Brief Note

So apparently Benedict XVI said that the Church's prohibition on torture cannot be contravened under any circumstances. So, forget everything I said about the deliberate infliction of pain possibly being justified. However, waterboarding involves the infliction of no pain, merely fear, distress, and discomfort, so I still say it's allowed (only being "torture" by analogy, like the Noriega Treatment). It's still only allowed, I should add, in cases of immediate necessity, for gaining intelligence.

Further Scientific Romancing

God, we should call SF Scientific Romance, shouldn't we? It's more specific than Science Fiction, and it also doesn't require you to lie by calling the books novels, because they aren't, not if they're remotely "hard" (or even, as mine are, "chewy"). Anyway, another series of random reflections upon my field of literary endeavor.

• So in Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo, Itsuki mentions, when she first sights the Leopard colony, that it (or rather he) looks like an O'Neill Island III. And you know what? He does. It's not just some technobabble, it's actually the name for a cylindrical colony that has redirecting-mirrors for its solar cells. Leopard doesn't spin for gravity, but, considering he can go through hyperspace, he can probably generate true artificial gravity.


• So apparently, when he canceled the Constellation program (which was to replace the Space Shuttle), Obama let them continue developing the Orion drive ship as, quote, "an escape module for the ISS." Um, what? Is this the Orion ship I'm thinking of, the one that uses nuclear bombs under a pusher plate?
  
  On the other hand, I suppose combining "escape module" and "self-destruct device" could be seen as a handy cost-saving measure.
  
  Oh well. Well-played, NASA; using "External Pulsed Plasma Propulsion" as a spineless euphemism for "Nuclear Pulsed Propulsion" seems to have paid off, since they're letting you keep researching it.
  
  Now come up with similar Newspeak for the Nuclear Thermal Rocket and we're in business.


• Boy Protector's ending is depressing, huh? I just re-read it, and, um, wow. But I noticed something about it, and indeed many of the races in Niven, and the portrayal of human militaries as well: why does everyone go into these situations alone?
  
  See, I've decided to write a scene with someone (a battle cyborg? maybe an android?) with physical characteristics similar to a Pak Protector...who, nevertheless, is defeated by a bunch of soldiers (probably of the felinoid race). I'm thinking of using this line:

  He could probably reach one of them, and with his strength he could pull and twist his target's body enough to kill him, in a matter of moments. But by then the others would all have shot him, probably several bursts each; and their bullets were designed for piercing their armor. Against that, his armor might as well not exist.

  Also, why does everyone think planets are defenseless against nukes or even asteroids? You stick lots of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, far enough out that they can shoot something directly over the poles. You power 'em with big reactors (fission, fusion, antimatter, doesn't matter), and you put big, light-speed weapons on them, like lasers in at least the MW range. The satellites will know the approaching threat is there at least seconds before it arrives, and will have shot it down in the same, or actually a slightly shorter (since it got closer in the interim), amount of time. You put multiple guns per sat, so there'll always be some ready while the others recharge. Really, is that so hard? Sure, spendy, but peace of mind is worth it, right?


• Of course, it's ludicrous to suggest you'd really do any major orbital bombardment, in a normal war. After all, what you're fighting over would be habitable planets as such, and there's no point breaking the thing you're fighting over. Maybe the occasional tactical nuke, and fusion and neutron bombs don't have issues like fallout, but there'd be none of this "create a Cretaceous extinction-level impact", except from utter nutjobs. 'Cause, you know, it might take too long to work to be militarily useful, and it'd definitely take too long to clear up to be a viable option in a territorial war.
  
  I think that's actually how the Man-Kzin Wars played out, so props to Niven for noticing.


• Did you know the New York Times said Robert Goddard didn't even know the basics of physics, because, apparently, rockets can't work in a vacuum?
  
  That's even funnier than Jayson Blair.

A Correction Plantation!

You try coming up with a title that expresses that it's the 101st post, and also a Reality Check. Just to make one person happy, let me add this (ahem): we'll all be Labradors!

