Rannm Thawts Nine

ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin. Post #585—which is 3² × 5 × 13.

• Apparently, calling the stuff that powers magic "mana" wasn't completely random; the term had been used in anthropology ever since an 1891 book on Melanesian religion. However, that doesn't explain why they started using the Polynesian term throughout anthropology—not when they already had the Latin word numen, which gives us the English word "numinous".
  
  I suppose it could just be because anthropologists were not studying ancient Rome. But still, it's odd that anthropologists use a Melanesian term for something that had a European name. One might posit that it's because anthropologists believe Melanesians a fit subject for study, in a way that Europeans somehow aren't. Why do they call the modern Western kinship system "Eskimo" and that of ancient Rome "Sudanese"? Wouldn't it make more sense to call the Eskimo one, say, "Italian," and the Sudanese one "Roman"? The latter terms must surely be more meaningful to a modern westerner.
  
  It also does not escape my notice that the sort of people who make the most noise about institutional racial biases and the "othering" of non-Western cultures (never mind that if you're Western, the non-Western is "other" by definition, that's what "non-Western" means—and that to the non-Western, the West is "other" in turn), never mention things like this. One might suggest it's because they don't actually know any anthropology...
• Crunched some numbers. Given the 68 megajoules per cubic meter energy-absorption of composite metallic foam, it seems like, at the thicknesses typical of personal body armor (6 to 10 millimeters), the minimum "spot radius" for a c. 10 kilojoule laser beam to penetrate the armor, is in the centimeters range—possibly even tens of centimeters. So it looks like the main determinant in what range a laser can penetrate such armor, is the boron-carbide plate.
  
  Thought I'd go with 7-millimeter B₄C plates for the lighter armor worn by Peacekeepers, since those probably ought to be the typical thickness of the hard inserts in our body armor. That, even a zled hand laser with a 4.29-centimeter lens can penetrate from a bit over 280 meters, in near-infrared; in near ultraviolet, the penetration range goes up to over 1300 meters. The long laser with an 8.58-centimeter lens can penetrate 7 millimeters of B₄C from 821 meters away in near-IR, and over 3900 meters in near-UV.
  
  The VAJRA suits, meanwhile, have 10-millimeter B₄C plates, which the lasers penetrate at about seven-eighths the ranges of the 7 millimeter ones.
• You will perhaps recall the aspersions I cast on Ursula LeGuin characterizing the word "ichor" as "the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate". As I said, the real sign of the seventh-rater is probably something like dressing up drearily overdone hippie-dippy Liberal Protestantism in poorly-understood watered-down Taoism. (This leaves to one side the issue that every combatant vessel below sixth-rate is "unrated" or a "sloop-of-war", and also leaves aside unflattering comparisons between LeGuin and types of ship that are not even accounted sloops—like garbage scows—which was tempting, and would've been gratifying, but was gratuitous. This is me becoming a better man.)
  
  But I think I've hit on a real touchstone, seldom-fallible at least, for detecting writers who fall short of the standard required to be considered sixth-rate, though I remain uncertain as to whether it distinguishes the unrated/sloop writer from the non-combatant writer. Namely, if they mistook lines from Dead Poets Society for serious writing advice, intended for a literate audience. You know why you say "very tired" and not "exhausted"? Because "exhausted" means that you have no energy left—it literally means "burned out". You know why you say "very sad" and not "morose"? Well because "morose" doesn't even mean that, it means sullen and ill-tempered.
  
  Why it's almost like the hack who wrote Dead Poets Society was a half-educated pretentious dilettante who acquired his vocabulary via thesauruses (Devil's catechisms!), rather than through actual literacy. Oh but that can't be right; it's so beloved of shallow English majors. That must be because it's good, and not at all because it panders to their laughably false-to-facts self-conceit as much as Ender's Game or John Green do to the self-conceits of their audiences. (Admittedly, Dead Poets Society and John Green have an awful lot of audience overlap...)
• Not entirely new news but apparently it's 100% official they're making four Avatar sequels. I understand the desire to milk the cash-cow but Cameron is, if possible, more offensively incompetent than Michael Bay, more clichéd than Roland Emmerich, and almost as hamfisted as Paul Verhoeven.
  
  I'm not exaggerating. Go to a fanfic site and read a story about someone's Sonic OC. The dialogue's almost certainly not going to be more sanctimonious than Sigourney Weaver's lines in Avatar, or Sarah Conner's rants in Terminator 2, or the corporate straw men in everything the hack makes. I'd probably pick the "protagonist's mother listing masturbation euphemisms" scene from the first Transformers, if I had to choose.
  
  However, it occurred to me, that if they must found a franchise on this cinematic squirt of foamy diarrhea, the first one would require a retroactive subtitle. Also something to distinguish it from the other Avatar. I suggest "The Last Rainforest". (That's certainly what I intend to call it.)
• Did a little more number crunching. Given the minimum size to be Colossal in D&D, the damage done by a Colossal boulder that falls as little as 30 feet (which is the same as maximum fireball damage, 10d6), the density of basalt (the most common rock), and the velocity an object has after a fall that long in Earth gravity...a maxed out D&D fireball is the equivalent of just under 250 kilos of TNT—but purely as heat, with no concussive effect.
• I know I've mentioned my dislike of "person from our world goes to another world" stories. I didn't get into their most irritating habit, congratulating the audience for the achievement of living in the only morally admirable society/era in all of space and time. (It's particularly irksome in light novels, which are written in a country that would have to acquit about 40 times as many people to be as lenient as the Spanish Inquisition.)
  
  Apparently, though, Kadokawa agrees with me that "going to another world" stories (isekai in Japanese) are lame. Their "Entertainment Novels that Adults Want to Read" Contest, for which the submission deadline is July 16, forbids isekai. It also requires that the protagonist be an adult male—I guess they were tired of the "ordinary high school student", too. (It's actually to appeal to older audiences, but still, that need to shoehorn the Japanese school system into every setting is easily as obnoxious as the "other world" thing.)
• Speaking of, I was watching Natsume Yûjinchô on CrunchyRoll, and I'm impressed by how stupid it isn't. None of this "yôkai are born from human emotion" nonsense here; and when one of them becomes a god, while it's because he used the power of human emotion, human emotion didn't create him. When he dies with his last worshipper, it's not because he was created by their worship, but because he'd invested so much of his power in it (like the One Ring but bittersweet rather than evil).
  
  I think it's so mature partly because it's from a manga. Where light novels, and shows based on them, cater to the ridiculous conceits of neckbeard man-children (hence the idiot phenomenologically anthropocentric "clap your hands if you believe"—as in the West, your Japanese neckbeard is usually a secularist), a manga can take a more intelligent, "we don't know where spiritual things come from, but it probably has nothing to do with our monkey butts" approach. (And remember, Natsuyû is shojo—it's still more mature than light novels.)
• Thinking about it, Young Justice (of which we're apparently getting a third season, finally, sometime this year) is not only a how-to of making a comics adaptation, it's also a how-to of doing animated storytelling. It uses its time-skip so it can meter out how much the audience knows about certain events. It masterfully balances multiple entire rogues' galleries and "families" of hero protégés. It even uses animation, and that with a fairly limited style, to convey the relationship between Dick Grayson and Tim Drake, and of both with Bruce—and the effect the death of Jason Todd had on them.

The Earth Is Blue

...and if you were looking for God in space, your name better be Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, or you're an idiot. And if it is, A) holy crap are you like undead, or what? and B) you're still kinda a wacko.

That's a reference to something Yuri Gagarin said from space, by the way, presumably on orders from his government.

Thoughts upon religion, much of it related to SF and fantasy.

• There is a quote somewhere about the Peyote Church (as it's known where I live) to the effect that, "The white man goes in his church on Sunday and hears about Jesus, and the Indian goes in his tepee and meets Jesus."
  
  To which one might be tempted to add, "And the Mexican goes in his church on Sunday and eats the flesh and drinks the blood of Jesus, the act without which there is no life in you (John 6:53). I'm sorry, cabrón, were you trying to make a point?"
• Remember how I said I learned about Taoism from East Asian folk-religion? Yes, well, where I learned about Buddhism—whose philosophy I can coherently discuss, a faculty that seems almost unique to me—is just plain weird. Namely, from writing fight scenes with ninjas in them.
  
  See, I wanted the mantras that go with those hand-signs ninjas make. I found out that a book on Shingon Buddhist iconography had the mantras that go with each hand-sign; it also had an in-depth discussion of Buddhist eschatology, cosmology, and soteriology. I think it's also where I first encountered the allegory of the cart, which explains the teaching of anatman (Buddhist atomism), and the Mahayana commentary on it (atomism leads to infinite regress) that leads to the Mahayana version of advaita, non-duality (the Monad is the only existent thing).
  
  Then I got Yagyû Munenori's "Family Martial Technique Record", often referred to in the West by the title of one of its chapters, "The Life-Giving Sword": because I wanted ninja sword-techniques, and Munenori's father-in-law was an Iga ninja. Munenori was also a Zen intellectual, and he uses the technical terms of Zen metaphysics. E.g., "essence vs. function": basically Zen only has two Causes in the Aristotelian sense, essence being formal (though only with provisional reality, please remember the doctrine of anatman) and function encompassing material, final, and efficient.
• Eywa, in Avatar (Ewoks, not Aang), is really a very laughable nature mother-goddess; as several reviewers have pointed out, why do people who live on, basically, the island from Cage of Eden, conceive of their nature-goddess as omnibenevolent? That jungle is full of hypercarnivores, and at least some of them probably pursue the "kill as many prey animals as I can, whenever I can" strategy pursued by foxes. And some of them also probably eat Na'vi, despite their Overfiend tentacle mindlink; it's tough to get your mindlink-tentacle into an animal while it's eating your viscera.
  
