FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE NIGHT SKY

On this page, I write about scientific events, discoveries, and general science topics from a science fiction fan’s (and writer’s) point of view. I’m not sure someone can be a fan of real science fiction if they aren’t fascinated by science in one way or another. And since the beginning of science fiction, the scientific field that’s inspired a huge percentage of SF is the exploration of space. Unlocking the universe beyond our sheltering home planet.

Space travel is an absolute natural for storytelling—the drama is built right in because of the hazardous nature of the enterprise, not to mention guaranteed interpersonal conflict when you throw high-performing types into peril together. There’s the innate suspense of encountering the unknown, plus the childlike wonder evoked by settings that boggle the imagination.

But why are we so fascinated by what’s “out there” when we have such a beautiful and hospitable home world right here?

For that I think we have to credit our love of the night sky. We can be certain that, from the moment our evolutionary ancestors developed curiosity, they gazed up at the sparkling points overhead in the vast blackness and wondered what they were. Why they formed the patterns they did. Why they moved, some faster than others. What it meant when one streaked across the heavens trailing a tail of fire. And the Moon, mistress of the night: was that a human face she showed? Why did she sometimes hide it? How did she work her magic over the deep waters?

I can’t say that those midnight observations were the beginning of science, but they certainly spurred the drive for knowledge, and they still do.

From identifying constellations, to oohing and aahing at meteorites; from staring in awe at a lunar eclipse, to tracing the craters and seas of the Moon with a captivated eye, a clear night sky always puts on a show. And it’s all free! Of course, many of us live in cities where light pollution obscures these delights, but if you make the effort to venture into the countryside and see the glorious sweep of the Milky Way overhead, you’ll be hooked. Then get your hands on a modest telescope. No matter how many pictures of Saturn I’ve seen, to actually look through a lens and find that glowing donut with a ball in the middle, and know that it’s really hanging over my head, though millions of kilometers away…it’s simply awe-inspiring. Even a pair of binoculars will bring the rugged landscape of the Moon into vivid view.

For some of us, at least, the next natural step is to imagine seeing such places up close. The strange worlds of our own solar system, or possibly even more amazing sights around other stars. You can’t help but become a devoted follower of space news, especially with so many astonishing missions of exploration in recent years (just take a look at this recent post of mine). And for the places that technology can’t yet take us, science fiction will always be there to indulge our cravings.

If you feel the sky calling to you, but are missing out because you don’t know where to begin, the internet offers everything you need. One great site to get you started is Jenny Brown’s '2019 Astronomer's Guide to the Night Sky'. Jenny not only lists the dates and other relevant details of the marquis events of the celestial showcase, like eclipses, meteor showers, conjunctions of the planets and such, but also provides a guide to which planets are visible in the night sky at a given time and place, and the best times for viewing them. Terminology is clearly explained, and it’s all laid out in simple language with plenty of weblinks should you want to dig a little deeper. Jenny’s page is obviously the pet project of a night sky enthusiast who loves to share her passion.

Once you’re ready to plunge headlong into astronomy and space exploration news, there’s a rich feast awaiting you at sites like Universe Today, Space.com, Sky And Telescope, and of course NASA’s own website with details on all of their missions. If you’re bringing a youngster along on your journey, check out KidsAstronomy.com. And there are lots more to be found with a quick online search.

In the end, it’s not about fostering new generations of science and science fiction fans (although that’s a worthy goal in itself), it’s about kindling a deep appreciation of the wondrous universe in which we live. Our existence isn’t confined to four walls, or a few streets, or even a bustling city. It’s a whole cosmos that’s beyond our ability to fully grasp.

But we can have a blast trying to.

FUTURE VISIONS INDEED

Since I’m a science fiction writer, you can safely assume that SF is also my favourite thing to read. So when my writing is published in an anthology or magazine, it’s the best of both worlds—reaching new readers, and getting to read the other great offerings in the collection.

I’m pleased to have a short story included in the recently published anthology Future Visions Vol. 3 edited by Brian J. Walton. And proud to have work in the same company as these excellent tales.

My story Elysium is the last one in the anthology (a placement I’ve always been partial to) but there’s no fear a reader won’t get that far. SF short fiction often finds its genesis in exposing the unsavoury underbelly of current trends, teases out the possibilities, and weaves a poetry of its own from the threads of our human frailties. That’s well demonstrated in this collection, and although it would take too long to detail every story, here are a few of my favourites:

Margery Bayne’s Another Life distills a looming moral dilemma down to just two people in crisis as a woman named Dana wakes up, only to be told that she’s been in a coma for 23 years. Exploring love, memory, obligation, and a slippery slope of personal rights, Another Life is, above all, very human.

After All by Bret Carter tells the story of Ben who believes he might be the last true musician because technological developments and corporate greed have warped his beloved art form beyond recognition. But his efforts to fight back unleash a devastating force (and you won’t thank Carter for what he leaves in your brain, either).

In Space Witch Yolande Ryle imagines the first manned spaceflight to Ceres. It’s the most light-hearted tale in this collection, even playing with the line between magic and advanced technology, but it explores a question that’s held my interest for a long time: are we Earthlings being watched? And judged? And what if the judgment doesn’t go our way?

A Lament For Marla by Mike Adamson takes us to the dark aftermath of climate change in a story that deliberately evokes Soylent Green (by name) but the way its conclusion links hope with degradation packs a powerful punch.

Nolan Janssen’s The Running Mill paints the terrible cost of the free market system to a future America where the jobless poor run on treadmills to produce clean power. But when one talented runner is given a chance to make his mark on the world, the shining dream isn’t all it’s made out to be.

