Freaking spiders, always getting up on the camera lens like they want to be astronomers, too.
The camera dome at Marshall Space Center has a small problem: every now and then an arachnid astronomer decides to go waltzing across the lens, obstructing the view for pesky humans.
The spiders climb onto the all-sky camera used for tracking meteorites.
At least they don’t leave footprints?
Contact the author at mika.mckinnon@io9.com or follow her at @MikaMcKinnon.
As temperatures continues to drop, there’s little reason to leave your computer! Instead, cuddle up with Worth Reading, our guide to the best games writing.
As Patricia Hernandez outlined this week
An excerpt from Livingston’s piece:
Every now and then I’ll start playing a game, in this case Fallout 4, one that potentially offers dozens of hours of stories, quests, adventure, and excitement. And I’ll say, essentially: “Nah. What else you got?” That’s why when I climbed out of Vault 111 and arrived in Sanctuary, the first settlement area in the game, I decided to simply stay there. No exploring, no wandering, just staying put. I’ve now been there for roughly ten hours.
And an excerpt from Maiberg’s story:
Bill, despite clearly looking like a shady drug addict, is able to talk people into getting what he wants thanks to his maxed-out level of charisma, a character stat in the game that helps you influence other people. It was easy to convince Trudy to pay up. Wolfgang paid me my caps, which I paid back to him immediately for all the Jet he was carrying. Once I took a hit of that, it was also easy to mow down everyone at the Drumlin Diner with a minigun I found in town earlier. Wolfgang, Simone, Trudy, and Patrick. I killed them all, took whatever positions of value they had, sold those at the nearest town, and bought more chems. Bill is a real bastard that way.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.
We love a good movie supercut video
These are tricky to do: you need to get the right balance of music, the right transitions and cuts of the films, and most importantly, you need to capture what is great about cinema: the action, the heartfelt moments and the humor.
Sleepy Skunk has put together a partial list of movies used in the clip, and it’s really neat to watch through and see what movies really grabbed you, and which ones you missed.
The Project Apollo Archive on Flickr is truly one of the great treasures available on the Internet. You can easily get lost in the stunning imagery and wonder about what exists beyond our world. It’s also an incredible resource for artists to turn those static pictures into gorgeous videos with 3D effects. My jaw is in total awe of this video, Apollo, which shows the magnificence of space travel. We have to go back.
Chris Coupland, the photographer who put this incredible video together, writes:
Between the years of 1969 and 1972 the human race accomplished arguably the single greatest technological achievement of all time, when humans first set foot on another celestial body.
This short film is a tribute to the NASA Apollo Program space missions which successfully landed 12 men on the Moon. It was created entirely from still images from the Project Apollo Archive, which has bought together scans of all the original unprocessed images taken by the crews of the Apollo 10 to 17 space missions.
Here are the best of today’s deals. Get every great deal every day on Kinja Deals, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to never miss a deal, join us on Kinja Gear to read about great products, and on Kinja Co-Op to help us find the best.
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Today only, Amazon’s offering all-time low prices on well-reviewed Photive wireless audio solutions. We’ve seen better prices on Bluetooth headphones and water resistant speakers in the past, but if you want something with more of a name brand, these are solid deals.
Photive PH-BTE70 Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds ($40) | Amazon
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Photive HYDRA Waterproof Wireless Bluetooth Speaker ($38) | Amazon
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If you want a cheaper option, you can get an a (non-waterproof) speaker and Bluetooth headphones from Aukey for just $36 combined. [Aukey Wireless Premium Stereo Bluetooth Speaker and Aukey Bluetooth Headphones V4.1 Wireless Stereo Sport Headphones, $36. Add both to cart and use code H9HKMZO5]
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If the power at your house can be a little spotty, this $20 APC backup UPS is designed specifically to keep your modem and router running on battery power, so you’ll never lose touch with the world. Today’s deal matches a short-lived Black Friday sale, which at the time was actually a full $20 less than its previous lowest price. [APC Back-UPS Connect, $20]
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...
Back again from Cyber Monday: Dell is once again offering a rare deal on a year of Dropbox Pro. In addition to a $20 discount, you’ll get a bonus $25 Dell promo gift card (shows up in the cart). [1 Year Dropbox Pro + $25 Dell Gift Card, $80]
As always with these Dell gift card deals, make sure you see the gift card in your cart before checking out, and remember that it’s only valid for 90 days.
If you didn’t pull the trigger on a new TV last weekend, this 55” Samsung 4K Smart TV is actually marked down to a full $100 less than its Black Friday price. [Samsung - 55” Class 4K Smart TV, $700]
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-5...
