Filed under: Alzheimer's, Babylon 5, Ballistics, Feedback, Guns, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, Predictions, Preparedness, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: Alzheimer's, Babylon 5, blogging, direct publishing, health, hospice, J. Michael Straczynski, jim downey, literature, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, writing
While I’m on a bit of vacation, I have decided to re-post some items from the first year of this blog (2007). This item first ran on September 24, 2007.
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“All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation.”
-G’Kar, Z’ha’dum
Yesterday a buddy of mine and I got out to do some shooting. It may seem odd to someone who isn’t into shooting sports, but this can actually be one of the most relaxing things you can do, at least for me at this time. Why? Because, when I’m shooting, I have to be completely attentive to what I am doing – I can’t be thinking about what is going on at home, whether my MIL is stirring and needs attention, et cetera. As I have mentioned previously, one of the most exhausting aspects of being a care-giver for someone with Alzheimer’s/dementia is that I always, always, have part of my attention diverted to keeping track of what is going on with my MIL. You try doing that with part of your brain while accomplishing anything else, and you’ll quickly understand the problem.
Anyway, it was a good time, doing some informal shooting out on private land. We shot some pistols, a little 9mm carbine of mine which is just a lot of fun, and then my friend got out one of his black powder rifles: a Peabody .43 Spanish made in 1863. My friend is something of an authority on 19th century guns, and has been educating me about them. We shot several rounds, the large 400 grain bullets punching paper at 40 yards, the gun giving a slow but very solid shove back into your shoulder. That’s typical with black-powder: it’s not the sharp crack you get from modern weapons, with their higher pressures from faster-burning powder. After each shot, we’d pull down the trigger guard, rolling the receiver down and ejecting the cartridge, then insert another cartridge by hand and set it before closing the rolling block to prepare the weapon to fire again.
After all the shooting was done, our equipment packed up and put away, we headed back into town and got some lunch. As we talked over lunch, I asked my friend about how long it was before the Peabody we had been shooting evolved into the later repeating rifles which proved so reliable and popular. Because, as I saw it, all the elements were there: a dependable brass cartridge, a mechanism to extract and eject the spent shell, the moving receiver. All that was needed was a way to hold more rounds and feed them.
As we finished up our meal he gave me the brief run-down of the history or the repeating rifle development (which is basically what you’ll find in this Wikipedia article, particularly the sub-headings of ‘predecessors’ and ‘development’), and the conversation moved on to a more general discussion. I started to explain that one of the things I find so interesting, one of the unifying themes in all the things I have done is an interest in…
“Transitions,” my friend said.
I stopped. I was going to say “innovations,” but he was right.
“It shows in your novel.” (He’d recently read Communion.)
“Actually, I was thinking more of ‘innovations’ – those instances when people bring together different and diffuse elements to achieve something new, whether it is a mechanism, or a procedure, or just a way of looking at the world.”
We paid the bill, headed out to the car.
“Yeah, but it’s like the way that the people involved in your book – the characters – are all struggling to understand this new thing, this new artifact, this unexpected visitor. And I like the way that they don’t just figure it out instantly – the way each one of them tries to fit it into their own expectations about the world, and what it means. They struggle with it, they have to keep learning and investigating and working at it, before they finally come to an understanding.” He looked at me as we got back in the car. “Transitions.”
Transitions, indeed. Moments of transition, moments of revelation. Because that is all we have, when you come right down to it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Humor, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, Travel, UFO, Writing stuff | Tags: humor, jim downey, Science Fiction, space, travel, writing
Those who have finished reading Communion of Dreams will have a particular appreciation of this:
“Ancient Aliens,” the popular sci-fi meme, has yet to produce solid proof that extraterrestrials ever interacted with humans. Yet Unidentified Flying Objects have a surprisingly ancient history. The earliest UFO sightings were reported by Roman historians Livy, Orosius, Seneca, Plutarch, Pliny, and Josephus. The ancient sightings have been classified by a NASA scientist according to the standard UFO categories devised by astronomer J.A. Hynek (1972): Close Encounters of the First (no physical evidence), Second (physical traces), and Third Kinds (occupants observed).
The parallels to modern UFO sightings are eerie.
