World Fantasy!

I'll be leaving in about two hours.

So.

You can find me at the "Effects of RPGs" panel on Friday at 3pm, which I will be moderating.

You can also find me at the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading on Saturday at 10:30pm.

I will be at the mass signing. There will be copies of Lost Guardians 1 through 3 available at the consignment table. I believe it's in the dealer room.

And you can probably corner me at the ice cream social or the art reception. Or, you know, the bar.

The space elevator...

...may be a step closer. Researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing have developed carbon nanofibers that may actually be strong enough (and long enough) to weave into a tether.

We've known for a while that carbon nanotubes were the most promising material. These might finally do it.

Of course, we still have to solve the problems of where to put it, of the stress on the cable, lightning strikes, micrometeor strikes, radiation shielding to protect passengers who would be spending 2 to 3 days in the Van Allen Belt.

But it's a step.

Lagrange point stations?

Well, it seems that a sixty year old theory that dust gathers at Lagrange points is true.

There are two Lagrange (or trojan) points between the Earth and the Moon. L4 and L5. They are important because you could in theory park a satellite or station there with minimal fuel.

However, it might face a problem. L5 is confirmed to have something called a Kordylewski cloud. L4 probably does too. These clouds of dust gathered at the Lagrange points could cause problems for the hulls and, above all, the solar panels of spacecraft positioned there. We may need to design technology to repel the dust before we can actually use the potential of Lagrange points.

Virgin Orbit Almost Ready To Go

Virgin Orbit are doing integration tests on Launcher One, designed to launch small satellites into low orbit.

The rocket will be launched from an old 747 via the same underwing method used to launch missiles.

The system will allow specific, direct launches of small payloads (mostly GPS and cell satellites), without having to put them in with stuff on a larger rocket. Oh, and can go from any runway that can take a 747.

We need to keep innovating - and hybrid launch systems are ideal for low orbital insertion, although they currently lack the power to reach higher orbits or, say, the ISS.

Crows!

Crows don't just use tools. They make them. Check out this article here.

Not all of the birds managed it, but several did. In an environment where that kind of tool making is valuable...well...they'll teach their chicks, and...

I'm more and more convinced that if we destroy ourselves, the dang crows will come down out of the sky to replace us. Maybe they'll do a better job.

Switch it off and on again!

Works for your internet router.

Works for the Hubble telescope. Yes, NASA fixed a gyro problem on the Hubble by turning it off and on again.

Science fiction writers, pay attention. It might be that no matter how advanced your technology...

Remembering History

Okay, so I had a twilight zone moment this week.

There was a British band called The Twenty-Fifth Of May (255) that was...no kidding, British white Communist gangsta rap. Which isn't a thing. Except that in the early nineties it was.

I was a broke college student at the time, but still ended up with one of their EPs in my collection.

Yesterday, I had reason to look something up and realized something odd.

The two discographies I could find from immediate searches...did not have the EP I was holding in my hands.

They only had the band's one album, a couple of singles, and a couple of short live recordings. The bio on one site implied, although did not state, that the band split somewhere at the end of 1992 start of 1993.

The EP I have was recorded in late 1993.

So. What? Did I have a CD from an alternate reality?

No.

Here's what happened.

255 had a meteoric rise and signed with Arista. For two glorious summers, they were a thing. I heard them live at the Reading Music Fest in August 1992. They were, in fact, good.

Then Arista dropped them, because really...British white Communist gangsta rap was never going to be a thing. Arista dropped them at the end of 1992.

People were sourcing off of Arista's catalogue.

Their final EP, Apathy in the U.K., was produced by an independent label, Copasetic Records. Thus it got left off those lists. (I did find it, eventually, on a site intended for record collectors).

This is only 25 or so years ago...and the historical record is already wrong.

Remember this when you're studying history. The record can, internet or no internet, become wrong within less than a human lifespan.

