Keith Mansfield

Some people say there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Earlier this week, mine lasted 32 hours, beginning with a grand American breakfast (eggs sunnyside up) in downtown San Francisco, followed by a cable car ride up Nob Hill, clinging onto the outside which they’d never let you do in London.

A little shopping preceded a walk along the waterfront, staring out towards The Rock, otherwise known as Alcatraz, on which Jo Rowling’s Dementor-guarded prison of Azkaban was based. Her third title, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is many reader’s favourite so it was fitting to see it as I’ve spent a little of the past few days getting back to the third Johnny Mackintosh book.

Great cities have great architecture and San Fran is no exception. There’s the landmark Transamerica Tower and, as you can see above, I managed to catch a glimpse of the unforgettable Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Mason Hill before heading back towards the hotel, having lunch (a pastrami and swiss sandwich even Joey Tribbiani would have been proud of), and then on to the airport, scene of my first ever full body scan where the security guards can see right through your clothes (I felt so sorry for mine!). We talked about these on The Science of Spying exhibition that I worked on, so it’s amazing to see them already in action.

On the plane it was a lamb curry, two disappointing films (Aliens in the Attic and the animated 9) and a chat with neighbour Katy who showed me photos of the prizewinning cats she breeds. She’s also a dog lover and there’s an Old English sheepdog in the family, so we talked about Bentley. To get over the poor movies I also re-watched the first half of the terrific Time Traveler’s Wife, which is a splendid adaption of a great but difficult book to bring to the screen. I could be wrong but the film seemed to die in the UK from a near total lack of publicity, after a very delayed global release. Some fans of the book weren’t keen on the casting, but Rachel McAdams is seriously underrated and always splendid and Eric Bana did a great job too.

Sadly, not much time for sleep, before leaping onto the Heathrow Express and heading for lovely London town – it’s always good to come home after some time away. One of the tricks to defeat jetlag is to stay awake as long as possible and not succumb to the thought of “a little lie down” which could turn into several hours and then you’re scuppered for the week. To keep me going, I had the prospect of the 30th Brit Awards Launch Party to look forward to, which was happily an early evening affair.

Arriving at the Dome, I confess I eschewed the red carpet, thinking I didn’t look quite my best having been up for more than 24 hours at this point. I’ve just started Tweeting (you can follow me @KeithMansfield) so had checked in on presenter @FearneCotton during the day. She’d suggested a choice of three outfits and people were sending their preferences. The power of the internet meant she picked blue. I bumped into her as I entered Indigo where the event was being held, but was a bit too jetlagged to twig and say hello. The next moment she was up on stage introducing 80s throwback synth singer La Roux.

Performances from JLS (X Factor runners up made good from a couple of years ago), Ellie Golding (winner of the most promising newcomer award) and Pixie Lott – the night could largely have been retitled “Here Come the Girls”. I’m sure everyone performed fine. Though I was struggling to stay awake by this stage, everyone was enthusiastically cheered on by the kids from the Brit School who were down at the front.

It’s the thirtieth anniversary of The Brits. For me the greatest ever was the night Sam Fox presented with Mick Fleetwood and it was total chaos, but the organizers prefer not to talk about that one. Sadly, a little self-indulgently, the award for “Best Live Act” has been dropped this year for “Best Performance at the Brits”. In an era when the industry is being devastated by illegal downloads, we’ve seen a great resurgence of live music and it seems short-sighted not to recognize this.

Even so, the Brits is the music award everyone wants to win (or even go to so it was great to have an invite). As if he doesn’t have enough on his mantelpiece, Robbie Williams is up for this year’s lifetime achievement gong. The main event is in Earl’s Court on 16th February.

By the time it had all finished, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going, got on the Tube in the wrong direction and spent about an hour stumbling around Canary Wharf  buying supplies I didn’t need before finding the way home, all ready for a 6.30am start for work the next day. I’ve survived the week relatively unscathed when it comes to jetlag, but confess to still feeling rather tired.

The adage from creative writing courses up and down the land is that “there’s no such thing as good writing – only good rewriting”. I must have gone through nearly fifty drafts writing Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London. trying to prove the saying true. It’s lucky I’m such a great re-reader because I can honestly say I never got tired of it. However, it was an incredibly liberating experience to embark on the next one. I’d go so far as to say it was even better than beginning a brand new Harry Potter book having waited a year since the previous one, and only those who know me will realize quite what that means.

So, as I wrote it, Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze became my new favourite book and I struggled to contain my excitement over some of the chapters. That said, it’s embarrassing now to look back on the first draft – we’ve probably reached something like version twenty-five or so now and each has been a major imporvement on what went before. I’m still excited to read it, but now can’t wait for the thrill of book three. For today Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze is published. You can read the cover copy and the opening page over at JohnnyMackintosh.com.

