FFB - Gravity

Not the book of the film.

While the film Gravity is good to look at, probably moreso in 3D on the big screen, and Sandra Bullock does sterling work, virtually occupying the screen throughout, the story has very little plot and character interaction. That cannot be said of Tess Gerritsen’s book, originally published in 1999; amazingly it’s still in the top #50 on Amazon COM as I write. This was an unusual departure for Gerritsen, known at the time for her murder mystery medical thrillers. This is science fiction with medical thriller overtones.

 

Like the countdown to a shuttle take-off, the beginning is a slow burn, getting to know some characters – notably Emma Watson (long before the first Harry Potter film was released!), a research physician who is scheduled for a trip to the International Space Station (ISS). She’s going through a divorce from her husband Jack McCallum; he was trained as an astronaut but a medical condition grounded him.

Almost at the last minute, Emma’s assigned an earlier slot to go to ISS. On getting there, when some kind of ailment starts plaguing the crew, one by one. The blurb gives it away: ‘a culture of single-celled organisms begin to regenerate out of control.’ Emma struggles to combat the contagion. And meanwhile Jack and NASA juggle with bureaucracy and some sinister elements in the hope of bringing the survivors back to earth. Until it’s realised that bringing them home is no longer an option; they must be quarantined in space, to die there.

An immense amount of research went into this book, that’s obvious. The public has become rather blasé about astronauts and cosmonauts et al floating above us in the ISS – that bright star we glimpse on good cloudless nights. Yet their very existence is constantly under threat, from ‘out there’ and even from within.

I have no intention of inserting any spoilers – I feel that the blurb writer spoiled some of the suspense by using that description – but let me just add that several revelations are made towards the end. And even though it’s almost 500 pages in length, it’s a fast read, an edge-of-seat experience, with a chilling conclusion.

There’s a glossary at the end, thankfully, for as Gerritsen says, ‘NASA has been dubbed the National Acronym Slinging Agency’.  

Tess Gerritsen is currently involved in a lawsuit against Warner Bros with regard to ‘breach of contract’. You can read more about it in her blog here

A later blog will discuss a related subject – literary ideas and their fate.

A Martian Odyssey

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water...Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. – The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (1898)

Out here in Spain we’re usually blessed with clear night skies so we can view the stars and planets without too much light pollution. There’s something about stargazing that tugs the imagination, a sense of wonder, perhaps. 

 

Nasa just released a video revealing what Mars may have looked like as a young planet billions of years ago. http://news.sky.com/story/1168023/nasa-video-mars-evolution-from-watery-world

It appears to have had a thick atmosphere that was warm enough to support oceans of liquid water - a crucial ingredient for life.

The animation, created by Nasa's Conceptual Image Lab, shows how the surface of Mars might have developed over four billion years. The artist's concept is based on evidence that Mars was once very different. It shows vast Martian lakes surrounded by mountain ranges, beneath Earth-like blue skies and rapidly moving clouds.

The shift from a warm and wet climate to a cold and dry one is shown as the animation progresses. The lakes dry up and transform into a rocky landscape with canyons, volcanoes and craters. The atmosphere gradually turns to the dusty pink and tan hues seen on Mars today.

Nasa scientist Dr Pan Conrad told Sky News: "We think that the when Mars was created it was a lot wetter and warmer than it is today. It probably lost much of its atmosphere over time and that's how it came to be such a desert and cold place."

Red dust - from the iron in its soil - now covers almost all the surface of the Red Planet, which has an average temperature of -27C (-80F).

Nasa's Curiosity rover has been exploring the surface of the planet since August 2011 and has made several discoveries to support the theory that Mars was once able to support life. These include pebbles providing evidence that a stream once flowed on the planet, and more recently, Martian dust, dirt and soil suggesting a "substantial" amount of water on Mars.

The planet’s atmosphere is over ninety-five percent carbon dioxide and its rocks, soil and sky have a red or pink hue. The distinct red colour was observed by stargazers throughout history and the planet was named by the Romans in honour of their god of war. Other civilizations had similar names, for instance the ancient Egyptians called the planet the red one. 

It has two orbiting moons, Phobos and Deimos.

 

The Red Planet, fourth from the sun, diameter 4,200 miles, with a day forty minutes longer than ours and a gravity only thirty-eight percent that of Earth’s, Mars is more than an astronomical sphere.  As a symbol Mars is imbedded in our culture, even in our psyche.

Galileo was the first to observe Mars through a telescope and eighteenth century Frenchman Giovanni Cassini first noted the planet’s poles. 

However, in 1892 it was Schiaparelli who was responsible for many of the popular illusions about the planet.  When he saw grooves or channels on the surface of Mars, his report in Italian used the word canali to describe the phenomenon. Translations interpreted canali as canals rather than channels and the description evoked an image of an old and sophisticated but slowly dying civilisation on our sister planet. 

 
Three years later American astronomer Percival Lowell published a non-fiction book, Mars, in which he speculated about the terrain and the presence of life on the planet.

These works were read by Wells and fired his imagination in the writing of his classic The War of the Worlds which was given the Spielberg blockbuster treatment, inevitably transposing the story to the United States.  A British version came out at the same time (2005), H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.

Lowell published two more books, Mars and its Canals (1906) and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908).  Fourteen years after Lowell’s death, Pluto was discovered – its presence beyond Neptune had been predicted by Lowell. He’s probably turning in his grave now that Pluto has been demoted from planet to dwarf planet (plutoid).

Then in 1911 the serial ‘Under the moons of Mars’ was published in the monthly All Story magazine.  Written by the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the story was a great hit and was later published in book form as A Princess of Mars.  This was the first of eleven swashbuckling imaginative books Burroughs set on Mars – or, as the inhabitants called it, Barsoom. The first three volumes in the series actually constitute a single super epic. A film version, John Carter was released in 2012 to a mixed reception; the fans loved it, most of the critics panned it, and the marketing was abysmal.

 

Burroughs’s tales showed great innovation for their time, and the exciting stories caught the interest of millions of readers, helping to inspire serious interest in Mars and in space exploration. 

Many later science fiction works, from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers films of the 1930s, to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, to the Star Wars films, to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, about terra-forming the red planet, also offer nods in Burroughs’s direction. Robert A Heinlein’s novel The Number of the Beast and Alan Moore’s graphic novels of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen directly reference Barsoom.

This article’s title is taken from the classic short story by StanleyWeinbaum published in 1934.

 

Mars and Martians naturally figured in science fiction books and movies over the years but never seemed to capture the popular imagination until 1978 when interest in Mars was revived by Jeff Wayne who put together a memorable and quite eerie musical version of Wells’s The War of the Worlds, narrated by Richard Burton.

In June 2003 – when the positions of Mars and Earth provided for the shortest possible route, a condition that prevails every twenty-six months - the Mars Express rocket was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan by the European Space Agency. Comprising an orbiter and its lander, Beagle 2, its journey took six months at a velocity of 10,800km an hour.  The spacecraft arrived in orbit around Mars on Christmas Day, 2003. Pictures and information are still being collected by the orbiter. The lander failed to respond to Earth-based instructions so was deemed a failure. It’s unlikely that it was tampered with by any Martians, however...  Indeed, Mars Express, so called because of the rapid and streamlined development time, represents the European Space Agency’s first visit to another planet in the Solar System. The spacecraft borrows technology from the failed Mars 96 mission and from ESA’s Rosetta mission that is currently en route to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission helps to answer fundamental questions about the geology, atmosphere, surface environment, history of water and potential for life on Mars. For the past decade, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has been observing atmospheric structure on the Red Planet. Among its discoveries is the presence of three separate ozone layers, each with its own characteristics. A new comparison of spacecraft data with computer models explains how global atmospheric circulation creates a layer of ozone above the planet's southern winter pole. The full article can be found at http://sci.esa.int/mars-express/52881-a-seasonal-ozone-layer-over-the-martian-south-pole/

Probes sent from Earth beginning in the late 20th century have yielded a dramatic increase in knowledge about the Martian system, focused primarily on understanding its geology and possible habitability potential.

Engineering interplanetary journeys is very complicated, so the exploration of Mars has experienced a high failure rate, especially in earlier attempts. Roughly two-thirds of all spacecraft destined for Mars failed before completing their missions, and there are some that failed before their observations could begin. However, missions have also met with unexpected levels of success, such as the twin Mars Exploration Rovers operating for years beyond their original mission specifications.

Since 6 August 2012, there have been two scientific rovers on the surface of Mars beaming signals back to Earth (Opportunity, and Curiosity of the Mars Science Laboratory mission), and three orbiters currently surveying the planet: Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

To date, no sample return missions have been attempted for Mars, and one attempted return mission for Mars' moon Phobos (Fobos-Grunt) has failed. (previous 4 paragraphs, from Wikipedia).

