Via the BBC, news that researchers at Cornell University have constructed a self-replicating machine and published their notes in Nature. This one is certainly a “Clanking Replicator” type and not a more exotic nanoassembler, but it’s pretty cool stuff nevertheless. I for one welcome the arrival of our new robotic overlords and look forward with great anticipation for the lauch of our first von Neumann probe and the beginning of (post)human galactic domination – Bwahahaha!

Issue 4 of this new(ish) Iain (M.) Banks fanzine is available for download (PDF, 218kb). (Thanks for the heads-up, Dave.) Older issues are available from the homepage. Lots and lots of Banksie trivia, plus discussion of Consider Phlebas, notes on the publicity tour for The Algebraist (which I missed out on due to a conspicuous lack of dates in the south-west), and news of the DVD release of The Crow Road which I’d like to see.

(Posting this, I look through my sf posts and realise I don’t write enough on this topic. My degree thesis centred on SF, so I must be able to come up with something interesting to say on the subject. BTW, I’m not going to publish the dissertation here. The word “postmodernism” is used far too often for comfort.)

This story by Adam Roberts is a sort of modern re-interpretation of why the Martian invasion chronicled by H G Wells may have failed. I enjoyed it.

I promise. Well, at least until I see the film itself. The weather held out for Wellington’s big day on Monday, and the sun beamed down on the thousands of people who turned out hoping for a glimpse of their favourite LotR actors. Most weren’t disappointed, as despite the crowds it was possible to see what was going on even if it proved more difficult to get any good photos.

The parade, which ran all the way through the centre of the city, made me think of a US ticker-tape parade or a Royal occasion back in the UK, but with far less security than you’d expect given the numbers involved. Interspersed between groups of costumed extras, the stars of the film slowly made their way to the cinema for a round of speeches and the Premiere itself. They all looked pretty blown away by the whole event, and all seemed to have big smiles on as they drank in the adulation surrounding them.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get any good shots of the stars themselves. I had a reasonable vantage point, but the sheer frenzy that greeted them proved beyond my capabilities to penetrate. I’m not too bothered really, as I’m sure we’ll all see plenty of them all over the coming weeks as the hype continues to build for the film’s general release. In the mean time here’s another shot of some of their escort.

The parade was fun, and seemed to live up to the city’s expectations. There was a general sense of carnival throughout the day, and I don’t think anyone really expected to get a lot of work done (I had a job interview rescheduled for Tuesday). Even the phone company got in on the act (I hope you can make out the screen, it says we’re in ‘MiddlEarth’)

Should you think that the whole country was united in LotR celebration, I should mention a few signs of dissent that were present, albeit almost swamped, on the day. As the band which concluded the parade marched past the spot I’d found for myself, a handful of people unfurled a large banner:

A little further down the road was another small group standing around some graffiti-covered cardboard boxes haranguing the crowd on the same issue. There was some debate with a few of the surrounding crowd, but I didn’t stay to watch for long. There weren’t many people protesting – a tiny number compared to the crowds happily watching the parade go past – but it’s worth a mention, especially as the latest issue of The Package mentions something similar in a short piece on some of the consequences of increased tourism to NZ. There is some concern over these issues here, even if it doesn’t seem to rate much of a mention in the mainstream media outlets.

We watched the speeches in a bar, although for some bizarre reason the local media kept interrupting their coverage of the days events – even in the middle of the speeches – to report on mundanities such as the sports results, or some piece of dull local news. This was actually the subject of complaints in the letters page of the paper later in the week, so it wasn’t just us that found this a bit odd. After the speeches were concluded and the stars enjoying the fruits of their labours in the cinema, the crowds began to disperse. We headed down to Taranaki Wharf to watch some of the entertainment laid on, but it quickly became pretty cold and we ended up heading home to bed rather than sitting up to watch the Two Towers yet again – after all the bloody hype, we plebs still have to wait until the 18th to watch the damn new film ourselves!

The much expected day is here, and Wellington is well and truly gearing up for the fun. The parade is due to start in about half an hour and the crowds are already gathering along the rails marking the route, the sun is shining and there’s a carnival atmosphere throughout the city. Best costumes I’ve seen yet are the two Ents and the Elf Maid wandering up and down Lambton Quay.

I expect to see a few more before the day is out! Right, I’m off to join the fun.

Wellington is currently in a fit of Lord of the Rings insanity. The World Premiere of The Return of the King is being held here on Monday, and the city is gearing up for the big event. The local papers are already full of gushing reports about stars being spotted in the city and many of the shops are sporting special window displays (regardless of what it is they actually sell in the normal course of things) as there’s a display competition being run by Positively Wellington Tourism. I reckon this well dressed Orc has got to be my favourite so far:

A set of commemorative stamps have been released to mark the occasion and these are the source of much of the more obvious decoration – from banners adorning the street lights to billboards to vast sheets tied across the fronts of office blocks. The largest depicts Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf, hangs down about eight floors from the front of the NZ Postal Service building and has become an icon of LotR-obsessed Wellington, but I prefer the (slightly) more subtle approach embodied by this three-dimensional billboard:

There are two cinemas associated with the Premiere, the Embassy and the Reading Cinemas complex, and atop each building perches a Black Rider astride his dragon-like winged steed gazing down balefully on the passing throngs.

