Phallic Obsession – new ebook out now!

Phallic Obsession

This is my first foray into fiction for several years. Actually the stories aren’t new, just “cleaned-up” versions of earlier stories that saw print elsewhere. Here’s what I say about them in the book’s introduction:

For over 30 years I’ve been fascinated by various weird mystical beliefs – alternative religions, occult practices, New Age fads and so on. I always find it amusing how often sex – which you might naively think is completely out of place in such seemingly spiritual subjects – rears its head. In particular, many of these traditions have what can only be described as a distinctly phallic obsession, and it’s this observation that inspired the three short stories collected here.

The title story was my attempt at a Lovecraftian-style tale of “cosmic horror”, set in a typically Lovecraftian musty old museum – in this case, one devoted to the phallus as a religious icon. The second story, “The Cult of Zagoth”, reflects the real-world tendency of the phallus to crop up in occult and esoteric rituals – often, I suspect, because the people who devised these rituals had something of a phallic obsession themselves. The final story – the shortest of the three – takes its title from the “Masculine Cross” theory of Hargrave Jennings, who saw phallic worship as the primordial religion from which all the others developed.

“The Masculine Cross” was originally published under the title of “The Mystic Fayre Affair” in an earlier story collection by me, The Museum of the Future. I’ve only made slight editorial changes to that one for this book, but the other two differ considerably from the versions which first saw print. They were both originally published by JMS Books, an erotic fiction imprint, as short standalone ebooks. For the present collection, however, I’ve removed all the explicit sex scenes and other salacious elements, mainly to comply with Amazon Kindle guidelines, but also because I’m not convinced they add anything!

… and here’s the book’s blurb:

The title story deals with the bizarre case of a disgraced professor of anthropology, Merrigan Blake, and her museum of sacred phallic iconography collected from all over the world. But there’s another, more sinister side to Dr Blake’s obsession – one that involves a vast conspiracy by an evil race of reptilian humanoids. It’s all in her mind, of course, but that makes it no less dangerous – as naive student David Gracewell discovers when he’s drawn into her world of crazy paranoia. The collection also contains two other stories on related themes, “The Cult of Zagoth” and “The Masculine Cross”. All three stories deal, at least in part, with the academic study of phallic symbolism, particularly in an occult or pseudo-religious context. But THIS IS NOT EROTIC FICTION.

Available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.com, Amazon UK and all other Amazon stores.

Another year, another 3 cover features

How It Works covers 2024

I’ve been writing regularly for How It Works magazine for over 5 years now, with at least one article in every issue this year. As last year, I’ve managed three cover features in 2024, as pictured above. Here’s a quick rundown of them:

  • Time (issue 187, February) – the history of timekeeping from the Antikythera mechanism to atomic clocks, together with a bit of relativistic theory on time dilation and spacetime
     
  • The Science of Eclipses (issue 188, March) – with a particular focus on the much-publicized 2024 solar eclipse, as well as ESA’s much less widely reported Proba-3 “artificial eclipse” mission, also launched in 2024
     
  • Quantum Physics Explained (issue 197, December) – covering all those things that used to give me nightmares as an undergraduate, such as the double-slit experiment, Schrodinger’s cat and the uncertainty principle, as well as newer developments like quantum teleportation and quantum-dot displays
     

Space Trends

Asimov Trends in Astounding Magazine

Here’s another piece of Isaac Asimov memorabilia, following my post a few months ago about his visit to Britain 50 years ago. It’s the original magazine appearance of one of his very first short stories, “Trends”, in the July 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I put my own book The Space Business in the same shot mainly to prove that I do really own a copy of the magazine, although it does have some vague relevance to the subject I want to talk about.

In that earlier post about Asimov, I mentioned getting him to sign my copy of The Early Asimov vol 3. At that point I’d already got the first two volumes, and “Trends” is included in vol 1. That means I would have read it in late 1973 or early 1974, not long after the last of the Apollo Moon landings which I followed avidly. So to me at that time, “Trends” – which describes a very different vision of the first lunar space mission – would have seemed very dated. The idea that the general public would be openly hostile to spaceflight, and that the government would seek to hinder rather than embrace it, were totally at odds with the way things were 50 years ago. But now that we’re well and truly in the “future” (i.e. the 21st century), they’re starting to look distinctly less far-fetched.

