Chris Beckett: Transmissions from Jodrell Bank

Just over a week ago, Comma were fortunate enough to bring a crack team of authors to Jodrell Bank and the global HQ of The Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO), to get up close with the inner-workings of the facility from the darkest server-rooms to the massive bowl of the 250ft Lovell Telescope. Our authors met with scientists at SKAO, who they will be working with over the coming months to come up with new science-fiction stories - rooted in science-fact - for an upcoming Comma anthology: Firmament: Stories from the New Bounds of Space. One of those authors is Arthur C Clarke winner Chris Beckett, who wrote the following for his blog which you can read here. 

This vast structure is the main radiotelescrope at Jodrell Bank, near Macclesfield, where I and a bunch of other writers spent the day last week. This was as part of an ongoing project of Comma Press in which they pair up a set of writers with a set of scientists to create a series of original short story anthologies inspired by real science. In this case, the scientists were astronomers at Jodrell Bank. The main Lovell Telescope was the largest steerable radiotelescope in the world when it was built in 1957, and is still one of the largest. It’s apparently so powerful that it could detect a mobile phone on Mars, in the unlikely event that someone lost one there – and it needs to be that powerful, because one of its purposes is to detect radio waves originating so far away that they have been spreading out through space, like ripples on a pond, for billions of years.

We got to climb up the telescope and walk around in its enormous white bowl. (I was surprised we could do this, given that this is a precision instrument whose surface is supposed to be smooth to an accuracy of 1mm, but it is very solid and robust.)

During the day, the writers would ask each other, ‘So who is “your” astronomer?’ ‘My’ astronomer is Ida Janiak, who, apart from being extremely nice, is interested in exoplanets and alien life, and has a particular expertise in optical telescopes. She is going to help me write a story about a ‘free-floating planet’ (or ‘rogue planet’), a planet without a star. I have already written a whole trilogy set on one of these called Eden, but when I originally came up with the idea (for a short story called ‘The Circle of Stones’ back in 1992), I honestly didn’t know that such things really existed. It just seemed to me a plausible possibility that planets could form from dust and gas in space like stars do, or could spin out from a solar system, and I went with my own ideas of what it might be like.

With Ida’s help I am now going to write a story about a FFP that, this time, is more or less scientifically accurate, and so isn’t very much like Eden. There is, however, a scientific consensus, as I understand it, that an FFP with a hot core could sustain life without the help of a star. And that does concur with my own original intuition.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Announcing a new partnership between Jodrell Bank, SKAO and Comma Press... Firmament: Stories from the New Bounds of Space (edited by Teresa Anderson) will be the latest instalment of Comma’s 'science-into-fiction' series.

The commission process got underway this week when authors and scientists walked across the face of the dish and got up-close and personal with the furthest reaches of the cosmos. 

Fiction writers and scientists have been paired to collaborate and explore some of the cutting-edge astrophysics being conducted at Jodrell Bank and the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), an intergovernmental organisation headquartered in the UK and building the world’s largest radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia.

The end result: a new book of stories and essays inspired by the collaboration out next spring. 

Authors will include Alan Garner, Lucy Caldwell, Nell Stevens, Courttia Newland, Erica Wagner, Sanjida Kay, Emma Newman, David Cleden, Chris Beckett, Oliver K Langmead, among others... 

Stories will cover everything from SETI’s search for alien intelligence to new learning about the life of the cosmos. 

Watch this space...