For the curious reader of science fiction (scifi) and fantasy
…is upon us again! (As reader Marco pointed out in a comment below.) This would be a hard one for me to miss, because my daughter is giving it a shot, along with several friends. Ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka… Different people have different feelings about this project, but my own feeling is, if it gets people writing and having fun writing, it’s a good thing! Check it out at NaNoWriMo.org.
“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.” —E.B. White
Reader Marco sent me to an interesting article on the psychology of voting—and whether we’re willing to change our minds in the presence of new evidence or information. Neurologist Robert Burton writes on Salon.com:
In the current presidential election, a major percentage of voters are already committed to “their candidate”; new arguments and evidence fall on deaf ears. And yet, if we, as a country, truly want change, we must be open-minded, flexible and willing to revise our opinions when new evidence warrants it. Most important, we must be able to recognize and acknowledge when we are wrong.
Most of us don’t seem to be very good at that. It also turns out that the less competent we are, the less likely we are to be aware of our own incompetence. Burton quotes from a Cornell psychological study:
People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else’s.
I also stumbled across this on Salon (but now can’t find it again). It appeared first in the Baltimore Sun, and is an open letter to John McCain, which says in part:
At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, “Kill him!” At one of your rallies, someone called out, “Terrorist!” Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered…In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.
You have changed…
Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.
I didn’t know until I got to the bottom that this was Frank Schaeffer, author of the book Crazy for God, calling McCain to task for inciting (or certainly tolerating) the flames of hatred at his rallies. It is true that Senator McCain stopped one woman who was denouncing Obama as an Arab—though it might have been good if he had also noted that “Arab” does not equal “bad”—but where was his reaction when people start shouting “Kill him!”?
(By the way, I’ve read Schaeffer’s book, and it’s a fascinating story of journey as a member and leader of the evangelical right who later left the movement in complete disillusionment. Not a political story so much as a personal odyssey.)
“Muddy water will become clear if allowed to stand undisturbed, and so too will the mind become clear if it is allowed to be still.” —Deng Ming-Dao
No, as far as I know, Sarah Palin isn’t advocating mirrors on the moon; astronomers are. But an interesting response to Sarah Palin came across my desk today, and so did a piece about, you know, mirrors on the moon. So, two birds with one stone.
In the recent VP candidate debate, because it was clear that with Sarah Palin’s looks and folksy charm, Joe Biden was in a match with both hands tied behind his back, and maybe his feet, too. I thought he did just fine. Probably the best commentary on the debate was Saturday Night Live’s dead-on impersonation of Palin by Tina Fey. If you missed it, you can catch it on NBC’s web site.
Today, though, I saw a particularly incisive written commentary from England, by Michelle Goldberg of The Guardian, who said in part:
At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.
By any normal standard, including the ones applied to male presidential candidates of either party, she did not. Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also,” she said.
And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity….
Read the whole column. It’s so, so true.
On a far cheerier note, NASA’s science newsletter today reports on proposed plans to place giant, liquid-metal telescope mirrors on the surface of the Moon. The reason? Huge mirrors outside Earth’s atmosphere could do astronomy that would make the Hubble seem like a school science project. And liquid mirrors could do that for far less money. Basically, you put the liquid in a stable basin, and you spin it at a very moderate speed. The result: a nearly perfect parabolic mirror surface. At Science@NASA.
“No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.” —Edward Hopper
It’s hard to open the paper these days without dreading what you’re going to read about the financial situation. Yesterday I heard Congressman Barney Frank tell us on NPR that an agreement was near; today I opened the paper to read that it had all fallen apart. Meanwhile, the taxpayers are left wondering why the government can think of coming up with $700,000,000,000 (yeah, it looks like more when you put in all the zeroes, doesn’t it?) to bail out greedy and moronic financial institutions and their CEOs, but it can’t help individuals who are losing their homes. If you want to read a serious and sober analysis, you could do worse than this summary from Common Cause: Ask Yourself Why…They Didn’t See This Coming.
That’ll get you bristling about the way Congress gets bought off by special interests. But a perhaps more entertaining look at the matter is found in a Powerpoint presentation called The Subprime Primer. (This came to me in an email, but when I did a search, I found it on a bunch of sites. This is just one.) If you click the link, it’ll ask to open a file in Powerpoint. My Avast! virus-scanner said it was okay.
It’s hilarious. And it’s also the most concise explanation you could ask for, of how this all happened.
For another funny take, go over to Woot! and read their description, ostensibly, of an iRobot Scooba that was up for sale yesterday. (You’ll have to scroll down. I didn’t write this in time to clue you in to the sale on the Scooba, but they keep their descriptions for a while in their blog. So zoom down the blog until you come to a Scooba.) It’s great fun.
These days, we need all the fun we can get. Right?
I wrote earlier about an article in The Atlantic Monthly by Gregg Easterbrook, called The Sky Is Falling. In it, Easterbrook laid out some reasons why we should perhaps be more attentive to the possibility of disaster raining down on us from space, in the form of Earth-impacting asteroids. The probability is small that we’ll be smacked by a planet-killer, but the cost if it happens could be civilization itself. Go ahead and read the article; it’ll open in another window. Done? Unfortunately, it suggested arming ourselves for asteroid by abandoning our plans to return to the Moon. Here’s my response. (The Atlantic didn’t publish it, so I’m publishing it here.)