There is to be a great big parade on the day of the Premiere winding it’s way through the city to the final stretch of Red Carpet leading up the steps to the doors of the Embassy Theatre. Most of the inner city hotels and hostels are completely booked up and have been for weeks and weeks; had we not sorted a flat this week we might have faced a night in the park on monday!

It’s quite fun being in a city the size of Wellington when something like this is happening – it’s small enough for the excitment to get everywhere, and you can’t help get a bit caught up in it all even as a visitor. We even had a moments excitement ourselves the other day when we realised that we’d just strolled past one of the hobbits!

I’ve got to mention this, as I’ve been waiting expectantly for the book since I put down Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson, one of my favourite authors, launches a wiki to go along with his new book, Quicksilver. Great idea. (Via boing boing)

By Ian McDonald, 2001, Earthlight, ISBN 0-684-86151-8

Any book with a protagonist named Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th has got to be good, especially when she knows she’s in a story.

In Ares Express, Ian McDonald returns to the rather dreamlike distant future Mars of his earlier Desolation Road (1988). This is a welcome return for all those who enjoyed DR, and AE will not disappoint, although AE is a separate work and only one character makes the crossover between the two.

It’s a fantastical romp through a richly detailed and surreal landscape, strangely believable for all its magical touches. Martian humans are little changed from ourselves, living ordinary lives beneath the barely understood gaze of the Artificial Intelligences that drove the terraforming of the planet. Sweetness is the child of railway engineers, the pilots of the vast fusion-powered trains that link together the disparate cities and communities of the planet. She’s a dissatisfied child for all the pride and arrogance of her clan, for females do not pilot the trains, instead it looks like she’s to be married off into the Stuard clan and a life in their stainless steel kitchens.

Fortunately for the reader, Sweetness isn’t likely to take to this particular destiny without some rebellion, and when she realises that she’s featuring in her very own story, she’s off at right angles to the tracks and into a series of mishaps and lucky escapes that lead her into a search for her dead twin (who lives in mirrors) and ultimately a struggle to save the very fabric of her universe…

McDonald writes vividly. His prose in itself is reason enough to read the book, bringing the strange world to life and entrancing the reader at every step. Sweetness’ own knowledge that she’s living a story might put off those who are not fond of such indulgences, but on McDonald’s Mars, where reality itself is subject to manipulation, it fits right in among all the other weird and wonderful events and beliefs and magical technologies.

Delightfully written, pure escapism – this is one of the best books I’ve read for quite some time. Go and lose yourself among the vast trains, uploaded demi-gods, reality-twisting AIs and insane Cults on McDonald’s Mars.

A guy called Chris Lynas used to host a website called Excession that had lots of graphics inspired by the work of Iain M Banks.

This disappeared from the net a while ago, but it’s now found a new home – at www.fastness.co.uk. There’s some of his older stuff there (including the version of the Salwowski cover of “The State of the Art” (pictured below) and a couple of new bits too, and he promises to keep it updated a bit more often.

His images are available in various sizes – suitable for use as desktop wallpapers – and he is fine about use of the images for personal use – details are on his front page.

Everyone must have seen the pictures from the demo yesterday. Somewhere around 1 million of us shuffing slowly through central London in the freezing cold. It took the best part of four hours to get from Bedford Square to Hyde Park, surrounded by people from all walks of life and all parts of the UK.

I saw no touble, and many high spirits despite the crush and the cold. Although the vast majority of the placards on site were of the mass-produced variety, there were plenty of home made ones too, often with funny and ironic slogans. Respect to the guy on the phone box at the bottom of Shaftsbury Avenue holding aloft his which said “All your bomb are belong to us”, to the utter mystification of many of my fellow marchers.

As is always the case on large demos like this, there were plenty of groups present hoping to get their various messages heard along with the more general anti-war message that the majority had come to support. I was a little troubled by one or two of these, but I don’t think that this is important – the sheer volume of people ensured that no one group could wholly hijack the march for their own agenda. The proliferation of left wing splits reminded me of an incident in Ken Macleod’s The Stone Canal, where the characters are on a similar Peace March (p.82, UK Hardback edition):

My father spotted a young woman carrying a bundle of papers whose headline – no, it wasn’t even that, it was the actual masthead – read “Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!” and asked her in a tone of polite curiosity: ‘Why don’t you fight capitalism, for a change?’

But none of this really matters. What matters is that somewhere between 750,000 and 2,000,000 people were on the streets yesterday to show their disapproval of the coming war on Iraq. Tony Blair suggested on Friday that we ought to think about those in Iraq who would be supressed if they tried to do such a thing, and yes, we should, but that shouldn’t stop us doing it if we feel that it is the right thing to do, whether or not we believe that it will make a difference.