How to write

Some fabulous insights from Robert Jackson Bennett on how to write.

Faster than the speed of light

I've just been mulling about science and myth...for more, read here.

Jaw Dropping Photos

I just got tweeted this link for the most jaw-dropping photos I've seen in many a year.

Callan RIP

You may have seen this already...Edgar Wright's tremendous tribute to the late, great Edward Woodward. He was wonderful in The Wicker Man, and many other things, but for me he will always be Callan.

For the benefit of younger readers of this blog, Callan was a great British TV noir series, featuring hitman Callan and a regular 'snout' (informant) called 'Lonely' who, er, smelled, hence his loneliness.

On the Art of Covers

On Twitter

I've finally succumbed and joined Twitter. (My username is Phil2Palmer.)  Like all evil vices, it's addictive. I now know what Jack Yan is doing, I've heard Robert Grant's view on copyright law, and I'm aware that my friend David Bishop is prepping lunch - chicken with lemons. (I have that recipe - it's great!) 

I've also tweeted about my recent discovery of the meaning of life, over on the Orbit site. There've been some very cool blogs on this space recently, including Robert Jackson Bennett's weird and wonderful neighbourly tales. (When I started reading them, I assumed it was all true - some people really do live strange lives, and meet the strangest people!)  But I guess Robert's been having some fun at our expense...

I'm hoping to post a bit more regularly on the Orbit site - musings about science and fiction and things that are stranger than fiction. 

That's if I can drag myself away from Twitter.  (Hold on - let me just - yes, I've sent one.) Like all addictions, it's (hold on - Is  Twitter an addiction? Yup, I've sent that little insight out into the world) and some scientists fear that (hold on - Is there some special lab where they keep all the scientists who fear stuff? -What a great thought!  yup, that's tweeted now) and - where was I?  Who am I? I'm lost in cybermuddle.  I'm so busy tweeting and blogging my life I haven't got time to (life? What life?)

On 2012

Roland Emmerich has just announced his new movie project - a disaster movie in which THE ENTIRE DAMNED SOLAR SYSTEM falls to pieces, spectacularly, and only a handful of A List Hollywood actors survive, floating on a plank in empty space. 

This is the only way he could top 2012, a disaster movie which features the end of the world, in astonishing graphic detail.  A supermarket splits in half; cities fall into the sea; the South Pole moves to Minnesota; and Everest looms in the middle of an ocean.

It's a great spectacle, but it's also a classic example of a Hollywood movie built by story engineers, not written by real writers. A real writer would have found some pain and pathos in this story of the End of Days.  A real writer would have created characters who you didn't want to punch because they're so damned noble. (The evil Russian oligarch with the big lips was the only character I liked - because he was so flawed.)  And a real writer would, quite possibly, have found a place for passion and eroticism and love, amidst all the falling buildings - because if the world's about to end, wouldn't you want to find a quiet place, and drink a bottle of wine, and make gentle elegiac love with your partner?  I mean - don't these people have any emotion other than blind panic?

But story engineers do know how to engineer a good story.  The thrills thrill, the spills spill; all the characters have journeys (from A to A 1/2), and yes, I did have a tear in my eye when Danny Glover did the noble thing half way through the story.

It's a shame, though, that Emmerich didn't feel able to call upon the many brilliant screenwriters in Hollywood who can infuse genre material with real truth and wit. 

Oddly, it feels like an oldfashioned movie because it's not in 3D. After Pixar's Up, I can't believe that all blockbuster movies aren't made that way.

For a fabulous image of Apocalypse, as painted by John Martin, see Paul McAuley's highly perceptive blog, and scroll down to 4th November.

On Space Art

I just had a very nice email from a 'space artist' called Brian Smallwood, who has just read and loved Red Claw.

Check out these amazing images on his website, here.

Forbidden Planet

I had a delightful morning in Forbidden Planet earlier this week, signing copies of Red Claw.  (They've sold quite a few, but there are still plenty left!)

