Oh, and here's a spoiler warning, although I'll try not to spoil anything too much.

Eclipse Three should be required reading among anyone who wants to write short stories — or, for that matter, among anybody who still clings to the hope that short fiction can be enriching. The storytelling in this volume is, for the most part, both polished and bumpy — that is, it gives you the assurance from the first sentence that you're in the hands of a storyteller who knows what s/he is doing, but it also contains lots of irregularities and odd surprises. These are almost all stories by people who know how to set up, and subvert, expectations without seeming manipulative or crass.

I had high hopes for Eclipse Three already — the first two volumes from editor Jonathan Strahan were superb (you can read my review of volume two here.) And the list of contributors for the third volume is pretty awe-inspiring, including Karen Joy Fowler, Peter S. Beagle, Maureen McHugh, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Nicola Griffith and Paul Di Filippo. (Not to mention a lovely, previously unpublished cover by the late Richard Powers.)

But it's actually better than I'd hoped. Pretty much all I need to say about the quality of the stories in this volume is that the Peter S. Beagle entry does not stand out. By which I mean, it's as rich and clever and epic-feeling as any Peter Beagle short story — but you don't feel as though you've stumbled on the one standout story in the book. A number of the other stories in the book are just as instantly engrossing, and have that "personal but also huge and world-encompassing" feeling that Beagle does so well.

A lot of the best stories in this volume follow a main character who encounters a stranger who opens up a bizarre world. In Beagle's story, it's a magician who meets a woman whose husband and little girl have died, and shows her how to play a trick on death. In Molly Gloss' "The Visited Man," it's a weird (and not very good) painter who befriends a man whose wife and son have also died, forcing the widower to adopt more and more animals and go in search of night ghosts. In Nnedi Okorafor's "On The Road," it's a little boy who shows up at a woman's door in Nigeria, carrying with him some kind of terrible hunger that hollows you out from the inside.

There are also a lot of stories about people's relationships with odd communities, including Fowler's opening piece, where a rebellious teenage girl gets sent to a nightmarish kind of "boot camp" where her spirit is broken (and the camp turns out to have a weird secret). Or Di Filippo's "Yes, We Have No Bananas," in which a guy gets evicted and goes to live on a houseboat in a world that we (and he) gradually realize is an alternate universe. In Pat Cadigan's "Don't Mention Madagascar," a woman gets caught up in a world of travelers who are being forever being shuttled around impossible destinations — is it the spirit world? Alternate universes? — and they form an odd sort of community.

A lot of the stories have to do with creativity and the life of the artist, including Maureen McHugh's "Useless Things," the story of a sculptor who gets robbed and finds herself hardening against the world, and Elizabeth Bear's mermaid-meets-guitarist tale. Most of all, many of these stories deal with loneliness and loss, and the strange discoveries that come to people who've given up on finding themselves in this world.

The best story in the book, though, is Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," the jaw-dropping story of freakish biochemistry experiments, venture capital, and a lesbian lapdance that goes much further than anyone expects. It's reminiscent of the thrilling leap-in-the-dark feeling of her novel Slow River, but feels even more intense and weird, maybe because nothing could be weirder than a strip club in Marietta, Georgia.

Though a few stories in the book didn't thrill me quite as much as the rest, and purists may protest that a few of these stories are more literary than speculative, Eclipse Three is almost entirely a great prize. I didn't realize how much my faith in the short stories had dwindled, after reading dozens of unsustaining tales, until I read these stories. It made me want to go back to writing short fiction myself, something I've been neglecting, in the vain hope that I can write something half as engrossing as the tales in this collection. [Borders]

We were blown away by the second volume of Strahan's Eclipse series, not least because of Ted Chiang's Hugo-winning story "Exhalation." (At WisCon, I'm afraid I cornered Chiang and babbled inanely at him for five minutes about how great that story was.) But the table of contents for volume three actually sounds even more fantastic:

