Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “Space Doggity.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “The Future Soon.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[The Future Soon]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM, for the next two weeks, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

There’s more, but we’ll let John and Jonathan themselves further introduce the concept, the details, and the sparkly prize at the bottom of this particular cereal box.

[Read on]

I’m not gonna lie to you: I like Starship Troopers, the movie, and pretty much always have. I know many of you don’t. For those of you, I’m going to share my five secrets to enjoying Starship Troopers, the film, here in 2012.

[Five secrets...]

I have a story I like to tell about my first encounter with Patrick Rothfuss and The Name of the Wind. Pat knows which story this is, and he’s probably even now putting his hand to his forehead and thinking, “Oh God, not this story again,” but for the rest of you it might be new, so here goes.

In 2007 I was on tour for my novel The Last Colony, and at the Minneapolis stop, the folks at Uncle Hugos, where I was doing my signing, told me a new author had left behind a signed book for me. Then they proceeded to use a crane to drag out this monster of a book called The Name of the Wind. It was huge, we’re talking elk-stunning huge, and since I had everything for a three-week tour in a single carry on (if you give airlines dozens of chances to lose your luggage, they will), I had no place to pack the thing. I had to carry the thing around.

[Much ado about stew]

Following up on Jo Walton’s post on why Heinlein discussions frequently become acrimonious, I think there’s another reason why Heinlein today presents a challenge to current readers and critics, which is that his work is literature in transition—it’s in a middle ground between being contemporary work and being part of the background of the genre. Or, to put it another way, the problem with Heinlein right now is that he’s not quite Neal Stephenson, and he's not quite Jules Verne—he’s in a middle place, and that makes him and his work contentious.

Or, to put it in yet another way: Heinlein passed away 22 years ago, long enough ago that it’s reasonable to say that a majority of his readers under 35 never read him while he was still alive. To them, he’s always been history, and he’s always been, quite literally, less than vital to their understanding of the genre. The majority of his readers over 40, on the other hand, read him and were aware of him while he was still a lion of the literature—not just a Grand Master of the genre but the Grand Master, the first Grand Master, who while contentious and controversial as he may have been, was still someone to whom attention was to be paid.

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Every student of Heinlein knows that among the number of things he did during his career, one of the more significant events was selling four science fiction short stories to The Saturday Evening Post in the late 40s, thus becoming the first writer of the genre to graduate from “the pulps,” as the science fiction magazines of the time were known, to writing fiction for “the slicks,” the name for the higher-end, general interest magazines. And among those magazines the Post was at the top of the heap, having the highest circulation of any magazine in America at the time.

Why had Heinlein tried placing the story in a magazine that hadn’t published science fiction before? One obvious reason was for the money: The Saturday Evening post paid a multiple of what Heinlein could have earned from John Campbell and Astounding, and that of course was reason enough in itself, especially for a man who, as I noted in my earlier entry about Heinlein, wasn’t always flush with cash. Another reason was because Street & Smith, the publisher of Astounding, where Heinlein placed much of his fiction, had declared it was buying “all rights” to work it published, and Heinlein, who had an eye toward reprints and adaptations, refused to sell his work under such terms.

But Learning Curve points out another reason, which is of interest to me: Heinlein felt that there was a need to propagandize and popularize the idea of space travel and exploration, for a number of reasons, not a few related to the already-chilling cold war between the US and the Soviets. Writing for the pulps in that regard would be preaching to the converted; placing science fiction in the Post, on the other hand, would be putting it into the laps of people who had never read science fiction before, or who avoided it as something for the eggheads and misfits.

[Read more]

Hello, all:

I’m going to start off my contribution to this little online discussion of Heinlein by noting the gift this first volume of the Heinlein biography gave me, which is the ability to think of Robert Heinlein in terms of being a struggling writer, rather than Robert Heinlein, Grandmaster of science fiction.

This is no small feat. To give a little perspective on the matter, Robert Heinlein was given the Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America (now the Damon Knight Grand Master Award, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), back in 1975, when Heinlein was sixty-eight years old and I was six, and still years from my first encounter with his work—which was Farmer in the Sky, which I read in fourth grade.

[Read more]

Here’s one in the “better late than never” category: Church of England to apologize to Charles Darwin:

The Church of England will concede in a statement that it was over-defensive and over-emotional in dismissing Darwin’s ideas. It will call “anti-evolutionary fervour” an “indictment” on the Church...

“The statement will read: Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practise the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends.”

