The actual release date is set at Monday November 23rd. The paperback copy will be along at about the same time depending on the vagaries of the process. And here also for your pleasure is the cover, created for me as usual by Ian Grainger. With real asteroidal textures from Vesta and elsewhere blended in to the image.
For those who can’t wait, there are free sample downloads in both Kindle mobi and general epub format, available at the Kephrath website ‘Downloads and Offers’ page. They contain the first portion of the story.
Here’s the general blurb:
Quick wits and loyalty confront high-tech crime in space
Welcome to the Scilly Isles, a handful of asteroids bunched together in space, well beyond the orbit of Mars. This remote and isolated habitat is home to a diverse group of human settlers, and a whole flock of parakeets. But earth-based financial regulator ECRB suspects that it’s also home to serious large scale fraud, and the reputation of the islands comes under threat.
Enter Mitnash Thakur and his virtual partner Slate, sent out from Earth to investigate. Their ECRB colleagues are several weeks away at their ship’s best speed, and even message signals take an hour for the round trip. Slate and Mitnash are on their own, until they can work out who on Scilly to trust. How will they cope when the threat gets personal?
This is a development on from my earlier blog on this topic which generated a number of interesting comments at different places. The issues which aroused comments were mainly to do with the numbers quoted:
Dawn achieved an acceleration of around 1/100,000 that of Earth’s gravity…I am assuming that advances in technology bring that up to 1/20 gravity, which leads to a top speed around 130,000 m/s.
First, the top speed I was thinking about relates to my Earth-asteroid belt journey, not any sort of absolute maximum. My main concern when I wrote it was that it was a tiny fraction of the speed of light. Even for an Earth-Pluto trip the turnover speed is only about 1% of light speed – which makes life and calculation a lot simpler. If you were able to carry on with the drive over a period of months or years – say in an attempt to travel to a nearby star – then you would have to take Einstein’s relativity into account.
NASA/JPL image – artist’s impression of Dawn
A brief digression on how rockets work. Basically you propel something in one direction in order to travel in the opposite one – the larger the objects you throw out, the faster you get to go, but on the other hand you run out of fuel quicker. Or, the faster you propel them in that direction, the faster you go, but that needs good engine design. In principle you can throw large objects very slowly, but it would be a frustrating business – much better to throw small objects very fast! The fastest ‘propellant’ would be a beam of light, and the most efficient engine would completely transform some piece of matter into that light energy. The Dawn probe used atoms of xenon as propellant, on the grounds that they are easy to ionise (and hence use as propellant) and are also unreactive while being stored prior to use. The exhaust velocity was in the region of 20,000-50,000 meters per second.
Now, so long as you have fuel, you can go on accelerating, and since your ship is continually getting lighter as you burn fuel, the acceleration tends to increase, unless you throttle back to achieve greater efficiency. The next question is – how long does your fuel last? There’s a trade-off here – if you had a more powerful engine then it would use fuel at a higher rate, but since you get to your destination quicker, you might still come out ahead. When Dawn left Earth orbit, about 1/3 of the mass was fuel (a little over 400kg), but then the engines have been used multiple times to achieve all kinds of exploratory moves.
A solution which is popular in science fiction is to gather your fuel as you go along, typically by sucking up interstellar hydrogen in an arrangement of electromagnetic fields called a Bussard collector – the theoretical science is real, though to date we have not actually built spaceships which use it. Star Trek’s Enterprise claims to be equipped with these, alongside the vastly more exotic warp drive to achieve faster than light travel.
If you had a total conversion engine firing, let’s say, a laser beam from the ship, your fuel cost is very minimal for journeys within the solar system – the Earth-asteroid trip costs you only a few grams of propellant, which presumably you would just carry in your pocket. In Far from the Spaceports I have deliberately not gone to that extreme. Nor, in fact, have I quantified the mass required for these journeys, but have made the assumption that it is a real though not dominant consideration. Mitnash has to purchase “reaction mass” at a spares yard after arrival at his destination St Mary’s, but the design of his ship, the Harbour Porpoise, is not overwhelmed by fuel tanks. Imagine something like a few tens of kilograms of fuel – say the equivalent of a few large suitcases.
