Space in the Seventies.

As I've mentioned a few times, according to my childhood ambitions, I should be working on the Moon by now. Or commuting from my otherworldly Arvo Job to my groovy pad in the swankiest district of the hippest, domed metropolis on the Martian plains. At the very least, I should be living on a cool, colony habitat orbiting Jupiter or some distant star.

If you want to relive that dream, pop over to http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/space-colony-art-from-the-1970s/  and see what the future used to look like.

 Forests.

But in space!

In the 1970′s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.

Suddenly The Chook Seems Eminently Manageable

It stood 11.5-feet tall and tipped the scales at perhaps 500 pounds, with the body of a raptor, the head of a chicken and the crest of a cassowary; it sported big sharp claws and, probably, feathers.

 I surely wouldn't want this turning up at the kitchen door each morning. Thank goodness I missed it by a mere 66 millions years:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/03/20/500-pound-chicken-from-hell-dinosaur-once-roamed-north-america/
 

Some Good PR for SF

Stay your alarm, reads the review by Helen Elliot that I read this morning in the Age, 'The Humans' is not speculative. It has more in common with the most memorable fairy tales than anything else because it has a simple moral instruction at its centre; kindness as opposed to selfishness, warmth in the place of chill.

Because, like, you know, speculative fiction can't be about moral instruction, kindness and warmth... And fairy tales aren't speculative fiction, oh no they aren't, so get your nasty specfic cooties off our most beloved stories! Also, the novel is witty, droll, tender, romantic, and sad, so yeah, with all those praiseworthy qualities, it definitely can't be speculative fiction.

The book in question is The Humans by Matt Haigh. This post is not about his book - I'm sure it's a  great read - but about the usual haphazard labelling of genres, and the predictable implied hierarchy of merit. So, according to the review, The Humans is about an alien - a Vonnodorian - from a galaxy where mathematical genius is the norm. The Vonnodorian dispatches a mathematics professor and assumes his human identity. Much observation of the human race ensues and the ever so logical Vonnodorian, much to his surprise, develops fond feelings for our erratic species.

Nope, not speculative fiction at all.

In the usual litfic tendency to cherrypick who gets to pass through the hallowed gates of literary respectability, and despite the main character being from another galaxy and engaging in what I imagine are debates about humans that have already appeared in hundreds of brilliantly written and thoughtful SF short stories and novels, this book gets the mainstream seal of approval. Kudos to Matt Haigh. I wish him all the best. However, I can only surmise he escapes what the reviewer obviously regards as the dreaded speculative fiction label (possibly to do the book a favour because she views The Age readers as being biased against it) because the alien in the novel cunningly morphs into a middle-aged, Cambridge mathematics professor with marital problems, one of the customary mainstays of mainstream fiction (though a professor of English is even more acceptable). Mind you, I've read plenty of SF with that exact same hero, and pretty much the same scenario and well-written to boot, so, hmm, back to square one.

As I've wondered time and time again, who gets to choose what is "respectable" fiction, and what is sniffingly rejected as genre dross? What criteria do they use? How widely read are they? What are the limits of their imagination? Oops, I might be getting a bit snippy there myself...

On a brighter note, over at The Atlantic, science fiction gets the thumbs up in an article about a couple of M.I.T. Media Lab researchers who are teaching a course called Science Fiction to Science Fabrication aka Pulp to Prototype, in which they use texts (not the movies) like Frankenstein and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to encourage students to anticipate the consequences of their inventions and designs:

Reading science fiction is like an ethics class for inventors, and engineers and designers should be trying to think like science fiction authors when they approach their own work.

They even quote the late, great Frederik Pohl:

Frederik Pohl once said that it wasn’t the job of science fiction authors to create the automobile but to describe the traffic jam.

It follows that it is our job as technologists not to avoid creating the automobile, but to look at the traffic jam and design so that doesn’t happen. Thinking about these things at the beginning and iteratively throughout the process allows us to create better technology. Just as storytelling gives you more lives to live, speculative design or science fiction prototyping gives you more iterations to consider before your creation goes out into the wild and becomes hard to control. Once a genie is out of the bottle, it isn't inclined to allow itself to be stuffed back in. Once an abusable technology is in the hands of a fascist government or rogue nation-state, its leaders aren’t likely to return that technology for an upgrade that removes the features they’re using to spy or express their political agenda. Designing the genie so he can’t be used that way, before he gets out of the bottle, is the safest choice.

It's a good read, positive about science fiction and the vast philosophical playground the genre typically covers. As per usual, I'm just left wondering why well-written stories about far reaching subjects that span time and space should be deemed less valuable a contribution to literature than, say, the shenanigans of shallow, inner-city narcissists. I read all kinds of books, as do all the speculative fiction writers I know, and there's good and bad stuff in every genre. Unless one has done an in-depth study of the works available, one really should refrain from making snide remarks about something one knows nothing about. Besides, using a certain genre as a broadly accepted insult is just plain rude. It happens. We know it does. I saw it in a movie just the other day. I could see the joke coming a mile away - 'I write science fiction', said the nerdy character. Cue the laughs.

