ISS

Unless you're on it, the International Space Station is a long way away - 400 or more km, even if it's flying right overhead - but on the other hand, it's huge. Modern digital cameras and lenses can do surprisingly well at capturing images of such a large and distant object, so - having been impressed by some of the pictures I've seen on the web - I thought I'd have a go myself.

This is my first proper effort -I tried a couple of nights ago with my camera on automatic mode, but the battery was low and in the low light conditions I struggled with finding the focus at infinity (my camera has a continuous focussing dial, so there's no handy end-stop). Tonight I set the ISO to 800 and the shutter speed to 1/500th, and focused on the Moon and a couple of stars beforehand. My cameras is a Lumix FZ50 with a 1.5 teleconverter on top of the built-in 420mm lens. The sky was clear except for some cirrus and the pass was a bright one. I balanced my camera on a wheelie-bin, as I've seen mentioned elsewhere - good tip. A tripod is not much use as you can't track fast enough to keep on the station.

What do you reckon? It looks like I've resolved something more than a smudge, but I admit it's not very scientific. Next time, I'll take a sequence of exposures at the same angle and see if there's any consistency between the images.

Enlargement:

Grrrr

My story "At Budokan", which originally appeared in Jetse de Vries's Shine anthology, is now available to read for free in Lightspeed magazine:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/at-budokan/

Mural and Year's Best

I was delighted to hear from Dakota Freeman, a physics and mathematics undergraduate at MIT. Dakota tells me that they're allowed to paint more or less whatever they like on the dorm walls, which strikes me as a great concept. For Dakota's dorm the inspiration came from the cover of my collection Deep Navigation. Says Dakota: "I particularly enjoyed "Fresco" and "Tiger, Burning", though my favorite story of yours is definitely "House of Suns."

A person of taste and refinement, I think we can agree.

Here's the magnificent result:

Thanks, Dakota - I'm honored.

In other news, I'm as thrilled as ever to be included in the latest edition of Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction, in this case, amazingly enough, the thirtieth annual selection. This year Gardner has kindly chosen my story The Water Thief, which originally appeared in Arc magazine at the start of 2012.

You might think I'm terribly blase about this sort of thing but it couldn't be further from the truth. I still get an immense kick out of being picked for inclusion in the Year's Best. Back when I started reading Interzone, in 1985, the SF field was undergoing one of its periodic bursts of reinvention - in this case, the emergence of a whole new slew of writers loosely organised into the "cyberpunk" and "humanist" camps. Interzone published some of these writers, but equally there were a large number that one could only read about in the reviews and commentary section. When I got hold of my first copy of one of Gardner's anthologies, it felt like gold dust. That was 1987, and the confusingly retitled British edition offered no hint that this series had already been running for some while. Quite apart from the contents of the anthology - which contained, among other things, Bruce Sterling's "The Beautiful and the Sublime" - the volume also had a lengthy overview of the preceeding year in SF, as well as a huge selection of "honorable mentions" at the back of the book. In a way, these lists of titles were at least as fascinating as the anthologised pieces themselves because one could imagine the stories that fitted the titles. Some writers seemed to have a gift for brilliant titles. I remember thinking that this Lucius Sheperd dude sure came up with some good ones.

Years later, when I'd started selling short fiction, I would anxiously scan the "honorable mentions" in the hope of, well, an honorable mention. I remember being gutted when a story I regarded as my strongest to date didn't merit so much as a nod, let alone inclusion in the book. That was one of those moments when I almost considered giving up. Yet, within a year or two of that, I found myself on Gardner's radar and before very long, he had picked a story of mine for inclusion. That was an amazing feeling. I was on a high for months, counting down the days until the book appeared. It's been a kick every time since - and just as much as a downer when I haven't managed to get a story into the book. In other words, it still matters to me. There are other "Year's Best" editions out there, all edited by people of sound judgement (some are even friends of mine) but Gardner's will always be "the big one" as far as I'm concerned.

So here we are, twenty five-odd years later, and it's a blast to be included.

