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I'm in the US right now. Thanks to my pal Louise, I was lucky enough to get ringside seats for the departure of STS-125 on its way to the Hubble Space Telescope.
It was spectacular, everything I hoped it would be. For added comedy value, your humble correspondent was looking at the *wrong pad* until seconds before ignition (when his wife pointed out that everyone else had their cameras pointed *that way*). Never mind, I did take some truly awesome photographs as the shuttle cleared the pad and began its rotation. You could see everything, even the shock diamonds in the SSME exhausts. The launch was over incredibly quickly, as Atlantis punched its way into low-lying cloud. We didn't get to see the solid rockets separate due to the cloud cover, but that was a small disapointment. It wasn't as loud as I was expecting: about on a par with the loudest afterburner noise you'll hear at an airshow, which is to say impressive but not physically painful. Actually having felt my stomach being churned in knots by a Vulcan bomber, I'd actually rate the shuttle launch as being somewhat quieter. We were at Banana creek, which is about as close as you can get, but there's still a large body of water between you and the pad, which absorbs a lot of the noise. My wife, who saw the launch of an Ariane 5 from Korou, felt that the Ariane was the more visceral experience.
Afterwards, we went to see the new Star Trek film (liked it) at the KSC IMAX. Which is where, rather frustratingly, I appear to have lost my camera, with all the Atantis photos still on the memory card. I've put out feelers and contacted lost and found, but to no avail. In the unlikely event that somewhere out there did find a Panasonic Lumix FZ-50 with a shuttle launch on the card, do get in touch...
Anyway, enough of that - I'm over it now (sob). No, really. Took a biplane ride to cheer myself up, and tonight we're off to see the new Terminator film, which opens today. Usual lacklustre service will be resumed when I return to the UK.
Once again I must apologise for my slowness in responding to both comments posted here and emails sent to the Dendrocopus account. I'm getting there, but slowly. Thanks for your patience...
In the meantime, I've finished a couple of stories. One of them, "Monkey Suit", is a 5000 word piece set in the Revelation Space universe. More on that when I know for sure that it's going to appear where I think it will. The other story, a somewhat longer piece entitled "Pandora's Box", (not set in the RS universe) will be appearing as an original translated piece in Finnish in the SF magazine Tahtivaeltaja, edited by the inestimable Toni Jerrman.
I've always been fascinated by the texture of translated prose, especially that cool, icy detachment that seems to hover around prose that's been translated from a genuinely foreign language such as Japanese. I used to fantasize about paying someone to translate my stuff into Chinese or Russian, then paying someone else to translate it back again, just so that I could obtain some objective detachment on my prose, im the hope that it would turn out to read like the work of Lem or some other brilliant foreign-language SF writer. I also used to wonder if it was possible to be hypnotized into forgetting your own work, so that you could read it afresh. (I don't need to do that now - I get the same affect just by being 43 and reading stuff I wrote 10 or 20 years ago).
Anyway, a long time ago - 2004 at the latest - after several pints too many in a Helsinki bar, Toni and I came up with the idea of translating a story of mine into his native language, and then destroying all copies of the original english-language version - including mine. So that's what we're going to do, as soon as Toni has a good translation in hand. So I'll have a story that exists in Finnish, and Finnish only, and if I want to read it again, I'll need to pay someone to translate it back into English. Of course the fact that it's Finnish, not exactly a language everyone can dip into with the greatest of ease, only adds to the fun. Again, more on this when it happens. What wackiness, eh?
For me, I'm just about to dive into the rewrites on TERMINAL WORLD, then I need to do a short story for another anthology project, and then it's onwards and upwards with the new book. Currently reading: Azincourt, Bernard Cornwell. Currently listening: Ali Farka Toure: Savane. And the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, of course, which is very good.
Long-time readers may remember this post (you can find it in the archive, along with comments):
"Has anyone else seen the early 1960s Czech science fiction film Ikarie XB1? (Also released as Voyage to the End of the Universe).
When I was a kid, I saw a film on television that had a considerable effect on me - so much so, that at least part of it fed into Chasm City nearly thirty years later. I remember seeing this film in our house in Cornwall, and we moved out of there around about 1974. It was in black and white, but then so was everything - we only had a black and white telly. (Such is the power of suggestion, though, that when I think back to Pertwee-era Dr Who episodes I only saw in Cornwall, I see them in colour).
The film was set on a spaceship going somewhere. I have the feeling it was foreign (the film, not the spaceship). Now and then there exterior shots of the ship whizzing along at a very high velocity.
At one point a holographic clown or clown-like figure appears to give instruction to/entertain a child (see the clown subplot in Chasm City, which was a conscious nod to this exceedingly vague memory).
