The Rain - The Sun

The Rain - The Sun

The three men sat in silence inside their ThermaTech storm tent. Outside, an icy wind buffeted the shelter, threatening to tear it from its moorings. None of the men took notice; each had seen situations far more threatening than this one.

Their tent was stark white, pitched in a shallow depression, out of sight. Their communication devices, transport, and weapons were all state-of-the-art. The group leader was code-named Delta-One. He was muscular and lithe with eyes as desolate as the topography on which he was stationed.

The military chronograph on Delta-One’s wrist emitted a sharp beep. The sound coincided in perfect unison with beeps emitted from the chronographs worn by the other two men.

Another thirty minutes had passed.

It was time. Again.

The time. New Jersey. Photo by Elena

Reflexively, Delta-One left his two partners and stepped outside into the darkness and pounding wind. He scanned the moonlit horizon with infrared binoculars. As always, he focused on the structure. It was a thousand meters away—an enormous and unlikely edifice rising from the barren terrain. He and his team had been watching it for ten days now, since its construction. Delta-One had no doubt that the information inside would change the world. Lives already had been lost to protect it.

At the moment, everything looked quiet outside the structure.

The true test, however, was what was happening inside.

Delta-One reentered the tent and addressed his two fellow soldiers. “Time for a flyby.”

Both men nodded. The taller of them, Delta-Two, opened a laptop computer and turned it on. Positioning himself in front of the screen, Delta-Two placed his hand on a mechanical joystick and gave it a short jerk. A thousand meters away, hidden deep within the building, a surveillance robot the size of a mosquito received his transmission and sprang to life.

Though the latest glaciation had yet to reach its deepest cold, the sea level had already dropped hundreds of meters. In the coastal reshaping that resulted, the islands of Java and Sumatra had been joined with Southeast Asia to form a great shelf, and much of Indonesia had become a long peninsula. Similarly Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea had been merged into a single mighty mass.

In this unique, temporary geography, there were places where the Asian landmass was separated from greater Australia by only a hundred kilometers or so.

(Rain, the novel by Elena and George).

Stunning View of the Earth

Stunning Views of the Earth...

Odry rapped on the metal hatch of the blister. After a moment, the bolt slid back and the door opened.

Odry entered through the first access door and directed herself across the spacious open expanse of the module’s laboratory section toward her office, located in the fore starboard corner. Inside the office, she powered up her communications console and called the headquarters in Huston. She had a selection of voice encryption chips at her disposal. The chips broke up the voice transmission into meaningless signals that would be reassembled by another chip at the receiving station. Eavesdropping ham-radio operators would hear nothing but Chinese violins. Odry didn’t often use encryption when talking to the Earth, but today the language could become dicey. So she pressed a chip into its slot.

The outer surface of the dome was covered by an aluminium clamshell shield that could be closed to prevent damage from meteoroids, ice particles of the Cloud or debris. Retracting the shield in different ways offered stunning views of the Earth, the night sky or both.

There was the Earth, breathtaking, sparkling blue and brilliant white, gliding past beyond the Lexan windows. But Odry barely noticed the spectacular panorama. She focused on the Cloud, long, immense and deadly calm.

Stunning views of the Earth. Photo by Elena

Do People Dream in Space?

Do People Dream in Space?

The judge looked as a pretty woman with vines for hair. She said with a passion: We the members of the Jury being duly constituted in the State of Grace, and otherwise perfectly lit to determine the issues presented here, find the defendant guilty of playing with nature and otherwise intending to make the world a worse place for a living. Give me a minute so I can pass a comb through my hair, answered Norma.

She was asleep and yet she was conscious about a dream she was in. She didn’t know that people dreamt in space. And in the dream the judge and the foreman of the jury were the same person. And this woman was floating freely inside her cubbyhole making notes on a clipboard. Norma ignored both the decision and the pain.

