The end is nigh!

The next issue of Jupiter will be the big 50. It’s also the last consecutively named of Jupiter’s moons. For some reason the IAU has named the 50th moon as Herse, and left the rest currently unnamed, except for Dia (#53). I’d previously announced that issues of Jupiter beyond 50 will simply be named ‘Jupiter’. Well I’m now announcing that the 50th issue will also be the last. Perhaps not for ever, but certainly for the time being.
I've greatly enjoyed the last 1 2 and a bit years, but I need a break. I think Jupiter needs a break from me as well. Family life has reduced the time I can commit to running Jupiter and as such it’s been pushed and squeezed, and quite frankly it deserves better. Our authors deserve better and you our readers deserve better. I intend to take a break from the slush pile, spend time reading science fiction because I enjoy it, and fall in love with the genre all over again. I’m going to stop taking new subscriptions and for a limited period will price the final issue at subscription pricing so you don’t miss out.
Obviously where subscribers have subs extending beyond issue 50, money will be returned.
That’s enough from me, get on and read the stories!

Issue 49 out now!

Sorry for the delay, 4 great stories "Stripped" by David Cleden, "Anthilion’s Eyes" by Jack Schouten, "Mods" by Jude Jones and "Alien Abduction" by Rik Hunik. Cover by David Conyers.

Andrew Darlington - "Time, a simple thing considered as..."

My story ‘The New Flesh’ – in the current issue of ‘Jupiter’ takes a light-touch look at species origins, and at future evolutions, while caught up in the midst of eco-catastrophe. It’s a work of fiction, but everything here has gone into it. That’s what makes SF unique.

‘TIME, A SIMPLE THING, CONSIDERED AS…’

by

ANDREW DARLINGTON

So, like it or not, we’re stuck in this time-stuff like journalists embedded in a war-zone. We get no choice in it. We don’t understand it. But our lives are subject to its laws, from beginning… to end. Some speculate about the ‘Big Bang’, and about what preceded it. Seems to me there’s some basic glitch in their reasoning. According to the very wonderful Albert Einstein, space-time is interconnected, they’re aspects of one another. So matter did not exist before time. And time did not exist before matter. Time came into being woven into the structure of matter. It’s an integral aspect of life, the universe and everything. There was nothing prior to the Big Bang, not even time. So the idea of ‘before’ itself is a nonsense. As Albert said, and he should know. But I’m getting sidetracked already…

James Ussher, diligent seventeenth-century Archbishop Of Armagh and Primate Of All Ireland, famously totted-up all the dates in the Bible to conclude creation was six-thousand years old. That it came into being at around nightfall – 9pm or thereabouts, preceding the Sunday of 23 October 4004BC. That’s not a very long period of time, in what we term historic or prehistoric terms. What it presupposes it that the world, and everything else was created in exactly the form it is now. That it is essentially unchanged, and unchanging. Bishop Ussher was not exactly unique in assuming this. For the most part of human existence on this planet, time was not something invested with the significance we now attach to it. People in ancient civilizations lived in a state of perpetual now-ness. Of course, those nomadic peoples on their flat-Earth world beneath a closed dome of finite sky across which the Moon and the Sun criss-crossed on their regular paths, they had their creation myths. They were sufficiently curious, and poetically imaginative enough to conjure up some engaging fantasies. Bizarrely, some claim still to adhere to those antique myth-systems as a kind of spiritual litmus-paper test of their religious beliefs. But those ancients were as embedded in time as we are, they aged and died like we do, they were aware of the passing of dynasties, of old-time heroes and legendary military campaigns. They were even surrounded by the monolithic remains of earlier civilizations. What they didn’t have was any concept of historical progression. The past was no better and no worse than the present. The future would be no better or worse, or significantly different to the present. People came and people went, but the world they moved through remained essentially the same. In fact, for your average peasant, life didn’t change in its essential details – tied to the cycle of seasons, for thousands of years. For some people alive today, it’s still pretty much like that.

Many worlds of Fantasy Fiction continue to exist within that continuum. It’s a useful and popular story-telling device. But that’s what distinguishes it from science fiction. Can science fiction exist without science? Without awareness of scientific methodology? Without an appreciation of space-time…? I think not. This is what differentiates us.

