An Impossibility in an Impossible Universe

The title of today’s post refers to a quote by Ray Bradbury, who once said, “We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.” He was referring to how amazing we humans and the universe are and how it’s almost overwhelming to understand it all. Yet we do strive to understand it all through science, faith, and our imagination. Today is a big day for our family. We have gathered in Flagstaff, Arizona to celebrate my youngest daughter’s graduation with a geology degree from Northern Arizona University.

Artist’s Rendering of the surface of Proxima Centauri b. Image Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Verity’s journey toward a geology degree has inspired me and filled me with a sense of wonder. On the way to obtaining a geology degree, Verity worked with Dr. Steve Howell at NASA’s Ames Spaceflight center to investigate planets in multiple-star systems, like the one in the artist’s rendering above. We often imagine a planet in a binary system as resembling Tatooine in Star Wars: a planet in a long orbit around a pair of stars. However we find more cases like the Alpha Centauri system, which contains three stars. Proxima Centauri orbits Alpha Centauri A and B. Yet, Proxima Centauri has its own planets, like Proxima Centaur b, pictured above. In the illustration, Proxima Centauri looms large as the sun in the sky while Alpha Centauri A and B appear as bright stars to the upper right of Proxima.

Since working as a NASA intern, Verity’s interests have moved on to paleontology, which is no less inspiring to me. Paleontology strives to understand life on Earth and how it has changed and will continue to change. Understanding how life arose on Earth will also help us understand the conditions needed for life arising on other planets. Also, understanding how different lifeforms have appeared and why they die off may help humans as they move into the future.

A week ago, I gave a presentation to the Tucson Hard-Science SF Writers, Readers, and Artists Group and discussed the ways science inspires my writing and how it’s helped with some of the life challenges I’m currently undergoing. I also gave shout-outs to both of my daughters in my presentation. I also mention a little about how Ray Bradbury himself inspired me early in my career. Of course, I spent a fair amount of the presentation talking specifically about how my work in astronomy inspires my space-based science fiction, but I also addressed how it inspires my vampire fiction. In fact, I argue in the presentation that its almost more firmly science-rooted than my space operas! Here’s a link to the video. The presentation takes about an hour and a half and I give an overview of both the NEID and DESI projects I work on at Kitt Peak.

You can find most of the books I discuss at my website – http://www.davidleesummers.com – or my online bookstore at https://www.hadrosaur.com. It’s also worth mentioning that if you would like a signed copy of any of my books, just order from hadrosaur.com and then go to the Contact Page there and let me know you’d like it signed. I’ll even personalize the book for you or to someone else if you’re buying it as a gift. Just let me know who you’d like it signed to. With that, it’s time to celebrate my daughter’s success in completing a geology degree and to continue dreaming about impossibilities in our wonderful, impossible universe.

Bride of the Monster

I just learned 2024 is the centenary of Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s birth. I first learned about Wood from a book called The Golden Turkey Awards by critics Harry and Michael Medved. The book named Wood’s film Plan 9 From Outer Space as the worst movie of all time and Wood himself was named worst director of all time.

The reason I owned the book was that I’d always enjoyed so-called B-movies and, I have to admit, I enjoyed the Medveds’ somewhat snarky look at bad cinema. To their credit, they didn’t limit their critiques to low-budget films. They criticized big budget movies as well. Still, Plan 9 From Outer Space became sort of a holy grail for me. I wanted to see what made it the worst movie of all. I eventually did find a copy around a decade later, soon after my wife and I were married in 1990, as I recall. Yes, I found myself laughing at some of the cheap sets and shaking my head at the clunky acting and even clunkier writing. Still, after watching the film, my reaction was, “that was kind of fun.” Four years later, Tim Burton made his biopic of Wood, which only made me want to watch more of his movies. The next one I would see out, was Bride of the Monster.

The movie opens on a dark and stormy night. Two hunters are out in the woods. They seek shelter at an old house. The door opens and they’re confronted by none other than Bela Lugosi in the last speaking role of his career. Lugosi sends the hunters away. They’re convinced when his henchman named Lobo, played by wrestler Tor Johnson shows up. The hunters run away, thinking Lobo is the monster they’ve been hearing about. Soon the hunters stumble over some bushes. One tumbles into a lake to be eaten by a giant octopus. The other is captured by Lobo and brought back to the lab to be experimented on by Bela Lugosi, who plays an atomic scientist named Dr. Eric Vornoff. It turns out, Vornoff has devised a way to create atomic powered supermen. Unfortunately, the hunter Lobo brings back dies when Vornoff tries to convert him.

