But that is exactly the problem I’m facing with moving a nitrogen lake… yes I did say NITROGEN… and yes nitrogen is liquid between -209.86 and -195.8 degrees Centigrade. So we are talking real cold stuff stuff here. Well it is cold on Triton, the largest moon of Neptune.

Now Triton has a polar cap, which is surrounded by a chain of nitrogen lakes. Beyond the lakes are a series of hummocky hills from which geysers of nitrogen blow into vacuum.

Yes, you’ve guessed it, the polar cap is frozen nitrogen.  And where do I want this lake? On the ice cap! It’s like putting a water lake at the North Pole.

So what are the options? Well a manmade lake springs to mind. OK – so we have a manmade nitrogen lake we need to keep warm. That requires effort, so there needs to be a good reason for us to build this lake. What though? What could humans want with large amounts of liquid nitrogen on Triton’s polar cap? Fertiliser? Um… they’d just hack the ice and melt what they wanted. Err… for use in a fire sprinkler system in habitation? Err… doesn’t need that much of a lake. Using parabolic mirrors to focus on the solid nitrogen to liquify it and keep things warmer (note not warm by our standards) to stop them being damaged. Oops… it would be much less effort to use a lake at the edge of the polar cap and transport things to the Base when needed.

Looks like manmade won’t do it, doesn’t it? Blow!

So it has to be natural. But how? The nitrogen is frozen absolutely SOLID!

Umm.. hold on a mo… let’s look at this another way. The liquid nitrogen could be considered akin to the lava we have on Earth. Now lava turns up anywhere where the Earth’s crust is thin or cracked as at the edges of tectonic plates… whoa, did I just write at the edges of tectonic plates? What if Triton has the icy equivalent of our rocky tectonic plates?

But why would triton have iceonic (yes this is one of those made up words in the absence of me knowing anything better) plates?

OK. Triton is not one of Neptune’s naturally developed moons, but a captured one. It is slowly descending to its Roche limit and will in about 100 million years time break up to produce a magnificent ring system (at least this is the current prediction). So why can’t I have a weakness in the iceology just where I want the lake to be, and have it form a lake on the ice cap where I want it between now and when Triton Base is built?

Yes, it’s improbable, but not impossible given our current knowledge of the moon… this looks like an answer… but now the main worry is how much of this background do I have to explain in the story. I’ve had comments on draft stories where people could not credit the things I described as being plausible. The way around it is to have someone explain it, but it takes up words and slows the story, and besides the characters in the story would just accept as a fact of life and wouldn’t go about explaining it….

So I may have solved the world building problem, only to find myself with a writing problem…. sometimes it feels like you just can’t win. But this is where a little dose of stubbornness can come in useful… onward and upward as they say.

For the purposes of this blog, let us ignore the fact that the Brinnell test is only one of several different standard tests to measure the hardness of materials. But a natural question does arise. Can one measure the hardness of hard science fiction?

Well first let’s define what hard science fiction is. Yes, I know that when you get three hard science fiction writers discussing this you will end up with seven very different definitions, but let’s pick a nice simple one that a lot of people can say, yes that’s not a bad definition for starters.

Hard science fiction is where the science in the science fiction is a credible extrapolation of the accepted laws of science and engineering at the time the writing was done.

So first off we can say if the writing breaks the laws of science, it is not hard science fiction, can’t we?

Did I hear someone at the back of the room go, ‘Um, errr…’?

Well they would be right in a sense. There is a fundamental assumption about science. That the laws of science apply to the totality of the universe we can experience. Let me give you a well known example of how this works… in the mediaeval ages everyone believed all swans were white. Then they discovered Australia and guess what? They found swans could be black too. See what I mean?

So how do we know that the laws of science won’t break down when we step to somewhere new, like Mars for instance? We just assume they don’t. How do we know that as time progresses the laws of science won’t change? We don’t. But we have to assume that the laws of science apply to everywhere, otherwise we would end up collecting different science laws like some people collect postage stamps, as I believe one famous physicist suggested. So let’s take the assumption that the laws of science apply everywhere for granted.

