Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Eric Reynolds has just announced the final cover for Footprings on his blog. It’s the same Apollo photograph as the concept cover in the earlier post, with some added text. Co-contributors getting cover credit are Brenda Cooper, James Van Pelt, and Lawrence M. Schoen. You can see the full-size cover here. I think it looks great — although it would look better with my name on it too (grin).

I got the news a couple of weeks ago, but wanted to wait until the official announcement: my short story “Snowball” has been accepted for the upcoming Footprints anthology from Hadley Rille Books. The pictures below is a concept cover, the final book may look different.

The theme of the anthology is summed up by Jay Lake, co-editor with Eric T. Reynolds: “Long after our species and all its works have turned to dust, the Moon landing sites will still show evidence of our time here on Earth. Imagine future explorers from among the stars interpreting that. The astronauts’ footprints should last longer than the fossils in the Olduvai Gorge have.” (–Jay Lake, ca. July 2008) My story isn’t nearly as far in the future as Homo habilis was in the past — and the Moon isn’t the only place the aliens find artifacts. I hope you enjoy the story, and I’m keen to see what my co-contributers did with the idea.

The book is due out this summer — with any luck in time for the 40th (40th!) anniversary of Armstrong and Aldrin’s Apollo 11 landing.

This post may turn out to be just a placeholder. I have several incomplete posts from the past few weeks to finish up and, well, post. Things have been more than a little crazy: we went out of town for the Christmas/New Years holidays, my father-in-law passed away in January, I came close to having a heart-attack a week later, and I just sold a (non- T-space) story (so, some good news). Details to come.

If the software lets me (and it will, one way or another — I’ve learned a few things in my careers as software engineer and systems administrator) I’ll backdate the posts to better fit the actual chronology.

Cheers.

My father-in-law, Jack Steele, passed away today. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, he’d been ill for a while, and getting up in years. He was known to many in the Dayton, Ohio area science fiction community as a fan, and to many others as the “father” of bionics. (Which I guess makes me the brother-in-law of bionics — and Jack always had a sense of humor.) He coined the term while doing research for the Air Force, later SF author Martin Caidin picked up his work and used the term – crediting then-Major Steele – in his book Cyborg. That was later picked up by Hollywood and turned into the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, which is where most people first heard the term.

Jack did more than just that, of course. As a systems engineer, medical doctor and psychiatrist he had unique insights into the human mind, and after retiring from the Air Force went on to work a psychiatric word, helping many patients that others had given up on.

Of course his most significant contribution in my opinion was his daughter, Jill, to whom I’ve been married for twenty years.
He has a Wikipedia entry, and the Dayton Daily News ran a lengthy obituary.

Fly high, Jack.

It has been way too long since I’ve posted here. I have several projects on the go at the moment (some will show up here as separate pages), plus the usual chaos of trying to get things done before the holiday season and year end.

And of course, the new year. Dean Wesley Smith, a very successful author, has been putting up a great series on his blog about setting and working toward goals, starting with this one, which has motivated me to push more consistently on my fiction writing — and also to be more consistent about updates here. Author J. A. Konrath has been making similar points this month over on his website.

Okay, I get the hint.

It’s been an interesting week, okay, week-and-a-half since my last post. Although I haven’t made as much progress on the NaNoWriMo novel as I’d have liked, I have got two more short stories out for consideration. I’m not counting those in my NaNoWriMo word counts. It’s also been an interesting time for planetology. We’ve photographed (or perhaps “imaged” might be a more accurate term) planets around no less than three other star systems, and discovered interesting things about the history of water on Mars.

On Nov. 13, NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had succeeded in photographing a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, a mere 25 light years away (putting it just within T-Space). Fomalhaut is a youngish star (100 to 300 million years old), with about twice the mass and twenty times the luminosity of our Sun. The planet is Saturn-sized and extremely distant from its sun.

Almost simultaneously, scientists at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics announced that, using the Keck and Gemini telescopes, had imaged (in infrared) three planets orbiting the star HR 8799. This star is younger than Fomalhaut (perhaps 60 million years old) and further away, about 130 light years. The planets of younger stars may be easier to spot, especially in infrared, because they’re still glowing with the heat of their own formation.

On Friday, Nov. 21, a team at ESO announced that images of a previously suspected planet around Beta Pictoris had been obtained with the Very Large Telescope. Apparently the image was captured a while back but not noticed until the data was recently re-examined. Beta Pictoris is about 64 light years away and again, bigger and hotter than our sun, and perhaps even younger than HR 8799.

Being so young, none of the above planetary systems are particularly likely to have any life at all, let alone complex or intelligent lifeforms. (The upper age range of Fomalhaut would put it at just about the age where the chemical soup on Earth may have started to favour complex molecules that could replicate.)

Closer to home, and much older, glaciers have been found on Mars much closer to the equator than expected, protected from evaporation by layers of soil, and analysis of gamma-ray spectrometer results from Mars Orbiter adds further evidence that early Mars once had an extensive ocean, or oceans.

