Archive for September, 2007
Dawn launching...photograph reproduced by kind permission of NASA.
It's getting even more cluttered up in space...before long, they'll need bus lanes.
The latest NASA mission features the unmanned spaceship Dawn which has just begun its journey to the asteroid belt, where it will explore Vesta and Ceres. Dawn is the size of a motorbike, but in space its wings will unfurl to create a magnificent Icarus. It is basically a flying camera, but after being launched by old fashioned booster rockets into orbit (see above photo - most of what is taking off is the Delta II rocket, not Dawn herself) Dawn will be propelled by a sophisticated ion drive.
This sent a shiver down my spine. In Debatable Space, Lena's space yacht has a back up ion drive engine. To be honest, as a science fiction writer with no science degree, I had only a smattering of a grasp of how such a spaceship engine would really operate. It just, er, kinda sounded good.
But now we know; and it's way cool.
Rather to my surprise, I've won (or part won, or shared in the winning of) an award for my radio drama Gaza. It's the Clarion Award, which was given for the radio series From Fact to Fiction, to which I contributed one 15 minute episode.
Still, even a tiny minuscule chip off the edges of an award for a very short play is good enough for me. It beats my abject failure to win a BAFTA for my episode of the TV series Rebus (I was short-listed for the Best Newcomer award, but then some smarty-pants noticed that I'd had over a dozen Bill episodes broadcast, and hence wasn't strictly speaking a newcomer, and so I was de-nominated - sob!)
Anyway, I'm proud to have a stake in this glorious shard of an award, and thanks to Sasha and the rest of the team.
I've just finished reading The Electric Church by Jeff Somers. I'd recommend it strongly. It's a blisteringly exciting, brilliantly conceived cyber-noir-thriller-actionmovie-SF novel.
Somers is a clever high-octane writer, and has the knack of re-energising his storyline with new characters and fresh story elements every three or four chapters...so the narrative never lulls or sags, it just keeps hurtling along to its excellent climax.
It's also a wonderfully vivid piece of writing; you can see every image, you can smell the fear. And the story premise is a peach - it's about a Church which promises eternal life by turning its disciples into cyborgs.
For the first time in human history - a religion which delivers on its promises!
Somers has been enslaved by his publishers for some time, and this has clearly inspired him to do his best work. For further details of the Electric Church, which alarmingly appears to actually exist, check out what happens when you click on this full stop.
I wrote a little while ago about why women are still getting short-changed in action movies...and now to competely confute and contradict me, along come two movies with female action stories. There's The Brave One with Jodie Foster, which is trailering now; and Quentin Tarantino's critically pasted Death Proof.
Death Proof, of course, was originally meant to be one half of the Grindhouse project, a double bill of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez exploitation flicks. The two-films-in-one version bombed in the States because audiences kept leaving before the second film screened (I did that at the theatre once - left at the interval, relieved it finally was over, only to find there was a second half. Oops!) So Harvey Weinstein, the film's distributor, has now released the two films separately - Rodriguez' Planet Terror is still to come.
This process, of course, screws Tarantino's movie badly. He's had to add material that he'd previously cut, making it too wordy and too slow at times. And the spoof trailers which spliced the movies together have also gone, killing most of the joke.
Even so, I found it a fascinating and artistically rich movie. It shows that Tarantino can write for women as effectively and lusciously as he does for men. For much of the film, women chat and bicker and insult each other - and it's done with panache and wit and great verbal dexterity. And though many critics found the chatting tiresome, I felt it was delightful.
And the casting is magnificent - the women have energy and chutzpah and verve in abundance and the camaraderie between them is sublime and to be savoured.
But Tarantino also plays some magnicifent style tricks. The film begins in a mock-70s fashion, complete with scratches on the celluloid, dialogue jumps and dialogue repetitions, with cheesy, grating music, and at one point there's a ghastly car-crash (!) of an edit to (apparently) remove a nude scene.
Later, as a group of women pull up in a car, the image turns to black and white for the duration of an entire scene. Then abruptly, colour is restored; and from that point on, the celluloid scratches are gone and the screen look is rich and properly graded.