On the government side, the biggest problem for human spaceflight seems to be lack of political motivation. America’s need to prove that it was the world’s top technological nation in the 1960s led to the Apollo program, and the joint desire of Russia, the US and Europe to appear to be the best of friends by the 1990s led to the International Space Station. But there’s no geopolitical priority of the same order today, with the result that very little happens. As we approach the end of 2024, it’s worth remembering that NASA’s Artemis program was originally supposed to put Americans back on the Moon this year. But that hasn’t happened. There was an uncrewed Artemis flight to lunar orbit and back just over 2 years ago, but there’s been no visible urgency since then to take the next step.

While the US government seems in no hurry to advance its own space program, it’s been actively hindering developments in the private sector – albeit not quite as blatantly as in Asimov’s story. With two years and counting between flights of NASA’s giant Artemis rocket, the media seemed quite impressed that SpaceX managed just a four-month gap between the 4th and 5th test flights of its own roughly equivalent Starship rocket. But the gap should have been weeks, not months – the holdup was purely government red tape, not engineering readiness.

Asimov’s story portrays government policy towards spaceflight as being driven by public hostility to the idea. What we’re actually seeing is subtly different – government apathy towards spaceflight driven by total indifference on the part of the general public. Ironically, I suspect that Asimov’s successors in the science fiction field have more than a little to do with this. Blockbuster Hollywood movies are now so exciting and visually spectacular that real-world spaceflight can’t hope to compete. Or as I wrote in a recent book review, “It’s a sad fact that space is only seen as cool when it’s fictional; as soon as it becomes factual then it’s strictly for science nerds only.”

Spooky Physics and Spooky Music

Spooky physics and music

A few years ago I discovered (and became fascinated by) the various ways in which music and science overlap. I’ve even managed to write two books on the subject: The Science of Sc-Fi Music (Springer, 2020) and The Science of Music (Icon Books, 2023). So I was very pleased when Brian Clegg sent me a brand new book on the subject to review for his website: Quantum Mechanics and Avant-Garde Music by Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (my 4-star rating on Brian’s site reflects the book’s rather specialized audience – my own personal rating on Goodreads was 5 stars). I learned plenty of interesting things I was previously unaware of, and added a few snippets to things I did know. For example, I knew that Albert Einstein and Arnold Schoenberg, two of the most famous figures in 20th century physics and music respectively, had met each other, but I’d never seen the photo of them together that Rakhat-Bi includes in his book (that’s an AI-enhanced version of it above). This prompted me to try a small “quantum musical” experiment of my own, just in time for Halloween!

I mentioned in my sci-fi music book that Schoenberg was the (unintentional) originator of many of the tropes of “spooky” B-movie background music. You can hear this to some extent in the early Schoenberg piece I’ve used here, his Klavierstück no. 2 from 1909. In the video, I’ve coupled that with Einstein’s famous quote about “spooky action at a distance”, with deepfake vocals courtesy of the excellent fakeyou.com site. Here’s the result:

A few more experiments in creative AI

AI music album cover

This is a sequel to a blog post I wrote last year, about the proliferation of free online tools that use AI to produce creative writing and imagery. Since then, I’ve made frequent use of the latter in particular, as it provides a quick and effortless way to obtain customized visuals for blog posts, videos etc. The results can often be strikingly imaginative, as in the above example from Bing Image Creator. The prompt in this case (for reasons that will become obvious in the course of this post) was “artwork for an album cover themed around ancient Egyptian mythology and space warfare“.

Until recently, a notable omission among creative AI tools (at the “free” level, at least) was anything that could produce convincingly realistic musical compositions. You could ask an AI chatbot to “write a song”, but that only gave you the lyrics – you had to compose the music yourself. But fortunately that’s changed now, and there’s at least one really excellent tool that produces impressive results even in the free demo mode – https://aimusic.so/ .