Anyway.

• So the gent what runs Rocket Punk Manifesto was blatantly off-topic, and saying he wished the recession would force Americans to learn austerity. Dude, get with the 1970s. Austerity sometimes makes sense when you have commodity money, say gold. When you use fiat money, like we do, you're basically using consumer confidence as a monetary standard. Therefore, the less consumption and investment, the less your money's worth.
  
  Apparently people make fun of Sarah Palin for wanting a return to the gold standard (which I hear she favors, though I've never heard it from her). It seems they don't know that doing that would let us pursue alternatives to consumerism. It would, of course, also slow growth, but nobody ever said economics was simple.


• Still oh-so-fascinating how many commentators don't know that capitalism means "system with an investor class". Though middle- and lower-class tax cuts are good for the economy, by driving up consumption, the ugly reality is that the biggest payoff comes from cutting taxes for the upper, investor-class. Because (and I know this is counter-intuitive) they then have more money to invest, in addition to engaging in purchasing just like the lower income brackets.


• Did anyone hear about Ted Turner saying the rest of the world should adopt China's one-child policy? Which, he claims is accomplished "without draconian measures". I'm curious to know what he considers draconian, if not the measures by which the one-child laws are enforced. Does he mean they're not using metallic dragons corrupted by priests of Takhisis? Because that's the only possibility I can think of.
  
  The irony of all this is that CNN, which Turner owns, has reported on China's methods of enforcing that law. So apparently Turner doesn't watch his own network.


• So back when John Paul II died, and they were discussing the next Pope, Chris Matthews said "They're not going to elect the Grand Inquisitor."
  
  The irony of that is, until the 1890s, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was known as the Roman Inquisition. So...actually, they did elect the Grand Inquisitor.
  
  Not really a reality check but on a related note, until the late 1990s half the detectives in France's national police had "inquisitor" (inquêteur) as their job title. Now they're all called the other thing, inspector (inspecteur). Wouldn't you be mad if they changed your title? "Inquisitor" is the coolest job title ever!


• So routinely you'll find Orthodox writers saying Catholics don't value mystical, noetic experience of God, but, um, have you guys maybe heard of the Cistercians? You better tell 'em they don't value noesis, 'cause they sure think they do.
  
  Huh, speaking of noesis (adj. form noetic), the opposite, discursive thought, is dianoia. Of which the adjective, I think, is "dianetic". Yeah, Hubbard didn't make that word up.


• So I'm not sure, but when people say "cerebral" science fiction, they seem to mean "soft". Firefly gets called "cerebral", Babylon 5 not so much—yet you can get doctoral dissertations out of Bab5, and not just in fake majors. Solaris, 12 Monkeys, Bladerunner—all of 'em could be based on Phil Dick books, and that last one is.
  
  Now I'll be the first to say science's whole point is to render intelligence moot (that's the whole point of all systems of thought), but a complex, hard sf story requires more brain-work, if it's also going to be entertaining, than a dystopia or a time-travel story. Besides, the two most intelligent time travel stories never get called cerebral—mostly because they star Michael J. Fox and the duo of Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, respectively.


• A word I learned from John C. Wright is "amphictyony", an alliance of tribes who share common ritual centers. I bring it up because for some reason I referred to Christendom as a state, and that's silly; it's plainly an amphictyony.
  
  And that's also what the felinoids' "empire" is in my SF books, specifically a militocratic amphictyony with popular sovereignty and a strong executive.

Marshalling of Words

Alas, I do put on airs; this isn't half as cool as the part in Belloc's "Path to Rome" where he marshals his words (the Gallicisms are, apparently, very dangerous cavalrymen, and the anachronisms are, of course, commanded by old Anachronos himself). But I thought I'd do one on a lighter note, about writing and characterization and such-like. By the way, this is my 100th post this year.