Finally, none of these figures take into account getting away from the surface of a “proper” planet like Earth. That is a separate problem, involving high impetus. An ion drive is fantastic at maintaining low impulse for long periods of time, but nearly useless at the high levels of thrust needed for lift-off from a planet. I have assumed that there are regular shuttles of some design which take travellers from Earth’s surface to Low Earth Orbit (broadly speaking at a similar altitude to today’s International Space Station), and that the ion-drive ships take over from orbit on the long haul trips.
It’s been a busy week here, with lots of behind-the-scenes work on Far from the Spaceports – mainly the work of getting the print-ready PDF file laid out properly.
As well as that I have been helping my friend David Frauenfelder get his latest book ready for epublication: The Staff and the Shield, Book II in the Master Mage of Rome Series – more news of that in a few weeks’ time.
Smithsonian image – ancient arrow headsAnd finally I contributed an article to the Review Group’s Commemorating Agincourt – 600 years series of blog posts. I don’t know huge amounts about Agincourt itself so focused on the history of the bow.
The bow is at least 10,000 years old – some evidence suggests over 70,000 – and through all that time has served as both hunting tool and weapon of war. Early arrow heads are found quite often, but bows are less long lived, and the earliest European bow discovered so far dates from around 6000BC. The technological challenge in all that time has been how to gain more power. More power equals more range, or more destructive effect at the same range. But the basic design has remained the same…
The solar system is a big place, and journey time is a big issue with present technology. The Apollo capsules took just over three days to go from the Earth to the Moon, and the several current proposals for sending people to Mars involve months of travel time. The New Horizons probe which recently flew past Pluto took the better part of ten years to arrive there after leaving Earth.
Now, for narrative purposes in Far from the Spaceports, I wanted journeys between planets to last weeks rather than months or years. This gives a reasonable sense of remoteness, without the drawback of having settlements separated so far from each other as to make meaningful interaction virtually impossible.
Almost all contemporary space journeys are based on the principle of critical burn points. The vehicle performs a small number of high energy rocket firing sessions at key stages of the trip, typically at start and end, with smaller mid-journey corrections. The rest of the time is spent in free fall, unpowered. This saves fuel, and is the only feasible journey choice for chemically based rockets.
Here, for fun, is a NASA artist’s impression of the Dawn probe using its ion drive near Ceres.
NASA artist’s impression – Dawn at Ceres
But this occasional burn pattern also means that speed is limited, especially for human travellers. A person can only withstand acceleration of a few multiples of Earth’s gravity, and the total change in speed is therefore limited. You are stuck at whatever speed your short burns can achieve. Logically, it is far better, once away from the immediate vicinity of Earth, to maintain a low acceleration rate all the time. This doesn’t appear to do much over the course of a few seconds, but the cumulative effect adds up to something quite impressive. There have been experiments with this already, using a technology called the ion drive, of which more later.
For the moment just assume that there is a technology able to drive a spaceship with an acceleration of 1/20 the surface gravity of Earth. That gives the occupants a sense of up and down, and generally makes life easier. The recent film The Martian, following from similar ideas in 2001, used a rotating wheel idea to give a kind of pseudo-gravity to the astronauts, but their engine design was on the current occasional burn pattern. But if you had a drive which could be always on at a low level, then the quickest journey time to some remote point is to accelerate at constant rate to the half-way point, and then flip over and decelerate the rest of the journey. With that drive and flight plan, the average Earth-Mars trip takes about a month (just two weeks at the point where the orbits bring the planets closest together). The trip out to the asteroid belt takes four or five weeks, and a trip to Pluto about 4 months. Nicely in the range of what I want in a story.
What about reality? NASA has trialled ion drives on a couple of small probes, notably the Dawn mission which travelled to two destinations in the asteroid belt – the giant asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Currently it is still in orbit around Ceres sending back scientific data. Dawn did not burn its ion drive engines full time, but it did trial them for blocks of hundreds of days at a time. Using this regime, Dawn took around four years to reach Vesta, having travelled inwards towards the sun first to acquire a gravity assist from Venus. After some science work at Vesta, Dawn took about two more years to migrate to Ceres. That’s longer than I want for the book, but it’s a whole lot better than just coasting there after a high-energy burn leaving Earth orbit.
