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News from what's happening in the world, touching upon themes that might be of interest to Stan Robinson readers. On the menu this week: some geoengineering, the economy crisis, prehistorical climate change, renewables investment and alien-like photos on Earth!

More after the jump.

Following the recent dust storm in Australia that made it look like Mars (we linked to pictures here), the dust had some interesting effects on the marine biota that could very well serve as proof-of-concept for geoengineering efforts. The dust that settled in the ocean provided nitrogen and phosphate to the plankton, whose population exploded and in turn expanded the population of local fish. At the same time, this ocean fertilization caused the algae to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their organisms and -- arguably -- store it in ocean depths for the long term.

Ocean fertilization using iron dumping has been proposed before but as with any large geoengineering project its wider effects are a matter of debate. This is very akin to the salt dispersion effort championed by Frank Vanderwal and NSF in the Science In The Capital books to restart the thermohaline circulation of the oceans. (via io9)

"Crisis management specialist and personal advisor" John Berling Hardy uses a Robinson quote from Green Mars ("That’s libertarians for you – anarchists who want police protection from their slaves", from the anarchist character The Coyote) to argue for a more balanced regulation of the market in this article.

William Ruddiman, professor at the University of Virginia, published a paper supporting the idea that humans first started altering the Earth's climate when they first started farming some 5000-8000 years ago, burning forests to clear land and building rice paddies that release methane, an idea he has been supporting since 2003. The idea has met with criticism, for example that people were too few back then to have an effect, that they had no modern fertilizers or tools, to which Ruddiman replied that these early farmers had a lot of land and no means to control the fires they started, meaning they could farm the ground to a barren state and move on -- effectively "those tens of millions (of people) had the impact of hundreds of millions, because per person, they had 10 times the impact". Coincidentally, I got a similar feeling when I read Stephen Baxter's Evolution: humans have been altering the environment extensively be it through bush fires, farming or wood and coal burning for thousands of years. A dangerous assertion from this would be to think that today's climate change is not caused by fossil fuel combustion and that there is no need to move away from that: a point on which both Ruddiman and his critics agree needs to be acted upon.

Speaking of which, the world is gearing up for the United Nations' meeting in Copenhagen in December, where a follow-up on 1997's Kyoto Protocol will be debated, with talks this week in Bangkok. This week also, the European Commission announced it would triple its research budget on clean technologies from €3bn to €8bn yearly following its 2007 Strategic Energy Technology (SET) Plan that would put it in a pathway to reduce its emissions by 80% by 2050 compared to 1990 emissions levels.

And on a final note, here are some beautiful photos from alien-looking landscapes that are however very much Earth-based. This city in Yemen looks straight out of a fantasy novel!

(photo by Jan Vandorpe)

"The Lucky Strike" by PM Press is now released in the USA. It contains the titular novella, another short story and an in-depth interview with Robinson. You can post impressions and reviews here. The release date for other territories seems to be 2010.

On that occasion, Stan will be doing readings in October in San Francisco. He will be appearing with author Terry Bisson, who is also part of the "Outspoken Authors" series launched by PM Press and had participated in the Robinson-edited collection Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias in 1997 with "Bears Discover Fire" (also check out this excellent filmed short adaptation of Bisson's classic short story "They're Made Out Of Meat"!). Two readings are to be held:

The first on Oct-21-2009, 7pm, at The Green Arcade:
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street @ Gough
San Francisco, CA 94102

The second on Oct-24-2009, 3pm, at Borderlands Books:
Borderlands Books
866 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

Also, Robinson has penned the introduction to "Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction" (AK Press, an independent publisher specialized in radical and anarchist literature), also released on October 1st 2009. With interviews by Steampunk Magazine editor Magpie Killjoy of the likes of The Dispossessed writer Ursula LeGuin, ecotage partisan Derrick Jensen, V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore, "Multiverse" writer Michael Moorcock and many others, where they "reflect on the ways in which their personal politics have shaped their work", this book gives a "specific focus on anarchist politics" in fiction. Magpie will be touring for it as well, and since it's under creative commons a PDF should be available later on.

Feedback from Kim Stanley Robinson's book tour in London last week.

First the signing at Forbidden Planet (photo via their photostream):

More after the jump.

And second, the New Scientist meeting in the Yorkshire Grey, of which we get a detailed account from Robert Gordon at Future Conscience. Also present were writers Geoff Ryman and Paul McAuley. There were readings (Robinson read out from the Virginia Woolf letter to Olaf Stapledon he uncovered for the New Scientist article), a Q&A session (surprisingly for the PKD uninitiated, Robinson's favourite P.K.Dick novel would be Now Wait For Last Year and, less surprisingly, favourite SF novel in general Samuel Delany's Dhalgren -- if he had to choose) and general mingling of guests and attendees. Head over to Gordon's article for more details (photo by him).