• To kick things off, here's Holly Lisle to tell us how to write joyless PoMo anti-fiction that wins Pulitzers. It is a healing balm.


• So I remain convinced that my definition of the difference between SF and fantasy is correct—essentially that the difference is actually along a continuum, depending chiefly on whether the chief device of romancing is technological/scientific or marvelous/miraculous. But it occurs to me that I might want to have a working definition of SF as such. How about, "That field of romance where the chief wonder comes either from the data revealed or speculated upon by science, or from mankind's adaptations to same, social and/or technological." Yes, I think that's a good working definition. I would indeed argue that fantasy has the precise same definition, except with "folklore" substituted for science.


• So where does everyone else stand on sex in stories? I'm a firm believer in the "fall into each other's arms and fade to black" method; past a certain point, sorry, but you're basically writing porn. Then again, most of the sexual relationships in my stories are based on (sometimes misguided) love, even the extramarital ones. Apparently that's rare; far too many of the stories I've read have this weird "everyone has a pathology and the relationship is therapy" approach to relationships.
  
  And hey, you know how it's supposed to be terrible when the smokin' hot villain lady falls for the everyman hero? Anyone else want to write something where someone says something about it, and she says, "What, so just because I'm a supervillain I have to be shallow?"


• So I re-calculated my ships' masses, all based on the mass of this thing called a Reaction Engines Skylon, that's a jet-bordering-on-a-rocket that might soon be used for LEO insertion. So I figured hey, use multiples of its mass and dimensions (keeping in mind the Square-Cube Law) and you know your thing'll work as a spaceship, right? Yeah.
  
  It still shocks and saddens me how many spaceships are based on sea-ships, because apparently nobody knows those things are made of friggin' concrete.
  
  And then, the fact that I started using designs based on the Frisbee rocket has made me redesign my aliens' ships; I sorta can't take ships anymore unless they look real realistic. Which reminds me, I need to rewrite a couple scenes so the aliens land the right way (yes, they do land, they have better tech than the humans).


• So that "I Write Like" thing said that, among other people, my sister writes like David Foster Wallace. That's not actually too bad; I don't know about his fiction but he can't have been all bad, since he said this:

  I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems.

  True dat; maybe someone should tell Whedon.


• So when you become a writer, some of the very odd things in other writers begin to make sense. For instance, in Niven, the ramscoop robo-probes being misprogrammed so the find habitable points, not habitable planets, resulting in worlds like Jinx and Mt. Lookitthat and We Made It? Plainly that process goes like this:
  
  
  1. Oh, and I'll have like a heavy planet, and one that's like Venus except you can live on top of one really high mountain, and one with really fast winds in two seasons!
  
  
  2. Wait, why would anybody be stupid enough to live on worlds like that?
  
  
  3. Oh, oh, oh, I know! It's an accident! They never would've gone except there was a mixup, maybe like a badly programmed robot probe or something, and hell, it's not like you can just turn around and go back, with spaceships.
  
  I submit that is the most likely explanation. Many of the most imaginative things in fiction start out as ways around objections to things you want to do; I know half my best work is.


• Does anyone else notice that the deaths in Serenity (I shall not name names), and Whedon's interpretation of same (he apparently did it to show his audience they care about his characters), are essentially emotional abuse? "You're forgetting you love me, I'll leave until you realize it?" Yeah, I think Browncoats may have a touch of battered-women's syndrome here.
  
  Pointlessly, randomly killing off beloved characters may be "edgy" and "realistic", but it's also bad narrative. Plus, women having markedly less upper-body strength than men is also realistic. Thoughts, Whedon?
  
  Oh and by the way, smacking into another ship at reentry velocities will vaporize both ships, not just puncture the cockpit. The cockpit it shouldn't even have ("windows" on spaceships—yeah, we wanna be damn sure the Red Baron's not sneaking up on us, right?).


• Larry Niven's Laws for Writers have some very good advice, like "it is a sin to waste the reader's time" and "everybody talks first draft." Also this:

  If you've nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn't get it then, let it not be your fault.

