C OV ER S T ORY
F6 Sunday, January 31, 2010 • THE BULLETIN
Spirit’s roving days are over Stuck in soft soil on Mars since April 2009, one of NASA’s exploration rovers, Spirit, will begin a new stationary mission; it outlasted its three-month expected roving time by nearly six years. Crater
Spirit’s progress • Since landing, the six-wheeled rover Traveled 4.8 mi. (7.7 km) since landing
has sent back thousands of images; sampled Martian soil and air • Companion rover Opportunity still functioning on other side of Mars
Father’s sudden death, ups and downs of film projects add to tumult
Jan. 4, 2004 Landing site Front, rear right wheels broken Solar
Cameras 1/4 km
Rover problems
panels
Bottom resting on obstacle Source: NASA
1/4 mile
Craters
Tilted toward left, limiting sunlight to solar panels
Hills
April 2009 Gets stuck on edge of small crater
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Rover Continued from F1 The plight of the Spirit has motivated people to send e-mail messages suggesting how to get it out. The most common advice is that the Spirit should use its instrument arm, located at the back, to lift and push itself out like a backhoe. John Callas, the project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, said, however, that engineers had calculated that the arm could exert less than onetenth the force needed. Officials decided that even if Spirit could extricate itself, with two bad wheels, its best driving days were past. The Spirit, designed to last three months, has survived for more than six years. “It’s kind of a poignant moment for us,” said Steven Squyres, the mission’s principal investigator.
Mission managers will focus in the coming weeks on trying to get the rover’s solar panels pointed more toward the sun. As the Martian winter approaches, the shorter days will mean less energy, and the rover will most likely exhaust its batteries. The rover is programmed to put itself into a deep sleep, and it was designed to survive the frigid cold. “She was designed to go through this, but again I’ll caution this was for a brand-new rover,” said Callas. The beginning of the Martian winter is in May, and the NASA officials are hoping that the Spirit can resume its science activities in August or September, conducting radio and atmospheric studies that were not possible when it was moving. Precise radio measurements could pin down wobbles in Mars’ axis of rotation, and that could tell whether the center of the planet is liquid or solid.
Engineers test a rover model’s wheels in soft soil at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in July, trying to find a way to free the rover Spirit from a Martian sandpit. NASA/JPL via New York Times News Service file photo
‘L AST TRAIN FROM HIROSHIMA’
Screaming horses, broken minds tell story of A-bombs By Jeffrey Burke Bloomberg News
The hand-drawn illustrations of origami cranes that open “The Last Train From Hiroshima” are the only truly pleasant thing the book offers. I don’t mean to say Charles Pellegrino has written poorly in this account of people affected by the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945. The human suffering is as unavoidable as it is incalculable. It comes with large doses of science that can be heavy going. And of course, the knowledge that we live in an era of nuclear proliferation hangs over every page. That last point highlights the value of this sort of unpleasantness. Pellegrino sets out to capture experiences of dozens of people caught within the devastation zones of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Using physics and forensic archaeology, he details the workings of the bombs and their many effects on living and inanimate things. He follows several survivors closely during the aftermath, with special interest in those who lived through both attacks. Pellegrino says there were about 30 of those, of which one, an engineer named Tsutomu Yamaguchi, died earlier this month at age 93, according to his obituary in the New York Times. For many, death came quickly. Pellegrino writes that a Mrs. Aoyama, who happened to be right below the detonation’s Point Zero, had “one of the fastest deaths in all human history.
For author Gaiman, year brings trials and triumphs
Before a single nerve could begin to sense pain, she and her nerves ceased to be.” Others endured extensive burns, shrapnel-type injuries, radiation sickness. Some experienced suffering one can only hope was cushioned by shock, like the man heard making “a rhythmic clicking on the road surface as if he were dancing down the street with metal taps on his shoes,” Pellegrino writes. “But he wore no shoes. In fact, his feet were gone and the bony stilts of two tibiae — chipping and fracturing with each step against the pavement — were the source of the tapping.” A young girl had this picture etched into memory: “the screams of the horses as they broke free from the stables and ran toward her with flames leaping from their backs.” Pellegrino, a scientific consultant on James Cameron’s movie “Avatar” and his Titanic expeditions, has written books that dissect the myth and fact in subjects such as Pompeii and Atlantis. Here he is often, like a pathologist, coolly descriptive, yet he depicts with compassion some of the psychological damage. Besides survivor’s guilt, some never forgave themselves for not helping others, even when they could have done little. Many books have been written by and about the bombing victims since John Hersey’s 1946 profile of six survivors in “Hiroshima.” Pellegrino’s effort may be the first to combine science and memories comprehensively.
Neil Gaiman isn’t always happy with Hollywood — he was bitter about the way Paramount handled “Stardust,” for example — but the box-office success of “Coraline” was a triumph during a tumultuous year for the award-winning author.
