So long, and thanks....

So there it was. Thirty years and 134 missions, and the Space Shuttle era has officially ended.

The reason I mention this is not because I have anything startlingly original to add to the conversation, because I don’t. It’s because the Space Shuttle has undoubtedly contributed to my becoming a sci-fi fan and writer.

I was seven when the programme started – old enough to have been aware of it, too young to remember what I thought of it at the time. But in those days, the shuttle was exotic, exciting. Launches still made the news, even when they went off without a hitch.

Of course, it’s the one that didn’t go off without a hitch that I still remember. John Craven had the job of telling the nation soon after it happened. And not long after that I was given a plastic kit of the Shuttle and its Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, which I made into Challenger, seeming at the time the best tribute a pre-teenage boy could pay.

But - and I admit that what I am about to say is a little bit shallow – the reason I remember the Challenger disaster is not because of the immensity of the event, but because the Space Shuttle had captured my young imagination. I had the toy shuttle from Moonraker, I had read the specs in magazines and books, I was even, in my youth, quite proficient at drawing the Shuttle orbiter.

I’ll stop there, before I start sounding like some kind of Shuttle fanboy. At some point, of course, the routine shuttle launches stopped making the news. I stopped being a Shuttle fanboy. Arguably, I grew out of it, as did much of the media. But whatever it was about the shuttle that caught my imagination – fed by space Lego, Luke Skywalker and endless Star Trek re-runs – I never grew out of.

So, even though the Space Shuttle will always be my spaceship, I can still look with interest (and possibly a little excitement) at the developments that are already happening at Virgin Galactic, where the next generation of space travel seems to be drawing ever nearer, ready to spark the imagination of the next generation.

Of course, if I was a science-fiction writer, I would probably be wondering what space travel landmark we will be marking in 2041…

Phursday Photos: obvious subject....

Well, a blog which pretends to be vaguely related to science fiction is hardly going to let the end of an era slip by unnoticed is it? I've never actually seen a space shuttle in person, so this week I'll hand the camera over to NASA...

Sci-Fi Song of the Week

A tenuous link to sci-fi, maybe, but inspired by the last Space Shuttle mission which is going on at the moment...

It's a love song, in a vaguely space-age style.

So, is everyone still here then?

Well, based on the evidence currently available, it would appear that booting up the Large Hadron Collider (I wonder how long it took to come up with that name?) has so far failed to bring about the end of the universe, or even planet Earth. That must have been an almighty anti-climax to all the doomsday merchants. (Although, if anybody has experienced any space-time anomalies, or been eaten by a micro-black hole, please do leave a comment.)

In the near future the Big Bang machine will try to recreate the moment after the creation of the universe, and hence discover exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here. Presumably that means they will create a whole new universe (or something even more bizarrely inexplicable) somewhere under the Alps.

Part of that, apparently, involves finding the hypothetical Higgs bosun, the particle responsible for supervising other particles of the universe’s deck crew. If we’re really lucky, they won’t find it, and having proven the non-existence of God-particles will have to recalibrate the whole of particle physics.

If we’re really really lucky, in between discovering the nature of dark matter, and opening the gate to parallel universes, they will also discover all manner of higher dimensions, such as those in which angels and demons operate. Imagine having to rewrite the whole of physics to take into account the fact that you just proved the existence of God.

So, potentially lots of exciting ground for us sci-fi writers to tread there, provided, of course the men in white coats don’t make too many startling discoveries too soon…

The Tunguska Event at 100

It is 100 years since the Tunguska event, when a meteor/black hole/badly piloted spaceship crashed into Siberia, and exactly what happened remains a mystery.

Which is convenient for science fiction, because you can plausibly have a micro black hole floating around under the Earth's core, or the Death Ray experiments of a mad scientist. (Steampunk meets World War 1 on the Eastern Front, anybody?)

Most popularly, of course, Tunguska has become an integral part of UFO mythology, including being involved in the 'black oil' arc in the The X Files.

I have no idea where this is leading in terms of Christian sf, except that I kind of like the idea that when Lucifer fell from heaven, he landed in early 20th Century Siberia. (If I'd been a little more on the ball I would have actually written that story already, but I've been excercising my gift for procrastination instead.)

The whole UFO thing, though, has facinated me since I was a yoof, so I may explore that a bit. Or I may just sit and watch some X-Files. Yes, I think that's more likely.

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Sixth - The Total Perspective Vortex)

So we make a long-awaited return to the increasingly occasional series plucking at the spiritual threads of Douglas Adams' writings.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the Total Perspective Vortex:

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.
And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

I was sort of going somewhere with this, like to parallel the Vortex with the way getting too close to God would annihilate the brains of Old Testament Jews, but really I just wanted to let the universe speak for itself.

Rubbish stories, saviour siblings and unlikely superheroes

I have spent my writing time over the last couple of days working on a short story which hasn't worked. The short story is still a genre which baffles me. I can do short-shorts, blast an idea out in 500 words, but most of the contests I’m considering ask for about three times that, which is way beyond what I can get to at the moment.

There again, I had the same problem when I started attempting novels – the first few chapters would be ok, an interesting story sprinkled with witty one-liners, but then I’d find I had used all my ideas, lose the plot, so to speak, and end up waffling until finally realising it was all crap and giving up.

A couple of those abandoned in a desk drawer somewhere and I finally managed to put something of novel length together that I thought was far enough from rubbish to release on the world.

Practice, as they say, makes slightly better.

It's kind of a shame I haven't got to grips with it yet, because there's plenty of real life material for sf stories at the moment: two UK universities have been given research licences to start work creating human-animal hybrid embryos; along similar lines, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill currently going though Parliament will also allow the creation of "saviour siblings", essentially genetically engineered kids created to provide healthy tissue for a sick sibling.

