Brian Clegg's Blog, page 106

Dipping a toe in the fiction world

I have long had this suspicion that somehow you aren't a real writer unless you've written some fiction. Clearly this is ridiculous - and yet it's a beguiling feeling.

The first ever book I wrote was a novel (a thankfully now lost turgid science fiction epic, written on the train on the way to school), and I have written at least half a dozen more, which haven't seen the light of day, but I would say are part of my learning to be a writer.

Now, though, I am glad to say, I have a real work of fiction that makes me proud and is published. (I should say I'm already proud of some published short fiction, like my short story in Nature.) It's called Xenostorm: Rising and it's aimed at the young adult market, which is theoretically 11 to 14ish, but in practice is popular with adults too - think Harry Potter in this respect.

This is science fiction, but not in an intrusive spaceships and ray guns way - it is SF that happens to apparently ordinary teenagers with extraordinary results that could transform the world in a shocking way.

The book is available as paperback and ebook from its website, where you will also find details of the Xenostorm game, a fun online puzzle game. At risk of sounding corny, the book should be a great stocking filler for young adult readers.

To give you a taster, here's the opening chapter:

One
DAVY FORCED a path through the streams of pedestrians flooding down London’s Cromwell Road.

Across the wide street loomed the Natural History Museum, a Victorian forest of pillars and carved beasts thronging around its twin towers. Already visible ahead was the tall town house with his flat on the third floor. Davy’s home – at least for the next few months.

He stopped to unwrap a stick of gum and stared at the plain white house.

When, he thought, had they ever lived anywhere longer than a year? 

Now Davy was in London. Before that Kent, then France and South America. It sounded exciting. But it wasn’t so great when you lived it. Davy had never belonged anywhere. His parents said that their jobs were to blame, but that seemed an excuse. There were plenty of journalists and scientists who didn’t drag their children from place to place. It was almost as if they were frightened of settling down.

Why couldn’t they have stayed on the farm? That was really home.

Davy’s first seven years had been spent on an isolated farmstead, up on the high Pennine moors of Northern England. A cold, wild, wet place – yet one that always felt solid and reliable.

That was how it should be, he thought. Seven years without moving on. There was a dog, Jasper, and everything. It was normal, comfortable. They were a proper family then.

He threw his gum wrapper at a bin by the road’s edge. It fell short, dropping to the pavement.

No one would notice. London was like that. You could be invisible. If only it was the same at school.

For Davy, walking through the school gates with their twisted crowns of barbed wire was a daily ordeal. He knew that somewhere the bullies would be waiting. It was only if he managed to find his best friend Raul first that he would be safe. Then they would leave him alone.

It’d be hopeless without Raul, he thought. There’d be no way to make it through the day. But everyone liked Raul – even the bullies.

Just ahead of Davy a girl collecting for charity stood in the middle of the pavement, chatting to an elderly man. He saw her at the last moment and swerved to avoid a collision. When he looked back over his shoulder, she winked at him, a pretty girl with long black hair. Davy felt a warm flush of embarrassment and looked away at the pavement ahead.

If mum knew about the bullying she’d say ‘Just tell a teacher,’ but it didn’t happen to her. She didn’t know what it was like.

Davy’s mother was the solid one of the family. The person he and his father turned to when things went wrong. A physicist, she wasn’t anything like the stereotype mad scientist. She was good with people, always making friends quickly. But she wasn’t right about everything. She thought anyone could be reasoned with, even a bully.

Why was he a target? It’s not like he was a nerd. He fitted in. Not fat. Average height, almost. Alright, there was his hair, you always got snide remarks about red hair, but not like this.

‘School sucks.'

Oh great, thought Davy, I said it aloud.

He glared at the passers-by, daring them to laugh, but they ignored him.

His iPod reached the end of the track. He slipped it out to skip the next song, that rubbish one with the boring chorus.

He touched the control.

Pain! 

What’s happening? Stop it! Please, someone stop it!

