Dames de voyage

Cory Silverberg interviews David Levy about sex and robots. (Link via Steven Levitt at the Freakonomics blog, where there is also a rather funny discussion of the subject going on...)

Familial frivolities

To the best of my knowledge, neither of my brothers has a blog, and nor does either sister-in-law, but I do have two extremely talented cousins on my mother's side of the family who both blog as a pastime!

Forthwith (I am partly contemplating this because I'm steeling myself to set up a Myspace page for the new novel, only I am slightly bewildered by how to handle the whole thing!): Patrick Pringle (here's a good sample post) and George Pringle (check out the songs, very fun stuff!--but it also must be said that enchanting prettiness is a good trait for a musician also in the modern world, she is extraordinarily lovely to look at!).

Sorry, George, now I will have made you self-conscious--but really it is only the honest truth!

Favorite devices

Dinah Birch reviews Brian Aldiss's science fiction omnibus at the TLS. Some interesting thoughts there on writing about the future, but the thing that really made me start paying attention (really I must get this volume, or at least Eliza Blair's story!):

Eliza Blair’s exuberant “Friends in Need” (2006) imagines a world in which a cheerful adolescent, speaking the electronic dialect of her generation, makes common cause with a genetically enhanced ginger tom, who is endowed with English of the most formal and fastidious kind. Together they dream of a revolution. “I’ll need some books on civil law”, ponders the cat.

Fatness, idleness and a limited book budget

At the New York Sun, Eric Ormsby has a very nice review of Jim Endersby's altogether wonderful-sounding A Guinea Pig's History of Biology (I have it from the library, but have not yet had a chance to delve into it--but I am going to buy a copy also, it is too appealing a title just to have from the library!):

Mr. Endersby has had the happy idea of tracing the successes of modern biological research through the subjects which have made it possible. Each of his chapters focuses on a particular plant or animal, from the now extinct quagga, a cantankerous relative of the zebra, to microscopic bacteriophage, or "bacteria eaters," and culminating in the genetically engineered OncoMouse®, one of the first rodents with a full-fledged patent all its own. As he points out, "the history of biology has, in part, been the story of finding the right animals or plants to aid the search."

That search was twofold. It drew on practical considerations: to improve breeding lines, beginning with racehorses but extending to livestock; to develop cash crops with higher yields, culminating in our current, and controversial, genetically modified crops (of which Mr. Endersby provides a cautious and very balanced assessment), and, most crucially, to understand and find cures for devastating diseases. But it was also a search for something fundamental and far more elusive. In Mr. Endersby's account, the history of modern biology is a story of challenged assumptions, of refusing to accept easy explanations, of a willingness to ask apparently silly questions and to pursue the answers to them with astonishing doggedness.

As Mr. Endersby rather mischievously suggests, certain questions may unwittingly reflect the preoccupations of those who posed them. Why, Darwin wondered, were two sexes needed for reproduction? Certain animals, such as barnacles — as well as most flowering plants — are hermaphroditic. Isn't self-fertilization safer, less random, and more efficient? Since flowers contain both male and female parts, why is pollination advantageous? Mr. Endersby notes that while he was pondering such tantalizing questions — which led eventually to his theory of natural selection — Darwin was also contemplating marriage. And in 1838, he drew up a list of the pros and cons. He worried about falling prey to "fatness and idleness," and fretted that matrimony would crimp his book budget. In the end, he decided in favor of marriage; having "a constant companion," he decided, was "better than a dog anyhow." One gets the distinct impression that the great man had spent far too much time in the company of barnacles.

Hmm, perhaps this is just the calming book that will be most suitable for me to read right now at this very moment...

(Somehow I do not think this one, which arrived this evening from Amazon along with an inordinate number of Clif bars and books about triathlon, will be nearly as suitable!)

The ghost of pelvis past

At the Times, the glamorous Olivia Judson offers evolutionary theory for alternate historians (sticklebacks also make me think of The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher!) Everything this week is conspiring to make me desperately want to start writing the sequel to The Explosionist, but it must wait for the end of the school year...