My key recollection, and the thing that I found quite disturbing at the time (keep in mind I would have been no older than six or seven) was that one of the crew on the ship was kept in a kind of upright black box with only his head sticking out of the top - it was some kind of suspended animation device, I think - although I remember that the crewman was conscious, or became conscious. Later I recall him breaking out of this box.
That's it. I've looked at online summaries of the plot of Ikarie XB-1, and while none of them specifically contradict these memories, nothing confirms them either. There are also lots of things in those summaries I don't recall.
Did I see this film? Did it mess with my mind and set me on the course to being a miserabilist, left-leaning SF writer?"
(End of earlier post)
Thanks to a conversation at Eastercon with possibly the only man on the planet who could have answered my query, Mr Kim Newman, I now know the identity of this film. My recollection of the plot turned out to be right in certain details, very slightly off in others.
Anyone care to take a final guess before the big reveal?
Well I'm back in circulation. I've just done a massive catch-up on the Dendrocopus email account and will now move onto the comments on this page. Give me a day or two and I might actually get ahead of myself.
TERMINAL WORLD is now a finished book, barring editorial changes (I say that every year, as if the edits were a mere frippery, when in fact they can be weeks of tough work) and I'm about as happy with it as I ever am. Objectivity goes out the window when you've been doing little else than stare at a screen for the better part of three months, let alone the nine months of slog before that, lost in a world of your own creating. That's why it's good to get some distance away from the book for a few weeks, before diving back into it again.
I'm itching to post the cover, but I don't yet have an image of the final draft. Suffice to say it rocks. Really. In the meantime, here's the cover copy:
"Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different - and rigidly enforced - level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains . . . Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels - and with the dying body comes bad news. If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality - and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability . . ."
If you can read that in the voice of that recently deceased Hollywood trailer voiceover guy, that would be good. You know, "In a world where..." kind of thing.
I've touted it as steampunk, but - as I hope is obvious from the above - that's only part of it. It's not exactly hard SF, but - appearances to the contrary - it's not fantasy either. However, it's definitely the book of mine where I've erred on the side of explaining as little as possible.
With that off my desk for the time being, I'm working on a slew of short stories (one of which looked for a while as if it was going to be another Carrie Clay one, before I realised I couldn't make it work in Carrie's universe) and slowly beginning to get into the mindset for the new book, which is likely to be part one of the "big spacefaring" 11K trilogy. So, having taken a holiday from hard SF for at least a book or two, it's time to get back into it big-time... speaking personally, I can't wait.
Music, it's Ladyhawke for me, all the way. Oh yes.
Some time ago I mentioned my exciting journey into the world of guitar lessons, something that, I'm pleased to say, is on-going and still proving enormously stimulating.
I'm never going to be anything other than a hobbyist guitar player, someone who enjoys making some vaguely tuneful noises in the privacy of their own bedroom - know your limitations, as they say. But I enjoy reading around the subject of guitar playing, and as a consequence - because I've been given a piece to study which involves detuning the lowest string from E to D - I started nosing around the internet to find out a bit more about this "tuning" lark. Inevitably, therefore, I came across the "new standard tuning" as devised and promoted by Robert Fripp and his students, and that led me to read some old Fripp interviews I found online.
I've always had an odd, vaguely adversarial relationship with Fripp's music. I've been listening to it in its various forms for more than twenty five years, yet I've never really had anything resembling a conventional emotional connection with it. It's more like mathematics, or physics. I suppose the analogy would be looking up at a cliff: it's huge and soaring, impressive in a bleakly magnificant way, but it's also kind of forbidding, with an attendant risk that chunks might break off at any moment. It's certainly in no way warm or consoling, in no way capable of cheering you up, but then I don't suppose that's remotely the point. What is true is that, of all the "prog rock" I listened to as a callow youth, much of which I'm still enormously fond of in a guilty pleasure sense, only the albums of King Crimson seem capable of holding my interest as strongly now as they did then. I listen to a lot of modern rock and pop, a lot of world, blues and classical, but it's a rare week that doesn't go by without "In the Wake of Poseidon" or "Starless and Bible Black" or "Red" getting a spin. This isn't music that it's easy to love, but it is fascinating and challenging, and I doubt that I'll tire of it any time soon. Even Kurt Cobain liked - hey - KC.
Fripp's music is known to many people who've never picked up a Crimso album, of course. It's all over Bowie's Scary Monsters and Super-Creeps, and Heroes wouldn't be the awesome thing it is without Fripp's "hairy rock guitar" running through it like a bright chrome thread. He's done amazing work with many other artists, not least Brian Eno. Their 1973 collaboration, "No Pussyfooting", has been unavailable for years, but it's recently been reissued on a 2CD set. It's pretty daunting music for the uninitiated, truth to tell - toe-tapping and hummable are not phrases that spring immediately to mind.
