I’m catchin’ up with myself!

Talking Heads

I’m'a just go semi-chronologically through some stuff I’d have posted here (& that I didn’t post over at the We are the Dead site) had this site not been in limbo (due, according to the HostGator support guy, to “the database” having “a hiccup” [or to "the powers that be" having "it in for me", if you're not into the whole Ockham's Razor heuristic]).

First, from way back on April 10, Annalee Newitz yakked with Peter Watts about his research background, current science in current science fiction (and in Blindsight specifically), the moving target of “timelessness”, unrepentant criminality, and other fun stuff.

On a related note, via Deanna, some space intrigue I missed from late last month.

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

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He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

“Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking” by Jonathan Leake, Sunday Times UK 4-25-10

Sounds like Hawking has also been reading Blindsight (and maybe Tiptree’s “Mama Come Home” and “Help” and Reynolds’ Revelation Space and Banks’ Matter and… well, the list goes on).

Somewhere above earth is America’s latest spaceship, a 30ft craft so classified that the Pentagon will not divulge its mission nor how much it cost to build.

The mysterious X37B, launched successfully by the US Air Force from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, using an Atlas V rocket, looks like a mini-Space Shuttle — but its mission is top secret.

It is officially described as an orbital test vehicle. However, one of its potential uses appears to be to launch a surge of small satellites during periods of high international tension. This would enable America to have eyes and ears orbiting above any potential troublespot in the world.

The X37B can stay in orbit for up to 270 days, whereas the Shuttle can last only 16 days. This will provide the US with the ability to carry out experiments for long periods, including the testing of new laser weapon systems. This would bring accusations that the launch of X37B, and a second vehicle planned for later this year, could lead to the militarisation of space.

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With all the focus on the launch of the secret X37B, another space launch by a Minotaur IV rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base in California received less attention.

It was carrying the prototype of a new weapon that can hit any target around the world in less than an hour.

The Prompt Global Strike is designed as the conventional weapon of the future. It could hit Osama bin Laden’s cave, an Iranian nuclear site or a North Korean missile with a huge conventional warhead.

“Launch of secret US space ship masks even more secret launch of new weapon” by Michael Evans, Times UK 4-25-10

Aside from a few episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater I remember from my childhood, this PBS/Wonderworks joint from the year I was born has to be the the finest adaptation of a Bradbury story I’ve ever seen.  Cinematography by Robert Elswit (who went on to relative greatness), music by David Frank (who went on to relative obscurity, but who was apparently working on some kind of symphonic collab with Michael Jackson at the time of Jackson’s death).

A few months back, John Allen clued me in to another Ray, whose track “Triangle Walks” put me in mind of Bradbury’s “Tomorrow’s Child”, in which a woman gives birth, kinda, to a small blue pyramid.

Via Margaret Killjoy, here’s Fever Ray’s cover of Nick Cave’s “Stranger Than Kindness”.

Bit with the lamps reminded me, inevitably, of this.

Also via John Allen, now they‘ve gone and done it.

According to India’s DARPA-type deal, Prahlad Jani also did some things you’re not supposed to be able to do (live without food & water for 70 years, be nourished instead by amrit), but Indian spook scientists, shockingly, have yet to present the study data.

In other old news, editorial standards at The Telegraph are just as abysmally low as those at any other major pape you’d care to name.

India’s Defence Research Development Organisation, whose scientists develop drone aircraft, intercontinental ballistic missiles and new types of bombs. They believe Mr Prahlad could teach them to help soldiers survive longer without food, or disaster victims to hang on until help arrives.

“Man claims to have had no food or drink for 70 years” by Dean Nelson, Telegraph 4-28-10

As an Anglophile and proofreader, stuff like this drives me nuts.  I mean, it’s your language, arseholes!  We Yanks are just usin’ it.

Last, but certainly not least, I give yinz Director, CEO, President and CFO of Matrixx Initiatives, Bill Hemelt.

He may not melt, but Bill’s eyes do sorta shapeshift at around 0:50.

Keep on keepin’ on keepin’ on and cuídate.

Fans of classic science fiction will be saddened to hear that one of its most imaginative writers has passed. In the 1950s and 1960s, William Tenn stood with pioneers like Theodore Sturgeon in creating vivid scenarios of mind-blowing alien worlds in novels and stories that illuminated emotional, political and ethical issues of good old humanity. Tenn was a pseudonym for Philip Klass. His particular contribution to the Golden Age was a willingness to put humor at center stage. (My favorite story of his: “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi.”)His death on Sunday, a few months short of his 90th birthday, is a blow to sci-fi. Condolences to his wife Fruma (herself an award-winning writer) and daughter Adina. But the loss also extends to those who never did manage to crack his novel about an extraterrestrial race with seven sexes.

