The Way the Future Blogs

If there was one program that every single human being alive would benefit from, it is the identification and control of N.E.O.s — Near Earth Objects — which is to say some wandering asteroid or comet core that sets its sights on this nice planet we live on. The thing is that if one turned up in our telescopes now, say one the size of the Chicxulub one that did the dinosaurs in, there’s nothing much we could do about it beyond waving “bye bye.”

This is not to say that we can do nothing at all. Au contraire. It’s just that we have no capacity to do anything about it right now. In the future, assuming we started preparing for action now, we could do a hell of a lot — starting, say, with a systematic scan of N.E.O.s to identify which are threats (this has already begun, and in fact has routinely picked out the ones that come closest to Earth — although, annoyingly, it hasn’t identified most of them until they have already passed us by. This is not a situation that is useful to us). But if we achieved earlier identification, why then, we could even design and build a fleet of space tugs to change the orbits of threatening N.E.O.s from collision to miss.

These are not trivial chores. Put them together just that far and you’ve already run up a total bill that probably exceeds the tab for the total present world space program, by how much I don’t know.

But that’s only the beginning. If we successfully carried out such a program, it might save us from an abrupt extinction. But here we’re only talking about something that would wipe out a majority of life on the planet itself. What about something smaller, say a Tunguska collision that would wipe out a single city? The actual Tunguska Event (on June 30, 1908) didn’t wipe out a city. It didn’t wipe out anything but a few thousand acres of uninhabited Siberian forest, because that’s where it chanced to land.

It didn’t have to be that harmless . Since the location of such an impact point is essentially random, it could just as easily have landed on Times Square, which would have meant the instant annihilation of the entire city of New York.

Does that make you think of anything, well, scary? Because it does me. And I’m fairly sure that there are a lot of people in this world who would consider it greatly interesting, to use your space tug, in a different manner.

One way you could make an N.E.O. miss a city and instead fall into the sea (which raises its own problems of tsunamis and so on, but never mind that for now) is to fly up to it in your space tug and push it into a slightly different orbit.

No problem?

Well, not exactly no problem at all. There are certain quite problematical theoretical possibilities.

Suppose the pilot of your space tug was, well, Iranian. And suppose he was an enthusiastic believer in the rightness of his president’s views on Israel, and why wouldn’t it be just as easy to dump that N.E.O. right on top of, say, Tel Aviv?

Re-orbiting N.E.O.s, as we have described, might someday save us all from extinction. But another way to look at it is that it could become the deadliest weapon that this endlessly inventive species of ours has ever devised.

 
Still, we don’t really have to worry about that as a real possibility, do we?

I mean, the world’s astronauts and cosmonauts are all sane, calm human beings who would never allow themselves to be distracted from their duties by any other consideration. Trust me on this. The people in the International Space Station are not harmed in their duties by extraneous forces.

Still, if you’ve been troubled by these stories of discord on the space station that have been coming to us now and then, calm yourself. Yes, the Russians once stopped the Americans from using their toilets. The Americans then retaliated by ejecting Russians from the American gym. And measures involving food, water and even air were then threatened.

But all is well. Relax. Have a good night’s sleep.

This one’s going to be pretty nuts-and-bolts elementary, but you don’t have to read it if you have no intention of writing anything any time soon.

I. How do you get to be a writer?

1. You sit down and write something.
2. Finish what you write. Pensées don’t count. Neither do short stories without an ending.
3. If the next morning you think it’s any good send it to some editor who might buy it.

4. Repeat as needed.

II. How do you prepare the manuscript?

1. Type your story (no handwritten works need apply) in black ink on white 8½ × 11 paper. (Unless you’re British, in which case the only typing paper available to you may be slightly larger.)
2. “Type” is understood to include typing on a computer.
3. Remember to number the damn pages! You would be astonished how many otherwise reasonably intelligent and quite good writers have not figured out how to make their computers number the pages. Can you imagine what happens if the wind blows the manuscript?

III. How do you send it?

1. Put it in a manuscript-sized envelope. Put in with it a self-addressed return envelope.

2. If you’re using the postal mail service (recommended) include return postage. I recommend paper-clipping the stamps to the envelope instead of sticking them on. If the editor buys your story, he gets to keep the stamps, which some of them like to do. Of course, this is not enough to make him reconsider a rejection and instead buy the thing, but it may lead him to have a kindlier thought of you, and how can that be bad?
3. If you prefer to use Fed Ex, etc., tell the person who sells it to you that you want to pay for return and he’ll take care of it.
4. Submit by e-mail if (and only if) the publisher’s submission guidelines say you should.
5. If you are submitting a novel, you don’t have to send the whole thing. Just send the first 40 or so pages with an outline (can be short, since all you’re aiming for is to get him to read the whole thing).

