Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

A short post from the road (you’d almost think this was Twitter) as I’m enroute to the track of the Yellowstone hotspot, i.e. the Snake River valley. The hotspot is currently sitting under Yellowstone Park, a while back it caused the lava flows that make up Craters of the Moon National Monument, and apparently originated under what’s now southeast Oregon. And I’m headed to Oregon for a writer’s workshop with prolific and award-winning authors (and editors) Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch. Should be a good time. I’m getting fired up to write just thinking about it.

I find I haven’t talked about the process of writing nearly as much as I thought I might when I started this. That’s going to change. I’ve been a little reluctant up until now; I know there are many aspiring authors out there, but there are quite a few sites, with authors more experienced than I, offering excellent advice. But perhaps I do have something to offer, if only another viewpoint that might click with someone a little better. (Or, worst case, as a bad example.)

On that note, let me mention a slim (64-page) book of excellent writing advice, Writing to the Point, by Algis Budrys. Algis was a well-respected author and editor in his own right, and served as the managing judge for the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. (Don’t let Hubbard’s name put you off. If there is any connection between the WotF contest and the Church of Scientology, it is by no means apparent to any of the contest participants, and the contest, its online forum, and award events are excellent.) In this little book Budrys offers up brilliant advice in easily absorbed chunks. He distinguishes between a story and a manuscript. A manuscript is one way of presenting the story. The story itself is a character, in context, with a problem, and the attempts and final success in overcoming the problem. Other authors, including Orson Scott Card and Marion Zimmer Bradley, have offered similar advice, but Budrys nails it in fewer and clearer words. Other chapters cover everything from agents (sell your first book first) to ideas to manuscripts to some specific advice on writing science fiction.

I had been stalled out on a novel in progress, and after reading this book I realized that I had stalled because I didn’t fully understand the main character’s central problem (a story beginning is a character, in context, with a problem). With that realization I saw where the novel needed to go, and also where I could take an individual chapter and create a stand-alone short story from it. (This offers not only the chance to get paid twice for essentially the same work, but the short can help build a market for the novel.)

If you’re at all interested in writing fiction, I recommend this book. One thing, when I went looking for it on Amazon they only had a couple of used copies at an asking price of $499.98 (!). It is, however, available directly from the publisher (Action Publishing) for only $10.50 plus a couple of bucks shipping. I got my copy in just a few days. (And no, I’m not making anything by linking it, I just think it’s a worthwhile book.)

It has been another good week for astronomy, in particular for space-based astronomy.

The Hubble Space Telescope repair mission has been the biggest of such news items, and at the moment seems to be going well. This week (yesterday, in fact) saw the successful Ariane launch of two European space observatories, the Planck observatory to investigate irregularities in the cosmic microwave background, and the Herschel telescope, which is essentially a souped-up Hubble (it’s mirror is 1.5 times bigger than Hubble’s). All will add significantly to our knowledge of the universe as a whole and the various planets and stars in it.

But it gets better. This week another space-based telescope, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, began its formal mission to, as Star Trek puts it, seek out new worlds. It is specifically intended to look for Earth-like (terraform, if not terraformed) planets around other stars. Over the next three-and-a-half years it will examine over 100,000 stars. The observatory itself was launched in March and its telescope saw “first light” in April. Between then and now it has been going through testing and calibration. This past Tuesday (5/12/09) it was pronounced ready for its primary mission. Kepler is designed to look for planets as small as Earth orbiting their stars in the habitable zone (where temperatures could let surface water remain liquid on at least part of the planet). I’m eagerly awaiting results, the first of which will be transmitted from the satellite in mid-June.

This past week-plus has been pretty hectic. Jill came back from Ohio with a truckload of her parents’ possessions, which we’re still finding homes for (including storage), and we have to get the place prepped for when her mom comes up later this summer.

I did get another T-Space page written, this one about Tau Ceti, a nearby Sun-like star that has been both a popular location in SF and a prime target for SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence). It occurs to me that I haven’t really written much set in that locale; I’ll be changing that shortly.

It was another good week for planetary astronomy, with the announcement of the discovery of the smallest exoplanet (planet orbiting another star) yet, only twice Earth’s mass, orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 581. The planet, dubbed Gliese 581 e, orbits very closely, and would be too hot for life as we know it. However, in other news from the same system, one of the earlier discovered planets (we now know of four) Gliese 581 c, is orbiting in the habitable zone, which means liquid water could exist. It’s a big planet, Neptune-size, and may very well be a water world. Of course any moons it has (which would be too small for us to detect yet, even if they were large by our standards) would also be in the habitable zone.