A wave of pure agony blasted through Davy’s skull. It was like a dentist’s drill ripping into his brain. Pressure soared in his head. Jagged bursts of excruciating pain tore down his neck. More and more the pressure built behind his eyes, so much they would surely burst.

Clutching his forehead, Davy dropped to the pavement.

... read on in XENOSTORM: Rising .

Shields up, Mac users

I'm virus proof on my Mac! Oops...Even though I am now a Mac user, I have to admit that, as a species, they have their problems. Specifically, they have always had a tendency to be smug. Infuriatingly so.

Perhaps the biggest example of this, bigger still than their certainty that their machines had more style and flair, or were better at arty things, was the assurance that computer viruses were not a problem for them. They sneered at the poor PC user, scrambling to update their anti-virus every year. They sniggered behind their hands as friends computers succumbed to worms and trojans. Because, on the whole, Macs were virus proof. Not because they were so technically sophisticated, but because they were simply too small a market to make it worth virus writers targeting them.

However, though Macs still have a relatively small market share, it has steadily grown. And guess what? Viruses are out there. What's more, since hardly any Macs are protected against them, they are easy pickings.

I've taken the plunge and installed AV software. I haven't done a scientific survey or anything, but I've gone for Sophos. There are a couple of reasons for this. I have an affection for the company as they helped me out free of charge a number of times in the early days of PCs at British Airways. Their software has never been the slickest, but it has always had an industrial strength feel to it. The other reason, frankly, is that it is free. Eat that, PC users.

How has the experience been? Pretty good. The initial scan was a bit of a nightmare - it ground to a halt a couple of times and I had to restart it, but eventually I got the 6 million files (gulp) scanned. But since then, in background mode it has been trundling away nicely, occasionally spotting nasties in my emails and generally being a good egg.

If you are a Mac user and want to give it a try you can find it here. I would recommend giving it a thought. The world, it is a-changeing.

I ought to stress there are other products, this isn't a comprehensive test and (sadly) Sophos are not paying me anything to say this.

Elements of Excellence

I very much enjoyed Mark Forsyth's fluffy but inspiring earlier books on words, notably The Etymologicon , and his new title The Elements of Eloquence is equally enjoyable (and anything but a hard read). But it is also a book that makes you stop in your tracks. Because this stuff really matters.

Forsyth has revealed a startling truth that should have been obvious - in all those hours spent in English lessons we aren't taught how to write well. Yet there is a way to do this that has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks and that was, until it went out of fashion, a major part of the school curriculum - rhetoric.

Now, if you told me a couple of weeks ago that I would wax lyrical about a book on rhetoric, I would not have believed you. 'Rhetoric' just sounds really dull. As a subject, it sounds as if it would make politics look engaging. Yet, as Forsyth so ably demonstrates, rhetoric is simply the key tools and techniques of getting something across in words in a way that will catch the attention and engage the reader. Although originally aimed primarily at speeches, these techniques are equally important for the written word.

A couple of hundred years ago children were taught rhetoric - now we have to pick it up by osmosis as our English teachers rabbit on about 'what the author was feeling when she wrote this' or 'what the author really means.' How much more valuable to teach us 'what techniques and tricks the author is using to reel the reader in.'

Admittedly the whole field could do with a bit of a work over. If their science was anything to go by, I can't believe the ancient Greeks had the last word on rhetoric - there are probably key tools and techniques they weren't aware of. And the current terminology is horrendous. Forsyth points out that experts can't agree on what the rhetorical terms mean - but even if they could, many of them are obscure Greek words that are almost impossible to remember. If we were to teach rhetoric again, I'm sure we could come up with more memorable terms than aposiopesis, polysyndeton and epizeuxis (to name but three). But the fact remains that rhetoric is a treasury that most modern writers have never consciously explored - and our writing life would be much richer if they had. It's a brilliant conceit to do this, Mr Forsyth.

