More Names for Pluto and Charon Surface Features

The scientists at JPL/NASA have released their first list of informal place names for features on the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest satellite Charon, all courtesy of the New Horizons space probe which passed through the Pluto system two weeks ago. While all of the names so far announced are “informal” (meaning, they are terms that have not been officially suggested and put forward to the IAU Nomenclature Committee), it is highly likely that most – if not all – will eventually become official.

First off, Pluto:

Pluto’s place names are all being drawn from either explorers (who haven’t already been honored with a named object elsewhere in the solar system) or with mythical dieties or lands relating to death or the underworld. And as the previously mentioned Cthulhu Regio indicates, NASA is choosing to use considerable leeway as to choosing appelations they feel are appropriate (note also the inclusion of “Balrog”, from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien).

And now… Charon:

Charon’s names are being drawn almost exclusively from “fantastical myth and literature”, and boy are they taking advantage of the opportunity. Names from the Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Alien, Doctor Who franchises abound. There’s even at least one anime reference (Macross Chasma, after the title ship from Space Fortress Macross/Robotech I), and arguably a second in Argo Chasma (“Argo” was the name used for the title ship Space Cruiser Yamato in its English translation, Star Blazers). The naming scheme on Charon seems to be that space ships get “chasmas” (canyons), fictional characters get craters, and people who actually lived get “mons” (mountains).

As a side note, one of the reasons why I think Argo Chasma is indeed a reference to Space Cruiser Yamato is because in Yamato I, the Yamato actually visits Pluto and even shoots its anchor into “Pluto’s moon” – thereby making it the first media depiction ever of any moon of Pluto (it was also a bit of prescient storytelling, seeing as the episode in question was made in 1974 and Charon wasn’t discovered until 1978).

Keep in mind, these are just the first, initial maps. Most of the data has yet to be downloaded from New Horizons, and there are still whole regions for which any images have yet to be retrieved. So once again, expect more in the coming months.

And don’t be surprised if in the next few weeks there is announced a Setsuna Meioh (Sailor Pluto) crater somewhere on either body…

Pluto New Horizons Update – My Favorite New Place Name

The scientists at JPL are assigning “unofficial” names to various features on Pluto, based on the images recieved from New Horizons. Most of these names will probably be submitted to the IAU Nomenclature Committee in due course, but in the meantime none of the names are considered anything more than provisional. But there’s at least one name I hope sticks.

If you were keeping track of New Horizons as it approached Pluto, you may remember a dark vaguely fish-shaped feature that some dubbed “The Whale”. Well, it has now been dubbed with a new name.  May I present to you… Cthulhu Regio:

Cthulhu Regio lies near Pluto’s equator just east of Tombaugh Regio (the so-called “Heart” of Pluto). It is approximately 2,990 kilometers long (1,860 miles), and is probably a much older feature than the adjacent, lighter plains of Tombaugh. Please note the splotchy area just to the right of Cthulhu in the image above.

That’s Sputnik Planum and the mountain range now known as Hillary Mones.

Also released by NASA/JPL is an image of Pluto being eclipsed by the Sun.

We’re still weeks away from getting the bulk of New Horizons data packets. Most of it is still stored on the spaceship, awaiting the chance to download. Because New Horizons is so far away (signals take about 4 hours to arrive at Earth) and the transmitter is so slow, it will take most of the rest of the year to get everything. Even tho the close encounter is over, theres still much, much more to come.

But just remember… Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Cthulhu fhtagn! Cthulhu fhtagn!

My Hugo Awards Vote

Well, after weeks of reading and a fair amount of thought, I am finally ready to submit my final votes for this years Hugo Awards, to be awarded at Sasquan (WorldCon 73) in just a few weeks.