This is a time of great uncertainty, as an author never knows how a book will be received. My fervent hope is that you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Lovely news earlier this week when I discovered Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London is one of twenty titles longlisted for the New Horizons Prize. This is a county prize, organized by the Dorset School Library Service, for debut novels appealing to the 9-13 age group. A creative writing competition will run alongside the award.

Can I take a moment to say how much I love the county of Dorset, have spent much time there and think the DSLS is clearly run by a very enlightened bunch. Not wishing to influence the shortlisting process in any way, I’d add that it would be great if everyone votes for Johnny Mackintosh. I was delighted to set the fictional town of Yarnton Hill in the southwest on the Dorset/Somerset border so there’s even the added incentive of having a base for evil aliens right on your doorstep.

I also want to add how much I love the name of this award because New Horizons is also the first spaceship ever that will visit the dwarf planet Pluto – at least that’s what NASA thinks. Early on in Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze, the Spirit of London gets there first!

Image credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

With only a few days to publication of the new Johnny Mackintosh book, I’ve posted up a couple of excerpts to whet your appetites. The first is the opening page; the other is from a scene later in the book.

Publication is Thursday 7th January, but you can pre-order Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze from any of these sites.

Partway through last month I went on a trip to one of the most amazing places in Britain. The stones at Stonehenge have stood for over four and a half thousand years. There’s been a monument of some kind at the site for even longer. Our very own wonder of the ancient world was erected around the same time as Egypt’s pyramids and it’s amazing to think that, even when the Romans invaded Britain, Stonehenge was standing tall and proud as an ancient mystery.

The great thing about the visit was that I was able to walk inside the stones, after dark, with hardly anyone around. To coincide with the winter solstice, the day was organized by the Royal Astronomical Society to mark the end of the International Year of Astronomy. Archaeologists were on hand to explain the different elements of the site, while astronomers were there to talk you through the night sky above.

Sadly, the day was overcast. I was especially disappointed because the first thing one of our astronomer guides said was that Cassiopeia, Johnny’s very own constellation (his Star Mark) would have been directly overhead, set against the backbone of the Milky Way. There’s even talk of making the area the UK’s second designated dark sky park, following on from Galloway Forest Park in Scotland.

For millennia, indeed since before Stonehenge was even thought of, people have gazed upwards at the night sky in awe. The stars have driven humanity’s progress, whether it was calculating when to plant crops, navigating ships or racing to the Moon. Now it’s rare to be able to see the night sky and there’s a danger we’ll lose our interest and sense of wonder at the heavens. It’s important for our futures and those of our descendants that this doesn’t happen, and the International Dark Sky association are doing their best to fight against light pollution everywhere.

As well as the stones, the site was hosting the IYA’s From the Earth to the Universe exhibition. If that doesn’t have enough spectacular space shots for you, check out today’s entry in the Twelve Days of Johnny Mackintosh, over at JohnnyMackintosh.com.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

It’s actually a beautiful White Christmas here in Nottingham, having snowed this morning and then turned into a gorgeous sunshiny day. I hope you’re enjoying yourselves as much as I am.

I would like to think that some of you may have been more than a little disappointed not to receive a copy of Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze in your Christmas stockings this morning. Well, although the new book doesn’t publish until 7th January, don’t despair.

Everyone’s heard of the twelve days of Christmas. From tomorrow, over at JohnnyMackintosh.com, I’ll bring you the twelve days of Johnny Mackintosh. Continuing every day until publication, I’ll post twelve images I’ve created or picked out that follow sequentially through the book, giving a little taster of what’s to come, but without spoiling anything.

As if that’s not enough, I thought I’d leave you with a Christmas brainteaser. Below are three anagrams, the solutions to which are chapter titles in the new book. Thinking caps on!

A Venus pro (9)

Hello Keith – try in rebel flats (2, 3, 5, 2, 3, 4, 6)

Draw on exit path (3, 4, 7)

Eugene Cernan: last man to stand (or drive) on the Moon (photo Harrison Schmitt, NASA)

Earlier this year was the glorious fortieth anniversary of the first Moon landing. Today marks the rather more ignominious occasion of humans (I could still simply write “Man”) leaving the Moon for the last time. On this day in 1972, Apollo 17’s Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt lifted off from the Mare Serenitatis and the first chapter of the Space Age ended, leaving the rest of the book unwritten.

It was claimed that, reaching the Moon was somehow an end in itself and that, less than four years on, the public had become as bored of the whole incredible affair as the politicians. In the many years since, all we’ve done is send a few robot explorers into the solar system and some people into low Earth orbit, most recently to the International Space Station (ISS). Anyone who thinks the ISS is a long way away should realize the Moon is a thousand times further – it seems almost as out of reach today as when President Kennedy made his famous speech in 1961.

Of course it’s right to scoff at the witless lunatics who disbelieve the whole glorious adventure. Even now, mirrors left behind by the crew of Apollo 11 can be used by anyone around the world with the right equipment to bounce lasers back and forth to measure the distance between us with great precision. Yet it was such a stand out achievement that you can almost understand why some, who weren’t alive at the time, are a little incredulous. The pace of technological advance appears so tremendous, yet we’re unable to repeat what we achieved all those decades ago.