This shop really is nerd heaven, isn't it? And the manager assured me that he and all his staff are indentured to the shop - all their wages are spent buying books and graphic novels, and they rely on the kindness of strangers for food and suchlike.

On Balance

Here's a lovely short film, sent to me by one of my screenwriting students, which shows the perils of, er, living on a rectangle in the middle of space.

A Touch of Evil

I love evil;  I embrace evil. And, on a daily basis, I earn a living out of evil.

However I am not, despite what you might suppose from the sinister photograph at the top of this blog, an evil man. 

If you asked those who know me, they would tend to describe me quite otherwise.  'Cuddly' might be a word you'd hear.  'Half-soaked' is an adjective that is frequently associated with me. And 'absent-minded' is a term my wife will often use, in conjunction with other less polite phrases, at around the date of our anniversary, whenever the hell that might be. 

And yet, in my professional life, I am both a student and  a master of evil. I write about murder and horror and genocide and atrocities so terrible that I  feel ashamed of my own dabbling in horror. And I've been doing this for many years. so my excursion into evil has become, amongst other things, a habit.

Without evil we wouldn't have villains; we wouldn't have suspense; we wouldn't have innocence defiled; we wouldn't have happy endings, snatched out of the jaws of terrifying climaxes.

Like most writers of course I live a sedentary and often humdrum existence. And yet, from time to time, I have come within recoiling distance of real evil.  I have met a murderer, in Wormwood Scrubs Prison, and I drank a cup of tea that he made. (Before being told, by amused prison officers, that this man had been convicted of poisoning his wife.)  I've attended the post mortem of a woman murdered by her own lover; the killer had, incompetently, left his bloody fingerprint on her naked corpse - and when I saw that, I shuddered with genuine (not imagined) horror. 

I've met relatives of murder victims, and felt the stain on their souls that evil leaves. 

I've also met career criminals. I spent a night in a Peckham pub with a recidivisit blagger (i.e. bank robber)  who at 6pm was blind drunk. He told me tales of villainy as, bizarrely,  around us several other customers engaged in a bar-room brawl. But he wasn't evil, merely sad.

I also spent a day with another armed robber who took me around the scenes of his various crimes, including Wembley Stadium, where he and his fellow crooks had stolen the proceeds of  a charity concert held on behalf of handicapped children.  To make their getaway, they had their wives and kids waiting in cars parked around the corner, loaded with holiday suitcases, as a perfect cover in the event they were stopped by police.

To involve your own children in an armed robbery is a terrible thing to do; a wicked thing to do. But this man wasn't evil either. This is when I learned the difference: wicked is different to evil.

There has always been a great deal of evil in the world, and these are not the best of times. Private firms embezzled billions from the nation of Iraq in the early years of the war; everyone knows this and nothing was done. That's evil.  And there are other stories, even worse stories, in the papers every day.  Man's inhumanity to man knows no bounds; and the corruption of the ruling elites in nations around the world beggars, it seems to me,  belief.

And I abhor all this. Of course I do.

And yet! All the stories I write these days celebrate evil in one form or other. In my first novel Debatable Space I have a character called Flanagan who early on in the story beheads an innocent man; and he's the nearest thing I have to a good guy.  And in Red Claw the dystopian vision is bleak in the extreme (though fear not! there are plenty of jokes too!) and the characters all behave so badly that at times  it may be hard to see who the actual hero of the story is. 

For it seems to me that to combat true evil, you need protagonists who are themselves touched with evil, smirched with darkness. 

And, what's more, such characters are invariably more interesting than pious, moral, entirely honourable heroes.

Have you heard the song that's in the charts at the moment, by that sexy beautiful singer off the X-Factor? It's called 'Good Boys', and it has the chorus:

The good boys are always catching my eye.

They are so sweet, reliable and cuddly, it really spins my mind.

And I know they'll never let me down, they're always punctual,

And well-mannered, and neat, and always study hard.

Recognise it?

Me neither. There's no such song , nor will there ever be.

Evil is a candle, and we are the moth. 