• The Pelican Bar, Karen Joy Fowler
• Lotion, Ellen Klages
• Don't Mention Madagascar, Pat Cadigan
• On the Road, Nnedi Okorafor
• Swell, Elizabeth Bear
• Useless Things, Maureen F. McHugh
• The Coral Heart, Jeffrey Ford
• It Takes Two, Nicola Griffith
• Sleight of Hand, Peter S. Beagle
• The Pretender's Tourney, Daniel Abraham
• Yes We Have No Bananas, Paul Di Filippo
• Mesopotamian Fire, Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple
• The Visited Man, Molly Gloss
• Galápagos, Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Dolce Domum, Ellen Kushner

That's a pretty incredible list of names right there. And yes, there do happen to be a lot of women on that list, including Karen Joy Fowler and Nicola Griffith — two authors we were just imploring to come back to science fiction.

Meanwhile, io9 contributors Jeff and Ann VanderMeer announced the table of contents for Last Drink Bird Head, their new anthology of flash fiction raising money for literacy charities, which will be available in time for the World Fantasy Convention. And befitting a book of flash fiction, there's a huge list of contributors, but it includes Gene Wolfe, Leslie What, Keith Brooke, Paul Di Filippo, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tanith Lee, Jay Lake, and many others.

And finally, if you're tired of anthologies about vampires or zombies, then rejoice! Ekaterina Sedia, author of the masterful Alchemy Of Stone, is putting out an anthology of werewolf tales called Running With The Pack.

Here's the back cover blurb:

Remember the werewolves of old stories and films, those bloodthirsty monsters that transformed under the full moon, reminding us of the terrible nature that lives within all of us? Today's werewolves are much more suave and even sexy, and they moved from British moors to New York City lofts, shaved, and got jobs. But as the tales of these writers will show you, they remained no less wild and passionate, and they still tug at the part of our being where a wild animal used to be. RUNNING WITH THE PACK includes stories from Carrie Vaughn, Laura Anne Gilman and C.E. Murphy, and they will convince you that despite their newfound gentility, werewolves remain as fascinating and terrifying as ever.

I was talking to some friends online about the writers we miss the most from science fiction, and these four's names came up again and again. So I was moved to get in touch with them and ask them if they thought it was true that they'd stopped writing science fiction. And if so, why was this the case? Their answers say as much about the genre as a whole as they do about the individual writers.

Mary Doria Russell wrote the breathtaking first-contact novel The Sparrow and its sequel, Children Of God. Since then, she's written two historical novels, A Thread Of Grace and Dreamers Of The Day. She writes:

My husband and I talked this over last night, and it's not clear to us that anything significant changed when I began my third novel. I didn't decide to switch genres. I simply told a third story, and then a fourth, and now a fifth.

SF and historical fiction make similar demands on an author. They both require you to imagine as fully as possible a time and place that are not your own. In all my novels, there is an ironic and distanced narrator who knows a lot more than the characters about their past and future. And there is always an awareness of the contemporary limitations of technology and ideology, and of how those limitations affects lives.

In my personal life, the most unconventional thing about me is how relentlessly conventional I am have remained for nearly six decades. I married my high school sweetheart almost 40 years ago. I was a PTA mom who stayed at home to raise my kid. Don and I still live in a Cleveland suburb and I'm on the City of South Euclid's Planning and Zoning Commission, for crissakes. At the same time, intellectually, I am drawn to borderlands and to the people who inhabit them: marginal natives, newcomers, travelers, people who don't fit and who therefore have an interestingly slanted view of the cultures they inhabit. Remember: I was an anthropologist long before I was a novelist. We are trained to seek out marginal natives; no one can give you a better perspective on aspects of culture that statistically normal people simply accept as, well, normal.

Admittedly: I have turned out to be kind of a genre slut. I will stand on the literary street corner and get into any genre that drives by and offers to take me to a good par-tay. And sometimes I don't go home with the one who brung me to the dance.

THE SPARROW is first contact SF; it is also a courtroom drama a lot like THE CAINE MUTINY. CHILDREN OF GOD is obviously SF, but it's also a three-generation family saga. Both are prolonged meditations on the role of religion in the lives of many people and in human history from the Age of Discovery to the Space Age. A THREAD OF GRACE is a World War II thriller, and a natural history of resistance movements. It also lets readers think about the two questions that every Holocaust novel must address: How could this have happened? What would I have done?