  Words to live by.

Ordering Our Lives Together

I was going to call this "The Art of the Possible" because it's about politics, but politics isn't the art of the possible, science fiction is. So I'm fallen back on an older definition, that politics answers the question "How ought we to order our lives together?"

• So apparently the latest round of wiki-based intelligence leaks has revealed that, well...Saddam Hussein did, in fact, have lots of uranium "yellowcake", and other WMDs. I sincerely doubt vindicating the Bush Administration's position on Iraqi WMDs was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's intent, but there you are.
  
  What fascinates me is people who can't be made to understand the concept, "even if there weren't WMDs, it is a good thing to get rid of someone who uses the systematic gang-rape and meat-grindering of the relatives of dissidents as a political tool." Go ahead and say the war was imprudent, if you think so (though we had less than half the casualties in five years that France had in one day at the Battle of Agincourt, so this ain't exactly a taxing war), but saying it was immoral is, as far as I can see, endorsing Saddam's practices. If not, how not?
  
  Finally, as a person of Irish and Acadian descent, I know a little something about having your resources taken by people with names like Bush and Cheney. It's something Anglos have historically proved quite good at. The fact we don't have Iraq's oil (and, by the bye, we don't) means they weren't after it.


• Pat Buchanan and his ilk point to the violence against Chaldean Christians, in the absence of Saddam's more egalitarian terror state, as justification for opposing the war, but, I have a question. If the fact people abuse their freedom means they should not be liberated, mustn't we also scrub the operations inaugurated by the Declaration of Independence and the 13th Amendment?


• One more point against a number of "Catholic" opponents of the Iraq War, and the larger War on Terror: waterboarding. So essentially what people like Mark Shea, who gets his news from Harper's (and therefore from the far-left MacArthur Foundation), say is, "War is not intrinsically immoral but torture is."
  
  Two things, jackass. First, the use of spanking in child-rearing is far more "torture" than waterboarding, since the former involves the deliberate infliction of pain and the latter doesn't (fear is not pain). Since the Catholic Church is not opposed to spanking, we may conclude that the deliberate infliction of pain is not intrinsically immoral. Similarly, the Church's lack of opposition to the deterrent use of any threat of force, lethal as well as nonlethal, forces us to conclude that inflicting fear, as well, is not intrinsically immoral.
  
  Second, your position is, given the ways one often dies in modern warfare, that it is immoral to subject someone to a little fear and discomfort (again, not even pain), but it is completely morally neutral to turn him into a gigantic plume of blood and tattered entrails on a crumbling wall with jagged shards of bone buried in it. Even though, given the evils terrorists perpetrate, his death is unusually likely to send him to hell.
  
  I don't know what cosmos you learned moral theology in, but in mine, that seems questionable.


• So they're making a movie of Atlas Shrugged. Why? Shit, how should I know? But I'm sure the question on everyone's mind is, "Are they actually going to have John Galt Speak at the end for, what, an hour? Two?"
  
  I doubt it; yet not only is that speech the point of the book, it's probably the best part of the book (yeah, not a fan). The plot and characters are as worthless as Rand herself (who is, in my opinion, a one-woman tragedy of Stalinism and Nazism, namely that so many worth a damn people didn't escape them, and she did); only that one speech has any merit at all. Rand was a complete drool-soaked wrestling-helmeted incompetent at most aspects of writing, but she was good at rhetoric.


• Speaking of strange movie news, Mark Johnson, producer of the Narnia films, claims he's not sure if they're Christian. So, Mark, are you also in doubt as to whether Rand might've been a socialist? Does Childhood's End leave you thinking maybe, just maybe, Clarke might've been a Southern Baptist? Just how much do you need to be beaten over the head with a message before you'll even acknowledge its presence?
  