  What's most irksome is, Pandora is just a bad knockoff of Perelandra crossed with Malacandra. Eywa's its orissa, and the Na'vi are Tor and Tinidril. They even have Adam's authority over animals. Only instead of being deliberate Eden-analogy, with huge swaths of shoutout to Milton, Avatar was trying to be neo-pagan. Only, like most neo-paganism, it only succeeds in being Liberal Protestantism. Eywa's omnibenevolence is the omnibenevolence of the Christian God, who, as Supreme Being, is also the Monad, the Form of the Good. No pagan god is omnibenevolent, because pagan gods can be hurt, therefore they must protect themselves—Zeus strikes down hubristic mortals (remembering his own usurpation of Chronos), Spider Woman spirits away weavers who show signs of becoming better than her.
• And seriously, no pagan gods are omnibenevolent; the Hindu gods (some of whom are described that way) are not purely pagan gods. Hinduism is not paganism, it is a pagan pantheon (the one described in the Rg Veda) being identified with the Supreme Being, usually either pantheistically or monistically.
  
  Say what you will about India, but they got a better answer than the Greeks or Romans did, to the cosmological yearnings paganism, by necessity, leaves unaddressed. The Greeks and Romans generally tended to the Stoic or Epicurean answers, neither of which is really an answer—both are really methods for dodging the question, just like Neo-Confucianism and the various "Enlightenment" attempts to discuss theological questions without reference to Christianity.
• This is an interesting article about primitivism and the "Noble Savage" idea, though I think I dispute her using "shaman" to mean "hunter-gatherers' priests" (I prefer the usage where "shaman" means "priests of the Eurasian shaman-complex who are primarily spirit-channelers", i.e. "the kind of person we get the word from"). But it has a very interesting point about how Westerners approach "shamanism" as a spiritual technology.
  
  Now, there actually is a technological element to that sort of religion—they're called "medicine men" for a reason—but the difference between a Navajo medicine man and an MD is, the MD doesn't have to be on good terms with anyone but a pharmacist and the medical association to effect his cures (and he doesn't even need that second one if he doesn't mind becoming a black-market physician). A Navajo medicine man's cures are effected by beings both he and his patient must be on good terms with—or they die, as both the medicine man and the patient (and one of the dancers) did when they let the Night Chant be filmed all the way through, in 1963.
• There is often used, by Christian writers too numerous to name, the analogy of Creation as a work of fiction and God as its author. Now, the analogy isn't perfect—fictional characters do not have free will, they do what their author makes them do (though, like God, a good author does not force them to act as they would not)—but it is certainly not without its value as a model.
  
  However, has anyone, using that analogy, noticed what a testament it is to the awesomeness of God? Namely, his self-insert character, who shows up people who disagree with him, has a cool secret parentage, and dies and returns from the dead, is excellent, not a Mary Sue at all.
• Boy, it's really too bad self-aware computer programs are logically impossible, and all. Got a patron saint picked out for 'em and everything. Well, okay, so there was a saint who was alleged, in the 1373 Rosario della Vita by Matteo Corsini, to have made a mechanical man, along with all the other kooky alchemical stuff he was supposed to have gotten up to.
  
  I refer, of course, to Albertus Magnus, the practice-grandfather of all Thomists, as he was the teacher of our own master (what, like a kung fu analogy don't belong in Scholasticism?). And to think, Anthony Boucher was so close.
• I know I said St. Barbara was the patron saint of hard SF, but as it turns out, Maximilian Kolbe was a rocket scientist, who designed and tried to patent a reusable space-plane.
  
  And not the most zealous of reductive demythologizers can deny Kolbe existed. So let's take him as the patron saint of hard SF writers. Interestingly, his Nagasaki monastery, that was famously spared the bombing, was apparently on land that was cheap because it was on the northeast side of the mountain—the inauspicious direction known in Onmyôdô geomancy (think Japanese feng shui) as the "kimon", or "ogre gate".
  
  The men of the East may spell the stars,
  And times and triumphs mark,
  But the men signed of the cross of Christ
  Go gaily in the dark.

De Romanicorum Theoriarum

"On Speculative Fiction"—the Latin root of "speculative" actually means "to watch", with implications of "to spy on". "Speculators" were the Internal Affairs division of the Praetorian Guard.

Basically it's my "On Science Fiction" deal, but I might talk about fantasy too.

• If you read the essay by the Antichrist Ron D. Moore, called "Battlestar Galactica: Naturalistic Science Fiction or Taking the Opera out of Space Opera", you will quickly notice two things. Firstly, that his vision of "naturalistic" science fiction is actively opposed to the creation of joy in the audience. And second, that he attacks a strawman version of science fiction.
  
  Plainly, a few years of being criticized by dumb Trekkies who couldn't stand having DS9 turned into a show for grownups has broken his mind. And that, coupled with his obvious ignorance of science fiction other than Star Trek, led him to essentially identify any of the things that would make you want to set a show in space with a few of the unique excesses of the Star Trek franchise.
  
  Babylon 5 never pretended it wasn't science fiction, and it also never made any of Star Trek's mistakes. Neither did any Gundam show ever (G Gundam came close, though). Perhaps a novel idea: people who plainly have never even heard of any SF other than Star Trek shouldn't be involved in developing SF shows.
• Whedonites, guess what? You get to shut your noise-holes about Fox canceling Firefly, because they canceled Sarah Connor Chronicles—whose toilets Firefly isn't fit to tongue-wash—just as a favor to Whedon. And then you know what? He made a show with every single one of his stupid tics, and none of the funny dialogue we tolerate him for. And Fox lost money to keep it going longer than one season, just as a favor to you, you braindead monkeys!
  
  Someone needs to send a cyborg back in time to kill Whedon before he can sign that Dollhouse deal, so we can see more Sarah Connor.
• In my fantasy book, I'd replaced a lot of animals with their New World equivalents, e.g. jaguars instead of lions in the heraldry, but I was thinking I had to fudge, since I needed cavalry. I had hoped to rationalize it by the fact horses actually evolved over here before moving back into Central Asia over the land-bridge.
  
  But then I remembered: you can ride caribou. People apparently do it in Mongolia all the time. And also, if the caribou fulfilled the role in a society that the horse did here, you'd probably have bred different sizes of the things, and everything.
  
  I had considered making the people Asian-looking, but the flaw with that is, well, Asians have one eye color and two hair-colors. So I think they might have Asian features, but European coloring. Unfortunately it's really hard to describe that without being able to say "they looked Asian except for their coloring", so it might not actually make it into the text.
• My response to the book After the Siege, by Cory Doctorow, which essentially asserts moral equivalency between protecting intellectual property rights and bombing starving people, is that he's a racist. Obviously playing the race card is descending to his level (or would I have to ice-pick myself in the temples to do that?), but seriously, how do you think the Tlingit Indians, or any other Pacific Northwest potlatch cultures, feel about it?
  
  Also, fun fact: intellectual property may well predate tangible. Consider the number of societies throughout the world that, no matter what their material arrangements, made you join initiation societies before they'd teach you various skills or stories. Consider how pissed the Eleusinian Mysteries got at Plato, for incorporating their teachings into one of his dialogues. I guess it's nice to know that Doctorow considers the Australian aboriginal religion and Hopi kiva societies to be one step removed from Nazism.
• The name-dropping of actual brands, to lend verisimilitude, is called "K-Mart realism". I actually like to incorporate it into my SF, for instance using the ISO numbers for various things (Unicode, for instance, is called ISO 10646). I wondered about brand names, but I think I'm going ahead with 'em—while none of our corporations date back to the 1680s, a few do date to the early 18th century, and practically no business not requiring international trade was a corporation at that point.
  
  Remember how I said my Jeeps were Chrysler Vlakvarks? I also have a luxury car, known as the Tata Ocelotl. Most of the guns have names consisting of "BG", then an R or a P depending on if they're a rifle or a shotgun, followed by a year—roughly the naming system that gives us "AK-74". The BG stands, of course, for Běifang Gongyè. Somewhere I have a list of a bunch of other brands, too.
• I just realized I can sum up the anime Lost Universe in three words—"The Slayers: Andromeda."
  
  'S better 'n it sounds, though.
• I take back everything mean I ever said about the Chinese government. Why? They banned fictional depictions of time travel. Apparently they claim it treats history frivolously, though I question whether they don't actually mean "Marxism is a species of Hegelian historicism, therefore it dislikes the notion of being able to screw with the inevitable victory of the proletariat."
  
  But so what? I'm totally willing to overlook Tibet and the One Child Policy, due to their principled Anti-Time Travel stand.
  
  Okay not really, but still, man, I totally agree with them, banning that garbage. As long as Bill & Ted and Back to the Future get grandfathered in, I think we should get that made the UN's first actually binding resolution. A UN Peacekeeper shoving an M16 in their stupid faces might force people who write scifi TV shows to actually come up with stories that aren't an insult to the intelligence.
• Terra Nova is dumb (speaking of intellect-affronting time-travel stories), but passably entertaining. It has the dude who played Quaritch in Avatar, as one of the protagonists, and the people making it actually grasp that, when you live in a lone outpost that's under attack by dinosaurs and anarchists, you're either under martial law, or you're under six feet of dirt. Also they realize that mandatory limits on number of children are totalitarianism (though the unauthorized kid still got born, which—as anyone who knows China will tell you—basically doesn't happen).
  
  It is, however, pretty stupid. Leaving to one side that it's impossible for mankind to have polluted the planet that much by 2149, you wouldn't be any better off in the Cretaceous. In the Mesozoic, remember, the planet had half as much oxygen—that's the reason birds' lungs are so much more efficient than ours, and also why mammals were restricted to small sizes until the Cretaceous extinction event. Also, dinosaurs, like elephants, may be huge and terrifying, but guns still kill them pretty efficiently. They're not monsters, and it's long past time writers stopped treating them like they were. Freaking graboids from Tremors get treated more realistically.
  
  But on the other hand, Libertarians and liberals both hate the show, for acknowledging that sometimes you have to do without certain "civil rights"—which are actually the privileges of a citizen living in a peaceful community. For that alone, I think I can overlook the time travel.
• Apparently a lot of people didn't turn on Battlestar Galactica until they realized—as I saw coming a mile off—that it was going to end with a hackneyed "Adam and Eve" plot. And it seems the one thing many of them objected to about the series in general, was all the "religious" stuff.
  