In comparative terms, Dawn achieved an acceleration of around 1/100,000 that of Earth’s gravity, which is roughly equivalent to going from stationary to 60 miles per hour in four days (!). Even at such a low value, Dawn currently holds the speed record for spaceships sent out from Earth, with maximum speed around 11,500 meters per second. I am assuming that advances in technology bring that up to 1/20 gravity, which leads to a top speed around 130,000 m/s. I feel those are credible goals for technological advance of the hardware, given that I am also assuming that we have the ability and motivation to establish settlements on various rather inhospitable locations throughout the solar system.
Now, the actual distances between planets vary considerably depending whereabouts in their orbits each of them are – for example the Mars-Ceres trip can take anywhere between 20 and nearly 40 days with this engine. But the main thing, and the one I really wanted, was that you can go places within a month or so.
A few days ago I finished a complete draft of Far from the Spaceports which I was happy with. It’s not quite a final version, and there’ll be another couple of edit sweeps, but it’s nearly there.
So to celebrate that, here’s a longish extract from near the start, as Mitnash discovers something of why he is being sent out from Earth to investigate some fraud. The scene takes place on Earth, at Mitnash’s place of work in Finsbury Circus, London. The actual release date is a few weeks away yet, as I run through final edits and the process of getting kindle, epub and physical copies ready.
Elias swirled an ident onto the wall screen. It dissolved away the ECRB logo to show instead a top-down view of the asteroid belt, unevenly coloured. There was a deep red area to the left, fading quickly through orange to yellow and green. There were a couple of other red patches, but nothing so striking as the first one. I looked at it for a few seconds. It seemed perfectly graduated at first glance, but as you studied it, little irregularities appeared here and there, anomalies in the superficial smoothness.
Little white blobs appeared roughly where you might expect them. Ceres was well away from the centre of the red area, about a radian anticlockwise. Mars was almost opposite Ceres, as well as a long way in-system. Jupiter and a whole shoal of moons were almost directly out into the cold from that red epicentre.
The Jovian data was almost all green, and bore no resemblance to the glaring red directly inwards. I blinked. Elias laughed.
“Funnily enough, we did think of comparing that ourselves. But full marks for thinking of it.”
“Why the difference?”
“There’s actually no reason they would be the same. The Jovians get a separate feed from any of the belt settlements, or Mars for that matter. Reutberg sends out EOD London rates and benchmarks to all the outstations at the same time, plus all of the calc methodologies to derive the rest. Of course the arrival time varies per station in exactly the way you’d expect, but there shouldn’t be time for anyone to take advantage.”
“This is just arbitrage?”
It sounded a disappointing end to what had started out as an interesting problem. Arbitrage was an old business – it went back at least as far as when our ancestors were trading goats for grain or shiny beads. If you were a shiny bead trader with a quick pair of feet and an appetite for moderate risk, you could juggle the trade in goats and grain to your advantage and – with a good dollop of luck – go home a richer man. But it was hard to do in a massively connected world, and friction in the margins meant that those who tried it today regularly lost the game.
There were no short cut alleyways that the modern shiny beadsman could take to get ahead of his more ponderous fellows. Reutberg sent all the information out in synchronised fractalised packages, all at the same time, and everything went at light speed. The fastest systems available kept all of the triangulated rates aligned. Unless somebody had quietly invented a wormhole, or figured out how to curve space to order, there was no way to get ahead of the system. And if someone had come up with such a thing, I was quite sure they would be using it for more than a bit of petty market fixing in the asteroid belt.
I leaned forward, touched the white blob closest to the red centre.
“I suppose I’m going there? Is that Pallas?”
“No, not even close. Pallas is round again from Ceres, in the bottom right of the plot. Those are called the Scilly Isles. There are a good number of people scattered on those rocks. It should be easy enough for you to blend in. Somewhere on those islands you should find the root of the problem. Or at any rate some good leads.”
“Who am I this time?”
“Bored coder, wannabe miner with what you think is a foolproof way to find precious metals. Rare earths in particular. Learn all you need to about commodities for the rest of today, from extraction to dealing. And it would do no harm to refresh on benchmarks too.”
He looked again at the timepiece.