This dream was telling her something, but what exactly it was saying? That the end was approaching and the epoch of humanity was over? It was a sad thought, but it was a logical one.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Space Dream. Illustration by Elena

Cosmos as Home

Cosmos as Home

We are made of stellar ash. Something in us recognizes the Cosmos as home, as our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events, and we are the children of equally of the sky and the Earth.

However, the Cosmos was discovered only yesterday, as for many years it was clear to everyone that there were no other places than the Earths. Indeed, in the last tenth of a percent of the lifetime of our species, in the instant between Aristarchus and ourselves, we reluctantly noticed that we were not the purpose and center of the Universe, but rather lived on a fragile world lost in immensity and eternity of the Cosmos. Our small world drifts in a great cosmic ocean dotted here and there with a hundred billion galaxies and a billion trillion stars…

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Infinite Space. Illustration by Elena

A science fiction novel by one of the most prolific and bestselling authors of our times, George B., the novel which will change the face of the planet Earth forever. You have never read a novel like this one. Oscar for the best original script guaranteed!

Jupiter Module

Jupiter Module

After leaving Daniel in the command module, Odry made her way down the station’s central tunnel until she passed through the double hatch marking the boundary between the station proper and the Jupiter module.

The lab of the Jup Module was even murkier than the connecting tunnel. The gray floor and salmon ceiling blended into a single, dismal blah. Odry moved through the snadows cast by the equipment and floated toward the end of the module, heading for the bulky figure waiting for her there.

The station’s goal is to develop bioremediation techniques, using genetically engineered microorganisms, to help reverse the environmental damage done to our planet by generation water, soil and air pollution.

The Jupiter Project was a joint effort between the European Space Agency and NASA to test humans for a planned flight to Jupiter. The original purpose of the project was to stimulate the rigors of an actual flight to that distant planet. A dozen men and women had been selected to spend five full years in space.

The project though gradually metamorphosed into a study of the subtle stressed microgravity places on the human body and the not-so-subtle conflicts that can arise when people live in close quarters for extended periods of time.

(Rain)

Odry was more English than Big Ben (or tried to be). Image: Elena

How to Survive Technological Adolescence

How to Survive Technological Adolescence

Yes, civilizations would take billions of years of tortuous evolution to arise, and then snuff themselves out in an instant of unforgivable neglect. But let’s consider the alternative, the prospect that at least some civilizations learn to live with high technology. Just imagine that the contradictions posed by the vagaries of past brain evolution are consciously resolved and do not lead to self-destruction. Or, may be, even if major disturbances do occur, they are reversed in the subsequent billions of years of biological evolution.

Such societies might live to a prosperous old age, their lifetime measured perhaps on geological and stellar evolutionary time scales.

If only 1 percent of civilizations can survive technological adolescence, take the proper fork at this critical historical branch point and achieve maturity, then the number of extant civilizations in the Galaxy is in the millions. These estimates are stirring. They suggest that the receipt of a message from space is, even before we decode it, a profoundly hopeful sign which will mean that someone has learned to live with high technology and that it is possible to survive technological adolescence. This alone, quite apart from the contents of the message, provides a powerful justification for the search for other civilizations.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Technological Adolescence. Photo by Elena

Technological Civilisations

Technological Civilisations

What percentage of the lifetime of a planet is marked by a technical civilisation? In our case, the Earth has harbored a technical civilisation characterized by radio astronomy for only a few decades out of a lifetime of a few million years. So far, then, for our planet the lifespan is less than 1/108, a millionth of a percent! And unfortunately for us, it is hardly out of the question that we might destroy ourselves tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

Suppose this were to be a typical case, and the destruction so complete that no other civilisation (technical or biological, of the human or any other species) were able to emerge in the billions of years remaining before our Sun dies. Then a simple mathematical equation would prove that at any given time there would be only a handful, a tiny smattering, a pitiful few civilisations which achieved technical phase in the Galaxy, the steady state number maintained as emerging societies replace those recently self-immolated.