After living a scuffling life of a freelance sci-fi writer in Greenwich Village for many years, Klass joined the faculty of Penn State in the mid-’60s. He was instrumental in encouraging the careers of fiction writers and journalists like David Morrell, who dedicated his debut novel, First Blood, to his mentor — that’s right — the book that unleashed Rambo.

During the “golden age” of American science fiction, the short stories of William Tenn were read as avidly as the works of Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury.

The first Tenn story appeared in 1946, the dawning of sci-fi’s literary sophistication. More than 200 followed, as well as two novels, most appearing in Galaxy magazine, but Tenn was a pen name.

The author’s real name was Philip Klass, longtime English professor at Penn State University in State College who retired in 1989 after 23 years and moved to Mt. Lebanon.

Mr. Klass died Sunday at his home of congestive heart failure following a long illness, said his widow, Fruma. He was 89.

Having read only one of Baker’s books, last year’s The Empress of Mars, I feel perfectly comfortable stating that the woman knew how to write SF.

Adios, Kage!

Have fun and cuídate.

Smoke billowed around his face as he regarded Newbury.  “He made mention of the fact that the unit in question had been destroyed in the impact.”

Newbury met his gaze.  “I find that very difficult to believe, Mr. Chapman.  I understand the skeletal frames of these automata are constructed out of brass?”

“Correct.”

“Then why were there no remnants of the unit in evidence anywhere on board the ship?  Both Miss Hobbes and I toured the wreckage, and I can assure you, there was nothing to be found.”

Chapman poured the tea, his face thoughtful.  “Well, if Mr. Stokes’s assertions are correct, the unit may have burnt up in the fires that followed the crash.”

Newbury sipped from his teacup.  “Come now, Mr. Chapman.  We both know that the heat in the wreckage would never have reached a temperature enough to incinerate brass.  There has to be another explanation.”

The Affinity Bridge is the second 2009 novel I’ve read being marketed as “steampunk”.  While Mann’s first novel is fully steam-driven (though far from steamy, being daintily Victorian regarding sex), the degree to which it is “punk” is highly debatable: as in Westerfeld’s Leviathan, the protagonists of The Affinity Bridge work for the Man, or, more accurately, the Woman, the bionic Queen Victoria herself.

3/5 stars

We meet our dapper hero, Sir Maurice Newbury, fanboy of the latest tech and student of the occult, at a seance (which he entertainingly debunks) and our plucky heroine, Victoria Hobbes (here’s hoping the new year will bring at least one “steampunk” title that fails to reference the odious materialist of Malmsbury), at Newbury’s office for tea and exposition of the “revenant plague” zombifying, exclusively so far, the lower classes… who are also being picked off in a string of grisly murders popularly thought perpetrated by a “glowing bobby”.  With such conundra weighing on their minds, the duo dash off to poke around the wreckage of a just-crashed automaton-piloted airship and the game is afoot (or atoot, as in, you know, a noise associated with steam engines).

In tone the book falls somewhere between an Agatha Christie “cozy mystery” and the Tom Swift novellas I devoured as a kid.  As a light adventure it works, but as a mystery it kinda fails: by a third of the way through, the reader knows the “who”, by two thirds through, the “how”, and all that really remains are decent, but by no means pyrotechnic, chase and fight sequences (with zombies!), tidying up, as it were, and stage-setting for the sequel.  That’s not to say that Mann isn’t talented, that I didn’t get numerous kicks out of The Affinity Bridge, just that I expected more.  The novel’s greatest strength is surely the flavor of its world, which I found most agreeable.  The airships grounded and in flight, the cavernous, automated factories, the trackless steam engines rumbling over fog-occluded Whitechapel cobbles, Hobbes’ visits to her asylum-bound precog sister – all tasty enough, but not terribly filling.  In one of my favorite set-pieces, Hobbes comes upon the unconscious Newbury, half-full bottle of laudanum near at hand, in the center of a pentagram chalked on the floor of his bedroom; but Hobbes never learns, nor do we, “what Newbury had been up to with that pentagram.”  What a tease!

