Pattern Recognition

Technology marches on. Sometimes I find myself caught entirely unawares by some capability which not only works flawlessly, but which has become almost freely available to the consumer or enthusiastic amateur. I still remember buying a digital SLR camera which had face recognition built in almost as an afterthought. I'd given it no great thought until - with the camera sitting powered-up on a coffee table - I noticed that it was locking in on the picture of the queen's head on a five pound note! It was a shock to realise that this supposedly futuristic image-processing functionality was not only highly robust, but so cheap to implement that it was barely mentioned in the camera's sales material.

I had a similar experience earlier today. After a long run of cloudy nights, I've finally been able to get outdoors with the telescope and attempt to continue my long-running adventure in astronomical imaging.

This being Spring, one of the obvious candidates is M13, the globular cluster in Hercules. It's easily visible in telescopes and not hard to find in binoculars. I've looked at it many times over the years, but only this week did I manage to get a picture of it.

I shot this using a telescope on a GoTo mount. The mount contains a computerised database, and provided it's set up reasonably well at the start of a night, the "kit" enables the telescope to automatically locate and track astronomical objects. So, although I can find M13 for myself, I didn't need to: I just typed "M13" into the handset and off it whirred. The pointing accuracy was such that the cluster ended up close to the field of view and there was no difficulty obtaining images,

M13's fairly easy game, though, and I fancied a stiffer challenge. High in the Spring sky, near the "handle" of the Plough, is M101 - a "grand design" spiral galaxy of quite exceptional beauty. It's also very faint and a reportedly tricky object to see by eye alone, even through a telescope. With light pollution and a bright moon, there was no chance of that - but I was still optimistic that I could obtain an image. After all, at least I didn't have to worry about the pointing part - the telescope and its GoTo mount could take care of that for me.

However, I didn't succeed. Here's one of several frames I took over two clear nights:

Fascinating stuff, eh. Some random stars and electrical noise, and no sign of anything resembling a spiral galaxy. Now, I mentioned that the GoTo mount does need to be set up properly at the start of the night - accurate polar alignment and all that - so there's always a possibility that it isn't quite aiming in the right direction by the time it thinks it's found M101. Compounding that, the digital camera that I attach to the telescope samples a smaller field of view, so the object of interest might be falling just outside the camera's reach.

It was then that an astronomer on Twitter, Andrew Gray, mentioned that there is such a thing as "plate solving", The idea is that a sufficiently powerful pattern matching algorithm can analyze an image of some stars and work out exactly where in the sky they correspond to. That's an incredible feat of computation, especially if you don't know in advance little niceties like angular scale, brightness calibration and so on. Now, I was distantly aware that something like this capability existed, but I had no idea it was now easily within reach of the amateur such as myself.

However, within minutes I had uploaded my frame to:

http://nova.astrometry.net/

And almost as quickly I had a set of annotations for my frame:

This is ASTONISHING. Not simply because it comfirms that M101 was indeed within my field of view - but presumably too washed out by glare to show up - but that this capability exists and is free for use, and returns results quickly enough to be useful for astronomers actually sitting at their telescopes, trying to find stuff. I didn't even have to submit the image in some fancy, astronomy-only image format, either - I just sent a Jpeg.

For the sheer hell of it, I also ran my M13 image through the processor:

I'm amazed, and impressed, and excited by the possibilities. Truly we are blessed to be living at a time when such miraculous feats of technology are easily within our grasp.

Just to end, here's a close-up of M13:

The light I caught had travelled 25,000 years to reach my telescope. If there's ever a day when that sort of thing doesn't send a shiver down my spine, please feel free to shoot me.

Foundation 123

Will Slocombe of the University of Liverpool has kindly contributed two articles to the current issue of Foundation, the International Review of Science Fiction. There's a lengthy interview with me - which we did face to face on a park bench in Cardiff last year - and two reviews, one of Poseidon's Wake and the other Slow Bullets.

"What both Poseidon's Wake and Slow Bullets suggest is that Reynolds has yet again managed to switch tones and styles in his writing, but retain his sense of perspective and invention to still keep readers hooked."

I am very grateful to Will for these contributions.

Foundation is published three times a year by the Science Fiction Foundation:

http://www.sf-foundation.org/

New stories for old universes

Pleased to announce that I've sold a pair of stories set in two of my established universes. The first, "Belladonna Nights", takes place in the House of Suns timeline a few million years earlier than the events of the novel. Campion plays a part in the story. This will appear in an as-yet-untitled original anthology with an exceedingly interesting conceptual premise, and I was really thrilled to be able to contribute something.

The second, longer piece, is entitled "The Iron Tactician" and is a new novella featuring my long-running character Merlin. Previous Merlin stories were "Merlin's Gun" (1999), "Hideaway" (2000) and "Minla's Flowers" (2007). The very tentative plan at the moment is that the novella will appear as a standalone chapbook, but we should have a firmer idea in a few months, and of course I'll give fuller details on where these stories will appear in due course.

It was enormously enjoyable to dig back into these two universes, after nearly a decade away from them, and in both instances I felt the distant glimmerings of new story ideas. So we'll see.