Use your primary sources. Ask people. Whether it's about an obscure footnote to British musical history...or events that shake the world.

The historical record can be, and often is, wrong.

Battling In All Her Finery

This is what happens when I don't post something the day of - I finally remember it days later.

Battling in All Her Finery, containing my story "Dropping Rocks," is now available for purchase. Got to love the cover.

Check it out here.

So...

...scientists have now grown "functional human neural networks" in a lab.

We've seen this movie. It didn't end well.

(Seriously, this is great for studying certain things, but I've seen enough bad horror movies to envision brains in tanks...)

New constellation: Godzilla

Yes, Godzilla is a constellation now...but you won't be able to hunt him down with a telescope in your back yard.

The "King of the Monsters" is one of the gamma ray constellations put together by folks at NASA who love their jobs too much.

There's also a TARDIS, a Starship Enterprise, and the Hulk.

Because NASA people are nerds and I love it.

What about that space art?

SpaceX will be launching a diamond sculpture visible to the naked eye soon. Astronomers are less than amused.

Should we put art into space? The answer is a maybe.

When and if we go into space then obviously we will take art with us, we will create art in space. We may even find new forms of art, new ways to sculpt that only work in microgravity. We will also, no doubt, leave graffiti all over the moon. We will. No matter who tries to stop us.

Art visible from Earth, though, is always going to be a mixed topic. Many of us don't get to properly see the night sky, or only get to see it on vacation. So some would argue that this art is just another form of light pollution.

I'm usually on the plus side for art, but even I'm not sure about this one. Thoughts?

World Fantasy

So, I'm going to be at World Fantasy Con...which starts the day after Halloween.

On Friday at 3pm I'll be on a panel about "Effects of RPGs" where panelists talk about the influence of role playing games on their writing.

Oh, and I'm not missing the ice cream social ;). Sorry to the people with panels scheduled at that time.

Romance, Colonialsm and...Symbiotes? (Warning: Spoilers for Venom)

I wasn't going to watch Venom, but some friends who's judgment I trust gave me a nudge. I was never really "into" the character in the comics, and the Sony Marvel movies have been honestly hit and miss. One of the early trailers left me wondering "Which movie is that supposed to be, again?"

One of the things circulating in the pre-release buzz was that the writers (One of whom is Jewish and the other sure looks that way) saw the relationship between Eddie and Venom as a romance.

This approach created something that is seldom seen in the comics: Character development for Venom.

Venom was shown not as a "suit" but as a character in "his" (Symbiote gender is questionable to me) own right, who changes his opinions on things over the course of the movie. They made Venom a person.

And I'll be honest, this exchange:

"What really made you change your mind?"

"You"

...how much more romantic can you get. So the first lesson of Venom: You can have a romance that is not about sex or mating. This is something I've long held. A really good friendship narrative can be just as strong as a "traditional" romance. (Nothing wrong with traditional romances and I'm not above writing them myself when I feel like it). The romance between Eddie and Venom is counterpointed by the "anti-romance" between Eddie and Anne...the breakup story and its aftermath.

So, to the second part of my title.

Colonialism.

I semi-joked to Greg afterwards that Venom has essentially the same plot as Dances With Wolves.

Guy from superior culture travels to primitive culture. He falls in love with a native, switches sides, and decides to protect these people.

It's...essentially the same story. And that's another thing that, if realized, could make some people uncomfortable with this movie. It presents our highest technology (The bad guys use drones in a way I haven't seen in any movie, although I admit I've missed some of the recent technothrillers), it actually has a "day after tomorrow" feel with manned rockets intercepting comics...

...and then says "These guys have you beat. These guys are going to colonize you. Not just your land, either, but your bodies. And if you fight it you're going to die."

"That's a higher being."

And Venom calling Eddie his "ride" at the start. Venom sees Eddie, at the start, the way I see a horse...something you look after and treat well, but you would never think of as an equal.