  It's funny to me, because I actually like well-handled religious stuff in science fiction—maybe it's just the novelty that appeals to me (because SF writers, by and large, understand religion even less well than they understand human sexuality, and read some later Heinlein if you wanna see how little they understand that). The fact they actually can hack it is a big selling-point of many of the better done SF anime, like Gurren Lagann (which is chock-full of religious ideas, pace John "Took a Miracle to Know There's a God" Wright's assumption that religion=Christianity).
  
  But that, I think, is the problem with the religious stuff in BSG. Japanese works can cope with religious elements because everyone in Japan is the same religion—Confucian ancestor worship + Shinto purity code + Buddhist soteriology. BSG, on the other hand, pretends that it comes from a pluralistic society, despite America being just as religiously uniform as Japan (roughly 3% of both countries isn't, at least culturally, of their majority religion, and Americans are much more devout). So BSG poodles around between the Cylons' monotheism and the colonials' retarded version of polytheism, trying to pretend that both are true, because Hollywood is too chicken-shit to come down on one side or the other. Or neither—"they're both wrong" could've been handled satisfactorily, even to religious believers, if the writers had just had the guts to say so.
• In the "purgery" file, I think, go the people who say, and I quote, "Firefly is totally original". Uh, the US and China as the only superpowers, again, goes back at least to Heinlein; swearing in the other superpower's language is just a knockoff of Nadsat (all those weird words are actually Russian (e.g. "horrorshow"=khorosho), mangled significantly less than Firefly's actors mangled Mandarin).
  
  As for the plot and setting: the Earth being uninhabitable a ridiculously short amount of time from when the story was written is, again, at least as old as Heinlein. Only it was, just barely, tenable, when the reason was "nuclear war"; environmental crises, to the extent they aren't simply hoaxes to justify totalitarianism, take a lot longer. Contemptibly quick terraforming is pretty much as old as sending probes to Venus (not that we thought we could terraform Venus, just that that got people thinking about the Greenhouse Effect and the idea of artificially inducing climatic changes for human benefit).
  
  And the Alliance and its shenanigans are, of course, the standard boilerplate post-Watchmen comic book plot, or the tinfoil-hat conspiracy-mongering that also brought us the X-Files. So they go back at least to the Kennedy assassination (which, fun fact, was by the enemy in the Cold War—Oswald was a Communist).
• And finally, God forgive me, a word in defense of Avatar. A bunch of people on this screenwriting forum thread, about how Cameron is a hack (which he is), were saying the mecha in Avatar are ripped off from the one in the Matrix.
  
  Only, it was pretty obvious to me that the mecha in the Matrix are ripped off from the one in Aliens. So, no. He's not ripping off a ripoff of himself, guys.
  
  Everything else they said stands, though—not least because mecha should have armored cockpits. And hey, pro tip, armor 'em in red and they go three times faster.

'Alienist' Means 'Psychiatrist'

Isn't that weird?

On aliens.

• Why do people insist that aliens in SF should be utterly bizarre? You know, methane-breathing hive-mind clouds of silicon that communicate by blinking lights and reproduce by budding in the flesh of passing astronauts?
  
  Two things. One, the Weak Anthropic Principle (the Strong AP is, in my opinion, largely bogus) may be interpreted as meaning that humans are right in the middle of the road, biochemistry-wise. A number of aspects of terrestrial life appear to be the only option, or one of a very few similar options. We would need more samples to speculate further, but it really does seem that the laws of physics restrict life to something very like our model, at least under conditions remotely comparable to ours.
  
  And two, and vastly more importantly, SF is shit you want people to look at. I'm sorry if that's confusing, but for the aliens in the story to be interesting, they must interact with humans. If the biosphere they come from is vastly different from that of Earth, you may have gotten around that "conditions remotely comparable to ours" thing, but guess what? Your story's gonna be restricted to the portrayal of a rousing game of "sea lion and squirrel" ("We have nothing at all to do with each other—and it's fun!"). People whose conditions are not remotely comparable do not interact.


• The ane-ue had an interesting point, a while back, in a comment on one of my Avatar rants. Namely, that Pandora, being a moon (a forest moon...of a gas giant, inhabited by cutesy noble-savage aliens with rhinarium-type noses...), probably spends a lot of its time in its primary's shadow. And, she suggested, that might be why so much of the life there is bioluminescent.
  
  Apparently it's actually because Cameron's a diving buff—actual justification for something in a film? Please, King of the World's got shit to blow up. I myself think that "science fiction" may almost be held to consist of coming up with those justifications, so you can guess my dismay at the current fashion of "nothing explained ever" so-called SF. For example, my felinoids' fur is iridescent, except for their stripes—the stripes are pigment, but the coloring is structural (that's sorta the reverse of pheasant feathers, look at the stripes on one sometime). That probably wouldn't pose any camouflage difficulties anyway, anymore than it does for pheasants, but it's helped by the fact most of the plants on their homeworld are themselves iridescent, thanks to having multi-layered cuticles, like some seaweeds.
  
  Also, I think I mentioned it before, but my felinoids don't have a rhinarium. The skin on their noses is more like a bird's cere, and the nose isn't quite the same shape as a cat's.


• Related to Avatar, while European colonization of the New World obviously gives examples of contact between wildly disparate cultures, only an idiot uses aliens for that sort of simplistic White Guilt narrative. Look at the real history: the Aztecs had it coming, the Apache and Sioux gave as good as they got, and it was only the kindness of the US government that the Comanche still exist (much higher-class horse-nomads than them have been dealt with much more harshly by the people they raided; let's just say Romania did not provide the Turks with a reservation, although Basarab Vlad III did give them, ahem, a forest).
  
  There's a reason we remember the Long Walk and Trail of Tears as atrocities: they were. But, because learning the details is hard, people too often generalize from them to the assumption that every time force was used against Indians, it was wrong. That is not the case. A lot of Indians made a substantial proportion of their living raiding, and that raiding often at least as nasty as the European barbarian raids of the Dark Ages.


• Not really alien-related but why do people insist on space prisons? Ask yourself, "do this civilization's spaceship-engines function by expelling an exhaust?" If the answer is yes, then they won't have off-world penal colonies, space-colonization is too expensive. If they run out of room to keep their criminals? Guess what, their civilization would've long since perished from the sheer body heat of the population, there's a lot of room on an Earth-sized planet.
  
  Now, conceivably, less-than-spotless people might be selected for a dangerous colonization effort, and people might be offered a chance to work off debts as an incentive to join projects, but you're not gonna have penal colonies. You think prison's bad, try putting one on a nuclear submarine, because that's what a spaceship is.
  
  The one exception is, you might get incredibly dangerous prisoners, deposed tyrants and the like, moved off-planet to try and neutralize their power-base and prevent rescue attempts, and so on. But you're still likely to have them moved to normal prisons, just on other planets, and I'm not sure that, even then, it wouldn't be too much trouble without reactionless drives. And hey, killing tyrants is usually preferred anyway—hanging Saddam was a big blow to the Iraq insurgency, but he would've become a rallying point for all kinds of trouble if we'd just carted him off to Gitmo or something. The same may be said of Qaddafi, though Qaddafi wasn't within a light year of as nasty as Saddam was.


• Here's a question: why do aliens in SF never react to humans' sexual advances as they would to bestiality? Since that is, from a biological perspective, what it is. Are writers afraid to consider why we taboo bestiality? Generally speaking when a person is afraid to question a taboo there's one of two things happening; he's either afraid he won't be able to make a case for his standard, but still wants to keep the standard, or he's afraid that the standard will be found to apply to other things he had not previously tabooed.
  
  So either SF writers are too chicken to be the guy who says there's no basis for forbidding bestiality, or they're afraid that the taboo on bestiality will cut into their little fetishes. If that seems harsh, please remember Heinlein's incest-fixation and Niven's rishathra (which isn't exactly bestiality, it's just only justifiable by assuming humans have many behaviors in common with bonobos—which they don't): SF writers are kinky sons of bitches.
  
  It's a moot point to me; not only do my aliens react appropriately, but I do know the case for the bestiality taboo. Then again I don't get my ideas on sexuality from people with a vested interest in removing the nuclear family as a counterbalance to the power of the state and the corporation.


• Avatar-related again, why is it always Native Americans people base aliens on? How about African or Australian aborigines? Or any of the various tribes of Southeast Asia, or the Pacific Islands? Nobody's ever had Polynesians in space, to my knowledge. And nobody's ever done European tribes, either, and those are probably in many ways the best-studied—come to think of it East Asia technically has tribes as well, China is the Hua and Japan is the Yamato (God only knows what the Koreans' real name is, it's not Han).
  
  The one exception I can think of is probably accidental: the Kzinti are essentially Zulus. Highly warlike, extremely loyal to their leaders, proud of courage to the point of forbidding even the showing of fear—all Zulu traits. Only I don't think Zulus were one of the African peoples that ever ate their enemies, I think that practice is more coastal.
  
  Actually come to think of it, the only Indians they ever rip off are the Plains Indians. Leaving to one side that those are not all one thing, either—the Sioux were much less nasty than the Comanche, for instance—or the veracity of the versions they use, come on. There's much more interesting Natives on this continent. The Apache, for instance, can stand toe-to-toe with the Sioux in the Proud Warrior Race department, and Navajo culture's probably the most thoroughly studied in the country (mostly since, y' know, nobody wants their land, so they're still there). If the Hopi factions of Friendlies and Hostiles don't immediately suggest SFional possibilities to you, you're no son of mine.
  
  Oh, wait, also, the Elites, in Halo, are actually based on a non-Native American tribe. Namely, the Dorieis.


• I wonder, speaking of Africa and Native Americans, why don't aliens ever believe in witchcraft? I regret to inform you that you only disbelieve in it because the Catholic Church told you to; penalties for witch-hunting were imposed by the Council of Paderborn in 785 and that of Frankfurt nine years later.
  
  It might be maintained that a highly technological society that could get into space wouldn't be superstitious, but I cordially invite you to step into a bookstore in this society. Notice the section consisting entirely of fourth-rate mysticism and quasi-Gnostic mystagoguery (often perjuriously labeled "metaphysics")? Is it really so hard to believe that, in a society that never had witch-hunting declared a heresy, those sham gurus would set up as witch-smellers rather than faith-healers?


