PD Smith

An interesting discussion developed the other day on Twitter about the idea of "crowdfunding" books - asking people for donations to fund the author while writing a book. Simon Sellars (@ballardian) started the ball rolling, sending me a link to Deanna Zandt's blog in which she asks for donations.

I have to say I was initially sceptical, not to say cynical, about the whole idea. As Will Wiles (@WillWiles) said, it seemed a bit too much like "panhandling". Science fiction author Tim Maughan (@timmaughan) was similarly negative about the idea. 

But having thought about this and listened to Deanna's side of things I see that it certainly can work. Although, as she says, it clearly works best if you are talking to a community that is open to this approach. I'm not sure it would work for the kind of cultural history books I write, for example.

Tim Maly (@doingitwrong), co-founder of Capybara Games, pointed out the advantages of this way of funding books and other artistic projects. As he said, if it works for Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) at Kickstarter, why shouldn't it work for other authors?

Anyway, it's an interesting debate and Tim Maly has collated the various comments from people and written a fascinating blog on the issues it raises which is well worth reading.

Michelle Pauli (@michellepauli) at the Guardian has also written a rather more sceptical piece highlighting the ethical problems involved. For example, she points out that "as [Deanna Zandt] is writing about social networking it might be relevant to the reader to know if, for example, the MD of Facebook has contributed a large sum to the writing of her book".

One nagging fear I have about crowdfunding is that if it catches on then publishers may stop paying advances altogether. Authors are already having to make do with much lower advances. And today I see in The Bookseller that an agent has struck a deal where there is no advance and the profits are split between author and publisher.

Perhaps the new age of the eBook will change things, allowing authors to reach untapped audiences and making writing more rewarding. I hope so. If not then crowdfunding books may well be the only option for some authors.

My review of Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson, is in today's Independent. It's a wonderfully eclectic collection of specially commissioned essays celebrating the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society. Among the authors are scientists (Dawkins, Steve Jones etc), historians (Simon Schaffer) and novelists (Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson). It's also beautifully illustrated with images from the Royal Society's collection. I was particularly struck by a reproduction of the title page of Einstein's 1917 popularization of relativity, On the Special and General Theory of Relativity. It is signed by Einstein who had sent it to his friend, the Berlin physician Hans Mühsam. On it, Mühsam has written (in German):

"This copy is the first one which left the printer. It was sent to me by Prof Einstein the moment he had received it, and shortly before I went to France with the army. Hans Mühsam, Berlin, at present at the French Front, April 1917."

The idea of Mühsam taking this copy of Einstein's book with him to the hell of the trenches in the First World War is deeply moving. It speaks volumes about the power of scientific ideas.

You can see the title page of Einstein's book here and read my review here.

The latest issue of Wired UK, "Rebooting Britain", has a piece by me on how cities can help us to save the planet.

It's based on research I'm doing for my next book which explores the past, present and future of cities. Here's a taster:

"For the first time in history, more than half the world's population live in cities: by 2030, three out of five people will be city dwellers. But the British are bucking this trend. The 2001 census revealed an "exodus from the cities". Since 1981, Greater London and the six former metropolitan counties of Greater Manchester, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, West Midlands and West Yorkshire have lost some 2.25 million people in net migration exchanges with the rest of the UK; in recent years this trend has accelerated. This is not sustainable. British people need to be cured of the insidious fantasy of leaving the city and owning a house in the country: their romantic dream will become a nightmare for people elsewhere on the planet."

There's also a great piece by science fiction author Paul McAuley on the technological changes that could make cities carbon neutral:

"From the air, the ideal green city should resemble Mayan ruins poking out of a lush forest. Under the canopy, there'll be densely populated but diverse and vibrant streets humming with every kind of human life. Utopian? You bet."

Read my article here and Paul's here.

In a fascinating article for the Sunday Times, Jonathan Leake asks could the Large Hadron Collider be sabotaging itself from the future?

"Some physicists suggest that when billions of pounds have been spent on the kit to probe such ideas, there is little need to invent new ones about time travel and self-sabotage. History shows, however, it is unwise to dismiss too quickly ideas that are initially seen as science fiction. Peter Smith, a science historian and author of Doomsday Men, which looks at the links between science and popular culture, points out that what started as science fiction has often become the inspiration for big discoveries."

Read the rest here.

