Monthly Archives: March 2016

110. Our Stellar Neighborhood (post 2)

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In the science fiction books of my youth, no one ever mentioned heading out into the universe already knowing what planets would be circling the stars they would visit. Even when I began Cyan, no one was thinking like that, so the first thing my explorers do is to map Procyon’s solar system and discover the eponymous planet which they will explore.

Alpha Centauri A is a near twin of our sun, as well as the closest to us. It used to be logical to assume that we will visit there first. That is no longer true. By the time we find the breakthroughs that will allow even relativistic speeds, we will probably have a full inventory of the nearby cosmos, and our first star journeys are likely to be to relatively well known destinations.

I really hate that. What fun would Columbus have had, if he had seen the National Geographic special first?

Where were we? Ah, the neighborhood.

Ignoring the various stellar specks out there, these are the stars we might have interest in, in order of closeness to Earth.

Alpha Centauri – luminosity 1.0 – 4.4 light years from Earth – already covered yesterday.

Sirius – luminosity 23.0 – 8.6 light years from Earth – is the brightest star in the night sky, as seen from Earth, due both to its inherent brightness and to its closeness to us. Sirius is a binary star. Sirius A is extremely bright and hot; Sirius B is a white dwarf.

Epsilon Eridani – luminosity 0.25 -10.5 light years from Earth – is the closest star which has a reasonably well confirmed planet, a giant thought to be about 3.4 AUs out. An AU (astronomical unit) is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, making it ideal for a quick mental picture of distance. The presence of a giant planet at that distance leaves us free to postulate smaller, more human-friendly planets closer in.

Procyon – luminosity 5.8 – 11.4 light years from Earth – is another binary. Procyon A is hot and white (but nowhere nearly as bright at Sirius) with an even fainter white dwarf companion, Procyon B.

Epsilon Indi – luminosity 0.12 – 11.8 light years from Earth – has three-fourths the mass of the sun and a much lower luminosity. Any human-habitable planets would be close in, with a very short year. If it has a decent tilt, its seasons could go by quite rapidly, leading to interesting story possibilities.

Tau Ceti – luminosity 0.36 (newer figures suggest .55) – 11.8 light years from Earth – Tau Ceti is a slightly smaller Sol type star. It is the nearest single star to so resemble our sun.

When I worked out the backstory for Cyan, I only considered stars within 5 parsecs; I will add two more to this list because Gordon Dickson used them in his version of the neighborhood, which we will see in tomorrow’s post.

Altair – luminosity 11 – 16.7 light years from Earth – is a slightly variable blue white star with a rapid rotation (about 9 hours, compared to the sun’s 25 days) which gives a pronounced equatorial bulge.

Fomalhaut – luminosity 16.6 – 25 light years from Earth – is also blue-white with one known planet called Dagon. The size, nature and composition of Dagon is highly controversial, but it seems to be visible to the Hubble telescope only because it is surrounded by a dust cloud many times larger in diameter than the planet itself.

Voices in the Walls 27

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Chapter five, continued

I wanted war and rumors of war to just go away and let me get on with my life. I knew that none of those things were going to happen.

In that state of daydreaming, my mind slid from subject to subject, and landed on Ben Sayer. I liked him, but I was very uncomfortable around him. I couldn’t fit him into any familiar category. I knew how to be a master to slaves, and I knew how to treat Southern free blacks, but Ben Sayer had a dignity and reserve about him that I had never seen in a negro before. It kept me off balance, and he seemed equally uncomfortable around me.

We had trouble with names. If he had been a slave, I would have called him Ben, and if he had been white I would have called him Mr. Sayer. He was neither, so I didn’t know what to call him, even in my own mind. When we worked together, I would say “you” or point or gesture; I could never call him by either of his names. And he never used my name. Since he was thirty years older than me, he wouldn’t call me Mr. Williams, but he couldn’t call me Matt, or Boy, or Son without seeming too familiar.

Despite that, I liked him. He had easy, friendly ways and he was a master at his trade. He demanded excellence of me, but he was patient even when he was telling me I was doing something wrong.

What it all boiled down to was that I would have liked to have him for a friend, even though he was negro, and that scared me. If I could admit that, it shook the foundations of my whole life.

I shook hands with the Reverend at the door, hoping he would not question me sharply, for I had hardly heard a word he said. It was a good thing that the team knew the way home because my mind was miles away. Some neighbors had dropped Aunt Rachel off after their service, and she was already putting the finishing touches on dinner. It was a quiet meal; Sarah kept stealing looks at me, trying to figure out why I was so distant.