The Affinity Bridge is not the “enormous pile of awesome” for which Chris Roberson’s blurb on the back cover led me to hope, but a reasonably awesome foundation on which to heap such a pile.  If this weren’t the first volume of a series, I’d conclude that Mann was deficient in plotting ability and unable to follow through on his most intriguing concepts; but I’ll generously attribute these flaws to first-time jitters/canny restraint, and remain optimistic that the sequel will handle its occult/paranormal and mystery elements more deftly and deliver on the various pacts made with readers here.

Happy reading and cuídate.

Quantum mechanics was known to be only an approximation to the world’s deeper rules.  There were three new realms to take into account: the parallel spacetime of the Hibrane, the unexplored zone beyond the infinity of the lazy eight axis, and the subdimensional levels beneath the Planck length.  While remaining quantum-mechanically orthodox, teleportation teased its practitioners with glimpses of the subdimensions.

As the shape of Jayjay’s wave function shifted, he felt himself skimming across the surface of a hidden sea: the Planck frontier that separated ordinary reality from Subdee.  Voracious, meddlesome subbies lived in the subdimensional sea.  They’d once attacked Thuy by sending up harpoon-tipped tendrils.  It was good to finish one’s teleportation hops as quickly as possible.

But the mind force of the twelve teekers was barely adequate for the task of moving the house, and the passage was proceeding slower than Jayjay would have liked.  And then, just when it seemed like they were ready to bloom up into the redwood glen – old Khan lost his focus.

Thuy’s mother, Minh, was teeping him, she was having a hissy fit because they’d forgotten to bring along her special homemade ginger-plum dipping sauce.  As the distracted Khan’s mental grip weakened, the cabin teeped a yip of fear.  They were sinking too close to the subbies’ sea.  Jayjay heard a noise like a wood chipper.

“Damn you, Mom,” screamed Thuy.  “Get away!”

Minh withdrew; Khan regained his focus; the house settled onto the foundation in the woods.

Amid relieved murmurs, the group unlinked.

“You must respect your mother, Thuy,” said Khan.  “It’s not easy for her anymore.”

“We’re lucky we made it at all,” said Jayjay, sticking up for his wife.  He went over and looked out the door.  Most of the porch had been gnawed away by the insatiable beings of the subdimensions.

“I’ll teek for the sauce,” said Khan, briefly closing his eyes.  Two little pots appeared on the dining table.

Hylozoic is the second singularity-themed novel I’ve read this year (the first being Simon Funk’s delightful After Life) and I dug it.  If you like your SF super-speculative (and super-goofy), check it out.

5/5 stars

With Hylozoic, Rucker applies his manic whimsy and multidisciplinary rambunctiousness and comes out with another fine entry in the “psipunk” subgenre he initiated with 2007′s Postsingular. Not only is everything (from trees and streams to individual atoms) in Rucker’s future self-aware, telepathically chatty and linked via the planetary overmind Gaia, but teleportation and telekinesis are also coming into mass use and reshaping civilization.  Though anyone so inclined can take advantage of the eight-dimensional fun, cultural inertia being what it is, fundamentalists and despots are still around to cause headaches for folks who just want to live their lives.  In addition to three simultaneous alien invasions, the main problems faced by our heroes (among them a sentient pitchfork and Hieronymus Bosch) are those mainstays of dramatic fiction, the personal and the interpersonal, and Rucker takes the time to make his principals, for all the wonders of which they are capable, fallible, sympathetic human beings.  As Gaia tells one character seeking a “viral reset rune” to undo the damage wrought by the avian alien tulpas’ quantum operators,

“Pekka has the edge on me,” said Gaia.  “Her birds are diligent and they honor their world.  But my humans – my humans are stoners or loners.  If I can’t find this thing, it’s your own fault.”

Addiction, guilt and the increased prospect for pain that accompanies increased empathy and interconnectedness are at the bottom of Hylozoic‘s gravity well along with all the goodies.  In writing about transcending human limitations, Rucker spends a good deal of time picking at those sore spots of conscious awareness, and the result feels less like glossy progress porn than like the societal/mathematical larks of Carroll and Abbott.  For all the cutting-edge concepts it showcases, Hylozoic works, against all odds, as a story.  If there’s another recipe for singularly rad SF, I don’t know it.

If you’re interested in the far-out ideas included (and not included) in Hylozoic, or in Rucker’s writing process, he’s made available 385 pages of working notes (over twice the length of the novel itself) at his site.

Hylozoic is available from the Carnegie Library.

Happy reading and cuídate.