Events frequently have unintended consequences. It could be argued that it was the industrial revolution that rendered the slave-trade obsolete, when capitalism twigged that machines are faster, more efficient and cheaper than forced human labour. Darwin – and I concede there were pre-Darwin and simultaneous Darwinian-type thinkers around, but for the sake of this diatribe we’ll leave it at Darwin. And yes, he ripped the roof off pretty-much everything. The apes-into-human bit, obviously. But it alters our relationship with time too. People, and bipeds that look a lot like people, have been around for, not thousands, but millions of years. While the Earth, the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos, are suddenly calculated in billions, not millions of years. It expands the scope, and introduces changes. The obvious corollary is to switch that perspective around. If the past is not like the present, the future will be equally unlike the present. Tomorrow will be different. The day after tomorrow will be differenter. The past is still springing surprises, still being fine-tuned and redrawn. But if our species and subspecies have been around millions of years, just possibly we’ll be around a few million more. If we can survive the current unsustainable population-bump through pandemic or ecological armageddon, and reemerge at something resembling medieval population-levels, with current technology intact, the potential is endless. Until we gradually shift into something else.

And if the Earth has been around billions of years since its fiery birth, chances are it’ll be around, in some form or another, for billions more, until it eventually ceases to be. A fairly obvious conclusion, to us, now. But a perception that’s different to Bishop Ussher’s fixed static world-view. And a step-change in human consciousness from what came before. An awareness that ripples out and alters with unintended consequences. It shocks the documentation of history out of this-happened then this-happened then this-happened into a structured narrative that starts way down there in messy unhygienic primitivism and inexorably climbs up to whatever cultural pinnacles we now enjoy. Relativistic issues may gnaw at that certainty every now and then, but some things are inescapable. Read this online. Now argue that’s not progress. Yet narratives are not fixed. They involve plot developments, with chapters as-yet unwritten. They also imply a dénouement.

There could be no ancient Roman or classical Greek science fiction, because they did not possess this sense of time as something infinitely malleable. Homer and Virgil schemed tales of epic journeys to fantastic realms which are easily adaptable to a kind of SF-mindset. They are fantasy, with story-telling devices that have been subsumed into SF. But they are not SF.

And human’s being a naturally inquisitive organism, just as desert nomads once dreamed creation-myths from the dance of campfires beneath the stars, so there’s no way they’re not going to populate that immensity of future-centuries with new ideas, with playful half-fantasy, half-speculation. Jules Verne was writing about dinosaurs and evolutionary proto-humans in ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Earth’ (1964) even as, simultaneously, the Darwinian dialogue was still hot hot hot. We forget just how innovative that was. Then HG Wells transported his Time Traveller forward to the very end of old Earth’s story, to its bleak cold extinction days, in prose that still shocks chills of frisson through the frontal lobes. These concepts open up the scale of what is possible. This is no small thing. This is a big deal. That science fiction was a trashy academically-disreputable genre that rapidly became associated with cheap bug-eyed monsters in garish pulp-magazines doesn’t detract from the fact that the SF community was the first to think of us as one global tribe – we are Earthlings. One species, beyond national boundaries.

From its very beginnings, writers have never ducked the opportunity of projecting their visions to the end of time. Arthur C Clarke’s ‘The City And The Stars’ (1956) envisions a single eternal city on an otherwise dead planet. Michael Moorcock’s ‘Dancers At The End Of Time’ (1972-1976) novel-series has decadent humans with techno-supernatural powers cavorting and partying into eternity. Jack Vance’s ‘The Dying Earth’ (1950, and on) has the Earth awaiting the Sun’s death as cunning and intrigue continue their devious eccentric way towards oblivion. Against all the evidence these fictions suggest the human form will survive the passage of millions of years largely unchanged. Others are not so restrained. Brian Aldiss’ brain-expanding end-of-time ‘Hothouse’ (1962) is populated by squat lemur-like humans lost in a vast tropical rainforest world of a single Banyan tree. Stephen Baxter has it both ways. In his ‘Evolution’ (2002) humans change and devolve into a bleak arid Mars-like world 500-million years ahead, while an alternate parallel-future diverges into “The Children Of Time”, a Baxter spin-off that appeared in ‘Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine’ (July 2005), and later in the Mike Ashley-edited ‘The Mammoth Book Of Apocalyptic SF’ (Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010). This related story-strand insists humans will stay human. Until there are no more humans. Still elsewhere, the Asimov and ‘Star Trek’ tomorrows suggest human manifest destiny is to expand out across the stars and colonise the thronging galaxy. Others look at the distance of the stars, and turn away. No, we are here to stay. One planet. One solar system. Fact is, we don’t know. We can guess. It’s all up for grabs. But our guesses are restrained by the now-ness of this time-stuff we’re embedded in.