Meanwhile, back in town, we learn reporter Janet Laughton is on the trail of the monster and her boyfriend, police Lieutenant Dick Craig, is trying to solve the mystery of the disappearances by the old lake. It should be no surprise they find their way out to Vornoff’s house. However, they aren’t the only ones trying to figure out what’s going on. A monster hunter named Strowski has turned up, but it turns out he may know more about Vornoff than he let on. I won’t spoil the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but it all ends with a big atomic blast. No question this is a movie of the 1950s, when atomic power could do anything. In many ways, the fear and promise of the atom then isn’t too different from the fear and promises of AI today and maybe nanotechnology will in the future.

As I reached the end of the film, I realized that sure, Lugosi’s delivery is sometimes uneven, but the fun he has playing that role is infectious. Sure, when it’s not stock footage, the octopus in the lake looks a little limp. Sure, some of the sets look like painted plywood or even cardboard. However, never once during the film was I bored. It’s a glance back at the hopes and fears for the atom, including how agents from other countries might wield its powers. I’ve already watched the movie multiple times since that first time. There are many “better” movies that don’t engage me enough to back for a second much less a third or fourth viewing.

Mad scientists trying to unlock terrible secrets and monstrous henchmen are also a part of my latest novel, Ordeal of the Scarlet Order. You can learn more about it at http://davidleesummers.com/OSO.html

The Tick

Three weeks ago, I attended El Paso Comic Con as to promote my books. Events like this can be busy, but I do like taking time to meet people who have been involved in projects I enjoyed. One of those people attending this year’s El Paso Comic Con was Patrick Warburton. I knew his work primarily from watching the Cartoon Network’s series The Venture Bros where he voiced Brock Samson. I also knew his work from Seth MacFarlane’s series Family Guy where he plays Joe Swanson, and from the series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated where he played Sheriff Bronson Stone. While meeting Warbuton, I enjoyed hearing how much he sounded like his iconic characters. When celebrities appear at pop culture events like El Paso Comic Con, they often have photos from parts they’ve played. Meeting Warbuton in person, reminded me that his face actually had appeared on screen when he played the title role in The Tick back in 2001.

Thing is, I’d never seen the live-action version of The Tick. I loved the animated version that ran on Fox Kids from 1994 until 1996 and even collected a few issues of Ben Edlund’s comic that the show is based on. Basically, The Tick is a parody of the superhero genre. We never learn who the title character is out of costume, although the comic implies that he escaped from a mental institution. He’s basically a big, indestructible guy with a heart of gold who spouts bombastic heroic-sounding nonsense before rushing into action. His sidekick is a mild-mannered accountant named Arthur who made his own moth costume. Arthur has no powers, but his costume does let him glide from place to place.

The reason I never saw the 2001 live action series had a lot to do with a really bad couple of days that year. The first was September 10, 2001, yes, the day before the twin towers fell. I’d just come home from a convention in Phoenix, Arizona and I’d learned that my Great Aunt Ethel, the woman who had raised my mom had passed away. I also learned that our house had been hit by lightning and a power surge destroyed our television. That latter event was probably something of a blessing for the next day. Though hearing about the events of September 11 on the radio were pretty terrifying too. To be honest, I didn’t feel a strong desire to replace our television for some time and when we did replace it, we made the decision not to connect it to cable. The live-action version of The Tick would debut in November and it only lasted nine episodes. Alas, I missed it. Instead, I spent the time working on my novel Children of the Old Stars. You can read more about the novel and the series it’s a part of at http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#pirate_legacy

So, being fans of The Tick, my wife and I decided to check out the live action version starring Patrick Warburton. It turns out the live-action series captured the energy and fun of the animated series. Back when the live action series came out, I remembered being a little surprised that the supporting characters Die Fledermaus and American Maid had been redesigned and were now called Bat Manuel and Captain Liberty respectively. Looking it up now, I discovered that the earlier incarnations were developed for the Fox Kids show and couldn’t be used in the live action show, so they had to be re-imagined. The Tick remained his naive and bombastic self, despite a change in cowl that allowed us to see Patrick Warbuton’s face. Arthur is still the accountant trying to find his identity as a superhero and just wants his mom and sister to accept him for who he is, while putting up with his big, blue roommate. Being live-action, the show ventured into somewhat more adult territory than its animated counterpart, but that actually let the writers have just a little more fun with the Tick’s naivete, which Warburton played to a tee.