• It is perhaps occasion for some dark mirth, but I wonder how much of people putting up with BS aliens—the Na'vi, Xenomorphs, aliens who not only have sex with humans but children with them—is because they don't know anything about science? Several times, pogo-sticking through the minefield that is "talking about abortion on the internet", I have come across people who don't know the difference between fertilized and unfertilized ova—that is, between a haploid gamete and a diploid zygote. Which is, uh, 9th grade bio class, guys.
  
  Please, please, please, find a sensible program for advancing science education—I mean one that's not married to bad fiscal or other policies, of course—and give them as much assistance as you can. If it helps people make better informed political choices, that'd be nice, I guess. But I'm really just hoping they won't sit still for codswallop baffle-gab passed off as science fiction.

Swords and Plowshares II

SF military stuff and just gear in general. Unfortunately heavy on reality check because you people are stupid.

• Read a guy, talking about a bunch of things we're actually doing that are like sci-fi and comics, who said in 30 years there probably won't be any manned combat aircraft, it'll all be UAVs. Sigh. Stop predicting the death of air forces, you chimps, it's never gonna happen. We're always going to have to have manned combat vehicles, and also actual boots-on-ground military personnel. Why?
  
  Jamming, my pets. EMPs. And oh yeah, hacking. Now sure, a whole bunch of tasks can be automated, but you are still going to need to put command functions inside the craft itself in some applications, and AI cannot take over every function of human personnel.
  
  Seriously, Hideo Kojima knows that. Are you actually less aware of military realities then him? If so, you probably need to kill yourself.
  
  Then again Kojima probably only knows that because it's a major theme in Gundam (especially Wing, consider the mobile dolls). Kill 'Em All Tomino may, in many ways, be an idiot, but not in every way. He's definitely right on this one.
• Or how about people who think the fact the soldiers in Avatar use helicopters, when they can do interstellar travel, is a flaw? I'm sorry, I must have missed how we stopped using cars when airplanes were invented, and then replaced the airplanes with space shuttles. Machines optimized for one environment are not optimized for another. Not only do you have to use different craft for orbit-to-surface/surface-to-orbit and orbit-to-orbit flight, but you can't combine an airplane with a tank or submarine, either. Airplanes can become "flying boats", because a boat only has to have buoyancy, but nothing that can withstand submarine pressures is gonna be light enough to fly. You can combine car and aircraft or tank and submarine, but neither tanks nor submarines will ever fly—the best you'd be able to do is a boat that can also become a car or helicopter.
  
  Now, admittedly, it's entirely possible to use a VTOL SSTO craft as a ground-support aircraft, à la the Pelicans in Halo, but there's no requirement to do so. And the company in Avatar is plainly not military, whatever Cameron's quaint conceits on the matter. I wouldn't be surprised if those helicopters they use are just 22nd century versions of the UH-1C, an improvised "gunship" variant of a utility aircraft; it might look scary but it's a lot wider than a dedicated attack craft. Attack craft, both airplane and helicopter, tend to prefer a one-in-front-of-the-other layout in their cockpit seating, while the seats in Avatar's aircraft are side-by-side, like a utility aircraft. Probably they're meant to be reminiscent of the Osprey, but no, Cameron totally doesn't hate Marines.
• And yeah, spaceplanes like the shuttle are sub-optimal for atmospheric flight, because, again, they're optimized for space. While they do speeds most planes only dream about, that's mostly because they're braking from orbit (the orbiter's velocity when it hits appreciable air density, at 122,000 m, is still Mach 25). And its cargo capacity is only 25 megagrams, the same as a Shaanxi Y9 transport plane...which has an empty weight of 39 Mg, compared to the shuttle's 68.6 Mg. Because a Shaanxi Y9 is not also carrying a big honkin' SSME and its propellant.
  
  God forbid I should stop anyone from criticizing Avatar in any way they can, but I don't think this is a way they can. We're never going to phase out ordinary aircraft, if for no other reason than that there are more fuel-efficient options than rockets for atmospheric flight. E.g., induction-motor turbines.
• I realized, since my felinoids can already throw a car (a 24th-century sedan weighs less than a megagram, to save battery life, and the felinoids are as strong as jaguars), they have little incentive to use powered armor to boost their strength. Our powered armor is a long way from letting its wearer throw a car (it generally can't lift more than 90 kg, and that without the "snap" necessary to throw things); I figure by the 2340s the tech will be there, and my Peacekeepers field a few elite units outfitted with powered armor who can stand toe to toe with the felinoids in terms of strength.
  
  Unfortunately for the Peacekeepers, though, the felinoids' armor is powered. It has power-lifting systems that counteract the armor's own weight, letting the wearer move as quickly as normal, while wearing a good 20 kg of high-tech armor. And remember, they can run as fast as a human on a bicycle; the Peacekeepers' powered armor can let them move at a fast walk, maximum, and weighs about as much as its wearer (which means a PK powered-armor trooper weighs as much as his felinoid counterpart, basically, just that his armor makes up a much bigger part of the total).
• Going along with those technological developments, both sides make much more extensive use of explosive rounds (the St. Petersburg Declaration ban on explosives under 400 g having become obsolete, but the expense of the explosive ones ensuring they're mainly restricted to use against armored opponents). Not only are under-barrel or dedicated grenade launchers much more common—I think both humans and felinoids use a grenade launcher with its ammo in a tube magazine, like a shotgun—but they actually make grenade rounds in small-arms calibers.
  
  Also unfortunately for the Peacekeepers, the felinoids are about 300 years ahead of humans—the two were about synched up at one point, but the felinoids never had nearly three centuries of intellectual stagnation and pointless, fetishistic antiquarianism the Renaissance. One effect of that technological superiority is, while small-arms explosive rounds can penetrate Peacekeeper powered armor, taking out the felinoids' armor requires the use of anti-tank rounds, generally of actual grenade caliber.
• I think the standard magazines in the Peacekeeper guns are gonna be 50- or 60-round "casket" magazines, and they'll still carry six spares like our soldiers do (only ours are only 30-round box), for a total of 350-420 rounds. The weight's the same, though, because caseless ammo is about half as heavy. Cool, huh?
  
  The felinoids' detachable tube-mags hold 50 rounds, and, because they're copper-tungsten alloy, they weigh a lot, about a kilogram per mag, or twice what a 30-round STANAG mag weighs fully-loaded, and I don't mean caseless. However, their whole military wears powered armor, and it cancels out the weight; besides, even though they have reduced stamina relative to humans, when you're a 194 cm bipedal jaguar and weigh 117 kg, a mere 7 kg (six spare mags, just like the humans) isn't that much.
• So this one dude has a whole website devoted to how the Empire from Star Wars could defeat the Federation from Star Trek. That's contemptible on a number of levels, since not only is that a rather puerile, pathetic-nerd thing to make a website about but those are neither of them real science fiction.
  
  But also, dude, transporters. I don't care how many hojillion watts a Star Destroyer's lasers can output (much good might it do them against Federation ships that can do real-time FTL, not hyper-jumps), the Enterprise D has 20 transporter bays, each with six pads. Even assuming each only has the energy output necessary to transport 100 kg, that is still—since it is energy-matter conversion—1.0788×10²¹ Joules. The Death Star's main weapon, it's true, outputs 2.2×10³² Joules, but I've only taken the energy of the 20 transporters' 6 pads; this says nothing about the cargo transporters in the at-least-2 cargo bays, the transporters on the God-knows-how-many-shuttlecraft of the 3 shuttle bays, or the energy responsible for the aforementioned real-time-FTL. Which, remember, is at least the equivalent of .068 solar masses...or 1.78803908×10⁴⁷ Joules. I.e., the engines of each (warp-capable) shuttlecraft in the Federation must output 812,745,036,000,000 times as much energy as the Death Star's main weapon. Just hook up the shuttlecraft power systems to the phaser arrays and every Federation starship is like 813 trillion Death Stars, except (since the mothership still has its own warp drive) capable of realtime FTL, which renders every laser in the Empire completely worthless.
  
  And that is why we don't bother the grownups, brat, they wreck your little dreams.
• That .068 solar masses number comes from a paper by David Waite et al. that I read on Los Alamos' archive site. Its title? "Reduced Total Energy Requirements for a Modified Alcubierre Warp Drive Spacetime" (emphasis mine). Because the original Alcubierre warp equations called for more energy than exists in the universe.
  
  In my own books I assume that the Alcubierre metric is a good starting point, but they've found a way to do it with much lower energy requirement (on the order of high-level fusion), and rather than doing a real-time FTL distortion their system is a short-lived, much longer-range one. That is, a space-fold. FTL comms also use the space-fold, either sending a radio wave inside a small space-fold metric, or else sending tiny space-fold metrics as a wave-form (the human and felinoid/dromaeosauroid methods, respectively).
  
  Then again—because I'm a real science fiction writer, rather than sword-and-sorcery or action/soap opera set in a poor facsimile of space—my setting uses dedicated re-entry capsules or space-planes, nobody uses ion engines in atmosphere (because they don't work, did you know?), and they don't have "Twin Ion Engine" be a major type of craft designed for maneuverability (ion engines give shit acceleration, and that's what maneuverability is). My ships have tower floor-plans rather than naval ship, and nobody's stupid enough to put giant picture windows on them.
• On a cheerier note...well, on a less contentious note, apparently the higher the yield on a nuke, the cleaner it is, in terms of radiation. I wonder, however, if that's not "relative to their energy output", since every fusion bomb uses a fission bomb as a "pilot light". The other explanation I can think of is that the stronger the bomb, the more of the reaction's dangerous byproducts either get burned away, or react further into an inert form.
  
