This handsome little hardback is an arresting read. The strange, tactile quality of Aliya Whiteley's fiction has long entranced me (see posts on Skyward Innand The Loosening Skin) and this non-fiction collection is just as oddly, unsettlingly captivating. It's like venturing into the woods with her, to catch a glimpse of something ancient, earthy and alive. An MR James story but real.
"Collection" may not be the right word for what this is; it's a series of often short chapters exploring different aspects of the physicality and science of fungi, and the ways this is woven into culture and literature as well as the life of the author. There's stuff on what it's like to encounter different fungi in the wild, in the UK and abroad. We cover disease, whether St Anthony's Fire or the fungal infections most likely to affect someone with HIV; we cover cures such as penicillin and LSD-related therapies. There's time for monstrous fungus in fantasy and sci-fi (such as Whiteley's own works, Tade Thompson's Rosewater, John Wyndham's Trouble with Lichen and many others). There's stuff on mushrooms as food and as poison.
These tangible, evocative threads are connected, making up a mycelial network of their own. At one point, Whiteley explains that the mycelial networks of fungi might be best thought of as single bodies, vast and intricate, living half-submerged in the soil. It's this kind of thing that makes the book such fertile ground, all so rich and potent that I kept thinking "This would make the start of a good story..."
One chapter explores fungi as "Saviours" for our real-world problems. Penicillium notatum is the best-known example, discovered in 1928 to kill the bacteria in a series of Petri dishes while Alexander Fleming wasn't looking; over many subsequent years (Whiteley is good at underlining the effort involved), it was then developed into the first antibiotic. A related fungus, Penicillium citrinum,has an effect on cholesterol and led Akira Endo to develop statins, now one of the most commonly taken drugs in the world.
I was particularly taken by examples that may change and shape our future. In 2017, Aspergillus tubingensis was found to be "feeding on polyurethane on a rubbish site at Isamabad" (p. 36). Pestalotiopsis microspora has been identified in the Amazon rainforest doing something similar and may be able to do so without air.
"It could survive deep in the darkness of landfill and steadily work its way through many kinds of plastic, if initial hypotheses turn out to be accurate." (p. 37)
A later chapter, "Stowaways of the Space Age", explores the bacteria and fungal growths identified on spacecraft, the risks they pose to systems and ways they may be affected by exposure to space and radiation. And then there's this, which I dreamt about last night:
"NASA has been investigating the possibility of using mycelia to create living shelters on Mars using melanin-rich fungi to absorb radiation and protect the human inhabitants within. ... They could be constructed, effectively grown, on location, making them easier to transport. They also offer the proposal of easy, organic disposal after use, putting little strain on the alien environment." (p. 121)
It's literally describing alien life and yet that quality of strangeness is something we'd take with us from here. It's all around us, if we'll only look and see.
This smart, thrilling, brilliant new novel is about the women who are part of the astronaut programme in an alternate 1950s. History diverges from ours on 2 November 1948 when Thomas E Dewey beats Harry S Truman in the US presidential election. By 3 March 1952, the US has put its third satellite into orbit. That morning, a meteorite crashes into Earth with devastating effect. Washington DC is obliterated.
So, despite the devastation the space programme is well ahead. In our universe, the space race began years after this, on 30 August 1955, when lead engineer Sergei Korolev got the Soviet Academy of Sciences to agree a programme to beat the Americans into orbit. The result was Sputnik (4 October 1957), followed by the first person - Gagarin - sent into space, on 12 April 1961. A month later, President Kennedy announced plans to land people on the Moon by the end of the decade.
Part of the joy of The Calculating Stars is how much of "our" history is woven into the alternate timeline: our heroine, Dr Elma York meets Wernher von Braun, while among her fellow trainee astronauts listed on page 426 are "Collins, Aldrin and Armstrong". Her husband reads science-fiction by Ray Bradbury, his visions of settlements on Mars apparently coloured by the events in this timeline.
Also great is the technical detail. We encouter this world through Elma's perspective as a former WASP, a qualified pilot and extremely competent mathematician. She works as a human computer, outperforming the nascent IBM machines - at one extremely tense moment in the story, her speed and accuracy with complex numbers are vital. Robinette Kowal's acknowledgements include real astronauts and other experts: she admits she doesn't understand the maths herself. As a nerd for the early days of space travel, there was lots I recognised - and lots that came as new.
"There is something about having your legs over your head that makes you need to pee. This makes it into none of the press releases, but every single astronaut talks about it." (p. 493)
But the book is also excellent on the social detail: the drama of this post-meteorite world is overshadowed by inherent sexism and racism, our Jewish heroine not immune to her own prejudice. Elma also suffers from anxiety and there's lots on the shame and secrecy surrounding mental illness. Characters are well drawn, and Elma must learn to work alongside people she doesn't necessarily like, managing rivalries and her own privilege, for all she is discriminated against. Each chapter opens with a quote from a newspaper filling in more of the background detail of this world, and full of telling turns of phrase. It all makes for a rich and real version of history, a compelling world in which this adventure takes place.