Here are my rankings:

Best Novel

1. Skin Game, by Jim Butcher
2. Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)
3. The Dark Between the Stars, by Kevin J. Anderson
4. Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
5. The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison

This was actually something of a hard decision, as I really liked Three Body Problem. But in the end, I gave it to Skin Game because, simply, I was more entertained by it (tho frankly, I expect Three Body Problem to win). The Dark Between the Stars was fine, but because its heavily based on KJA’s previous Saga of the Seven Suns series, I can understand why some would downgrade it – especially if they haven’t read that series. Ancillary Sword was better than last year’s Ancillary Justice, but I’m still finding that series mostly “meh”. The Goblin Emperior was the only book of the bunch I wasn’t all that thrilled with; its a palace procedural that wallows in the Byzantine mechanations of court politics, and not much else.

Best Novella

1. Big Boys Don’t Cry, by Tom Kratman
2. The Plural of Helen of Troy, by John C. Wright
3. Flow, by Arlan Andrews, Sr.
4. One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright
5. Pale Realms of Shade, by John C. Wright

Nothing much to say here except Tom Kratman’s story blew me away.  The rest were good but not as good.

Best Novelette

1. The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale, by Rajnar Vajra
2. The Journeyman in the Stone House, by Michael F. Flynn
3. Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium, by Gray Rinehart
4. Championship B’Tok, by Edward M. Lerner
5. The Day the World Turned Upside Down, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

I’ve been reading Rajnar Vajra off and on in the pages of Analog for some time, and I’ve enjoyed everything he’s written. The others were generally fine, tho I did have a problem with “Championship B’Tok” as it frequently felt like the abridged version of a much longer story.

Best Short Story

1. A Single Samuraii, by Steven Diamond
2. Totaled, by Kary English
3. The Parliament of Beasts and Birds, by John C. Wright
4. Turncoat, by Steve Rzasa
5. On a Spiritual Plain, by Lou Antonelli

Personally, I thought the choices in this catagory were a vast improvement over last years ballot, but were still overall the weakest of the literature nominations. The only real clunker to me was “On A Spiritual Plain”, which I frankly came close to ranking below No Award.

Best Related Work

1. The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF, by Ken Burnside
2. Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and the Awful Truth, by John C. Wright
3. No Award

Best Graphic Story

1. Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt
2. Saga Volume 3, by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples
3. No Award

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

1. Interstellar
2. Guardians of the Galaxy
3. Captain America: Winter Soldier
4. Lego Movie
5. Edge of Tomorrow

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

1. The Flash: Pilot
2. Doctor Who: Listen
3. Game of Thrones: The Mountain and the Viper
4. Grimm: Once We Were Gods
5. No Award

Best Professional Editor (Short Form)

No vote (Didn’t know enough to feel comfortable voting in this catagory)

Best Professional Editor (Long Form)

1. Toni Weisskopf
2. No Award

I gave Toni Weisskopf a vote based on her fantastic work at Baen. But other than her, I know next to nothing about the editorial catagories and as such did not feel comfortable voting in them.

Best Professional Artist

No vote (Didn’t know enough to feel comfortable voting in this catagory)

Best Semiprozine

1. Andromeda Spaceways
2. Beneath Ceaseless Skies
3. Abyss & Apex
4. Lightspeed Magazine
5. Strange Horizons

Best Fanzine

1. Journey Planet
2. Elitist Book Reviews
3. The Revenge of Hump Day
4. Tangent Online

Best Fancast

1. The Sci Phi Show
2. Adventures in SciFi Publishing
3. Dungeon Crawlers Radio
4. Tea and Jeopardy
5. Galactic Suburbia

Best Fan Writer

1. Dave Freer
2. Amanda S. Green
3. Cedar Sanderson
4. Jeffro Johnson
5. Laura J. Mixon

Best Fan Artist

No vote (Didn’t know enough to feel comfortable voting in this catagory)

John W. Campbell Award

1. Jason Cordova
2. Kary English
3. Rolf Nelson
4. Wesley Chu
5. Eric S. Raymond

New Horizons at Pluto

As most everyone knows by now, the NASA/JPL’s New Horizons spacecraft passed by the dwarf planet Pluto six days ago. The images it has sent back are stunningly beautiful.