  Apparently, however, even low-yield nukes are, as explained here, inappropriate for actual use, even as bunker-penetrators. Apparently, in fact, using a nuke as a penetrator makes more fallout. Basically, until we get to space (where nukes are a lot less scary), there's no use for them except as a deterrent. Of course the fact is that nuclear retaliation is itself contrary to the principles involved in the law of war, but there is the interesting question of how one enforces laws of any kind against the sort of entity that would make a nuclear strike in the first place.
• Apparently nuclear and biological are considered a different class of WMD from chemical and radiological. I guess it makes sense—the former are capable of apocalyptic effects, wiping out whole civilizations, while the latter are just really, really nasty. Poisoning wells is bad, spreading plagues is worse.
  
  I was thinking, would a venomous species feel that way about chemical weapons? Leaving to one side that a venomous species is unlikely to develop sapience (evolution tends to be minimalist), I don't think it'd make a difference. Man is the builder of fire, that doesn't change the fact firebombing is rarely if ever permitted (though obviously capable of misuse, most of our incendiaries are primarily used as defoliants).

Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused

Boy the letter U looks neat in that font, huh? So, random thoughts.

• Someone said "Objectivism is a kind of existentialism". Haha. No it isn't, and you owe an apology to Heidegger and Sartre—and remember, they were a Nazi and a Stalinist. But at least they knew "existence" is something different from "that which exists"; Rand said "Existence is identity", which is logically equivalent to identifying existence with that which exists. And that is logically equivalent to identifying the sky with the concept of blueness.
  
  Basically, she was to philosophy what Deepak Chopra is to quantum physics.
• Which reminds me, they took the analogy part off the SAT. I took it a long time ago (got like 1400 something), but the analogies were my favorite part. And don't you twits understand that taking out the parts the kids score low on, isn't really helping anything?
• So, read this avatar riffing. I'll wait.
  
  Back? Cool. Anyway, it's weird how in the comments the guy claims that Avatar doesn't show that people are getting dumber, and says he doesn't believe in the "lowest common denominator". But, dude, the lowest common denominator doesn't refer to some kinda anti-popular elitist thing; it just refers to going after the cheapest aspects of our common humanity. For instance, everyone struggles with their ethics and organizing their priorities, and everyone loves their children, etc. But everyone also likes hot chicks and shit blowing up. The former are rational or at least human; the latter we share with every other animal above sponges. It's a lot easier to go after the stuff that's older than your notochord.
• Did you know birds can't taste bitter, and can only taste sweet if they're frugivores? Yeah, but water defines a flavor for them, the way "salty" is defined by salt or "sour" by acid. The fact birds can't taste bitter, by the way, is usually the reason bitter fruits, like cranberries, taste that way—if birds eat them and mammals don't, their seeds get scattered farther.
  
  Yeah, birds are weird—although all the same things are true of cats, except cats can taste bitter. Still not sweet, though, and they also have a water-taste.
• Speaking of weird anatomy, I'd thought that frogs had a joint in the middle of a greatly elongated femur, and then had a shortened fibula and tibia in their "foot". Turns out, it's even weirder. They have a normal length femur, then their fibula and tibia are merged (their calf-bones have two cores), and they have two greatly elongated talus and calcaneus bones making a shape like your tibia and fibula. So when a frog walks with its "feet" partially up, and its "toes" on the ground (the way dogs or cats or hamsters do), it's not really walking digitigrade. Nope, it's walking plantigrade, but propped up on its freakishly elongated ankles.
  
  I decided to use a modified form of that for my felinoids, except the two long ankle bones cross over each other, like the bones in your forearm—they can rotate their feet, like margays and squirrels, but they use a different mechanism. They also still have 'feet', unlike frogs going right from their freakishly elongated ankles to their freakishly long 'toes'—their metatarsi and first phalanges make an arch shape, like in your foot but shorter, and then their other phalanges are shaped roughly like a cat's toes. They still have the same number of joints in their toes (3), because they have an extra row of phalanges—they have the same number of finger-joints as humans, despite having claws.
• And yes, the pads on their hands and feet are different—indeed, not only are they a different shape from a cat's pads (in some ways, they're more like a possum's or koala's), their skin is also different, with its keratin in beta-sheets rather than alpha-helices—like a lizard or a bird. Similarly, they don't have triangular wet noses, like cats; their noses are more rectangular (still slightly narrower toward the bottom) and the skin has a waxy texture. The wetness's functionality (telling them which way the wind is blowing, for smelling) is duplicated by pits with bundles of nerves, like in a wading bird's bill.
• Incidentally, what kind of keyboards do your aliens use? What, you mean you don't know? Huh. But you do have their alphabet figured out, right? Right?
  
  My dromaeosauroid gift-givers use roughly the Datahand ergonomic keyboard, modified for the fact they have 4 fingers and xygodactyl thumbs (like Elites). The felinoids usually use something similar to the Crandall typewriter from 1881:Except the keys are different, of course. Specifically, it has 51 (three rows of seventeen). Yes I figured out the layout, why?
  
  The felinoids also use the gloves on their armor as chorded keyboards, and yes, I figured out the key sequences for that, too.
• Even I think it's excessive that I've come up with ways that the different nations my felinoids have of caricaturing each other's accents. What I mean is, for instance, their "empire's" official language renders the dentals (Th sounds) as fricatives, the way English does, but a related minority language renders them as stops, like the T and D in Spanish. So, if a speaker of the first language were trying to write dialogue with the second language's accent, he'd put glottal stops after the dentals.

Welterfindung Zwei

Was looking around for stuff on worldbuilding. Like ya do. Noticed some things.

• People really just need to stop being cutesy-poo, and mistaking originality for quality. Unoriginality is not bad; attempting to use "aping a successful idea" as a substitute for an actually good idea is bad. Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese do similar things in their written form: none of them copied the others, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether logograms are optimal for writing (they got their advantages, though personally I prefer them mixed with something phonemic).
  
  For instance, a guy said SF movies should stop using the long-slow-pan-across-a-ship, a la Star Wars, and he's probably right: but his two alternative examples, teeny-tiny spaceships and species that don't need ships, are dumb. The universe does, in fact, have an absolute scale (humans and terrestrial lifeforms generally are squarely in the middle of it), and it's doubtful anything too small would A. develop sapience or B. invent space travel. Even if you're the size of a cricket, or an E. coli, a fusion rocket has a certain minimum size—and nobody's ever made much of a case for microscopic sapients. Similarly, nobody, not even Niven, has really done a convincing job with space-borne life, and space-borne sapience should be a whole 'nother story.


• Limyaeel, of Fantasy Rants fame, is cordially invited to stick to things she knows something about—which, as a person with a PhD in English, is either poverty or teaching, and perhaps chain-smoking. She exceeds the limits of good taste—in that I find blind stinking pig-ignorance personally offensive—when she talks about history, politics, religion, philosophy, or economics. Also most aspects of literary analysis (the only intelligent thing she's ever said is for writers to knock off the rape-as-plot-device).
  
  Understand, when you say the Medievals—who, remember, charged people with heresy for making witchcraft accusations—tortured and burned cats as witch's familiars, you automatically forfeit your talking privileges. Also, no, medieval cats were not "ratters"—they mainly caught mice and various bird- and bug-pests. Rats are too big for most cats, that's why there are whole breeds of terrier devoted to rats.
  
  Also, if you Livejournal under the name Limyaeel—a triphthong after a palatalized nasal, for God's sake!—you have no right to criticize anyone else's goofy fantasy names.


• So there's this article, called "7 Unnecessary Science Fiction Worldbuilding Details". Most of them—no air in space, things on a spaceship being recycled or bolted down, etc.—are, indeed, essentially unnecessary (though we, uh, can't actually do most of these just yet), but the last two aren't. The last two are as follows, and I block-quote:

  6. I understand that it requires more power to launch a ship from a planet’s surface than from a space station. Newton explained this awhile back. (If a culture has the technology for starships, I assume they have the power to launch them from anywhere they dang well please.)
  
  7. The process of passing through an airlock. Again, no need for lengthy details or even any details so get on with the story already (we don’t need the inside scoop on the hull’s paint drying, either).

  First off, no, actually, just because they have the tech for starships doesn't mean they can launch them from wherever—in my books, for instance, the starships are propelled by massive fusion rockets that would wipe cities off the map if used in an atmosphere. Takeoffs and landings are accomplished by dedicated shuttle-type ships, which dock with the heavy-mover starships.
  
  And second off, while the process of passing through an airlock is, in and of itself, quite superfluous, it really helps the setting if you describe what it feels like. I do it myself: a character's ears pop, because the ship she was on had a different internal pressure from the place where she goes. God forbid I should delay "the story" by telling you what happens to the characters in it. No, wait, isn't "what happens to the characters" the same thing as the story?


• Know whose worldbuilding a lot of them praised? Gibson. As in Neuromancer. Only, what? I may have to reread that book (for my sins), 'cause I don't remember a son-of-a-bitching thing about the worldbuilding, other than that the prose was a bad noir pastiche. And my sister was in film class when I read the thing, so lemme tell ya, I know from bad noir pastiches. Oh, well, that, and also that the hacking scenes were ridiculous—unless you mistook ReBoot for a computer science documentary—and the sex scenes were more gross and ugly than anything else.
  
  I actually have a TakeThat to cyberpunk hacking in my SF book, where one of the aliens' computer technicians scoffs that human hackers actually talk like computer networks are places. I originally actually had him say the human hackers used the VR-interface from the cyberpunk canon, but that was before I rewrote with realism in mind. Apparently, real UI experts are pretty much unanimous that the VR stuff is the single worst possible interface you could design.


• So at least two people who are not, at least to my knowledge, severely brain-damaged, have praised the worldbuilding in Avatar. As in big blue shaved Ewoks, not Aang (the worldbuilding in that is actually pretty fair).
  
  I wish we had some kind of a rule where people who say things that reveal them to be completely divorced from reality could lose their voter's card, and probably custody of any children, because dude, Avatar? I said it before, but nobody whose society was born Post-Scarcity is gonna act like human hunter-gatherers, not even like the mythologized hunter-gatherers the Na'vi are. Why are the Na'vi sapient, when there is no evolutionary need for them to be, since their whole planet's ecosystem is one big love-in? 'Course, given that the nervous system of every life form on Pandora can be interfaced to that of every other, it's extremely doubtful evolution there would be anything like here. The only way Pandora's Nature is "red in tooth and claw" is that it seems to function as "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need".


