Perspective

Earth from the cupola of the ISS.

Earth from the Moon

Earth and the Moon, acquired by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter while in orbit around Mars, at a distance of 142 million kilometres.

Earth from the surface of Mars, acquired by the Spirit rover.

Earth from Saturn, acquired by the Cassini orbiter, at a distance of more than one billion kilometres.

Earth from the edge of the Solar System, acquired by Voyager 1, at a distance of more than 6000 million kilometres.

'That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. ' Carl Sagan

Read More

Something Just Happened

'How nice,' Peter Handke remarks, in an interview with Die Zeit, 'literature would be without all of these journalistic, family and society novels . . . Eruptions are needed, a controlled letting go, not this prescription-like writing.' And in a limpid essay in The New York Times, Haruki Murakami suggests that neorealistic literature - the novelist as chronicler of the age, providing a tidy, humanised view of a big picture his readers can all agree on - has had its day. Things have changed, hinging on two events. One hopeful: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the swift crumbling of the Soviet empire. One dreadful: the fall of the two towers on September 11 2001.

These two acts of destruction, which played out on either side of the millennial turning point with such vastly different momentum in each case, appear to have combined into a single pair that greatly transformed our mentality . . .

Let’s call the world we actually have now Reality A and the world that we might have had if 9/11 had never happened Reality B. Then we can’t help but notice that the world of Reality B appears to be realer and more rational than the world of Reality A. To put it in different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not “chaos”?

What kind of meaning can fiction have in an age like this? What kind of purpose can it serve? In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?

Asking how novelists should respond to this - as they must, or else fall silent or become irrelevant - Murakami observes that his kind of fiction, the kind once called (amongst other things) magical realism, the kind which doesn't always faithfully follow the tramlines of known reality, is now no longer an -ism. It isn't off to the side. It's part of the main event.

As a science-fiction writer, I find Murakami's ideas incredibly interesting. And hopeful. Or rather, potentially hopeful. For something similar should have happened to science fiction, shouldn't it? After all, catastrophes and sudden shifts in perception are part of its stock in trade. But instead of confronting Reality A, the genre has, in the first decade of the 21st century, too often turned to its own comforting version of Reality B: retreating into pleasant little pulpish daydreams in which starships still effortlessly span a galaxy where a guy can turn a profit, or where technology is as controllable as clockwork and the actions of individuals can still make a mark on history. Meanwhile, they grumble, 'mainstream' writers are grabbing ideas from the genre and doing terrible things to them without acknowledging the source. As if permission could be somehow given, or withheld.

I prefer the point of view of William Gibson, who has pointed out that the only way to tackle the place we're in now is to use the science-fiction toolkit - the tropes, images and metaphor developed from the crude flint hammers of pulp by decades of cooperative effort and argument. If other writers are using the science-fiction toolkit to evolve new kinds of stories in the present's different air, that's exactly what we should be doing, too. Forget the past. Especially the pasts of all those great glorious science-fiction futures, lost when it all changed. Look again at the future. Embrace change. Let go. If only. If only.

Read More

SF v. the Reality Lords

From Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, a footnote that nails the dichotomy between 'mainstream' literature and SF:

The conventional high-culture repudiation of SF - its stigmatization of the purely formulaic (which reflects the original sin of the form in its origin in the pulps), complaints about the absence of complex and psychologically "interesting" characters (a position which does not seem to have kept pace with the postcontemporary crisis of the "centred subject"), a yearning for original literary styles which ignores the stylistic variations of modern SF (as Philip K. Dick's defamiliarization of spoken American) - is probably not a matter of personal taste, nor is it to be addressed by way of purely aesthetic arguments, such as the attempt to assimilate selected SF works to the canon as such. We must here identify a kind of generic revulsion, in which this form and narrative discourse is the object of psychic resistance as a whole and the target of a kind of literary "reality principle". For such readers, in other words, the Bourdieu-style rationalizations which rescue high literary forms from the guilty associations on unproductiveness and sheer diversion and which endow them with socially acknowledged justification, are here absent.

In other words, attempts to appeal to the gatekeepers of the high literary citadel by pointing out that SF is firmly rooted in the present, that it extrapolates and amplifies current nightmares and obsessions, or that it explores alternate social structure through utopian or dystopian constructions, are, even though valid, pointless. Not only because there's no chance of success, but also because who wants the career arc of archetypal neorealists like Ian McEwan (from supple postmodern fabulist to shuttered reactionary self-crucified by the iron nails of didactic social realism and (again, from Jameson) "the great empiricist maxim, nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses")? Better to turn away from that and address the great luminous question that SF should make its own: what do you mean by reality, anyway?

