Let me get one thing straight, before I commence my rant for today: Avatar is one of the best things to happen to the science fictional world in years.  It’s raised the credibility of the genre in the movie theatres - after all those Harry Potters and Hobbits in Pursuit of Rings movies and other fantasy epics of recent years. It’s got the world excited about aliens and space exploration. And it’s at the vanguard of a whole new generation of incredibly exciting and visually extraordinary blockbusters.  To cap it all, James Cameron is a director I admire enormously.

But he is, as I say, a traitor to his own species.

And he’s also made a film that in my view – despite breaking all box office records, and although it’s  pretty damned good – isn’t THAT good, or that special.  It’s fun, it’s certainly beautiful, the ending is exciting.  But I don’t really ‘get’ what’s so revolutionary about the 3D effects. Compared to Up, it’s no big deal; that movie set the bar for CGI 3D movie spectacle and Avatar comes nowhere near it.

Nor do I think the film is as visually extraordinary as everyone claims. The scenery and action scenes are marvellous, but it all lacks imagination. How come the aliens are blue, but the trees are made of bark and the leaves are GREEN? It could all be, well, much more alien. 

There’s nothing in this film to compare with Predator, perhaps the most visually spectacular SF film ever made. Director John McTiernan and cinematographer Donald McAlpine created a movie that is both a nail-biting kick-ass actioner, and a piece of modern art – by which I mean that every time we switch to Predator-POV the screen becomes filled with colours as vivid as a Kandinsky. 

But Predator plays a cleverer game.  It isn’t just about the scenery, it’s built around mythic concepts – chiefly, Arnie as the mud-coated (think woad-coated Celt) warrior going mano a mano with an alien.  The explosion scenes in that movie, too, are astonishing – visions of a Dantesque Hell on Earth.

Avatar, by contrast, has blue gazelle-like creatures running through what looks like the Amazon rainforest. Sweet – but not astonishing.

But that’s just my opinion – which in view of the box office triumph of the film, shouldn’t be taken too seriously (and, indeed, won’t be).  There’s no doubt that SOMETHING extraordinary is happening with this film to make it such a phenomenon.  And the media coverage in the press has been awesome. 

Online, too, Avatar has been covered extensively, and I’ve been taking a peek at some of the comments to be found out in cyberspace. There have been rave reviews, like this one in the Hollywood Reporter.     Fantasy SF Blog revealed that Cameron’s volcanic temper eclipses that of our our British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (once you’ve clicked the link, scroll down to ‘James Cameron, Benevolent Tyrant’.) John Scalzi got pretty much what he was expecting, and (unlike me!) felt no moral outrage at the ‘noble savage’ strand. Ann Wilkes’ Cherokee blood boiled at the way the natives were treated, and she loved the story. Revolution SF drew attention to the alarming phenomenon of Avatar fans who feel like committing suicide because they can’t live on the planet of the Na’vi. SF Gospel made some very smart points about the movie’s provable theology, and asks – would it be okay to kill the Na’vi if they DIDN’T have a provable God?

And the definitive review came from Richard Morgan. (He said it was ‘Very pretty.’)

But my final take on Cameron’s masterwork is, as I say: TRAITOR!

I’m referring of course to the second part of the film when (SPOILER ALERT! BUT I THINK THIS HAS ALL BEEN GIVEN AWAY IN TRAILERS) our hero dons the body of a blue-skinned alien and goes to war against the humans.

Think about it. Our main character is human! We are human. And yet we’re being asked to root against our own species, in favour of the aliens?

It’s not as if this is a minor spat between alien and human. It’s a brutal war.  Dozens and dozens of human beings die horribly, and we are invited to cheer.  Almost as many aliens die in the carnage, and we are clearly meant to be sad as each of them perishes.

This defies all the rules of rooting. You root for you own team, not the opposition. As a Welshman, even of the non-sporting variety, I am obliged to root for Wales every time there’s  Wales v. England rugby match. If I cheered on the English, I would be surgically de-Taffed.

The disloyalty to humankind comes, of course, cloaked in liberal good intentions.  The Na’vi are, you see, noble savages; they are metaphorical of the Native Americans and the Australian aboriginals and all the other Stone Age tribes who have been wretchedly treated by invaders from Europe.  And the movie manages to function simultaneously as a) a shoot-’em-up kickass action movie and b) as an ecological hymn to the glories of the nature, and the crapness of being an evil corporation that wants to destroy the rainforest and doesn’t care how many natives die in the process.