* * *
The astronomical meteorologist who analyzed these Roman reports in Classical Journal (2007) notes that the “UFO phenomenon, whatever it may be due to, has not changed much over two millennia”: disk, elongated, or sphere shapes; metallic, brilliant colors and materials; smooth, erratic, or hovering motions; the object often vanishes. Whether these are extraordinary atmospheric effects, astronomical phenomena, or extraterrestrial encounters, the persistence of consistent details over thousands of years seems to point to something real observed by many witnesses over time, something that we do not yet understand.
Since I’ll be in Rome in a couple of weeks, maybe I’ll have to talk to my Classics Prof friend about this…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Astronomy, Augmented Reality, Fermi's Paradox, Government, Hospice, Man Conquers Space, Marketing, Music, NASA, New Horizons, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space, tech, Travel, Violence, YouTube | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, care-giving, direct publishing, free, health, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, literature, memoir, music, NASA, politics, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, travel, Voyager, www youtube
Major “spoiler” warning further down in this post. Skip the rest of the section after the [] warning if you haven’t read the book. It’s OK to watch the video or read the concluding section.
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Tomorrow, with a little luck, we’ll break 20,000 downloads of the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams, and could also break 10,000 downloads of the Kindle edition of Her Final Year.
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This has been making the news the last few days:
Voyager 1 About to Become Interstellar Emissary?
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft may be getting its first taste of interstellar waters beyond our sun’s familiar shores and, like the pioneers that first took to the oceans to explore seas unknown, the 34-year-old robotic spacecraft is about to make history as the first man-made object to venture beyond the known horizon.
This historic announcement was made on Thursday by the team keeping a careful eye on Voyager 1’s particle detectors who noticed an uptick in interstellar cosmic ray counts in recent years. That can mean only one thing: the mission is beginning to leave the outermost regions of the heliosphere — the farthest extent of the sun’s influence.
* * * * * * *
From Chapter 18: [MAJOR SPOILER WARNING.]
“Well, the two of them have been going over all the data coming down from the ship. In addition to the telemetry about the condition of the ship, they’ve had a flood of data about the communications broadcasts that the ship has been receiving since stopping.”
“Communications? I thought your report summary said that we couldn’t broadcast to the ship, that it was on the other side of some kind of barrier?”
“Correct. But on that other side is ample evidence that the universe is teeming with technological civilizations. Klee hasn’t been able to decipher any of the communications yet, but is certain that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of sources. Seems that we’ve been kept in the dark about all of them by this shell of artifacts that surrounds our system.”
* * * * * * *
Yeah, me too.
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Tomorrow, with a little luck, we’ll break 20,000 downloads of the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams, and could also break 10,000 downloads of the Kindle edition of Her Final Year. Downloads all day will be free to one and all.
Help spread the word if you can. It’s not like sharing it with an alien civilization or anything, but still it will be appreciated.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Feedback, Hospice, Kindle, Marketing, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, BBC, care-giving, direct publishing, free, health, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, literature, memoir, Moon, NASA, predictions, reviews, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, travel, writing
First, a reminder: Sunday, Father’s Day, will be a Kindle promotional day for both Communion of Dreams and Her Final Year. Both books will be free to download in the Kindle edition, and I would invite everyone to please do so! We’ve had some new reviews up of both books, and the word continues to spread about them.
Second, Phil Plait has an excellent (though too short) item up on the BBC site about prospects for human colonization of the Moon. Correctly, I think, he explains the likely reason that this will eventually happen, and why it’ll be essential for our future in space:
A critical aspect of this is being able to mine asteroidal material and process it, which Nasa and its contractors are studying. One line of thinking is that mined metals can be used to build structures in space that would be very difficult and pricey to construct on Earth and launch. Examples abound, including big spacecraft to use for crewed exploration of the planets, giant telescopes in orbit, space stations, and more. While the cost of the International Space Station (ISS) is estimated to be $100bn, much of that was simply getting previously-built components into space in the first place. If you already have those pieces in space, the cost is far less.
Smelting material in the near-weightless environment of an asteroid is one thing, but creating complex components of spacecraft is another. Manufacturing is likely to be easier in gravity, and the Moon is a perfect compromise for this.
Getting the materials to the Moon is not hard from an asteroid mining operation. And once built, getting even massive components off the Moon’s surface is far, far easier than it would be from Earth due to lower gravity and lack of air (it took a tremendous Saturn V rocket full of fuel to get to the Moon, but only the tiny Apollo ascent module to get back off). Building vehicles and other space-based structures on the Moon is vastly easier and less expensive than it would be here on Earth. From there, the rest of the solar system is an easy trip.
