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So, who thinks Carl and I were too sporty with the diggers and other robots in In the Shadow of Ares?

The humanoid robots are a little creepy in an uncanny valley way, but quite impressive for what they can do if even part of it is autonomous (it looks to me like the Petman demo involves someone driving the device in realtime, possibly by mean akin to motion capture, yet still with autonomous responses/reflexes at work in maintaining its balance). I found the robotic pack-mule the most impressive, probably because it (and the hexapod thing near the beginning) appears to be the most versatile and mature design – one can already imagine a production version being used in the field for a variety of applications (with or without cinder-block-tossing appendages). Or, imagine a future Mars “rover’ based on a similar platform, able to wander into more interesting areas of the planet’s surface than the current wheeled designs can reach.

The hexapod device really caught my attention, partly because Carl and I dreamed up a similar device a few months ago for Ghosts of Tharsis – more sophisticated of course, but something that is recognizable as a 40-year evolution of the device shown, augmented with the wholly-fictional (?) simulacrum intelligence technology. And if you thought the diggers were dangerous…

Posted on April 1st, 2013 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Useful Technology. Tags: Boston Dynamics, DARPA, robot, Science Fiction. Comments Off

Thanks to a cheap promotional airfare and some friends willing to go on a weekend trip to the Arctic north, in the winter, on a lark, I now know what Iceland looks like in the dark.

Something like this…

…which reminded me of the agricultural bubbles at the Green in In the Shadow of Ares.

In fact, they’re a set of agricultural greenhouses in the town of Hveragerði, and despite their size are each about a tenth as wide and about 1/15th as long as their fictional counterparts.

CLARIFICATION: No, we did not actually go to Iceland on a lark. We used an airplane.

Posted on January 26th, 2013 under In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Settlement, Useful Technology. Tags: Iceland, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Comments Off

Bruce Webster is making some: The coming liberal meltdown.

Interesting. Plausible. Maybe or maybe not likely — who knows?

What I liked about his post was the element of prognostication from current trends and social/political circumstances, and how it resembles what Carl and I have been doing for the backstory for In the Shadow of Ares and its in-work sequels (the first of whose outline I plan to finalize today, given the crappy weather here in Denver). Whether or not his predictions materialize, it’s fun to take them as a set of initial conditions for a fictional near-future history — for example, the future-history potential of the Obama-Clinton feud:

• Imagine it escalating from the low-intensity political warfare he describes into an all-out factional “civil war” as 2016 approaches.
• Blue collarists, liberal-leaning Jews and Latinos, and other center-left Democrat constituencies line up with Clinton loyalists and erstwhile PUMAs behind Hillary.
• Blacks along with Progressives, ivory towerists, callow youth,  union extremists, and other hard-left Democrats follow Obama.
• Democratic women split between the two on similar lines, with Hillary not automatically winning the bulk of Democratic women due to Obama’s appeal to the more radical youth demographic.
• What happens next?
  • Does the Democrat party then split into two, or see the smaller faction peel off and join an existing third party?
  • If the party doesn’t split, does the internal divide render the Democrat Party nearly irrelevant for several election cycles, say through 2020, as they focus on factional infighting and sabotaging each other instead of running against Republicans?
  • Does Andrew Cuomo (as Webster hints) emerge as a “neither-nor” figure who is able to glue the factions back together while (under the pressure of emerging fiscal/economic necessity) bringing the party back towards the reasonable center from where Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the Progressives have shifted it?
  • If not and the Democrats (as a single or split party) experience waning influence, what happens to Republicans, who experience show tend to drift from principles and platform quite rapidly in the absence of competition from an energized opposition?
  • Under such circumstances, could the GOP itself experience a loss of factional cohesion, with a non-negligible contingent of center-left, center-right, socially-liberal, and Progressive Republicans defecting to join Hillary Clinton’s “less extreme” new party? Would this result in a major two-party reconfiguration along the lines of the Whig-Republican split in the 1850s, or would we end up with a new equilibrium state involving three stable medium-large parties in place of two very large ones? If the latter, would there be an evolution to more discrete special interest factions akin to (say) the small parties in the Israeli Knesset, with the three parties becoming more explicitly coalition-based and the new equilibrium maintained via coaxing these factions to jump parties (difficult under the current party system, but since this is all speculative anyway, why not assume changes to it)?
  • If any of the outcomes above involving party splits emerge, would existing third parties (Libertarians, Greens, etc.) see greater influence? Presumably some not-insignificant portion of Democrats in the Obama/Clinton split scenario would be disgusted enough with both resulting parties to seek a third alternative. Same for libertarian Republicans in the diminished-competition scenario, with disgust with the squishiness and corruption of one-party GOP dominance motivating them to switch to the Libertarian Party. If the large parties get smaller and the small parties get larger, would the equilibrium necessarily stop at (say) three core parties? Why not four or five?

