Eclipse of the Sun - Always Amazing

Somewhat "kludgey" image taken
with an iphone through
eclipse filter glasses

I was lucky to be in the right place (Japan) at the right time (about seven in the morning) to see another solar eclipse.  It is something I never get tired of seeing - something that never feels jaded.  A solar eclipse is a great astronomical event to witness, for a whole variety of reasons.   

The event takes time to unfold, so it gives the viewer an opportunity to observe it in detail.  The effect is dramatic, so there is no wondering if you "saw it" or not.  A shooting star, for example, can happen so fast and can be so faint that you might second guess if you spotted it at all.  Also, it is easy to have a group viewing and sharing a solar eclipse, which adds to the fun and sense of community.

This first image was taken by a friend at my location in Niigata, and we were both surprised it worked as well as it did.  He was pointing his iphone through one of the eyes in a pair of mylar filter eclipse glasses.  We were off of the center of the eclipse path, so our Sun always appeared to have a bite of smaller or larger size taken out of it.  The eclipse was more complete in Tokyo, with the sun becoming a ring (i.e. this was an annular eclipse, not a total eclipse.)  There a friend saw large crowds of people snapping away photos while standing in the street.  (Sure hope they had filters of some kind ... )

Of course there is more than one way to "view" an eclipse.  One unique way is described on the Cliff Mass Weather Blog.  The post shows a sequence of images from a National Weather Service satellite looking down at the clouds of Earth.  Each image shows the shadow of the Moon on the clouds below.  Looking at the images quickly, one after another lets you see the shadow sweep over the Earth.  A really different way to look at an eclipse. 

Crescent suns through
oak leaf 'pinholes'
focused on wooden wall

The most impressive way I've ever seen a solar eclipse was through the branches of a huge, very leafy tree.  I was not looking up, but down at the ground.  The leaves of the tree were so dense they were only letting light through as tiny beams.  In fact, the leaves were acting like little pinholes in a pinhole camera.  They focused the image of the sun, with a huge bite out of it, all over the ground.  There were thousands of little crescent suns all around me, on the ground, the trunk of the tree, and even on me.  It was amazing.  A friend caught a similar image from today's eclipse (but this is only an inkling of what I saw that one time, just to give you the idea ...)

My very first writing prompt here on the blog was about eclipses.  They are a great source of writing inspiration.  We live in unique circumstances, where the angular size of our only satellite is close to that of our primary star, and their orbits allow the satellite to occasionally pass in front of the star.  What might have been different for us if solar eclipses were more common, or if they never happened at all?

Image Credit:  Top, photographer, Andrew Rivkin.  Bottom, photographer, Leonidas Moustacas. 

Prompt the Muse #31 - Speculative Writing Prompt

Image: Supernova Remnant

Your characters have found a boundary before them.  It was not put there intentionally to bar their way, but nevertheless, it blocks their path.  They cannot break, destroy, or banish the boundary.  How do they pass by or through it to continue on their way?  Write your thoughts in 150 words.



Image Credit:  NASA Hubble Heritage, Supernova Remnant 0509-67.5

Prompt the Muse #30 - Speculative Writing Prompt

Image: Prismatic Spring

A strange substance has been found in a protected natural area that could be very valuable.  Obtaining the substance might destroy the area.  Describe the point of view of someone involved in the dispute, in a way that highlights your chosen genre (sci-fi, horror, fantasy, etc.) in 250 words.

Image Credit:  Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park

Becoming Real in Modern Myth and Future Fables

A Fada Azul - The Blue Fairy
Priscilla Tramontano - noprips

A common trope in myths, fables, and fantasy is that of the construct that becomes "real."  This theme is compelling to us for two reasons.  The first is the desire of every artist to see their creation truly come to life (figuratively if not literally).  The second is the desire of every person to transcend a certain condition (flaws, flesh, etc.) and become something greater.  This second idea is related the concept of salvation, that base mortality can somehow be transcended to perfection.

There are many ancient religious stories that have this theme.  An obvious example is in the Bible, where God fashions man out of clay and breathes life into him.  This is often read to be a portent or promise, where after death flesh itself will be transcended into an existence even more real.  In one version of the Prometheus myth, it is he, a Titan, who fashions mankind out of clay, and Athena who gives it the ability to reason.  It is no surprise that humans, who are so creative, would want to see their own ideas take shape and life.