While Aunt Rachel and Sarah cleaned up afterwards, I went into the parlor to be alone. Like most country houses, the parlor was a rarely used room. I had not set foot in it during the week of our stay. The furniture was old, but there was no dust anywhere. I sat on a couch and idly sorted through the pile of newspapers in a rack. They were mostly back issues of a Philadelphia paper, but there were also three issues of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

Meeker had called Aunt Rachel an abolitionist; apparently he had been right. It was no surprise, but it brought back an old puzzle. If Mother had been the daughter of a Quaker, abolitionist family, why had she married Father, who was a plantation owner and slave holder?

Aunt Rachel came in alone. She said that Sarah had gone up to her room. In the dim light of the parlor, with the light behind her hiding her face in shadow, she looked so much like Mother that I could not speak. She opened the curtains and the spell was partially broken.

She sat beside me and said, “Would you like to tell me what is troubling you?”

*****

I may amuse you to know that Matt’s difficulty with names shows up in the anthropological study of kinship terms. When there is a confusion in appropriate address, as when an uncle is younger than a speaker, people tend to avoid terms of address altogether. The technical term for this is “no-naming”     continued tomorrow

109. Our Stellar Neighborhood (post 1)

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FTL is the break point of science fiction. Without a faster than light drive, exploration is restricted to the local area, and that’s fine with me. I take satisfaction in building planets within the constraints of known stars. But beware, the party is nearly over. We now have the capacity to discover extrasolar planets, and new ones are found every year. Fortunately for latecomers to the planet builders guild, megaplanets are easier to find that Earth sized ones, and NASA keeps cutting funding. Still, it won’t be too many years before you can’t decide for yourself where, within the limits of orbital mechanics, you want the planets of Alpha Centauri or Procyon to be.

When I began world building, the prime reference was How to Build a Planet by Poul Anderson. I also had an article from Sky and Telescope titled Stars Nearer than Five Parsecs. Today the internet provides an embarrassment of riches, including planet building apps. Apps? Where’s the fun in that?

What I am about to present will be old knowledge to some of you, so forgive me. Not everybody can be a nerd on everything. There are plenty of people, including would-be science fiction writers, who only want a primer on the local neighborhood, because their passions lie elsewhere.

What is the star closest to Earth? The sun. That’s a gotcha riddle among middle school students. The sun’s luminosity is generally given as 1.0, which makes the luminosities of other stars easy to understand by simple comparison.

Okay, what star is next closest, Alpha Centauri or Proxima Centauri? The P- word gives it away, but it isn’t really that simple.

Alpha Centauri isn’t a star, it only seems to be one to the naked eye. A moderate telescope resolves that dot in the sky into three dots. Alpha Centauri is a triple star, or maybe  a double star with a third star wandering through the area. Astronomers haven’t decided yet.

Alpha Centauri is the largest “star” in the constellation Centaurus. Centaurus has moved southward since the ancients named it, so that Alpha Centauri is no longer visible from the northern hemisphere. I had to wait decades to see it, on my first trip to Australia. There you don’t look for Centaurus, you look for the Southern Cross, a kite shaped constellation within Centaurus.

Alpha Centauri is just a dot in the sky, but I was thrilled to finally see the star which was the setting for so many science fiction stories from my youth.

The two stars of the binary pair are named Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. The third star is sometimes called Alpha Centauri C, but more often Proxima Centauri because it it slightly closer to Earth. Beta Centauri is something entirely different. The second brightest dot in Centaurus, Beta Centauri is a star system 525 light years from Earth – not in the local neighborhood at all. Beginners sometimes say Beta Centauri when they should be saying Alpha Centauri B.

The naming convention is widespread, but not universal. Many stars have names given to them by the ancients. Many more are simply alpha-numeric designations, following the conventions of published star charts or inventories by observatories.

*****

Click here for a Wikipedia article that will list 56 of the nearest stars, followed by maps. The first map will give you some idea of where these stars lie in relation to each other.

Tomorrow we can look at some of the rest of the nearby stars, concentrating on those which might have planets useful for human real estate.

108. Enough

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Do not misunderstand! This is not about suicide. It is about letting go, and knowing that no one lives forever.

It is also the flip side of David Singer’s frenetic pursuit of immortality in To Go Not Gently, in Serial, and in the novel A Fond Farewell to Dying.