You can also opt for a 48” model for $500. [Samsung 48-Inch LED 2160p Smart 4K Ultra HDTV, $500]
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We’ve seen plenty of USB charging hubs that included one Quick Charge 2.0 port, but this one boasts five. [Tronsmart Titan 10A/90W 5 Ports Quick Charge 2.0 Desktop USB Charger Charging Station, $25 with code 5PORTCHA]
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B017OLP8UE
Want to try out Prime Pantry, but can’t bring yourself to pay the $6/box shipping fee? Just add four qualifying items to your package, and use code PANTRYDEC for free shipping. [Purchase four qualifying Prime Pantry items, get free shipping with code PANTRYDEC]
One of our best selling
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As we move into Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, here’s the best deal ever on the collectible Phase 1 Blu-ray box set. [Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One - Avengers Assembled, $99]
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Amazon’s also discounting a bunch of Marvel-inspired clothing, today only. [Marvel apparel on sale]
If you missed out on Black Friday’s Brother monchrome laser printer deals, you can pick up a barebones (but still excellent) 2300D for $40 today from Amazon.
This model doesn’t have a scanner or built-in networking, but it can still spit out 27 pages per minute, and print in duplex. Plus, unlike similarly-priced inkjet alternatives, replacement toner cartridges are affordable, and they won’t dry out if you don’t use them for a few weeks. [Brother HL-L2300D Monochrome Laser Printer, $40]
http://www.amazon.com/Brother-HL-L23...
GoPro’s lilliputian Hero4 Session got an official $100 price drop (from $400) just a few months after launch, and now you can save another $100, plus take home a head strap mount and a 32GB microSD Card. [GoPro HERO4 Session Starter Kit, $200]
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...
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This isn’t the first time Amazon’s had a sale like this, but if your car’s wiper blades are a little worn down, you can replace them both for just $22 today.
All you have to do is add any two Valeo frameless wiper blades (shipped and sold by Amazon) to your cart, and their total price will automatically drop to $22 at checkout. If you can’t remember what sizes your car requires, Amazon has a built-in tool at the top of the page to filter the options. [Buy Any Two Valeo Wiper Blades For $22]
Note: The promotion page says this deal ended on November 30, but it still seems to be working fine.
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here
Alice Hamilton was one of those people who used science to shape morality. Basic concepts like sanitation, worker safety, and proper chemical disposal exist because she proved there was no other choice. She was also one of the first to speak out about the growing threat of Nazi Germany.
Technically a biochemist, Hamilton is a science all-star who deserves to be far more famous than she is. She was smart enough to be the first woman to be appointed an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and outspoken enough to be nearly thrown out multiple times during her multi-decade career. Once, she put cocaine in her own eyeballs
When she’d worked in Chicago during a typhoid epidemic, she’d shown that flies could carry typhoid between overloaded, filthy communal privies and cramped kitchens without window screens. Her work helped kickstart laws meant to keep landlords from stinting on sanitation or overcrowding their buildings.
Yet Hamilton later found out that her experiment, while correctly done, did not reveal the source of the epidemic. A sewer line had burst and the city had covered it up. Whenever anyone credited her with solving the mystery of the typhoid epidemic—often at the beginning of a speech introducing her—she would immediately correct them. She was the first to speak out against herself.
She was the first to speak out against nearly anything. She helped prove that radium was poisoning watch-painters (so-called “radium girls”). She helped prove that carbon monoxide was poisoning steel workers. She helped prove that mercury was poisoning hatters. She helped prove that excessive use of jackhammers caused “dead fingers” in construction workers. And she helped show that making lead pigment was bad for workers, especially child workers. Most importantly, she spoke publicly and loudly about what she had proved. The most basic worker’s safety concepts were pioneered by Alice Hamilton.
During her college years she’d traveled to Germany with her sister. After World War I, she went back, returning home to rally people to provide food for the starving Germans. Hamilton had been against entry into World War I, considering pro-war stances militaristic and useless. Many Americans were not impressed with the fact that the person who nagged them about staying out of Germany was asking for aid for the people who had been killing American soldiers. Pressure mounted on Harvard to terminate her professorship, which, to their credit, they did not.
Germany recovered. Hamilton went back. And she came back with even more complaints, which also proved to be justified. In 1933, she wrote widely about the rise of the Nazi party, decrying its antisemitism and militarism, and noting the party’s particular appeal to youth culture.
She also wrote about something many social crusaders of her time neglected. Hamilton had worked all her life, in government and in academia, and her German counterparts were getting fired from both spheres. Nazi policy promoted the concept of motherhood above all else. Hamilton pointed out that this wasn’t just sexism, it was a power grab. Every non-Nazi German woman who they kicked out of a position made way for a Nazi sympathizer who could help solidify their hold on public institutions.
