The Days Are Just Packed     
The ongoing saga of David D. Levine's writing and other adventures.

I'm a geek, fan, and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. For more information about me, please see my web page. If you have questions, comments, or just want to chat, you can send me e-mail. Or you can post a comment on my LiveJournal.

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Penguins and kangaroos and emus and fans

Right after posting my last entry we headed to the Old Melbourne Gaol (misspelled Goal in some brochures), but on the way we spotted posters for the free exhibitions at the State Library of Victoria, including Ned Kelly's armor (which is what I'd been hoping to see at the Old Gaol). We happened to get the benefit of an amusing pair of docents doing Good Cop/Bad Cop on Ned Kelly for a group of uniformed schoolgirls (though he was a common criminal, neither revolutionary nor Robin Hood, he is considered a folk hero by some Australians).

In the evening we took a tour bus to Phillip Island for the nightly Penguin Parade. This is a highly touristy event but it was recommended to us by our friends Paul and Debbie and we're really glad we went. It was about two hours' drive from Melbourne. You wait in these bleacher-type seats watching the surf as the sun sets, and just as it starts to get dark you see what looks like a whitecap slowly moving up out of the ocean and across the sand. As it gets closer the shimmering white blob resolves into individual birds: tiny one-foot-high penguins waddling as fast as they can across the sand. Once they reach the vegetation line they slow down and stroll as much as a kilometer up into the dunes until they reach their burrows and waiting mates, and you can walk along the boardwalk and follow them. They make a weird cawing trilling racket, and you can hear the tiny pattering sounds of their wet penguin feet on the sand. Yes, we paid good money to see penguins commute. But they were so cute!! Highly recommended.

The next day I got a long black (Americano) from the coffee bar in the hotel lobby and tried the "Tim Tam Slam." The cookie just melted and I dropped it in the coffee. Might have worked better if the coffee hadn't been so hot.

That day we had signed up for a Savannah Walkabout along with Seanan McGuire, two other fans, and four non-fans. The point of this expedition was to view Australian fauna in the wild; if this had been Africa it would have been a safari. We drove out into the boonies (passing through the small town of Little River, after which the band is named, to You Yangs Park and Serendip Park), viewing a billabong (Australian oasis) and many cockatoos, corellas, magpies, gullahs, and other birds along the way. In the park we were joined by a nature guide who had been out spotting koalas for us; she led us to three of them, munching contentedly in their trees. After lunch and the Billy Tea Ceremony (which consists of swinging the billy (kettle) rapidly over your head to settle the sediments) we went off looking for kangaroos and emus. (How to tell the difference between a kangaroo and a wallaby: if you see one by itself and it's less than waist-high it's probably a wallaby; bigger and in mobs are kangaroos. "We're not a mob," said Seanan. "We are respectable business marsupials.") We stalked the wild kangaroo and emu all afternoon, sneaking to within good binocular distance of the kangaroos and closer to the emus. The kangaroos and emus hang around together; the emus, being faster, provide an early warning system for the kangaroos. The 'roos watched us at all times while we were near, and when we got too close (or when, for reasons of their own, they decided to move) they loped gently and silently away. We also saw the skeletonized remains of a 'roo, which Seanan found fascinating (but she did not wish on its paw; probably wise). An exceptional day.

Today we checked out of our pre-con hotel and met up with Murray Moore, Leslie Turek, Pricilla Olsen, Karen Schaffer, Mike Ward, Andy Porter, and others to visit Bruce Gillespie and Elaine Cochrane and their suburban home, cats, garden, and collection of Ditmars. Elaine fixed us a delightful lunch and we spent the middle part of the day smoffing and chatting about fanzines. Then we returned to Melbourne, dragged our bags over to the con hotel, and checked in. The brand-new South Wharf Hilton has a lot of dark wood and glass and feels like the Doug Fir restaurang in Portland. We met George R. R. Martin, Amy Thomson, and John Scalzi in the hotel lobby, and had dinner with Lenore Jones at Cafe Keyif across the river ("on the mainland" says Kate). As we were finishing up dinner, Doug Faunt came in and we chatted with him for a while before returning to our hotel. We didn't manage to get registered at the con but our convention has already begun.

We didn't take this picture but the penguins are that small, that close, and that cute

Jeanine, our guide for the Savanna Walkabout

Took this shot of some 'roos through my binoculars

Emus and kangaroos together

Jeanine and emus

Seanan was thrilled by the dead kangaroo

We got closer to the emus than the kangaroos

Posted 09/01/2010 04:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We're having a great time in Melbourne, but haven't blogged because free wi-fi isn't widely available. Today is Melbourne Day, the 175th anniversary of the city's founding. We saw a couple of hot-air balloons from our 28th floor balcony this morning.

The flight to Australia was about as painless as one could hope for. We'd upgraded to business class using miles and got these great lie-flat seats. I slept about 7 hours and spent the rest of the time eating and working on my current YA SF novel (it's not going well, alas). On the first day we managed to keep going until dark and then crashed at 8 or 9, waking up around 6 the next morning, so we're working on approximately Australia time, which is not to say we aren't suffering from jet lag. It's hard to tell the difference between jet lag and fatigue from touristing too hard.

Melbourne in August reminds me a lot of Vancouver in November (though not quite so cold) -- multinational, multilingual, multicultural, and subtly not-American. It's a very civilized place, very walkable and well-supplied with trams, and the tourist info office in Federation Square is top-notch. Many fine cafes and shops and much cool architecture can be found in the chaotic network of "laneways" that fill the spaces between major streets. We also haven't had a bad meal or a bad cup of coffee yet. Given Australia's location it's not surprising that there are a lot of Indonesian, Malaysian, Chinese, and Indian restaurants, also Bangladeshi and Nepalese. Many aspects of the language here strike me as a weird mix of American and British; for example, tickets are one-way and return (American: one-way and round-trip, British: single and return) and the Parliament consists of two houses called the House and the Senate. Australia also has its very own words for many things, such as coffee (a "flat white" is a latte with no foam, a "short black" a shot of espresso, and a "long black" an Americano).

So far we've been touristing around Melbourne's central business district, including the Tim Burton exhibit at the Australia Center for the Moving Image (ACMI). Spending that much time in Tim Burton's head was kind of disturbing. Also very cool at ACMI was their exhibit on the history of film and video in Australia, including some snippets of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. That kangaroo could do some amazing things, including getting letters out of the mailbox and reading them -- Lassie was a piker by comparison. Also on display: a replica of the Last of the V-8 Interceptors. Yesterday afternoon we took the tram to St. Kilda, a slightly shabby beachfront tourist town featuring keen little amusement park Luna Park. I can't imagine how crowded it would be on a summer Saturday.

Random notes and pics:

• My god, the moon really is upside-down here!
• Both Sydney and Melbourne from the air are a sea of tight-packed single-family houses, with remarkable uniformity of roof (all hipped, all red-tiled).
• All my instincts about "what is that bird" are wrong. Both crows and seagulls look almost the same as back home but sound very different. Pigeons, though, are still pigeons.
• Fluffy gray-green eucalypts look like lichen trees on a model railroad layout.
• Vegemite spread thin on a toasted English muffin is actually quite nice. Tim Tams cookies also very nice; have not yet tried the apparently traditional "nibble off two opposite corners and suck hot coffee or tea through the Tim Tam" thing.

Gog and Magog in the laneways

This is not the entrance to the Tim Burton exhibit

This is the entrance to Luna Park

Posted 09/01/2010 04:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

"A Little Song, A Little Dance," a ghost story co-written with Andrine de la Rocha, will appear in charity anthology Breaking Waves: An Anthology for Gulf Coast Relief from Book View Cafe. It will be published very soon but I don't know if it will be an e-book, hardcopy, or both. All the proceeds will go to help victims (people and animals) of the recent Gulf oil spill.

Also, take a gander at the fabulous cover for Wild Cards I, coming in November! Might be the best cover I've ever had.

So much to do before our trip to Australia, but we had a pleasant afternoon hanging out with our friend Nevenah from New Orleans, a nice surprise.

Have I mentioned I won't get a Thursday this week? We depart the US on Wednesday and arrive in Australia, 18 hours later, on Friday. On the other hand, when we come home our flight takes negative 53 minutes.

Posted 08/22/2010 21:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The preliminary program schedule for Aussiecon 4 has been posted, and I'm on the following items:

Kaffeeklatsch
David D Levine
Thursday 1700 Room 201 I could do better than that
Whenever a Hollywood science fiction blockbuster enters cinemas, there seems to be a queue of fans lining up to complain how bad it is—and even that they could do better if put in charge of the studios. Here’s your chance: a team of panelists will lead the attempt to generate the better blockbuster: looking at Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Avatar and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Catherynne M. Valente, David D. Levine, Darren Maxwell
Friday 1300 Room 213 Readings
David D Levine, K. A. Bedford
Friday 1700 Room 207 To market: How to sell your short stories
Submitting a story to a journal, anthology or magazine might seem as simple as attaching a Word document to an e-mail and firing it off, but is it? How do you know the appropriate market for your fiction? How much is enough money to be paid for your work? How should you approach an editor? What are the dos and don’ts of getting published in the speculative short fiction marketplace?
Cory Doctorow, Robert Silverberg, David D. Levine, Angela Slatter
Saturday 1100 Room P3 The race to the Red Planet
Ever since the Apollo moon landings, it always seemed Mars was the next target for human space exploration. It’s been 41 years and we still haven’t been there. As the debate over a human mission to Mars continues, we ask the questions: should we go? What is stopping us? What will we need to do, and consider, to make a human mission to the red planet a success?
Kim Stanley Robinson, David D. Levine, James Benford
Sunday 1300 Room P3 Mission to “Mars”
In January 2010, Hugo-winning SF writer David D. Levine spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, the Mars Society’s simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. Although the Martian conditions were simulated, the science was real, as were the isolation, hostile environment, and problems faced by the six-person crew. Although his official title was Crew Journalist, he soon found himself repairing space suits, helping to keep the habitat running, and having interplanetary adventures he’d never before imagined.
David D. Levine
Sunday 1400 Room P3 The bioethics of terraforming
Let’s say we colonise Mars, and develop the technology to terraform its environment and create a warmer, breathable atmosphere for humans to breathe. Let’s also so that we discover bacterial life on Mars - life that cannot exist if the planet’s atmosphere changes. Do we have a responsibility to leave Mars intact, or simply try to save the bacteria the best we can. What are the bioethics of terraforming worlds?
Kim Stanley Robinson, James Benford, Sam Scheiner, David D. Levine
Monday 1000 Room P1

An everyday future: Including popular culture in science fiction
Most science fiction writers take care to present the broader culture and technology of their fictional futures - but what about the elements many writers forget? What is the media of the future like? What are the sports? A look at the everyday aspects of future life that can bring a science fiction world to life.
Paul Cornell, Gord Sellar, David D. Levine
Monday 1400 Room 219

I'm also listed in the preliminary program on panels The future of gender and sexuality, Music, movies and speculative fiction, The difficult second album: Middle parts of movie trilogies but I've had to drop those due to scheduling conflicts.

Posted 08/22/2010 08:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I've actually worked on the YA novel for three days in a row, which is a rarity so far this year. Unfortunately, most of today's work consisted of messing with spreadsheets and Wikipedia to work out the calendar and timekeeping system of my fictional Mars settlers rather than any actual, you know, fiction. This is my comfort zone, to which I retreat when the writing itself is not cooperating. Oh well, it's valuable worldbuilding and at least I typed it into my notes file rather than as yet another expository lump in the text which would eventually have had to be either excised or smoothed into the action.

Posted 08/19/2010 00:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Oh my gosh, we're leaving for Australia next week! We have all of our hotels and internal flights arranged, and most of our major tourist activities reserved. Soon it will be time to pack!

Here's our itinerary, in brief:

August 25-27: Fly to Australia.
August 27-31: Melbourne, plus at least one day trip out of the city.
September 1-6: Aussiecon 4 (68th World Science Fiction Convention), also in Melbourne.
September 7-9: Mungo Outback Journey at Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area. Kangaroos! Emus! Cockatoos!
September 10-13: Adelaide.
September 14-16: Lady Elliot Island Resort on the Great Barrier Reef. Snorkeling! Manta rays! Sea turtles!
September 17: Hervey Bay. Whales!
September 18-21: Sydney.
September 22: Fly home.

Posted 08/16/2010 15:25 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

For a change, we were in town for the weekend, and we decided to take advantage of the many fine activities offered by our own home town for a change. It was uncharacteristically hot all weekend but we made the best of it.

On Saturday we drove up to Mt. Hood for a tour of five cabins built by Henry Steiner and his family in the 1920s and 30s. Steiner himself hand-carved the massive hexagonal columns in the grand hall of Timberline Lodge, and he is also responsible for the Oregon Writers Colony's Colonyhouse. These cabins on Mt. Hood share the same aesthetic and hand-built details that make the Colonyhouse so delightful. You can read an article and see some pictures of one of the cabins we visited, and a few small pictures of another.

Today the city closed a bunch of streets in our section of town to cars, an event called Sunday Parkways, creating a couple of bicycle-only loops and offering a variety of bike- and pedestrian-oriented activities. Kate took her bike around and had a grand time while I stayed home and did laundry and other chores. When she returned we went back out again to hit the Hawthorne Street Fair, our neighborhood's annual festival of food, shopping, and face-painting (we saw Tina Connolly taking a breather from her day job). And of course, it wouldn't be Hawthorne without a visit from the local unicycle-riding bagpipe player.

After a nap, we went downtown to the India Festival, which was hot, crowded, noisy, and otherwise completely authentic. We ran into an old friend, Keith Lofstrom, there and talked about novel methods of launching satellites into orbit while sitting on a park bench and eating delightful Indian food.

Then we came home to enjoy our air-conditioned house.

A rather ordinary day in some ways. But it's ours.

Posted 08/15/2010 21:30 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I'm on an hour-and-a-half layover at the Salt Lake City airport, where there are little carrels with power outlets and free wi-fi. Why can't all airports be like this? (Though, all in all, I'd rather have returned the way I came, via Seattle, which would have given me at least an hour less time in the air.)

The day started with the usual end-of-convention prepositions: get up, wash up, dress up, pack up, check out, eat up, and check in (for my flight). I bought my ticket from Alaska Air, but the flight is actually a Delta flight, and since Alaska doesn't actually fly to Cincinnati itself I was unable to check in on the Alaska web site (which for some peculiar reason requires you to specify the originating city as well as the confirmation code). Fortunately, they gave me a Delta confirmation code as well and I was able to use it to check in via the Delta web site. But the boarding pass, when printed on the hotel's printer, had its outer half-inch cut off and would probably not be acceptable at the airport. Grr. (As it happens I had to check a bag anyway, so it cost me little time to reprint my boarding pass at the gate. My bag, by the way, weighed the same 50 pounds as my Monster Bag from MDRS on the way out, but I seem to have sold at least 12 pounds of books at the conference.)

Having dealt with all that, I was only a bit late for the morning's plenary session by David Chuss, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, about The Early Universe. Much of this talk was not new to me, but it's nice to be reminded about what we know and how we know it.

He started with the earliest development of cosmology, going back to Tyco Brahe and Newton and the statement "Mathematics starts with a truth and looks at the consequences; cosmology starts with the consequences and looks for the truth." Einstein's general relativity implied that the universe was either expanding or contracting, not static, and he added a term (the "cosmological constant") to get rid of that. Not too much later, Hubble's observations of the apparent motion away from us of distant objects showed that the universe was indeed expanding, and Einstein took the constant back out, saying it was his "greatest blunder."

So, astronomers reasoned, if the universe is expanding it must be cooling. This prompted them to look for the red-shifted light of the early, hot universe, but they were scooped by a couple of microwave engineers who were trying to track down the source of some interference in their antennas and wound up with a Nobel Prize.

NASA has launched several satellites to map this cosmic background radiation, with increasing detail and sensitivity, and they are telling us a lot about the early universe. This radiation is slightly uneven (anisotropy), which tells us that the early universe was lumpy; these lumps coalesced into galaxies, stars, and us. Doing a Fourier transform on this radiation reveals the power curve of the early universe, which (through math I have never been able to follow) explains where the fundamental particles like baryons came from and whether the universe is positively curved (closed, leading to an eventual collapse) or negatively curved (open, continually expanding). Weirdly, the data tells us the universe is exactly flat, which is unexpected and unstable (the slightest curvature in either direction will tend to increase). No one quite understands yet how this can be.

Recent observations of extremely distant objects reveal that they appear to be accelerating away from us -- that is, the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This implies that the universe is mostly (over 75%) composed of "dark energy," whose properties are completely unknown -- all we can say is that it accelerates expansion. A negative value for Einstein's cosmological constant fits this data, but we still have no idea what this might mean in real-world terms.

Careful examination of lumpiness in the cosmic background radiation hints that the very early universe expanded faster than the speed of light ("inflation"); we don't know how this is possible, though perhaps in the first moments of the Big Bang the laws of physics had not yet coalesced into their current form. NASA is launching the Dark Energy Explorer and Webb Telescope satellites to investigate these questions.

In 1900 they thought 20th century physics would be boring, with only a few questions left to answer (the "ultraviolet catastrophe" and the presence or absence of ether). The search for answers to these questions led us to relativity, quantum dynamics, transistors, and GPS. We don't have such low expectations today, but we know we will be surprised.

Kevin Sloan was up next, talking about the Mars Society's University Rover Challenge, which is held each year at the MDRS in Utah (students participating in the challenge stay at a hotel in Hanksville, not at the hab).

The University Rover Challenge gives engineering students a concrete project that they can use to build skills, work in teams, and maybe win cash prizes. This year's URC had 12 teams from 4 countries; 7 teams made it to Utah for the final trials.

We believe that astronauts will work together with various kinds of machine to amplify their abilities. Rovers can, for example, be used to perform tasks outside a Mars base without having to suit up. The rovers in the challenge are wheeled (or tracked) vehicles with cameras and a manipulator arm; they are remotely operated, not autonomous. This is an engineering design, construction, and operation challenge with no artificial intelligence component. Rovers are limited to 50 kilograms and must perform 4 different tasks (they can be reconfigured with different parts for each task, but no configuration can be over 50kg). Most rovers weigh in at right around 49.9kg, but one team was surprised at the official weigh-in and had to quickly strip the rover of unessential cameras and batteries to get under the line.

The four tasks are: Equipment servicing task: navigate to a panel, read the instructions posted there using the rover's camera, and perform several tasks such as flipping switches and plugging in an electrical cord (this part was really hard, only the Oregon State University team was able to do it). Site survey task: find and survey several markers in a field, recording their coordinates with GPS-like accuracy. Sample return task: search for and return samples of biological interest, perform field analysis, and deliver field briefing to judges. This task requires engineers to work with biologists who are directing the work, rather than just drive and scoop. Emergency navigation task: cross difficult terrain, find a stranded astronaut, and deliver emergency supplies in less than 20 minutes. This one too was won by the Oregon State team. One of the Polish teams would have won the contest if they had gotten the full 100 points for this task, but their rover with its single camera was looking the wrong way and drove right past the astronaut.

We got a talk from the winning Oregon State team about their rover design and the lessons they learned from the previous challenge, which was very cool, but I'm running out of time here.

The final session I saw before departing the conference was Joseph Palaia from the NewSpace Center, talking about a planned "themed attraction" called Interspace. He said that the current wave of commercial space development is a "new barnstorming era" and very exciting, but direct participation is extremely expensive and the facilities are too isolated and not set up for the public. Current science and aerospace museums are focused on the past, not this new technology. Interspace is intended to be an interactive, immersive experience for tourists based on what's happening now and in the near future in space. They have a 75-acre site in Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center, and are currently trying to nail down the $72 million they'll need to build it. It looks like a lot of fun and I hope they succeed.

Then I drove to Cincinnati, dropped off the car, and flew to Salt Lake City without incident. At the moment it looks like my flight to Portland is about 15 minutes behind schedule, but I don't anticipate any problems getting home. See you soon!

Posted 08/08/2010 18:21 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

This morning's first plenary session was Carol Stoker of the NASA Ames Research Center, talking about the Drilling on the Moon and Mars in Human Exploration (DOMMEX) program from last season at the MDRS. The first half of her presentation was an overview of MDRS, which largely overlapped with my own presentation from yesterday, but I'm not going to fault her for that; she's on deadline and probably wasn't even here yesterday. It was interesting to see a different take on the same material, and (dropping modesty for a moment) to analyze the things that make my presentation more interesting and entertaining.

