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.

Shame-faced, I’m emerging from a long period in the blogging wilderness. At least I haven’t been idle. In only a few short weeks the second book in the Johnny Mackintosh saga will be published.

Kepler's Supernova (Credit: NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.)

Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze will be available from 7th January. The story begins nearly six months after the end of Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London. The Star Blaze of the title is how the majority of the galaxy’s inhabitants refer to a supernova, the stupendous explosion that occurs when a giant star runs out of fuel at the end of its life and collapses. These events appear rare – the last one observed in our Milky Way was seen in 1604, now known as “Kepler’s Supernova”.

This beautiful picture, put together using images from the Chandra telescope, shows the nebula left behind following the explosion witnessed with the naked eye (there were no telescopes then) over four centuries ago on Earth.

When they happen, supernovas produce more energy in their gigantic blaze than all the rest of their galaxy combined – anything in the path of the explosion has no chance of survival. Johnny’s fear is that Earth is very much in danger…

Today, there are celebrations right across England – it’s Johnny Mackintosh’s birthday. Some might say the public are raising their glasses to the bard, for the 23rd April is also Shakespeare’s birth (and death) day. More likely still, they might claim pubs up and down the land are full to celebrate St George’s Day, that noble slayer of dragons. Isn’t Johnny every bit as heroic?

If Johnny were especially lucky, he might have a cake a little like the one baked for my birthday last year:

Readers of Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London will know the book opens on Johnny’s birthday, but it wasn’t originally 23rd April. If I remember, I set the first day of the early drafts as 14 April, but eventually decided I needed to move a little later in the month for the chronology to coincide better with the final day of the football season.

Growing up in Nottingham, every year I’d participate in the St George’s Day Parade (as a cub and then scout), which was generally a pain as it often coincided with the FA Cup semifinals (only highlights) on the TV. It’s hard for people to imagine how starved of televised football we were back then.

More recently, St George seemed to have fallen out of fashion with the absurd position the English couldn’t celebrate our own patron saint. Here in London we’re still in the frankly rather strange position where we have a huge parade from Trafalgar Square on St Patrick’s Day (the patron saint of Ireland) yet there’s normally been next to nothing for St George himself. No offence to our Irish neighbours who I love dearly, but happily George is returning to prominence.

There are also celebrations for Shakespeare at the Globe on the south bank. Being a writer, it’s impossible not to be aware of the shadow of the most famous ever Britain, who looms over all our work. When I moved the date to 23rd April it was actually with a nod to the bard, as I’d heard that he lived in Shoreditch, which is the same part of London as me. Just before Christmas, the site of his original theatre was discovered about half a mile from my house. There’s not a lot left, as it was deconstructed in Shakespeare’s own lifetime with the timbers removed to be used in the building of a new theatre to show off his plays – the Globe. It would be funny if, one day, while performing Henry V there, the final line of the opening scene of Act 3 was spoken as:

Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Johnny Mackintosh!’

Thursday March 5th 2009 is World Book Day, but only in Hackney, the other parts of the UK and in Ireland. The rest of the world celebrates World Book Day on 23rd April, coincidentally both William Shakespeare’s and Johnny Mackintosh’s birthdays, but here in the British Isles we like to ignore our famous sons and do things a little differently.

Hackney is close to where I live in London. Shakespeare’s original theatre is there, where he performed in person as well as having his plays first staged (before it was dismantled and the timbers used to construct The Globe on London’s south bank). Nowadays it’s home to another theatre, the famous Hackney Empire, and is represented in Parliament by Diane Abbott MP (a regular on my favourite telly show, This Week).

Throughout its history it’s been a haven for free-thinkers, partly because it’s just five miles outside the centre of historic London which meant people were able to give speeches there criticizing the state and the church that weren’t allowed any closer in (by an Act of Parliament long before Diane Abbott’s time).

It’s also where I shall be giving a little talk on World Book Day. I hope this shan’t be too subversive, even though I’ll explain how time travel is possible and why aliens are almost certain to exist in our galaxy, as well as discussing whether or not there was ever a real place called Atlantis.

If you want to listen and even get yourself a signed copy of Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London, make your way to the Hackney Museum and Library for 4.30pm. The full address is

Hackney Museum

1 Reading Lane

London E1 1GQ

The event’s been organized by the fabulous Victoria Park Books and I’ll be there until around 6.30 and will be talking with two other writers, Belinda Hollyer and Gaby Halberstam. For younger readers, there’ll be some other authors too: David Lucas, Kevin Waldron, Carolyn Hink, Guy Bass and Will Gatti. We all look forward to meeting you.

There’s something wonderful about being in a museum after hours. Umberto Eco’s wonderful Foucault’s Pendulum opens with one of the protagonists hiding out in the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris. I was once invited to a party to celebrate the opening of a new gallery at the Science Museum in London and was able to slip away unnoticed, exploring the space section of the museum on my own with access never dreamt of during regular hours.

Last night, the Science Museum held one of its “Lates” sessions, a rather more official way of seeing the museum than my earlier nocturnal wanderings. And I noted, with disappointment, that this time, the route to the Apollo 10 capsule was barred. But it was good to see signed copies of Johnny Mackintosh  beside Harry Potter in the museum bookshop.

However, while most of the crowds were there to see the Japan Car exhibition, I’d gone along on another of my moon missions – to view the high-definition videos from SELENE, one of Japan’s satellites in lunar orbit.

