I’ve been pondering the value of science in fiction, and I’d love to hear your thoughts over at Science in My Fiction.
Dinosaurs Don’t Eat Flowers
Today is International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch Day. In honor of the holiday, please accept my pixel-stained flash piece, and all the other flash fiction stories I’ve posted over the past year.
“Maybe dinosaurs ate them.”
Alice looked at her little sister in disgust. “Dinosaurs didn’t eat flowers, dummy. Flowers hadn’t been invented yet.”
Meg looked up at her. “You’re not smarter than me just because you’re older.” Anyone watching would have recognized a long-standing sibling disagreement, if there had been anyone left to watch. “Dinosaurs did so eat flowers, so maybe we can too.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone eating flowers. I don’t know if people can do that.” Alice screwed up her face, trying so hard to remember whether people could eat flowers. She was kind of hungry, but somehow flowers just didn’t seem right. Meg ripped a handful of blossoms from the shrub and stuffed them in her mouth. She spit them out again before Alice could do more than take a breath to yell at her. “Ick. Dinosaurs definitely didn’t eat flowers.”
“Dinosaurs ate other dinosaurs,” Alice replied with all the certainty of an older sister who’s nearly eleven, almost. “So that doesn’t help, because there aren’t any more dinosaurs.”
“There aren’t any more airplanes either,” Meg retorted. Alice wasn’t sure why that mattered, since nothing ate airplanes. Or maybe something did, and that’s why there weren’t any more. Their mama was supposed to be on an airplane coming home, only the airplanes all stopped. The internet stopped too, and that’s what they noticed first because the iPad went dark in the middle of a cartoon. Their babysitter said some words Meg wasn’t supposed to know. Alice wasn’t sure where she went after that. She told them to stay in the house, but after a couple hours in the dark they got bored and went outside.
Meg stomped around like a T. Rex for a few minutes, while Alice tried to listen to the grownups. She was the big sister, after all, and she needed to know what was going on. That’s where she heard about the airplanes. They all fell out of the sky, Mr. Neely from down the street said. He was out in his yard talking to Mrs. Singh who lived on the other side of him. All the houses were dark, so people were standing around in the street. Alice wondered what they’d do when it got dark.
Then Alice wondered what she and Meg would do when it got dark. “Meg. Enough dinosaurs.” She grabbed her sister’s arm and tugged her back toward the house.
Meg started to object, then looked at Alice’s face and stopped mid-complaint. “What do we do? Where’s our babysitter? Where’s Mama?”
Alice decided they should stay in the house until Mama got home. Mama always told her to be responsible, and that would be the responsible thing to do. Something outside made a horrible noise, like when she dropped a plate only much, much worse. Alice peeked out the window. Somebody she didn’t know has smashed the Gonzalez’s door in across the street. Maybe they couldn’t stay here after all.
Alice dumped the schoolwork out of Meg’s backpack, the green one with the allosaurus on it. She put in two bottles of water, some Oreos, and a whole bag of Goldfish crackers, plus Meg’s favorite stuffed animal. In her own she put the biggest knives from the kitchen, the things from her mother’s jewelry box wrapped up in a clean towel, and clean t-shirts and underwear for both of them. She left their cell phones because they wouldn’t turn on.
The forest started right behind their house. She and Meg could go out the back without anybody seeing them. She knew how to get into the old mine shaft; she spent lots of time running around in the woods. Hardly anybody knew it was there, so she and Meg could hide from the monsters that ate airplanes. They had food and water and clothes, and they could take care of themselves until Mama came back.
That’s what dinosaurs do.
This one differs slightly from the usual twitter flash. Same time limit (an hour), but different source for ideas, and it wasn’t written on a Friday.
From me – spring flowers, dinosaurs
From Nick – Forest, airplane, abandoned tunnel
Science Paper Art
I saw Lisa Nilsson’s anatomical paper art on NewScientist this morning.
It’s gorgeous, and precisely hits my sweet spot linking scientific accuracy, beauty, and clever use of materials to mimic form.
Egg
Yeast bread and spices. That’s what the house smelled like. How could the current inhabitants do something as comforting as bake hot cross bun? Satai stood on the porch. The railing was painted bright blue, and the floor a deep piney green. The vivid red door looked cheerful and welcoming. The fading daffodils and the budding tulips only added to the general good nature of the house. It was the kind of house where your beloved grandmother lived, or your best friend.