  That is, indeed, my one complaint about Narnia. The characters and writing, and basic plots, are excellent; Lewis had a largely unrecognized talent for writing characters, especially children, and also a disarming style that also served him in his apologetics. But the Narnia books, far more than the Space trilogy, beat you bloody with their Christian allegory.
  
  Actually my problem with That Hideous Strength, the book in the Space trilogy everyone likes to pick on, is probably unusual. My problem with it is: there's no Church. There's Ransom and his tiny group of friends, and a bunch of spirits. There's no community, formal or informal, of believers. And Christianity is nonexistent without the Church, far more nonexistent than any religion except Buddhism without the Sangha (that's why most western Buddhists feel inauthentic).


• More from Hollywood: Salma Hayek was apparently playing the Halle Berry "nobody casts minorities in good parts" card. Only, wait, what minority? Turns out she's Mexican, it's just hard to tell 'cause she's as güera as my (Czech-Irish) mom and has a German name.
  
  Hint, Salma: if you both look German and have a German name, you are not being discriminated against. Go look up the phrase "visible minority."


• How come nobody's pointed out, to Libertarians who support gay marriage, that it's the thing they hate most, resource redistribution? And not a necessary resource like money, that people will die without; but a complete frill, social approval.
  
  Remember, the Libertarians are the ones who pride themselves on their "rationality" (i.e. shallow selfishness) and love books like Freakonomics, one of whose theses was that the recent drop in crime rates was due to a high Black abortion rate. When these people wax sentimental about "the right to love", either they're nuts or they're putting on a con-job.

Ψ-yonara

How much do I rock? So much so that that title, aside from sounding like "sayonara", actually means "if it's psi." Yes, yes, I am that cool. No applause, just send money.

Before I kick this off I have to say I was a little hard on Arthur C. Clarke, though I generally favor mouth-shooting anyone who combines arrogance and ignorance like that (and I still love that post's title: zing, bitch). His jackass nominally atheist (but actually just quasi-Gnostic) bloviating is only a deal-breaker in Childhood's End. Otherwise it's a foible of a good writer, a thing like the rishathra, dolphins, or unworkable Kzin society, in Niven, or Cherryh's obsession with gender-reversing male-chauvinist tropes (she's an equality feminist, I think, one who never got the memo that some genders are more equal than others). You can tolerate it, though there's a few cases where it drowns out the plot. It's not like Asimov's systematic cultivation of blind, stinking pig-ignorance, or Brin's shrill doctrinaire-liberal harangues, or Iain M. Banks' puerile gutter-wallowing. Clarke's flaw is an annoying distraction from his writing; Asimov's, Brin's, and Banks' flaws are their writing.

Anyway, John C. Wright said, in his brilliant discussion of how much Childhood's End sucks, that in SF, you stick to a naturalistic worldview; any supernatural stuff has to be called psionics or something. My problem with that is, psychic phenomena have been demonstrated far more conclusively than Keynesianism or the Laffer curve; so, too, the pagan gods (if you disagree, try explaining it to the three men who are dead because they filmed the Navajo dance invoking Yé'ii Bichaii, the Maternal Grandfather of the Gods, all the way through). But the explanations "parapsychologists" always give are bunk. At best, you have to call that stuff "psi", which is a sciencey-sounding way of saying "hell if I know" (no really, the term comes from early ESP experiments, where the letter stood for "unknown factor").

Personally, in my own writing, the distinction between SF and fantasy is more subtle. My fantasy and dark fantasy have huge, improbable works of magic, fireballs and shape-shifting and vampires and Thor. But the science and tech are all real for the era they're set in. My SF book has fusion and antimatter rockets, space-folds, and inertia-control by stress-energy tensor metric patching, but the psychic powers are limited to the kinds of things Wolf Messing or Nina Kulagina could pull off. Basically, SF is where I'm being speculative with tech, while fantasy is where I'm being speculative with wonder-working.

