Feeling very spicy

A couple years back I came across the following call for submissions by editors Jay Lake and Nick Mamatas for their forthcoming anthology, "Spicy Slipstream Stories" --

"Submission Guidelines

From Spicy Detective's (circa 1930s) submission guidelines:

'In describing breasts of a female character, avoid anatomical descriptions.

If it is necessary to have the girl give herself to a man, or be taken from him, do not go too carefully into details...

Whenever possible, avoid complete nudity of the female characters. You can have a girl; strip to her underwear or transparent negligee or gown, or the thin torn shred of her garments, but while the girl is alive and in contact with a man, we do not want complete nudity.

A nude female corpse is allowable, of course.

Also a girl undressing in the privacy of her own room, but when men are in the action try to keep at least a shred of something on the girls.

Do not have men in underwear in scenes with women, and no nude men at all.

The idea is to have a very strong sex element in these stories without anything that might be interpreted as being obscene or vulgar.'

From Bruce Sterling's essay, "Slipstream", from Catscan #5:

'It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a "sense of wonder" or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction.

'Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books "slipstream."'

We'd like a bit of both for Wheatland Press's latest anthology, Spicy Slipstream Stories! What we're looking for is work that embraces both the traditions of the old "spicy" pulps (not just adventure, but adventure and bosoms out to here!) and the stylistic innovations and reader affect of that non-genre genre, slipstream. And when we say embrace, we mean embrace, the way a sweaty and bruised naif cut free from a phallic V2 rocket by a square-jawed test pilot will embrace her savior."

What red-blooded American skiffy postmodernist could resist that one? Alas, as happens too often in the world of small press, Wheatland Press proved unable to complete the project. So I was delighted to hear this week that the anthology has found a new home at Lethe Press.



Wondering what spicy slipstream looks like? Here's a tease.

"Wild Tchoupitoulas"
by Chris Nakashima-Brown

“Bob Denver,” said Captain Betty, “is going to be murdered by assassins from FEMA. Deal with it, get your ass over here, and oil my back.”

The fully reclined sun chair rattled slightly as she turned over onto her stomach. I stood. The balcony of her penthouse suite in the abandoned Hotel Le Meridien looked out over the black water of Canal Street and the French Quarter. The silent city mostly only spoke up at night now, with the sounds of gunfire, swamp boats, and helicopters.

“And while you’re at it,” she added, “can you juice my music?”

I picked up her emergency radio/music player and put a dozen hard cranks into it. Moments later, the mellow vibes of remixed white boy bossa nova lounge drifted over the railing.

“Aaahhh,” she sighed with a feline stretch. “That’s more like it.”

Her uniform hung from a chair nearby, blue and gray cotton festooned with insignia representing her status as commanding officer of the Coast Guard’s 3rd Psychological Operations battalion. Nearby, the handcuffs she had allowed me to remove, evidence of her confidence that she had my custody fully secured.

“Come on, already,” she said, reaching down to open her book, a dog-eared copy of Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.

I sat on the edge of her chair and grabbed the Bain de Soleil. The Gulf sun painted a beautiful landscape in miniature across the muscular but feminine V of her back, a palette of Aryan bronzes interrupted only by the flaming reds of her shampooed tresses and the shimmering lines of the bikini that had been revealed when she stepped out of uniform.
She picked up her Cuervo rocks off the concrete floor and took a long sip. I squirted a load of oil onto my palm and warmed it with friction, summoning wafts of coconut, aloe and hot chocolate into the air.

“Don’t forget to unsnap me,” she said, turning the page.

Perched softly on the small of her back, I reached down and slid open the tiny plastic latch of her bikini top. The straps fell to either side, revealing the field of tiny goosebumps along the bronzed marshmallow serrations of her well-formed spine. I ran my oiled hands along the underside of her lats, felt my way over the curves of her marvelous glutes, pushed strong splayed digits up the full expanse of her back. Time stopped as I repeated the process with slight variations in an infinite loop, watching the tones of her flesh darken subtly before my eyes, mirroring the dappled light of the after-storm sky.