To put it into perspective, when the original album was broadcast on the John Peel show, it was accidentally played *backwards* due to a tape-threading error and no one - except Brian Eno, who tried to phone in to correct the error - spotted the mistake. Amusingly, the new release includes both main tracks (yeah, just the two - this is the early sevs, maaaan) in their backwards format, as well as one of the tracks played at half-speed, as if the original vinyl were being played at 16 and 2/3 speed, as was possible on some players. This struck a chord with me because I used to play the instrumental side of "Starless and Bible Black" at 45 rpm, to make it sound heavier and faster. (And pop pickers, the Cocteau Twins' Victorialand, which was one of the few albums meant to be played at 45 rpm, sounded like Bladerunner backing music when played at 33 rpm).
I digress. Anyway, one of those online Fripp interviews contained the following Fripp quote: "Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence." Which, when you think about it, is quite a conversation stopper. But the quote nagged at my memory - something about music and wine - and eventually I remembered why. "Music is the wine" is the first track on Seventeen Evergreen's album, which I mentioned in my year's end music round-up. A hitherto unsuspected Fripp connection? Yes, because "Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence" is *also* a Fripp quote, or so it would appear. The fact that these statements are mutually contradictory, but in some way both inarguably correct, is, I think, rather pleasing.
And we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.
While searching for stuff about myself on the internet (egomaniacal, moi?), I came across some kind of website/forum thing for people of the INTP (Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Perception) personality type. A thread was running in which the participants speculated as to which authors might fall into the same grouping, and my name was raised as a possible INTP (or "architect", in the Kiersey classification). According to the Wikipedia page, INTP types make up about 1 - 5 % of the population.
The interesting thing is, I've done the Myers-Brigg test twice, about a year apart, and on both occasions I was indeed classified as INTP - despite what seemed to me fairly conscious efforts to "cheat" the test on the second run. So, while I've no idea of the legitimacy of this kind of exercise, it did seem quite robust.
I wonder what is the most common Myers-Briggs type among my readers?
In other words, it's my birthday today. I'm taking the afternoon off and going out for a nice meal with my wife. Then it's back to the grindstone and the final push to the end of the new book.
As mentioned here, I went up to the Science Museum a couple of weeks ago to do a short piece for the BBC. While I was there I popped into the shop and treated myself to a gadget I'd been meaning to get hold of ever since reading about it in one of the astronomy magazines: a nifty little beast called a Celestron SkyScout. I nearly bought one in Chicago last year, but didn't fancy trying to get it through customs, given that it's about the cost of a mid-range digital camera and I'd already picked up a few other goodies.
I guess if you're plugged into astronomy, you'll know about these things (Meade market an equivalent product) but, without exception, everyone I've shown it to has reacted with a degree of surprise, in the sense that they genuinely didn't know that anything like this existed.
SkyScout is a thing about the size of digital video camera with built-in GPS. It's very light and runs off a couple of AAA batteries. You go outside at night, switch it on and wait until it acquires a GPS lock. You then point it at something in the sky - and this is the clever bit - it tells you what you're looking at, based on an internal database of stars, planets and other astronomical objects.
That bright star in the west? Venus. That less bright star over there? Castor. What's more, SkyScout will give you a brief audio narration for the brighter objects, and it also includes a display window where it can display scientific data, GPS stats, even your position. It can also be used to guide you to an object of your interest: simply select an item from the database, and the device will lead you across the sky until you're looking in the right direction.If you're up for it, it can even give a guided tour of "tonight's highlights".
It's pretty amazing, really - and it's only the tip of a GPS revolution in amateur astronomy. You can now buy a GoTo telescope that you can essentially set up in your back garden out of the box, switch on, and allow it to find its way around the sky.
Of course, there's an argument that all this shiny gadgetry takes away some of the fun of navigating around the sky, learning the constellations etc. But take it from me. I was a professional astronomer for more than a dozen years, and an occasional amateur for a quarter of a century, and I've never been particularly good at sky recognition. In fact, on the rare occasions when the skies are clear around here, the last thing I want to be doing is trying to figure out which star is which. I want to look at stuff, before the clouds roll in. I can do the recognition later, thanks. Anything that helps me get my telescope (or even my eyeballs) actually pointed at something interesting has to be a boon.
Anyway, I bought it for my wife. Not me. Just so that's clear.
I've turned off the comment verification thingy as it was causing problems for people. I don't remember purposefully switching it on, so it's no biggie. I've yet to delete a single comment, so provided we don't get spammed to hell, I can't see things changing.
