turnaround in medical thinking in 150 years, replacing the single-minded focus on microbes as the enemy with a broader view that they are also our essential allies.'

 Insects Au Gratin - 3-D printed food made from ground, edible insects.

Scientists have barcoded ants to monitor their career choices.

A sea anemone starts swimming to escape a starfish:

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Jackson's Reef

Jackson’s Reef was a froth of bubble habitats wrapped around a shaped sliver of rock some ten kilometres long. Half its volume was ravaged, open to vacuum; the rest had devolved to low-diversity, low-energy ecosystems dominated by tough, slow-growing chlorophytes, blue-green algae, and archaebacteria. There were hundreds of similar bodies within the Belt and beyond; Jackson’s Reef was distinguished from all the others by its eccentric, long-period orbit.

It had once been the centre of the Golden Mean, a kingdom of gardens and settlements in the outer belt that had flourished several centuries before the rise of the True Empire. When they’d been deposed by a vicious civil war, the last members of its ruling family had hastily converted their capital city into a multigeneration starship and aimed it at 61 Cygni, but its mass drivers had failed before it could acquire solar escape velocity. It had become trapped in a cometary orbit with a period of more than six hundred years, taking it out above the plane of the ecliptic and across the Kuiper belt to the edge of the Oort cloud before swinging back towards the sun. Its original inhabitants were either dead or long gone by the time it first returned to the Belt. A crew of rovers laid claim to it, tried and failed to revive its ruined biomes, abandoned the project. And now it was returning to the Belt for the second time, and Nabhomani and Nabhoj had devised a plan to strip out salvageable machinery and artifacts, and mine what was left of its ecosystem for useful biologics and unique genomes.

From Evening's Empires

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Links 19/04/13

You wait for a potentially Earth-like planet and two come along at once.  In the same system.

Fossilised iron-loving bacteria may contain the signature left by a supernova.

How do you clear space debris from Earth orbit?  With space harpoons, of course.

'There were once were two planets, new to the galaxy and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years ago, and took roughly the same shape. Both were blistered with volcanoes and etched with watercourses; both circled the same yellow dwarf star—close enough to be warmed by it, but not so close as to be blasted to a cinder. Had an alien astronomer swivelled his telescope toward them in those days, he might have found them equally promising—nurseries in the making. They were large enough to hold their gases close, swaddling themselves in atmosphere; small enough to stay solid, never swelling into gaseous giants. They were “Goldilocks planets,” our own astronomers would say: just right for life.'

 Russian enthusiasts may have spotted the Mars 3 lander in a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image.

 Nano space-suits for insects.

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A Day In The Life

Let me start by declaring an interest. A couple of decades ago, Kim Newman and I were touting an anthology of original stories to my then editor at Gollancz, the late, great Richard Evans. We had a potent weapon in our armoury: a submission by Ian R MacLeod, one of the best alternate history stories we'd ever read.  The anthology, In Dreams, was eventually published, and didn't do half as well as its contributors deserved, but now Ian MacLeod's story has found new life as a TV play in the second series of Sky Arts' Playhouse Presents...

It's 1991. John Lennon is fifty, living in a rented room in Birmingham, and at a new low point in his life.  He been forced to take up menial work by his local Job Centre, and his nemesis, the Beatles, are about to start a Greatest Hits tour ('obviously the solo careers are up the kazoo again'). Forever known as the guy who left the Beatles (during a blazing row in 1962, over whether or not they should cover Gerry and the Pacemaker's 'How Do You Do It'), history has rolled on without him. The Beatles never were toppermost of the poppermost, and Lennon is on his uppers, licking envelopes for a living, sustained by roll-up fags and his sarcastic wit, struggling to stay out of the clutches of the Snodgrasses, with their suburban bungalows and 2.4 children, their yuppie phones, and their dead imaginations.

Adapted by David Quantick, it's a marvellous piece of ventriloquism, a poignant, funny, surrealistic commentary on the struggle against conformity, and regret for the life not lived, the consequences of a moment and a choice made long ago. Ian Hart, who played the young Lennon in Backbeat and The Hours and Times, perfectly captures the voice and vulnerable defiance of an aging Lennon who never was, a man out of time; Martin Carr provides musical cues from the Beatles' alternate career; David Blair's direction jigsaws warmly-lit snippets from the past into the cold blue present. It's a story in which nothing really happens, yet it closes on a marvellous moment of affirmation. It's one of the best science fiction dramas you're likely to see this year.

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It Was Twenty-Five Years Ago Today....

My first novel, published as a paperback original in the US by Del Rey, in 1988. Still in print, in the UK at least.

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Oblivion

The moon has been shattered by vicious alien invaders, the Scavengers, and Earth has been ruined by the all-out nuclear war that defeated them.  Most of the surviving human beings have decamped for Saturn's moon, Titan.  Only a small clean-up crew is left behind, using drones to defend massive machines that process seawater into fusion fuel from the roving remnants of the Scavenger army.  Jack (Tom Cruise) is a drone repairman, assisted by his partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) and mission controller Sally (Melissa Leo).  Both Jack and Victoria have had their memories wiped as a security precaution, but Jack is increasingly troubled by dreams of life on Earth before the Scavengers came . . .

If that sounds like an over-elaborate and implausible set up (how did the human race manage to build huge machines and initiate a deep-space colonisation programme after an apocalyptic war? why leave Earth in the first place? why Titan, of all places? why drain Earth's oceans for fusion fuel when most of the moons of Saturn are mostly water?), that's because it really is a set up.  After rescuing the pilot of a crashed spacecraft (Olga Kurylenko), Jack begins to uncover the truth - which is, unfortunately, only slightly less implausible than the cover story, owes a big debt to Philip K. Dick and a bunch of SF films I won't mention because spoilers, and is full of the usual logic holes that allow for heroic gestures and explosions.

Still, the ruin porn of the devastated Earth is lovely to look at, especially on an IMAX screen, and while the story slowly unfolds you can pass the time spotting homages and allusions to Wall-E, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others.  And even though it devolves into a derivative, two-fisted actioner and gives neither Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman enough to do, it is at least a widescreen SF film that is knowingly SF.  What a shame that, like so many big budget SF shoot-em-ups, it lost its sense of humour somewhere in the production process.

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Links 05/04/13

Beats piping: 'Telepathic control of another person's body is a small step closer. By linking the technologies of two brain/computer interfaces, human volunteers were able to trigger movement in a rat's tail using their minds.'

'Researchers in Japan used MRI scans to reveal the images that people were seeing as they entered into an early stage of sleep.' 60% certain that those things you're counting are sheep.

Possible bad news for the search for signs of life on Mars: 'Wind, not water, deposited most of the sediments in the layered Martian mountain NASA's Curiosity rover was sent to study, suggests an analysis of observations from orbit. If the rover confirms this scenario when it reaches the mountain next year, it could spell trouble for its chances of finding organic material there.'


Possible good news for the search for signs of life on Titan: 'A laboratory experiment at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., simulating the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan suggests complex organic chemistry that could eventually lead to the building blocks of life extends lower in the atmosphere than previously thought.'

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Evening's Empires Cover

A dramatic interpretation by Sidonie Beresford-Browne. Yes, that's Vesta, in the foreground. The novel is due to be published on July 18th.

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