First off, Pluto itself (all images courtesy of NASA):

Notice anything odd about the surface? As in, what seems to be missing?

Craters. Lots and lots of craters. Thats whats missing.

Consider that Pluto lies at the inner edge of the Kuiper belt, an asteroid field probably larger and more populated than the more familiar asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Consider also that most other non-gaseous outer solar system objects have surfaces that are generally heavily cratered, due to the accumulated impacts of smaller objects over billions and billions of years. The fact that craters are so few here indicates that Pluto’s surface is probably relatively new, only a few hundred million years old. Which means, Pluto is more geologically active than we originally thought. Some process is causing the surface to renew itself, either through active vulcanism or possibly internal heating caused by tidal stress from Pluto and Charon’s orbital dance (remember, Pluto appears to be composed primarily of various ices; it wouldn’t take much heating to periodically melt the surface into a viscous slushie).

Some close up views of Pluto’s surface have also been released.

Those are mountains, and they are composed almost entirely of water ice. They too cannot be more than a few hundred million years old, although it is probable that they are generally older than the smoother surfaces around them.

Moving on to Pluto’s principal moon, Charon:

Again, we’re seeing a general lack of heavy cratering, alhtough the surface here does appear to be more cratered than Charon’s parent planet.

Here’s a good image of the pair, showing once more their relative sizes:

The smaller moons of Pluto also recieved some attention during the flyby, but sadly they were all too far away for detailed images. These are probably the best images we’ll see for the satellites Nix and Hydra:

From what I gather, only about half of the data load that New Horizons recorded has been transmitted back to Earth. In fact, most of the really detailed images of Pluto taken during its closest approach haven’t arrived yet. New Horizons will be transmitting them over the next several weeks, so expect to see more images released in the coming month.

New Horizons will now fly on to another Kuiper Belt object, for an arrival sometime in 2019. There are two objects up for consideration, both of which are much smaller than either Pluto or Charon. A decision as to which of the two objects to target will be made in August, as New Horizons needs to start firing its engines no later than early September.

More details will follow as they become available.

Yes, I am alive.

I started my roadtrip and soon after discovered that my laptop was dead. When I finally arrived in Pasadena CA I took it to a tech, and the laptop has now been resuscitated (tho I am watching it warily). So for the moment I am once more operational.

I’ll be doing a roundup of New Horizons at Pluto soon, and then write ups of some of the various places I’ve been to on the way. I’m also finalizing my Hugo Awards votes before the deadline, and will probably augment those with some reviews. But for the most part, to those who are wondering, yes I am fine and no I have not abandoned this blog once more. You aren’t getting rid of me that easily.

Driveabout 2015

Driveabout: Its like going on Walkabout, but with air conditioning and without actually using your feet.

My boys and I are hitting the road starting this Friday. First destination will be San Antonio, Texas, because my son Liam has been bugging me for months to visit The Alamo (my other son, Martin, says he doesn’t care where we go, “just so long as we get away from here”). Beyond that, we’ll be bumming around the Southwest for a week before winding up at a friend’s house in Pasadena, California, then head up the coast to visit family in Oregon. The whole trip will culminate in a visit to Sasquan, aka the 73rd Annual WorldCon, in Spokane, Washington. So it looks like I’m going to be on the road for the next 6-7 weeks. Really, really looking forward to it. And yes, I do hope to be blogging along the way. So expect vacation shots. Lots and lots of vacation shots.

In the meantime, I have to get ready. Clothes to clean and pack, camping gear to get out of storage, a vehicle to stuff full of enough necessities to survive “in the wild” for almost two months. Which is why I haven’t been putting much work into this blog.  Hopefully that will change when I hit the road; I tend to do a lot of writing in my head when I’m on long trips behind the wheel, and for me there’s nothing quite like the American West to kick my writing muses into full gear.

New Horizons Back on Line. UPDATE: New image posted by NASA

New Horizons appears to be working again. As Wired’s website put it, the upcoming encounter made the spacecraft so excited it essentially passed out. But JPL seems to have fixed the problem, and everything looks good for the next week.