In the endless moment, I forgot about Bob Denver and the myriad other unsettling conspiracies and rebellions I’d heard in the preceding hours of this long strange day marooned in the disaster area. Her Bain de Soleil was a narcotic, predatory catalyst of some antediluvian pheromones that summoned the reptile below.

She sighed as the massage released the formalized artifices of military command, my fingertips transmitting a premonition of more intimate interactions to come. Her presence pulled my head closer to hers, and I sucked in a lungful of the fresh radiance of her aromatherapied hair. Dhalgren dropped to the ground and she closed her eyes.

“Stupid fucking book,” she said, squirming anxiously under my hands. “That little fag just wanders around among the looters. Nothing happens. Where are the goddamned cops? You want me to read 900 pages of this?”

I looked at the raging orb of our warmed sun through the haze of a tropical afternoon. The eye of Ra provoked, glaring though the humid haze.

“Grab the handcuffs,” she said, eyelids getting heavy, albeit not in a sleepy way.

In the street below, a pair of guys who looked like refugees from the 1954 L.L. Bean catalog paddled a shallow draft canoe toward the Mississippi River and the West Bank beyond. The guy in the stern even had a rain hat and a pipe. A wounded woman lay propped against the gunwales, wrapped in gauze.

“It’s Mark Trail,” I said, clamping one cuff onto Captain Betty’s right wrist and the other to the railing. “Suppose he’s one of the revolutionaries?”

She rolled over, readiness in her smoky eyes. The shimmering bikini top barely preserved the last touch of her modesty, held in place only by the proud architecture of her ample bosom.

“Come here, prisoner,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, grabbing her 9mm Beretta, a cold bottle of water, Dhalgren, and a box of ammo. “I need to go find Penelope.”

Of Starship Troopers and Marching Morons

Firstly, apologies for my absence. I've been moving house, trying to finish a Ph.D. thesis, teaching Creative Writing to freshmen, and occasionally even writing some fiction. I've approximately finished moving house, though too many of my books are still in cartons, so my plans to continue the "Lost Books" series is hampered by my inability to find those books (though new bookshelves are being put up as I type this). Similarly, my intention to comment on the print and cinema versions of Starship Troopers will have to wait until I've seen 300.

But I was reminded of Starship Troopers this morning while embroiled in a discussion of C. M. Kornbluth's 'The Marching Morons' on another blog, Paul Riddell's The Esoteric Science Resource Center.

In case any of you don't know the story (and The Best of C. M. Kornbluth will have its day in my Lost Books series), it postulates that the tendency of intellectuals to have fewer children than the less educated will result in a world overpopulated by congenital idiots shepherded by an overworked minority with IQs six times as high. Kornbluth also used this idea in 'The Little Black Bag' and his collaboration with Frederick Pohl, Search the Sky... but in 'The Marching Morons', a twentieth century con man comes up with a murderous but sanitized retroactive solution to the problem.

Like so much dystopian sf, these were cautionary tales that started with the premise "If this goes on..." and came up with a worst-case scenario. While Kornbluth was almost certainly wrong about the influence of genetics on intelligence, at least two of these stories stress that the problem is also a cultural dumbing-down, an anti-intellectual streak that is strengthened by the tendency of people who are more inclined towards intellectual pursuits to have fewer children (and from what I've read, as late as the 1960s men were statistically less likely to marry those women who did have the determination to pursue higher education and a career), giving increasing power to an increasingly less educated majority until "wise guy" becomes the greatest insult imaginable (a similar premise to that of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451). Kornbluth raised the possibility of mass sterilization and rejected it on practical grounds; he failed to predict the developments in contraception that could have been used to slow down the population increase (as in Walter Tevis's Mockingbird), but as he was writing in 1950, I'm inclined to forgive him for that. And the end of 'The Marching Morons' shows what Kornbluth thought of the ethics of the solution his racist hustler suggested. (Search the Sky has a more humane answer, but one that depends on a considerably more advanced technology.)

As in dystopias, the setting of these stories may be nightmarish to the writer and most readers (especially as most sf fans are likely to identify with the intellectual elite), but Kornbluth's morons are actually depicted as happy and materially wealthy, albeit doomed to extinction by their over-exploitation of the planet. Dystopia, again, is in the eye of the beholder.