On 13 November 1984, a Soviet missile was launched from Kapustin Yar, east of Stalingrad. About forty minutes later an R-36M intercontinental ballistic missile blasted off from an underground silo in Kazakhstan. Known to Western intelligence experts as the SS-18 Satan missile, it was capable of carrying either a single 24-megaton warhead or eight independently targeted 600-kiloton warheads. The bomb that killed some 200,000 people at Hiroshima was just 12 kilotons.

The launch was monitored by the West’s spy satellites. But it was an unexceptional moment in the history of the arms race and soon forgotten. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached, and the ice of the cold war began to thaw, did military analysts realize the significance of these otherwise unexceptional rocket launches. They were the first operational test of what the Western press later described as ‘Russia’s doomsday machine’.

In my book Doomsday Men, I showed how popular culture played a vital role in inspiring the dream of the superweapon, a dream that in the nuclear age turned into the nightmare of mutually assured destruction, or MAD.

More than any other weapon, it was Leo Szilard’s chilling notion of the cobalt bomb (first described on American radio in 1950) that came to symbolize the threat of global nuclear destruction. The C-bomb consisted of one or more massive hydrogen bombs jacketed with cobalt. It was the ultimate weapon, a doomsday device which could spread radioactive fallout across the entire planet.

As throughout the history of superweapons, fiction and film played a key role in exploring the horrific implications of the C-bomb and how it could be used to create a doomsday machine, most famously in Peter George’s best-selling thriller Red Alert (1958) and Stanley Kubrick’s cold-war classic (based on George’s novel) Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

As Ambassador DeSadeski explains in Dr Strangelove: ‘If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety-three years!’

Twenty years after Kubrick’s film depicted the world being destroyed by a Soviet doomsday machine, the real one became operational. Nicknamed by its commanders ‘The Dead Hand’, it was a sophisticated system of sensors, communication networks and command bunkers, reinforced to withstand nuclear strikes. At its heart was a computer. As soon as the Soviet leadership detected possible incoming missiles, it activated the system, known by its code name ‘Perimetr’. Part of the secret codes needed to launch a Soviet nuclear strike were released and the computerized process set in motion. Then, like a spider at the centre of its web, the computer would watch and wait for evidence of an attack.

As I said in my book, the way it worked was strikingly similar to the doomsday machine described by Dr Strangelove. He explained that the computer was ‘linked to a vast interlocking network of data-input sensors which are stationed throughout the country and orbited in satellites. These sensors monitor heat, ground shock, sound, atmospheric pressure and radioactivity.’

Much about the Dead Hand system is still shrouded in secrecy. Russian arms expert Bruce Blair revealed the first details in 1993. Recently declassified interviews with former Soviet officials have cast fresh light on the system. They show that there were doubts about its reliability. Some even questioned whether it was ever fully deployed. However, these interviews also reveal the shocking possibility that the Dead Hand system may have been fully automatic.

Previously it was thought that once the computer detected signs of an attack, it required human approval before any counter attack could be launched. A Soviet officer buried deep underground in a command post would have had the unenviable task of authorising the Dead Hand to complete its lethal task. But these interviews raise the possibility that the Dead Hand had eliminated the need for any human control. It may be that the Dead Hand could launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal as soon as its sensors indicated that an attack had occurred. That idea is truly terrifying.

A machine would be responsible for unleashing nuclear weapons with a total destructive power as much as 50,000 times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Even without Szilard's C-bomb, who knows what would be left alive after such a nuclear holocaust.

Intriguingly, Nicholas Thompson, writing in Wired today, argues that Perimetr was actually designed ‘to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis’. In other words, it was an insurance policy meant to reassure the Kremlin’s hawks that their country could hit back, even after a sneak attack by submarine launched missiles, which would have given the Soviet leadership barely thirteen minutes advance warning of a devastating attack.

As far as anyone knows, the Dead Hand remains operational. What is truly worrying, even today, is the secrecy that continues to surround the whole subject. Thompson has found that neither George Schultz nor former CIA director James Woolsey had heard of the Dead Hand system. Former Soviet era officials will still not discuss it. One who dared to talk died in mysterious circumstances. Such secrecy is, as Dr Strangelove realised, disastrous: ‘Yes, but the...whole point of the doomsday machine...is lost...if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?’

The doomsday machine is supposed to be the ultimate deterrent. But if no one knows that the deterrent exists... Well, you've all seen the final scenes of Dr Strangelove.