And when a character is tempted by evil, dabbles in evil - but chooses a nobler, truer path. Well, that's where the good stories tend to start.

Faster than the Speed of Light

In the last blog I wrote, as promised a little while ago, I offered a detailed mathematical explanation of the principles of faster than light space travel, and added an appendix containing blueprints for an FTL vessel that can be built out of computer components, and a 3D map of the hyperburrows of space, including directions to the planet where sexy aliens can be found in abundance. (You see! I really am a man of my word!)

However, in an appalling breach of professional etiquette, my editor DongWon Song intercepted my blog and proceeded to build and then use his own spaceship. He has now departed New York for the Planet of the Sexy Aliens, leaving behind him a virtual avatar who (via a doppelganger connection) will continue to perform his editorial duties for Orbit.

The avatar is indistinguishable from the real DongWon save for one telling feature; when it rains, he does not get wet.

Chastened by this experience, I am now writing a much more general blog, without any maths or blueprints, to explain how you (or rather HE!!!) can travel through space.

The impossibility of FTL travel is, of course, a perennial bugbear for science fiction writers.  As all SF fans know, the theory of special relativity does not rule out the possibility of faster than light travel; it merely renders it impossible to travel AT the speed of light.  For at this very fast speed, one's mass will be infinite (i.e. even greater, so the equations prove, than my mass and the dimensions of my arse on Boxing Day) and this makes travel of any kind difficult.

But who, some readers might exclaim, gives a damn?  After all, science fiction is full of all sorts of preposterous nonsense - why balk at this  particular bit of preposterous nonsense?  Why not just have spaceships travelling 'very fast' and getting to their destination 'very quickly'?  Our hero might board a plane in New York and be in Alpha Centauri in half an hour, assuming that the pilot uses a 'lot of acceleration'.  Is that really so outrageous and unforgivable?

Well yes it is. If you want to write science fiction featuring spaceships - 'hard' SF - then this is the law that can't be ignored.  You can cheat, lie, bend the rules, but you can't just pretend that FTL travel isn't prohibited by special relativity.

Because to ignore it is to flout the principle that science fiction must be about the unlikely but possible.

Luckily, the rule is easily bent.  Tachyons, for instance, are postulated particles that travel faster than light. So give your spaceship a 'tachyon drive' and you're quids in.  The fact that your hero - who presumably exists in a 'tachyon-like' state - is incorporeal and non-existent is a small price to pay.

Even better - give your ship a 'warp drive'.  Or, as in Battlestar Galactica, allow your ship to 'jump'.  Because there is a vast amount of scientific theory based on the concepts of 'hyperspace', and 'wormholes', which allow trans-dimensional travel through outer space  So,  rather than walking down the stairs to the floor below, you drill a hole in the floor and fall through.

The two most familiar ways of travelling through hyperspace (familiar to the SF fan, I mean - I take it for granted that no 'normal' person will be reading this blog) are the Alcubierre Drive and the traversable wormhole.

The Alcubierre Drive was invented in 1994 by a Mexican scientist called, um, Alcubierre. And it's a way of stretching and contracting space-time around the flying spaceship.  The spaceship doesn't travel faster than light, but space itself gets shrunk,  so the journey time is reduced.  For a pretty picture that makes visual sense of this, see below:

But if that seems too slow a method of locomotion, then it's easier to use the multiple helter skelter system of wormholes in space - you simply enter the wormhole in one place, and pop out in another.  Niven and Pournelle use this principle with their concept of the Alderson points; Peter Hamilton has them in his Commonwealth books; and in Star Trek, they're always popping in and out of wormholes.

Many SF  writers,  and indeed scientists, have  postulated that black holes are natural wormholes - and since no-one has ever survived falling into a black hole, it's a hard theory to falsify. However, artificially created Morris-Thorne wormholes, supported by exotic matter, are more convenient, if you have limitless resources, and enough exotic matter.

Here's a wormhole:

Easy, isn't it? Just drive your spaceship into the top bit, and you fall out of the bottom bit, in another region of the universe.

