Sadness ... Iain Banks (1954-2013)

BBC News
The Guardian
Obituary
In His Own Words
Five Minutes with: Iain M. Banks
Neil Gaiman journal entry

Cinco para Cinco de Mayo

For this 5th day of May, here are five past posts from Nancy Kress's blog:

• Discovering Science Fiction
• Frog Blog
• Choice
• Zombies at the CDC
• New Words

Playing around with sight and sound

Can you guess the city in these two pictures?

\

Click here for the answer.

Can you guess the book in these three manipulated versions of its beginning?

Version 1: No words shorter than four letters, and names removed
Pausing beside hanging needle rock tapped with lance Precise staccato-like tones filled passageway Hear coaxed right ahead don’t hear thing edged forward stumbled fell lightly against back Nothing hanging stones pits None hear There’s twenty paces Better stick close tapped rock again inclining would miss none subtle echoes right massive evil clung nearby ledge listening advance Ahead more needles rock could conveniently last echoes told much produced pair clickstones pouch brought them together sharply hollow hand concentrating returning tones right ears traced great formations rocks folded over other reflecting confusing pattern sound clutched shoulder pressed forward smart We’ll never catch with

Version 2: Adding a little alliteration to the above
advance again against ahead Ahead back beside Better brought catch clickstones close clung clutched coaxed concentrating confusing conveniently could don’t ears echoes echoes edged evil fell filled folded formations forward forward great hand hanging hanging Hear hear hear hollow inclining lance last ledge lightly listening massive miss more much nearby needle needles never None none Nothing other over paces pair passageway pattern Pausing pits pouch Precise pressed produced reflecting returning right right right rock rock rock rocks sharply shoulder smart sound staccato-like stick stones stumbled subtle tapped tapped them There’s thing together told tones tones traced twenty We’ll with with would

Version 3: Words going backward paragraph by paragraph
.yawegassap eht dellif senot ekil-otaccats ,esicerP .ecnal sih htiw ti deppat deraJ ,kcor fo eldeen gnignah eht ediseb gnisuaP
".daeha pu thgir s'tI" .dexaoc eh "?ti raeH"
".senots gnignah dna dum tub gnihtoN" .kcab s'deraJ tsniaga ylthgil llef dna delbmuts ,drawrof degde newO ".gniht a raeh t'nod I"
"?stip oN"
".raeh nac I taht enoN"
".em ot esolc kcits retteB .ffo secap ytnewt ton eno s'erehT"
.ecnavda rieht ot gninetsil egdel ybraen a ot gnulc ti sa live dna evissam—thgir lla ,saw ti erehT .seohce eltbus eht fo enon ssim dluow eh os rae na gninilcni ,niaga kcor eht deppat deraJ
.dnuos fo nrettap gnisufnoc a gnitcelfer dna rehto eht revo eno dedlof ,sckor fo snoitamrof taerg tuo decart srae sih ,thgir sih oT .senot gninruter eht no gnitartnecnoc ,dnah sih fo wolloh eht ni ylprahs rehtegot meht thguorb dna hcuop sih morf senotskcilc fo riap a decudorp eh oS .hcum taht mih dlot dah seohce tsal ehT .pat yltneinevnoc dluoc eh kcor fo seldeen erom on erew haehA
".ti htiw pu hctac reven ll'eW .trams oot s'tI" .drawrof desserp yeht sa redluohs sih dehctulc newO


Had enough of the weirdness? Here's how the original actually reads:
Pausing beside the hanging needle of rock, Jared tapped it with his lance. Precise, staccato-like tones filled the passageway.
“Hear it?” he coaxed. “It’s right up ahead.”
“I don’t hear a thing.” Owen edged forward, stumbled and fell lightly against Jared’s back. “Nothing but mud and hanging stones.”
“No pits?”
“None that I can hear.”
“There’s one not twenty paces off. Better stick close to me.”
Jared tapped the rock again, inclining an ear so he would miss none of the subtle echoes. There it was, all right—massive and evil as it clung to a nearby ledge listening to their advance.
Ahead were no more needles of rock he could conveniently tap. The last echoes had told him that much. So he produced a pair of clickstones from his pouch and brought them together sharply in the hollow of his hand, concentrating on the returning tones. To his right, his ears traced out great formations of rocks, folded one over the other and reflecting a confusing pattern of sound.
Owen clutched his shoulder as they pressed forward. “It’s too smart. We’ll never catch up with it.”

This first novel by Daniel F. Galouye was nominated for a Hugo. It's a tale of a post-apocalytic world where humans have built a society in the dark underground. The descendants of the survivors only remember the pre-apocalyptic world in old stories, legends and myths. To preview more of the book, click here.

