Voyager by Stephen J Pyne

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery by Stephen J. Pyne is a book that aims to set the West’s exploration of the Solar System in its historical context. Pyne, a historian at Arizona State University, has an “organizing conceit” for looking at this context based around three broad ages of discovery.

The first began with the great voyages of discovery by Renaissance explorers of the fifteenth century and was led off by Portugal. The second began in the Enlightenment, when mid-eighteenth century Britain and France led the way with scientific expeditions to measure the transit of Venus and measure an arc of the meridian. The third Great Age kicked off in the mid-twentieth century, tackling the exploration of the last great wildernesses of Earth—the Antarctic and the oceans—and space. Driven at first by the cold war, the great voyages that distinguish this new age of discovery are marked by technological sophistication to the point where the explorers themselves are often robots.

Whether we accept Pyne’s categories or not does not matter much. The framework provides the author with a means to explore many parallels and similarities he finds between the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern worlds and the West’s attitudes toward the three great motives for pursuing these difficult, dangerous, and expensive voyages: discovery for its own sake, the ability to do science that you can’t do at home, and finding new worlds for people to colonise or exploit.

What results is a broad and sweeping investigation of the very nature of exploration, with the larger-than-life adventure of the two Voyager spacecraft’s “grand tour” of the Solar System to give it all shape and direction.

After the introductory chapters, which do an excellent job of setting the ground for the three Great Ages and the Voyagers’ role in the present Great Age, Pyne follows the journey of the two robot explorers from their launches in 1977 to the present day and beyond.

The only way it was possible to slingshot these spacecraft to the outer reaches of the Solar System, through the heliopause and out into interstellar space, was to take advantage of a once in 176-year alignment of the outer planets. That the science and technology, as well as the political and social climates were just right at just this moment made this amazing, 33-year (and counting) voyage perhaps the defining journey of exploration of our age. Long years of cruising between planets, punctuated by brief and frantic encounters as each ship swings around a planet and moves on, gives the book its structure and its style, activity and reflection, leading us step by step into the future. As Pyne puts it, the book is “an interpretive history whose internal rhythms mimic those that led to Voyager’s launch and journey.”

We meet a number of characters along the way, not just the luminaries of the Voyager mission, including a succession of project leaders and technical specialists, and key figures like Michael Minovitch, Gary Landro, and Carl Sagan, but also the explorers of previous Great Ages: Magellan, da Gama, Columbus, Cooke, Lewis and Clarke, Shackleton, and many others.

But the people are essentially incidental to the story. This is a history book and rarely dwells on individual stories. Institutions and nations also appear. Portugal’s struggle with Morocco, the USA’s struggle with the Soviet Union, JPL’s struggle with NASA, the Royal Society’s competition with the Paris Academy of Science—all provide the impetus to the great waves of exploration, discovery and, sometimes, colonization.

It is a book that leaves no stone unturned as Pyne’s focus moves from one aspect of exploration to another—the naming of newly-discovered places, the treatment of space exploration (and especially the fantasy of colonisation) in science fiction, the legal treatment of new worlds, the people who speak out for and against exploration.

Sometimes the comparisons between the Voyager mission and earlier explorations are interesting and instructive. Pyne’s discussions of the political and social, even the psychological bases for exploration are often fascinating. Sometimes they verge on the bizarre, as when he compares the physical dimensions of the Voyager craft with those of Lewis and Clarke’s nineteenth century keelboat, and Columbus’s caravel Niña.

While the writing is generally precise and very nicely done, Pyne has a small tendency to sound overblown and somewhat poetical (e.g., “[Voyager’s] trajectory has the arc of a hero’s quest.”) In his defense, he has taken on a huge and quite magnificent subject, and a little exuberance in the writing should probably be forgiven. Even when he swings the other way, rattling off transmission bit-rates, speeds, distances, and broadcast signal strengths, he uses technical terms with complete confidence and clearly understands the engineering, the communications jargon, and the celestial mechanics he is talking about.