Latest images are starting to show features:

And here’s the above laid out as a map. This is all of what we currently know concerning Pluto’s surface details:

Both images courtesy of NASA. By this time next week we should be seeing images millions of times clearer than these. Exciting times.

UPDATE:

JPL & NASA have released a new color image of Pluto, taken 7/8/2015:

This image is already a huge improvement over the image they released yesterday.  New Horizons is currently 5 Million miles away from Pluto.

 

Review: Champions of the Force (Jedi Academy Trilogy #3), by Kevin J. Anderson

NOTE: For some reason, I seem to have skipped reposting this review when I was posting last night. Must have been more tired than I thought.

(Originally posted on Amazon 8/18/2003)

The climactic novel of Kevin J. Anderson’s Jedi Academy Trilogy is probably the best of the series, but in the end it is something of a disappointment.

The book picks up where Dark Apprentice leaves off, namely with yet another super weapon on the loose, this time in the hands of a would-be Jedi with revenge on his mind, while Luke lays in a helpless trance on Yavin 4. Meanwhile, a plot is in motion to kidnap Leia and Han’s third child (Anakin Solo), the Republic finally gets around to moving against that hidden weapon’s research facility from Book #1, and Admiral Daala continues to fail miserably in her Honor Harrington imitation (why does anyone in their right minds follow her?). All of these plot lines lead to that perennial Big Climactic Space Battle, which are a trademark of the Star Wars series. On the plus side, the action works well, the characters are much more interesting, and there’s actually a good deal of humor (more so, IMHO, than in either of the previous two books). However, on the negative side…

To give Anderson credit, he does manage to tie in all the threads he began in the previous two books, which is in some ways a marvel. But the ending feels rushed, and the novel loses much of its steam because of it. Going into the end of such a series, there should be a feeling of tension and excitement, a build-up to the final confrontations about to take place. There is little of that here, just a feeling that we’re finally reaching a conclusion. Anderson does achieve his primary task of re-establishing the Jedi order, but once he has them back he doesn’t really have much for them to do — which is a shame, because that was supposedly the point of the series in the first place. At least he sets things up adequately for subsequent novels.

If you’ve managed to get through the first two books of the Jedi Academy Trilogy, Champions of the Force is an adequate ending. Even if you were wavering on reading the third book because Dark Apprentice was not quite up to snuff, going on to the last will at least satisfy your curiosity about how things turn out. But once you’re finished, don’t expect to want to ever go back to the books again. This isn’t the kind of series that’s likely to occupy a permanent place on your shelves unless you are a Star Wars completest.

Three Stars out of 5 Stars

Various and Sundry

Well, I think I have now posted all the various reviews I’m willing to see reposted.  There’s actually a few more on Amazon that I skipped, but most of those are either too short to bother with or (for whatever reason) I think need a serious rewrite before I’m willing to archive them here. I think I’m going to mull it over before I decide whether to spend the effort to make them satisfactory or not.

In general things, by now everyone has heard that New Horizons had a computer glitch on Saturday that put it into safe mode. Some people seem to think that the Pluto encounter is now in serious jeopardy. Relax. Galileo had a similar problem days before it was scheduled to enter Jupiter orbit (not to mention major problems with its primary antennae), and those problems were worked out long before it settled into orbit. The problem New Horizons encountered seems to have been resolved and the spaceship looks to be in good shape for its Pluto encounter in 9 days. In fact, JPL now says normal operations will resume on Tuesday. So everything is still looking good for Pluto close approach.

Right now I’m trying to finish up my reading for this year’s Hugo Awards.  So far I’ve been mostly enjoying the nominees this year (moreso in some categories than those from recent years, at any rate) and am still trying to decide how I’m going to vote in several cases. And No, I am not going to talk about the whole Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies controversy here. Frankly, I think its been done to death by now, and the only thing left is to vote your conscience. I’ll probably post my final ballot here when I decide, and perhaps some commentary about why I voted the way I did. But anything more than that… guys, its a literary award with voting rules not much different than a popularity contest. On the grand scheme of things, it means jack shit. There are more important events going on in the world to get all bent out of shape over.