“Time’s up. You have an orientation session on rare earths from one of our economists in twenty minutes on level five. Then another one with an ex-miner who will tell you all about detectors and display analytics. Then another one with me straight after that, when we’ll go over the details in the secure pod on level three. You leave tomorrow morning.”
Look out for Far From the Spaceports in just a few weeks now…
And here for fun is an ESA picture of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko as seen by the Rosetta probe…
Today is another author interview day, this time with Trish Cox. I read her book Chasm Creek earlier this year and thoroughly enjoyed it. Chasm Creek is a western – a genre I have hardly ever read since school days long ago. Most of my acquaintance with westerns comes from old television series like The Virginian and The High Chapparal, with a smattering of more recent films.
Trish has also published a collection of short stories and flash fiction, and her writing career extends well beyond that into magazine and newspaper articles, guide books, and memoirs.
2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist badge
As a bonus “stop press” note for this interview, Trish just told me:
On September 25, the New Mexico Book Coop announced finalists in many fiction and nonfiction categories for the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Chasm Creek by Patricia Grady Cox is nominated in the Historical Fiction category. Winners will be announced at an awards banquet to be held on November 20 in Albuquerque NM.
Congratulations! Now on with the interview…
Q.Trish, the western is a genre not much practiced here in the UK, though I guess it is more popular in the States. What drew you to write in this genre, and specifically to write Chasm Creek?
A. Hi Richard. It’s an honor to be interviewed for your blog; thank you! I can’t say that I chose to write this story. It was more that the story grew within me and had to be told and Arizona was where it happened. When I first moved here 25 years ago, I lived in a little town north of Phoenix. I visited the local historical society’s museum and discovered the town was established in territorial days and originally was a gold mining camp. That led to reading about gold mining in Arizona. Then, in my travels around my new home state, I visited Monument Valley on the Navajo reservation. It was here I first heard of The Long Walk. It’s a shameful part of our history that is not widely known: in 1863 thousands of Navajo were rounded up, after being starved and slaughtered into submission, and marched over 300 miles to Fort Sumner in New Mexico where they were held captive for five years. Thousands perished on the Walk, and more at the Bosque Redondo. I wanted to work that into my story.
Q.I was very struck by your frequent and very evocative descriptions of the natural beauty of Arizona. It’s a part of the world I don’t know at all. Do you think that the magnificence of the surroundings is an important feature of the western in general?
A. Thank you, Richard. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that the setting has resonated with so many people. I believe what is coming through is my absolute love of this geographical area. I moved here because I wanted to live in this setting. In 25 years I have not tired of it. I like stories in which the setting becomes a character, something that is almost required if you’re writing about the historical American west. I tried, in Chasm Creek, to paint a picture of the harshness and isolation of life then as well as the beauty. It gives the characters one more obstacle to deal with.
Full moon shines on the Three Sisters, Monument Valley Tribal Park, Navajo Nation, Utah, Photo by Patricia Grady Cox
Q.You have lived in both Arizona and on the US Eastern seaboard, as indeed have some of your characters in Chasm Creek. Tell us something about the differences between them, and how this affects your writing.
A. I think my personal experience leaks into the story a couple of times through Esther. She is the one who considers moving back east at one point, but realizes she would be smothered by the closeness, the buildings, everything paved and cultivated, trees that block the view, the sky. Those who know me commented they saw me coming through in that section, and they were correct. Rhode Island is a beautiful state. It’s green, filled with forests and many small farms, the ocean is not far from any point (it is a tiny state). The coastline is beautiful and ferries abound to take you to various islands off the coast. I loved the ocean. But the time came to say goodbye and head west! No ocean here. Hardly any water. Everything is sharp, ragged, poisonous. But you can hike to the top of a hill, even in the middle of the city, and see for miles. You can drive along the highway and look out on either side of the road and see mountains and buttes and mesas and cactus, maybe a stray cow or a wild burro. There is no closeness (at least once you leave the city which you can do in less than an hour). I never knew that clouds cast shadows on the ground. I never knew that you could see a storm approach, experience the line between no rain and a downpour as it passes over you.