Hamilton also was one of the rare academics who managed to study different classes. Having spent her life studying the working class, she wrote about the Nazi policy of sending working class women home—and correctly predicted that it wouldn’t work because, ideals or not, the country needed the labor.
Alas, she didn’t have the clout to stop the Nazis. (How cool a story would this be if she did?) What she did have was connections and drive, and so for most of the 1930s, she provided what help she could to people fleeing Germany.
Hamilton continued being a loud pain in the ass well into the 1960s. She argued that the paranoia about the Cold War was taking away American liberties. She fought against the propping up of anti-Communist regimes. She lobbied for the Civil Rights Amendment. (At first she’d been against it, believing it would take away workplace protections for women.) She was on the FBI watch list into her nineties.
Hamilton died in 1970, age 101, having spent her life being supremely useful to humanity and making pretty much all the right enemies.
Images: (top) “Radium girls” working in a US factory. Public domain. (middle and bottom) Alice Hamilton, young and old. Public domain.
Ray Bradbury has long said that his education came from libraries. It’s fitting then, that the Carnegie Library in Waukegan Illinois might become home to a museum devoted to the famous author.
NASA scientists have captured a remarkable glimpse of a primordial compact galaxy that came into existence at a time when the Universe was exceptionally young, using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Scientists at NASA spotted the ancient galaxy while analyzing a Hubble image of a massive cluster of galaxies. Located at the mind-boggling distance of 4 billion light-years away, it’s visible on account of an effect known as gravitational lensing. The intense gravity of the galaxy cluster is acting as a kind of magnifying glass—a rather fortuitous effect that makes the distant galaxy appear about 20 times brighter than normal.
Astronomers have detected other galaxies that are record-breakers for distance, but this new galaxy represents a class of ancient galaxies that have, until now, remained undetected. As study lead author Leopoldo Infante explained, “Thanks to this detection, the team has been able to study for the first time the properties of extremely faint objects formed not long after the big bang.”
At the time, MACS0416.1-2403 was about the size of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that neighbors the Milky Way. Astronomers believe that this object eventually evolved into a full-fledged galaxy not unlike our own.
As an aside, astronomers have nicknamed this object Tayna, which means “first born” in Aimara, which is a language spoken in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America.
Humans have dreamt of of drilling to the center of the Earth for over a century, but the fact of the matter is, we haven’t made it past the crust. An ambitious new scientific expedition hopes to change that.
As Nature News reported this week, a drill ship called JOIDES Resolution is about to depart Sri Lanka for the Atlantis Bank, a spot in the Indian Ocean that features one of the thinnest regions of crust on the planet. There, the ship will lower a drill bit and attempt to bore through nearly a mile (1. 5 km) of solid rock.
If all goes well, future expeditions will return to screw down even further, plunging human technology into the mantle for the first time in history.
In many ways, exploring Earth’s interior has proven harder than exploring Mars. But that’s not for a lack of trying—in fact, drilling missions
What do we hope to learn from this deep dive into the Earth? For one, previous attempts to reach the mantle have retrieved sedimentary cores dating back millions of years, which help geologists piece together the movement of continents in Earth’s deep past. We’ve also discovered microbial life far deeper than anyone expected, a find which has expanded our understanding of Earth’s biosphere. As JOIDES Resolution attempts to make the plunge, it’ll collect geologic and biological samples to further our understanding of how Earth’s tectonic plates shift around and how microorganisms makes a living under extreme conditions.
Phase one of the Slow Spreading Ridge Moho, or ‘SloMo’ Project, is expected to start this month and run until the end of January. If all goes well, the JOIDES Resolution will return to drill to 1.9 miles (3 km), after which the Japanese Chikyu drill ship—the world’s largest deep sea drill—will finish the job, plunging past the crust-mantle transition until it reaches the Moho. It’s too early to say whether this brave attempt to bore beyond Earth’s crust will be a success, but if one thing is clear, it’s that humans sure as hell aren’t going to stop trying.
Follow the author @themadstone
Top image: Chikyu, a high tech scientific research ship designed to bore nearly 4.5 miles into the ocean floor. Image Credit: Katsumi Kasahara/AP
In a breakthrough that could lead to printable organs and an enhanced understanding of human physiology, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Labs have 3D-printed functional blood vessels that look and function like the real thing.
3D bioprinters are similar to conventional 3D printers, but instead of using inert materials, they use “bio-ink:” basic structural building blocks that are compatible with the human body.
To create the 3D-printed blood vessels, a LLNL team headed by research engineer Monica Moya combined this special biomaterial with living cells. The material and environment were designed to enable small blood vessels, or human capillaries, to develop on their own. A release from LLNL explains:
This process takes a while, so initially, tubes are printed out of cells and other biomaterials to deliver essential nutrients to the surrounding printed environment. Eventually, the self-assembled capillaries are able to connect with the bio-printed tubes and deliver nutrients to the cells on their own, enabling these structures to function like they do in the body.
