The timing of when QotW goes up has become a little sporadic (it's been 10 days since the last one) but fortunately, on this blog, my word is law and "a week" is precisely the number of days I want it to be ;)
Picking this week's Quote of the Week: Philip Palmer
(Unfortunately, it wouldn't let me copy the slightly sinister photo on the right hand side of Philip's site. Darn!)
Philip Palmer has recently débuted with Orbit in the US & UK with his science-fiction, Debatable Space (which, as you know, I loved), even though you'll probably have seen more of him on my blog last year than this... To remedy that...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.- Arthur C. Clarke
I once performed a thought experiment on a group of friends to illustrate the difference between people with arts degrees, or a bias to the arts (like me) and people with science degrees. Even though I love science, and read books about science, and am inspired by science, I couldn’t for the life of me tell you how to build a television set, or programme a computer. It’s the broad concepts I understand, I hope; not the actual mechanics.
So my question to my friends was: if a new kind of apocalyptic bomb exploded on Earth, destroying all the technology and killing all the scientists, but leaving the artists alive, how long would it take to rebuild our civilisation?
My scientist friend responded, with terrifying rigour: ‘Fifty years.’ His theory was that once you know what is scientifically possible and previously discovered, even if it’s only in the most general terms, then the cleverest of the survivors would be able to reconstruct physics, chemistry and all the other disciplines in half a century. And once the underlying theories were mastered, it would then be possible to restore all or most of the technological supports and comforts we take for granted.
But in answer to the same question my writer friend, with the arty-farty flakiness typical of the likes of him and me, said: ‘Well, it all depends on what you mean by civilisation….’
The truth is, most of our modern technology is magic to the vast majority of citizens. As far as the Arty Farty Heads among us are concerned, when our flatscreen TV pixillates we get angry with it, but we don’t really fathom why, or have any grasp of how to create a signal that doesn’t pixillate. If our computer crashes we reboot by pressing the ‘On’ button, but we don’t truly grasp how so many complex software applications can be made possible via the workings of a binary code.
I think this is why the Arthur C. Clarke quote above amuses me. I don’t feel pleasantly superior to those who belong to non-technological civilisations (as I’m sure Clarke, with all his scientific expertise, did when he wrote it), I feel embarrassingly dumb. The quotation strikes me a fabulous joke, at my expense.
But the Clarke quote also makes a fascinating point about the mystery and astonishing range of possibilities of science; and it’s a point that has been a constant source of inspiration to me. In Debatable Space my aim was to amaze, confound, and astonish the reader. I wanted it to read like a book of marvels, to have the kind of ‘wow’ factor that Marco Polo’s tales of the wonders of the East would have had in 13th century Europe. And so the whole book is full of seemingly improbable and staggeringly remarkable things. Spaceships fly amazingly fast, and they halt astonishingly quickly. Unbelievable bombs that can distort reality are created; stars are milked of energy; planets are terraformed with all the speed and efficiency of a garden being watered.
The tone of the prose is deliberately heightened; but so far as I can judge, guided by my wonderful science advisor Dr P. Bostock, most of what happens in Debatable Space is possible according to the tenets of hard SF. Space ships can accelerate amazingly fast, provided you have a powerful enough engine, and some kind of anti-inertia device to stop the crew being crushed to jam by the G forces. And if planets can be terraformed at all, who’s to say they can’t be terraformed quickly?
The key to it all is energy. If you have limitless energy - and the energy from the stars in the universe is as limitless as it gets - and sufficient ingenuity, then almost anything can happen. (Apart from FTL travel!) And the effect I want to create is of a universe where the seemingly impossible is a regular occurrence.
I don’t, however, explain in detail how the technology works; it’s not that kind of novel. I just like the idea of a rollercoaster ride in which the reader is amazed on every page, then re-amazed, and amazed once more.
Because my abiding belief is that the universe has so far revealed itself to be astonishingly strange; and as the years pass and we grow into our future, it will seem stranger still. So let’s not take the wonder for granted; let’s marvel at the real-life ‘magic’ that science constantly reveals.
And marvel we shall. Thanks to Philip for that excellent Quote! You may have noticed my link list growing with cool science sites, particularly the Mercury Messenger project; lately, science has been making me marvel more than ever.
There have also been a fair few reviews of Debatable Space recently, at...
And you really should read this very cool interview with Philip! Can't remember who it was done by, though... ;)
3 comments:
Very nice quote.
Most technology is like magic to me, and I long ago resigned to accepting its existence without trying to understand how it works. As long as I sort of know how to use it, I'm fine.
Keep up the good work. Cheers:-)
Thank you both :D I'm OK-ish with technology, but like you only at the working-it-well level ;)
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