Right let’s move on the next question, which is it possible to know all the laws of science? We don’t have to actually know them, we just have to know that we can know them, if you see what I mean. And this turns out to be stumbling block. Yes we can know from what we perceive some of the science laws, but do there exist science laws beyond our perception? Well they could in theory. But does it matter if they don’t affect us? No, of course if doesn’t. So we have our second assumption here. We are only interested in the laws of science that we can perceive.

Now we come to the interesting part… we can only perceive, directly or indirectly, through our senses (touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, balance, magnetism if we were pigeons or some other type of animal that uses the Earth’s electromagnetic field for navigation purposes, etc.). The point here is that there is clearly a limit to each sense. So the laws of science can only be perceived through the these senses, which means there is a limit to the laws of science we can deal with.

‘Phew!’ you may say. That was quite a bout of deep thought and philosophy.

But can we quantify the laws of science and their effects that we can perceive? It is like asking if we can quantify the number of smells a hunting dog can distinguish (much more than a human) or the number of different wavelengths that make up the light spectrum we see. Whilst we know there is a limit to the laws of science, we can see by these examples that it is difficult to quantify. In fact the latter case is impossible…. you always find another wavelength between two wavelengths that you have chosen.

So in essence we really cannot measure the laws of science and their effects. So there is no way we can measure the hardness of science fiction.

However, there is one very good bit of news that comes out of all this…  because we cannot quantify the laws of science and their effects, there is no way that hard science fiction will run out of new things to write!

End result was I asked the Harkess person to let me think about the whole scene and how the artifical gravity could be made to work…

One good general rule of engineering is keep things simple. Amongst other things it makes the devices easy to build and easy to repair. It has other advantages for science fiction writers… it makes things easy to explain and as Harkess says, helps with the flow of writing.

The main problem with gravity is that it radiates outwards in all directions. This can lead to an overspill in that force where the author does not want it. So we need a material that can block gravity going in certain directions. We also of course need a gravity generation mechanism. And this is really all that is needed in terms of invention… the rest can be engineered… seriously.

I’m going to take the rest of this by simple steps so as to make it easy to understand and apologise immediately for what might appear to be baby-speak.

If you have a gravity generating substance, lets call it gragen (for want of inventing a name) sitting at the bottom of a long test tube made of the gravity blocking material (lets call this substance gravbloc), where would you experience gravity outside the test tube from the gragen? The answer is only when you have line of sight to the gragen i.e. directly over the test tube mouth and a smidgen off the main line of the test tube. The gravbloc has to be a gravity absorber (as opposed to gravity reflector) as otherwise you will get gravity reflected at various angles off the gravbloc near the top of the test tube, which in turn will cause spillage in many directions.

Now what happens when you put a set of test tubes next to each other with their open ends all pointing in the same direction? You get an area above the test tubes that experience gravity and a quickly diminishing field at the edges.

Let’s now miniaturise the test tubes into a layer of carpet say… You have the gravity immediately above you and not to the sides, except for a small overspill. Even that overspill can be reduced by adding small ‘winglets’ of gravbloc rising up out of the sides of the path.

The difficulties with this is that gravity goes on into distance above the carpet. However, if this carpet is inside a building all that is needed is to have this gravity absorbing material in the ceiling facing the carpet. If it is in open air, then by the time the gravity reaches other structures, it will be very much weaker and therefore barely noticeable. Remember gravity is proportional to one over the distance squared.

As for where the energy of absorbing gravity goes to – well given that the crack is open to the atmosphere, you might like the underfloor heating from the path!

Simples as the meerkats would say… (for those not familiar we have a series of adverts in the UK using cute meerkat puppets).

Rosie and I have been at each other’s throats for two years, and we have torn each other’s work to shreds over that time. Fortunately, it’s cordial – mostly ‒ and when we met last year there was nobody scurrying about to remove any sharp objects first.

We both belong to the same writer’s circle, an Orbit group run by the British Science Fiction Association. I knew Rosie was going to be trouble after her first comment on the SF story I had written. She said she would have to consider elements of it as fantasy because she didn’t consider it ‘real potential science’. Rosie, you see, writes ‘Hard’ science fiction. I do not.

I’ll admit, at the time, I didn’t know what to make of the comment. I was relatively new to writing. Oh, I wrote quite a few unpublished novels about fifteen years ago. One was even half-way decent. This time around, though, I had only been testing the water of this new digital age for a couple of months before I got involved with Orbit. Pretty soon I realised that it was fundamentally irrelevant what label Rosie stuck on it. Her comments were still valid, and she was taking my work as seriously as I was taking hers (perhaps I could have phrased that better).

