Hay Festival - Saturday

Martin Rees, the Asronomer Royal, kicked off my Hay festival this morning with a talk about The World in 2050.

He covered much of the usual climate change pessimism that probably all of us here share. What are the solutions? Professor Rees has his own favourite, a global grid centered around massive solar power stations based in and around the Sahara. But he warned that these were long-term projects which, like fusion power would come too late. The immediate priorities should be focussed on carbon capture, because we don’t have too many years before the climate tipping point is reached. He also spoke of the threats of population growth and other mass extinction dynamics. He was concerned about the way biotech and cybertech were having an empowering effect on the lunatic fringe of society, and that “the global village will always have its village idiots”.

“There have been five great extinction events in the Earth’s history,” he said, “and humans are now causing the sixth.”

Other matters, and on to space. Only twelve years elapsed between Sputnik and Neil Armstrong, but it has now been over 35 years since man set foot on the moon. There is progress in space, but it will largely be confined to small robotic devices. He’s probably right. It is shame, because where is the passion in sending a pocket calculator to the stars.

Prof. Rees also spoke about the prospect of intelligent computers by 2050 – an indirect reference to the Technological Singularity. He didn’t really commit to a viewpoint, but hinted that he had his doubts, and anyway, how would we know what intelligence really was?

I took issue with one point, his description of Science Fiction writers as “flaky American futurologists.” This is so wrong. Some of us are British (or Manx).

Prof. Rees summed his talk up with a view that the next 40 years will see an ever widening of the gulf between what doors we can open and what doors we should keep closed.

 Other thoughts on Hay so far: well it’s hot! I’m sitting on the grass in the main square and I am concerned because a) we haven’t brought sunblock and b)its hard to see the screen of my laptop. I’m not complaining. Long may it continue.

Next up is Brenda Maddox, the biographer, talking about her study of Geoge Eliot.

Hay Festival

Hay Festival Beckons. Only two days to go. Caravan is nearly packed, wellies and cagouls are ready. Bring on the rain and the wind and the cold, because this year we are prepared, and the BBC weather forecast will not dampen my enthusiasm.

This post is a taster, a bit of a warm-up to flex my blogging muscles. I plan to blog every day throughout the festival. Most of it will be loose; on the fly. Maybe it won’t work, maybe I won’t find a good enough mobile signal, maybe I’ll be swept down the River Wye in the torrent, who knows.

I’ll be listening to Stephen Fry, Martin Rees, Dave Gorman… talks, panels, music… I went through the brochure like a lunatic – Sarah set me loose with a yellow highlighter and I morphed into a man insane. We’re there for the whole week – more than a week, we head out on Friday.

Are we nearly there yet?

Can’t wait

To Boldly Go

When I was 12 or 13 I remember one particular day when I went into school in a state of nervous excitement. In the playground I found that everyone was the same; anxious, hopping from foot to foot, needing to talk. We had all been part of a shared experience that was far-reaching and important.
The first lesson that day was double games – this is where you have to put on shorts and go out onto the cold, wind-swept playing fields and run up and down in the mud while the other kids kicked a ball around and called you names, like Spaz and Retard.
But this day no one had any interest in football. We had other things to talk about. The previous evening a new series had just appeared on TV. It was special. It came from America, and it was immeasurably better than anything that we had ever seen before.
It was, of course, Star Trek. Forty years later, it’s morning, and I come into work feeling those same butterflies of excitement; the same sense of wonder; the same need to talk about an experience from the previous evening. Because last night I became a child again. I went to the pictures and I saw Star Trek, the new film. There was Captain James T Kirk, young and full of vigour, so too Mr Spock, Bones and Scotty.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no life-long die-hard trekky. I’ve enjoyed Star Trek in it’s various guises over the years, but not in that passionate, dress-up, learn-to-speak-Klingon kind of way that some of my contemporaries seem to favour. But really, last night, I was ready to abandon reason and buy the plastic Spock ears, don the Star Fleet uniform and join the band of the faithful. The new film is superb. In every way. I cannot fault it, and I’m a harsh critic when it comes to SF films. Oh, it’s got all the bad science and the dubious plot lines and the iffy time paradoxes of the original - but so what? It works. My goodness how it works.

And here’s the thing. It’s open-ended. It’s just the beginning. There’s going to be more – got to be.
Yeay!

Live long and prosper.

Motorway Moanicle

NINE HOURS!!! In nine hours I could fly to Denver. Or I could take a leisurely night sailing from Plymouth to Roscoff, in Brittany.
Nine hours is also how long it takes to travel a measly two-hundred-odd miles on UK motorways. Why? Because UK motorways are crap. Poorly designed, badly signposted, absurdly junctioned, and with service areas that merely jolly you along ever closer to that M1, M6, M25 stress-induced heart attack.

Here’s a picture of our journey along the M25. If it were a video it would look exactly the same as this, because nothing is moving. I don’t like travelling on UK motorways. Maybe you guessed. There is nothing about our motorways that is admirable. Someone is to blame. Who is he? Who is responsible for this mess? What was he thinking? I want him here. I want to tell him all that is wrong. It will be a long conversation. There may be blows.

Anyway, we are here at last, in SE London. I planned for us to arrive in time for lunch. We arrived at 7pm. Just enough time for a late tea and maybe an hour of writing. But tomorrow I’ll be better. Tomorrow Sarah and I will get the train into the city, and that will be cool, I like London. Sarah’s off to an art seminar at Westminster Hall and I will have the whole day to follow my nose and explore.