Well, I’m all in favour of hating those who pillage the natural world; and I certainly don’t condone the way the Native Americans or the aboriginals were treated.  So at one level, I’m certainly on Cameron’s side.

But on other hand – per-lease! Couldn’t the morality be a little more subtle?  The guy from the corporation virtually slavers with evil, his treatment of the Na’vi is both incompetent and buffoonish, and there’s a complete absence of moral ambiguity.  Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) and Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and a couple of others are good;  all the Na’vi are good; but all the soldiers and the horrible white capitalists who run the mining corporation are all utterly and irredeemably evil.

This kind of black & white morality is forgiveable, of course, in an action movie where you don’t look for rich characterisation and moral subtlety.  But in a movie that proclaims itself to be a moral force for good – well, maybe the script could have had just a LITTLE more work done on it. 

But that’s not my gripe. My gripe is – what’s so bad about humans? I mean – I’m human,  my friends are human:  all the people I like and  admire,  alive and dead, are human. Humans are – well, what can I say? We’re not SO very bad.

But in science fiction, we get a bad press, as the ignoble history of colonialism gets writ into stories set among the stars.  And Avatar is for me part of this syndrome – of neglecting the virtues and glories of humankind. 

And the chief virtue and glory of  humankind is – we’re not all jocks. We’re not all heavily bicepped, macho monsters who are so obsessed with gadgets and weapons of war that we lose sight of the finer things in life – like Nature, and art, and being nice to each other.  In fact, none of the people I know are like that.  All MY friends are weedy, cowardly, bookish, kind, and, well,  nice.

But in Cameron’s parallel universe, all humans are either soldiers or cruel capitalists (admittedly Signourney Weaver is a scientist and there are a couple of other scientists helping Jake Sully fight his good war – but these characters don’t really have much character.)

Contrast this with the weedy science graduate geek played by Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day, cursed with a wisecracking dad, and always banging on about scientific things. A broad caricature yes – but there’s hope for humanity if there are a few of THESE entertainingly anal-retentive guys about.

Avatar would, in my view, been a richer and better film if there’d been more diversity among the characters, and less idealisation of the Na’vi.  They are supposed to be like the Native Americans – but they aren’t, not really. The Native Americans were a Stone Age tribe with a flair for war, especially of the sneaky variety;  as I recall from my past reading, ambush was considered by many tribes to be a worthy way of attacking an opponent. And, once confronted by an invasion of white-skins, the Native Americans proved themselves to be adaptable and savage; they learned to ride horses, they learned to shoot guns, they even copied the invaders’ trick of scalping their enemy.

All of which makes the Native Americans REAL, and flawed, and complex, as opposed to the holier-than-thou Na’vi, who can’t kill another creature without an act of gaian communion.

Cameron over-eggs it all in other words; the Na’vi are so perfect that I hate them. They don’t even LOOK like real aliens; they have the wide-eyed blank-faced look of characters in a manga comic.  For all the much vaunted brilliance of the CGI, I never forgot for a moment that I was watching blue simulations.  Indeed, in some ways I felt these aliens felt less ‘real’ than the animatronic aliens in Farscape.

Of course, I freely concede that in my own novels I don’t shirk from making the humans the bad guys -  it makes for a better story that way.    But I think we shouldn’t forget to celebrate the best of humanity – the geekiness, the wit, the camaraderie, the cleverness, and the heart-bursting loyal love of which humans are capable. 

Admittedly, Jake DOES fall in love, with the girl alien Neytiri, who IS quite pretty in an eerie ‘she looks like a blue Bambi, is he really going to do it with a deer?’ kind of a way.  But he’s a pretty dull character in other respects; we root for him because he’s the hero, not because he’s all that interesting.

A sequel to Avatar is being planned, I gather; I’d love to think that it involves a spaceship full of Jewish comedians who are airlifted down to teach the Na’vi the skills they clearly lack; self deprecation, grumbling, and the cruel taunting of the afflictions of others.  Not to mention, cake!

For my part, living on the planet of the Na’vi would be like living in the English countryside: beautiful, spiritually uplifting, and BORING.  I’d rather live in New York and eat bagels and pastrami with the aforesaid Jewish comedians, and indulge in daily rituals of sarcasm and ironic hyperbole. 