Now I suppose I need to go see the 2016 version of The Tick which features much of the same creative team. Patrick Warburton is even one of the executive producers, even though he handed the starring role over to Peter Serafinowicz. And so, may Evil beware and may Good dress warmly and eat plenty of fresh vegetables.

The Vanishing Girl

After last week’s dive into Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids and revisiting the comic Scooby Apocalypse, I decided to investigate what other Scooby-Doo media existed. Of course, I’ve known about the movies and TV series which are available in a variety of formats, and I’ve known many books exist for younger children, but I was curious if more had been done. I was pleased to discover a young adult novel series published by Scholastic under the series header Daphne and Velma. The first novel in the series is The Vanishing Girl, by Josephine Ruby.

The novel introduces us to high school students Daphne Blake and Velma Dinkley, who had been close friends as children when they spent many afternoons with Fred Jones, Shaggy Rogers, and Scooby-Doo playing at being detectives. However, as time passed, the friends went their separate way. Daphne fell into the “cool crowd” while Velma became a loner who is working for Crystal Cove’s theme park, celebrating the town’s haunted past. One morning, Velma comes into work and is doing her rounds only to discover her distant cousin and Daphne’s current best friend, Marcy Heller, locked in the old west Sheriff office’s jail cell. Marcy claims a ghost locked her in. Whether that’s true or not, the park’s owner blames Velma’s mom, who was the night manager, for not making sure everything was locked up at night. With her mom’s job on the line, Velma wants to find out what really happened. As she begins her investigations, Marcy starts evading Daphne and ultimately disappears completely! Now Daphne wants to find out what happened to her friend, which causes her path to cross with Velma’s. If the two want to find out what really happened, they’ll have to reconcile their differences and heal their friendship in order to work together.

The Vanishing Girl turned out to be a pretty dandy young adult mystery. We get enough clues that we’re able to solve the mystery alongside Daphne and Velma. Yes, I did figure it out before they did, but as a reader, I got to see all their clues as they found them, plus part of the plot is them dealing with preconceptions both about who they felt must be the culprit and who they had already eliminated. On top of that, part of the story is learning how the rift developed in their relationship and how they heal that rift. As someone who had been a teen and as someone who recently watched his kids go through their teen years, the emotions felt genuine.

Telling the story in prose allowed the author to explore the world of Scooby-Doo more deeply than even the movies have to date. Of course, Scooby’s world has been explored by many creative teams over the decades and there has been little consistency about the gang’s backstory, their parents, and even their hometown. Still, the author found a nice balance between their world as portrayed in A Pup called Scooby-Doo, What’s New Scooby-Doo?, and Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated. As I read, I thought I might not make the same choices for what to use and and what not to use as the author did, but I did feel the author made valid choices.

Over the course of the novel, we also meet series regulars Fred Jones, Shaggy Rogers, and Scooby-Doo along with supporting characters like the Hex Girls. In fact, Shaggy and Scooby prove to be major supporting characters. The author made an interesting choice to not allow Scooby to use human words. He only barks and whines as a real dog would. I rather liked this since it helped me suspend my disbelief for this more in-depth mystery novel. What’s more, there have been multiple points in the series and movies where it’s implied that only the Mystery Inc. gang actually understand Scooby. Those of us who’ve lived with dogs and cats do begin to understand their language after awhile.

Fortunately, there are two more novels in the Daphne and Velma series and I plan to dive in as soon as I can. I really enjoyed spending time in this version of Crystal Cove and felt like I got to know these old friends a little better. Reading these made me wish that Warner Brothers would actually develop a Scooby novel series for adult fans like me and my kids who all grew up with these characters. In fact, great movies like Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island and comics like Scooby Apocalypse showed us that stories with the gang as adults do work.

