I’ve finally created a website on my own domain. I’ve uploaded all my posts from here to the new site and future blogposts will appear only there, so if you’ve been following this blog, please follow my new website. It also has a language switcher, so my English-speaking readers will no longer be bothered with long posts about solely Czech works (and conversely).
See you all a couple of nodes later!
Martin Šust prepared an interview with me for XB-1. I talk about my upcoming SF trilogy Blíženci (Gemini), the transhumanist anthology Terra nullius and other projects. It’s in Czech, though, and I really don’t recommend Google Translate (yeah, it does seem that human translators will remain unchallenged a bit longer). He surprised me by putting that particular picture there; the award was borrowed for a few seconds at last year’s Worldcon, but hey, maybe I’ll hold my own one day. One can always hope, especially if lots of work are behind that hope.
And if you’re going to PragoFFest next week, you can come to my talks about Kuiper Belt (Friday 1 p.m.) and “paranoid optimists” (on cognitive biases; Saturday 6 p.m.), both in the science&tech section.
The February issue of XB-1 is coming soon a it features the second part of Equoid (Charles Stross), Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma (Alex Shvartsman) and What Doctor Gottlieb Saw (Ian Tregilis) in the foreign stories section. And with so much horror, humor ranging from the darkest tones to the lighter ones and a lot of lovecraftian world, it would be impossible not to build on it in the nonfiction section. Therefore my article “The Darkest Humor from Deep Spacetime” on Lovecraftian pastiches, with emphasis on the ones containing an element rarely if ever found in Lovecraft: humor.
There are hundreds or thousands of pastiches, many of them more or less humorous, some even parodies. But there are two great fiction series I’ve encountered that managed to convey deep horror and despair and season it with moments of wonderful, mostly very dark humor without making the horror seem any less serious, each series in its own brilliant way. One of them are Laundry Files by Stross. Equoid is a part of that series, among more shorter works, but be sure to try the novels as well. The other one is the Johannes Cabal series by Jonathan L. Howard. It’s composed of short stories as well as novels too and again I can recommend reading everything of it.
In light of unseen terrors and gloom, on the very verge of madness, there still can be something to laugh at. And where you’ve got laugher, you’ve got an even tiny spark of hope. Maybe that’s why the combination of true horror and humor works so well.
Are you an aspiring author writing in English and based in Prague, and want to join a workshop to improve your craft? You might consider the Writing Workshop, an initiative founded by a successful SF writer and friend of mine, Jan Kotouč. He’s been running the workshop for two years by now and starting with this year, he’s expanding and offering more courses and classes by more lecturers. Jan is teaching the Intro to Creative Writing, Public Speaking and Press Releases. Our marketing expert Honza Felt teaches Internet Marketing for Writers. These are all one-day courses. The six-lesson Creative Writing workshop is taught by Jan and me. We’ll also start offering courses on book promotion and publishing in speculative fiction magazines (by yours truly).
Anyone can join the upcoming courses – the only requirement is being able to communicate in English. We’ve already had students from Russia, Latvia, Finland, Fiji, Croatia and other countries and we are always looking forward to meeting students from the whole world!
The cover for my upcoming anthology Terra nullius is complete… and it just takes my breath away.
In addition to yesterday’s big news, I have some other ones today. Czech translations of my stories The Brass City and Catching A Ride, both of which have been published in English, appear in the upcoming issue of XB-1, along with my translation of Jason Sanford’s brand new column.
It’s also a special 50th issue since the transition of Ikarie into XB-1 (therefore the retro cover) and the readers can look forward especially to the foreign fiction section, which contains all the Hugo-winning short works from last year: Equoid (divided into two issues), The Lady Astronaut of Mars, and The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere.
Another big anniversary is coming up in April – there’s going to be the 250th issue of the whole magazine’s history (Ikarie and XB-1 together)!
Happy new year everyone! I have some good news to share, especially with Czech lovers of modern space opera, hard SF and bio/cyberpunk. I’ve been holding something out in December but now I can finally announce the news. First of all – I’ve edited an anthology of transhumanist-themed stories by Czech authors, Terra nullius, and it should be published in May if all goes according to plan. I’m especially excited about this as the authors I’d picked all sent me really inspiring stories full of brave ideas. Cover coming soon – I had seen the prefinal version and it’s just awe-inspiring!
The other news is that my science fiction trilogy Blíženci (would translate as Gemini) is going to be published this year as well. The covers are already prepared and I was just breathless when I saw them. So brace yourselves for high acceleration into the world of new space opera…
And finally, a short story of mine is appearing in Robert Pilch’s fabulous-looking space opera anthology Capricorn 70.
