Brian Clegg's Blog, page 134

Idiot tiger in the tank

Those of us with any sort of scientific bent have groaned for years over the misuse of sciencey words in  cosmetic adverts. Practically any cosmetic ad seems to try to do two things:

To use emotional trigger words like 'natural' to make us think the product was practically squeezed out of a fruit or leaf, rather than blended in a vast industrial complex. Also words like 'nourish' however ridiculous this is when talking about something like (dead) hair.To use words that have real meaning in science, but removed from their context. So, for instance, putting 'DNA' into the description of your product, or some wonderfully obscure compound name like pro-boswellox-retinox-B.Now an oil company has got on the bandwagon (not an entirely strange jump, since most cosmetics contain a fair amount of processed oil of one sort or another). When selling petrol, the oil companies have a real problem, because petrol is a commodity. We don't really care what brand it is, just how cheap it is. Esso's answer to this is to resort to the cosmetic world's plan B.
In recent ads, Esso makes a big thing of the fact that their new fuel (ok, petrol with a tiny bit of additive) works at a molecular level (specifically to help remove deposits). Now unlike many of the cosmetic adverts, this isn't just a use of magic words. The fuel does work at a molecular level... but then so does pretty well every chemical compound that isn't part of a larger structure. Okay there will be sub-molecular activity - hydrogen bonds, for example. And I suppose it's possible they could produce a fuel that undergoes nuclear decay and so works at the nuclear level. But otherwise how else is it going to work?
I am now going to drink my coffee. It works at the molecular level, you know. I might watch myself a classic Esso ad as I do so:

Nature’s Nanotech #6 – Silk Elevators

Sixth in the Nature's Nanotech series.



Anyone who talks to young children about science knows that there are two things that really grab their attention – dinosaurs and space. While I’m not aware of any antediluvian nanotechnology, there is certainly an absolutely stunning potential space application that has some natural inspirations. (I’m aware, by the way, that the word ‘antedeluvian’ is both anachronistic and unscientific… but it’s a lovely word that we really shouldn’t lose from the language.)

Nature has some amazing, extremely fine fibres. Take, for example, that everyday wonder, a spider’s web. The spider silk that makes up the web is a spun fibre constructed from proteins. Though light, these filaments are extremely resistant to fracture – tougher than steel. Spider silk is typically 3,000 nanometers across, but its toughness is down to its structure at the nano level.

A team at MIT discovered that the unusual strength is down to a substructure of ‘beta sheet crystals’, which hold the silk together. The linking is done by hydrogen bonds, the same kind of bonding that stops water from boiling at room temperature. Such bonds are easy to break, but the MIT scientists discovered that if they are confined to spaces just a few nanometers in span – as they are in the beta sheet crystals – they become exceedingly strong. So spider silk depends on a kind of nano-glue for its strength.

In the nanotechnology world, the equivalent of spider silk is the carbon nanotube. We are all familiar with the way carbon comes in different physical structures or ‘allotropes’ that have remarkably different properties. Chemically there is no difference between diamond and the graphite in a pencil ‘lead’ but physically one is extremely hard and the other has multiple planes that slide easily over each other making it effectively soft (although those planes themselves are surprisingly tough).

Another way to fit together a structure of carbon atoms is to form a tube. Imagine taking a plane of graphite a single atom thick (technically graphene) and folding it around to make a tubular shape. Carbon nanotubes are amongst the most amazing artefacts ever made. Though simple in structure, they are remarkable both in their strength and their other physical properties.

Electrically they can behave as if they were a metal or a semiconductor, simply as a result of the shape of the tube. Although carbon nanotube electronics is in its infancy, there is considerable speculation about the capabilities of nanotube products. They could be used to make everything from transistors that are switched by a single electron to batteries built into a sheet of paper.  But their pièce de résistance is their strength. Carbon nanotubes make spider silk look like tissue. When you compare a nanotube’s strength per unit weight with steel it comes out around 300 times greater.

All kinds of applications are possible for such a remarkable material. Nanotubes are present in the much thicker carbon fibres used to reinforce everything from tennis rackets to bike frames, but only incidentally and in small quantities. At the moment they tend to be used in random bulk combinations of many small fragments – not as strong as a set of individual aligned nanotubes, but still enough to add strength and to change electrical properties. But one potential application could totally transform the space industry.

