Irregularity
Page 23
Richard Dunn and Sophie Waring
May 2014
From: root@podolsky.ch
To: Shurin, Jared
Re: Noel “diary” comment
Dear Jared,
I see why you have to give space to this document, of course. The merest sniff of time travel, and the inevitable piffle about a grandfather paradox (in this case, the book that exists in a loop) is always going to be news. Does that culture of infotainment really have to be the driver for a reputable journal these days? I suppose perhaps it does.
What I find difficult, as you no doubt you anticipated, is the way in which this particular hoax seems to be targeted at me personally. I am the custodian of the Noel papers and it’s a matter of public record that I derive my genetic map from a historical sample thought to have come from Augusta Noel. And I do also, for completeness, hold the title of librarian here at the Podolsky Energy Institute – though the actual custodianship is handled by trained people while I get on with the physics. I won’t belabour the obvious, I’ll just note that since the espionage investigation in the 1960s and Podolsky’s subsequent exoneration, people here have a profound loathing for sensation. I do, of course, look after an eclectic collection that is organised on an intuitive, non-linear basis according to the wishes of the original collector, so I can not only do duty as the end product of the events in this little fiction, I may even be intended to be its instigator as well - though by what ridiculous sequence of inversions I am supposed to end up as the mother of my own Victorian progenitor, married to some radical libertine blowhard, I cannot begin to imagine. I take offense at the idea! But that’s a side issue. The point is that the whole thing is so wrong-headed! Yes, yes, I know, the theory must yield to the empirical evidence, but this isn’t evidence - it’s baloney. Let me count the ways:
1. Physical time travel is impossible. There is no way to send a macro-scale object back in time. Information, maybe, but a book? No. It’s not just difficult, it’s bad physics.
2. Similarly, there can never be a grandfather paradox. It is mechanically prohibited. If you alter the past, the timeline branches and never leads to your version of events. You come by definition from a different Universe where you didn’t tinker. If we’re talking about silly ideas, incidentally, that always gives me the heebie jeebies because it makes me imagine that Parallel-Me is watching and has tinkered with my timeline in preparation for coming here and taking my place. Although what Parallel-Me could hope to gain from that I have no idea. Perhaps tomorrow I’m going to win the lottery.
3. If I am being cast in the role of “mother”, I’m supposedly going to go back to the Victorian period and have a child who is genetically identical to myself. How am I going to achieve that? Am I taking a PCR machine? Perhaps an entire lab and some biomedical specialists? If I do that, chances are the changes I’ll inflict on the timeline are going to be a bit more notable than a book and a proto-feminist daughter.
4. WHY? What could possibly motivate me to do any of this? A desire for a simpler life of vaccinated pseudo-transtemporal transuniversal meddling? Some sort of High Science concept pop art? Or maybe a religious obedience to the document itself, if you like predestination cheap and dirty?
I looked it up. There is not, and never was, a book called “Irregularity”. No such project has, in so far as anyone in the publishing world can tell me, ever been contemplated. Half the writers listed are characters in novels, from those endlessly annoying books about books. The name of the man who is supposed to have found this new journal of Noel’s, “Nicholas Harkaway” is listed twice on Google, and both men are deceased. Neither of them was ever a novelist. I don’t like Occam’s Razor very much – I think it’s lazy to imagine the world as tending to the simple – but honestly: either this is an eruption into our Universe from another one with the aim of creating an apparently impossible situation to ends which must be at best obscure, or the whole thing is a fiction of the most incomplete sort. I think if you’re going to go ahead with the publication, you should allow me the right of reply. Print this email in its entirety, if you like, or I’ll send you something more fit-for-purpose tomorrow. I’d do it now, but I’m already late for the thing at CERN and I really need a shower before I go. I’m getting a tour of the ring – they have a monorail, apparently – and I’m told it’s sensible shoes because afterwards we’re going to get plastered on white sangria and dance on the accelerator housing.
I won’t ask you to put this aside. Just think, please, about whether it’s really a story.