That’s what it is to be human.

Whew. Serious stuff. If you need to lighten up – go down an item and check out Stuart’s song choice.

As a climate change agnostic – and I suspect most of us are, especially now, and more especially after the Guardian series this week – I’ve been bothered by two aspects of the argument. The first is the religious overtone. Humankind has always wanted to blame its own behaviour for natural events, whether Noah’s flood, plagues of frogs, or volcanos which demonstrate that the gods are angry.

Three years ago a British bishop announced that gay marriage had caused our floods. I’ve often wondered whether global warming is another example of this, an irrational belief designed for a rationalist world.

In hs first paragraph Hoggart is referring of course to the Climategate ‘scandal’ concerning the British scientists who falsified data and deleted emails to protect their dubious views on global warming.  Thus, the ‘greatest scientific fraud in this history of mankind has been exposed!

Except, of course, if you read enough articles, it’s clear that nothing of the kind occurred.  A group of scientists at the University of East Anglia reacted to what they thought were idiotic attempts to muck up their working day with childlike rebellious gusto; but frankly, if someone used the Freedom of Information Act to get access to MY emails I would be similiarly enraged. (No scientific papers were censored; no scientific data, so far as I know, was wilfully falsified.)  

But the damage is done; the mud sticks; and now liberal commentators like Hoggarts are ‘agnostic’ about climate change.

This isn’t an isolated opinion; another recent press report says that many Tory MPs in the UK are also ‘sceptical’ about climate change. 

And if you want to go deeper into the science, here’s an interesting article setting out the case for and against climate change  as an actual phenomenon.

Here’s my own particular take on the subject: Simon Hoggart walks with evil.

I haven’t, I should stress, ever met the man (though I once almost bumped in to him at a BBC Radio party);  but I know, from his columns, that he’s a sweet loveable cove who is devoted to his family, has a delightful sense of humour,  and often talks a good deal of sense. 

So I’m not saying he IS evil.  I’m sure he’s a really nice man! Nor am I crazed enough to believe that anyone who disagrees with me is wicked – far from it.  I’m wrong far more often than my right; I love my opinions because they are my own, but I would never make a claim to be infallible.

But what is evil here is the wilful telling of lies.  There are some who argue on the topic of climate change in a reasoned and scientific fashion, and whose views don’t exactly and in every respect tally with the consensus/mainstream. And that’s normal.   But anyone who argues that there’s no such thing as global pollution is clearly talking nonsense.  And anyone who argues that global pollution has and can have no effect on the biosphere is totally straining credulity. 

And anyone who then goes on to argue that there is a global conspiracy of scientists to invent a phenomenon that does not exist is on a moral par with those that argue that 9/11 was caused by a global conspiracy of Jews.  It’s just off the scale lunacy; but it’s out there, as an opinion, and an undercurrent.  It’s the fuel of the anti global warming campaign.  And it’s an opinion that denies and repudiates the notion that science has any authority in this – and by extension in any – sphere.

This is evil. Lies are evil. Sophistry is evil. Saying something is so when you know it is not so is evil.  And pandering to the myth – by which I mean ******* falsehoold - that global warming is a lie cooked up by evil scientists is evil. Because that ludicrous opinion is clearly not a random lie; it’s a lie that suits the interests of the powerful interest groups I ranted at in the Tuesday blog on the BBGAE

A global conspiracy of scientists? Get real, they’re not that smart.  A global conspiracy of the rich elite whose privilege  depends on the football pitch sloping in their favour?  Yeah, well, it’s happened before, it’ll happen again, and it’s a fair bet it’s happening now.

And that’s why so many scientists are jittery and angry and – at times – irrational.  Not in their work, so far as I know, but certainly in their emails.  (See below.)  Because they GET it – this isn’t the usual process of scientific debate. It’s a war. 

It’s the war between aspiring-to-the-truth and downright lies; a battle , as I say, between Good and Evil.  And Hoggart, bless him, doesn’t get it at all.

There’s  a saying that it is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.  

And THAT’S what Hoggart is doing – he’s doing nothing, and he should stop it forthwith.

He calls himself a ‘climate change agnostic’.  But that’s like saying you’re an electromagnetism agnostic; it’s a nonsensical thing to say!