Enough

The old man walked the narrow path
That snaked between the boulder falls,
Past the sound of water moving
Deep within the willow thickets,
Upward toward the one lone tree
That marked the juncture of the sky.

There he stopped beneath the tree
Where the cliff fell sheer away.
A thousand feet below him lay
Tall tips of trees, and the sun,
Yellowed by the rising dust
And reddened by the end of day.

The old man eased his bones
Gently into roots’ embrace,
And looking out, he said, “Enough.”

“Ten thousand sunsets I have seen,
“I do not need to see another.”

All his life came to him then;
Marched in review before his eyes,
Comrades, children, and his wives.
Briefly his — now all passed on,
Briefly his — forever gone.

He settled deeper into soil,
And closed his eyes to outward sight.
The birds he heard were decades past;
The smell was lilacs overhead,
When he first lay with his first wife.

His heart, filled up with that which was,
He closed to passage of his blood;
And was complete.

Voices in the Walls 26

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Chapter five, continued

Strength is a family heritage; my grandfather was a noted amateur wrestler, and I have always been active. Even when I was studying with Mr. Harding, I took the time to ride, to hunt, and to take long walks. So I was surprised when I could hardly get out of bed the next morning. In lifting rocks onto a stone boat, I had been twisting into awkward positions. It had strained a whole different set of muscles than I was used to using.

The morning’s work was agony, but I wouldn’t let Ben Sayer see that. By afternoon I had everything stretched out again. The next day was better, and by the fourth day, I was feeling normal again. Of course, that was the day we finished carrying rocks.

Aunt Rachel and Ben Sayer had similar ideas about barn building. Their theory was that anything worth building was worth building right. Ben Sayer said that he wanted any building he had a hand in to last at least a hundred years.

To Ben it meant that, except for the siding, there should be no nails. Everything was to go together in the old timber frame style, with properly cut joints in the beams. Here, finally, the skills I had picked up in the shipyard would become useful.

In the old days, each beam would have been shaped from trees cut locally and squared with broad axes. That alone would have taken months, but Aunt Rachel and Ben decided to accept modern times and get the timbers from a sawmill. They were delivered by wagon on Saturday the seventeenth, half-way through November, in the first snow storm of the year. Mr. Dreyfus was driving one of the teams, and complaining all the way about people who don’t know enough to settle in for the winter. Ben replied that a man couldn’t do proper work during hot weather.

Ben was not satisfied to leave the timbers where the teamsters had dropped them, so we spent the afternoon with a pair of peavies and a drug, restacking them so that they would dry without warping. By that evening, I had discovered still another set of unused muscles.

*****

The next morning, I hitched the team and drove Aunt Rachel to a nearby farmhouse where the Society of Friends was holding their meeting that week, then took Sarah on into Gettysburg to the Presbyterian church. Aunt Rachel had invited us to join her, but I was not ready to become a Quaker.

Reverend Cummings was a preacher in the old style; his sermon went on, point by point in learned argument, for the better part of two hours. There is a certain pleasure in following a closely reasoned sermon, but it was lost on me that day. I sat, eyes wide open, apparently attentive, but my mind was elsewhere.

I had been in Pennsylvania for about a week. Except for the letter explaining to Aunt Rachel why we were coming – which came two days after we did – I had heard nothing from Father. I actually enjoyed working on Aunt Rachel’s barn, but it was not my life’s work. I kept thinking of the appointment I had to enter Annapolis. I was scheduled to arrive there on January first. I wanted a miracle to happen; I wanted a terrible disease to strike Lincoln down before he could take office. I wanted war and rumors of war to just go away and let me get on with my life.

I knew that none of those things were going to happen.

*****

Here is an example of a historical novelist ignoring history. I doubt that Annapolis classes begin January first, but I needed them to, so that is the way I wrote it. A later run through after the rough draft is finished will give me the chance to change my mind on this kind of minor point.

107. Codger’s Law

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There are laws which govern human behavior. No matter how chaotic things become, somebody will take what he sees and codify it. Science fiction is no different.

Asimov gave us the three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Asimov himself worked those laws to death, and provided countless plot ideas for other authors.

Since so many science fiction authors are scientists or engineers, laws from the “real” world permeate writings in the field. We frequently see references to the three laws of thermodynamics, the three laws of motion, and the three laws of planetary motion. Three is a happy number for codifiers, but sometimes it just isn’t enough. Both robotics and and thermodynamics needed to add a zeroth (but not a fourth) law.