I can see why some critics think this is all random and silly; but I bought into it. And I bought into it because of the application of Samuel T. Coleridge's fundamental principle of how poetry (and by extension, movies) work - through the 'willing suspension of disbelief.' This phrase is in fact generally misquoted - people talk about not being able to 'suspend their disbelief' at a far-fetched piece of storytelling. But the word 'willing' in there is the killer, and truly defines how the process works. Movies - all drama - all fiction - constitute an entirely interactive experience. As a movie goer, or a reader, you can choose to suspend disbelief; or you can sit there carping and sneering and hating it. It's your choice. Of course, if the film is bad, no amount of suspended disbelief will make it good; but there is always an early moment in a film when you the audience agree to the deal - yes, I will believe this ridiculous premise, provided you entertain and stimulate me with your movie...
And Tarantino, as a master of genre movie-making, knows this process. And he knows that style tricks are a way of sending coded messages to the audience - 'this is the experience I'm going to give you,' 'this is how to experience and interpret the film'. In Kill Bill his blatant pastiche of cheesy martial arts movies - evident in his choice of music, his choice of shots, even his casting choices - tells the audience right from the start: 'This isn't real, don't look for psychological truth, it's this kind of movie.' And you have to roll with that; because if you don't, this movie has nothing whatever to offer you....
All genre movies have to define their genre of course - they have to tell us what kind of film we're watching. So a film noir will begin with moody, film noir music; a thriller will begin with action, or at least, with energising music that tells us action will soon occur.
But Tarantino is playing games with his very art form. In Kill Bill he switches genre and even switches medium with bewildering dexterity. He has anime; he has a fight sequence seen entirely through the shadows of the fighters behind the screen - turning the movie into a shadow puppet play. He has a fight scene in the snow which stops being cinema and becomes an animated version of Chinese plate engraving. He has cheesy B movie low angle shots; then he has shots worthy of Kurosawa. He's like a jazz pianist who switches to classical riffs and back again (as Nina Simone, by the way, does so brilliantly.)
So with Death Proof, a story with a wacky plot which implies it's okay to take brutal revenge on nasty men - the style shifts are an essential part of the point of it all. This film is not one thing, it's many thing. It's a No-Brainer (with its laughably simple narrative); it's also a Much-Brainer, rich in artistic experimentation. It's a straight-down-the-line exploitation movie, with great car chases and cheesy moments; it's also a Nouvelle Vague art film, with rambling dialogue about life and everything; and it's also a postmodern exploration of the limits of cinema. There really is no narrative reason for the movie to suddenly be in black and white; but when colour is restored, the characters are standing next to a canary yellow car which spears the retina with its brightness. It's a particular kind of yellow which Tarantino uses again and again in Kill Bill; and the switch from black and white to such savage colour teaches us to savour the beauty of that yellow, the yellowness of that yellow. It's an existential moment.
It's also a bridge; it allows Tarantino to change register to a 'modern' and colour-rich screen image, set much more firmly in the present day. (Though the mobile phone seen earlier tells us that in actual narrative fact, the entire movie is in the present, just shot like a 70s movie.) Then, through a series of ludicrcous contrivances, Tarantino has a climax featuring two vintage 70s cars (I'm not a car person, I can't remember the damn makes of these cars, though of course that shit really matters to Tarantino's characters) weaving in and out of traffic on a road filled with Saabs and 4 x 4s, in a wonderfully jarring time-dislocation effect. In theatre this effect is used often - when characters in a Shakespeare production wear clothes from different eras and different places, for instance with 20s gangsters side by side with Roman centurions. In movies, it's less expected, and hence even more effective.
Ultimately, this is a movie which is less than the sum of its parts - but only because the rest of its parts have been severed and (temporarily) cast elsewhere. But it will, I predict, do massively well on DVD when Grindhouse will be seen as it was intended. And since the theatrical release of movies these days is often not much more than a warm-up for the DVD release, that means that this project should not be counted as a failure - the judgement can't be made until it's watched at home, by an audience of willing disbelief suspenders, with a six pack of beer at the ready.
I did find it hugely refreshing to see a film with so many distinctive, and vivid, and rich female characters. And I admired Tarantino for creating the two stunt women characters - who can outdo guys at any daring feat, and who really are bona fide Action Women.
The special energy of the film comes from the rapport between the (massive!) cast of women. Tarantino clearly loves the way women talk, the way they banter, the way the tease, the way they move and dance. And the life force of each of his actresses is a palpable thing in this movie; they light up the screen, they radiate personality and life, and they provide the human heart of this shrewd exploitation flick.