The fact is, I don’t really understand the science that underlies the scientific consensus that global warming is taking place at a dangerous level, as a consequence of human pollution. If I spent a couple of months reading up on it, I’d have a pretty good knowledge of the issues; but as a non-scientist, there would still be major gaps in my understanding.   So on this matter, as on so many other matters (hel-lo? how does my television work?) I have to take it on faith that scientists know what they’re talking about.

I don’t understand general relativity either – not really, not in detailed mathematical detail. I also don’t entirely grasp quantum mechanics, though for a layperson, my reading in this area is fairly extensive.  But I do understand scientific method, and the nature of scientific theories. And I know that for a ‘consensus’ to exist, a lot of very smart scientists must be very sure of their ground. That doesn’t mean global warming is a FACT, or is 100% certain. It’s a theory. The theory may be superseded by a better theory. Or the Earth’s biosphere may behave in ways that scientists don’t expect and can’t predict.  It may be that the warming of the Earth will cause cryogenically frozen aliens in the Earth’s crust to wake up and conquer us – ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.  But some things are more likely than others.

If there is a scientific consensus on this matter, and there is, we have to heed it.  We can’t expect to understand it – not to the degree of sophisticated understanding that world authorities in the field possess – but we have to believe that a huge number of people who know what they are talking about,  using a system of peer review that involves a constant intellectual challenging of the theories and the data, are convinced beyond reasonable doubt that global warming is happening and is a threat to all of us.  And the expertise of these experts, and the integrity of their time-hallowed scientific approach, has to be respected.

The trouble is, climate change science isn’t as scarily hard as quantum physics; so there are plenty of bungling amateurs out there who think they know better.  They don’t!  They are just bungling amateurs. (Former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson is one such bungler – my God, this man used to run our ECONOMY.) 

So that’s why I strongly take exception to Hoggart’s casually uttered remarks.  He’s the ultimate arts graduate, who is used to being able to judge the merits of an argument on the basis of common sense, and by employing the guiding principle of ‘If X argues one thing strongly, and Y argues the opposite equally strongly, then the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.’

But the truth is NOT somewhere in the middle.  The truth is the truth, and it has to found, and searched for; but in this debate, there are people (scientists) who wants to find the truth and other people (rightly and rudely called the climate change ‘deniers’ ) who claim to know The Truth regardless of the scientific consensus.  These ‘deniers’ are Flat Earthers, they are Creationists; they should not be humoured or indulged.  They may – like Hoggart – be nice people, but they fellow travel with Evil.

Lies are Evil; so shame on you Simon for coming up with such lie-indulging claptrap.

Remember: like all scientific theories, the ‘climate change hypothesis’ is falsifiable.  And it is also, because it’s a theory about a system full of variables (the biosphere) possible that this theory is correct in theory, but its predictions are totally wrong.

Or it could be the world goes to hell; and is that a risk you would be willing to take? I wouldn’t; only fools would ignore such a clear and present threat to the wellbeing of our planet, and of our children.

Evil. There’s a lot of it about. It’s like dog shit; it doesn’t matter how nice you are, you can still tread in it.

So my advice is: if you DO tread in dog shit, don’t believe the people who assure you – passionately and plausibly – that shit does not smell.

 ’Cause it does.

This sounds melodramatic; but it’s TRUE.

I don’t mean global warming, though that’s part of it. I don’t mean the war in Iraq, though that’s a major part of it. I don’t at all mean the threat from terrorism – because I honestly believe that for all the flaws of our Western society, Al Qaeda are a bunch of shallow charlatans who have no worthy cause to promote.  They’re our enemies; but we’re not the bad guys in that particular conflict.

But we are the bad guys so much of the time.  Or rather, the countries in which we live are implicated in such terrible, wicked, dishonest stuff,  and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. 

It’s all lies; that’s the heart of my argument.  We’re lied to, all the time.  And duped, and deceived, and defrauded. 

Now I sound like a lunatic.  A conspiracy theorist. Worst still, I sound like a Marxist.

When I was at University I knew a lot of Marxists. I had tutorials with a legendary Marxist, Terry Eagleton, a witty, funny guy who used to play the Rolling Stones in tutorials, instead of teaching us.  I liked him hugely, and I liked my fellow students in that module – Marxist to a man!  But I never bought in to that whole conspiracy theory capitalism-is-evil way of seeing the world.