• All I'll say about people who complain about fantasy using quasi-European settings so often, is this:

  You don't actually get European culture, and you come from it. You think—motivated mainly by your unreflective Post-Modern occidental self-hatred—that you should be allowed to besmirch other continents, inhabited by cultures still less comprehensible to you, with your ignorance?

  So there.

Oh, by the bye, "son-of-a-bitching" is apparently something Elvis would use. I like it, don't you?

Miscellany

I think Miscellany (if you pronounce it to rhyme with Melanie) would be a really cute name for a girl. Anyway this is random thoughts.

• So my travails with delta-v—curse your cosmist eyes, Tsiolkovsky!—have made me realize another flaw in Avatar. I know, I thought I'd run that well dry too. But that whole thing about how Sully can't fix his legs on his salary "in this economy"? Yeah, um, what economy is it that can afford to build rockets fueled by antimatter? 'Cause that's what the ship in Avatar uses for fuel, and antimatter is the single most expensive substance known to man. Even if it's fusion catalyzed by antimatter, well, their gas money could probably be used to stage a reenactment of the first moon landing. Except with high-grade heroin standing in for the moon dust.
  
  Of course, that also raises the question of how bad the economy can possibly be if they can fund these missions to Toliman (what, didn't know Alpha Cen had a proper name?). Also, considering they've got some Unobtainium, and it's naturally occurring, they should be able to synthesize it. Actually, that's understating it; they are able to synthesize it. By definition, anything naturally occurring (on a planet anyway) should be fairly easy to synthesize since, you know, it happens on its own. And even if it's not that easy, there is absolutely no way in hell that it's more expensive to synthesize than it is to schlepp—by slowboat, mind—four and a half light-years to mine the stuff.
  
  I'm sorry Mr. Cameron but your plot is an economic impossibility.


• One of two things in my SF writing of which I'm very proud (the other being my cooling radiators) is my explanation for space war. See, synthesizing resources is either easy, or profitable for whoever does it, but terraforming is as-good-as-impossible, so planets that are easily-habitable (at least with domes) are at a premium. So the only thing you're fighting over is territory. Or rather, you come into conflict over territory, but you don't start fighting until one side or the other in the conflict does something rude. Like, you know, carrying off the wife of a chieftain whose tribe is contesting with yours over trade routes...and prompting him to launch the thousand black ships, and bring about the fall of Holy Ilium, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear.


• So remember the name Robert Frisbee. Why? Oh, well, this.
  
  Yeah, an antimatter rocket design that's not AIMStar or ICAN-II (which aren't really antimatter rockets, they're antimatter-catalyzed nuclear rockets). And now, suddenly, I can get images into this blog; for some reason I'd had trouble doing that. Anyway, it's not exactly like what the ones in my story are gonna look like (mine have for-realsies artificial gravity, and aren't 700 kilometers long), but it's an awesome first step.
  
  In his honor, I may have to have "frisbee" be 24th century slang for an antimatter ship.


• And yeah, people in my books do indeed use antimatter rockets...but nobody in my book says the economy is so bad that biotech (the fastest-growing field of tech after computers, by the bye) is too expensive for soldiers.
  
  And hey, come to think of it, so in Avatar's future there are no charities like Wounded Warriors? Maybe years of over-regulation and anti-entrepreneurial economic policies killed the biotech industry, and years of state-funded medicine killed the charitable impulse. Nah, I kid—Cameron favors those policies, remember?


• So remember how I said I wanted to do SF Saiyuki and SF Peter Pan? Another thing, it occurs to me, is it'd be really fun to do an SF version of the Shinsengumi. I mean, for crying out loud, "Hijikata" means "Earthman", and he, Saitô, Nagakura, Harada, and probably more of them have numbers in their names. Don't "Primus Wisterfield" and "Triannum Earthman" sound like the kind of names a very far-future society might have? And you could give them cool gear based on their techniques—Okita's signature three-piece stab becoming a three-barreled gun, or something, and Saitô having a gun-arm on his left, that he suddenly switches to to catch opponents by surprise (contrary to Rurouni Kenshin, Saitô's signature left-handed thrust works best as a surprise maneuver).
  
  And hell, the Black Ships=first contact; the plot just writes itself. If you're going to use history as the basis for SF, at least use something less asinine than Gibbon.

White Man's Boredom

So I was reading the comments on one of the (far too few) articles that noticed how much Avatar sucked, and one person was complaining about the Noble Savage thing in it. Rather than complaining about it because it's historically/anthropologically inaccurate Mary Sue BS, however, he was mad because, get this, it continues to dehumanize "the other"; he went on to say of course it's popular with white audiences, because they never have to view themselves as the other.

Okay couple things. First, why not dehumanize the Other? Are Sparks even human? She's a sociopath and she's got all those zombie slaves and those "ghost women" servants, right?

Sorry, couldn't resist the Girl Genius reference.

Ahem. For real this time, though, yes, it is bad that the Noble Savage archetype is so condescending. But the reason we continue to use it in fiction is because, the second we judge other cultures by the same standards as Western Civilization, we notice, huh, they're just as bad as we are, if not worse. And there goes a multimillion dollar victim politics industry, which has friends in Hollywood.

Funny how the people who act like Watergate was Lepanto are never willing to follow the money.

Also, though, whaddaya mean white audiences never have to view themselves as the other? Tell a French, Polish, or Spanish American Hollywood never portrays his people as the other. Tell a Catholic he's never been portrayed as the other. Tell it to a Mormon or a Southerner. For that matter tell it to a corporate executive, a suburbanite, or a homemaker. Not only are white people commonly portrayed as "other", they're routinely demonized, even in contradiction of history.

The guy also said the Noble Savage is a legacy from Colonialism, which is false; it's a legacy from Romanticism, which inherited it from the Enlightenment denial of the Fall.

But that reminds me, why do we always assume decolonization is a good thing? Does anyone else think it's weird that leftists use this neo-con rhetoric about democracy and self-determination, as long as we're talking about European powers getting out of their colonies? Belgium leaving its colonies had much worse consequences than Saddam being toppled in Iraq—and the colonial Belgian governments were much better than Saddam's on human rights—yet the left likes decolonization and hates the Iraq War. Do you like democracy for blacks, but hate it for Syrians, Mesopotamians, and various Persian tribes, to be specific about what Iraqis are? Or do you just have an illiterate, unthinking taboo on Westerners having any foreign influence? 'Cause if you do, you might wanna stop all those global distribution deals for Hollywood movies.

Footwear, Navigation, Packaging, Agriculture, Monarchy, Sea Temperatures, Porcine Aviation

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Random ones.

• I don't always agree with her—indeed almost never on economics—but I am fond of reading Ann Coulter. She's a lot different than the media tells you she is (most of the mean stuff? Yeah, satire, glad you picked that up). And the fact she's a Daddy's Little Girl warms my black heart.
  
  But one thing I noticed a while back is, her tone is exactly like the narrative tone in the Slayers novels. Which is weird. On the other hand, though, where do you think Lina stands on the capital gains tax?


• Conservatives often call the somewhat ritualistic outrage the leftist media often express, the "kabuki theater".
  
  Wouldn't it be awesome if it was, though? Chris Matthews cutting a genroku mie, and rolling his head on his shoulders rhythmically as he intones, "This time Ann Coulter has gone too far-uh!" And then Keith Olbermann hits one of those little drums, and gives a howl? And then Rachel Maddow cuts in with a "Shibaraku!" and recounts what she was doing in the previous act, before summing up with something decisive. It'd be awesome.


• So I decided to change it so now, none of the human ships in my SF books land. Ever. They just send down landers. It didn't take much doing, and it made my book awesome, by firming up the science at no narrative cost.
  
  By the way, boy, it sure is hard to write fresh bereavement. Just putting that out there.


• It occurs to me, how come people who always complain the media misrepresents them, don't realize it might misrepresent other things? Tycho Brahe knows the media lies about gamers, but seems to take its word on Ann Coulter; conservatives know it lies about them, but take its word on gamers and Catholics; Catholics know it lies about the history and teaching of their religion but take its word about politics. Hey, idiots (yes, even Tycho, though only here): think for your damn selves!


• And yes, Tycho is only an idiot here. Lemme put it this way. I used to brag about my intelligence by telling people my IQ is in the 96th percentile (because it is). Now I just tell them I know when he uses a word wrong. Should these words reach him: sir, take that in the spirit it's intended. You're the bar, man!


• I think a part of why he always seems so smart is, he never went to college, so he never got into the habit of spewing up his professors' nonsense in lieu of thinking for himself. 'Cause nearly everyone else who comments on geek-pop, if that be not a contradiction, like Overthinking It or FerretBrain, just does it from the part-feminist, part-multiculti, quasi-Marxist PoMo perspective of the academies. Only Tycho is not content merely to vomit the viscous oils of bad theories all over his subject, like a startled albatross drenching an assailant in gut oil. And as with the gut oil, ideas that get PoMo theories on them lose their waterproofing, and sink to the bottom of the sea.


• Gut oil, by the way, is really gross, but its existence is useful should you happen to wonder if there are alternatives to milk for aliens. My aliens' "milk" comes from chest-located glands, but they're modifed oil glands rather than sweat glands, and it turns solid at room temperature. They use domestic animals' milk, just like we do, but they consume it by the slice instead of by the cup.
  
  Mmmm.
  
  Other options are crop milk, like flamingos and pigeons have, and honey-ant type things. One of my other races has the coat fall out, on the mothers' necks, and globes of translucent stuff, high in sugar, fat, and protein, form from the oil-glands there, for their babies to lick it off.


• It occurs to me, the big flaw in Avatar, or at least with the Na'vi, is, "Their culture would not be anything like any earth culture, since they've got their tentacle-hentai link to every other lifeform on the planet." If you don't understand why a species that starts out being de facto "Post-Scarcity", would not be anything like any human culture (let alone a human hunter-gatherer culture whose chief economic activity is subsistence), guess what, you fail every social science there is, forever. In fact we're gonna shred your SATs now; security will be by shortly to escort you off campus.