It continues to be a busy time up in space...after some difficulties, the plucky robot explorer Opportunity is now roaming in Victoria Crater, Mars. A fly-past of Iapetus has yielded some amazing images of its odd equatorial bulge, which makes it resemble an orbiting walnut.
And on the ISS (the world-circling anti-celebrity reality show, which this blogs reports on from time to time) a group of weary astronauts and cosmonauts are preparing for the end of their mission. (For a virtual tour of the International Space Station, click here.) On October 10th, a Soyuz spaceship will dock with the ISS, and Expedition 15 will go home to their families, and will be replaced by the 'spacenauts' of Expedition 16. (Apart from the irrepressible Flight Engineer Clay Anderson, who featured in that wonderful space press conference for American schoolkids, juggling ping pong balls and grinning at the camera - he'll be staying on a little longer.)
I was intrigued to see that the Commander of the new team, Peggy Whitson, is a veteran space-dweller; she was Flight Engineer on Expedition 5, from June till December 2002. She's a scientist-astronaut, as they mostly are; born in 1960 in Iowa, with a doctorate in biochemistry. At the end of her first expedition, she had logged 184 days, 22 hours and 14 minutes in space. She has phenomenal academic credentials, and according to her biog she enjoys weightlifting, biking, basketball and water skiing.
These bare facts can't of course give much sense of her personality. Though it's plain to see that she's brainy, fit, and so far as I can glean, entirely fearless. Er, what's not to love about this lady?
In a 'letter home' during her time with Expedition 5, she wrote beautifully of her experiences in space:
As the Soyuz capsule began to fill my video monitor, the sun began to peek around the edge of the planet, making that incredible royal blue curvilinear entrance. Alpha and the new Soyuz capsule were soon bathed in brilliant white light from the sun. While the Earth below was still dark, the Soyuz made contact and became our new rescue vehicle.
Every six months a new Soyuz capsule is sent up to the ISS to replace the capsule that is in orbit, and serves as the emergency return vehicle for the station. It's a chance to swap crews, and convey materials to and fro. Later in her account, Peggy descibes how the old Soyuz capsule returned to Earth:
I shut off all the lights in the lab to watch from the window there. The thing I noticed first was what appeared to be a milky white contrail in the darkness. It brightened and the Soyuz became visible as it began to glow from the heat of re-entry. The Soyuz consists of three parts, the engine section, the "living compartment", which is not larger than a subcompact car volume, and the cramped descent module, sandwiched in between them. I was surprised to actually see "razdalenea" (separation) of these three modules. The three glowing pieces separated, and the engine compartment and the living compartment trailed behind the descent module and began a fiery disintegration, looking much like a bright orange Fourth of July sparkler...We were able to see the descent module for a few minutes after separation, before it seemed to be swallowed up in the cloudy darkness below. After 4 hours of separation from the station, the taxi crew had landed in the cold desert of Kazakstan.
NASA astronauts are not selected on the basis of their flair for writing evocative prose - they are selected because they are brainy, fit, capable of working staggeringly hard doing routine but essential jobs, and fearless. (This, by the way, rules me out as an astronaut on every single count.) But on the basis of this letter home, this woman has poetry in her heart and typing fingers, as well as a science brain.
Peggy will spend the next six months with the (irrepressible!) Clay, who has promised to write a song in space and may well inflict it on the unwary newcomers, and with the other members of Expedition 16: Flight Engineer Yuri Malenchenko, Flight Engineer Daniel M. Tani; Flight Engineer Leopold Eyharts from France; Flight Engineer Garrett Reisman; and Spaceflight Participant Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor.
If you have any idle moments, check out their progress from time to time; the link is on the right of this page.
Photo Gallery
The ISS in space, seen against a blue Earth.
Rick Mastracchio and Clay Anderson, space walking.
Peggy gets a haircut...
Peggy looks at some soy beans that she's grown in space.
Rick Mastracchio, still spacewalking...er, looks like they're not going to let him back in....
All photographs reproduced by kind permission of NASA, who claim no copyright on images used for non-commercial purposes.