There’s a beautifully absurd sequence in HG Wells’ tale filmed by Alexander Korda into ‘Things To Come’ (1936), in which a fleet of vast propeller-driven flying-machines appear over devastated post-war Europe. It’s a stunning steam-punk image as outmoded by subsequent events as our imaginings will soon be reconfigured and junked by what happens tomorrow. My story ‘The New Flesh’ in the current issue of ‘Jupiter’ takes a light-touch look at species origins, and at future evolutions, while caught up in the midst of eco-catastrophe. It’s a work of fiction, but everything here has gone into it. That’s what makes SF unique.

Check out my website ‘EIGHT MILES HIGHER’ – ‘The Blogspot for People Who Don’t Like Blogspots’ – latest postings includes John Brunner ‘Earth Is But A Star’ retrospect & overview, TV Smith (of the Adverts) Live In Leeds, ‘Kraftwerk: In A Schizophrenic Country’ interview, ‘The Big Three: Cavern Stomp’, ‘Harry Harrison: The Real Galactic Hero’, Jethro Tull In Hull, 1969’, Vintage SF Book Review Kenneth Bulmer ‘The Fatal Fire’, Poem “You’ll Never Find A Gay In The Catholic Church” etc, Cat Stevens ‘First Cuts’ – Is It Time To Forgive Him?, ‘The Art Of The Artwoods: The Story Of A Cult Mod-Soul Band’, 1950’s SF ‘When The Moon Died’ by Richard Savage, and more… monthly updates at http://andrewdarlington.blogspot.com

Author Guest Blog - Neil Clift

When I was asked to make a guest appearance on the blog for Jupiter SF I was really pleased. I have to admit that it's great to be involved in the 10th anniversary celebrations of what I believe is one of the best publications of short fiction around. I wanted to do something really special for it, but try as I might my moments of inspiration continued to be few and far between and thus I couldn't conjure up anything other than these few words to present before you... So for what it's worth here goes...

When I first read Jupiter I became hooked straight away and  loved all of the stories featured in it. At the time I thought that the prospect of being published within its pages was merely a fantasy, but some years later I am now making my fourth appearance with my story 'White Wave Valley.' Oddly enough I took some inspiration from a source that I never thought would inspire me. Reality TV... (I guess it will seem pretty obvious which type of show shaped my creative spark in this instance once you've read the story.) But upon reflection reality is something that I think is becoming increasingly important within sci-fi in general. The need to create plausible characters or at times situations is an ever present concern in many forms of modern enertainment.

I never looked at it that way when I was plowing my way through Asimov, until Philip K. Dick hit my radar in my late teens. Since then, numerous authors have helped to shape my style, such as Richard Morgan, and Iain M. Banks (R.I.P.). I've also branched out into horror and fantasy in recent years, as very often there's a crossover in these genres these days.

I take inspiration from films and music. Needless to say science fiction and horror/ fantasy are high on this list. But I also like thrillers and dramas, and it is these elements that I try to reflect well in my own output...

Well to quote a famous phrase... 'Enough of my yackin'.' Here's to another ten years of Jupiter... And I hope you enjoy my part in this edition.

All the best.

Neil Clift

Tweet

Issue 41: Aoede Coming your way soon

Issue 32 FREE today on Kindle

As part of the build up to our 10 year celebrations we've stuck issue 32 of Jupiter up on Amazon for their Kindle for FREE. That's right. FREE.

At them moment, it's just for today...

Enjoy here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0053YHEUW/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb

SFrevu reviews Mneme

"it’s yet another of their fine issues"Full review here: http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=14617

We have stories that are "beautiful", "poignant", "too good", "good, solid story" and feature a "very interesting scenario."

Sounds like the sort of magazine you should be reading hey?