uncanny valley

Manchester, Moscow & Gagarin

Little flurry of interest in the forthcoming novel following the BBC's tv/radio/online features on Yuri Gagarin's visit to Manchester in 1961 and my recent trip to the Star City cosmonaut training centre. If you're new to this blog and want to read about the Star City visit, then click here and scroll down for the Moscow diary entries.

The whole story about Gagarin coming to Manchester came to my attention because of a mural of Yuri by a wonderful artist called Walter Kershaw, which he was commissioned to paint to cover up shattered store fronts after the 1996 Manchester bomb. Sometimes when you write a book, you scratch the surface to discover all sorts of unexpected things underneath.

There will be more later this year and into next, on the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight.

Kosmonaut Zero itself is coming along well and will see the light of day in 2011.

Moscow Diary #5

It's been an exceptional trip to Moscow. Barely scratched the surface of this monumental city. Whether it's the recent Metro bombings, or the impending 65th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, the city seems to have an edge - police and soldiers are everywhere.

One gets a sense of a nation discovering itself and flexing its muscles - only yesterday, Prime Minister Putin quipped on TV about eating Ukrainian politicians. Brave words, considering the ongoing fall out between the two countries over whether a famine inflicted by Russia could be considered genocide...

One also gets the sense of a country looking backwards and forwards at the same time - I surf the internet a few hundred yards from Moscow's first McDonald's. And yet the spirit of the May Day parades persists. Later on, the young men and women of the Red Army will rehearse for the upcoming celebrations of the country's victory over Nazism.

So the old Soviet Union is still here. In Red Square, in the metro, at Star City and at Lubyanka, where the FSB has announced this week that citizens who are 'uncooperative' will in future face fines and imprisonment. In this kind of city, it's not hard to envisage the world in which a young KGB officer called Marina Mernova might have existed.

Moscow Diary #4

This is Yuri Gagarin's office at Star City, preserved just as it was on 27th March 1968 - the day he was killed in a plane crash. Even the clock on the wall is stopped at 10.31am, the moment of the accident. 

 It's been a remarkable tour around Star City, which is still a working military base where cosmonauts from all nations train for their work in space. The visit that I chose, organised with Rus Adventures, was the 'museum tour' as Kosmonaut Zero is set in the late 60s.

The guide, Nina, made the comment that for her, coming to Star City is like coming to the old Russia, with everything very neat and very organised, as if provided by an unseen, benefic state. One got the sense that as much as some embrace the change in this country, there is also nostalgia for how things used to be.

Perhaps here at Star City is the Russia that I've been looking for. The long drive out took me away from the new Moscow with its neon signs, designer stores and SUVs. Out past Communist-era apartment blocks, along bumpy roads and through the birch forests. 

Star City is quaint and understated - with just a single guard minding the gate. You would never guess at what goes on inside. Only the roar of jet engines hints at what lies inside. If this place were in the west, you have the feeling it would be branded to within an inch of its life. Instead it is a gateway, both to space and - through the artefacts of the early Soviet space programme - to an empire from another era.

Moscow Diary #3

 Finding the Moscow of 40-odd years ago is a matter of peeling back the layers. Most of the architecture remains the same, except now it has been retro-fitted with advertising hoardings: vast neon signs for mobile phone companies cling like leeches to the granite and stone. 

Imagine the Chrysler Building in New York with an immense Samsung sign running down the side of it and you get the picture.

The metro system is another amazing Soviet construction. It is vast, multi-layered - a city beneath the city. To get a perspective, imagine New York's subway or London's underground, give them some steroids and again, you'll get the picture.

Today, I visited the forrmer KGB / now FSB headquarters in Lubyanka Square. Across the road from this still-feared institution is a poignant memorial to the thousands who were executed in various communist purges throughout the 20th century. Photographs, flowers and notebooks commemorate those who died, just a couple of hundered metres from the headquarters of the organisation that did most of the killing. Times are changing in Russia. In western terms, I'd say this melting pot of a city has reached the 1980s - displaying wealth seems to be everything right now.

