For many years there’s been a narrator running amok inside. He (it’s always he) looks at the world through harsh, embittered eyes and runs his tongue down the catalogue of human condition and unforced error in the doings of what he sees. We know him. He narrates stories we all know; the darker, seamier side of life, the compromises we all make to survive in the big city, what it does to us as people. Those that make it are a lesson in cynicism. The men maintain a civilised veneer as long as it suits their purpose; when they have to drop it, they are still smart and polished, but brutal. The women cunning and ruthless but sexy as hell. Philip Marlowe, private detective is in all of us, even if just a little. Science Fiction is my first interest but, if all there was was Detectives, written Raymond Chandler style, well life wouldn’t be that bad.
A couple of months I finally summoned courage to get A Guide to First Contact edited. I cast around eventually electing to use someone from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. SfEP, as they are known, are UK based and their members offer a full range of skills and an idea of what it will achieve, plus the cost. For the record my first contact was Louise Harnby who is a proofreader. Through her good offices I was put in contact with Stephen Cashmoor, an editor. The edit process lasted over one month, only really ending by August. It gave me more confidence in my style and the courage to experiment. I’ve just trialled a piece: Alibi and the feedback is good. I ought to do more but first I need prepare A Guide to First Contact for publication. That also means putting it on Kindle. When I stuck 36 Short Stories 2010/11 on Kindle I was determined to use the HTML to good effect; lists of character appearances and links to show plot facets. If 36 Short Stories was anything to go by, there’s a lot to do.
19 Nov 13
Noir
I always wanted space explained to me but few Science Fiction works connected their fiction to the real; their action was invariably in a far off place and time. Second best to reading it is to do an essay on space. This is the Science part of Fiction. When I dreamed up Lucky I had a vague notion of where she was going but I knew exactly where she was from: the Galactic Core. What’s cool about the core of our galaxy is that it is quite elongated – so much so that astronomers call it a ‘bar’. Astronomy can be a fascinating subject and srudy of it can take you as many places. Here's my notes for Lucky...
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Habitable planets.
The earth sits in a habitable zone around the Sun. A gas giant close to the Sun would disrupt the habitable zone unless it were reduced to say a Venus…. The earth currently enjoys the benefit of a habitable zone free of gas giants. Calculations are changing all the time for the number of planets in the Milky Way occupying an Earth-style habitable zone.
In February 2011 the Kepler Space Observatory Mission team proposed a list of 1235 extrasolar planet candidates, including 54 that may be in the habitable zone. Six of the candidates in this zone are smaller than twice the size of Earth. A more recent study found that one of these candidates (KOI 326.01) is in fact much larger and hotter than first reported. Based on the findings, the Kepler Team estimated there to be “at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way” of which “at least 500 million” are in the habitable zone.
Small planets are more likely to be geologically dead or have reduced tectonic activity. Radical axial tilt makes seasons extreme and make bio-homeostasis a more difficult proposition.
The amount of water in Earth’s oceans seems too great to have been generated by volcanic outgassing. If it didn’t come from here, then where? The vast majority of water – and other things necessary for life, such as carbon and amino acids – must have come from the outer Solar System. Away from the Sun’s heat it would remain solid. To follow this model, comets impacting with the Earth in the Solar System’s early periods could have deposited vast amounts of water, along with the other volatile compounds required by life, providing a kick-start to the origin of life.
Under the model, comets seed inner planets; without them, life as we know it would not exist on Earth. Thus a supply of long-term orbiting comets would be the key to life forming in any stellar system. If true, this methodology would render the likelihood of the four “life elements” occurring in the right proportion elsewhere, somewhat remote.
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Interstellar medium
The interplanetary medium of the Solar System ends at 90 – 100 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun in a region known as the termination shock. It is called this because at this distance from the Sun, the solar wind slows to subsonic velocities. Beyond the termination shock is the heliosheath where interstellar matter interacts with the solar wind.
Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock December 16, 2004. Since 1998 it has been the farthest human-made object from the Earth and as of 25 March 2013, will soon be entering interstellar space. Once there, it will provide the first direct probe of conditions in the interstellar medium. (Stone et al. 2005).
The Voyager 1 is 722 kg (1,590 lb) and was launched by NASA, September 5, 1977. Its mission was to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar medium. This probe receives routine commands and transmits data back to the Deep Space Network. By March 2013 it had reached a distance of nearly 125 AU (123.48 AU = 1.847×1010 km) from the Sun. It is still unclear whether the region it is currently traversing is part of interstellar space or an area within the Solar System.
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Stars
Stars are essential to life. The Sun is a star and it is classified as a G type main-sequence star. Class G types are yellow, which is comforting as that’s the colour it appears in our skies. Most visible stars about us (about ¾) are red. Red dwarfs emit little heat – to be close enough for life, a planet could well get tidal (gravitational) locking.
In the galactic core, neighbouring stars are close to each other. If we had a close stellar neighbour, the stability of various orbiting bodies such as Oort cloud and Kuiper belt objects would be disrupted. This could prove catastrophic if they were knocked into the inner Solar System. Why? Because of the quantity of large mass objects.
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Stellar classification / frequency / colour
Class O / 1 in 3,000,000 / blue
Class B / 1 in 800 / blue white
Class A / 1 in 160 / white
Class F / 1 in 33 / yellow white
Class G / 1 in 13 / yellow
Class K / 1 in 8 / orange
Class M / the rest (76%) / red
Astronomy is constantly making discoveries. Proposals for additional star types include hot blue emission stars, cool red and brown dwarfs, carbon-related late giants, white dwarfs, non-stellar spectral types, degenerate and exotic stars
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Galactic Year
The galactic year, also known as a cosmic year, is the duration of time required for the Solar System to orbit once around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. Estimates of the length of one orbit range from 225 to 250 million “terrestrial” years. According to NASA, the Solar System is travelling at an average speed of 828,000 km/h (230 km/s) or 514,000 mph (143 mi/s), which is about one 1300th of the speed of light. If you could travel at that speed in a jet aircraft along the equator, you would go all the way around the world in approximately 2 minutes and 54 seconds. According to NASA, even at this incredible speed, it still takes the solar system 230 million years to orbit the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy one time.
The galactic year provides a conveniently usable unit for depicting cosmic and geological time periods together. By contrast, a “billion-year” scale does not allow for useful discrimination between geologic events, and a “million-year” scale requires some rather large numbers.
Timeline of universe and earth in galactic years
The following list assumes that 1 galactic year is approximately 225 million years.
~61 galactic years ago - Big Bang
~54 galactic years ago - Birth of the Milky Way
18.4 galactic years ago - Birth of the Sun
17-18 galactic years ago - Oceans appear on Earth
15 galactic years ago - Life begins on Earth
14 galactic years ago - Prokaryotes appear
13 galactic years ago - Bacteria appear
10 galactic years ago - Stable continents appear
7 galactic years ago - Eukaryotes appear
6.8 galactic years ago - Multicellular organisms appear
2.8 galactic years ago - Cambrian explosion
1 galactic year ago - Permian-Triassic extinction event
0.26 galactic year ago - Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event
0.001 galactic year ago - Appearance of modern humans
Present day
6 galactic years in the future - Sun’s habitable zone moves outside of the Earth’s orbit
22 galactic years in the future - The Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy begin to collide
25 galactic years in the future - Sun ejects a planetary nebula, leaving behind a white dwarf
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Black Holes
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has come up with evidence to show that massive black holes were common in the early universe. It also shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies. Observations from it were combined with optical and infra-red images from its Hubble Space Telescope, allowing astronomers to search for black holes in 200 distant galaxies, from a time when the universe was around 800 million to 950 million years old. These early black holes are 100 times fainter and 1,000 times less massive than quasars. A quasar is a rare, very luminous, supermassive black hole, powered by material falling onto it; the supermassive black holes charted by Chandra were weak-quasars.