The DOMMEX part of the presentation was also interesting, because I'd read the emailed field reports and wanted to know more about it. Drilling will be an important part of any Mars mission (because so many interesting things are below the surface) and the DOMMEX experiments are intended to demonstrate different drilling technologies. The Mars Underground Mole (MUM), a self-driving impact-driven sampling robot, barely managed to embed itself completely in the soil, while a human-operated gas-powered backpack drill worked much faster and was more adaptable to unexpected situations. Bottom line: humans are more efficient and effective than robots. Other technologies tested included ground-penetrating radar and a manual core sampler (basically a small post hole digger, good for samples up to 1 meter in depth).

Dr. Stoker's presentation was followed by a panel discussion on Obama’s new space policy. None of them like it, particularly for the cancellation of the Ares heavy lift vehicle. The good news is that the Senate doesn't like it either and has restored funding for that program in their budget. We were all encouraged to write our representatives and ask them to support the Senate version of NASA's budget.

Carol Stoker returned after that with a presentation on the habitability of the Phoenix Lander site. She went into some detail on the factors that govern habitability (defined as suitability for Earth-like microorganisms, either in the present or in the past), what the Phoenix lander did to test for them, and how the site stacks up on each of them.

The items required for habitability are: liquid water, energy in forms usable by living things, the presence of the chemical building blocks of life, and the absence of factors inimical to life such as radiation and toxins. Phoenix had an extensive suite of instruments to detect most of these things. Its landing site (selected for the highest concentration of ice outside of the north ice cap itself) had plenty of direct and indirect evidence of water; chemical energy in the soil in the form of perchlorates and iron; solar energy available for photosynthesis, plus mica rocks in the soil which are transparent to visible light but opaque to damaging UV; and most of the chemical building blocks of life (except for nitrates, which might be present but were not tested for). Unfortunately, temperatures at this near-polar location are too low for life most of the year. However, in the distant past Mars had a much larger axial tilt and during the northern summer this part of Mars could get warmer than Antarctica does on Earth today. The Phoenix lander site is more habitable than any other site visited and deserves a follow-up expedition to search for signs of ancient life below the surface (which ties into her previous presentation on drilling).

After that plenary session I stuck my head in on Mars Camp, a family-friendly event that was open to the public. It was just hopping with kids and parents, flying flight simulators, working in a glove box, directing robot arms, and enjoying an inflatable planetarium. A very keen addition to the conference. I also picked up a couple of cool Mars coloring books.

I skipped the afternoon program in favor of a visit to the Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a mere 15 minutes' drive away. I'd been told that it has a better collection of airplanes than the Smithsonian, and I have to agree with that assessment. Here are just a few photos of some of my favorite bits:

The Bockscar, the bomber that dropped the Fat Man A-bomb on Nagasaki

A German V-2 rocket

A U-2 spy plane

The one and only Berlin Airlift Dog Parachute

An East German Trabant automobile and a section of the Berlin Wall (okay, this is not an airplane by any stretch of the imagination, but it is associated with the Berlin Airlift)

In the evening we had the annual banquet, with pretty good food and an awesome presentation by Dr. Carolyn Porco, director of the Cassini mission's CICLOPS Saturn Imaging Team. Her collection of amazing images of Saturn, its rings, and its moons (over 60 moons are now known) was like a year of Astronomy Pictures of the Day all at once, and she was excellent at explaining what we were seeing and why it was exciting. I had not known that we learned some amazing things about Saturn's rings at its equinox, when the sun shines directly across the rings and we can see the long shadows of any variations in height within them. The wobbles in the ring on either side of the moon Daphnis, for example, were revealed to be mile-hile walls of rubble thrown up by the moon's passage (the ring itself is just 30 feet thick). I had also not seen the amazing photos from the surface of Titan returned by the Huygens probe, or the plumes of salty water erupting from the surface of the moon Enceladus.

I had convivial table companions for the banquet, handed out many business cards, and made some professional contacts whose potential is very exciting. About which more later, if any of them should happen to pan out. For now, to bed.

Posted 08/07/2010 21:20 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Today was my big day. Paradoxically, this means I don't have much to say about it.

I presented my Mars Talk as the first plenary session of the day. It went well, there were no technical issues or embarrassing lapses, and I got a lot of compliments on it. I had been concerned that I would either say something technically or politically incorrect for this audience, but even those who had been to the MDRS themselves agreed that it really summed up the experience.

The panel discussion "The VASIMR Drive: Silver Bullet or Hoax?" consisted of four people who didn't think it would work, and was harmed by starting off with a detailed and jargon-heavy technical discussion of the problems rather than Geoff Landis's introduction to the concepts of electric propulsion in general and VASIMR in particular, which came third. Basically, the entire panel agreed that the powerful nuclear reactor necessary to power the thing could never be made lightweight enough to achieve the drive's stated potential of reaching Mars in 39 days. Apparently the drive's proponents argue that a nuclear reactor can be made that's 100x lighter than current designs, which all four of the panelists believe is highly unlikely. It would have been nice to get a representative of the pro-VASIMR viewpoint on the panel.

Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin spoke about how NASA has spent about as much per year in inflation-adjusted terms since Apollo as it did during Apollo, but the last 40 years haven't seen anything resembling that level of actual achievements, and the budget on the table right now does not have any US government capability to put people in space after the Shuttle is retired. Commercial space travel is all well and good, but Griffin argued that this capability is a critical function for the nation and should not be left entirely in the hands of private industry.

In the afternoon I attended several smaller presentations, including Geoff Landis's entertaining talk about colonizing Venus. Although Venus's surface is one of the most hostile places in the solar system for human life, above the cloud layer it's actually quite pleasant, with reasonable temperatures and air pressure (though the air is carbon dioxide, you can live without an expensive and fragile pressure vessel) and you are protected from space radiation by the atmosphere. And floating in Venus's atmosphere is easier than you might think; Earth air is much less dense than carbon dioxide, so on Venus it is a buoyant gas. A 400-meter-radius bubble of Earth air on Venus could lift the Empire State Building.

After dinner I was on the Sci-Fi Writers panel, also featuring Geoff, Mary Turzillo, and Robert Zubrin (whose published books include the SF First Landing as well as numerous works of non-fiction). It was two hours long and very, very basic by SF convention standards, but I think I aquitted myself well and at the end of it I sold a bunch of copies of The Mars Diaries and Space Magic.

This was followed by an entertaining presentation about "a century of Mars in the movies," with posters and trailers for films from Edison's A Trip To Mars (1910) to Disney's Princess of Mars (2012?).

Tired now. Bed.

Posted 08/06/2010 20:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The day started off with a hotel breakfast, as my iPhone was dead and I didn't yet have the convention restaurant guide. Once I registered (name badge, foil-lined cloth tote bag, recyclable pen, comb-bound program book, "Mars or Bust" button) there was coffee and milling about and I chatted a bit with Geoff Landis and Mary Turzillo before we all filed in for the first plenary session.

Robert Zubrin is an angry man. Or, to put it another way, he's passionate and committed and enthusiastic about human exploration of mars, and frustrated by the blindness of those who don't see how important it is or how badly they are going about it. NASA works best, he says, when it is given a strict goal and deadline and must focus all its efforts on that goal; he compared the current NASA funding model to stopping by a series of garage sales to see what's available and then building a house from whatever you find. Apart from this, the bulk of his talk was an outline of the Mars strategy outlined in The Case For Mars and was not new to me, nor I suspect was it new to most of the attendees, but it got the conference off to a good start.

The second plenary speaker was William Borucki, the Principal Investigator for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope mission. Kepler is a deliberately unfocused telescope, peering Mr. Magoo-like at the stars as opposed to Hubble's tight focus. But the area of sky that Hubble can see at any one time is the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length; Kepler can look at over a hundred thousand stars at once, gathering just a little bit of data about each one.

The purpose of this exercise is to find Earth-sized planets orbiting in stars' "habitable zones" (close enough to the star that water is a liquid, not so close that it's a gas) by examining the light output of each star over time. If the light shows a small dip at regular intervals, that might be a planet crossing in front of the star's face. (The exact size and shape of the dip are used to distinguish a planet from a companion star.) Of course, this only works if the stellar system in question is edge-on to us, which is only a small fraction of them, which is why so many stars must be examined.

It takes at least three occurrences of such a dip before you can be fairly sure that you're seeing a regular pattern; four is better. This means that to find Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone (which, given a star like the Sun, means the planet's orbital period is around one Earth year), you'll need to look for at least several years, and the Kepler telescope is funded for 3.5 years. But in its first 43 days of operation it found over 300 candidate planets, five of which have already been confirmed. Because of the short observation period, the planets discovered so far all have orbital periods of just a few days, which means they orbit very close to their star, which means they are very hot (some are above the melting point of gold). They are also huge -- much bigger than Jupiter -- which had been thought impossible. Some scientific theories will have to be rewritten, which is rather the point.

The third plenary speaker was SF writer and NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis, who gave an extremely entertaining overview of what the Mars rovers have been up to in the six years since he last appeared at this conference (which has an annoying tendency to conflict with the Worldcon). The basics were familiar to me, but he had lots of cool details I didn't know. Opportunity, for example, landed smack dab in the middle of a small crater, which was named Eagle Crater to honor this hole-in-one feat. When Spirit landed the geologists cried "It has everything we need in a landing site!" By which they meant rocks. Unlike Earth, Mars has three kinds of clouds (dust, carbon dioxide, and water vapor). "Mars is not the red planet; it is the butterscotch planet." (The name of the color is actually "adobe-orange.") Spirit hasn't been heard from since March but it's still midwinter, it might wake up as early as September. Opportunity, still going, sees a dark rock sitting atop the sand every mile or so -- these are nickel-iron meteorites! Some are 500 pounds or more. And the Curiosity rover (2011) is the first rover that can defend itself; it has a powerful laser designed to drill through rocks.

The morning's final plenary speaker was Charles Doarn of the University of Cincinnati, talking about Telerobotic Surgery in Extreme Environments. It was an interesting talk, and I live-tweeted it like the others, but it's getting late so I'm not going to attempt to summarize it.

I had lunch with Geoff and Mary, again at the hotel restaurant, then decided to blow off the afternoon program in favor of getting my iPhone fixed. My main motivator was the scary idea of taking the trip back to Portland without my primary information, entertainment, communication, and navigation device. The drive to the nearest Apple store, in Cincinnati, took about an hour, which is what it might take me at home to go to the most distant Apple store in town (which I have done upon occasion, when the others were sold out of the product I wanted) with traffic. Once there I was met by a bright and knowledgeable fellow within five minutes of my Genius Bar appointment. He confirmed my suspicion that the phone had suffered a hardware failure and that it was still under warranty (with 63 days to spare!) and sent me away with a brand new one, just the same as the old one, at no cost. Missing the afternoon program seems a fair trade-off for restoring the device that acts as my clock, calculator, map, camera, calendar, address book, email client, Twitter client, music player, games machine, blog reader, e-book reader, and... oh yeah, phone!

In the evening we had a reception with cocktails and reasonable amounts of pretty good food, which turned into the Mars Society's annual "town meeting". There was more program after that, but I returned to my room to rehearse my Mars Talk, which I will be giving first thing tomorrow morning.

Speaking of which... it's time for bed. G'night!

Posted 08/05/2010 20:45 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Here I am at the hotel in Dayton, Ohio for the Mars Society conference. Eastbound travel across the country really kills a whole day, between the hours spent in the air and the three-hour time difference, plus because of ridiculous airfares to Dayton I had to fly to Cincinnati, rent a car, and drive an hour and a half from there. The trip was pleasant, though, and as I drove through the curiously familiar cityscape of downtown Cincinnati I found myself singing a peculiar mix of "Skullcrusher Mountain" (which is what had just come up on my iPhone) and "WKRP in Cincinnati."

The heat and humidity here are beastly but fortunately everything is air-conditioned.

Halfway to Dayton, for no apparent reason, my phone suddenly popped up a message: "Restore required; cannot make or receive calls." It showed No Signal, but the music kept playing and, fortunately, I remembered that all I had to do was get off at exit 51 and the hotel would be right there.

In the last ten miles I was treated to an increasingly-spectacular aerial display of lightning. Some folks like thunderstorms; I'm not one of them. They terrify me. But even I have to admit this one was amazingly pretty. No rain, nor thunder; just lightning.

There are two Marriotts at Exit 51. Fortunately, the first one I tried knew of this situation and provided easy directions to the correct one.

Once I got to the correct hotel, I tried rebooting my phone but it was extremely sad and cried for its binky iTunes. iTunes, however, wanted nothing to do with it, saying that I had to enter the passcode on the phone, which the phone refused to present a keypad for me to do. Fortunately, I had access to the Internet from my computer and was able to Google for a solution, which involved putting the phone in Recovery Mode.

Restoring a dead phone in Recovery Mode requires downloading the latest phone OS from Apple (I'd been planning on waiting until 4.1 to update but oh well.) At the moment I'm waiting for the OS download to complete; it should take another 75 minutes or so. Hope this works! Being without my phone for this weekend would really bite.

The lightning and thunder have been storming away up there with increasing vehemence.

Oops, the lights just flickered and the wireless Internet went out, interrupting the download. Fortunately the wired Internet is still there and I was able to restart the download (another 70 minutes, sigh). I'm going to post this while we still have power...

Posted 08/04/2010 19:39 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Day after tomorrow I head off to lovely Dayton, Ohio for the Mars Society's annual conference, where I'm an invited speaker. I've never attended this conference before, nor have I ever visited Dayton. The only person I'm sure will be there whom I know is Geoffrey Landis. Anyone within the sound of my blog going to attend, or know someone who is, or have advice to offer about the conference or the city?

Posted 08/02/2010 07:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Back from the Washington Coast where Jay Lake and I were "writer gurus" at the annual Writers' Weekend. Jay and I each led two critique sessions for 3-5 stories each; I gave two lectures (on plot, and on using props and sets to define character and build emotion) and gave my Mars talk. Delicious meals were provided by our hosts. The rest of the time we walked on the beach, swam in the pool, relaxed in the hot tub, and talked.

The conversation ranged widely, from hardcore writing and publishing advice to extremely silly. One of my favorite moments was a series of Other Sith Lords, including Darth Congruous, Darth Corrigible, and the ultimate winner of them all Darth Sectivorous. At one point someone came up to a group and asked what we were laughing about, and we told her "Thundercat slash." "It's a gas, gas, gas?" she replied without missing a beat. I 'bout died laughing. And one of our host's nieces introduced us to a Salish word pronounced, approximately, "lobstaboot," which means "don't do anything you'd regret" and which we used as a farewell for the rest of the weekend.

Sometimes I worried that Jay and I were dominating the conversation, but then I realized that the Jay and David Show was part of the point of the whole exercise. This made me feel weird, but over the weekend several people came up to me and told me that they found my critiques, lectures, advice, and blogs useful, so what the hell.

Good critique, good food, good chat, I made new friends and got to know old friends better. What's not to love?

Posted 07/26/2010 08:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

As you may know, I've never been an advocate of self-publishing. There's a huge difference between printing a book, which is something that's easy today with web-based print-on-demand services, and publishing a book, which involves selection, editing, promotion, and distribution. Self-publishing, in my view, is no road to riches.

However, there are some projects for which self-publishing is the way to go. That is, those cases where the physical artifact of a printed book is desired, and/or where there is a small but known audience. Personal memoirs, local histories, and charity cookbooks are excellent projects for self-publishing. You won't make a lot of money at it, but you'll get the satisfaction of sharing a printed book with your friends and relatives.

It is for this reason that I have created The Mars Diaries.

The Mars Diaries is nothing more nor less than a trade paperback collecting the blogs of the Mars Desert Research Station's Crew 88. The content is the same as what you could find at Bianca's, Laksen's, Paul's, Diego's and my blogs, and the pictures are in black and white. All I've done is collect them in one place, put them in chronological order, and format them for print. Well, I also got Lynne Ann Morse and Kate Yule to translate Bianca's and Diego's blogs into English -- that's something you won't find online.

The main purpose of this book is to have a physical souvenir for the crew, and their friends and families, of our adventure on "Mars." But as long as I've gone to the trouble of putting this volume together, I saw no reason not to make it available for anyone who wants to buy a copy. You can order one yourself, if you like, from lulu.com:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-mars-diaries/11784405

It's only $20, and shipping is currently free. If you order a copy, please do let me know how you like it.

P.S. I did this project in Microsoft Word, for reasons that seemed valid when I started. I'm proud of the end result, but I have to say that the experience might just be the straw that makes this camel delete the last bits of Microsoft software from his Mac and use something else instead. Anything else. Maybe a sharp stick and a piece of leather.

Posted 07/22/2010 13:17 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Lately I have been feeling like a WINO -- a Writer In Name Only. Since my trip to "Mars" in January I've been spending a lot more time being an Author (traveling, speaking, signing) than being a Writer (actually putting words on paper).

The Author thing is a lot of fun and very rewarding. I got a thank-you card from the Clarion West students for the talk I gave there, which was extremely touching, and the feedback I've gotten from my Mars talk at the Nebulas has been overwhelming. The Mars thing has been my entree to so many experiences I would not have had otherwise -- the TV appearances, my turn on stage at Ignite Portland, the Shuttle launch, and many more. But it's also quite tiring. It seems to take me a week or so to completely recover from a trip out of town, even longer if I gave a speech, and in the last few months I've found myself heading out again right after that. So I've only been writing once a week, at the Tuesday afternoon writers' coffee shop get-together. If it weren't for that goad I probably wouldn't be writing at all.

I really feel like a wimp by comparison with Jay Lake, who seems to write every week more than I have in the last six months, despite the ravages of chemotherapy. His amazing persistence in the face of the many blows cancer has dealt him is awe-inspiring.

I did write an outline and the first ten thousand words of a YA SF novel and got them critiqued. Based on the feedback I received, it needs a lot of work, and I've been reluctant to tackle that. I just need to pull up my socks and do it.

I also wrote two short stories in that time. One of them, "Citizen-Astronaut," won second prize in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest (I just got the prize package of Baen books and schwag) and is currently seeking publication. The other one, "Floaters," just today sold to the Drabblecast podcast. It should appear in August.

And I've kept the stories I wrote last year (and earlier) in circulation. "Finding Joan," the story I read at Wiscon in 2009, sold to the new online market Daily Science Fiction, which hasn't yet begun publication but pays eight cents a word. Another story was rejected with a note that described it as "powerful," but too disturbing for the editor because it raised personal issues. I have high hopes for that one.

On reflection, I guess all in all I've been doing pretty well.

The Author thing continues. Tomorrow I head to the Washington coast to be "writer guru," along with Jay Lake, at the annual Writers' Weekend. Two weeks after that is the Mars Society convention, and three weeks after that we leave for Australia.

I hope to do some work on the YA SF novel while traveling. We'll see.

Posted 07/21/2010 11:03 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Just back from a week in Chicago at the gay square dance convention. The convention, held in the luxurious and historic Chicago Hilton, was fantastic, well run, with plenty of great dancing (and, well, a few Squares From Hell, but into each life a little golfball-sized hail must fall, eh?). We also squeezed in a Frank Lloyd Wright bus tour and a downtown architecture river cruise, as well as a visit to the Art Institute.

The Art Institute visit was particularly interesting to me because my story "A Passion For Art," which I wrote after visiting the Art Institute during the ChiCon 2000 worldcon, was just published in Interzone last month. It took ten years to be published because I waited a long while after getting it critiqued before editing and submitting it, and then it spent a few years kicking around various markets before being accepted. Touring the Art Institute I was surprised by a number of details that I had either mis-remembered or completely fabricated (and forgot I'd done so) in the story. For example, the statue of Pocohontas that plays a prominent role in the story, which I had remembered as being life-sized (and this is important to the plot), is actually only about four feet tall. Another piece that appears in the story, a pencil sketch of a ballerina by artist Edward Moy, is nowhere to be found at the museum or anywhere online; I guess I must have made that one (even the artist) up out of whole cloth. And Tuesdays are no longer free, though they were when I wrote the story.