So, places that may one day have Earthlike (loosely speaking) planets, and a neighbor planet that was once much more Earthlike than it is now. The hunt is still on for currently Earthlike planets.

[I originally posted the following in response to comments by Howard Tayler and others on Howard’s Shlock Mercenary blog. I’ve made a few minor changes here.]

Happy US Veterans Day. I have great respect for US veterans — my father-in-law numbers among them, and US forces helped save Britain during WW II — but I’d like to gently point out that this is also Remembrance Day in Canada and Britain (and indeed all of the Commonwealth; in France it is celebrated as Armistice Day). So if you’ll forgive me, a few personal remembrances:

My mother’s father suffered lasting effects from being gassed in a trench in WW I; by that war my father’s father had already served with the British Army in the Sudan and South Africa, and was in Home Guard during WW II. One of my mother’s brothers was a commando during WW II, another spent most of that war in a Japanese POW camp in Burma. (You’ve seen/read “Bridge on the River Kwai”? He worked on that railroad, not the bridge.)

My Dad was “drafted” to work on radar and countermeasures during that war; sadly I didn’t learn much about what he did until after he died, some of it wasn’t declassified until the 1990s. I know he was on a mission that involved him and a pilot, in a small plane, flying toward the continent with radar-spoofing gear making them look like a fleet of bombers, with the expected (and hoped for) Luftwaffe reaction. (Idea being to get the Luftwaffe alert planes to scramble and burn fuel, so they’d be on the ground refueling when the real bomber fleet flew over.)

I spent a few years in the Canadian Forces Reserves, and spent much of my duty time deep in a NORAD bunker minding teletype machines — pretty safe. Some of my fellow reservists volunteered to serve with regular forces assigned to UN peacekeeping duty in the middle east. Fortunately, all my buddies came back.

I’ve had the privilege to be born, raised, and live in free countries (England, Canada, and the United States, respectively.) To all those of freedom-loving nations who have served in defense of that freedom, thank you.

Well, it’s the day after the US Presidential (and many other) elections. I’m not going to dwell on the politics, other than to say I’m not thrilled that Obama won but I wouldn’t be thrilled if McCain had won, either. The country is in for interesting times ahead, let’s just hope that we as a nation and we as a planet don’t do anything to screw up our long term — meaning centuries and millennia, not merely the next ten years — prospects.

Coincidentally, today is Guy Fawkes Day, a British (and some other parts of the Commonwealth) celebration of the capture of Guy Fawkes, apprehended on this day in 1605 trying to blow up Parliament (specifically, the House of Lords) and assassinate King James I during the Opening of Parliament. In other words, he was a terrorist, and the Gunpowder Plot (as the scheme became known) was devised by religious extremists (Catholic, in this case). Sounds depressingly familiar, with only a few details changed.

The punishment for Fawkes and his co-conspirators, by the way, was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, the traditional punishment for treason. It’s rather unpleasant: hung until not quite dead, disembowelled, and then the body cut into four parts, plus the head. (It’s even worse than that, see Wikipedia for the gory (literally) details.) After they were found guilty at trial, of course. (The confession forced by torture perhaps excusable by Fawkes having been caught in the act of attempting to detonate the powder.)

And on that cheery thought about how far we’ve come in just over 400 years, I’ll observe that the last time a Presidential Election actually fell on Guy Fawkes Day was 1996, and the next time will be 2024.

As I write this, NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is kicking off as the world turns under the midnight line. It will be November first here in Colorado by the time this gets posted. NaNoWriMo’s web site will do a better job of explaining it than I want to take the space here to, but essentially it’s the opportunity to get together virtually, and in many cases in real life, to try and crank out fifty thousand words of fiction in a month. There’s a lot of cameraderie and you can learn a lot just from the effort. Nobody expects the result to be of finished quality, that’s what editing and revision and rewrites are for, and they come later.

I’m taking the opportunity to get a big chunk, at least, of my Apollo 18 (working title) done. It’s a technothriller about a secret mission to the Moon shortly after Apollo 17, to investigate a secret Soviet landing (the N-1 explosion was faked), in parallel with Project Jennifer (the attempt to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine). Yes, figuring out how to stack and launch a Saturn V in secret a bit of a trick.

I see from the clock in the corner of my screen that it’s just ticked over to 00:00. Time to post this and fire up the word processor. If anyone’s interested I may post snippets as I go. We’ll see.

NASA announced today that observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope lead them to believe that the star Epsilon Eridani (about ten light years from Earth, and currently the closest star to ours known to have planets) has two asteroid belts. There’s a somewhat expanded story at Science Daily.

This has no immediate effect on my T-Space stories (dodged a bullet there, I was just commenting yesterday about how astronomical discoveries sometimes render stories obsolete) but does give me a few ideas, and has stimulated me to start adding to the T-Space pages. The first is of course on Epsilon Eridani.