In the meantime, I’m busy creating stories about my own characters exploring spooky mysteries. One good choice is my novel The Astronomer’s Crypt. You can learn more and see a video trailer at: http://davidleesummers.com/Astronomers-Crypt.html

Running the Marathon

When my wife learned she had breast cancer back in 2009, her doctors told her the battle against cancer is more a marathon than a race. In other words, if you catch the cancer early enough, you have options and can work with your doctors to make the best treatment plan. That’s been what I’ve been doing since I learned I have prostate cancer earlier this year. I have had some very productive discussions with a radiation oncologist and two surgical oncologists. I’ve also learned that several friends and family members of friends have had prostate cancer. Before I go any farther, I want to say thank you to everyone who has reached out to tell me about their experiences and their family’s experiences. Most of the outcomes have been great and it gives me hope. The few instances of more problematic or sad outcomes have allowed me to ask important questions and do research so I can have the best results from my treatment.

One friend who has recently undergone prostate cancer surgery recommended a book I have found invaluable in this journey and I want to share it with anyone who may find themselves with a prostate cancer diagnosis. The book is Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer by Patrick C. Walsh and Janet Farrar Worthington. The book compiles the most up-to-date information available about prostate cancer and how to treat it from the team at the Johns Hopkins University. Of course, a book is no substitute for actually discussing a diagnosis and options with your doctor, but the book gave me good questions to ask, assured me that I wouldn’t insult my doctors with some of the tough questions, and it helped lead me to a surgical oncologist that I feel very comfortable with. The book helped me understand how prostate cancer can return even after the best treatment. It helped me understand all the lab results that have come back so far and it gave me confidence my team of doctors had ordered the best tests available to date. Dr. Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer is available at Amazon and other book sellers. The book is frequently updated, so search for the most recent update.

Prostate cancer can be different for everyone. Since this marathon began, I have had a prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) PET scan and learned that mine is fairly widespread within the prostate, but largely active on one side. That said, it still seems contained within the prostate and does not appear to have metastasized. After consulting with doctors, it seems my best option is a radical prostatectomy, where the prostate is simply removed. This is scary, but it does give me a good shot at long-term survival. It does not guarantee the prostate cancer will not return, but I always have the option of radiation therapy after the prostatectomy if it proves necessary. At this point, it looks like the surgery will be scheduled in mid-June.

As I noted in my earlier post, I appreciate your positive thoughts and prayers. I’ve been touched by everyone who has reached out. I have really good support from my team at Kitt Peak National Observatory. If you’d like to be even more proactive in your support, the best thing I can suggest is buy a book I wrote or edited. Recommend one of my books to a friend. Review one of my books at Amazon, Goodreads, or on your own blog. These things give me a real emotional boost and that can be invaluable at a time like this. You can browse my books and find places to purchase them at http://www.davidleesummers.com

Those Meddling Kids

I suspect most people who hear the phrase “meddling kids” would immediately associate it with the television show Scooby-Doo Where Are You? or one of its many follow-up series. As it turns out, the show went a whole year before the phrase was ever uttered and it was only used twice in the second season. As an adult, I rewatched many of my favorite Hanna-Barbera cartoons with my kids and it struck me that Josie and the Pussycats were referred to as “meddling kids” much more often than Scooby and the gang! That noted, throughout the 1970s, Hanna-Barbera Studios made numerous cartoons that involved a group of teens and a funny sidekick (often, but not always, a talking animal) who solved mysteries. Although based on an Archie Comic, Josie and the Pussycats was one of those. Other examples included Jabberjaw, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, and The Funky Phantom.

It’s with this in mind that I came to Edgar Cantero’s novel Meddling Kids. It tells the story of the last case of the Blyton Summer Detective Club. Thirteen years before the novel begins, the club consisted of four young teens and their dog Sean. One summer, they investigated the appearance of a mysterious lake creature near an old abandoned house in Oregon. They soon learned the creature was a guy in a bad salamander costume scaring off the locals so he could hunt for gold rumored to be stashed in the house.

However, in the years since then, the club’s leader, a handsome boy named Peter, committed suicide. Nate, the science fiction and fantasy aficionado, was committed to a mental institution. The tomboyish Andy joined the army, but was kicked out. The smart girl, Kerri, became an alcoholic and never went on to achieve her potential in grad school. Sean, already an old dog, passed on, but Kerri now owns Sean’s great grandson, Tim. All of them are haunted by things they saw at the mansion that didn’t add up and didn’t mesh with the villain being a guy in a bad costume.