Yours in science and in an absolutely towering rage – but not with you, obviously -
Izzy Millbank
Contributors
Tiffani Angus is an ex-pat PhD Creative Writing student in Cambridge, finishing up her dissertation and an historic fantasy novel set over 400 years in an English country-house garden. She is a graduate of Clarion 2009 and has published fantasy, horror and erotica stories. When not languishing under fluorescent lights writing or teaching writing, she can be found geeking out in gardens that other people have planted.
Rose Biggin writes plays, stories, and lists. She has a PhD in Drama from the University of Exeter, and lives on the same street as a wild peacock who sometimes eats out of her hand. Her short fiction has appeared in Pandemonium: The Rite of Spring (Jurassic London) and The Colour of Life and Other Stories (Retreat West); her plays include Sour Nothings (Tommyfield, London Kennington), Victor Frankenstein (King’s Arms Theatre, Salford) and The Very Thought, a one-woman show about loneliness, love and pole dancing (Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter). Once at the Edinburgh Fringe she won a poetry slam by accident, with a retelling of the Iliad she’ll do on request.
Archie Black lives and works in London. Her published fiction includes stories about pigeons, bugs, fearsome maiden aunts, secret agents, Lovecraftian monsters and serial killers.
Kim Curran is the award-nominated author of books for young adults, including Shift, Control, Delete and Glaze. She studied Philosophy & Literature at university with the plan of being paid big bucks to think deep thoughts. While that never quite worked out, she did land a job as a junior copywriter. She’s worked in advertising ever since. She is a mentor at the Ministry of Stories and for the WoMentoring Project. And lives in London with her husband and too many books.
Richard de Nooy grew up in Johannesburg, but has lived in Amsterdam for more than 25 years. He worked as a crockery salesman, data typist, lab assistant, bouncer, cartoonist and translator, all of which prepared him for his career as a novelist. He writes in both English and Dutch. His first novel, Six Fang Marks and a Tetanus Shot, won the University of Johannesburg Prize for Best First Book in 2008. He has published two further acclaimed novels (in English and Dutch) since then: The Big Stick (2012) and The Unsaid (2014).
Richard Dunn is Senior Curator and Head of Science and Technology at Royal Museums Greenwich. He is currently engaged on a research project, “The Board of Longitude 1714–1828: Science, Innovation and Empire in the Georgian World”, a collaboration between Royal Museums Greenwich and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His publications include The Telescope: A Short History (2009) and Finding Longitude (2014, with Rebekah Higgitt).
Simon Guerrier created and wrote the science-fiction series Graceless, broadcast on Radio 4 Extra. He’s also written Blake’s 7 (again forRadio 4 Extra) and over 40 audio plays for Big Finish Productions, including Doctor Who. He’s currently producing a documentary for Radio 3 about Oliver Cromwell’s wife and writing poo jokes for Horrible Histories magazine.
Howard Hardiman is the creator of the comics Badger and The Lengths. He has recently completed a year-long artist residency which culminated in his first major exhibition, Line & Shade. He has a studio on the Isle of Wight where he draws, makes oil paintings and vector images for exhibitions, commissions and books.
Nick Harkaway won the Oxfam Emerging Writers Prize at th
e Hay Festival in 2012. He was also awarded The Kitschies’ Red Tentacle (for the year’s most intelligent, interesting and progressive novel with speculative elements). He is the author of three novels —Tigerman, Angelmaker and The Gone-Away World — and a non-fiction book about technology and human social and political agency called The Blind Giant. Before he began writing novels he was a notably unsuccessful screenwriter and a truly hopeless martial artist. He likes red wine, deckled edges and most of Italy, and lives in London with his wife and two children.
Roger Luckhurst usually writes cultural histories of supernatural things, such as The Invention of Telepathy and The Mummy’s Curse: A True History of a Dark Fantasy. His history of the zombie appears from Reaktion Press in 2015. He comes out at night, mostly, to teach Gothic literature at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Claire North is a pseudonym for Kate Griffin, who is actually Catherine Webb. All of these people are a London-based, fantasy and science fiction writer with a fondness for urban wonders and Thai food, who also works as a theatre lighting designer.