Getting things into space is expensive. Hugely expensive. To reach a geosynchronous orbit (of which more later) typically costs around $20,000 per kilogram. But there is a hypothetical nanotube technology that once developed could deliver satellites and even people into space for around 1/100th of this cost. What’s more, rocket technology is inherently risky. You will inevitably lose some of your space missions. Yet the nanotube technology could, once established, run day after day without problem.

Imagine you were sitting on top of a house and wanted to get something up there. You could have someone attach your payload to a rocket and shoot it in your direction. But like the space launch it’s a dangerous and expensive solution. Instead you are more likely to throw a piece of string off the roof, have a basket tied to it and then haul the object up.

Now extend this picture to the Empire State Building. Your piece of string would have to be very strong, which would make it quite heavy to haul up and down, increasing the cost of the process. What might be better is to keep the string (or more likely a piece of metal) in place and have the basket haul itself up and down along the supporting structure.

Time to take another jump into that geosynchronous orbit. An object in orbit is in a very strange state. It is in free fall, dropping towards the Earth – but at the same time it is moving sideways at just the right speed so it always misses. This, incidentally, is why people float around in the International Space Station. It’s not because there’s no gravity – the Earth’s gravitational pull at its height (350 kilometres above the Earth’s surface) is around 90% Earth normal. The astronauts float because they and the station are falling. But they stay in orbit because their sideways motion means they keep missing the planet.

Because of this balance, at any particular height there is one speed that keeps you in orbit. And if you go high enough – around 35,786 kilometres up – that speed is the same as the rotational speed of the Earth, making you geosynchronous. Point the orbit in the right direction and you will stay over the same point on the Earth’s surface (this is a geostationary orbit).

So, imagine you could drop a piece of string from a geostationary satellite down to the ground. You could then just send a lift (elevator) up the string and replace all that dangerous, expensive rocketry. What you’ve got is a space elevator – and to make it work, that string needs to be made from carbon nanotubes.

Of course this is a long way in the future, though a range of companies (including, bizarrely Google) are working on the technology required. There’s no doubt that Bradley Edwards of NASA’s Institute of Advanced Concepts was being over-optimistic when in 2002 he commented ‘[With nanotubes] I’m convinced that the space elevator is practical and doable. In 12 years, we could be launching tons of payload…’ However in a more reasonable timescale – perhaps another 30 or 40 years – it is entirely feasible. And you can’t fault the scope of imagination that allows the inspiration of spider silk to transport us into space.

Next week, in the final piece in the series, we will be learning the lesson of the peacock’s tail and the amazing optics it inspires.

Images from Wikipedia and iStockPhoto.com

Gauss and Newton's Apple

One of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Carl Friedrich Gauss, was painfully dismissive of the good old story that Newton dreamed up his theory of gravitation when an apple fell on his head. Gauss remarked:

Silly! A stupid officious man asked Newton how he discovered the law of gravitation. Seeing that he had to deal with a child intellect, and wanting to get rid of the bore, Newton answered that an apple fell and hit him on the nose. The man went away fully satisfied and completely enlighted.

I'm sorry, Herr Gauss, but that picture really doesn't hold up. Look at the account of the man to whom Newton told the story of the falling apple (no mention of it hitting him), related by the historian William Stukeley:

After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, and drank thea [sic] under the shade of some apple trees; only he and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. 

I know I've quoted this before, but I find these words absolutely fascinating, particularly given Gauss's grumpy interpretation. Firstly Stukeley was no fool. Secondly, to dismiss the apple story out of hand is to totally miss the point of the importance of stories in our understanding of the world (a frequent failing among scientists and particularly mathematicians, though not Charles Dodgson).

And finally, this isn't the story of someone fobbing off an irritating passerby, it is an old man reminiscing after dinner with a friend. I am more inclined to Stukeley's picture of events and to give Herr Gauss a firm kick up the rear.

Thanks to the Royal Society you can view Stukeley's original hand-written words in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life.

Vive la France!

I was recently a little rude about the French habit of adding a new requirement for drivers every year. But I ought in all fairness say that practically every time I go to France I spot something and think 'That's brilliant! Why don't we do that?' And it almost always involves taking something simple and familiar and giving it a twist.