By Geoff Boucher Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — Neil Gaiman knows that the best stories must be both bitter and sweet — he is, after all, the author of “The Graveyard Book,” the tender children’s novel that opens with a nasty knife murder. Still, the 49-year-old Brit sounds dazed when he reflects on the past year of his life. “I had a really strange year,” the author said in a faraway voice. “I was leading up to the writing of an ‘Anansi Boys’ screenplay (based on my 2005 novel), which begins with an incredibly funny sequence where the protagonist’s father keels over from a surprise heart attack. And as I was doing that, my father keeled over and died of a surprise heart attack. It’s not terribly funny though, is it?”
New York Times News Service file photo
“It left me just completely stilled for about nine months. It was very weird. ... I’ve never really had much time or patience with writer’s block.” — Neil Gaiman, on the death of his father
Dealing with loss The death of David Gaiman in March left his son searching for words. As the weeks passed, though, the writer was met with blank screens, blank pages and a blank stare in the mirror. The author of “Coraline,” “American Gods,” “Stardust” and the comicbook epic “The Sandman” was suddenly unable to conjure up those apparitions of imagination that had made him a signature figure in fantasy circles. “It left me just completely stilled for about nine months,” Gaiman said. “It was very weird. ... I’ve never really had much time or patience with writer’s block. I think sometimes you need a period of just healing and distance before you can say, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to do that now.’” Gaiman is also mourning the potential loss of a highly anticipated film project: “The Graveyard Book” adaptation that was to be written and directed by Neil Jordan (“The Brave One,” “The Crying Game” and “Interview with the Vampire”) has fallen apart on the financing front. It’s a demoralizing setback for Gaiman, who had announced Jordan’s participation last Janu-
ary on “The Today Show.” It may all still happen, but it added to a year of tumult for the author. Gaiman has a spotty history with Hollywood, but he’s clearly fascinated by its career upsides. He was publicly bitter that the 2007 film adaptation of his “Stardust,” starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro, wasn’t marketed by Paramount Pictures as a clever-but-winking fairy tale in the vein of “The Princess Bride.” But last year, Gaiman was over the moon with Henry Selick’s acclaimed stop-action interpretation of “Coraline,” which grossed $122 million worldwide and earned strong reviews. Gaiman also co-wrote the screenplay for “Beowulf,” the 2007 film from director Robert Zemeckis.
High hopes for films Born in Portchester, England, Gaiman lives in a rambling old manse in Minnesota; he and his fiancee attended this year’s Golden Globe Awards. “Coraline” was nominated for best animated film, and the author of the source material was dazzled and amused by his red carpet experi-
ence. He found himself sharing a banquet room with George Lucas, Paul McCartney and Mike Tyson — an experience, he said, that was just like real life but entirely different. “They definitely were all there, you were not hallucinating,” Gaiman said with a chuckle. “There was also Mickey Rourke in a cowboy hat, Meryl Streep threatening to rename herself ‘T Bone.’” Gaiman has high hopes that a long list of his creations on the page will live and breathe on the screen. His “Sandman” would seem like natural fantasy property for comic-book-obsessed Hollywood studios. The author is also optimistic that “The Graveyard Book” project has not truly given up the ghost: “It’s a natural, that’s why Jordan wanted to do it in the first place; he knew that someone was going to do it.” So what’s next for the writer? The big goal is completing that “Anansi Boys” script and getting past the emotional connection it has to his father’s death. “It would be a nice way to put that story to rest,” he said, “and put what happened to rest.”
A strong start for mystery series “City of Dragons” by Kelli Stanley; Minotaur (352 pgs., $24.99)
By Oline H. Cogdill Sun Sentinel (South Florida)
Unconventional characters provide the backbone of the mystery genre. And Kelli Stanley’s riveting new series about 1940s San Francisco private investigator Miranda Corbie revels in the character’s uniqueness without resorting to cliches. Miranda’s former life as an “escort,” a euphemistic attempt to soften that she sometimes was a prostitute, is only part of the back story of this complex character with a dark past. The gritty, hard-boiled “City of Dragons” works as an insightful look at racism and sexism. Stanley never misses a beat as she also shows San Francisco’s hidden corners, seething emotions in the days before World War II. On this bright February day in 1940, San Francisco is alive with fireworks and crowds as the city celebrates the Chinese New Year with the Rice Bowl Party. This year, the three-day carnival is a fundraiser for China’s war relief. The horrors of The Rape of Nanking — the Japanese capture of the Chinese city — have emotions running high, especially in Chinatown. Miranda is outraged about Nanking, but her sense of justice also is outraged when the cops tell her to forget about finding the body of Eddie Takahashi, a young Japanese man who was a numbers runner. But Miranda can’t forget about his death, especially when she tracks down his close-knit family. Her own investigation leads her to some of the city’s most insidious criminals. Stanley’s first novel was the award-winning “Nox Dormienda,” which was set in the aftermath of the Roman conquest of Britain in 83 A.D. But with “City of Dragons,” Stanley has found a more accessible niche, showing a side of San Francisco not often explored with an original character as a guide.