Yet there is only so much that can be done with words. As Pyne himself says, “The Voyagers spoke to the public primarily through images, for which words served more as captions than as stand-alone texts.” So it is extremely odd that the book contains not one single image from among all the thousands that the Voyagers sent back to Earth. All we get are a few (simply drawn) diagrams and graphs in an appendix. It is true that many of the Voyager images Pyne talks about are so well known that anyone who has been watching the news for the past 30 years will recognize many of them. Yet the lack of images is a striking and unfortunate omission.

Voyager is a thoughtful and reflective book in which Pyne brings a wide and frequently detailed knowledge to bear on one of our more interesting human traits: the urge to explore. It is not the book to look in for the human faces of the people who discovered and dissected new worlds. It is a book that considers the broader sweep of history in counterpoint to the detailed technical, scientific, social, and political minutiae of this one, exceptional voyage.

In the brave new world of electronic publishing – in which we live right now – picking up an unknown book by an unknown author has become a much bigger risk than it used to be in the old, print-only days of a couple of years ago. This is because, on the major retails sites, the line between commercially-published and self-published ebooks has become rather blurred. Sometimes it is impossible to tell which is which without looking at the content. Sometimes, of course, even the content won’t give you a clue, but that is only in a few, very rare cases. So, if you pick up an ebook at random, and it turns out to be self-published, the chances are that you have wasted your very, very precious time.

I don’t want to disparage all self-published work. A small amount of it is very good. I just want to point out that finding the good among the bad is hard work. Let’s face it, finding the good among the bad in commercially-published books is hard enough. But, with commercially-published work, the book has gone through a sort of quality control process that self-published work typically has not. It has been read by an agent (most likely) and the agent has liked it. The agent may have worked with the writer to improve the book. Then it has been read by an intern at a publishing house and, if she liked it, it has been passed up the line to a commissioning editor. If that editor also liked it, and could convince an acquisitions meeting that the book looked saleable, it probably got into print (or ebook format) but only after a further, very important process; the manuscript was edited.

It seems to me, therefore, that the “vetting” publishers do is in two parts. In one part, the publisher (and the agent, if one is involved) makes a judgement about commercial potential. Here, publishers (and agents) mostly get it wrong, judging by the statistics. (Most published novels – perhaps as many as 80% – do not “earn out” their advances. The figures for début novels are very much worse.) In another part the editor (and perhaps an agent) makes a judgement about the manuscript’s quality and then actively works with the author to bring the book up to the best standard they can achieve between them.

When it comes to giving the reading public the assurance that an unknown book is a good bet, it is the editor’s part that appears to be really crucial in all this. The commercial judgement by the publisher seems to be not much better than throwing darts at the slush pile. The recognition of good writing and the work that polishes the manuscript, is what makes the real difference between commercially-published and (most) self-published books.

It looks as if there is a huge opportunity here for editors. Since it is their judgement and their work that gives the public its confidence in a published book, it is the editors that readers and reviewers should be paying attention to. For this to happen, editors would need to begin branding themselves and working with independent (self-published) authors as well as publishing houses. Book reviewers and readers could then ask themselves the question, “Is this a book that has been worked on by a well-respected editor?” regardless of who published it.

I’m not suggesting that an editor’s brand would ever outsell an author’s brand – although for top editors with great judgement and skill, perhaps it would – only that editors are what self-published books need, and editor brand awareness is what reviewers and the buying public needs so they can tell, by glancing at the cover, whether a book is a good risk or not. Then the distinction between commercially-published and self-published can safely disappear.

What can I say? It's fun!

Not being a religious person, I don’t have a handy reference book to guide me on moral matters. So I tend to put in quite a lot of brain-time working on questions of right and wrong. One of these questions popped into my head a couple of years ago – about the time when I first started having my fiction published. I suppose that, until that point, writing fiction was just something I did in private that had no consequences in the world. Suddenly, people were reading the stuff and I had a moral quandary: telling people stories about things that have not happened seems very much like lying. In fact, as far as I can tell, it is exactly like lying. Not to mince words, it is lying! I wanted to be a writer but did I want to tell lies for a living?

