Short Book Reviews: A Deliciously Bizarre and Terrifying Dystopic Medical Thriller

 Leech, by Hiron Ennes (Tordotcom)

I should preface my review with the confession that although I don’t read a lot of horror, this novel captured my imagination and kept me staying up way too late, turning the pages. It straddles the boundary between science fiction and horror, with a nod to thriller pacing and suggestions of fantastical elements. In a far, but not too far, dystopic future, Earth is barely recognizable. Upheavals have overturned the layers of crust, so that the surface is all but barren. Humans must mine the caverns for wheatrock foodstock. Winters are bitterly cold and getting worse. Even so, settlements persist. One such is an estate ruled by a grossly obese baron who relies on sophisticated machinery to stay alive. When his doctor dies, he sends to the elite Interprovincial Medical Institute for a replacement (the narrator). But this is no simple matter of sending another graduate of the same school. The nameless narrator shares consciousness, knowledge, and memories with every other graduate. In fact, they are all human hosts for a single, telepathic parasite.

As if that weren’t bizarre enough, the cause of death of the former physician turns out to be a second parasite arising deep in the caverns. It’s not only deadly, it’s incredibly difficult to kill, and it’s spreading from one host to the next like wildfire.

I loved the medical neepery, the skillful way the author introduced the characters and plot elements, the rocketship ride of dramatic tension, and the wildly inventive world-building.

Content warning for violence, gore, mental rape, and a few other horrors. The book might be too nightmarish for some readers.

Short Book Reviews: An 18th Century Astronomer

 An Astronomer in Love, by Antoine Laurain (Gallic Books)

I loved this combination of the historical adventures of the 18^th Century French astronomer, Guillaume Le Gentil de la Galaisière, and a modern-day love story. Le Gentil was part of an international effort (proposed by none other than Edmond Halley of Halley’s Comet) to measure the distance to the Sun, by observing the transit of Venus at different points on the Earth and triangulating the distance. The transit of Venus occurs when Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun and can be visualized against the brightness of the Sun. (I was fortunate enough to view this in 2012, using proper eye protection, of course.) Le Gentil’s expedition was  a saga of one disaster after another, including his ship being blown off-course (for the 1761 transit), after which he remained in India for 8 more years until overcast weather made observation of the 1769 transit impossible. By the time he returned to Paris, everyone believed he was dead, and he had quite a time recovering his property and position.

Two and a half centuries later, Parisian realtor Xavier Lemercier chances upon Guillaume’s telescope. It’s turned up in a locked closet in an apartment he had once sold, and the new owner wants nothing to do with it. When Xavier sets it up, he inadvertently spies the apartment across the way, inhabited by a zebra (taxidermied, he later finds out) and a beautiful woman. She walks into his office, much to his surprise, in search of new digs. In the process, romance blossoms, aided by their children, who have become best friends. Now he has to find a way to confess that he was spying on her without the whole affair blowing up.

The two stories alternate in an interwoven pattern as Xavier discovers the telescope and becomes intrigued by Guillaume’s story. Guillaume’s adventures are dramatic enough to fill volumes and he was apparently a prolific diarist. I like to think that if they ever met, they would have appreciated one another.

[shameless promotion] Another Five-Star Review of The Laran Gambit

The Laran Gambit has another five-star review!

Short Book Reviews: The Latest "October Daye" Adventure

 Be the Serpent, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)

I’ve loved Seanan McGuire’s “October Daye” urban fantasy since the very first volume and looked forward to each new installment. Be the Serpent is every bit a treat for long-time fans of the series. It is not, alas, an entry point for the new reader. Long-running series are often burdened by sheer weight of backstory. McGuire is skillful enough to weave in bare-minimum necessary details, but after 15 previous volumes, that amounts to a lot. Even though I had read all the previous volumes, some more than once, I found myself wondering who is this person and when did that happen? I wished for a “refresh my memory” synopsis from time to time, especially when supporting characters had similar names (like Simon and Sylvester, although there aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to give everyone in Toby Daye’s world a name starting with a different letter). I have the greatest sympathy for the poor, unsuspecting reader who tries to jump into the middle of the story. To be fair, there are plot elements that don’t depend on an encyclopedic knowledge of What Has Come Before and are engrossing in their own right.

Be the Serpent has the same delicious blend of Faerie, magic, romance, mystery, and action, not to mention great characters, as has come before. Fans will love it, me among them. If I was disappointed by once-terror-inspiring characters descending to warm-fuzziness, the switch from BFF to arch-enemy more than balanced it out.

The story ends on a partial resolution, a false cadence as it were, promising that the story isn’t over yet. This is great news for fans, maybe not so much for someone still trying to figure out what’s going on.

I tried to read the attached novella, but I kept falling asleep.

 

[personal] My Love/Hate Relationship with Chanukah

For the past decade or so, whether Chanukah falls in early December or overlaps Christmas, I have wrestled with the meaning of the holiday. I grew up in a devoutly secular Jewish family, although my father used to tell us stories of the holidays. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that observing Jewish customs became important to me. Their father, my first husband, came from a family that celebrated Christmas as a paean to overconsumption, an amalgam of showering each other with cheap gifts and gorging on indigestible food while sniping at one another. In our own home, however, we would have a modest tree, a modest meal, and presents that had something to do with the interests of the recipients.