Meanwhile, Robinson's article in the New Scientist published last week sparked quite a debate as one would have expected from its clear-cut position. Are science fiction novels under-represented or excluded entirely from literary awards such as the UK's Man Booker prize? Is there a literary genre that monopolizes literary awards? Are non-SF/fantasy/horror novels in general a genre in and of themselves that have their own prizes like SF has eg. the Hugo? Are the award jurys accountable or is it the publishers, who provide them with award candidates? Are award jurys and/or publishers snobbing SF, or is SF distancing itself from "mainstream" literature willingly? This is far from being the first time these things are being discussed, and SF as a literature has evolved and sophisticated itself a lot since the 1950s pulp era. Robinson himself has always described himself as a science fiction writer and been described by others as a literary science fiction writer in a milieu where many SF writers deny the branding of their work as science fiction in hopes it would be better regarded and not quickly categorized as non-literature.

The New Scientist article was relayed by The Guardian, which gathered reactions from the accused Man Booker jury members James Naughtie and John Mullan, who argued that it greatly depended on what the publishers chose to submit to the jury but who also described SF as a genre that is now "in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other", which is hardly a non-discriminative comment. Academic and author Adam Roberts -- whose new novel Yellow Blue Tibia should probably be this year's Man Booker prize winner according to Robinson, and whose review of Galileo's Dream was very positive -- also argued in another Guardian article on these exact topics.

In other news, Australia is plagued by a sand storm and as a result the Australians wonder whether they woke up in Mars. Judge by yourself: is this Sydney or Odessa?

(photo by Greg Wood, via Boston.com)

Today, Thursday 17, took place the K.S. Robinson signing at Forbidden Planet in London.

Taking the opportunity of having Robinson on British soil, London-based science magazine New Scientist gives you the opportunity for a pub meet with Robinson himself, tomorrow Friday 18th, 7pm local time! The chosen pub (for it's a pub, this is London after all!) is:

Yorkshire Grey
2 Theobald's Rd
London, London WC1X 8PN
United Kingdom

Details here.

This week's issue of New Scientist (#2726) also has a science fiction special and Robinson is a guest editor.

More after the jump.

The New Scientist's "The fiction of now" features an editorial by Robinson, in which he quotes from a 1937 letter by Virginia Woolf to Olaf Stapledon, praising him for Last and First Men (we already pointed out Robinson's (and mine) fancy of Stapledon), and he goes on to develop his view on today's British science fiction literature, "the best British literature of our time", as being in a new golden age. Building on from Woolf's letter and the lack of SF novels among 'non-genre' award winners, he urges people to be more open to reading science fiction.

Also, for this issue Robinson "challenged eight leading British SF authors to write flash fiction about the world 100 years from now". The flash fiction, each about 300 words long are accessible on the website; the writers are Stephen Baxter, Nicola Griffith, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley, Ian McDonald, Justina Robson, Geoff Ryman and Ian Watson.

And if you're up for it, New Scientist launches a Flash Fiction competition on that very theme, with the winner to be published.

KSR's novels are very inspiring for both the intellectual and the adventurer. The Mars novels certainly give a lot of weight to majestic landscapes, virgin vistas and never-before-seen world-building. Who has read the novels and hasn't spent time wondering what would Ann watching a copper-violet sunset over the Tharsis Buldge would look like? One who has is French KSR fan Ludovic Celle, who has dedicated an entire blog to Mars visuals which I urge you to visit (don't be intimidated by the French, the focus here is the visuals): the aptly named Da Vinci Mars Design.

More after the jump.

Apart from collecting imagery from every film and documentary on Mars in existence, Ludovic shows a simple and efficient way to produce Mars imagery: by photoshopping (well, GIMPifying) images taken from elsewhere. A red filter over an image from James Cameron's The Abyss takes you to Red Mars (see above).

A silver line over a red sky gives you the space elevator:

There are many artists who have taken a pencil and drawn what Man on Mars would look like. Apart from Don Dixon (the Mars trilogy US cover artist), there's John Harris, Peter Elson, Manchu, Carlos NCT and many others... Like T.E. Williams and his Ares model, Ludovic has gone from drawing to 3D model. Here's a rover:

Here's an imressive view of Hiroko's bamboo city of Zygote:

And finally, some pen-drawn sketches or storyboards for some Mars trilogy scenes:

No more of the blood-red sky of Ghosts of Mars. No more tents freely dangling in the toxic martian wind of Mission to Mars. Until we see the real thing. Any visual adaptation of KSR's Mars novels would need to be very careful with photography and design in order to keep with the realism of his vision.