Amazon.com link:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Years-Best-Science-Fiction/dp/1250029139/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376300246&sr=8-1&keywords=dozois+thirtieth

Amazon.co.uk:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Mammoth-Book-Best-Books/dp/1472106016/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1376300312&sr=8-9&keywords=best+new+science+fiction

From sketch to cover

Everyone loved the hardback cover of Blue Remembered Earth by Dominic Harman (me especially), but for the smaller format required for the paperback edition, it was felt that a significant redesign was needed, together with a visual element that emphasized the space-based action of much of the book. In other words, another spaceship.

There is no one spaceship that dominates the action in BRE - I actually tried to make the various craft more like routine vehicles than major characters in their own right - but it was clear that the ship "Winter Queen", which figures in the later action, might not be a bad choice. It also serves as a generic template for the basic look of some of the other vehicles mentioned in the book, such as the Maersk Intersolar liner and the Kinyeti - hopefully conveying a sense that these technologies are only a little more advanced than what we have now.

To give the artist (I think it was also Dominic) something to go on, I provided this extremely rough and ready sketch:

It's very interesting to compare it to the final cover - note the "details don't matter". I liked the final interpretation very much, although I've still a soft spot for the original cover, with its lovely hues and evocation of Earth.

Eagles High

Eagle, the hugely popular children's comic, casts a very long shadow. In its original incarnation it ran from 1950 to 1969. Its golden age, however, was even shorter than that, for by the mid sixties the comic (which was always aimed squarely at boys) was struggling to find its place in a world of television, pop music and a new era of global sport.

Yet the reach of the magazine was huge, and there must be countless children who came to a knowledge of Eagle not through the comic itself, but through the durable hardback annuals, which would have belonged to our parents and relatives a decade or more earlier.

Such was the case for me, for my father's copy of Eagle Annual 3 soon passed into my possession:

The annual was published in 1953, when my father would have been ten. By the time it entered my consciousness, in the early seventies, it would have been the better part of twenty years old. Of course, it had something of an old fashioned feel to it but it was also a very attractive and colourful package, and I found much to enjoy in it. Not least, of course, the colour spread containing the adventure of Dan Dare and the Double-Headed Eagle:

This would have been my first encounter with Dare and of course I came to it without any establishing context, knowing nothing of the characters or their world. I remember looking at the pictures with some interest, long before I was able to work my way through the story and grasp the "plot", such as it is. But it has stayed with me ever since.

Eagle, though, was not just about the science fiction exploits of Dan Dare although he may well have been the comic's most iconic creation. The comic set out to be educational as well as entertaining, and it was stuffed with factual articles, as well as stories and comic strips documenting historical events. The comic took an optimistic view of technological and scientific progress - this, after all, was the time of the Festival of Britain, a period when the memory of the war was beginning to fade and a newly invigorated Britain was still a world class player in engineering, ranging from supersonic aircraft to record-breaking motor cars. Eagle championed all this and more. Known for its staggeringly detailed cutaway drawings of then contemporary technological marvels, Eagle had tapped into an audience warmly appreciative of such matters. A few years ago I was delighted to pick up this Eagle "spinoff":

Times were moving on, though, and there's no doubt that the appetite for such wholesome educational material could not be sustained. Eagle was gone by time of the Apollo landing, and yet magazines of the same general "improving" type must have taken a long time to fade away completely. Four years after the demise of Eagle, for instance, this was one of my Christmas presents in 1973:

Now, I have no idea whether or not "Tell Me Why" had an existence independent from this annual, but between the covers it's really just a slightly updated variation on the Eagle theme. There are factual articles - the book opens with a chapter on the wonders of modern Japan - but also cutaway drawings, historical comic strips and so on. It's a very similar formula.

For better or for worse, I don't think it's possible to understate the degree to which these annuals colonised my imagination. Here's an example: I know the story of Earnest Shackleton well enough as an adult - I have read about it, and seen television documentaries. But my sense of the internal narrative of the story is entirely predicated on this monochrome comic strip from the Tell Me Why annual:

It's actually quite a fantastically good piece of history as entertainment, and that choice of blue as the sole tinting is suitably chilly. Elsewhere in the annual, there are similar stories and articles which still form the bedrock for my understanding of the relevant subject. (There's one on early lighthouses, for instance, which will always flash through my mind whenever someone mentions lighthouses, and another on the sinking of a Japanese aircraft carrier).