"Slow Bullets" and the Sad Puppies

I was away for a few days without internet access and discovered when I returned that my novella "Slow Bullets" has been included on the "SP4" Sad Puppies list for Hugo nominators.

At this point it's of no concern to me whether this is a slate or a set of recommendations. Given the taint left by last year's antics, I don't care for any work of mine to be associated with any list curated by the Sad Puppies.

The list was announced at Kate Paulk's website Madgeniusclub.com. Late last night I left a comment asking - politely, I hope - for the story to be removed, but after I checked the site in the morning I couldn't find my comment and the story was still listed. I've tried to leave another comment to the same effect.

Hey Joe

Here are some one-line plot synopses from a TV series set close to the present day.

After a military coup, a dictator misappropriates global aid funds to develop drone warfare technology to use against his own citizens. A stricken submarine ends up in the territorial waters of a Central American failed state, threatening to derail international peace talks. In a Middle Eastern Sultanate, a political assassination leads to a constitutional crisis, imperilling the progressive, democratic policies of the rightful successor to the throne. In the Arctic, a nuclear accident heightens an already tense East-West standoff…

Failed states. Democracies. Autonomous weapons. Middle East crises. Rising nuclear tension. The East and West at each other’s throats …

Sound familiar?

This is the world of 2013 – or rather the world of 2013 as envisaged in 1968, when Gerry Anderson began making Joe 90, the last of his series to be based exclusively around Supermarionation. Never as popular as Stingray, Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 nonetheless remains strikingly prescient in its vision of a messy, mixed-up twenty first century, neither entirely good nor entirely bad, neither simplistic utopia nor grimdark dystopia. The storylines may be rudimentary, and there’s seldom any real sense of jeopardy in Joe’s adventures, and yes, it’s puppets (you have to get past the puppets, I’m afraid) but the world presented here is a much closer fit to our present than that predicted by almost any other TV series of similar vintage.

No one wears shiny suits or shoulder pads. People wear normal clothes, live in normal houses or thatched cottages, they drive on normal roads with normal road markings and road signs. There’s still a Dorset. They go on skiing holidays, fishing trips, attend piano recitals and so on. Even the vehicles, while futuristic, look perfectly plausible to modern eyes. Unlike Star Trek, which presented a flawless post-monetary future completely detached from our own, Joe 90’s future was built on the present. This was something Gerry Anderson got right in almost all his puppet shows – a sense that, even decades hence, a lot of old stuff would still be hanging around, and while global institutions might come and go, the world would still be as busy and complex as it is in the present. There would still be money, and where there was money there would still be bank robbers and forgers.

The Anderson shows didn’t necessarily share the same future, although it generally looked as if they did – but what they did share was a common idea, a unifying notion that, for all the gadgetry and hardware, some things just won’t change. It shouldn’t be a radical notion, but it’s one that Gerry Anderson alone seemed to really take on board. Of course there are lots of things missing from the series – there’s nothing like the internet, there are no digital media, there is no hint of climate change – and the race and gender politics is at times very dated, although no more so than in any other series from the same timeframe.

But the central triumph is that Anderson created a future one could believe in, rather than some idealised daydream of starships and warp drives. Even the world of Captain Scarlet, overshadowed by the ultimate War on Terror, is fundamentally our own. Apart from the Mysterons threatening to blow up stuff or assassinate people, life goes on for most people – as it does in ours. Much the same applied to Thunderbirds: unless you were caught up in the disaster of the week, the world of the Tracy Brothers seemed a fairly livable place. Especially if you were stupidly wealthy, and could afford to hang out in Monaco.

Thunderbirds is coming back, of course – this time it’s Thunderbirds are Go! – and while I’m quite indecently excited at the prospect (can you tell I’m a diehard Anderson fan?) I also hope that the new series doesn’t stray too far from the spirit of the old. I’m not talking about puppets versus CGI, or whether the new vehicles look better or worse than the old – I mean the setting, the larger world in which the action takes place. I want that same sense of continuity with the present, looking forward but also acknowledging that the future will be just like Now, only with more stuff. Anderson got that splendidly right in the sixties, and by the time I came to his shows in the early seventies – via battered old Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet annuals, Dinky toys and the occasional blink-and-you’ve-missed-it TV re-run – it made the twenty first century seem exciting. I wanted to live long enough to see Gerry’s world.

Now it seems I have.

This piece originally appeared in SciFi Now magazine in 2015.

Revenger

If you’ve ever tried to sleep in a grumbly old house with pipes that hiss and clank, floors that creak, walls that groan, windows that rattle, you’ve maybe a tenth of an idea what it’s like to try sleeping on a ship like the Monetta’s Mourn. If it wasn’t the restless noises of the ship it was someone barking out an instruction, someone calling the hour of a watch, or a mad woman screaming while bound to a bed.

Just when I might have managed to sleep for half an hour, there was a soft knock, and then Mattice drew aside the curtain that shielded our quarters, making enough of a gap for his big beardy face to loom into my vision and say: ‘Morning watch. There’s hot tea in the galley, hot water in the washroom. You’ll feel like death now but we’ve all had our first night on a ship and it gets better.’