“If you take this approach of co-engineering with nature you allow biology to help create the finer resolution of the printed tissue,” Moya said. “We’re leveraging the body’s ability for self-directed growth, and you end up with something that is more true to physiology. We can put the cells in an environment where they know, ‘I need to build blood vessels.’ With this technology we guide and orchestrate the biology.”
The resulting blood vessels cannot be transplanted, but they’re suitable for toxicology studies and medical treatment testing (which will lead to a decreased dependency on lab animals
The LLNL scientists will soon be able to utilize a brand new 3D bioprinting lab equipped with a more precise printer capable of higher resolution and larger structures.
“It’s going to change the way we do biology,” said Moya.
[ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ]
Human wetware is astonishingly good at pattern recognition and interpreting complex, noisy data, but it’s also painfully buggy. Mars is the red planet, except it really isn’t.
When we send robotic explorers to Mars, we equip them with colour calibration targets of known optical properties. Yet, even with those calibrated instruments, the view of the same rock in “true” colour can change dramatically just based on the brightness from the time of day. As this panoramic from the Spirit Rover demonstrates, that change can be visible over the time necessary for the robot to slowly swivel its camera to take in the full field of view.
The problem gets even weirder when you try to compensate for lighting that we’re familiar with instead of the lighting as it actually is on the planet. Here’s Mount Sharp under Mars lighting, then rebalanced to blue skies
This leads to an almost philosophical problem: even raw images won’t tell us what we’d perceive in different lighting conditions. The same dusty red rocks can look disconcertingly different under very slight changes in environment.
So what do we do with the photographs our robots capture for us? Should we consider the rocks with the warm tints of their home red skies and blue sunsets, or relight them to represent how we’d see them brought to our own blue skies and red sunsets? Should we try to maintain some sort of consistency, or allow the same rock to fluctuate from pale to dark with the time of day the photograph was taken?
[The Color of Mars | NASA | NASA | NASA]
Contact the author at mika.mckinnon@io9.com or follow her at @MikaMcKinnon.
It isn’t easy to diagnose wound infections before they’ve progressed into a nasty, purulent mess, and many doctors prefer to play it safe by doling out antibiotics early. But a clever new bandage that glows bright green at its first whiff of bad bacteria could help change that.
Led by chemistry professor Toby Jenkins at the University of Bath, the new “smart bandage”—although not yet tested in humans—might one day serve as an early warning system, allowing doctors and patients to detect infections before they get out of hand. The mechanism behind it is pretty clever: the bandage contains a gel-like material infused with tiny, fluorescent green dye-filled capsules. When it comes in contact with toxins produced by pathogenic bacteria, those capsules are punctured. And voila, a lovely green glow signals your unwanted microbial colonists.
An early application of the technology might be burn treatment. Burn victims are often prescribed antibiotics preventatively, because doctors are so worried about them developing bad infections. But as we’re acutely aware in the age of antibiotic resistance, this strategy can backfire, resulting in even more aggressive pathogens.
In a recent demonstration, Jenkins and colleagues were able to show that their early-warning bandage glowed green shortly after coming into contact with three pathogenic biofilms, but not after touching harmless bacteria. If future trials go well, the bandage could be ready for clinical testing by 2018.
Let’s just hope we can get these things out to hospitals before the zombie apocalypse strikes—seems like they’re going to be awfully useful.
Follow the author @themadstone
There’s a new featurette for The Force Awakens on the web, featuring Daisy Ridley, J.J. Abrams, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac ruminating on the legacy that they’ve inherited.
It’s a neat behind the scenes look at the upcoming film, and it only reinforces how everyone working on the film were huge fans of the original films. Plus, there’s a couple of new glimpses of the film.
12 days to go.
Today at the PlayStation Experience we got our first real look at the Final Fantasy VII remake, which is currently slated for 2123 or so. It’s looking real good. Also: real-time combat?
Here’s video of the latest footage from FFVII REMAKE
Square Enix also announced on stage that the PC->PS4 port of Final Fantasy VII will be out today, in case this trailer has you in the mood to revisit the adventures of Cloud and his sword.
Ronald Reagan was a fan of Star Trek—and even a critic of it sometimes. In his diary he talks about watching Star Trek III in the White House theater and how he thought it sucked. In his post-presidential years apparently this interest in the franchise continued, and in 1991 he visited the then-highly popular Next Generation Set.
The Gipper’s attendance at Paramount Studios Stage 8 came as the cast and crew were filming the season four Klingon-centric two-part finale, Redemption. There were Klingons running around everywhere, to which Reagan supposedly noted “I like them, they remind me of Congress.”