Andy gathers the surviving members of the gang so they can return to Blyton Hills and figure out what was really going on. On their first night camping near the old mansion, they soon find themselves beset by real lake monsters. They survive the encounter and learn that the lake monsters only appeared because the owner of the mansion, now long gone, had been dabbling in some very dark magic from that infamous Lovecraftian tome, the Necronomicon, and something even scarier might be lurking under Sleepy Lake.

Overall, I enjoyed this take on a gang of young mystery solvers who could have walked out of any Hanna-Barbera Cartoon of the 1970s growing up and discovering that real monsters do, in fact, exist. That said, Cantero tended to bounce between a traditional prose style and a more cinematic script style, including stage directions. Even in the prose, he would refer to people “entering frame” or “leaving frame.” This could have felt clever if one of the characters made movies or if he gave us a reason for the cinematic references. As it stands, it just served to pull me out of the book when those shifts occurred. I did like the fact that Tim the Dog never speaks, even though we occasionally hear his thoughts and Cantero does give us a clever reason for Tim being smarter than the average dog.

This Thursday, over at https://threadsthatbind.net/, I’ll take a look at another gang of familiar adult mystery solvers who are confronted by real monsters. Have you seen an update of the Scooby gang or other teen mystery solvers you liked? Let me know in the comments.

Liberty’s Daughter

I discovered Robert Heinlein’s books in my university years and I have to admit that many of his libertarian ideas appealed to me. That noted, my politics have always been nuanced. I have a real problem with the kind of “sports team” politics that say you must believe everything a party espouses or you’re not a “true” member of that party. The best governments come from people getting together, exchanging ideas, hashing them out, and making a good faith effort to help society run in as smooth a way as possible by doing those jobs that are too big for a smaller group of individuals to accomplish on their own. It’s from this background that I came to Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter.

In Liberty’s Daughter, sixteen-year-old Beck Garrison has grown up on an archipelago of ships and platforms out at sea assembled by a group of people determined to live by purely libertarian principals. She’s been educated by tutors paid for by her dad, who proves to be one of the power brokers on the platform known as the seastead. As far as she knows, her mom died in an accident when she was young. In addition to going to school, Beck works as a “finder.” Isolated as the seastead is from the United States, people often have difficulty importing things they want while other people often have difficulty disposing of unwanted items. Beck’s job is to place unwanted items into the hands of those who want them. The job is going fine until a woman comes to Beck, asking her to find her sister. Now Beck has to become a true detective and this brings her face-to-face with some of the darker parts of the seastead. And this is just the beginning. As the novel progresses, Beck gets a job as a liaison for a TV show from the mainland who wants to do a reality show set on the seastead. This, in turn, brings Beck in touch with those who are trying to form unions and those who oppose such activity.

Kritzer tells this story with good, balanced characters who feel like real people. There are people who have done unsavory things, but she helps you see the good in those people as well. The upshot is that you care for these characters as individuals and not as “heroes” and “villains.” What’s more, while Kritzer is clearly critical of a purely libertarian society, she doesn’t let her futuristic United States and it’s more strongly government-based society off the hook either. Over the course of the book, Beck realizes there are things she like about the seastead and things she likes about the mainland United States. The upshot is that I could see this being a good book to hand to a young person who wants to have a serious discussion about the role of the government and an individual’s place within it.

Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Time Enough for Love was one of those novels with the libertarian ideas that interested me. It was also a novel that discussed the history of a planet in its early pioneer phase. It inspired me to write The Pirates of Sufiro, where I look at a planet from the time humans settle until governments form. It was a novel where I explored the role of government, corporations, and individuals. You can check it out at http://davidleesummers.com/pirates_of_sufiro.html

A Heist for the Gods

I recently became aware of the term “godpunk.” It’s a science fiction/fantasy sub-genre that sits alongside such sub-genres as “steampunk” and “solarpunk.” While “steampunk” imagines a story set in a Victorian-like milieu and “solarpunk” imagines positive outcomes in a future with climate change, “godpunk” tells stories about the world’s deities their close associates, such as angels and demons. Often these stories are set in a time period outside of the classic stories of these gods. What’s more, while these stories can be humorous or offer wry commentary, they endeavor to be respectful of the traditions represented. Examples of this sub-genre include Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Silvia Morena-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow. I recently dove into Wole Talabi’s godpunk novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obulafon.