It is an adventure, full of twists and turns. Robinette Kowal nicely manages the personal stakes with the technical and global. I zipped through the almost 500 pages and am keen for the next instalment.
Earlier this week, the Dr pointed me in the direction of Professor Joe Cain's splendid talk on the dinosaur sculptures at Crystal Palace, which you can watch here:
It's a great talk with some amazing insights and pictures - including of the insides of the dinosaurs. I love those dinosaurs and visit them a lot. (They've also appeared twice on the cover of Doctor Who Magazine.)
Then, last night, Nimbos and I attended "Planet of the Dinosaurs", a talk at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, where Dave Hone, paleontologist from Queen Mary gave a history of the dinosaurs as, on the vast Planetarium screen, Earth's continents shifted before our very eyes.
My favourite fact of the evening was about the very well preserved fossils found in Liaoning province in northern China. Paleontologists have not only found the remains of small, feathered dinosaurs, they also know the fauna and weather. In the cool drizzle, dinosaurs would have run through the magnolia blossom and between rhododendrons. Exactly the plants and weather of a Victorian garden - or the Crystal Palace.
I've just finished rereading Dune, having first got through it in my teens. In my head, the book is rather overshadowed by the 1984 film - which I adore - and more importantly by the stickerbook that I and my classmates devotedly filled up because of/despite being far too young to see the film.
As before, I was struck by the richness of the story, the wealth of memorable characters, the complexity of the court politics and the worlds created. The desert planet Arakis is an extraordinary creation, with sounds, smells and language, and a whole ecology, that feel tantalisingly real.
It's not perfect. A lot of the dialogue is horribly clunky, and I can see where the film has cut down or modified examples to make it work more smoothly. Early on, Herbert constantly tells us what's about to happen, which initially adds to the suspense and then just gets annoying. It's at its best when we're left with more work to do as readers, spotting the gaps between what people think they're doing and what they're seen to be doing, or being able to join up the dots of future history. Quotations by Princess Irulan discuss events we're yet to see, placing them in a context of an as-yet-unknown future and adding a scale and importance to the most minor scenes of intrigue. It's a thrill when we meet her in person towards the end of the book, as if we've entered some new age.
Nosing through the web, I've found analysis of the book's links to drug, ecological and countercultures, the islamic influences and so on. I've also found plenty of criticism, such as Samuel R Delany taking
"offense that the book's only portrayal of a homosexual character, the vile pervert Baron Harkonnen, is negative."
At least as objectionable is the simplistic gender binary that runs through the book, with hero Paul fulfilling a prophecy to be the only man capable of doing something normally the province of women. When he succeeds and fulfils the prophecy, it seems to prove the truth of this strict binary division between men and women.
"Paul said: 'There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman the situation is reversed ... The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It's as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.'"
Frank Herbert, Dune, p. 505.
That certainty sits oddly at the end of a book so otherwise - brilliantly - caught up in doubt, counterplot and pragmatism, where characters die brutal deaths suddenly and without warning.
I found myself wondering how rare it is in sci-fi for a prophecy not to come true, or a young hero turn out to be not the messiah... Yes, I'd welcome examples.
Varga the Ice Warrior menaces Victoria The Ice Warriors, episode two
Tonight, the Ice Warriors return to Doctor Who in Cold War - their fifth story, and their first since 1974. I've chosen a moment from their debut story to talk about something clever the show does to disguise its limited budget. It's something that also means it better gets into our heads...
Doctor Who has all sorts of tricks for making it seem more expensive than it really is. In reality, there are a limited number of sets, set-ups and actors, but the producers reuse sets and costumes, or film different episodes (set in different times, even different planets) in a single block, and use effects to fool us.
When the Ice Warriors made their first appearance in 1967, the clever producers had also established a formula that made the most of the limited studio space available to the show at the time. Almost every week, the Doctor would be trapped in a control room with a group of terrified humans while monsters tried to break down the door.
Yet, those adventures still suggested an extraordinary scale. The first episode of each story quickly sets up that we’re somewhere strikingly different, usually with location filming. In The Tomb of the Cybermen, we cut from the interior of the TARDIS (shot on film and looking amazing) to a multiracial expedition of archaeologists setting off explosives on an alien world. In the next story, we see Doctor Who’s first location filming in another country, as a Welsh valley doubles for Tibet. Then it’s The Ice Warriors, in which glaciers roll over Britain in the future. The next story begins with a helicopter chase on a beach in Australia, like something out of a Bond film. They’re all big, vivid worlds created very quickly (and economically) before we get locked in a control room.
We deal with big concepts, too: a world war that changes which nations are super powers or climate change run out of control. The Wheel in Space riffs off the near-future realism of 2001: A Space Odyssey - which had its premiere two weeks before the broadcast of episode one.
But these big images are grounded in simple, cost-effective reality. The Web of Fear manages to convince us that London is deserted by showing us a newspaper billboard and the power being off in the Tube.
