Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

It’s Veterans Day here in the US, Remembrance Day in Canada, the UK, and other commonwealth countries. Sometimes called Poppy Day, after the traditional symbol named from the poem “In Flander’s Fields” (where poppies grow…)

I have a book coming out today too — but that will keep.

To all veterans of the US, Canada, the UK and allied countries … thank you.

Another MileHiCon — the Denver area’s annual SF convention — is underway. I have a full schedule this year, with four panels (FTL, collaborations, writing humor, and space mining), a reading — I share the slot with Kevin J. Anderson, which pretty much guarantees me an audience 😉 — an autographing — sharing the table with Vernor Vinge, so there’ll be a long line for one of us — and an interview for the Machine Readable podcast.

It promises to be a lot of fun, as always, and I get to announce the imminent release (on 11/11/11) of my novel The Chara Talisman, which I may have mentioned here once or twice already.

Hope to see you there.

(BTW, the astute among you may have noticed a gap here since the pre-Worldcon post. Mea culpa. There was plenty happening — Worldcon, Bubonicon, the report of possible FTL neutrinos, and more — and I took notes. But I didn’t immediately turn said notes into postings here, and a bunch of the other stuff happening (of lesser interest to anyone not me) got in the way. Some of those notes, particular on the possible superluminal neutrino observations, will make it here soon. Or perhaps I can figure a way to use superluminal neutrinos to post them a month ago. Cheers.)

I’m frantically packing and otherwise getting ready to leave for Renovation, the 69th annual WorldCon in Reno. I’m behind schedule in just about everything else because of a whole bunch of other crap stuff going on in my life, but this weekend is for forgetting all that, meeting old friends, new friends, fans, fellow writers, editors, and generally having a good time. I fly out right after work tomorrow, and I’m taking the train (the California Zephyr) back — I haven’t taken a good long train ride in years.

I hope to see those of you who are attending, stop me and say ‘hi’. I’ll likely be wearing an aloha shirt, and my hair’s a lot shorter than Ed Bryant’s. 😉

I’m in the middle of prepping my story “Stone Age”, which appeared in the June issue of Analog a couple of months ago, for ebook publication. Here’s the cover, based on the Frederik Catherwood print which partly inspired the story. I’ll update this when it’s available, and probably do a special intro offer through Smashwords.

This story is, as I think I’ve mentioned before, based on a couple of the first chapters of The Chara Talisman. Publication plans for that are still pending — the traditional publishing industry moves slowly — but I’m considering making an e-version available sooner, possibly serializing it on-line. Let me know if you’re interested.

Update: “Stone Age” is now available in ebook format from Smashwords, and should be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and outlets supplied by Smashwords (such as Apple and Sony) soon. Stay tuned for an offer in connection with The Chara Talisman.

My author’s copies of the October issue of Analog just arrived (early!), containing my Probability Zero story “The Sock Problem”. This is kind of a sequel to “Light Conversation” in that both stories feature a major appliance and the first-person narrator is a bit of a tinkerer. My son Robert is urging me to do a whole series of humorous appliance stories. We’ll see.

Also in this issue is Brad Torgersen’s “The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project”. This is kind of a thrill for both of us; back in 2009 at one of Kris’n’Dean’s writing workshops, before he had had anything published and only my “Snowball” had been sold but wasn’t yet in print, we’d joked about one day both having stories in the same issue of Analog. Well, two years later and here we are. (Hey, Brad, one day we’re going to be on the Hugo awards stage together, right? ;-))

Should be on the stands in a couple of weeks, electronic versions possibly before that. Enjoy!

Speaking of time machines (see my earlier post), news from the ArXiv today is that physicists have created a “hole in time”, the temporal equivalent of an invisibility cloak. Only 110 nanoseconds so far … but consider the possibilities!

Tangentially, writer Alex J. Kane, in a blog post titled “On the Use of Tropes in Science Fiction” today considers possibilities for science fiction, and quotes my buddy Brad Torgersen: “There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s all about how you use the various stock elements that makes the story.” I’d absolutely agree with Brad’s second sentence there, but I might quibble about the first. Is the above “time cloak” new to science fiction? Not exactly, if you consider stasis boxes, bobbles, or some of the ways time travel has been used in stories. But I’m willing to bet that nobody came up with something quite like what the physicists did. All kinds of interesting story ideas there.