Men of Letters

1964: Stanley Kubrick

1980: Gene Roddenberry

1981: Philip K. Dick

pre-1984: Robert A. Heinlein

2006: Ray Bradbury

Robert A. Heinlein - birthday quiz

Robert A. Heinlein was born on 07/07/07. Here are some passages from 7 of his works ... can you figure out where each one comes from?

Your choices are:

• Orphans of the Sky
• Sixth Column
• The Puppet Masters
• The Man Who Sold the Moon
• Starship Troopers
• Glory Road
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Ready?

1. A mile and eight-tenths— A little closer than I liked, especially without company. The inner egg had reached steady speed, no more help to be gained by staying inside it, and its skin temperature indicated that it would not open automatically for a while yet—so I flipped a switch with my other thumb and got rid of it.
2. Not as sound—it was a white noise, a roar in all frequencies, sonic, subsonic, supersonic, so incredibly loaded with energy that it struck him in the chest. He heard it with his teeth and with his bones as well as with his ears. He crouched his knees, bracing against it.
3. Backed down fast and out of there, blind-dogging both hatches, then blind-dogged every pressure door on way back. Told Mum, then told her to put one of the boys on back door with a laser gun—here, take this one.
4. My mind was distracted from this string of lies by a wench pitching hay just across the ditch from the road. She had remarkable pectoral muscles and a lava-lava just suited her. She saw me eyeing her and gave me the eye right back, with a wiggle tossed in.
5. That was a mistake. The surface of the globe, being featureless silvery white, had nothing to lend it perspective. It might have been a hundred feet away, or a thousand, or many miles. He had never experienced an unbroken height greater than that between two decks, nor an open space larger than the village common. He was panic-stricken, scared out of his wits, the more so in that he did not know what it was he feared. But the ghost of long-forgotten jungle ancestors possessed him and chilled his stomach with the basic primitive fear of falling.
6. He dropped into a light sleep and dreamed that he was flopping around on the end of the longest lever conceivable, a useless lever, for it rested on nothing. Part of the time he was Archimedes, and part of the time Archimedes stood beside him, jeering and leering at him with a strongly Asiatic countenance.
7. On the other hand, would a skilled cowhand have destroyed a well-trained work horse in favor of an untried, strange mount? That may be why I was hidden and saved—or perhaps I don't know what I am talking about; what does a bee know about Beethoven?

A Death in the Science Fiction Family

Sadness at the death of Ray Bradbury ...

There are the works of his that many of us are familiar with, including The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. But have you read any of his poems?

Too Much

Too much beauty
Too much delight
Too much of sun
And much of night.
It bursts my sight
It floods my heart
It knocks my dreams
With half-sensed art.
Too much of sky
And thus of land
Abundance brims
On every hand
To power the soul
And crush the blood
With harvestings
Of wild and good
That cause one's cries
To overflow
With more than being
Can see or know
Vast libraries
Of touch and tell
That soar in heaven
To drop in hell.
So lovely lean
Some sunsets' fire
That I am tinder,
Torch and pyre,
So lovely sing
Lost birds at dawn
That I am up
And flown and gone.
And where soul was—
An empty tree
Full branches my
Lost blood and me.
So breathing thus
And knowing such
I cry to God:
Too much! Too much!



Of What is Past, or Passing, or To Come

Of what is past, or passing, or to come,
These things I sense and sing, and try to sum.
The apeman with his cave in need of fire,
The tiger to be slain, his next desire.
The mammoth on the hoof a banquet seems,
How bring the mammoth down fills apeman's dreams.
How taunt the sabertooth and pull his bite?
How cadge the flame to end an endless night?
All this the apeman sketches on his cave
In cowards' arts that teach him to be brave.
So, beasts and fire that live beyond his lair
Are drawn in science fictions everywhere.
The walls are full of schemes that sum and teach,
To help the apeman reach beyond his reach.
While all his ape-companions laugh and shout:
"What are those stupid blueprints all about?!
Give up your science fictions, clean the cave!"
But apeman knows his sketching chalk can save,
And knowing, learning, moves him to rehearse
True actions in the world to death reverse.
With axe he knocks the tiger's smile to dust,
Then runs to slay the mammoth with spear thrust;
The hairy mountain falls, the forests quake,
Then fire is swiped to cook a mammoth steak.
Three problems thus are solved by art on wall:
The tiger, mammoth, fire, the one, the all.
So these first science fictions circled thought
And then strode forth and all the real facts sought,
And then on wall new science fictions drew,
That run through history and end with . . . you.