When we returned I found a whole bunch of good stuff in the mail/email:

• My contributor's copies of the September Analog, with my name not only on the cover, but listed first on the cover and spine! That's a first for me.
• The June Locus, which not only included my photo (in the group shot from the Nebulas) and my name in the news section (for having won second prize in the Baen/NSS contest), but also three photos I took at Wiscon, along with a check for same! Another first!
• A note from Realms of Fantasy assistant editor Douglas Cohen that my RoF story "Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven" was selected as an Honorable Mention by Gardner Dozois in his Year's Best SF.
• An invitation from the Mars Society to give my Mars talk at their annual convention (August 5-8 in Dayton, Ohio). I'll be presenting to the whole convention right after Robert Zubrin opens the event!
• Page proofs for my story in Esther Friesner's "werewolves in suburbia" anthology Fangs for the Mammaries (don't blame me, or Esther, for the title; it was the winner of a contest).
• A short story rejection, just to keep me humble.

We're only at home for two days. On Friday we head to Seattle for the Clarion West party and another session with the Washington Aerospace Scholars. Two weeks after that I'm off to the Washington Coast to be "writer guru," along with Jay Lake, at the annual Writers' Weekend. Two weeks after that is the Mars Society convention, and three weeks after that we leave for Australia! Whee!

Posted 07/07/2010 09:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Sometimes I blog a lot. This hasn't been one of those times.

Not too long after returning from Wiscon I traveled back to Wisconsin for my mother's funeral (technically a memorial service, I suppose, as there was no casket). It went very well -- over 125 people attended, and there was more laughter than tears during the service. It's clear she touched a lot of lives. I learned a few things about her that I'd never known, or had forgotten, including that she wrote a play about the last days of Spinoza that was given a reading by the Milwaukee Rep.

My aunt (Mom's younger sister) told a story about visiting my mother when I was two years old. Apparently I was not being very cooperative in eating my dinner, and Mom gently upended the bowl of spaghetti on my head. As I sat stunned, Mom commented to her sister "I've always wanted to do that."

After the funeral all of the relatives (me, Dad, my aunt and uncle, and great-aunt Millie), plus family friend and cookbook author Alamelu Vairavan, visited the spectacular Quadracci Pavilion of the Milwaukee Art Museum, which I'd not visited before. While we were there we saw the Blue Angels practicing for the following weekend's air show, which utterly delighted tiny Aunt Millie.

Since the funeral I've been dealing with occasional bouts of free-floating grief, especially during the scene in Toy Story 3 where Andy's mother says she wishes she could be his mom forever. (Excellent movie, though.) I've been generally low in energy and unfocused, but part of this could be the amount of travel we've been doing and the gray and chilly weather we've been having. But today's weather has been gorgeous and I'm working to improve my mood by tackling my daunting to-do list. For example, this blog post.

Last weekend we took the train to Seattle. The excuse for the trip was that I was presenting my Mars talk to the Washington Aerospace Scholars (high school juniors interested in science, technology, engineering and math), but we took the opportunity to stay at a hotel in Pioneer Square and play Seattle tourist. In addition to visiting the Concorde, Air Force One, and the Curiosity mars rover at the Museum of Flight, we took a ghost walk of Pike Place Market and a "coffee crawl;" it was cool to see the back sides of some things and get a little bit of education about Seattle history and coffee. We also had a delightful dinner and excellent dim sum with fan friends. I also finished writing a creepy story on the train. It was over too quickly, but we'll be back in a couple of weeks (July 9-11) for a Clarion West party and another Mars talk to a different group of Washington Aerospace Scholars.

Next week we're heading to Chicago for the annual gay square dance convention. Whee!

Posted 06/24/2010 17:50 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I'm at the airport again (it seems that's the only time I have for sitting and blogging these days), heading back to Milwaukee for my mother's funeral. I'm still pretty much okay. I didn't really cry hard until I heard the opening of "What a Good Boy" by Barenaked Ladies.

Grief is a funny thing. It sneaks up on you sometimes.

Apart from the whole business with my mother, I had a great trip. Three weeks and five cities, or 13 cities if you count every one we stopped at on our various airplanes. I've spent much of the intervening week digging out from under the stuff that wasn't done during that time, including resubmitting a bunch of stories that were rejected. I also logged in some publications: the audio version of of "The Last McDougal's" appeared in podcast Escape Pod 240, "A Passion for Art" appeared in magazine Interzone 228, and "Second Chance" appeared in anthology Alembical 2. Photos and videos of the Nebula Awards Weekend have also been posted, including a video of my keynote address.

Wiscon continues to be one of my favorite conventions, with some of my favorite people. I participated in the Writers' Workshop, I was on two hilarious panels: "Let's Build a World," in which we wound up with a Klein-bottle world inhabited by solipsistic LoLcats who reproduce through music and fetishize prime numbers, and then sketched out the plot of "I Can Haz Musical! The Musical" set on that world (see LJ user "coraa"'s panel notes for more details); and "Pshaw! Psst! Argh!," in which we discussed sound effects in writing and I managed to make one of the audience members literally fall over laughing by positing the torturer Severian in Book of the New Sun grimly lopping off someone's head, which then bounces down the steps with a "doink, doink, doink." Amy Thomson's proposal of a fantasy language consisting of nothing but apostrophes was also memorable.

I also gave my Mars talk to a small but packed room. Later in the convention I overheard someone praising it to someone else in the elevator. People really seem to like it, and at the Mid-Career Writers' Gathering I got some great advice about how to parlay this brush with near-fame into writing success. It will mean selling myself much harder than I'm usually comfortable with, but you know what they say about the turtle, which makes progress only when it sticks its neck out.

Apart from that I spent most of the time hanging out with friends old and new, starting with the guests-of-honor reading at A Room Of One's Own bookstore ("AROOO!") and ending with shooting pool at the Great Dane. In between there were show tunes, readings, many fine dinners, and hallway conversations galore. I didn't spend any money on books but I still came home with three more than I'd started with. I also received a couple of cool invitations which I will discuss more in due course.

Wiscon is too short. That's all there is to it.

Posted 06/09/2010 12:05 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

My mother passed away at about 3:00 this afternoon.

She was diagnosed with bladder cancer at about this time last year, and decided that she did not want any kind of treatment for it. Although this is not the course of action either my father or I would have wished, Mom was never the type to let anyone else tell her what to do. She died as she lived, on her own terms.

When we visited Milwaukee before Wiscon, Mom was suffering from an extended bout of stomach flu. During the time I was there she mostly sat and watched TV, while Dad and I talked about quantum physics or what have you. Then, while I was at the convention, she finally went to the doctor and it was determined that the "flu" was actually kidney failure caused by the cancer. She went into hospice at that time, though due to an email snafu I didn't find out about it until Tuesday morning when we were about to come home from the convention.

We took one extra day in Milwaukee before heading home. Kidney failure isn't a bad way to die; you just spend more and more time asleep until you simply don't wake up. Talking with Mom in the hospice was like talking to a toddler who's up way past her bedtime; she'd exchange a few words and then drift off. She received excellent care and obviously wasn't feeling anything worse than mild discomfort.

The hospice was a lot more pleasant than visiting Jay or Mark in the hospital, because there was no tension, no worry, no fear that something worse might happen. The worst had already happened and now it was just a matter of managing the end game.

Dad is doing okay. He's sad, of course, but also relieved. We've known for almost a year that this was coming and pretty much how it would go, and we all got to say goodbye. There wasn't any deathbed drama with relatives or unfinished business. Even the medical bills are all taken care of. He said to me several times "she won," which at first I thought meant she'd finally won the argument about whether or not to treat the cancer, but after a while I realized that he meant she'd gotten the quiet, pain-free death she'd wanted instead of a long drawn-out agonizing medical battle.

Here's the obituary he wrote for her:

Marilyn Malka Levine was born on April 11, 1933 to Maurice and Frieda Gordon in Brooklyn New York. She attended public schools in Queens and met the man who was to become her husband in the spring of 1953 in a required dance class at Queens College of the City University of New York. At the end of the semester, at their first date, they decided that their union could be a solid one. One year later, after being graduated on June 9th they married on June 13, 1954 and moved to Syracuse. Marilyn was awarded an informal degree of P. H. T. (Putting Hubby Through) in 1959 and the adventure continued.

She began her first company "The Look-it-up Lady" in 1963 when it was clear that her son David D. was safe to go without diapers. She did manual data searches for clients in these pre-computer days. Her company name changed to "Doctor Levine's Information Machine" with the award of her Doctorate from UWM's School of Education. By this time it was becoming clear that Boolean Searches were possible in publicly accessible databases using terminals and the early dial-up data networks. Her company name changed to "Information Express" and remained that for about a decade.

She was convinced that Librarians could be innovators in data searching and offered courses to librarians using the good offices of UWM's school of Engineering Extension. For several years it was clear that, if a librarian in southeast Wisconsin could generate a Boolean Search, she had learned how to do it by attending one of Marilyn's classes. With the advent of services like Google, of course, much of that changed.

A strong advocate of free enterprise, Marilyn brought together, in June of 1987, 26 members to a meeting in Milwaukee to form the AIIP (the Association of Independent Information Professionals). She was the group's first president. The organization has since grown to more than 500 members and is now worldwide.

In 1993 Marilyn sold the rights to the Information Express title to a California company and turned her attention to the field of Art. She opened the Bay View Gallery and ran it for about seven years until her retirement in 2000.

Marilyn holds a patent on a Phonic Keyboard. Intellectual discourse in the family continues. Small talk at home involves questions about the nature of a deity, whether or not there is a difference between god and nature, how much energy is required to actually store a singe "bit" of information and what, if anything, occurs in the universe when a new idea is created or the last copy of an old idea is destroyed.

Marilyn will be missed. She is survived by her husband Leonard just a few days short of 56 years of marriage and her son David.

I know that she was very proud of me.

Posted 06/05/2010 22:32 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I'm now at the Albuquerque airport, on the way from Taos NM to Milwaukee WI for the third leg of this three-week five-city tour. Kate's in New York for another couple of days, then will meet up with me in Milwaukee, after which we will proceed to Wiscon by car.

This is the second time this year I've flown to a desert state, driven to an isolated location three hours from the nearest airport, and spent an extended period confined with a small group of smart people of debatable sanity. The first time was my trip to "Mars" (six people, two weeks); this time was the Rio Hondo writers' workshop (twelve people, one week).

The food at Rio Hondo was much better.

The writers invited to Rio Hondo included Karen Joy Fowler, Daniel Abraham, Alex Jablakow, James Patrick Kelly, Diana Rowland, and our hosts Maureen McHugh and Walter Jon Williams. The primary purpose of the workshop is critique, but the week also included lots of schmoozing, talking about writing, hiking and touristing, and eating. Oh, how we ate. Walter and Maureen did most of the cooking, but Kristin Livdahl and I took the lead on a dinner each, and the food was both ambitious and fabulous. I was actually more intimidated by the prospect of cooking for this group than by the prospect of critiquing or being critiqued by them, but my main dish of Broccoli and Tofu in Spicy Peanut Sauce was well-received. Karen even asked for the recipe.

The workshop was held in the Snow Bear Condominiums, which boasted comfortable beds, plenty of hot water, well-equipped kitchens, and breathtaking views both down the mountain (trees, rock formations, pristine streams, deer, and marmots) and up the mountain (looming cliff down which pebbles continually rattled). On the last night a small tree fell down the cliff, coming to rest against the battered fence just above my room. With luck the Snow Bear will still be there next year.

A typical day at Rio Hondo went as follows. Morning: group critique of two stories. Afternoon: reading stories, hiking in the mountains, touristing around the area, cooking, and napping. Evening: chatting, watching episodes of Middleman, or playing Thing, all lubricated with appropriate amounts of alcohol. Kind of like Clarion but without the lecture or the pressure to produce a story a week (though many of us did spend a lot of time putting down new words, especially those facing deadlines). I didn't do very much new writing but I did some research and a lot of thinking about my current project.

It was an honor, a privilege, and a great learning experience to have the opportunity to read these writers' drafts with a critical eye. In many cases I got more out of the reading than I was able to give in critique, but I hope I was able to provide some useful feedback. I also learned that there's no story that's so good that eleven insightful writers can't talk for an hour about how it can be improved. All of these pieces were, I think, publishable as they are, but just about all of them received at least one of those "ding!" comments that points the author in a direction that can make the story truly outstanding.

I got some excellent feedback on my own current project, which I am currently trying to assimilate. I need to keep in mind that all of the other stories, some of which were superb, got just as many comments as mine did, and I need to find a way to incorporate all of this feedback in a way that moves the story in the direction I want it to go. Once I decide what that is.

I also got some very good advice about my career, and I intend to get a lot more serious about writing and marketing my work once I get home, possibly including some difficult decisions. Though there's lots of travel to come in June and July, and in August we head to Australia for a month. The days truly are just packed.

Posted 05/23/2010 13:06 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I'm now at the Houston airport, heading from Orlando (Nebulas) to Taos NM (Rio Hondo writers' workshop) for the second leg of this three-week five-city tour. Kate's still in Orlando for a couple of days, then will go to New York for a week before we meet up again in Milwaukee before Wiscon.

Saturday morning and afternoon at the Nebulas were mostly spent in programming -- Future of Publishing, Finances For Writers, Social Networking, that sort of thing -- and schmoozing. Best quote of the morning was from Finances For Writers: "The IRS won't let you take off the dress you bought for the Nebulas." (!?!) NASA TV was on the TV in the lobby 24/7 and I commented to someone else in the elevator that many of the things the astronauts get to do, even apart from going to space, are things the rest of us would kill for, such as commuting to their jobs via fighter jet. Another fellow in the elevator, not a SFWA person, commented that the pilot was a friend of his. This guy is the manager of the Solid Rocket Booster program, staying in our hotel for the launch. He'll be going home after the SRBs are fished out of the ocean and sent back for refurbishment. ::gawp::

Saturday evening was the Nebula Awards Banquet, of course. The bad news is that I didn't win a Nebula. The good news is that I didn't lose a Nebula, either, though I think I was may have been nearly as nervous waiting for my speech as I have been as a nominee. I missed the pre-banquet milling and swilling in favor of making sure my audio-video equipment was properly set up, but I was very glad of that trade-off when my speech was the only audio-video presentation of the evening that went off without a serious glitch.

Kate tells me I was a little nervous and stammery at the beginning of the speech but I soon found my footing and delivered the rest of it fast but smooth. (The "fast" part was appreciated by the audience because the ceremony was running way behind schedule and the nominees had already gnawed their fingernails all the way to the collarbone.) I wasn't feeling much of a reaction from the audience as I spoke, but I did get laughs in the right places and after the ceremony the praises were effusive. Connie Willis, Sheila Williams, Patrick Neilsen Hayden, Betsy Wollheim, and many others all went out of their way to say it was the best Nebula keynote they'd seen, using words like "riveting."

(If you haven't yet seen the list of Nebula winners, it's here, and I must say I'm generally quite pleased with the results.)

After the ceremony and photographs we found ourselves out on the deck with most of the winners. So thrilled to see Eugie Foster still stunned by her win, after she'd said on the bus to the shuttle launch that she hadn't even prepared a speech. Some wag -- might have been China Miéville -- suggested that all the winners should be required to get Nebula tattoos. "Tramp stamp!" said someone, but I countered that would only be appropriate for an urban fantasy -- as Paolo Bacigalupi had won with a dystopian SF novel it should be on the neck, or perhaps forehead. This led to the idea of Nebula brands, where the winners would be branded immediately upon receipt of the award. ("And the Nebula goes to..." ::rotates brand in brazier of hot coals::) It would certainly make losing the award a lot more palatable.

I didn't sleep well at all; maybe I was still wired from the banquet. I really do enjoy public speaking, and in fact I have already delivered variants of this same speech before packed houses at Ignite Portland, Potlatch, and Google so I should have been confident, but I think this was the toughest audience of all. Not to mention I was wearing my tux, which always induces nervousness. I think it's soaked up pheremones from all the other nerve-wracking events I've worn it to, including my wedding, Writers of the Future, three Hugo ceremonies, and the Nebulas. Maybe I'll get a nap on the flight from Houston to Albuquerque.

Sunday morning I gave a brief Q&A about my trip to Mars, because there wasn't time for questions during the banquet. Only a few people showed up, but it was also streamed to the Internet and there were some good questions. Then we raced to the airport, where I discovered the addition of the Nebula freebies bag had pushed my checked luggage over the weight limit. Fortunately the removal of a large handful of books brought it down far enough to pass, and there was just barely room for them in my carry-on. Good thing I didn't win a Nebula -- those suckers are heavy!

Posted 05/16/2010 13:21 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The Science Fiction Writers of America's annual Nebula Awards weekend started yesterday, and indeed we left home yesterday, but it doesn't count because the entire day was consumed by travel. But everything went smoothly and we arrived at the hotel around 1:00 AM as expected and were settled and asleep by 2:00.

We awoke this morning at 7:00 to catch the bus to the Space Shuttle launch viewing area. There we met up with the Nebula folks, notably including Mary Robinette Kowal, Cat Valente, Eugie Foster, Laura Anne Gilman, and Jerry Oltion who was wearing the same T-shirt as I (the two-sided one with cats wearing NASA space suits), the bitch.

The part of Kaylee will be played today by Laura Anne Gilman

There was some confusion as to who was on which bus. The Nebula nominees and podium staff, including myself, were on the Short Bus to the VIPs' Banana Creek launch viewing area, but Kate had been left off the Short Bus list and it seemed that she would have to go to the Causeway viewing area with the hoi polloi. But at the very last minute she was allowed on, yay. Even though our buses didn't actually get rolling until nearly 10:00, we still got an earlier start than most and encountered no traffic on the way to Banana Creek nor any crowds once we arrived.

The Banana Creek viewing area is where the astronauts' families and other VIPs watch the launches from. In addition to bleachers for a couple of thousand people and parking for their buses, it also includes the Saturn Building, a major visitor center containing a nearly-full-size replica of a Saturn V booster and many mockups, prototypes, and actual space hardware from the Apollo missions. Also bathrooms, a gift shop, and both permanent and temporary snack bars -- all very welcome.

Oh, so that's why they call it the Saturn Building

We spent a couple of hours gawking at the exhibits, then had a pretty decent lunch before heading out to the bleachers to claim seats. We'd been warned that the bleachers would fill up starting about two hours before launch, and indeed by the time we (Laura Anne, Kate, and I, later joined by Jane Jewell and Peter Heck) got out there more than three-quarters of the seats were taken. But as the afternoon wore on, people just packed in tighter and tighter. It was sunny but not unreasonably hot, especially since all the women in the party had brought parasols.

LEM cockpit mockup
The actual Apollo 14 command module, gosh wow

It took about three hours to get through the last hour of the countdown, with several scheduled holds and a search for a missing ball bearing, but no major problems occurred and the final countdown from 10 started exactly as scheduled.

T minus 26:11 plus me

I knew exactly what to expect from all the times I'd seen launches on video, including the rushing sound of the water they dump to lessen the blast, the rumble of the engines, and the pants-flapping rush of air and sound that follows a minute behind the sight of the launch. The one thing nothing had prepared me for was how bright the exhaust was. It was nearly as bright as the sun -- hard to watch, yet impossible to look away. This can't be captured on film or video, of course.

The shuttle climbed quickly. I alternated watching through binoculars, naked eye, and camera. Through the binoculars I saw the solid rocket boosters separate and fall away, just barely visible as a couple of tumbling flecks of white. Eventually that massive searing flame was reduced to a tiny bright dot. The Shuttle had become a star. A rising star, something I'd never seen before. It left behind a column of smoke which quickly dissipated, and swarms of disturbed birds.

The huge crowd that had taken all day to build up now all wanted to leave at once. Our bus was poised for a quick getaway, though we nearly lost a wheelchair when the driver failed to lock the back door, so we avoided much of the traffic. Even so it still took a couple of hours to get back to the hotel. Then it was nap time.

So we spent all day on a show that was over in about ten minutes. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Although I must confess that, space geek though I may be, I wasn't as bowled over by the experience as some. It was still pretty freaking impressive, both the sight and sound and the knowledge that, as John Scalzi said on Twitter, we humans can actually throw people all the way into space and get them back again safely. Hard to come up with anything fictional that's quite that awe-inspiring.

Go, baby, go!