• So how come, in the first Halo, Cortana speaks British English, but with an American accent—"fancy a look", "chums", "sod off", etc.? It's weird, is what it is.


• It occured to me, Catholicism in America was long dominated by a certain type of Frenchman, and the Irish, rather than by any of the many other Catholic peoples who came to this country. Why? Well, couple reasons, many of them linguistic, but one I see mentioned too seldom is, Jansenism. For those who don't know, it's basically Catholic Puritanism, and it's borderline heretical. But it was strong in Ireland and parts of France—Pascal was one—and I can't help but wonder if it, being similar to the Puritanism of the Northeastern cities a lot of the new immigrants came to, didn't ease their transition. But it made it easy to paint Catholicism as another species of Puritanism, which it's not.
  
  Know what real Catholicism looks like? Look at Bavarian- or Cajun-Americans. Not a whole lot like the Puritans, oué?

The Suetopia Bypass

Okay, so I mentioned the Na'vi are unconvincing Sues. And it occurred to me, the race in my own books are something of a wish-fulfillment fantasy, for me, the values I believe in made the basis of a successful civilization.

They're basically something like a cross between medieval and Napoleonic France, with some of the trappings of the Roman, Holy Roman, and Russian Empires. Their agriculture is all privately owned ("peasant proprietorship"), their industry is regulated by committees of craftsmen who own their means of production (basically guilds with a few differences), and their government is by military officers who still have many of the trappings of feudal lords, under a single executive. Their chief religion (they've got more than one) is centralized, sacrificial, and monotheist.

But I don't think mine qualify as a Sue, and I'll list the things I did different. And I do mean list.

1. Embroider this in your skins, writers, NO NOBLE SAVAGES. I don't care what they taught you, most of the Native Americans the US actually had wars with were somewhere between Vikings and Mongols on the SOB scale; if Comanche had a word for Karma it'd be "smallpox". Yeah we treated a lot of peaceable tribes badly—and didn't treat the Comanche badly enough (personally, I think if horse-nomads don't steal your corpse's head just to be sure you're really gone you're being too nice to them)—and there were excesses in the wars themselves, but don't let's pretend all the bastardy was on one side. It wasn't, not by a long shot. African tribes are the same story, as were the European barbarians, let's be real clear—romanticizing the Vikings or the Wends is just as much Noble Savage BS as romanticizing Plains Indians or Zulus.
   
   My aliens not only have higher tech and science than humans, they have a state, with formalized laws and a concept of government based on abstract principles. Because sorry, the alternative just doesn't work as well.


2. Similarly, no Proud Warrior Races. This is just a personal thing, but I hate that word "warrior"; "soldier" is so much more civilized. A soldier is a professional, a warrior is an amateur—and amateur war is a scary thing. It's not a coincidence that Proud Warrior races usually use about 2/3 of the Noble Savage cliche, even if they have space-level tech. Or they just combine them, like the Na'vi do. Also like the Noble Savage thing, they ignore the bad side of that sort of culture.
   
   Which isn't to say militocracy is a bad idea—many societies are ruled by their soldiers, with no ill effects. Sure, military-dominated states currently tend to be bad, but it's not inherent; it's just that all the decent governments, currently, are in a tradition that taboos militocracy. It's like how, in much of Mexico, only loose women dress as revealingly as American women do—that doesn't mean dressing that way makes you loose.
   
   My aliens are a militocracy—the political leaders are also military officers—but the officer class has a number of restrictions the citizens don't, analogous to how you have fewer civil rights in military than civilian law. They also use their peculiar, mystical code of honor—essentially chivalry—as a political ideology. The fun thing about that is, chivalry precludes doing certain things even to an enemy, and applying it systematically, as the ideology of the whole state, means their state has self-imposed limits, like a Constitution.
   
   Rank is hereditary, but that just means the children of an officer automatically have a commission—they're raised with that in mind, the funny thing about having an elite with a specific job is, you can raise it to do that job. Anyone can be promoted from the ranks, too, and it's pretty easy to lose a commission.


3. This is probably the most important: make them work at it. America has to be continuously maintained by human sacrifice offered to the Tree of Liberty—it's funny how innocuous Founder quotes sound scary if you rephrase them—and any alien society would constantly have to fight threats from within as well as without. Any functioning ideology will require striking a balance, and there'll always be someone who figures he'd be happier under some other balance, even if the whole rest of the system falls apart. Some people are willing to do very bad things to adjust the balance, and that needs to be shown.
   
   On the other hand, it really is Sue-ish if the only conflict or crime is people trying to buck the society's system. I mean, what, so the Na'vi are so perfect they even accept being cuckolded with nary a grumble? Riiiiight. Sorry, but no species whose males have so little in the way of gonads could ever win a war—and it's unrealistic, also, in that Neytiri's clan would probably have lost the support of Tsu'tey's clan for something like that.
   
   My aliens constantly have to put down secession attempts by their officer class. See, once, all the nobles were supreme in their own territories, but then they were gradually absorbed by the "Empire". Some of them want to be supreme again, and are willing to do many very bad things in order to secede. On the other hand, though, they also have normal crime and conflict—the main alien character is a cop, after all.


4. Don't just show them working for it in the here and now, though, show how they've had to work for it in the past. Obviously tread carefully, or you'll end up with an alien messiah story, but I expect to know, you know, how'd they get their one-world government, or that sort of thing?
   
   My aliens were consolidated by a huge war between two branches of their empire, that killed 93 million people in 95 of our years. But that was their whole species fighting—World War II was only in the Eastern Hemisphere, mostly the north half, and killed 70 million people in 6 years.
   
   The aliens also had a reform, 88 of our years before the big war (so only in one branch of their Empire), that made the people, rather than any other officer or even the Empire, the recipient of the officer class's fealty—remember, the officer class still has the trappings of feudal nobility. Similarly their women's status has been steadily improving, mostly due to their religion, which was also responsible for chivalry (Christianity, especially the reverence for the Blessed Virgin, was a major factor in the incredibly high status medieval women had, and in the creation of chivalry). But the aliens still have sexism and over-ambitious nobles/officers, because societies aren't perfect.


5. This is a rule for avoiding Sue-ishness in general, actually: if you don't want to show them doing something bad, you still have to show them being tempted to. Unless you're writing a story specifically about a race where the Fall never happened, a la Perelandra, your aliens still have to have that tendency to evil.
   
   My aliens' emperor admits, in the third book (in the works), that he had one of his aides calculate how long it'd take to genocide the human race—he overreacted to reports of atrocities humans were committing against them. He never did anything, but he did actually want to vitrify every planet humans lived on.
   
   Incidentally, the answer was 144 of their days (slightly more of ours), assuming human space resistance was at its maximum. It sounds even more pitiful in their units: two months, two nine-day-units-analogous-to-weeks.

This Is Your Addictive Fantasy World?

I thought I'd comment on "Avatar Withdrawal Syndrome", which is where people become despondent over the fact that Pandora's not real. Yes it has a name; let's all weep bitter tears for the human race. Someone actually said he didn't even want to play World of Warcraft anymore! Give me the Night Elves any day over the Na'vi, AKA "giant shaved blue ewoks".

I mean, I sympathize with their trouble, processing the quality disparity between fantasy and reality, I really do; Lord knows I've had more than my share of grappling with that. But Pandora, seriously? What's to like? The planet's just not that impressive. Maybe it's 'cause I'm from Arizona (my parents met working in the Grand Canyon), but what, precisely, about that planet is remotely different from this one? That it looks like a bunch of fake aquarium plants? I'll concede that unfamiliar things often look fake, but the real problem with Avatar is, they had the planet designed to much more realistic specs than the unjustifiably humanoid critters that sit at its apex. They had Barlowe, of "Guide to Extraterrestrials" fame, do the concept art for the rest of Pandora's ecosystem, but they didn't have him design the Na'vi, with the result that they look no more native to their planet than the humans do. Speaking of, the Na'vi are unconvincing Mary Sues, more on that in another post.

But I think really, the problem people have is not that Pandora isn't real. It's that none of it is real. If only we could jump into Cameron's child-universe where business and the military are simply evil, scientists are always good, and natives are never murderous torturing gang-rapists whose economy is founded on robbery and enslavement. The movie hits all the right buttons, it rings every bell the dogs are conditioned to salivate at. And yet—I don't know if it's because other voices are actually being heard in the culture, or what—people's minds aren't taking the infusion like they used to. That's why so many people root for Quaritch. I think their disgust with the real world, when presented with Pandora, is actually just their displaced disgust with the fact people are questioning the ideological "truisms" the film needs you to believe in order to work. They'd rather live on Pandora because Pandora is a world where left-liberalism is actually true. Don't misunderstand me; when people realize the fatal flaws of right-wing ideology, movies based on those cliches will cause "withdrawal", but that's not where we are just now.

Or maybe I really am being too generous. Maybe they're not having a subconscious reaction to the movie's echoing of their political illusions, just as those illusions are at risk of being shattered—maybe they're just a bunch of stupid kids who couldn't handle losing their pretty colors.

Sierra Foxtrot, Again

Oh, I like that, I think I'll call it "Sierra Foxtrot" (SF) from now on. I had still more thoughts on that field of literary endeavor. I will show you the true horror of my bulleted lists!

• So, here's a thought: if you're going to plagiarize history for your SF, why not, you know, learn the history? Asimov based his Foundation books on Gibbon, apparently not knowing that when Gibbon wasn't simply wrong, he actively lied (the folklorist Andrew Lang, best known for the "color fairy" books, famously proved that Gibbon had not read most of his cited sources). History-in-spacesuits SF suffers from the same flaw as most historical fiction: the people who write it never know any history.


• So, solar sails, and similar. Basically the way it works is, there's more radiation pressure on one side of the sail—closer to the star—than there is on the other. This produces a force propelling the sail away from the star.
  
