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Dragons!

The staple in fantasy ever since a pudgy British dude wrote about a pudgy British dude with hairy feet! The most exploited, reported, told story in the history of fantasy books! That, of course, is no insult; I happen to be a great fan of dragons, no matter how much coverage they happen to get, and I am good friends with at least four pudgy British dudes (two of which have hairy feet).

Hence why I have written a story for the anthology: “The Dragons Book,” contributed by several great authors including Garth Nix, Naomi Novik and Tamora Pierce.

“Humane Killer” is the story of a berserker nun, son of a Divine Rapist, half-bred witch and her weed-smoking zombie struggling through an alternate Crusades-era world to defeat their own inner dragons…as well as the big, red, fire-spewing one eager to crunch them up and spit them out.

Now, such a thing may strike you as grim and gruesome. Perhaps your dog was run over by an irresponsible weed-smoking zombie. Perhaps he came back as a zombie himself and took up weed-smoking out of the poor example set for him and now you watch, helpless to change him as he refuses to get a job, move out or do anything besides play Mario Kart and eat Doritos. I get that completely, sir and/or madame. But, even if your beloved canine has come back as the living dead (and, indeed, perhaps you may be looking for a distraction from that), I must advise you to pick up this book to read one of the other of fantastic authors on display here.

Read it.

Read it or I will chew your bones!

-Sam Sykes

Snapped by HiRise. Howdy, neighbour!

Xposted to Pyr-o-mania

Soon after posting a short note on Paul Davies’s proposal about getting to Mars cheaply by staging one-way missions, I ran into my friend Oliver Morton, who pointed me towards a post on his Mainly Martian blog that with takes apart Davies’s claims in meticulous detail. Oliver is a Mars-head from way back – his book, Mapping Mars, is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of observation and exploration of the red planet – and his demolition job is pretty comprehensive. Cutting out a return vehicle wouldn’t lower the cost of the mission by as much as Davies suggests; if the one-way trip isn’t a suicide mission, the Mars explorers will have to set up a permanent base camp under extreme and arduous conditions, and will need continuous resupply from Earth for the forseeable future; the ‘lifeboat’ argument for space colonisation elides the uncomfortable fact that most people will be left behind. And so on.

All in all, it’s a bracing dose of realism. If there is a cheap way of going to Mars, a one-way trip isn’t the way to do it. (Still, as an irresponsible SF writer, I feel there’s plenty of fictional traction in the scenario. I’ve already dabbled in it, as the background story of one of the secondary characters in The Secret of Life; now I’m wondering what would happen if, say, there was a privately funded one-way mission to Mars that had to rely on viewers’ ratings to keep its astronauts resupplied: a Robinson-Crusoe-On-Mars reality show. Or suppose a one-way mission made a go of it with the help of a substantial resupply programme, and fifty years later their descendants were faced with the bill…).

I do take issue, though, with Oliver’s last point:

Human Mars exploration is indeed a fine goal, and it is quite possible that fairly early on there will be some who elect to stay. But the only real argument for doing it sooner or rather than later is the selfish one of wanting to see/participate in it personally. I can appreciate that, but I don’t think it’s a compelling policy point. There are a lot of other big exciting projects to inspire us — a new energy infrastructure for the world, the millennium development goals, in pure science the development of telescopes for characterising the atmospheres and possible biospheres of exoplanets.

Yes, going to Mars as soon as possible for personal reasons isn’t a compelling reason (even if you are a zillionaire who can fund the entire caper). And yes, there are plenty of other ways to spend the money. But I’m not convinced that funding of expensive space missions diverts essential resources from more pressing problems here on Earth. It’s a straw man argument that’s been around since the Apollo missions, and there’s no evidence that cash cut from NASA funds goes to humanitarian aid or other scientific projects instead; either it goes elsewhere in the overloaded federal budget, or it simply isn’t spent. And it isn’t as if all that money is blasted into orbit, never to return. Most of it stays right here. It’s spent on research and development, on construction of infrastructure, and on the salaries of the thousands of men and women who are involved in supporting manned missions in every kind of way. And if manned missions are cut out of the NASA programme, then all that expertise is lost, and so is the momentum.

The International Space Station is due to be decomissioned in a few years; if it is, that will put an end to the need for manned missions to low Earth orbit. And although there’s talk about going to the Moon, we’ve already been there, and the main rationale for returning is that it would be a staging post or training ground for the Big Leap Outwards. Given that funds are limited, why not start planning and working towards that Big Leap now, with missions to Near Earth asteroids, a round trip around Venus, and maybe a mission to Phobos, rather than a diversion to the Moon? The romantic in me would like to think that kind of thing might be possible in my life time, at least . . .

