De Romanicorum Physicalium 5

Started this not 24 hours after the last one. Had some thoughts on SF.

• Not directly SF related, but I was looking for criticisms of John Scalzi, to see if Old Man's War was worth looking into (I eventually found John C. Wright mentioning something that shows it isn't—ideologically-motivated bad cultural setting, which for me vitiates you not only as a writer but as a human being).
  
  But I came across his essay, I think for CNN.com, about "what it's like to be poor". I specifically found it mentioned in a forum, and what I thought was funny was that pretty much every single comment was, basically, "Dude, your mom had a car and your school fed you lunch, and you're bitching about being poor? Some of us have been to Africa, India, and South America."
  
  (The other thing I thought was funny is that it sorta sounded like his family was just barely worse off than mine was when I was a kid, and I don't posture like some damn Dickens character. Admittedly it did help that my dad has a superpower for saving money—when store cashiers tell him, as they do, "You saved x percent shopping with us", the number is often over sixty, thanks to his shrewd usage of sales and coupons. He's actually had cashiers do double-takes when they look at his receipt.)
• So an example of how crazy I am is, I'm working on some short stories set during the Zled-UN War. The first one is about a woman in a powered-armor unit, named Léih Sèuhndíng (the woman is named that, not the unit—it's Cantonese). But I had someone mention her ID number. So I had to come up with a format for such ID numbers. So I based it on the Chinese system, with a modification.
  
  Her number is 156-91-2314-08-18-320-B. 156 is the ISO 3166-1 numeric country code for China. 91 is the ISO 3166-2 numeric national-subdivision code for Hong Kong. 2314-08-18 is her birthday—2314/7/7 on the Chinese lunar calendar, a holiday throughout East Asia associated with both the Big Dipper and the legend of Cowherd and Weaver Girl. 320-B is like the "order code" in the Chinese ID number, except with a letter so you can have 26,000 people per rather than only 1000. It doesn't have a checksum, because calculating what it ought to be was annoying.
  
  Also (and this too is typical of my writing—namely, references to things I like that nobody else will recognize), 320-B is a reference to Halo; Kat is Spartan B320. Sèuhndíng also means "pure peak", "pure" and "peak" being the two things "Catherine" is theorized to mean.
• The unit is named Hammershield, because, well, what do you think the UN would name an elite unit of Peacekeepers? It's the surname of the second Secretary-General—but more to the point it sounds badass.
  
  Speaking of the UN and Peacekeepers, I have to refer to the Security Council by its full name, rather than by an acronym. Why? Well, because someone else already has a space-military run by the UNSC, you know? Maybe I'll call it SecCo, that has a nice Soviet ring to it.
• As for whose auspices they go to space under ("under whose auspices they go to space"?), I have a policy of never making something up if there's already a real thing for it. And the UN has a space-agency, little as has yet come of it; it's called UNOOSA (United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs). Its HQ is in the UN's Vienna offices. The thing has a subdivision (which is actually just slightly older than it is) called COPUOS, the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Its main job in the 24th century is colonization and things like asteroid-mining; I wouldn't be surprised if it started being heavily involved in that latter one, in real life, before too long.
  
  I'm still wondering which the aliens consider the UN capital, New York or Vienna—the former is the UN building proper, while the latter is where everything dealing with them comes from. Maybe they think there's something like the Edo period going on, where the capital was nominally at Kyoto but all the actual government was handled from Edo (modern Tokyo).
• It behooves an SF author to read the space-treaties that actually exist (mainly, the Outer Space Treaty, the Rescue Agreement, the Space Liability Convention, and the Registration Convention). First rule of science fiction is, even if you decide to ignore something, know that you're ignoring it.
  
  And, really, you are gonna have to ignore some of 'em—we're gonna have to ignore some of them, if we ever want to do space-travel for realsies. I mean, the Partial Test Ban Treaty? I'm sorry, but working on big-people rockets intrinsically involves the testing of nuclear devices, and if the death-by-the-wayside of Orion is any indication, the fact they're a propulsion device rather than a weapon doesn't appear to make a difference. Or how about that part of the Outer Space Treaty that says you can't claim resources in situ, only once they're extracted? "Claim jumping", greenhorn, look it up.
  
  Seriously, we should revise the treaty so that, while bodies as a whole aren't subject to claim, deposits of ore or other resources are, according to the same principle as govern mining claims on earth. We've been mining for a long time—43,000 years, if you were wondering (and if you weren't, why not?). Why pretend doing it on some other lump of rock suddenly changes the rules?
• I have elsewhere said Niven writes better space-stuff than Cherryh, but actually some of the most memorable space-scenes I've ever read were in Cherryh. For instance, in the first Chanur book, how they're sitting in the outer part of a system, with their engine cold, getting hit by the various communications wave-fronts as they hit, to see who's there and if it's safe. That scene quite fires the youthful imagination, let me tell you.
  
  Or the stuff about how you have to secure things on the ships, because accelerations make things fly around? Now, I seem to recall a related passage about how the corridors of the ships would become chasms during a rocket-burn, which raises the important question "why would you build them that way?", but still.
  
  Also, if you'd like to know how to write alien psychology and linguistics without getting into Sapir-Whorf silliness, I cordially recommend the first book of her Foreigner series.
• So here's a question: can you name a science fiction writer who has a grownup's understanding of history or politics? They're all raving psycho leftists or libertarians (or left-libertarians), and they take a provincially Hegelian view of history that makes Nazi Germany look cosmopolitan.
  
  Well, except Cherryh, I suppose—certainly compared to Iain Banks, John C. Wright, John Scalzi, John Ringo (what are they, Red Lectroids?), Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Charles Stross, or Cory Doctorow (who, yes, writes science fiction). Or look at the "Golden Age"—did Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein, between them, ever write 300 true words concerning human society or human nature?
  
  I suppose it's not all bad. My stuff oughtta have a built-in market, namely "people who don't make their politics into an unusually hidebound religion". Oh, and also "people who do not hold as an article of faith that, by a bizarre coincidence, all the decent and intelligent people are alive right now".
• I'm curious to know how so many people can continue to get away with Orientalism in the matter of alien cultures. I mean, quite seriously, how many aliens who are really the Japanese does one civilization need to create? And not even good versions of the Japanese, the kind of portrayal you'd expect from someone whose exposure is a few magazine articles and the movie Gung Ho.
  
  Ditto, I suppose, Plains Indians and Vikings. There are other cultures you could take inspiration from, you know, and if you are going to keep using those ones you might take the trouble to get them right for a change. I mean, what if one of those alien races based on the tea-ceremony/flower-arranging aspect of Japan (which come to think of it probably includes Cherryh's stsho), also had people who were very finicky about the proper method of doing straight-man/funny-man comedy duos? Because the Japanese are connoisseurs of the form, they've been doing it for about 400 years.