Oh – a word of explanation – what’s a Moanicle?
A Moanicle is something I introduced in my yet-to-be-published book, ‘Travelling in a Box’. It’s a bit like a chronicle... only I moan a lot.

Words and Music

What is it that makes writing and music so emotionally compatible? So many writers are often musicians and vice versa. They both demand exclusivity in terms of time-management. Often when I have a gig I’m painfully conscious of the dent that it’s making in my word-count schedule. And sometimes I’ll even turn down a gig because it comes at a time when I really do need to be writing.
But I cannot set one above the other.
I have a show this week, HMS Pinafore. I’m 2nd clarinet in the pit. It’s demanding, it’s every night, and it takes nearly an hour to travel to and from home. So the solution is: I don’t travel. I bring my home to Llangollen.
Here I am, at the end of the arrow. Instead of driving for two hours I can write, and Sarah can paint. And just look at the scenery round here. Can life get much better than this?

So, back to the initial question. What makes writing and music such comfortable bed-fellows?
Here’s my view: It’s all about validation. As a musician I love the sound of applause. You know that you have entertained people when they clap. There’s nothing like seeing a group of smiling faces leaving a theatre or club and knowing that you have been part of their experience that evening. Or playing a solo that comes together and really works, and hearing the approval immediately afterwards.
But, here’s the thing, it’s fleeting. When a solo is done, it’s done. Over. It will never be repeated. (It might be recorded, but that’s rare.) So with music you get instant gratification, but it’s gone the moment you let it out of the bag.
With writing it’s different. It takes time to create, to rework, to edit. Then it goes out to editors and you wait weeks and months for any feedback – meanwhile you’re working on something else. Often the feedback is negative (although I have noticed, since becoming a ‘Writers of the Future’ winner, that I do seem to be getting a better class of rejection slip nowadays.) When something gets published there is another delay, weeks and months. There’s no instant gratification with writing. But writing isn’t fleeting, like music. When its out there it’s out there for a long time. The feedback is no less gratifying than applause for a good improvised solo, but it has more substance, because it lasts. There’s also a better chance of it being heard by a wider audience. Maybe no more in number than the hundred or so who fit into Maghull Town Hall each month to hear my efforts with the Merseyside Big Band, but they’re more geographically dispersed.

It’s my last night in Llangollen tonight. I’m going to miss it. It’s the first time I’ve done HMS Pinafore – a terrific show, packed with good tunes and there are some great lines. It was very political in its day and it still has resonance. And it's still very very funny. Words and music, working together.

But before I put on my DJ and dicky, and go off to entertain the cultured masses of North Wales, there are other pressing duties to perform: The toilet is full; it has to be tipped out into a big hole at the top of the field. And the drinking water tank needs filling, the waste water tank needs emptying and... oh, it’s my turn to cook the tea. I’m not going to get away with beans on toast again tonight.

Eastercon Retrospective

This is me outside the caravan the morning after Eastercon LX. Notice the dark glasses which hide the bleary-eyes that half a night’s sleep hasn’t managed to fully erase.
So, how was my first experience of a SciFi convention? Would I do it again?
Well, I’ve already booked for 2010. So that probably also answers the first question.
What were the highlights?
It’s hard, but I’d have to say, for me, the George Hay Memorial Lecture, given by Dr Adrian Bowyer, about the RepRap project was the talk I’ll take away and remember. Here’s the link. (http://reprap.org/) The whole concept just blew me away.
The trouble with doing just one day is that so much is going on you are scared to miss anything, and there are so many panels at any one time. And when do you eat? You have to stop sometime and then you fret about the panels you’re missing by pausing to eat.
But then, at about six o’clock you realise that your head is filling up and there’s a data buffer overload thing going on, with knowledge escaping out of your ears in the form of both steam and ectoplasmic goo, and the latter is dribbling down your neck. So that’s when you have to stop. And so at that point you may as well eat.
But then there’s more to come. Because events go on into the night – on this night there’s a full sized orchestra playing Wagner and film theme music and Beethoven.

Sarah puts up with a lot. I thought that twelve straight hours of SF geekdom just might cause her to crack, but she surprised me by declaring that her favourite was the session on small-satellites, (because we’d recently been to a lecture on satellite technology at the Wrexham Science Fair, and this had set up the context for her).

“So, are we going next year,” she said.

“Wow!” I said.

Eastercon

Starting a new caravan season with a visit to Eastercon. Right now I'm sitting in the caravan on a Yorkshire hillside just outside Bradford and the rain is beating out a samba on the caravan roof. Nothing much new there, then. It rained every day we were away last year so I'm well used to it. At least I don't feel tempted to do energetic stuff like walking. I have a full car battery to power the laptop so I'll get lots of opportunity to write. Yeay!
Tomorrow we head for Eastercon, the British Science Fiction Convention. Never been to a con before. Don't know what to expect. So I figured one day would be enough to try it out. Besides, Eastercon runs for four full days, dawn 'till after midnight. I couldn't do it to Sarah, she puts up with enough. But I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to meeting people who have heard of the writers I enjoy- people who know the jargon and what's happening in the field. Maybe I'll even get to meet some real writers.
Uh-oh, the winds picking up. Caravan's starting to rock and creak a bit. The rain's gone all sideways. Must be a sign. Must be about to run out of water. Time to get the wellies on again.