Or there's quantum teleportation.  Here's how Charles Stross handles this in his novel Glasshouse:

I stumble to the exit - an A-gate - and tell it to rebuild my leg before returning me to the bar. It switches me off, and a subjective instant later, I wake up in the kiosk in the washroom at the back of the bar, my body remade as new.

The A-gate is a teleportation booth, which uses the scientifically valid and experimentally confirmed concept of quantum teleportation and combines it with the concept of the fax machine. In other words, the human enters the booth (or gate), his/her body is copied then destroyed, and a perfect copy is printed/constructed at the other end.

Thus, to travel faster than light, you have to die a thousand deaths...

Or you can do what the Silfen do.  You can just...walk from one end of the galaxy to the other.

The Silfen, of course, feature in Peter F. Hamilton's novel Pandora's Star. This begins with a wonderful sequence in which astronaut Wilson Kime travels to Mars on a spaceship, after years of preparation and months of travel...only to find that two college kids have beaten him to it, using a quantum teleportation device  they just invented.

The two kids are Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaacs, and later in the same novel Ozzie explains how the Silfen - an elf-like race who are basically, um, elves - travel through space, based on a story a man once told him:

He claimed he'd been living with the Silfen for a few years. Really living with them, down at the end of those paths at the end of their forests which we all know about and never see.  Well he said he'd walked through their forests with them. Start out one fine morning on a path in the heart of some Silverglade wood, and finish up hiking across Mount Finnan on Dublin, like all the rumours have it. Three hundred light-years in a single stride.  But he'd actually done it and come back. He'd been to planets far outside the Commonwealth, so he claimed; sat on the blasted desert of a dead planet to watch the remnants of its sun fall into a black hole, swum in a sea on a planet where the only light comes from the galactic core.

This, of course, strictly speaking, is Not SF. 

For in a single stride, Hamilton has stepped outside the sane logical universe of science fiction (bounded by the laws of physics, ruthlessly policed by the Hard SF Police), into the wacky universe of fantasy where anything goes,  and your characters can do anything you want them to do, provided you call it "magic".

And yet, Hamilton's stuff about the Silfen is just great.  It's not just great it's

fabulous

fantastic

magical.

In other words, it's hard to praise this concept without using the words that actually embody the fantasy genre itself - the realm of fable, magic and, er, fantasy.

Hamilton plays a similar trick, in a much more complex way, in his Dreaming Void trilogy (of which I've read the first two.) It's an SF novel, which contains as its major strand a fantasy tale about the Waterwalker - a human being with astonishing psychic (magic) powers.  (Superman, of course, is SF not magic - because there's supporting baloney to explain he has his powers because he comes from another planet. The Waterwalker's powers are more magical than that; though admittedly the plot does thicken by the end of Book 2).

But back to the Silfen.  Isn't that speech of Ozzie's wonderful? Isn't the concept of walking through the woods and on to other planets just unbeatable? By contrast, wormholes and exotic matter feel ever so prosaic.  And that's because wormholes are extrapolatively real; but Silfen paths are mythic.

Bear with me here, because I'm falling through the paper on which this blog isn't written, via a traversable metaphorical wormhole, and into the very middle of a previous blog I wrote, called Is this the Golden Age of SF?

And the answer to my question  - this time round, in this universe -  is  Probably Not.  Or maybe: Not Yet.  For SF is a genre with huge yet-to-be-fully-tapped potential, which in my view has lost its underlying myth.  The "Golden Age" myth of the Campbell/Clarke/Asimov/Heinlein generation was one of optimism, expansion, hope for mankind.  No one believes in all that any more.  And - despite the wonderfully high calibre of SF being written today - I'd argue that the great Golden Age myth has never been replaced.

Fantasy, of course, has its own myths - and indeed the myth of a 'Golden Age' ,  without technology but WITH magic and higher spiritual values, is grist to the mill of many a fantasy epic. 

Hamilton's Waterwalker story feeds off this myth too - in a far future world where because of technology no-one need ever die, human beings still yearn to be in the universe of the Waterwalker, where magic is possible.