How does this affect my writing? It probably imbues everything I write. My second novel and my third (work in progress) all contain elements of this conflict between safety, closeness, civilization – whether back east or just within a city in the territory – and the wide open spaces which, to me, symbolize freedom, adventure, and opportunity, much as it did during the western expansion in our country. For me it’s on a spiritual and emotional level as well as geographic. I did not write novels until I came here.
ITCAOnline – Tribal Homelands in Arizona
Q.In the older westerns, American Indian groups tended to be presented as simple stereotypes. You depict them as far more nuanced and diverse. Can you say something about American Indian groups living in Arizona at that time? A. It’s unbelievable the way American Indians were portrayed in the past. Actors speaking gibberish or stilted English, casting white actors, no regard for tribal cultural differences. I can’t claim to be an expert in Native American culture. I studied what I needed to study to make my characters historically accurate. I learned that the Apache and Navajo tribes, with common distant ancestors and very similar language, considered each other enemies. I learned there were many subdivisions within tribes – among the Apache were Tonto, Mescalero, Chiracahua, Jicarilla, just to name a few. They were not one big unified group. There is so much to know, and I’m just glad that writers and move-makers are becoming aware of this and showing more respect.
So to answer your question, there were many different Native Americans living here when European settlement spread west in the mid-1800s. Some were pueblo Indians, some agrarian, others hunter/gatherers, and so on. There was no homogenous “Indian” in Arizona. The ones that tried to fight the Europeans suffered the consequences. Others were more peaceful. I tried to stick with just the two groups – Navajo in order to incorporate the Long Walk into my story as it affects two characters, and the Tonto Apache because they lived in the area of the fictional Chasm Creek. According to the InterTribal Council of Arizona, http://itcaonline.com/ there are 21 tribal nations currently living in Arizona.
Patricia Grady Cox at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Spider Woman monolith. Photo by Susie Whiting
Q. How did you carry out research for this book, and more generally about the era? Is it easy to uncover documentation about the life and times of people there?
A. It is fairly easy to do research on that time period in Arizona. There was a huge military presence and they kept excellent records. Martha Summerhayes is one famous journal-keeper who recorded her travels around the territory with her Army officer husband. Phoenix, Prescott, Tombstone, and other big towns were publishing newspapers regularly. Almost every town has a historical society and some kind of museum, although not all go back to my favorite territorial period. My preferred way to do research is to travel to the actual locations. I drove the 300 miles from the Navajo reservation to the Bosque Redondo, where the Navajos built a memorial and museum. I walked the grounds of what was once Fort Sumner, looked at the slimy, slow-moving creek that is called the Pecos River and thought about 10,000 people having to use that as their sole source of water. I’m sure the river looked different back then, but I could get an idea. I also had to picture the area devoid of trees because the prisoners quickly cut down all the trees for firewood and shelter; now there are trees along the banks. I was able to visit every setting that was used in the novel, take notes and photographs, then research what it would have been like 130 years ago (much different). Oh, and I read a lot.
Pioneer Arizona Living History Museum
Q.Your website (http://www.patriciagradycox.com/) mentions that for a few years you volunteered at the Pioneer Arizona Living History Museum, portraying an 1800s ranch wife (several other interviewees this year have taken part in re-enactments, so this is clearly an appealing activity for authors!). Tell us a little about your experiences doing this. A. There are many groups that do reenactments, and many of them pride themselves on their authenticity and their knowledge of the period. Working at the museum was similar except one was assigned to a particular building, and you took care of it (swept, dusted, tended the fire, hauled water). The novel I’m working on now is on three levels that incorporates modern time, the living history museum, and 1879 Arizona. My characters are shocked at the difference between what they thought was an authentic representation and the reality of life then. Some of my blogs address this issue. It was not romantic or easy or fun (unless, of course, one was wealthy—same as today).
Q.Your web site indicates that you have another novel in progress, Hellgate. Can you tell us a little about that, and when we might be able to enjoy it?
A.Hellgate is finished and has been with an agent for a year and a half. It’s a problem because it’s a western historical novel with two female protagonists. One is a young woman who has been kidnapped and is being held captive in an outlaw lair run by an Irish madman. The other is her aunt who lives in the territorial capital, a lady with servants and a Victorian home, but she has her own problems (addictions). I am considering whether to give traditional publishing any more time or to self-publish it.