If I Were Epitaph

What would I say of me,
If I were Epitaph?
That there were silly bones in him?
The grim but made him laugh?
The jolly made him serious?
The glum made him delirious?
That lawyers talked him sleepy,
And made him snooze at noon,
But bed was his by nine o'clock
So he could rise with moon?
And roll upon the meadows
While other people dreamed,
With windows up and chilly
He smiled and only steamed?
They sealed him in a coffin
But could not make him stay,
His laugh too large, his smile too wide,
For any Death to lay?
No matter what the molder,
The maggot in his bin,
No measuring-worm could inch and cir-
Cumnavigate his grin?
If Universe should claim me
And keep me with a sleep
I'd open up my laughter
And drop the Abyss deep;
There we would lie all friendly,
The empty stars and I
And speak upon Creation
And with God occupy
The time that's left for burning,
A billion years to sup,
Then open wide God's laughter
And let Him eat me up.



Ah, the wonder in his words ...

Happy Valentine's Day!

Here are some Valentine words for you:

"How does woman look? What makes you woman?"

"I have learned two ways to tie my shoes. One way is only good for lying down. The other way is good for walking. And I have learned conjugations. I am, thou art, he is, we are, you are, they are, I was, thou wast—"

"Only an Old One can always be sure of right action at a cusp ... and I have much learning to learn and growing to grow before I may join the Old Ones."

"... on Mars, when we needed to know anything, we asked the Old Ones and the answer was never wrong. Jill, is it possible that we humans don't have 'Old Ones'? No souls, I mean. When we discorporate—die—do we die dead ... die all over and nothing left?"

"Goodness is not enough, goodness is never enough. That was one of my first mistakes, because among Martians goodness and wisdom are identical."

"The Truth is simple but the Way of Man is hard. First you must learn to control your self. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes."


Have you read Stranger in a Strange Land?

From Charles Dickens to Jules Verne ... sixteen years and one day

Some bits of Jules Verne, born on this day in 1828:

"Ah! sir, live—live in the bosom of the waters! There only is independence! There I recognise no masters! There I am free!"

Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.

"It was just when I was alone that I was not afraid."

Jules Verne at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Entry for Jules Verne at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

and   more

and a video of an octopus going on a little land excursion.

Science fiction Hugo and Nebula - some early dual winners (novel)

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

The phrase was his own, created to describe to himself what had happened to him. He hadn't used it often, but he'd never had to explain it. They always knew what he meant.

Twice more, unnoticed, she had buried herself in rock, and each time she sensed and knew, and each time when Odeen would explain matters to her, she knew in advance what it was he would explain.

Normally, he never went into so much detail, but these circumstances were scarcely normal. This might be the last gram he would ever send to those he loved. He owed it to them to explain what he was doing.

He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist's arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, being that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.

New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.



Have you read any Hugo- or Nebula-winning novels? Do you plan to?

Are you eligible to nominate for the 2012 Hugos? Have a particular book in mind?

Getting back around to the moon ...

 
Last month we shared a few words about the moon (and some pictures of other moons). If you're craving more information about our Earth's moon, check out Moon Zoo.

And here are a few more items having to do with a moon:

Future eclipses of the moon

" ... Imagine it: a moon at your beck and call.”

The moon and the International Space Station

Just at this crisis, as though she comprehended all this agitation regarding herself, the moon shone forth with serene splendor, eclipsing by her intense illumination all the surrounding lights.

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata

“I forbid any more mingling with the men from now until the moon’s next rising!”

A crossword puzzle about the moon

I received a little news that way, although I chose not to believe most of it. Assassinated leaders I could accept, but people walking on the Moon?

Moon phases word find

And these guys (as before, turn your volume down LOW!) still really like the moon.

"Georgia on my Mind"

Happy new year!  Georgia on my Mind and Other Places, the collection of stories by Charles Sheffield, is the Phoenix Pick free e-book of the month. The code for the free e-book is in our monthly newsletter. Not signed up yet? Subscribe by clicking here to send us an e-mail.

A few things related in some way to Georgia (the US state) and science fiction:

DragonCon

Science Fiction Lab at Georgia Tech

Hugo-Award-winner William McIntosh

Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup Group

Jack McDevitt lives in Georgia.

Escape Pod podcast (Escape Artists, Inc. in Marietta, GA)

A book published by The University of Georgia Press


And a couple of mentions of said state:

"Dixie Mae had grown up in Southern California, but she’d been born in Georgia–and she was proud of her roots."

“This is a new artifact designed and executed by five previously out-of-work engineers in Athens, Georgia. They’ve mated a tiny Linux box with some speaker-independent continuous speech recognition software, a free software translation engine that can translate between any of twelve languages, and an extremely high-resolution LCD that blocks out words in the path of the laser-pointer.
“Turn this on, point it at a wall, and start talking. Everything said shows up on the wall, in the language of your choosing, regardless of what language the speaker was speaking.”