*sigh*

I know this is a lost cause, but can't we writing folk and readers all just learn to get on with each other and practice the common courtesy of mutual respect for the hard work of our fellow scribes? Read or don't read books according to your interests, that's each individual's prerogative, but let's ditch the pettiness and toss overboard the judgmental pretensions that can sour the experience.
   

Weaponised For Wellness

Bearings and bits imbued with Higgs Bosons borne away from the CERN accelerator in the dark of night (nicked? Sounds like stealing to me) by maintenance staff whose creative wives then turn the scrap metal into jewellery that cures almost every ailment known to humankind and sell the miracle pendants for the reasonable sum of $199... well, reading is believing. Tipped off by last week's New Scientist, I did so here.

It's that God Particle again.

Apparently, after one round of CERN collisions:

...an interesting occurrence had been noticed by some of the staff involved in the project. As the days passed their general mood was improving, accompanied by a significant sense of clarity, balance, relaxation and unusual vitality.

This phenomenon, realized and verified by those lucky workers led the researchers to an unequivocal conclusion: prolonged physical contact with the internal metal parts of the accelerator, is the cause of that phenomenon. Those employees, mostly technicians and engineers whose task required them to stay and work inside the accelerator were the ones diagnosed as being affected by the amazing phenomenon.

Being scientists, they naturally looked into the miracle. It all turned out to be very scientific:

Samples from the parts exposed to the surge of energy which showed substantial evidence of having the God Particle were sent to the leading universities and research centers in the world.
According to preliminary evidence found thus far by researches in the medical field, the energy of the God Particle has some amazing effects on migraine prevention, on treating different kinds of skin conditions, up to a surprising improvement among those who ailing from sexual dysfunction disorders. All those among a long list of other medical conditions.

The effects of the God Particle is also tested in the field of mental health and in this field the patients are also getting some surprising improvements in a wide range of medical cases, for example treating phobias and depressions of different kinds.

One of the theories being researched by the scientists is that the God Particle doesn't really cure the listed conditions but provides the human body with the energy needed to normalize and cure itself

Didn't you just know from the get go that those reliable old money-spinners 'sexual dysfunction disorders' were going to turn up amongst the things Higgs Bosons cure? And I like the 'long list of medical conditions' that can obviously be filled in as you go.

I think this is my new most favourite wellness product, replacing my hitherto most favourite, Shungite:

Shungite is a revolutionary shield for harmful electromagnetic radiation from computers, microwave ovens, TV sets, mobile phones and other «achievements» of the modern civilization.

Shungite is a mineral, which has no analogues of range and diversity of its healing properties. Generally Shungite heals, saves, cleans, improves, protects, neutralizes and regenerates. Numerous worldwide studies of the unique properties of Shungite prove it to be the  medicine of the 21st century.


They were selling little tabs of Shungite at an local exhibition recently for people to stick on their mobile phones so it could create a personal force field to protect them from, as far as I could discern, the stuff that made their mobile phones work.

But if you're that worried, wouldn't it be easier be to ditch the tech, if only for peace of mind?

Still, if the Shungite fails and things go pear-shaped health-wise, a few ball bearings from CERN should fix everything.

As long as they're not radioactive...

Outer Space Just Got Pinker

As an addendum to yesterday's post, I've just discovered that to commemorate the first anniversary of Curiosity's landing on Mars, NASA has teamed up with Mattel to create the Mars Explorer Barbie.

I do like the fact that after luring the little girls in with much pinkness and rover cuteness:

The packaging art also includes a list of facts about the history of American women space explorers, plus a link to the space agency's Women@NASA website.

I'm not a great fan of pink myself (though I understand that historically, it was once viewed as a powerful, vibrant colour before being demoted to a weak, "female" shade, but now seems to be swinging back and climbing the ranks as it is defiantly embraced and empowered again. Humans are funny creatures, imbuing the merest things with meaning according to societal trends and then using those templates to take shortcuts when thinking.) Anyway, anything that says space exploration is not just for boys, that girls can do these things too and do them their own way with feminine sass and flair if they choose (and not, if they also choose) can only be a good thing.

 I hope this means we'll soon see little girls unselfconsciously playing space launches and landings in their bedrooms and racing their spacesuited dolls at breakneck speeds around the lounge room coffee table in pink exploration buggies. I hope to see them organising tea parties in back yards for Barbie, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, and the five of them, whilst eating pretend scones, discussing with aplomb the difficulties of setting up a Martian colony.

And if, as they grow older, these girls look up at a starry sky and see that the universe, which doesn't give a hoot about human politics, is actually a cool, gender-neutral place full of wondrous challenges, then I'd say Barbie's job is done.

Party Time!

Over at the JPL/NASA site, everyone is wearing funny hats, streamers deck the consoles, whistles are being blown and everyone is reminiscing about that amazing event which happened just one year ago when Curiosity, that huge hunk of wonderfully sturdy technology, successfully landed on Mars. What an achievement! And one that the earthbound teams involved are still justifiably and most palpably proud of. There are plenty of stunning photos, videos, and fun information like the list of Curiosity's mostly chirpy wake up songs that the MSL team have played at the start of each Martian day. You know, stuff like Don't Worry, Be Happy - just the thing to cheer up an explorer far from home and all alone on an alien world.

You can even get into the spirit of things by sending a postcard to Curiosity.

Aaah, how I love those plucky Martian rovers.