Between 30% and 100% of these distant (and thus long ago) galaxies contained growing weak-quasars. Simple extrapolation suggests that there would have been at least 30 million of them in the early universe. This is about 10,000 times greater than the estimate for ‘full-blown’ quasars at that time.
Scientists believe there is a connection between the mass of a black hole and that of the galaxy it resides in. A question bothering them is whether the growth of a black hole is regulated by the galaxy, or vice versa. Professor Lucio Mayer is part of a team working on this, he postulates that their research could be useful for physicists who search for gravitational waves and thus want to supply direct proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity. According to Einstein, the merging of supermassive black holes must have resulted in massive gravity waves. The remains of these should still be measurable today.
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This prompts the thought: what is Science Fiction? There are swathes of English middle class who never come into contact with their social inferiors – the working class – and may well find their ways alien. As a former resident of a sink estate and, following the same principle as before, I determined that further explanatory notes on my alien heroine were in order and accordingly, provide further relevant notes.
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Space and Fiction
Lucky, my protagonist, comes from the galactic core. Part of the fun of SF is envisioning a cosmogony. Evolving a robust model of the universe is the role of scientists. Science changes to match the observable phenomena. In the following, Lucky’s universe doesn’t stray too far from what we currently know.
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Life on Earth
Life on Earth is different from space. It’s something we know well, but what would it be like for an alien who came to settle, clandestinely?
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Northern Soul
Back in the 1970’s UK, there was a lot of interest in US Soul. In Northern England this developed into a fad for reviving obscure but catchy records. English DJ’s would go the US and scour record stores for 45’s, hoping to bring back something different. Sometimes they would remove the record label to make it difficult for others to catch onto their latest finds. Dance clubs sprang up offering all-nighter discos, themed on these records. All-nighters could last from 2 AM to 8 AM (and might be fuelled by amphetamines). Famous clubs included Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca and the Golden Torch in Stoke on Trent.
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Being Sectioned
The UK National Health Service operates under a framework of enabling legislation. The Mental Health Act (2007) codifies the procedure under which people are sectioned.
The main ones are:
section 52 (3 days)
section 2 (28 days)
section 3 (6 months)
Sectioning someone ought to be done in the presence of the following persons a GP, a registered social worker and a psychiatrist. Once somebody is placed under a section they are usually in a psychiatric ward. Patients who are place under a section do still have basic human rights but a psychiatrist takes over some decisions if they are not deemed competent to make the decision on their own.
Lucky is a sketch for a novel, the narrative being taken to a landing stage – at which point, story arc and characters should be clear.
Pronunciation in Lucky
’ Unpronounceable, transliterated from Lucky’s language
! Unpronounceable, transliterated from Lucky’s language
œ Old West Norse letter sometimes known as ethel
Þ Old English letter known as thorn
C’laighr P!œÞie equates to something like Claire Phoetheie
23 Feb 13
Lucky - a sketch for a novel
At the beginning of December 2012, I completed my final weeks work contracting at Mouchel plc. Mouchel was a business in the throes of delisting from the stock exchange. Its management were at loggerheads with each other and what their professional advisers were telling them. Basically they’d grown too fast and their internal reporting systems needed some slimming down. My expertise is in Excel, model design, management information systems – pretty much the whole of the record to report function – all acquired naturally over a number of years. That’s work that engages you and drives you. By the end of December I was going stir crazy; I wasn’t ready to commit to starting the next novel and I won’t be until I hire an editor. Not yet.
At the prompting of the lead consultant of my main client: J.J. MacDonald, I decided to collate my short stories and issue them in one volume. I’d already done this one year back for 36 Short Stories 2010/2011 collating representative stories together in one volume – I could do it for myself. By the end of December, I’d identified the pieces that might make it – bringing me to this month. Most of January has been spent tidying them up. There are 33 stories ranging from Ghost, Humour, through Science Fiction and Fantasy with a smidgen of Historical.