Sigh. Now I do.  I’m still not a Marxist.  But look at the stuff that’s happening out there!  We all know the stories, we all rage and rant as the bankers give themselves more vast bonuses, as entire countries are looted, and as profitable companies are subjected to leveraged takeovers (meaning, they’re bought with debt, and so then get saddled with that debt, and hence become less profitable, and hence have to employ fewer people.)  We know about profiteering in Iraq, led by US companies like Halliburton.  We know about greedy ******** like Fred Goodwin, who feathered his own nest as his company teetered on the verge of catastrophic collapse.  

 And I was shocked to see John McCain on the TV news accusing Barrack Obama of ‘Business as Usual’  as if he’d caught the President out in some major fraud.  Obama is attempting to reform health care,  improve the lives of Americans, end corporate fraud, and extricate the American nation from a ghastly expansionist war; it’s the Republicans who stand for Business as Usual. But the pork-barrel politicans have learned a new trick; accuse your enemies of your own sins.  It sounds ridiculous; but it works!

This is what I mean by Good versus Evil.  We’re fighting our own political systems, our own leaders; and the entire system is rigged so that people who do not create wealth, and serve no useful function, cream off all the cream. 

It shouldn’t be like this.  We’re supposed to live in a liberal venture capitalist democracy, in which there’s a balance between state control and bold private enterprise.   I don’t want to live in a Marxist country.  When Stalin collectivised agriculture in Russian in the late 1920s, early 1930s, it’s estimated that between four and ten million peasants died of starvation – that shows the peril of excessive state control.

But the idea in our Western culture is meant to be that entrepreneurs who take risks – and who work long hours, under the constant threat of bankruptcy to make their business work – can become very rich indeed when things go well.  The pay-off is in proportion to the risk.  I’m happy with that; it takes risk-taking brave people to create anything new, and they should be rewarded for their courage, and cleverness. 

But now we live in the period of ‘heads I win, tails the government bails me out’ economics.   That’s wrong – it’s evil. Not as evil as Stalin, but evil nonetheless.  Health care companies in America whipped up a storm of protest against a moderate reform that would help millions of Americans enjoy better health, and more stable lives; that’s evil.  Sarah Palin lied by saying that Obama wanted to establish death panels – evil. 

When I was growing up, I read history books about times of great evil and thanked my lucky stars that I was living in such a peace-loving, liberal period in history. But that’s changed; or maybe it hasn’t changed, maybe I was just too dumb to spot the lies back then.

How can you fight this kind of evil? The kind that depends on lies, sophistry, distortions, and acts of fraud that don’t appear to be against the law? I only know one way, which is to keep snarling.

But that’s not much of a solution.  The solution is to change the system; make it fairer; punish the bad guys when they break the law, or even when they break the rules. 

All my science fiction novels feature baroquely exaggerated battles between good and evil, often involving acts of genocide and brutal mass murder.  Now things in our world really aren’t as bad as that.   But the stories in my books are a metaphor for our actual lives; there are bad guys, and they are winning.

So far…

This post prompted ace webguy Darren Turpin to send me a link to this fabulous story.

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.

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.

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.)

I was particularly struck by this talk by one of my all time heroes, Elaine Morgan.  Morgan is one of the finest writers ever to script dramas for BBC Television; and she is also an avid proponent of the much mocked and discredited Aquatic Ape theory.  This hypothesis attempts to explain why humans, uniquely among the apes, have streamlined bodies, no fur, and, fat beneath our skins.  The suggestion is that for a period in human evolution, we were semi-aquatic – like dolphins, who are land animals who then made a life in the sea.  Except in the case of humans, we left the sea again and returned to the jungle – as naked, talking and, er, fat hominids. 

That’s a pretty crude summary of the theory – Morgan’s books and website explain it all in more detail. (I read The Descent of Woman many years go, and its ideas have always stayed with me.)  But the substance of her talk is an attack on the blinkeredness of modern science, which refuses to take the hypothesis seriously, even though there ISN’T a better theory available. 

Morgan is in her 80s now – and she’s sharp as a tack, adorable, and witty too.