She’d been hunting them for what felt like forever, from the court of Catherine the Great to Timbuktu. That sounded like a metaphor for a long time and a long distance, but it was nothing but the truth. It wouldn’t have taken nearly so long, but she lost them during the chaos of the Crimean War.
Here and now Satai could hardly believe she’d found them. Her informant had been certain, and she’d left him in no condition to warn anyone of her presence. She stared at the forsythia golden along the steps. A house like this, it should have encysted them, pushed them out whole before they had time to infect it. When she’d circled the place earlier, counting the possible exits, she’d even seen a beehive in the back, in a small orchard.
The tiny video camera she was wearing would pick up the colors, the sounds of birds singing in the trees overhead, but not the smell of cinnamon and cloves. Satai hoped it wouldn’t betray her trembling, though she could probably edit that out when she made the DVD.
Standing here for too long was suspicious. This time of day, people would probably take her for a visiting friend, but the last thing she needed was a garrulous neighbor coming over to say hello. The inhabitants of the house would be sound asleep by now, not to wake until the sun was firmly set.
The lock was old. Satai slipped it easily, then closed the red door behind herself. The buns were on the counter on a cooling rack. She touched one, but they were cold. And crosses? Why would they have put the crosses on the tops?
A white porcelain bowl was heaped with dyed eggs, mostly red like the Easter eggs of her childhood, but some drawn with the intricate designs that the court had come to favor. She didn’t think anyone remembered how to make those eggs. She hadn’t seen any for so long, and the red ones in even longer. There was no skill to those, just boiling the eggs with onion skins, but nobody bothered.
She touched one, ran her finger over the smooth ovoid. They should be in a basket, in a kitchen that smelled of smoke, in a farm waiting eagerly for spring. April was a hard month back then, with winter stores nearly exhausted and summer’s bounty a long way off. Here and now, it was flowers and trips to the grocery store, an easier life but one that slipped by, leaving no mark.
Satai wondered if those she pursued missed their homes as much as she did, just then. They were the only ones who might remember, who had been shaped by the same spring, and the only ones who might help her forget.
She picked up an egg, turning it over and over in her hands, then took it out onto the porch to watch the bees rumble through the forsythia and wait for the dusk.
Twitter flash, with contributors:
Timbuktu, DVD production, Crimean War espionage – @quasigeo
Beekeeping and Easter eggs – @qitou
Scientific visualization
I’m waiting eagerly for the computer to churn out the results I need for the talk I’m writing. I’m giving it a week from Monday, so some results would be nice. (Highly-trained professional, closed course. Do not attempt at home.)
While I’m waiting, I’ve been looking at some recent scientific visualizations. Ways to portray data that are both informative and beautiful are an interest of mine, and these three examples are really quite good.
Perpetual Ocean: Animated map of global ocean currents from the Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The video is lovely.
Hint.fm has put together a similar visualization for winds over the United States, only this one is near real-time. Then compare that to this NASA Earth Observatory map of two extreme circulation patterns that caused drought or flooding.
How about a look at atmospheric composition instead of currents? This visualization of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory clearly makes the case that the Industrial Revolution changed not just society but the atmosphere as well.
And now, I have some data of my own to visualize.
It’s complicated
Jen Rhee sent me a link to a graphic that she and her team put together on girls in science and tech fields. There’s nothing in there that surprises me, but they’ve done a nice job pulling it together. I’m too busy doing science right now to have much to say about it, but I wanted to share, and I’d welcome any comments.
Originally from http://www.engineeringdegree.net/girls-in-stem and now stored directly here because of Engineering Degree’s administrative issues.
Goodies
SO MANY good things are coming out in March, or have appeared in the last couple of weeks. Here are a few of the things I’ve been looking forward to for ages. That’s what they mean by March Madness, right?
Books, lots of books. First a couple that came out in February:
Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed. I heard Saladin read from this at World Fantasy in Columbus, and have been waiting impatiently ever since. Fantasy set in somewhere other than northern Europe, with a protagonist who isn’t young and sexy? So refreshing.
Then there’s Arctic Rising by Tobias Buckell. Toby and I have had various friendly online arguments about all sorts of things, and I’ve promised him a review of the science in his new novel. There should be more books with global warming in them. I also roped Toby into inaugurating the Science in My Fiction guest post irregular series.
