Harry Harrison

I only found out about this last month, but science fiction author Harry Harrison died back in August, aged 87. He was one of the greats. I’ve just finished reading Make Room! Make Room! which is a rather bleak novel about overpopulation, published in 1966 and set in New York at the millennium; searching for an ebook version of this story is how I found out that he had died. More typical of Harrison were the Stainless Steel Rat books, which I enjoyed, and his stories of Bill the Galactic Hero.

What I really love, though, is his trilogy starting with West of Eden, which is based on a what-if scenario where the dinosaurs did not die out but continued to evolve into the human era. It is excellent speculative SF, in my opinion, and the paperback versions I have contain beautiful illustrations that resemble medieval woodcuts, which help to bring the stories to life. Wonderful stuff. He will be missed.

Fellow SF author Christopher Priest wrote an obituary of Harry Harrison in the Guardian, and you can read it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/15/harry-harrison

The (very small) starship Voyager

Just a brief trip to outer space, before I post links to the next lengthy climate transcript. In the news this week, the people at NASA JPL announced (actually not – see my update!) that they believe Voyager 1 is about to leave the solar system, 35 years after its launch in 1977, and after having had thrilling close encounters with Jupiter and Saturn along the way. This being the vast wilderness of space, there is no obvious frontier which marks out the limits of the solar system, but the JPL people have picked up an increase in the amount of cosmic rays hitting the probe, which suggest it is crossing the borderland or “Heliosheath”, where the solar wind pushes up against the cosmic radiation from the rest of the universe, about 16 – 18 billion kilometres away.

What will happen to it now? And how long will we be able to keep in touch with it? The answer to the second question hinges on how much electrical power Voyager has access to, as it crosses the deep, dark gulf between worlds. The probe is powered by three RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) fuelled by plutonium-238, which of course is in limited supply and must be husbanded very carefully. And what it’s doing is gradually shutting down some of its more power-intensive activities in order to maintain others for as long as possible. That will last until about 2025, after which time the spacecraft will no longer be able to power any single instrument and Voyager will be drifting, inert and basically, dead.

I was curious to find out where it is heading. Anywhere famous, perhaps? There are actually two Voyagers, as you will know, and according to NASA Voyager 2 will pass within about 4.3 light years of Sirius, which is, of course, a very prominent and bright local star, well known to us from prehistoric times. This will take place around 296,000 years from now. Voyager 1, on the other hand, is heading towards AC+79 3888, otherwise known as Gliese 445, a very dim and unremarkable red dwarf in the unfashionable constellation of Cameleopardalis. It will pass by Gliese 445 in about 40,000 years, but what also might be surprising is that Gliese 445 itself is approaching the solar system much faster than Voyager 1 is moving in the other direction – it’s 17.6 light years away, at present, but will be only about 3.45 light years away from us, 400 centuries from now. Such is the unnervingly dynamic nature of stars, as they buzz like bees around the galactic hive.

So, what will happen to Voyagers 1 and 2, after that? Maybe they will drift forever in the dark spaces of the galaxy, until the end of time. Maybe one day humans will go out and retrieve them (or, even better, send a robot) and they will be exhibited in a museum, if they still have these in the 40th century (and I hope they will, as I think museums are a very good thing in any epoch.)

In the 1979 movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager probe has been discovered by sentient machines, who transform it into a gigantic and threatening spacecraft (renamed “V’ger”), which then starts to make its way back towards Earth and is only stopped by the brave people aboard the Enterprise, armed with their superior wits and sparkly late-1970s special effects. However, Trekkies will be aware that the probe in question was actually Voyager 6, and so the events of the movie clearly take place in an alternative timeline and dimension to this one, where I am writing this blog and where Voyagers 3, 4 5 and 6 were never built.

But maybe the basic premise of the film is correct, and someone – or something – else will find our little metal emissaries to the stars. And if they do, will it be good or bad news for Earth? I wonder.

