Well, Hello

So, it's a been a long, long time since I've posted here, eh? I've been busy...

• Saamaanthaa (2011)
• Chosen (2012)
• Relict (2013)

In paperback and in Kindle and Nook formats. Pick them up, give'em a read. And if you find your attention span or busy schedule doesn't allow for much book reading, Relict is a novella -- nice and short.

Days of Future Past

This NPR piece amused me, how we've passed various "future" dates from all sorts of movies, and how quaintly unrealized those various futures were, and what they say about the present times that spawned them, and how real life is far more complex and rich than these imagined futures.

Funny that this came up, as I was watching an episode of TRANSFORMERS with the boys, where this politician uses doctored media to fan anti-Autobot flames in the populace (aided by Megatron, naturally), propagandizing people into thinking that the Autobots are the bad guys, which gets them booted off the planet, leaving it for the Decepticons. Anyway, a fairly straightforward demagogue narrative that communicates that this is a bad thing.

But watching it today, you can't help but think that this is what we have now -- the talk radio and Fox News circuits create a reactionary echo chamber that crafts its own reality, affecting how people react to the world around them in various invidious ways. It wasn't a reflection of the prescience of the kiddie show, so much as it showed the debasing of our political culture by a demagogic faction, and how much damage that had done. In the episode, of course, the bamboozled people realize the error of their ways; in real life, people most certainly haven't; if anything, they've gotten worse!

Parasitic

I always read a lot about parasites. Having lived with one for 20 years, I'm something of an expert on the topic. Bahah! But really, I am fascinated by their adroit gaming of evolution. The Sacculina barnacle mentioned in the above article was the inspiration for my short story, "Rotgut."

A New Hope?

Watching some of "Star Wars" with the boys, I am struck at how rotten the tactics are of the Rebellion. Like in the end, they send 30 small fighters in against the Death Star. Well and good. But they squander their few numbers by bad deployment, ensuring that the fatality rate is terribly high. They basically send a three-man squadron into the trench for a bombing run, without proper cover. Unsurprisingly, Vader and company waste them. What they should've done is much like you'd have in any team sports -- have your forwards taking the offense, and have some guys covering the back, and then maybe some in the middle to lend a hand when needed. So, instead of this...

T.I.E. Fighters === Rebel Squadron A (RS A)

...they could have had this...

RS D === RS C === RS B === T.I.E. Fighters === RS A

Do it like a conveyor belt, and whoever survives A's bombing run loops back to the back of the line, with a reserve squadron running interference to cover them. The above configuration (counting the reserve) would allow for 12 fighters allocated, which would leave 18 fighters to otherwise divert the attention of the Imperials. Just keep it up until somebody manages to fire their proton torpedoes into the exhaust duct and voila!

The point is that instead of the incredible man-wasting tactics of the Rebels and the guaranteed high casualty rates, they have better tactics and better survivability in the squadrons. Vader and his crew couldn't have picked off the squadrons if backups were right on their tails.

Instead, they send them down one squadron at a time, with the other Rebel fliers just apparently holding their dicks while their buds are getting wasted.

Of course, this lets Luke get to play the hero, but it's impossible to believe the Rebels could even have survived as long as they had in the face of such rotten battle tactics.

I mean, in "Empire Strikes Back," they use trench warfare against the superior armor of the AT-ATs on Hoth. WTF is that all about? Oh, I know -- high casualty rates again. The poor bastards in the trenches get absolutely slaughtered. Now, you could speciously argue that they are doing a delaying tactic to buy time (with their lives) for the transports. But the infantry's presence on the battlefield doesn't so much as slow the AT-ATs down. What's more, it's demonstrated by Luke (both in a speeder and on foot) that grapple guns and grenades apparently work marvelously to dispatch AT-ATs, so the Rebels were likely better off charging the AT-ATs on foot with grapple guns rather than futilely blasting them with weapons that are immediately shown not to work (which calls to mind whether the Rebels have faced AT-ATs before, which, in all likelihood, they have). Again, bad, bad tactics yielding extraordinarily high battlefield losses.

*shaking head*

I don't mind a role being established for the heroes of the story, but not at the expense of tactics with the groups in question. At least make the tactics good.

Don't even get me going about "Lord of the Rings," how the Uruks (an army built expressly to deal with cavalry, hence the pikes they carry) get wasted in battle.

Vampire Moths?!

I just found out about Vampire Moths the other day. WTF?! It's worse than the Lunesta death moth!

Robo-Cuisine

The Snackbot is coming! Barring some human-induced cataclysm or just cosmic bad luck (e.g., an asteroid hitting us or something), I think we're going to see so much more with robots in this century. Of course, the flip side of that shiny coin is that a huge proportion of humanity will be even more irrelevant than they already are, if robots get good enough at whatever they're programmed to do. Note: I don't think anybody's irrelevant -- that's one of my beefs with the capitalist economy, the winners v. losers aspects of it (e.g., rich v. poor). The litany of "get an education, get a good job" that was part of the 20th century's economic model of progress has really begun to take a tumble -- the jobs, increasingly, just aren't there to be had, and you have PhD's working far beneath their capacity. Demand for good jobs seems to have always exceeded supply.

So, you throw actually effective robots into the mix, and suddenly they're doing the jobs nobody wants to do -- the jobs historically taken up by immigrants and other needy souls. And as they get better and more diverse, then they're taking up increasingly challenging and desirable jobs, putting more and more people out of work.

What do all of those people do? Our country already fails to really help its neediest. What'll happen when all of these people are out of work? Trouble. There's a chance for self-improvement, yeah, but will people take it? And will governments make it easier or harder for people to do so? Europe and Japan, I can see doing it -- but our country? Not so much. I imagine fundamentalists staging anti-robot riots, etc.

Dark Star

I find it fascinating that the idea of a black hole was first theorized during the Enlightenment, before vanishing from scientific thought for a century...

The idea of a body so massive that even light could not escape was put forward by geologist John Michell in a letter written to Henry Cavendish in 1783 to the Royal Society:

If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity.

—John Michell^[2]

In 1796, mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace promoted the same idea in the first and second editions of his book Exposition du système du Monde (it was removed from later editions).^[3][4] Such "dark stars" were largely ignored in the nineteenth century, since light was then thought to be a massless wave and therefore not influenced by gravity. Unlike the modern black hole concept, the object behind the horizon of a dark star is assumed to be stable against collapse.

Comfortable Strangeness

I'm working on a new book, a SF novel that I've had in my head for about a year. I suppose "SF" is not quite right -- it probably is more Slipstream than SF, although we'll see. Maybe Literary SF, if not Slipstream. It's unlike anything I've written before, and I'm enjoying the ride. The world is "comfortably strange" -- very familiar and yet laced with unfamiliar and unsettling things I throw out like little bon-bons for the reader.

I started it yesterday, got 2500 words done, about five pages, and it is going just fine. I can't wait to dive into it again, although likely not until tomorrow, owing to scheduling difficulties at home. We'll see. Hopefully I'll get it done this winter and have it ready for revision by spring.

Meantime, the ABNA is closed. Fingers crossed on my submission. I should find out if it made first cut by the end of this month. We'll see.

The CTA service reductions have Chicagoans pissy, crowded on the buses and trains. A lot of pissed-off people, going nowhere fast! Hopefully the city will sort out its transit funding woes, and things'll return to normal.