But, I would argue,  "Golden Age" is just one among many possible myths.

And science fiction, in my view, works best when it's not just scientifically credible, but also mythic.

And that's why Star Wars is such a powerful movie, a film which tapped into the zeitgeist of a whole generation - and in effect, created a zeitgeist.  Because of course, despite the spaceships and technology, this is a mythic story, a fairy tale with light sabres.

And - tracking this river back to its source - one of the reasons for the film's success is that George Lucas very deliberately tapped into one of the greatest resources for students of myth: the Joseph W. Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This essentially is an encyclopedia of ancient myths and legends from around the world.

And it is also the basis for the Christopher Vogler book The Writer's Journey, which breaks down stories into stages based on the structures of ancient legend - the Call  to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, the Threshold Guardian etc etc.

Vogler was working for Walt Disney as a story analyst when he read the Campbell book, and he wrote and circulated a 7-page memo to the studio execs explaining Campbell's ideas - a memo which changed the way Disney commissioned and developed movies  from that moment on.

And thus Vogler's book has - for almost twenty years - been the Bible for a large number of Hollywood executives and creatives who strive to create a mythic inner arc for their movie stories - whether they are sci-fi, action, thriller, or drama. Blockbuster movie stories are based on mythic stories, in a totally conscious and deliberate way. (In The Matrix the Wachowski Brothers use the Hero's Journey template quite consciously, and yet also in a tongue-in-cheek way.  When the Hero Refuses the Call early on in the story, it's a phone call.)

And Joseph Campbell was, by the way, a friend and confidant of George Lucas.  And that's the intellectual smoking gun of this argument - the proof of the deep and abiding link between the theory of myth, and the practice of science fiction storytelling.

So the question I'm left with is: how to make technology mythic? How can wormholes be mythic? How can exotic matter be mythic?  This doesn't mean abandoning the rigour of the science fiction enterprise - yes, you can chuck magic into an SF novel, as indeed I do in my next book Version 43. But you can't have Wrong Science.

However, assuming that the science is Right Science - it needs to be part of a mythic story structure that adds up to more than the sum of the parts.

It's the distinction between Tech-Fi and Mythic Sci-Fi. Or the difference between Engineer Fiction - all geek stuff, no mythic underpinning -  versus bona fide Science Fiction, that stirs and exalts the imagination.

All of which is not the blog I started with: time to join up the two bits of the argument.

1) How can we as SF writers get our characters to credibly travel faster than light to experience stories in cool locations?  Because it matters! We can't just make it up as we go along; we have to use real science or we are damned.

2) How can we write SF that is as richly mythic as the best fantasy writing?

In the tension between 1) and 2) is created, in my view, the fertile territory for the New Golden Age of SF.  We have to be faithful to the constraints of science, yet inspired by the boundless imaginative reaches of myth.

Here's a concrete example of one writer who does  just that - (Professor) Adam Roberts, whose novel Stone is a witty and noirish thriller about a mass murderer which has, in my view,  one of the coolest ever methods of FTL travel.  Roberts refuses to accept an off the peg solution; he invents his own method of faster-than-light travel, based on his detailed readings of quantum physics.  Here, in his own words, is the narrator (female), explaining how it works:

Around each atom, several electrons exist, like planets in their orbits around the star, like points at the end of clock hands swinging round on their pivot...And sometimes, when the energy injected into the system changes, then these electrons may hop from a lower orbit to a higher one...and this movement, over miniscule distances though it be, is instantaneous. ..And by co-ordinating this motion over a whole body, it is possible to flick forward through space instantaneously.

This is a completely adorable concept!  If the famous 'quantum leap' of electrons is instantaneous,  oblivious to the no-FTL rule,  then many quantum leaps can take you vast distances in an almost infinitesimal amount of time.  But the greater joy of this concept is that (arbitrarily) Roberts declares that large objects like spaceships can't travel by this method; so each individual space traveller has to be covered in impregnable foam, and sent spiralling out into space like an Egyptian Mummy on a funeral barge being conveyed to its final resting place.