Some interesting links:
NASA JPL’s main Voyager page: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
Interstellar mission overview: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.html
Spacecraft lifetime: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html

UPDATE

After all that, I just realised that the NASA people haven’t actually made any official announcements yet. But they will, soon. Or they might do. Or something like that.

The Spaceplane – Still Early Days

One of my childhood treasures is a slim book called Inside Information on Space Travel, which was published in 1970 and has cutaway diagrams of various spacecraft, from Sputnik 1 forward in time – via Black Arrow, communications satellites and Apollo – to the Space Shuttle (or a rather oddly-shaped Shuttle as it was envisaged in those days, before it became a reality.) The final page has a picture of a futuristic, sleek-looking spacecraft, accompanied by the following text:

WHAT OF THE FUTURE? A space liner like this will shuttle passengers between earth and orbiting space stations in the late 1970′s. It will be a combination of aircraft and space ship and will be able to take-off and return to land-based space ports.

Maybe there is an alternative dimension where space liners actually did start to operate in the late 1970s, but not in this particular universe, sadly. However, spaceplanes are on the drawing board and a technology that might power them was tested to destruction again last week. A scramjet could propel a vehicle up into Earth orbit, as an air-breathing engine of this kind is theoretically capable of providing the sheer power needed to climb up and out of the planet’s gravity well, and the U.S. military carried out its latest attempt to fly a prototype, over the sea off Southern California last Tuesday.

This trial, like the others before it, ended in failure, when the machine – the hypersonic X-51A “Waverider” – crashed into the ocean, due to a faulty control fin, before the scramjet engine could even be ignited. So it’s really still early days, and we won’t be able to ride in comfort up to space or across to a distant continent in one of those, to the music of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz (one of my favourite moments from 2001: A Space Odyssey) for some years yet.

Spaceplanes are taking shape, though – on paper and on computer screens. One promising (and British!) example is the Skylon, which is a hydrogen powered spaceplane that could take off from a conventional runway; the SABRE engine powering this vehicle would be an air-breather, technically not a scramjet but a kind of jet/rocket combination.

The Skylon remains a wonderful idea, but at the moment only the military appear to be actually building and testing anything similar, and their motivation, as you’d imagine, has to do with war and the capability of delivering some sort of explosive payload anywhere on the planet within minutes of launching.

However, military technology has a habit of trickling down to the rest of us, given time. The jet engine is an example of this, of course – swiftly developed during World War II (although the concept and early development of the jet engine pre-dates the war), but now powering civilian airliners across the globe, 24/7. And so is the internet. Eventually, something of the sort will be available for the likes of you and me – and even if there is no space station for us to rendezvous with, there’s always the promise of being able to hop from London over to Sydney, or Tokyo or Honolulu in a couple of hours. It would probably be very expensive but you might even be able to commute!

Earth Declares War on N165

On Mars this weekend, the Curiosity rover gets a first chance to try out its ChemCam (Chemistry and Camera) imaging system, which includes a powerful laser – over a period of 10 seconds or so, it will fire off about 30 shots at a designated sitting target, which is located three metres away. This target has been given the imaginative name of N165, and is an otherwise rather unexceptional, small, roughly triangular-looking Martian rock, about 7.5 centimetres wide. The flashes of light generated by the mini laser strikes will then be analysed by Curiosity’s spectrometer, to see what N165 is composed of.

The laser is, of course, a very familiar device, and ubiquitous these days. The first one was built in the 1960s, but before then, in the 1950s, scientists had already developed its older cousin the maser – from “Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” – which amplifies microwaves rather than visible light (an early term for the laser was “optical maser”, in fact.)

One of the obvious applications of course, for this emerging technology was as a beam weapon, but – perhaps fortunately – this has not really happened yet, outside the realm of SF and James Bond. This idea can be traced back to the fiction of H.G. Wells, whose Martians wielded a horribly effective Heat Ray after they landed in Surrey, in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. Here is the moment when a group of men approach the landing site, hoping to communicate with the visitors from another world:

Beyond the pit stood the little wedge of people with the white flag at its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a little knot of small vertical black shapes upon the black ground. As the green smoke arose, their faces flashed out pallid green, and faded again as it vanished. Then slowly the hissing passed into a humming, into a long, loud, droning noise. Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it.

Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.

Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.

If there is microbial life on Mars, and if a deputation of tiny Martians have assembled today on N165, preparing to communicate with this giant visitor from another world, it would be a very odd and ironic – if highly unlikely – twist on the classic tale.

UPDATE

Well, the laser firing seems to have gone well (hopefully with no microscopic Martian pacifists being killed), and now Curiosity has gone for its first drive. We can see tyre tracks!

Things not looking too good in 3991 AD…

I heard on the radio this morning that committed computer gamer James Moore has spent the last decade playing Civilisation 2 (not continuously, it has to be said) and has now reached the virtual year of 3991 AD. Things have taken a somewhat nasty turn over the millennia – the world has been stuck in a vicious, Orwellian three-nation standoff for centuries, and has been through a generally rather tough time, what with famine, nuclear war, mass population die-off and also runaway global warming (the ice caps have somehow melted over twenty times – which is interesting in itself, as logically one would assume they’d need to grow back, in between melts.)

Daniel Knowles from the Telegraph explained, over the radio, that the game had certain assumptions build into it, which he deemed reasonable and not particularly outlandish. He mentioned nuclear war and a stop to the production of green technology as scenarios which would have certain consequences; for example, stopping green technology – in the universe of this game, at any rate – would of course lead to dangerous global warming.

What I find interesting is that James Moore has now become mired in something of an impasse – his nation (the Celts) is stuck in a permanent stalemate and nothing seems likely to change it – indeed, there’s a possibility that the game has now reached some kind of terminal state. And this, I think, speaks volumes about the limits of any kind of simulation, whether it be a humble game or the sort of computer models used to try and predict what the economy or the climate will do. There are always fixed assumptions and a finite number of possibilities. If the assumptions are incorrect, and if stuff happens that hasn’t been accounted for when the model was designed, then the simulation will be wrong, although it might be quite useful (and also entertaining, if it’s in the form of a game.) And the longer it runs, the wronger it will get.

In the real world, the unexpected can always happen. And often does! And in unexpected ways, too! And just when you thought it wouldn’t!

RIP Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

Ray Bradbury was an early favourite of mine – his lyricism, excitement and sense of wonder shone through just about everything he wrote. He also produced some deliciously weird, diverting and macabre stories, and it was books like The October Country which helped me survive the stresses and tedium of school.

Some fine Ray Bradbury quotes:

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

I particularly like that last one, even though I’ve never been the jumping-off-a-cliff type.

Ray Bradbury was one of the greats, along with Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. Like them, he is gone now, but his words will live on.

“Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

There’s a project under way at Cornell University to perfect a 3D food printer that creates meals in layers made up of countless numbers of infinitesimal “dots”, although it is unlikely to be commercially available – or generally affordable – for a while yet. At the moment, the lab prints food using syringes full of gloop of different kinds (“raw food”, if you like) but they’re working on “food inks” – which are hydrocolloids, also known as gums – that can be blended to make cookies or cheeseburgers, much as black, yellow, cyan and magenta tones are combined in an inkjet printer.

The Guardian recently reported on it and you can see why some Guardianistas might approve, as it fits in with the “sustainability” mantra, having the potential to eliminate much of the supply chain behind every packet of chocolate Hobnobs bought in Tesco. I like the idea for different reasons, however. Not being a particularly enthusiastic cook, the notion of dialling up lunch (rather than messing around with saucepans) really appeals. And it’s a baby step closer to Star Trek’s replicators! Full-blown molecular nanotechnology will be the ultimate answer, of course, but this looks like a promising start.

Undeniably Innovative Flying Objects

I switched on the car radio on the way home from work recently, and found myself listening to an item on BBC Radio 4 about a new breed of bugging devices. They’re not the traditional kind, microphones hidden in electric sockets or bunches of daffodils, that sort of thing. No, these are more like actual living bugs. Technically they’re unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as UAVs or drones, but not the larger variety that float about over Central Asia, occasionally zapping dead the enemies of the West. They are tiny flying (or crawling) machines that resemble dragonflies or spiders, and which will soon be able to infiltrate buildings and eavesdrop on our enemies instead, as they plot the destruction of the West over coffee.