In another encounter, then-ailing Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry
Yet the best story from this obscure cross-section in pop culture and American history comes from Patrick Stewart himself. During a recent appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Stewart recalled a peculiar moment during Reagan’s visit. He said that during VIP visits, people—even members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—politely asked him if they could sit in the captain’s chair. But not Reagan:
Reagan just went over and sat in it, without asking. Perks of the job.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was born in the mid-1980s, during the middle of the Reagan Administration and the height Cold War. Both the series and the motion pictures often pulled concepts from the headlines and provided commentary on them in the neutral ground of science fiction. Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country, which opened in theaters the same year as Reagan’s visit to the Next Generation set in 1991, was largely a commentary on the possibilities and pitfalls of the end of the Cold War.
The Pentagon also lauded Star Trek: The Next Generation for its message of service and sacrifice for a greater cause, and of course Star Trek is embedded in the soul of NASA, with many engineers and astronauts being inspired by the franchise.
With all this in mind, you can see how the franchise has captured the minds of world leaders, even “Ronald Ray-Gun” himself. And it is telling that even after having had his hands on the nuclear codes and ridden as the VIP passenger aboard Air Force One, sitting in the captains chair on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise is still a sought after experience.
Contact the author at Tyler@jalopnik.com.
Photo credit- “Intergalactic Guest Stars - Presidential Visit: Ronald Reagan”, TNG Season 5 DVD special feature. Note that is you have not seen this series on Blue Ray you are robbing yourself. It is an entirely new experience, treat yourself for Christmas!
In my regular ‘So You Want To Join The Empire’ column, I’ve gotten the question a bit: why dress up as the bad guys of Star Wars, given the iconography? The LA Times goes into how the 501st Legion went from a Geocities site for Stormtrooper enthusiasts to a world-wide charitable costuming group.
Notorious B.I.G. and Star Wars aren’t exactly two things that you’d think would work well together, but Solar Slim and Richie Branson have proven that wrong with Life After Death Star.
Solar Slim and Richie Branson mashed up music from the Notorious B.I.G. and the music of Star Wars, using the soundtrack to underscore the lyrics.
Biggie’s music isn’t something I’ve really listened to before, so I’m coming at this with completely fresh ears. But, they line up in an interesting way, with the music of John Williams complimenting that of Biggie. It’s a cool experiment, and I’ve been listening to it over the last week.
Best of all? The entire album is free to download.
Whoosh! Did you see that? It may look a bit scrappy, but the tiny white projectile at the center of the animation below—officially called 1994 JR1— is a cosmic time capsule, brought to you by a piano-sized spacecraft over 3 billion miles away. You’re looking at the closest picture yet of a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) by a factor of at least 15.
The animation consists of four frames captured by the New Horizons spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on November 2nd. Spaced an hour apart, the images show the 90 mile (150 km)-wide KBO known as 1994 JR1 sailing through the void against a background of stars some 3.3 billion miles (5.3 billion km) from the Sun. New Horizons captured the scene from a distance of only 170 million miles (280 million km).
It’s a small taste of what’s to come if NASA approves an extended mission for New Horizons to explore the cosmic badlands beyond Pluto. The Kuiper Belt is a vast ring of icy rocks; primordial material that hasn’t changed much since the formation of the Solar System. By studying KBOs, astronomers can peer deep into past and learn what conditions were like when the very first planets were coalescing around our star.
After a series of engine burns
Follow the author @themadstone
Next week, Cheeky Frawg Publishing will release a collection of stories and novels from Finnish author Leena Krohn. The collection is a major translation for the author, and we’ve interviewed editor Jeff Vandermeer about the project.
http://www.amazon.com/Leena-Krohn-Co...
Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction is a collection that introduces a wide range of English-language readers to the author for the first time. The collection contains a range of her works, from novels such as Pereat Mundus, The Pelican’s New Clothes, Tainaron: Mail From Another City and a number of short stories, as well as some critical essays.
We had a chance to chat with Jeff Vandermeer, who oversaw the editing and translation of Collected Fiction.
When did you first read Leena Krohn’s fiction, and what about her writing style appealed to you?
I first read Tainaron as a stand-alone book back in 2003, now included in Collected Fiction. It’s about a nameless narrator writing home while living in a foreign city populated by giant, intelligent insects. Each of the letters is a gem of compressed storytelling and not only works as a stand-alone but has an underlying symbolism. What I loved about Tainaron was this mosaic way of putting a novel together, but even more so how Krohn manages to make the most surreal concept pragmatic and tactile. She makes the impossible believable, and often in a way that’s both direct and poetic. I also loved—and love in her other work—how she deals with the natural world.
