Amazon now allow anyone to publish to their store using ‘Kindle Direct Publishing‘ so I’ve uploaded a short story called ‘Into Great Science’ which I wrote last year.

“Fumbling, floating, he found the hammer, and headed for the window…”

In lean times NASA has gone into partnership with the Catholic Church, launching a ‘Voyager’-style probe which will be the first manned mission out of our Solar System. For the monk returning to his former career as an astronaut, the mission will be the ultimate hermitage: he will be in total isolation for the rest of his life.

But that may not be long. A violent solar storm has sent a powerful wave of radiation through space, shutting down Mission Control and preventing them from warning him of the coming danger.

In this tense and tight short story, theologian and technology-writer Kester Brewin explores issues of faith, doubt, abandonment and trust, all based on real data of the projected effects of a ‘mass coronal ejection’ similar to the ‘Carrington Event’ of 1859, which left machinery spontaneously combusting and telegraph operators thrown across the room.

You can get the UK version here for £1.41, and the US version here for $2.

Do I think this will replace traditional publishers? No. But what I think it will do is push traditional publishing back to its roots a little. In other words, they will publish less, but it will be far better. With the material I have written I would without doubt have published it too quickly if I was simply uploading to Amazon. Working with a publisher, working with good editors and readers pushes writers to greater height and depth. And this will be what traditional publishing will continue to offer that KDP simply can’t: quality editing.

That said, it looks like a great place to get writing out there and raise some profile. Hope you enjoy the story if you’ve not already read it.

Colour synaesthesia is more common: sounds or numbers are seen as distinct colours, and some estimates reckon that around 1 in 23 experience it.

And I just wonder if some of us suffer some kind of soul-synaesthesia. All these sounds, words and senses kick off an involuntary response in the spirit that wonders why and how, and wanders, in wonder…

Most of the people he seemed to help were suffering depression, or from ME. The film followed him ‘helping’ one woman who had chronic fatigue and ‘couldn’t go on’, though half way through the first attempt she started buttering a bagel, and announced her house-mate was due back any minute. This sent the guy packing quick-sharp: what he is doing is clearly illegal, and this was taken up in the film as the FBI chased him for extradition to Ireland to face charges of assisting a woman in Dublin to commit suicide.

It is possible to see Exoo as a very prolific serial killer akin to Harold Shipman – a British doctor who ended the lives of perhaps 215 people, most of whom were nearing the end of their lives too. Certainly, it seemed he got some sort of thrill out of ‘fulfilling his calling’ – which is precisely how Exoo saw things.

One thing he would do for all his clients (‘because’, as he said many times in almost Pythonesque comic style, ‘you’ve not done this before’) is give them a copy of ‘Life After Life‘ – a video detailing the near-death experiences of a bunch of characters (some of whose stories didn’t quite seem to hold up).

Exoo’s reasoning is that ‘death is a great adventure to a wonderful place’. And this is where things get interesting. Because if, as Christians or otherwise, we really believe in some after-life, then should we be critical of Exoo, or of euthenasia at all? (He claims that Jesus practised some sort of suicide, which Stanley Hauerwas refuted, before being able to come up with any proof text to show God didn’t approve of suicide.)

I was watching the programme with someone I am close to, who trained as a nurse. She mentioned that in practice, in hospices and elsewhere, euthanasia is pretty common.

She then revealed that as she had watched her father lie dying of cancer in the 60′s, his GP had passed her a suitable amount of morphine and told her to ‘stop his pain.’ She thought about it for a very long time, and then did gradually increase his dose to relieve his pain, knowing that this would kill him.

I personally think this was an incredibly brave and humane thing to do. I don’t think it excuses Exoo, or his associate who does the same for a $7000 fee (Exoo takes no money) but I do think if we are to state that we believe in an after life, we need to do so in an active sense, by which I mean making sure that we fully value this life, and don’t simply cheapen it as a blip before the ‘real’ version begins, while permitting people the option to humanely end life at an appropriate moment in a dignified manner.

A bill regarding the use of human embryos is currently passing through parliament at the moment, and, naturally, causing a huge amount of debate. One piece on the BBC caught my ear the other morning – a Bishop was asked what he thought about the creation of so-called ‘saviour siblings’: human beings created for the sole purpose of saving another. And I thought, this is going to be interesting, how is a Christian going to respond to that?

He didn’t go there of course, but it remains a difficult area of theology: is Jesus just a ‘saviour sibling’?

Technorati: Embryo | Saviour Sibling

Gore has given a truly stirring speech as he accepted his Nobel peace prize, offering a clarion call to the US to get on and start taking climate seriously. Good on him. Quoting Churchill – and if the world had to rise against fascism, it surely must rise in equal force to battle climate change – who said in ’38 of those vascillating about action,

"They go on in strange paradox, decided only be undecided, resolved only to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent"

He goes on to urge the world to forget about the US and press ahead, leaving a blank place for them to sign once the muppet Bush is out of the way in a year or so…

I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that. But my country is not the only one that can take steps to ensure that we move forward from Bali with progress and with hope.

Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now. You must anticipate that. Just in the last few days, on the eve of this meeting, I have received more than 350,000 emails from Americans asking me to say to you: "We’re going to change in the United States of America."

During this upcoming two-year period there will be a national election in the United States. One year and 40 days from today there will be a new inauguration in the United States.

If you decide to continue the progress that has already been made here on all of the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions; on the hope (and with the expectation) that, before this process is concluded in Copenhagen, you will be able to fill in that blank (with the help of a different position from the United States) then you can make great progress here.

I think he is right. The rest of the world must press ahead if the US – and Canada and China – keep holding things back. He goes on:

Not too long from now, when our children assess what you did here in Bali, what we and our generation did here in this world, as they look backward at 2007, they will ask one of two questions.