The best example is onmyodo. Being the Nihonphile I am, I have onmyoji in both my SF and my dark fantasy. But in my SF book, it's subtle, and in doubt whether he's really doing anything at all—the main thing he does is use it to get around Lucas-Penrose. In my dark fantasy, the generating cycle of the five elements is used to blast zombies with fireballs by pointing twigs at them. See the difference?

Now, personally, I think anyone who calls that stuff "supernatural" or "miraculous" is quaint. There is, in real life, a distinction between the paranormal/marvelous, on one hand, and the supernatural/miraculous, on the other. And magic, ESP, telekinesis, ghosts, gods, and the rest of it, go firmly in the paranormal and the marvelous. So, actually, I guess I stand with Wright: I just have a vastly broader conception of "natural" than him. The only things I consider supernatural/miraculous are the things that involve contradictions of sacrificial economy ("equivalent exchange").

The resurrection of the dead is a miracle (it breaks a rule of magic; onmyodo's Taizanfukunsai or "Invocation of the Minister of Mt. Tai" is actually a technique for exchanging one person's bad omens for another person's good ones, and in any event would've required a human sacrifice for every person brought back to life). Indeed, resurrection breaks a metaphysical rule: ordinarily, form and matter, essence and accidents—what you skin-clad savages call soul and body—can't be reunited once separated. Creation ex nihilo is a miracle, as is a change in form/essence/soul without changing matter/accidents/body. Do you detect a pattern? Yeah, basically only God with a big G, the Subsistent Act of Being, can get you miracles. All of them involve existence, in some way, because no mere form can affect that (one might call it, in relation to the Four Causes, the Zeroth Cause). That's why they're violations of sacrificial economy.

Where exactly devils and angels go on this continuum is anyone's guess, I'm afraid. But I err on the side of caution; there aren't any in my SF book. There's two, possibly three miraculous apparitions, far back in history, but it's necessary to the plot. Meanwhile in my fantasy book the religion (the direct worship of existence) has clerics who can raise the dead and heal huge wounds (the gods, who are called elves and trolls when they're at home, can only speed up the body's own healing process, and regenerate their own wounds); my dark fantasy has three devils, one of whom is variously called Satan, Lucifer, or Shemyazah, an exorcism (of a possessed vampire no less!), a stigmata, and an intervention by the Guadalupana.

Holy shit. Did I just actually come up with a working definition of the difference between SF and fantasy, that can actually address mixed cases? I think I did. How do I patent this? Hell, while I'm at it, watch this: "pornography is those works whose sole or chief artistic merit is the excitation of the prurient interest." Ta-dah: gets around the question of whether it's "art" or not, and also represents more of a standard than "I know it when I see it."

I'd just like to say I rock and roll, all of the time.

Adolescence's Beginning

Why yes, that is a slap at Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End; dumbass sets out to try and write an atheist answer to Lewis' space trilogy and it just ends up being about emanationist pantheism, with shades of Fyodorov's Cosmism and De Chardin's Process Theology. I'm curious to know if anyone who calls himself an atheist really knows what the word means.

And to think, that "I write like" thing has the gall to give me this:

I write like
Arthur Clarke

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Them's fightin' words, ya hairdressin' lil Java program. I write like Tony Hillerman.

Clarke may have invented the thing I get my teevee shows from, but that doesn't change the fact he was a philosophical illiterate and a shallow-skulled, self-righteous twit with a Pollyanna view of human destiny that bordered on the Hegelian.

Or take his "Apes or Angels" thing. In brief, Clarke theorized that what we call "human" represents a brief period between being an animal and some woowoo "ascension" crap, so we're very unlikely to encounter other species at a stage of development comparable to our own, but either in the stage before it or the stage after it.

Only guess what? Clarke was an insect. Provably, viz Heinlein. What I mean is, Clarke may have known a thing or two about space (oh hell, the man was a demigod, credit where it's due), but his understanding of evolution, especially human evolution, is the same pop-sci BS any man on the English street circa 1960 could give you. For God's sake, even TV Tropes knows there's no such thing as EvolutionaryLevels, but apparently nobody told Clarke.