What distinguishes Krohn’s stories, and by extension, the larger body of Finnish speculative fiction from what else is out there?
Finnish writers typically have a good eye for nature and write in an interesting way about the natural world. I don’t mean that they write nature narratives, but that in their stories there’s an awareness of ecology and of nature that is very sophisticated and interesting. This isn’t true of all Finnish writers, but several have told me it is a major theme. Some of Johanna Sinisalo’s novels share this propensity, and I think it’s a timely focus, given the uncertainties of climate change and our need to redefine our relationship to our environment. And certainly Nordic fiction in general seems of use in this sense—look at the work of Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck or the poetry of Aase Berg. You can also see this in Finnish Weird, which readers can sample in two lovely downloads. Hopefully with the World SF Convention being hosted by Helsinki in 2017, more English-language readers will encounter the wealth of great Finnish writing out there.
What is it about the natural world appeals to you? It’s certainly prevalent in your own fiction.
I grew up in Fiji, surrounded by a very complex ecosystem, and everywhere I’ve been I’ve found a great deal of solace and reflection in the natural world. It is, in fact, the world we live in, even as we’ve transformed so much. When we forget that—and we forget too much, too many times—we lose a pretty vital connection. It’s not a fluke that research says going for a walk or hike in nature is soothing and settling. We also share this world with so many creatures more sophisticated than we are…and that is their world. Understanding this is now vital to our own survival on this planet.
Cheeky Frawg Books has published several translations recently: Karin Tidbeck’s Jagganath comes to mind. What goes into translating these works?
Sometimes it is a matter of the author translating their own work into English or writing some fiction in English directly, as with Tidbeck. Sometimes, as with the Leena Krohn Collected Fiction, we acquire rights to existing out-of-print translations and supplement that with new translations by a variety of translators. Collected Fiction has 8 or 9 translators, and we enlisted the help of Finnish fiction writers like Viivi Hyvonen and Leena Likitalo, who we felt would bring their writerly sensibilities to the job. J. Robert Tupasela provided additional translations and served as a consulting editor. And Hildi Hawkins was a stalwart—in that most existing translations of Krohn’s work had been by her. Then, of course, you check your work with the writer. So the larger projects it’s more like editing an anthology—a lot of moving parts and decisions to make.
What role do you see translated speculative fiction playing the larger genre pool?
In the English-language world, we’re impoverished, I believe, if we don’t have access to the full picture. We like to center ourselves in the middle of SF/fantasy when, in fact, you could do an entire big anthology of twenty-century Latin American SF/Fantasy that would be the equal of anything from US/UK writers. So it’s really important to foster a cosmopolitan, open attitude toward works from other countries—both in translation and in English, because sometimes writings by non-UK/US/Australia writers written in English are made invisible, too. But when this happens it is to our detriment most of all. No one wants to wind up living in a literary provincial backwater—and without the totality of world literature, that’s what happens. But also—this stuff is immensely entertaining and fun and beautifully written. Who wouldn’t want that?
What translations do you have coming up that you’re particularly excited for?
The Krohn project, all 850 pages of it, has taken up so much of our time that I can’t even think ahead that far. But I would point readers to both Pasi Jääskeläinen’s recent Rabbit Back Literature Society and Johanna Sinisalo’s forthcoming The Core of the Sun (Grove Press).
Not to mention these remarkable fantastical works in translation published by mainstream literary houses in 2015. All of these books are amazing and entertaining.
Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction will be released on December 7th.
I had some mixed feelings about tonight’s episode of Doctor Who. The plot of the episode (and the season) felt severely half-baked, to say the least, and great moments intermingled freely with a certain amount of WTF. But that ending? Was the greatest. That ending retroactively made the whole thing great.
Spoilers ahead...
I’m just going to start out by talking about why that ending was so great, and then work my way back to the rest of the episode. Because when something ends that well, you want to go back and see the rest of the story through that lens.
The big “twist” in tonight’s “Hell Bent” has to do with the Doctor’s neural block—in a framing sequence, you keep seeing Clara working in a Nevada diner (the same one from “The Impossible Astronaut,” sort of) and the Doctor is telling her the story of his return to his home planet, Gallifrey. Clara seems not to know who the Doctor is, and meanwhile in the “return to Gallifrey” story the Doctor is plotting to erase Clara’s memory of him.
The twist is that the Doctor, not Clara, has had his memory wiped. He doesn’t know that this is Clara he’s talking to, and he’s not even sure how much of the story he’s telling really happened, and how much he’s made up after the fact. He’s sort of reconstructed his lost memories by the hole they left behind. As he says, a story is what a memory becomes once it’s been forgotten.
This is great for several reasons:
1) Clara gets to have agency and decide her own fate, instead of having the Doctor decide it for her.