Q.Is there anything else you would like to tell readers today? A. I would like ask that people look at my blog posts, and let me know if they like them. Also, I have a page on Facebook which can be “liked”. And there is one blog post from a while ago that your readership might especially enjoy since it’s about an American West reenactment group – in England. The blog is entitled “The British are Coming!” https://pcoxwriter.wordpress.com/2014/07/19/the-british-are-coming/.
Trish Cox
Many thanks Trish for participating in the interview today! Chasm Creek comes warmly recommended by me (see The Review Group or Goodreads) and I look forward to Hellgate as and when it gets published.
Thank you Richard, for the wonderful review and for inviting me onto your webpage. I enjoyed the questions very much!
It’s a good week for science fiction, what with the film version of The Martian coming out in a few days. Not that I am cashing in on that or anything, and the draft itself is not quite finished, but here is a first cut at the back-cover promotional blurb for Far From the Spaceports. It may well change over the next few weeks… comments welcome.
Quick wits and loyalty confront high-tech crime in space
Welcome to the Scilly Isles – a handful of asteroids bunched together in space, well beyond the orbit of Mars. They are a good home to a varied and unique group of settlers. But now, someone is accumulating credit by fraud on a large scale out here. Nobody knows how or why, and the reputation of the islands is under threat.
Meet Mitnash Thakur and his virtual partner Slate, sent out from Earth to find out what is happening, and fix it in the best way they can. Their colleagues on Earth are several weeks away at their ship’s best speed, and even message signals take an hour for the round trip. Slate and Mitnash are on their own, until they can work out who to trust. Then, as soon as they start their investigation, the threat gets personal.
For fun, here’s a NASA picture of the asteroid Ida, which to everyone’s surprise turned out to have its own little moon, Dactyl. NASA picture of asteroid Ida and its moon Dactyl
I am a little behind with the blog this week, largely because I have been making some necessary updates to the various websites that I am responsible for. Anyone who has been following the tech news over the last few years will be aware that the EU has insisted that any site using cookies should have a warning to users about this. They are tightening this right now to require that sites have some kind of popup which requires active user dismissal.
Now, along with most people in the techie world I think this is a silly regulation. There are far more effective and far less obtrusive ways that your online activities can be traced which do not involve cookies at all, so the whole mechanism gives a rather spurious sense of safety. And whatever you think of cookies, at least they can be inspected in your browser and deleted if you so choose. All the really big datasets that hold personal information about you – the ones you might conceivably be really worried about – are tucked away on remote servers to which you have no access.
But, whatever I think of it, it has to be implemented… which all takes a bit of time… which takes away from more exciting things.
Now, along the way I also discovered that several of the sites are way out of date! That is unequivocally my own fault, and I have been building up a rather long to-do list for the next few months.
So for today here is another extract from Far from the Spaceports. In this, Mitnash is also struggling with the travails of coding. Mitnash is not me, but I do have first-hand knowledge of the problems he faces! It’s a minor part of the plot, but will give him the opportunity in a few more pages to speak with a person who has information he needs.
It was time that I learned how to code the NuFleece API. So together Slate and I went through the documentation – as pitiful and contradictory as anything I had met before – and learned how to do it. This involved another trip to Aladdin’s, this time to buy a NuFleece wrap that I could practice on, and then most of the rest of the day first being baffled, then swearing at the painfully slow and irrational logic, and finally crowing with satisfaction.
Mrs Riley called me for dinner just as I got to that point. I bounced into her dining room waving the wrap about, and insisted she watch my trial template teapots drift across the surface of the wrap. They cycled through dimension and hue changes as they did so, and adapted contextually to the base colour stripes as they drifted over them. She watched them for a while as I tucked in to the soup she had brought me.
“Could you do that with pictures, Mr Mitnash? I was thinking it would be nice to have a wrap like that with pictures of the four of us on it. Riley, me, and the two children.”
I was on a real high with the afternoon’s successes.
“Drop the pictures onto this hand-held and I’ll have it done for you this evening.”
