TO STET OR NOT TO STET

It's a truism of the 9 to 5 world that good work goes unnoted while the boss and the customers only single out bad work. More or less the same happens in speculative fiction publishing. We even have a sort of horror subgenre based on the reported misdeeds of editors, agents, copyeditors, and writers themselves.

Competent people with a high degree of professionalism aren't praised nearly enough. One of these is Deanna Hoak, the copyeditor for my novel coming out from Pyr in July 2007. She did an impressive job. In reviewing the copyedited MSS in Microsoft Word, I responded with the electronic equivalent of stet at some places – I meant it the way I wrote it. At other places my reaction was Am I ever glad she caught that one!

Deanna's work was astute, meticulous, and fair. She posed excellent questions when the MSS was unclear, and when it was perfectly clear but merrily contradicted itself. So she caught scads of typos and worse. As a reader, typos irritate me, but if I can tell what the word/name/sentence was supposed to be, I don't fall out of the story. If the grammar has a glitch I grumble but keep reading. Logical lapses and internal inconsistencies are the worst annoyance of all. If I have to flip back and forth in a book trying to figure out how it makes sense – or how it could make sense if rewritten to say what the writer probably intended – well, that's when my suspension of disbelief teeters and may come crashing down. As John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction, a writer's mistake can abruptly and unpleasantly snap the reader out of the "vivid and continuous fictional dream." That's not, not, not what I want for my novel, and at number of points where it won't happen, I'll have Deanna to thank.

She has a Website in which she offers insight into what her job is like and much good advice to writers. Recommended!

No. 5 of 9

So here we are, a year (give or take) following the launch of New Horizons mission to visit the last unexplored planet in our solar system. A lot has changed since then--namely, a conspiracy of egomaniacal astronomer-types (not to be confused with the sane, rational astronomer-types) conjured up a new and utterly convoluted definition of "planet" for the sole purpose of demoting Pluto. That, folks, is a dead horse I won't continue to beat here at this particular moment. Instead, I'd like to point out some nifty value-added science New Horizons is currently cooking up en route to its primary target world eight years from now:

The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons will make its closest pass to Jupiter on Feb. 28, threading its path through an "aim point" 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from the center of Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity will accelerate New Horizons away from the Sun by an additional 9,000 miles per hour - half the speed of a space shuttle in orbit - pushing it past 52,000 mph and hurling it toward a pass through the Pluto system in July 2015.

At the same time, the New Horizons mission team is taking the spacecraft on the ultimate test drive - using the flyby to put the probe's systems and seven science instruments through the paces of a planetary encounter. More than 700 observations of Jupiter and its four largest moons are planned from January through June, including scans of Jupiter's turbulent, stormy atmosphere and dynamic magnetic cocoon (called a magnetosphere); the most detailed survey yet of its gossamer ring system; maps of the composition and topography of the large moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto; and an unprecedented look at volcanic activity on Io.

The flight plan also calls for the first-ever trip down the long "tail" of Jupiter's magnetosphere, a wide stream of charged particles that extends tens of millions of miles beyond the planet, and the first close-up look at the "Little Red Spot," a nascent storm south of Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot.

"Our highest priority is to get the spacecraft safely through the gravity assist and on its way to Pluto," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. "But we also have an incredible opportunity to conduct a real-world-encounter stress test to wring out our procedures and techniques for Pluto, and to collect some valuable science data."

The Jupiter test matches or exceeds the mission's Pluto study in duration, data volume sent back to Earth, and operational intensity. Much of the data from the Jupiter flyby won't be sent back to Earth until after closest approach, because the spacecraft's main priority is to observe the planet and store data on its recorders before transmitting information home.

After such a long and thorough observation of the Jovian system by Galileo, it is really a great bonus to be able to scope out Jupiter with a suite of even more advanced instruments such a relatively short time later. It'll be particularly nice to get closer observations of the "Little Red Spot" as it grows, moves closer to, and interacts more with the famous Great Red Spot. Any observations of the Jovian satellites--in particular, Io and Europa--will be quite welcome as well.

When I was a kid, I would pore over the issues of National Geographic that featured extensive coverage of Viking at Mars and the Voyagers at Jupiter and Saturn. I'd goggle over the photos, and reread the articles until the pages were literally in tatters. That thrill's never really left me, and I'm sure I'm only one of millions eagerly awaiting our first closeup view of Pluto and Charon. I have to admit, though, that Jupiter's a pretty groovy opening act.

For more information on New Horizons, visit http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.