So where did Chanukah fit it? For one thing, when my kids came along I decided not to compete with Christmas. No big gatherings. No tinsel. No horribly unhealthy meals. And no presents. Instead, we turned off the tv, and gathered around to light the candles and stumble through reading the blessings. We’d play dreidel using Chanukah gelt (foil-wrapped chocolate coins) and take turns reading aloud from a collection of funny children’s Chanukah books. The hands-down favorite was Eric Kimmel’s Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, although his The Chanukkah Guest came a close second. One of the appeals of Herschel was the way the dialog of the goblins lent itself to silly voices as Herschel outwitted them one by one. Needless to say, the kids loved reading together and playing games as a family. Years later, they told me that they didn’t want to give the impression they didn’t like getting presents for Christmas but they liked Chanukah better.

As the kids grew up, and I divorced and later remarried, I found myself re-evaluating the holiday. I hadn’t celebrated it as a child and I no longer had children to delight. By this time, my own Jewish identity had become increasingly important to me. What did this holiday mean, beyond a way of enjoying the winter in a non-specifically-Christian way?

I started reading the story behind Chanukah, and that’s when my troubles started.

Short Book Reviews: A Domestic Haunted House Thriller

 Just Like Home, by Sarah Gailey (Tor)

Oh, my.

I fell in love with Sarah Gailey ‘s writing when Magic for Liars hit the stands, and  I became even more a fan with her tale of hippopotami in the Mississippi River (River of Teeth). Her domestic thriller, The Echo Wife, took her storytelling into new territory and new heights. Now Just Like Home unveils her mature talent. It fits loosely within the new genre of “domestic thriller,” more toward the “domestic horror” side with supernatural elements.

Vera Crowder returns home at the summons of her dying mother, from whom she has been long estranged. She does so reluctantly, because her house--the notorious Crowder House, hand-built by her father—was the scene of serial murders. The town isn’t exactly thrilled to have Vera back. Questions like “Did you know what was going on?” still haunt her. To make matters worse, her father and the house have become the object of true-crime fans, and the son of a journalist who helped to publicize it has become the mother’s caretaker (and heir) and is busy stripping the house for his “murder art pieces.” As Vera sorts her mother’s belongings, the memories she has long suppressed come to life, along with disastrous truths.

I won’t say more about what those truths are because the process of revealing them is one of the ways this book is brilliant. Vera is an unreliable narrator who hides horrific childhood memories from herself, but she herself is not the person initially presented. Nor are her parents. By alternating between past and present, Gailey takes us on an ever-tightening spiral path, each revolution bringing more and deeper connections. The final confrontation and resolution, which would otherwise have come as a surprise—not to mention being utterly unbelievable—proceeds inevitably and naturally from what has come before. It’s a masterful handling of darkly gothic elements, psychopathy, domestic terror, and gorgeously bizarre characters.

Gailey is a writer who has come of age and richly deserves the acclaim she’s earned.

A Month of NaNoWriMo posts (highlights)

I've been putting up brief posts about National Novel Writing Month. Here are a few that are worth repeating.

November 1: Happy November! It's @NaNoWriMo time! Will you join this year?

NaNoWriMo is a yearly event that challenges participants to write a novel in a single month. The #writingcommunity spirit, online tools, and general cheering one another on can be awesome. But it's not for everyone.

Here's what I'll be doing for NaNoWriMo: Cheering on my friends. I'll be finishing up revisions on the next Darkover novel, Arilinn. Revising is a very different process from drafting. I find that drafting goes better when I do it quickly, so I don't get caught in second-guessing myself or editing as I write. Both are recipes for disaster and paralysis. Revising, on the other hand, does not reliably produce any measurable result in terms of pages or words. I dive into it and call it quits every day when my brain won't function any longer.

November 2: Happy @NaNoWriMo month! Whether you participate or not, this is a great time to review your writing goals. If finishing a novel is too much, how about a single chapter? Or a short story? While it can be helpful to set ambitious goals, for many it's overwhelming. We fare better with short, manageable goals that allow us to succeed, sentence by sentence, word by word. What are YOUR goals for this month?

November 3: Happy @NaNoWriMo! Candles, music, hot drinks, snacks, a purring cat on your lap... What helps make the words flow for you?

I like soft instrumental music, an occasional spearmint candy, and lots of kitty vibes!

November 5: Happy @NaNoWriMo! Is it possible to write a novel in only 30 days? What do you think?

1. 1. Why stop at only one? Let's write a trilogy in 30 days?
2. 2. Hell, no! I can barely manage a sentence in that time--but it's a perfect sentence!
3. 3. Yes, if the voices in my head keep dictating to me.

November 10: It's time for a break! Rest is important – even during @NaNoWriMo. Writing a novel in 30 days is pretty intense. Knowing when and how much to rest is tricky. Are you a fan of rest or do you find it difficult to switch off?

November 12: Supporting characters can provide comic relief when things get heavy. Do you have a favorite, one just begging for their own story What would a writing session look like if some of your supporting characters were keeping you company?

November 13: Doing something as demanding as @NaNoWriMo can teach you things you didn’t know about yourself. Tackling a novel, regardless of time, teaches me humility and patience. And that I have a wacky sense of humor. Does this surprise you? What are you learning about yourself this month?