Kane goes on to say:

Writers like Orson Scott Card have even gone so far as to reduce the genre, in a way, by saying that it’s merely “a subset of fantasy.” True, but when I heard those words […], I couldn’t help but feel a sense of betrayal.

Wasn’t science fiction the genre that had made Card’s career, after all? Without having written Ender’s Game, would I even know who he was?

But for the sake of argument, let’s take Card’s elaboration into account. He argues that science fiction is a sort of literary dead end because there just aren’t enough new scientific discoveries — or moreover, any new ideas — out there to justify writing sf anymore. From a storyteller’s perspective, he says, it makes more sense to just resort to a magical fantasy setting. Why bother with the facade of making things like FTL travel, etc., seem plausible in a universe where we know such key tropes to be utterly impossible?

I call bullshit.

So do I.

Card (and others) miss a key point when they call science fiction a subset of fantasy. True enough, much of what gets passed off as SF (or perhaps rather, sci-fi) is just fantasy with spaceships, computers and aliens instead of horses, magic and trolls — Card’s own Ender’s Game stories could be considered in that light (although perhaps not the original short story which started it all). But the hard core of SF — and I heard Connie Willis making just this point a couple of weeks ago — is as a literature of ideas. Yes, we as readers (and, we hope, as writers) these days we expect more than just the idea; the Hugo Gernsback days when cardboard characters and cliche settings were fine so long as the idea was new are long gone, we expect rounded characters and well thought out settings as well as ideas. Indeed, the ideas don’t even have to be new if you do everything else well enough, but if you do come up with one, or put a new twist on one, you’ve got a potential award-winner if everything else holds up. (Larry Niven in his short-story heyday had this finely honed; several of his award-winning stories were near category-killers. Just try writing a crosstime-travel story these days without considering the implications he raises in “All the Myriad Ways” — which have real echoes in quantum theory.)

Not that there’s anything wrong with a good rollicking space, time travel, or zombie apocalypse (to pick three not-quite-random examples from this year’s Hugo nominees) story either.

And I’ll agree with Kane’s closing quote: “To quote George Carlin: ‘The future ain’t what it used to be.'” Ain’t that the truth!

Two months is a long time to go between blog updates. Things have been crazy busy around here, more chaos than usual.

I mentioned a few posts back that I’ve been having issues with hosting this site. Still am (my internet connection was just out for 2.5 days; that sucked), but I have a plan. As soon as I figure out an easy way to port the content database, this site is getting rehosted on a commercial provider (right now it’s on a server about ten feet from where I sit in my basement office). I’m giving up some control and gaining a bunch in reliability and connection speed.

I’ve already been using that provider to host the MagicBakeshop. As I explain there, the name Magic Bakeshop is adapted from Dean Wesley Smith’s “Magic Bakery” concept, the idea being that stories are like magic pies: you can keep selling (or giving away) slices of them and still have the whole thing. MagicBakeshop’s first product is a computer app to help authors and indie publishers track their sales through Amazon, Pubit, Smashwords, etc. If that’s up your alley, check it out.

Partly because I’ve been working on the above software, and partly because of some of the other events going on in my life, I haven’t been spending as much time writing as I’d like. I have two stories (shaping up to be novelettes in length, perhaps) about half done, one a Jason Curtis story, the other set in what may well be T-Space, but in our past rather than the future. I’m having a lot of fun with both of them, I just wish I had more time.

I have several more stories (including “Stone Age” from the June Analog) almost ready to up as ebooks. And I really need to get that redraft of Alpha Centauri finished.

Anybody got a time machine I can borrow?