Is the book perfect? No. I find Forsyth's writing style a little too jovial and jokey, while some of the approaches he uses (cramming paragraphs full of the rhetorical technique covered by that chapter, and ending each chapter with an example of the next technique, for instance) are irritatingly clever-clever. For me, some of his examples of hendiadys just don't make sense (though to be fair, he says you can never really be sure this technique has been used.) But I can forgive anything for a book that has educated me more about the use of English than several years in English classes at school.

if writing were building construction, grammar and vocabulary would give us the raw materials and the basic skills to assemble them, but rhetoric provides the abilities of the architect. To write without an awareness of these tools and techniques is like expecting a bricklayer to create a cathedral. Anyone with the faintest interest in writing, or the English language, should be rushing out and buy this book.

You can see more at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

The Smartwatch Files

O yippee-do-dah, Sony has brought out another smartwatch. And further surprises, Samsung's smart watch sales are pitiful. Still my beating heart, and pass the smelling salts. (Whatever happened to smelling salts?)

In case you haven't come across them, a smartwatch is the wrist-worn equivalent of a smartphone, though the screen is, of course, much smaller. I can see why people get excited about smartwatches. They are truly reminiscent of all that 1950s scifi. Once you've got a videophone on your wrist, all you need is a flying car and a laser gun and you are truly equipped for the twenty-first century. But the reality is rather different.

Firstly, all the evidence is that wearing watches is going out of fashion. Remaking them as a smartwatch seems a bit like the way the gas companies responded to the introduction of the electric light by bringing out a better gas jet. They were already dead, but they didn't realize it. I'm not saying watches will disappear. There are still plenty of old fogies like me who love them, and they will always have a niche appeal. But lots of people in my daughters' generation simply don't wear watches.

Then there's the matter of functionality. It's amazing what you can get in a watch-sized bit of electronics, but it is not going to be the equivalent of a phone. Firstly, at a time when phone screens are getting bigger and bigger, you are talking about taking the screen down to a tiny fraction of the size. But also it would be an immense challenge to get all the gubbins of a smartphone into that form factor.

So in reality, smartwatches are actually dumbwatches. Rather than have the functionality themselves, they pretty well universally tie into a smartphone using Bluetooth. So you have to carry the phone anyway. And that being the case, what would you rather do using that tiny screen on your wrist? After all, bear in mind that as much as 90% of smartphone use has nothing to do with making calls. I can't see myself typing a text on a smartwatch screen, or consulting a map, or looking up something on Google, or watching a Youtube video, or updating Facebook. It is inevitably going to be very limited by scale. You are left with a very expensive remote control for a device that really isn't hard to handle.

Will this stop manufacturers churning them out? Not for a while. Because anyone who hasn't got one will still be tempted by that Dick Tracy appeal, and the gadget lovers amongst us will lash out for one. But after that... would they buy a second smartwatch once the novelty has worn off? I think not.

Thermodynamics 3 - The Demon

 It's relatively rare that physicists indulge in a spot of whimsy. They are, on the whole, rather literal people - which is not to say unimaginative. Most modern physics is so imaginative it is hard to believe it is connected to the real world. But it is rarely whimsical. However, one rare step into the field, far eclipsing Schrödinger's unfortunate mangy moggy, is the strange case of Maxwell's demon, and this imaginary character's threat to the second law of thermodynamics. This is the third and final post on the subject, inspired by my book Dice World .

Let's start with the split box we met in the previous post. The door in the middle has been open for  a while and entropy has risen as the gasses on either side go from being hot and cold respectively to a mix of the two. But now enter the demon. He is an extremely small creature, so small that he can see the individual molecules of gas passing back and forth in the box. And he has such a high metabolism that he can respond to the different molecules one by one as they pass by. He is in charge of a trap door in the divider that splits the box in half, a special trap door that it takes no energy to open and close. As a molecule approaches the (closed) door our demon takes a look at it. If the molecule is moving left to right and it’s fast, he opens the trap door and lets it through. If it’s going slow he leaves the trap door shut. Similarly, if a molecule is moving right to left and it’s slow, he opens the trap door. Fast molecules from right to left don’t get through.