Then he realizes Eddie is his equal. "We're both losers." Maybe that's not the most positive way of putting it. But Venom's character development is "These are people and we can't just invade them."

And all of this in a movie the critics have been panning. It has a rotten tomatoes of 31%, but the bad reviews include fans pissed off about the lack of a connection to Spider-Man - which is probably a result of those ongoing rights battles, but which also allowed Venom to be introduced right away as a much-more-interesting antihero. At the same time, most of the fans liked it. If you take only audience reviews, it jumps to 89%, although of course that might be people mad with the critics. Screenrant has the right of it: The critics didn't realize the movie is supposed to be campy, is supposed to leaven its serious themes with a nice dose of humor.

And the one rating that really matters is positive: Venom topped the box office for its first two weeks.

A couple more notes on the movie: Riz Ahmed does bad very well, but I'm starting to experience some fatigue with bad guys who are "Just trying to save us from global warming." This includes the new motivation for Thanos. The Champions comic book just did it too. Can we please stop? By framing wanting to do something about global warming as a villainous motivation, we only support those who don't want to do anything to protect the environment at all...

Launch failure

Launch failure. It's a dirty word, and it's been even more of a dirty word since 1986, when the Challenger disintegrated right after separation.

Amazingly, this is the only instance of a fatality caused by an aborted launch. But one was enough to get people to think about abort systems.

Ironically, the more primitive Soyuz has always done better. There have now been three cases of a launch failure involving a manned Soyuz capsule.

Soyuz T-10-1 exploded on the pad and Soyuz 18-1 blew up at a high altitude...149km...after a separation failure.

And last week, Soyuz MS-10 experienced a booster failure.

The big thing?

No astronauts were killed or even seriously injured in these accidents. (Hey, Space X, why don't you get a copy of their abort system to study? Might save you some time).

Which demonstrates that it is, yes, quite possible to make launch safe for astronauts and ultimately passengers.

(I'm trying not to conspiracy theory about the fact that this comes right on the heels of the mysterious drill hole...)

Should we bring back the passenger pigeon?

Deextinction is starting to head from "can we" to "should we." (Experiments in cloning an ancient horse are seen as preliminary to recreating mammoths).

A team is using rock pigeons and CRISPR in a plan to edit in passenger pigeon genes to restore the species...or something like it.

The eventual plan will be to use a much more closely-related species, with the ultimate goal of reintroducing the engineered "passenger pigeons" (Which the creator acknowledges will be a band-tailed pigeon/passenger pigeon hybrid).

So.

Should we?

Humans are in no small part to blame for the loss of the species, so one might argue we're expiating the sin. However, there's one issue with this (which rears an even uglier head in mammoth cloning).

Not all of a species is in its genes.

I've long held that while I consider cloning a mammoth as an attraction to be relatively harmless, we won't actually get a mammoth.

We'll get a fuzzy elephant. Because our cloned mammoth will be birthed and raised by a female elephant. He'll grow up within elephant culture, he'll learn how to be an elephant. Mammoth culture may have been different.

Ah, but elephants are much smarter than pigeons.

Perhaps, but pigeons have culture too. We can't bring back the passenger pigeon culture, and if we reintroduce large numbers of these birds...then what culture will they have? Presumably that of band-tailed pigeons. Will the genes shift them enough?

Or will they take off in some unanticipated direction. Maybe they'll be something good, maybe not. But we should think about deextinction carefully, because we could end up introducing yet another invasive species to an already stressed environment.

Amused...

...at the people who seem to think it's news that Liam Neeson was recognized by a horse he worked with on a previous movie.

Anyone who knows horses (and mules) knows that all you need to do is give them a treat and they'll remember you forever.

Bees and...mushrooms?

Apparently, somebody saw bees feeding off of mushrooms. And it seems that those mushrooms contain something which kills viruses transmitted the varroa mite, the ultimate cause of colony collapse disorder.