Arthur C. Clarke also committed three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Asimov’s laws were for fictional robots; Clarke’s laws are more about how the real world works.

Everybody knows Murphy’s Law, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. It is a favorite of engineers, but it works equally well in almost any human situation. It has variants and corollaries. Sod’s and Finagle’s variants add, “. . . at the worst possible time” or “. . . with the worst possible outcome.” Some even say that “Murphy was an optimist,” but that may be stretching things a bit.

Related, and not a law but a test, is the matter of the half-glass. Optimists say the glass is half full; pessimists say the glass is half empty. At my house, given a 50% glass, my wife will say it’s nearly full and I’ll say it’s almost empty, but that could be an extreme case.

Of all the “laws”, Sturgeon’s is my favorite. Wearying of critics of science fiction who claimed that ninety percent of science fiction is crap, Sturgeon replied, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” I’ve never heard anyone disagree, expect those who would have a higher percentage, or who substitute an even more disreputable excremental material.

Finally, not to be outdone, I want to add my own bit of codification. I came to this idea when comparing Dorsai! and The Final Encyclopedia, two of my favorite science fictions novels. They come from early and late in Gordon Dickson’s career and are so different in style that, brilliant as they both are, they could have been written by two different authors. I have seen the same phenomenon in the work of other writers. Possibly even in my own.

Codger’s Law: “The older the writer, the longer the manuscript.”

Voices in the Walls 25

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Chapter Five

I had expected to find Sarah in a bad mood, but she was beaming. She caught me by the hand before I even had time to wash up and led me into the kitchen. “Look!” she all but shouted, pointing at an apple pie. “I baked it.”

I sniffed it and broke off a kernel of crust. She slapped my hand as I tasted it. It was good, and I said so. Remembering Sarah’s burned bacon just yesterday, I was sure that Aunt Rachel had supervised this pie very closely.

Supper was a festive meal and we sat long over pie and coffee, trading family stories. Afterward, Sarah led me upstairs. She had put knick-knacks and gee-gaws on every available surface, but everything was neat and there was no clothing in sight. I asked where it had all gone, and she said that Aunt Rachel had stored half of her trunks, unopened, in the spare bedroom.

Early to bed and early to rise is the rule on the farm, and I was ready. Every muscle in my body ached from lifting rocks, so I went straight across the hall from Sarah’s bedroom to mine and straight to bed.

It seemed like minutes later that I heard a soft knocking at my door. I sat up with a groan and pushed the window curtain aside, expecting to see a stain of pre-dawn light. The moon was still high. I pushed my legs into trousers and fumbled for the pocket watch Father gave me two years ago. It was just midnight.

////rewrite this as dialog////

Sarah was at the door, looking terrified.  I sat her on the bed and asked what the matter was.  She had heard voices.  She couldn’t say what kind of voices, or where, or what they were trying to say to her, but she was sure that she had heard them.  I told her she had just been dreaming, but she would not be satisfied with that.  Very carefully, so as not to waken Aunt Rachel, I lit a candle and went downstairs with her.  We made a circuit of the first floor before she was satisfied that she had only dreamed the voices, and would go back to bed.

*****

This is a very important and tricky passage. Sarah has heard the sound of slaves who are hidden in the cellar, trapped by the fact that their conductor has been shot, and growing desperate after several days without moving further north. In these last days before the Civil War, due to the Dred Scott decision, reaching to the North no longer means safety. Safety now lies in Canada. They arrived at Aunt Rachel’s house the night Matt and Sarah were sleeping off their train ride. They are the slaves whom Meeker and Bellows are seeking. Of course, Matt know nothing of this – yet.

This passage needs a touch of “ghost story” as a red herring before Matt discovers the truth.

The note-to-self to rewrite as dialog is something I do fairly often. I knew as I was writing that I wasn’t up to making things come out right just then, and I was anxious to continue exploring Matt’s relationship with Ben Sayre, so I made a notation and moved on, with intention of returning later.

106. Super Tuesday

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Super Tuesday, March first. By the time this hits the ‘net many of you will already have voted, because I am on a west coast schedule.

You surely know more about this day than I do, since I am writing this in late January. Today, Trump is ahead of everybody on one side, and the other side is up for grabs.

I have no intention of suggesting whom you should vote for, but I do have something to say. Politics is about now and tomorrow and the next day. Politics is about making the best of a bad situation, and the situation is always bad. Politicians shouldn’t outright lie, but any politician who answers every question with the full truth, will never be elected.