In Communion of Dreams I have references to Lunar colonies, and in St. Cybi’s Well, the prequel I am currently working on, the first colony is in the process of being built (as I’ve mentioned recently).
What I haven’t mentioned here much is another book which would also be a prequel to Communion of Dreams, set sometime in the 2030s, which would take place largely in such a colony. I don’t have a title for that book, and my thoughts on it are still very sketchy, but I think that it would be a really interesting one to write for exactly the reasons that Plait outlines. I don’t want to give too much else away about that (or commit myself to something I may decide to completely change later), but I am really interested in some of the artistic possibilities which working in a 1/6th Earth-normal gravity field would present.
Anyway, TGIF and all that. Remember to share the news of CoD and HFY being free this coming Sunday.
Jim Downey
Filed under: A.P.O.D., Astronomy, movies, NASA, Ridley Scott, Science, Science Fiction, Space | Tags: jim downey, movies, NASA, photography, Prometheus, reviews, Ridley Scott, Science Fiction, space, technology, video
We all have our little phantasies. One of mine (mentioned previously) is to see a screen treatment of Communion of Dreams.
But in reading about what kind of SF clusterphuck Prometheus has turned out to be, I’m almost afraid to contemplate it any further in case it might come true . . . in the worst way possible.
Jim Downey
(Yes, I intentionally misspelled those words. Here – go watch this stunning transit of Venus and stop bothering me.)
Filed under: Mars, Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction, Space | Tags: literature, Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction, space, writing
One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.
And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer’s ancient green lawns.
Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.
Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.
The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land….
Farewell, Mr. Bradbury.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ad Astra, Astronomy, Brave New World, Connections, Government, Man Conquers Space, NASA, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, UFO, Writing stuff | Tags: astronomy, HST, Hubble, Israel, jim downey, Moon, NASA, Newton, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, Transit, travel, Venus, Wfirst, writing
* * * * * * *
From Chapter 1:
Jon spoke. “That’s typical. Sidwell is a bit of an old coot. He’s about 80, close as anyone can get him to admit. He has been at the forefront of exploration all along, having started with the Israeli colonies on the Moon, and was one of the first prospectors to establish himself on Titan.”
* * * * * * *
NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy
The secretive government agency that flies spy satellites has made a stunning gift to NASA: two exquisite telescopes as big and powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope. They’ve never left the ground and are in storage in Rochester, N.Y.
* * *
The telescopes were built by private contractors for the National Reconnaissance Office, one of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. The telescopes have 2.4-meter (7.9-foot) mirrors, just like the Hubble, but they have 100 times the field of view. Their structure is shorter and squatter.
* * *
The announcement Monday raised the obvious question of why the intelligence agency would no longer want, or need, two Hubble-class telescopes. A spokeswoman, Loretta DeSio, provided information sparingly.
“They no longer possessed intelligence-collection uses,” she said of the telescopes.
* * * * * * *
“The Israeli colonies on the Moon?” When did that happen?
Now.
One of the plot points for St. Cybi’s Well all along has been that Darnell Sidwell had been a shuttle pilot for a secret operation by Israel (with the tacit support of most of the governments of the major world powers) to establish permanent colonies on the far side of the Moon. That effort was well along by 2012, which is when the novel is set.
Remember, the timeline for Communion of Dreams isn’t exactly our timeline. It is very, very similar to ours, but there are some divergences.
The biggest worry I have had for some time was how to say that such a space program could exist without people knowing about it. In fact, earlier work on St. Cybi’s Well revolved around this very point as an espionage/counter-espionage sub-plot. I was concerned that it might be *too* outlandish an idea for readers to be able to suspend their disbelief.
So much for that concern; we’ve just found out that what we thought was at the limits of our technology is so obsolete that it can be handed off as so much surplus junk. And the implication is that while NASA is currently without the means to launch and service something like Hubble, that there are plenty other agencies within our government which are not so inconvenienced.
* * * * * * *
Ex-Spy Telescope May Get New Identity as a Space Investigator
The phone call came like a bolt out of the blue, so to speak, in January 2011. On the other end of the line was someone from the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation’s fleet of spy satellites. They had some spare, unused “hardware” to get rid of. Was NASA interested?