Magic mushrooms indeed...and anything that helps the bees is good.

But one has to wonder if it's boosting bee immune systems if this could also be useful for human medicine...

Doctor Who Series Eleven First Thoughts

The episode was solid (the lack of opening and closing credits did disconcert a lot of people).

Whitaker doesn't have me as quickly as Capaldi does, but she's developing a good grasp of the role. It's hard to establish her final take as the Doctor spent much of the episode in the throes of post-regeneration confusion (on occasion even forgetting English words, although that may be partly because she didn't have the TARDIS to translate).

And no, we haven't seen the new TARDIS yet. This episode was about the Companions and primarily about Ryan Sinclair.

The episode was explicitly narrated by Ryan (I'm hoping we'll get episodes narrated by Graham and Yasmin too), and somewhat centered on him. Whether this implies that Ryan is the primary Companion or not, I'm not sure.

If he is, then I have no complaints.

See, Ryan Sinclair is the first full time Companion with a disability. "He has dyspraxia."

To my current knowledge, this also makes Ryan Sinclair the first major character in any TV show to struggle with dyspraxia.

And they didn't "code" the character or let it go for episodes while we figured it out. They stated it, up front, in dialog.

My favorite lines in the episode:

"You're...a woman?"

"I am? Does it suit me?"

And, of course, "Sheffield steel." Which you have to be British to fully understand. (Basically, Americans, Sheffield is British Pittsburgh).

Oh, and the Doctor's new sonic screwdriver case is made of spoons. Just handing that out there to people who might be amused by it.

(I was quite fond of "I'll have a plan by the time I get to the top" too).

I think the writers and actors still need to settle in some before this gets really good, but it's a refreshing change in tone from Moffat's late seasons and I have absolutely no complaints.

Moons the size of Neptune?

Possibly! We may have found the first exomoon...and if so, it's orbiting a planet larger than Jupiter and is, itself, the size of Neptune.

The first exomoon being very large is understandable. The first exoplanets we found were huge too. However, current theories don't really give space for moons that large...

...so is it real, is it an artifact, or are we just wrong? I'm hoping for the last, because I love when science is wrong.

RIP Kepler

The exoplanet hunting telescope may be dead. Researchers have sent it into sleep mode to hopefully ensure that it will have enough fuel to do its scheduled data transfer on October 10.

There may be a little left over to do a few final observations, but this is very close to the end of the Kepler mission.

The news is not bad, though - Kepler's replacement, TESS, has already started doing its own surveys - and TESS, planned to operate for two years (although NASA's history shows a good record of keeping spacecraft operational beyond their initial parameters) will offer superior resolution and may well find planets Kepler missed. Especially earth-sized planets.

We are in a very exciting time for astronomy!

Shards! Released

Another new anthology. This one is from Spring Song Press (Yes, they're a Christian publisher, but this isn't Christian fiction, although it follows some pretty strict rules of "clean").

The book contains 21 stories on the theme of the title including my own Grimoire. It's edited by C.J. Brightley.

You can get your copies here:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

Kobo

iTunes

Enjoy!

So...

...if you invented machine telepathy, what is the first thing you would do with it?

It appears we actually have invented machine telepathy. It's called BrainNet. It's been tested with three people, it's slow and rather unreliable (rather like the internet 25 years ago).

First thing they did with it?

Play Tetris, of course.

Capclave Roundup

I only made it to two panels (plus the Broad Universe reading).

Laura Montgomery's presentation on current U.S. space law was fascinating (and quite useful for writing accurate near future science fiction). It got me thinking about how space law might evolve (which sparked a brief discussion about how we deal with people shooting nuclear reactors into space. For reasons).

I also made it to the panel on human genetic engineering, always a fascinating and controversial topic.

Attendance seemed about normal. It was good to see the regulars (especially Danielle Ackley-McPhail, who's had some issues lately).

The new hotel was okay but they need to open their bar later! 11pm? Seriously?