This season is all about inexpensive tricks done with maximum effect, such as when the Doctor turns out to be the spitting image of the wicked Salamander. Previous stories had shown us doubles of the Doctor, but this is the best example yet. We’re not always sure who we’re watching – our hero or the villain – right up to the neat twist at the end where Salamander tries to steal the TARDIS.
Another neat trick is bringing young Professor Travers back two stories later but as an old man. And is it conscious that this season even plays with its own ‘base under siege’ format? In The Enemy of the World, the Doctor needs to rescue people from their underground base.
But the moment I've chosen from The Ice Warriors because of a line of dialogue. Often, the most vivid moments of Doctor Who are things we never see: the silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi mentioned in The Brain of Morbius, World War Six as described in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, the Time War between the Doctor's people and the Daleks that has haunted the show since it came back in 2005...
It's not just big events, either. Varga the Ice Warrior threatens Victoria, but she doesn't recognise the device he's holding. "Sonic gun," Varga hisses - and we'll see it used to kill people in this and the Warrior's next three TV adventures (and perhaps tonight as well).
It's a pretty boring prop, just a tube with a light in the end when it's fired. There's then a wobbly effect over the person being killed and the actor cries out and falls to the floor. It's not much different from any other sci-fi killing, except that I find the deaths by sonic gun particularly vivid and horrible, because of a line of dialogue describing something we'll never see. I think it colours every future death inflicted by the Ice Warriors, and makes them a far more chilling monster.
Varga warns Victoria: "It will burst your brain with noise."
The main problem with science documentaries (having made a short one, “Entropy Explained”, that, despite a well-qualified and engaging presenter, I think doesn't quite work) is how to illustrate the argument without distracting from it. A personal bugbear is documentaries that show pretty pictures of space or CGI that aren't even connected to what's being said. At the same time, just having a talking head addressing the viewer can get dull very quickly – telly is all about moving pictures.
That's why Brian Cox gets sent all round the world, spelling out the science in a way that's visually appealing – and related to what he's saying (if also riffing off this). In the 1970s, Jacob Bronowski was commissioned to link science to art, which makes for better visuals in the amazing The Ascent of Man (1973). Later, Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) dramatised lots of moments from history – and at great expense – while Carl himself hosted the show from the inside of spaceship (I can't help thinking it looks like the inside of the Pinky Ponk from In the Night Garden...).
But James Burke is quite the master at thrilling, engaging and boggling ways to put across his ideas. He cut his teeth presenting Tomorrow's World and the Apollo Moon landings. You can see a little of this early work at the BBC Archive's Tomorrow's World collection, while the excellent Apollo 11: A Night to Remember DVD features clips of Burke putting a spacesuit through its paces or testing the rocket escape system. All this shows his flair for simple and direct ways of talking technology in a way that we'll remember.
But Connections is something altogether more impressive: a 10-hour thesis on the history of and our dependence on technology.
The first episode reminds me, in terms of strategy, a little of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That film consists of four separate but related stories: early man making a discovery; something happening on the Moon; something happening in a spaceship; a journey into the unknown. Each sequence is visually and aurally stunning, and each sequence ends with a startling, gosh-wow revelation that takes us somewhere new. As a whole, it aims to simply and vividly boggle our sense of where we come from, how we got here, and where we're going next.
Connections' first sequence is remarkably simple. Burke addresses us directly:
“Would you do me a favour? I'd like to stop talking for a minute and when I do, take a look at the room you're in and above all at the man-made objects in that room that surround you – the television set, the lights, the phone and so on – and ask yourself what those objects do to your life just because they're there. Go ahead.”
Watching it now, it's striking how much more dependent we are on clever telephonic and electronic devices since the series was made, so it makes the point even harder: we don't know how these things work and yet we're in their thrall.
To make that case, Burke then spells out what happened in the New York City power blackout in 1965, dramatising scenes and speaking to witnesses. It's as fascinating for its depiction of human behaviour – passengers on a tube train sharing birthday cake and wine as they waited in a dark tunnel – as for the explanation of how a single protective relay caused chaos.
Burke shows us the offending relay before telling us what is, inviting us to guess. It's a very effective way of drawing us in. The point is that we are reliant on gadgets and networks we barely understand.
Next, he spells out a nightmare scenario of how long we'd survive in a world where technology stopped working, making the brutal choices horribly vivid – we'd need food and shelter, but would we be prepared to kill someone to take their house, or protect our own? Again, he gets in our heads, and plays to 70s concerns about how far we removed ourselves from the means of production and essential skills, played out earlier in Terry Nation's Survivors (1975-7).
But this is all merely a prelude. Burke is then in Egypt to trace the origin of our dependence on technology. I gather from my in-house expert that what follows is based on the work of the archaeologist Flinders Petrie.
About 10,000 BC, at a result of climate change, mankind's behaviour radically altered. Around this time, the glaciers receded and the temperature rose, and water became scarcer. The hunting nomads had to come down from the high grasslands in search of food, and did so, says Burke, in northern India, central America, Syria and Egypt (and possibly also Peru). In Egypt, where Burke bases his argument, they found a lucky accident of nature. A yearly flood of the river Nile created a very fertile ribbon of land stretching some 750 miles, in the midst of what was otherwise scrubland and desert. This fertile land supported plants the nomads could eat. About 5000 BC they settled permanently in the area. They dug and sowed crops, irrigating them by hand and perhaps with basic tools for nearly 1,000 years, and then an odd-shaped bit of wood transformed everything ever after.