It's All About Us, Maybe.

I often pop over to this NASA site. Like many others, viewing the breathtaking images from NASA's telescopes and probes often reminds me of Douglas Adams' famous Total Perspective Vortex. You know, the machine that lets an individual experience how utterly insignificant they really are in the greater scheme of things and this truth basically melts their brain (unless, of course, they have an ego big enough to confidently compete with an infinite universe). A true sense of perspective, therefore, is not a entirely desirable thing for your average citizen. It can lead to much brow slapping, moans of What's it all about, and existential crises of the truly epic sort.

Still, skirting around the edges of that true sense of perspective can induce gasps of amazement and feelings of heart-swelling wonderment, and for me, today, that WOW! came from this image, taken on July 19, 2013 by the Cassini spacecraft, which shows the rings of Saturn, our very own, little blue planet Earth, and our moon as well :

 

 

I prefer the uncluttered image above, but for those who need a helping hand, NASA also kindly provided a touristy YOU ARE HERE version:

If only one could shrink oneself down and hitch a ride on one of those crafts gallivanting around the outer solar system, or better still, a daring little probe leaving for realms unknown beyond our home patch.

It'd be a cold and harsh trip, for sure, but oh, the things one would see!

Doddering Old Dogs and Shiny New Tricks

Because it's always good to shake things up every now and then so one's brain doesn't calcify and one's hot-bloodedness doesn't cool and congeal, I've initiated a writing experiment for this month of March. Nothing spectacular, just an attempt to up my word count by using two smidgens of the advice promulgated by author Rachel Aaron in her famous piece from last year so enticingly titled How I Went from Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day that I'm sure many of you already know and have possibly taken on board way before me. If I can simply add a few more hundred words to each writing session, I'll be happy with that. Actually, I wouldn't mind achieving her starting point of 2000 words a day :)

So this month, before I hit the keyboard, I'll spend 5 minutes before each session jotting down what I'm going to write in the hopes that I'll then rip through scenes that I've already sorted out in my head. It's worth a go. To keep the experiment imminently measurable, this morning I picked an upcoming antho theme, fished out a title from an old notebook that I've been dying to use for years, had a quick think, did my note jotting, and then off I went. I did not reach any spectacular heights wordcountwise in the 2.5 hours I worked, but I was satisfied with the creditable result. The best thing was that I pushed forward with the actual story, getting stuck into the unfolding of the tale more than I have for a long while instead of getting sidetracked by endlessly fiddling with already written sentences.

Also, in part two of the experiment, I'll take a moment before each session to make sure I'm enthusiastic about the project, not just going through the motions. And if I'm not, if I'm a bit blah, then I'll damn well make myself excited about it!

In other news, I ventured into town and bought a huge bag of  chicken food with the words luxury, organic, yummy, free-range and many other tasty adjectives printed all over it for the Chook. She'd better hang around long enough to finish it!

Great Balls of Guilt

So today's frightening news was all about a meteorite hitting the Russian Urals:

At least 112 people have been seriously hurt among the 1100 injured, according to the Interior Ministry. About 200 children who had been at schools were among the hurt from flying glass and debris.

The meteorite, which weighed about 10 metric tons and may have been made of iron, entered Earth's atmosphere and broke apart 30-50 km (19-31 miles) above ground, according to Russia's Academy of Sciences.

The energy released when it entered the Earth's atmosphere was equivalent to a few kilotonnes, the academy said, the power of a small atomic weapon exploding.

All of which immediately made me feel irrationally guilty about yesterday's lighthearted post on Asteroid 2012 DA14. I know, I know, I didn't make the Russian fireball happen, I'm not that powerful, and I truly wouldn't even if I could control the stars and planets and every bit of space debris in between, but still...

Luckily, updates such as this soon soothed my troubled conscience:

NASA said that the Chelyabinsk fireball had nothing to do with the approaching 2012 DA14 asteroid, as some scientists had previously suggested.

"The trajectory of the Russian meteorite was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object,” the space agency said on its website. 

 Events like this are a timely reminder that there's a lot going on out in the great unknown beyond the comfort of our cosy Spaceship Earth as it negotiates the universe's highly unregulated interstellar traffic.

Duck!

So here it comes, Asteroid 2012 DA14 (they couldn't have come up with a snazzier name?) which will flyby just 25,000 kilometres above out heads, the closest-ever known approach by a large near-Earth asteroid. 45 meters across and whizzing past inside the ring of GPS, weather and communications paraphernalia presently in geosynchronous orbit, it'll be 8000 kilometers closer to us than any of those satellites. Not to worry though as researchers say that both the satellites and our planet are safe from impact. Wouldn't want our smartphones out of action. Now that would be a catastrophe!

Lucky Australia will be afforded one of the better views of this non-happening Armageddon. Look under the Southern Cross from 4.30am AEDT. And here you can read about everything you need to know about Asteroid 2012 DA14 (Happy Harbinger?)