I voiced my concerns on a couple of online forums at the time and got the usual responses, which amounted to this, despite the veneer of fiction, the novelist is actually telling a “deeper truth”. The notion is that by making characters that are psychologically real, their responses, even to fictional situations, reveal truths about the Human Condition. What’s more, without the fictional setting, the carefully constructed story, and the carefully chosen characters, it would be almost impossible to state these truths in any other way.

I didn’t like the answer so I shut up and brooded about it. It may be true that, in certain types of fiction, or in fiction of a certain very high quality, such “truths” can be revealed, but how can we be sure we are seeing truth in such cases, rather than being bamboozled by a clever writer (who may themselves be suffering all kinds of delusions about reality)? Besides, what proportion of the books that exist are such high art? One in ten thousand? One in a million? And what about the rest? Don’t they count? The explanation threw up more questions than it answered – a sign, I always think – that there is something very wrong with the explanation. Yet I couldn’t find my own answer and had to let the conundrum simmer on the back burner all this time.

Now, I think I see it. I was right. Fiction is lying. There is no way to pretend it isn’t. If by some fluke of skill or chance it reveals a “deeper truth” that’s fine, but it almost never does and it’s status as a lie remains unmitigated in almost every case. Unmitigated except by one and only one thing: fiction is entertaining. And that is where the crux of the moral problem is resolved. We enjoy fiction. We like to be told stories, even though we know they are not true. We collude, as readers, with the writers. The harmless deception I practiced in the quiet of my office is, after publication, a vice enjoyed in tandem with other consenting adults.

My readers give me permission to lie. They give me encouragement to do it! God bless ‘em. I may be lying, but I don’t deceive anybody. I may be lying, but only people who want to be lied to pay any attention. And, as with other vices, practiced in private by consenting adults, I have no objection to that whatsoever.

–

The title is from Sir Walter Scott’s poem Marmion.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!”

As one of my favourite authors, Sir Walter and I have tangled webs together many times.

Where do you get your ideas?

Although no-one has ever asked me, I thought I’d answer the question anyway. I’ve just started writing a new book – a new trilogy in fact – and I’ve been watching myself as the process of coming up with the story unfolds. And this is how it happened.

Almost three months ago, I started feeling something. In the back of my head I had a mood, a sense of something big, something grand, and dark, and special. I quickly realised it was a new book coming out. I often get the mood or feel of a book before I write it. This one was very, very large. So I supposed it had to be a space opera.

Space opera has become, to sci-fi, what The Faerie Queen is to poetry, what The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, what The Grapes of Wrath is to literature. It is the big canvas on which only the grandest of themes are depicted, the highest of high concepts, in an adventure that stretches across the Galaxy, through oceans of time, or beyond. The space opera that had begun stalking me was a big one, so big it was daunting.

I knew what I needed, a place and time for it to unfold in, a cast of characters to carry the story, and stakes so high that loss – huge, apocalyptic loss – confronted everyone at every turn. Yet nothing in my head at the time could possibly match the epic proportions of the sensation I was feeling.

So I started experimenting, sketching out futures, playing with disasters. It took me weeks before I had a place and time  – a future ten thousand years from now, a sphere one hundred light years across containing a thousand inhabited systems – no aliens, just 120 billion humans stranger to one another than they have ever been. I worked on the details, the histories, the technologies, the societies, the economics, the politics… In the end, I had enough to get started.

A story was starting to emerge as I looked at the world it would take place in. It would centre around a catastrophe and it had to be a big one. I sat for hours and pondered the nature of such a beast, why it should happen, how it would unfold, but, while I could describe it in detail, I didn’t know just what it was until, one day, sitting outside in the sunshine, staring into the forest that surrounds my house, I found myself staring at the dark branches of a massive tree, its limbs twisting and dividing against the sky, and I knew I had it.

Now, all I needed were people and a story. Finding the right people is hard, but once you have them, finding their story is easy. For a story that might stretch across three books – or more – the people have to be very special, very interesting, and very sympathetic. I started plucking them from the various cultures and activities of the world I had been inventing. They were OK, not bad, sort of alright – but nothing special. And then I found the one I needed, the catalyst who would bring every one of the others to life, make the story sing, make this huge edifice of invention hang together.