IV. What do you put in the cover letter?

1. Only what is necessary for him to know about you.
2. Include any writing awards you may have won. Do not include telling how much you need the money because your baby is sick and you can’t afford to buy medicine. If you are a good-looking woman, do not include pictures of yourself in a bikini. Make it as brief as you can.

V. Good luck!

 
Related posts:
Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon forty years ago the otherwise admirable British magazine New Scientist was, as they put it, “a tad curmudgeonly” when writing of the event, saying, “it is really a matter of no greater moment than just peering into the high recesses of a trapeze act” and “We believed the hype about the technological age that we thought we lived in. Moon shot? Easy.”

But now, looking back at the pitifully rudimentary technology that was all the Apollo people had to work with (cork for insulation, emergency exit by sliding down a rope, a mere 64K of computer memory, etc.), they’ve changed their mind about the “astonishing splendour” of this “remarkable demonstration of human ingenuity.”

So we accept your apology, Britain. Now will you accept ours for the uncalled-for rudeness of 1776?

 
Today is the anniversary of the day in 1930 when young Clyde Tombaugh, blink-comparing a bunch of astronomical photographs, found a dot that had moved — Pluto — and told the world he had discovered a new planet. Boy! What some people won’t say to make themselves look important!

One of the nice things about running a blog is that you can conveniently republish things that people have asked for. Another is that you can sometimes republish things that hardly anyone has ever requested … like this.

Among my childhood vices was the writing of poetry — sometimes quite quirky, like the first exemplar, sometimes pretty banal, like the second. (The best thing about the banal ones is that I quite often got some editor to buy them.)

I wrote “!” for the very first magazine I ever edited (and published, and ran off on the mimeograph machine, and bound), a tiny semi-fanzine called Mind of Man. It is also the very first thing I ever wrote that got favorable comments from people as astute as Cyril Kornbluth and James Blish, who memorized it and was known to recite it at parties.

              !

         ,   ,   &
        ! my frand
        ;  $
        - - . . . . . . . 

The second poem is significant even to me only because it is the first thing I wrote that some editor bought and published and paid cash to me for.

Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna

Darkness descends and the cluttering towers
Of cities and hamlets blink into light.
The harsh, brilliant glitter of day’s bustling hours
Gives place to the glowing effulgence of night.
The Moon, that pale creature, the queen of the sky,
Peeps wistfully down at the life forms below,
Thinking, perhaps, of the eons rolled by
Since life on her bosom lapsed under the snow.
A dead world and cold, this satellite bleak,
Whose craters and valleys are airless and dry.
No flicker of motion from deep pit to peak,
No living thing’s ego to shout, “I am I!”
But once, ages past, this grim tomb in space
Owned living things on its surface now bare
Till grim Time in his flight, speeding apace,
Swept life, motion, thought away, who can know where?

All right, all right, the Moon isn’t a planet and it never had any living things, or snow, either. Sue me. When I wrote it I was a fairly ignorant fifteen.

Then, when I was sixteen, the editor of Amazing Stories, T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph. D., accepted it, and when I was seventeen he published it in his October 1937 issue, and when I was 18 he paid for it. Two dollars.

 
Related post:
Verse Decoded

Sir Arthur C. Clarke at home in Sri Lanka, 2005. Photo by Amy Marash.

I first met Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s, on the occasion of his first cross-Atlantic visit to New York City By then Arthur had established himself as a first-rate science-fiction writer and he did what sf writers do in a strange city: He looked for other sf writers to talk to.

He found them in the rather amorphously shaped group that called itself the Hydra Club, where I was one of the nine heads that had been its founders. We became friends. We stayed that way for all of the half century that remained of Arthur’s life. We met when chance arranged it — at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, at an occasional scientific meeting, at assorted “cons” — sf-speak for science-fiction gatherings — in many places at many times.

In the early days Arthur spent a lot of time visiting New York, usually staying at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street, and when possible I would join him for dinner or a drink — that was all expense-account money and happily paid for by my publisher, because I was an editor in those days and eager to publish as much Clarke as I could get my hands on. But by the turn of the millennium our friendship had reduced itself to a desultory correspondence and the odd phone conversation. I had given up editing to concentrate on my own writing. What Arthur had given up was ever leaving his island home in Sri Lanka, where I had never been. (Although I visited a number of other countries, Sri Lanka wasn’t one of them.)

Then, in one of his letters in the early part of 2006, Arthur rather offhandedly mentioned that, a couple of years earlier, in a fit of exuberance, he had signed publishing contracts for several books that, he was now convinced, he would never be able to write himself. Most of them he had arranged for some other writer to finish, but there was one, called The Last Theorem, for which he needed a collaborator.

Continue reading ‘Sir Arthur and I’ »