DREAMERS OF THE DAY is about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference and the invention of the modern Middle East, but it's also sort of a romance, and it ends as magical realism, complete with Egyptian gods and a bitchy little tiff between Napoleon and General George McClellan. And I'm almost finished with EIGHT TO FIVE, AGAINST.

This new book is in some ways a classical Western about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, but I see John Henry Holliday as a heartbreaking figure: born in the antebellum South, educated in the North for a professional life in the East, trying not to die on the rawest frontier of the West. Doc might as well have been THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH: frail, lonely and desperately homesick, surrounded by people who are not nearly as sophisticated or educated as he was. At the same time, this story is a murder mystery set in Dodge City in 1878.

So I guess what this all adds up to is: who gives a shit about labels? I write about what fascinates me, and I use whatever tools seem best suited to do the job at hand. What happens after that is marketing.

Karen Joy Fowler wrote Sarah Canary, which is widely viewed as a type of first-contact novel. Her story "What I Didn't See" won a Nebula Award, and she co-founded the James Tiptree Jr. Award for speculative fiction stories that consider gender in new and interesting ways. (Full disclosure: I was a Tiptree juror.) Her more recent novels, The Jane Austen Book Club and Wit's End, have fewer overtly fantastical elements. She tells io9:

So this is something I've been thinking hard about ever since I published Wit's End. I've just finished yet another of my maybe-they're-aliens-maybe-they're-not stories, (Gardner Dozois calls this the "is that a dinosaur in the shadows?" stories) and am about to write an incontrovertible ghost story.

Here are some of the things I've been thinking.

1) I don't set out to write in any genre; that's just not my working method. I start with whatever I have, some tiny incoherent image that I hope to make into a story. And then I take what I need to make that story work. Maybe what I need comes from science fiction, but maybe not. I won't know until I write it.

2) I'm really interested in genre and draw a lot of energy from it. So even if the things I write aren't, strictly speaking, genre piece, they all seem to be in conversation with genre in some way. (I like mysteries as much as I like sf, by the way.)

3) What I love most about science fiction is the short fiction. Almost all my short fiction spins around a science fictional idea even if the resulting story isn't quite sf. Charles Brown of Locus told me once that I'm a science fiction writer because I think like a science fiction writer and I was enormously flattered and hope that's true.

4) But even if it is, mystery writing with its emphasis on plot and sf writing with its emphasis on tech don't really play to my strengths.

What I noticed with Wit's End was that my most sympathetic reviews came from inside sf or mystery. The literary reviews were more baffled and less pleased. People have asked me repeatedly if I think my story "What I Didn't See" is sf and I can't say that I do. But what is very clear to me is that I wrote it for sf readers. And what became clear with Wit's End is that I'm always writing for sf readers. Science fiction readers enjoy figuring things out and don't mind being puzzled for long stretches. They read in a very active way. And that's the way I read and those are the readers I'm trying to please.

So — what I'm asking myself now is: if my ideal readers are sf readers, doesn't it seem, well, logical, that I would please them most by writing sf? Which is really what they want to read? And I'm not sure I can be anything but the writer I am. But I'll keep trying.

One final point. In the last couple of weeks I've read about toxoplasma — the parasite that alters our behavior until we're simply pawns in the paws of housepet cats; a woman in India found guilty of murdering her fiance based on her brain scan; a site on the internet where for a monthly fee a computer will pray for you ceaselessly. Stan Robinson says we all live in a science fiction novel now and it's clearly true. So I truly believe that science fiction is realism now and literary realism is a nostalgic literature about a place where we once lived, but no longer do.

Nicola Griffith won the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Literary Award for her first novel, Ammonite, and the Nebula and another Tiptree for her second novel, Slow River. She co-edited two queer speculative fiction anthologies in the Bending The Landscape series. Her last few novels have been crime fiction, and her most recent book is a memoir. She says:

I'm a native of sf. You can't leave that kind of thing behind. Just as everyone I meet in the US knows I'm English, everyone who reads my work knows I'm a skiffy geek. It doesn't matter how long I've been away; my English sf upbringing colours my accent, my attitude, my vocabulary. It's who I am.