Last… now that I’ve posted all the reviews I’m willing to own up to (for the moment), my attention is going to be on my fiction. I’m still trying to sift through the myriad of stories I’ve worked on over the years. Some are finished; most are not. I’ve got an embarassingly large amount of fanfiction (Doctor Who, mostly; some Teen Titans, some various anime-related), and many, many odds and ends. I’m trying to decide which — if any — are worth posting here. So be forewarned: I’m going to subject you all to my writing, even the stuff I think is terrible. My intent for this blog is to cover my attempts, as anemic as they may be, to both improve my writing and to (hopefully, eventually) become a professional writer. I’ve got a long way to go, tho. Maybe I’ll make it, maybe I won’t. But I certainly won’t do it sitting back and wishing.

Going to sleep now. Too tired to compose any more.

Review: Ebla – A New Look at History, by Giovanni Pettinato

(Originally published on Amazon 3/9/2003)

Between 1974-1976, nearly 20,000 tablets or fragments of tablets were unearthed at an excavation site known as Tell Marduk, in northern Syria. The tablets proved to be the royal archives of an ancient trading empire known as Ebla, which flourished around 2500 BC but the location of which had long since been lost to time. Because of their completeness, the archives of Ebla proved to be an earthquake in ancient near-east studies, disrupting many long-standing assumptions and forcing a new interpretation of our understanding of 3rd Millennium BC middle east. Most importantly for biblical scholars, it seemed to provide some tantalizing hints at Old Testament connections, including the firm identification of “Eblaite” as a semitic-tongue predating Hebrew and the possible mentioning of biblical names such as Abraham and Sodom. Giovanni Pettinato, who was the first to interpret these tablets and who is credited with having “cracked” the Eblaite language, has had no small role in this shake up, and this book continues with his (sometimes controversial) theories about Ebla and the archives true meaning.

Ebla: A New Look at History is in some ways an update of Pettinato’s previous book The Archives of Ebla, which was published in Italian in 1980 and translated into English (with some revisions and additions) in 1981. In his previous book, Pettinato sought to introduce the archeological finds at Ebla and to make some tentative steps toward casting them into a better understanding of the ancient middle-east. However, The Archives of Ebla was hamstrung by the fact that the finds were (at the time of its publication) still relatively new, and much work had not yet been performed on archival translating and interpretation, to say nothing of the ongoing excavation work going on at Tell Marduk/Ebla. With more than a decade of additional scholarly activity, Pettinato is here better able to place Ebla in context with the more well known ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia. He also is better able to back up some of his assertions regarding biblical/old testament connections, a position which sometimes has put him in direct conflict with even the archeological team excavating Ebla.

Pettinato’s book brings the entire state of Ebla studies up, if not to the present, to the present at the time of it’s publication (1991). This makes the book more valuable than most of the other books on this subject, which along with The Archives of Ebla were all published in the first few years immediately after the initial discovery. Besides offering Pettinato’s interpretation of much of the Ebla finds, Ebla: A New Look at History recounts the circumstances behind the discoveries as well as offering a fairly rounded summation of what we know about Mesopotamian civilization at the time of Ebla’s apex. If the book has a fault it is that Pettinato is perhaps a bit too firmly encamped in the biblical-connections field of thought, tending to sell his critics short and asserting as fact which might more fairly be considered as conjecture. But despite this, Ebla: A New Look at History does work as a very readable introduction to this fascinating and evolving subject. While it is in general aimed at the layman, it is aimed at a layman who at least has a passing knowledge of ancient history; therefore, some familiarity with the ancient near-east studies is recommended, but not necessary.

For those interested in archeology and ancient or biblical history, this is probably the best introduction yet published on Ebla and its implications. Highly recommended.

4 Stars out of 5 Stars