Gregg Easterbrook gets it half right in “The Sky is Falling” (The Atlantic, June 2008). He argues incisively for the need for those in the space community to take seriously the planetary threat of wayward asteroids and comets. NASA isn’t interested, as Easterbrook says, and the Air Force is hardly seizing on it with gusto, either. I spoke recently with a USAF officer whose job is strategic planning, and his unofficial comment was that the Defense Department could be considered criminally negligent in its failure to recognize planetary defense as a crucial part of its job description. If an asteroid-strike occurs (or threatens), are NASA and the Air Force just going to shrug and say “Not my job”? As Easterbrook says, that needs to change.
Where he gets it wrong is his dismissal of the return-to-the-moon program as a waste of money, detracting from other efforts. While balancing funding is always difficult (and the space budget is vastly smaller than most people think, accounting for only about half of one percent of the U.S. budget), a return to the moon could be a promising next step indeed. Learning to homestead other worlds is the next step toward what Captain Kirk famously called “the final frontier.” The point is not that a lunar base will be a launch point for a Mars mission–no one suggests that. It is that living on the moon will give us necessary experience for future exploration (to Mars and elsewhere), in a place where help is three days’ travel time away, not six to twelve months’ travel time. Further, a moon base could be the first place for serious mining of extraterrestrial resources, signaling the beginning of the end of humanity’s sole reliance on Earth-based metal and energy resources. Why mine minerals on the moon? Well, if you want to get metals into space–for example, to build satellite-based solar energy systems to beam nonpolluting energy to Earth–it’s potentially a lot cheaper and easier to lift tonnage from the low-gravity moon than from Earth, especially if you build solar-powered electric launchers for the purpose. This is a good argument for mining asteroids, as well.
This brings us back to the wayward asteroid and comet problem. While Easterbrook mentions several promising technologies, the best long-term solution may be to build an infrastructure for living and working productively in space–not just one low-Earth space station, but a community of space habitations, complete with multiple, varied, and redundant transportation systems. Instead of hoping someone can get off a nuke to deflect one of those wayward asteroids, let’s build a permanent capability to move large objects in orbit. If a deadly ball of rubble comes along, we could nudge it away. If a metal-bearing asteroid comes along, we could move it to a parking orbit. Then, instead of watching it destroy our civilization, we could turn it into a mineral-lode, and put it to work building our new future in space.
That’s what I told The Atlantic, and I still think it’s true. Sometimes you just have to bring your own soapbox.
“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” —Leo Tolstoy
I mention Barack because I’m watching his acceptance speech as I write this. I can’t tell you how much I hope this guy will be our next president. I really do. I haven’t caught that much of the Democratic convention, but I did hear Bill Clinton and John Kerry, and all I could say was, right on, dudes! Time for a change, indeed. Obama is giving a great speech, as I write.
But this isn’t primarily a political entry, because I’ve actually been thinking about and working on other things. I just came from reading a touching post on Tor.com—my editor Jim Frenkel reminiscing in an entry called Still Waters Run Deep about the many years we’ve worked together, from Dell to Bluejay Books to Tor. It was a treat to see those years through his eyes.
I continue to be amazed by the support and generosity of the ereading community on Mobileread.com. By the time I was done with Neptune Crossing, four different people (none of whom I knew a week ago) were working on format conversions for me, or helpfully tweaking my own files. At the same time, people have been saying thanks with Paypal donations, and/or letting me know they’ve gone to buy my other ebooks. The dollar amount maybe won’t buy us a new washing machine (the damn Calypso died again today) but the feeling of support, encouragement, and community doesn’t have a dollar sign on it. It’s just been great.
Meanwhile, I’m happy to report that Strange Attractors draws ever closer to being an ebook available for download. Expect word soon.
“People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.” —William Jefferson Clinton
It’s been a busy month. I got my name landed on Mars, and I’ve put my characters deep into the Orion Nebula. In other words, I just finished correcting the galleys (page proofs to check the typesetting) for the hardcover edition of Sunborn. That’s pretty much the end of my work on the book. I’d promised my editor, Jim Frenkel, that I’d have them in the mail by end of day on Friday—and I got to the post office literally about thirty seconds before they were going to close the windows. Package sent, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I like this book, but I may have read it as many times as I need to, for a while.
To help decompress, last night I wrote a letter to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, both praising and protesting this month’s cover story, The Sky Is Falling, by Gregg Easterbrook, about the hazard to Earth from wayward asteroids and comets. Seriously, it would take just one good-sized rock from space to kack most of human civilization. So NASA’s gearing up to protect us, right? Ding. Nope. NASA’s head’s in the sand. So far, I’m with the author.
Where we part company is where he dismisses our planned return to the moon as a waste of money detracting from our ability to do other things in space, like defend ourselves from big rocks. In fact, I believe returning to the moon is the next step toward building a permanent infrastructure in space, which among other things will give us the ongoing capability to do such things as capture or divert asteroids before they can divert us (from our future).
