Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that the Mars rover Curiosity successfully landed in Gale crater last night. This is quite a feat, not least because of the rather Rube-Goldberg sequence to successfully land the rover without contaminating it or the surface too much with backsplash from the landing jets. That’s been thoroughly discussed elsewhere, no need to go over it here, except to congratulate all those involved: the dang thing worked!.

With the landing accomplished, it’s now in the hands of the science teams and drivers. I wish them team all success, and hope we see Curiosity crawling around Mars for years to come. With any luck we’ll see data that pins down some of the ambiguous information we’ve been getting from previous probes.
I like to joke that the Vikinglanders, which landed on Mars back in 1976, were designed to answer the question: “Is there life on Mars?”. They landed, took their soil samples, ran their experiments, and beamed back: “Could you repeat the question?”.

The majority scientific opinion is that the Vikings discovered some very unusual soil chemistry, not life. The thing is, the results from the Labeled Release Experiment (basically, put soil on a nutrient medium labeled (chemically tagged) with isotopes and see if you detect labeled metabolic products) returned results which pre-launch criteria stated would indicate life. They changed the criteria later because of odd results from the other experiments: taken together, they didn’t indicate what the scientists believed would indicate life.

Later some of those same experiments would be repeated in relatively barren places on Earth, such as the ultra-dry Atacama Desert in Chile. They didn’t detect life on Earth, either. (More sensitive equipment will detect microbial life even in the Atacama.)

Do I believe there’s life on Mars? I have no data. I believe there could be, and that there almost certainly was once. We know (or are pretty sure) that Mars was once once wet, with a thicker atmosphere. We know that large meteorite impacts with Earth can knock off rocks which will eventually reach Mars, and, much more so, vice versa. We have strong evidence that some microbes could survive such a blasting into space, millenia long voyage, and entry into another planet’s atmosphere. In other words, it’s entirely possible that Mars was cross-contaminated from Earth (or vice versa!) in the early days of the solar system.

I feel pretty safe in predicting that Curiosity won’t answer all these questions either, but it will answer some. And I’m pretty sure it will raise a few more.

Readers of The Chara Talisman (and there are a bunch of you out there, thank you!) already know that the sequel, The Reticuli Deception (working title) touches on mysteries in addition to those of the millions of years ago Terraformers and the more recent Spacefarers. Namely, whether there was anything to some of the UFO contacts reported in the 1960s. Since these books are set 150 years after that, there’s some question as to whether the original Blue Book files can still be located, and they do try, although that’s a side story to the main plot. In particular, they’re curious about the Betty Hill incident, and the star map she drew.

Sometimes, though, truth can be stranger than fiction. I’d heard that the Project Blue Book files were all transferred to the National Archives when the project was shut down in 1969 (or 1970, depending on which report you read). It’s not quite that simple. They were first transfered to the Air Force Archives at Maxwell AFB in Alabama, where they resided for about five years, although nominally available to the public. It was in 1975 that they were transferred to the National Archives, but only after redacting witness names and similar personal information. The Air Force kept a microfilm copy (also censored) for their own use.

It turns out, though, that uncensored microfilms also exist, discovered in the National Archives in 1998, and that “these rolls also contain some pages that are not on the NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] rolls” (– bluebookarchive.org). Curiouser and curiouser.

Eagerly I began to browse through Blue Book Archive’s list of microfilms. These are on line. Fantastic! I’d love to read the actual Betty Hill files. Pages one through four of their listings cover the pre-Blue Book projects, Sign and Grudge, as well as all the Blue Books up to 1954. The Hill contact was in 1961, I’m getting close. Page five … begins in mid-1968. Wait, what?.

So I dig a little deeper. Flip back and forth through various rolls. Search for “Betty Hill”, and find nothing relevant. Search for “Pease Air Base” (where they supposedly reported the incident) and find many interesting reports … from 1965. Ah, but what’s this? One of the first rolls has an index to all the cases. Great! Skip ahead 25 pages at a time: 1954, 1956, 1958, 1960… I’m getting close, slow down. Page 498, 16-30 April, 1960. Page 499, 1-15 May, 1962. Nineteen sixty two? What the…?

Okay, flip back and forth some more. Ha! Page 497 of the index is also 1962, page 498 must have been misfiled. Not a good sign (and at this point all the microfilm images are very faint, it’s near impossible to make out the text), but I’ll keep looking. Page 489 looks like it might be August, 1961, but the typewritten text is ghostly, and there’s an ominous hand-scrawled “missing” beside several of the cases listed. The next few pages are even less legible. (For example.)

I incline toward the sentiment “never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence,” and that’s probably what’s going on here (not, let me hasten to add, on the part of Blue Book Archive, who are doing an admirable job, but on the part of whatever bored Airman or clerk was microfilming this stuff in the first place, and other clerks who may have misfiled things). On the other hand, as Ian Fleming supposedly said, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” I wonder.