Burke's explanation of what happened as a result of the invention of the plough is quite long but well worth following. It's a brilliant, eye-popping series of consequences, just as gosh-wow as 2001.
“Initially the surplus [food] produced by irrigation and ploughing permitted non-foodproducers to operate within a community, and in the beginning these may have been the men who dug and maintained the irrigation systems, and those who organized them. These administrators would have derived their authority from their knowledge of astronomy which gave them alone the magic ability to say when the flood would come, when to sow on the land wet from the receding waters, and when to harvest. The grain needed storage room out of the weather, and dried clay daubed on woven reed baskets gradually gave way to more permanent containers as the demand for them increased with the crop. Fire-hardened clay pots, made from spiralling loops of wet earth, came to be used, and the first evidence of solid burning is of piles of these pots heaped together to form a form of central granary. The need to identify the ownership and amount of grain contained in a pot or a granary led to the development of writing. The first picture-words came from before 3000 B.C and comprise lists of objects and totals of figures contained in pots and chests. The surplus grain paid for craftsmen: carpenters, potters, weavers, bakers, musicians, leather-workers, metal-workers, and those whose task it was to record everything – the scribes. The need to ensure regularity of harvest in order to support those members of the community demanded a taxation system, and so that it should be operated fairly skills were developed to assess each man's due. Initially this may have started with the measurement of field boundaries destroyed each year by the flood, but as time passed and the irrigation systems grew more complex, the process demanded greater sophistication, calling for mathematics to handle the measurement of distance, area and cubic amount.
These early forms of arithmetic and geometry grew from the demands of canal building: how long, how wide and how deep? It may have been the need for tools to do the job which spurred interest in the copper deposits across the Red Sea in Sinai, and this in turn would have stimulated the use of metal for weapons. Weapons were needed by those whose task it was to protect the land and crops from invasion, as the surplus food and the goods financed by its production began to be used as barter with neighbouring communities, some of which looked with envy on the riches of Egypt. Metal tools gave the Egyptians the ability to work stone, initially, perhaps, in blocks for strengthening the irrigation ditches. The Nile is bordered for 500 miles south from Cairo by limestone cliffs, and it is from this stone that the first pyramid was constructed.
A mere hundred and fifty years after the first use of stone for the construction of buildings, the massive step pyramid of King Djoser was erected. It rises out of the desert as Saqqara, south of Cairo. Built by the king's chief minister, Imhotep, it is the oldest extant stone structure in the world, dating from around 2800 B.C. It was constructed using the tools and the theoretical knowledge developed by the canal builders, and it shows a high degree of precision in the use of both. By the time Djoser was being laid in his pyramid, Egyptian society had developed a form that is little changed today. At the top came the Head of State, served by his cabinet of advisers; these were aided by a civil service which organized every aspect of life in the state, gathering taxes from craftsmen and farmers to support themselves and the army. The regulation of the state's business was effected through the application of laws, which rested for their observance on the availability of an annual calendar, by now divided into twelve months or thirty days each. By 2500 B.C. the Egyptians (and their neighbours the Mesopotamians) had a developed and sophisticated society operating with a handful of essential tools: civil engineering, astronomical measurement, water-lifting machinery, writing and mathematics, primitive metallurgy, and the wheel. With these tools the Egyptians administered am empire whose power and influence was unparalleled in the ancient world, based on an agricultural output made possible by the plough. Its use had ensured the continued survival and expansion of the community and set in motion the changes that resulted from that expansion.
The first man-made harvest freed mankind from total and passive dependence of the vagaries of nature, and at the same time tied him for ever to the very tools that set him free. The modern world in which we live is the product of that original achievement, because just as the plough served to trigger change in the community in which it appeared, each change that followed led to further change in a continuing sequence of connected events.”
James Burke, Connections (Macmillan London Limited: 1978), pp. 10-12.
The final sequence in this first episode sees Burke in Kuwait, showing how oil transformed the country in a single generation, so that people whose parents were nomads (as people were in Egypt before the invention of the plough) are now millionaires, racing through the desert in the latest Rolls-Royce. It's an awe-inspiring thesis, that a single invention or discovery can so transform our lives, and in ways the inventor or discoverer could never have predicted.
In each of the next eight episodes, Burke traces the discoveries that led to a key invention that he says define modern life – such as nuclear weapons, the space rocket and television. It's a shrewd and often very funny series drawing together myriad threads. Burke has a dry wit and love for historical irony. We learn, for example, that in the hunt for the cause of malaria (literally “bad air”), Napoleon ordered a bad smell map of Egypt.