Last Day, Last Words

The first post of this blog listed some first sentences from science fiction books ... now here are some last ones:


"Sure I know. A boy loves his dog."

He loved Big Brother.

For you.

"Absolutely, a day to remember."

Would I lie to you?

"Perhaps it is at that."

They can hurt.

but let's not shun the sun

Image credit: NASA

The sun arrives each morning as predictably as it left the previous night ... and then there are coronal mass ejections.

Found in science fiction works, words having to do with one star or another:

"Things were difficult for him in a world with two suns. The new sun was tiny and white, while the old one was big and yellow. The new sun circled constantly overhead. It never set, and he could no longer catch things at night."

"The surface of the Sun, barely ten thousand miles below the clear-walled cabin of the Lightrider, was a floor across the Universe. The photosphere was a landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere—the thousand-mile-thick outer atmosphere—a thin haze above it all."

"But the sun doesn't stop at the photosphere; the density of matter falls off slowly with height. If one included the ions and electrons that forever stream out into space in the solar wind—to cause auroras on Earth and to shape the plasma tails of comets—one might say that there was no real boundary to the Sun. It truly reaches out to touch the other stars."

"And the solar storm was blowing gouts of plasma, flooding some of their links with static. The sun was going through rough weather, spewing out big, noisy torrents."

But is the sun always bright and cheerful? Or it sometimes blue?

A few words about the moon ...

Do you like the moon? These guys (turn your volume down LOW!) do.

So many words have been written about one moon or another. How many of these have you read?

"What, exactly, would happen to the Moon without the Earth?"

"What is the first thing we do when awe-inspiring vistas of some faraway moon are transmitted back by our little robot envoys? Why, we reverently name the craters, valleys, and other strange beasts discovered out there."

"Today, with space full of ships, colonies on the inner planets, and Earth's Moon so close that pilots on the Luna run sleep home nights, it is hard to imagine when 'flying to the Moon' was a figure of speech for the impossible, when men who thought it could be done were visionaries, crackpots."

"The moon was very bright tonight."

"The first of December had arrived! the fatal day! for, if the projectile were not discharged that very night at 10h. 48m. 40s. P.M., more than eighteen years must roll by before the moon would again present herself under the same conditions of zenith and perigee."

"Due to the way the ship was positioned above the planet they were supposed to be surveying and evaluating, they had visible moons on almost every side; three completely full ones above them, in relation to the ship’s rotation."

And how well do you know your moons?

fear and dread

Son of Poseidon

child of Gaia (courtesy NASA/JPL)

a priestess of Hera

Beginnings

At the beginning of this blog, thinking about beginnings. Any word can be a beginning.

Many people can name their favorite book of all time ... but how many of us can remember the first sentence of that book?  Can you?


First sentences from SF books through the years:

1865
From the Earth to the Moon
During the War of the Rebellion, a new and influential club was established in the city of Baltimore in the State of Maryland.

1886
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.

1895
The Time Machine
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.

1901
The First Men in the Moon
As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under the blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident.

1912
The Lost World
Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth—a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self.

1919
The Moon Pool
For two months I had been on the d'Entrecasteaux Islands gathering data for the concluding chapters of my book upon the flora of the volcanic islands of the South Pacific.

1924
We
I am merely copying out here, word for word, what was printed today in the State Gazette:
  In 120 days from now the building of the INTEGRAL will be finished.

1932
Brave New World
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.

1939
Lest Darkness Fall
Tancredi took his hands off the wheel again and waved them.

1949
Nineteen Eighty-Four
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

1951
Fahrenheit 451
It was a pleasure to burn.

1957
The City and the Stars
Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert.

1961
Dark Universe
Pausing beside the hanging needle of rock, Jared tapped it with his lance.

1966
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect—and tax—public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure.

1970
Ringworld
In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.

1975
The Shockwave Rider
The man in the bare steel chair was as naked as the room's white walls.

1981
Lilith: A Snake in the Grass
The little man in the synthetic tweed jacket didn’t look like a bomb.

1985
Neuromancer
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

1992
The Multiplex Man
The flashing signs on both sides of I-94 south into Minneapolis read: POLICE CHECK AHEAD, PREPARE TO STOP.

1994
Mother of Storms
This is the good part.

1997
Blue Limbo
As the copter lost altitude, Mitch Helwig, encased inside the prototype Honda skimmer that hung below it, suspended on steel cables like a spider dangling from some nightmarish hummingbird, donned his night goggles.

2001
American Gods  (audio clip)
Shadow had done three years in prison.

2004
40 Signs of Rain
The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight.

2007
Brasyl
Marcelina watched them take the car on Rua Sacopã.

2010
Surface Detail
“This one might be trouble.”


Do you have a favorite first sentence?