How did I know I’d found such a magical person? Because this was the one with ‘the voice’. The voice of the book, the voice that was there in the mood I’d sensed all those weeks ago. The one that could tell this story and make it sound just the way I could feel it sounding inside me. With this character, with their voice in my head, I could, at last, tell the tale that had been nagging at me.

I’m very excited about it. I’ve written an introductory chapter (so much still to do!) and it feels right, it feels good. I’m ready now to take the plunge into what might be two or three years’ work to bring this to completion.

Wish me luck.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

(from ‘The Waking‘ by Theodore Roethke.)

Writing is a strange business. Last night I killed my babies.

I woke at about 3 am, drenched in sweat, even though it was cool. My head was full of purpose. I knew what to do. I got up, dressed in the dark and staggered through the house to my office. I thought about coffee, I’m always so slow to wake, but there was no time.

My novel, Time & Tyde, something I wrote two books ago, which got lots of attention but no contract, needed fixing. And I knew, at last, what to do. In a daze, I squinted against the glare of the screen, waiting, waiting for everything to boot and load and settle down so I could write.

It started in the wrong place. Time & Tyde is a psychological thriller. I’d never realised before, but now I understood. It was a psychological thriller but it started like a literary novel, beautiful prose, deft brush-strokes to introduce, describe, all those clever phrases, all that lovely rhythm.

I cut it all out. I cut to the chase. I slashed and burned, ploughed the stubble under, and scraped off the topsoil. My lovely opening was landfill. Now I was down to bare earth, and the real opening was revealed at last.

Various readers had told me, but not in any way that made sense. Various writers had pointed the way. The words of Vonnegut in particular had haunted me, “Start as close to the end as possible.” I must have known, somewhere, that I hadn’t done that. Now I had. Now I could sleep.

By 5:30 am I was finished. I went back to bed and slept until 10.

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a grammatically correct sentence and they can’t spell.

Most of the grammatical and spelling mistakes you see in people’s manuscripts are old chestnuts. They don’t know how to punctuate (especially when it comes to apostrophes,) they mix up the spellings of homophones (their, there, they’re, for example, or your and you’re,) they misspell uncommon words, they use inappropriate words, they blindly repeat common errors (like using ‘epicentre’ when they mean ‘centre’,) they don’t understand how to form plurals (especially frequently malformed ones like ‘medium’ vs ‘media’,) and they write as they speak (using ‘then’ instead of ‘than’ for example, as in, “He was bigger then his father.”)

What people who can’t spell and who don’t understand grammar fail to appreciate is that, for people who can and do, each little mistake they encounter provokes an almost physical pain. Editors and agents faced with a page full of mistakes like this will save themselves the agony of reading the whole manuscript by rejecting it as swiftly as they can.

To lack such simple skills when you aspire to publication is therefore quite an impediment, and astonishing, too, when the causes and the remedies are staring us in the face. I believe that the root of the problem is that people do not read enough well-written books, that they do not pay enough attention to what they read, and that they do not acquire the habit of speaking well.

You don’t have to read the classics to find good, grammatically-correct writing, you can find it in most published fiction. But if you want to know what it looks like, go and read some Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal, and Ray Bradbury. Then, at least, you’ll have a benchmark. You do have to read carefully though. You have to consider the sentences, the word-choices, the punctuation, the arrangement of words. And you do have to read enough of it that it starts seeping into your unconscious. If you love words, if you love reading, this will hardly be a chore.

And practice speaking too. I have never seen this mentioned as an aspect of good writing, but it seems clear to me that many of the mistakes people make in their writing come directly from the way they speak. I’m not suggesting that everyone who wants to write in English should speak ‘the Queen’s English’ but that they should, at the very least, speak English.

The grammatical mistakes people make in ordinary speech are more easily forgiven – and feel less jarring – than the same mistakes seen in print. We get away with a lot when we speak but we cannot expect to receive the same latitude when we write. If you speak sloppily, if your grammar is atrocious, if you misuse words and can’t form plurals, and you are unaware of it, it is not really surprising that your writing will reflect this. So listen to what you are saying. Think about what your words mean. What’s more, don’t just let other people’s words and sentences wash over you, or into you. Listen to them and analyse them. And don’t take it for granted that a newsreader or a journalist knows how to speak or write good English; a large proportion of them do not.