Grosso modo, if civilisations tend to destroy themselves soon after reaching a technological phase, there might be no one for us to talk with but ourselves.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Dundas Street, Toronto, Canada. Photo by Elena

Cellular Division

Cellular Division

In ten years of independent work she has never achieved the level of metabolism for cellular division in a single sample.

Norma hurried to her data terminal and called up second by second analysis of the sample’s progress.

She watched in awe as the single cell duplicated itself. The thrill of possibility quickened her pulse Of course, she had to search for the potential cause, but it seemed it was relatively easy to find. An unusually high level of metallic hydrogen was present on the disc, which meant that he sample’s growth medium had been contaminated.

Cellular Division. Photo by Elena

She would have chided herself for her carelessness: clearly she had used one of the specimen containers meant for a forgotten and abandoned project. But this happy accident had shown her the path to what Norma was now convinced would lead to ultimate success. She imagined the life of a single flowering Generala Pazum – P, but it almost broke her heart to realize that she would likely never see it bloom.

Not because this creation was only meant to thrive in the most inhospitable of environments, but because she would be dead long before the specimen grew. A single tear slid down her face.

(From the number 1 SF novel The Rain, by Elena and George)

The Survival of Our Civilisation

The Survival of Our Civilisation

Space and time are interwoven. We cannot look out into space without looking back into time.

In our tenure of the Earth we have accumulated hereditary propensities for submission to leaders and hostility to outsiders, propensities for aggression and rituals, which place sometimes the survival of our species in some question. However, even if have accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage, we have also acquired a desire to learn from history, compassion for others, love for our children and soaring passionate intelligence, which are the tools for our survival and prosperity.

Today, our home planet is the planet of an emerging technical civilisation, struggling to avoid self-destruction, and this is the only religious idea that must prevail.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Civilisation. Illustration by Elena

Battle of the Cemetery

Battle of the Cemetery

Our choice is stark and ironic. The same rocket boosters used to launch probes to the planets are poised to send nuclear warheads to the nations. The radioactive power sources used on Viking, Voyager and other spacecraft and probes derive from the same technology that makes nuclear weapons.

The radar and radio techniques employed to track and guide ballistic missiles and defend against attack are also used to monitor and command those tiny unmanned exploratory spacecraft from Earth which are moving, glistening and elegant, through the solar system and to listen for signals from civilisations near other stars.

If we use these technologies to destroy ourselves, we surely will venture no more to the planets and the stars. But the converse is also true: space exploration – manned and unmanned – uses many of the same technological and organisational skills and demands the same commitment to valor and daring as does the enterprise of war.

Should a time of real disarmament arrive before nuclear war, such exploration would enable the military-industrial establishments of the major powers to engage at long last in untainted enterprise. Time of the Battle of the Cemetary will end. The choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different conetxt, is clearly the universe or nothing.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Battle of the Cemetary. Photo by Elena

Electric Blue Eyes

Electric Blue Eyes

It was a face built of contradictions: hawk’s nose and finely sculpted cheekbones. Strong stubborn jaw with a mouth that seemed almost too small and lips as this and sensitive as a poet’s. She kept her light hair long enough to cover her eyes, and liked to throw it forward to conceal her large forehead, which bothered her, even though men called it distinguished.

The eyes: electric blue, brilliant, vital. The eyes of an eagle, a flier, probing incessantly, never still, never satisfied, but wary, guarded, the eyes of a woman who had never been defeated or banished. The yeas of a woman who wanted to be alone and live in a deep forest, but found herself smothered in the responsibilities of commanding a space-station that plodded along a calculated and fixed orbit.

She was really beautiful. And she realized that she was in danger of losing not only her own life, but of destroying the world. By a single and tiny mistake.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Young woman in an abstract world. Image: Copyright © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Divert the Danger From the Earth

Divert the Danger From the Earth

Norma turned her attention to the calculations she had been working on just prior to the explosion in the Cloud and birth of the sphere.