Two books I’m interested in come out today, so you should buy them right now and make the authors happy and successful.
I’ve heard amazing things about The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin Kiernan. Kiernan writes dense, dark, complicated stories with unreliable narrators. Not easy reads in a number of ways, but worth the effort. The author and some talented artists put together a lovely, haunting trailer for the novel.
Seanan McGuire’s new book Discount Armageddon comes out today, starting a new series for her. Biology and magic: sounds like my kind of thing. I like her zombie novels (written as Mira Grant) better than her urban fantasy; I’m hoping this new series melds the things I like best about both.
Later this month Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear arrives. This is another fantasy novel with an unconventional setting. I had the opportunity to read an ARC, and I highly recommend this one. I’m a serious fan of Bear’s prose (top-notch sentences) and themes–the Promethean Age books are some of my favorite fantasy novels ever–and I enjoyed this tremendously.
And then there’s music. Whisperado’s website is badly in need of an update, since it doesn’t even mention their new album I’m Not the Road. Since you’ve probably never heard of the band, here’s a taste.
Long-time favorite of mine, The Magnetic Fields, have a new album out today, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, their first in several years. I’m enthralled by this video from it (though it’s not entirely work-safe).
What is it about March 6? Today has been a fabulous if somewhat expensive day. And I don’t have time to read any of them! I’m utterly swamped at work, so I hope these suggestions will keep you busy until mid-April or so when I expect to re-emerge. Of course, then I’ll have to spend some time buried under a pile of novels.
Plinth
My workload roughly doubled in the past week, from its already-high state to something approaching insane. Deadlines moved, cancelled activities resurfaced, new projects fell from the sky. It’s all good, but blogging will be rare to nonexistent until mid-April, as will fiction writing, and pretty much anything that isn’t work.
Except Sunday evenings – that’s writers group time, and I intend to keep that up. After a day spent editing grant proposals and book chapters, I didn’t have much brainpower left for anything major, so I solicited ideas on twitter. The usual suspects contributed, and here’s the result.
The stone pillar loomed over the town square. Today only a trio of pigeons occupied its flat top, their inevitable leavings sinking down through cracks in the stone. The pigeons had no use for the stairs spiraling up its sides, carved from the same block of granite as the pillar they encircled, their centers eroded by centuries of footsteps. Grooves around the edges of the steps, worn and faded, showed which parts the apprentice wielded the laser cutter on. The overslip lessened as the stairs ascended, until at the top the work of master and student stonecutter were indistinguishable.
Clouds scudded across the azure sky, trailing blotches of shadow across the square. Nothing moved except the sliding light and darkness. Even the feral cat that haunted the square dozed on a window ledge, having given up on pigeons for the time being.
The windows surrounding the square opened into house and guildhall and kirk, but all were blank. No faces looked out, no blurred motion appeared through the glass. One of the windows at the corner of the square had shattered, shards littering the ground beneath it, the jagged bits covered in dust and pollen.
Whatever force had broken the window came from the inside.
Once the square had been full of noise and movement and music far into the night. The three men and one woman who stood on the plinth watched over the barely-controlled chaos. Traveling vacuum cleaner salesmen–their products guaranteed to suck–vied with peddlers of cut-rate powders and potions for everything from healing broken bones to loosening stiff muscles, and the bars fronting the square did brisk business in gin martinis, or whatever drinks were currently fashionable. Glowing chartreuse cocktails had been a brilliant if short-lived sensation.
The entertainers had been the main attraction: jugglers of iridescent fire, dancers in antigrav bubbles, courtesans of all genders garbed in modes from eighteenth century high court to the finest nanofabrics. After sunset the square glowed with gemlike light limning the forms of the participants, trailing from the walls, puddling on the ground, flowing in luminescent rivulets and runnels around the plinth, but never touching its black silhouette.
As the sun moved toward the west, the shadow of the plinth extended across the square, touching the base and then the top of the building on the far side before merging with the shadows of dusk. No light glimmered anywhere. The cat had vanished with the sun. The pigeons had flown to their roost long before sunset.
Even the people had fled from the shadow of the plinth, but not before blood soaked into the stone where the light had refused to flow.
Contributions:
@fadeaccompli plinths
@ChiaLynn Pieces of glass
@qitou vacuum cleaners, gin martinis, muscle relaxants.
@marjorie73 18th century harlot