Still missing

Some imagined sightings of Johnny Gosch, Missing Paper Boy and forgotten icon of the American imagination



• January 8, 1990, 12:41 pm: Standing against the wall of an airport terminal in Cozumel, Mexico.

• August 27, 1983, 3:57 pm: Emerging from the bathroom of a service station on Highway 668, east of Phoenix.

• September 5, 1982, 4:20 pm: Peering out of the rear window of a rusted and worn white Ford Econoliner van traveling north on 86th Street, Clive, Iowa.

• June 10, 1993, 9:35 am: Sitting in front of an abandoned Stuckey's outside Cape Girardeau, Missouri, drinking water.

• October 19, 1986, 6:15 am: Shuffling down Cahuenga Boulevard, Los Angeles, wearing tight jeans and an olive green windbreaker.

• July 15, 1994, 4:00 pm: Raking sand trap, Hole 17, Royal Melbourne Country Club, Buffalo Grove, Illinois.

• December 20, 1987, 10:00-11:17 pm: Appearing as "Johnny (School Boy Number 3)" in "The Dead Paper Boys Society," Aetherium Theatre, 44th & Broadway, New York City.

• October 28, 1984, 7:40 pm: Hitchiking, westbound shoulder, Route 40, mile marker 172, State of Nevada.

• February 3, 1985, 10:11 am: Sorting novelty devices wrapped in blister-packs, back room, "The Secret" magic shop, Merle Hay Mall, Douglas Avenue, Urbandale, Iowa.

(For one elaborate and insane theory of this secret history of middle America, read this)

Straight Outta Ljubljana

If you're feeling in the mood for 75 minutes of a hyperactive Marxist-Lacanian from Slovenia spewing Theory riffs on his world tour, this is the ticket.

Žižek! Now available at your local indy DVD rental shop.

Sic semper posterus

Edit: The original post was lost; this is a recreation, sans relavent links.

For some of us, science is ensuring that the future will be every bit as glorious as we’d ever hoped.

By "some of us," I mean those of us whose parents read De Quincey’s "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" to us while we were still in the cradle. We’ve a macabre (not to speak of morbid) bent, and a heightened appreciation for aesthetically pleasing methods of putting others to death. The artistic murder, the one which appeals to a sense of beauty and fitness, to theology and geometry, deserves admiration as much as a well-turned violin solo.

One can point to the achievements of Dr. Anton Phibes, of course (and I often do), but we needn’t restrict ourselves to fiction. History is full of murders which are pleasing and symmetrical, which have a certain panache or élan or je ne sais quoi, mais il assassine joliment néanmoins.

Tradition (if not modern Japanese scholars) tells us that Uesugi Kenshi was killed by a ninja who hid in Uesugi’s privy for several days; when Uesugi sat down to relieve himself, the ninja thrust upward with a spear. (Something similar befell Emperor Caracalla). Divine Claudius was murdered by a poisoned feather, stuck down his throat in an apparent attempt to induce vomiting. The Markov death umbrella has a pleasing pulp feel, while the Great Molasses Disaster, long rumored in Boston to have been industrial sabotage aimed at killing one particular worker, is on the correct side of the surreal.

But those are all in the past. We have more wonderful murder weapons awaiting us.

You will undoubtedly have been aware of the use of rats in detecting landmines. It makes good sense, seeing as rats have a better sense of smell than dogs, are easier to train, are generally cleverer, and of course much lighter. But you may not have heard that scientists, using fifty-year-old science, are using rats not only to discover buried earthquake survivors but are even controlling the rats’ behavior from a distance. Those behind this use, in their article in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods (v133n1-2, 15 Feb 2004), describe their equipment as "a multi-channel telemetry system for brain microstimulation in freely roaming animals." A Boston University researcher is achieving similar results with sharks, electrically stimulating the sharks’ sense of smell via remote control.

Meanwhile, for at least fifteen years experiments have been carried out in recording and "artificially" eliciting saccades, "fast eye movements by which objects of interest are sought and captured." (See, for example, Trends in Neurosciences, v13n10, Oct. 1990). And scientists have shown that remote electronic stimulation of the monkey brain can artificially and automatically evoke fight/flight reactions. (Neuropsychologia, v44n6, 2006).

My point?

