Ave Aqua Vale

The whole floor of Mendeleev crater had fractured into blocks in the biggest quake ever recorded on the Moon, and lava had flooded up through dykes emplaced between the blocks. Lava vented from dykes beyond the crater rim, too, and flowed a long way, forming a new mare. Other vents appeared, setting off secondary quakes and long rock slides. The Moon shivered and shook uneasily, as if awakening from a long sleep.

Small teams were sent out to collect the old Rangers, Lunas, Surveyors, Lunokhods and descent stages of Apollo LEMs from the first wave of lunar exploration. Mike and I went out for a last time, to Mare Tranquillitatis, to the site of the first manned lunar landing.

When a permanent scientific presence had first been established on the Moon, there had been considerable debate about what to do with the sites of the Apollo landings and the various old robot probes and other debris scattered across the surface. There had been a serious proposal to dome the Apollo 11 site to protect it from damage by micrometeorites and to stop people swiping souvenirs, but even without protection it would last for millions of years, everyone on the Moon was tagged with global positioning sensors, so no one could go anywhere near it without being logged, and in the end the site had been left open.

We arrived a few hours after dawn. A big squat carrier rocket had gone ahead, landing two kilometres to the north, and the robots were already waiting. There were four of us: a historian from the Museum of Air and Space in Washington, a photographer, and Mike and me. As we loped forward, an automatic beacon on the common band warned us that we were trespassing on a UN heritage site, reciting the relevant penalties and repeating itself until the historian found it and turned it off. The angular platform of the lunar module’s descent stage sat at an angle; one of its spidery legs had collapsed after a recent quake focused near new volcanic cones to the south-east. It had been scorched by the rocket of the ascent stage, and the gold foil which had wrapped it was torn and tattered, white paint beneath turned tan by exposure to the sun’s raw ultraviolet. We lifted everything, working inwards toward the ascent stage: the Passive Seismometer and the Laser Ranging Retro reflector; the flag, its ordinary, wire-stiffened fabric faded and fragile; an assortment of discarded geology tools; human waste and food containers and wipes and other litter in crumbling jettison bags; the plaque with a message from a long-dead president. Before the descent stage was lifted away, a robot sawed away a chunk of dirt beside its ladder, the spot where the first human footprint had been made on the Moon. There was some dispute about which print was actually the first, so two square metres were carefully lifted. And at last the descent stage was carried off to the cargo rocket, and there was only a litter of cleated footprints left, our own overlaying Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s.

It was time to go.

From 'How We Lost The Moon, A True Story By Frank W. Allen'

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Nostalgia For The Future

In the 1960s, we were too impatient to wait for the future.  We had to have it now.  The Americans and the Russians were racing to the Moon.  In Britain, we had TSR-2 and Concorde, and in TV ads men in white coats sold us washing powder and alien robots sold us powdered instant mashed potato.  Even ice lollies were space-age ice lollies.  Not only was the Zoom lolly shaped like a rocket ship, with three differently-coloured stages, in 1963 or thereabouts a space-age card was secreted between lolly and wrapper.  I was just getting into science fiction, and was an avid follower of both the space race and Fireball XL5: I had to have a complete set of those cards.  It was one of the first of many obsessions.  I had little pocket money, and there are only so many ice-creams you can eat even when you're eight or nine, but I hit on a cunning plan.  We lived close to the village shop, and one day I noticed that someone had discarded not only a Zoom wrapper in the bin outside, but also the free space-age card.  After that, I checked that bin every day, braving angry wasps to peel open sugar-sticky wrappers in search of those precious cards.  I never did get the full set, but I sent away for the free album and carefully glued my collection inside.  It vanished long ago, and the row of cottage where I lived and that village shop have vanished too.  The future isn't what it once was, but what is?

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What I Did On My Holidays

Nothing much gets done in the publishing business, in August.  Editors and agents are out of town; authors who still retain any shred of common sense should take some time off too.  The populations of towns in the industrial heartlands used to relocate en mass to slightly sunnier, coastal towns for their summer holidays.  In Scotland, cities still have trades fortnights, when tradespeople all go on holiday at the same time.  August is the publishing industry's trade holiday.  Try to take time off in any other month, and a massive, and massively urgent, copy edit of that novel you submitted several months ago is liable to turn up just as you're packing your bags.

I clearly don't have any common sense.  I've just delivered a novel, but instead of relocating, I've stayed in town.  London in August is half-deserted.  Families have loaded up their people carriers and 4x4s and vanished beyond the M25, or entrained through the Channel Tunnel for France and Italy, Spain and Portugal.  Away from the centre of town, streets have the somnolent, dust-blown air of an earlier, car-free decade.  You can hear birdsong.  Nothing much moves.  Even the Olympics hasn't really disturbed the tranquillity.  It's my favourite time of year.