As with an AI image creator, all you have to do is type in a simple prompt and the AI does everything else for you – musical score, lyrics, electronic orchestration and synthesized voice. After a few initial experiments, the first prompt I tried that worked really well was “A symphonic metal song about the pyramids and mythology of ancient Egypt“. After working away for a few minutes, the AI then came back with not one but two different songs (both with the same lyrics). Here’s the first of them:

Pharaoh’s Wrath (1st version)

Musically, I think that’s a very impressive effort – just the balance I wanted between a hard rock sound in some places and a more sophisticated electronic sound in others. The AI-generated lyrics are pretty good too, but as they’re not very easy to make out, here they are in full:

[Verse 1]
Serpent’s hiss; Anubis’ gaze;
Jackals hunt; End of days;
Temple crumbles; Pharaoh’s might;
Horus’ wings in endless flight.

[Chorus]
Scepter falls; Blood-stained kings;
Cursed tombs and deathly rings;
Mortal souls; Gods’ design;
Power divine; Sands of time.

[Verse 2]
Ra’s inferno; Eyes ablaze;
In Isis’ arms; Final praise;
Nile runs red; Fate’s cruel jest;
Pyramid’s heart; No rest.

[Bridge]
Bones turn to dust; Heart weighs;
In Maat’s scale; No escape;
Eternal pain; Undead realm;
Crown and sword; Evil helm.

[Verse 3]
Scarabs crawl; Shadows close;
Ancient lore; Royal foes;
Warlords rise; Slaves of old;
In death’s grasp; Embers cold.

The second version of “Pharaoh’s Wrath” was generally less interesting than the first, but there were a couple of things near the end that I liked: a rather exotic instrumental that actually sounds quite “Egyptian”, and a nice dramatic ending. So here’s just the second half of v2:

Pharaoh’s Wrath (2nd version, ending only)

For a second experiment, I tried a more prescriptive prompt: “A military sci-fi song called Celestial Cyberstrike, male vocals, verses in heavy industrial metal style in D minor, but chorus in E minor in more melodic prog rock style“. I don’t think the result is quite as impressive as “Pharaoh’s Wrath”, but it’s still far better than anything I could do myself. The machine has made a reasonable effort to vary the style between the verse and chorus – and, judging by what my trusty ChordAI mobile app says, it pulled off the change of key too. Here’s the result:

Celestial Cyberstrike

And for completeness, here are the lyrics:

[Verse 1]
Battle cries echo through the void
Programmed rage soldiers deploy
Brutal code hearts are hollow joys
Man and machine nothing to destroy

[Chorus]
Hear the stars lament and cry
In the void our fate we tie
Reach out through the dark divide
Together we move collide

[Verse 2]
Gunfire dances digital reaper
Destruction codes sinking deeper
Lost souls ride this endless sleeper
In the void no dream’s a keeper

[Bridge]
Silent echoes tear the night
Distant fires burning bright
Underneath the cold starlight
Courage finds its moment’s flight

[Verse 3]
Chaos reigns in circuits twisted
Every step by fate enlisted
We are broken dreams resisted
In the void where hope persisted

Isaac Asimov in Britain, June 1974

Isaac Asimov First Visit to Britain

50 years ago today I was lucky enough to see Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest science fiction authors of the 20th century, on his first visit to Britain. I wrote about this previously on my Astounding Science Fiction website, where you can see a detailed itinerary of Asimov’s trip. Most of his time was spent in London, but I saw him during his visit to Birmingham on Thursday 13 June 1974 (note that, by coincidence, today is also a Thursday).

At the time I was 16 years old, and had been reading SF (including numerous books by Asimov) for around three years. This was largely thanks to my mother, who had been a fan since before I was born. Around 6 months before Asimov’s visit, we’d discovered that Birmingham had a specialist SF bookshop called Andromeda, and that was where we found out about Asimov’s upcoming visit. It actually happened on a school day, but as I had an exam in the morning of the 13th (Chemistry O-level) it meant I had the afternoon free. Equally fortunately, my mother was able to get the day off work.

We actually went into Birmingham twice that day (we lived a 30-minute drive away): first, with one of my school friends in tow, to a book-signing session, and then (just my mother and me) to an evening lecture. The tickets for the latter are shown above, together with four copies of the souvenir booklet (two from the book signing and two from the lecture).