Substance P

Wendy sends a great little story about naked mole-rats (the picture is adorable, but really mostly it would make an excellent premise for a science-fiction novel--I love the notion of a distinction between chemical and mechanical pain, I had never thought of it in those terms before!):

Researchers have added to the list of biological curiosities about mole-rats: the animals do not feel all types of pain. The discovery could eventually help humans who are battling chronic discomfort.

African naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are unusual creatures — they are cold-blooded mammals, have a long lifespan, and live in co-operative societies of hundreds of individuals in a manner more typical of bees and wasps than moles or rats.

The animals react normally to the mechanical pain caused by pinching and prodding, but are insensitive to a suite of other normally nasty stimuli, according to Thomas Park of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Gary Lewin at the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany, and their colleagues.

Those stimuli include acid and capsaicin, the ingredient in chilli peppers that causes a burning sensation in many animals. These mole-rats are also odd in that their skin, when inflamed, does not become hypersensitive when exposed to unpleasantly hot objects, even though they react to excessive heat in the same way that other mammals do, the researchers report in PloS Biology

It is purely irrational, but I am consumed with the notion of how appealing it would be to have a huge cooperative society of naked mole-rats living somewhere nearby, perhaps not actually in a back garden (I am too lazy to garden!) but within walking distance...

Synergistic chemicals

Stuart Jeffries interviews Joan Brady at the Guardian--it's a fascinating profile in its own right, but it also clarifies certain matters concerning the absurd notion (I blogged about it the other day) that fumes can make a writer "go lowbrow" (link courtesy of Sarah):

The Times ran with the headline "Fumes made me go lowbrow, says writer". It even juxtaposed two extracts - one from Theory of War, the other ostensibly the opening paragraph of Bleedout (it is actually from later in the book) under the headline "Dumbing down" - as if to suggest the fumes had made Brady a literary thickie. "The voice is exactly the same as in Theory of War," she counters crossly. "I haven't dumbed down. I never said it. That's the pure invention of the Times. They have decided that this effete literary woman has become so stupid that she can no longer write boring literary fiction and writes poorly selling thrillers instead. My mental faculties haven't deteriorated. And anyway, what an insult it would be to thriller writers to suggest that you need to be stupid to write them. It seems to me so irritating that you would denigrate a remarkable genre where much of the best writing is done. I'm a great admirer of writers like John Grisham and Scott Turow."

Hmmm, my personal opinion is that Grisham and Turow should not be mentioned in the same breath, Turow is so markedly the superior writer...

Epistolary delights

Clarissa Harlowe to Anna Howe, from Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross, letter no. 12:

That you and I, my dear, should love to write is no wonder. We have always from the time each could hold a pen delighted in epistolary correspondencies. Our employments are domestic and sedentary, and we can scribble upon twenty innocent subjects and take delight in them because they are innocent; though were they to be seen, they might not much profit or please others. But that such a gay, lively young fellow as this, who rides, ,hunts, travels, frequents the public entertainments, and has means to pursue his pleasures, should be able to set himself down to write for hours together, as you and I have heard him say he frequently does, that is the strange thing.

Watermarketing

The other guys were more poetic.

"An elite 10% that engage in advice-giving conversation up to five times more frequently than the average American"

Clive Thompson considers the "Influentials" component of six-degrees-of-separation arguments. (Link courtesy of BoingBoing.)

The part I like concerns something that's useful for alternate historians to think about:

In 2006, he performed another experiment that chilled the blood of trendologists. Trends, it suggested, aren't merely hard to predict and engineer--they occur essentially at random.