They’ll look back, and either they will ask "What were you thinking? Didn’t you hear the IPCC four times unanimously warning the world to act? Didn’t you see the glaciers melting? Didn’t you see the deserts growing, and the droughts deepening, and the crops drying up? Didn’t you pay attention to what was going on? Didn’t you care? What were you thinking?"

Or they’ll ask a second question, one that I’d much prefer them to ask. I want them to look back on this time, and ask: "How did you find the moral courage to successfully address a crisis that so many said was impossible? How were you able to start the process that unleashed the moral imagination of humankind to see ourselves as a single, global civilisation?" And when they ask that question, I want you to tell them that you saw it as a privilege to be alive at a moment when a relatively small group of people could control the destiny of all generations to come.

Instead of shaking our heads at the difficulty of this task, and saying "Woe is us, this is impossible, how can we do this?", we ought to feel a sense of joy that we have work that is worth doing that is so important to the future of all humankind. We ought to feel a sense of exhilaration that we are the people alive at a moment in history when we can make all the difference.

I have a funny sense that we might look back on a speech like this as a classic. I hope so, for the right reasons: that it stirred people to action. If it is read in the future as a condemnation of our failure, it will be tragic indeed.

And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject

Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe

To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others

Relativity,

Two clocks moving apart

At light speed never separate

And, in time, are forever together.

Yes, Albert,

As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,

You locked us in:

No information shall travel faster than light,

Yes, our infinity, given a limit:

46.5 billion light years

To the edge

Of us.

But you are there, and I here,

And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,

A new spacetime arcs out,

Socking the eye with an infinite number of

Observable universes.

And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.

Some mother said I was unique, but now

A father’s physics wants me to believe in

Another me,

Beginning 10 to the 10

to the 29 metres far away.

Too far, and yet too close,

For my comfort.

Quantum physicist,

Hugh Everett III, what have you done?

“The existence of other universes

is inevitable”

Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,

Which denied too the objective reality

Of wavefunction collapse.

And I’m like, WTF?

You go on:

“Between 0 and 1:

A single random number

With all its infinite decimals,

Is expressed, computationally,

Longer

Than

The computational expression

Of the whole set of numbers

That exist there.”

Meaning?

Apparently this:

A universe of infinite parallels

May be more economic

Than a straight, linear,

Singular

One.

Meaning?

Somewhere you and I are together,

Though, in this universe, we are apart,

And somewhere else there are more in betweens

Than we could ever fathom.

And that may be more efficient

Than this.

And now my gourd is swirling,

Thinking,

What is love, and life and us,

Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,

And chose to forego

In the infinite possibility

Of the efficient multiverse,

And dig long

And deep

For life,

And love,

In this

One?

Technorati: Eels | Parallel Universe | Everett

The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics*. It’s an eccentric volume itself, but delicious for that difference. The Folio edition I was perusing began with a quote from John Stuart Mill:

“In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

The quote comes from his 1859 book ‘On Liberty‘, where he regularly rages against ‘custom’, believing it leads to conformity, and thus lack of freedom:

“Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes.”

Eccentricity simply means ‘having a different centre’. For this reason alone, and with no thought for wanting to be ‘quirky’ or ‘different’, I’d like to sing in praise of being eccentric. Within this definition it is only the eccentric who can speak prophetic criticism. It is only the eccentric who can, by the gravity of their thought, draw close and change the orbit of the masses. Bauman writes in Liquid Life of “the mind-boggling quandary of having to mark oneself out as an individual, while also remaining obviously an acceptable part of the group” and it is this pressure that draws us into predictable, one-dimensional orbits. Being such a satellite around such a large mass is safe, yes, but cold and life-less.

The force to break away from this comes in two forms. The greater force, perhaps, is the gravity of the a-centrics, the vacuous cult of celebrity that tempts us with ideas of total freedom: responsibility-free sex, rootless trans-atlantic existence and the exultation of form over content. But nothing can have no centre, save nothing itself.

So it is down to the eccentric, the differently centred, the ‘dirty trickster’ as my book would have it, to provide some alter-orbit. The physics is clear on this: the closer this eccentric orbit swings to the other mass, the greater its changing effect. Eccentricity is not an excuse for seclusion or flight, but an invitation to challenge the prose-flattened, cathode-ray world with some vital poetry.

[* The book. Not the online fashion store. Urgghhhh.]

Technorati: Eccentricity | Eccentrics | Mill | Sitwell

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It’s stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded – in a way Gore never quite achieves in AIT – that the earth really is immensely precious. Armstrong’s continued absence from any documentary – literary or on film – only serves to add mystery to an already ethereal and epiphanic event. He was the first to step out onto another world; what God whispered to him before leaving for someplace else he will continue to keep to himself.

If, you’re in London, you’ll have to catch it soon, as it’s been on a scandalously limited release. If you miss it, buy the DVD, with the largest screen you can lay your hands on. Or, better still, read Andrew Smith’s ‘Moondust‘ – which very likely inspired the film.

Technorati: Al Gore | Andrew Smith | In The Shadow of The Moon | Moondust | Neil Armstrong

Back in 2000, western pharmaceutical companies began a massive marketing campaign to introduce a new product to the good people of Japan: depression. Before 2000, the good people of Japan apparently did not even have a word to describe sadness as a debilitating biological illness. So the companies had to coin a new word, “utsu,” and create an appropriately catchy ad slogan to help explain the concept. They chose the phrase, “Does Your Soul Have A Cold?” antidepressant sales have since quintupled.

Catch the trailer here.

Technorati: Believer | Depression | Japan | Wholphin

So when do Typepad release a ‘Green Tariff’, which allows you to ensure your power-draw is coming from renewables?

Technorati: Environment | Green | Second Life | Typepad