I expect Douglas Adams was watching that first episode the night it was broadcast on 17 October 1978. He'd soon be working on a Doctor Who story about an alien who forced the progress of mankind. An episode first broadcast on 13 October 1979 – a little less than a year later – includes this from the alien:
SCARLIONI:
Achievement? You talk to me of achievement because I steal the Mona Lisa? Can you imagine how a man might feel who has caused the pyramids to be built, the heavens to be mapped, invented the first wheel, shown the true use of fire, brought up a whole race from nothing to save his own race?
“David Agnew” (David Fisher, Douglas Adams and Graham Williams), Doctor Who: “City of Death”, part three (1979)
Connections is certainly of its time. Burke not unreasonably assumes the viewer remembers the launch of Apollo 11 and the stirring of emotions that went with it. There's the irony, for a series about technology, that he could never have predicted how this show would be watched or by who all these decades later. And in some ways it feels prehistoric.
Burke addresses himself to a straight male audience, and makes a whole load of other assumptions, too. At one point he asks us not to be distracted by a pretty girl in shot. Later, he asks us to recall his argument, “the next time your wife asks you to change a plug”. I imagine a few chums would find the patrician tone too condescending and arrogant, but that's a shame because there's so much to enjoy. For example, in discussing the Apollo programme and the criticism that it cost too much, he says, “in the same period, American women spent the same amount on cosmetics”.
But there are other things that seem from another age. For all this talk of technology feeding into our lives, computers are things that only affect us in the workplace. Yet when he talks about the relatively new-fangled credit card and how it will change “future” transactions, it seems prophetic. He explains in episode 8, that the credit card is more than just a substitute for cash. The magnetic strip on the back is a moral judgment on you, your life and your credit worthiness. The powers that make these judgments are secret and immutable, based on patented algorithms and business practices. More than that, they drive you to behave in certain ways which were, until recently, thought wholly immoral: encouraging you to live outside your means. As he says, chillingly, at the end of this sequence,
“What will happen when being in debt all the time is the normal way to live?”
Burke is also good at looking for connections between the different stories and episodes, to understand what aids progress and what stands in its way.
In episode 3, he argues that many inventions key to industrial development in the West – gunpowder, paper, magnets – had existed commonly in China for hundreds or even thousands of years. What made the West different, he says, is that China was a Taoist state, and believed that everything and everyone had their rightful place. In Europe, however, there was more social mobility and competition, so people were constantly looking for any advantage that might make them rich and lift them up the social order.
It's interesting to join that up with the BBC's other seminal, authored series of the time. Kenneth Clark in Civilisation (1969) argued the essential element for civilisation was the courtesy to discuss new ideas without fear of reprisals or death. Jacob Bronowski in The Ascent of Man made the case for knowledge over certainty – good evidence is key not just to science but law and history, too. To this, Burke adds opportunity which allows and encourages experiment and play, so that those who make discoveries or find new ways to apply them can fully reap the rewards. Effectively, without social mobility progress grinds to a halt.
Finally, in episode 10, Burke tries to sum up all we've seen: the surges of communications technology through letters, a postal system, telegraphy, satellite phones. He concludes that,
“The faster you can communicate, the faster change happens.”
He predicts – and more accurately than he could ever have imagined – that the near future would depend on,
“Information... what you do with the facts”.
He argues that the defining question in the technological arms race will be,
“How easy is it for knowledge to spread?”
He also says that lack of access to this information will equal powerlessness, just as if someone were deaf and dumb and blind. Watching it now, that all feels chillingly right.
And yet Burke's also under no illusions about how difficult it is to predict the future. After all, the inventions he's covered in the series led to things no one could have predicted. And he concludes by connecting up the eight inventions from the series to one that will (he thinks) dominate our future – the bomber carrying nuclear bombs. Luckily, he was wrong.
There's a Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch that parodies Burke, with him telling us something, then contradicting it and then contradicting that contradiction. That's unfair, and though he does something a little like that in this last episode it's to make a serious point. He says he can't predict what will happen, or what developments will dominate our lives. In effect, he's saying, “It's more complicated than that” - itself a paraphrasing of all of science.
And he leaves us with something more potent and compelling than a dodgy prediction. Because the last moments of the series are an even more effective gosh-wow. Again, he directly appeals to us, telling us to become discoverers ourselves. He tells us that new discovery depends on challenging authority, religion and ideology that keep us in our place. As he says, science is sometimes seen as hard and emotionless because it “removes the reassuring crutches”. But he's not calling for some kind of revolution or new dawn of atheism. Instead, he simply spells out that all we need for progress is to ask the right questions.
“Ask for explanations. And ask yourself if there's anything in your life you want changed.”
I know what I'd like changed. I'd like a souped-up Region 2 DVD or Blu-Ray of Connections, please.
Adam Grose's blog announces the not untimely publication of Flood, an anthology of one-page comic strips to raise money for the British Red Cross in the name of flood relief. It includes my first ever commissioned comic strip, "The Coral Invasion of London" - with art by Tony Suleri - which Adam posts as an inducement.
It's just £3.75 a copy and all in a good cause. Buy Flood now.
Adam Grose has announced my inclusion in his forthcoming FLOOD comic, which features one-page strips and drabbles to raise money for flood charities.