The end result: Ice Made and other stories, is just over 53,000 words and available on Lulu.
At some point I would like to split this collection into genres and make the results available on Kindle. Based on content, the most pragmatic split would be: Science Fiction / Fiction with a Fantasy Twist / General Fiction.
Story collection - Ice Made
30 Jan 13
The History of the World Conqueror –
In 1218, about one hundred miles north of Tashkent, a trade caravan was stopped by a Khwarezmid official and its members accused of being Mongol spies. Three years later, Khwarezm had been conquered by the Mongol hordes and the Golden Age of Islam was brought to an end. Few direct accounts of that conquest survive. One that did was written by Juvaini. In it he recorded the actions of the Mongols in 'The History of the World-Conqueror'. This work goes on to describe the systematic rape and slaughter of millions of people. Estimates put the death-toll of civilians at between 10 and 20 million. The cities that the Mongols destroyed were ancient; each having a population of several hundred thousand people. The ruin brought to Khwarezm was so complete that even now, few in the West know who these people were, or what became of their forgotten realm. Juvaini justifies the tale by reference to God’s justice, but the bleak despair at the fate of his people is hard to miss.
Doesn’t seem a great deal for a project that took the best part of a month.
Ta'rikh-i-Jaban-Gusha Volume 1
I've always been interested in history – the origins of mankind, the origins of the West. On the net are all kinds of obscure books. About 750 years ago, a scholar, going under the name of ‘Ala-ad-Din ‘Ata-Malik Juvaini (usually shortened to Juvaini) wrote an account of the doings of the Mongols during his time. This was during the time of the Il Khanate. The Il Khanate was built on the ruins of the Khwarezmian Empire. That realm is little known now but in its time it was a premier league power in Western Asia – think Greater Persia and you're not far off.
His account tells an important tale of the shape of the pre-Western world. It sets out the conditions under which Golden Age Islam was crushed and is an important source of information – Juvaini was an eye witness to some of the events he describes. It is an important tale that not only helps understand the mischief that occurred in Central Asia, it also set the stage for many of the troubles that have since afflicted the region.
It found its way to the West, from there to a translation some 60 years back – The History of the World Conqueror. That journey continues: books like these then go on to be pulped as libraries, in this case Kansas City Public Library, destock in the face of the ebook revolution. This work is out there but if you want to study – well PDF is a pain. It would be good on ebook – it is, but if you look, what's there is merely PDF images forced into Kindle. You can print it out if you fancy but it's an odd size – it ought to be read so I reproduced it.
The cover is from a damaged frontispiece which in turn, is based on a very rare illustration – Terken Khatun, Captive to the Mongols. So rare that there is no evidence of the colour scheme of the originals I repaired this and studied Persian art of the time for my colour scheme.
Ta'rikh-i-Jaban-Gusha Volume 2
In reproducing this two volume set, I toyed with extracting the text and making something useful – the work has a great many footnotes which would benefit greatly from the advances in technology. It needs doing – an account of the destruction of a great civilisation that preceded ours is of great value. Once I began to extract / crunch the text, I realised it would totally consume my time. The variations in spelling and in the employment of diacritics needs to be tidied up; a significant task. It appealed to me but was beyond my needs, I only wanted a decent reproduction. That’s a task for others.
In producing this I straightened the PDF images and then stretched them to make the text readable (a significant task), next I located hand-drawn maps as these weren’t in the PDF generated by Kansas City Public Library. Finally I worked on the respective frontispieces, both of which were monochrome, to arrive at suitable covers.
This cover uses a well known rendition: the Enthronement of Ögedei (plus monarchs abasing themselves). It was monochrome but I located a suitable colour version on the net – much smaller, but by stretching and warping layer transparencies, I got a result.
My interest is in the shape of the world before the rise of the West. This work is likely to be of interest to those with some knowledge of that time.
An SF author interested in history! Lawd preserve us from sin!
28 Apr 13
Genghis Khan