The interesting thing about this record event, apart from the cosmic bullet burn suffered by Earth, has been reading about all the asteroid deflection research going on around the world. Bandied about with abandon are plans to use kinetic impactors or gravity tractors, fitting asteroids with rockets, vapourising space rocks to force them to move in a different direction, and painting asteroids white so the pressure of sunlight will force the asteroid into a safer orbit etc. I was amused to read a slightly dismissive quote by a scientist in New Scientist stating that "These are in the realms of science fiction for now" (oh, the insult) but then a few paragraphs later, there was talk of the viability of designing a nuclear missile to blow apart a dangerous asteroid or comet, and a real, upcoming test mission called Deep Impact 2 to smash a spacecraft sans nuclear explosive into a small asteroid. So did that theory go from science fiction to science fact in one rah-rah Hollywood movie? Did the coolness of Bruce Willis give it instant street cred? Just asking on behalf of those other poor, cruelly put-down theories.

Anyway, people of Oz, if you want to get up in just a few hours, look to the Southern Cross and behold the wonders and the dangers and the harsh, arbitrary nature of the universe (just ask the dinosaurs). If somewhere out in the dark beyond, the course of Asteroid 2012 DA14 (Flyby Fred?) had been bumped just a smidge by a piece of cosmic grit or a gravitational tug...

Have Moon, Will Travel

Over at The Book View Cafe, Steven Popkes has written an interesting and inspiring piece about private enterprise and space travel, using Heinlein's book The Man Who Sold The Moon as his launching pad.

On getting to the Moon, he writes:

I'm tired of one shots to places. Exploration is fine and I love it. Science is fine and I love it. But we need a space traveling culture. A space based industry. And we're not going to get that as long as long as we have to crawl out of the earth gravity well every time we turn around. Until that happy day we carve a hole in Vesta and use it to move around, the next best place to work is the Moon.

As per usual when I read such stuff, I wonder if I'll get to see us as a species heading in the right direction (upwards) before I shuffle off this very earthly plane.

Bits and Bobs, Sense and Dollars.

The best thing about having holidays is that one has time for movies and long leisurely reads. Here are three things that recently caught my attention:

It was all about the money when Germaine Greer went after the publishing industry in her article Writers wonder if it's worth putting pen to paper :

Australian publishers are not doing their job, which is to manage the market. Their most obvious failure is in organising the merchandising of electronic texts. Online publishing is the most exciting development since the invention of printing. Properly orchestrated, it would make possible the publication of all kinds of books in all kinds of formats at reduced cost and hence with higher profit margins.

Australians have always paid over the odds for books and they have bought as many books per capita as any other English-speaking nation, so it is not readers' fault Australian writers cannot make a living. And it's not the writers' fault, either. Even the best Australian writers find that, given the escalating cost of living typical of a mining boom, they cannot keep up their mortgage payments unless they work their ticket around the literary festivals, teaching creative writing or even how to be a professional author.

Writers getting paid properly for creating the primary product that keeps afloat the mammoth industry that is publishing? What an outrageous idea. She's such a trouble-maker, that Germaine.

But writers aren't the only ones getting dudded, and the matter of money popped up again in the December 2012 issue of Cosmos in this quote from physicist and author Brian Cox, which had me going 'What? Can this be true? Well, that's outrageous. Get your priorities straight, World!':

When you look at the cost of sending a manned mission to Mars, it's less than the cost of the current financial crisis. You can contrast the amount of money paid: we spent more money bailing out the banks in Britain in one year than we've spent on science since Jesus.

Just once, I'd like to read about CEOs and financial barons fully bearing the consequences of their greed-fuelled actions and doing it tough. Seems to me it's all fun, excuses and superior attitudes about their perception of what makes the world go round, but no accountability.

Finally, at the movies last week, watching Wreck-It Ralph (which had me worried half way through because it seemed to me the film was preaching that we should be happy with our miserable lot even if other people are mean and nasty to us because upsetting the status quo will inevitably upset the social order and make those other thoughtless people miserable too, which I found offensively feudal. Fortunately, a more inclusive message that condoned a little shaking up of society to right such injustices ultimately prevailed), this now often quoted line excusing the gruff behaviour of Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch), a highly armoured and beweaponed and certainly troubled female soldier from a sci-fi, high action, space bug-hunting video game was also the standout for me and made me laugh:

It's not her fault - she was programmed with the most tragic back story ever.

And boy, her back story as it unfolded was heartbreaking indeed. Every old chestnut in the tragic hero/heroine journey was presented with a comic SF twist.

Funny.

Moon Dreams

The word on the street is that NASA will soon announce plans along the lines of We're going back to the moon, attempting a first-ever mission to send humans to an asteroid and actively developing a plan to take Americans to Mars. The scuttlebutt is that these plans have already been approved, but were kept under wraps in case Mitt Romney won the US presidential elections. Rumour has it that the Mittsterman was less than enthusiastic about investing in the commercial possibilities of offworld mining to supplement our dwindling resources and a glorious future that possibly encompasses space travel and worlds beyond our own tiny planet. Ah well, his lack of vision is shared by many.

It all looks very exciting. And the Europeans want to know if they can play too.

Heading out again on manned missions is the kind of right stuff which, if it gets the go ahead, will no doubt inspire a whole new generation of scientists, writers and astronauts. However, to someone who was a child during the Apollo program and experienced a couple of moon landings a year until budget cuts forced NASA to switch its focus, the fact that these lunar happenings, if they do come to pass, are scheduled for 2021 and beyond, well, it seems like an awfully slow process to me. Here we are in the future in possession of technology well in advance of what was available over forty years ago, but it'll still be another 9 years or more until we repeat the feats of our forefathers and then finally build upon that foundation?