November 15: During a project as big as @NaNoWriMo, it’s normal to feel tired, to doubt yourself or run low on creativity. So it’s good to have a few go-to accounts that lift you up, brighten your day or remind you why you’re doing what you’re doing. What nourishes you during those moments? What keeps you inspired?

November 26: @NaNoWriMo pals: Are you old school or ultra-modern? Whether it’s keeping track of your ideas, staying on schedule or actually putting words on the page – do you prefer pen and paper, your trusty typewriter, color-coded post-its, a giant whiteboard, clever apps... or something else? Ask your readers: are you traditional or high-tech?

For organization, I use a writing paper schedule and a spiral notebook for each novel. For writing, I mostly use Word (or Google Docs), but if I'm stuck, I write my way through with that handy notebook.

What about you?

November 27: Into the home stretch of @NaNoWriMo, there’s a good chance you’ll run low on energy at some point this month. When that happens, do you take a break or push through? What restores your energy and momentum?

November 30: On the last day of @NaNoWriMo, you may need a little extra help to get across the finish line. Feel free to be honest about that and ask for #encouragement.

Here's some from me: You've done an awesome job, whether you finished a novel or not. Your words are precious, so keep writing!

 

 

 

Short Book Reviews: Walter Jon Williams's "Praxis" Homerun

 Imperium Restored (A Novel of the Praxis), by Walter Jon Williams (Harper Voyager)

This was my first “Praxis” novel, and it’s a tribute to the author that although I could not always follow the intricacies of the backstory, I was so caught up in the action that I simply didn’t care. Imperium Restored works on so many levels, each of them fascinating. Star-crossed lovers are separated by a colossal misunderstanding that spews forth confusion, mistrust, and crushing hurt (but does nothing to erase the fundamental attraction between them). There’s also a bang-up battle in space, one of the smartest and most inventive I’ve read, enough to convince me that any spacemil science fiction Williams writes will be superb. Life in a vast star-spanning spaceforce is filled with rivalries, jealousies, boredom, ill-fated sexual encounters, interspecies friction, and what-do-we-do-with-ourselves once the war is over. A lesser writer might have focused on the war itself. While the battle scenes are pure bravura, Williams keeps enlarging the lens to look at the ramifications, not just during the conflict but also afterward. The resulting peace offers as many opportunities for tension, betrayal, alliances made and broken, assassination attempts, revenge, and general chaos as the actual fighting did.

There’s also a mystery.

What more could a science fiction fan want?

GUEST POST: Lillian Csernica on Finding Happiness in Writing

I’m delighted to welcome author Lillian Csernica, who writes eloquently from the heart about her life. She says the following essay “embodies the main theme of my NaNoWriMo project, Keep Getting Up.”

 

HAPPINESS: A WELCOME STRANGER

By Lillian Csernica

 

If you ask me where I make room for my happiness, it will take me a minute or two to come up with a reply. Not because I don't know where I keep it, but because in a very real sense, I don't have any to keep. I live with Major Depressive Disorder. It's not like I get depressed every now and then. I'm depressed all the time. I have to fight my way out of it to a state of mind that approximates the kind of baseline cheerfulness that gets most people through their day. The specific name for the no-happiness part of my condition is anhedonia. That's the inability to experience pleasure from normal activities such as watching a funny movie or playing with a pet. If that sounds sad, it is. Some days it goes beyond sad all the way into tragic. I sit there and watch life go by. I can see the colors and hear the sounds, but I can't feel anything other than depression. The tastes, the smells, the textures are there but they don't connect to the pleasure center in my brain.

I've had to actively seek out qualified people who taught me the skills I need to change my perceptions and reframe my thinking. I might not be able to feel happiness, but I take great pleasure in other people's joy. Here are two examples:

• My son John just finished taking a class at the library on using a digital camera and laptop to make movies. He learned how to use some new software and do some interesting things with the storyboard pages he'd spent so much time drawing. John doesn't have a completed animation project yet, but he did master a new part of the process in just one hour. I put the experience in context for him, explaining how the animators he admires had to learn step-by-step methods as well. John is proud of himself.
• Michael, my older son, just brought home his latest award-winning art project. He and his aide had kept it in his classroom until summer school ended because it's a triptych with two of the panels created by two of Michael's classmates. It shows a street scene right off the beach in Capitola, done in multimedia that includes paint and crayon and some glitter. While Michael didn't make it into the Top Three for this year's school district art contest, he and his team received ribbons for Awards of Merit. All of us at home made much over Michael winning his fourth award for an art project.

 I think I'm the closest to real happiness that I can get these days when I write. When I get into the creative trance, all sense of time passing vanishes. I leave behind the sorrows of the real world and function within the world of my story. I am on that intuitive wavelength where I'm processing structure and characterization and setting and dialogue all the way down to the microwriting level of word choice and punctuation placement. I could be a gem cutter working with the magnifiers and the precision tools that allow me to cut a stone into a solitaire, a baguette, a marquise, whatever best suits the particular gem. I reach into the story itself for its reality, its shape, the right way to show off its color, cut, and clarity. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of finding the exact word and putting it in the ideal setting.