‘How many nights does it take?’ Adrana asked.

‘Oh, not many. Sometimes as few as twenty.’

‘Thank you, Mattice,’ I said, shivering despite all the layers I’d pulled around myself in the night.

‘Take your time. But not too much of it if you want to see the sails run out. Hirtshal’s already begun.’

Running out the sails got everyone twitchy. Hirtshal was the master of sail, the man in charge of them, but if something went badly wrong at this stage, half the crew would need to go out in suits to untangle the mess.

‘We run a tight crew,’ Rackamore told me, while we were gathered at the hemispherical window, watching the sail-control gear swing out from the hull. ‘That’s not just because a light ship is a fast ship. It means we don’t have to split our profits too many ways.’

‘I want to learn what I can,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘That’s a fine attitude. And you will – within reason. Knowing how to wear a suit, operate an airlock, find your way around the outside of the ship – that’s basic survival ability. And some knowledge of the other areas of expertise is always useful. You’ll want to know a little about baubles, a little about relics, and so on, if only because it’ll give you a healthy respect for what you don’t know.’ His jaw tensed. ‘But I have to draw a different line with my Bone Readers. You’re scarce . . . too scarce to expose to the risks that the other crewmembers naturally accept.’

Prozor, next to us, said: ‘What he means is, girlies, you’re goin’ to be pampered, so get used to it.’

Beyond the glass, the barbs that had been folded along the Monetta’s hull were angling out, just as if that bad-tempered fish were stiffening its spines in some defensive reaction. These were the anchor-points for the rigging, the whiskery filaments which linked the ship to her sails. Under Hirtshal’s supervision, they’d be tugged and released all the while, making up for tiny shifts in the solar flux and accommodating the changes in our course that Rackamore had in mind.

‘We don’t run out the main sails all in one go,’ he was saying. ‘They’d snag and rip. Hirtshal uses the drogue sails first. Do you see them, unfurling about a league away from us? They’ll take up the slack in the lines, get them handsomely taut and aligned, and then we run out the main sails, a thousand square leagues of reflective area.’

He had a way of saying ‘main sails’ that sounded as if the two words were running together.

‘It might seem simple,’ he went on. ‘It’s anything but. The sails are as tricky as they’re delicate.’

Hirtshal was already outside, standing with magnetic boots on the back of the Monetta, using controls that came out through her hull for exactly this sort of operation. If something jammed or tangled, he could sort it out before it got too bad. The launch was ready as well, just in case something got snarled up tens of leagues beyond the ship.

But all was going well. The drogues snapped open, blossoming like sudden chrome flowers, and they in turn helped the unfolding of the main sails, intricate, interlaced arrays of them. I don’t mind saying: it was properly marvellous, the way they gradually opened out, planing apart along seams we’d never have known were there, layer after layer of them, snapping wider all the time. It was like a conjuring trick, something a cove would do in Neural Alley, with cards and a sly gleam in his eye. The sails blazed back at us, each glittering facet silver tinged with red and purple, reflecting the world-filtered light of the Old Sun. The rigging was invisible, but already it was straining to move the ship. In response, Monetta’s creaks and groans had a different sort of music to them. An eagerness, now. The ship was straining, wanting to catch the photon winds.

And so we sailed. Monetta’s Mourn no longer had to slink around on ion thrust, or cower from the gravity well of a swallower. She’d become the thing she was always meant to be: a vessel of the deep void, a creature of the Empty.

That ship of ours was a sunjammer.

Excerpt from REVENGER, copyright Alastair Reynolds 2016, due to be published in September.

The Best Of

I'm immensely pleased that 2016 will see the publication of my Best Of, courtesy of Subterranean Press and Orion books, who will both be doing editions. Jonathan and Bill have done a sterling job selecting the stories, no easy task given the number to choose from, and  - since I was party to the whole process - I can state that there were some very difficult choices to be made about which pieces to omit or include. The book is physically huge, and it really wouldn't have been feasible to include any more material than what has been selected.

Subterranean themselves will be doing two editions, one of which is the Limited, which features my own artwork as shown above. The piece was done specifically for the book, while not being based on any one story - although since spaceports figure in more than one of them, it's not inappropriate. Meanwhile, Dominic Harman, who did some of my Interzone stories, is working on the cover for the main Sub Press edition. I've seen some roughs, and Dominic's cover is going to be wonderful. To add to the goodness, there will be a separate cover again for the Orion edition - and the roughs I've seen of that look pretty lovely as well.

You can find out more about the book, including the table of contents, at the Sub Press website:

http://subterraneanpress.com/store/product_detail/beyond_the_aquila_rift_the_best_of_alastair_reynolds

I've been publishing short stories for 25 years (and this year will be 27 since my first professional sale) but I can honestly say there wasn't a point in all that time where I was ever bold enough to think I'd see a "Best Of" published. Now that it's nearly here, I'm truly grateful for the continued opportunities and friendships that the field has offered me, and offer thanks to the editors and readers who have kindly seen me this far.