In the past it has been things like interspersing motorway service stations with cheap to build stopping places that just have loos and picnic facilities. Or making it possible to screw off crown corks on beer bottles - sheer genius.
Boring British RDS display
The latest was something simple but impressive. When we cross the channel we tend to press the button on the radio that finds a selection of stations, to get some authentic French sounds. And many of those French radio stations were doing something very clever.

With an RDS radio, as fitted in most cars, a typical British radio station will display something like BBC R4. To the point, useful... but not awe inspiringly informative. What the French stations were doing was changing the RDS tag with every track. So it would read something like:

RADIO X - Pink Floyd - Welcome to the Machine (1975)

Wonderful! Taking a very basic bit of technology and transforming it. Of course the RDS display can't show all this at once, but they are designed to scroll when the text is too long. My suspicion is the UK stations don't do this because it takes away one of the few advantages of DAB radio, which still has practically no penetration into the car market - rather worrying when they keep threatening to take the analogue signal away. But they should make more of RDS.

Nice one, France.

Infinity just got bigger

One of the books I enjoyed writing most was A Brief History of Infinity, so when I got a chance to write an illustrated Introducing Infinity I jumped at the chance. It's now sunning itself in the shops for your attention.

Part of the 'graphic guide' series it combines easy-to-absorb bite-sized chunks of text with superb illustration by Oliver Pugh (an all round nice guy). The pictures are very much part of the story, rather than being quick illustrations on the side - we worked closely together to ensure they got across the message.

As for infinity - it's one of the subjects that simply boggles the mind, but there are some great human stories from its history, whether you look back at the likes of the Ancient Greeks and Galileo, follow the calculus wars between Newton, Leibnitz and Bishop Barclay, or take on Georg Cantor and his amazing visual proofs that there is more than one type of infinity, with one bigger than another.

In the end, though, it's the mind-bending paradoxes you keep coming back to, and I've a number of them in there, from covering the number line with umbrellas, though Hilbert's infinite hotel, to the remarkable Gabriel's horn, which you could fill with just pi units of paint, but would take an infinite pot of paint if you wanted to cover its surface.

I have to admit a particular delight for me was that Oliver included both photos and line drawings of me as a kind of narrator when there isn't a historical character in the scene. I couldn't resist including one here - which I think illustrates the style well.

You can find out more - or buy the book from Amazon (please!) - at its web page, and it is also sharing a Facebook page with its big brother.

Get real, car manufacturers

Here's one I inflated earlierLike, I suspect, most drivers I don't check my tyre pressures anywhere near frequently enough. (This is not helped by the assumption of everyone else in my family that it's my job to look after their tyres too.) But when I do, as I did this morning, I feel a strong urge to get hold of the car maker and shake them until they rattle.

Pretty well every car I've ever had has presented the driver with two different pressures, one for if you just have one or two people in the car, and one for when the car is full and so is the boot. As if anyone is going to modify the tyre pressure every time someone gets in the car. 'Sorry, Auntie Carol, you can't get in my car, I would need to increase the tyre pressure to cope with your weight.' It's just not realistic.

What I need is a sensible inflation level (in bars, please - get over this pounds per square inch nonsense) that will do in all circumstances. It might not be ideal, but that's life. Few things are ideal. Let's just be given a practical value and get on with things. Life is too short to have to guess an interpolated value between the two. I wouldn't mind, but at least one of the cars I deal with has identical pressures all round if you have 2 people in the car but widely differently pressures front and back for a full load.

Arggh! Send the motor manufacturers to the naughty step.

Next week - does it have to be so difficult to change a bulb?

Boneland - Alan Garner

I loved Alan Garner's books as a teenager. And I'd still say that Elidor and The Owl Service are the best Young Adult fantasy books ever written for the younger and older ends of that spectrum respectively. I was also quite fond of his first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath. They were also gripping fantasy adventures, and I loved the setting of Alderly Edge, which I knew quite well. Even at the time, though, I had slight reservations about them. So it was with some interest that I got a copy of Boneland, described as 'the concluding volume in the Weirdstone trilogy.'