Gary Northfield has been writing and drawing childrens comics for over ten years. Famous for his crazy (and creator-owned!) Beano character, Derek the Sheep, Gary has also worked for The Dandy, Horrible Histories Magazine, Horrible Science Magazine and The Magical World of Roald Dahl. He currently beavers away on strips for The Phoenix and National Geographic Kids. His first graphic novel, Teenytinysaurs is available from Walker Children’s Books and his next, Julius Zebra, will be published in 2015.
Adam Roberts was born two-thirds of the way through the last century. He is a writer of science fiction, and a professor of nineteenth-century literature, and he lives a little way west of London. His most recent novels are Jack Glass (2013), Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014, with Mahendra Singh) and Bête (2014).
Henrietta Rose-Innes is a writer based in Cape Town. Her most recent novel, Nineveh, was published in South Africa in 2011, following a short-story collection, Homing (2010), and two earlier novels: Shark’s Egg (2000) and The Rock Alphabet (2004). A new novel, Green Lion, which deals partially with species loss, will be published in early2015. Henrietta’s is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing and the South African PEN Literary Award, and in 2012, her short story ‘Sanctuary’ took second place in the BBC International Short Story Competition.
James Smythe is the author of The Testimony, The Explorer, The Echo, No Harm Can Come to a Good Man and The Machine. The Testimony was the winner of the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Award and The Machine was a finalist for both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and The Kitschies. He has written narratives for video games and teaches Creative Writing.
Matt Suddain is a journalist and author who has written for Sunday, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, Vice, Five Dials, Opium, BBQ Aficionado, Popular Tree, The Singular Gentleman, Caravan & UFO, Fancier Financier and The Onion. Several of these publications do not exist. His first novel, Theatre of the Gods, was published by Jonathan Cape in June 2013.
E.J. Swift is the author of The Osiris Project trilogy: Osiris, Cataveiro, and Tamaruq. Her short fiction has been published in Interzone magazine and appears in anthologies from Salt Publishing, Jurassic London and NewCon Press. She was shortlisted for a 2013 BSFA Award in the short fiction category for her story “Saga’s Children”, from The Lowest Heaven.
Sophie Waring is completing a PhD on the Board of Longitude, focusing on its role in the transformation of the organisation of science in the early nineteenth century, at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge and Royal Museums Greenwich, as part of the research project, “The Board of Longitude 1714–1828: Science, Innovation and Empire in the Georgian World”.
Jared Shurin is a trained BBQ judge.
All the images within this book are by Gary Northfield, and are reinterpretations of original art from the collection of the National Maritime Museum, part of Royal Museums Greenwich:
“Sailors in port”, aquatint, PAH7355 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Eighteenth century mezzotint of Isaac Newton, PAF3327 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Eighteenth century engraving of Robert Boyle, PAF3264 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
“A ship in a scudding gale”, mezzotint, PAG6875 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
“View of the Crystal Palace as built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition, July 1851”, graphite sketch, PAI0856 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
They are used here with the the National Maritime Museum’s permission.
The typefaces used in this book are Igino Marini’s careful reproductions of the seventeenth century Fell Types. The body is English Roman and the titles are in French Canon.
I would like to thank the cast of irregulars who made this book possible: David Bailey, Robin Hermann, Rebecca Nuotio, Andrew Mills, Sara Wajid, Sophie Waring and Anne C. Perry. It helps having the world’s best editor available for advice.
Irregularity is Jurassic London’s third collaboration with the generous team at Royal Museums Greenwich, and I am especially grateful to Richard Dunn and Marek Kukula for their vision, imagination and patience. As Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth Astronomer Royal and Fellow of the Royal Society, famously described his lunar distance method, “it helps to have friends in high places”.