I spent Sunday on the South Bank, in the midst of the Thames Festival. Music, food, and a Night Carnival featuring the fabulous London School of Samba. And at lunchtime, I saw people playing on the sandbanks on the shore of the Thames, a rare sight - and then, even rarer, I saw a crocodile and an octopus beautifully sculpted from sand.
Later on I took my family to see this amazing spectacle, only to find the tide was high and the sand was all gone; and I was once again exposed as a probable fantasist. ("A crocodile, Philip?")
In the afternoon, I did a sci-fi workship for Blast! in Theatre Square, outside the National Theatre. It was a delightful session, with a small group of 13-19 year olds who listened, either enraptured or bored to tears but hiding it very well, at my account of SF extrapolation, and the principles of quantum teleportation as used in the novels of Charles Stross and Michael Crichton.
A few of the young people said they didn't really know what science fiction actually is. I've heard various good accounts over the years, and most recently this definitive account from Darrell Schweitzer on the Benford/Rose website. (His comments directly follow Benford's comments about fantasy.) But it's harder than it seems to summarise the essence of science fiction. No, it doesn't have to be about the future; no, it doesn't have to have lots of gadgets. And in answer to one young person's question - yes, Orwell's 1984 is definitely science fiction - because it's an extrapolation, a brilliant guess about what society might be in 1984, as well as being a satire of life in Europe and Russian in 1948. (Hence the title.)
The best definition of SF for me though came in the second part of the session, when I asked my wannabee SF writers to come up with their own extrapolations. I won't describe them in detail - because some of these young people may be planning to write their own stories, which they will want to sell for money. But the range and imagination of the ideas they generated were heartening. One girl had an idea for a new form of energy, in a way that was ripe for exciting dramatic development; one boy had a great mystery/thriller concept about an object buried in the Thames; another of the participants had an idea involved 'mutated souls' which I adored. Another had a wholly new angle on identity swapping, which could be a great basis for a thriller. All great stuff! Though no one of course had time to develop an actual storyline.
But this experience confirms for me that, more often than not, in SF it's the idea that starts it all. Yes you need great characters, yes you need emotional truth, yes you need suspense and thrills and a strong narrative. But ideas that inspire - SF is the only genre which starts and ends with that.
There are, of course, SF novels that are not about scientific extrapolations or ideas, where characters come first. Those books are cool too; and if they're in the future, or an alternative present, they're still SF. (I hate definitions that act as slammed doors; I prefer definitions that illuminate.) But as a rule of thumb, I do think 'ideas that inspire' fits aforesaid thumb.
Elsewhere, I've given this definition; science fiction is the collision between extrapolation, speculation and imagination. That also works for me.
But does anyone else have a better definition....?
Anyway, a great day; and many thanks to the BBC for organising the Blast! workshops, on the South Bank, and all around the country.
A friend of mine emailed me last week to say that he'd been using the Astronomy Picture of the Day link on my site...and loved what he saw there.
This came as a real morale-boost to me, in my one-person crusade to persuade the world that space exploration and the colonisation of the solar system are exciting and thrilling things and not, er, dry, and boring, and stupid, and pointless, which I guess is how these topics are generally perceived.
Also in my Blogroll is a link to the ISS Website - the log of the International Space Station, which I describe as 'an anti-celebrity reality show'. This is, let's face it, a really boring site. The style of the entries is dry as Martian dust. There's an interview with some of the astronauts, including the loveable baldie Clay from Expedition 15, which has all the slick professionalism of early episodes of Blue Peter. A female astronaut (Barbara Morgan, who is also a teacher) has hair that sticks up as if she's been electrocuted, the astronauts have fixed cheerful grins and stilted delivery, and Clay juggles with ping pong balls (which float in microgravity!) looking like a rabbit caught in headlights. It's refreshing to see such total absence of PR skills and media spin in today's glossy, glitzy world; but it's still dull dull dull. And the truth of the matter is, a lot of the work those guys do up there is mind-numbingly tedious.
But!!!! They're still heroes! And the very notion of a space station with American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts working in unity is extraordinary. By any criteria, the existence of the ISS is one of the marvels of the modern age.
But this continues to be is a media non-story; you never get news bulletins about the latest exciting space walk outside the ISS; no one knows the names of these people, or the details of the scientific work they've achieved; and no one much cares.
