“For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything had to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing”. Writing is more about destroying than creating.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle
Friday, 9 March 2012
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
I've mentioned before that when I was a practising research scientist I investigated symbioses between animals and unicellular algae, and my chief experimental organism was the humble green hydra. It's a freshwater coelenterate (a relative of jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals, which use specialised stinging cells, cnidocytes, to catch prey and to defend themselves and move about) that's easy to culture in the laboratory and reproduces by asexual budding, so in a relatively short time the researcher can grow up a large, cloned population (hydras can also reproduce sexually, but if they are kept in constant conditions it's a rare event). It's also a wonderfully simple animal, with just two cell layers separated by an acellular mesoglea, a mouth ringed by tentacles at one end, and a foot, or pedicule, at the other, which adheres to the substrate. There are relatively few types of cells, a simple nerve net, and that's about it. So it's a useful lab model not only in the investigation of symbioses, but in all kinds of developmental studies, too.
Here's one of the most recent, and most interesting. Researchers using a non-symbiotic species of hydra have discovered that its stinging cells exhibited a sensitivity to light - they are more likely to fire at low levels of light or in darkness, while bright light actually inhibits their firing. That's interesting in its own right - hydra prey on water fleas and other small swimming animals, whose activity may correlate with the activity of the hydras' stinging cells. But there's more. That activity is regulated by a species of light-sensitive chemical, opsin, which is also found in the visual systems of higher animals, including mammals. So although hydras don't have physical structures analogous to eyes, they are photosensitive, and that photosensitivity is regulated by a chemical that has a very similar function in the human eye. The 'eye' of the common ancestor of hydras and the eyes of higher animals (fish, fowl, mammals, us) share a common pathway.
Parenthetically, it would be fun to examine to role of opsin in the behaviour of green hydra, which will migrate towards a bright light shone in one corner of their culture dish, presumably to maximise the photosynthetic output of their symbiotic algae. It might also be interesting to discover if green hydra's feeding behaviour is diurnal, or if it is just as active feeding by day as at dusk, or night (the polyps of reef-forming corals seems to photosynthesise by day and feed by night, getting the best of both being a plant and a predator).
There's also an important evolutionary angle, as one of the researchers, Professor Todd Oakley, points out: "What good is half an eye? Even without eyes there are other functions for light sensitivity that we may not be thinking of."
This is precisely the problem that Charles Darwin raised in On The Origin of the Species, in a sentence that's often quoted by opponents of evolutionary theory:
Here's one of the most recent, and most interesting. Researchers using a non-symbiotic species of hydra have discovered that its stinging cells exhibited a sensitivity to light - they are more likely to fire at low levels of light or in darkness, while bright light actually inhibits their firing. That's interesting in its own right - hydra prey on water fleas and other small swimming animals, whose activity may correlate with the activity of the hydras' stinging cells. But there's more. That activity is regulated by a species of light-sensitive chemical, opsin, which is also found in the visual systems of higher animals, including mammals. So although hydras don't have physical structures analogous to eyes, they are photosensitive, and that photosensitivity is regulated by a chemical that has a very similar function in the human eye. The 'eye' of the common ancestor of hydras and the eyes of higher animals (fish, fowl, mammals, us) share a common pathway.
Parenthetically, it would be fun to examine to role of opsin in the behaviour of green hydra, which will migrate towards a bright light shone in one corner of their culture dish, presumably to maximise the photosynthetic output of their symbiotic algae. It might also be interesting to discover if green hydra's feeding behaviour is diurnal, or if it is just as active feeding by day as at dusk, or night (the polyps of reef-forming corals seems to photosynthesise by day and feed by night, getting the best of both being a plant and a predator).
There's also an important evolutionary angle, as one of the researchers, Professor Todd Oakley, points out: "What good is half an eye? Even without eyes there are other functions for light sensitivity that we may not be thinking of."
This is precisely the problem that Charles Darwin raised in On The Origin of the Species, in a sentence that's often quoted by opponents of evolutionary theory:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
Darwin went on to say (and this is the bit that his opponents often miss out):
When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.On The Origin of the Species, 6th Edition, Chapter 6
Darwin goes on to describe examples of possible transitional forms. The photosensitive 'eye' of the hydra is one such, and may help us understand 'how a nerve comes to be sensitive to light', one of the first steps in the evolution of the complex mechanism that is helping you read this.
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Fiction about the near future, as many people have noted, is most often like a funhouse mirror of the present. It distorts and exaggerates our current fears and preoccupations; it takes current trends and pushes them as far as they'll go without breaking down into incoherence. It's science fiction in its most purely satirical mode. Like costume drama films, it contains the fingerprints of the time in which it was composed. It doesn't go out of date; it loses context. It's also becoming more and more difficult to do, as the present increasingly becomes its own self-engulfing parody.
