Extras

Little, Brown have announced that they're piloting eBook versions of certain novels with DVD-style extras. Some interesting ideas, but I feel they really don't go far enough. How about:

A 4000-hour long Andy Warhol style documentary showing the author's hands, typing out the novel.

A commentary track featuring author and editor.

Every draft of the novel.

A version of the novel in which every other word is redacted.

A Georges Perec remix in which every word containing the letter e is replaced with an equivalent.

A version of the novel which is twice as long, but contains nothing new or extra.

A version of the novel annotated with emoticons.

Video clips in which the people on which the characters are based explain what they would have really done.

Links to live video feeds from locations in the novel.

A mashup in which the novel's characters are replaced by characters from Pride and Prejudice.

The author's tax returns.

A map of the author's study.

All the material that ends up at the bottom of word-processing drafts (I believe Nicholson Baker actually did this).

A list of every book and newspaper and magazine article the author read during the period of composition, and URLs for every website visited.

A list of everything the author ate and drank during the period of composition.

The possibilities are endless!

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It's All About Me

Well, not quite. The shortlist for the John W Campbell Memorial Award has been announced, and I'm very pleased to find that Gardens of the Sun is included. I have no chance of winning against some very impressive competition, but it's a honour, and all that.

I was asked to write about my favourite space opera novels and series; the results are here, along with some other great picks.

And in the mail today, Infinivox's spoken-word anthology The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction, which includes my story 'Crimes and Glory'.

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Reverse Alchemy

Despite the ex cathedera tone of someone looking down from the heights of literature on the swampy plain of 'commercial fiction', Philip Reeve's diatribe against steampunk nails the abiding sin of all genres - too often the golden coin of originality is turned into a ton of commercial tin.

EDIT: Diatribe deleted on Reeve's site but still available here.

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Ice and Fire

It's pretty much a golden age for exobiologists. Once the preserve of cranks, science fiction writers and supermarket tabloids, the search for evidence of life on other planets is may still be based on speculation and extrapolation rather than actual hard evidence, but it's now a sober and respectable area of legimate scientific research, covered soberly and respectfully in popular science magazines and broadsheet newspapers.

Latest headlines concern findings by the Cassini spacecraft: it seems that not only is hydrogen in Titan's atmosphere flowing down to the moon's surface and disappearing, but there's a distinct lack of acetylene at the surface, too; acetylene should be formed from methane and ethane and snow out onto the surface, but so far it hasn't been detected. Most likely, the disappearance of hydrogen and low levels of acetylene are due to some kind of catalytic chemical process, but exobiologists have pointed out that it could be the signature of some form of biological activity. The surface of Titan is far too cold to support any form of life that uses water as a solvent, but there's abundant liquid methane and ethane, which rains out of the atmosphere, carves rivers into the surface, and forms lakes and seas. Acetylene would be the best energy source for life based on liquid methane, which would consume hydrogen much as we consume oxygen. Right now, on Titan, some frigid, curious slime mould could be edging its way with infinite patience across a pebbly beach towards the Huygens lander, wondering if it's evidence for life above the eternal clouds.

Jupiter's moon Io is one the least likely venues for life in the Solar System. Although it's only a little larger than Earth's moon, it exhibits extremes of geological activity. Tidal effects stretch and flex its crust, and the resulting friction generates enough heat to power volcanoes that spew molten sulphur at temperatures of over 1600 degrees Centigrade. Areas between the volcanoes are covered with sulphur dioxide snow chilled to -130 degrees C, almost all water has long ago been driven off, and besides all that, it's drenched in Jupiter's radiation fields. But astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch has pointed out that Io would have possessed plenty of water when it first formed, and if life arose before the water was blasted away by Jupiter's radiation, it could have retreated underground, into rocks or even lava tubes, which would provide protection from radiation and conserve and moisture and nutrients (and would be ideal homes for any intrepid human colonists).

It's unlikely, but not impossible. Extremophile bacteria, the poster children of exobiology, exploit all kinds of forbidding niches on Earth, from hydrothermal vents to Antarctic dry valleys, and lithotrophic extremophiles extend the biosphere deep into the Earth's crust, obtaining energy from all kinds of organic and inorganic sources. The oddest example is Desulfurodis audaxviator, discovered in 2008 deep in a South African gold mine. It survives without light or oxygen, using energy generated by the radioactive decay of uranium and other elements in the surrounding rock to drive its thrifty metabolism. When you contemplate this microscopic, one-species, completely self-sufficient ecosystem, life on Io or Titan doesn't seem so unlikely after all.

