John M. Powell is the sort of visionary who gets locked up as a madman.  But, like the best creative madmen, his ideas resonate with a wild kind of sense that nags constantly at you once you've heard them, until you start asking yourself:  what if he's right?

Powell's idea, and the subject of the new Apogee book Floating to Space:  The Airship to Orbit Program, is simplicity itself.  If zeppelins and balloons can take us to the upper atmosphere--140,000 feet and beyond--why can't they take us further?  Namely, all the way to orbit? 

The first time you hear this idea you laugh--just the way you no doubt laughed the first time you heard of the space elevator.  Yet Powell's logic, when you hear it, is equally simple.  Why did the Mir space station reenter and burn up in Earth's atmosphere?  Why, because its orbit decayed.  But orbits don't 'decay'--not by themselves.  No, the actual reason why Mir and other satellites have crashed into the Earth is wind resistance.  There is a headwind even three hundred miles above the Earth; the space shuttle feels it when it's orbiting.  And if you fired a bullet at a high enough velocity, it could orbit the Earth four feet off the ground, except for that same pesky headwind (and a few obstacles).

Not only is there air in space, there's enough air that a big enough wing would create lift.  Powell describes that wing--a classic 'flying wing' in fact--in detail in Floating to Space.  Combining the technologies of high-altitude ballooning with ion drive engines and hypersonic airfoils, he proposes a mile-long hydrogen-filled wing, so diaphanous it would be torn apart by the slightest breeze at sea level.  But launched from a 'black sky station' at 140,000 feet, this orbital ascender can surf the upper atmosphere, gradually building both altitude and velocity over the space of several days, until it's in orbit.  There, it can play with the tenuous headwind to ascend some more, keep station, or descend as gracefully as it rose.

This isn't just literal pie-in-the-sky hand-waving.  Powell's company, JP Aerospace, has actually built many of the components of his vision, some under US military contract.  He's pursuing a slow but steady experimental program that is intended to pay for itself at every step.  His vision is rational and even economically plausible.  Financially, I'd be more inclined to invest in it than in the elevator, because even if the final ascender doesn't work, technologies like the black sky station could be huge money-makers.

All this is cool.  Unfortunately, as a document Floating to Space needs to be convincing, and it falls short in several key respects.  It's well packaged by Apogee, but was apparently never edited:  the text is rife with typos, grammatical errors and just plain bad writing.  These issues severely weaken the sense of authority that a book proposing something so radical needs to project.  I won't fault Powell for this, but I'm definitely slamming Apogee for doing a piss-poor job here.

 Also, although Powell does a pretty good job of describing the technologies and solutions that would make his vision possible, he glosses over some potential show-stoppers.  For instance, it takes some digging to find out that current supersonic models indicate that his orbital ascender would face impossible levels of drag, rendering the idea dead in the water (or air).  This may be a deficiency of the models rather than reality--but Powell needed to address this issue head-on, and give some idea of how big a risk this places on the whole program.  His failure to come clean on this one issue makes me suspicious of all the rest of his claims, and therefore creates a serious credibility problem.

I love Powell's ideas, but I can't evaluate their feasibility.  I recognize that to some extent he can't either; actual experiments are needed.  But if I had a hundred million lying around to invest in something, this book wouldn't make me want to invest it in JP Aerospace.  --Neither does the website, incidentally, which looks amateurish.  All of which is a shame, because I do think these ideas need to be explored, because at the very least the black sky station--a stable city sitting atop the atmosphere, where the sky is permanently black--is a stunning concept that could become a lucrative tourist and research destination.  It deserves investment, and Powell's other ideas deserve some investigation.

Floating to Space deserves to be bought and read, too.  It deserves, in fact, better than it's likely to get.

This one's from the unbelievably cool department:  reprap has built its first child machine! 

Reprap is the world's first self-reproducing machine.  Mind-boggling as this sounds, the proof is in the picture; and, if you take some time to explore the site, in the project's extensive documentation.

Not that reprap is yet able to sit in a corner by itself and knock off copies of itself without human aid--it still needs people to screw the bits together and as yet not all of its electronics can be made by itself.  Think of the human beings and electronics as being like environmentally-available resources, free-floating enzymes, say, that facilitate the work of the reprap.  It needs them, like we need air; but that doesn't mean it's not reproducing by itself. 

The idea is that the irreproducible parts should be commodities you can find in any electronics supply store; what reprap makes is its unique pieces. 

Reprap is now alive, by some definitions.  It's is a stunning milestone and happened a lot faster than I expected it would.  Thanks to Michael Nielsen for alerting me to this!

I always eagerly await my reviews in Locus, but luckily they've been reviewing my Virga series well in advance of the books' arrival.  Pirate Sun will be published in August, but in the June, 2008 issue of Locus Russell Letson reveals all.  Though there's no easy pull-quotes from his review, it's clear that he really enjoyed the book.

Actually, reading this review made me realize just how byzantine a storyline I've crafted:

Chaison wants to get back to Slipstream, but first he has to hide out in Falcon Formation, which turns out to be threatened with invasion by the neighboring nation of Gretels and to be harboring a resistance movement against its own authoritarian government.  Elsewhere, the defeated nation of Aerie... has developed another underground... if that weren't complicated enough, Chaison is being hunted by agents of his own government... an action that has caused turmoil in Slipstream and a crisis in the rule of the Pilot.  Oh, and...

