I’ve just finished reading Stephen Baxter’s new novel, Ark, and it’s superb: the sequel to his end-of-the-world narrative of global inundation, Flood, it’s an immensely readable account of the building and flight of a starship to take a select few humans to an extrasolar planet where humanity can, hopefully, start again. I’ll write a review when I’ve a moment; but until then I’ll just note that the cover, above, strikes me as just lovely. I like the illustration very much; I like the design, and I like the shape and size of the font. Above all I love the way the arc (ha!) of the starship’s launch mimics the curve of the ‘a’; and the sharp diagonals of the ‘k’ take us down to the rocks at the bottom of the image.

While gloom increases about the new NASA budget, widely feared to be too low to fund plans to a return of astronauts to the Moon by 2020, there’s been some bullish noises about reconfiguring plans to send manned missions to Mars.

First, there’s been a revival of Fred Singer’s ‘Ph-D project’, which suggested establishing a forward base on one of Mars’s two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, before landing astronauts on the planet. It would be economic in terms of fuel, would provide a platform that would allow astronauts to control rovers on the surface of the planet in real time, and would enhance our knowledge of small bodies. The possibility that the moons may harbour ice deposits and could have collected material blasted off Mars by large impacts are enticing bonuses. And Russia’s Fobos-Grunt mission, which plans to study Phobos in detail and land on its surface a probe that will return a soil sample to Earth, could pave the way for manned missions. (We’d better make up our minds relatively quickly; the orbits of both Phobos and Deimos and decaying, and in only ten million years the moons will enter the atmosphere and break up and bombard with surface of Mars with debris.)

Second, Paul Davies has an even more radical suggestion to cut costs: send explorers to Mars on a one-way ticket, and begin colonisation of the planet without any prelimary and expensive round-trip manned missions. Supplies could be sent ahead in robot landers; costs would be slashed by 80%; there is, he claims, ‘no shortage of eager scientists, young and old, who say they would accept a one-way ticket’. Anyone who’s read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars will feel a definite tingle of recognition; although the pioneers in Robinson’s novel were preceeded by manned expeditions rather than a horde of versatile robot explorers, the ethos is the same. As, no doubt, would be the human complications. It’s hard to believe that Davies and his supports will overcome NASA’s cumbersome caution (although maybe the Chinese would be more receptive), but I thought this raison d’etre very fine:

‘A worldwide project to create a second home for humankind elsewhere in the solar system would be the greatest adventure our species has embarked upon since walking out of Africa 100,000 years ago, and provide a unifying influence unparalleled in history.’

And after Mars, why not the moons of Jupiter and Saturn?

Xposted to Pyr-o-mania.

What do we think of the cover-art for the reissues of Douglas Adams’s sublime Hitchhiker’s Guide novels? I know what Ian Sales thinks. He thinks the ‘new cover art for Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy novels makes them look like self-published books.’ That’s what he thinks. (Check out the complete set here)

Sorry for going all Austin Powers on you in the title line there; but I thought I’d do some more leavening of Lou’s blog-mission. He seeks to bring you SF excellence; I seek to balance that with examples of books that are, shall we say, differently-excellenced. There’s today’s example, top-of-post, with its ungainly blob-of-psychedelia cover design (a sort of cover that seems to me terribly characteristic of its era): Sam Merwin, Jr.’s The Time Shifters (1971).

It’s a splendid little book, actually: pretty much bad from start to finish, but gloriously bad, all spun from a nicely batty premise. Its characters travel through time using high-tech ‘passports’, but in addition to the usual toing-and-froing, grandfather paradoxing and so on, we discover that one side-effect of time-travel is to make the traveller fantastically randy, which enables Merwin to fill most of the book with descriptions of pneumatic sex. What does it feel like to travel through time? ‘It was a fierce, rutting, animal instinct, that of a caveman under a full moon’ [73]. The results make conventional sex seem tame: ‘She kissed him then, and the touch of their loins drew sparks’ [101]. Ouch. Other choice stylistic moments:

‘He ran the light-blue eyes up and over his nephew’s massive person.’ [6]

‘It sounded like a hen laying an egg. Uncle Phil had a hideous laugh.’ [7]

‘She was wearing a skin-tight jump suit of silver lamé with lipstick to match’ [14]

‘The brandy [was] decanted from a pharmacist’s jar labelled Denatured Alcohol, the soda from an aerated keg lettered Liquid Sodium.’ [51]

‘Paula moved like a wraith with a hotfoot, grabbed Chuck by the wrists and spun both of them through an arched opening in the hedge.’ [59]

‘He received an impression of a small sea of featureless pink faces staring at him in wide-eyed astonishment.’ [69]

‘At that moment his libido seemed to have gone into reverse.’ [73]

‘Finding that my new love is my great-grandfather, however happenstantially, requires a certain amount of getting used to.’ [94]

‘Considering this horrid fact, he drained his vodka and soda and motioned to Mullarney to shove up another sheep.’ [95] [Since Mullarney is the barkeep, this is a cocktail, I presume; although it’s not exactly clear in the text]

‘She compressed her luscious African-American lips and shook her head, causing her pigtails to fly in circles behind her ears. “Maybe you need another kind of therapy.”’ [99]

‘It’s …the long accepted theory that a man who could travel faster than light could spin off this planet for a light year or two and return that much younger.’ [172]