* * *
The telescope’s short length means its camera could have the wide field of view necessary to inspect large areas of the sky for supernovae.
Even bigger advantages come, astronomers say, from the fact that the telescope’s diameter, 94 inches, is twice as big as that contemplated for Wfirst, giving it four times the light-gathering power, from which a whole host of savings cascade.
* * * * * * *
From Sir Isaac Newton’s translation of the Emerald Tablet:
Tis true without lying, certain most true.
That which is below is like that which is above that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.
And as all things have been arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth its nurse.
The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.
Its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth.
– Separate thou the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross sweetly with great industry.It ascends from the earth to the heaven again it descends to the earth and receives the force of things superior and inferior.
And yes, that is a hint about another part of what’s to come in St. Cybi’s Well.
* * * * * * *
Enjoy today’s Transit. As above, so below.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Brave New World, Emergency, Failure, Heinlein, ISS, NASA, National Geographic, Preparedness, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Space X, Survival, tech, Weather | Tags: blogging, Diane Rehm, Everest, health, Heinlein, ISS, jim downey, NASA, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, SpaceX, stupidity, survival, technology
Following up from Sunday…
“Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime: the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
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There was a very interesting discussion on the Diane Rehm show the other day with Stuart Firestein, who is the chairman of the Department of Biology at Columbia University as well as a professor of neuroscience. The whole thing is worth a listen, but in particular there were a couple of particular bits I wanted to share. Here’s the first:
So in your brain cells, one of the ways your brain cells communicate with each other is using a kind of electricity, bioelectricity or voltages. And we’re very good at recording electrical signals. I mean, your brain is also a chemical. Like the rest of your body it’s a kind of chemical plant. But part of the chemistry produces electrical responses.
And because our technology is very good at recording electrical responses we’ve spent the last 70 or 80 years looking at the electrical side of the brain and we’ve learned a lot but it steered us in very distinct directions, much — and we wound up ignoring much of the biochemical side of the brain as a result of it. And as it now turns out, seems to be a huge mistake in some of our ideas about learning and memory and how it works.
* * * * * * *
I stared at the body, blinking in disbelief. We were in the shadow of the First Step, so the light was dull. The body lay about 10 metres from where I stood and was angled away from me. It jerked – a horrible movement, like a puppet being pulled savagely by its strings.
We had been on a well-organised and, so far, successful trail towards the summit of Everest, worrying only about ourselves. Now a stranger lay across our path, moaning. Lhakpa shouted down at me and waved me to move on, to follow him up onto the Step. I looked back at the raggedly jerking figure.
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From about halfway through Chapter 6 in Communion of Dreams:
“But smart how?”
Jon looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, there are lots of kinds of intelligence, and I’m not just talking about the reasoning/emotional/spatial/mechanical sorts of distinctions that we sometimes make. More fundamentally, how are they smart? Are they super-geniuses, able to easily figure out problems that stump us? Or maybe they’re very slow, but have been at this a very long time. Perhaps some sort of collective or racial intelligence, while each individual member of their species can barely put two and two together. There are a lot of different ways they can be intelligent.”
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(Warning – the page from which the following comes contains gruesome images and text.)
Above a certain altitude, no human can ever acclimatize. Known as the Death Zone, only on 14 mountains worldwide can one step beyond the 8000 meter mark and know that no amount of training or conditioning will ever allow you to spend more than 48 hours there. The oxygen level in the Death Zone is only one third of the sea level value, which in simple terms means the body will use up its store of oxygen faster than breathing can replenish it.
In such conditions, odd things happen to human physical and mental states. A National Geographic climber originally on Everest to document Brian Blessed’s (ultimately botched) attempt at summiting, described the unsettling hallucinogenic effects of running out of oxygen in the Death Zone. The insides of his tent seemed to rise above him, taking on cathedral-like dimensions, robbing him of all strength, clouding his judgement. Any stay in the Death Zone without supplementary oxygen is like being slowly choked, all the while having to perform one of the hardest physical feats imaginable.
It makes you stupid.
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Again, Stuart Firestein:
And in neuroscience, I can give you an example in the mid-1800s, phrenology. This idea that the bumps on your head, everybody has slightly different bumps on their head due to the shape of their skull. And you could tell something about a person’s personality by the bumps on their head. Now, we joke about it now. You can buy these phrenology busts in stores that show you where love is and where compassion is and where violence is and all that. It’s absolutely silly, but for 50 years it existed as a real science. And there are papers from learned scientists on it in the literature.