My issues with the originals, which feature a circa 12 year old pair of twins hurled into a Cheshire setting with supernatural goings-on, were two-fold. I was already a huge Lord of the Rings fan and I couldn't help feeling that the svarts that the children discover down the copper mines are extremely derivative of the orcs in the Moria scene in LotR. I also felt that Garner flung in every tradition he could think of in a messy mix. So we had witches, King Arthur and his knights sleeping under the hill to rescue England at its peril, a wizard, the Wild Hunt and even a chunk of Norse mythology.

So what of the 'sequel'? First the good news. Boneland is an interesting book in its own right, I love the way Garner weaves in Jodrell Bank (visible from his house), and the character Meg is superb. Colin, one of the twins from the original books, now middle-aged, is less appealing (and, I'm sorry, but Garner got his surname wrong. It just sounds wrong.) But the claims on the cover are downright fibs.

Not only is there no way this is the concluding book of a trilogy - it has no similarity of feel to the first books - Philip Pullman's comments on the rear are highly misleading. He calls it a resolution of the stories of the first two books, and says those who were young when they came out (as he and I both were) 'won't be disappointed: this was worth waiting for.' Actually I was hugely disappointed. The first books didn't need a resolution: the apparent cliff-hanger that links them and Boneland isn't in the original books. And this is anything but a resolution. Let me try to explain why have problems with this book.

One is inconsistency. Having said that the original books were a real mish-mash of legends and traditions, at least there was some consistency of having a medieval English feel (with a touch of Scandanavian) to them. Apart from the use of crows, there is hardly any overlap with the mystical content of this book, which is all cod-Stone age. And there is so much of that. I really had to fight myself not to skip over the huge chunks of mystical waffle to get back to Colin and Meg, because it is deliberately obscure and unsatisfying.

It didn't help for me, and I know not everyone will agree, that it was cod-Stone age. I have real problems with this particular style. I found the same experience with Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother books. The thing is, if you use an existing legend - like the Wild Hunt - you are tying into a true tradition, and that gives a story real resonance. But we have no idea what Stone age religion was like (or even if they had any: it's all supposition). So people make guesses from cave paintings. But it always feels really false and strained to me. But most of all, as already mentioned, what we find here has nothing to do with the mythos of the Weirdstone books.

So, all in all, a disappointment. Not a bad book, by any means. But it doesn't do what it says on the tin.

You can see more on Boneland or buy a copy (if I haven't put you off - note I did say it was an interesting book in its own right) at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Nature's Nanotech #5 - Catching a Cure

Fifth in our Nature's Nanotech series



Isaac Asimov was a great science fiction writer, but even the best has his off days, and Asimov’s low point was probably his involvement with the dire science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage. Asimov wasn’t responsible for the story, but provided the novelization – and he probably regretted it. The premise of the film was that miniaturization technology has made it possible shrink a submarine and its crew down to around 1,000 nanometres, sending it into a man’s bloodstream to find and destroy a blood clot on his brain.
Along the way the crew have various silly encounters with the body’s systems – but strip away the Hollywood shlock and underneath is an idea that has been developed in a lot more detail by IT pioneer and life extension enthusiast Ray Kurzweil. Based on the idea of miniature robotic devices – nanobots – Kurzweil believes that in the future we will not have a single manned Proteus submarine as featured in Fantastic Voyage in our bloodstreams but rather a whole host of nanobots that will undertake medical functions and keep humans of the future alive indefinitely.

As we have seen in The Importance of Being Wet , the chances are that any such devices would not be a simple miniaturization of existing mechanical robots with their flat metal surfaces and gears, but rather would be based on the wet technology of the natural nanoscale world.

Among the possibilities Kurzweil suggests are on the cards are self-propelling robotic replacements for blood cells (this eliminates the importance of the heart as a pump, and hence the risk of heart disease), built in monitors for any sign of the body drifting away from ideal operation, nanobots that can deliver drugs to control cancer or remove cancer cells, and even miniature robots that make direct repairs to genes.

Kurzweil also expects we might separate the pleasure of eating from getting the nutrients we need, leaving the latter to nanobots in the bloodstream that release the essentials when we need them, while other nano devices remove toxins from the blood and destroy unwanted food without it ever influencing our metabolism. You could pig out on anything you wanted, all day and every day, and never suffer the consequences. (Given Kurzweil is notorious for living on an unpleasant diet to attempt to extend his life until nanotechnology is available, perhaps this is wishful thinking.)