The novel opens with a chase on the streets of the “spirit side” of London. Shigidi, recently the Yoruba peoples’ god of nightmares, is in a cab with the Succubus Nneoma. He’s lost an arm and they’re being chased by a giant on a makeshift chariot being pulled by enchanted bronze horses. They’ve just stolen the Brass head of Obalufon, a relic which has been displayed at the British Museum and hope to deliver it to the powerful Yoruba god Olorun. At last Nneoma confesses her love for Shigidi. From here, the novel goes back in time to tell us how we reached this point.

In Talabi’s cosmos, gods live on prayers and worship. The gods of the world have separated themselves into corporations that control different parts of the world. Christianity and Islam are the megacorps of this world. The Yoruba gods are a sizeable, but smaller company fighting to survive and some gods have already faded away. When we reach back in time, we find that Shigidi is a rather ugly god who people pray to so he’ll give their enemies nightmares bad enough to kill them. One night, while on the job, he meets the succubus Nneoma. Although she comes from the Christian side of the cosmos, she’s an independent contractor, doing what succubi do, using sex to steal souls. She encourages Shigidi to go independent with her. When he agrees, she reforms him into a beautiful god. It looks like things are going to go well, but as with many indie operators, they find they have to work in a world dominated by the corporations. They fall afoul of some of the wrong gods, they begin to owe favors to others, and at last, Olorun comes to them with an offer they can’t refuse, steal the Brass Head of Obalufon and they’ll have it made.

Talabi takes us on a wild ride that ranges from Nigeria to Malaysia to London, weaving the elements from the distant and near past that brought Shigidi and Nneoma to the point we meet them at the start of the novel. Infamous spiritualist Aleister Crowley even comes along for part of the ride. Along the way, we see human-like jealousy, love, anger, and vengeance writ large as only the gods can do. I thought this was a fun novel and it’s made me curious to learn more about the Yoruba gods and their influence on world culture.

For myself, I’ve only really dipped my toe into the godpunk waters once. This is in the story “Dusty Violet and Bleached Bones” which appears in the anthology It Came From Her Purse, edited by Terrie Leigh Relf and Marcia A. Borell. The story features a smackdown between the Kachina Crow Mother and La Llorona. You can find the story at https://www.amazon.com/Came-Purse-Terrie-Leigh-Relf/dp/1087882079/

It would be fair to ask if my Scarlet Order Vampire novels count as godpunk with their angels, gods, and Kachinas. While some of the aliens of this world may have inspired a few specific legends, my characters in this series are aliens whose egos are big enough that they’re content with being seen as gods and other powerful beings. Despite that, fans of the genre might find the novels close enough to be interested in reading more. You can learn about the Scarlet Order Vampire novels at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order

Rebuilding Worlds

I was first introduced to the idea of terraforming a world from Carl Sagan’s 1980 television series, Cosmos. He introduced the idea that if we discovered no life on Mars, it could possibly terraformed and made into an Earth-like planet. He discussed the possibility of planting dark green plants on the polar caps to warm them and free the trapped oxygen and any water that might be there. It was a romantic notion and even then, he implied the technical innovations required would likely be far in the future and such an endeavor would take a long time, possibly even generations.

Since then, a lot of science fiction has come along that has introduced magic boxes that allow rapid terraforming of worlds, which has created an impression that such an endeavor would be easy. For those who would “rather” save the Earth than terraform another world, I feel compelled to point out that saving the Earth would be a prerequisite for terraforming another world. Terraforming is not a magic bullet that can be done in a few weeks. We would need to know how to manage our own climate and resources before we could generate an ecosystem on another world.

It’s because of this, I was excited to read The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. Set some 57,000 years in the future, Newitz takes us to the planet Sask-E, also called Sasky, which is in the final phases of being terraformed. We’re introduced to a ranger named Destry who makes two shocking discoveries. First, her corporate bosses have plans to develop the world in a way that threaten the natural beauty that has been cultivated and she finds a hidden enclave of the original rangers, who breathe a slightly different atmosphere, but didn’t die off a few centuries before as expected. Destry faces the choice of whether or not to help these ancestral people survive on Sask-E in the wake of the planned development. Along the way, we learn that humans have made great strides in health and the biosciences. People can and do live for centuries. Also, technology has given other creatures besides humans the ability to speak. This includes Destry’s partner, a moose named Whisper. The upshot is that the novel spends time exploring what makes a “person.”