Now, in terms of technological capabilities he's probably right, though I'll point out (gleefully, indeed I am dancing on his grave in spirit) that only one civilization on the Earth had Christianity, and Christendom is the only civilization to make several of the scientific advances necessary to the kind of technological progress Clarke talks about.

This post isn't all going to be a rant about Clarke, though (I know, I'm surprised too). See, this fact—that only Christendom could've created a space-capable civilization—has interesting implications for science fiction. It's certainly one answer to the Fermi paradox: the aliens haven't ever contacted us because they're quite literally benighted heathens. But what do you do if you still want to have spacefaring aliens, since we know nobody develops science without Christianity? And this isn't a thing where Buddhism is a substitute; Buddhists did develop egalitarianism and feminism, but they didn't develop science.

Although I just said Christendom mostly developed science because they couldn't do magic, there's actually another factor. Christians developed science because they're not allowed to hate the material world, and there are thousands of dead Cathars who might like a word with anyone who says otherwise. And that's why the Buddhists didn't develop science; what do they care about the tire-pressure on the Wheel of Suffering? That's also, to an extent, why not as much came of Buddhist egalitarianism and feminism—precisely because Buddhism is less worldly than Christianity, "Buddhist" countries usually based their laws on systems like Confucianism, unfortunately for the common people.

Anyway, you'd need, specifically, an Incarnational religion to develop science. I'm not sure which aspects are necessary, but certainly mere pantheism can't pull it off, or the Stoics would've. Islam, you say? Well, the only real thing they did with all that astronomical knowledge was figure out when Ramadan started; besides, after Averroes got the wrong answer to the question of reason's place in religion, the Islamic world basically decided everything is completely arbitrary, the will of God alone. That's not conducive to scientific advancement. They were okay at medicine but the West surpassed them by the 1400s, and in terms of what we think of as practical technology—manufacturing and agriculture—they were centuries behind the West, again because they had slaves.

Interesting, though, huh? Just like how you'll have to figure out your aliens' biology and economics, you've got to work out their theology. You can't avoid the question, because it determines whether they'll even show up.

Interestingly, theology is considered the queen of the sciences.

Sed Est Verus?

Reality Check (and a Latin title!). Mostly concerning history.

• It will shock many of you to learn, not only did Pius XII save more Jews than anyone else, by a wide margin (that whole "Nazi collaboration" thing was, provably, made up in the 70s by the Stasi, to undermine the Vatican), but another ally of European Jewry was...Francisco Franco. Yeah, I know, weird, but he apparently helped a lot of Jews escape places occupied by Nazis or the other Fascists.
  
  Of course, what people don't know about Spanish Fascists would fill a pretty thick book. They sure weren't nice guys, but let's just say the fictional cruelty of the fascist in "Pan's Labyrinth" still isn't as bad as the stuff the Communists actually did, in the Spanish Civil War.


• So a lot of ink gets spilled on the topic of why science arose in the West, and not elsewhere. Certainly it has something to do with Christianity, but a lot of writers ascribe it to the Christian view that nature is orderly and intelligible—yet Asia also generally believes that, but they didn't come up with science.
  
  Myself, I have a different theory. The reason Christians came up with science, and Asia didn't, is simple: we're not allowed to do magic. China and India both had much better astronomy than the West, but the primary thing they did with it was ever more detailed horoscopes. Similarly their biological and anatomical studies were inseparable from their folk-magic and alchemy. And the main use of astronomy in Mesoamerican cultures was horoscopes; all three of those cultures' much-lauded accurate calendars were at least half of divinatory origin.
  
  I'd say a related element, the much quicker technological development of the West compared to its contemporaries, is that, unlike both polytheist Asia and the Islamic world, the West didn't have slaves anymore: so they needed good machines. That's certainly why the Classical world had such great military tech but such bad plows: soldiers were freemen, but farmhands were slaves.
  