Of course, if you see this trend as real and problematic, there are better ways to deal with it problem than bribing the better educated to have more children (as was tried in Singapore), or restricting the number of children that people can have. A more secure and rewarding life for those who do pursue an education. Easier access to childcare (including allowing brain-workers to telecommute while spending more time with their families). Ready access to information for those who do favour intellectual pursuits but are restricted by geography (the web is a good start). And access to education based on intelligence and application rather than wealth.

Which brings me (at last) to Starship Troopers. There is a scene there where Colonel Dubois tells his students that "Nothing of value is free (...) If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier... and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity you the poverty of your wealth."

The novel states that this class, in History and Moral Philosophy, is the only compulsory class for the student body. This does not necessarily prove that education is free in this world (arguably Heinlein's personal utopia); the same teacher repudiates the idea that humans have any rights at all, and his assertion that the incompetent should not be encouraged to waste resources that can be profitably used by the competent might be applied to the material costs of education. However, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, and considering the stance another Heinlein father-figure takes in Have Space-Suit, Will Travel in favour of access to education and against anti-intellectualism, I will give Heinlein benefit of the doubt and presume that he would agree with me that even if access to education is not an inalienable right, it is more cost-effective for a society that can afford to educate its people to do so than to turn it into a privilege for the materially wealthy.

It could even be argued that while "Nothing of value is free" might be interpreted as a justification for making education PAYG, taken in full, Dubois's speech makes a case for giving access to education to those who've made the most use of it in the past, rather than those who can afford to pay for it in advance with their parents' money.

Now, as it happens, our conservative Australian government is calling its most recent budget "an education budget" because it's created a trust for universities to pay for new facilities (not including staff), and removed the cap on full up-front fee-paying places. This means that (our currently government-funded) universities will find it more cost-effective to give preference to students who couldn't qualify for entrance to university on academic merit. The Labor opposition, conversely, is promising to phase out full-fee-paying places in favour of those who qualify according to proven ability. As a tutor and postgrad student at one of these universities, you can probably guess who I'm likely to vote for (and against), and why I was sufficiently motivated to rant at this length.

This has been an unpaid political broadcast. We will return you to your regular programming as soon as possible.

Regression (Civilization) -- Fiction

In the realm of libraries, WorldCat is a really cool tool, a self-described "window to the world of libraries." As explained by Wikipedia, it's "the world's largest bibliographic database, built and maintained collectively by libraries that participate in the OCLC global cooperative. Created in 1971, WorldCat catalogs the content of more than 50,000 libraries in more than ninety countries. As of April 2006, it contains more than 63 million records referencing physical and digital items in more than 360 languages."

So I did a WorldCat search for the title of my forthcoming novel, Hurricane Moon (Pyr, July 2007.) And it came up. Oh, this is exceptionally cool. After working in libraries all my life as a student or staff, there's my book and my name:

Hurricane moon

by Alexis Glynn Latner

Language: English Type: Book : Fiction Internet Resource

Publisher: Amherst, N.Y. : Pyr, 2007.


Happily clicking to the next level of detail, I get this:

Loading Options

Buy from Amazon.com

Hurricane moon

by Alexis Glynn Latner

Language: English Type: Book : Fiction Internet Resource

Publisher: Amherst, N.Y. : Pyr, 2007. | Other Editions ...

ISBN: 9781591025450 1591025451 | OCLC: 86038541 | Cite this Item

Subjects: Regression (Civilization) -- Fiction. | Outer space -- Exploration -- Fiction.

More Info: Table of contents only

Oh, joy, it's even cataloged as to subject! Regression (Civilization) -- Fiction isn't a subject heading I would have thought of. That link pulls up 45 titles including books by authors ranging from Philip K. Dick to Pat Murphy to Andre Norton, and Cormac McCarthy to Doris Lessing. Outer Space -- Exploration -- Fiction yields 230 titles of books and movies as well.