But I've been visiting home more often lately.

I've just written my first short story in years and it's sf—it will be in Eclipse Three, out in December. I've been outlining a screenplay—it's sf. I've written chunks of, and have most of an outline for, an alternate history/sword swangin' fantasy novel. My recent favourites in film and TV are all skiffy extravaganzas—Iron Man, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, True Blood. My last two essays were all about sf (one is even called "Identity and SF"). I just wrote the intro to the new edition of Leigh Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon. The only anthologies I've ever edited were fantasy, sf, and horror. I've just agreed to be a GoH at the Atlanta queer geekvent, OutlantaCon, next year.

Yes, the next novel I plan to publish is a 7th C. historical — but, hey, think of it as basically a big fat fantasy novel with no magic.

So, no, I haven't left. I'm still part of sf, and it's part of me.

Samuel R. Delany became a published science fiction author at the age of twenty, and wrote the Nebula Award-winning novels Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. His novel Dhalgren is considered one of the most important works in the genre, and his other novels include Nova, Triton and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. Since the mid-1980s, he's focused on writing literary fiction, essays and erotica. He talked to us by phone yesterday, and here's what he said:

I certainly don't feel that I've abandoned science fiction in any way. I still love it. It's true, I don't either read or write it, the way I used to. But I've always basically considered myself, dare I say it, just a writer. In an odd way, I never really made a decision to be a science fiction writer. I was about 19 years old. My then-wife, Marilyn Hacker, got a job as an assistant editor at Ace Books, and she would come home complaining about the stories she would edit. Her major complaints had to do, mainly, with the women characters. This was back in 1961 or 1962. The heroines tended to be unbelievably wimpy and would hang around waiting to be rescued, and the villainesses were so dastardly, you couldn't believe them. And there was nothing in between. The women characters tended not to resemble anything that you could recognize as a human being at all.

So I began to write a science fiction novel for her, and I tried to work specifically on the female characters, and to make a couple of characters who started out looking like they were fulfilling the stereotype, their reputations came through. And then when you actually spent time with them, you discovered they were a little different than that. That was the Jewels of Aptor. To make a long story short, we submitted it. It was sold, and because it was sold, I began to write another one, and then another one and then another one. And by the time I had written a fifth, I suddenly thought, "Oh, I must be a science fiction author." Because I had now written five of them and had had sold four of them, and was on my way to selling a fifth. As I said, it was something that just kind of happened. I never decided I wanted to be a science fiction author, per se.

Before that, I had written nine other novels that were not sold — and that were not science fiction — and probably for good reasons. They weren't terribly good. It's arguable that neither was my first science fiction novel, if the truth be known. I was nineteen, and you can imagine how good they might have been, or not been. But I just kept doing this. And finally around 1975, 1976, or probably a little earlier than that — I guess it was with Dhalgren — I started thinking about things that couldn't be handled in the usual way science fiction handles things. I think of Dhalgren as a science fiction novel, but it's a lot bigger and a lot more ambitious, than some of the things that came before. And then as things went on, I think Triton is a return, pretty much, to the center of science fiction concerns. And then the Tales of Nevèrÿon, which is the next big project that occupied me — that's a sword and sorcery series.

And since 1984, when I finished Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, I haven't written anything that's immediately recognizable as science fiction. And so the last few things have been non-science fiction: Atlantis: Three Tales, which is pretty much mundane fiction; the Mad Man, which is sort of highly erotically charged mundane fiction; Hogg (although Hogg was actually written when I was 27). So I was always sort of moving back and forth between them. Dark Reflections, which is last published novel, was not science fiction. Gallows is a historical novel and sort of a spoof on erotica. My most recent novel I'm actually finishing, is something called Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders, and it's very much on the three-way border between literary impressionism, science fiction and pornography. It's an attempt to see whether you can do all three in one book. Though the science fiction aspect of it isn't pushed, and you have to get at least a third of the way through it before any of it raises its head. I hope it works. I will either keep away people, the other two genres will alienate the lovers of the one genre, or maybe it'll be inclusive and invite people in from all three. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

So I never saw myself as either giving it up, or exclusively committing myself to it. I was just interested in trying to write well, and to tell stories using whatever generic constraints seemed to highlight what I was trying to do in that particular story. That's how I've always looked at the process.