There are a lot of real delights in the publisher Brokilon’s plan for 2015 – new books by Jan Kotouč, Vladimír Šlechta, Jan Hlávka & Jana Vybíralová and many others, so check it out (if in Czech you can check… sorry, I couldn’t resist; but there’s a Czech version of this website coming sometime soon, so the primarily Czech fiction concerned posts are going to be appearing there).
Happy new year again and be it filled with lots of speculative fiction of your choice!
So. It’s this time of year again. Cultists sing about elder gods stirring in their sleep, something horrible is creeping down the chimney to eat your souls, skeletons dress in red robes and deliver presents (whether the original giver is available or not), things fall apart, giant robots roam the streets after sunset and aliens plot their invasions to Earth. You know, the usual stuff. And if we survive the season with our lives and minds intact, we can look forward to the new year.
And it’s looking like a pretty exciting year ahead of us. We’ll see whether Philae wakes up near 67P’s perihelion, what results Dawn brings about Ceres and how New Horizons‘ flyby of Pluto turns out.
Happy Christmas or whichever other festivity you’re celebrating. As for my Christmas wish for everyone: let’s keep working on gradually making this reality…
You couldn’t have missed the headlines: Due to Rosetta’s measurements of the ratio of hydrogen and deuterium in 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’s water vapor, the hypothesis that Earth’s water had been brought here by comet impacts sometime around the Late Heavy Bombardment suffered a heavy hit, so to say. In short: Most comets have a much higher ratio of D/H (deuterium/hydrogen) than Earth. The only known exception is comet 103P/Hartley 2. Of course, we don’t know how representative the current sample may be of comets hitting Earth nearly four billion years ago, but it’s now supposed that Earth’s water had been more likely brought here by asteroid impacts (as most investigated asteroids have a D/H ratio similar to Earth), or possibly that most of our water has been here since Earth’s formation (only not always on the surface). According to seismic measurements, about twice as much water as is in our oceans, lakes, glaciers and atmosphere may be contained in high-pressure mantle rock. So far, it’s not very clear if this water gets to the surface due to tectonics or is stored there for billions of years. However, slow degassing of the mantle rock may have formed Earth’s oceans. We may not need to explain the abundance of water on Earth by impacts of other bodies after all. It’s still in the early stages of research, we shall see later how each of the hypotheses fares in the light of new results.
But summing this up is not why I’m writing this post – you can read so much more in any popular science article on the web. I have an idea, which may or may not be completely off – I’m not a geologist or a chemist, so I’d be glad if a more qualified person told me whether it’s really stupid, clever or somewhere in between. Suppose for a moment that comets had indeed brought most of our water on Earth. How do we get from an average comet’s D/H ratio to Earth’s?
That’s where mantle rock comes back into the game. Could it have been more depleted in water in earlier stages of Earth’s existence, only gradually enriched in it until reaching some equilibrium?
So. In this scenario, we have water with more deuterium in it than now and mantle rock gradually absorbing water from the surface reservoirs.
What intrigues me is this: Is there any reason why heavy water would be absorbed in the mantle disproportionately to water containing hydrogen atoms?
We don’t need to devise any kind of preferential intake into chemical reactions due to the little higher molecular height of water containing deuterium instead of hydrogen (I don’t even know of any inorganic chemistry process that would distinguish between izotopes well enough – some enzymes are capable of that, but let’s leave biochemistry aside here). When I discussed this little idea of mine yesterday, Professor Markoš offered an easy solution when he mentioned studies showing that normal water evaporates more easily than heavy water (suggested also by the very high D/H ratio on Venus). If we evaporate a significant portion of the oceans of “comet water” and the water still in its liquid form is being incorporated into the bedrock, we may get a disproportional amount of heavy water stored in the mantle compared to what’s left on the surface. The Earth cools, the water whose molecules haven’t dissolved and atoms reached the escape velocity, gradually rains back. The D/H ratio of surface water is now lower than at the beginning.
That’s it in a nutshell. Now, this scenario is far too simplified. We’d need to put some constraints on the intake of water into the mantle, rate of evaporating under the presumed temperature and atmosphere composition in the given time range, create a model, etc., and finally try to falsify the hypothesis by measuring D/H ratio in our mantle water. Which is, you know, kind of difficult to do…
What I’m interested in is: Is it at least remotely possible, or am I far off on this track? Geologists, chemists, astronomers – fire at will!
For those interested in D/H ratios in different parts of our solar system, this graph from Altwegg et al. 2014 shows it quite nicely:
My newest novel, “Bez naděje”, is having a book launch ceremony at Fenixcon this Saturday afternoon. More info and a snippet from the novel (in Czech) is to be found here.
In another news, I’m invited as a speaker at University Pardubice’s seminar (on December 17) about the relationship of philosophy and science. I’ll be speaking about this topic from a biologist’s perspective, and if I have enough time, I’ll dive into the topics of formulation of hypotheses, development of science and (dis)advantages of reductionism a bit.
Julie Novakova 