By “tiny” I mean really tiny. At Middlesex University in the UK, they have miniature quadrotor helicopters little bigger than a human hand, and in the programme it was said that Peter Singer of the Brookings Institute in Washington, who is an expert on such things, has claimed to have seen one small enough to land on a pencil head. British soldiers are now reported to be using micro drones in the badlands of Afghanistan; I looked this up and it’s true, apparently – these are Black Hornet PD-100 Personal UAVs (manufactured by a Norwegian company called Prox Dynamics) – basically, a Black Hornet PD-100 is a helpful sparrow-sized nano helicopter that you launch to find out whether a Taliban welcoming committee is waiting for you around the next corner. We could actually use a few of these in London, too.

The possibility of using these little machines as weapons was mentioned, as presumably they could also carry a miniature payload of explosives. A more subtle approach, I thought, would be to equip one of the tinier drones with a syringe full of some sort of allergen or deadly toxin – perhaps, deep under the MI6 ziggurat in Vauxhall Cross, London, I wonder whether Q, or some similar person, is working on this very idea, and if his counterpart in Moscow is doing the same.

By now, you might be wondering why this blog has an accompanying picture of some people gazing up at what appears to be a couple of fish-shaped balloons. A few weeks ago I finished reading a novel called Zero History by William Gibson, which features a sort of penguin-shaped helium-filled balloon deployed for marketing purposes and directed through the air using a smartphone. The very same day I had an e-mail advertising “air swimmers”, and not knowing what an air swimmer was, I looked it up. Basically it’s a similar sort of item to the device that appears in Zero History and it’s made by the William Mark Corporation – you can buy your very own for about £20 in the UK. It comes in two shapes at the moment – clownfish or shark – and is a mylar balloon full of helium which “swims” through the air, with a to-and-fro motion of its fins, and which can be made to change direction using a radio controller.

So air swimmers are toys, apparently and look great fun too, although going by some of the reviews, they can be a little flimsy. However, put a micro camera and/or mike on the fish’s nose and it would make a nice unobtrusive surveillance platform – not outdoors, as the wind would blow it into the next county, but in a large indoor public place like a shopping mall. Air swimmers floating high above people’s heads could carry some sort of advertising (thus justifying their presence), and they could be fitted with tiny robotic brains to direct their movements – along with eyes and ears to detect potential criminals or terrorists (or of course, just eavesdrop on the public.)

It’s addictive, I find – as soon as you start thinking along these sorts of lines, you just can’t stop. All at the same time, technological wonders and dystopian possibilities are being born and taking to the air.

UPDATE

Neal Asher drew my attention to this article on the Next Big Future website, about DARPA funding the development of a moth cyborg, controllable via electrical impulses transmitted directly into its nervous system. Even a few years ago, this sort of thing would have been firmly in the realm of science fiction, but it seems that reality is quickly catching up.

The Samizdata site also has some recent articles about mini drones, including this one featuring a synchronised swarm of nano quadrotors!

Olaf Stabledon: Last and First Men

Think of epic science fiction and works such as Asimov’s Foundation series and Herbert’s Dune saga spring to mind – sets of novels that are truly on a grand scale, with plots that span millennia and cover vast distances across interstellar space. Yet long before these were written, there existed novels every bit as epic and gigantic in scope. Written by philosopher and pacifist Olaf Stabledon way back in 1930, Last and First Men is certainly one of them.

It is not a novel in the conventional sense, as there are no real characters save for the narrator, who is one of the 18th Men living on Neptune two million years hence and is broadcasting his thoughts back through time into the mind of a contemporary human. Though it could also be said that the story’s protagonists are, in fact, the various races – the First, Second, Third (and so on) Men, who succeed one another and enjoy their moment on the world’s stage. Last and First Men is basically a future history of the human race, from the twentieth to the twenty thousandth century, and a titanic tale of struggle, technical and cultural development, heroic achievements, bitter warfare, near total extinction and the rise and inexorable fall of mighty civilisations.