Fiction about the far future, on the other hand, digs deep into the past. Given all the problems of attempting to predict the near-future - black swans, non-linear dynamics, the law of unintended consequences - it certainly makes no sense in consciously trying to project any part of the present on to the far future. Instead, writers suggest that archetypal human narratives and historical principles will survive every kind of technological change, and reappear in different forms. James Blish's Cities in Flight series, for instance, is underpinned by the theories of Otto Spengler. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series was inspired by Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Frank Herbert's Dune and Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun are different takes on Messianic figures. Old-school space opera, with its palaces and empires, its sword-wielding heroes and princesses, echo Hollywood's romance with medieval history. And so on, and so forth. Like fantasy, the narratives of far-future science fiction are shaped by patterns of Story. Unless you believe, like those who champion the technological Singularity (aka Rise of the Machines, or the Rapture of the Nerds), that the far future lies on the other side of an intellectual event horizon. That the far future will not only be impossible to predict, but also impossible to comprehend. That it is an end to Story and the heat death of science fiction, and we cannot utter a single syllable about what follows. But where's the fun in that?
Fiction about the far future, on the other hand, digs deep into the past. Given all the problems of attempting to predict the near-future - black swans, non-linear dynamics, the law of unintended consequences - it certainly makes no sense in consciously trying to project any part of the present on to the far future. Instead, writers suggest that archetypal human narratives and historical principles will survive every kind of technological change, and reappear in different forms. James Blish's Cities in Flight series, for instance, is underpinned by the theories of Otto Spengler. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series was inspired by Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Frank Herbert's Dune and Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun are different takes on Messianic figures. Old-school space opera, with its palaces and empires, its sword-wielding heroes and princesses, echo Hollywood's romance with medieval history. And so on, and so forth. Like fantasy, the narratives of far-future science fiction are shaped by patterns of Story. Unless you believe, like those who champion the technological Singularity (aka Rise of the Machines, or the Rapture of the Nerds), that the far future lies on the other side of an intellectual event horizon. That the far future will not only be impossible to predict, but also impossible to comprehend. That it is an end to Story and the heat death of science fiction, and we cannot utter a single syllable about what follows. But where's the fun in that?
Sunday, 26 February 2012
This brilliantly simple graphic by Adam Grossman neatly illustrates how the scale of human achievement is dwarfed by the size of the galaxy. We've been emitting radio transmissions for about a century now, and since they travel at the speed of light, the very first transmissions have reached a theoretical distance of one hundred light years from the Sun. (As Emily Lakdawalla points out in the Planetary Society blogpost where I first found the graphic, the inverse square law means that those transmissions would be so incredibly attenuated as to be undetectable except by the magic of advanced alien technology.) This means that all of the transmissions to date are contained within a sphere of two hundred light years' diameter. The graphic shows just how small that is, compared to the size of the Galaxy - if you click to embiggen the image, you'll see that a little blue dot in the centre of the enlarged square: that's us, that's as far as we've reached out.
Space opera's central conceit is to imagine that human influence can extent across the entire breadth of the Galaxy. Across billions of stars, and about 120,000 light years. And cosmology operas imagine that humanity can influence the billions of galaxies beyond our own, the fate of the observable universe, and even multiverses beyond that. Which is why, of course, breaking or getting around the Einsteinian lightspeed barrier is such a common trope, in space opera. While some writers - Alastair Reynolds springs to mind - have cleverly incorporated the long spans of time required to traverse interstellar distances at sublight speeds into their plots, they usually (as far as I'm aware), limit themselves to so-called near-space. Conventionally, that isn't much bigger than the volume of the little blue dot. That image really brings home why it's so necessary to break the speed limit if you're going to have any kind of comprehensible galaxy-spanning plot, and introduce human dramas to the galaxy's vast stage.
Friday, 17 February 2012
Way back in the 1990s, when I had a day job, I used to do research into plant/animal symbioses, and taught, amongst others things, an advanced course in symbiosis. All eukyarotic organisms are the products of at least one symbiotic event. The cells of animals, plants and fungi contain mitochondria, organelles that are, amongst other things, the source of most cellular chemical energy. Mitochondria were once independent organisms, probably related to Proteobacteria, which entered into an endosymbiosis with the ancestor of eukaryotes - one of the defining steps in the evolution of life on Earth.
In addition to mitochondria, cells of algae and green plants also contain plastids, the organelles responsible for photosynthesis. These, too, were once independent organisms, and now researchers believe they have identified the host and symbiont that are the ancestors of all species of algae and plants. It's a hugely exciting piece of work, with equally huge implications. DNA sequencing shows that the plastid of a species of glaucophyte, a small group of obscure, microscopic blue-green algae, retains genes associated with early cyanobacteria, the photosynthetic bacteria from which plastids are believed to have evolved. Comparison with the gene maps of a variety of plastids suggests not only that all algae and plants evolved from a single symbiotic event, but also that another organism was involved: 'the DNA includes genes similar to those from ancient bacteria similar to the Chlamydiae bacteria.' If the hypothesis is correct, the bacteria (which were probably some kind of parasite) have all but vanished, leaving only a few of their genes in plastids, a little like words from the languages of long-vanished civilisations that live on in English and other modern languages. It isn't a unique phenomenon - one of the more unexpected results of the human genome project was the discovery that genes from retroviruses make up something like 8 per cent of the human genome. We are the expression of texts from many sources.