One standby that never fails to get a vote is:

They are coming to get us, to smother us, to bury us, to kill us, but I can stop them if you will help me build a wall.

American has been building walls since before it was America. They never work.

*****

In September, when this website was only three weeks old and no one was listening yet, I posted a poem. Here it is again, for your consideration.

Poetry should stand without explanation, but, like anything else, it can be misused. So, be notified! This is not a right wing call to man the barricades to keep the enemy out, but a cautionary tale about what it will cost us if we don’t find real solutions.

Hungry

We who horde the common wealth
Upon this crowded planet,
Must look to see what lies beyond
Our barricaded borders.

The world stares back,
Unblinking eyes — prepared
To eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

                              It’s happened all before.

Once, seven in a cave drove out the eighth
With stones and fire-sharpened sticks,
Because the antlered carcass on the ground
Was not enough to feed them all.

And then in ancient days when kings and priests
Invented both religion and the law,
To fill their coffers so that they could eat
While those who raised the food went hungry.

Or yet again, when men of white
Despised the black, and black despised the gray.
And those whose colors ran together were disowned.
Color was enough to make them hate
But hunger taught them how and why
A thousand years ago.

Yet still we breed and laugh,
And play at deafness, though an angry sound
Declares the world is poised to seize its bread.

They will march like locusts through the earth,
And eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

This world is troubled. We are surrounded by people hungry for bread and freedom. Pointing a finger at them and saying, “It’s your fault!’ won’t solve our problems.

And a wall won’t do it. Never has; never will.

Voices in the Walls 24

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Chapter four, continued

“Don’t need papers, Mister,” Ben Sayer replied. “This is a free state and I’m a freeborn man.”

“How do I know that?”

I was getting pretty irritated by their high handed manner. I said, “I’ll vouch for him, or you can ask Rachel Pike in that house up there. She knows him well enough to hire him to build a barn for her.”

Sheepskin Jacket scowled and said, “That lying abolitionist! I wouldn’t believe a word she said.”

I took a sharp step forward and reached up for the reins of his horse with my right hand, moving up close on the side where his revolver was holstered. “I don’t know who you think you are,” I snapped, “but if you want to keep all your teeth in your mouth, you will think twice before you call a lady a liar.”

That made him hot and I watched him like a snake, ready to pull him down off his horse if he made a move toward that gun. True, I was shy of sixteen, (or maybe just shy of seventeen, I haven’t decided yet) but I was man-tall and there are some things you just don’t let anyone say about you or your family. Besides, Sheepskin Jacket didn’t look that much older than me.

Behind me, I heard the other rider say, “Meek, you are about to get us in trouble over nothing. Let it go.”

Meek looked down at me with anger, but he only said, “Let go of the reins.” When I did, he jerked his horse around and kicked it into a gallop from a standing start.

I turned to the second man and said, “Who are you and what is all this about, anyway?”

This man was older than Meek and more heavily built; he looked slow and friendly, but I wouldn’t have wanted to fight him. I had a feeling he had more staying power than his younger companion. He said, “I’m Joe Bellows and that there was Tom Meeker. We got us a job of returning runaway slaves, and we just got word of a bunch of them moving north in this area. Two men and one woman, all in their twenties, one old woman in her fifties or thereabouts, and a baby. If you see them, send word down to Brannigan’s in Gettysburg and he’ll contact us. We’ll see you get part of the reward.”

I didn’t say yes or no. I just nodded and he took off after Meeker. It might seem odd, but even slave owners didn’t have much use for auctioneers, overseers, or slave catchers.

Ben Sayer looked pale, which was quite a trick because he was one of the blackest black men I had ever seen. He shook his head and said, “You don’t know how close you come to dying right there.”

I said, “Don’t be silly.”

“If I had said what you said, they’d have shot me down where I stood.”

I realized that he was probably right. Being a free black, even in a northern state, was not the same as being really free. I shrugged.

Slowly a grin crept across Ben Sayer’s face. “You still don’t get it, do you? You still thinking like southern gentleman.” There was sarcasm in his voice. “Look at yourself, there in raggedy clothes that don’t fit. You look like white trash. If you had told them you were Representative Thomas Williams boy, they would have laughed at you.”

He was right. I had never thought about what I must look like.

Ben said, “If you want to come on high and mighty with your fine southern pride, you better get your dress clothes back on and carry a gun. Nigras and raggedy whites can’t afford no pride.”