For the record, I don’t really think Betty and Barney Hill were abducted by aliens. On the subject of UFOs as alien spacecraft overall, I’m a skeptical agnostic. I’ve seen enough strange things in the sky that I couldn’t identify at the time to have no doubt that plenty of people see unidentified flying objects. I think that to immediately identify them as alien spacecraft is silly. Some might indeed be, but the burden of proof is pretty high as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s also silly to say flat out that alien spacecraft are impossible. We just don’t know enough.

As far as research for The Reticuli Deception goes, I may not be learning anything new about the Hill incident or the supposed Zeta Reticuli starchart, but I am gaining a good insight as to how my characters feel when they’re looking for this stuff: frustrated.

Readers know that none of my characters take frustration well, and they tend to come up with creative solutions to it. This is gonna be fun.

So, on this day 2055 years ago (give or take a few days for calendar reform) Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by a bunch of senators (politics was more hands-on in those days) to prevent the Republic from turning into a dictator-led Empire. That worked well. Of somewhat more relevance, the Ides of March was a festival day for Mars, although for the god, not the planet.

Me, I’m in the middle of a major crunch in the day job, counting down to the cutover to a major reimplementation of our business software in a couple of weeks. By day (and sometimes night) I’m a senior analyst/developer for a major provider of satellite-delivered entertainment. This cutover is as complex as any satellite launch, except that we do that every year or two.

Which is by way of explaining my absence here lately, and for the next few weeks to come. (And by the time the dust has settled, it’ll be tax time. Oh joy.) More sometime in April, unless something exciting happens in the meantime.

Cheers.

The title pretty much says it all. Next Saturday Who Else! Books, part of the Broadway Book Mall, is hosting a book signing for four Colorado SF authors, including yours truly. The others are Robin D. Owens (Hearts and Swords), Courtney Schafer (The Whitefire Crossing), and Rob Ziegler (Seed). Of course I’ll be signing copies of my The Chara Talisman as well as Space Horrors and/or Footprints.

That’s the Broadway Book Mall, 200 S. Broadway (in Denver, just north of I-25) at 3:00 pm on Saturday, February 11. Come on out!

Some of you will have already heard by now that I sold another story to Analog magazine. I’m pleased to say that I had help with this one, my friend and now collaborator Brad Torgersen. The story, “Strobe Effect,” will have both of us on the by-line, and I can honestly say that I couldn’t have done it without him. I know, because with this particular story I tried, and while Dr. Schmidt (the editor) liked my earlier solo version of several years ago personally, it was a little too technically focused even for Analog readers. Brad has admitted that he couldn’t have written this story alone either. Brad — who won the AnLab readers’ poll for his first Analog appearance and scored the cover with his most recent — took the core story, gave it the Torgersen touch (and a few thousand more words), and then both of us did some final polishing. I think both my fans and Brad’s will enjoy the result. It would seem Stan Schmidt thinks so too.

This is a buzz for both of us. Back in 2009 Brad and I met in person for the first time at one of Kris and Dean’s workshops on the Oregon coast (we’d met online already, in the Writers of the Future forums). Neither of us had published any fiction at that point (I’d just sold my first story, but it wasn’t in print yet), yet we joked about both being in the same issue of Analog some day. Well, that day came with last October’s issue. Now we’re sharing a byline. Coincidentally, this is also the fifth sale to Analog for each of us, but the first collaboration*. We both hope it’s not the last. (Indeed, we already have a few possibilities in the works.)

(*First collaboration with each other. Brad has also written stories with such illustrious authors as Mike Resnick. Technically I’ve collaborated on non-fiction with the likes of Poul Anderson, Jerry Pournelle and a host of others in preparing reports from the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, back in the day. But that’s not the same at all.)

I’ll be in Colorado Springs, at the Crowne Plaza hotel, for this year’s COSine Science Fiction Convention. I’m not scheduled for any panels but I’ll be around at least for Saturday. It’s a small but fun con.

Who Else! Books will have a presence in the dealers’ room at the con, and they’ll have copies of my The Chara Talisman for sale — as well as a wide variety of other books, particularly by Colorado authors. On a related note, on Saturday, February 11, Who Else! is hosting a multi-author book signing at their Broadway Book Mall location (200 S. Broadway, Denver), and I’ll be there to sign copies of Chara or anything else someone wants me to sign. Well, excepting maybe blank checks.

I posted some of the below in a comment to Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, in turn commenting on one at Joe Konrath’s site. If you’re here for the science and fiction, and don’t care much about publishing or the logic and numbers behind pricing, feel free to skip this post.