Darwin, as he has been dead 126 years, had no comment on the apology at this time. However, a descendent of Darwin thinks it’s kind of silly:

Andrew Darwin, a great-great grandson of the eminent scientist, said he was ‘bemused’ by the apology, which seemed ‘pointless’.

“Why bother?” he said. “When an apology is made after 200 years, it’s not so much to right a wrong, but to make the person or organisation making the apology feel better.”

Oh, I don’t know about that. Sure, wording the apology to Charles Darwin himself is a little goofy; Darwin’s well beyond caring about such things. But it’s not insignificant that a religious institution which had previously held scientific ideas in contempt steps forward and says “our bad.” Likewise, it’s always nice when a major religion can come around to acknowledging that science and the scienctific discovery of the natural world is not an inherent and inimical threat to everything that religion stands for. Whether this changes anything on this side of the Atlantic (other than the Archbishop of Canterbury’s season pass to the Creation Museum being unilaterally voided) is another thing entirely, of course. But one takes one’s victories where one may.

To celebrate this meeting of minds, I suggest a trip to Darwin Online, for the complete published and private writings of the no-longer-quite-so-heretical Charles Darwin. Enjoy.  And learn! Both Darwin and the Church of England would want it that way.

The good people of the city of San Antonio, Texas produce 140,000 tons of sewage—or “biosolids,” as the sewage industry so delicately puts it—on an annual basis. What to do with all that...stuff? San Antonio has a good idea: Make fuel out of it. San Antonio has contracted with Massachusetts energy company Ameresco to use all those biosolids to create natural gas. San Antonio and Ameresco will use some of it to power its sewage systems, and the surplus will be sold for a profit.

How much natural gas can come out of San Antonio's sewers?

“Treating these biosolids generates an average of 1.5 million cubic feet of gas a day,” San Antonio Water System chief operating officer Steve Clouse said. “That's enough gas to fill seven commercial blimps or 1,250 tanker trucks each day.”

“We have for many years wanted to find a beneficial use for these waste gases,” Clouse said. “Most of that gas is currently burned off using flares.”

San Antonio apparently already recycles the water from its sewage from irrigation and the biosolids as fertilizers for local farms, so this is just another step in reclaiming everything reclaimable from what San Antonians flush down their pipes on a daily basis. And while it’s requiring every single ounce of my will not to make various fart and crap jokes, I think this is a fine idea. Energy is energy, wherever it comes from, and burning off all that natural gas rather than putting it to profitable use (in more one sense of the term) is silly and wasteful. It would be nice if other municipalities picked up on this idea as well. There’s a lot of “biosolids” and sewage out there. Might as well get something useful out of it. Wasting energy is a crappy thing to do.

Sorry, I couldn't help it. Please don't hit me.

(Image nicked from here and used under Creative Commons license.)

Recently I’ve been asked two questions:

1. Where have you been, since you haven’t been posting on Tor.Com the last week or so?

2. Will the activation of CERN's Large Hadron Collider next Wednesday doom us all to a horrible and very science fictional death by black hole?

The answers, in order:

1. Fighting crime.

2. No.

Sadly, my NDA with certain authorities prevents me from going into any further detail about the crime fighting thing, but I can go into more detail about the Large Hadron Collider.

[More after the cut...]

I’ll let you into a little secret of mine, which is this: I’m the sort of dude that gets wrung out about emotional scenes in books and movies and TV. I date this tendency back to a specific event, which was the birth of my daughter. Before then, I could read or watch a scene of complete heartbreak and go “eh”; after her birth, I get choked up watching very special episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants. I hate it, man. Among the reasons I hate it is that when I go out in public to do a reading, there are entire books of mine that I can’t read aloud, because I can’t get through them without sobbing. And, you know, look: When you can't get through something you’ve read a hundred times because you actually wrote it without turning into a blubbering fool, there’s something wrong with you.

That said, I’ve often wondered if one entertainment medium is better at wrenching emotions out of people than others. Apparently so had scientists Mbemba Jabbi, Jojanneke Bastiaansen and Christian Keysers, so they set out to discover whether visual and written mediums had any difference in how they were able to evoke emotional responses (specifically, the emotion of disgust).

[Read on below the fold...]

Scientists find a honkin' huge stash of western lowland gorillas, and wouldn't you know, they were in the last place they looked:

A grueling survey of vast tracts of forest and swamp in the northern Congo Republic has revealed the presence of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas, a rare example of abundance in a world of rapidly vanishing primate populations.

As recently as last year, this subspecies of the world’s largest primate was listed as critically endangered by international wildlife organizations because known populations — estimated at less than 100,000 in the 1980s — had been devastated by hunting and outbreaks of Ebola virus. The three other subspecies are either critically endangered or endangered.