After a while, our demon will have many more fast molecules in the right-hand half of the box than in the left-hand half. He will have started with a mixed gas with a middling temperature throughout the box and will have ended up with cold gas in the left section and hot gas in the right. He has reduced the entropy, because the gas molecules are now more ordered than they were before, the reverse of the original action of opening the partition and letting them mix. But assuming he really can open and close the trap door with no energy used, then he really is a demon. He has defeated the second law of thermodynamics. Not through some statistical fluke, but systematically and reliably.

Ever since the demon's introduction by the great James Clark Maxwell (though it was Lord Kelvin who called the creature a demon), there has been a debate about what's wrong with this model of the world. It surely can't be allowed. The chances are that it comes down to a failure in the simplification that always occurs when we build a scientific model of reality. Sometimes that simplification is very obvious. I recently saw a paper addressing the likelihood of getting a cat into a superposed state and it began by assuming the cat was a sphere of water. Can you spot the simplification?

With Maxwell's demon we have a few potential issues. One is whether we can have a door that can be opened and closed without putting energy into the system, which may be enough to account for the very small increment in entropy every time a molecule is switched by the demon. Another is that the demon would have to make a measurement of the incoming molecules to decide if they were fast or slow. That act would surely involve some exertion of energy? Again, very little is required to balance out the increase in entropy of a single molecule's position. But cunning scientists have found ways around these issues.

There is a more mind-boggling suggestion. Apparently, while storing information does not require energy, erasing information does. And it is suggested that with each measurement the demon has to adjust its ideas of what 'fast' and 'slow' are, which means that each molecule that passes by will add to the demon's memory store. Arguably, however much storage the demon has, to keep going with the process it will eventually have to delete information to make room for new stuff - and there goes the energy.

If you think that argument is tenuous, it is. The demon may well still be off the hook. But whatever the outcome, it still makes a fascinating way to think a little more about this most significant of physical laws.

White sharks and romantic comedy

I'd like to introduce another of my guest bloggers: Ute (who pronounces her name Oooh-tah) Carbone is a multipublished author of women’s fiction, comedy, and romance. She lives with her husband in New Hampshire, where she spends her days walking, eating chocolate and dreaming up stories. Find out more about Ute and her work at her website.

GUEST POST

Last summer, the great whites came to Cape Cod. There were multiple sightings of these sharks in the waters off the Cape Cod National Seashore. In July, a great white shark attacked a man kayaking near Nauset Beach in Orleans. A few weeks later, a swimmer was bitten near Balston Beach in Truro. These were the first recorded incidents of shark attack on the Cape in seventy five years.  Towns began to post warnings about getting into the water. On busy Labor Day Weekend, the bank holiday that marks the unofficial end of the summer season, beaches in Chatham and Orleans, a stretch that the Cape Cod Times  dubbed “shark alley”, were closed to swimming.  It was beginning to look like the opening to a sequel of Jaws.

I watched this unfolding story with great interest. I live in New England and have spent many a long weekend and holiday week enjoying the beaches on Cape Cod. I’m also a fiction writer and Provincetown, the fist at the end of Cape Cod’s arm, is the setting for my romantic comedy, The P-Town Queen.

The story revolves around the relationship between a down-on-her-luck shark researcher and a guy who’s hiding from the mob by pretending to be gay. You might think writing such a story involves little more than pulling it from
my overactive imagination and putting it to paper. But fiction, even at its wildest, has to have some basis in reality. If it doesn’t, the reader will soon put down the book (or throw it against the nearest wall, as the case may be) never to pick it up again. So even a fiction writer like me has to do her homework, otherwise known as research. Since my main character, Nikki, was a shark expert, one of the things I researched was great white sharks.

 It takes a while for a book to go from bright idea to published entity. In the case of  The P-Town Queen, the process took  four years, give or take. And what I found in researching sharks off the waters of Cape Cod, four years before publication, was there weren’t many of them. An occasional sighting would cause a blip on the local news, but that was about it. If you were a shark researcher like Nikki, you’d most likely do research somewhere other than Cape Cod, choosing instead a location where there was a large population of sharks to study. The Channel Islands off the coast of California, perhaps. Or the southwestern coast of Australia.