After a bite of dinner provided by the Nebula committee, I found that I'd been assigned a spot next to Joe Haldeman at the mass autograph signing. I hadn't signed up for a spot, but I duly took my place and actually signed a couple of autographs. After that was the traditional milling and swilling and the presentation of pins and certificates to the nominees. Then Grand Master Joe Haldeman and Author Emeritus Neal Barrett Jr. were called up to the podium to receive gifts from the committee. To my surprise, my name was also called. As the presenter of the Keynote Address I received a delightful surfboard-styled cribbage board. Cool.

Posted 05/14/2010 19:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

This was the last straw: New Facebook Social Features Secretly Add Apps to Your Profile.

Now, it's true that the abiity for other websites to add apps to your Facebook profile without asking was a bug, and was corrected as soon as this story was published. The fact remains that Facebook's new APIs, which allow any website to add a Facebook "I like this" button and link back to your Facebook account, made this behavior possible. Facebook users are now relying on Facebook and its partners to design well, program well, follow their own Terms of Service, and respect users' privacy. But Facebook and its partners have a terrible record on this. For example, the Facebook APIs make it easy for the "Like" button on a website to actually "Like" a completely different site. And the CEO of Zynga, maker of some of Facebook's most popular games, admits to using scams and spyware to build revenue.

I've known from the beginning that "on Facebook, you're not the customer, you're the product." Facebook provides you fun content for free, which gets your attention ("eyeballs"), which it then sells to advertisers. That's the same deal that broadcast TV offers and I've been accepting that for my whole life. But changes within the last year in Facebook's policies about users' private information, culminating in these new APIs, change the rules of that game. Facebook is no longer selling your attention -- it's selling your private information. Basically, anything you've put on Facebook is visible to Facebook's customers -- advertisers, app developers, and anyone else who gives Facebook money for it -- no matter what privacy level you've specified for it. Yeah. Read that again.

In response to these changes, yesterday I stopped leaving Facebook open all the time, instead logging out unless I was actively using it. I posted a status update to this effect, to which a couple of my more tech-savvy friends replied that they're already using a separate browser just for Facebook, just to keep it from interacting with the other websites they visit. Furthermore, one of them said:

At first I thought that simply logging out of FB would be sufficient. Then I started looking at all the .facebook.com tracking cookies that are generated when visiting totally unrelated sites. So now I block facebook.com cookies by default and manually enable them only in a private browsing session when I want to check FB (much less often than before).

That's when I realized that Facebook has become a malware platform.

I used to work for McAfee. I take computer security pretty seriously. One of the main reasons I switched from using a PC to using a Mac at home is that the time, effort, and aggravation involved in keeping the computer safe from malware is much less. And what I'm seeing in Facebook now is what I saw in Windows fifteen years ago: a platform that doesn't do enough to prevent malicious software from negatively impacting users.

On Windows, security holes are patched by third-party anti-malware tools, like McAfee and Norton. On Facebook, the users must perform their own anti-malware scanning (watching out for scams and viruses in messages, blocking undesired applications, being alert for inappropriate requests for personal information, etc.) manually. I don't think there's any technical way for a third party to automate these scans on the Facebook platform. It's going to have to be Facebook that does it, and given Facebook's recent behavior that seems extremely unlikely! It's the scammers and malware makers, not the users, who pay Facebook's bills, so this problem is just going to get worse.

I already seem to spend just as much time on Facebook blocking unwanted applications and invitations as I do interacting with my friends. When I think about the additional work that will be required to keep my private information private, I just want to run screaming.

This is only the last straw. I've been annoyed for years by Facebook's user interface (which changes frequently but never gets better), by its ads, by its psychological manipulation of its users, by the way it lets random strangers associate my name with any photo they like.

This isn't about the time spent on Facebook, it's about the Facebook corporation's business practices. I have over 1000 Facebook friends; many of them are my actual friends and I enjoy reading their updates and sharing conversations with them in comments. The rest of them are, at least, potential readers of my fiction and Facebook is an excellent way to keep my name in front of them. But I've come to realize that, by providing interesting content for Facebook to use to attract and keep users, I'm part of the problem. I'm a professional writer who's been giving content away to a company that I've come to despise.

That stops today.

Posted 05/08/2010 09:54 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

My story "Citizen-Astronaut" just won second prize in the 2010 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest. This is a contest for positive stories showing the near future of manned space exploration; the stories are judged anonymously. I won a year's membership in the National Space Society and a prize package containing various Baen Books, Jim Baen's Universe and National Space Society merchandise. Second prize does not include publication, but I now have a very nice recommendation to include in the cover letter when I submit this story elsewhere.

I have to admit that I feel a little bit strange about this win, as I finished the story barely in time and submitted what I considered an extremely rough draft. Basically, I used the contest deadline as a goad to get me to finish the story. I always used to use the quarterly Writers of the Future Contest deadlines for this purpose and I've kind of been missing that lately. At the same time I submitted the story to the contest, figuring it would not win, I also sent it to my critique group, and they agreed with me that it can be improved (in particular, it's a bit exposition-heavy and the main character's primary problem in the the front half of the story is not as well connected to the climax as it could be).

Part of me says I should take this prize win as validation and just submit the story as-is. However, I think I will go ahead and revise it, though perhaps not as heavily as I might otherwise have done.

The next question is where to send this story (an optimistic space-based hard-SF adventure) first. It's an excellent fit for Analog, of course, but Clarkesworld pays better, replies faster, and seems to be catching a lot of positive critical attention. Your thoughts?

Posted 05/07/2010 15:29 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. I have a bunch of stuff to blog about, too, and I'm going to try to clear out that backlog starting now.

One of the things I've been doing and not blogging about is that I went to the coast last week for six days of hanging out, walking on the beach, cooking and eating, knitting, and writing writing writing with the cool folks pictured above: Jerry Oltion, Spencer Ellsworth, Janna Silverstein, Amanda Clark, Tina Connolly, Camille Alexa, Kathy Oltion, David D. Levine, Kate Yule. Not shown: Carrie Vaughn. Photo by Jerry Oltion.

I wrote over 7500 words of draft on a new project, plus 2500 words of notes and outline, and had a great time.

We also shared bits of our most embarrassing juvenilia. For myself, it wasn't the clunky prose in my early work that really made me hang my head in shame (13-year-old me suffered from Exposition Syndrome rather than the more typical addiction to Purple Prose -- obviously, the tree grows as the twig is bent) but the sexism. I cannot help but recall that when I was a young sprout my favorite TV show had only two female characters, one of whom was mute.

What can I say? I got better...

Posted 05/06/2010 14:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I just learned that Alembical 2 from Paper Golem Press, which includes my novella "Second Chance," will be launching at Balticon at the end of May. That's also Wiscon weekend, and I hope to have some copies there. Here's the cover:

I've also recently learned that May should see the publication of Interzone 228, including my story "A Passion for Art;" the anthology Légendes, including the French translation of "Tale of the Golden Eagle;" and the May issue of Laptop, including a "Burning Question" section with a short essay by me about futuristic technology.

In May I will also be presenting the keynote address at the Nebulas in Florida, and if all goes well we'll get to see a Shuttle launch while we're there. ::squee::

And the May issue of Analog (which was of course released at the beginning of March and is off the stands by now) was reviewed in the April Locus, where Rich Horton gave my story "Teaching the Pig to Sing" a Recommended review.

Posted 04/22/2010 19:46 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Probably the single best thing about my high school years was my membership in the Shorewood High School Drama Club. SHS has a fabulous and wildly ambitious theatre program and has taken shows to the International Thespian Convention and the Edinburgh Fringe. Drama Club taught me to sing, dance, paint, do carpentry and electrical work, and sew. I even used my scene shop skills on "Mars."

Unfortunately, budget cuts now threaten one of SHS Drama's two remaining part-time staff members. Barbara Gensler, the dynamo who has been the heart and soul of SHS Drama for the last 40 years, is mounting a personal campaign to fund this position through donations. If you care about high school drama I hope that you will be able to contribute something.

See here for more information and to donate: Open Letter to Alumni and Friends from Barbara Gensler

I know that there are other schools that are in even more serious trouble, but the SHS Drama Club was a lifesaver to me personally and I believe that the arts are a vital part of any young person's life. Drama Club is not a "frill," it's part of a well-rounded education.

Posted 04/22/2010 17:12 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

There's room for just two more writers at A Writer's Weekend, July 22-25. "A Writer's Weekend offers writers an excellent opportunity to make connections with people in the industry, get published, develop their craft and move their work to the next level. This year's Writer Gurus are Jay Lake and Hugo award winner David Levine. Held at the Ocean Crest Resort on the Washington coast, this Thursday through Sunday workshop allows writers to have their work critiqued by published professionals in addition to plenty of free time for writing or revising. Other craft classes will also be provided."

The deadline to sign up is May 15. The website is at www.WritersWeekend.com; you can email the organizers at writersweekend@hotmail.com or call 425-827-1806.

Posted 04/16/2010 19:13 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We're at the San Jose airport on the way home. The visit started with a square dance fly-in, which featured good friends, excellent callers, and mostly good dancing. As a bonus, I won the centerpiece (a cute stuffed bunny) at the banquet and we got to visit Allan Hurst's home and his California Desert Tortoise named Beta.

We then shifted to the lovely home of Karen Schaffer and Mike Ward, who provided an excellent home base for three days of fairly low-impact visiting with our Bay Area fan friends. On Monday we had lunch at Google and dinner with a friend who works for Intel and used to work for Apple (Allen Baum, and his wife Donya White). On Tuesday we had lunch at Apple and dinner with a friend who works for Google (Matt Austern, and his wife Janet Lafler and daughter Alice). The Google campus is amazing, with a life-sized replica of SpaceShipOne and many other cool gadgets on display, not to mention the free food. Apple seemed much more corporate by comparison. At Google I also presented my Mars talk, to about thirty people who paid close attention and asked some great questions. The talk was recorded and I believe it will be posted on YouTube at some point in the future.

We also visited the Intel Museum, toured the demonstration garden of Sunset Magazine and other gardens with Master Gardener Karen, and had an excellent lunch and ice cream with Spike Parsons.

This morning we took a ride on a Zeppelin. It was rather spur-of-the-moment and we snagged the last two tickets on the thirty-minute "taste of Zeppelin" trip from Moffat Field to Stanford and back. It was similar to the small plane trip we took from Seattle to Victoria BC a couple of years ago, only even cooler because the vehicle moved slower (only about 35 MPH), the windows were bigger, and you could move around the cabin. Got lots of great photos of which just one is shown at http://twitpic.com/1dvdes. Very, very cool and we hope we will be able to take a longer trip soon, maybe next year between Potlatch and FOGcon.

So all in all we hit just about all the Bay Area highlights, but it's time to go home now. I'm giving my Mars talk at Powell's Technical Books tomorrow night.

Posted 04/07/2010 19:35 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I just completed and submitted my first short story this year. After doing no writing at all in January and February due to the Mars thing, I began work on this story in March, but worked only sporadically on it during that month. I finally buckled down this week, as I had a market in mind with an April 1 deadline. I wrote 1530 words on March 31 and 2265 words on April 1, getting the completed story in at 7800 words just before deadline. It's an un-critiqued second draft, but I feel pretty good about it.

At the moment I'm at the airport, heading for San Jose for the El Camino Reelers' 25th-anniversary square dance fly-in. After that we'll be hanging out in the Bay Area for a few days. This begins a summer with insane amounts of travel:

We're not yet certain about the 4th Street Fantasy convention in June but everything else on there is committed. As I should probably be, for planning this much travel... but we want to do all these things! And as we don't have day jobs, and we have the money for it, and we're healthy enough to do it, we're doing it.

The stars represent days I'll be presenting my Mars talk. These are:

• April 5: Google, Mountain View CA
• April 8: Powell's Technical Books, Portland OR (open to the public)
• May 15: Nebula Awards Weekend, Cocoa Beach FL
• May 29: WisCon, Madison WI
• June 20 and July 11: Washington Aerospace Scholars, Seattle WA

I'll probably also be giving the talk at the Worldcon and Potlatch, but those are too far in the future for me to contemplate.

Why am I doing this? I'm not being paid for any of these speaking engagements and they probaby aren't going to sell many books (I will be signing copies of Space Magic at some of these but it's not directly connected). But it's great exposure, and I consider it part of my job as MDRS Crew 88 Journalist to do public outreach in support of the Mars Society and humanity's future on Mars. And I'm a huge ham.

So what the heck. Allons-y!

Posted 04/02/2010 09:04 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

A couple weeks ago I hinted on Twitter and Facebook that I had some squee-worthy news I could not yet reveal. Well, it's now public: I will be giving the Keynote Speech at this year's Nebula Awards!. I'll be presenting the same talk about my trip to "Mars" that was such a success at Potlatch.

Posted 03/31/2010 13:55 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

On Thursday April 8 at 7:00 PM I'll be presenting a thirty-minute talk about my trip to "Mars," profusely illustrated with photographs, at Powell's Technical Books in the Park Blocks (33 NW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon). People seem to like this talk a lot. If you're in the neighborhood, please do stop in!

Posted 03/23/2010 15:04 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I am feeling very much loved right now. And that includes both the warm-and-fuzzy and the cold-hands, butterflies-in-the-stomach aspects of that emotion.

It started at Ignite Portland, where I presented the five-minute version of my Mars talk in front of about 600 people. The feedback on my talk at the event, on Twitter, on the forums, and from my MDRS crew and others who watched it on YouTube has been most gratifying.

The next day we headed to Seattle for Potlatch, which was as usual filled with lovely people, both old friends and new, and we had many fine conversations and excellent meals. I was amazed by the number of people who came up to me to say they liked my work, even people I barely knew or didn't know at all. The "Writing the Other" panel on Friday evening went well, and then at the auction Saturday night I got to do the Happy Snoopy Dance for a bid of over $100 many times -- including when my MDRS mission patch and "Mars" rock went for $120. Color me astonished!

The peak of the weekend for me came at brunch on Sunday, when I presented the 30-minute version of my Mars talk. People laughed in all the right places, there were tons of excellent questions, and I was just bowled over by sustained applause at the end of it. After that several people came up to me to talk about presenting my Mars talk at other events (I'm told that one person from Wiscon said to someone else "we'll have to be sure to get a big room for it!"). Some of those discussions are beginning to bear very exciting fruit, which I hope to be able to report on soon.

Online, I participated in a "Burning Question" discussion at the blog of Laptop Magazine, in which several SF writers answered the question "Which Technology Makes You Feel Like You’re Living In The Future?". (Thanks to K. Tempest Bradford for the invitation.) That's nice enough, but then the editors of Laptop liked the results so much that they decided to print it in the May issue of the paper magazine. And then Annalee Newitz at io9 picked up one paragraph I wrote in that about "techno-snot" and called it out for a whole article on its own. This attracted the attention of Dearbhaile Heaney, an MA student at the Royal College of Art in London, who is working on an art project investigating the social and cultural perceptions of "goo" and emailed me to pick my brain about the issue. I wound up writing a 300-word flash piece about a fictional techno-goo for the project.

On and on the connections and the links go. There's more in the works, and I'll let you know when I have details.

It's amazingly cool to be at the center of attention like this, and yet it's also scary and nerve-wracking. Although I'm a big ham, performing takes a lot out of me and I have to retreat to a dark room for a few hours afterward to recuperate. I imagine this is a tiny taste of what it's like to be Neil Gaiman. It's exactly what I've always wanted, but I'm also kind of hoping it will slack off and get back to normal soon. Looking at my schedule for the next few months, though, I'm not sure that it will.

The business of being a famous Marsonaut has also interfered with the business of writing. I've written barely half a short story since the beginning of 2010. I've also received a couple of very disheartening rejections recently. But when I look on all these accolades and awards I know that I am capable of writing work that makes people smile. I fully intend to get back on the writing horse this month.

Posted 03/17/2010 15:38 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Jay Lake and I will be "writer gurus" at Writers' Weekend this July 22-25 (Thurs-Sun) at the Ocean Crest Resort on the coast of Washington state. This is a continuation of the former Iron Springs Writers' Workshop at a new location. It's educational, laid-back, and fun, with critique, lectures, and plenty of free time for writing and revising. There are still a few spots left, so if you're interested you should head over to writersweekend.com for more information. To register, email writersweekend@hotmail.com.

Posted 03/17/2010 07:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We are coming to San Jose for the ECR@25 square dance fly-in, April 2-4, and have decided to stay on for a few days afterwards, returning on the 7th. Anyone in the Bay Area want to hang out April 4-7? We're also interested in crash space, and information about events happening during those days. Leave a comment below or email me at dlevine at spiritone dot com.

Posted 03/10/2010 22:32 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

At the moment we are at Potlatch in Seattle. So far we have had a delightful Chinese dinner with Janna Silverstein and Jack Bell, dim sum with Allen Baum and Donya White, and vegetarian Thai with Liz Argall and Julie and Greg Sardo. I also participated on a panel about "Writing the Other" with Ellen Klages and Nisi Shawl and hung out and talked with a bunch of other cool people.

We also spotted the May 2010 issue of Analog, containing my story "Teaching the Pig to Sing," at a Seattle magazine shop. My name's on the cover! (Yes, as far as the magazines are concerned it is now May. If you want a copy, run down to your local newsstand before June arrives at the beginning of April. This issue will also be available as an e-book in a variety of formats but I don't know when.)

The video of my Ignite Portland talk has been posted on YouTube:

Someone accidentally opened a fire door at the beginning of my talk, causing a loud alarm buzzer. This made me really flustered and I flubbed some of my lines (like calling the Viking rover Voyager and forgetting where Bianca came from) but I did manage to recover once the noise stopped. Everyone said I handled the interruption really well.

Many people in the audience were on Twitter and you can see some of their comments here. The Mars Society's Director of Operations called it "a very inspirational talk" and says she will be including it in the training videos for future crews.

You can see all 20 talks from Ignite Portland 8 on YouTube. My favorites are Why Wikipedians are the Weirdest People on the Internet and The Beginner's Guide to Psychiatric Hospitalization.

I also participated in a group discussion on Laptop Magazine's blog about Which Technology Makes You Feel Like You're Living In The Future?. Go over there, read it, and if you like it leave a comment. There may be more of these "Burning Question" discussions in the future if there's sufficient response.

Posted 03/06/2010 01:04 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Having driven myself to a frazzle with rehearsing all day, I'm just heading out the door for Ignite Portland right now. If you're coming, bring a nonperishable food donation. If not, you can watch it live -- I'll be appearing in the second half of the show. Wish me luck!

Posted 03/03/2010 17:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I wrote 500 words yesterday, and 500 words the day before, which is the first fiction I've committed this year. Nearly two months of writing time sacrificed on the altar of Mars, but I think it's a decent tradeoff given the learning and publicity I've gotten out of it. Still, it's good to get back to the actual writing, though I don't think I'll be producing any words today.

Although I haven't been writing much lately, my little paper children are still out there in the world working on my behalf. In summary:

• My nonfiction essay "How the Future Predicts Science Fiction" appeared in the final (alas!) issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction. This essay is based on the talk I gave at the Library of Congress last year.
• The audio version of my story "Wind from a Dying Star" was podcast at Escape Pod. It's also available on iTunes. This story was my first professional sale (it originally appeared in the anthology Bones of the World, which is amazingly still available) and I'm still proud of it.
• There's a fascinating discussion of "Wind from a Dying Star" going on in the Escape Pod forums. I'm particularly touched by comment #17, from user Mobius04, which says of this story: "Know that you helped change one soldier's life for the better." (Go read the whole thing.)
• On the same day "Wind from a Dying Star" appeared, I sold another story to Escape Pod: "The Last McDougal's," which originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Asimov's.
• I learned that Fangs for the Mammaries, including my story "Family Matters," will be published in September. Rich Horton liked my stories in the previous two volumes of this series.
• Finally, the expanded version of Wild Cards Volume One, including my story "Powers," is scheduled for November.

Posted 02/27/2010 13:40 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I had a great interview on KATU-TV this morning and it is already available online!

My previous TV appearance is stil available, if you haven't seen it.

I think this may be the end of my 15 minutes of fame, for this round at least.  I'll let you know if I get any more media attention.

Posted 02/26/2010 13:49 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I just received the following email from the folks at Drabblecast (http://www.drabblecast.org):

From: The Folks at Drabblecast
Date: February 25, 2010 12:26:38 AM PST
To: David D. Levine
Subject: Drabblecast People's Choice Award 2009: Babel Probe by David D. Levine!