This is hard SF at its best - a dazzling concept, that honours the science, yet takes us into the realm of mythic imagery.

But what is myth?  Myth is more than 'an ancient story about the gods'.  Myth is the very substance of the imagination. In the words of Joseph Campbell - the 'go-to' guy of modern Hollywood, master collater of the myths of the world:

Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo-jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-Tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument from Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.

I have no idea what that means: yet I feel its truth intensely.  And when Campbell talks about the 'basic, magic ring of myth' he is evoking a sense of Story as something primal, deep, profound.  And fantasy writers tap the waters of this deep well as a matter of course - for why would you not, if myths are the very fabric of your storytelling?

But SF can be mythic too, in this deep and felt sense; our scientifically valid FTL drives can take the reader into a world of wild imagination, haunted by a suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.

Which is all very well of course - but even so! This digressive afterthought of an argument doesn't excuse my editor's shocking behaviour.

How dare he travel to an alien planet without me!

I am, however, finding his incorporeal avatar to be a delightful collaborator - apart from the fact that he never, ever, gets wet when it rains.

Enough on FTL travel.  In my next blog, I will talk, in lingering and seductive detail, about sexy aliens.

The Meaning of Life

I recently discovered the meaning of life.

And you think I'm going to tell you?

Well okay I will.  This is the edited version of course.  I have thousands of pages of rough workings but this is the short version.  The meaning of life is this: 42. 

Yes, I appreciate that you already knew that.  As a card-carrying science fiction fan (actually, are there cards you can carry to say you're a science fiction fan? and where do I get one?) you will have known for many years that the meaning of life, according to the great guru Douglas Adams, is 42. 

The question to the answer, however, is; why?

Why 42? Why not 41? 12? 7?

In order to answer the question to the answer (stay with me guys!) we have to go back in time to the days when the gods walked the Earth, and miscegenated like nobody's business.  Thus it was, that the Greek god Hermes merged with the Egyptian god Thoth, in a somewhat inexplicable fashion, to become the deity Hermes Trismegistus.  And this divine being (according to various authorities) left behind a library of divine texts, based around a core of forty-two (42!) essential texts.

The forty-two texts of Hermes Trismegistus are one of history's great legends; and the devotees of the Hermetic sect (who survived into the 20th and possibly the 21st centuries) have long believed that all the answers to all the secrets of existence are to be found there.  Douglas Adams may, possibly, not have known this - but what are the odds on that? He knew; hence 42. 

Various documents allegedly written by Hermes Trismegistus circulated through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and were almost certainly forgeries.  But the myth of 'thrice-great-Hermes' burned brightly, and was a great influence on the celebrated Elizabethan scientist John Dee.  Dee was a cartographer, an astronomer, and a magician (what a hyphenate!), and, as well as believing he could talk to angels, he was also a passionate numerologist.  In other words, he believed that numbers contain hidden within them great truths about our existence.

John Dee, I will just mention in a brief aside, is a real historical character much beloved by fantasy writers, including John Crowley and Michael Moorcock; and in Neil Gaiman's graphic novel 1602 his role in the Elizabethan court is taken over by Dr Stephen Strange.  Along with Aleister Crowley, Dee is one of the most famous occultists of all time.

Enough of the aside; back to numerology. 

Numerology (bear with me,  for this is a rocky  paragraph in turbulent seas) is an ancient discipline which is nowadays regarded as a) bonkers and b) a form of pseudo-mathematics.  Numerologists,  you see,   find patterns in numbers which mean nothing - they are just random patterns, like clouds which look like horses. Whereas mathematicians find patterns in numbers which, erm, do mean something.  The distinction is a fine one; but the trick of modern science and modern mathematics is to favour theories which can predict, and hence can predict rightly or wrongly; and so can be 'falsified', in the Karl Popper sense of that word.   With numerology, the pattern is all that matters.