I’ve met Charlie at a couple of conventions – he’s a very likable, charismatic, larger than life guy, of astonishing fluency and cleverness.  And I also saw him talk at Easter Con on his vision of the future – not about his SF per se, but his more general thoughts on what he guesses will happen in technology and science. 

This is very much Charlie’s area of expertise - he’s a computer guy as well as a science guy. And he’s absolutely on the ball about the kind of technology that’s about to hit us – from quantum computing to ‘smart spectacles’ (which allow us to see the world and the virtual world of computer info or games simultaneously.  Think of Arnie in Terminator with his computer screen POV; that’ll be all of us in just a few years.)

At Easter Con, Charlie also spoke fascinatingly about the ‘plateau’ effect that’s affected a number of major technological developments. Because in the 1940s and 50s, many sensible speculators assumed that by the twenty first century there’d be men on the Moon, and men on Mars and a Moon colony, and maybe even starships, as well as flying cars and suchlike.  Well, man did reach the Moon in the 1960s; but none of the rest has come true. And this is because it all costs so much. A graph representing the limits of the possible would shoot up in an almost vertical line; but a graph of the limits of the affordable would be a horrible, boring flat line.  Progress goes so far at Fast; then it slows down.

In computing, by contrast, Moore’s Law applies – the rule that says that the number of transistors than can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years.  This is not really a Law of course – it’s just the way it’s been up till now.  And it explains why computers are getting smaller, and more powerful, and yet also cheaper…!   And it explains too why we are now living in a world in which science fiction seems to have come true – with Bluetooth, Wi-fi, mini-computers, and Nintendos that double as phones. (Have you seen those? They’re so scary.) And yet – we don’t have spaceships, we don’t have teleportation, we don’t even have very many electric cars. We are a twentieth century industrial society with twenty first century computing power.   

In other words,  computers have improved exponentially; every other dang thing is stuck on the plateau.

Charlie’s view,  though, is that the same plateau effect may start happening in the world of computing – UNLESS quantum computing comes on line, in which case, who knows? 

But his thoughts on the future, in that talk and in Halting State, have made me think a little bit about my own vision of the future. 

That’s assuming I have such a thing of course -  because the truth is, I wrote Debatable Space to be fun and entertaining and thought-provoking. I didn’t sit down and spend months working out the science and the rules of the future history.  The story, and the characters, came first.

However, after writing DS, and revising it, and after working on Red Claw and Ketos, I’ve started to realise that my future universe depends on a number of key assumptions. 

And in a nutshell; in my future universe, there is no plateau effect.  Science progresses fast, and keeps progressing faster.  Many many planets are colonised.  Spaceships are huge and reliable and go very very fast.  Doppelganger Robots can be easily manufactured – whole armies of them if need be – and planets can be terraformed at extraordinary speed.  And in the Earth system, no one is poor, resources are limitless, and the Solar System even has its own lighting system so that it’s constant day.

This is a far cry from the dystopian vision of much SF.  It’s a world of plenty, and of endless resouces.  So how could that be possible?

In a word, batteries.

Yeah, I know, that last line was a ghastly belly flop.  If the word had been ‘magic’ or ‘science’ or if I’d used a phrase like ‘the exaltation of the human spirit’ it would have been much cooler. But batteries? How utterly nerdish is that? A future forged by Duracell?

Let me use another word then; energy.  As a planet and as a civilisation we are now experiencing a major energy crisis: oil and gas supplies are becoming depleted, nuclear fission energy is dirty and too expensive, nuclear fusion still isn’t commercial, and ‘green’ energy sources are hard work. (And can be highly non-ecological – look at all those damned wind farms.)

In addition, of course, we’re facing global warming because of the way we run our profligate industrial society. And it’s by no means ridiculous to suppose that in 50 or 100 years we’ll be experiencing climactic disasters on a global scale.

All this puts a terrific damper on scientific progress – apart from being, of course, awful in itself.   As SF readers we’re all familiar with the amazing variety of new inventions that could and we hope will transform our lives – quantum computing (as mentioned above), nanotechnology,  robotic fabricators which can turn every home into a factory, quantum teleportation, etc etc etc. But none of this is much use if we can’t turn the lights on.

So in the Debatable Space Universe, to make all the cool toys possible, I make a major supposition; I suppose that some clever spark has invented a battery (perhaps a development of SMES, superconducting magnetic energy storage, or a supercapacitor incorporating nanotechnology, or both) that is phenomenally efficient, small, and can hold vast amounts of energy in compressed form.  In Debatable Space these batteries are assumed; in the later books, I name them – I call them BBs, or B Bats. 