If we are to develop this kind of nanotechnology, there are two aspects of nature that we will need to use as guides. One is to listen to the bees. Bearing in mind just how small a medical nanobot would have to be, even with the best developments in electronics the chances are it would have to be relatively unintelligent – yet it would need to achieve quite complex tasks. Bees are an excellent natural model for a way to achieve this.

A colony of bees achieves remarkable things in the construction and maintenance of its hive – yet taken as individuals, bees have very little capacity for mental activity. The realization that transformed our understanding of bees is that they form a super-organism. In effect, a whole colony is a single organism, not a collection of individual bees. A bee is more like a cell in a typical animal than it is a whole creature. By having appropriate mechanisms for communicating between the component parts – in the case of bees, using everything from chemical scent markers to waggle dances – relatively incapable individuals can come together to make a greater whole.

It would be sensible to expect something similar from medical nanobots at work in a human body. Individually they could not be intelligent enough to carry out their functions properly – but collectively, if they can interact to form a super-organism, they could operate autonomously without an external control mechanism continuously providing them with orders.

A second model for these miniature medics is a piece of natural nanotechnology that we usually regard as a bad guy – the virus. Viruses are very small – typically between 20 and 400 nanometres in size – and they lack many of the essential components of a living entity. However they are able to reproduce and thrive by using a remarkably clever cheat. Lacking the physical space to carry all the components of a living cell, they take over an existing cell in their host and subvert its mechanism to do their reproduction for them.

The particular class of virus that may be particularly useful as a model for medical nanobots is the phage. These are amongst the weirdest looking natural structure – some have an uncanny resemblance of the Apollo Lunar module: they actually look as if they are the sort of nanotechnology we might construct.

The word ‘phage’ is short for bacteriophage – ‘bacteria eater’. These are viruses than instead of preying on human cells – or those of any other large scale animals – attack and destroy bacteria. Because there are so many bacteria out there (even the human body has ten times more bacteria than human cells on board), their predators are also immensely populous and diverse. Phages may not be common fare on David Attenborough’s nature programmes, but they play a major role in the overall biological life of the Earth.

Because phages attack bacteria, they can be beneficial to human life. Throughout human existence we have been plagued with bacterial infections. (Literally – bacteria, for example, cause bubonic plague.) It is only relatively recently that antibiotics have provided us with a miracle cure for bacterial attacks – but that miracle is weakening. Bacteria breed and evolve quickly. There are strains of bacteria that can resist most of the existing antibiotics. But phages have the potential to attack bacteria resistant to all antibiotics. For a long time phage therapy was restricted to the former Soviet Union, but interest is spreading in making use of phages in medical procedures.

The biggest problem with phages is getting them to the right place. But medical nanobots based on a phage’s ability to attack or modify particular cells, combined with a super-organism’s ability to act in a collective manner would have huge potential. Modified viruses are already used to insert genetic payloads into cells – but the nanotechnology of the future, inspired by the phage and the bee, could see something much closer to Kurzweil’s vision.

Moving away from the medical, and from individual nanoscale elements, in the next installment of Nature’s Nanotech we will see how natural nanotechnology plays a role in silk and how fibres based on a nanotechnology structure could make rockets obsolete for putting satellites into space.

Images from iStockPhoto.com

Quark quandaries

Every now and then I think it's a good idea to dip into a basic aspect of physics that may not have been in the school curriculum. Take, for instance, the quark. I don't refer to the low fat cheese sometimes given this name but the particle at the heart of every atom in your body (and everywhere else for that matter).

Proton structure
Once upon a time we talked about the basic particles in the nucleus in the middle of the atom being protons and neutrons. They haven't gone away, but they are no longer considered fundamental particles. Each is made up of three smaller particles – quarks. There’s a whole mess of quarks distinguished by characteristics known as flavors (no, really). The different flavors are charm, strangeness, top/bottom and up/down. (Even the more prosaic names can sound a bit odd with antimatter versions. One is the ‘anti-bottom quark.’) The proton is two ups and one down; the neutron two downs and one up.

