I took part in a rather science fictional thing last night. A trans-national wake fro someone still alive moderated and shared over twitter.
I’m not sure where everyone else was on the #forIain hashtag last night, but I was in The Netherlands at the Planck conference when I joined in with the mass single malt drinking in honour of Iain (M) Banks.
It was sad, but also a little cathartic. I quite like the idea of holding a wake for someone before they’re gone, but know that’s not always possible.
Devastatingly bad news about author Iain M Banks:
http://www.iain-banks.net/2013/04/03/a-personal-statement-from-iain-banks/
A great writer, great guest at conventions and elsewhere. And now he probably won’t be around to be the Guest of Honour at the London Worldcon in 2014.
One of the great things about teaching the Planets part of Imperial’s Sun Stars and Planets course is that it gives me an excuse to read scientific reports I would be reading anyway from the science fictional perspective. But the way stories have come out over the last several weeks that have been so well timed for lectures I’m delivering has been more than a little uncanny.
Before I started we had, of course, the landing of Curiosity on Mars, Messenger’s results from Mercury and Dawn’s results from the asteroid belt. Then, just before I started the course, the possibility of two naked eye comets this year emerged. And once I started we had the Russian meteor, and a few days ago a report about the nature of supermassive planet cores around evolved stars, suggesting that they are the remains of evaporated gas giants.
Next week I give a couple of lectures on exobiology, so inevitably there’s a relevant report in Nature in a paper in Science.
It seems that suboceanic basalt, a layer several kilometres thick and covering 60% of the planet, may contain a large number of chemosynthetic bacteria using hydrogen, carbon dioxide and reactions with iron to produce their energy, rather than any of this new fangled photosynthesis stuff. This suboceanic biosphere could be bigger than the biosphere we know on the surface.
The science fictional connections are obvious – the ‘shadow biosphere’ discussed in novels by people like Peter Watts – comes a step closer.
And of course with the company I keep the first comment I hear when I mention this is ‘are you sure they’re not shoggoths’?
There is a long history of interstellar warfare in SF, using both real and less real physics. Various discussions of space combat can be found at Strange Horizons, Gizmodo and elsewhere, to name but three. Those three discussions cover a lot of ground, most of which I agree with, but with one notable exception. What I’d like to discuss here is the somewhat more specific issue of interstellar warfare – of how one might conduct a war between two solar systems separated by several light years. Hopefully, being an astrophysicist, I can bring some quantitative analysis to the subject.
Assumptions
Before we get started, various assumptions need to be clearly stated. The most important of these is that I will be trying to keep within the accepted laws of physics. Thus no faster than light travel will be permitted. If that were possible it would be a total game changer, and the details of how it worked would define the way interstellar warfare would be conducted. So, no warp drives, jump drives, stutterwarps, Guild navigators or hyperspace.
Secondly, I will take as an assumption that the resources to conduct this war are available in the opposed systems. This is not a simple assumption. Accelerating a ship to 10% of the speed of light (0.1c), which is what I’m going to assume our interstellar battleships are travelling at, takes a lot of energy. For a 1000 Tonne vehicle, probably the minimum size craft one might consider, that will take 4.5×10^20 J. That amount of energy is equivalent to the whole of the UK’s power output (about 110 GW) if dedicated to this purpose, and no other, for 130 years. And that’s just to get it up to speed – I haven’t included any allowance for inefficiencies and deceleration at the destination system. However, the total power from the Sun received by the surface of the Earth is about 2×10^17 W. If this could all be collected and used, you could generate the power required to accelerate our interstellar battleship to 0.1c in about 2 hours. Of course, you probably wouldn’t want to pave the whole planet with solar cells for this. Instead you’d build a solar collector the size of the planet. In fact, since you would want a large battlefleet, you would probably build several.
Thirdly, I will assume, for the moment, that magic nanotechnolgy pixie dust isn’t available. This, like FTL travel, would be a massive game changer. Our 1000 Tonne ship could be replaced with untold billions of nanomachines, any one of which, on arrival at the victim system, could construct anything it wanted from local resources.