When I was a littlie, manned space exploration was moving at such a good clip that it didn't seem the least bit unreasonable for we young ones to plan a career that involved working on the moon as a grown up. And if  NASA had kept up their then pace, who's to say it might not have happened?

Alas, at this rate, that lunar vacation I've always wanted to take simply isn't going to eventuate. And let's not even talk about how I'd planned to enjoy my retirement in a low gravity environment to ease my aching bones.
 

Ssssh! Don't Ssssay 'Ssssteampunk'

Yesterday, instead of going to the movies as usual, I was whisked off into the hinterlands of Victoria for an unexpected adventure. Apparently, or so I was told, as a writer of steampunk (doth one, lone steampunk story amongst many non-steampunk stories in fact make one a bonafide steampunk writer?) I was honour-bound to enthusiastically hike it to the Lake Goldsmith Steam Preservation Association's 100th Steam Rally instead of sitting in a theatre watching Argo. Fortunately, I'd read about the event a couple of weeks before in the entertainment section of the Age, and the proposed evening entertainment Steam! A Theatrical Extravaganza, openly labelled as steampunk by the paper, in particular had caught my eye, so I was amenable to the jaunt.

It really was a fun day. I love it when people have a passion - I simply cannot fathom folk who have no hobbies or interests - and am fascinated by the bubbleworlds created by people who share the same fixations and together create a safe place to enjoy a delight that others, often dreary people of narrow interests, might mock. Writers and readers of different genres have their respective bubbleworlds, as do horse fans of the various equine disciplines, car enthusiasts, comic book geeks, fashion lovers, music folk, stamp collectors, and aficionados of countless obscure, but to them endlessly fascinating obsessions. Within these worlds, like attracts like, and it's easy to spot the visitors from the permanent dwellers. My brother, for example, who builds stuff and is always complaining about the shoddy tools sold by most hardware stores, was very quickly greeted as knowledgeable fellow when we wandered into a tent full of drill bits and other whatnots of apparently superior quality. It was funny to watch how the salesblokes there zeroed in on him instantly, and much conversing in the universal language of expert tinkerers and machine-makers ensued.

Steam preservation is definitely the province of mostly male enthusiasts, and the rally was chock-a-block full of stoic, patient, obviously retired blokes wearing baseball caps sitting on camping chairs next to the working scale models they'd painstakingly assembled or old steam engines they'd lovingly restored. When a kindred spirit stopped to talk about their project, these blokes instantly perked up and launched into an animated discussion that was heart-warming to behold. There were also crowds of fascinated boys moving respectfully amongst the older men, lads whose eyes lit up at the sight of giant wheels turning and great gushes of steam issuing forth. No doubt, one day in the far future when they have time to lock themselves away in workshops and tinker to their heart's content, they too will pull up a camping chair, slap on a baseball cap and continue the tradition. There were some women in the forefront with oiling cans tending to the needs of various pistons and shafts, and many young girls riding high on the family steam engines, but mostly the steamie women there were wives having cups of tea together at kitchen tables set up at the back of the sheds.

There was no doubting the majesty of these great old machines, some of which were over a 110 years old but were still trundling along in a dignified manner and jauntily blowing their whistles. To me, when they had the grand parade, it was strange that there wasn't more dress-ups going on, costumes to compliment the periods that produced these wonderful behemoths, but that was the steampunk fan in me missing the point. I'd already been wondering as I wandered between the exhibits why the steampunk angle wasn't being pushed at all, if even just for promotional purposes. You simply could not find the word anywhere, not on any posters, not in the brochure, not in conversation. The penny farthing and odd-kinds-of-Victorian-Age-bicycles people did don period costumes, but the whole families, often up to three generations, atop the steam engines were mostly in plain overalls or jeans and t-shirts, the kids usually sporting colourful hearing protection devices. But then I gradually realised that steam preservation is all about the engineering, not about dressing up the beautiful functionality of those great creations for casual onlookers. It's by devotees for devotees within their steam loving bubbleworld, and anyone who needs razzmatazz to jazz it up can go jump in a lake. The machines have the spotlight, not their dedicated attendants. Steampunk, I thought, after a spot of casual investigation, with its focus on people using steam machines as a backdrop for their dress ups, was viewed as possibly suspect.

My hunch was confirmed when the loudspeaker guy began to speak about the evening's forthcoming entertainment. His long-winded ambiguity about the project was treat to listen to. He rambled on for quite while and in some depth about how he'd been dubious about the whole thing, how he'd frankly questioned the decision of the society's committee to allow the theatre people to use their beloved 90 tonne steam shovel for goodness knows what kind of arty shenanigans, but how after catching the dress rehearsal the night before, well, he'd had to admit the show was impressive and probably worth a look. And always it was the 'steam extravaganza'. Not even once did the word 'steampunk' pass his lips. In fact this is one of the few sources I've been able to find that unashamedly proclaims it a steampunk show.