In addition to mitochondria, cells of algae and green plants also contain plastids, the organelles responsible for photosynthesis. These, too, were once independent organisms, and now researchers believe they have identified the host and symbiont that are the ancestors of all species of algae and plants. It's a hugely exciting piece of work, with equally huge implications. DNA sequencing shows that the plastid of a species of glaucophyte, a small group of obscure, microscopic blue-green algae, retains genes associated with early cyanobacteria, the photosynthetic bacteria from which plastids are believed to have evolved. Comparison with the gene maps of a variety of plastids suggests not only that all algae and plants evolved from a single symbiotic event, but also that another organism was involved: 'the DNA includes genes similar to those from ancient bacteria similar to the Chlamydiae bacteria.' If the hypothesis is correct, the bacteria (which were probably some kind of parasite) have all but vanished, leaving only a few of their genes in plastids, a little like words from the languages of long-vanished civilisations that live on in English and other modern languages. It isn't a unique phenomenon - one of the more unexpected results of the human genome project was the discovery that genes from retroviruses make up something like 8 per cent of the human genome. We are the expression of texts from many sources.
Friday, 10 February 2012
I'm digging deeper and deeper into the third draft of Evening's Empires, so apologies in advance if posting here gets a bit sparse. Like a variation of Zeno's paradox, the closer a novel gets to completion, the more of my time and brain it consumes.
I didn't stop writing when I went away last week for my first SFX Weekender, a huge gathering of fans of science-fiction TV series and films, and science-fiction in print. This was at Prestatyn, a small resort town in the north-west corner of Wales; specifically, at the Pontins holiday camp. It wasn't for the faint-hearted. There were at least 4000 fans in attendance, stretching the fairly basic facilities to near but not quite breaking point, forming Soviet-style queues for autographs and food, filling the huge arena where the main, media-related events were held, providing a very good showing at the panels where authors did their stuff. The median age seemed to be well below that at more traditional SF conventions, and the level of enthusiasm and energy was constantly high. There were previews of films, and writers of all kinds did their best to sell their new stuff (and there were some serious queues to get autographed books), but what struck me was a large part of that enthusiasm and energy was aimed at the past. At actors from TV shows long since ended, and films made before a good percentage of the attendees were born. It's something that's also evident at more traditional conventions, too. And inevitable, I suppose, given that most afficiendos are exposed at an early age, and are indelibly printed with the stuff they loved first. Like everything else, the future is never what it once was.
What there wasn't, as someone else has pointed out, was some kind of chill-out space that might have provided a respite from the noise and crowds. Like the other authors, my timetable wasn't exactly crowded with events, and I spent a lot of time talking with old and new friends. It would have been nice to have had a space for conversation that wasn't a hundred-foot-long bar (there was a pub, but it was as crowded as everywhere else). Actually, there was a good quiet space, but it was off-site, at the hotel where I was staying - I decided to opt out of the complete Pontins experience. There was also a fantastically long and almost entirely deserted beach, butressed with impressive concrete fortifications to prevent erosion. A good place to walk and think - so good I stayed on an extra day, and missed the inevitable queues for coaches that replaced the railway service on Sunday, after the whole thing ended.
I didn't stop writing when I went away last week for my first SFX Weekender, a huge gathering of fans of science-fiction TV series and films, and science-fiction in print. This was at Prestatyn, a small resort town in the north-west corner of Wales; specifically, at the Pontins holiday camp. It wasn't for the faint-hearted. There were at least 4000 fans in attendance, stretching the fairly basic facilities to near but not quite breaking point, forming Soviet-style queues for autographs and food, filling the huge arena where the main, media-related events were held, providing a very good showing at the panels where authors did their stuff. The median age seemed to be well below that at more traditional SF conventions, and the level of enthusiasm and energy was constantly high. There were previews of films, and writers of all kinds did their best to sell their new stuff (and there were some serious queues to get autographed books), but what struck me was a large part of that enthusiasm and energy was aimed at the past. At actors from TV shows long since ended, and films made before a good percentage of the attendees were born. It's something that's also evident at more traditional conventions, too. And inevitable, I suppose, given that most afficiendos are exposed at an early age, and are indelibly printed with the stuff they loved first. Like everything else, the future is never what it once was.
What there wasn't, as someone else has pointed out, was some kind of chill-out space that might have provided a respite from the noise and crowds. Like the other authors, my timetable wasn't exactly crowded with events, and I spent a lot of time talking with old and new friends. It would have been nice to have had a space for conversation that wasn't a hundred-foot-long bar (there was a pub, but it was as crowded as everywhere else). Actually, there was a good quiet space, but it was off-site, at the hotel where I was staying - I decided to opt out of the complete Pontins experience. There was also a fantastically long and almost entirely deserted beach, butressed with impressive concrete fortifications to prevent erosion. A good place to walk and think - so good I stayed on an extra day, and missed the inevitable queues for coaches that replaced the railway service on Sunday, after the whole thing ended.
Monday, 6 February 2012
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