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)
Tag Archives: SF
Ares Express
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.
Images from IMB
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.
Demonstrated
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.
Futurism
In a bizarre story, the BBC reports about a printer adapted to produce 3 dimensional living tissue.
Again via the BBC, President Bush looks set to back NASA’s project to use nuclear propulsion systems in spacecraft. This has the potential to make the exploration of space by either crewed or robotic craft a lot more viable, but is something likely to meet with opposition from anti-nuclear campaigners. Needless to say the news will please those in favour of a human exploration program.
There’s been wide reporting of the discovery of a fossil of a four-winged dinosaur in China. Here’s the New Scientist report and the BBC report.
Researchers at Imperial College London looking into memory and neurofeedback make claims that it might be possible for people to be trained in better recall. Neurofeedback techniques involve showing people their brainwaves on a screen and teaching them how to exert some control over them. (Guess what? via the BBC.)
Bits and bobs
Just posting this stuff for the sake of it really.
Although this has been covered everywhere already, I’ll mention the publication of Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a joint online/hardcopy publication which can be downloaded here under a creative commons license. I’ve enjoyed Cory’s stuff before, not to mention Boing Boing, so I’m looking forward to getting into this over the weekend. I reckon that I’ll end up buying a copy too. (Also available online, at scifi.com, is Jury Service, a collaboration between Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross, also worth reading.)
Hmm, what else has been going on…
Read a discussion about Palladium and the release of American Megatrends palladium BIOS on Slashdot yesterday. Don’t think I’ll be buying one for my next PC (if I have any choice 
, and the whole thing makes me feel a bit uneasy.
Had a laugh at dontlink.com, which I hadn’t seen before, and thoroughly approve of.
Got bored in the evenings and started on yet another minor makeover for this blog, this time trying to be a bit more XHTML and CSS orientated.
Going to try and post a couple of more original pieces that have been brewing for a little while at the weekend, too.
High Strangeness
I like the High Strangeness History of UFO Phenomena cartoon I found syndicated on the Fortean Times website. You can look at the strip from the beginning at the High Strangeness archive.
William Gibson has a blog
Cool! Check it out.
(via Boing Boing)
Cloning Humans
This topic has been in the news recently what with the announcements from Clonaid that the first two human clones have been born, one in the US and one in Europe. The announcement of the birth of the first clone was greeted with scepticism (BBC report), and a proposed DNA test has now become less likely after a lawyer in the US began a legal action against the “parents”. The birth of the second clone was announced this week (BBC report), and will no doubt be treated sceptically as well.
For those not au fait with the ins and outs of cloning, the New Scientist has devoted part of their website to the subject. These pages include a FAQ and compilations of reports and articles on the subject.
I’m disturbed by the news that human clones have already been created (assuming that they have, and this wouldn’t surprise me). I’m not disturbed by the concept of cloning, and I don’t feel that there’s necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with the cloning of humans, what disturbs me is that the technology is far from being a mature one. The various experiments which have resulted in successfully cloned animals over the last few years have thrown up many questions about the long term viability of clones. Dolly gets arthritis young, cloned mice appear to age rapidly – what’s clear is that we just don’t know enough about this technology to start applying it to humans in an ethical manner.
Research and experimentation on humans is a complex area. In most western countries there are ethical frameworks for it involving concepts of informed consent (an example). I’m not sure how these sorts of rules are usually applied to unborn or unconceived children, but I imagine that it would be difficult to get a program of medical experimentation past many Ethics Committees where the potential consequences were quite so vague and uncertain, and where the actual subject had no chance to give consent of any kind.
Of course out in the real world there are places where and people for whom such considerations are irrelevant and, as has been said many times before, the cloning of humans is probably inevitable. I think that it’s profoundly irresponsible for anyone to have embarked upon this project at this time, and I think that it will ultimately damage rather than improve chances for the technology to be used positively. I suspect that one factor motivating this rush to produce that first cloned child (rather than money, fame and a place in the history books, of course) was to do it before it became illegal everywhere. Unfortunately this very action is likely to encourage knee-jerk legislation against cloning technology before we even really know whether it has any potential human applications at all.
The Praxis, by Walter John Williams
Published by Earthlight in the UK
I just finished reading this the other day, bought with some of the book tokens I got for Christmas, and as it was such an enjoyable read I felt obliged to give it a bit of hype, despite the fact that most of what I say below has been said before.
I’d encountered some fairly good reviews of this (see below for some links) before I picked it up, but I’d been meaning to get it anyway as I’ve enjoyed WJW in the past. It’s a Space Opera in the classic sense, complete with galaxy-spanning decadent empire, aliens, planet-busting weaponry, dramatic space battles, and most of what you’d expect from such a work.
The aliens who thousands of years previously had established the empire and it’s code of ethics (the Praxis) by ruthlessly conquering everyone else – humanity included – have been dying out gradually, and the death of the last member of the race occurs during the book, triggering all sorts of events best left out of this brief commentary. The story follows two human characters, both of whom are fun to read about and I found myself interested in both of their fates. The pace doesn’t really pick up until the last half/third of the book, but when it does the action comes thick and fast and I found myself up late reading the last sections.
Although The Praxis doesn’t really break any ground in terms of innovative plot structure, amazing new technology or particularly well rounded aliens, it’s a fine example of it’s type. It’s the sort of book you’d expect to see from an accomplished writer like WJW who’s decided to sit down and pen a classic space opera, and as such is highly readable and I recommend it for those times when the future shock is getting too much and you’d like to get back to the old days of ray guns, rocket ships and adrenalin. It’s the first book in a sequence too, so there’s the next in the series to look forward to once you’ve finished off this one.
Other reviews available online include: