Simon Ings's Blog, page 52
February 25, 2012
February 10, 2012
What colour is the moon?
Thursday, 1 March at 4pm – my Science Museum debut!
We humans acquired the means, very late in our evolution, to perceive a world of colour – and every day we spend phenomenal amounts of energy making the world even more colourful than it would otherwise be, with face paints and aniline dyes, fabrics and photographs, paints, powders and moving images everywhere.
But the further we leave our terrestrial environments behind, the more we confront a relatively colourless universe. At best, the Martian sky is mauve. The rings of Saturn are dun brown. The Moon is black and white. Or is it? Today, with a decent telescope and a digital camera, any keen amateur astronomer can demonstrate that the Moon is full of colour – but can our unaided eyes, so spoiled by life on earth, ever appreciate its de-saturated motley?
Exposed to radiations from which they were normally shielded by the Earth's atmosphere, the earliest astronauts – balloonists with the US Air Force's Man High and Excelsior projects –saw colours they conspicuously failed to identify on a Pantone chart. There are, after all, new colours to be discovered in space – but to see them, we need new eyes...
What Colour is the Moon? is a journey in space and time. We will see how colours, colour words, and the demands of art and industry have altered and enriched our understanding of colour. On the way we'll re-enact Edwin Land's startling "retinex" experiments in colour vision, and enjoy some (literally) dazzling optical illusions.
And we'll journey across the lunar surface, taking in a spectrum that stretches from the sky-blue cast of the Mare Tranquillitatis, through the mysterious mustards near the crater Aristarchus to the red-brick "lakes" west of Montes Haemus.
The talk will be in the Science Museum's Lecture Theatre on the ground floor of the museum. It's open to all. No booking is necessary and seats are available on a first come first serve basis.
February 3, 2012
Alastair Reynolds is all glossy
The style magazine Man About Town is available on the iPad. My interviews with the writer Alastair Reynolds and the astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell are in there somewhere, along with some "Mild Simulated Gambling". (Don't ask me; ask iTunes.)
January 12, 2012
Why Russia Sits on Plenty and Never Gets Rich
On Monday 23 January 2012 at 7.30pm I'm giving the second of four talks on Russia's scientific legacy. I've just sold the book of this series to Faber, so there may be a certain amount of drinking afterwards….
The old boast ran that Russia governed an empire with more surface area than the visible moon. Still, 40 per cent of it lay under permafrost, and no Romanov before Alexander II so much as set foot in Siberia.
Defying nature, the Bolsheviks forcibly industrialized the region, built factories and cities, and operated industries in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Beginning with the construction of the Transsiberian railway, and ending with the planting of the Russian flag on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, this is a story of visionaries and idealists, traitors, despots, and the occasional fool.Pushkin House, 5a Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2TATickets: £7, conc. £5 (Friends of Pushkin House, students and OAPs)Box Office +44 (0)20 7269 9770
December 21, 2011
What is science fiction anyway?
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I call it The Conversation. You know the one. It has a tendency to erupt whenever more than three science fiction fans gather in one place. Science fiction is that genre whose readers tend to ask: "But what is science fiction anyway?" No other genre is as obsessed with self-definition.
I haven't had The Conversation for a while. The nearest I've come to it was a couple of months back, at a public debate convened to discuss the proposition that science fiction (whatever that is) is the only form of literature that's relevant for our times.
After all, how can we write about the real world *without* science fiction? We are all, after all, cyborgs. We're born in intensive care, and we die there. In between we neck pharmaceuticals, conduct meaningful relationships through the screens of our TVs, computers and phones, and hurtle about in the bellies of huge, mechanical beasts. Even my spectacles are a caveman's bionics. It will be science and technology that make us whatever we are tomorrow. And it's science fiction that tells us what to expect.The world is full of journals and websites and blogs telling us what the future might look like. Harder to find, and set in ever-clearer opposition, are works of science fiction that dare to set out what this future might mean for us. And sometimes it's the least "accurate" science fiction that has the most to say. Earlier this year, William Gibson put it this way: that science fiction is a way of examining the present without having to cope with the terrifying reality of looking directly at it.Another of my fellow panelists, the author and academic Adam Roberts, noted that science fiction often gets the technology wrong in order to get the priorities right. Even when science fiction is at its most stolid, trying its damnedest to be about things rather than people, it still ends up saying a whole lot about optimism, anxiety, shamanism and snake oil. There's truth about people, and there's truth about technology. The two aren't the same.Perhaps that's what Margaret Atwood was driving at when she explained that she writes speculative fiction (about how we get from here to there) rather than science fiction (which starts there, among the octopuses and spaceships). It's a perfectly workable distinction. Inevitably, it led to The Conversation, immense heat, and very little light.In recent years, the Arthur C Clarke Awards have revealed a lot about how contemporary writers regard the genre. The word "confused" springs to mind: Kazuo Ishiguro turned up (for Never Let Me Go); Cormac McCarthy's The Road wasn't even submitted.Science fiction impresario Tom Hunter saved the Clarke Award from extinction when its eponymous benefactor died. When he revamped the Award to be more diverse in its nominations, he found himself facing accusations that he was trying to out-do the The Man Booker prize.It was quite a compliment, in its way: The Man Booker, after all, wants to stand for literary excellence (whatever *that* is). But Tom thinks the comparison is false. The Clarke isn't the Man Booker, so much as the Turner Prize. It's the Turner, after all, that continually throws up new definitions of what modern British art actually is.Why do lovers of science fiction waste so much of their time on The Conversation? I think it's out of a fear that the literature they love, let off the leash entirely, would simply run off without them with never a backward glance. Science fiction is notorious, after all, for biting the hand that feeds it, for deliberately running counter to all expectation, and getting lost for decades at a time in the contested, sometimes ugly territory where the humanities leave off and the sciences begin. Science fiction prides itself on crashing and burning, again and again, against the walls of narrative expectation and good taste. It's the Gully Foyle of literature, fearsome and damaged and perilous in its promise: a Prometheus figure shoving fire in your face. "Catch *this!*"That's the proposition that we've set out to explore in Arc, a new digital magazine that's about the future - the promise and the terror of it. We've enlisted some of the finest writers of our time to explore our growing conviction that, for good or ill, science and technology have acquired spiritual power over us - and that science fiction really has become our only truly relevant literary genre.Is Arc a science fiction magazine? Perhaps. Until something better turns up. But these things turn on a penny, and the future - whatever *that* is - always wins.December 14, 2011
Announcing Arc
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The first of several tantalising press releases...
For immediate release
February 2012 will see the debut of Arc, a bold new digital publication from the makers of New Scientist.
Arc will explore the future through cutting-edge science fiction and forward-looking essays by some of the world's most celebrated authors – backed up with columns by thinkers and practitioners from the worlds of books, design, gaming, film and more.
Arc 1.1 is edited by Simon Ings, author of acclaimed genre-spanning novels The Weight of Numbers and Dead Water. Simon, who made his name with a trio of ground-breaking cyberpunk novels, is a frequent commentator on science, science fiction and all points in between.
"Arc is an experiment in how we talk about the future," Simon explains. "We wanted to get past sterile 'visions' and dream up futures that evoke textures and flavours and passions." The response, he says, has been amazing. "I feel like the dog that caught the car," he says. "The appetite to be part of this project has been huge. Writers have seized the opportunity to showcase their thoughts, their dreams, their anxieties and their opinions about our future."
For New Scientist editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Arc is an opportunity to explore new territory. "We've known for many years that our readers are fascinated by the future and all the possibilities it raises. But as a magazine of science fact, we can't indulge that fascination very often," he explains. "Arc will explore the endless vistas opened up by today's science and technology. While it's a very different venture from New Scientist, it will share its unique combination of intelligence, wit and charm."
John MacFarlane, Online Publisher of New Scientist, says "I am thrilled to be involved in the launch of this new title. The combination of superb content and an innovative digital publishing model make for a very exciting project and I am sure a broad range of readers will love Arc."