But numerology and mathematics are both driven by the same instinct - a belief, a blind faith - that patterns in numbers are important.  In Pythagorean numerology the name and birth date of an individual are used to divine personality traits about that person. Which is nonsense! (Isn't it?)  By contrast Paul Dirac discovered a pattern in numbers that amazingly connects gravity and the universe - expressed in an equation that shows that the strength of gravity is inversely proportional to the age of the universe.  And that's clearly an important discovery! Or is it? Damn, no, it turns out that most scientists regard Dirac's equation as nonense - as, in fact, numerology. (But are they right, to say he's wrong? It certainly seems a fishy coincidence to me...)

The fact remains that numerology, hermeticism and magic were the dominant philosophical traditions in the years and centuries when science as we know it was created.  John Dee - magician - was also a pioneer of science.  Nicolaus Copernicus, who revolutionised astronomy by arguing that the Earth goes around the sun and not vice versa, was much influenced by the pagan concept of sun-worship, and invoked Hermes Trismegistus as one of his authorities - since the old Thrice-Great had believed the Sun to be the 'visible God', and hence, had  to be at the centre of our universe.   There were, of course, sound scientific reasons for Copernicism to flourish - but in truth, it wasn't all that much more accurate than the old Ptolemaic hypothesis (Copernicus's figures were based on the hypothesis that the planets orbit the sun in perfect circles, which in fact they don't,  they travel in ellipses.) But for many of his contemporaries, the fact that Copernicus was implicitly invoking the great sun god Ra - now that made it a theory worth supporting...

And then there's Newton. 

I have a great soft spot for the great scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, ever since I discovered he was also a celebrated thief-taker and murderer (true!), and then wrote a radio play about him.  But when he wasn't being a great scientist, or interrogating felons, Newton was engaged in his real passion - alchemy.  His pursuit of the prisca sapienta - the unified theory of the principles of the universe - led him to study all the great occult authorities of the past, including Hermes Trismegistus and all the probably bogus texts attributed to him. This occult exploration was his life's work; and  Newton's laws of motion and theory of gravity were, in effect,  just trifling discoveries that occurred to him along the way. 

This side of Newton is usually dismissed by modern commentators - even though his alchemical and quasi-occult writings occupied vastly more of his energy than his purely scientific work.  But the question I would pose is: can you have one, without the other? Would Newton have created a theory of gravity, if he hadn't been impelled by a passionate, blind belief in the hidden secrets of the universe that were there to be discovered, and which already HAD been discovered?  The 42 books of Hermes Trismegistus are more than just a legend; they are a myth, a dream, an aspiration. 

Or to put it another way: without faith in magic, there might have been no science.

Of course, that was then, and this is now.  Modern science is sane and rational, and there's no mumbo-jumbo whatsoever going on. 

But is that really true? 

Science is after all getting crazier and crazier.  Like many SF nerds, I was alarmed to read that two scientists have theorised that the failure of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to create Higgs Bosons is because the boson is abhorrent to Nature, and so at the moment of its creation ripples travel back in time to prevent it becoming created.  (Whilst driving a De Lorean, we might surmise).  This theory is so lunatic that it makes even MY books looks sensible; but it's not a gag. The two scientists involved have even devised an experiment to test the hypothesis.

Quantum physics is also, of course, an affront to common sense.  Einstein mocked it, and refused to believe God would play dice with the Universe.  It is a theory with such devastating implications that it challenges our every assumption about what reality is, and how it works. 

So there comes at a point at which we have to wonder: bearing in mind that science is stranger than magic, and more fantastic than magic, and was to a very large degree in its early stages created by magicians (or hermeticists, or sun-worshippers) is science merely a more effective and experimentally-confirmed form of magic?

Or to put it another way; the fact that most magic is bunk, doesn't mean it's all bunk.  The history of occult philosophy is littered with false hopes and lies and forged documents and self-delusion; but the underlying principles do seem to work. There is a hidden order in things; patterns found in numbers actually do mean something, and can reveal huge truths; and, (according to the formulations of quantum physics)  the impossible can happen, and should happen more often than it does.