And as for bloggers… Well, let’s just say that the first draft of this piece contained numerous typos. I’ll also say that the final draft of my novel, TimeSplash, came back from the copy editor buried in such a thick encrustation of markup, it was hard to find the text. You did take that pinch of salt, didn’t you?

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

I’ve just spent half a day working on the schedule for the TimeSplash Blog Tour in March and April, contacting everybody involved and trying to firm up all 16 dates. Just another facet of the writerly life that no-one ever bothers to mention. I’d rope Wifie in to do all my admin (she’s great at that stuff) only she has this unfortunate view that she has her own life to lead and her own stuff to do. If only the dog could type!

Juggling all these dates, planning all these interviews and pieces of writing, making sure the tour stays interesting over the whole two months got me thinking. And this is what I thought, “I hope to God the publication date doesn’t slip.”

It made me realise that I need more information from my publisher. If I’m working as the freelance publicist in this team, I’d really like to be attending the staff meetings and seeing the internal project reports on my book’s progress. My last editing deadline went past about two weeks ago with no word or sign of progress. The Managing Editor tells me not to worry, everything’s fine, but is it? Is it? I now have 16 blog tour dates set up. I have reviewers waiting to receive review copies of the book. I have other events planned. I’ve been telling the world to expect my book on 15th February 2010 US EST (there, I’ve done it again) and it is starting to become important that that date is actually met.

In this world where authors are their own publicists, where books succeed or fail depending on what kind of marketer the writer is, a publishing house can no longer be a black box. It has to become a project partner. We have to plan together and share information. My own publisher attempts to do this through half-a-dozen discussion groups and the writer/editor relationship. But, although it’s a lot, it’s still not enough. The process is not transparent enough for me.

Maybe I’m a control freak, but I have run lots of IT projects in my day, some of them involving fifty-odd people spread across several countries and lasting years. I know that communication and the visibility of information is what makes large collaborations work. I’m sure publishing houses know this too, they just don’t yet seem to have grasped fully that the writer has become an essential part of the downstream process and his own plans and schedules need to be coordinated with all the rest.

The following email came to me from Ed Patterson. It was originally from Al Past. It explains itself, I believe.

Do you know anyone deployed overseas, or even in the military? If so, here’s a simple way to do something tangible to help those folks get through their hitches: Operation E-Book Drop.

Troops overseas are hard up for good reading material, and one author had a simple idea that’s catching on nicely: have willing authors send books by email to anyone interested. The project is described here: http://blog.smashwords.com/search?q=operation.

Here’s what you can do: if you know someone deployed, or even in the military or a member of a military member’s family, have them send an email to Ed Patterson at edwpat@att.net and ask to be placed on his list. That person can potentially be contacted by over 200 authors who are willing to email their books free—and they can be read on regular computers, any e-reader (like the Kindle), or even an iPhone.

Thanks!

As it says, this is a project to send free ebooks to soldiers serving overseas (it doesn’t matter whose armed forces). It’s being organised by Ed Patterson, and Smashwords is helping out. To take part as an author, all you have to do is contact Ed and he’ll make the arrangements. You may have to talk to your publisher about giving away your ebook, but otherwise, it’s very simple.

No, not a post about the Battle of Thermopylae just a few comments on building up a following on Twitter. Yesterday, you see, I had 300 ‘followers’ for the first time. Unlike King Leonidas, I won’t ask my gallant band to give their lives in a hopeless rearguard action against the armies of the Persian Empire. However, I might ask them to retweet something, one day.

A long time ago (in social media years) I weighed Twitter in the balance and found it wanting. It was time consuming and most of what my followers were saying back then was pretty boring. I felt there were better uses of my time. It seemed that Twitter was only really useful for people with something to sell.

And then I got my book deal for TimeSplash and suddenly there I am, with something to sell.