In mythology, Selene is the name of the Greek equivalent of Luna and was a daughter of two Titans. Nowadays, the spacecraft is more often called Kaguya, the name chosen by the Japanese public after a beautiful lunar princess in a Japanese folk story (who rejects countless marriage proposals here on Earth before returning to her original home on the Moon). SELENE stands for SELenological and ENgineering Explorer

Although images from the satellite are high-definition and give a better view of overflying the Moon than we’ve had before, they were projected onto the screen in the Science Museum’s small theatre rather than its giant Imax, and were at the limits of magnification with some pixilation setting in, so still came across as pretty low-resolution. But it’s always a wonderful thing to see Earthrise.

It’s well worth taking a look at the dedicated youtube channel. Sadly, I’m not allowed embed the videos into this blog to give you a taster. The accompanying copy read “the closest you can get to flying over the moon”, but I’d argue that, for the very best Moon experience, you really have to see the Imax film Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D. Now that, genuinely, is just like being there…

All the space images are copyright Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)

Political observers argue over the influence of Britain’s best-selling tabloid. Normally the paper supports the Conservatives and “It ’s The Sun wot won it” was a famous headline from April 1992 when John Major confounded the opinion polls to defeat Neil Kinnock and give the Tories their fourth straight election win.

Currently, I’m reading The Alastair Campbell Diaries (Arrow Books). Tony Blair and his chief spin doctor went to a lot of trouble to woo Rupert Murdoch and have The Sun on board to support Labour in the 1997 election, which they duly did. Was it The Sun wot won it again?

Now, in 2009, I’m delighted to say The Sun has come out for Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London. I posted a copy of the new paperback to Natasha Harding who reviews books for the paper’s Something for the Weekend section. She sent me a lovely email back saying, “I started reading it last night, and although I’m not your target audience I think it’s great.”

I’m not sure that the paper has the same influence on the book-buying habits of its readers as it claims on their voting habits, but it’s great that they’ve joined the Daily Express in recommending Johnny and Clara’s adventures.

Johnny Mackintosh went into The Sun on Friday 23rd January. The full review reads:

JOHNNY MACKINTOSH AND THE SPIRIT OF LONDON by Keith Mansfield (Quercus, £6.99): Johnny is a 13-year-old who lives in a children’s home. He’s often in hot water for getting up to no good with the help of his dog Bentley.

As well as loving football, the youngster is a techno-wizz which has made him a firm favourite with his peers but not with the staff of Halader House.

When he runs away to find his sister he falls straight into alien hands and is sent into outer space.

In order to escape, he needs to find out who he really is – but could that mean he will never get to go home?

Although aimed at young lads this was a great read and I really enjoyed it.

If you click on the image you should see a larger version of the actual piece.

To read all the reviews of Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London, go to the What other people say about Johnny Mackintosh page on the johnnymackintosh.com website. I have to say they’re all lovely and I’m grateful to everyone who’s written about the book.

Tomorrow, another milestone is reached in the young life of Johnny Mackintosh. Up until now, you’ve only been able to read about his adventures in one of those beautiful, but slightly bulky, hardbacks. From this point forwards, all good bookshops wil be selling the paperback as well.

The soft cover of Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London is every bit as handsome as the original, but also features additional text on the front reading:

“Alex Rider meets Dr Who in an incredible adventure across time and space”

When I first pitched the series to my publisher, Quercus, is was as “Harry Potter meets Star Wars”, but I’m equally happy with their wording and the Dr Who reference admirably captures Johnny and Clara’s time-travelling adventures.

You might notice this announcement is the first entry for a while as I’m still very busy finishing off Johnny’s second story – oh to be able to travel in time myself, taking the manuscript with me, in order to complete it well ahead of schedule.

As I explain in the Science of Johnny Mackintosh, that’s sadly not possible, but I have had great fun during my school visits recently, talking about how any of us should soon be able to take a trip into the far future – but only on a one-way ticket.

My first ever school visit took me to Hounslow Manor in southwest London. Before last Friday, I confess the thought of facing “the youth of today” en masse made me slightly nervous, but the reality was that I’ve never been in a room with nearly fifty such polite, charming and enthusiastic pupils – certainly not when I was at school.

Before getting started I had five minutes to judge the winners of a poetry competition from a shortlist – this was impossible because the standard was incredibly high. I confess I wimped out and drew the names of the winners from out of a hat but I’d say to everyone whose poem was there, their entries were superb and I’m sure there are some future writers among the finalists.

I began trying to talk a little about story-telling. With a willing volunteer and a couple of trusty umbrellas (doubling as light sabres) I re-enacted the pivotal scene from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back to demonstrate the beauty of a plot twist, before also talking about Harry Potter, probably the series that most influenced my writing.

We moved on through discussions of time travel (which clearly happens in Hounslow as some of the pupils had actually met Albert Einstein earlier that very day), the possible location of Atlantis and the existence of aliens. Of course those are all elements of the Johnny Mackintosh story and I hope whetted a few appetites for the book. Then I rushed through a reading of when Johnny (and Clara) are taken into space for the very first time.

The reason it was rushed was because I overran terribly, partly because of all the hands in the air while I was talking to my eager listeners. I didn’t want to ignore possible the best audience I’ll ever have, so I found myself stopping all the time to take questions (which I didn’t feel I did justice to properly). I was asked if there was a moral to my story, whether I’d seen the Transformers film, if you went back in time how could you bring the dead back to life, and zillions more, all of them fascinating and thought-provoking.

Looking back, I probably made the cardinal author’s sin of not saying enough about my own writing and book, so if there’s anyone from the school who wants to ask me a question they didn’t get to pose on the day, or one they felt I didn’t answer well enough, or they couldn’t even get to the talk so missed out on asking a burning question about Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London, me or writing and stories in general, now’s your chance. If you leave a comment on this entry I promise to give you a considered reply.

And, finally, thanks to everyone for being such a wonderful audience.