My one-pager is called "The Coral Invasion of London", features some fine quality sci-fi motifs, and is illustrated by a fantastically talented fellow called Tony Suleri.
The FLOOD comic is not available to download or buy just yet - I'll holler again when it is.
As you’d expect, it explains how to identify the main kinds of clouds. And reading it is like an epiphany – I find I’m looking up on the way to work, or while waiting for buses and trains. As Pretor-Pinney says, it’s a hobby you can take part in anywhere, and for as long or as little as you wish.
The nebulous nature of clouds means several share characteristics or even bits of the same name – alto, cirro, cumulo, nimbo, strato. I got even more list over which combinations merge into which other combinations, and then there’s the huge number of sub-species, features and effects. It’s no wonder the book comes complete with a cloudspotter’s diploma. (There are also copious plugs for the Cloud Appreciation Society, which the author founded.)
Mixed in with the scientific explanations and Latin etymology are a wealth of top facts. For example, I now know where the phrases “cloud nine” and “cloud cuckooland” come from. Yet, as well as the top facts, there’s far too many terrible jokes and asides which can get a little grating. Part of me wonders how much that stuff just pads it out, and how much the author or his editors feared scaring punters off with too much technicalia. The clutter of tangents and silly bits makes it harder to remember the clues to diagnosis. Of course, this is a book to carry with you and refer back to, but I’m a bit annoyed I don’t remember more as I went along.
The penultimate chapter is perhaps the most interesting, as it covers man-made clouds. First there’s the militaro-cloud technologies, as worked on by sci-fi writer Kurt Vonnegut’s brother Bernard. In the movie of the book I imagine him played by Andre Morrell (or his modern equivalent, which would be Ian McKellen). Anyway, back in the 1940s and 50s, Bernard K (not Bernard Kay. See, these asides are annoying!) studied how clouds formed, and that led to seeing if they could be influenced or controlled.
Soon the US Naval Weapons Center took over the funding of this research. According to Pretor-Pinney, this was because it was believed that the Russians were also investigating the same area – though he gives no evidence for this belief. I can’t help feeling it’s a good excuse to do stuff you want to do anyway. Can’t get permission to build atomic bombs, rocket to the moon or stock your museum with other people’s statues? Hell, just say, “But if we don’t, some foreigners will…”.
So what was the result of the militaro-clouds?
“Operational cloud seeding commenced on 20 May 1967 and continued for six years over parts of Laos, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and Cambodia, at an estimated annual cost of around $3.6 million a year. It is impossible to say whether it was really successful in increasing rainfall, since no systematic assessment of precipitation was made after the initial test phase, which itself could not be considered to be statistically rigorous.”
Still, once the story got out that clouds were being developed as weapons, there was a bit of a rumpus. Some laws were passed to technically stamp out any further such projects. But, amazingly enough, the US has wriggled around its own legislation and Pretor-Pinney lists some unsettling developments.
More unsettling, though, is the second part of the same chapter, which addresses the clouds produced by plans. Condensation trails (or “contrails” if you wanna get with the lingo) have been the hot topic of debate for cloudies recently. There’d been some discussion anyway about how they influenced weather systems – affecting other clouds’ formation. And then, when US airplanes were grounded after 11 September 2001, eagle-eyed observers noticed that this pause seemed to have an affect on ground temperatures. Since then, it’s been shown that contrails “reduced ground temperatures during the day and raised them at night” (p. 274) – by as much a whole degree centigrade.
(Yes, that’s quite a lot.)
Pretor-Pinney is good at covering the different possible outcomes of this – it could add to global warming, it could lower temperatures – and also of the problems in trying to tackle it. Getting planes to fly lower would stop contrails forming, but would make them use up more fuel. So whichever way, the environment is shagged.
A little ironically, the final chapter sees Pretor-Pinney jetting off to the other side of the planet to see a cloud formation that’s also been seen over the English Channel. The “Morning Glory” is a miles-long tube of cloud that can clearly be seen cutting across the north of Australia in a wowing satellite image. Turns out that the place Pretor-Pinney goes to see it is Burketown, one of the dusty, ramshackle stop-offs on my brother’s trek across the outback.
Yes, he tells me, everyone talked about the “Morning Glory”. No, he admits, he wasn’t there at the right time to see it.
The deluge continues, and there are mad pictures of Reading, with the cinema I used to go to and shops where I'd buy milk now under feet of water.
The expected bank-bursting of the Thames last night seems, thankfully, not to have happened. M'colleague Matthew Sweet took the picture showing how the Evening Standard boldly and nobly takes such matters on the chin.
This reminds me of another billboard from when the London Underground was flooded with Yeti.
The press have had fun explaining why it's been so wet, and the new PM was live on telly in the gym yesterday talking tough about water and the causes the water. But he's pressing ahead with plans to build more houses on flood plains. Those who've suggested this might not be the wisest bit of genius ever - that flood plains are called flood plains because they, er, flood - are being accused of "playing politics". Not, you know, fulfilling a consititutional obligation to oppose the Government when they are silly.