David,
Not sure if you were even aware of this, but your story, Babel Probe made the top 5 in the Drabblecast People's Choice Awards.  Out of all the stories we ran last year- listeners in our discussion forums voted for their favorites, and the top 5 were:
Clown Eggs by Jay Lake
Annabelle's Alphabet by Tim Pratt
Teddy Bears and Tea Parties by S. Boyd Taylor
Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs by Leonard Richardson
and then your story.
Finally, our listeners had to narrow it down and vote for their favorite of those-- and you won!  You won "Best Story of 2009" in our 2009 People's Choice Awards.  Congrats!  We announced it on this week's show.  It's a big deal for us.  That story was fantastic and I'm really glad that it won.  Even though we ran it all the back in April, our listeners still remember it and gave it crazy love.
So we have a cup called the "Sacred Chalice of Glory" that we're having your name engraved on and that we'd like to send you, if you can provide us with a mailing address.
Again, congratulations, and thanks for the phenomenal story.  Hope we keep getting submissions from you-- clearly our listeners would love that.
Best, Norm

The winning Drabblecast is a most excellent audio performance of the story, with music and sound effects and everything, and you can hear it here.

This is the story for which thepussinboots drew this awesome picture (click to embiggen):

I am so thrilled!

Posted 02/25/2010 07:51 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Sunday was my 49th birthday. (Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes!) It was a quiet day, but I ate some of my favorite things and hung out with my sweetie, who gave me the new Mark Knopfler CD.

I am a very lucky guy. I'm retired, which means I pretty much get to do what I want every day, and I have enough money that I can pretty much get myself whatever I want when I want it. This makes it really hard to buy presents for me or to do something "special" to celebrate a birthday. That's okay; I wouldn't have it any other way.

The day before my birthday, the TV interview I taped last week about my trip to Mars finally aired. I'm very pleased with how it came out, and you can see it below:

Today was the tech rehearsal for Ignite Portland, where I'll be giving a 5-minute version of my Mars talk (at the Bagdad Theatre next Wednesday, March 3). I don't feel quite ready but I'm sure it will go fine.

I have more news but this will have to do for now.

Posted 02/24/2010 17:34 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

My appearance on KGW tonight has been bumped to tomorrow, due to breaking news about a police shooting.

Even if you don't have a TV, you'll be able to watch me live at http://www.kgw.com/thesquare when it does air, currently scheduled for 7:00 PST on Friday.

Posted 02/18/2010 17:02 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I got an excellent interview in The Oregonian (Portland's daily newspaper) on Monday, which took up half the front page of section B and continued within. The full text of the article can be found online.

I also had an interview with Willamette Week (Portland's "alternative" newsweekly), which they published on their website but not in their print edition.

I am scheduled to appear on two local TV stations -- tomorrow evening on Live @ 7, (KGW, channel 8, February 18, 7:00 PM PST) and next Friday on AM Northwest, (KATU, channel 2, February 26, 9:00 AM PST). If you're not local or don't have a TV, both are supposed to be available via live streaming at the given web pages, and selected segments should be available online after the program airs. This is live TV, so it's subject to change.

Posted 02/17/2010 23:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

A one-R GRM is a rental equation
A two-R GRRM is a writer, Caucasian
But I would bet a can of worms
That there is no three-R GRRRM.

Posted 02/11/2010 10:13 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

One of the hosts of the show, the one who is a space geek and really wanted to do this interview, had to have dental surgery, so my appearance has been rescheduled to February 26. Can't say I'm completely surprised... in my experience, dealing with television means you have to be fast on your feet.

Meanwhile, I've had two interviews with local print media in the last two days. One of them may or may not publish the piece, depending on what the other one does and when. This process is fascinating to watch. I'll let you know when and if either of these interviews bears fruit.

I also got the February Locus, with a big picture of me in my space suit in the People and Publishing section.

My fifteen minutes of fame are ticking away...

Posted 02/10/2010 12:13 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Well, the current East Coast Snowpocalypse has put the kibosh on our planned trip to Washington, DC for the ACDC square dance weekend. Poot.

The event is still going on, as they expect the weather to have cleared somewhat by Friday, but our plane tickets were for Wednesday and the airline canceled them today. We could have tried to reschedule, but given the number of stranded and desperate people who will be trying to rebook and the likely condition of the airports and roads, we decided with great reluctance to bag the whole thing. Because it's a weather-related cancellation we can get all our money back from the airline, and ACDC will roll our registrations over to next year.

But, as they say, every dark cloud has a silver lining, and when one door shuts another opens, and three skinks are as good as a lemur: This weekend is also Radcon, a science fiction convention in Pasco, WA. Everyone's been asking whether I'm going anyway, so since we no longer have any plans for the weekend we're embracing serendipity and going to that. It's also a chance to visit Kate's folks in Kennewick.

The convention hotel's sold out, but the amazing Radcon Bob has managed to scare us up a room, and he also says he'll find a spot on the program for me to present my Mars talk. I might also be on some other programming. Whee!

In other news, I'm told there's a display at Powell's Cedar Hills of ten local SF writers' recent books and their favorite books by other authors. I believe I'm represented by Space Magic and Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas. Also, I'm getting a lot of media attention on the Mars thing and hope to have some news to share with you soon. I'm no longer worried about making it back from DC in time for my appearance on AM Northwest on Tuesday morning, so if you're in Portland, set your TiVos for that!

Posted 02/09/2010 20:50 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Sorry I haven't blogged lately. I spent most of the first week back just recovering and digging out from under two weeks of email. Much of the time since has been spent working on a Keynote (Apple's answer to PowerPoint) slide show of my trip to Mars, mostly photos -- I'm about three-quarters done with it and I suspect the first draft will take about two hours to present, but once I have it organized and structured I can cut it down. I also have begun outlining a science fiction story incorporating my experiences at MDRS; right now I'm trying to get the orbital mechanics to work with the plot I have in mind. (Can't have a Mars base with two-week rotations when there's only a launch window every 26 months!)

I sent out a bunch of emails to the local media right after I got home and they've begun to bear fruit. I'm giving an interview to a reporter from Willamette Week (local alternative weekly newspaper) on Tuesday, I'm scheduled to appear on AM Northwest (local TV morning show) the following Tuesday, February 16, and on March 3 I'll be presenting a rapid-fire talk as part of Ignite Portland -- 20 speakers each presenting 20 slides in 5 minutes on a topic they're passionate about. (I described it to a friend as being like a cross between TED and speed-dating.) All of these should be available on the web after they're done; I'll provide links when they are available.

On March 6 I will be speaking, with slides, for about 20 minutes at the banquet of Potlatch, a science fiction convention in Seattle. I've also been asked to produce short text pieces for the website of the Science Fiction Writers of America and the progress report of Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention, neither of which I've yet begun writing. Once I've written those I plan to pitch non-fiction pieces to many other markets, which is a new thing for me. I also hope to present my Mars talk at Wiscon, the Worldcon, OryCon, and other events, if the organizers will have me. (Not Radcon or Norwescon, alas.)

In writing news, my non-fiction essay "How the Future Predicts Science Fiction" will be appearing in the final issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction and my story "horrorhouse" made the BSFA Award longlist. "horrorhouse" might also be (re)printed in a forthcoming paper version of DayBreak... I'll keep you informed of any progress. The cover and final ToC of Retro Spec, including a reprint of my story "Nucleon," have also been announced... it's scheduled for publication in October 2010. And I got a nice wooden base made for my Endeavour Award.

Today is a busy day, with a manuscript-mailing party, a critique group meeting, and two square dances. I need to finish my Keynote presentation, prepare slides for Ignite Portland, and select photos and edit videos for AM Northwest. There's several kinds of writing to do. We're having a small party on Sunday and there's prep to do for that. There's laundry and dishes and taxes and all those other mundane details. And all of this has to get done before we leave for a square dance event in Washington, DC on Wednesday (assuming they've dug out from under their Snowpocalypse by then).

What else? Oh, yeah... must remember to breathe.

Posted 02/06/2010 10:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I'm back from Mars, but my head's still in a strange space. This will probably continue for some time.

I've been spending some of my time doing catchup chores, like clearing out my spam traps (I have five, for my various accounts) and unpacking and doing laundry. Most of the rest of yesterday was spent working on a Keynote presentation (Apple's answer to PowerPoint) of my Mars mission. It's going to be mostly photos. I have 2500+ photographs to sort through and in two passes I got them down to the 1000 best and then the 400 best. I really need a 100 best and 30 best for various purposes. And that's not to mention the videos.

Most other daily stuff isn't happening yet. I need to take the car to the shop (battery died while I was gone) and vote (deadline is today) and answer some important paper mail and clean the kitchen and stuff like that there, but it's hard to concentrate on Earthly life.

The new MDRS crew is going great guns, fixing the shower and water heater and fourth rover which have been out of commission for a long time, putting up GPS tracks on Google Earth with their heart rates and everything, and finishing the erection of the radiotelescope. I am so proud of them! You can see their group blog at http://www.wkiri.com/mdrs_crew89/.

Posted 01/26/2010 08:05 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Now that I'm back on Earth I have the bandwidth to post videos and higher-resolution photographs. Here's the first: a two-minute tour of the habitat and the view from the observatory.

Posted 01/24/2010 12:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I posted photos every day during my trip to Mars, but for technical reasons I could only post them to LiveJournal rather than here. Here's a link to all of my photo posts on LJ (about 6 photos per post). Enjoy!

MDRS-88 sol 1 photos
MDRS-88 sol 2 photos
MDRS-88 sol 3 photos
MDRS-88 sol 4 photos
MDRS-88 sol 5 photos
MDRS-88 sol 6 photos
MDRS-88 sol 7 photos
MDRS-88 sol 8 photos
MDRS-88 sol 9 photos
MDRS-88 sol 10 photos
MDRS-88 sol 11 photos
MDRS-88 sol 12 photos
MDRS-88 sol 13 photos
MDRS-88 sol 14 photos
MDRS-88 sol 15 photos

Posted 01/24/2010 10:47 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Woke up in the hotel in Grand Junction, and even though I'm no longer in an isolated station in the middle of the desert I felt very alone. I miss my crewmates. Had another hot shower to the point of wrinkled fingers. Aah.

Didn't have a great breakfast. My waffle stuck in the waffle maker, then I spilled a whole cup of coffee getting the creamer out of the fridge, and by the time I got that cleaned up the torn-up waffle was cold. Fox News was babbling away on the TV, talking about how a nun had been saved from being run over by a train and a dog was rescued from floodwaters on the L.A. River, and I reflected just how much I had not missed the news from Earth. About the only news I did catch was the fact of a horrible earthquake in Haiti, but the news was... well, it was so irrelevant to us that it might as well have been on another planet.

I realized only later that I hadn't had to take full responsibility to clean up the coffee spill. It simply never occurred to me to ask anyone else to do it.

While I ate my cold waffle I pulled out my iPhone to check my email. But as soon as I connected to the network, the very first thing I pulled up was the MDRS webcam. All the new kids were gathered in the kitchen area; looks like they're doing the dishes together. Good for them. Then I read my email, and the first couple of messages were between the new crew and Mission Support (crew members are included on the hab mailing list for the previous and following rotations as well). The crew was asking about how to get the water heater in the kitchen working (it isn't working because there isn't one; we heated water for our sponge baths on the stove) and Mission Support sent them a reminder about getting your daily reports and photos in on time. And while I was reading a trivial little exchange about getting a network hard drive set up on the hab laptop I started sobbing, right there in the Best Western's breakfast room. I can't really describe my emotions at that point. Loss? Homesickness? Relief? Exhaustion? If it's homesickness I'm not sure whether it's for Portland or Mars. Whatever it is, I'm crying again right now as I type this.

It's now 9:00 AM and my flight home isn't until 4:00 PM. I could go to the airport now and try to get on standby for an earlier flight, but that would be a hassle and I'd most likely wind up spending the day in the Grand Junction and/or Denver airports rather than home with my sweetie. I have a lot of things to do on my computer anyway, and my hotel room has a nice desk and fast free Internet, so I'm just going to stay here until my scheduled departure time.

Posted 01/24/2010 07:55 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The day dawned clear and cold, with most of the snow melted and the ground mostly frozen rather than muddy. By noon it was about half dry, squidgy in a few places but no impediment to travel at all.

Spent the morning packing, taking a last few pictures and videos, and doing a few bits of paperwork, but mostly just waiting for Crew 89 to show up. I put on my space suit for the last time, to get a video of the process; I walked up to the Musk Observatory for the last time, to get one more set of photos of the splendid view; I walked around and got a few pictures of things that had come to be important for me without ever being photogenic, like the Engineering shed. I said a fond goodbye to my radios, my faithful rovers, my trusted backpacks -- even cantankerous #4. I gave Laksen a signed copy of Space Magic. I must confess I got a little teary-eyed.

Crew 89 was about an hour late, which made us even more pleased to see them when they finally showed up. Even better, they came in a huge 4x4 that would easily handle any rough roads and could accommodate all our luggage. They came in with a huge load of food, including many things that had run out early in our mission or even before we arrived. Lucky bastards!

We spent about three hours in hand-over meetings, walking them through the hab's systems and answering questions. Having written the Quick Guides, I could answer questions about areas I never even handled. They seem like a smart bunch, but so naive in the ways of Mars. They intend to do jazzercise every day and have a clever plan to get showers which seemed horribly overambitious to us, but hey, if they can make it work, more power to them.

After the traditional group photos on the front porch, we drove off, leaving the starry-eyed young'uns to make their way on Mars. They have an exciting and challenging two weeks ahead of them, but I'm sure they'll find their way just as we did, and in two weeks they will be the old hands, doing the same for Crew 90.

In any endeavour, from running for the bus to serving a tour of duty, one naturally paces oneself, conserving energy and attention to last as long as necessary. If this were a three-week mission I'm sure I would be much more ready to go on at the end of two weeks than I am right now, but as it stands I am completely spent and more than ready to go home. I am so very glad we didn't have to spend even one additional night at the hab.

We had a little excitement not long after departing the hab, about which I'll say no more. Then we got a panicked phone message from the commander of Crew 89, saying that a jacket and wallet had been left in our car and he was running after us in New Blue. We were not pleased at the delay, but it would have been churlish to keep driving, so we waited by the side of the road for about half an hour until he caught up and got the missing jacket (the wallet was not in the car; I hope it turns up). If we'd been able to call him back, though, I think we might very well have left the jacket hanging on the milepost 152 sign and kept going. Do not get between the outgoing crew and their showers.

Once we made it out to where I had proper cell phone service I checked the hab webcams on my iPhone. The new kids seemed to be settling in nicely, but there was a weird moment when one minute they were all at the table and the next they were all gone; a few minutes later they'd returned. A sudden crisis, or did they all just go out to look at the stars? We may never know. It's very weird looking at the MDRS webcam and seeing other people in "our" hab. Imagine seeing live video of your own kitchen with a different family in it! Surprisingly addictive to watch.

After a stop at Wal-Mart to return a few unused items and buy some souvenirs, we had one last dinner together -- real meat, and non-dehydrated vegetables, and soda pop, and wine, and all the water we wanted, just for the asking. Heaven. Bianca had to go back after visiting the loo because she realized only after leaving the bathroom that she could flush the toilet. I washed my hands in warm water for the first time in two weeks, and also saw myself in the mirror for the first time in two weeks (I caught a lot of sun, apparently, because those spots aren't washing off). We reminisced and cracked in-jokes at the expense of the new crew and generally acted like crazed prospectors just returned to town.

Then the hotel -- just a Best Western, but oh so luxurious with its soft soft beds and clean white sheets and acres, just acres of space. Waiting for me at the front desk was a surprise package from Kate: gingerbread astronauts (with red sugar Mars dust on their boots) and computers and space shuttles and stars and red-frosted planets Mars. I love my sweetie so much. We shared the cookies all around, hugged and shook hands and promised to stay in touch, and I cried a little again. Might see some of them tomorrow at the airport, but we have to assume this is our final goodbye.

Finally, after settling into the room, dealing with some email questions from the new crew, and a long phone call to Kate, came the eagerly-awaited moment: a long, long hot shower, with real soap and everything. I washed my hair three times and scrubbed myself all over with a washcloth until I felt actually clean. I stayed in there until my fingers were all wrinkled. And I flushed the toilet too, just because I could.

And now to sleep, in my soft warm luxurious motel bed. Tomorrow I return to Portland and my beloved and much-missed snookie.

This is David D. Levine, Space Cadet For Mars, signing off!

P.S. You can track Crew 89's progress on their group blog at http://www.wkiri.com/mdrs_crew89/.

Posted 01/23/2010 22:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Here's what I submitted to my commander for his End-of-Mission Summary Report to the Mars Society.

MDRS-88 Mission Summary
David Levine Background information: David is an award-winning science fiction writer who worked for 25 years as a technical writer, software engineer, and user interface designer for Tektronix, Intel, and McAfee. He came to MDRS looking for the "telling details" that make stories believable, and got not only that but an amazing adventure as well.

Journalism: David fulfilled his primary mission as Journalist by posting almost 10,000 words of daily reports to his blogs on livejournal.com, dreamwidth.com, and bentopress.com, along with over 70 photos (N.B. photos were small, only 20-80 KB in size). He also posted several brief status updates per day to his Twitter and Facebook readers. These updates reached nearly 2000 "friends" (registered readers) and an unknown number of unregistered readers, and received over 100 comments. He also took over 700 photos and 25 video clips, some of which will be used in future outreach, public education, and publicity opportunities. After returning to Earth, David will write articles and essays about his experience at MDRS, as well as fiction incorporating the things he has learned here, and attempt to place them at national publications. He will also speak about his experience at science fiction conventions and other venues.

David also maintained MDRS's official web presence by selecting and uploading the crew's daily photos (despite many technical issues), managing the MDRSupdates Twitter feed, and fixing and maintaining the webcams. When we arrived at the hab we had only 3 working webcams; now all 6 are working, and all are level and pointed at interesting things. These are all important public-relations and outreach elements of MDRS's mission.

Engineering: In addition to his journalistic duties, David used his technical background to assist Laksen and Paul in keeping the hab and rovers running. He participated in the daily engineering rounds, diagnosed and repaired electrical and plumbing problems, and made sure the radios were properly stowed and charging every night.

David took responsibility for the EVA suits, making sure that all backpacks were properly charged and straps tightened after each EVA. When we arrived we found only five working backpacks and one badly cracked helmet; David repaired the helmet and replaced a dead battery to bring us up to six functional suits, then fixed hoses, replaced fuses, repaired cables, and unstuck zippers to keep all six suits running for the whole rotation.

David also used his technical writing skills to create a series of one-page Quick Guides to help get new crews up to speed quickly on the hab's systems and to offer fast, focused answers to their questions when things go wrong. These are intended to be the documents we wished we'd had when we first arrived. They have been emailed to the Mars Society and to the next crew; laminated printouts will also be handed over to the next crew, and the "Quick Guides.doc" file has been left on the hab laptop so that it can be updated by future crews.

Other: David also worked on the reconstruction of the radiotelescope (much of this work was done in EVA suits), rode along on GPS tracking runs, and participated as a research subject in the food study, suit constraints study, and hab architecture study.

Posted 01/23/2010 07:47 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Spent a big chunk of last night with Paul, sitting around a bucket of water in the lab cleaning mud off our boots with a toilet brush and talking about how to become a for-real astronaut. Just about everyone here but me has taken serious steps toward becoming an astronaut, and it sounds like it's even harder than getting a novel published. They have so many applicants and the requirements are so stringent that the tiniest problem -- or no probem at all -- can knock you out of consideration. In fact, it might just be that the easiest route to becoming an astronaut is to become a US Senator, like John Glenn. That's a position you can obtain with no qualifications but a substantial bank account.

Internet is back up and running at full speed today, thank goodness. It went down again this morning, and I volunteered to go out and clean the dish, but while I was putting my boots on it came back up by itself. Apparently I have become so mighty an engineer that just the threat of a visit from me is enough to make balky equipment cooperate.