2) The Doctor thinks Clara needs her memory wiped, so that she can be left on Earth to have a “normal” life and nobody will be able to find her by zeroing in on her memories of him. (Leaving aside the fact that she’s a time-frozen zombie, which could hinder her ability to have a “normal life. We’ll get to that in a minute.) But that’s not what Clara wants, and she gets her way.
3) Instead, Clara turns the tables on the Doctor—he wants to erase her memory? Fine. She erases his memory of her instead. He can take his own medicine for a change. And maybe this theoretically makes Clara safer, since nobody can use the Doctor to get to her. I love the bit where she tells him that tomorrow’s not promised to anybody, but she insists on keeping her past.
4) This is pretty explicitly a subversion of what happened to poor Donna Noble, in one of the most infamously unfair companion exits in Doctor Who’s history. Donna Noble becomes a kind of version of the Doctor (the “DoctorDonna”) and her brain can’t take it—so she has to be mind-wiped for her own protection. After that, if she even hears someone mention the Doctor, her head will explode like something out of Scanners. (Which makes it too bad that the Doctor tends to stomp around shouting, “I’m the Doctor. I’m a Time Lord. I’m the oncoming storm, etc.” all over London, all the time.)
5) The Doctor is forced to admit that it almost doesn’t matter which one of them forgets the other—the problem is that they’ve become bad for each other, because they’re too similar. And (as has been built up as an idea all season) the Doctor is willing to go to insane lengths to avoid losing Clara, to the point that where when he thinks she’s dead he goes kind of nuts a couple times. And in this episode, he breaks all the rules to bring her back from the dead. But him forgetting her works just as well as her forgetting him. Which is neat.
6) Clara’s arc last season was all about her learning to be like the Doctor, and sort of becoming another Doctor. And instead of taking that away from her in the name of resetting the status quo, she actually gets to “graduate.” She gets her own TARDIS to fly away in, with Ashildr/Me, another immortal, by her side. And it’s not just a random chicken-leg-that-could-become-a-TARDIS, like Rose got, but a full-fledged working TARDIS from Gallifrey. It’s even got the color scheme and design of the original Hartnell TARDIS, although it’s stuck as a 1950s diner instead of a police box.
Of course, given that the Doctor refused to travel with Ashildr because two immortals traveling together “wouldn’t be good,” and Clara is now an immortal—and is too similar to the Doctor in any case—they could get up to a lot of mischief.
Plus Clara is still frozen in time at the moment of her death, and she’s supposed to return to Gallifrey so she can be returned to her timestream and the universe can reset. She’s just taking rather a long detour along the way, and given how unclear the rules are on Doctor Who, there’s no knowing if this will have bad consequences for the universe.
In a lot of ways, this was a typical Steven Moffat finale. Unlike last year, when we had an army of zombie Cybermen and Missy wreaking some very concrete havoc, “Heaven Sent” is once again about a much more abstract danger. There’s some hand-wavy notion that the Hybrid is going to threaten all of time, and destroy everything, but it’s left incredibly vague—much like the universe ending in “The Big Bang,” time going woobly in “The Wedding of River Song,” and the Doctor’s timestream going foop in “The Name of the Doctor.”
(Contrast that with 1981’s “Logopolis,” where we’re told the universe is ending, but we actually see Logopolis dying and then get to witness Nyssa’s reaction as her homeworld, Traken, is extinguished.)
Here’s what we learned about the Hybrid. Prophesies from the Matrix, the computer made up of the consciousnesses of all the dead Time Lords, say that it’s the combination of two warrior races. And it’ll one day cost a billion hearts to heal its own, and will stand in the ruins of Gallifrey. And when the Doctor was a young Time Lord, he sneaked inside the Cloister, where the Matrix is physically kept, and the ghosty things that guard the Matrix told him the secret of the Hybrid. This scared him so much, he went a bit mad and ran away from Gallifrey.
And now, the Time Lords have decided that the threat of the Hybrid has become so imminent that they need to trap the Doctor to find out what he knows. Which is why they got Ashildr to lure him into her trap street and then teleport him inside his own Confession Dial. The Confession Dial, we finally learn, is supposed to be a way for a dying Time Lord to confront his or her demons and make peace with death before joining the Matrix. But the Time Lords turned it into a torture chamber for a living Time Lord, the Doctor. (Which makes it odd that the Confession Dial can kill you, both because that would be an odd way to make peace with your demons, and because the Time Lords risked having the Doctor die before he told them anything.)
I’ve watched “Heaven Sent” a couple times, but I’m still confused by the Hybrid stuff. Here’s what I think is going on. The Doctor doesn’t really know for sure who or what the Hybrid is, despite what he said last week. The whole time he was trapped inside his Confession Dial, he was allowing the Time Lords to think he knew the truth about the Hybrid, so they would need him and he could have something to bargain with.