At least now a return is being mooted, even if driven by a second space race. The West is being overtaken as the world’s economic powerhouse and there’s no better national symbol to prove it than to send a new generation of humanity a step further out and plant a new flag on another world. And the West is responding by dusting off plans and also looking to go back – I suspect (and hope) we’ll all end up pooling resources and journeying together.

the Moon combined with background stars (double exposure, NASA)

If we’re to survive as a species then one thing is certain – we need to colonize space. Failure to do so, simply keeping all our eggs in this one basket here on Earth, means we’ll one day be wiped out. It might happen next year (let’s hope not!) or it might take a few thousand years, but the simple rules of probability, coupled with the global catastrophic risks, make it certain. While I’m sad I won’t see it myself, I long for a day of human colonies around the galaxy, embassies on alien worlds, spaceships with mixed human and alien crews exploring together and witnessing sights we can’t even begin to dream of. I’ve always loved the words of my hero, Carl Sagan, who said:

“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it, we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen out toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return.”

It’s thirty-seven years since we left the Moon – I hope it doesn’t take us so long again to return and that, when we do, we don’t stop but instead use our handily placed satellite as a stepping stone to begin our great journey to the stars.

Alphabetical order always struck me as unfair. Arabella Asquith was born with a distinct advantage over Zachary Zephaniah. Even the brothers James and John sprang to rather greater prominence than their mustachioed father. I’m an egalitarian. Everyone should have an equal chance to shine. That’s why I’ve always felt sorry for the letter ‘z’ – loved it, supported it, tried to ensure it wasn’t always bringing up the rear. Almost every list starts with an ‘a’, but how often do people go all the way through to the end? Never ever – and, when they do that, poor ‘z’ is split in two:

In one verse, All Saints give us:

“Flexing vocabulary runs right through me
The alphabet runs all the way from A to Zee”

But in the next, it’s:

“Sometimes vocabulary runs through my head
The alphabet runs all the way from A to Zed”

And some words cheat – they pretend to use z. How else should Coleridge have spelt the mythical place where Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decreed? Perhaps the opium got to him.

The Greek alphabet has only 24 letters and z (or zeta) is right up there in sixth place. None of the other letters jostled for position, yet somehow (decreed by the great Alpha to Omega?) z was relegated all the way to the end and beyond. Even the new upstarts finished ahead of it.

At least in mathematics z holds pride of place, though only in italics. Not only is it first choice for any complex variable (if you don’t know, you don’t want to know), but the Riemann zeta function remains the greatest mathematical mystery there is – that may one day amaze us with the distribution of prime numbers.

Some people think that –ise endings are the way things have always been and it’s those upstart revolutionaries from across the Atlantic who introduced us to –ize. But they’d be wrong. It’s on these shores that spellings went awry, de-zedding the dictionary for its common-as-muck sibling, as if the language weren’t swimming in a swirling sea of smug esses already. At least Inspector Morse recognized that no Oxford don would have written ‘realise’ in a suicide note.

Happily Tibor Fischer’s excellent The Thought Gang is so deliberately packed full of zany z words that it even comes with a glossary. I don’t know if he rhymes them with me or head, but at least it shows I’m not the only z zealot.

Eighteen months ago I went to the Royal Society’s awards evening to acknowledge the best popular science books. On the shortlist was The Sun Kings by Stuart Clark. He didn’t win, but Stuart was definitely the most fashionably dressed finalist present. We chatted for a while and he made his book sound absolutely  fascinating. I left resolving to read it straightaway, but one thing led to another and, only recently, did it reach the top of my (very long) reading list.

Sadly, nowadays I have very liittle time for casual reading – everything has a purpose. Happily, DAMTP (the famous Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge where Stephen Hawking is based and where I occasionally went as an undergraduate) hosts a brilliant online popular maths magazine called +Plus. It’s full of zillions (to use a very mathematical number) of interesting articles, one of which is now written by me. When they wanted me to write a book review for them, I remembered my conversation with Stuart and asked if I could stretch the definition of mathematics just a little to include The Sun Kings.

The story is set around a giant solar flare observed in 1859, telling how the science of astrophysics grew out of observational astronomy. In today’s world where everything seems to be so short-term or temporary, it’s incredible to read of people making observations for decades and then their data being passed on to those who came after them to add to and make sense of.

It’s important because our island Earth isn’t as isolated as we might think – the Sun has a major influence on what happens here. Our home star goes through an eleven year cycle of magnetic activity that is currently building towards a maximum (between 2011 and 2013). On the downside, satellites are likely to be damaged and our mobile phones might stop working some of the time. On the plus front, there should be more beautiful auroras, like in the banner at the top of this blog.

With Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze not coming out until January, it’s well worth putting The Sun Kings on your Christmas list and taking a look at +Plus, to give you a picture of just how interesting maths can really be.