I haven't finished it yet, but I already have to rave about Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, she who brought us insights already into cadavers (Stiff) and the science of sex (Bonk). I'm not doing a review here, but since I'm using her book as a launching point, I might as well highly recommend it, which I do. Huge fun. I haven't been reading it for fun, but it's great to be entertained while I learn.
This is a wonderful book in which you discover bizarre, hilarious facts, such as how a sex toy dummy was actually considered by Russian cosmonauts and more than you really want to know about throwing up when you reach multiple G's of acceleration. Which brings me to the subject of this little blog, which I intended to write at a later date, but what the hey.
I'm actually reading Packing for Mars for research. Because, full confession here, I am a scientific illiterate. I could blame it, of course, on Mr. Kitchen, my Grade 10 Science teacher who appalled many of us when he blatantly started pushing Creationist theory (which we all promptly ignored as bullshit), but ehhhh, that's not it. I could blame it on the idiocy of the way they taught Chemistry, which insisted you get the lab results predicted in the textbook otherwise you failed; the late Richard Feynman already pointed out in one of his fun memoirs how this taught three generations to cheat and fudge data instead of actually learning from mistakes. But no, the truth of it is my brain simply isn't big enough to handle Math, let alone basic chemistry and physics.
At one point, I really wanted to be a surgeon while growing up. Bodies were cool. The history of medicine is fascinating and cool. Bzz! Sorry, kid because a) I was blind as a bat for decades until recent surgery to insert contact lens implants, and b) those annoying grades stopped that plan cold.
Hmmmm, and yet I've been trying to write, among other things, science fiction novels, or "science fiction-ish" novels. This can get one into trouble. I idly put a throwaway line into The Karma Booth over the story not too long ago that heralded an arsenic-based life form. Unfortunately, a reviewer wiser than I who keeps up to date on such stuff read follow-up material on how, yep, the media did it again and misreported things, getting its facts wrong. She pointed it out, and I was so embarrassed by my sloppiness, I made sure this was corrected in the paperback edition.
And damn it, I should know better. Back in the 1980s, Discover Magazine, the American networks, everybody jumped on the bandwagon over something called Biosphere 2. When my boss of a producer wanted to do a story on it at the TV station where I worked, I had to mercifully point out to him that the Village Voice had done an investigative article, linking the project to a cult. It wasn't that I was so lip-smacking clever; it was because I bother to read and watch more than the operation I work for.
That was (cough, cough) ages ago, and today I have a conundrum. Got a brilliant idea for an SF novel, which involves space travel. And physics. And chemistry. And biology. And probably more Math than I can handle. The concept was originally pitched as a series to a certain television network, which said, wow, this is really brilliant, it's intelligent, it's cool, yada, yada, yada... We're not going to do it. For reasons which have nothing to do with the idea or its scientific plausibility, not even with me, but over their demographic. C'est la vie. Now I could keep shopping it around as a script in its early, rough treatment phase, or I could get cracking on it with my first instinct as a novelist. Which is why I've been reading Packing for Mars, to help me understand more about the mechanics of space travel.
But now is as good to enlist a few beta readers and hopefully a couple or maybe even a few people -- because hey, you never know -- who have the degrees that I don't but who might be able to help. Hey, this blog finally got interactive! (Well, sort of.) So if there is someone out there who's got credentials of a kind willing to be patient with a very dim novelist over the easygoing course of six to nine months, who understands physics, space technology, etc. drop me a line. God knows, I need educating. :-)
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