Now I count Rosie as one of my most trusted advisors. I don’t always agree with everything she says, but that’s part of the critiquing process, as is filtering out what you don’t agree with as opposed to what you simply don’t want to hear. Just as important is separating constructive criticism from the person offering it. Understanding how to accept and learn from the observations of others is one of the most important skills a writer can develop, and sometimes one of the most difficult, and it’s a valuable skill for ‘real life’ too.

You’ve also got to respect people who are prepared to offer comment on something outside their comfort zone. The next project I shoved in front of my Orbit group was a general-SF Young Adult piece. Rosie gave me a lot of good advice, as did the other members of my Orbit group, and I was happier with the end result than any story I had written so far.

That story, Aphrodite’s Dawn, has now been published as an e-book by Proxima Books, and is why I am creeping around on other people’s blogs. The e-book is a refreshing diversion in the YA market, involving no sparkling, nor other objects of paranormal romance. It tells the story of three young people who find the tiny world they thought they lived in is actually a huge asteroid, kitted out as a rescue ship. The ship has 300,000 sleepers on board, but is out of control, and Garret, Pitr and Alyssa have to puzzle, and sometimes fight, their way through to the other end of the ship to give the engines the commands to save them all.

It’s available from Amazon. Go take a look, and drop by my blog and tell me what you think.

Nice cover! I'm plain jealous!

Hm… good one, Harkess. One advantage I have is a right of reply on my blog… more anon.

Women can’t write “hard” science fiction.

In fact I’m so disgusted with this and the subsequent comment discussion about women hard SF writers, I won’t even bother to give the link! This kind of thing just reinforces the dumb kind of thinking that there can’t be women hard SF writers. This mislead has to stop. It puts prospective women hard SF writers off from joining this sub-genre. So I say to all those who want to continue with this propaganda – stop it!

Me? I’m off to move a nitrogen lake into a landscape where it shouldn’t exist and drafting my regular engineering column. But I’m still annoyed – with extreme prejudice. Those of you who know me, know what to expect…

Computers, like humans, now do pattern recognition very well. They are continuing to be improved in the computer labs around the world. They can outplay chess grandmasters now. They can now play games of chance against humans and win by recognising human behaviour to predict what their next move will be.

Wind that comment back – computers can predict how humans will behave. At the moment it is in playing random games of chance, but in the future?

Imagine getting a note from your PA computer saying, ‘There will be no need to buy groceries for the end of the week, because you will be dead.’

If they can predict that, then they can predict how to prevent your death, can’t they? Of course they can. They’ll tell what to do and why. But if you avoid death through following their instructions, how do you know you would have died? (My braincell is hurting on this one…)

Now if they predict when you’re going to die and if you decide to avoid death, then they should also have the capability of predicting what you are going to write. So why not turn to your computer and let it do the writing for you?

There’s only one problem with that… publishers will use the same computers to predict what will sell well and bypass having an author at all. Looks like the days of being an author are numbered… don’t know what that number is, but it is definitely finite!

The worrying thing about all this is that I think it is oh so very feasible… and the question must be is how to stop the computers coming and ruining the writing profession?

The end result was much more rounded characters and atmosphere. The plot stayed the same, but what I was doing was making the characters match the plot more closely and adding useful background detail.

In a sense my characters grow out of the place I put them in, unless they are given something deliberately unusual. It’s like having Africans being good runners while northern Europeans tend to be more stocky for dealing with the slightly higher gravity they experience.  Now I ask myself how much consistency do we see between place and characters in science fiction?

And this is where I go err, um…

Let’s try another angle. How many science fiction novels have an in built history as to how they got there from the present day?

A lot of the ‘jolly good reads’ tend to be based on straight forward extrapolations of the trends of the day or post catastrophe when the writer can start on a nearly clean page. So there is very little or no need for building in a history into the science fiction. They both in their own ways have the advantage of being familiar to the reader. So the writer can get on with the story and the reader get on with enjoying their entertainment.