Read More

The Cafe Wall Illusion

Back at the end of the 1970s, when I was finishing my PhD at Bristol University, the exterior of a cafe close to the university had a black and white tile decoration that gave the illusion of being distorted from the true. One of Professor Richard Gregory's research team spotted it, and it became the subject of a famous paper, Border Locking and the Cafe Wall Illusion.

Just recently, I noticed that a local barbershop had been given a makeover, which included tiling that nicely shows the wedge distortion of the cafe wall illusion:




In their paper, Gregory et al described experiments which locked down the parameters that evoked the illusion, and proposed a model, border-locking theory, that suggested the functional mechanisms in the human eye that generated it. A nice example of how observation of something unusual in the everyday and close examination and dissection of what it is and how it works can uncover an underlying fundamental truth. Science in action!

Read More

ET v. Shadow Life

A media advisory note posted by NASA yesterday about a news conference 'to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life' loosed the cats of speculation on the pigeons of improbability. Had NASA received a signal from passing ETs? Spotted signs of life on an exoplanet? Discovered that some kind of photosynthetic process was depleting hydrogen, acetylene and ethane in Titan's atmosphere? Found a fossil on Mars? Calmer voices, having checked out the research pedigrees of the scientists involved, suggested something more Earth-bound, but potentially very exciting: the discovery of microoorganisms with an alternative, arsenic-based metabolism: hints at a shadow biosphere.

Why is this important? Well, because they are neighbours in the periodic table, arsenic shares many chemical properties as phosphorous, and phosphorous is an essential element for life as we know it: amongst other things, it is at the heart of molecules that store and transfer energy, and helps to form the backbone of RNA and DNA. Arsenic is a poison to many organisms because it interferes with phosphorous biochemistry, but although the bonds it forms are weaker, it could also substitute for phosphorous; in other words, there may be organisms with biochemistries based on arsenic rather than phosphorous, forming a shadow biosphere in parallel with our own. Several of the scientists mentioned in NASA's note have been searching for signatures of that shadow biosphere like that, in places like Mono Lake, California, which have higher than average concentrations of arsenic. If they've found evidence for it, there are all kinds of implications, not least that life may have evolved more than once on Earth. And that's genuinely exciting.

By the way, I published a short story about searching for a shadow biosphere last year. 'Shadow Life' is still online, at Discover magazine's site. Read it now, before science overtakes it tomorrow!

Read More

Epigraph

Man has only one life, and must live it so that he does not recall with pain and regret the aimless lost years, and does not blush with shame over his mean and trivial past, so that when he dies he can say, ‘All my life has been devoted to the struggle for the liberation of mankind.’
Nikolai Ostrovsky: How the Steel Was Tempered

Read More

Quant insuff.

John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, is an entertaining account of the economic crash that uses farce as its narrative model and, for the economically-illiterate (most of us), unriddles those mysterious instruments (CDOs, CDSs, SPVs, junk bonds, sub-prime mortgages) used by finance industry's Masters of the Universe to create what appeared to be a casino filled with fruit machines that spewed a jackpot at every tug of the handle. I don't buy into his theory that it all started with the collapse of communism, which freed the West of the need to emulate communism's cradle-to-grave care and let loose unbridled libertarian capitalism, but it's an interesting thesis that would make a good SF story (Gardens of the Sun is a somewhat similar story of triumphalist hubris trashed by nemesis, but required the unity of a despotic government to work). But his dissection of the root cause of the crash is masterly. Briefly, it was caused by underestimation of risk, because of overreliance on equations devised by the clever maths PhDs (quants) hired by the banks. The quants devised nice, tidy equations which they applied without taking into account of the real world's messiness, and the inability of most people to make rational assessments of risk:

Most of this exemplifies what I would argue is the most common mistake of very smart people: the assumption that other people's minds work in the same way theirs do. To non-exonomists, the mathematically based models and assumptions of rational conduct which permeate the field often have the appearance at best of toys, entertaining but by definition of limited utility; at worst, they can seem wilful delusions, determinedly ignoring reality.

Gosh, Lanchester could be talking about science fiction - the Analog school of storytelling that irritates the hell out of me with its childish just-so logic; the armchair critics who complain that characters don't behave logically or consistently while failing to notice, all around them, the blooming, buzzing confusion of ordinary life.

Read More