And maybe this is a good thing...it shows that space exploration is becoming an accepted and normal thing. But to me it's a shame that no one gets excited about space exploration until there's a disaster and people die, and politicians clamour to stop scientists spending so much money on stupid rockets.
The wonder of it is that it's happening, and happening now.
My own daily hit of the Astronomy Picture of the Day has become a source of genuine compulsion and excitement. Today's photo shows the Mars Rover Opportunity about to enter Victoria Crater - and the image is amazing. Click the links and you'll see an even more amazing photo of a robot shadow on Martian 'soil'. Opportunity and its sister robot rover Spirit have been on Mars for more than 1000 Sols (a Sol is a Martian day). They've survived dust devils, they've discovered clear evidence of the existence of water, and they have pluckily if robotically trudged from crater to crater on a rare voyage of discovery.
Yesterday's space photo of the day is even more amazing - it shows an American astronaut floating free above the Earth. There's no tether, he's using a backpack with nitrogen thrusters - and it's the most beautiful image of man in space I have ever seen. To find it, go to APOTD in the Blogroll, click Archive, and click September 16; or just click here.
A few days ago the Japanese launched a lunar probe called Selene (Selenological and Engineering Explorer) which consists of several satellites which will orbit the Moon using stereo cameras and x-ray spectrometers to map three-dimensional images of the lunar surface and study its dust.
Last week, also, Google launched a prize worth $30 M to the first private company which manages to land a robotic rover on the Moon and send back a gigabyte of video and images. To be honest, this feels like a terrible deal, since you have to land your robot on the Moon first in order to be eligible (and if the camera doesn't work, you're $30 M out of pocket). But in principle, this is another indication of the imminence of the moment when space is no longer boring and nerdish, but is sexy and glamorous once again.
Until that moment comes, I will continue to bang away about my neekish space obsession, and I'll continue to look at the Astronomy Photo of the Day, and I'll continue to read the ISS Website as Expedition 16 and Expedition 17 and Expedition 18 come, and inevitably go.
At some point, I predict, the imagination of the world will be captured by space. But what will it take? The first mission to put men and women on Mars? The first space tourist flight? The first Moon Colony? The first multi-billion mission to mine an asteroid?
It's probably the latter; if there's money in space, the world will start to pay attention. But in my view, the real reason to be excited about space is that it's a new horizon, a new frontier. The human spirit needs those, from time to time; such things feed our souls. But of course, colonising space and harvesting the energy and mineral resources of space don't help us solve our current and pressing problems - political corruption, wars of imperialist expansion, environmental degredation, and grotesque divide between rich and poor. The exploration of space doesn't make the human race any nicer.
But it is, in my view, a worthy and a glorious cause, one of the better things that human beings can do.
Photograph of sunset on earth as seen from space reproduced by kind permission of NASA.
Take a look at this. It's a love sonnet written in prose by Jonathan Ross about one of his childhood heroes, Steve Ditko.
I loved Marvel comics too, I loved Spiderman, and I still hero worship Stan "the Man" Lee and the creative teams he inspired. (Stan now has a second career making cameo appearances in movies based on his own comic books. In the last Spiderman movie he got an actual speech!)
I wish I'd written this piece about Steve Ditko, but I didn't; and so all credit to JR for pursuing his passions with such delightfully insane conviction.
'Nuff said.
Today was the first day of the BBC's Blast! festival at the National Theatre (in Theatre Square, just outside the main building.) This offers nine days of events for young people (aged between 13 and 19); you can learn how to create your own garage band, how to record music, and make podcasts, how to DJ and how to VJ, how to street dance, how to be a TV producer or a radio producer, how to make animation, revamp an old hat (!?!) or practice the Brazilian martial art of Capoeira. I had a guided tour today around the marquee and the studios, and it's seriously impressive. (Oh, and did I mention the trapeze workshop...?)
This year for the first time Blast! is offering a workshop on science fiction, which I'll be running, from 2.30 - 4.30 on Sunday 16th September. I'm be talking about extrapolation and speculation in science fiction, then I'll be asking the tuned-in teens to offer their own extrapolations about what will happen to technology and society in the future. Since theirs is a generation which has grown up taking for granted such technological miracles as the mobile phone, wi fi and the internet, this could be a truly fascinating discussion.
I hope to feature some of the most amazing ideas in another blog in about ten days time.