The scope of the story is absolutely breathtaking. As from an aeroplane travelling across some vast continent, the reader mostly looks down upon the temporal equivalent of a majestic landscape viewed from several thousand feet, with great plains and mountain ranges visible but lacking intimate detail. At times, however, just as the plane must descend to ground level periodically, the narrative sometimes closes in on some pivotal moment in the life of the race – a battle, a discovery, a scientific breakthrough – and then even the occasional individual might briefly come into view. Afterwards, though, it is always time to soar back up to the Olympian heights for another few aeons of world history.

There is much that I enjoyed in Last and First Men. First and foremost, the stupendous scale of Stabledon’s project. “Man’s sojourn on Venus lasted somewhat longer than his whole career on the Earth” is a typical Stabledon sentence, which has all the more impact for being completely undramatic.

And there are some pretty neat ideas in there. The human form as something plastic and malleable, ready to be shaped to suit new circumstances, such as adapting to the hostile environment of Venus or Neptune. Winged folks thronging the Venusian skies, seal-men swimming in alien seas, monkey-like men, giant sessile brains encased in fortresses… I am not sure whether Last and First Men was the first novel to address the theme (in effect, the idea of genetic engineering, decades before its time), but I would not be surprised if this turns out to be the case.

In addition, the Martian cloud-jellies are credible aliens – floating clusters or swarms of living particles that are capable of forming formidable hive minds (a forerunner of the neural network idea, perhaps.) Their long and bitter fight for dominance over the Second Men seems all too realistic – neither side being completely victorious – and resembles the “arms race” type of constant evolutionary struggle (e.g., between plants and insects.)

There’s also, it has to be said, some rather strange science. In around AD 5000, the people of the First World State rely completely on coal for their energy, and relapse into complete barbarism once it runs out, being curiously unable to come up with any viable new energy source. About 100,000 years later, the Patagonian civilisation is wiped out by an atomic explosion which creates a runaway global cataclysm (silly, maybe, but this was a genuine fear in the days of the Manhattan Project.) And roughly 400,000 years after that, the Fifth Men have to decamp to Venus, as the orbit of Earth’s Moon has become dangerously low – due to the effect of thought radiation from humanity’s advanced minds.

And there is also some equally odd future history and psychology. One choice moment that had me scratching my head in puzzlement comes early on in Last and First Men, when representatives of the two superpowers – a decadent Chinaman and a puritanical American – meet on a remote Pacific island to decide the future of the world, only to both fall in love with a mysterious young female native who emerges, as if by magic, to play an unaccountably crucial part in the proceedings. This struck me as being decidedly wacky (although, goodness knows, equally wacky things happen in this reality too.)

In addition, a particular theme that now comes across as very mid twentieth-century (along with the whole idea of telepathy in SF) is that of the group or race mind – humans adding their mental powers to the collectivity until it is capable of becoming a sort of supercharged being, thinking truly god-like thoughts. What might have seemed noble and exalted in 1930, however, now seems rather sinister and repugnant – to my somewhat small and mortal mind, anyway.

Yet despite its oddities and quaint qualities, First and Last Men remains absolutely a work of classic science fiction (“timeless” even, to use the cliché). Indeed reading it can be compared to being fed into the Total Perspective Vortex (in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams) an ominous machine which is able to produce a virtual model of the entire universe and show anyone who enters it just how incredibly tiny and insignificant they are.

But Olaf Stabledon’s masterpiece does so in quite a positive and uplifting way. The reader is left marvelling at the sheer immensity of it all, and forgetful of all the world’s problems, which on this scale are as trifling as the merest speck of dust.

UPDATE

I wish I had thought of the Total Perspective Vortex comparison by myself, but alas I didn’t; I read it in this excellent review by Tal Cohen.