She called up the program she had written to create a suppression beam. Half of the emitters in the cockpit didn’t work, and it took her over a minute to find a portable field emitter, which she stationed as near as she dared to the core. With shaking hands she coded the beam.

Her initial intent was only to stop the sphere’s progress, but now Norma realized, she had to do more than that. No one, least of all she, had understood the Cloud’s most destructive weapons were the Cloud itself. The small sphere approaching contained a quantity of water sufficient to destroy the ship. Her job now was not only to contain the sphere but to alter harmonies of the sphere and the energy shell surrounding and divert it from the Earth.

(Excerpt from The Rain, the world acclaimed novel by Elena and George B.)

Norma against the most destructive weapon, © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The Audrey Hepburn

The Audrey Hepburn

The Audrey Hepburn was called after a commander’s Daniels Rastoropnov’s fiancee, who patiently waited for him on Earth while he was exploring the asteroids belt.

When we found the sky of this tiny planet a kind of pinkish-yellow rather than the blue which had erroneously first been reported, the announcement was greeted by a chorus of good-natured boos from the public – people wanted the other planets to be, even in this respect, like the Earth.

And yet the Audrey’s landscapes are staggering, the vistas breathtaking.

A long television series was made about the planet. In fact, we all are oriented toward astronomy and we are engaged to it with our heart as well as the mind. Some television series aimed at popular audiences, visually and musically stunning, prove that the public is far more intelligent than it has generally been given credit for; the deepest scientific questions on the nature and origin of the world excite the interests and passions of enormous numbers of people.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Communication of science in an engaging and accessible way. Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

(Many illustrations in this book are based on the striking visuals prepared by NeuroscienceTv for the television series. In fact, books and television series have somewhat different audiences and admit different approaches. This novel and Neuroscience television series represent a hopeful experiment in communicating some of the ideas, methods and joys of science).

Deadly Force From Space - II

Deadly Force From Space -II

Peace is born at mutual understanding. But if there was one thing the Earth could not afford, it was the luxury of understanding. Many called the Cloud the destroyer of the worlds, but humans have always demonstrated on a vast scale that they knew how to conquer those who came to destroy.

“Though we agreed that the attack we had planned might come with an unusually high casualty rate, we were at a loss to imagine in what way we could possibly stop the advance of this deadly force. There is also no way for us to be certain that the part of the Cloud currently visible on our scanners comprises the entirety of the force arrayed against the planet.” Norma hesitated to even allow her thoughts to go further in that direction.

Silently she prayed the Earth would find a better solution before this crew was forced to take an action she never believed she would have to contemplate.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

The Cloud, this deadly force arrayed against our planet. Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Hybrid Varieties

Hybrid Varieties

Norma had worked tirelessly for two nights, creating dozens of virtual hybrid varieties until she found one that could endure the rain and prolonged rainy seasons. The pure happiness she had felt when genetic analysis confirmed the stability of the hybrid could not be rivaled.

She was aware of the fact that the day she would present her hybrid to the world, she would be hailed as a hero and secured her place forever among elite botanical geneticists. She also knew as well that the exponential growth of thousands of seeds, including dozens of exotic ornamentals had yet to prove their viability.

But as soon as she reached the bay, she saw that the flowers that remained on stems were dried black and brown. Most of the blooms had already fallen into the humidifiers below them. Likewise, the unharvested vegetables and fruits were rotting on their vines.

(Excerpt from The Rain, the world acclaimed novel by Elena and George B.)

Genetic analysis, hybrid varieties. Illustration : Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Dangerous curiosity

Dangerous curiosity

Moments later, they watched as the spheres began to spin and gyrate along their individual axes. The various colors within them – oranges, reds, yellows, lavenders – all increased in vibrancy with the motion, and within minutes they had begun to move gracefully among each other, gliding, spinning upward with their increasing speed and intensity.