Unfortunately, utterly pooped as we were after five hours of wandering from one shed full of tractors to another shed full of busily pumping machines, and watching steam-powered hay baling, ploughing, earth shifting and other such impressive demonstrations, we couldn't hang around another 3 hours for the twilight show. It was a long trip there and back, and we had to get moving. However, if they decide to repeat their steampunk experiment next year, we'll plan ahead so we can catch it then. Who knows how this tentative, budding relationship will develop? Perhaps, if this collaboration works, in future the steam preservation bubbleworld and the steampunk bubbleworld might even grow comfortable with each other and eventually accept at least temporary mergings of their respective passions. Surely not a bad thing, although I suspect it will difficult to convert the baseball-cap wearing blokes to the idea of grown-ups donning ringmaster top hats.

As an addendum to the day, after arriving home, I noticed my clothes were a bit stinky from smoke and the various petrol fumes. Soon after, I realised I could actually draw lines in my soot-covered face, and I must say the romance and allure of a steam powered world paled a little then.

.

Instigating a Scientific Investigation of the Fowlest Kind

It would seem the world needs saving again, for the Chook has once more vanished. I could tell she was distracted yesterday - she just swooped in for a quick brekky and that was the last we saw of her for the whole day, even though the house was open and she usually likes to sneak inside on Wednesdays. Possibly she was too busy in her secret chookcave getting her chickenmobile prepped for combat. This morning, she was a complete no show.

I might start logging her disappearances and plot the data on a fancy graph. I'll see if I can accumulate important information that can help me make sense of these cycles, or I might be able to tie in her absences with major events of the political, natural catastrophe, astronomical or criminal kinds.

It could be an interesting experiment. Who knows what outlandish correlations one might discover.

Cleaning my Slate

Can one become addicted to watching Bruce Willis movies? After seeing Loopers last week and Moonrise Kingdom yesterday, I was overcome by, and surrendered to, the urge to watch 12 Monkeys again last night. Now I find myself eyeing the multiple stacks of blu-rays kindly left by my brother and battling the urge to pull out Die Hard 4 tonight - a worrisome development, because Sunday is Game of Thrones night in this household. I shall be strong and resist. No more Brucie Boy, not for for a few weeks at least. I can control this!

Addiction is something very much on my mind at the moment because I'm slowly coming off all the pain killers that have kept me upright and functional over the past 6 months. It's a very strange experience. I completely stopped taking one medication two weeks ago, and my body tried to make me believe it was suffering shooting pains down my legs and other discomforts, but I put on my poker face, waited it out, and sure enough, four days later, my nervous system threw in the towel and everything was fine again. It's a sad day when you realise your own body has become a junkie willing to lie to you for another hit.

I'm particularly eager to be done with the last lot of pills, but have been advised to gradually wean myself them off over the next few weeks. I thought the doctors were exaggerating, but nope, it's no fun. But I'll persevere. The reason I'm so keen to see the last of them is because there's no way around the fact that these strong medications, while a pharmaceutical blessing for which I have been deeply grateful up until now, seriously affect my writing and other aspects of my daily life. They make me constantly drowsy, blunt my problem-solving abilities, and for the past 5 months, there's been a thick layer of fuzziness between my cerebral cortex and cranium. I've never been a big one for believing that you have to suffer terrible deprivations to create art, but I do find it curious that analgesics should so effectively dampen one's imagination, or at least they've done so to me. No matter how hard I've pushed my brain, there have only been brief windows of time when I've felt inventive enough to get down a few new lines. I now far better understand those stories about artists who stop taking anti-depressants when they realise the medication is interfering with their creative process, choosing to risk their own well-being rather than live what they consider a half-life devoid of artistic input. Conversely, there are others who suddenly stop producing new work when they choose to stay the medicated course rather than risk the ravages of their illness. Already today, after only a few days on lower dosages, I was back at the keyboard for a flat-out, two hour stretch before breakfast, and then another session after eating. Hopefully my brain will soon once again be unfuzzy enough for me to get back into some kind of regular writing routine.  

Since writing is itself an addiction for many of us  -  we poor scriberly junkies need regular paragraph hits to feel complete and happy, obsess about when we can clear time for our next story score when not writing, and sometimes neglect other aspects of life to satisfy the need for putting down page after page of prose - I find it amusing that what I'm desperate to break my pill-popping habits so I can satisfy another habitual craving. Of the two dependencies, however, I do think writing is the lesser evil :)

I started this year with all sorts of big plans for working really hard and producing better stories and getting them off to professional publications. I had a schedule that involved writing stories for a number of upcoming anthologies complete with timelines for their completion, had tagged a number of more ambitious stories for magazines that I would love to get into, and had even dared to put aside time for finishing my YA novel. All these plans, of course, skidded off into the concourse when I tried to negotiate a particularly sharp turn on the racing track of life. I survived, and that's what really counts, but lost most of this year to medical issues. Tomorrow, because of my time out in the Land of Not Well, there's yet another deadline that I'll most reluctantly and sadly miss because I've decided the story I've been working on isn't ready - I'd prefer not to get a reputation for subbing rough drafts rather than polished pieces.