A nasty mash-up of social media and the self-improvement mania takes a frightening twist in A Century of Faults by Evan Scott Edwards. And a well-meaning attempt to save the world from a growing shortage of bees veers in a disastrous direction in P.R. O’Leary’s Pollen.

And there are still more engaging stories by Robert Jeschonek. Michael W. Clark, Joseph Aitken, B.A. Paul, and, oh yeah…me. My story Elysium follows ex-cop Gib Thorne as he tries to solve a rash of seemingly unrelated deaths while coping with his terminally ill mother’s “upload” into a digital afterlife. If there’s life after death, can there be murder, too?

Short stories are like tantalizing appetizers compared to the full meal of a novel, so if you’re looking to stimulate your science fiction taste buds with some pungent flavours, Brian J. Walton is a very savvy editor and I’d recommend his whole Future Visions series—new offerings are published about every two months. Future Visions Volume 3 is a great place to start, available in Kindle and paperback editions.

Bon appétit!

BEYOND THE FARTHEST...SNOWBALL?

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL

Congratulations to the China National Space Administration for the successful landing of their Chang’e-4 spacecraft on the far side of the Moon January 3rd (the first time it’s ever been done), as well as the deployment of the Yutu-2 rover. Its tracks in moondust prove China is now a major player in space exploration.

Other than that, recent space news stories are full of exotic names and exotic places—names like the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, Ultima Thule, Farout (which sounds more like the expression of an enthusiastic hippy than a scientific designation!)

In the first minutes of New Years Day 2019 the NASA spacecraft New Horizons hurtled past an object identified as (486958) 2014 MU69, a name that doesn’t fall trippingly from the tongue so it was given a nickname chosen by the public: Ultima Thule, an ancient Greek and Roman phrase meaning the farthest of places, beyond the known world. It isn’t actually even the farthest place in our solar system, but it is now the most distant object ever visited by a man-made device. New Horizons is the craft that sent terrific pictures back from Jupiter and then went on to astonish us with stunning images of Pluto, so it’s a little probe with a great track record. Since Ultima Thule is more than 6.4 billion kilometres from Earth, receiving data from New Horizons is a slow process (it will take many months for all of it to come in), but pictures show what’s called a “contact binary”, meaning two objects that formed separately but then fused together into one, and it looks like a reddish snowman about 30 kilometres long. The scientific community has long expected that the so-called Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune consists mostly of objects like slush balls made of water, ammonia, and methane that orbit the Sun as far away as fifty AU (astronomical units—the distance between the Sun and Earth). Learning more about Ultima Thule will increase our knowledge of how the solar system was formed.

The other trans-Neptunian object to get attention recently is one nicknamed Farout, officially 2018 VG18. Discovered in November 2018, Farout is the most distant object ever observed in our solar system. It’s currently between 125AU to 130AU from the sun—about 3.5 times as far as Pluto—though its orbit will carry it farther and closer to the sun at times. As unimaginably distant as that is, our solar system is thought to extend much farther to include the theoretical Oort Cloud, a spherical area that might extend as far as 200,000 AU from the sun and be composed of more slushy iceballs, remnants of the original cloud from which the solar system formed billions of years ago. The Oort Cloud hasn’t been observed directly, but is thought to be the source of many comets with very long orbits. By comparison, the nearest star to ours, Proxima Centauri, is currently about 268,500 AU away (4.246 light years).

Such distances are incredible when considered in a straight line, but to recognize that they apply in every direction, in three dimensions, the sheer volume of space involved is truly beyond our minds’ ability to process. After all, you could fit all of the planets in the solar system side by side in just the space between the Earth and our Moon with room to spare, so a sphere 100 AU across and more is one heck of a lot of real estate!

What could be “out there”? That’s the domain where theoretical astronomy and science fiction thinking converge. A fertile realm for the imagination.

Could there be a super-Neptune “Planet X”, ten times as big as Earth? Or the proposed brown dwarf star ominously named “Nemesis”? If so, why not a whole second planetary system orbiting in the darkness?

Could there be life? We already know of microbes and other life forms that can survive under the most extreme conditions. We have no reason to assume that life couldn’t arise in those dark realms. Even on Earth some forms of life in the deep oceans depend on chemical energy rather than the sun. At the very least, if all those slush balls and hypothetical dark planets don’t support native life, they could still provide waystations (or hiding places) for visitors from other stars. Are there advanced aliens watching us from the shadowy borders of our home system? Fleets of conquering ships just waiting for the order to strike? Maybe one navy with plans to conquer, battling with another determined to save us from enslavement. (Maybe I’ve been reading too many space operas!) Or what if there are giant life forms, planet-sized or larger, to whom we’re no more significant than bacteria?

If comets can be knocked out of the Oort Cloud by a galactic tide and fall toward the Sun and inner planets, could there be larger, much more dangerous threats lurking beyond sight? Vagabond moon-sized rocks? Maybe wandering black holes remorselessly devouring everything in their paths? (Actually, scientists would probably have spotted such powerful gravitational effects. Phew!)

Flights of fantasy aside, I’m kind of partial to the idea of giant forms of life “out there”. SF writer Robert J. Sawyer described mega-beings made of dark matter in his novel Starplex. It just feels right that such vast spaces should be inhabited by something and not simply empty voids. I also think it’s quite possible that alien visitors would bide their time in the dark reaches, observing us before deciding to make contact.

Some people may wonder why we go to such effort and cost to send a machine six billion kilometres to look at an oversized slushball. The fact is, in investigating things we expect to find in the great beyond, we really have no idea what we might find. That’s what makes it so exciting.