Very soon now we will no longer need fear the gracelessness of the sniper, the obviousness of the suicide bomber, or the crudity of the poisoner. In their stead will be the assassination by remotely-controlled animals. Humans being what they are, we can expect gaucheries: the predictable pecking to death of a president by a flock of pigeons, the general tediously killed by the no-longer-urban-mythical rat-in-the-toilet, who was there to gnaw through the general’s exposed genitals, and the unimaginative (albeit lethal) alligator or hippopotamus attack on a tyrant. But there will be artists among the killers, the occasional Cassius standing out from the many Servilius Cascas and Decimus Brutuses. We can expect straightforward symbolism: the glutton gnawed to death by pigs, those who malignly buy up stock being trampled by bulls. We can look forward to homonymic puns: boors gored by boars. We can pleasantly anticipate whimsy: a lethal bear attack on Stephen Colbert, peacocks smothering whichever vapid heiress is the celebrity-du-jour, rabbits lethally abrading the skin of the president of a cosmetics company. Those of us of a pulp mindset will be able to glory in remote-controlled monkey assassins.

Fear the future? Some of us can’t wait for it to get here.

The Tick-Tock of the Doomsday Clock, part 3

With my mother in the early stages of senile dementia, I'm reminded of the Doomsday Clock's minute hand – too near midnight for comfort, but flicking back and forth when the future looks better or worse. She starts having falls at night and suddenly it's three minutes to midnight. The next morning, I see a red-tailed hawk perched in the tall, bare sweet gum tree over the house. I call my mother to come look, and she marvels with me at the big raptor with its terracotta-colored tail feathers. My mother's parenting style over the years can be described as woefully inadequate. But she did instill in me a sense of wonder about nature.

The next day my mother clearly remembers seeing the hawk. The minute hand of her personal doom has backed up a bit, or so I imagine. I'm aware that senile dementia progresses inexorably. At some point my mother may not have a future in a meaningful sense, even if she's still alive.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock, on the other hand, is designed to be a galvanizing warning. The journal hopes that if the warning is heeded, the minute hand will never touch midnight: nuclear war won't happen.

While the realization of my mother's condition was sinking in over Christmas of 2006, I happened to be reading Our Final Hour by Martin Rees, the renowned cosmologist and Astronomer Royal in Great Britain. He subtitled his book A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century – on Earth and Beyond. Rees thinks we were lucky to get through the Twentieth Century without a fallout-flavored world war. But our luck may be about to run out. "If our solar system's entire lifecycle, from its birth in a cosmic cloud to its death-throes in the Sun's terminal flare, were to be viewed 'fast forward' in a single year, then all recorded history would be less than a minute in early June. The twentieth century would flash past in a third of a second. The next fraction of a second, in this depiction, will be 'critical': in the twenty-first century, humanity is more at risk than ever before from misapplication of science."

The British edition of Our Final Hour is titled Our Final Century. Did a Marketing Department decide that America's event horizon is so short that "century" wouldn't grab the American attention? Could be.

Rees covers a lot of doomsday ground, includes asteroid impacts. Asteroids coming our way are inevitable, but disastrous impacts may be preventable with space monitoring and deflection technology. Rees even mentions extremely unlikely world-rending outcomes of as-yet-unknown new physics. He advises scientific caution with regard to events of very low probability but utterly catastrophic consequences. The most probable dooms are those that stem from "bioterror and bioerror." Outcomes range from civilization collapsing to the top of the Earth's ecosystem shearing off, leaving the bacteria to start over.

Through the book, Rees builds a case that human technological adventurism has higher stakes than we imagine, for this reason: we do not know if there is intelligence anywhere else in the universe. If we manage to destroy ourselves, perhaps this universe will forever cease to wonder at itself.

It's distressing to imagine no one out there, and intelligence on Earth winking out.

Usually I don't share Rees' cosmic concern. I tend to think that intelligence exists elsewhere in the universe. My guess is that intelligent races arise, live and die on a regular basis the same as stars do. Or if intelligence doesn't occur throughout the stars, it could happen sequentially here. Who says we are the only, last, much less best intelligence on Earth? When we fade away, or manage to make a more drastic exit, and somebody else evolves into the role of tool-using intelligent life, I bet it'll be squirrels. Or creatures evolved from ravens, crows and jay birds, and then the dinosaurs will once more rule the Earth.

My science fiction happens in that kind of universe. In my novel Hurricane Moon, there's an old world that has birthed a succession of intelligences ranging from sapient bipeds, to intelligent birds, to sentient plants. In other words, when I'm in a SF-nal mindset, I don't think it's a cosmic tragedy that the human species has a finite life expectancy.

Yet the day my mother and I saw the red-tailed hawk, I think I better understood what Martin Rees hopes to get across. It was such a significant coincidence: the hawk in the sweet gum tree, right over the roof of the house, where we've never seen a hawk before, on a bad day for my mother, in the last meaningful fraction of her life, when I was there to call her to come see it. Traditional peoples believe in totems and spirit-animals. So do I, just for different reasons. The red-tailed hawk is our traveling companion on Earth and a fellow creature with whom we share a great deal of DNA. Hawk kind is older than hominid kind and abler in flight – every glider pilot I know yearns to soar like a hawk, and would be thrilled just to soar in the same thermal with one.