I take this opportunity to direct your attention to a slightly gushy review (by the AR Project, over at Strange Horizons) of Muse’s new, sciencefictional, proggish release. The Project loves it prog, and of course loves its science fiction, so is particularly pleased when the two coincide. And isn’t the album’s cover an appealing piece of work? The ocular ‘O’ of that colour-sample chart pierced by the filed-off, orange, pyramidic A, with its defiant tiny human passenger. Very striking. I’m not sure I understand what it is, exactly (‘resistance’, presumably) or why there are two shells of multicoloured hexagonals surrounding the earth. Nevertheless, UK readers of a certain age will understand what I mean when I say: ‘I’ll have an M, please, Bob…’

Here’s the cover for my next novel, The Office of Shadow, the sequel to Midwinter. It continues the story of the struggle between the Seelie Kingdom of Queen Titania and the Empire of Mab. It’s a story of high adventure and espionage in Faerie; if Midwinter was “The Dirty Dozen with elves,” then this is “The Sandbaggers with Elves.” That fellow on the cover is Silverdun, Mauritane’s stalwart companion from Midwinter, and the young lady with him is Sela, a new character with an extremely weird and troubled past.

The beautiful cover artwork is by Chris McGrath, and the cover design is by Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger. (Click the image to embiggen.)

In other news, I’ve sold the German rights for both Midwinter and Office of Shadow to Verlagsgruppe Lübbe. Will I become the David Hasselhoff of fantasy literature? Only time will tell.

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]

?While browsing Emily Lakdawaller’s inestimable blog at the Planetary Society’s site the other day, I came across this great list of active planetary probes – where they are and what they are doing in various parts of the Solar System. What really caught my attention was the entry right at the end of the list: a reminder that the two Voyager probes are still going strong.

Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977 on Grand Tour trajectories that took advantage of a favourable alignment of the outer planets. I was in the middle of my Ph.D studies back then; the space shuttle prototype Endeavour flew for the first time; Elvis died; and Star Wars was released. In 1979 both Voyagers swung past Jupiter, discovering volcanoes on Io and evidence for an ocean beneath the surface of Europa. I gained my Ph.D that year and began my first stint of postdoctoral research; Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister; Sid Vicious died in New York; Y.M.C.A. was the best-selling single in the UK. The next year Voyager 1 reached Saturn and swung past Titan to investigate the moon’s dense atmosphere, a manoeuver that flung it out of the plane of the ecliptic and ended its planetary tour (instead of flying past Titan, it could have gone on to reach Pluto, in hindsight a better option, but back then we didn’t know that Pluto had three moons and an active atmosphere).

Voyager 2 reached Saturn in 1981, the year I started work in the University of California, Los Angeles. Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer married; President Reagan was shot in a failed assassination attempt; the first personal computer was launched by IBM. In 1986, when Voyager 2 swung past Uranus and discovered that one of its moons, Miranda, looked as if it had been shattered and badly reconstructed, I was working in Oxford University, Chernobyl blew its top, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated soon after launch, and Phil Collins won a Grammy. Not a great year, all in all. Voyager 2 reached Neptune in 1989, discovering evidence for active geysers on the ice giant’s largest moon, Triton. In the same year I moved
to St Andrew’s University in Scotland to take up my first (and last) real job after a decade of scraping by on postdoctoral grants; the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Empire began to crumble away; George Bush the First succeeded Ronald Reagan as US President; the Chinese pro-democracy movement was crushed at Tiananmen Square; the first full episode of The Simpsons was screened.

Twenty years later, The Simpsons is still going; I’ve written a bunch of short stories and two novels that have made extensive use of images of the outer planets and their moons taken by Voyager 1 and 2; and the two probes are still sending data back to Earth. Voyager 1 is 110 Astronomical Units – 16.5 billion kilometres – from the sun, beyond the Kuiper Belt and every known large body in the Solar System apart from long-term comets; Voyager 2 is presently some 90 AU from the sun. Both probes have passed through the termination shock point, where the velocity of solar wind particles falls below its speed of sound and becomes subsonic. At some point, as yet unknown, they will pass through the heliopause where the flow of solar wind particles is halted by pressure of gases in the interstellar medium, and enter true interstellar space. They will continue to transmit data about the Solar System’s boundary until they no longer have enough power to run any instruments, around 2025, 48 years after they were launched. They’ll continue to fall through interstellar space (unless they are intercepted by alien probes) until, after a couple of billion years or so, their fabric finally disintegrates. They carry with them greetings from Earth, including two golden phonograph records (remember them?) containing images and sounds from Earth. One of the musical tracks is Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting blues lament, ‘Dark Was Night, Cold Was The Ground.’ Never as dark, nor as cold, on Earth, as the long night through which Voyager 1 and 2 are sailing.

(Clip from Wim Wenders’ contribution to Martin Scorsese’s The Blues; Ry Cooder used Johnson’s music in his soundtrack for Wenders’ Paris, Texas, released in 1984, two years before Voyager 2 reached Uranus.)