These days, publishers aren’t expected to do a lot of book publicity for new authors. I expect my own publisher to organise a number of reviews and that’s about it. If you want your book to be noticed, you have to do an awful lot of it yourself.

Frantically, I read all I could find online about marketing your book. There is a massive amount of material out there and one of the things everyone says is to build up your social media followings and then use all those people to spead the word. In particular, they mention Facebook and Twitter.

For me, Facebook is a lost cause. The system is so ridiculous I can barely bring myself to look at it, what with its endless quizzes and games. Great for 12 year olds maybe, but not for grown ups. If I were a Hollywood actress, I’d be Keira Knightly, apparently.

So I looked again at Twitter. A month ago, I had just 28 followers and it struck me that that was pretty pathetic, what with my book coming out in February and all. So I set about finding a few more. Here’s how I did it.

1. I went to each of the blogs I follow and found the twitter address of the blogger. Then I followed them. This ensured that I started with a core of people whose tweets I was almost guaranteed to find interesting.
2. I started tweeting. Just being active on Twitter means people will spot you. People retweet you so that their own followers see you, they mention you, and they recommend you (e.g. with a #followfriday tag.)  This wider exposure means people you don’t know are suddenly following you.
3. I set up an automatic doodad on my blog so it would tweet every time I made a new blog posting. I only did it for my writing blog, having made a decision to keep my twittering firmly focused on writing and writers. I also made it easy (by installing another doodad on my blog) for people who read the blog to retweet it if they want to. If you make it easy for people to do things like that, some of them will. (The button is at the top right of this post. Why not click it?)
4. As I came across people who made interesting tweets, I followed them. Many people you follow will follow you back, I’ve found. I mostly only follow writers or people in the publishing business. Some quite famous writers have followed me back! But sometimes I find others who are doing and saying interesting things and are just too good not to follow.
5. As well as talking about myself (yawn!) I try to join in conversations, make recommendations, and to retweet interesting news items related to writing. Particularly rewarding is to retweet announcements by people who are doing interesting and exciting things. It costs me almost nothing but it feels great to be helping people get their news out, however small my contribution may be.
6. When people I followed recommended other people, I checked them out, had a look at what they’ve been tweeting lately (yes, you can do all that) and, if I liked the look of them, I followed them, too.
7. I installed TweetDeck. This is an application that helps you manage your tweets. It is one of many. I’ve only tried a handful but TweetDeck seems to do what I want. The main thing it does for me is to organise incoming tweets. I’ve only got 300 followers but that means a couple of thousand tweets a day, and I find it hard to keep track of them. God knows what people do who have thousands, or tens of thousands of followers! TweetDaeck gives me a display with tweets organised into columns. I have one for my ‘real’ friends and family, one for the people I’m especially interested in following just now, one for all the rest, one for tweets that mention me, and one or more for various searches. The searches are continuously updated and I usually have one for tweets mentioning Stanthorpe, my local town, and then ones for the hashtags I’m focusing on.
8. I have started making use of hashtags (words preceded by a hash symbol, as in #timesplash). I try to associate particular tags with my tweets (like #scifi, #writer, #Brisbane, etc.) and will be using #timesplash to follow any comments about my book if there ever are any – so far, mine are the only ones Using hashtags potentially exposes you to yet more like-minded people who may themselves be searching on the tag. They also help you find people you might like to follow.

I really only want to follow interesting people so I’m a bit picky about who I follow and I spend a lot of time checking people out before I click that follow button. It is very easy to build up followings of thousands. Many services exist to help you find them. I may be a poor marketer for ignoring this wealth of eyeballs but if I’m going to do this thing, I’d like it to be fun and to mean something, not just be a business venture. I’m also diligent about reporting and blocking spammers. Why Twitter attracts adverts for teeth-whitening schemes I cannot understand but anyone who follows me who so much as mentions teeth is summarily reported and blocked.

300 isn’t a lot in Twitter terms, almost everyone I follow has far more followers than that, but it’s a 1000% increase over last month, ao I’m quite happy with it.

Here’s what I’m twittering now. Why not follow me?