Needless to say, our book-signing of choice was the one at Andromeda, but prior to that we peeked in at an earlier signing session at a much larger general bookshop called Hudsons, which is where we caught our first glimpse of the great man. But it was in Andromeda a bit later that we actually queued up for autographs. Of the three of us, my mother went first, and when Asimov looked up and saw a respectable middle-aged woman – in contrast to all the scruffy young males that made up the bulk of SF fandom in those days – he did a double-take and then said “Oh, hello dear”. That not only made Mom’s day, but I think it was pretty much the high point of her life!

We actually got two autographs each, one in the souvenir booklet and one in a freshly purchased paperback book. My mother bought a new copy of The Caves of Steel, which I think was her favourite Asimov novel, while I got volume 3 of The Early Asimov, which had only just come out at the time. The latter includes the spoof article “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline”, which I discussed in detail in my book Fake Physics, where (just to show off) I included an image of the book open at Asimov’s signature. To show off a bit more, I’ll put the same picture at the bottom of this post.

The evening lecture took place at the Holiday Inn, and was organized and introduced by Dr Jack Cohen – a minor SF/pop-sci celebrity in his own right (looking at his Wikipedia article just now, I see that it says “he was one of the small group of British Mensans who persuaded science fiction author Isaac Asimov to visit the United Kingdom in June 1974”). Unlike Asimov, who I only ever saw that one time, I did see Jack Cohen on several subsequent occasions, most recently talking about his book What Does a Martian Look Like? at an event in London a few years before his death.

As for Asimov’s lecture, I retain several vivid memories of it, some of them distinctly trivial. I was struck by his strong New York accent, which wasn’t something I’d really come across before at that point (it was to become much more familiar a few months later, when the BBC began showing Kojak). I remember him saying that when he woke up after his first night in London and saw a Union Jack flying outside, he though “Aha, that must be the British Embassy”, before he realized where he was. He also complained that, although the hotel supplied plenty of towels, they didn’t provide a facecloth (which he referred to as a “washcloth”). Amazing what ridiculous things your brain chooses to remember after 50 years!

On more serious subjects, I remember him talking about environmental issues and non-renewable resources. This was the first time I ever heard the word “syllogism”, the example he gave being “Premise 1 – the Earth is finite. Premise 2 – we extract resources from the Earth. Conclusion – resources are finite”. He also described in some detail how, when Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a story about a nuclear fission weapon in 1944, its editor John Campbell received a national-security visit from the FBI (an incident I also recounted in my book Rockets and Ray Guns: The Sci-Fi Science of the Cold War). One thing that sticks in my mind is how at one point in this narrative Asimov wanted to say “confirmed”, but struggled for several seconds trying to recall the word. It’s gratifying to know that even the greatest writers are occasionally stumped for words!

Issac Asimov signed book

Space Telescopes – book and Guardian article

Space telescopes book

I’m very pleased that yesterday’s Observer newspaper featured an article by me about space telescopes, which is now free to read – under the title Cosmic Time Machines – on the Guardian website. That’s one of the most prestigious mainstream news sites here in the UK, so hopefully I’ll reach a wider-than-usual audience with it.

The article ties in with my latest book, Eyes in the Sky, which was published last month by Icon Books. As with my previous books for them, it’s part of their “Hot Science” series – actually my 6th contribution to it. Here’s their blurb from the back cover of Eyes in the Sky:

Over 50 years ago, astronomers launched the world’s first orbiting telescope. This allowed them to gaze further into outer space and examine anything that appears in the sky above our heads, from comets and planets to galaxy clusters and stars. Since then, almost 100 space telescopes have been launched from Earth and are orbiting our planet, with 26 still active and relaying information back to us.

As a result of these space-based instruments, such as NASA’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope, we know much more about the universe than we did half a century ago. But why is Hubble, orbiting just 540 kilometres above the Earth, so much more effective than a ground-based telescope? How can a glorified camera tell us not only what distant objects look like, but their detailed chemical composition and three-dimensional structure as well?