Wolfram Alpha makes grandiose claims, but also says it's a long-term project and will eventually have much, much greater capabilities:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people-spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Status

That it should be possible to build Wolfram|Alpha as it exists today in the first decade of the 21st century was far from obvious. And yet there is much more to come.

As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica-which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research-Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

Wolfram|Alpha's knowledge base and capabilities already span a great many domains, and its underlying framework has the power and flexibility to support ready extension to essentially any domain that is based on systematic knowledge.

Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite and Slow River, tried out Wolfram Alpha, with mixed results:

It's kind of cool—if you're willing to simply trust that what you get is true. But I tend to do that with things like Wikipedia, anyway, unless I'm writing a real essay*, in which case I sigh and confirm via other sources. So I'm guessing for simple travel (how far from Leeds to London?) or money (how many dollars in a pound?) questions, I'll be happy to use it, and then follow their links to the source material and check it out myself if it's really important, if I need to lean on that answer to make a crucial decision about something.

But go play. It's fun.

I'm still worried about what evil uses Wolfram and Hart will put all your search queries and personal data to, now that they've teamed up with the rogue doll Alpha. [Wolfram Alpha]

The move, referred to on Twitter and elsewhere as "AmazonFail," stripped the Amazon rankings from large numbers of books over the past few months, but it only came to light this past weekend. An Amazon rep wrote to author Mark Probst:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

But many of the books that were de-ranked, such as David Gerrold's The Martian Child and Nicola Griffith's Ammonite, had no adult themes whatsoever. Non-fiction science books such as Biological Exuberance, a study of homosexuality among animals, were also de-ranked.

By the end of the weekend, after a storm of internet protest, Amazon apparently changed its story and told Associated Press the de-rankings were the result of a "glitch" that was being fixed. (This explanation was greeted with some skepticism online, as the appearance of a Twitter hashtag called "glitchmyass" showed.) When the L.A. Times asked why this "glitch" only affected books with certain types of content, an Amazon.com rep declined to comment.

As a result of stripping the sales rankings from these books, they also disappeared from some searches on Amazon. (It seems as though these books still turn up if you search under "books," but not under the default search, "all departments.") Also, the books disappeared from any bestseller lists. The move did not seem to affect the Kindle editions of any of those books, just the print ones.

Whether the move was a glitch or a deliberate policy that blew up in Amazon's metaphorical face, it affected a decent number of science fiction and science books. Authors like Nicola Griffith and Katherine V. Forrest saw all their science fiction books disappearing from Amazon search results. Also removed were science books like Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality And Biological Diversity. Curiously, David Gerrold's orgiastic The Man Who Folded Himself was unaffected, but his chaste book The Martian Child was erased. Similarly, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren seemed unaffected, but most editions of The Einstein Intersection were.

We asked Gerrold what he thought of the move, and he said:

It's silly. They've removed The Martian Child from their page rankings which was based on an award-winning novelette about how I adopted my son and was the source for a warm-hearted movie starring John Cusack. Meanwhile, they've left The Man Who Folded Himself ranked, which is a far more explicit novel about a man who explores a number of unique sexual possibilities. Obviously, they didn't think this through. Amazon says it's a glitch. Let's hope they fix it soon.

We also talked to Griffith about how this move would impact her as a writer, as well as the place of queer writers in science fiction generally, and here's what she said:

Amazon's policy is idiocy of the highest order. Some thoughtless manager OK'd the low-hanging-fruit approach. ("Hey, if you want to protect Moral Americans from na-s-s-s-ty sexual content, then deleting all queer books from the rankings—and therefore the bestseller and some search listings—will get lots of 'em at once! Woo hoo, straight Christians will be safe!") That manager should be fired.

And then I want a public apology from Jeff Bezos.