However, the use of local resources in general, albeit using more conventional construction techniques, is something that I will allow, and in fact is probably something that will be essential.
Interstellar Warfare will be Asymmetric
In terms of sheer numbers and resources, the system being attacked will have huge advantages. There will be one or more inhabited planets, along with assorted habitats on moons, asteroids, and floating in space. In the event of a pitched, face to face battle, the overwhelming numbers in favour of the locals would mean almost inevitable defeat for the invaders, in the long run if not in any specific engagement.
However, the vastly superior resource base for the locals is also a disadvantage, since, as we shall see later, this makes for a very target rich environment.
Hide and Seek with Bazookas
I borrow this phrase from one of my favourite space battle games – Star Cruiser from the late lamented GDW’s 2300 universe. While SC uses FTL and other exotic physics, the basic idea that the main defence of a starship is stealth is a conclusion I agree with.
This isn’t universally accepted. Memphet’ran’s discussion of space combat concludes that the amount of energy released by starship propulsion would be easy to detect even at very great distances, and that the waste heat from a ship, even in cruise mode, would also be easy to spot.
Interestingly, recent projects in astrophysics have a lot to say about these problems.
Boost Phase Detection
Memphet’ran claims that an accelerating starship could be spotted as it boosts to cruise velocity in its own system, while still light years from its target. In a sense, this detection problem is equivalent to trying to detect the light of a terrestrial planet orbiting another star, and a lot of astrophysicist effort is current aimed at exactly that.
Let’s look at our 1000 Tonne battleship again. It needs to use at least 4.5×10^20 J to get up to speed. In fact it will be more than that, at least twice to account for exhaust gasses, unless something more sophisticated, like a laser-driven solar sail, is used (more on these in a moment). If we assume our invaders are coming from a sun-like star, then the power output of our ship’s engines has to be seen against a background stellar output of ~3.8×10^26 W. If our starship was to burn all its fuel, and go from a standing start to 0.1c in just 1 second (which would produce some rather extreme G forces), the ship’s energy output would amount to only about a 1 in a million perturbation on the stellar output. Spreading the boost phase over 20 minutes, which would still turn your crew into a monomolecular layer of raspberry jam, would turn that into a 1 in a billion perturbation. A more realistic boost phase, say using 1g acceleration, would take 34 days to reach 0.1c, meaning that the light of the engine would be essentially undetectable against the light of the star.
But wait, I hear you say, by the time that 34 day burn has finished, the ship will be something like 300 AU away from its starting point. Won’t that be far enough to be able to resolve its emission from that of its parent star? That is more technically feasible, except for the fact that the invaders know where their enemy are, and can arrange to have the sun at their backs for the whole of the boost phase.
This analysis also ignores the possibility of hiding the light of the boost phase with some kind of screen, which would probably be necessary anyway since otherwise you might irradiate your ship and crew. The laser-drive light sail, mentioned briefly above, is just a large scale example of such a screen, but with the ‘engine’ left behind. Any light overspill from a laser booster would be quite conspicuous – indeed searches for laser lines superimposed on stellar spectra have been proposed as a method for detecting extraterrestrial intelligence. In our case, though, we want stealth, and this can easily be achieved by oversizing the light sail, so that any weak, sidelobe spillover from the boosting laser would still be obscured by the sail.
We must therefore conclude that boost phase detection of a launched invasion fleet is not at all possible. The victims of the attack will be unprepared for what is going to happen.
In the next instalment we will look at the arrival phase and conduct of the actual war.
There is a problem in writing near-future science fiction, which is that the real world is often closer to your fiction than you think. Charles Stross has written a fair bit about his experiences of this when writing his near-future novels Halting State and Rule 34, with key chunks of the plot of the after (and it’s originally planned title) eaten by Bernie Madoff and by rumours about Goldman Sachs (rumours which of course are not true).