…
As always happens, the API work actually took a lot longer than I had expected. I promised myself again that I would stop giving ambitious estimates. So I worked into the night to get it done, and then at breakfast made a little show of presenting her with her finished wrap. She was delighted, and was still talking about it when I set off…
And here, just for fun, is another NASA image, this time of Saturn and (extremely small) the moon Tethys…
NASA picture of Saturn and the moon Tethys, taken by the Cassini probe
Here’s a bit of fun from the Work-in-Progress science fiction novel Far From the Spaceports. Mitnash is one of the main characters, and he is talking to the lady running the guest house on the asteroid Bryher where he is staying:
“Get away with you, Mr Mitnash. I’ll wager that can’t be done. Look now, were you wanting the chicken or the fish tonight?”
I hesitated, not being very sure. She laughed.
“No point spending too long deciding. It’s all guinea-pig anyway. I just prepare them a mite differently and you’d never know they’re the same animal. And it’s what you’ve been having everywhere else on Scilly.”
“Truly?”
“To be sure. Tell me now, where did you eat when you arrived on St Mary’s?”
“Taji’s.”
“And what did you have? His Venusian azure duck wrap?”
I nodded, and she carried on, “So did you really think he pays to ship real duck all the way out from Earth? Just to cook it and put it in a wrap? No, Mr Mitnash, all his menu is actually guinea-pig, but he’s very good at disguising it. For just me here, I only need one male and half a dozen females. Taji has three males and thirty females. Or something like that. So now, would you like the chicken or the fish?”
Look out for more extracts, and further news of Far from the Spaceports over the next few weeks. All being well, it will be published this year…
Meanwhile, here’s a recent NASA picture of the asteroid Ceres.
Recent image of Ceres from the Dawn probe, linked from NASA server
I’ve had the happy experience of being on the Scilly Isles for the last couple of weeks, surrounded by ancient historical monuments as well as natural beauty, and it set me wondering about how people in the past thought about the older monuments they saw around them.
Bant’s Carn entrance grave above Halangy Village
A couple of examples. On St Mary’s there is an Iron Age village, Halangy (from the early AD period). It now overlooks the stretch of water across towards Tresco, but when the island was first settled, a person standing here would be looking across a wide expanse of cultivated land towards some low hills. But up the hill from the houses, with a space carefully left between, is a much older entrance grave, Bant’s Carn, from either the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age – possibly 2 or 3000 years older. The grave overlooks both the village and the drystone walls marking out ancient field divisions.
How did the Halangy villagers regard that tomb? Was it a place of solace or spiritual protection, either in the ordinary difficulties of life or more specifically from the slow but relentless impact of rising sea levels? Or perhaps a nuisance that called for regular observances but apparently contributed nothing and took up valuable land? Or was its function lost to history by the Iron Age, and it simply stood there as an enigmatic reminder of an older time? Many such old human relics are given names suggesting they were built by giants – apparently their monumental scale made it seem impossible that they could have been built by human ancestors. But at least there would be a sense that whoever built it was living in the same place, sharing something of the same experience of life.
Wayland’s Smithy, beside The Ridgeway
Another example comes from The Ridgeway. The modern national trail follows the middle portion of a very ancient trackway linking the Wash in East Anglia with the Channel coast and River Severn. It was used actively for thousands of years, and scattered along it are all kinds of monuments of the human past. The particular one I want to focus on is Waylands Smithy, a very long Neolithic burial mound beside the track which itself incorporated an older, smaller tomb within it.
Now picture yourself as a person walking the Ridgeway in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1200BC say for definiteness) – perhaps you are carrying trade goods, or going to a festival to celebrate. You camp one night close to Waylands Smithy, and wander over to look at it in the moonlight. What do you make of it? Something like 2000 years separates you from its builders, and presumably the symbolism which was clear when first constructed is obscure to you. Do you even recognise it as a burial place? And if you do, does that recognition bring comfort or anxiety? Unlike the case of Halangy village, you have no possible personal connection with the culture who erected it, and no sense that those people could be your own ancestors.
All this made me think a lot about my own writing, set in the Late Bronze Age in the Levant. Uphill from the town of Kephrath are caves used as family tombs over a number of generations. There is a very direct link between the current occupants of the town and those tombs, and so there is no mystery about them, other than the basic mystery of death. But elsewhere in the land nearby, there are older constructions, to which Kephrath and its occupants have no connection. What would they make of them?
No answers here, but a lot of provocative questions about the past!
