Filed under: BoingBoing, General Musings, Government, movies, Press, Science Fiction, Wired, Writing stuff
Wired has a great piece about how the CIA used a faux science fiction film project to smuggle out the six Americans who had hidden at the Canadian embassy during the 1980 hostage crisis in Tehran. Longish, but well worth the read.
I was finishing up my final semester at college when this happened, and remember well the news that the six had been smuggled out. To find out now that it was done using this kind of ruse is fascinating, and has had me reflecting on how real life is often much more absurd than most fiction. Surely, there’s a screenplay waiting be be written about this story.
And I think I’ll have to slip in some reference to either the supposed film (Argo), or the fake Hollywood production company (Studio Six) set up to pull off this rescue into one of my future books. It’d fit nicely with the prequel to Communion…hmm…
(Via BoingBoing.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Carl Sagan, General Musings, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
News yesterday of interest:
Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet located 150 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The planet is known as HD 209458b.
OK, this is mostly significant because someone has gone on record announcing a discovery that pretty much everyone expected would happen before too long. With over 200 extra-solar planets now on the books, it was really just a matter of time before one was determined to have water vapor in its atmosphere. Scientists just needed the right combination of observeable data.
Important? Yeah, in the sense that it’s happened. Surprising? Not really. This is more the sort of thing that the press can get excited about than a real breakthrough – almost no space scientist would be surprised that water exists outside our solar system.
It is interesting for me, though, since I posit for Communion that there is an array of scientific instruments in orbit around Titan which has been created just for the purpose of seeking out likely extra-solar planets for colonization. (And I place it there due to the “bubble” of shielding created by the web of Tholen gel on Titan’s surface – which, of course, is foreshadowing of the larger discovery to be made about the gel in the course of the novel.) I fully expect that at some point we will identify planets in other stellar systems suitable for supporting human life – likely long before our tech advances to the point of allowing us to travel such distances. It’s just so much easier to look at the data coming our way in the form of electromagnetic radiation than to actually send a ship out to investigate.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, General Musings, NASA, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
On this morning’s Marketplace, Robert Reich had a good commentary about the problem with near-Earth asteroids and the NASA effort to identify and track these potential threats. Being an economist, he took the position that for the cost of one week’s expeditures in Iraq, we could fund this program completely through 2020, and then start thinking about what technologies we might need to deal with such a problem asteroid.
All well and good. But what does it have to do with Communion?
My previous versions of the book contained another bit of ‘history’ in addition to the “Fire-flu”: that an asteroid of about 300 meters diameter had hit in central China in the mid 2020’s. This I used for an explanation for several things in the world that I create: an offset to the effects of global warming; an explanation for what happened to the rise of China as an economic power in coming decades; and as a motivation for humankind’s rapid development of the necessary technologies to get into space in a big way.
I don’t see the matter as at all unlikely, and if you look at the information provided by the scientists involved in the search to identify these near-Earth asteroids, you quickly come to the conclusion that we’re rolling the dice each year to see whether or not we’re gonna get hit.
But this seemed to be the thing that tripped up most of my early readers. The prospect of both a pandemic flu and a meteor strike was just too much – even though the two things are in no way related, and we’re ‘overdue’ for both. I’m not sure whether this was just asking people to suspend their disbelief a bit too much, or whether it was just a little too frightening a prospect, but it was clear that however well it worked to create the “world” of Communion, it had to go.
So I dropped back, thought through the potential ramifications of a pandemic flu, and figured that I could more or less accomplish the same things with saying that the world collapse which followed the Fire-flu leads to some small-scale nuclear wars. In the great scheme of things, I see this as probably just as likely a scenario, I suppose. But it is somehow less satisfying an explanation for me. Ah well.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Predictions, Press, Promotion, tech, Writing stuff
So, I was checking stats for the book and this blog this morning, and decided to follow one of the search links shown. And on that, I saw a listing for a Wikipedia page for me.
Huh.
No, I didn’t do it. To be honest, I signed up for a Wikipedia account the first of this year, as I was working to organize the various components for promoting Communion. Like this blog, I figured that it was a marketing tool that I would want to have in place at some point, and knew that there was likely a lag-time between signing up and creating pages (a common precaution to limit vandalism on such sites). But I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with it yet, being busy with a number of other aspects of this endeavour and life.
But this one was last changed in June ’06. And has some dated and slightly incorrect information. And has me listed as being an ‘Internet Personality’. Very odd. But you may be amused to see what it says presently, so I won’t get in there and muck around with it for a while (I *am* still busy). Have fun.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Feedback, General Musings, Press, Promotion, Writing stuff
I’m tired.
This stems in large part from the fact that the person for whom I am a care-giver (see this post) has a bit of a cold/flu bug, and so needs more care and attention. As a result, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, and I’m guessing that tonight won’t be a lot better.
So I don’t have a lot of energy. Not for blogging, not for writing, not for doing conservation work. Which creates a certain symmetry with the fact that right now I am largely just waiting for things to happen: waiting to hear back from any of the current crop of agents I’ve contacted, waiting to hear about that article in the newspaper, waiting to get feedback from anyone who is reading/has read the novel. Hits to the site have slowed to just a hundred or so a day, and downloads of the full novel are slowly climbing towards 1900. Everything is on hold, waiting, waiting…
Jim Downey
Well, OK, probably not. And, frankly, I’ve had more than my 15 minutes of fame, thanks to my Paint the Moon project and whatnot over the years.
But I am going to be included in a feature that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is doing about artists, writers, and musicians who are using the web in some innovative ways to get their work out to the public. Over the last couple of days the reporter doing the piece and I have chatted by phone and email. Currently, downloads of the novel are over 1700, and I’ve had almost 9,000 page hits since I put the Communion site up on 5 January. This article will certainly help to boost both of those numbers, and perhaps penetrate into the press in other ways. I’ll post a link here when it is done.
Of course, as I remind friends and well-wishers, the goal still remains to land an agent who can get me a conventional book contract. And that hasn’t happened yet.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 