So let’s assume we have a BB that is able to contain in compressed form as much energy as the Sun emits in a day, assuming also you have a vast solar panel in orbit around the Sun to capture that energy.  And when I say vast I mean vast - after all, no one is going to complain that it blocks their view.  The orbiting solar panel can be far enough away from the Sun that melting does not occur, but near enough that the full value of the Sun’s heat is received.  And all that energy is then stored in the BB.

You then send a spaceship from the solar panel to the Earth carrying the BB; or you transmit the energy via laser beams to a satellite in orbit around the Earth,  if that’s possible, though my science advisor let me get away with it; or you find some other mechanism. But essentially, once you have you have lots of batteries all full of huge amounts of power, the energy needs of the world are over.  You can use the BB to power factories to build spaceships to collect more BBs.  You can use BBs to power robot miners to hew metals out of the asteroids.  BBs power the robot fabricators; BBs run our homes, so we don’t need a National Grid.

You’ll notice this above account is a little short on maths and engineering data and diagrams of solar panels in orbit. I adore writers like Asimov and Clarke and Greg Bear (and, indeed, Alastair Reynolds) who can back up their extrapolations with heavy duty science.  That’s not something I can do, not off the top of my head anyway; and it’s not where my focus is.

My point is simply this; this one invention makes everything else possible.  The sheer lunacy of the British government’s policy in promoting nuclear power (because it makes a loss! it fails on its own terms) is an indication of how inward-looking our policy of seeking out energy sources is.  We use oil and gas – which are the remains of carbon forests, but which ultimately constitute an organic stored form of the energy of the sun.  And we split the atom, to generate energy. And we dream of clean and cold nuclear fusion, which allows us to replicate on Earth the process by which energy is generated in the Sun.

But why not just cut out the middleman – go to the Sun. If we had materials strong enough, we could fire solar panels into the Sun itself.  Our entire planet – our forests and trees and plants and hence our animals – is fuelled by the energy from the Sun which, let’s face it, is way far away. But this is a tiny proportion of the energy the Sun spews out every day.

And once you have space travel – there are the stars.  Every single star is a burning mass of energy; and if you take a look at how many stars there are even in our tiny bit of the Galaxy, and how many other Galaxies there are, the mind starts to swim.  Even the human race couldn’t use up all that power.

The Universe of Debatable Space is therefore based on three assumptions.  1) That instantaneous space travel is possible by a combination of virtual technology and quantum entanglement.  2) That a new kind of battery makes energy virtually limitless.  3) That humanity continues to screw things up, big time.

Because the universe of Debatable Space is no Utopia, it’s no rosy-eyed vision of a world where no one wants for anything. It’s a nasty ruthless universe, where limitless resources are distributed in the most appallingly unfair way possible. That’s the drama and the ultimate source of jeopardy in these stories; that’s the war that Flanagan and Lena fight.

But it’s taken me three books to realise that I am essentially an optimist about the possibilities of scientific progress. I don’t believe there will be a plateau; I think we’ll either blow ourselves up, or we’ll spread through the galaxy with gadgets galore. 

And I also believe that even global warming will have a technological solution.  The solution may come too late – the crisis is imminent, as almost all commentators now agree. And the solution may be undesirable; is it morally right to solve the problems caused by technology by using more technology?

 Well, maybe not; but I still think it will happen. Because scientists are smart, and science is powerful; and if it can be done, we will do it. (Or rather, others will – I’ll still be writing SF.)

With great power comes great responsibility, as Peter Parker is told, rather too often.  So if at some future date – when? I have no idea? – our energy crisis is solved,  that doesn’t solve all our problems. Far from it. 

But it would be nice if all the other things I predict in Debatable Space – tyranny, oppression, brutality, genocide – don’t come true.  It would be nice if the human race were better, and wiser, than that. 

Let’s hope…

This is another vital step forward in transforming the International Space Station into a genuine space city and research lab.  At the moment, it’s a bit of a tin can in space; but the whole ethos is that the ISS can grow, and grow…

Take a look here for more details; and click on the video of the launch for a great shot of a bird flying in front of the shuttle’s pillar of flame.