As with the Biblical account, many stories have a supernatural entity of some kind who provides the actual power for changing what humans have created into a living creature.  In the myth of Pygmalion, it is Venus who turns his statue into a woman.  In the Disney version of Pinocchio, it is the Blue Fairy who first animates the wooden toy, and then later turns that toy into a real boy.  The Velveteen Rabbit becomes an actual rabbit the moment he is kissed by the Nursery Magic Fairy.  However, in each of these cases the driver for the creation to become real is the love of another person: Pygmalion, Geppetto, and the boy who owned the rabbit. The supernatural force provided the power for change, but only after a human already loved the creation.

In more modern times, it is science fiction that has grappled with this theme.  In science fiction, the trope is often that of humans seeking the power to create life, themselves, without the need for supernatural influence.  Frankenstein and Metropolis are two examples of humans attempting to create something like a living person, and meeting with mixed success.  I would suggest that both these stories underscore the idea that love still matters.  If a creature is created without love, or is not loved after creation, it cannot truly become human.

Of course the idea has been taken in any number of directions, including the movie Weird Science and in the character of Data on Star Trek.  I think it is particularly interesting to note that Roddenberry's intention was for the Data character to become more and more human throughout the series, but not quite get there.  A major part of this transformation was Data's acquiring a chip that allowed him to feel and express emotion.  I have this idea that Data did become fully human the moment he made his ultimate sacrifice to save others.  Again, love was what was required.

Which of course brings up the question of where this trope can and will go in the future.  I really like the idea that the real power to become human lies with the creation itself, not with any supernatural force, nor the direct creator.

What are your ideas?  What is the next incarnation of this theme in speculative fiction?

Pax, All

Image Credit:  A fada azul by noprips, Priscilla Tramontano on deviantArt.  Tramontano is a Brazilian artist who has been on deviantArt for eight years.  Of this piece, the artist comments, "Consider this as my own version of “A fada azul”, or, "the blue fairy", the good lady who had turned Pinocchio into a real boy. Wooden boys are sooo last century. But Robots? Yeah, now we are talking."  This amazing piece is used with permission of the artist.  I found this image captivating from the very first time I saw it.  The expression on the robot's face is somehow so plaintive.  And the concept of the "fairy" being in a space suit is so unique.    

Brilliant Writer Award Thanks, and Other Updates

Art:  Writer Award

Many, many thanks to Deirdra Coppel at A Storybook World for presenting One Writer's Mind with her "Brilliant Writer Award!"  It is always an honor to have the blog get positive feedback from other bloggers out in the speculative fiction community.  I really enjoy blogging, mostly because it provides a chance to connect with other fans and writers of the stuff we all love.  So thanks to Deirdra and to all my followers and readers!

As far as updates, NaPoWriMo has ended and I did indeed produce more poems.  I didn't manage to create one a day but I ended with sixteen drafts.  Two of them are actually not bad at all so I'm feeling good about my effort for the month.

Apparently these crazy challenges like "write 30 poems in one month" or "write a novel in a month" actually work for me.  Since I've also been thinking of going into a short-story writing blitz, anyway, I've decided to try another of these crazy challenges.  The idea is to write one story a week for 52 weeks in a row.  I was inspired by Nicole at Rivera Runs Through It and couldn't get the idea out of my mind.  Now, I've seen this idea roll around for some years and have always talked myself out it.  Not this time.  I am tweaking the rules for myself to be 52 stories by May 1, 2013.  Naturally, the target is one a week but given my travel schedule I might write some ahead or have to do catch up.  Anyway, there is my stated intent - should be a very interesting writing year.

Pax, All

Image Credit:  Brilliant Writer Award, Deirdra Coppel at A Storybook World

Prompt the Muse #29 - Speculative Writing Prompt

Art: Colorful Design  

A civilization chooses to depict their leaders in a form of art.  Do they create a painting, sculpture, mosaic, poem, piece of music, etc.?  Do they include other elements in the work, such as religious, natural, or technical elements?  Describe the work in 150 words.

Image credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum,  Design Made at Airlie Gardens, 1967 Minnie Evans

Wear Your Influences Proudly

Image: Gas Walker I by soulburn3d

We all produce our writing and art from the raw materials within our minds, yet so much of what is in our minds comes from the outside.  What we eat, our means of transportation, the language we speak, major life benchmarks, and so much more are based on the norms for our regional culture.  People within a culture work from a related set of inspirations to produce designs, styles, and imprints.  Whenever a particular design becomes popular, that vision itself becomes a new inspiration that gets stirred back into the mix.