I have to work hard at making room for happiness in my mind and in my life. Every day I have to survive in an environment of ongoing tragedy, knowing that because of their disabilities, both of my sons will not enjoy everything life has to offer them. I've learned that I can't hold on to happiness. Life changes too quickly, and some of the changes are permanent. I've learned that I have to take medication to correct my brain chemistry so I can get out of bed in the morning and get through the demands of each day. I've learned that I can't let my mental and emotional room be taken up by negative feelings and old baggage. Most of all, I've learned that if I just keep still and be in this present moment, happiness will wave at me or throw me a smile. Once in a while, it will even come and sit beside me so we can share the moment.

 

Lillian Csernica writes fantasy, romance, and horror. Her short stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Fantastic Stories, and Jewels of Darkover. Her Kyoto Steampunk short stories can be found in the Clockwork Alchemy anthologies Twelve Hours Later, Thirty Days Later, Some Time Later and Next Stop On The #13. SHIP OF DREAMS, an historical romance, is set in the Caribbean of 1725 during the Golden Age of piracy. A genuine California native born in San Diego, Lillian resides in the Santa Cruz mountains with her two sons and three cats. Visit her at lillian888.wordpress.com.

Book Review: Mothtown, A Brilliant Second Novel from Caroline Hardaker

 Mothtown, by Caroline Hardaker (Angry Robot)

Caroline Hardaker’s second novel, like the first, presents a challenging read. It asks the reader to keep critical faculties, human sympathy, and a healthy degree of scientific skepticism onboard as the story unfolds. It’s been described as a cross between horror and mainstream, but I don’t think it’s horror in the usual sense, any more than Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is. It might better be described as a psychological mystery. Whether the fantasy/science-fictional/surreal elements truly exist in Hardaker’s world or whether they are creations in the mind of the main character is, ultimately, a judgment call for the reader to make.

The story alternates between “After,” in which the adult protagonist races desperately through a sinister wilderness, and “Before,” looking back to his childhood. The “Before” section opens on an apparently dystopic world in which people go missing and floral tributes appear on all-too-many doorsteps and street corners. This is the first part of the mystery: What is going on? Are people really vanishing? If so, where are they going? If not, where are their bodies?

Although his parents try hard to protect him and his sister, ten-year-old David believes something more is going on. When his beloved grandfather--a Professor of Superstring Theory and Dark Matter Studies--disappears and his parents insist the old man is dead, David refuses to believe them. He becomes convinced that his grandfather has found a door into another world, a place he truly belongs. And David is determined to find such a world for himself.

David faces many difficulties in the ordinary world. He’s barely verbal, doesn’t pick up on social cues or interact with others, and seems oblivious to the feelings of others. His mother’s increasingly anxious about the “disappearances,” and despite this, David takes off on his own to visit the cemetery where his grandfather is buried. As a mother myself, I was furious at his lack of sensitivity. Fortunately, Hardaker’s skill kept me reading long enough to ask the question, “What is going on with this kid?”

David is more than an unreliable narrator, although he is that, too, and herein lies the second part of the mystery. What, indeed, is going on with him? Can we trust anything he says about himself, the world, other characters, his grandfather—anything?

Can we read between and behind the lines to discover the real story?

==SPOILER ALERT==

New Evidence on How the Dinosaurs Died

 Such a cool article from Universe Today, I think it merits a post all to itself!

Devastating Clouds of Dust Helped End the Reign of the Dinosaurs

When a giant meteor crashed into Earth 66 million years ago, the impact pulverized cubic kilometers of rock and blasted the dust and debris into the Earth’s atmosphere. It was previously believed that sulfur from the impact and soot from the global fires that followed drove a global “impact winter” that killed off 75% of species on Earth, including the dinosaurs.

A new geology paper says that the die-off was additionally fueled by ultrafine dust created by the impact which filled the atmosphere and blocked sunlight for as long as 15 years. Plants were unable to photosynthesize and global temperatures were lowered by 15 degrees C (59 F).

Most scientists agree the disaster started with an asteroid impact, where an asteroid at least 10 kilometers wide struck the Chicxulub region in the present-day Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The impact released 2 million times more energy than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated.

The devastation created layer of ash sandwiched between layers of rock, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, formerly known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) boundary, which is found across the world in the geologic record. It includes a layer of iridium, an element common in asteroids but rare on Earth. It was this ‘iridium anomaly’ that first revealed the extinction event as an asteroid strike to geologists more than three decades ago.

What has been debated is what created conditions for the post-impact winter. The leading candidates were sulphur from the asteroid’s impact, or soot from global wildfires that ensued after the impact. Both would have blocked out sunlight and plunged the world into a long, dark winter, collapsing the food chain and creating a chain reaction of extinctions.  

Short Book Reviews: Louisa Morgan's Powerful Take on Ghosts, Abuse, and Friendship

Louisa Morgan is a writer of astonishing depth and power. Now she brings her superb talents to a modern tale of abuse, friendship, and hope.