Anyway, I've decided that all this looking backwards at all this year's lost time and lost opportunities is not only useless, but it's counter-productive and misery inducing, so today I firmly cleared the table of all but one of my writing plans for 2012. I will now turn my attention from what might have been to what might still be in 2013. With the detritus of 2012 now dumped in my wastepaper basket, I've pinned nice, new notices of upcoming anthologies with deadlines due next year to the workboard over my desk, and I've tentatively planned a more realistic, light writing schedule for the remaining two months left of this year.

Then, come the month January, I'll hit 2013, and I'll hit it hard!

Snoopy Happy Dancing my Way Back to Good Health

As you can guess from the title of this post, my Date with Destiny went well. After months of various doctors gently grooming me to prepare myself for the worst (yes, I knew what they were up to. I'm a writer. I study dialogue!) you can colour me surprised, amazed, a little shocked, but most of all, a bright shade of extremely grateful.

The day didn't start out well though. When I got to the hospital for my Date with Destiny scan, I was told that the MRI was broken, which meant there'd be no up to date information for the afternoon consult, which meant I would have had to head home again full of unknowing, which is dire stuff to feed my imagination, and wait goodness knows how long to find out about my situation. Luckily, the MRI tech guys arrived on the scene and managed to fix the machine in the nick of time. Thank you tech guys. I'd buy you each a beer if I could. Heck, throw in vodka chasers all round as well. And peanuts. And chips. The expensive ones.

After that unwelcome drama, I met up with my sister for tea and cake, and off we went to the specialist consultation.  Last time I was there, I was warned that the best case scenario after my initial three months of post-op therapy was a lot of upcoming pain and botheration for myself, friends and family. I'd been advised by my palliative nurse to not go to this meeting alone, so my sister was there to pick me up and get me home if the news was too bad and I was reduced to a puddle on the floor. However, when we walked into the consult, we were faced with a grinning surgeon and a smiling medical student. The surgeon announced that she was very pleased with the scan. My sister and I looked at each other in bafflement. We were primed for bad stuff, so it took a moment to sink in. Then our questions of the 'what do you mean by pleased' type started.

 Apparently, I've beaten the odds. Apparently, I've responded so well to the initial treatment that I'm well on my way back to good health. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine (although my sister and I have a theory that last week's horse riding helped too), bad things have disappeared. Other bad things have reduced significantly in size. It happens sometimes, said the surgeon. I'm not out of the woods yet, but I'm pretty much standing on the treeline and looking out at the world and feeling very much like a part of it again for the first time in over ten months. I'll continue with my present therapy and checkups for another 3-6 months, but my team of medicos are quite confident I'll be as right as rain soon.

You cannot believe the relief I'm feeling. I can hardly believe it myself. I hadn't realised just how wound up I was. This is so amazing!!!! If I never win tattslotto, that's okay. I'm more than happy for the universe to siphon all my lottery luck into my continued good health.

So now I can breathe again. I can be calm. I can plan. I can purge all those twisty dark thoughts and free up my brain to WRITE again! Watch out anthologies of the world, here I come. Gitte is back in the game! Or at least she will be very soon.

Dial A for Adventure

I was reading this morning about a new phone app that deliberately gets people lost so they can experience the cold hand of fate and the thrilling vagaries of chance. This is how some people choose to escape the rule of GPS devices that always know exactly where you are and behavioural tracking programmes that take all the thought out of people's lives by anticipating desires and recommending what they should read, watch, think, do and whom they should follow and hang out with to achieve maximum happiness.

 Sorry, I'm a bit slow sometimes, but lets see if I understand this correctly - there are grownup people with minds of their own who are reasonably conscious of the fact that they're so enslaved by their mobile phones that their lives have been organized and homogenized and made safe to the point of blandness that they conclude that they need to shake things up to make life interesting again. In short, they self-diagnose that they're in sore need of an unplanned adventure. However,  instead of just putting the damn phone away for a while and going for *shudder* (is it even possible) a completely cost free, disconnected walk, they buy an illusion of freedom for $2.99, or whatever liberty is going for these days, and bravely set off on a journey where they once more hand over their choices to their phone? They toddle about the neighbourhood obeying the phone's command to 'turn left instead of right' or 'follow the next redhead you meet' and consider this an exhilarating foray into the unexpected? And by the by, isn't that a bit stalkerish? I swear, if I ever catch anyone tailing me who then uses the excuse that their phone made them do it...

Anyway, give me a break. This is all so irrational it makes my head hurt.

I also read article about the perennial criticism of how the very technology designed to ward off our intrinsic fear of being alone and apart from the comfort of the herd is actually driving us further into isolation. Mainly, it was a spiel on that modern phenomenon that we all know so well - people sitting outside on a beautiful sunny day oblivious to the weather and each other because they're busy phoning, Facebooking, tweeting, checking emails or surfing the net. Or people sitting with other people at a cafe but each is talking/texting to another, faraway person on their phones about how much fun they're having being with the people they're sitting with, perhaps snapping a "spontaneous" photo a la the standard, wacky fun pose for their Facebook page and sneaking in a few words about what an awesome time they're having with these awesome people, and if you don't believe them, check out the Facebook pages of those very same awesome people and they'll for sure confirm all this social awesomeness. 