An example is the artwork Gas Walker I by soulburn3d on deviantArt.  Depending on your own influences, you might see something here that reminds you the movie Alien, or the video game Mass Effect.  For me, it looked a little like a shadow ship from the TV series Babylon 5.  But Babylon 5 is hardly the 'prime mover' of influences.  They too took from what was around them to create the overall design scheme of the series.  I like to think the designers said, "Hey, we have to create the spaceship for the creepy bad guys - so what looks really creepy?"  Well, why not pick out things that actually do creep and put them together?  You can't get much more basic in your influences than forms of life that have been around for tens of thousands of years.

Basic math equation for creepy ship

The artist soulburn3d, Neil Blevins, states this in a way that really appeals to me, "... when it comes down to it, it's all just that we were inspired by the same things. And that's how it should be, everyone should take their influences and try to find a unique take on them, and find other contemporary people producing artwork that speaks to you, and incorporate the parts you like into your own style. I'll never say my style is unique, but hopefully it's different enough that it's recognizable. I wear my influences proudly ..."

That one might have crash landed

Yet it remains a difficult question - how do we take our inspirations, on large and small scales, and give them a twist, a strange perspective, or a surprising viewpoint?  Where does "too derivative" stop and "something unique and interesting" start?  It can be very subjective.  After all, once we have flying spider ships on the brain, everything starts to look like a flying spider ship.  No really.  When NASA's Messenger spacecraft took images of Mercury in 2008, it spotted this set of radial grooves.  B5 fans, some of which were science team members, all had the same reaction.  Yep.  The bad guys were hiding on the unexplored side of Mercury all this time ...

As I noted, the idea that we should wear our "influences proudly" really appeals to me.  We all have them, and being conscious of our inspirations allows us to (A) give them proper credit and homage, and (B) see more clearly how we can use our personalities in combination with our inspirations to produce something that carries our own unique fingerprint.  Perhaps the only real way to know if we have generated the next new vision is if we then become inspirations for the generation of artists and writers that follow us.

Pax, All 

----------

Image Credits:  Artwork - Gas Walker I by appears with the generous permission of soulburn3d, Neil Blevins, on deviantArt.  Artist soulburn3d is a professional digital artist.  "I've been an artist for as long as I can remember. Raised in Canada on a healthy dose of scifi and fantasy films, books, and videogames, I began painting and drawing traditionally, and then got into the computer, making 3d graphics and painting in 2d digitally. Professionally, I've created art for animated features, live action, videogames, TV, ride films and album art for companies like Blur Studio, and Pixar, where I currently work as a Technical Director."  Spider image from, J. Coelho on Flikr via Creative Commons, CC 2.0.  Crab image, Dancing with Ghosts on Flikr via Creative Commons, CC 2.0.  Shadow ship, Babylon 5 series promotional image.  Mercury Image, NASA Messenger mission, NASA/JPL/APL.

Fact, Fiction, and Fractals

Images: Above - The Fall by Golubaja on deviantArt  Below - Agate Geode

I am enthralled by fractal images.  As I've mentioned previously in the post Art Imitates Life, there is something about the repeating patterns of fractals that I find intriguing (maybe even soothing).  But as I view more of them over time, I'm coming to see how much I enjoy fractal image because they make it easier to perceive certain aspects of the world around us that I may not have fully appreciated.

I never really studied fractals in detail.  I have plenty of math in my background, but things like chaos theory were just getting off the ground when I was in those courses, and so exposure was limited.  My grasp of fractals at this point remains incomplete, since even the people who work on fractal systems for a living do not all agree on the perfect definition for a fractal.  Instead, they point to a set of characteristics of a set or system.  One of these characteristics is self-similarity; the same geometry repeated over and over and smaller and smaller scales.

Fractal images, which make it possible to visualize these mathematical sets and systems, were only appreciated by the general populace for their spacy sci-fi look.  I was (and remain) one of those who thought they looked so cool, and so different from the usual boring geometry of everything in the real world.  Which is painfully ironic, since as it turns out almost anything with a complex, dynamic character can't be expressed with simple, easy geometries and linear equations.  Yet they can, in some ways, be expressed with fractals.  That's most of the real world - not just natural systems like weather - but also human made systems like the stock market.

Any dynamic, complex system is chaotic by nature.  That's chaotic in the "math" sense.  Colloquially, we use chaotic to mean unpredictable, random, and lacking in order.  It looks random to us, but chaos does appear to have a kind of underlying structure - fractals.  Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics that examines those complex systems that are very sensitive to starting conditions.  Most people know that as the Butterfly Effect.  It turns out that meteorologists are not just toying with us when they get the weather prediction wrong.  Weather cannot be perfectly predicted, ever.  Sad but true.