Yes, there was something very dated, very paternal, in these magazines - especially in their assumed choices of content, for the middle class male readership they undoubtedly had in mind. But I cannot deny that they have played a part in shaping my view of things, and stimulating my interest in what, for want of a better word, one might call "progress". I accept their deficiencies but at the same time I am quietly pleased to have been born in the shadow of Eagle.

The Foss Way

Over at http://www.unlikelyworlds.blogspot.co.uk/ Paul McAuley has been posting some classic 70s paperback SF images, many of which are by the incomparable Chris Foss. These days, it's perhaps hard to grasp the extent to which the spaceship-orientated visual style of Chris Foss was absolutely inseparable from SF, to the extent that many of the other artists of the period were obliged to emulate the Foss look. I adored Foss's work even as I came to the sobering conclusion that most of the images had nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the book.

This seemed as good a time as anyway to reprint my review of Hardware, which originally appeared in the BSFA's Vector magazine:

 
"That'll never happen."

These words were delivered by a geography teacher, examining a paperback of Asimov short stories that I'd foolishly allowed to remain visible on my desk. The focus of his scorn was not the contents of the book, of which he remained ignorant, but the cover, a painting of some daunting megastructure rising above an alien moon. Actually, I'd have readily agreed with him that not only would the depicted situation "never happen", but there was a vanishingly small chance of it having much to do with the stories in the book. This, after all, was a Chris Foss cover. Foss covers seldom related to anything.

It didn't matter. I loved Foss and I still do. The colour, the drama, the vast sense of scale and possibility - his pictures have always delighted me. Liberated from the texts themselves, as they are in this massive restrospective edition, it matters even less. Foss has been prolific, so clearly nothing less than a big book will suffice. I haven't counted, but with more than 230 pages, a good number of which are divided into three or four panels, Hardware must contain well over 500 illustrations, all - to my eye - well reproduced on good quality paper. Given the proviso that it's almost all machinery and landscapes, the range is impressive. There are, for instance, fifteen paintings just of submarines. There's a two-page spread devoted solely to paintings of things being grabbed by giant robot claws coming out of the sea. Hundreds and hundreds of spaceships, space stations, bases, asteroids, towering robots, explosions. People crop up here and there, but they're not the reason we come to Foss. His most iconic images are largely devoid of the human element. Personal favorites: the marvellous double-spread picture for "A Torrent of Faces" - Ballardian entropy made manifest, even though it isn't a Ballard book, and the gorgeous single image that was split into three for the Foundation trilogy.

It's such a generous assortment that it seems churlish to quibble. I'd have appreciated an index by book title, and I'd be slightly wary of the date attributions: my edition of Harry Harrison's In Our Hands The Stars, for instance, with its gorgeous cover of a chequerboard spacecraft rising from a night-lit cityscape, dates from 1981, not the 1986 stated here. There's also little about Foss the man: other than a single small photograph from 1977, there's no image of him (and even in the photo, it's not obvious which one is Foss). I'd have appreciated a sense of the artist in his natural habitat. We're assured that Foss is still active, but there's little evidence of that from the images, few of which date from later than the early 90s. Clearly, SF paperback illustration is a very different game than it was in the "golden age" of the seventies, but Foss's work still looks pretty timeless to me. It would be good to see new work, but in the meantime this lavish book is a fitting retrospective.

Denver pissed him off

There's almost certainly a post to be done on the influence of Joe Haldeman's work on my writing (I've been a huge admirer of Haldeman's work since I finally scored a paperback copy of The Forever War, years after reading about it, in those valve-driven days of the early 80s) but for now I was happy to be given the chance to review The Best of Joe Haldeman over at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Some quibbles aside (I'd have liked the book to feel more like an "event") this is a fine way to sample more than forty years of short fiction output by one of the most significant voices to enter the field in the last half century.

You can read the full review here.