And besides I've been working.  Editing a collection of short stories for publication next year, and preparing for Kindle, with my co-author Kim Newman, our post-alien invasion novella, Prisoners of the Action. The terrific cover is by award-winning artist and make-up maven Dave Elsey, and for those of you who aren't on holiday, it's available now.

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Coming Soon

(Illustration by Dave Elsey)

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Housekeeping

Karyl drove ever westward, crossing the long trough of Palatine Linea and the southernmost edge of the bright frosts flung across half Dione’s globe in wispy swirling patterns by explosive venting from deep fractures, created when ammonia-water melted by residual heat in the lithosphere had intruded on pockets of methane and nitrogen clatherates. After ten days or so, he stopped at the garden habitat of the Fifer-Targ clan and was woken in the middle of the night: the ships of the Brazilian and European joint expedition were on the move, breaking orbit around Mimas and heading out for different moons. Members of the clan were packing and rounding up livestock, following a plan they’d worked up for just this eventuality, preparing to leave their big, tented habitat for shelters. They refused Karyl’s offer of help, so he wished them luck and left them to it and drove off. It was night out on the surface, too. The habitat had been built in short string of low craters created when several vent pits had collapsed, with all the lights switched on inside, its domes shone like a string of glass beads in the black moonscape under Saturn and the swathes of fixed stars, a target that dwindled behind Karyl and quickly sank below the horizon.

He picked his way across the moonscape by the mellow light of Saturnshine. He had suppressed the urge to call Dana and ask if she was all right. Maybe later he’d call her mother, who had been somewhat sympathetic to him. Right now, he needed to work out what he was going to do. He avoided roads and cut directly north-east, towards the southern end of Latium Chasma. One of his caches was tucked into the east wall of the chasma; he could pitch camp there and find out what was happening and figure things out. Wait things out for four or five weeks if he had to, or load up with supplies and follow the chasma’s long straight trough north, into the fractured labyrinth of Tibur Chasmata, where there were any number of hiding places.

(From 'Karyl's War'.)

An extract from a Quiet War story that's only available in an ebook, Stories From the Quiet War, at a price that wouldn't buy you a small (sorry, regular) coffee in Starbucks.

I've been making some minor adjustments to the three ebooks I've published (the other two are a novelette, City of the Dead, and a collection, Little Machines), so they'll play nicely (I hope) with the new generation of Kindles. A few minor typos and transcription errors have also been excised.  Housekeeping tasks that make me appreciate the support of a publisher - I'd rather be writing than coding HTML, and trying to figure out why table of contents tags are stable on one platform but not on another.  But Kim Newman and I are planning to release another Kindle single soon - our novella 'Prisoners of the Action', which appeared in print some years ago in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ellen Datlow. The links are to the US editions, by the way; the UK editions can be found in the list of ebooks to the right.

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Reading Matters

Now that I've turned in the novel, I can spend some time reading (an activity that for any writer is as important as hammering the keyboard).  First up, Andy Duncan's fine collection of esoteric Americana, The Pottawatomie Giant and other Stories, and Samuel R Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of the Spiders: enormous, enormously challenging because of its frank depictions of polymorphous perversity, thematically congruent with his examinations of the responsibilities of freedom in Trouble on Triton: an Ambiguous Heterotropia and Dhalgren, and a moving, beautifully humane story of a partnership that endures the hopes and hazards of the next seventy years.

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Giant Steps Are What We Take

It's forty-three years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, but their footprints are still preserved in the lunar dust.  In High-resolution images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter their tracks around the Lunar Module and the science packages they deployed show up as dark trails in the Lunar soil.  With no wind or water to erode them, they'll last a long time, but not forever.  Bombardment by micrometeorites will erode them at a rate of about a millimetre per million years; eventually, after ten to a hundred million years, they'll be ground down into the surrounding soil.  Space archaeologists are already making plans to preserve them.

In his terrific new book, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert MacFarlane describes walking alongside 5000 year old human footprints preserved in silt in Morecombe Bay.  Volcanic ash in Laetoli, Tanzania, preserved the footprints of Australopithecus afarensis individuals some 3.6 million years ago (there's a nice diorama of this in the New York Museum of Natural History).  There are many trackways of dinosaurs much older, including 250 million year old prints left by a cat-sized dinosauromorph, an early ancestor of dinosaurs, preserved in what was once the mud of the floodplain of a large meandering river.  And the oldest known animal tracks are around 585 million years old, created by a tiny, unknown, soft-bodied creature that's left no other trace.  We humans have some way to go to match that record.

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