All this, I would surmise, Douglas Adams knew, because he was one smart fellow.  Admittedly, when quizzed about his reasons for chosing the  number  42 as the answer to everything, he claimed it was 'a joke', a number chosen at random, which he happened to feel was the funniest of the two digit numbers.  This may all  be true; or it may  be a cunning lie he told to conceal his deep reading in Hermetic literature.  We shall never know (though apparently Stephen Fry does know, but is hugging his old friend's secret to his bosom.)

But I am 100% confident that Adams did intend to obliquely refer to Hermes Trismegistus when he wrote those hallowed numbers '42'; for, in the spirit of the great occultists, I am only too happy to believe what I want to believe.   

And the heart of my argument is this:  the  meaning of life (in this particular context) is that, in pursuit of 42 texts that almost certainly didn't exist, written by a god who didn't exist, many very obsessive individuals have fumbled their way through lots of wrong and crazy ideas until, through trial and error, some less crazy and more useful  ideas coalesced and evolved.  And thus was created the entire scientific-intellectual fabric of our 21st century society. 

None of this would have happened without the dream, the blind faith, the conviction that everything that could be discovered had been discovered - the myth of the 42 texts.  Practically minded engineers do not seek the truth about the meaning of life; it takes a wild dreamer to do that.  And many of these wild dreamers, I would argue, were inspired by the Myth of 42.

There, that's the meaning of life done and dusted. 

In my next blog, I shall explain how to build an FTL spaceship and travel through the space to a fertile Earth-like planet populated by sexy aliens who will worship you. 

So keep watching this space....

(First published on the Orbit website.)

No Waste of Time

I've been meaning to write a blog about the A Space of Waste? debate I attended at Greenwich Observatory, as part of the Sci-Fi London event.  It was a terrific night - we held the panel debate in the library of the new Observatory, a beautiful galleried room just under the dome.  There were brass telescopes and helioscopes (is there such a thing? did I just make it up) in glass cupboards, surrounded by walls of books; and all in all, it was bibliophile and steam punk heaven.

Paul McAuley gave a wonderful and learned talk about the solar system, illustrated with the most amazing slides.  He also proved we're better off living on Saturn's moon Enceladus, rather than on Earth. (I forget the details of the argument, but I was utterly convinced at the time).

Jaine Fenn, a very charming speculative fiction writer who like me is represented by the wonderful John Jarrold, spoke with real passion about space and its magnitude and why we should explore it. And I was particuarly pleased to meet legendary web guy and critic Paul  Raven, who, since the topic was based on the premise that SF writers shouldn't in fact write about space,  gallantly kept the debate alive by arguing in favour of Mundane SF - which likes to avoid improbable intergalactic travel and unlikely sentient aliens.  But, hand on heart, Paul  clearly loves his space opera as much as the next SF geek.   

My argument was that hard SF is based around a deception.  All the credible science and all the accurate scientific theory is a smokescreen to disguise the fact that other inhabited planets are, in all probability, a very long way away.  And though wormholes in space may exist - the chances of an actual spaceship travelling through such things, seem  to be honest, slim.  In which case, it could (for all we know) take millions of years to reach the nearest habitable planet, travelling at less than the speed of light.

But you can't tell a spectacular SF story with ships that slow!  So every space opera writer has to hold his or her nose and embrace a piece of nonsense - quantum teleportation, FTL drives, and/or a ridiculous plethora of very near habitable planets which can be fully terraformed in an implausibly small amount of time.

In other words, SF is fiction about the possible - not about the likely. And that's the fun of it. Or to put it another way: SF writers are conjurers, who misdirect and deceive with scientific facts, in order to make you believe in the reality of what you are reading, however insanely improbable it might be.

Sci-Fi London did a great job organising this event - which is called Oktoberfest because a) it's in October and b)  the name makes people think about beer, and thinking about beer makes people feel happy.  Robert Grant did a splendid job of making it all happen, and even wrote me a nice mention on the Sci-Fi London website.