Still here? There’s been a bit of buzz over the last year or so about best pricing for indie-published ebooks. (Ebooks from traditional publishers too, but we writers have less (read “no”) control over that, and the general opinion seems to be that their prices are way too high.) One school of thought is that lower is better and you’ll make it up in volume, another is that discount prices devalue the work and no, you won’t make it up in volume. I won’t go into the arguments here (go through Dean’s and Joe’s archives for much of that). I do believe in fair value for money, in both directions. I haven’t put up any of my previously-published flash fiction yet, one reason being that Amazon won’t let me put anything up for Kindle at a price less than $0.99, and I’m not going to offer a 1000-word story at the same price I’m selling one four or five times that long. (I’ll probably put a collection together soon, though — and maybe a couple as free samples here.)

But on the reader side — and I was a reader long before I was a writer — I also have a sense of what a fair price is. When I was a young teenager I used to devour paperback novels (mostly science fiction, oddly enough) at the rate of several a week — sometimes several a weekend. True, they tended to be shorter in those days (late 60s/early 70s), but I could afford that many on my modest allowance. They cost $0.60 trending up to $0.95 by the end of that period, hitting one to two dollars toward the end of the 70s. I considered that a fair price — I could afford buy as many as I had time to read — and I’d probably (no, I remember doing it, I would have) turned up my nose at something offered for a mere $0.35 or $0.40 as perhaps suspect.

With that in mind, when the discussion came up again I decided to see what that worked out to in modern currency. (Well, 2010 — I couldn’t get 2011 figures.) I can’t help it, sometimes I’m a numbers geek.

I pulled a half-dozen old paperback novels (including an Ace Double) off my shelves, with publication date ranging from 1969 to 1991 and price from $0.60 to $4.95 then ran the dates and prices through an online CPI inflation calculator.

In 2010 dollars those prices range from $3.53 to $7.82, with the Ace Double (two 50k-word stories) at the low end, and a 134k-word novel at the high end. The two 65k-word novels average $4.88 each. The top three (ranging from 83k to 250k) average $6.97 each at an averaged wordcount of 155k.

This is all stuff (especially the 1969 and early 70s novels) that I had no qualms about buying out of my meager allowance as a high school student — and I went through several such a week (sometimes propped up behind a textbook in class, grin).

So yeah, adjusting for inflation (and ignoring the media difference between mass market paper and ebook) the prices suggested — $4.99, $5.99 — are spot on.

Speaking of superluminal neutrinos, my friend Tim Kyger has called my attention to a recent paper that has to have the best abstract ever. The paper, by M.V. Berry, N. Brunner, S. Popescu & P. Shukla is entitled Can Apparent Superluminal Neutrino Speeds be Explained as a Quantum Weak Measurement? Summarizing this ten-page paper filled with the requisite mathematics, diagrams, and references, the abstract: “Probably not.”

In all seriousness, the paper raises some interesting ideas (at least, I think it does — I don’t so much follow it as get the gist of it), and further, it eliminates one possible “they’re not really superluminal” explanation. We’re definitely seeing some new science — or at least, new thinking about science, which amounts to the same thing — come out of all this. Time to go make more popcorn!

The OPERA experiment team at CERN is again reporting (as of Nov. 18) possible faster-than-light neutrino measurements. This time they’ve been using 3-nanosecond neutrino pulses, to better pin-down the timing, and they’re still reporting seeing them show up at the detector 60ns sooner than photons would. If this holds up with other labs attempting to repeat the experiment (not until some time next year), then we’ve got some interesting new science, folks. (I’ll have more to say on that soon — some of which I said elsewhere after the September announcement.)

On the other hand, the ICARUS experiment team is saying that their neutrinos have too much energy to have ever gone faster than light. I haven’t read their paper yet, just going on what has been filtered through the popular press, so I’m not very clear on the details. That said, they seem to be basing their conclusion (high energy == slower than light) on models which don’t permit FTL in the first place. Since we don’t know how the neutrinos are going superluminal (if, in fact, they are), that seems shaky ground to be building conclusions on. But maybe I’m just being over-optimistic.

More when I get a chance.

Actually I think I’ve mentioned it here a time or two before 😉 Now I’m announcing that The Chara Talisman, the first full-length novel set in T-space, is now available in e-book and trade paperback form. (First to be published. A novel set earlier in the time-line is in progress.) This is the expansion of my Analog story “Stone Age”.

E-book versions are available from Amazon (for Kindle) and Smashwords (all formats) and should be available direct from B&N, Sony, Apple and others soon. The trade paperback version is available from Amazon (or should be, by the time you read this) as well as through bookstores (you might have to special-order it — bookstores rarely take chances on newer authors these days unless the publisher is doing a mega-marketing blitz) and my publisher, Mabash Books.

There’ll be some promotions for Chara Talisman and some of my other T-space stories going on over the next month or so, so stay tuned. I haven’t decided on the rewards yet, but I’ll be offering prizes for the first person who reports to me a typo or factual error (only one prize or reward for each typo/error) in the book. It could happen — Larry Niven had the Earth rotating in the wrong direction in the first edition of Ringworld. 😉

(Update: added link (above) to paperback version at Amazon.)