I also see Hurricane Moon listed as being in some libraries already. These libraries may have Pyr books ordered "on approval" and routinely get them all. A book like that can show up in the online catalog before it's actually available... or even published quite yet. Right now, a couple of months before its publication, Hurricane Moon is held by nine libraries. Leading the list is the Gwinnett County Library in the greater Atlanta area (735 miles.) WorldCat assumes you might want to go to the nearest library that has the book you want, and so it helpfully notes the distance from wherever you're logged on.

Libraries in Seattle, Pasadena, California, Albuquerque, and Flint, Michigan are also on the list. Then there's the British Library (4700 miles.) And that sounds like a fine reason for me to visit the British Library the next time I'm on that side of the world.

Extinction of a species

When Paizo Publishing announced the demise of Dragon Magazine and its sister publication Dungeon, I felt a wave of nostalgic regret. Sure, I hadn't read Dragon in maybe 15 years or more, but it had a tremendous impact on my teen years and was a presence of varying familiarity throughout college.



I remember my first issue, bought at a Waldenbooks tucked away in a Victoria, Texas, mall in 1984. I'd been reading fantasy and classic science fiction--courtesy the Science Fiction Book Club--for a number of years, and was just starting to learn about this cool game called Dungeons & Dragons. The whole Basic, Expert and Advanced rules systems were so much Greek to me, but for someone who grew up on a steady diet of Godzilla and Harryhausen films, D&D was a veritable siren song. And, wonder of wonders, there was an entire magazine devoted to it!. Issue 91, pictured above, was the first issue I picked up. The cover art may go a long way toward explaining my obsession with airships in fantasy and SFnal settings--along with my own personal close encounter with Goodyear decades back. I sent in my subscription the next day, and for the next five or so years faithfully read every issue until 143, when my subscription finally lapsed. Along the way, I read some interesting fiction on occasion, saw games such as Gamma World and Boot Hill die, delved briefly into the now-quaint world of Play By Mail and spent quite a bit of money on Kelstar Enterprises' "The Melding" along with others I no longer even remember the names of. I even had a subscription to the PBM industry magazine "Paper Mayhem" for a year. In hindsight, the PBM scene was the direct forerunner of today's overwhelmingly successful massive multiplayer online games, but at the time the concept of playing against other folks across the country via once-a-week mail-in turns was a novel one. Issue 100 had rules for a new game by Gary Gygax, Dragon Chess, a three-level fantasy variant on chess that really caught my fancy. I even built my own tri-level board and painted dozens of miniatures to create my own set. I still have it, somewhat worse for the wear after umpteen moves, but I fully plan to restore it completely in the not-too-distant-future and proudly display it once again (and hopefully play it, too).

My favorite part of every issue, though, wasn't the articles or the fiction or the nifty games. It was the comics section in the back. Specifically, Wormy by David Trampier.



I couldn't really appreciate it at the time, but by the time I started reading it, Trampier's writing had improved significantly from the first strips that appeared back in 1977 and contained more subtext and nuance than most gamers I knew ever picked up on. He satirized the gaming culture, sure, but also expanded the boundaries of what was expected with a sword-and-sorcery comic with deft metaphor and confident storytelling. His work on Wormy is not unlike Dave Sim's Cerebus, at least before Sim went off the deep end, and in some of the longer, nearly wordless installments of Wormy near the end of the run hold faint echos of Alan Moore's writing. In addition to the main characters Wormy and Irving the Imp, two of my favorites were Ace and Hambone, a backwoods cyclops and his giant, one-eyed hound. I'd forgotten all about them until researching this post, so imagine my surprise to realize that Ace apparently had more than a slight influence on the creation of Daniel from my 1998 story Cyclops in B Minor. I certainly wasn't thinking about Trampier and Wormy when I wrote it, but looking back now the lineage is obvious and undeniable. I'm just glad I didn't give Daniel a one-eyed dog named "T-Bone."

Like everyone else reading Dragon back then, I saw the ads for Trampier's collected volume of Wormy strips, and made plans to send in my money. But I never quite got around to it. Then, abruptly, in the middle of an ongoing storyline, Wormy vanished from the pages of Dragon, with only editor's terse "We regret to announce that 'Wormy' will no longer be appearing in DRAGON Magazine" statement to answer any lingering questions on the parts of the fans.