Up quarks have a 2/3 charge and down quarks -1/3, resulting in a positive charge of 1 for the proton and no charge at all for the neutron. We aren’t used to nature coming up with quantities in thirds. But bear in mind the unit of charge is arbitrary. We really ought to say that up and down quarks have charges of 2 and -1 respectively – so a proton has a charge of 3 units – but because protons and electrons were the simplest particles known when the units were established we are stuck with thirds.

No one has ever seen a quark, nor broken a proton or neutron into its components. It is particularly difficult to do so, because the force that holds the quarks together gets stronger as they move further apart. As this is the case, it’s difficult to understand how quarks were ever dreamed up. The reason we believe that quarks exist owes its origins to a different type of physics that emerged in the early days of quantum theory.

As quantum theory was developed, two different approaches emerged. One had clear parallels in the real world. The second, matrix mechanics, was purely mathematical. It was by building on purely mathematical concepts, until they closely predicted what was seen in the real world, that the quark emerged. The existence of quarks themselves has since been indicated by experiments that show three constituents in a proton – and by the very short-lived production of otherwise unknown particles made up of combinations of different quarks. It’s possible things will go horribly wrong, and quarks will turn up not to exist – but it’s unlikely.

Although “quark” is usually pronounced to rhyme with bark, when American physicist Murray Gell-Mann came up with the name he wanted it to rhyme with dork. Gell-Mann says he used the “kwork” sound first without thinking about how to spell it, before coming across a line in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which reads “three quarks for Muster Mark!” The way quarks come in threes made this line and the spelling very apt, but Gell-Mann wanted to keep his original pronunciation (Joyce clearly intended it to rhyme with mark).

Given all the fuss about the Higgs boson lately, there are some interesting observations to be made about the mass of quarks. Almost all the mass of atoms - and hence of you - comes from protons and neutrons. But the vast majority of has nothing to do with the Higgs field. Around 99 percent of the mass of those particles comes not from the intrinsic mass of quarks but from the energy coming from their movement and that of the gluon particles that hold them together. Thanks to Einstein we know energy and mass are equivalent, and though gluons are massless, the energy of the whole vibrant gluon/quark mix inside the protons and neutrons is experienced as mass. Bizarre or what?

Image from Wikipedia

John who?

The cover of my rather ancient
Penguin copyI occasionally like to revisit books I've read before, and recently picked up a title from my shelf by an author that seems to have almost disappeared from the collective memory of science fiction - John Brunner.

When I was in my teens and early twenties, Brunner was everywhere in the SF bookshops. He was a prolific author, and frankly some of his books were poor rushed jobs. But his best were excellent, and deserve to be remembered.

His most famous title is probably Stand on Zanzibar - not one of my favourites, but interesting in its use of news clippings etc to give the book a different feel. It's an over-population book and I was never thrilled by disaster novels. For me, one of his best was The Shockwave Rider. This used Alvin Toffler's extremely popular (and very inaccurate) stab at futurology Future Shock as a model. That part in itself wasn't very interesting, but Brunner gave us images like the computer virus before such things existed and made use of the fascinating if flawed concept of the Delphi principle (the idea that a group of people with no particular knowledge in a subject will improve their response to questions about it if there immediate answers are fed back to the group, which then re-thinks) as a mechanism for government - a really clever idea.

The book I re-read was a much smaller scale work, both physically and in it reach. Called The Productions of Time it features a collection of has-been actors brought together to put on an experimental play. What they don't know is that this is scheme to drive them further and further into their weaknesses to record the experience for an audience from the future. It's not bad as a novel, if not superbly written, but I think it's a great example of the sort of thing that those who criticize SF as a genre don't get. There is some technology (often painfully old-fashioned in its vision of the future: reels of tape? Perlease!) -  but this is entirely a book about people.

Admittedly not all great SF is about people. I was amused to hear the excellent Angela Saini struggling to defend Asimov's Foundation trilogy on that rather smug A Good Read programme on Radio 4. The format of the show requires three people to read each others choices of books, and the arty types were definitely looking down their nose at Asimov's dire characterisation. It's true, he couldn't write convincing characters, especially women - but Asimov is great for his ideas, not his characters. The Productions of Time is the absolute opposite - it really is all about the characters and for me is good example of why you shouldn't pigeonhole SF as all blasters and space opera. I'm not ashamed to say I love the original Star Wars trilogy of movies... but sometimes I want something different, and Brunner could put it in SF with the best of them.