In Eyes in the Sky, science writer Andrew May takes us on a journey into space to answer these questions and more. Looking at the development of revolutionary instruments, such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, May explores how such technology has helped us understand the evolution of the Universe.

Zen Dynamics – book and website

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was very interested in both Zen meditation and Zen Shiatsu, being particularly impressed by how practical and results-focused they both are – quite different from the fluffy mysticism often associated with such subjects. To get some of those ideas across, I set up a website called zendynamics.com in 2001 which was centred around a Javascript/PHP personality test that I’m still quite proud of.

The idea of producing a Zen Dynamics book has been on my to-do list for ages – in fact I produced a short outline for one 22 years ago when I first created the website, and then a second outline in 2012. One reason the book took so long to see the light of day is that I wanted it to focus on practicalities, but I couldn’t see how to dive straight into them without spending a lot of time on “Buddhist theory” (or my understanding of it) first. But all that theoretical side was covered in my book Is Buddhism Scientific? (2019), so now I’ve finally got round to writing my Zen Dynamics book – and polished up the website (hopefully making it a bit more usable on mobile devices) into the bargain.

The book’s full title is Zen Dynamics: Putting Buddhist Theory into Practice, and it’s available as either a paperback or a Kindle ebook from Amazon.com, Amazon UK and all other Amazon sites. Here is the blurb from the back cover:

Buddhism can sometimes come across as abstract and philosophical, but it has a strongly practical side too – and that’s what this book is all about. It focuses on four areas in particular:
– The analysis of personality types, both in Buddhism and traditional Chinese medicine, showing how this can enhance self-awareness and personal development;
– How “karma”, or the law of cause-and-effect applied on a personal scale, functions in an entirely non-mystical, non-supernatural way within the flow of human thoughts and emotions;
– How meditation techniques are used in different schools of Buddhism to calm the mind and provide insight into its inner workings;
– A “demystification” of Zen Buddhism, showing how its seeming illogicality and iconoclasm actually serve a serious practical purpose in developing the human mind.

Three More Cover Features

Three issues of How It Works magazine

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had three consecutive cover features in How It Works magazine between November 2021 and January 2022. I’ve just come close to repeating that feat, making the cover for three out of the four issues between June and September this year. As pictured above, the topics this time were near-Earth asteroids, gravity and the solar cycle. The first two are particular favourites of mine, having previously covered the asteroid threat in my book Cosmic Impact, while my PhD thesis was all about gravity and its effects on stellar orbits. Around 15 years after that, in the late 1990s, I had some peripheral involvement with BAE Systems’ “Project Greenglow” on the possibility of gravity control (or antigravity, if you like) – something I’ve written about on a number of occasions, for example in this blog post from 2015. As I said there, my link to the BAE project came through its leader, Ron Evans, who I’ve remained in touch with ever since. So I was really pleased when the magazine editor asked me to include something about “antigravity” in the How It Works feature, as it gave me the opportunity to include a brief Q&A with Ron as a sidebar at the end of the article.

New book: How Space Physics Really Works

How Space Physics Really Works

This is my fifth contribution to Springer’s “Science and Fiction” series, and in some ways my favourite so far, because it deals with a subgenre of SF that particularly appeals to me. The full title is How Space Physics Really Works: Lessons from Well-Constructed Science Fiction, and that really sums up what I’m talking about – SF stories that take the trouble to get their physics right. Here’s the blurb from the book’s back cover:

There is a huge gulf between the real physics of space travel and the way it is commonly portrayed in movies and TV shows. That’s not because space physics is difficult or obscure – most of the details were understood by the end of the 18th century – but because it can often be bafflingly counter-intuitive for a general audience. The purpose of this book isn’t to criticize or debunk popular sci-fi depictions, which can be very entertaining, but to focus on how space physics really works. This is done with the aid of numerous practical illustrations taken from the works of serious science fiction authors – from Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke to Larry Niven and Andy Weir – who have taken positive pleasure in getting their scientific facts right.

The book has just been published and is available from all good bookshops, as well as online retailers such as Amazon.com and Amazon UK (paperback: ISBN 978-3-031-33949-3, ebook: 978-3-031-33950-9).