All sorts of wild rumors took root over the years. To my best ability to sort it out, it appears that there was a payment dispute of some sort that poisoned the well for ever and always. Trampier was so angry at TSR that he returned some checks for his work on Wormy uncashed. TSR retaliated by sending back several completed but unpublished Wormy installments. And Trampier effectively disappeared until 2002, when he was interviewed by a newspaper in conjunction with his current job as a taxi driver in Carbondale, Ill. Shortly after I took over fiction editor duties at RevolutionSF I got it into my head to try and reprint the Wormy strips. I found that newspaper article, and through the magic of Google, tracked down the then-current address for Trampier. Alas, my letter was returned unopened, and I never could bring myself to intrude with a phone call. Not that it would have mattered, though--apparently Jolly R. Blackburn, Vice President of KenzerCo, followed the same process as I did and actually telephoned Trampier in 2005 to discuss a Wormy compilation. Trampier apparently turned him down flat, saying he wants nothing to do with Wormy or gaming ever again.

Personally, I find it disheartening that such a talent creator is willfully trying to diminish his creation. Unlike trademark law, where a trademark can be abandoned and enter the public domain, copyright law is fairly airtight--the copyright persists for 70 after the death of the creator, entering the public domain before then only if the creator releases said work in writing. So Trampier refuses to create any more Wormy strips, and refuses offers for authorized reprints. There are several unsanctioned sites online that publish Trampier's old strips as well as new creations by fans, and apparently Trampier hasn't bothered to address these one way or the other. That's the creator's right, however, and I'll defend that right even if I disagree with the decision. Wormy is a worthy creation that ended far before its time, and if anything, its legacy will outlast that of the magazine that first spawned it and ultimately spurned it.

Clackety-clack

Two years ago I stayed for the first time at the renovated Thunderbird Hotel in cosmic Marfa, Texas. Kind of the poor man's Vermilion Sands, that place, a refuge in a remote West Texas plain where the sun bleaches the prairie grass a certain iridescent shade of beige and the only place left to go is off the edge of the planet and through the Chinati Mountains to the hot springs at the end of the world.

Best of all, the Thunderbird, just like the Ballard short story, has an actual poetry-generating machine available for the use of guests. I borrowed it the last night, head filled with fresh aesthetic alterations from the West Texas moonscape, and figured out how to make it work, cranking out otherworldy missives to friends. I liked it so much that, when I returned home, I searched for one just like it. And found it. $7.00 on eBay.



The manual typewriter is a green machine of irrevocable text for an age of electrified malleability. It does not make any noise other than the pretty punchy cinema newsroom sound of the keys hitting the paper as you type. It promotes a careful selection of words. It promotes brevity. When you stop to think, it does not whir like the fan on the roof of an office building or crackle like an electric popcorn machine. Just the silence of your own thoughts. The only hard drive the soft wet fallible one between your ears.

Find yourself one, write a letter to someone you care about, and you will see what I mean. They are easy to find. The trick is finding the ribbons, but most towns of any size usually have one weird shop where some grizzled ostiary in lab coat maintains an inventory and the ability to jury rig a fit.

There are a few writers who still use them exclusively. Well, at least there's Howard Waldrop, who transforms the vintage courier font into a mind-blowing hieroglyphic. For a while, he was even blogging on a typewriter. Ask Eileen.

Careful, though. As Thomas Jones insightfully notes in the May 10 issue of London Review of Books, if you go there you need to avoid the potential film noir self-delusion:

"There is a wearisome machismo inherent in much of the iconography of typewriting. In The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Cornell, £15.95), Darren Wershler-Henry describes the typewriter as ‘the symbol of a non-existent sepia-toned era when people typed passionately late into the night under the flickering light of a single naked bulb, sleeves rolled up . . . lighting each new cigarette off the smouldering butt of the last, occasionally taking a pull from the bottle of bourbon in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet’. Replace that evasive ‘people’ with ‘men’, and the fantasy’s spot on.

