uncanny valley

The Bells of Nagasaki

'Almighty God, Father of grace, we pray you, let your grace come down upon the men who will fly in this night. Guard and protect those of us who will venture forth into the darkness of your heaven. Lead them on your wings. Guard their bodies and their souls and lead them back to us. Give us all courage and strength for the hours that lie before us, and reward us according to the hardships they will bring. But above all, my Father, give your world peace. Let us go our way trusting in you and secure in the knowledge that you are near to us now and for all eternity. Amen.'

Taken from The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai, this is the prayer said by a US military chaplain to the crews of the Enola Gay and Bock's Car before they dropped the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. 

Irony, hypocrisy. Where to begin?

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Mine is just one of 1.6 million names printed on a microchip inside the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that is currently orbiting the moon. Kind of a nice feeling, especially with the Apollo 40 hoo-ha this year. kinda odd that when I filled in the online form at www.nasa.gov over a year ago, I had no idea that I'd be in the middle of writing a novel all about a mission to deep space by the time the craft finally launched.

As described elsewhere on this blog, the new story is set in the late 1960s and what's coming out of all the research on the era is that we used to envision the future in terms of grand projects - orbiting hotels, lunar bases, supersonic travel, capitalist or communist utopias. Perhaps we don't dream anymore... the 21st century reality is a future of small artefacts and intimate details - ever more wondrous handheld gadgets feed us our media and enable us to post the minutiae of our lives on social networks. The future in 140 characters or less, trickle-down celebrity makes everyone a star, rolling news shrinks the world ever smaller...

Space isn't as cool as it was but the LRO thing is important because it's a glimpse of what's outside the thin band of atmosphere that keeps us all alive. NASA are sending a robotic mission, named Curiosity, to Mars in 2011. Click here and your name could go too.