But writing in the history makes for a stranger and hopefully more fascinating world. It also means that you can’t get away with writing a short story or even a novella. And it is these fascinating worlds that I enjoy, and I suspect many others, enjoy the most. So if you want spot up and coming great science fiction writers, look at how they deal with the history of the culture they are writing about. If they give you quite a number of signposts, they are likely to be the classics of science fiction.

What do these spammers think they are going to gain? Their stuff is not getting through and all they are doing is wasting their time, valuable network energy and by using network equipment, running down that equipment. They are just parasites sucking the live blood and energy out of the internet. And it’s time they were stopped.

I would like to propose a way in which a lot of them can be stopped. Basically, nobody should send out e-mails addressed to more than  a twenty people, unless they have an accredited license to do so. This allows for institutions like universities sending out e-mails to their classes. I am sure that other similar energy-sucking parasitic behaviours can also be blocked. The licenses can be invoked by the ISP…

This of course will need more consideration, but it will have to go to legislation. Advantages to those of use who use the internet for respectable purposes are clear – cheaper bills for one… less wastage of the Earth’s resources for another…

I will go further – given the advances in artificial intelligence techniques, more and more spam will be identified as spam and blocked at source. Eventually it can automatically cut off a spammer from the internet after repeated offences and warnings. I kinda like this idea… now off to develop a science fiction story based on this… hm… where shall I start…

One trope of science fiction that tends to find itself in the non-filmic category are hive minds. Yes, I know they filmed Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, where the bugs have a hive mind, but did those who have seen the film get the message? No, what we saw was the queen-bug (for want of a better description) controlling all the other bugs.

So it was with interest that I read Jo Sullivan’s article on the collective consciousness of hive minds at josullivan.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/hive-minds-collective-consciousness-in-science-fiction/ , which points to various attempts at portraying and understanding hive minds.

Of course hive minds have a basis in nature via the bee and ant colonies, and how they work together for the common good. Mathematicians have gone as far as to come up with the mathematical equations that describe an individual’s behaviour that lead to colony behaviour. Now here’s an interesting point. Whilst the individual may understand and know what it’s doing, how much does it understand of the overall colony behaviour? Yes it can sense the physical aspects in its immediate environment, but how much can it understand other aspects of the hive behaviour?

There is another question, which to my mind is even more intriguing. How much of the individual’s behaviour is an automated response to the hive’s actions and is the individual conscious that it is forced to respond in a given way? Take pigeons for instance. When they are flying, they basically follow simple flight rules to stay in their flying formations. They don’t seem to think, they just do. And given they are flying so close together, then they really do not have the time to think about whether to turn this way or that, or they’ll end up bumping into each other in mid-flight. So using these simple rules really is a survival trait.

I reckon that a novel based on trying to understand the answers to these questions would have to be non filmic (notwithstanding the recent Sherlock Holmes invention of putting thoughts into printed words on the screen). And it is therefore a very ripe science fiction trope for exploration.

Fortunately, those of us who are mathematically minded can call upon the maths models to help us write such stories.

One further thought, before I close, this is exactly the type of topic that science fiction writers can explore, and which literary fiction writers have to wait until the ideas behind it are explained in words before they can develop the stories further.

So, come on science fiction writers… Go forth and write about interactions in the hive mind, this is one of your playgrounds.

Everyone knows that the minimum surface area to maximum volume shape is a sphere. (In a plane it’s a circle if you want the two-dimensional equivalent). The natural question then becomes what is the maximum surface area to minimum volume shape?

… and this is where I go… err… there isn’t one because you can always make one dimension of your shape smaller and spread the said shape out in the other two dimensions, like a pancake getting ever thinner and thinner.

Well that’s in theory. In the physical reality of our world, the thin side is limited to width of the smallest atom. Or is it? Can we use sub-atomic particles instead? Whatever, there is a limit.

Now the further interesting question is: can this idea be used for a science fiction story? Can for instance our expanding universe become that particle thickness pancake? And so what if it does? Can we go back to the world E. A. Abbott’s Flatland and add some real technology?

Well to design what is effectively a 2-D being, you would have to have the ‘brain’ be able to sense what is going on at the being’s edges, which means that there has to be a cohesiveness between all different types of the being’s ‘body parts’. That cohesiveness could be in one sense, while barriers between the parts could act in another sense…. oh my word, this is getting interesting… a totally different world to what we know… and this is a good example of how to start world being!