On the flip side of that equation, backpack #4 -- the one that wasn't working when we arrived, and whose battery I replaced -- never did charge all the way up and Mission Support recommended I try completely discharging it and charging it for 24 hours. I did so yesterday... and it reacted to this treatment by dying altogether. I was extremely annoyed to be leaving the next crew with a dead pack, after managing to keep all six running for my whole rotation. But after another 12 hours it seems to have mostly recovered: the light is yellow rather than green, and it doesn't blow air quite as forcefully as the others, but it's at least usable. Given another 24 hours of charging it might even be all the way up to 100%.

We had more snow overnight. Bianca and Diego went out for an EVA in the snow but Laksen and I were more cautious; we stayed inside and worked on the Engineering Rounds Quick Guide. This completes the series of Quick Guides -- the planned Power Systems Quick Guide could not be completed because we haven't seen DG this week. I also wrote up an email detailing the problems we've had with our Internet connection this week, with lessons learned and open questions, and mailed it to Mission Support. I hope future crews will find these documents useful.

With the snow and mud, I'm concerned about the next crew making it up Cow Dung Road (really no more than a trail) from the highway to the hab, but if they get the 4WD vehicle from the rental agency as they are supposed to (we didn't) they should be okay. It's been clear and cold all day here, but there are threatening clouds on the horizon and at the moment the wind is blowing so hard we can feel the whole hab shake. Every once in a while there's a frightening crash as ice comes cascading down from the hab roof.

This week has been a real lesson in You Don't Know What You've Got Till It's Gone. We had such gorgeous weather for the first week and a half and we didn't think it would ever change, but since Wednesday it's been completely different -- much harder to work in and much less conducive to beautiful "Marsy" photographs. I'm glad we made good use of it while we had it, and I hope it clears up soon for Crew 89. The same goes for fast and reliable Internet, come to think of it.

We spent the middle of the day cleaning up the hab, the major part of which was sweeping and vacuuming up the dust that has gotten everywhere since the last cleaning. We also organized the tool benches in Engineering and the EVA room, and cleared off the counters in the lab... yesterday those were valuable geological samples, but today they're just rocks. When Diego asked what he should do with his unneeded samples, I said "Throw 'em out the airlock!" I have never before had the opportunity to say that for real. Bianca even cleaned up the muddy rovers. When we were done the place looked fabulous. Oh, it's not spotless -- this place will never be really clean -- but it's much cleaner than it was, and we think even cleaner than it was when we first arrived.

In the afternoon, we laid various contingency plans to make sure Crew 89 actually makes it out here to relieve us despite the snow and mud. We have a powerful four-wheel-drive vehicle, New Blue (I referred to it as V'ger earlier but V'ger was replaced by this better vehicle), which we can use to drive out to the main road and pick them up if the car they get from the rental agency isn't up to the task. We also made a large sign saying <– HAB so they won't miss the turn-off we missed when we came in. We are in email communication with the new crew and we'll make final plans before they leave the hotel tomorrow morning.

Dinner tonight was a repeat of some of our favorites from earlier in the mission: salad of fresh alfalfa sprouts, corn, and onions with a balsamic vinaigrette, and vegetable couscous. Tomorrow we will treat the newly-arrived Crew 89 with something dehydrated, as is traditional (at least, that's what Crew 87 did for us, and let me tell you we appreciated it).

I think we're leaving the hab in excellent shape for the next crew and we eagerly await their arrival tomorrow.

Posted 01/22/2010 18:54 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Spent most of the morning on paperwork, one way and another. We have to do an end-of-mission summary report, and most of us spent much of the morning working on our sections of it. It's really rather amazing what we've accomplished in the last almost-two-weeks. We've done some serious science, we've had some amazing adventures, we've become experts at things that we'll never do again. (Unless we return, of course -- there are quite a few people who've gone on multiple MDRS rotations -- but even if we do return, things will have changed.)

I helped people with wordsmithing and such, and as we were working on the brief personal biographies for each section I was struck once again by what an amazingly qualified crew we have. Laksen has four advanced degrees and is a VP of a major biomedical company; Bianca represented Belgium at International Space Camp; Paul was a semifinalist for the "academic Heisman" award; Diego is well on his way to being an ESA astronaut. I am so honored to have had the opportunity to be part of this crew.

Despite the fact that much of yesterday's snow is still around, Paul, Laksen, and Bianca took off on a GPS-tagging EVA. The mud was terrible, though, and they soon had to turn back. I prepared hot cocoa for the poor chilled Marsnauts. Paul's radio came back from the EVA muddy and nonfunctional, but once I scraped the mud out of the little USB port on the bottom it came back to life. (In the process I also discovered tht these radios have a powerful LED flashlight built in. Good to know about in case of emergency.)

In the afternoon it began to rain, making the already horrendous mud even worse. Also, our Internet connection is currently limited again, even though the bandwidth usage report shows that we did not use more than the usual amount of bandwidth yesterday. (I've asked the Mars Society to contact HughesNet and find out what's going on but haven't heard back yet.) So with horrible weather outside and no Internet to speak of, I pulled out the game Set and taught it to Bianca and Paul. They are both very smart people and caught on immediately -- in fact, they both beat me handily.

It's snowing now. The snow is building up on the satellite dish and at the moment we have no Internet at all, so this report may not go out until tomorrow, but I'm going to try to send it now just in case.

(Later:) Well, that didn't work. Diego brushed the snow off the dish and that brought the signal back, but it went back down to zero again within 20 minutes. At the moment I'm watching the signal meter wobble between 2 and 4, which is not enough to get a lock on the satellite. So nore more Internet until the weather clears.

The feeling of isolation I am feeling right now is, I think, the most important thing I've gotten from this experience. The dust and the mechanical failures and the sound of breath in your space helmet are all part of the Mars experience, but I don't think that any smaller-scale simulation could have given me this very genuine feeling of complete isolation and self-reliance. We are a long, long way from home and from anyone who could help us, and we are reliant on the materials we have here and our own wits to survive, and even though we are not actually on Mars the situation is similar in emotionally important ways. It's not just our current situation that makes me feel this way; I've felt it the whole time, but right now I'm feeling it very keenly.

This feeling makes me more adventurous, more willing to take risks, and it also makes me more what I call "protagonisty." Protagonists don't just sit around or wait or expect other people to do things. They try to better their own situation; they take actions that affect the plot. Making your protagonist more protagonisty is an important way to make a story more engaging; making yourself more protagonisty is an important way to improve your own life.

It was being protagonisty that got me here, and I think the same is true of all the other people here. I've been a lot more protagonisty in these two weeks than I usually am -- leaping in to fix things, trying things that might have a downside, seeking forgiveness rather than permission. It's been an important life lesson to me and I hope to hang onto it for at least a while after I get home.

But I am ready to go home now.

I sure hope this weather doesn't stop crew 89 from getting here on Saturday...

(Later:) Okay, Paul's going out to try brushing the snow off the satellite dish again...

Posted 01/21/2010 20:50 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

You know, given enough time you can get used to just about anything. Even though sleeping in the hab is a lot like trying to sleep on a park bench with an idling semi nearby, I'm now getting at least seven solid hours of sleep every night. My hands have gone from being so rough that they catch on my sweater to just being dry. And although I can't claim that I don't notice when I'm wearing a space suit, the feelings of claustrophobia and the harsh oppressive sound of my own breathing have vanished from my perceptions completely. The daily engineering tasks have become second nature, and crises that would have dominated our day in the early part of the mission are now taken in stride, with all of us leaping into immediate action so that no serious consequences occur.

Must be almost time to go home.

Even though we're only in the middle of our second week here, we feel the end of our rotation breathing down our necks. The new crew arrives Saturday, and we need to spend Friday cleaning up and doing our end-of-rotation paperwork, which means that today and tomorrow are our last two days in sim. Fortunately we have completed all of the suit study trials, have collected a bunch of rock samples for the microfossil and extremophile studies, and have finished work on the telescope, so we are in good shape, but there's still plenty of data analysis to do on those projects and lots of GPS tracking and geotagging yet to do.

And then we woke up and found the ground covered with snow from the front porch to the horizon. We thought Monday was a snow day, but that was really just a heavy frost and it was all gone within hours. This was SNOW -- at least a couple of inches of fluffy white stuff. Quite a shock after yesterday's blue skies and 50-degree temps.

And then the Internet went down! Trapped in a tin can, miles from civilization, and NO INTERNET!? Surely we would be shortly reduced to eating our own shoes! Fortunately, power-cycling the satellite modem a couple of times brought our connectivity back. We learned a few things from that incident that I documented in the Quick Guide.

Even with the Internet back we weren't sure what to do -- the fossil-hunting and GPS-tracking EVAs that we'd planned out last night weren't going to be possible with everything covered with snow. But Paul pointed out that we really needed to warm up the rovers so they'd be ready for tomorrow.

So we did. We made sure those rovers were good and warmed up. I believe the technical term is "Yee-Ha!"

Laksen and I came in while Paul, Diego, and Bianca were still warming up the rovers; I fixed corned beef hash for lunch while Laksen dealt with his daily engineering tasks. Then the gang came in to the traditional welcome beverage for those who come in from the snow, which is hot cocoa. Except that since this bunch is from Florida, Texas, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Belgium, none of them knew about this tradition and I (from Wisconsin) had to explain it to them. They enjoyed the hot cocoa, though.

After lunch we saw that the sun had come out and the temperature had climbed to 47 degrees, so Laksen, Bianca, and I decided to try a GPS tracking run -- we'd stick to the main road and keep our speed down for safety. At first it was delightful, motoring across the fresh crisp snow, which sparkled in the sun and provided a delightful contrast with the red rocks and blue sky. But as we got further down the road and the temperatures continued to climb, the dirt beneath the snow changed to mud and the going got kind of nasty. We were slipping and sliding all over the place and the rovers' wheels were kicking up great quantities of brown and red goo; climbing hills turned into a real trial. I got stuck at one point, and Bianca had to take over my rover to get it out, but then I remembered the first lesson of driving in snow -- Don't Stop, Don't Slow Down -- and from then on I was fine. Still, it was pretty unpleasant, and then we couldn't find the next stretch of trail in the snow, so we decided to bag it and head back to the hab.

When we got back from that and cleaned up as much as possible, I worked on the Quick Guides. I have 9 one-page guides completed (ATVs, radios, webcams, white water system, black water system, gray water system and GreenHab, Internet, communication with the Mars Society, and EVA suit maintenance) and 2 to go (power system and engineering rounds), but I decided to print out and laminate what I've got. I also emailed them to a bunch of folks at the Mars Society and I hope they will be helpful for future missions.

Then it was time for dinner. I whomped up a batch of fried rice with tofu, miscellaneous vegetables, and rehydrated egg whites, which wasn't bad despite the fact that we're all out of soy sauce. Meanwhile Bianca rehydrated some cauliflower, topped it with Hollandaise sauce and rehydrated cheese, and popped it in the oven. It all came out delicious; just the thing for the end of a snowy day.

Posted 01/20/2010 20:16 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We had a busy day planned today, so as soon as we all finished breakfast (oatmeal again for me) we got straight to work. Diego, Laksen, and I took off for the final set of suited trials of the "determination of error in biological sampling due to EVA suit constraints" study. Laksen did his first, then headed back to the hab while I did my two. These weren't as much of a pain as the first two I did, because I'm more experienced in the suit and in the specific skills needed for this plant-gathering task. Though I did seem to collect my pencil more frequently than I did some of the plants. I took lots of pictures of Laksen's trial and of Diego looking for extremophiles in the rocks while waiting for Laksen to finish.

Once I was done with my suit trial I headed back to the hab, where I met Laksen and Paul who had just suited up for the final assembly phase of the radiotelescope. With the aid of a drill and a big hammer we got it all done and we posed for celebratory photographs. In the afternoon I wrote up a handoff report for the next crew, who will take over the work where we had to leave off due to lack of the right kind of coaxial cable. (It's working, and the height is adjustable, but it can't be raised to the ideal height because the connecting cable's too short.)

I came in after two and a half hours in my suit to a fine bowl of soup for lunch, and the welcome news that our Internet seemed to be back up to speed. We will monitor our usage closely to be sure the problem does not recur.

After lunch I worked on the radiotelescope handoff report and the Quick Guides for maintenance of the EVA suits and the GreenHab (with Laksen's help) while Steve, Paul, and Diego went off searching for fossils, with great success. As soon as they got back, Laksen, Bianca, and I hopped on the rovers and went out on another GPS-tracking run, looking for a trail that is called Cactus Road on our map. But the map is three years old and several previous attempts to find it had failed. Perhaps it had washed out. Finally, though, we did manage to find it, and it was a gorgeous run through a spectacular canyon labeled Valles Marineris on the map. (Though I'm told the canyon at Muddy Creek is even more spectacular.) We didn't make it to the end of the trail, but we'll try again tomorrow. I'm getting much better at navigating bumpy terrain and stepping over obstacles in first gear, and I'm very grateful to Paul, Laksen, and Bianca for their tolerance and support.

A big wind kicked up today, making the whole hab rattle like rain on the roof, and we can see some clouds that look like heavy weather on the horizon. We made sure to cover the rovers tightly against the weather and take in all equipment from the rover garage. I feel rather proprietary toward faithful Opportunity Girl, my favorite rover, which has served me very well. The rovers, and even the EVA backpacks, have developed individual personalities for me and I will miss them when I return to Earth.

Posted 01/19/2010 17:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Woke up this morning to snow! A light dusting of snow on the ground and just a bit in the air. Changed the appearance of the place completely -- very pretty, though not very Marslike.

The snow threw our plans for the day into a cocked space helmet. The suit constraints study, for example, couldn't be done because you couldn't see the plants under the snow. So we brainstormed a bunch of other stuff that could be done, most of it in the hab.

It was at around this time that we noticed our Internet was running exceptionally slowly. We tried restarting the wifi router and the satellite modem, but that didn't help. We suspected the weather, which was overcast as well as snowy and very cold, but we've had overcast before and it hasn't hurt us like this. We contacted Mission Support -- connectivity was present, though very slow -- and they suggested that we might have hit our satellite Internet connection's bandwidth limit. However, even the bandwidth usage page was taking forever to load. Finally I managed to determine that we'd used over 250 MB -- more than 5 times our usual hourly usage -- between 8 and 9 AM. That might explain why our Internet usage was throttled, but we'd all been at breakfast at that time! We tried and tried to figure out what had been the cause, not to scapegoat anyone but to keep it from happening again. Eventually it seemed that one of us had not managed to completely turn off updates and their computer had perhaps automatically downloaded a large Windows update during that time. That's turned off now, so with any luck our connection will return to normal speed at midnight tonight and the problem will not recur. I really hope so, because being without reasonable Internet connectivity is a royal pain!

Once we got that issue sorted out -- or at least diagnosed -- Laksen and Bianca took off on a GPS trail-mapping run and I started work on some more Quick Guides. But what really got us excited was the idea of shooting our official portraits. For a backdrop we set up the Official Flag of Mars (red, green, and blue), a map of Mars, and a plaque about the Mars Society that usually hangs in the airlock, and we prepared to pose in front of it in our space suits (holding the helmet) and in our official crew polo shirts. But then various people wanted to spruce up for their photos, so we kind of lost momentum.

While we were waiting for the photos to happen, Paul and Laksen decided to go off on another GPS trail-mapping run. It looked pretty darn cold out there but they talked me into going along and I had a great time jouncing along on an ATV across barely-tracked rough terrain. In fact, if you've ever been to Disneyland, imagine the Indiana Jones ride over the countryside of Big Thunder Mountain Railway. Only rougher and longer. I quickly learned that on an ATV your suspension system is your knees, not your butt, and after a while I was galumphing across ruts and gulleys with hardly a second thought. It was great fun and we saw some fabulous scenery and picked up some fossil shells as well as mapping out the trail system.

We got back just in time for our crew photos, smiling for the camera in our space suits and polo shirts. Bianca takes the school photos for her kids' school, so she had the whole thing down pat. It was very familiar, but also kind of surreal, and I think the photos came out great. (Paul thinks I look like Michael Farraday in Lost.) School photo day on Mars.

Today is a cooking day, and we got kind of ambitious. Bianca and I prepared pasta, pesto sauce from a mix, and canned spaghetti sauce beefed up with sauteed onions, TVP, and spices. Bianca also made muffins, which came out great, and Diego popped up with alfalfa sprouts from the GreenHab, which we served as a salad with a dressing of balsamic vinegar and rehydrated onions. A meal fit for a king!

We had an excellent conversation over and after dinner, including Star Trek and Monty Python references, but now it's time for the writing of reports and other paperwork. With the Internet still throttled it's going to take a while to submit this so I think I'll stop writing and send it in now.

Posted 01/18/2010 20:07 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

It's very hard to believe that we are now more than halfway done with our mission. We arrived at MDRS last Saturday and the next crew will arrive this Saturday. We have been working 18-hour days, so we're pretty tired, but we're still excited and we have plenty more to do before we head back to Earth. But the Best Western in Grand Junction is going to feel like the Ritz.

It being Sunday today, we decided not to have our morning briefing at any set time but just to sleep until we woke up. I woke up around 7:30 anyway. We'd turned the heat down last night because it was over 75 degrees F upstairs, but in the morning it was 41 degrees F downstairs. I needed to go to the bathroom, which is downstairs, but I hesitated at the top of the stairs like a cat at the door on a cold day.

Before breakfast I had to go into the EVA prep room to check out something that had been bothering me during the night. We discovered recently that the new radios we just got are much easier to use if you attach them to your suit with a belt clip instead of tucking them in a pocket, but I didn't know if we had clips for all of them. But after I looked in a few places I found the clips for all six. I also verified that they were all properly turned off and charging -- it's really easy to drop them in the charger in such a way that they don't actually make contact.

Breakfast was oatmeal with dehydrated mandarin oranges. Over breakfast we talked about how much we wished we'd had some kind of simple, up-to-date one-page checklist and troubleshooting guide for our most important procedures, rather than the detailed and, unfortunately, obsolete manuals we have. I responded to this challenge like a good technical writer and quickly whomped out one-page Quick Guides for the ATVs, radios, and webcams. Quick Guides for the power and water systems will follow as soon as possible.

In the latter part of the morning Laksen, Paul, and I continued setup of the radiotelescope, working mostly in the rover garage. Most of this work consisted of measuring out nylon ropes, tying knots, and drilling holes. We got just about ready to set up the masts when it was time for lunch. I snarfed some ramen noodles (amazingly, Steve didn't know what they were -- I thought every college student in America lived on them) and then headed back out with Paul to continue work, while Laksen and Bianca took off on an EVA to do GPS tracking and photo geotagging of all the trails around the hab. Paul and I got the four masts erected, the guy wires loosely wrapped around the stakes, and the antennas attached to the masts. The adjustable masts are currently at their lowest point, 10' high, because we don't have the coaxial cable necessary to reach the antennas at the 20' height we need to pick up radio signals from Jupiter at this point in its year, but at least we could check out the antennas and make sure they work. And they do! We picked up a signal that seems to be varying with the time of day as the sun's signal would be expected to do. It sounds like static, but it's the music of the spheres.

We'd planned a fossil-hunting EVA in the late afternoon, but the geotagging EVA got back later than scheduled and we didn't think there would be time to reach the fossil bed and return before dark. I was disappointed, but then Paul and Laksen invited me along on a second GPS run, looking for a trail the first run had failed to find. We did manage to find and tag the trail, and I had a fun time on the ATVs and saw some spectacular scenery. Thanks guys!

Dinner tonight will be Kung Fu Chicken, the first dehydrated meal we had and still the tastiest we've tried. We've all worked up a good appetite today and we're really looking forward to it.

Posted 01/17/2010 18:47 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Oatmeal for breakfast today, immediately after which I suited up and headed out with Diego for his study on "Determination of error in biological sampling due to EVA suit constraints." Each trial in this study consists of one test subject spending 20 minutes going over a patch of desert and identifying, photographing, counting, and taking samples of each different type of plant found there, either in a space suit (experiment) or not (control). There are 5 patches of desert and each of us is doing all of them, randomly selected as to whether each is suited or non-suited. The luck of the draw was that I was scheduled for one non-suited trial and four suited.