The picture for this blog is a detail from a rather good illustration that was made for the Great Moon Hoax, a hugely successful but completely fictitious 19th-century newspaper story. This could almost be a flock of Seventh Men (and Women), fluttering happily about in the atmosphere of Venus.

Neal Asher: Orbus

If this was the future, and there existed a desolate, lawless area of space which was a contested no-man’s-land between two implacably opposed galactic cultures and which was known colloquially as “the Graveyard”, would you ever want to go there? Would you, in fact, want to venture within a hundred light years of the place? I certainly wouldn’t, and neither would you if you’re as pathetically cautious as I am. Luckily for readers of Orbus, however, the characters in Neal Asher’s latest book are not averse to a little trouble now and then. And trouble – in spades – is exactly what they find in the Graveyard.

Ever since reading Neal Asher’s The Skinner back in 2003, I have thought that the Prador (a race of enjoyably nasty and warlike crustacean-analogues from deep space) are among some of the best SF baddies to emerge since Terry Nation invented the Daleks. Furthermore I have believed it was high time that they had a whole novel to themselves, more or less, without any danger of the planet Spatterjay’s entertainingly horrible and ruthless oceanic fauna stealing the show. Asher’s 2006 novel Prador Moon came close to accomplishing this, the one caveat being that it was all too short, but at 438 pages, Orbus hits the bull’s-eye.

So, what’s to like? Plenty! As per usual in a Neal Asher book, there is no shortage of futuristic mayhem, as Prador engage in battle with one another, and with monstrosities even scarier than themselves, in a flurry of explosions, crashes, laser blasts, rail-gun duels and hand-to-hand (claw-to-claw) fisticuffs. Joining the fray is the eponymous Orbus (a Spatterjay native with superhuman strength and an attitude problem), his rather dim sidekick Drooble, the nautiloid-shaped war drone Sniper (who easily has to be my favourite Neal Asher character) and his own sidekick, the seahorse-shaped drone Thirteen. They find that even a boosted musculature and/or fiendishly advanced weaponry do not necessarily guarantee survival in an environment like this, where sudden death is usually only a fraction of a second away. It is, of course, all excellent, violent fun.

What impresses me in Orbus, and in Neal Asher novels generally (as it also does in the novels of Iain M Banks) is the ease with which the future technology is described, to the point where it becomes difficult to accept that rail-guns, fusion power plants, augs, chainglass and all the other accoutrements don’t actually exist right now (although I’m sure DARPA is on the case) and this is a testament to the way Asher is able to make his fantastically and nightmarishly improbable scenarios seem absolutely solid and real.

What also delights is that along the way the reader is treated almost imperceptibly to some of the bigger themes and questions in both fiction and real life. Such as, what makes aliens alien? (Take a while to think about that one.) And if you take most of what defines a person away from him (by reanimating his corpse under the control of an uploaded digital snapshot of his own mind, let’s say, or infecting him with a virus that causes him to undergo rapid and irreversible mutation) is what remains the same person? Happily, these thought experiments are not conveyed by long expository passages but occur as by-products of the relentless action-filled story, like a crop of interesting weeds found growing in a bomb crater.

Some reviewers have pointed to the rather lacklustre character of Orbus himself as a weakness in the novel, but my own impression is that, mad as this may sound, he is just about ideal for the role – physically superhuman enough to hold his own in an environment where mere humans wouldn’t last more than a minute at most, and at the same time able to act as a perfect foil to the more exuberant or dramatically interesting characters. In my opinion, it works.

As you have probably realised by now, I had a lot of fun reading this novel; and yes, I’m rather a fan of Neal Asher’s books, generally. Orbus isn’t The Catcher in the Rye, or Anna Karenina, but then it never sets out to be. There are indeed days when I prefer to read something like Anna Karenina. And there are other days, mostly after having done my level best to help prop up this country’s ailing economy for another twenty-four hours, when what I really, really want to read about – and nothing else will do – is aliens trying to murder one another with absurdly powerful military hardware.