Part 2 of the novel bumps us forward a few centuries and we meet Destry’s mentee, Misha. Cities now dot Sasky and he’s been given the task of creating a sustainable railroad to connect the cities. However one of the cities refuses to cooperate and throws barriers in Misha’s way. Fortunately, Destry had made friends with just the people who can help Misha complete his task.

Finally, in part 3, we move ahead many more centuries and meet an organic, sentient train named Scrubjay who runs the route Misha helped to plan. Scrubjay befriends a sentient cat named Moose who is a reporter for one of the news outlets on the planet. The corporate owners of a group of cities are trying to control who can live and work in those spaces, effectively attempting to gentrify their slice of Sasky. The process of moving out the longtime residents results in a disaster, which requires Scrubjay’s help to evacuate survivors and Mouse’s clever reporting to let the galaxy know what’s going on at Sasky.

I enjoyed Newitz’s vision of the future and especially liked how terraforming was portrayed as a process that would take centuries. I also enjoyed exploring what humanity might be like so far in the distant future. It seems possible that Newitz’s humans are a bit more like humans in our current moment of time than they actually will be, but overall we’re presented with a hopeful future and I enjoyed considering the possibilities the novel suggests.

It struck me that the structure of Newitz’s novel is very much like my 1996 novel, The Pirates of Sufiro, in that it’s told in three acts and each act reflects the viewpoint of a new generation. They’re also similar in that they explore the way governments, corporations, and individuals struggle with and against each other. You can explore the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Pirates of Sufiro at: http://davidleesummers.com/pirates_of_sufiro.html

2024 Solar Eclipse from Kitt Peak

For the last week, it’s been almost impossible to turn on the news and not hear about the great solar eclipse that passed over much of North America yesterday. Eclipse totality cut a swath right through the middle of the United States ranging from Texas through Maine. Unfortunately, I was scheduled to operate the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona the night before the eclipse, which meant there was no way I could make it to the zone of totality in time to actually witness the event. At Kitt Peak, we were only able to see about 75% of the sun eclipsed. This was a little sad for me, since the closest I’ve been to a total eclipse of the sun was last year’s annular eclipse. One might think it’s not fair that a professional astronomer doesn’t get to witness a total eclipse of the sun, but solar astronomy is not my specialty. Imagine if you were scheduled for cancer surgery and all the techs rushed away to watch a rare heart transplant. That’s what it would be like for me to leave my post. Below is a sequence of photos I grabbed during the eclipse. They are sequential from just before to just after the eclipse maximum. The third from the left is basically the maximum coverage of the sun we saw from Kitt Peak.

Even though I didn’t get to see the total eclipse, I still had the experience of seeing the eclipse with friends. Several of us who work at Kitt Peak gathered at the WIYN telescope to watch the event. At least two other folks on hand were as sleep-deprived as I was!

The two primary projects I’m involved in at Kitt Peak are the DESI survey, which is making the largest three-dimensional map of the known universe with the goal of understanding dark energy and NEID, which is a high-resolution spectrograph that observes the effects of exoplanets on their host stars. If you look at the photo above, the telescope is housed in the dome at the left. However, if you look at the right, there is a structure on the top of the blue roof. That’s WIYN’s solar telescope. It feeds light from the sun into NEID each and every day because one of the best ways to understand light from distant stars is to compare it to light from our own star. The day of the solar eclipse was no different and here are my colleagues, Dr. Sarah Logsdon and Eli Golub observing the sun during the eclipse.

Sarah tells me, “Observing an eclipse with NEID is a great opportunity to mimic some of the measurement techniques we use when observing planets around other stars, but at very high signal to noise. We will be able to measure the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect—which can tell us if a planet is rotating prograde or retrograde or even if it ‘s on a polar orbit and completely misaligned to the spin axis of the star. We may also be able to see a [star]spot-crossing event.” In effect, a solar eclipse is a rare opportunity to use NEID on objects we understand in our own solar system as a way to calibrate what we’re seeing on objects outside our solar system. You can learn more about planets crossing star spots at: https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/~fdai/spot_crossings.html. I find this very cool because several of my published papers involve investigations of spots on distant stars.

I may have missed totality, but I feel like I may have witnessed some real groundbreaking science in its place.

As it turns out, I have edited two books that imagine what real exoplanets might be like along with exoplanet scientist Dr. Steve Howell, who once was also WIYN’s telescope scientist. You can learn about each of them at the links below.

• A Kepler’s Dozen
• Kepler’s Cowboys