If they don’t publish the letter (and the odds certainly are long), I’ll post it in its entirety later.
“Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.” —Flannery O’Connor
The successful landing of Phoenix on the northern polar region of Mars was a sensational event (which live coverage by the Science Channel managed to make dull; how could they do that?), being the first rocket-powered soft landing on Mars since 1976, when the Vikings landed. You’ve all seen pictures from the Mars surface, no doubt–but you might not have seen this picture, the first time any craft has ever been photographed landing on another world:
If you go to the full image at Astronomy Picture of the Day, you’ll see the magnificent crater near which Phoenix landed.
Phoenix is not just a national and international triumph; it’s a personal one, as well. I was reminded by the Planetary Society that my family and I are personally represented on Mars by this craft: it carries a DVD that bears our names, along with those of 250,000 other people who signed up for the mission. It also bears a library of science and science fiction works about Mars, to be recovered and enjoyed by future explorers. Here’s a picture, taken by Phoenix itself, of the DVD on Mars.
Now that’s a good feeling, knowing that a part of me is up there on Mars right now.
One of the last of the towering giants of our field is gone. Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. I learned of it when my daughter called from college to tell me she’d seen it on the BBC news site. (There’s a much better obituary in the Washington Post, also reprinted in the Boston Globe.) I was stunned, even though I knew I shouldn’t be; his health had been frail for years. Nonetheless, I feel deeply saddened, and at the same time grateful for the wonders of the imagination that he brought us all. Like many of my generation, I grew up inspired by AsimovHeinleinClarke, as well as many of their contemporaries. With Sir Arthur’s passing, that towering triumvirate is all gone now. In this world, all that remains is their work, and memories. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty impressive monument.
Photo from AP, via Boston GlobeI never met Arthur Clarke, but we corresponded briefly when I was in college. (Correspondence is probably glorifying it, but that’s how I choose to remember it.) When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, Arthur Clarke was there with Walter Cronkite, covering the story. Being a big fan of Clarke’s at the time (in particular, I loved his short stories and the short novel Against the Fall of Night), I wrote to him in care of CBS News, telling him how great it was to see him there on TV with Walter Cronkite. A week or so later, I got a postcard back from him, thanking me. He’d written it as he was departing for his home on Sri Lanka.
He and I shared a love of something besides science and science fiction, particularly science fiction with transcendent themes—and that was scuba diving. That’s something I’d always wished we could have talked about. It was not to be, in this world. Maybe in the next.
“All writing is a form of prayer.” —John Keats
The last few weeks have been jammed, with one thing after another, some better than others. Doing taxes (mostly, getting a year’s financial records caught up so that I could do our taxes) took a big slug of time. In my new model for life, it had to be done not by an April 15th deadline, but by the deadline of submitting all the application materials for my daughter’s college financial aid. Ironically, in the midst of this, I needed to bring said daughter home for a week of enforced rest. She bonked her head real good on a lighting fixture at the theater where she works, and got a concussion. Being a college kid, she of course wasn’t resting as needed for recovery. So home she came.
The day we drove her back to school (a 3 1/2 hour drive each way) was the day we had torrential downpours throughout the northeast—so we got on our way for the return trip home just in time to avoid flooding roads, and then drove for 3 1/2 hours through the hardest pounding rain I’ve seen in a long time. Made it okay, though.
That segued right into preparing for one of my most unusual trips (from which I’ve just returned). I flew to D.C. and joined a handful of other SF writers for a 2-day meeting with people from the defense department, or technically the Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP), brainstorming futuristic notions of how we might better prepare our soldiers for future combat. Now, I am not a military type at all, and there I was with a group consisting of military thinktank guys, ex-servicemen, and a few representatives of actual arms manufacturers. It was extremely interesting and educational, and I hope I contributed some useful ideas. Mostly I focused on nonlethal weapons and information systems and nanotech possibilities, because I think our people in the field ought to have more choices than doing nothing, or pulling a trigger and killing someone. (That’s greatly simplifying, of course, but the fundamental image is a 19-year-old kid with an M16, kicking down a door and making a split-second decision about whether the person on the other side is a threat or not.) We had some very interesting discussions (although the bureaucratic mode kicked in once in a while, such as when we “affinitized” our ideas, then went for—what was it?—a “Plenary Consensus on Affinity Grouping of Concepts”).
Following that meeting, most of us SF writers went on to meet with people from the Department of Homeland Security, who were eager to solicit our thoughts on how to anticipate threats in the future, and how to avoid them and/or adapt to them. That again was extremely educational, and I hope we got a start at useful brainstorming with them. They’re a lot smarter than most of the public probably thinks they are. And they’re interested in continuing to work with us.
And so I came home, where younger daughter was there to greet me, but wife was not. No, nothing bad had happened; we just missed each other, as she’d flown to London this morning to help her mom deal with some family business. You do what you have to, to get affordable air fares, right?
Anyway, I came back encouraged as much as anything else by the fact that there are some decision-makers in Washington who actually think science fiction writers have some useful thoughts to contribute. That alone was worth the trip.
“Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task — such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping — I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.” —Isaac Asimov