The astronauts could almost feel the pressure. All of this was outside their area of expertise. But the phenomenon was something more than a dangerous curiosity or a small problem to be solved. Six crewmen assigned to aeroponics hurried into their lab and begun clearing the space as if their lives depended on it. Well, they depended on it. And not only their lives, but those of billions of human beings.

(Excerpt from The Rain, the world acclaimed novel by Elena and George B.)

Dangerous Curiosity. Photo by Elena

Dangerous Force From Space

Dangerous Force From Space

Our first first-contact situation is in every way a textbook example of everything you don’t want to happen when you introduce yourself to a new species. In fact, we deal with a powerful and potentially dangerous force which we cannot fight with our most advanced technology.

We, the Humans, like to think of ourselves as invincible and superior to everything that might occur. But our evidence suggests we have been defeated on numerous occasions by storms, earthquakes, hurricanes and so on. The knowledge of our real situation could have created a cognitive dissonance the civilisation might have had trouble reconciling. An unpleasant thought and a memory we couldn’t live with.

In fact, what we lack in experience, we make up for with a record of biased judgments. As it stands now, we send five ships out to make contact with one of the most dangerous situations we’ve ever encountered.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Dangerous Force. Photo by Elena

The Earth Is Dying

The Earth Is Dying

Today, the human race is rushing headlong toward extinction. The problem is not for the generations to come. The dying has begun. Implacable rain chokes our cities. Farmlands are becoming lakes while megatons of water fall from the sky. Deserts are disappearing and rain forests are rapidly invading villages and towns. Global temperatures are rising toward the greenhouse level.

Worst of all, the oceans – the great embracing mother seas that are the foundation of all life on our planet – the oceans are being transformed in a large basin of distilled water, they are losing their salt, and all marine life will dye in a few short months.

We do not have a century to prepare ourselves to defend the environment. We do not have even years. The oceans are already beginning to die and after they are dead, we will dye as well. The humans are in a race against their own extinction.

(From The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

The Earth is dying. Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Hope and Fear Mean Nothing

Hope and Fear Mean Nothing

If she thought the Orpheus III stood a chance against the Cloud, Norma would set course for the ship at once, but something in her gut told her that she was still missing some piece of the puzzle. Perhaps the true history of the Cloud was unknowable. However it didn’t matter.

Most troubling of all was the thought that the reality of space exploration proved that there were mysteries out there that were never going to be solved. And as these dispiriting thoughts raced through her mind, Norma saw that she had never felt so alone in her entire life. For all she had loved or hated, there was something comforting in the knowledge that in the end, she was surrounded by the crowd. Norma realized suddenly that had she not accepted the command, she might have lost the chance forever to discover the truth about her own elusive past. Was that chance really all that had brought her to this moment, and much more important, was it worth it?

Hope, fear, regret, doubt – they meant nothing. Illustration:© Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

All that mattered was her determination to do right by her people, and the greater good here was learning how to save the planet. Hope, fear, regret, doubt – they meant nothing.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George)

Salvation Means Change

Salvation Means Change

Salvation means change and most people fear change more than anything else. To save ourselves we must engage in genetic research. Only by developing new forms of life, creating creatures that can eat up pollutants and may be convert them into harmless biodegradable waste matter, can we hope to cleanse the Cloud quickly enough to avert our own destruction.

We have to save our civilisation. That is way we need a research laboratory in space and that is why the UN appointed Norma Schmidt as commander. Hers background in botanical genetics is impressive. There is no one more highly regarded in the field. There was never a question that a ship designed to collect and analyse exotic biological specimens should have her on board.

Her background is impressive. Illustration : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

No national government would do it, and no single corporation could afford to risk the necessary investment capital. That is why the space-station had to be multinational effort by the multinational corporations.

To save the world. To keep the human race from going the way of the dinosaurs.

(From The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George)