  If that sounds familiar, it should—it's the Bernoulli effect. A solar "sail" is not a sail at all, it's a wing. Everything in a star system actually hangs suspended in the star's atmosphere—you could argue that, if you're not orbiting any planet in the system, "down" actually means "closer to the sun" and "up" means "farther from it." You say "orbital distance", and I say "altitude."
  
  No, I'm not gonna be one of those asshats who corrects people when they say "sucked out into space" ("blown out" isn't even actually any more correct, anyway; "removed along with the air that rushed into the area of lower pressure" is how suction works, isn't it?), but it's an interesting thought experiment. Space isn't an ocean, but it is a little bit like a sky.


• I said this in response to a comment from my sister, but it bears repeating: some of the Dicta Boelcke actually works in space combat. "If possible attack with the sun behind you," for instance, would actually allow a half-assed version of stealth in space, since the sun is almost certainly a bigger radiation source than you are. You'll be harder to spot if you stay between your enemy and the sun. "Always continue with an attack you have begun" is a sound principle, as is "Only fire when the opponent is properly in your sights" (accounting for the difference in technology, that means make sure you have a good target-lock).
  
  "It is essential to assail your opponent from behind", though, yeah, not so much.


• So all those people who say you wouldn't have starfighters? Yeah, well, almost certainly not anything like fighter planes, no, but small missile ships with 1- or 2-man crews aren't exactly a bad idea, dude. What's funny to me is how many of the people who say there's no reason for starfighters, then go on to say there's no reason for the Air Force. It's the same kind of stupidity that said we wouldn't have to put guns on jet fighters (guess what, we did).
  
  I think these yahoos actually think we don't need manned air forces because they have a simplistic conception of what an air force's role is. No, we don't need manned bombing runs anymore, we've got guided missiles now, but for a precision air-strike you do in fact need the Air Force (close air support, the kind provided by attack craft, is adequately provided by the aviation branches of the Marines and Army). But seriously, how many military-aviation missions can you name? Did you remember spying? How about infantry support? Tank-busting?
  
  I'm with Chesterton: you're allowed to abolish something only when you can adequately tell me what it's good for.


• It's fascinating how Stargate doesn't know how good of science fiction it wants to be, isn't it? That whole "ancient astronauts" thing, the "Ascension" nonsense—very soft. The ZPM is a very frequently-invoked form of nonsensoleum, as well. But then you have McKay's reason for disbelieving in prophecy:

  Look, in a mechanical, Newtonian universe, not a problem. I mean, you know enough variables, you can predict the outcome; but quantum physics blows that out of the water.

  Um...Yeah, that's just plain old awesome, right there.


• I realized one thing I hate about Avatar is, nobody that can get into space bothers fighting over resources, other than naturally-habitable planets as such. Unobtainium is called that because it has very specific properties, not one of which you are remotely likely to find in nature—you'd no more get naturally-occurring hot superconductors than you'd get "skrith", the stuff Ringworlds are made of. I know Cameron actually thinks he was saying something when he vomited out this hackneyed Marxist narrative a la Howard Zinn, but it simply will not happen in space.
  
  Of course, it never really applied to planetary history, either. The fact, fact fans, is that wars, colonialism, imperialism are never about mere resources. If you think anything humans do is that simple, well, I should certainly have thought your middle school would block this blog. Let's deploy another Chesterton quote:

  It is putting it too feebly to say that the history of man is not only economic. Man would not have any history if he were only economic. The need for food is certainly universal, so universal that it is not even human. Cows have an economic motive, and apparently (I dare not say what ethereal delicacies may be in a cow) only an economic motive. The cow eats grass anywhere and never eats anything else. In short, the cow does fulfill the materialist theory of history: that is why the cow has no history. "A History of Cows" would be one of the simplest and briefest of standard works. But if some cows thought it wicked to eat long grass and persecuted all who did so; if the cow with the crumpled horn were worshipped by some cows and gored to death by others; if cows began to have obvious moral preferences over and above a desire for grass, then cows would begin to have a history. They would also begin to have a highly unpleasant time, which is perhaps the same thing.

• I just found out the Japanese launched a solar sail spacecraft...and named it Ikaros. Uh, what? Or rather, nan de yan nen?! Where's a paper fan when you need it?
  
  I've heard of ill-omened names, but damn.


• So, something occurs to me. Magnetosphere sails (more formally "mini-magnetosphere plasma propulsion", though one always calls it "Maggy" in the family) are "inflated" bags of plasma, that essentially artificially increase the size of a sail-type propulsion. But if solar "sails" are wings, doesn't that make a ship propelled by a magnetosphere sail...a zeppelin?
  
  Only this zeppelin's gasbag is made of ever-shifting plasma, as though it was sewn together from the Aurora Borealis. Nice.

Because "Waldo" Would Sound Silly

Ahem. The title of "Avatar" is wrong—a remotely controlled body is a waldo, not an avatar. An avatar is a virtual representation. But can you imagine the poster with the Na'vi eyes and "Waldo" written all dramatically in the Papyrus font?

That would be hilarious.

Anyway, I had some thoughts on Avatar, occasioned by a recent viewing of...as much of it as I could stand. They're sort of random, so I'll put 'em in an unordered list.

• I've discovered that not even trying to riff on Avatar can make it bearable. Much like "Hobgoblins", Avatar is so bad, whole sections of it simply forbid the Satellite of Love treatment. And I'm a MSTie of long standing, I actually force my relatives to watch "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" with me every Christmas Eve (it's my birthday, so they have to). Yes, the version with Joel and the Bots, I'm not a monster.
  
  I think what makes it unriffable is its offensive, aggressive badness. It's like if Coleman Francis had tried to make Red Zone Cuba an incisive commentary on JFK, except with enough Noble Savage cliches to gag a buzzard.


• And what is it about Cameron, that his female characters are so completely unlikable? Ripley has some human moments, but Sarah Connor? I hear he set out to make her hateful, and he succeeded admirably! Max in Dark Angel is mostly just annoying (googling to double-check her name reveals her surname is Guevara—tell me, Cameron, why not Goebbels, who didn't personally murder nearly as many defenseless people?), but all the others are obnoxious. If there's an aspect of "Original Cindy" that wasn't calculated to make you want to stab her in the larynx, I don't know what it is.
  
  Avatar has two women you're supposed to hate, or else Cameron sucks at his job. Sigourney Weaver's character is a reprehensible woman, a shrill self-righteous hag with a ludicrously inflated sense of her own intelligence (newsflash, you chimp, the whole point of science is you don't have to be smart to do it...unlike military strategy). Admittedly her disdain for the military is justified, but that's because this is a Mary Sue story and the people who dislike the Sue have to be one-dimensional, so all the people who oppose the holy perfect Na'vi are chicken-milking lobotomites. What isn't justified is her psychosis-level lack of interpersonal skills. Lord knows I'm not the most personable of individuals, but Weaver's character in Avatar makes me look like if Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi could have babies.
  
  Meanwhile Neytiri is the reason genocide was invented. No, really, she's a complete bitch, who takes her worldview for granted and expects everyone else to do the same; the only reason she's not the villain is the director takes her worldview for granted, too. And the reason I say she's the reason genocide was invented is, if she's what the Na'vi women are like, and their children will grow up to be like her, killing their women and children suddenly becomes a lot less of an atrocity. Yes I'm exaggerating; my point is, I hate her, a lot. Also, I realize Zoe Saldana isn't much of an actress, but Neytiri's accent in English sounds exactly like Kida from Disney's Atlantis.


• Speaking of Weaver's character, am I the only one who's tired of that "Holy Virtuous Scientist Being Used By Evil Corporate or Military Villain" thing? Understand: the best a scientist can say, if they work for an organization like the one in Avatar, is, "I'm a grant money whore. I turned whatever tricks they asked me to, because I needed the money for my pet projects." And that's the absolute best; Oppenheimer and Mengele were just ego-tripping, and some of the others did it emphatically because science was, for them, the ideal to which petty "ethics" can be sacrificed, just as patriotism might be used to justify military excesses. Sure, you can make a case for the military involvement being a corrupting factor—"my atrocities are for the war effort!"—in the World War II science-scandals (Manhattan Project, the experiments on Shoah victims, Unit 731), but what about Tuskegee? That was civilian from top to bottom. Anything you make an idol out of, you're gonna give human sacrifices to; science is not exempt.


• It's apparently a commonplace how creepy those data-jack things the Na'vi have are. For one thing, it evokes the deal-breaker question of SF—"How the hell would that evolve?" The Gaia hypothesis is all well and good, except it isn't, but the whole point of Gaian thinking is that "Gaia" is sort of deist, and everything in the ecosystem will just sort of trend the right way...somehow. Yes it's poppycock, but it's a lot less poppycock than this—this is some weird combination of the Blind Watchmaker with the Deus Ex Machina.
  
  But the other point is the thing with those flying critters: so basically to become a man in their tribe, you have to tentacle-hentai a pterosaur. O...kay? Only this is portrayed as not at all the incredibly creepy thing that it is, but as all beautiful and wonderful and shit. And then Sully gets the biggest one, and becomes the Overfiend of the Na'vi, I guess?


• The Na'vi piss me off: they're a Noble Savage cliche, without the rape, robbery, torture, mutilation, casual murder, and occasional cannibalism that are the reason for that second word. They also don't have the almost suicidally strict social control that goes with that first one, seen in, e.g., honor-killings. It's pretty much unavoidable for aliens in SF to show the author's pet theories about society, but how about if those pet theories are something less naive? My own aliens are a militocracy, since I happen to know that actually tends to work out pretty well...but the main tension of their society is the members of the military elite trying to get absolute power in their territories, because I'm not an idiot.


• Update: forgot to add this yesterday. You know when Quaritch talks about the Na'vi having "naturally occurring carbon-fiber" reinforcing their skeletons, and that making them hard to kill? Maybe he meant "that makes them much tougher than you'd expect from light-worlders", because if the CF is on their skeletons then their vital organs are still just as accessible as yours are—there are no bones covering a bullet's access to your intestines of which I am aware. Also, even if they did have some form of natural armor...I'm guessing we still have armor-piercing rounds in the 22nd century, that are rated for stuff that simply doesn't happen in nature. Like, y' know, steel.