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O Brave New World

Surfacing from working on the ongoing (about halfway through the second draft, killing my darlings like there's no tomorrow), here's the cover for the UK mass-market paperback of Gardens of the Sun. It isn't published until August, but you can preorder it right now. The artwork is by the terrific space artist Don Dixon - how great is that? You can see the original here, and do check out everything else too, while you're there. It shows Uranus from the surface of Miranda, its strangest moon - and one of the strangest moons in the Solar System (which is saying a lot). From the novel:

Most of Uranus’s thirty-plus moons were small chunks of ice or carbonaceous material. One group orbited just outside the outer edge of the ring system; another occupied distant and irregular orbits, wanderers captured by Uranus’s gravitational field. And between these two shoals of tiny moons were five massive enough to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium, contracting into spheres under the force of their own gravitational fields. Four were much alike, balls of dirty ice wrapped around silicate cores, spattered with impact craters, dusted by dark materials flung outward by the chains of collisions that had created the ring system, fractured by varying degrees of ancient geological activity. But the smallest of the larger moons, Miranda, was not only the strangest of Uranus’s family of satellites, it was one of the strangest moons in the Solar System: a patchwork of cratered, banded and ridged terrains broken by mountainous ridges and monstrous fault canyons up to twenty kilometres deep, as if hammered together from pieces of half a dozen different bodies by some inept god who’d afterwards slashed and hacked at his botched creation in a fit of rage. An early theory about its formation suggested that it had been shattered several times by massive impacts and the larger fragments had randomly clumped together, exposing sections of the core in some places and sections of the original surface in others, but later research showed that its haphazard topography was the result of intense geological activity driven by tidal heating at a time in the deep past when it had possessed a far more eccentric orbit.

Stretched and kneaded every time it swung close around Uranus, Miranda had bubbled and blistered and cracked like a snowball wrapped around a hot coal. Eruptions of icy magma had flooded older terrain and created smooth plains. Coronae, huge domes edged with concentric patterns of ridges and grooves, had grown at the top of upwellings of warm ice that penetrated and deformed overlying strata. And after it had settled into its present orbit, it had cooled and frozen through and through. Its surface had contracted and tectonic activity had scored it with deep grabens formed by extensional faulting, while compressional strain had raised systems of ridges and valleys and thrown up escarpments several kilometres high.

This violent geological history had created a varied and chaotic moonscape that, patched with varied terrain, cut by the rifts and grooves of transition zones and gigantic scarps and grabens, provided a wealth of hiding places. The refugees elected to settle in the deep groove of a narrow chasm in the high northern latitudes, and put to work the two crews of construction robots they’d brought with them.

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Gnarl

A picture of men at work. Two astronauts (Michael Good on the left, Garret Reisman on the right) peek through the windows of the aft flight deck of the space shuttle Atlantis, before heading off to install batteries and other equipment to the exterior of the International Space Station. Your average everyday experience, in low Earth orbit (can you name, off the top of your head, every astronaut who has spacewalked? Can you even hazard a guess at the number?* We shouldn't be complacent about the amazingly difficult, dangerous and technically awesome feat of building and maintaining and space station. It's still not exactly a routine human experience, but we have been a space-going species for a couple of generations, now).

What I'm especially interested in are the controls in the foreground (check out the full-resolution photo here). Not just the clunky electromechanical switches and joystick, set in battleship-grey utilitarian panels, although it does remind us that Atlantis is 34 years old, built when prog rock and flares were still in fashion, and personal computers, mobile phones, iPads and cyberspace weren't even science fictional concepts; and here we are in the future, with spaceships designed forty-odd years ago just reaching retirement, and how science-fictional is that? No, what's especially interesting is the human clutter, the solutions to work-a-day problems. The patches of blue velcro stuck at intervals on every surface. The propelling pencil on the right, with its velcro collar. The two lab timers, with cryptic felt-pen identifying codes. The Post-it notes. The human clutter - the gnarl, the telling details that bring a scene alive. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to dinner with Al Reynolds and French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré, who flew two missions on the Mir space station. One detail especially sticks in my mind. The Russians sent up fresh food to their space station in automated Progress resupply vehicles; when the airlock was opened after the Progress vehicle had docked, the unbearably evocative smell of apples, of the planet Earth, filled the air.

[edit] *a list of spacewalking astronauts

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Composition

So right now I'm going backwards to go forwards with the second draft of the ongoing. Usually I like to press onward, ever onward, but I had a sudden blink of inspiration about the true nature of the kind of work one of the characters was doing before he became caught up in the plot, and rather than leave it until revision I unravelled an early chapter, dropped in a chunk of prose, and restitched it.

This is what happens when you don't spend a couple of months planning out a novel in every detail before writing it straight out. Which I understand is technically possible, but isn't for me. Much of the writing process in the first and second drafts is a process of discovery - or rather, a process of blundering about in a dark room, bumping into things while looking for a way out.

I do make lots of notes, actually, but usually ignore most of them because for me making notes is a Darwinian process of evolving and discarding possibilities. What's left for this project are lists of names, all kinds of notes and references on the evolution and structure of gas giants, brief portraits of various cities and odd little worldlets, and some chunks of the back stories of various characters that may or may not be threaded through the narrative. I also accumulate, like most writers who use word processors, a collection of sentences and paragraphs and entire scenes that drop below the fold.

She was still looking all around, drinking in fresh details in the view, when a second pod everted and the blunt triangle of the drone detached with a thump and flare of thrust that sent it flying away from the train.

At the same time, the child was attempting to make contact with the tutelary spirits of the river and forest. Her fantasy about the involvement of the river folk in the boy’s death had taken root and flourished.

Cactus skeleton. Fog spreads. Wonder at someone who can control weather.

And then he ducked away under the slanting barrel of the telescope and he was gone, and I could move again. The young woman beckoned to me, and I followed without thought or question through a doorway I had not noticed before, and found myself stumbling from the translation frame in the softly-lit room in the administration centre. The interview was over.

Sometimes it seems to me that what's left out is as important as what's left in.

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