Both of these things have been opposed by some Christian groups, but I'm more interested in the fact that, well, if a saviour sibling isn't a cool short sf character, I don't know what is. If I was a better writer, maybe I could do a nice, thought-provoking piece about that. I may yet give it a try anyway.

I'm probably more likely to write about the hybrid embryo that accidentally developed into... HeiferMan! Part man, part cow, Britain's latest super hero has the amazing ability to stand in fields for a long time, know when it's going to rain, and be slightly inconvenient to ramblers.

Well, practice, as they say...

Pluto: a Mickey Mouse planet

It's official: Pluto has been demoted, and it's all over for Charon, Ceres and Xena's hopes of becoming planets.

Well, for the time being anyway; it seems there are a number of objections to the decision, not least that the language in the definitions is illogical, and that it was voted on by less than 5% of the world's professional astronomers...

In the meantime, we now have dwarf planets. Possibly quite a lot of them, eventually.

We also have a good opportunity for Disney-based puns.

The observatory

A post in which I make some observations.

You may have seen the 12 planets proposal that's keeping astronomers busy at the moment. I can't help thinking Douglas Adams would have fun with a planet named after a Warrior Princess... Maybe they could call it Persephone in tribute, as that's the name he gave the tenth planet in Mostly Harmless. (Rupert, like Xena, was a nickname - 'after some astronomer's parrot.') Heh, so DNA thought ten planets would play havoc with astrology, now they may have to contend with 12...

I just got round to watching the Christmas episode of Doctor Who... (minor spoiler coming!)
It's the first episode after he regenerated from Christopher Ecclestone, and he seemed to regenerate into Arthur Dent... he spent half the episode in his dressing gown and really needed a cup of tea...

A Scanner Darkly hits the UK cinemas today... a potentially great collaboration of two sf greats - Philip K Dick gave us movies like Minority Report, Total Recall, and of course Blade Runner; Keanu Reeves is the veteran of modern sf classics like Johnny Mnemonic, and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Oh, and that one with all the kung fu. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, that's it.
Seriously, it sounds like this should be closer to the PKD novel than some film adaptations, and with all the digital rotoscoping, it looks good.

And finally, if you just can't get enough of my witty jottings, I've started doing music reviews on my other blog. Crikey, is there no beginning to this man's talents...

Compare and contrast...

I don't want to start any Creation v Evolution debates here, but...

Genesis 3 v14 appears to suggest that snakes didn't always 'crawl on their bellies'.

On the other hand, a fossil recently discovered in Argentina appears to shed new light on the evolution of snakes...

What I like about this is it shows that these kind of discoveries - be it alien contact, time travel, or something as down to earth (no pun intended) as a fossil - can either confirm or disprove our beliefs, depending on our point of view (and how much we choose to read into them).

Mos Eisley, NM

Well, who'd have thought it, eh? Little old Earth now has its very own fully operational commercial spaceport! Not that we're expecting tourists from Outer Betelgeuse to drop in any time soon or creating a little hideout for intergalactic bounty hunters - as interesting as those scenarios would be - but mankind's quest for the stars takes an important sidestep with this announcement.

Elsewhere, China and India have expressed interest in visiting the moon, and NASA put forward plans to use it as a staging post on their way to Mars, but the New Mexico spaceport takes space out of the hands of government space agencies, and puts in the hands of the man on the street. At $200,000 a trip, you may say it's a pretty select street, but then, airline flights, cars, TVs & computers... all started out effectively as playthings for the rich before the technology became cheap enough for mass consumption.

All of which means that science fiction writers can use holidays in orbit, on the moon or even Mars as settings for stories, with a fairly solid basis in current plans. I'm quite excited at the whole idea, having touched on this kind of 'space tourism' in Countless as the Stars, which, of course, is going to earn me the $200k I need...

The first launch from the spaceport is planned for July - I think they should invite Ash to play at the post-launch party.

Goddess on the mountaintop

Tonight we're watching the skies as the Venus Express begins to send back the findings from its destination, which it reached yesterday.

We already know, of course, that Venus is nothing like Perelandra as imagined by C S Lewis, or some other science fiction visions of the planet, which foresaw a habitable world beneath the cloud, where the sun coming was a once in a lifetime experience.... (insert Scotland gag here)

Some of the wilder speculation in anticipation of the probe's findings is whether the planets acid clouds may in fact harbour some kind of life; what's more certain is that the planet's current state is the result of a runaway greenhouse effect.

The fact that we can already see the early impact of this effect on our own planet means that as we learn more about Venus, we sf writers can better extrapolate a grim future for Earth, and create near-Venusian conditions in familiar locations (even, if you like, Scotland).

ESA Venus Express page
Mission guide from the BBC
Latest news from the BBC
Latest news from Space.com

A Mars a day...

Just in case anyone doesn't stop off at google on their way anywhere on the 'net, this is the little toy they're plugging today.

I'm not currently planning on sending any characters to Mars, for which this would be a nice, simple tool, but it's been such a mainstay of sf over the years - from H G Wells to War of the Worlds - that it has to be of passing interest to many sf fans.

And yes, it's a landscape already plundered by Christian sf too, right back to C S Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet, which may well have been the first instance of Christian science fiction - if anyone knows better, let me know!

A more contemporary version of Lewis' Malacandra - and therefore one more in accordance with current knowledge of Mars - is rendered by Stephen Lawhead in Dream Thief. This is one of my favourite Christian novels of any kind - worthy of a re-read and a proper review, but for now I will just say that Lawhead's sf books should be on any list of must-read Christian fiction.