  Huh. It just occurs to me that the same is true of the Renaissance: technological development slowed to a crawl in that era, except in military equipment. What's really fun to point out, though, is that there's exactly one Renaissance scientist of any greatness (Copernicus), and he was mostly building on Oresme and Buridan. The two initiators of the Age of "Reason", meanwhile (Descartes and Galileo), were pretty much just picking up where Oresme and Buridan left off (Oresme actually invented "Cartesian" notation, did you know?).


• So Cameron, not only is your plot economically impossible, but apparently its exogeology is wrong too. Seems the Alpha Centauri system's not that likely to have gas giants (Pandora is a moon), but is quite likely to have earth-sized rocky planets. Oops.
  
  Maybe someone should have pointed out that living on the "forest moon" of a gas giant is just one more parallel the Na'vi have to Ewoks, and they're pretty heavily-laden with those as it is.
  
  And I think the Unobtainium nonsense stems from Cameron being a flatlander. See, Unobtainium is just an unintelligent analogy to oil. Only, oil doesn't have to fight every law of physics and chemistry just to exist; in fact it happens because something else (a living thing) lost that fight. But a hot superconductor is not the kind of thing that is particularly likely to happen on its own at all, let alone on any planet a human can walk around on, breath-mask or no.


• So there's this strange idea among many on America's right that Mexico (and much of the rest of Latin America) are having their recent political instability because of European-style statism. But actually, no, a lot of Latin Americans, and indeed Latin cultures generally, have a "screw the government" mentality that'd make Ron Paul's head spin. Its most extreme form is the Mafia's omerta code; Belloc was once in a French town that made about 2/3 its living by smuggling.
  
  Personally I think it's just what happens when you try to make Liberalism (classically defined, I mean) intellectually consistent.


• Another example of how people know nothing of the history of Liberalism is, ask the nearest American conservative, "Who was more pro-family, Locke or Rousseau?" And of course they'll say Locke. Only, no, actually, Locke placed everything under the social contract, including familial relations, while Rousseau said that the family exists in the state of nature and its relations precede the contract.
  
  The other thing that's interesting is that "volonté générale", as used by Rousseau, doesn't mean anything remotely like "general will". It's much closer to "consent of the governed", except that Rousseau denies that the people are the governed—his thought, remember, defines them as the sovereign, and acts like it. It's arguably also something akin to "common good," as used by Aquinas (not by the quasi-Liberation Theology activists who've usurped the phrase).


• Late Addendum: Reality check for myself! So I was thinking, and it turns out there is a way that the Serenity can use its artificial gravity to make its rocket more efficient, without something nonsensical like negating rest mass. If your gravity device works like a Kzin gravity planer/polarizer, you can put a gravity well just in front of your ship, and that makes acceleration easier, because it's quite literally downhill. Of course, at that point, you don't need a rocket anymore, and that's not how the artificial gravity in Firefly seems to work—if it was, the deckplan would be different.
  
  Come to think of it, the Serenity's exhaust seems to drift remarkably slowly. Its delta-v must be ridiculously low.

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.

Brief Note

So I have an addendum and a correction to the previous post.

The addendum is a line from "In the Bottom of a Hole" that ought to be tattooed inside every federal official's eyes, as in stamped on their retinas so it's overlaid on everything they see, forever:

There's everything in space. [...] Metal. Vacuum for the vacuum industries. A place to build cheap without all kinds of bracing girders. Free fall for people with weak hearts. Room to test things that might blow up. A place to learn physics where you can watch it happen.

And the correction is, I overstated our ability to do interstellar flight; turns out our currently available nuclear rockets would have to be more than 99% propellant tank to get up to .1c. I calculated the delta-v myself. But you might be able to refuel them in-flight using electrostatic (not electromagnetic) ramscoops. And one day we'll be able to make fusion rockets, and full-fledged RAIR (ram-augmented interstellar rockets) will be within our grasp.