Well, it goes on.  All I can say is, it seemed pretty simple to me as I was writing it.

As Letson points out (with some glee), Pirate Sun wraps up the main plotlines introduced in Sun of Suns, but doesn't answer all questions.  As he puts it, "even three volumes seems much too short a ride for the possibilities offered by Virga"--and I agree.  I'm currently putting the finishing touches on The Sunless Countries and (bonus!) I'm writing some Virga short stories and novellas, the first of which should be finished in about a week.

Meanwhile, I'm buoyed up by this first review.  It's an auspicious start.

My favourite planet-hunting site is Centauri Dreams.  From there comes a discussion of the smallest conventional planet yet discovered outside our solar system--a super-Earth or mini-Neptune only three times Earth's mass.  It's not in a conventional location, however:  this planet circles a brown dwarf, a "failed" star that doesn't shine.

What's even more amazing (to me) is that there's speculation that this planet could be habitable.  There's a couple of reasons for this:  its size could mean that it retains enough radioactives in its core to heat it; its atmosphere might retain enough hydrogen (which is a greenhouse gas) to keep the surface temperature above the freezing point of water.  Also, although it's three Earth masses, that doesn't necessarily translate to three gravities of weight; it depends on its radius (you'd weigh almost the same on Saturn as you do on Earth, despite the fact that Saturn masses 95 times more than the Earth).

I never considered super-earths when I was inventing livable planets for my novel Permanence.  In this case, two interesting possibilities would be an oceanic planet with a hydrogen atmosphere; or a mini-Neptune with a radius large enough that its local gravity is Earth-normal, and an atmosphere that, like Venus, hosts a layer where the air pressure and temperature are also Earth-normal.  Just for interest, you could also imagine that the brown dwarf's radiation field dissociates water molecules at the top of this atmosphere; the hydrogen escapes and the oxygen falls back (this happens on Europa, which is now thought to have a breathable [by fish] ocean).  Then, you could have an air-world with Earth-levels of gravity, air pressure, temperature, and oxygen content in the air.  The only downsides:  no ground to walk on and no sunlight--ever.  But that lets us imagine all sorts of air-pirate scenarios in gloomy, lightning-lit skies.

Isn't that just too cool?  And brown dwarfs are everywhere.  As I said in Permanence, with this discovery the number of potentially habitable planetary systems in the galaxy has multiplied, by as much as a factor of ten.  There could easily be one within a light year of Earth.

Scientists like to low-ball their estimates.  The now-famous IPCC scenarios for the effects of climate change are already known to be woefully, unrealistically conservative (Freeman Dyson's recent opinions notwithstanding). Arctic changes expected 20 years from now are happening now, and in North America the beginning of spring has already been pushed back by two weeks, which is enough to play havoc with the fertility cycle of many migratory birds (among other consequences).  The worst-case scenarios used in public debate ignore some extremely worrisome factors, such as the possible release of oceanic methane from clathrates. If we're going to deal with this problem, we have to do it now, as in, within the term of your next government.

Science fiction writers, on the other hand, are generally optimistic--if not about the fate of humanity, then at least about the progress of technology.  The ultimate in technological optimism is the idea of the technological singularity, which posits that technological advance is exponential and, driven by progress in artificial intelligence, will soon hit the vertical slope of the curve.

Maybe.  In fact, let's assume that this mythology is true and, within about 25 years, computers will exceed human intelligence and rapidly bootstrap themselves to godlike status.  At that point, they will aid us (or run roughshod over us) to transform the Earth into a paradise. 

Here's the problem:  25 years is too late.  The newest business-as-usual climate scenarios look increasingly dire.  If we haven't solved our problems within the next decade, even these theoretical godlike AIs aren't going to be able to help us.  Thermodynamics is thermodynamics, and no amount of godlike thinking can reverse the irreversible. 

If there's to be a miraculous transformation of human civilization, it has to be accomplished by us, right now, and without the aid of any miracle technologies.  (That said, technology is a large part of the answer--and game-changing breakthroughs are possible--but until proven otherwise it's existing systems such as wind power that we have to assume we'll be using.)  The technological singularity may be real, but who cares?  By the time it happens, we'll have won or lost our grand battle with fate.

Therefore, here's a rare piece of advice for my fellow science fiction writers:  forget the singularity.  Even if it's real, it's irrelevant.  The decisive moment in history is now, before it occurs.  Seize that, write about that. 

All else is distraction.

Just thought I should summarize what I'm up to lately, which is quite a lot:

• I'm finishing The Sunless Countries for Tor.  I just burned a city and the protagonist has sold out to the enemy.  Ah, it warms my heart!
• I'm working on a talking-book novella for a secret project.  It should be announced at Worldcon.  And no, I can't say more.
• I have four other short story/novella commissions I'm trying to meet.  This will be quite a year for short fiction for me.  I rather dried up there for several years, during the period when I was writing Permanence and Lady of Mazes.  But I'm back, and having loads of fun.
• I'm thinking about how to top Virga.  Ha!  No mean feat--but just wait until you see where The Sunless Countries takes us.  After I'm done with you, you'll be willing to believe in Santa Claus again.

As usual, the more productive I'm being on the fiction side, the less frequent my updates on the website.  It's a handy barometer for how hard I'm working, as a matter of fact.  So if you don't hear from me for a while... think 'good stuff coming.'