I think I may have just had a similar experience, albeit on a smaller scale.
I’m currently working on a short story that has as its core conceit the crowdsourcing of various works to benefit the environment, with rich westerners spending their evenings driving drone bulldozers on environmental construction sites etc.. And now I read that Google is planning to deploy drones as a way of tracking and combatting ivory poachers.
Cool idea, one I now feel I should have had, but it opens some of the same cans of worms as the ones I was working on in my story. Guess I’ll have to work harder on the rewrites.
This list of questions is circulating among writing friends. I’ve been specifically tapped by Jacey to do this, and it gives me a chance to write about the Work In Progress that’s a bit more structured than me just burbling on ad nauseam. So here goes…
What is the working title of your next book?
The Bourbaki Conjecture
Where did the idea come from for the book?
I saw a scene in that half waking state between sleep and consciousness where two people walk through an airlock into a generation ship, and find devastation. One says to the other “This place didn’t die, it was killed.” I had to find out how they got there, and what happened next. But that scene isn’t in this book. It’s probably in the sequel, or in the final volume of the trilogy.
What genre does your book fall under?
Hard SF with a bit of space opera.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
I’m not one of those writers (or readers) who plays fantasy castings, so this isn’t an easy one. Jewel Staite from Firefly would do a good job as the ship engineer (yes, I’m probably typecasting), while Noomi Rapace would be good as the scientist left behind by the Collapse. Olivia Williams might work as the ship captain, but she’s a little too glamorous. Michelle Yeoh would be great as Colonel Cho. And as for the new pilot, Arthur Dervill would be about right, but he’s probably not young enough.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A remnant from the fall of Earth is revived in a very different world, and finds that the mystery of her survival hides a dangerous threat from her past.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It will not be self-published.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
About seven months, but the rewriting is taking a long long time.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I’d like to compare it with the work of Al Reynolds, but that would be pumping my own ego too much.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The Milford Writing Workshop. I took a 4000 word short story to them, written as a test for the world this book, and the putative sequels, would be set in. The short didn’t go down well, but in the discussion after the critting session, I answered all of the unanswered questions about what was going on, and more. They told me it was a novel and that I should write it. I did.
What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
A disastrous singularity, technological paranoia, an insane scientist gestalt, trans-neptunian habitats, exploring the Oort, and the secret history of the end of civilisation (though you’ll have to read the whole trilogy to really find out what’s going on).
And if anybody reading this is an agent, please contact me 
Writing, or at least submitting stories for publication, is a continuous battle between hope and experience – or at least it is at my level. I’ve had a few things published, mostly in anthologies (covers and links to them are on the sidebar to the right – clink on them and buy them!), but a couple of things in prominent ‘pro’ magazines. My work colleagues were most impressed with the story I had in Nature, but my SFnal colleagues were more impressed by the one I had in Analog, the premier hard-SF magazine. But the sad fact is that I’m still at the level of collecting far more rejections than acceptances. Submitting things is thus a constant battle between the hope of getting a story accepted by someone – and hopefully by a prominent ‘pro’ magazine – and the experience of the ever mounting mountain of rejection slips.
So this evening, while still a bit too addled by jet lag to get back to the story I’m currently working on (in a phase of what one of my writing group colleagues has called ‘novel avoidance’), I’ve gone through the process of submitting something to a major magazine.
Hope won over experience, this time at least.
At work, I’m also getting closer and closer to having a paper on what I hope is a major result ready to submit. Unlike fiction, this paper will have a host of co-authors and, also unlike fiction, the journal editorial and refereeing process will allow me to make changes in response to their comments so that the paper is likely to eventually be accepted.
The cultural differences between fiction and academic publication are rather interesting, but the jet lag is unlikely to make such an article coherent at this time, so you’ll have to look for that article at a later date.
And, just for statistical purposes, this newly submitted story means I now have three fiction submissions out at three different magazines. I think that’s a record for me!
