Redditch public library

Apologies for the lack of activity here since July - busy, busy, busy. Just dropping by to say that I'll be talking at Redditch Public Library this coming saturday (August 25th) in connection with Redditch Astronomical Society. If you're in the area, why not drop in? I'll be talking about science and science fiction and there'll be plenty of time for questions, chatting etc.

Cheeky chappie

I posted this picture and linked to it from twitter, forgetting to put an explanation here. It's an unusual bird I photographed in Holland. Obviously a corvid of some sort, and probably immature, but what is it? The best guess, courtesy of one of my twitter responders, is that it's a leucistic jackdaw, but I've yet to see a really persuasive photo of a similar bird. It was also suggested that it might be an immature hooded crow, but in my 20-plus years of living in and visiting the Netherlands, I never saw a hooded. In fact the first time I did see one, in either Finland or Sweden, I did a double take because it was (to me) such an unfamiliar species.

ESA

On the admittedly slight chance that you're already working at ESA/ESTEC in Holland, I'll be doing a talk tomorrow:

http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/events/workshops/10YearsAnniversary/Jul12_10years_ACT_programme.htm

cheers!

The PI files (contains significant spoilers)

Clay's excellent timelime prompted me to dig out this material, which is all that remains of the notes I kept during the writing of Pushing Ice. (To be honest, there wasn't much more - a few back of the envelope calculations about acceleration, time dilation etc). I kept these because I felt they might come in handy when I came to write the much promised sequel, and I suppose they will.

First up is a handy breakdown of the organisational structure of the Rockhopper at the start of the novel. This is interesting because it rather obviously lays bare my thinking concerning the likely ethnic makeup of such a ship in the year 2057. It disappoints me that there is not a single Middle Eastern name, for instance, and only one name that could charitably be taken to indicate African origin. Obviously I could have done better, but it is what it is and any sequel would presumably have to draw largely on this pool of surnames.

Moving on, our next thrilling document is a breakdown of loyalties, depending on who I perceived to be nominally on Bella's side and nominally on Svetlana's. While it was easy to keep track of the core characters, and of course there was a certain amount of swapping of loyalties, I needed hard numbers to give the shipboard politicking some conviction.

In similar fashion, once the ship ended up on Janus, and the crew started founding the new settlement of Janus, I needed to keep tabs on who married who, births and deaths etc. This document shows the inhabitants of Crabtree in 2065, by Rockhopper's skewed dating system.

Finally, we come to some aliens. There's a mildly boring story attached to this one. I needed to conceptualise my main "good guy" aliens, but I didn't yet have an idea what they were meant to look like or be called. I'd been bashing my head against this problem for several days when circumstances called me away from my office. I had a dental appointment, which necessitated a stroll through town. Along the way, my mind freewheeling (probably thinking more about anaesthetic and drills than aliens) I spotted an ornamental fountain in someone's front garden. Hence, Fountainheads! I gave no thought to how these strange-looking aliens had evolved; what kind of planet they'd come from, what kind of metabolism they had, etc - all that worldbuildy stuff seemed then to be completely irrelevant and I would take the same view now. They have been space travelling for millions of years; they themselves barely remember how they got there.

I was very pleased with the Fountainheads and enjoyed writing every scene in which they featured. I particularly wanted to make a point that any sufficiently advanced aliens are likely to have no trouble understanding us, which is why these incredibly weird beings nonetheless have a perfectly relaxed grasp of colloquial English, give themselves easily pronouncable names, and do everything they can to set our minds at rest.

Thank you to my wife for scanning these documents, and I hope they are of some interest.

Pushing Ice Timeline (significant spoilers)

Reader Clay Hunt produced this fantastic schematic of the timelines in Pushing Ice. In Clay's words: "When I got to the point where Bella touches the Memorial Cube and starts figuring out JUST HOW FAR into the future they have traveled, it BLEW my mind." This is Clay's attempt at figuring out the basic chronology of Bella and Svetlana's journey into deep time. Clay wonders if it's correct, and my truthful answer is that it could well be, but I'd need to re-read the book to be sure. In the meantime it looks pretty damn excellent, doesn't it? I'm a sucker for these things, and I'm knocked out that someone considered it worth their time to produce one for my story. Thanks, Clay.



Click to embiggen. If any of you have any thoughts on the timeline, I'm sure Clay and I would enjoy hearing them.

All stacked up in the rain

I don't mind spending days, weeks or even months on a piece of art, but sometimes it's good to cut loose and work quickly. When I was a student I went on a two week residential art course in South Wales, where we were encouraged to do just that. I remember one of the assignments involved being dropped in Pontypridd market and told to produce as many pen sketches as we could, aiming to capture people as they stopped to buy bananas and so on, almost a candid camera approach where the work would consist of a few pen strokes at best and then on to the next subject. I found it very liberating at the time but olde habits die hard and my natural tendency is to work meticulously and neatly.

Lately, though, I've been trying to draw and paint faster, to set myself a self-imposed time limit and see if I can produce a piece of art within that period. Sometimes this can be as brief as a couple of minutes, or perhaps half an hour for a slightly more involved drawing. Where the quick approach really comes into its own is with painting, though, since it really encourages you to drop your inhibitions and just start splurging paint around.

This picture was inspired by a black and white image in a collection of images of nighttime railroads - I've blogged about O. Winston Link before, although this image while in a similar vein was not one of his - and it was painted very, very quickly. The entire thing was completed during a two hour evening at the local art society, but allowing for a coffee break, and a certain amount of faffing around at the start, deciding what to do, then cleaning up at the end, the picture couldn't have taken more than 90 minutes to finish, and was probably closer to an hour. The key in this case was that nothing in the picture needed to be painted with any great precision, and I chose to use acrylics rather than the oils I've been using a lot recently. Oils are great for working fast as well, but in this case the high contrast between the lit and dark areas suggested that acrylics would be a better bet, since I'd be able to paint highlights onto already dry areas very soon after the initial application. I began with a blue background which had dried by the time I got back from coffee, then added black and white and intermediate tones over that.

The original, and I hope the painting, has a definite noir quality which I found intriguing. Who are those people further up the train platform? Who is the figure in the hat? Do they know each other? Is the man in the hat some kind of fugitive hoping to get on the arriving train and escape the other people? Going back to my O Winston Link post, the original photo made me think of the Blue Nile, of the cover of their album Hats and the imagery in many of their songs of late night trains and rain and melancholy encounters. I love the fact that a single photograph, a snapshot of a innocent moment (doubtless it was just another day at the station) can activate so many thoughts.

Saturn's Return

My adventures in astrophotography have been hampered by poor weather and (to be fair) a measure of lethargy on the part of your correspondent. But tonight some clear skies heralded this first attempt at capturing Saturn, low in the south but still rather lovely through a telescope. I took this at about 11 pm local time. It's still cold here - indeed, we don't really get warm evenings in Wales any more.

OK, it's not going to make the cover of Sky & Telescope, but it's another step and I'm pleased with it. I'm a little behind on emails and bookplates, by the way, but catching up slowly. Bear with me, as there's been a lot of travel these last couple of months, as well as two novels that need finishing. Cheers!