I needed to set my story in Provincetown and so I made up a story line to fit this few-sharks-on-the-Cape fact. Nikki had been researching sharks in California, she lost her grant money and was forced to move home to Cape Cod to live with her retired fisherman father while she figured out how to get more funding and further her career. The story line worked. The book was picked up by Champagne Books and, in June of 2012, it was published.

And in July of 2012, one month after the release, white sharks started appearing off the coast of Cape Cod. There are good reasons for the increase in the white shark population.  Grey seals are a protected species and their numbers have been on the rise. Monomoy Island off of the town of Chatham  is now home to over a thousand grey seals. White sharks feed on seals, so the greater the food source, the more sharks come around to feed.  It does make perfect sense, but I can’t help feeling a little wiz-bang shiver at the co-incidence. I’m sure Nikki would be pleased that the subjects of her research have come to her. Funny, how things work, isn’t it?

White shark image from Wikipedia

Alphabetti spaghetti

A few days ago I heard the author Michael Rosen talking on the radio about his new book Alphabetical. He told how the capital letter A turned upside down looked like a stylised ox's head with two horns - and low and behold, this letter used to be called aleph, the word in ancient Semitic languages for an ox. I was hooked and was soon plunging into this exploration of the English alphabet.

Along the way Rosen brings in so many stories. A lot of this is done by a cunning wheeze in the structure. The book is arranged alphabetically (how else?) and each letter starts with a short section on the letter itself, its origins and its uses in English, then follows with a longer section that has a theme. So, for instance, D is for disappeared letters and V is for Vikings. We then get a meandering exploration of that theme - sometimes with many deviations along the way, but always tying back to the alphabet and writing.

It ought to work brilliantly, and in many ways it does, but I was slightly put off by the chunkiness of the book - over 400 pages - and combined with the alphabetic approach, it is difficult not to occasionally have that sense of 'I must plough on to the end' rather than 'I'm enjoying it'. It's that same sense I might get when someone has kindly bought me, say, an encyclopaedia of science fiction and I feel I must my work my way through it from end to end. On the whole it does work, but I couldn't help but feel it might have been better if Rosen had let go of the rather obvious strictures of the alphabet for the book's structure. I think there's an interesting comparison with a couple of books I reviewed once about the periodic table. The one that worked best wove the subject matter into a series of stories with no particular table-related structure. This worked so much better than if the author had worked sequentially through.

However, there is lots to enjoy, from Rosen's impassioned rant against the obsessive use of the systematic synthetic phonics approach in teaching reading these days, to his really interesting observations on the importance of Pitman's shorthand and even his affection for the A to Z (or his knowledge of the absence of the London E19 district). It's a bit like being trapped in a lift with Stephen Fry when he's playing QI host. This is the QI of letters and words.

If you are interested in writing and words - or struggling for a present idea for someone who is - this could be an ideal buy. See more at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

The invisible truth

I am rather fond of the US TV show Fringe, and am currently working my way through Season 4 (when are we getting Season 5, Netflix?). An episode I watched recently featured an invisible man, which made me think of the difficulties that invisible man syndrome has traditionally revealed in the Science Fiction Hokum Test (SFHT).

The SFHT is a recognition that to make science fiction work it is perfectly acceptable to make up new science or to bend the laws of physics, but once you have set up a premise, it needs to work consistently and logically, or it fails the SFHT.

The original H. G. Wells invisible man (and many in the movies) have had a big problem because their alleged mechanism was a treatment that made our hero transparent. The SFHT says it's fine to invent a mechanism for making someone transparent - but then you have to live with the consequences. And for Wells' invisible man this should have meant going blind. If he had literally become transparent, light would pass straight through his eyes without interacting with them. So there would be no stimulation of the optic nerve - no vision. If, on the other hand, his eyes were allowed some kind of special treatment that prevented this, they would either appear as black holes in space (if they absorbed all light) or floating eyeballs (if they re-emitted photons).