The scale of Moscow is what is most striking. It's as if it's designed to make the individual feel as small as possible, but then perhaps that was the idea...

Moscow Diary #2

One of the mock-ups of the Soviet space shuttle, Buran, makes a rather odd addition to the rollercoasters and ghost trains in Gorky Park. It sits by the Moscow River and seems like it's there because no one could think of anywhere else to put it. On a cold Sunday at the end of April, it doesn't get many visitors.

The spacecraft is a relic. The new Russia is fast becoming an outpost in the global village and devours the achievements of the previous empire, only to then recycle them as tourist destinations. Moscow has a space history museum, a KGB museum and a Cold War museum in an underground bunker.

Perhaps the future was never going to be one of lunar colonies and space stations: it's as if Concorde, Buran, the American Shuttle, Apollo - all these visions of science-as-art, they shone for just a few years only to end up as items on tourists' itineraries.

Today I sheltered beneath Buran to hide from hailstones and a biting wind, wondering why it was here on earth and not doing what it was built for up in space.

Moscow Diary #1

Friday 23rd was a long flight, with a quick transfer in Helsinki Vantaa, an airport devoid of activity and food, but also exceedingly clean. Note to self: trying to read Metro signs in Cyrillic after a 12 hour flight will require some concentration...

Right now: in the foyer of the hotel, having a surreal moment as a bride dressed in white lace has just walked past smiling like a bride should.

The centre of Moscow is full of tourists with police everywhere too, not surprising after the recent bombings. Found the shopping mall under Red Square which was a little too much like home.

So why this trip? It is research for Kosmonaut Zero, a novel due out in 2011. Trying to get a flavour of Russia as it was 40+ years ago. The new book is inspired by two sources, one an article I had published 12 years ago called The Cyborg Mystery - about NASA's plans in 1960 to fit astronauts with mechanical pumps and body parts to enable them to go into space without spacesuits. The other source is the urban myth of Soviet Russia's Lost Cosmonauts. More on that here.

And to whet your appetites for what's in the new book, here is some teaser artwork (click image for the full view). 

 

i, Kosmonaut?

A book which I have loved reading as part of the research for Kosmonaut Zero is Two Sides of the Moon, by Alexei Leonov and David Scott. 

One of the reflections common to both men was that their mission profiles gave them no time to themselves, no break in which they could appreciate what it was they were actually doing - being the first man to walk in space and one of the 12 to land on the moon respectively. Leonov took paper and crayons to space so that he could sketch what he saw and recommended that future space missions should include a poet who could record the emotional impact of the experience for all humankind.

Mission Control would constantly ask for status updates and biological data, give them endless tasks to perform so that virtually every minute of each mission was occupied. The act of taking time to experience the wonder of what they were doing was just not part of the schedule.

Here on Earth 40 years on, the space race is forgotten and new technologies take precedence. Web 2.0 platforms proliferate - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube - all based on the premise of 'sharing' - photos and videos, experiences and perspectives.

It's as if we are all now in astronaut mode - document, record, share - giving realtime updates to a faceless global mission control, eviscerating all our activities, no matter how trivial or inane. Privacy is willingly forgotten as we seek to share/express/opine about everything and nothing.

For technology to develop, of course it must be democratic. But which of us are making history like Leonov and Scott - and which of us are merely filling space and time?

Non-Existent Navel

 The simulants in Exilium are part-organic, part-robotic hybrids - they come in male and female forms, in the way that mannequins do, and are notable for their lack of navel. They are made not born so, no mother = no navel. This week, model Karolina Kurkova has made headlines for that very same physical attribute.

'Karolina’s body is so amazing, but her belly button totally gives it away,' a fashion insider told this blog. 'We're wondering whether she's beginning to suspect...'

A team of sentient android therapists is on hand to help Karolina with the difficult transition as she comes to terms with her machine status, with weekly counselling sessions to gently erase those implanted memories away.