The hawk in the sweet gum tree was our hawk, because we are the hawk's relatives. Any time you lose a relative you lose a part of yourself. Within the realm of the possible, you do what you can for the welfare of your relatives. You avoid doing them harm. And a cavalier attitude toward the ruin of a relative is just unconscionable. Being responsible for our relatives – including parents and hawks, people and trees – is complicated, hard, and human: something we need to do because we are the natural world being aware of itself in dread and wonder.

The Day After

Fox has amped up the fear factor by opening the new season of 24 with a nice little mushroom cloud over Los Angeles. We watch with Jack Bauer from the vantage point of a perfect California cul-de-sac, where Jack has just rescued a family that was naive enough to help out the Arab family next door, only to discover they are *actual terrorists* (the son who makes suburban dad fetch the nuclear detonator amusingly played by the guy from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with a healthy dose of Spicoli — a perfect postmodern soldier of Hassan-i-Sabah). The pilot episodes warmed up the suitcase bomb with several scenes of intense torture inflicted by both sides (our hero scarred by Chinese interrogators like a Mel Gibson messiah), detention camps of American citizens straight out of an Alex Jones fever dream, and the lives of millions balanced on edge as the IT guys fight their Dilbert-meets-Melrose Place office battles.



24 has achieved near media ubiquity and all the best ads, reflecting its gift for mainlining the Zeitgeist since it premiered the same month as the September 11 attacks. The genius of 24 is its simulated realism, situating our contemporary geopolitical anxieties in the milieu of of Hollywood's imaginary version of Los Angeles.

The cliffhanger-on-speed plotting of 24 keeps us from ever giving much thought to the colossal anachronism at its narrative heart: the fate of the world persistently determined by the acts of a small group of meta-cops in the L.A. branch of a non-existent domestic ops division of the CIA. We buy it implicitly, our imaginations having been so well-nursed by Hollywood over the past century: Los Angeles is the primary soundstage of our dreams and nightmares. The streets the cops cruise, the deserts the cowboys cross, the planets Kirk beams down to. And, most importantly, the venue where most apocalypses occur. (Just ask Mike Davis.)



The world of 24 operates in accordance with the logic we believe — the narrative logic of police procedurals and disaster movies (informed by hundreds of hours of seminars in which nascent screenwriters internalize Joseph Campbell's distillation of the heroic über-myth). Jack Bauer is a direct descendant of Adam-12 Officer Pete Malloy and his kin, the law and order paranoia of the 60s amplified into the nuke next door (too bad they went for James Cromwell as Bauer's dad rather than Martin Milner). Just as Martin Milner matured from the frat boy beatnik Hemingway of Route 66 to become the lonely dutiful white guy playing patrol car whack-a-mole as the world went mad, Kiefer Sutherland leads the way as the Brat Packer devolved into a post-Clancy fighting machine who's not afraid to torture the enemy when it suits his real-time utilitarian calculus. And 24's terrorists are straight out of the Starsky & Hutch playbook — quintessential California Windbreaker Hoods mixed with a little Yellow peril.



As Hurricane Katrina played out last year, you could hear the collective gears grinding as our actual societal response to the disaster failed to conform to the Hollywood disaster movie paradigm. The master narrative calls for Charlton Heston, the solitary American professional who achieves heroics through self-reliant individualism, in some cases literally holding the world together as it cracks apart. Mass catastrophe, it turns out, is not amenable to resolution by lone Western heroes. That only works on the micro-scale -- the lone yuppie father, loading his family into the Volvo to escape to the Houston Four Seasons Hotel, to the in-laws in a nice white neighborhood in Memphis, barely evading the hordes of vampiric zombies that will rape and eat them all if they fail to make it out before the giant tidal wave hits.



Watching Kiefer Sutherland tackle the horns of the GWOT's dilemmas with the taciturn decisiveness of a rodeo cowboy is far more therapeutic than confronting the failure of reality to conform to the master narrative. See, e.g., the unresolved effort to find Osama in his Blofeldian mountain lair; the failure of Iraq's fractured society to gestate some saccharine Jimmy Stewart fantasy democracy. Nb. the quickly forgotten staged mythology of Jessica Lynch. Kiefer Sutherland's real-world analog may be Pat Tillman.

Is the real challenge for our leaders to do a better job of imposing the American myth on the reality-based community? We await the imminent appearance of "Jack Bauer for President" buttons.