Imagining Mars

WHATEVER the faults of John Carter, the new film based on the early work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, we're happy to have the chance to head back to Mars. Given the way NASA funding is going, this may be our only chance.

As a species, we've been fascinated with the Red Planet for a long time -- the film is only the latest of a long line. Why does it draw us to it, and how has our thinking about Mars changed over the years? Those are the issues I tackled on Hero Complex; here is my story.

Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson -- whose intriguing list of favorite Mars novels is here -- talked to me about images of Mars; when we spoke, he'd not yet seen the whole film, but was impressed by the trailer, calling its stark, mountainous Wild West-like terrain among the best Martian landscape he's ever seen.

"The was the film can have a real impact is if the true star of the movie is the planet," said Robinson, a longtime environmentalist. "The shape of a landscape is something very deep in human evolution. In hunting and gathering days, the landscape was pretty much what we had. There's part of the human brain that looks at new land and says, 'Wow, what's the potential here. Boy, you could live there."

Creativity and Depression

LAST year I saw a recital of Robert Schumann's music by the great pianist Andras Schiff. The pieces he played were lyrical, full of feeling, and almost consistently uncomfortable -- it was like hearing the mood swings of a rich but unsettled mind. (The composer is sometimes called "the most romantic of the romantics.")


The relationship between that unsettled mind and the often transcendent melodies that spilled from it is the subject of an event next month put on by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra: The group will play various Schumann pieces and UCLA's Dr. Peter Whybrow will discuss how depression effects artists and Schumann in particular. Two similar events -- with cheerier contexts -- will be staged by the LACO in April, one with a neuroscientist and the other with a brain surgeon. HERE is my whole piece on this series dedicated to music and the mind.


Schumann, like Van Gogh and many other artists and writers, likely had a combination of depression and a mild kind of mania called hypomania. “When you’re hypomaniac, you’re very willing to talk to anybody. People like to talk to you, and suddenly you ‘re the center of attention, which excites you because you’ve spent the last three years sitting against a wall drinking beer.”

This is a little different than more conventional mania, which sounds unpleasant. “They became sexually promiscuous, spending money they don’t have, running around insulting people. The manic people tend to fall out of favor.”

By the way, here is a recording of the great pianist Richter playing Schumann's Fantasy in C; with better video, here it Richter on the composer's Toccata. 

The Past Envisions the Future

LOOKING back at mid-century optimism is always both fascinating and depressing. All the labor-saving devices and exotic holidays -- weekends on the moon! -- we were going to get by now.


The science-fiction writer Gregory Benford, who teaches at UC/Irvine, and the editors of Popular Mechanics have put together hundreds of these predictions, from asbestos dresses to personal jetpacks, along with the original art which accompanied them in the magazine. Here is my story from Sunday's LA Times on The Wonderful Future That Never Was.


Benford, who also teaches physics, writes insightful essays that puts the whole future-looking enterprise into context. As any close reader of science fiction knows, we can tell a lot about an era by how it envisions its future.

Benford has also recently co-edited a tribute to science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, whose powers of predictions, especially re satellite communication, he praises. Sentinels: In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke, edited with George Zebrokwski, includes essays on the writer himself as well as stories by Heinlein and Asimov that speak to Clarke's ambitions. (It's published by Hadley Rille Books.)

February 15 and Galileo

TODAY is an important day for Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, composer John Adams, jazzman Henry Threadgill -- and that's just the musicians. Throw in Susan B. Anthony and Galileo, and I think it's about as good a day as there is, especially lodged as it is in the middle of the dreary month of February. (And I insist I am totally unbiased on the matter despite my Feb. 15 birthday.)

Galileo was one of my idols as a kid, coming before even, I think, John Lennon and Kurt Vonnegut. I responded not only the man's polymath genius, but his courage and resistance to the Catholic Church, which persecuted him until the very end despite his continued piety; he was an important early shaper of my religious beliefs. And just a hair over 400 years ago, Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter.

One way I'm marking the day is to post my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Galileo's Dream, a historical novel of the future, you might say, has just come out. HERE is that piece. Robinson, of course, is the environmentalist and Central California science-fiction writer with much fine work to his credit; his Mars trilogy is considered the best example of world-building since Dune.

In any case I will hoist a glass of Cava tonight to the great Florentine and the others.

The Misread City Goes Into the Future

THIS week yours truly will be serving as guest editor for the blog io9, which is devoted to science, futurism, and science-fiction in all its forms. I'll be posting on some topics familiar to readers of The Misread City -- some news regarding author Ursula K. Le Guin, a new film based on a Philip K. Dick novel -- as well as topics largely new to me such as eco-tourism and UFO abductions. (Or perhaps those are the same thing)

I find io9 both smart and funny and hope my readers do too. In any case, look forward to seeing you there.

HERE is a link to all my work on the site.

And don't forget that my best guitarists poll is still live!

Alan Alda vs. Science

AMONG the very few things yours truly has in common with Alan Alda is a love of science. (Though my wife tells me he was her first crush, so there may be a joke in here somewhere.)

In any case, it was as pleasure to have a beer with the star of the most successful tv show of all time and discuss the new three-part special he's hosting on PBS, "The Human Spark." The show tries to get at what makes us different from the other animals, and what made us that way. HERE is my piece from today's LATimes.  (The show, which I keep trying not to call "The Human Stain," starts tonight.)

Alda, who is tall, almost awkwardly lanky and far sharper than I expect to be at 73, was quite amiable and un-actorly, radiating a powerful curiosity even as we pursued little tangents. We discussed the show, of course, his scientist hero Richard Feynman ("a completely human person... he was a very deliberate communicator about his work, it wasn't an accident"), the workshops he runs for scientists to help describe their work more clearly, and the importance of bringing science to a general audience. "I think their lives will be enriched by it, and science will be enriched by it."

He also discussed -- or chose not to discuss -- his politics: After his work trying to help pass the ERA, he said, "I came to feel that I'd talked enough about my political views -- for about 25 years I haven't said anything in public about them. I have plenty of opinions, but I keep them to myself."

My interest in science has been somewhat subdued by my fascination for the arts and culture, but science (esp. physics and astronomy) was my first intellectual love. Needless to say, television shows like "Cosmos" -- and "The Human Spark" -- are an important way to keep curiosity and knowledge alive in the popular culture. Check it out.

Einstein vs. Picasso

ONE of my favorite pieces of my own, one that sent me on a real intellectual journey, explored the similarities between albert einstein's breakthroughs in physics and the ferment in modernist art and literature.

the artist einstein is usually likened to is cubist-era pablo picasso. these two unconventional bohemians were engaged in what scholar arthur. i. miller calls "the same problem," as einstein shattered newtonian physics and picasso shattered the picture plane.

sunday is picasso's birthday, so i'm posting my story, which was tied to a very fine show at the skirball cultural center.

i hope it proves as mind-blowing to read as it was to research and write.

fun fact: for this story i spoke to a freud scholar named michael roth, who at the time ran a school in california but is now the president of my alma mater, wesleyan.

ps. i also love the modern lovers song.