A cuttlefish working its chromatophores for all it's worthThe writers of Fringe escaped this problem by using a different mechanism. Their invisible man, it seems, was endued with chromatophores. These are special pigment-containing organelles found in various creatures that can allow them to change their coloration, most dramatically in the likes of squid and cuttlefish, to provide a remarkably good match to the background they are sitting on.

Now, SFHT says it's fine to allow this and to overlook all the difficulties of making it work to the extent of making a person invisible. (Apart from getting these alien structures in our skin, they would have to respond much faster than the original, be much more detailed, and be able to pick up a detailed image from the other side of the person, where an actual chromatophore user seems to primarily use information from its eyes.) However, once we have established this, the chromatophores have to act logically and consistently.

You could just about imagine a mechanism for concealing the eyes but leaving them working, though two spots on the back of the head behind the eyes would be visible unless there was a different mechanism for picking up the image from the pupil. But the real problem is with dead stuff. Hair and nails, for instance. Chromatophores have to be in a part of the animal that is alive. For nails this wouldn't be too much of an issue, because they are translucent, so they would produce ripples but be semi-invisible, but hair is a real issue. Doubly so, in fact. All your hair would be visible, and any part of your skin directly opposite a bit of skin shielded by hair would also be visible. It's a massive SFHT fail.

Interestingly the two real bits of invisibility technology echo these two science fiction approaches. The most effective at the moment is simply to put a lot of cameras on one side of the object you want to conceal and a screen on the other. Look at the screen and you see through the object. This is conceptually similar to the approach used in Fringe. At the moment it is an approach that is flawed because your invisibility only works when viewed from a single direction. But it would be surprising if, within a few years, we couldn't produce a spherical shield that consists of a matrix of alternating miniature cameras and LEDs, like those used in LED TV screens. The result is that you would both pick up and transmit an image in any direction - it should produce genuine cloaking.

The other, in some ways more impressive, technology, which you see quite often in the press, is cloaking using metamaterials. These are artificial materials that play around with the way substances interact with light or sound or electromagnetism. Invisibility metamaterials are usually those with a negative refractive index. You'll probably remember from school, refraction is the way light bends as it travels from one medium to another - causing effects like a bending pencil when one is put in a glass of water. Negative refractive index means that the light bends in the opposite way to usual, making it ideal to bend around something and conceal it. Like the original invisible man, with this kind of invisibility, the light never goes through an intermediate electrical signal.

The trouble with existing implementations is that they only work with very small objects and mostly with microwaves rather than visible light. The fact that this is reported in the media as 'Harry Potter style invisibility cloaks created in the lab' reflects the way the media (and university PR departments) can't help wildly exaggerating to get our attention. (A most dramatic example of this recently was the claim that a real Star Wars lightsaber had been made. Headlines literally claimed this. Actually what had been done is linking together two photons so they acted a bit like a molecule of light as they passed through a peculiar substance at near absolute zero. Not exactly a lightsaber.)

The kind of shielding provided by metamaterials, unlike the TV camera version (which doesn't render you blind as you can have inward facing LEDs as well) does suffer from the classic invisible man problem. As the light no longer passes through your pupils, but is deviated around your body, you can't see. Shame really.

So there we have it. You can be invisible and succeed with the SFHT. But very few actual examples in novels, TV and film actually do pass the test.

Image from Wikipedia

Haynes Death Star Manual

Anyone who has gone through that 'I want to fix up my car' phase in the UK will be familiar with Haynes workshop manuals. These large format hardback books take the reader through all the basic maintenance and fiddly bits for practically every model of car you can think of. Now, they've added a fairly unique bit of maintenance work to their portfolio - fixing up the Imperial Death Star from Star Wars.

This is one of a range of entertainment-based titles added to the range. I recently reviewed the UFO Investigations Manual , but the Death Star version is closer to originals in the sense of being about a specific piece of technology. Like the UFO book, though, it's a bit of misnomer, in the sense that it isn't actually a workshop manual - it doesn't guide you through maintenance work on a Death Star, but rather it is a book about the Death Star, treating it as if it really existed.