Clinical psychologist Beatrice Bird has always had a touch of “second sight,” a benign and occasionally useful talent for lucky guesses. An impulsive experiment with psychedelics during the Haight-Ashbury era transforms her intuitive gift. Now she sees ghostly figures attached to living people, embodiments of abuse, terror, and guilt. As the years pass, these manifestations become increasingly difficult to endure. She flees to a remote island community, where her only social contacts are a few nuns and a pair of opinionated cows. Just as she settles in to a life of isolation, her life collides with that of another refugee. Timid Anne Iredale is clearly on the run, willing to go to any lengths to hide her identity as the wife of a powerful judge. Beatrice’s gift, however, reveals the most horrific phantoms yet: a mewling child clinging to Anne and a specter of unalloyed evil looming over them both. Soon the two are thrown together on a journey of courage, healing, and redemption.

Morgan tackles complex and difficult issues with compassion, intelligence, and page-turning drama. The story unfolds like a spiral, circling through two very different lives, past and present, peeling away layers of illusion and façade until they are woven together in a triumphant, deeply moving unity. Clear your schedule before opening this book, because once you start reading, you won’t want to put it down!

Planets and Nebulae and Stars, Oh My!

An embarrassment of riches of science articles:

Want to Find Life? Compare a Planet to its Neighbors

With thousands of known exoplanets and tens of thousands likely to be discovered in the coming decades, it could be only a matter of time before we discover a planet with life. The trick is proving it. So far the focus has been on observing the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, looking for molecular biosignatures that would indicate the presence of life. But this can be difficult since many of the molecules produced by life on Earth could also be produced by geologic processes. A new study argues that a better approach would be to compare the atmospheric composition of a potentially habitable world with those of other planets in the star system.

Since planets form within the debris disk of a young star, they will generally have similar compositions. Because of the migration of certain molecules such as water ice, the outer planets can have a slightly different composition than the inner planets, but overall their composition is similar. For this study, the team looked at the abundance of atmospheric carbon among worlds.

Carbon is not just a primary element for life on Earth, it also absorbs readily in water and can be bound geologically in rocks. So the idea is that if an exoplanet is in the potentially habitable zone of a star and has significantly less atmospheric carbon than similar worlds in its system, then that is a strong indicator of the presence of water and organic life. Take our solar system as an example. Earth, Venus, and Mars are all roughly in the habitable zone of the Sun, but both Venus and Mars have atmospheres comprised mostly of carbon dioxide. In contrast, Earth has an atmosphere of mostly nitrogen and oxygen, and only a fraction of a percent of carbon dioxide. Earth’s atmospheric carbon is so dramatically different from that of Venus and Mars that it stands out as a likely inhabited world.

The Crab Reveals Its Secrets To JWST

The Crab Nebula – otherwise known as the first object on Charles Messier’s list of non-cometary objects or M1 for short

It has been known that there is a pulsar at the core of the nebula, and it’s this pulsar that is the true remains of the progenitor star.  When it went ‘supernova,’ the core collapsed to form the ultra-dense rotating object that, if you happen to be in the right place in space (hey, that rhymes), then you will see a pulse of radiation as it rotates. The infrared images from JWST reveal synchrotron emissions, which are a direct result of the rapidly rotating pulsar.  As the pulsar rotates, the magnetic field accelerates particles in the nebula to astonishingly high speeds such that they emit synchrotron radiation. As a fabulously lucky quirk of nature, the radiation is particularly obvious in infrared, making it ideal for JWST. 

Uranus Has Infrared Auroras, Too

Auroras happen when charged particles in the solar wind and near-planet environment get trapped by a planet’s magnetic field. They funnel down to the atmosphere and collide with gas molecules. This happens on Earth and we see auroras over the north and south poles of our planet. They also happen at other planets. Astronomers detect them on the other giant planets, and a smaller version of them occurs on Mars. Venus probably doesn’t experience similar types of auroral displays, since it has no intrinsic magnetic field. However, it may experience something like them during particularly gusty solar wind events. At the outer planets, the gas mix is different in the atmospheres. That means their aurorae show up in ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths.

Uranus has an interesting magnetic field. It does not originate from the exact center of the planet. It’s also offset by 59 degrees from the rotation axis. That’s tipped 90 degrees from the plane of the solar system. This arrangement means that the Uranian magnetosphere is asymmetric and its field strengths vary depending on location. It connects with the solar wind once every Uranian day (which is 17 hours long). The planet does show some auroral activity, particularly around the poles and Hubble Space Telescope detected some in 2011

Three Planets Around this Sunlike Star are Doomed. Doomed!

According to new research we can start writing the eulogy for four exoplanets around a Sun-like star about 57 light years away. But there’s no hurry; we have about one billion years before the star becomes a red giant and starts to destroy them.

The star is Rho Coronae Borealis, a yellow dwarf star like our Sun. It’s in the constellation Corona Borealis, and has almost the same mass, radius, and luminosity as the Sun. The difference is in their ages. The Sun is about five billion years old, but Rho CrB is twice that, which means its red giant phase is imminent, at least in astrophysical terms.

Post main sequence stellar evolution can result in dramatic, and occasionally traumatic, alterations to the planetary system architecture, such as tidal disruption of planets and engulfment by the host star,” Kane writes. Rho Coronae Borealis is both old and bright, making it “… a particularly interesting case of advanced main sequence evolution,” according to Kane. Not only because its similar to the Sun and easily observed, but also because it hosts four exoplanets.

