Destroyer of Worlds

Fair warning: this is a commercial announcement. (But likely my last for a while. Gotta refill the pipeline.) 

Destroyer of Worlds, released today, is a far-future space epic. It's also my latest/third collaboration with Larry Niven -- all part of our Fleet of Worlds series.


Destroyer, like our earlier books, deals with Puppeteer manipulations -- these aliens are aptly named for more than their appearance. And the afraid-of-everything Puppeteers have more than ever to fear, because on the horizon looms another, particularly scary, alien species: the Pak.

(That brings us to our second cover snap [below the fold].

Trope-ing the light fantastic (Earths)

That's Earths, plural. Obviously Earth itself exists and can hardly be a trope.

But what about the many Earthlike planets in SF?  (How often does the starship Enterprise encounter a solar system without an "M class" planet or moon?) Are Earthlike worlds realistic or a trope?

Our native solar system has but one Earth, of course. Real-life searches for extrasolar planets best spot large, massive, and close-to-their-primary objects. The observational methods are not yet sensitive enough to spot Earthlike planets (see current list of extrasolar planets here).  IIRC, the smallest extrasolar planet yet found is about five Earth masses. There may be -- and presumably are -- other Earthlike planets, but searches to date say little yet about the prevalence of such planets.

Future shlock

Today is Election Day in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Yup, we're one of the two states -- not, you will note, that we call ourselves a state -- with regularly scheduled statewide elections this year. (New Jersey is the second.) In theory that's so state elections go unaffected by national political tides. The Law of Unintended Consequences remaining in force, it really means the national political parties focus on these two states, making the electoral process here (a) a referendum on the national balance of political power and (b) a dry run for methods to be tried in the following year's  Congressional elections. And so, national money floods into -- and distorts -- Virginia state races.

The national/state overlap is always bad in Virginia, because we're just across the Potomac from DC. There's not even travel inconvenience to discourage national politicians from meddling. The problem is made worse this cycle by our outgoing governor happening also to be the party chairman for a national party.

Are we alone? How about now?

How does life emerge from lifelessness?  How does intelligence emerge from totally instinctive life? Science's answer to both questions has been, "don't (yet) know."


There's a business-school axiom, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." The scientific version is, in essence, "If you can't reproduce it, you don't understand it." Or, at least, you can't know that you understand it.

And so, synthetic biologists want to move from describing what nature has offered to building organisms from scratch. When we can build cells totally from inanimate material (and assemble DNA, not splice the good parts from living cells), then we'll know that we really understand the molecular mechanisms of life.

At least life as the DNA-centric readers of this blog know it. Because maybe we have other readers. 

Capclave

I spent much of last weekend at Capclave 2009. Capclave is the annual DC area SF con. I don't always make it, but this was my fifth time there.

 

Like the dodo logo?  That's the Capclave symbol, befitting their slogan, "Where reading is not extinct!"

Capclave is a small, intimate con -- about 200 attendees in a typical year. It draws lots of local writers, including MAFIA.