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song's merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had "social influence": Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that's what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another's opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here's the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs--and the bottom ones--were completely different. For example, the song "Lockdown," by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song's success seemed to be due to merit. "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

Word of mouth and social contagion made big hits bigger. But they also made success more unpredictable. (And it's worth noting, no one in the social worlds had any more influence than anyone else.) So yes, Watts figures, if you rewound the world to 1982, Madonna would likely remain a total unknown--and someone else would have slipped into her steel-tipped corset. "You cannot predict in advance whether a band gets this huge cascade of popularity, because the social network is liable to throw up almost any result," he marvels.

Teaser (self-promotional)

I still don't have a digital image of the cover of The Explosionist, but I did have the exciting job this weekend of proofreading the final typeset pages. I've picked a page more or less at random (one that doesn't give anything of the plot away!) so you can see how it looks....

(I will just add, though I am not sure it is discreet--and certainly it's a subjective judgment--that I think I have done something relatively unusual, which is to say written a book whose second half is better than its first! I like the first half too, but it moves at a more leisurely pace--things really pick up adventure-wise once it hits the halfway point--this is perhaps not as practical as the other way round, since [most!] readers will after all read the first half first, and a gripping second half will be wasted if people don't make it there in the first place!)

Bundles of joy

Jane Dark's Sugarhigh! on the structure of music delivery today.

Uranium, the Dead Sea Scrolls, a kidney?

It seems to me that this would be a supremely useful piece of luggage.

This deathless manuscript lacked charm

A rather delightful piece at the Independent in which ten "famous writers" reveal the details of books of their own that never saw the light of day. I must say that I am rather tempted to pick up a few novels of Amanda Craig's at the library, I think I've only read one of them but if her unwritten books are so appealing the written ones must be even better:

I have a few "sock drawer novels" knocking around – a dreadful romantic thriller set on Capri, a historical tragedy inspired by the life of the poet Catullus and a mock-Gothic mystery involving the Brothers Grimm. All were half-written in my teens and early twenties, when I was under the delusion that fiction was about fame, money and the love of beautiful men.

However, nothing fills me with as much relief as the idea that my space opera, The Abyss of Time, will never see the light of day. Like all budding writers, I was trying to copy what had excited me most when growing up. In those days, Faber still published its best SF short story collections, and there were some genuinely cutting-edge writers such as Robert Heinlein, John Christopher, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K Dick and Cordwainer Smith who excited me enormously, especially when I was feeling cramped by reading Eng Lit at Cambridge and being told that Modernism was the last gasp of civilisation. I wanted monsters, magic, marvels and bombs, not bloody Leopold Bloom trudging round Dublin. When I conceived of a towering space opera based on The Tempest, with Prospero as a genetic scientist living in exile with his "daughter" Miranda on an asteroid, and Ariel and Caliban as warring aliens, I was thrilled.

A mixture of magniloquent philosophy and stilted pornography, its climax involved a lot of intergalactic explosions and a hermaphroditic elopement. Really, I just needed to live longer, calm down and get out more.

"Gold is just lead on holiday"

In the latest Astral Weeks column at the LA Times, Ed Park considers the novels of Terry Pratchett:

Who was it who said P.G. Wodehouse could be relied on to provide two or three brilliant metaphors a page? I want to write "Evelyn Waugh," but I don't think that's correct. I am also pestered by the dim sensation that I've already used this assessment, in some fugitive piece years ago, in a quaint era known as Before Google.

If it wasn't Waugh, maybe the culprit was George Orwell, or Hilaire Belloc, or someone newish like Stephen Fry. It might have been Douglas Adams. I am dangerously close to forgetting why I brought the matter up in the first place, but the distant yowling of a baby, who happens to be my infant son, brings the point home: In my current fragile mental state, I am incapable of reading anything but the lightest of comedies.

I don't mean "lightest" pejoratively -- nor "comedies," for that matter. (Nor "of"!) I like light. And it's my informed opinion that it is many times harder to pull off light than heavy -- for example, this review so far is the product of nearly a week of labor, though much of that was taken up with changing the font from Times to Helvetica and back again. (Hmm, how would this look in . . . Garamond?)