A report today in the Guardian newspaper describes the actions of the world’s first rogue geoengineer. It’s alleged that Russ George dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into waters off the Canadian Pacific coast. The idea of this type of geoengineering is that a plankton bloom is produced and these creatures, when they die, will sequester carbon dioxide in their skeletons and take it to the bottom of the ocean.
This method of geoengineering is taken seriously and there have been full scientific trials of its effectiveness in the southern ocean, as reported recently in Nature. However, that study was done in the context of international funding and regulation, and has taken 8 years to analyse. Russ George, in contrast, seems to have mounted a cowboy operation using, in part, funds hoodwinked from an indigenous group on the basis that it would help boost salmon stocks.
There is currently an international ban on geoengineering experiments in the wild, based partly on worries about effectiveness and unexpected side effects, but also on the assumption that not exploring this Plan B for coping with CO2 induced climate change will encourage governments to be more effective in reducing CO2 production.
But we all know that governments, and the populations they represent, are moving too slowly and not far enough in reducing CO2 production. There’s thus a window between governmental inaction, and the keenness of environmental groups to insist on governmental action for the rogue geoengineer.
WIll we soon see a time when there is a community of pirate geoengineers seeding the sea with iron, painting desert landscapes white or spraying seawater into the atmosphere, in just the same way that we now see civil society groups like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd taking direct action for other environmental purposes?
The current case may have more to do with extracting funds from unsuspecting victims, but something similar to Sea Shepherd could be a very real possibility in the future.
And who would have thought the phrase ‘rogue geoengineer’ would appear first in a newspaper rather than in the pages of a Kim Stanley Robinson novel?
Writing fiction is an odd business. You might think that it is easy to have a blank slate in front of you and the whole universe to play with, but that isn’t the case.
There are plenty of ideas out there, and they do come along, but something I’ve found very useful is some kind of seed, a grain of irritant around which the pearl (hopefully!) of a story might develop.
My first published story, Recreation published in the Footprints anthology, came about that way. The brief for the anthology concerned the reaction of aliens who, millions of years after the disappearance of mankind, come across our leavings on the Moon, and specifically the footprints of the Apollo astronauts. I mulled over that brief for a while, added a few other things I’d been thinking about, like the collision between our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, in about 5 billion years, and came up with something that the people at Hadley Rille thought interesting enough to publish.
I’ve written other things ‘off the top of my head’ but over the past year, alongside the slow drag of rewriting the Novel In Progress (working title The Bourbaki Conjecture for those who are interested, I’ve been finding some very useful grains of irritant in the shape of the Arc Magazine competition. This has been run three times so far, and each time I’ve entered, responding to the various themes they provide.
I haven’t won the competition yet, but the stories that have come out of this, especially with some reworking, are all viable for other markets.
And this led me to an interesting thought. If this effect is not uncommon, then a sufficiently attractive themed market, like the Arc competitions, will, alongside the explicit winners, also leave a fallout of other marketable stories with the same theme, which will appear elsewhere overtime. So the leverage of something like the Arc competitions may go a lot further than just that specific publication.
I have a new book out!
Launched at Eastercon, the Rocket Science anthology contains both science fiction and science fact. I contributed a piece about the launch of Herschel and Planck, but there is lots of other good stuff here.
The Guardian agrees:
“All the tales are set in the near future, and all are in some way about space and humanity’s relation to it.
“The strength of the collection is that the best of the stories – and the standard is very high – are about the human condition.
“Standouts include Craig Pay’s “Incarnate”, a harrowing account of a mother and father’s response to their cloned daughter’s desire for suicide on Titan; “A Biosphere Ends” by Stephen Palmer, a complex and moving examination of ecological breakdown on a Martian colony; and Deborah Walker’s poignant “Sea of Maternity”, about the conflict between motherhood and scientific ambition on the moon. Superb.”
– Eric Brown, The Guardian
Go out and buy a copy right away!