The session on the 16th coincides with the Thames Festival, with fireworks and boat races and much merriment on the Thames, so for those of you who are in London that day, it's well worth strolling along to the South Bank.
For further details of Blast! check the website here, or email blast-national@bbc.co.uk and ask for Caspar.
Yesterday I played approximately 43 games of Spider Solitaire. I hate the 4 pack version, because I never win, so I play the 2 pack version. I came out maybe half a dozen times, but sometimes I didn't even bother to finish the game. I just played two or three hands, then Minimised, then started another game, then Minimised, and then at bedtime I switched the computer off and all the unfinished games were swept away like litter in the Queen's bedroom.
This was a dreadful waste of my time. I used to play Freecell, till I deleted it from my computer; but Spider Solitaire has me even more firmly in its grip. The trouble is, I don't even enjoy it. I take no pleasure in 'winning'. It's a really dumb game, in my view. But it's something to do in order to avoid doing something useful.
This is an occupational hazard for writers. We're always looking for reasons to avoid work. Some writers, I gather, hoover and tidy up to avoid working. This is an endearing habit, though I do feel, in all honesty, and in a spirit of due decorum and respect, that such people are STUPID! I mean!!! If you're tidying up, you're not wasting time, you're doing something useful. And if you're going to be doing something useful, you might as well be writing.
This is why my study is a place of squalor, full of empty cardboard boxes that used to hold typing paper, and scripts, and boxing gloves (!?) and, oddly enough, now I come to look around, several teddy bears and a yellow haired doll. (Where did they come from?)
At one stage, to avoid wasting so much time, I bought a keyboard and spent my 'time-wasting-time' learning to play piano, badly. Those were the good old days, before Spider Solitaire, and before I started clicking Send/Receive on my Outlook Express every three seconds, for minutes at a time, just to be able to catch any emails in mid-flight. Click. Click. Click. Clic
But I have a potential cure for my timewastingitis, which I recently stumbled across while researching science sites for previous blogs. I came across a site called Astronomy Picture of the Day, which I've now added to my links. There it is - just to the right of me, on the blogroll - just start at John Jarrold, scroll up past Fictionbitch, and you'll find it under 'A'. And it's a great way of wasting time! Every morning I click on the site, and see the photo of the day (today it's a bizarre time-delay photo of the moon from the South Pole.) Every photograph has a text, and the text is full of links to other photos and articles. Yesterday I read a detailed account of red-shift of which I understood not one word, but at least I wasn't playing Spider Solitaire.
The reason for reading the science sites was to explore (for a future blog, I hope) the role of science in science fiction. In particular, I'm interested in the difference between 'hard' SF and so-called 'soft' SF. What actually is the difference? Is it to do with how many facts about science the novel contains? Or is it a philosophical distinction, a question of style and approach? Is The Man in the High Castle soft or hard SF? Alternative universes are a staple idea of hard SF, both now and when the book was written; but does it count if the novel doesn't cite its sources?
Anyway, that's a meditation for another day. But in the first instance, my Science jag has prompted me to find a great way of killing those long, dreary, bored moments in between sentences and words of the commissioned work in progress. Instead of doing anything useful, I can just look at photographs, and marvel, and click links, and marvel a bit more, and click, marvel, click, marvel, click, until my agent finally phones me up and tells me to get off my arse and do some proper work....
I've just been reading Stephen Baxter's Deep Future, a book of essays about the future and what it may bring. It's great stuff, and it has some excellent sections on the space race, and how and why we never landed humans on Mars (despite detailed and now yellowing documents planning every stage of that seemingly inevitable next venture.)
And the book contains a marvellous account by astronaut Charlie Duke of his experience of walking on the Moon:
You couldn't feel the texture of the rock. You couldn't feel it under your feet either. You sank into the dust. In some areas you sank in half an inch, some were deeper than that. There were no colours, just shades of grey. As you looked away from the sun, it was a very light grey. The more you turned into the sun the darker the grey became. The texture: if you've ever seen a freshly ploughed field, harrowed and very fine, and you know how when it it rains on it, it gives you that sort of pimply look...That was how it was. But it was dry as toast.
