Hello there Reader! I hope you're having a great week.

Writing slowed down a little this last couple of weeks, as I hit some story problems in the final 'Martians' book. Nothing show-stopping, but I found myself temporarily stuck as to how to move forward.

Almost always when this happens, I find it's one of two things. Either I made a mistake way earlier, which is now exerting its drag on the story as I try and get away from it; or I didn't have the right plan in the first place (which if you think about it, is basically the same problem, just at the outline stage).

So I've learned not to stress over the current blockage, but to work my way back upstream and identify where the problem originated. In this case, it was a little of both scenarios. Firstly I'd left a small space in my outline where I wasn't sure of the best approach to bridge the gap. I do this from time to time, trusting to the process to carry my over the space without problem, and usually it works just fine. Occasionally though I think the gap is smaller than it eventually proves to be, and the momentum of the story isn't quite enough to carry me over. I might have still made it, except that the last chunk of story before the gap also wasn't right. Lacking faith in that meant that I didn't have a great place to start from, and so the gap looked insurmountable.

Fortunately, my method of backing up (taking a run-up in this scenario?) has worked! Now that I better understand the size of the gap I need to fill, I can work on building up to it better - consider it like building a ramp to get me over the chasm. I think we're done with that, and hopefully from here on out things are a little easier. For me, at least. The characters are not going to find it plain sailing.

Space News

Life on Europa?

Image: The outward-facing side of the Europa Clipper's silver vault plate is engraved with waveforms for the word 'water' in 104 languages.

If you ever read '2010' Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001, then you'll know the Europa moon of Jupiter plays a pivotal role in the events of that novel. Less so in the movie adaptation (though that's still certainly worth a watch, in my opinion).

In it a Chinese spacecraft lands to refill their tanks with water from the icy oceans we know exist there, only to be overwhelmed and destroyed by a light-seeking lifeform. While there's little to no chance of anything that advanced existing there, we do have some tantalising clues that life itself may well exist there.

Saturn's moon Enceladus also has a liquid ocean beneath an icy crust, and we've seen plumes of water escaping - Cassini even dove through one in 2015 and detected the building blocks of life. If the same hold for Europa, then it might well be our best chance for finding life in our solar system, beyond the Earth itself.

Next month NASA launches the Clipper mission, to reach Europa in 2030. The primary goal of the mission is to determine whether the moon is habitable to microbial life or not. We only have vague evidence of liquid water there, but it's definitely enough to be excited for this mission. It'll be bringing a barrage of equipment to investigate too - visible light and IR cameras, magnetic field analysers, gravity variance detectors, radar, spectrographs... and it'll be sampling any plumes or ejected materials that it encounters too.

ESA has already launched the JUICE mission which will also be investigating Jupiter's moons at around the same time. It's going to be a busy time for exobiologists in the coming years!

(As always, Dr Becky Smethurst has a great explainer video - and her cat only slightly steals the show...)

Source: europa.nasa.gov

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Strange News

Liminal Spaces

I've mentioned my fascination with liminal spaces before - those transitional zones between places like corridors, airports and waiting rooms. Because they have no real purpose beyond being a 'place between', they often feel unnatural, eerie or even frightening.

Such places have long been recognised in mythology and the supernatural, a place stripped of its usual context is unnerving in ways that we can't always explain. Imagine an empty shopping mall, an abandoned playground, a normally bustling high street devoid of other shoppers.

The pandemic certainly exacerbated this feeling for a lot of us - places were suddenly quieter than usual, and we also had that awful sensation of waiting for something while a certain dread hung over everything. So perhaps it's not surprising that the aesthetic of liminal spaces began to rise in popularity at the same time.

The Backrooms (I've mentioned them before here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnCnkmoiBr4ZmlFBBMo1wexKlFT-JXxIn ) sprang into existence in 2019, and are often felt to be the source of the liminal spaces idea. In fact it originated long before that, and has frequently been a trope in horror stories. The origin of the meme was a found image that depicted a sickly yellow 'back room' that the poster claimed awaited you if you fell through reality.

Earlier this year, diligent work by fans uncovered the source of that original image - I won't spoil the ending here, but the video is well worth a look.

The main link is to an article about the wider phenomenon, and the author is hosting a workshop on the topic in October.

Source: collegeofpsychicstudies.co.uk

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Miscellany

You can tell how healthy your soil is by listening to it.

Source: Atlas Obscura

Our planetary defences got tested the other day.

Source: Atlas Obscura

Did you see the Northern Lights this week?

Source: BBC News

And Finally

For all of the many and varied takes on 'The War of the Worlds' (my own humble sequels included) the most love seems to be reserved for the 1953 movie version.

Despite the 'modernisation' taking it out of the Edwardian era, the lack of tripods and the limitations of the special effects of the era, it's still regularly listed in 'top ten' lists and revered as one of the better adaptations that took place.

On the DVD version is a feature about the creation of the movie - which has been made available on YouTube. It's half an hour of fascinating details about the period, the technical and other challenges involved in bringing to life one of the most beloved science-fiction stories of all time.

I recommend grabbing a drink of your choice and settling in to relive the glory days of Hollywood, marvel at the ingenuity of the creators involved, and then maybe carve out some time to watch the movie again. https://ares.watch/z/B00IK7F3WK

It also includes some footage of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion Martians, from when he was hoping to be involved in the movie...and answers the question 'is Woody Woodpecker in War of the Worlds'?

I'm now wondering if I should create a 'tier list' of the various incarnations of the story. What do you think?

Source: ares.watch