Still, I suspect policy will be re-shaped anyway, not by the Government but by the money. There are estimates of claims to come of £2 billion, which could have the same knock-on effect on the economy as a whole as did the hurricanes and disasters of the late 80s. More importantly, it was the problems of insuring any workplace that allowed smoking (because of subsequent claims from workers on health grounds) that ultimately got smoking banned - where years of moral and medical lobbying had failed.
Am intrigued to see how the former Chancellor, with his reputation so tied to the health of the economy, weathers the ensuing financial storm.
Some years ago, I wrote my (not very good) MA dissertation about science-fiction being more fiction than science.
Yes, you might get a wheeze for a story by reading the news in New Scientist, but then your story is still all Made Up. Yes, sf writing worked out geostationary orbits and old Star Trek used things like mobile phones. But at the same time we don’t commute on inter-city travelators, nor drive atomic-powered motorbikes and flying cars. More’s the pity.
This cropped up recently when Michael Crichton’s State of Fear was lauded by those who profit from denying climate change. The book is about a conspiracy of leftie scientists who have dreamt this whole global warming thing up to get us to raise taxes. “See?” said those who would like this to be true. “See – it’s there in black and white. So leave the free market alone.”
Something is not true just because it is written down, especially when it is a story. Stories can include accurate details and philosophical truths, but they remain works of fiction, the worlds described in them entirely the creation of an author.
Science fiction sometimes claims otherwise because some of its authors care so much about the details; the description of, say, the engine on an atomic motorbike shows off lots of high-calibre research. But suppose we apply the same thinking to some other genre, where authors don’t need to rationalise the props. Because John Buchan describes trains and motorcars accurately in The 39 Steps, does it then follow that – as in the book – the Jews started World War One?
Anyhow. With this in mind, what are we to make of Sixty Days & Counting, the latest from Kim Stanley Robinson and the last of trilogy about climate change and politics? Well, first off, the indicia make plain that, “This novel is entirely a work of fiction… Any resemblance to actual… events or localities is entirely coincidental.” It might well be a model with which to discuss the real world, but it is not the real world itself.
Just as Crichton assumes that climate change isn’t a reality, Robinson assumes that it is. The first book in the trilogy sees Washington DC suffering unprecedented floods, and that’s swiftly followed by freakish and extreme weather and whole countries disappearing. It’s iconic, science-fiction-movie stuff – and as Crichton’s heroes would have it, blatant scaremongering.
Robinson also has a not-entirely-likely device of a US President blogging quite freely on any matters that take his fancy. With 5 million responses to any particular post, his communications directorate is in unsurprising meltdown. But this allowed Robinson to make explicit points about our attitude to the environmental problem:
“People were asking: Is it too late or not? And it seemed like this:
If it isn’t too late, we don’t have to do anything.
On the other hand, if it is too late, we don’t have to do anything.
So either way, don’t do anything. That was the problem with that way of putting the question. What we came to realize was that it was a false problem and not a question of better or worse. It was more a question of, okay, how fast can we act? How much can we save? Those are the questions we should be asking.”
To explore these questions, Robinson has two sets of protagonists both linked to the new President who reappraise their contributions to society. Charlie wants to advise on policy but he’s also stay-at-home dad to two sons. Frank thinks happiness can be found in a (literally) aping a lifestyle more like our ancestors had on the savannah – running, throwing stones and living in treehouses. But in doing so, he’s caught up in a hi-tech and nasty intelligence scam – a paranoid conspiracy.
For all it’s ostensibly about the scientific community and the practical solutions to problems based on evidence, Robinson also works in a lot of magic stuff via some Buddhist monks. I felt the shadow of his earlier The Years of Rice and Salt, though here we’re never sure whether to take the grand destinies and reincarnation entirely seriously. But there is evidence – for all Charlie wants to deny it – that there are evil spirits at work. I liked a last sort-of twist about whether his son Joe is really possessed…
I guess, like a lot of Robinson’s work it’s about trying to live a more enlightened and elegant life. Seriously liberal families work out their carbon footprints and realise they need to move house, while specific scientific projects to trap carbon in fast-growing lichen are matched by more philosophical stuff.
“The Dalai Lama talks about the situation they find themselves in, ‘a difficult moment in history’ as he calls it, acknowledging this truth with a shrug. Reality is not easy; as a Tibetan this has been evident all his life; and yet all the more reason not to despair, or even lose one’s peace of mind. One has to focus on what one can do oneself, and then do that, he says. He says, ‘We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people’s happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life.’"
Ibid. p. 308.
But more importantly, I think whereas Crichton’s book seems to say “we can’t prove it’s happening so don’t anything”, Robinson’s point is “we shouldn’t just change our lives because of the weather.” I think both authors understand that combating climate change means radical changes to the economic models of modern society. And rather than being about scientific fact, their positions are defined by political instincts.
By the end of the book, President Phil is also hooked on Emerson.
“One day [the President] laughed, beating her to the punch: ‘By God he was radical! Here it is 1846, and he’s talking about what comes after they defeat slavery. Listen to this: “Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances. Slavery and anti-slavery is the question of property and no property, rent and anti-rent; and anti-slavery dare not yet say that every man must do his own work. Yet that is at last the upshot.”’”