White Dwarfs Could Support Life. So Where are All Their Planets?

Astronomers have found plenty of white dwarf stars surrounded by debris disks. Those disks are the remains of planets destroyed by the star as it evolved. But they’ve found one intact Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a white dwarf.

Are there more white dwarf planets? Can terrestrial, Earth-like planets exist around white dwarfs?

A white dwarf (WD) is the stellar remnant of a once much-larger main sequence star like our Sun. When a star in the same mass range as our Sun leaves the main sequence, it swells up and becomes a red giant. As the red giant ages and runs out of nuclear fuel, it sheds its outer layers as a planetary nebula, a shimmering veil of expanding ionized gas that everybody’s seen in Hubble images. After about 10,000 years, the planetary nebula dissipates, and all that’s left is a white dwarf, alone in the center of all that disappearing glory.

White dwarfs are extremely dense and massive, but only about as large as Earth. They’ve left their life of fusion behind, and emit only residual heat. But still, heat is heat, and white dwarfs can have habitable zones, though they’re very close.

Astronomers are pretty certain that most stars have planets. But those planets are in peril when they orbit a star that leaves the main sequence behind and becomes a red giant. That can wreak havoc on planets, consuming some of them and tearing others apart by tidal disruption. Some white dwarfs are surrounded by debris disks, and they can only be the remains of the star’s planets, ripped to pieces by the star during its red dwarf stage.

But in 2020 researchers announced the discovery of an intact planet among the debris disk in the habitable zone around the white dwarf WD1054-226. If there’s one, there are almost certainly others out there somewhere. Why haven’t we found them? And does the fact that the first one we’ve found is a Jupiter-mass planet mean the WD exoplanet population is dominated by them?

Old Data from Kepler Turns Up A System with Seven Planets

NASA’s Kepler mission ended in 2018 after more than nine years of fruitful planet-hunting. The space telescope discovered thousands of planets, many of which bear its name. But it also generated an enormous amount of data that exoplanet scientists are still analyzing.

Kepler 385 is similar to the Sun but a little larger and hotter. It’s 10% larger and about 5% hotter. It’s one of a very small number of stars with more than six planets or planet candidates orbiting it.

The two innermost planets are both slightly larger than Earth. According to the new catalogue, they’re both probably rocky. They may even have atmospheres, though if they do, they’re very thin. The remaining five planets have radii about twice as large as Earth’s and likely have thick atmospheres.

SFWA's Statement on Artificial Intelligence

 

On October 30, the SFWA Board and the SFWA Legal Affairs Committee sent the following letter to the US Copyright Office in response to their August 2023 Notice of Inquiry regarding copyright law and policy issues in artificial intelligence, which is part of their AI Initiative.

We are aware that there is a wide range of opinion on the subject within our community, but the issues of known damage to fiction marketplaces and threats to original IP copyrights that these new AI tools pose must be made known to bureaucrats and lawmakers recommending and making policy. By doing so, when consensus emerges about the proper use of generative AI in art, we can ensure that such AI is created and utilized in a way that respects the rights of creative workers.

In the near future, we’ll have the opportunity to read other letters submitted to this call for comments, and both SFWA and individuals will be able to review them and respond. We invite all our members, but especially those writers working in gaming and comics, to make known the effects you are seeing of artificial intelligence on your careers, for good or ill.

We will continue to study this issue and speak up where we feel we can do good. The more we learn from our membership, the more effective we will be.

The SFWA Board

 

 

TEXT OF LETTER

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), formerly Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is, in part, to support, defend, and advocate for writers of science fiction, fantasy and related genres. Formed in 1965, SFWA currently has over 2,500 commercially published writers in those genres across various types of media. Its membership includes writers of both stand-alone works and short fiction published in anthologies, magazines, and in other media. SFWA is not a subsidiary of any other entity. SFWA has no subsidiaries or other ownership interest in any other organization that may be affected by the Copyright Office’s policies on AI.

It is in that capacity that we write this letter in response to the Copyright Office’s call for comment on issues raised by artificial intelligence systems. As creative writers who have long had an eye on the future, we are no strangers to the concept of artificial intelligence; indeed, the work of our members is frequently mentioned by the people who over the years have made progress in that field. We have long anticipated these developments and have thought deeply over the years about its promise and pitfalls. With this in mind, it is with much regret that we cannot yet speak in favor of using AI technology in the business of creating art.

The current crop of artificial intelligence systems owes a great debt to the work of creative human beings. Vast amounts of copyrighted creative work, collected and processed without regard to the moral and legal rights of its creators, have been copied into and used by these systems that appear to produce new creative work. These systems would not exist without the work of creative people, and certainly would not be capable of some of their more startling successes. However, the researchers who have developed them have not paid due attention to this debt. Everyone else involved in the creation of these systems has been compensated for their contributions—the manufacturers of the hardware on which it runs, the utility companies that generate their electrical power, the owners of their data centers and offices, and of course the researchers themselves. Even where free and open source software is used, it is used according to the licenses under which the software is distributed as a reflection of the legal rights of the programmers. Creative workers alone are expected to provide the fruits of their labor for free, without even the courtesy of being asked for permission. Our rights are treated as a mere externality.