A discussion on Slashdot today mentioned a story that Don Lancaster told in one of his columns. I’ve enjoyed Don’s column in The Midnight Engineer for years, and I built some of the projects in his many books, including the Cheap Video Cookbook back in my days playing with a KIM-1 (one of the first-ever microcomputers, a single bare circuit board with just pushbuttons and an LED display; I had to build my own power supply for it). An anonymous poster on Slashdot related Don Lancaster’s “flute story”, and I looked it up on Don’s site. He’s repeated it several times in his newsletters and books. Here’s the Slashdot version:

“Many years ago, I was at a rock concert. The opening act was a single flute player standing solo in front of the closed stage curtains. His job was to warm up the audience for the high priced talent that was to follow. He was good. But as he went along, the musical vibes got stranger and stranger, then totally bizarre. He was playing chords on his flute. Combined with utterly unbelievable riffs. Much of the audience got impatient and bored at what seemed like a bunch of god-awful squawks. Then I happened to notice a friend beside me who had both been in and taught concert band. He was literally on the edge of his seat. He turned to me and slowly said ‘You Can’t Do That With a Flute.’

Of the thousands and thousands of people in the theater audience, at most only five realized they were witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime performance of the absolute mastery of a difficult and demanding instrument.

Always play for those five.”

Another Slashdotters wondered cynically if the effort was worth it. I think that represents a certain lack of pride in his work. Maybe you’re not up to a high skill level, but isn’t it something to strive for? If you have that skill, isn’t it worth demonstrating?

My son Arthur is something of an amateur magician and we know a few professionals, and how many of the standard tricks are done. While most of an audience is impressed at the mere performance of a trick (so long as the magician is competent enough to keep from accidentally revealing the method), other magicians in the audience will be impressed at how skillfully it’s performed — especially if the magician can do what seems to be the old trick in a new way that even fellow magicians can’t figure out. Or, who like Penn and Teller performing the ancient cup-and-balls trick with transparent cups and telling the audience what they’re doing, can still pull a few surprises. Penn and Teller are playing for the five.

I write (among other things) hard science fiction. I like to get the details right, even in off-the-wall stuff like a conversation with an intelligent slime mold (“Light Conversation”). Sometimes I’ll take hours to get details right, calculating orbits or the exact distances and directions between different stars. Most SF readers will neither notice nor care, they’re just looking for a good story. But I care. Of course I want readers to enjoy my stories; it’s important that the details don’t get in the way of the entertainment, and if they do I’m failing my primary purpose. However there are a few who will notice, who may even do the math. They — you, since probably some of you are among them — are the ones I take that extra effort for. Sure, I want everyone to enjoy my writing (although realistically I know that it’s impossible to please everybody), but I write for the five.

Like Don said, play for the five.

Overwhelmed by the news of Osama bin Laden’s death (and the celebrations thereof — a little surprising to me; good news, yes, but no VE day) is the announcement from CERN that they’ve managed to trap antihydrogen atoms — atoms made from an anti-proton orbited by a positron — for 1000 seconds. That’s over 15 minutes, folks, seriously long term storage as antimatter goes. CERN’s previous record was only 172 milliseconds.

Granted, they only stored 309 atoms. Remembering Avogadro’s number from high school chemistry, that’s still a factor of 10-to-the-20th or so from a gram of antihydrogen, let alone the kilogram of antimatter mentioned in my story “Renee”, (to say nothing of whatever unspecified quantities were used to fuel the USS Enterprise in Star Trek) but it’s an impressive achievement none the less. It’s also enough to do some serious experiments on the more subtle properties of antimatter. For example, does it fall down, or up? They’ll also be looking for charge, parity and/or time (CPT) anomalies.

In the long run, what they find could turn out to be far more significant than the life or death of another criminal, even one who made Ernst Stavro Blofeld (James Bond’s nemesis) look like an amateur.

“The sleeper ship Raven sliced the icy, inky, tans-Plutonian darkness a light-year out from Earth.” So begins “Poetic Justice”, a deep-space psychological horror story that’s also a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado”. I wrote this for the anthology Space Horrors, and it is now available as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers.
It was a lot of fun to write and I think it’s one of my better short stories to date.
To help launch it, I’m offering a 100% discount (that is, free) off purchases made at Smashwords. Enter the coupon code QF56Q; the coupon expires May 8, so you’ve got a week. All I ask (beg, plead, implore) is that you give it a rating, ideally on both on Smashwords and Amazon (or B&N, if you’re a Nook reader). If you feel so moved, I’d appreciate reviews, too. Thanks! (In fact, I’ll offer a free e-book to the first five reviewers, good or bad — I want honest reviews.)