Have been comparing the post-Christmas tummy with m’learned colleagues, as well as sharing methods for working it all off.
One chum restricts himself to 10 units of booze this month, another has joined a gym. I have cut down my nights out significantly and will be gyming again once some work deadlines are seen off. No, Dr, honestly.
Golly I didn’t half eat well over the festive season. Some people say we miss the true meaning of Christmas these days, usually so as to remind us about that Jesus fella who was born on 25 December 0000 in a snow-strewn stable in Bethlehem to a blonde and blue-eyed mum while robins and holly looked on. Oh, hang on…
Christmas is, of course, a pagan festival co-opted by the Christians – who have a thing for nicking parties. Even Santa Claus as we know him today owes more to anglo-germanic traditions of the green man than he does to the real St. Nicholas of Myra. We celebrate with trees, the threat of punishment to naughty children and enchantment from mistletoe.
In more primitive times, it was good to have a knees-up around the shortest day of the year, when the world seemed at its bleakest. I wonder if Celtic man would follow the feasting with a vow to lose his new porkage, making a virtue of the lack of thrilling food for the remainder of the winter.
“admitted he would be reluctant to pressure people to stop taking overseas holidays – or indeed to stop flying himself. He explained:
‘I personally think these things are a bit impractical to expect people to do. I think that what we need to do is to look at how you make air travel more energy efficient, how you develop the fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less.’”
This answer was described as “muddle-headed” by Jonathon Porritt, chair of the Sustainable Development Commission (oddly not capitalised in the BBC News account), and came up again at the Prime Minister’s press briefing:
“Put to him that the Prime Minister therefore believed that the threat of global warming [...] could be dealt with without consumers really affecting their lifestyles, the PMOS [said that we had to] find more effective, energy efficient ways of doing what we do. Hence the investments that were already being made in energy efficient measures and hence our overall energy review, and the emphasis placed on both renewable and cleaner forms of energy such as nuclear. What should not be done was to address climate change by harming the world economy.”
The argument seems to be that we can’t expect people to give up their fun stuff for the sake of not breaking the weather. And anyway, Science has come up with some pretty neat tricks which will sort things out.
This thinking depends on two very wrong assumptions:
That Science will continue to come up with innovations as and when they’re needed
That the stuff Science comes up with can be implemented almost immediately
But worse, it assumes that we need not do anything to curb our rapacious behaviour because the boffins are on the case. We must not stop consuming.
People are not merely consumers, as some would have us believe. A “consumer” is just a mouth, and to concentrate on just the part of the process implies, wrongly, that there’s no consequence to stuffing our faces.
The mouth is just the start of the process, which leads through digestion to excretion. I guess in this model digestion could be seen as “value” – measured by the ratio of what it is being eaten to the benefit to the body doing the eating. As a consequence of that equation, the less that’s pooed out the other end the better. It is more elegant that way.
A rich and varied diet means lots of fibre and roughage to help clear out the system, because just eating cakes and sweets and Breakfast 3s from the local greasy spoon ends up clogging up the system until it drops down dead. This ends the consuming process once and for all: a bad thing.
That’s not to say we must never eat cakes, but there needs to be some balance. Ideally, we feast only sparingly, and match the excesses with leaner periods. Say, for example, following Christmas with a diet and the gym.
Likewise, when our lifestyles affect the weather, we do damage to ourselves. If the floods and thunderstorms don’t kill us, they at least damage the economy because of the excessive insurance claims, breaks in supply chains and general ensuring misery. The evidence seems to suggest that we either curb our eating habits voluntarily, or Nature (aka cause and effect) will have to do it for us.
TB’s view of consumption (dyswidt?) seems to be that people can’t be expected to mend their ways. But he’s also campaigning against obesity, and Government policy has targeted drink, drink-driving and smoking with considerable success. So sorry, but that’s bollocks.
There’s an argument that we cannot be forced or coerced into behaving less like walking cancer. But I also know a fair few smokers who are glad of the forthcoming English ban on smoking because it gives them the last resolve to quit. They knew they ought to, they had even given it a go, but the new rules make it easier by removing the temptation.
This is how I feel about air travel – which I haven’t half exploited in the last couple of years. There’s offsetting programmes, and the justification that it’s for work to some degree, but it would a lot easier if the flights weren’t quite so doable, and more of luxury.
Back in the mists of time when this post began, I said I’d stuffed too much recently. This gorging included a sizeable volume of Brussel sprouts, which are rather yummy. (They’re best when they’re cooked to not-too-sulphurous softness, and you can also serve them with bacon. Mmm.)
Though I like them a great deal, they don’t half carry a penalty. The Dr and I have held wars of attrition, attempting to asphyxiate one another. Which is why I’m only allowed sprouts in the festive season. It would be too dangerous any more often.
To finally get to the point, flights are like sprouts. Our actions have consequences, and you ignore the ensuing noxious emissions at your peril.