Arc 1.1 will be available from mid-February 2012 on iPad, Kindle and as a limited print edition.
Interested readers are invited to register to find out more at www.arcfinity.org
November 17, 2011
The Brain is Wider than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard
reviewed for the Observer http://bit.ly/vnT36g
In our desire to think great things about our IT "cloud", we're deliberately oversimplifying ourselves. In our desire to be part of something greater, we're making ourselves small.
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October 31, 2011
The Men Who Fell to Earth
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On Tuesday 22 November at 7.30pm I'll be joined by Doug Millard, Senior Curator of ICT & Space Technology at London's Science Museum, to trace Russia's centuries-old obsession with flight. Discover how Russia's pilots, parachutists and pioneers won the space race at Pushkin House, 5a Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2TA
October 11, 2011
Strangeness in Chelsea
September 30, 2011
What Soviet science did for us
I'm preparing a series of talks for Pushkin House in London, to tie in with a long project on science under Joseph Stalin. While we're finalising the programme, these notes will give you an idea what to expect.
Russia's Other Culture: science and technology in 20th century.
Early in the twentieth century, a few marginal scientists bound themselves to a bankrupt government to create a world superpower. Russia's political elites embraced science, patronised it, fetishized it, and even tried to impersonate it. Many Soviet scientists led a charmed life. Others were ruined by their closeness to power. Four illustrated talks reveal how this stormy marriage between science and state has shaped the modern world. 1. The Men Who Fell to Earth: How Russia's pilots, parachutists and pioneers won the space race.November 2011.In the 1950s and 1960s Sergei Korolev and the Soviet space programme laid a path to the stars. Now Russia is our only lifeline to the technologies and machines we have put in orbit. Simon Ings is joined by Doug Millard, Senior Curator of ICT & Space Technology at London's Science Museum, to trace Russia's centuries-old obsession with flight. This was the nation that erected skydiving towers in its playgrounds, built planes so large and so strange, the rest of the world thought they were fakes, and outdid Germany and the US in its cinematic portrayal of space. The nation's soaring imagination continues to astonish the world. The talk coincides with 50th anniversary of pioneering space travel by Yuri Gagarin
2. Prospectors: Why Russia sits on plenty and never gets rich
January 2012The old boast ran that Russia governed an empire with more surface area than the visible moon. Still, 40 per cent of it lay under permafrost, and no Romanov before Alexander II so much as set foot in Siberia. Defying nature, the Bolsheviks forcibly industrialized the region, built factories and cities, and operated industries in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Beginning with the construction of the Transsiberian railway, and ending with the planting of the Russian flag on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, this is a story of visionaries and idealists, traitors, despots, and the occasional fool. The talk will form part of a week of activity marking the fifth anniversary of Pushkin House's establishment in Bloomsbury.
3. Red Harvest: What Russia's famines taught us about the living world.
March 2012After the civil war, the Bolsheviks turned to the revolutionary science of genetics for help in securing the Soviet food supply. The young Soviet Union became a world leader in genetics and shared its knowledge with Germany. Then Stalin's impatience and suspicion destroyed the field and virtually wiped out Russian agriculture. Stalin was right to be suspicious: genetics had promised the world a future of health and longevity, but by the 1940s it was delivering death camps and human vivisection. Genetic advances have made possible our world of plenty – but why did the human cost have to be so high?
4. "General Healthification": Russia's unsung sciences of the mind.
May 2012The way we teach and care for our children owes much to a handful of largely forgotten Russian pioneers. Years after their deaths, the psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein, the psychologist Lev Vygotsky and the pioneering neuroscientist Alexander Luria have an unseen influence over our everyday thinking. In our factories and offices, too, Soviet psychology plays a role, fitting us to our tasks, ensuring our safety and our health. Our assumptions about health care and the role of the state all owe a huge debt to the Soviet example. But these ideas have a deeper history. Many of them originated in America. The last lecture in this series celebrates the fertile yet largely forgotten intellectual love affair between America and the young Soviet Union.
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