I did the non-suited trial at the beginning of the mission, and today I did two of my four suited trials. Man, what a pain! The gloves are the worst part. Imagine taking a photograph, writing down a brief description, breaking off a bit of plant, and stuffing it in one of several plastic bags, all wearing heavy winter gloves. (You are also juggling the camera, clipboard, and plastic bags in your hands, which is not the way I think a real biological survey would work, but that's neither here nor there because we did it the same way in both trials.) The helmet makes it hard to see, the backpack makes it hard to balance, and all in all it's painstaking, tedious, hard work -- stoop labor on Mars. The worst part is when Diego throws all the samples away at the end of each trial (we aren't measuring accuracy, only number of samples collected). And I have two more suited trials to do. I can really see why the astronauts in The Right Stuff despised the scientists so much.

Right after I got back from that, I joined Paul and Laksen in the lab to work on the radiotelescope. We think we've thrashed out a workable design for an adjustable support structure that can be constructed using the materials at hand, and when we finished work yesterday we made sure all the relevant bits were taken inside so we could do as much as possible in the lab. We got the cables measured and cut, and later today we plan to drill the holes and tie knots so that we can do an EVA tomorrow morning and just set the thing up. Wish us luck.

Lunch was canned corned beef, which looked disgusting to me, but Bianca sauteed onions and added tomato powder and spices and served it over mashed potatoes and it was pretty good.

In the afternoon I was still kind of beat from the suit study in the morning and I decided to not participate in any EVAs and take care of some other business. I backed up my computer, rearranged my Monster Bag (there's no place to unpack it, so I've just been digging in it for everything I need and it's all gotten horribly jumbled up), vaccumed the lab (just to beat back the encroaching dust a bit), and took a nap. But when I saw the cool photos and videos everyone brought back I regretted not having done another EVA today.

While everyone else was returning from their EVAs, I cooked dinner. Usually at home I work from recipes, but Bianca's an improviser and after consulting with her I whomped up something I'd call Tofu Enchilada Style: sauteed dehydrated onions, tofu, a package of enchilada seasoning, canned spaghetti sauce, and dehydrated cheese served over a mix of white and brown rice. It was darn tasty, actually, but the real hit of the meal was the muffins Bianca made.

Our daily reports at http://desert.marssociety.org/mdrs/fs09/ are supposed to include photos, but they take 24 hours to be posted when it's working and it hasn't been working lately. In fact, we only have photos posted for 1/11 and 1/13, plus two (of the seven we submitted) for 1/14. We've been going back and forth with Mission Support on this, but the webmaster's on vacation and nobody else has the necessary passwords to address the situation. Frustrating. (I've been posting photos on my personal blog but they're not the same ones.)

Posted 01/16/2010 18:42 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Today started with the now-usual ATV warm-up run. We had gorgeous weather again today, despite the fact that snow was in the forecast -- for some reason the weather we've been having has been much drier and warmer than forecast for Hanksville, just three miles away. (Mind you, it was 14 degrees F when I got up. Brr!) Because the weather was nice and the trip back from Engineering is so scenic, I stuck my camera in my front pocket with the lens sticking out and took a short Rover-Cam video. It's not quite level but otherwise turned out quite well. Like the other videos I've mentioned, I'll upload it to YouTube after I return to Earth.

After our morning briefing I tackled the EVA room webcam, which has been down since before we got here. The camera itself is in a difficult location to reach, at the end of three USB cables. I checked all the connections, unplugged and replugged it, rebooted the system -- nothing. So, suspecting that perhaps one of the cables had been gnawed by Martian mice, I un-duct-taped the camera from the wall and plugged it directly into the computer. This resulted in all sorts of uninformative Windows errors and also knocked the printer offline. I tried all the USB troubleshooting steps I could think of -- no dice (though I did get the printer back up and running). Finally I gave up and decided to put the camera back where it had been, just so it wouldn't get lost among all the other bits of miscellaneous computer hardware here. But when I plugged it back into the third extension cable, I heard a little bing-bong from the computer. I looked... and it was online! I have no idea what I did but I'm not going to mess with success. I taped it back up and, with Bianca's help, got it pointed at what I hope is an interesting part of the EVA room. (Bianca and I are both on the short side, so if you see the taller Marsnauts walking around with their heads cut off that's why.) So we now have six working webcams, up from three when I arrived.

Once I got done with that I helped Laksen pump water around. We have to haul out an electrical pump to move our clean water from the trailer in which it is delivered into the external tank next to the hab, and then run a separate pump to get it from the external tank to the internal tank in the loft. We also have a third pump to move gray water from the underground tank in which it is collected into the greenhab, where it is filtered and processed by duckweed and water hyacinths until it is clean enough to use for flushing the toilet, as mentioned earlier. The gray water is then moved from the greenhab to the toilet via a hand pump, which takes quite a bit of effort, whenever you want to flush. This is one reason we say "if it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down." We also fired up the heater that keeps the pipes under the bathroom from freezing. Maintaining human life is all about water -- too much water, or water in the wrong place, can be as much of a problem as too little, even on Mars.

After a nice lunch of rehydrated noodles with vegetables, courtesy of Bianca, I sat down with Laksen and Paul to continue work on the radiotelescope. We spent about half the afternoon designing the guy wires that will keep the telescope's masts vertical and properly positioned; this involved a lot of basic trigonometry and quite a bit of figuring out what we have in terms of hardware, rope, and cable. This took enough time that we did not get out on the surface today for this project.

In the late afternoon I went out on a geological EVA with Steve and Bianca, looking for microfossils. As I had no idea what to look for, and wasn't brave enough to climb up as high as Steve, I just picked up interesting-looking rocks and took photos. The light was excellent and the photos came out very Marsy. I took some videos too.

Most MDRS missions have only one engineer. We have three, in effect -- Laksen is the official engineer, and Paul and I are both handy with tools and available to help. For myself, I've been spending a lot of time on engineering tasks because I don't have a scientific mission and because I enjoy solving problems. It's great for me because anything I can do in this area is a bonus -- nothing was expected of me coming in. I understand that life on the International Space Station is similar: broken equipment and daily maintenance can easily take over the whole day. But with the three of us working on maintenance and repairs, we can actually get ahead of the game and leave the hab in better shape than when we came. This is very satisfying to me.

Posted 01/15/2010 19:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Today started out much like yesterday, with a quick trip out to Engineering to warm up and gas up the ATVs. The weather was gorgeous, clear and crisp but not too cold, and even on that short ride I was struck anew by the sere beauty of this alien place. If it's nice again tomorrow I'll try to take a video.

After breakfast and morning briefing, Paul, Laksen, and I put our heads together over the bits of the radiotelescope in the science lab. As in the movie Apollo 13, our challenge is to make this fit into that using only this stuff. In our case the available stuff is a little more than they had in the Apollo capsule but it's still weirdly limited. The radiotelescope consists of four twenty-foot masts holding up two dipole antennas, and they have to be braced with guy wires, but we don't have wire, just rope (and it's several different varieties of rope scavenged from various other projects); we don't have turnbuckles or eye bolts; and we don't have all the tools we'd like, but we do have an entire large plastic container full of various kinds of adhesive tape. It's like trying to do a home remodeling project at your beach house, if your beach house were too far from the nearest town to buy anything you left at home.

Another thing we did this morning is that we decided the hab was getting pretty scruffy, so we buckled down for a couple hours of cleaning. If you saw on the webcam that Bianca, the only woman, was mopping the floor on the residential level, please be reassured that the guys were sweeping and vacuuming like mad in the lab and the EVA room (where the webcam is still out of order -- sorry, I'll look into that soon, I hope). We also took out all the garbage and discards, scrubbed the toilet, and swept out the airlocks. The place looks much, much better now and we've instituted a strict shoe policy (no outside or downstairs shoes upstairs) to keep the dust from getting into the residential areas. It's a bit like being Japanese.

After a really thorough cleaning we were ready for a good hot lunch. As it is a "cooking" day, we could fix whatever we wanted... though, again, it's a matter of making this fit into that using only this stuff. We have nothing fresh, very little meat and very little that isn't dehydrated. We wound up with a very nice creamy wild rice soup, chili, and mashed potatoes with cheese. Hot and filling.

Most of my afternoon was spent in a space suit, just outside the hab, setting up the radiotelescope. We started by driving lengths of pipe into the ground to act as bases for the masts, using what I call The First Tool: a big rock. Then we drilled holes into the masts in some places and attached pipe clamps in others so that we had somewhere to attach the guy ropes, measured and cut the guy ropes, and erected one mast. But as soon as we got it up we realized the antenna's coaxial cable is not long enough to reach the antenna at its new height. We took measurements, took the mast back down, and called it a day; an unknown number of days of work remain, but we are optimistic that we can finish it before the end of this rotation. If there's more coaxial cable in the hab somewhere.

I was pretty wiped out after that and I declined to join in the afternoon's geological EVA. While they were gone I recorded a brief video tour of the hab, which is something I've been meaning to do for some time, and caught up on some paperwork. Steve, Bianca, and Laksen came back with some great pictures, lots of geological samples, and the story of having run into a couple of local tourists who were just pleased as punch to get their pictures taken shaking hands with a real live Martian. Steve's microfossil search achieved success: he found a fossil ostracod! Diego also found life this afternoon, specificially endoliths (cryptoendolithic algae) in some minerals he collected this morning.

Then came the time of staring into the cupboard and wondering what to fix for dinner. We found a box of couscous and Bianca got the brainstorm to prepare a vegetable couscous. We rehydrated onions and sauteed them, added broccoli, corn, peas, and carrots rehydrated in water with a couple boullion cubes, and topped it off with half a can of tomato paste and a variety of spices. Served over couscous cooked in the water we drained off the vegetables after rehydration, it was really really good. We also had "blueberry" muffins that Paul fixed from a Jiffy boxed mix. Best dinner yet, and great conversation over it as well.

Unfortunately that dinner took rather a lot of time to prepare, so I didn't get around to writing my report until quite late. I have to submit this in the next five minutes or Mission Support will be unhappy with me, so off it goes!

Posted 01/14/2010 20:04 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

The plan for today was to split up into teams morning and afternoon. In the morning, Diego and Bianca would perform the first experimental (suited) trials of the ergonomics study while Paul, Laksen, and I did a preliminary survey of the radiotelescope from the pressurized tunnel (i.e. path to the greenhouse). Then after lunch, Steve and Bianca would go off looking for microfossils while Paul, Laksen, and I began actual work on the radiotelescope.

What actually happened was that after Paul, Laksen, and I filled up the ATVs' tanks and checked their oil and tires, we went to pump water from the trailer in which it is delivered into the hab's external tank and the pump wouldn't run. It had been fine yesterday.... I tried unkinking the hose and poking at it in various ways, up to and including a complete disassembly, but still it would only hum when plugged in. At one point when we had it disassembled it began to spin, and we cheered and put it back together. Naturally once it was back together it wouldn't work any more. Fortunately we have enough water in the tank for several days so this isn't an immediate crisis, and right after lunch the water pump began working again, apparently all by itself. We went out and filled the tank right away, as long as it was working. (I still don't trust it long-term).

While I was working on the pump, Laksen looked for the source of water we'd seen leaking out from under the hab. It turned out that the U-bend under the sink in the science lab had come loose -- someone in some previous crew had put a bucket under it, but we'd been using it unawares and it had filled up and spilled over. There was ice at the back of the cabinet and water on the floor as well. Laksen started to look for PVC pipe cement to reattach it but I thought I remembered that gluing a U-bend in place would be bad -- you need to be able to get it off to clean out the trap -- and that it should be possible to just finger-tighten the joint. Turned out the gasket in the joint was in backwards, and once reversed and finger-tightened it no longer leaked (well, maybe seeped a little). We did manage to get about a half-hour in on the radiotelescope, reading over the documentation and surveying the current state of construction.

While lunch was cooking, I also ran up to the Musk Observatory to see if I could fix the #1 webcam there, which was completely washed out even when the sun wasn't shining directly into its eye. Poking around at the computer there, I stumbled into a deeply-buried settings screen where all the contrast, brightness, and gamma controls were seriously messed up. A simple press on the Restore Defaults button brought the camera back to life. Go me! There were three working webcams when we arrived and now we have five. I'll tackle the sixth when I get a chance.

For lunch we had split-pea soup from a mix, with dehydrated peas and corn and some yummy yummy TVP added. It was actually pretty tasty. We Marsnauts are research subjects in a food study, where we alternate cooking and non-cooking days and fill out a survey each day about how we liked them and what our current mood and energy level is, and today is a non-cooking day. On non-cooking days we eat only rehydrated foods (the sort of thing you would find at a camping or survivalist store); tonight's dinner is Texas BBQ Chicken with Beans. Some of these dehydrated meals are really good. (They're also expensive.) On cooking days we can cook whatever we like from what is available -- which is, more often than not, something else pre-prepared. One night I got ambitious and made a stir-fry of tofu, rehydrated broccoli, and rehydrated onions, served over real rice. It was pretty good, in my opinion, but I don't think it was good enough to justify the time it took.

Our time is fully occupied here. The days are filled with EVAs and various maintenance and repair tasks, and the evenings are largely taken up with the daily reports we have to file with the Mars Society, planning the next day's activities, and blogging. Blogging is a serious activity here -- it's public outreach. Diego and I had blogs before being selected for this mission. Laksen started blogging after he was selected, and Paul and Bianca both started blogging after they arrived here. Only Steve is blog-resistant.

After lunch we suited up for our radiotelescope EVA. The radiotelescope we have here is a very simple one based on designs provided by NASA's Radio Jove project (http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/). It just consists of a pair of dipole antennas -- basically two parallel wires -- which can receive a signal from a powerful radio source such as Jupiter or the Sun. The height of the two wires above the ground determines the angle in the sky where the antenna is focused, and right now that height is fixed to the position of Jupiter when the telescope was first constructed (it's since moved). We're replacing the poles that hold up the wires with telescoping assemblies so the telescope can be "pointed" at different parts of the sky. Two of the poles were replaced by the previous crew and we're going to try to finish the job. Today we managed to get the two fixed-height poles taken down and all the necessary parts moved into the lab; the next step is to build the telescoping poles.

Almost immediately after that EVA Paul and Laksen decided to go out on one more EVA to check out some repairs we'd made to the suits. I was tired, but when Paul invited me along I said "I'm never going to have this opportunity again" and I suited up with them. We're getting pretty good at the suiting process and it went quickly; we then took ATVs a short way away and climbed up a mesa. It was cool to be walking across the stripes you can see from the hab, and the whole thing felt exceptionally Marsy. The view was spectacular, but I pooped out before reaching the summit, alas. I rested on a rock while Laksen and Paul climbed to the top and got some great pictures.

After everyone got back from their various EVAs we sat down at our computers to prepare our daily reports and began boiling water for dinner. So ends another day on Mars.

Posted 01/13/2010 21:33 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

If my updates are only whetting your appetite, here are some other sources of up-to-the-minute information on MDRS-88:

• Live webcams: http://freemars.org/mdrscam/
• Official daily logs and some photos: http://desert.marssociety.org/mdrs/fs09/
• Laksen's blog: http://laksensblog.blogspot.com
• Paul's blog: http://paulgoestomars.blogspot.com
• Diego's blog (in Spanish): http://www.eltiempo.com/blogs/dejame_mi_espacio/
• Bianca's blog (in Dutch): http://bloggen.be/biancagoestomars/
• My Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/daviddlevine
• Diego's Twitter feed (in English and Spanish): http://twitter.com/diegou
• MDRS Updates Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/MDRSupdates

Posted 01/13/2010 18:12 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

After dinner I fixed both of the space suit backpacks that came back from EVA with problems. One of them had a fuse that wasn't making proper contact (just removing and replacing it fixed the problem) and the other had a spade lug that had worked loose from the battery.

Flush with that success, I looked at pack #4, which had been dead since before we arrived. With Paul and Laksen's help I determined that the battery itself was not taking a charge. We replaced it with a similar battery we found in the cabinet and it seems to be good to go.

I didn't mention in my earlier report that we had a problem after today's second EVA where one person's space suit zipper jammed really badly. Paul managed to get the occupant out, but only by tearing a couple of zipper teeth out. I used my science fiction convention costuming experience to get that zipper working better by rubbing a candle along its length.

Feeling very smug now. Probably I will get myself in big trouble trying to fix something tomorrow.

Posted 01/12/2010 19:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Today was a fix-it day for me. After the morning's briefing I checked over the EVA packs to make sure they were all charged up for the day's activity, but pack 4 was not charging and not functional. I tried all the basic useful stuff like wiggling the connections but it seems completely dead. It's probably just a loose connection somewhere. We decided that we could make it through today with only 5 packs. I also attached Velcro to our laminated name tags so we can all have our names on our space suits.

In the second half of the morning, Laksen and I went up to the Musk Observatory, which is out of commission for now because the telescope has failed and been sent back to the manufacturer, to see if we could get the two outdoor webcams back on line. We had been told that the computer at the Musk, which controls those webcams as well as the telescope (when the telescope is there) had failed due to low temperatures. Maybe it did, but it's a bit warmer today than it was last week and the thing booted right up. However, both webcams were really messed up in their positioning. This might have something to do with the fact that for a camera mount each one was just duct taped to a rock. I un-taped them and re-taped each one's stand firmly to the shelf on which they sit. We got one camera working properly and the other came up by itself later in the day, when the sun was no longer shining directly in its eye. That gets us up to five working cameras out of six (it was only three when we arrived) and I'll see if I can fix the sixth and improve the positioning of the second Musk camera tomorrow.

After lunch, Paul, Steve, and I went out on EVA #2. This was Steve's first EVA and Paul and I, now the Old Hands, walked him through the suiting procedure. We took the three ATVs out to the very end of the trail, which put us within hiking distance of a mineral formation where we had reason to believe we might find microfossils (Foraminifera, Radiolaria and Diatoms). The formation proved to be pretty inaccessible, but Steve bravely clambered up an unstable slope and collected two bags of samples. Steve's initial microscopic analysis didn't find any fossils, but he did find a micrometeorite and there are more samples yet to examine. We also got a bunch of fine photos.

This is the farthest and the fastest I have ever gone on an ATV. For safety's sake we wore motorcycle helmets, with our EVA helmets bungeed on the back rack, but on the way out all three of us managed to have the helmet fall off at some point. Mine suffered a cracked sun shield but that was the worst of the damage, fortunately. This explains why four of the six helmets have some kind of crack in the visor. After the third such incident we switched to carrying the helmets in front of us, perched on the gas tank. It was exciting and a lot of fun, but when the MDRS came in sight at the end of that trip I must confess I said to myself "Hab, sweet hab!" I'm a little achy but feel very satisfied and pleased with myself.

Very shortly after our return Laksen, Diego, and Bianca went out on EVA #3, their first EVA. Paul and I helped them suit up and took tons of pictures. They were all very excited, like kids on the first day of school. Paul and I waved as they rode off into the distance, pleased and proud at our babies leaving the nest. When they came back we helped them unsuit. It was a busy and productive time and I felt very professional, checking each pack to make sure its straps were tight and hoses properly fastened. "Looks like we've got an intermittent malf on #3," I said in my Astronaut Voice. After all this work with the backpacks I felt almost proprietary toward them as I racked them up. My babies! Two of the packs actually came back from EVA #3 with problems, which means we currently have only three working packs. Paul and I will look at the malfunctioning ones after dinner in hopes of bringing at least one or two of them back online.

We had a bit of excitement this evening when one of the crew went downstairs to take a sponge bath at the sink in the Science and Engineering Bay. When this person asked us to not come downstairs for a little bit, we pointed out that there's a webcam covering that area. Eek! I rushed to cover the camera (without looking) and wound up falling down the last couple of steps. Fortunately I landed well and didn't hurt myself, no Naughty Bits appeared on the webcam, and we all learned an Important Lesson.

You may have noticed that an ongoing theme of this report, and all other reports from MDRS, is fighting with malfunctioning infrastructure. (And I haven't even mentioned the fun times we've been having with the toilet.) I believe that this is an important part of our mission here -- the problems we are having are not the same problems a real Mars mission would have, but the time we spend on problems and the way we react to them are representative of the schedule and psychological problems a real Mars astronaut would have. Certainly the daily struggles of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers to survive on the surface of a harsh and unforgiving planet show that persistence, ingenuity, and improvisation will continue to be necessary skills for all kinds of explorers in new environments.