Currently exoplanets are named after their parent star with a lowercase letter in the order found, with “a” reserved for the star itself. Thus Gliese 581 c was the second planet discovered orbiting that star, the recent Gliese 581 e the fourth. This has nothing to do with the traditional (at least in sci-fi) convention of using roman numerals to indicate position from the star; until we discover all the planets a star has, we won’t know the order. But at the moment, until we discover more, Gliese 581 e would be Gliese 581 I, and Gliese 581 c would be Gliese 581 III.

Gliese 581 is only about 20 lightyears from here, within T-Space. I really need to set a story there.

I just sold my short story “The Gremlin Gambit” to MindFlights online magazine. Woohoo! Still not into the SFWA pro-rate markets yet, but I’m getting there.

This story was fun to write, it’s a mix of science fiction (alien invasion) and magical-creature fantasy. I’ll update when it gets published.

As if I wasn’t already spending too much time on other people’s web sites instead of getting writing done, I now find myself  in a few Yahoo! groups (relevant to a writer’s workshop coming up in June), Livejournal, (because Eric Reynolds, my editor for Footprints, was there, as were a few co-contributers) and now Facebook (again, several co-contributers to Footprints and a number other authors I know, and a few family members).  Problem is, I just spent (I won’t say “wasted”, since it wasn’t totally unproductive) several hours on Facebook instead of getting things done.  Like finishing the short story I’m working on, or writing the new scenes for Venaticorum Archive to bring it up to saleable length.  Sigh.

Speaking of Footprints, Eric now has a proof copy and posted a picture of it of Facebook, it looks great.  I can hardly wait to my hands on a copy.

The workshop I mentioned above is being presented by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, both prolific and award-winning writers. He just sent us details on accomodation, and there are still a few slots left.  If you’re interested in selling a novel or becoming a professional writer, it could be worth your while.  They did a very abbreviated version of the “Kris’n’Dean show” at the Denver Worldcon last summer, it was fantastic.

I just received the proofs for the anthology Fooprints, where my story “Snowball” will be appearing. It looks great! I’ve only skimmed it so far, but there a lot of wonderful stories in there. I’d buy it even if my story wasn’t in it. (grin).

As promised earlier, I’ve added a page on Alpha Centauri to the “T-Space Encylopaedia”.

I’ve added a page on the star system Delta Pavonis to the T-space pages. I plan to add pages there on a regular basis. They give the astronomical facts about the star (or other location) and some detail about how it fits into my T-space stories, and other writer’s stories too, occasionally. As best I can I want to keep things consistent with what we know about other star systems, but that still leaves plenty of room to play in what “hasn’t been disproved yet.”

Next up will probably be Alpha Centauri, a popular location for countless stories (being our nearest neighbor, and all). It’s possible, astrophysically, for both the main components (Alpha Centauri A and B) to have habitable planetary systems. I’ve also just found out something odd about it that has serious implications for T-space: its galactic orbit is very different from ours.

One of the best things to happen for those of us who like both hard SF and space opera was Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper demonstrating how General Relativity does allow for faster-than-light (FTL) travel, using “warped” spacetime. (Yes, Star Trek and all the SF writers before it seem to have guessed right, but Alcubierre did the math. See my article “Yes Virginia, There Really is a Warp Drive”.)

However, I see today on the Technology Review arXiv blog that a recent paper by Finazzi, Liberati and Barceló, “Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives”, applies quantum theory to Alcubierre’s analysis and comes up with two potential problems: Hawking radiation (the effect that makes small black holes “evaporate”) could be hazardous to the occupants, and the warp bubble itself might be unstable because of the “stress-energy tensor” growing exponentially. (No, I’m not exactly sure what that means either, I never got that far in my physics classes.)

Does that mean Finazzi et al. just killed Santa Claus? No. For one thing, they make some assumptions about the properties of the exotic matter needed to maintain the warp which may not hold. For another, it looks like they just analyzed an Alcubierre warp rather than Van Den Broek’s refinement (see the “Yes, Virginia” piece mentioned above for the difference), so the Hawking radiation may be confined to the “shell” in the latter case. Finally, instabilities can be overcome if you have a fast-responding control system. Maybe that means the controller needs a quantum computer.

Addendum: There may be another way to overcome Finazzi instability, depending on the physical constraints of how you generate the warp in the first place. The idea came to me in the course of writing a novel about the first Alpha Centauri expedition. The details are one of the plot points so I won’t go into it here (besides, I may just be handwaving — the math is beyond me), but consider the simplifying assumptions we can make to predict the behavior of large systems. — AM, 2010