As soon as the Doctor gets out of the Dial and is on Gallifrey, he sets about sulking inside the old farmhouse where he lived as a young orphan. The Time Lords try to force him out and then try to make nice with him, but nothing works, until the resurrected Rassilon himself comes to visit the Doctor—who leads all the other Time Lords in a kind of quiet rebellion, and ends up throwing Rassilon off Gallifrey.
And then the Doctor immediately uses the Time Lords’ fear of the Hybrid to trick them into letting him talk to Clara one last time, so she can help him figure out the truth. In fact, the Doctor doesn’t care about the Hybrid thing—even though it once scared him enough that he fled Gallifrey—he just wants Clara back. So they do the aforementioned thing of bringing Clara back from the dead. At which point the Doctor goes all Natural Born Killers, grabs a gun, and shoots a poor Time Lord—then flees into the Matrix.
So who is the Hybrid? The Doctor seems to think it’s Ashildr, because she’s human combined with Mire technology. Ashildr suggests it could be the Doctor, because he’s spent so much time on Earth he’s practically part human. But then Ashildr says it’s really two people: the combination of the Doctor and Clara, because they’re just so dangerous together. (Really?)
I guess the Doctor sort of is the Hybrid, because in bringing Clara back from the dead, he’s causing a catastrophic rupture in time that could borkify the entire universe. (“Borkify” is a technical term used in such circumstances, trust me.) Although we see no evidence of such borkification. But in the end, when the Doctor realizes he’s having his memories of Clara wiped, he says he accepts this, because he went too far, and he became the Hybrid for fear of losing her.
Both the Doctor and Ashildr actually stand (or sit) in the ruins of Gallifrey at the end of this episode, but that’s just because it’s the end of the universe and everything is in ruins.
So I’m not sure what the takeaway of all this is. Maybe the Doctor becomes the Hybrid when he forgets to be the Doctor? Maybe the Hybrid is just a metaphor for people screwing around with time too much? Rose brought Jack Harkness back to life by basically rolling back time after she had looked into the Time Vortex—was Rose the Hybrid? Is the Hybrid something that we still have to worry about in the future, or has it already happened?
I do like that the Doctor had another one of his “no limits” moments, like in “The Waters of Mars” and “The Girl Who Died,” and this time he actually faced some consequencesand pushback—including from Clara, who didn’t actually ask to be brought back to life. As various people, including Ashildr, point out, the Doctor is acutally dishonoring Clara’s choices by not letting her stay dead.
So I like the storyline of the Doctor breaking all the rules to save Clara from death, but the “Hybrid” thing needed to be fleshed out a lot more, probably a good deal earlier, for me to be invested in it.
And finally, the other thing that was super fascinating in this episode is how it turns the events of last week’s episode on their side. The Doctor could have left the Confession Dial at any time, as the Time Lords keep pointing out, if he’d just told what he knew about the Hybrid.
(Oh, and it’s odd how Ohisa and the Sisterhood of Karn, who are separate from the Time Lords, show up and are at first treated like random interlopers— but by the end of the episode, they seem to be sort of in charge.)
Last week, it seemed as though the Doctor was willing to go through four and a half billion years of dying and coming back in order to keep the secret of the Hybrid (although it must be pointed out, he only experienced this as a few days, since there’s no way he could have remembered all of those iterations.) Because the Hybrid is too dangerous a secret for anybody to know.
But now, I guess that turns out to have been just a lot of malarkey, and in fact the Doctor was just playing a very long con, trying to make the Time Lords think he knew a dangerous secret about the Hybrid when in fact he just knew how to play a stratocaster. He knew all along that it was the Time Lords that had trapped him in there, and he was playing them, because he knew they had the power to bring Clara back.
That’s going to change how I watch “Hell Bent” in future.
All in all, this was sort of a half-brilliant, half-frustrating season of Doctor Who. The season’s big arcs weren’t as satisfying as last year’s, with the exception of Ashildr. And the main thing I’m going to remember about any of this season is Peter Capaldi giving more long, electrifying speeches, because of all those longer stories. This version of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor’s monologues are the main action, was intriguing but ultimately a little bit low on story.
And in retrospect, I think we were supposed to glean something about the Doctor swapping his sonic screwdriver for a dark hoodie, sunglasses and electric guitar—something about the Doctor, shaken by the meeting with Baby Davros, having some kind of identity crisis—but I don’t entirely get it.
But I’ll say the same thing about the season as a whole as about this individual episode: the ending was so brilliant, I’m inclined to love the whole thing retroactively because it all led up to this.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.