"The Iron Whim (the title comes from a phrase of Marshall McLuhan’s) begins with an account of the making of Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test. On the afternoon of Sunday, 21 August 1966 – the year before my father’s typewriter was made – Ruscha drove a 1963 Buick Le Sabre at 90 miles an hour along Highway 91 through the Nevada desert. Shortly after five o’clock, the writer Mason Williams rolled down the passenger window, and threw out a Royal Model X typewriter. Patrick Blackwell photographed the results.

"Although Wershler-Henry devotes twenty pages or so to ‘the typewriter girl’ and ‘Remington priestesses’, and notes that between 1870 and 1930, the female proportion of typists in America soared from 4 per cent to 95.6 per cent, the bulk of The Iron Whim concerns itself with the likes of Paul Auster, Bram Stoker, William Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, J.G. Ballard and Hunter S. Thompson: in other words, men. He says more than once that he’s less interested in typewriters as machines (once upon a time the word also referred to the people, usually women, who used the machines) than in typewriting as discourse. But this is typewriting as it appeals to geeks who like guns: all those dates and serial numbers; all that metal. Incidentally, or not so incidentally, the first mass-produced typewriter, as Wershler-Henry notes, was made by a gun manufacturer, E. Remington and Sons. And the Tommy gun, invented by a one-time Remington engineer, John Taliaferro Thompson, was known during prohibition as the ‘Chicago typewriter’."

Though I have to say, the idea of throwing a typewriter from the window of a '63 Buick blowing down a Nevada highway is pretty fucking cool. Suggestions for a next generation homage are welcome.



(Thanks to the ever-erudite Tim Chapman at the JGB listserv for the LRB link.)

Confronting the suppressed.

There are few things more satisfying than a reading experience which functions as wish-fulfillment for desires you didn't realise you had, or which you didn't let yourself articulate. That was one of the aims of Dada, I know: the revelation of what we are suppress because it's too disturbing to acknowledge. But, silly old school me, I prefer my revelations to come in the form of linear fiction.

So there's Peter Raftos' The Stone Ship. I liked it. So did Cheryl Morgan, among other reviewers. It's entertaining, it has some vivid imagery, it's got one of the great fictional universities, it has a proper loathing for the administrative and bureaucratic side of higher learning, and it nicely balances the grotesque and the amusing.

All to the good, and I was quite happy with the money I spent on it.

But.

There's a scene in which a mob of crazed librarians, carrying "knives and staves and torches," rampages through the stacks, eviscerating, decapitating, and disembowelling the students and professors and researchers they find.

As I read that passage, my pituitary and hypothalamus flooded me with endorphins. I reached rapid conclusion of plateau phase. My eyes turned blue and I saw through time. My soul expanded, and my faculties were awakened to a high degree of life. I slipped the surly bonds of Earth, looked down on the clouds with contempt, and punched God in the face.

Needing a cigarette ain't in it, as Patrick O'Brian might have written, if he wrote Jack/Stephen slash.

I hadn't really admitted to myself just how much I wish death-by-explosive-dysentery on the students and faculty here. And I've only been doing this six years, and have yet to officially get tenure. I can only imagine what the Secret Masters of Librarianship say (besides "ook," I mean) about the students and faculty they have to serve when they meet in the shadowy offices of the A.L.A.

Ah, well. Being a librarian is hardly financially or emotionally rewarding, but at least I'm not a high school teacher. Those poor bastards have it rough.

Now THAT'S a volcano

New Horizons is winging its way toward Pluto, but along the way it's recording some really nifty scientific observations. The image of Jupiter's moon, Io, below is one of the most impressive ones thus far.



Ponder, just for a moment, the enormity of that volcanic plume. Keep in mind that Io is roughly the size of our moon. The mind boggles. And the sub-compact space craft New Horizons, not even designed to explore the Jovian system, continues to give us valuable science from that corner of the solar system. I can hardly wait for it to actually reach the Pluto-Charon system. No telling what wonders will be revealed.

PLUTO-BOUND NEW HORIZONS PROVIDES NEW LOOK AT JUPITER SYSTEM

WASHINGTON - NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has provided new data on
the Jupiter system, stunning scientists with never-before-seen
perspectives of the giant planet's atmosphere, rings, moons and
magnetosphere.