But now that chaos theory and an understanding of fractal systems have come along, there are new ways to study these complex systems.  All of this is the setup for a simple observation about crystal growth.  In an idealized world, the growth of crystals can be predicted.  We know the geometry of how those molecules come together, in quartz, say, pretty darn well.  But in the real world, crystals don't grow in a vacuum; there are contaminants, changes in temperature or pressure, changes in pH level, changes in the amount of water in the system, and on and on.  So instead of getting one piece of quartz formed into a perfect point, you end up with an assemblage that looks completely random.

Except it isn't really.  The amazing fractal art at the top, The Fall by Golubaja, exhibits patterns of swirls that appear to form and fade along the boundaries of the image.  When I saw it, it immediately reminded me of a geode, but I couldn't say exactly why.  I went digging for pictures of geodes and looked at them in a way I had not tried to before.  Did they look like fractals?  Definitely.  The picture under the fractal art is that of an agate geode.  I picked this one primarily because the color match was so amazingly close to the fractal art.  In reality, many of the geodes I found could have been used here just as well.

It seems like a simple, small revelation, but I pay attention to these things since they form the basis of how I see the world.  I've always loved visual fractals.  They do look cool and spacy, really.  They continue to inspire my writing.  I always felt they took me out of the mundane world.  It is a wonderful irony that they actually describe the mundane world very well.  It's a connection between my everyday world, and the worlds I choose to create, that I find ... well ... inspiring.

Later, All

--------------------

Image Credits:  Fractal Art Image The Fall by Golubaja on deviantArt.  Golubaja is a prolific artist who has been on dA for more than eight years, and whose work includes fractals, drawings, photomanipulations, photography and more.  This work of art is used with generous permission by the artist.  Agate geode in the public domain.

Planetary Poetry for National Poetry Month

Image:  Science - Saturn's satellite Titan

Time goes by way, way too fast.  Perhaps that's why the main character in my science fiction universe is a time traveler.  Part of me wishing I had more time, and some device to help me put it all in order.  Not that that is what his life is like ... so I probably should count myself lucky that I am forced into this linear lifestyle.

The linear nature of time has brought me to April, already.  It's been productive off-line, with ongoing edits to two novels that really need them.  But I am glad to find myself in April with an excuse to deviate from the novel-editing and into poetry for a brief while.  As you know, I've been one of those crazy folks who tries to write a poem a day in April to celebrate National Poetry Month.  I don't put my drafts up here on the blog, since I am working towards a specific project that I hope will be published.  But really, I have written poems this month (ahem, cough).  Really.  Okay, not one a day.  I have three, and several pages of notes, but you work with what you have.

Image: Phobos

I do, however, really enjoy going to the sites of other authors and checking out their daily posts.  Scientist and musician Andrew Rivkin continues to impress me with his dedication to the month.  For three years, he has posted a poem a day in April to his blog Imperturbable Music.  First it was a month of baseball poetry, then last year it was elements from the periodic table.  This year the theme seems to be planetary satellites.  Again, he has chosen not to divulge the name of the target, but instead leaves it to the reader to uncover the poem's inspiration like a riddle.

In addition, each poem contains so many references and allusions to topics relating to the satellite that each one of these is a small puzzle in and of itself.  I'm a planetary scientist, and am hard pressed to identify every single reference.  They are drawn from science, history, literature, religion, mythology, and on and on.

Here's a passage from today's poem "One of the Friends."

How many stories she could tell,

and what secrets lurk,

peeking out from inside!

Joining the TNO diaspora,

riding with the Centaurs,

greeting Cassini at the city gates

and consenting to a few pictures

before going on her own way.

Image:  Art's Conception of probing below Europa's Ice

His quirky poetry was noted on the The Planetary Society blog, penned by Emily Lakdawalla.  As always, I enjoy seeing where literature, science, and art come together.  I encourage you to tap into your own favorite speculative fiction topic, and see if the muse strikes you to create a few lines of verse.  Or go ahead and get back to novel writing - that's cool, too.  :)

Pax, All

Images: NASA and NASA/JPL. Titan - Color stretched to show detail. Phobos - Again, color stretched like crazy. Third image is a NASA artist's conception of a probe looking for life under Europa's icy lithosphere. Shown are imagined geothermal vents. My opinion? Ah, life is not too likely, here. But I'd still use it for story-fodder.  Lines from the poem "One of the Friends" are reprinted here with permission from the author, Andrew Rivkin.