It reminds me in some ways of the sort of thing you used to see in comics like the Eagle when I was young, where you might have a feature on something like the latest steam engine (ahem) or jet fighter or bomber (I remember one on the ill-fated TSR-2) which would inevitably include a cutaway drawing - and here we get several of these on the Death Star in all its glory.

One of the handy things about the whole Star Wars universe, probably only paralleled by Star Trek, is the extent to which back story details have been built up that makes it possible to provide page after page on the technological precursors of the Death Star and the different sections of the vast spaceship (120 km across, in case you wondered). There are plenty of diagrams and also plenty of stills from the Star Wars movies, illustrating different parts of the interior, exterior, and the partly completed second attempt at a Death Star.

Being old and cynical, the faux history and commentaries from the Grand Moff Tarkin amongst others come across as a little forced, but I think for a younger reader these won't prove a problem, and I think any younger fans of the original (and best) Star Wars movies, plus any older types with a sentimental fondness for these films will get a lot of enjoyment out of this. Certainly an excellent stocking filler if you have a big stocking.

You can see more at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

The history under our feet

 A new guest post by Kate Kelly. Kate is a marine scientist by day but by night she writes SF thrillers for kids. Her debut novel Red Rock, a Cli-Fi* thriller for teens, is published by Curious Fox. She lives in Dorset with her husband, two daughters and assorted pets and blogs at scribblingseaserpent.blogspot.co.uk

* No, I didn't know either. It stands for Climate Fiction, often dystopian fiction where climate change has had a significant impact on the environment.

GUEST POST

Most of the time you will find me somewhere on the internet talking about writing with my fellow authors, but Brian’s invitation to appear as a guest on his blog has given me the opportunity to talk about my other great passion – geology!

During the day when I’m not writing fiction I work as a marine scientist. I studied first geology and then oceanography at university and both these subjects have remained very close to my heart – especially the geology. And I’m lucky because I am able to indulge this passion – I live on the Jurassic Coast (The southern one – there are two).

What I love so much about geology is the way it influences the landscape around us – it is like the skeleton underneath the fields, determining where the hills persist and the valleys form, the balance between rugged headland and sandy bay. I love the stories it tells of ancient swamps and shallow seas, vast forests and marauding reptiles.

I stood in a quarry once, looking at a rockface - but that rockface was a section through time. I saw the ancient channels where a river once flowed, and the roots of the plants that had grown along its banks – cut off at ground level and singed to carbon by the overlying lava flow – an ancient cataclysm that had destroyed that peaceful valley.

I can stand on the beach near my home, sand ripples beneath my boots, and stare at ripples that look just the same, but are millions of years old, frozen into the rocks of the cliff face, reminding me that once before there was a sandy beach on this spot.

The Jurassic coast where I live is, in itself, a section through time. The rocks here span a period of time that straddles the Jurassic on either side.

We start with the Triassic red sandstone cliffs of East Devon, laid down in an ancient desert on the edge of an evaporating sea. We can see the ancient dunes in the cliff face, and find layers of gypsum left behind as what water there was evaporated in the sun.

As we head east the rocks change as the seas encroached, through the Triassic to the life rich seas of the Jurassic proper – ammonites and belemnites teemed in these waters as the occasional icthyosaurus swam by.

Then the seas shallowed to swamp and at Lulworth Cove you can stand on the remains of a fossil forest, giant tree ferns, their roots and stumps now turned to stone.

Finally the seas encroached once more – the eastern most layers are the chalks exposed at Old Harry Rocks – a deeper sea, these rocks made up of the carbonate shells of tiny plankton.

This is a section of coastline that can give you a broadbrush sweep through time – but if you start to look closer you can see the finer detail of that changing landscape – the local variations – where the land shifted along a fault line – did the Earth shake at that moment? I wonder if it frightened any dinosaurs?

Once there was a desert, then there was a swamp. Now there is a town. I wonder how much of that town will remain for geologists in the future?