On 18 November (Monday!), the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), is set to launch. It will explore the planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind. Scientists will use MAVEN data to determine the role that loss of volatile compounds, such as CO₂, N₂, and H₂O, from the Mars atmosphere to space has played over time, giving insight into the history of Mars atmosphere and climate, liquid water, and planetary habitability. On 8 November Maven was placed on top of the Atlas V rocket; checks so far look good for launch. See http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/

The magic of Mars still exerts its influence and pulls us there…

Make a date - 1, 14 and 31 October

Some time ago I published a regular monthly column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 14 October, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other October dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:

1, 14 and 31 October

October is supposed to be the scary month, a time of hobgoblins, ghosts and of course Halloween. They don’t get much scarier than those Nazi leaders who in 1946 were sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials (1). A couple of years earlier (14) Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, suspected of plotting Hitler’s assassination, was given the choice of a public treason trial and certain death by firing squad or suicide with honour. This much-revered soldier chose the latter.

A ruler who met a grisly end was Benito Mussolini; little did he know about his fate when in 1922 he became the youngest premier in the history of Italy (31). Familiar to all of us living in Spain, Francisco Franco, although a controversial leader, actually died in his bed: in 1936 he was named the head of the Nationalist government of Spain (1).

Benito Mussolini

 

Less fortunate was King Harold Godwinson, who in 1066 got one in the eye at the battle of Senlac Hill (14), seven miles from Hastings.

With one eye on history, Khruschev made several cataclysmic revelations about his predecessors in his 1956 speech, resulting in the body of Joseph Stalin being removed (31) from Lenin’s Tomb in 1961 because Stalin was suddenly a non-person.

A mere three years later, Leonid Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev (14), probably as a result of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which began with a U2 flyover taking photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed in Cuba (14).

Indeed, October seems to be a month marked by achievements in transport.

To begin with, in 1811, the first steamboat set sail down the Mississippi, arriving in New Orleans (1) and the following year work on London's Regent’s Canal began (14).

In 1908 Ford introduced the Model T car (1) and a mere thirty-nine years later Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 plane faster than the speed of sound (14), heralding in the concept of the space-age. NASA was created (1) in 1958.

Chuck Yeager and the X-1

 

Eleven years later to the day, a passenger aircraft - the Concorde - broke the sound barrier for the very first time (1). Maybe it did become uneconomical, but what a beautiful plane!

Other technological things happened on our selected days in October too. The first electric lamp factory was opened (1) by Thomas Edison in 1880 and the first rectangular television tubes were manufactured on the same day sixty-nine years later.

Although refrigeration was in use at the turn of the century, it wasn't commonplace, but that was due to change when Acme Refrigeration (1) was incorporated in 1959.

Quite a bit of land changed hands this month, too. Alexander the Great increased his empire (1) by defeating Darius III of Persia (now Iran) in the battle of Arbela in 331BC and Spain ceded Louisiana to France via the Treaty of San Ildefonso on the same day in 1800.

Still on the same day, with the help of T E Lawrence, the Arab forces captured Damascus for the Allies in 1918, while thirty-one years later Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China.

T.E. Lawrence

 

Eleven years after that (1), the British Empire was being given away - notably Nigeria and Cyprus gained their independence.

 
That favourite place for philatelists, the Gilbert Islands, lost the Ellice Islands when they took the name Tuvalu (1) in 1975. Independence occurred in 1978. Tuvalu means “group of eight” – there are eight inhabited islands in the group. In 2000 Tuvalu leased its internet domain name “.tv” for fifty million dollars (until 2012).

Four years later to the day – 1979 - America too gave back land, returning sovereignty of the Panama Canal to Panama. The canal was purchased by the US while Theodore Roosevelt was their charismatic president. In 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Roosevelt was shot by a saloon-keeper (14) but even with the flesh wound and the bullet still in him, Teddy Roosevelt delivered his scheduled speech.

Of course teddy bears were named after Roosevelt.

Another kind of bear cropped up in 1926 when A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (14) was first published.

 
An earlier landmark in the publishing of a continuing character was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published (31) in 1892.

A similar publishing phenomenon is Ian Fleming’s James Bond; Patrick Dalzel-Job, whose exploits were the inspiration for the famous spy, died (14) in 2003 while coincidentally on the same day in 1927 the movie Bond Roger Moore was born.

Further to the magic of movies, The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson was born in 1961, perhaps appropriately on Halloween. Thirty-two years to the day later, Federico Fellini, the Italian director died. Magician Harry Houdini died the same day in 1926 after his appendix was ruptured. Houdini and Conan Doyle were acquainted; the former debunked spiritualists, while Conan Doyle believed in them.

 

The magic of Broadway was heightened by the great composer Leonard Bernstein, who died (14) in 1990 while two famous British singer/actors were born on the same day (1) - Julie Andrews in 1935 and Stanley Holloway in 1890.

So there’s probably something to celebrate among that little lot! You could even sing Celebrations! Cliff Richard was born (14) in 1940 but they don't know in which attic he keeps the painting. (Oscar Wilde was born in October too [1854] but two days later than Cliff).