This is important. A quick and quiet revocation of the policy is not enough. I want a public acknowledgement and a pledge to never again try to shove queers under the carpet. It's the only way to counter the perception queer readers and queer writers don't count.

Being invisible is dangerous. It ruins careers and it puts young readers at risk.

Writing is my only source of income. No listing = no sales. Taken to its logical extreme, this policy could mean I starve—that I starve because I'm queer. It also means putting some editors in a terrible position. What if I write a story in which women kiss, send it to an editor, and he feels he must refuse it because its inclusion in his anthology might get the book labelled LGBT and so kill sales for everyone else in the book?

Countless readers (okay, dozens) have told me that my fiction has helped them through tough times. Two readers have told me that one of my novels literally saved their life. Imagine—again, I'm taking this thought to its logical extreme—if these readers hadn't found my books; they'd be dead.

I'm being extreme because the people I'm trying to reach are either not exactly thinky types or their corporate communication is screwed. As my partner, Kelley Eskridge (a current Nebula nominee and a management training specialist, see Humans at Work) said so succinctly, "they're an online business getting massacred by an online uprising, and they're not responding online... Someone needs to get behind the wheel over there."

Slow River won a Nebula. Ammonite won a Tiptree. Bending the Landscape: Fantasy won a World Fantasy Award. Will SFWA and the Tiptree Motherboard and the World Fantasy Convention meekly take this shunning of their own? I doubt it. But, oof, think of the time these organisations are going to have to spend dealing with this.

An online retailer thinking in 20th century terms. Laughable as well as dangerous.

Answering questions from a would-be science fiction writer, Griffith talked about how she approached research for her Nebula and Lambda award-winning novel Slow River. It turns out she was researching the topic before she even knew she was writing a novel:

Do I research? Yes. Half the time I don't know that that's what I'm doing. I'll find myself being interested in something close to hand—when Kelley worked at an environmental engineering company, she brought home magazines such as Garbage and Pollution Engineering and a catalogue (they called it a pigalog) of industrial things like emergency eye baths, drench showers, and neoprene protective gear. I inhaled them all. It got me thinking. I saw a faint outline of Slow River appearing from the mist. Then I began research in earnest.

By contrast, Caitlin R. Kiernan came up with a story about zeppelins on Mars, which is appearing in her new collection A Is For Alien, and then went about researching how it would work:

I spent several hours researching zeppelins, Martian aerodynamics, hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide oxidizers, entomopters, and the problems one encounters with propellers and rotors in a thin atmosphere. Turns out, putting zeps on Mars is not as easy as I'd hoped (but nothing ever is). Consider the following:

On Mars, with a sea level equivalent pressure of only 0.7 percent that of Earth, a ten-foot cube of hydrogen would weigh about seven one thousandths as much as on Earth, or about 3.5 thousandths of a pound. But even the Martian atmosphere, at a near vacuum, only weighs in at about a tenth of a pound. So the net difference in weight would be about ninety-six and a half thousandths of a pound. This means that to get a full 73 pounds of lift, we would need about 760 such cubes. Fortunately, Martian gravity is only thirty seven percent that of Earth. So we need even fewer cubes, about 280 cubes. So to carry the same payload on Mars as on Earth we are looking at a design that begins almost 300 times as large as a similar vehicle on Earth [italics mine - CRK]. This sounds extreme, but amounts to a cube of hydrogen on Mars of 67 feet on a side producing our net 27 pounds of lift. Ignoring such pesky add-ons such as structural weight, a dirigible made to lift one person of 200 Earth pounds, or 74 Martian pounds, would need about three Mars-sized cubes for lift. Four people would need a dozen, plus another dozen for payload, and another couple of dozen for fuel and structure. This means a spherical balloon would need to hold almost 50 volumes of a third of a million cubic feet each to be useful. A dirigible of 17 million cubic feet is called for, about triple the size of the Hindenburg.

And I need zeps that can carry dozens of people and a significant cargo payload.

It sounds like maybe doing the research first, and then coming up with the story afterwards, is the easier route. But not necessarily the more fascinating one.

[Caitlin R. Kiernan link via Marooned: Books On Mars.]