Again, my head hurts, but I doubt things will change anytime soon. We are but undeveloped babes in the wood at this point in time, at the mercy of our primitive emotions and overwhelmed by sophisticated influences that push all our instinctual buttons and exploit our primal fears. The technology is all still too new, exciting, massively entertaining, and, let's face it, extremely useful, and we are are mostly still so afraid of the unknown and uncontrollable, anxious about the brutality of life, and too terrified of going it alone to risk not being connected. Friends and likes make people feel relevant, safe, and important in a tumultuous world that does its best to erase each person's uniqueness. I Facebook, therefore I am. Facebook is the cyber equivalent of those amulets made up of things like pebbles and feathers that have a special meaning for an individual and which are then worn to ward off the unruly demons of the natural world. And yet, just as superstition can be the undoing of otherwise rational people, the modern obsession with instant connectivity and an outright  dependance on social networks to bolster one's sense of being is as inimical to a well-balanced, happy individual as any banned drug. 

I just hope that we as a society eventually grow out of our infantile desire to avoid discomfort zones, to have nannybots coddling us and telling us how great we are every minute of the day, to have apps replace original initiative and recorded lives replace real living. I hope one day we take back control of this truly amazing and wondrous technology, that we learn to integrate and control it  on a personal level rather than blindly serve and obey it, and that we use it to expand our horizons into the great beyond rather than to shrink our individual worlds into tiny, homogeneous bubbles of self-serving, self-righteous self-adulation.

May we grow mature enough and wise enough to know the difference. And may we once again feel brave enough to venture forth upon adventures of the unscripted sort.

Much Ado About Substance

HERE the Los Angeles Review of Books gives science fiction writing the once over. Fantasy gets a slap on the wrist too. Reviewer Paul Kincaid covers in depth the short stories chosen for the three biggie 2012 Best of the Year anthologies, namely Gardener Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection, Richard Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy:2012, and Nebula Awards Showcase 2012.

Best of is a loaded term that is always going to provoke debates - or at least it should, if we want to keep our genre exciting and relevant. Plucking certain mortals from the mud below and elevating them to a celestial position high above others is always going to pit one person's love of straightforward, ideas-based fiction without any new-fangled experimental bells and whistles against another person's love of escapist entertainment versus a third person's loathing of mundane prose and a fourth person's hankering for more interesting story structures. Your OMG, it's the most blooming awesome story ever in the history of the universe, and if you don't agree with me you're stupid might be my meh! Talk of spheres of influence to rival the old Cold War carving up of the world into political blocks, whisperings about competent but bland talent being helped along by friends in high places, complaints about uniform editorial tastes and grumblings about timid writers resorting to backwards-looking tropes are bound to erupt, and once again, your personal writerly or readerly POV will kick in and inform your position in the debate. All of this, as long as it's done within civilized conventions, is allowable and necessary. Freedom of expression and transparency are always desirable, although one should remember (geek alert) that much like the command of a starship, an anthology is not a democracy.

There's a lot to cogitate in Paul Kincaid's article of the good, bad, maybe, and absolutely spot-on sort. Basically, he seems to think that contemporary science fiction writing is much like a cardboard character of old who is bound for a tragic ending, picturesquely languishing upon a chaise longue in a perpetual state of exhaustion and ennui as he or she sighs and awaits the final curtain.

I do hope he's wrong.

From Spacecraft to Starship

I have to admit, I nicked that great title about Voyager 1 from this Washington Post article. It was just too cool and evocative to not nick.

But as a great fan of the workhorse technology of the Early Space Age that just keeps going and going and going, I was always going to do a quick post to celebrate that on this day,  35 years ago, way way back in 1977, Voyager 1 was launched. In a sequence that often confuses peoples, and mucks up careless sources, it's sister probe Voyager 2 blasted off first, a month earlier in August 1977, but because Voyager 1 was launched along a shorter and faster trajectory, it all sorted itself out in the great beyond and Voyager 1 actually reached Jupiter and Saturn first. Timing is everything.

After an impressive reconnaissance of Jupiter, Saturn and its moon Titan, Voyager 1 whizzed on ever outwards, passing Pioneers 10 and 11 to become the most distant man-made object from Earth. Voyager 2 is trailing its sister probe, and against all odds, both Voyagers continue to happily chug along, enjoying the stellar sights, and gathering and dutifully sending information back to their distant creators with their archaic, but still functioning, instruments:

Each only has 68 kilobytes of computer memory. To put that in perspective, the smallest iPod — an 8-gigabyte iPod Nano — is 100,000 times more powerful. Each also has an eight-track tape recorder. Today’s spacecraft use digital memory.

Primitive they may be by today's standards, but like the admirable Martian rovers that just kept on giving and giving, the two Voyagers have exceeded all expectations by keeping it together and steadily approaching the end of our solar system. Scientists predict that any time now, Voyager 1 will break through the hot turbulence at the edge of our solar system's heliosphere and sail on into the (perhaps) relatively cool calmness of interstellar space beyond.

So, yes, Voyager 1 will become a starship. What a promotion!

Ah, they built 'em tough in the old days. There's a lot to be said for screwdrivers and simplicity. I like my space technology to be rugged and robust and repairable. That way, when we finally do head on outwards, we'll be able to jump start engines, weld together emergency parts from scrap metal, and fix malfunctioning computers with a swift kick rather than having to find the nearest spaceship outlet selling slick, disposable, slot-in units with a limited warranty.