Perhaps, then, creative workers uniquely benefit from the existence of these artificial intelligence systems? Unfortunately, to date the opposite has been the case: SFWA has thus far seen mainly harm to the business of writing and publishing science fiction and fantasy as a result of the release of AI systems.

For example, short fiction in our genres has long been recognized as a wellspring of the ideas that drive our work as well as inspiring works in film, games, and television. Writers in our genres rely on a thriving and accessible landscape, which includes online and paper magazines. Part of the success of these publications depends on an open submission process, in which writers may submit their stories without a prior business relationship. This has frequently served as a critical opportunity for new and marginalized authors to have their voices heard.

Over the last year, these venues, particularly the ones that pay higher rates for stories, have been inundated with AI-written stories. The editors uniformly report that these submissions are poorly conceived and written, far from being publishable, but the sheer volume materially interferes with the running of these magazines. Once submission systems are flooded with such content, it takes longer to read and reject a submission than it took someone to have an AI produce it in the first place. Every submitted work must be opened and considered to verify that the writers for whom the system was originally designed are not missed or forgotten.

This amounts to a denial-of-service attack against a critical part of our community: at best, authors wait longer for the attention of a more-hurried editor; at worst, we fear that valued markets may be forced to close their doors to unsolicited submissions. As more and more users of AI hear about potential get-rich-quick submission schemes, this problem will only grow worse. Significantly, the harm to our marketplace will fall hardest on new and marginalized authors.

Likewise, novelists have reported to SFWA that their work has been increasingly crowded out in online marketplaces such as Amazon, where there is a well-known issue of large numbers of AI-generated book-length works for sale. In this case the market itself becomes clogged with AI-written books that are posted in the hopes of playing Amazon’s algorithms to lure readers into careless or adventurous spending, leaving those readers less able to find real writers’ work and less willing to take a future chance. Again it is new and marginalized authors without name recognition who will suffer most from the significant rise in noise in the marketplace, but even established authors are seeing AI-generated counterfeit works appear under their names.

In addition, we have received reports of AI systems trained on copyrighted material being induced to produce material that would be a violation of the original creators’ rights to license derivative works. The background and setting of science fiction and fantasy books are uniquely copyrightable and suited to derivative works that may not even copy the characters, but only the world in which the story takes place. It is common for science fiction and fantasy authors to license these worlds to other authors or publishers as derivative works. AIs have been documented being used without permission to produce putative prequels or sequels to copyrighted works using these derivative elements, for example, or to provide quotes from books.

AI does not uniquely enable such violations, of course; the potential harm is that what can be done on purpose can be done by accident. It seems entirely plausible for someone to generate text from an AI for use in their own creative work that violates the rights of another author. They would then publish the resulting work or seek copyright registration without ever understanding that their work infringes on the rights of others. Should this become common, the courts would likely become increasingly full of litigation to protect original intellectual property, at considerable cost and chilling effect.

Clearly, we are only experiencing the beginning of a potentially devastating process for both creators and consumers alike.

Even if at some point in the future as AI becomes more sophisticated, these ersatz books and stories become acceptable to human readers, that will be wholly because of the copyrighted material that these systems have copied and ingested. If they have any value at all, it will be due to the work of creators that has been taken without permission or compensation, and turned to a use that harms the ability of those creators to ply their trade. This state of affairs cannot stand.

The Copyright Office is rightly concerned with the details of the registration process and how AI generated writing should be treated by the law. We agree wholeheartedly that AI-generated works should be uncopyrightable and the Office should refuse to register such works. To promote the progress of science and the useful arts, that line must be held.

We are forced to conclude, however, in the light of the harms listed above, that existing policy is not sufficient. Lack of copyrightability has not prevented marketplaces from being flooded with counterfeit fiction. Treating AI-generated text as legally on par with public domain work ignores the possibility that it in fact inadvertently contains infringing elements placed there by a machine seeking only to respond to a prompt and not concerned with rights.

It must also be considered that AI systems may be trained in other countries with different laws regarding the ingestion of creators’ work. Care must be taken to craft regulations and laws that protect rightsholders in the US, no matter where the AI itself is trained. Training outside the US must not become a loophole allowing the violation of rights in the US.

Remedies will not be easy. However, we offer four suggestions that we consider necessary to protecting creators and preserving their future ability to create.

We recommend a disclosure requirement, to protect readers and potential business partners by explicitly identifying AI-created contributions representing at least a de minimis creative expression. Supporters of human authorship want to know what it is they’re buying, and markets have a right to not be fooled into publishing work which the putative authors have limited or no legal right to license.

The copyright registration of textual works that include a mix of AI-generated and human-authored expression should indicate how much of each there is. There is no easy way to distinguish whether a work is 95% human generated and 5% created by AI, or vice versa. The inclusion of purpose-created AI work thus differs from the otherwise-analogous inclusion of public domain work, which can in principle be researched and identified. We therefore ask that the CO include in registration a disclosure statement from the registrant estimating how much of the work is created by AI.

We recommend requiring proof of license or legal right to all training data before any AI-generated work based on that data can be incorporated into a copyright registration. Just as it is considered necessary for commercial software to track the licenses of all libraries used in its creation and verify the right to put those libraries to such use, it should be necessary as well for the training data of an artificial intelligence to be tracked such that it can be proved that all incorporated work is used under license by consent of the author. Work incorporating AI without that clear provenance should be treated as presumptively infringing on the copyright of unknown authors.