These new views include the closest look yet at the Earth-sized
"Little Red Spot" storm churning materials through Jupiter's cloud
tops; detailed images of small satellites herding dust and boulders
through Jupiter's faint rings; and of volcanic eruptions and circular
grooves on the planet's largest moons.

New Horizons came to within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on Feb. 28,
using the planet's gravity to trim three years from its travel time
to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach,
the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors
on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700
observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that
information back to Earth. About 70 percent of the expected 34
gigabits of data has come back so far, radioed to NASA's largest
antennas over more than 600 million miles. This activity confirmed
the successful testing of the instruments and operating software the
spacecraft will use at Pluto.

"Aside from setting up our 2015 arrival at Pluto, the Jupiter flyby
was a stress test of our spacecraft and team, and both passed with
very high marks," said Science Mission Directorate Associate
Administrator and New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern,
NASA Headquarters, Washington. "We'll be analyzing this data for
months to come; we have collected spectacular scientific products as
well as evocative images."

Images include the first close-up scans of the Little Red Spot,
Jupiter's second-largest storm, which formed when three smaller
storms merged during the past decade. The storm, about half the size
of Jupiter's larger Great Red Spot and about 70 percent of Earth's
diameter, began turning red about a year before New Horizons flew
past it. Scientists will search for clues about how these systems
form and why they change colors in their close observations of
materials spinning within and around the nascent storm.

"This is our best look ever of a storm like this in its infancy," said
Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. APL built
and operates the New Horizons spacecraft. "Combined with data from
telescopes on and around Earth taken at the same time New Horizons
sped past Jupiter, we're getting an incredible look at the dynamics
of weather on giant planets."

Under a range of lighting and viewing angles, New Horizons also
grabbed the clearest images ever of the tenuous Jovian ring system.
In them, scientists spotted a series of unexpected arcs and clumps of
dust, indicative of a recent impact into the ring by a small object.
Movies made from New Horizons images also provide an unprecedented
look at ring dynamics, with the tiny inner moons Metis and Adrastea
appearing to shepherd the materials around the rings.

"We're starting to see that rings can evolve rapidly, with changes
detectable during weeks and months," said Jeff Moore, New Horizons
Jupiter Encounter science team lead from NASA Ames Research Center,
Moffett Field, Calif. "We've seen similar phenomena in the rings of
Saturn."

Of Jupiter's four largest moons, the team focused much attention on
volcanic Io, the most geologically active body in the solar system.
New Horizons' cameras captured pockets of bright, glowing lava
scattered across the surface; dozens of small, glowing spots of gas;
and several fortuitous views of a sunlit umbrella-shaped dust plume
rising 200 miles into space from the volcano Tvashtar, the best
images yet of a giant eruption from the tortured volcanic moon.

The timing and location of the spacecraft's trajectory also allowed it
to spy many of the mysterious, circular troughs carved onto the icy
moon Europa. Data on the size, depth and distribution of these
troughs, discovered by the Jupiter-orbiting Galileo mission, will
help scientists determine the thickness of the ice shell that covers
Europa's global ocean.

Already the fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons reached
Jupiter 13 months after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station, Fla., in January 2006. The flyby added 9,000 miles per hour,
pushing New Horizons past 50,000 miles per hour and setting up a
flight by Pluto in July 2015.

The number of observations at Jupiter was twice that of those planned
at Pluto. New Horizons made most of these observations during the
spacecraft's closest approach to the planet, which was guided by more
than 40,000 separate commands in the onboard computer.

"We can run simulations and take test images of stars, and learn that
things would probably work fine at Pluto," said John Spencer, deputy
lead of the New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team, Southwest
Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. "But having a planet to look at
and lots of data to dig into tells us that the spacecraft and team
can do all these amazing things. We might not have explored the full
capabilities of the spacecraft if we didn't have this real planetary
flyby to push the system and get our imaginations going."

More data are to come, as New Horizons completes its unprecedented
flight down Jupiter's long magnetotail, where it will analyze the
intensities of sun-charged particles that flow hundreds of millions
of miles beyond the giant planet.