* * * * * * *
Update at 12:10 p.m. ET. Dragon Has Docked:
Dragon has finished docking with the International Space Station. That makes SpaceX the first private company to dock a cargo spacecraft to the space station.
That happened at exactly 12:02 p.m. ET, according to NASA.
* * * * * * *
“Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime: the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
Last weekend four more people died attempting to summit Everest. Partly, this seems to have been due to the traffic on the mountain. Yeah, so many people are now attempting to climb the mountain that there are bottlenecks which occur, which can throw off calculations about how long a climb will take, how much supplemental oxygen is necessary, and whether weather will move in before climbers can reach safety.
In theory, everyone who attempts such a climb should know the odds. One in ten people who attempted the summit have died.
But we live in an age of accepted wonders. We think we’re smart enough to beat the odds.
Jim Downey
(PS: I hope to wrap up the third & final part of this set, get it posted this weekend.)
Filed under: Charlie Stross, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, New Horizons, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Steampunk, Survival, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, Charlie Stross, jim downey, literature, predictions, reviews, Science Fiction, space, technology, writing
I’ve mentioned Charlie Stross several times here. As I’ve said previously: smart guy, good writer. I disagree with his belief in mundane science fiction, because I think that it is too limited in imagination. Which leads almost inevitably to this formulation on his blog today (and yes, you should go read the whole thing):
We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins (hey, weren’t airships big in the 1910s-1930s? Why, then, are they such a powerful signifier for Victorian-era alternate fictions?), of sexy vampire-run nightclubs and starship-riding knights-errant. Opening the pages of a modern near-future SF novel now invites a neck-chillingly cold draft of wind from the world we’re trying to escape, rather than a warm narcotic vision of a better place and time.
And so I conclude: we will not inspire anyone with grand visions of a viable future through the medium of escapism. If we want to write inspirational literature with grand visions we need to dive into to the literary mainstream (which is finally rediscovering fabulism) and, adding a light admixture of Enlightenment ideology along the way, start writing the equivalent of those earnest and plausible hyper-realistic tales of Progress through cotton-planting on the shores of the Aral sea.
But do you really want us to do that? I don’t think so. In fact, the traditional response of traditional-minded SF readers to the rigorous exercise of extrapolative vision tends to be denial, disorientation, and distaste. So let me pose for you a different question, which has been exercising me for some time: If SF’s core message (to the extent that it ever had one) is obsolete, what do we do next?
Well, I dunno about Charlie, but I plan on writing a couple of prequels to Communion of Dreams, which I understand have touched something of a nerve in people precisely *because* it is hopeful in the face of a harsh reality.
Jim Downey
(PS: sometime today we should break through the level of 500 total sales/loans of CoD so far this month. Which is almost twice the previous month’s tally. Thanks for affirming my vision, folks!)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, DARPA, Feedback, Google Lunar X Prize, Government, Kindle, Marketing, NASA, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Space | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, blogging, care-giving, DARPA, direct publishing, free, health, jim downey, Kindle, literature, Mother's Day, NASA, reviews, Science Fiction, space
No, this isn’t about NASA, some secret DARPA project, the military, or even any of the private companies involved in space vehicle development. Though those are all things I pay attention to.
Rather, it’s about tomorrow’s Mother’s Day promotion, mentioned previously.
Huh?
Well, I’m just extending the “book launch” metaphor, perhaps too far. But it beats comparing it to a nuclear reaction, I suppose.
Anyway.
Sales of Communion of Dreams have not just been steady, they’ve been slowly climbing this month, with the result that the Amazon Kindle ranking has now been hovering around 4,000 overall, and in the low 30s for a couple different categories of Science Fiction. And more people are writing reviews which are very positive.
Each time previously that I ran a free Kindle edition promotion, there was a following surge in sales, with things then leveling off. The most recent promotional day resulted in this fairly decent level of sales we’re currently seeing. And I’m really curious to see whether this push tomorrow will kick it up yet another substantial, self-sustaining level.
And of course I’m hoping that it will also do good things not just for the memoir, but also for John’s new book (which I am looking forward to reading, myself!)
Keep your fingers crossed. Better yet, help spread the word. Thanks!
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 