In the event that a collective license for AI textual works may be established, a number of factors need to be taken into account before accepting such a license, many of which are often overlooked. We believe that such a system should be voluntary, opt-in, and should cover any professional authors whose work has been ingested by the AI system. Collective licenses that do not receive explicit permissions from the authors of covered work should be treated as no license at all for these purposes, and AI-generated work based on them should be treated as infringing on the copyright of authors who did not voluntarily opt in.

As writers of science fiction and fantasy, we are confident that the boundless ingenuity of the researchers who brought these AI systems to the world will find ways to do their work that fully respect our rights.

SFWA looks forward to the opportunity to provide input on whatever additional subjects may arise during the course of this study.

November 03, 2023

Reprinted with permission.

Q & A On NaNoWri Mo (borrowed from Jim C. Hines)

Horace Scudder, 1903

In which I interview myself on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

What are you doing National Novel Writing Month* this year, Deborah?
Cheering on my friends. I'll be finishing up revisions on the next Darkover novel, Arilinn.  Revising is a very different process from drafting. I find that drafting goes better when I do it quickly, so I don't get caught in second-guessing myself or editing as I write. Both are recipes for disaster and paralysis. Revising, on the other hand, does not reliably produce any measurable result in terms of pages or words. I dive into it and call it quits every day when my brain won't function any longer.

How does NaNoWriMo compare to real writing?
Writing is writing! Every writer does it a little differently, and I think most of us change from project to project and also over the course of our careers. Challenges, whether novel-length or short-length, can be fun or oppressive, pointless, or a marvelous way to jump-start a new story.

Doesn’t it bother you when hundreds of thousands of people every year turn your career, the dream job you’ve worked at for 16 years, into some kind of game?
You say "game" as if it's a bad thing. If some aspect of writing isn't fun -- and there are wonderful professional writers who hate to write but love to have written -- then why do it? The community-building that happens during NaNoWriMo is one of its more attractive aspects. Writing is a solitary activity, so it's wonderful to have those "hundreds of thousands" of compadres cheering you on.

Sorry. Do you think it’s possible to write a good novel in 30 days?
Yes and no. Some writers can produce a solid first draft in a month, so that's the yes part. On the other hand, I'm skeptical of any first draft, no matter how long it takes, being "a good novel." I suppose some writers do so much planning and so much reflection on each sentence that their first drafts-on-paper are really third-drafts-in-the-mind. In the end, though, the goal is not to produce a good novel but to write quickly and and consistently and to push through to the end.

Isn’t the emphasis on quantity over quality a bad thing, teaching participants to write crap?
Most writers don't need to be taught how to write crap. We do that very nicely all on our own, thank you. However, writing challenges can teach us to get the story down on paper (or phosphors), which is a necessary first step to a polished final draft. The rewards of actually finishing a novel draft, no matter how much revision it will need, should not be underestimated. Even if that novel is indeed crap, it is finished -- the writer now knows that he or she is capable of completing it. That in itself is worth celebrating.

Another thought on crap. If you aren't writing it and you never have, you aren't doing your job. You aren't taking chances or pushing edges or just splatting out what's in the back of your semi-conscious mind. You are allowing your inner critic to silence your creative spirit.

Eric Rosenfield says NaNoWriMo’s whole attitude is “repugnant, and pollutes the world with volumes upon volumes of one-off novels by people who don’t really care about novel writing.“
I seriously doubt that what is wrong with this world is the surfeit of aspiring novelists. And I can't imagine why anyone would put herself through NaNoWriMo if she didn't 'care about novel writing.' Good grief, if you want to be irate about Bad Things In The World, there are plenty of issues out there, things that actually impact people's health, liberty, and lives. Too many one-off novels is not one of them.

Well, what about Keith DeCandido’s post, wherein he says NaNoWriMo has nothing to do with storytelling; it teaches professionalism and deadlines, and the importance of butt in chair?
Can storytelling be taught? I'm not sure. Yep to the other parts.

Fine, what do you think NaNoWriMo is about?
Why is it about anything than a community of people hell-bent on crash'n'burning their way through a short novel in a month? That makes more sense than it being a nefarious conspiracy.

Any last words of advice, Ms. Very Important Author?
I'd love there to be a parallel track for those of us who have other deadlines, such as revisions or finishing in-progress novels. Certainly FiMyDaNo (Finish My Damned Novel) fits the bill, and I encourage anyone in mid-draft to jump in. Revisions, at least mine, mean taking notes, cogitating, making flow charts of structure, correcting maps, ripping out chunks and shoving them around, not to mention generating piles of new prose. These all count. The thing with revisions is that sometimes a lot of thinking and a small amount of actual wordage change -- if it's the right change -- counts for a solid day's work. It's exhausting, too. So maybe the goal is, "I will think about my revisions every day this month." 


Okay, Ms. Interviewer, if you're not doing NaNoWriMo, what are your goals for this month?

*November 1 - November 30

National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo is a month-long creative writing challenge that takes place every November. During the month participants from all over the world are challenged to write a 50,000 word first draft of a novel.