The survey was conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society and local researchers in largely unstudied terrain, including a swampy region nicknamed the “green abyss” by the first biologists to cross it. Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, the president of the society, marveled at the scope of what the survey revealed. “The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”

What does it say that my first reaction to reading this story about finding over a hundred thousand gorillas was "For God's sake, why did you tell people where they are?" Because now I have images of entire battalions of hunters trekking down to this swamp to shoot these poor animals, and, I don't know, turn their bones into aphrodisiacs or some other such quackery, or otherwise say "now that you've found so many of them, I should be able to shoot one in the head. You know, to preserve the balance of nature." The balance of nature here being defined as "the number of these creatures that exist in the world, minus the one I want to shoot in the head."

Why yes, indeed, I am cynical about the fundamental nature of man, thank you very much (not all men, just the ones who really like to kill things purely for fun). And while I'm certain that now we've discovered these gorillas, a high priority now is to keep this population healthy and thriving, there's a not small part of me that believes, against all rationality, that the scientists here should have looked at each other and said, "Wow, this is a hell of a lot of gorillas, living here peacefully in this swamp. Now let's walk right out of here and never speak of this again."

(Photo by Kabir Bakie, taken from here, and licensed through Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5)

Dude: Water ice on Mars confirmed. It's been deeply suspected for a while. But as the NASA folks have noted, this is the first time we've actually touched and tasted it, inasmuch as our un-Turinged robot underlings can be understood to taste and touch anything. Why does this matter? Well, as any science fiction author will tell you, this means we've got a fuel source to get back to Earth once we decide to blow a huge wad of cash and send people to Mars (break apart water to get hydrogen fuel, etc). Also there's the little matter that as far as we know, without that water stuff, you can't have that thing that your people call life. The fact we know there's water on Mars heats up the search for life on Mars by a considerable degree. Not life today, mind you, but back in a wetter, warmer time in Mars' history. Needless to say, finding evidence of that would be a big day. But this is pretty big in itself. You have permission to be impressed with NASA today.

Here's the NASA press release of the event, for those of you that like original sources. And here's the image of Phoenix's "workspace," including the trench in which they found the ice. You can see it in the picture. It's the one that looks like it has ice in it.

What do the sluggardly and slothful wish for the most, aside from a Mountain Dew IV drip and Kari Byron to feed them Cheetos while they play Halo 3? That's right, to be able to ingest a pill to give them all the benefits of exercise without, you know, having to move. That glorious day may just have come closer, as scientists have discovered a chemical that fools the body into thinking it's just had a workout:

 

However, before you get yourself all winded in an attempt to celebrate, please note that this is still in the "test it on helpless rodents" phase of things; until and unless this line of research pans out, you will still have to occasionally hie your carcass off the davenport if you don't want to keel over whilst grabbing for the packaged, orange-powdered corn bits you love so well. And no, Kari Byron isn't coming over to bring them to you. Kari Byron can have anyone she wants. She's not going to hang with people marinating in their own Ritz Bits, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Yes, life is unfair. Or at least will be until this exercise chemical hits your local pharmacy.

The worst thing about being a parent is not that now you're responsible for a little human who one day will expect you to pay $50,000 a year so they can beer-bong Milwaukee's Best and major in Medieval Studies at one of the "Little Ivies"; no, the worst thing is that suddenly you are filled with irrational fears about the well-being of your sprogling, usually involving things that you really don't need to worry about. For example, one of my major fears concerning my daughter is that she will be caught in a riptide and dragged out to sea. Seriously, it keeps me up nights. The fact that I live in Ohio and that the Atlantic Ocean would have to find a way to sneak 600 miles inland without anyone noticing to sweep my precious lumpkin out into the murky depths matters not in the least. Hey, don't look at me like that. I told you it was irrational.

Irrational as it is for me, it's not entirely irrational to fear riptides if you are actually in an ocean; they kill 100 people a year right here in the US, and half of lifeguard rescues are because of them. This is why when I found this article, detailing the science of rip currents and how to keep them from killing the heck out of you, my first inclination was to rush over here and write something about it, all the better to save the rest of you from a briny fate. Not that if you're reading this, you'll be in the ocean at the time (and if you are, dude. Geekery stops at the shoreline). Just consider it useful advice for later.

As for me, I'll be printing it out a couple hundred times and wallpapering the walls of my daughter's room with it. That Atlantic Ocean, she is sneaky. We must remain vigilant. 

(image above from here, offered under GNU free documentation license)