Posted 01/12/2010 18:31 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Last night I went out after dinner to admire the stars. When I was a kid I didn't understand about stars twinkling, because when you live in a city you can only see the very brightest stars and they don't twinkle visibly. But here there are billions of stars, they are big and bright and they twinkle most merrily. But when I got back to the hab... the inner airlock door wouldn't budge! I knocked but got no answer. I walked back around to the Engineering lock and found Paul and Laksen doing their engineering rounds. They had locked the front door not knowing I was outside and were extremely apologetic.

When we awoke this morning we were officially "in sim." I arrived on Mars while I slept! Kind of like a cruise ship, except without the luxury, natives, and air.

As I was getting dressed I stubbed my toe on the milk crate provided as a step to get into my upper bunk. It was still hurting a while later so I took off my shoe to inspect it and found it bleeding. Bianca, our Health & Safety Officer, was concerned about infection so she treated it with peroxide and mecurochrome and bandaged it. It still hurts a little -- only a little, but I feel really stupid to have injured myself (albeit trivially) on my first day on Mars.

After a breakfast of oatmeal with reconstituted dehydrated fruit, we had the commander's briefing and a briefing from our Health & Safety Officer. We do have procedures for emergency medical aid here, but we hope not to have to use them. (Stubbed toe doesn't count, even if it's bleeding.)

Our first official activity in sim is to establish the controls for our study on Determination of Error in Biological Sampling due to EVA Suit Constraints. "Control" in this case means surveying several patches of desert for plant life, while not wearing EVA suits. (Even though we are in sim, we have special authorization to perform this activity without suits. We were supposed to run the controls yesterday, before the start of sim, but most of the day was consumed by the power problem we had.) The "experimental" runs of the study will perform the same task while wearing suits.

We had two working sessions today, with two teams going out in each session. As it happens I was randomly selected to participate in only one control and four experimental runs, so I went out only once. During the first run I was the only person in the hab. I checked in by radio every 20 minutes with the teams on the surface, updated the MDRS Twitter feed, and tried to diagnose the malfunctioning webcam in the EVA prep area (to no avail). I also effected a temporary repair on EVA helmet #1, which has a cracked visor. Duct tape to the rescue!

For my control run, I had a nice walk out to the study area, a square of desert marked out with flags where my job was to identify as many different plant species as possible, count the number of plants of each species, and collect a small sample of each plant, all in twenty minutes. It was kind of fussy work and I can tell that it will be much harder in an EVA suit (which I will have to do four times... oy). At the end of it I just dumped the samples out on the ground -- the point of this exercise was just to measure the number of samples collected in the time allotted rather than to actually use the samples. I could really identify with the Mercury/Gemini astronauts who got angry with the scientists who treated them like lab animals.

When we were done with that, Paul was really agitating to do a proper EVA, and we finally got the go-ahead for that with about an hour of light left. We helped each other on with our suits, went through the airlock, and stepped out on the surface.

What. A. Blast!

The goal of this first brief EVA was just to gain experience walking and driving in the suits. We were out for 40 minutes, including a hike over gently rolling terrain and ten minutes on the rovers in the immediate vicinity of the hab. I was grinning like a fool the whole time and Bianca got some awesome pictures.

Now I really feel like the first science fiction writer on Mars!

Posted 01/11/2010 18:00 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

We had a whole bunch of prep and setup on the schedule for today, our last out-of-sim day. But Mars has its own agenda.

(Sidebar: "Out of sim" means that we don't have to wear space suits outdoors or keep the airlock doors shut at all times. We'll be "in sim" starting tomorrow.)

The hab is full of strange noises at night -- whirs and thumps and gurgles -- making sleep difficult, but eventually I put in earplugs and got a pretty solid night's rest, finally getting out of bed around 7:00. I understand the ISS is also very noisy.

Paul made us pancakes for breakfast (using the last of the Bisquick and syrup, alas) and Bianca added a nice fruit compote made from dehydrated apples and berries. Then Laksen and Paul headed out for their first daily engineering round (surveying system status and performing maintenance). While they were doing this, I busied myself making name signs for our doors with the crew logo on them (hey, it's a tradition). A while later they radioed in from Engineering to tell us they were going to shut down Kitty, the new generator, to check its oil, and we shouldn't be alarmed if the power flickered a bit as the backup batteries took over.

(Sidebar: "Engineering" is a wooden shack full of oily equipment at the other end of a rocky path from the hab. In sim, we pretend that the shack is a bubble and the path is a pressurized tunnel. In addition to Kitty, the new generator that was just installed yesterday, this shack contains Casper and Wendy the old generators and Honey the backup generator.)

Okay, we said. And then the lights went out completely. Also the Internet, the heat, and everything else.

That wasn't so bad, we thought; how long can it take to check the oil on a diesel engine? But the outage went on and on and on... eventually Laksen and Paul came in with some disturbing news: having shut down Kitty, they were unable to restart it; they didn't know why the backup batteries hadn't kicked in; and they'd tried switching over to Honey but that didn't do the trick either.

With the Internet out, we had no way to contact Mission Support, and none of us have cell phone service here. Steve tried walking up to Observatory Ridge in hopes of catching a signal, but no dice. Finally Steve, Laksen, and Paul took V'ger into town in hopes that they'd be able to find DG at Hollow Mountain.

Through all of this I was feeling very much like a passenger, or maybe cargo, rather than crew. All I could do was sit and wait while the hab grew slowly colder. But after a couple of hours, V'ger came back with the sainted DG, who gladly came out on Sunday to get us up and running again. At least we were able to give our brave engineers a hot meal of chili and rice, which Bianca and I had prepared.

(Sidebar: V'ger is our Plymouth Voyager "pressurized rover" and DG is a Hanksville local who is absolutely essential to the continued operation of MDRS.)

It turns out that Kitty was keeping the hab running but was not charging its own battery, so when it came time to restart it, the starter didn't turn over. Meanwhile the backup batteries, which were supposed to take over when Kitty shut down, had become completely discharged because the inverter (which is more than an inverter, it's the brains of the operation and quite old and demented) had gotten confused by all the changes when Kitty was installed yesterday. The same demented inverter refused to accept that the power from the backup generator, Honey. Having diagnosed the problem, DG reconfigured the system so that Kitty is powering the hab and charging the hab's batteries, and there's a trickle charger plugged into Kitty charging Kitty's battery. He'll be back tomorrow or the next day to try to de-jury-rig this setup, but in the end we'll probably need a new inverter.

Having gotten power back up, we tried to accomplish as many of our planned tasks for today as possible. I helped Laksen and Paul finish their engineering rounds, including pumping swampy-smelling gray water from the collection tank into the GreenHab, where it will be purified by running through several filters and three tanks of aquatic plants before being used to flush the toilet. Diego and Bianca went out to do the control (non-EVA-suited) on an experiment to determine the impact of EVA suits on efficiency of gathering biological samples, and Steve and Paul went out to examine some strata, looking for likely sites for microfossils.

(Sidebar: We can't get the gray water clean enough to drink or even water edible plants with, but in a real Mars base such recycling would be necessary.)

As part of the engineering round, Paul got the Spirit rover, which had earlier failed to start, up and running, and Laksen and I each got to take it for a test run. Neither of us had ever been on an ATV before and it was deemed a good idea for us to try it once without the encumbering space suit. Paul offered me a radio to call for help in case I got in trouble, but I declined: "Don't worry about me doing anything crazy. I don't DO crazy." "Dude," he said, "you're on an ATV in the middle of Mars." "Woo-hoo!" I replied, and took off. I didn't go all that far or all that fast, but it was still a thrill and the terrain is magnificent, alien, and very Martian.

(Sidebar: We have three ATVs, called Spirit, Opportunity, and Viking 1. A fourth ATV, Viking 2, is out of service.)

So we didn't accomplish as much today as we'd planned, but we did get a lot of useful stuff done. Tomorrow when we wake up we will be in sim -- on Mars for real!

Well, for analog, anyway.

Posted 01/10/2010 21:13 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Awoke bright and early for breakfast with the crew. Bianca Nowak, the final crew member to arrive, did not have an easy trip from Belgium, culminating in the failure of her luggage to arrive with her. The airline promises that it will be here later today and they will deliver it to the hab's mail drop at the Hollow Mountain convenience store in Hanksville, about 3 miles from the hab. (Hollow Mountain is, in fact, carved into a mountain; some of the walls inside are raw rock. Fascinating!)

We checked out of the hotel and drove out to the hab, stopping at Wal-Mart on the way for some supplies. (Yes, Wal-Mart. Not much in the way of alternatives here.) The drive from Grand Junction to Hanksville took about three hours and treated us to some spectacular views. The terrain was mostly snow-covered but as we approached the hab it became more and more Mars-like, especially after we passed Hanksville. We did get slightly lost in that last stretch -- we were following a vague and extremely sketchy map drawn on the back of a cash register receipt by the clerk at the Hollow Mountain -- but we were only half an hour behind schedule when the white cylinder of the hab, familiar to all of us from photographs even though we'd never been here before, peeked out from behind a rust-colored rock formation. Excitement! Our new home and a new adventure begins!

The current crew (MDRS-87) greeted us warmly and gave us a whirlwind tour of the hab, complete with safety instructions, an EVA suiting demo, a short hike to a nearby fossil bed, and instructions on dealing with the temperamental ATVs (every one different from the others). Because we are not yet "in sim" we were able to bring our bags in and do other necessary chores without having to put on our space suits. Also, by happy coincidence, we were just in time to help install the new generator, which we hope will solve the power problems that have been bedeviling the last few crews. (Most of the work on that was done by DG, a local resident who is instrumental in keeping the hab running.) The shower, however, is definitely dead for the duration, as is the telescope. Alas.

The departing crew clearly had mixed feelings about leaving. Although they were doing a little happy dance at the thought of big greasy hamburgers in Hanksville and hot showers in Grand Junction, they seemed a little misty-eyed as they piled into the van and headed back to Earth.

We all looked at each other. "We're on Mars! Now what?"

Well, "now what" consisted of hauling our massive load of Stuff up to the residential level, eating the surprisingly tasty meal of freeze-dried chicken and corn the outgoing crew had prepared for us, and discussing our plans for the next day and the next two weeks. Steve and Bianca then drove into town (using "V'ger", our Plymouth Voyager "pressurized rover") to pick up Bianca's baggage and all the food we will be eating for the next two weeks, while Laksen and Paul performed an engineering walk-through and inspection of all the hab's systems and I got set up with Twitter (@MDRSupdates) and fixed up the web cams (http://www.freemars.org/mdrscam/). When Steve and Bianca returned, we all helped load in the groceries. The sun had set, and I got my first view of the vast and magestic desert sky. Oh wow.

We don't plan to begin sim until Monday. Tomorrow (Sunday) we will do a lot of necessary prep and setup that will be much easier without space suits, including running the control for a study to determine how much EVA suits impact our efficiency.

We aren't really on Mars yet. But we're definitely a long way from home.

Posted 01/09/2010 18:55 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

I'm not quite all the way to Mars yet. This is as planned. Currently I am safely ensconced at the charming Best Western Sandman Motel (which Diego, from Colombia, calls "a road motel like in the movies") in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Kate dropped my Monster Bag and I off at the airport at 5:45 this morning, where the MB weighed in at 50.2 pounds -- a hair over the limit but the agent let it slide. If I want to bring home any Mars rocks I'm going to have to leave something behind.

After an extremely uneventful security and flight experience I had a decent lunch at the airport in Denver, where I spotted fellow Marsonaut Diego Urbina by the many space-related patches on his laptop and backpack. He was not scheduled to be on my flight, but he'd missed his connection in Houston yesterday and then his flight from Denver to Grand Junction was canceled, so he was on standby for my flight. Fortunately he got on, as did his luggage, and we shared a shuttle to the hotel.

We both took a nap after that (I'm running on about three hours' sleep here) and then met up with Paul McCall and Laksen Sirimanne for dinner, over which we had a humorous, round-robin discussion of the early days of the mission. They're all great guys, very talented, very interesting. Diego is serious about becoming an ESA astronaut and I think he has a shot at it. Laksen is committed, brilliant, and humble. Paul is quiet and sincere -- a real All-American type. After dinner we met Stephen Wheeler, just arrived, and talked over plans for tomorrow and the following week. The final member of our crew, Bianca Nowak, was to arrive later (she's probably here by now but I haven't met her yet).

It is FREAKING COLD here. Currently 0° F with a bit of wind and some snow and ice on the ground. Even wearing long underwear, jeans, a flannel shirt, wool socks, a nice wool sweater, a down jacket, and my Tilley hat with the ear flaps I was still shivering when I was outside. Tomorrow I'm switching to heavier long undies and the ugly but warm WWII-surplus wool pants. Could be worse, though -- it's way warmer here than the real Mars (not to mention having way more air).

The news from the current MDRS crew is mixed. They all had colds but they're feeling better today. The main generator is still down but the backup and batteries are holding out. The frozen pipes got thawed out but it looks like the shower is out of commission for the rest of the season, so it'll be nothing but sponge baths for us. And the telescope isn't going to be fixed any time soon so we will try to get the half-assembled radio telescope up and running instead. Doing this in space suits will be an interesting challenge. It's Man vs. Machine and Man + Machine vs. Mars! (Apologies for sexist language, but it was necessary for the alliteration.)

Tomorrow we drive out to the hab and our adventure begins in earnest!

P.S. Check out the MDRS Webcams at http://www.freemars.org/mdrscam/.

Posted 01/08/2010 20:56 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Well, here's my to-do list for the day before my departure for Mars:

• Deal with all mail (not done)
• Do dishes
• Get money
• Buy wool pants, sweater
• Call hotel for airport shuttle
• Read The Real Mars, return to library
• Turn on international roaming for Kate's phone (not done)
• Yoga (skipped class)
• Resubmit latest rejected story (not done)
• Make appointment for furnace tune-up
• Clear camera memory card (not done)
• See China Design exhibit at art museum (museum closed by power outage)
• Fold laundry
• Pick up comics from Excalibur (not done)

Kate and I also had a nice Indian dinner and watched Shaun of the Dead. And now to bed... early early flight tomorrow.

OMG I'M GOING TO MARS!!

Posted 01/07/2010 21:59 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Well, that's just about everything I'm taking with me. It all made it into the bag, just barely, and the bag is just barely under the airline's size and weight limits (assuming I can trust my yardstick and bathroom scale). I still need to buy a few things -- I wore my wool tux pants the last time I did cold-weather travel but for Mars I think I want someting a little less formal -- and the computer and other tech gear aren't packed yet, but basically I'm set for my early-Friday departure.

I got some good news and some bad news from Mars today. The good news is that I will be allowed to post using Twitter from MDRS, both as myself (@daviddlevine) and as @MDRSupdates. The bad news is that the hab's telescope has broken and most likely won't be fixed until after our rotation. This is a disappointment -- though it's definitely in keeping with the history of Mars exploration, which includes as many failed as successful robot probes -- and we're trying to find out if there's any other equipment we can use in its place.

One more day!

Posted 01/07/2010 21:51 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

Anxious and busy preparing for an early Friday departure. The radio station in my head keeps playing "Rocket Man," "Leaving on a Jet Plane," and the theme from "Das Boot." Here's a random collection of the stuff that's been rattling around in my head.

Yes, I'm anxious, even though I know I don't really have anything to be worried about -- apart from lost luggage, bitter cold (tonight's forecast low: 8° F), and the possibility of rolling over my ATV and dying of a fractured skull in the Utah desert. (I had to sign a disclaimer which said, among other things, that I acknowledge that riding on an ATV in the desert wearing a pretend space suit is stupid dangerous.) They've had 87 of these two-week rotations so far and I'm sure nothing serious will go wrong. Right? (But I'm not packing any red shirts.)

I've been reading The Real Mars by Michael Hanlon and it's fascinating. If you've been wondering "why go to Mars anyway?" you might want to gnaw on this: satellite observations of Mars show surface features which seem to indicate that in the past the planet had substantial quantities of surface water. (There are other theories to explain these features, but this is a commonly-accepted one.) But Mars is now far too cold and airless for liquid water to exist on the surface. If Mars was, indeed, once warm and wet enough for rivers and lakes, what caused its climate to change? The answer to this question could help us to understand, and possibly reverse, our own global climate change. And despite the sophisticated robots we've sent, we need close-up hands-on observations by human beings -- with their nimble fingers, excellent senses, and ability to change plans on the fly -- to really understand the early history of Mars.

For some reason, Mars was weirdly omnimpresent in my life even weeks before I knew I'd be going. My favorite ride at Disney World? Mission: Space, a simulated flight to Mars. The last book I read before getting the email? Mars Crossing by Geoff Landis. The last Dr. Who episode I watched? Waters of Mars. And I'd been thinking for quite a while that our upcoming trip to Australia feels a little like a visit to a recently-colonized Mars.

Don't forget to vote in the What should David take to "Mars" poll. If you read Spanish, MDRS-88 Biologist Diego Urbina asks a similar question over in his blog. The MDRS-88 Executive Officer, Laksen Sirimanne, has posted the research goals for the mission (which I helped write) on his blog. You can see bios of the crew, and read the daily reports from earlier rotations, on the MDRS web site. And you can see a nice collection of photos of MDRS over at PopSci.com.

I think I have all my ducks in a row for blogging and such. I should be able to post here once a day, but I won't be able to read LJ, Twitter, Facebook, or email. There's a special email address you can use to contact me if it's important, which I will be sending out to my email correspondents shortly. (If you don't get that email in the next day or so and you think you need it, feel free to email me and ask for it.)

Friday's coming soon. Zero hour nine 7:45 AM. Better get packing.

Posted 01/04/2010 15:28 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

25 years ago I met a cute redhead at a New Year's Day brunch. I got her phone number, but did I call her? Not before she called me. We went on a date the next weekend -- to the movie 2010 -- and didn't spend a weekend apart for five months. Within the year we'd moved in together. (You can get her perspective on that meeting here (part 1) and here (part 2).)

10 years ago I was a manager at Intel, and miserable. I had an Employee From Hell and I had no one to blame but myself, because I'd hired her; I was under enormous stress which I was transmitting to my employees; and I'd just been turned down for a transfer to a position as an individual contributor in Intel's Smart Toy Lab, so I felt trapped in a position for which I was manifestly unqualified. I had written a few short stories but not yet sold any, and I was preparing to apply to Clarion. There were other things starting to happen in my life at that time that have since borne strange fruit, but at the time I had no idea how significant they would turn out to be.

The year 2009 for me was Made of Win. Looking backward from here I see a surprise acceptance into the Mars Desert Research Station; a trip to Disney World; winning the Endeavour Award; the Worldcon and subsequent travel in Quebec; joining the Wild Cards consortium; giving a talk at the Library of Congress; many fun conventions, workshops, and fly-ins; and an exceptionally successful year of short story writing, with the most stories written, most stories submitted, most stories sold, and most stories published of any year in my career. I put my butt in the chair and wrote -- 250-500 words or an hour of editing or research -- every single day this year and it really paid off.

My biggest area of disappointment and frustration this year was my two novels. Remembrance Day was rejected after over a year, and due to an email snafu has not yet been resubmitted (it will go off again in January), while The Dark Behind the Stars languished all year on the desk of an editor who has not, to my knowledge, even looked at it and doesn't return my agent's calls or emails. If I don't hear back on that one soon I'm going to pull it for non-response and send it elsewhere. I really want to be a published novelist, and I'm already working on a third novel, but these absurd (non)response times mean that the effort/reward ratio for short stories is so much higher.

New Year's Eve was spent with my beloved Kate, the abovementioned cute redhead, preparing and eating one of our favorite festive meals (a garlic-crusted prime rib) and watching... 2010. (We also ushered in 2001 with 2001).

New Year's Day was a delightful brunch at the new home of the same friends who hosted the New Year's Day brunch at which we met. It's so nice of them to throw us an anniversary party every year.

The year 2010 looks busy, with my mission to "Mars" coming up next week (gulp!) and a trip to Australia in August/September, as well as many other fun travel opportunities. My new year's resolutions tend to be quirky, and this year's is to read Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin books in order. I have other goals for the year, including a revised pledge to write every day (starting in February), but that's my resolution.

The next 10 years will no doubt include many surprises. If the last ten years are any indication, currents in my life that are already beginning to flow, if only as a trickle, will become the rivers that course beneath my days ten years from now.

25 years from now, if the fates allow, I will be celebrating my 50th anniversary with my one true snookie. Beyond that I'm not going to even try to predict.

Posted 01/01/2010 23:31 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]

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