Duke also describes going on a space walk, on the journey home:
As I floated out, the Earth was off to the right, probably about a two-o'clock low, real low. I could see it beyond the hatch, beyond the service Module. And it was just a little thin sliver of blue and white. and then I spun around this way and directly behind me there was this enormous full Moon, and it was, I mean it was overwhelming, that kind of feeling. And you could see Descartes, you could see Tranquillity, all the major features, and it just felt you could reach out and touch 'em. No sensation of motion at all. The sun was up above my eye line but it's so bright you don't look at it. And everything else was just black.
There was more of a feeling of being in an audience as you were floating. Here was this big panorama in front of you, below - I just sort of felt detached, I was just enjoying the view, as if I was enjoying the play.
These days, space has lost its glamour. The nation is glued to the TV set when there's a war in Iraq, or an eventful episode of Big Brother; but no one pays too much attention to the launching of space stations and shuttles. The exhilarating wonder of man's reaching for the stars feels like yesterday's news.
That will change, though. In so many ways, the future is already upon us - we use mobile phones, we have a world wide web, we carry computers in our pockets and genetic engineering is a commonplace. And thus it's the safest of bets to believe than in another ten years, or twenty, or even thirty years, space exploration will start becoming extraordinary again. We will have space tourism. Men and women will inhabit the Moon and scientific alchemy will conjure water out rocks. New forms of space travel will be pioneered. We will travel to the stars. This is all the staple stuff of science fiction, but after the long lull years following the Moon landing, it's inevitable that space will start to be colonised. There is money to be made out of space; there is energy out there (the Sun); there are minerals; and it's crazy for us not to explore our own cosmic backyard.
As space travel becomes more frequent, science fiction will become the coolest genre, as the people of the world start marvelling en masse at the wonders of science and the solar system. My agent will become rich. And in twenty years time, I confidently predict, the Book Swede and I will be having one of our never-ending annual lunches in the best restaurant on Mars.
History shows that the pace of change can sometimes be slow, and at other times can be bewilderingly fast. And space travel is, I believe, emerging from the doldrums, and is about to catch the wind.
I want to go into space. I want to float on a tether and marvel at the sight of the Earth floating in front of me, blue and green amd miraculous. I want to spin around and see the stars blur. I want to catch an easyJet to Saturn.
This is all possible, and it's possible soon.
I hope...
Top photograph: Space Shuttle launching.
Bottom photograph: Space seen from space.
Photographs reproduced by kind permission of NASA.
Isn't it annoying, in a world of 24 hours news and ever more intrusive media stories, how the really important stories get neglected and ignored?
This thought occurred to me recently when browsing Gregory Benford and Michael R. Rose's website, which is intended a forum for debate about science in the modern world. (It also includes a superb rant about fantasy fiction, which I don't necessarily agree with, but rates as an eloquent and brilliant five star tirade by someone who has every right to those views.)
But elsewhere, the site offers access to a scientific presentation which essentially argues convincingly that IMMORTALITY is possible, and that all of us have at some point in our lives the potential to become immortal.
But how, I marvelled could such an amazing discovery be so little known, and under-reported? It's like discovering that telepathy and dowsing are on the GCSE syllabus.
The rationale is that the ageing process, essentially, slows down remarkably beyond a certain stage - hence the profusion of people aged 90 and over. Yes, there are aches and pains, joints get arthritic, wear and tear kicks in, and the chances of being killed by a fatal illness increase simply because the individual has lived longer. But no one ever dies of old age; there's always some specific medical reason. And this graphic slideshow display illustrates a taken-for-granted scientific truth; we are immortal.
Um, how come that never rated a newspaper front page?
This is not, I hasten to add, a crank article; Benford and Rose are distinguished figures and would not be held responsible for promoting flim-flammery and scientific spoofery. No, the truth is out there - immortality is possible.
I've now done extensive research into the practical implications of this discovery; and I can confidently assert that I know how to live forever.
I am prepared to share this knowledge with a select number of like-minded people. And, as an inducement to the small but loyal readership of this blog, I am willing to make the following offer:
Whoever is determined to be (by a fair adjudication based on mathematical principles) the most loyal reader of this blog, in regard to hits and Comments sent, over the next 12 month period, will be entitled to be informed of the secret of immortal life (OR ((There's always an 'Or')) subject to this blogger's discretion, such person will be entitled to a free copy of every novel I ever write, plus a slap up meal in the most expensive pizza restaurant in London.)
Here's looking forward to the next millennium...