It’d be fun to tackle his other predictions in similar fashion (which I intended to do before spending too much time on the one above), but I’ve got too much to get done today.

Posted on October 27th, 2012 under Colorado Politics, Entertainment, politics, Science Fiction, Writing. Tags: future history, Hillary Clinton, Obama, politics, Science Fiction, speculative fiction. Comments Off

I managed to get in on the Colorado Springs showing of “Iron Sky” last night.

I won’t say it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it certainly had a lot going for it.

First off, the bad:

• The dialogue was a little klunky through most of the movie, but once you allow for it it’s only jarring in a couple of places. It’s probably attributable to it being written and produced by ESL speakers, but it was a little irritating in hindsight since it would have been a trivial thing to fix: just hire an aspiring American screenwriter for a couple of days to polish the dialogue. (An American rather than a Brit, because the idiom/usage should reflect the Earth-side part of the story taking place in the U.S..)
• The screenplay was a bit inconsistent in its recurring gags and themes, for example the “Heil Kortzfleisch” bit and Washington being a racial token rather than an actual astronaut. Indeed, Washington’s whole situation was ripe with un-PC comedic potential that they seemed just a little hesitant to exploit in the way Blazing Saddles did (they appeared to be setting up an “oh they didn’t just go there” racial gag in the airlock scene, but…then…they didn’t go there). The “woman scorned” bit was completely hamfisted – it would have been far more effective to have had a few vague cues as to her motivations in leading the assault, and then follow up with the “did he suffer?” line structured in a way to turn the whole sequence on its head as the vengeance of a jilted lover rather than the defense of Earth.
• The acting was similarly inconsistent in places. This seemed to be a function of editing, however, as the actors involved did a decent job elsewhere.
• In one of the later scenes the albino makeup is poorly done, in that you can plainly see it is just makeup – the earlier shots are actually pretty convincing in that regard.

Now, the good:

• Overall it was good, silly fun. With a little polish on the jokes and dialogue, it could have been a Holy Grail-level classic. Just the premise of the film is brilliantly absurd, which even the characters on several occasions acknowledge (see trailer above).
• The special effects, sets, etc. were pretty impressive for such a low-budget film. They may have created a new sub-genre of Steampunk with the depictions of “advanced” Moon-Nazi technology – it was thoroughly retro, but in a clearly 1940s way rather than an 1890s way. Ditto the color grading – it was a nice touch how the backgrounds and background action in many of the lunar scenes were nearly monochromatic, like Nazi-era films and photos, as if things faded back into the 1940s as you moved away from the camera.
• While the effects of low gravity are otherwise set aside, the scenes of Washington’s escape attempt use the Moon’s gravity as a subtle sight-gag. Imagine a fleeing Jason Bourne leaping from one roof down to the next…but taking six times as long to get there…bellowing in terror all the way.
• While some of the humor came up short as noted above, there were a number of gags that were either subtly done (the Great Dictator references), unapologetically unsubtle (the Downfall bit), or just pitch-perfect (the Beetle sight gag and the use of classic Meier/Shaver UFO designs).
• The quantity and distribution of allusions was well-done. If you were paying attention, there were quite a few references besides those to The Great Dictator and Downfall,and they were fit in in unobtrusive ways (that is, they fit the flow of the story and weren’t clumsily thrown in to get a laugh). In particular, Dr. Strangelovemakes quite a few appearances.
• Renate Richter’s cluelessness about the actual nature of Naziism is exploited pretty well as a running gag. And when she figures things out, she is simply furious about it and takes action – she doesn’t turn into a moralizing, self-righteous, preachy Jane Fonda caricature who delivers long moral-relativist soliloquies on manufactured consent and the basis of all power structures in exploitative lies.
• The guy who plays Klaus Adler was an excellent casting choice. On the one hand, he has the same exaggeratedly chiseled features of the Ideal Aryan Übermensch one finds in Nazi propaganda posters, and on the other, his snarling grimace when angry is utterly creepy and the kind of thing you’d find in graphic-novel illustrations of Nazi villains.
• The parody of American politics is not totally spot-on, but it gets pretty close to capturing the venality, stupidity, and mendacity of the people involved. The satire of Sarah Palin seems confined to simply physical and cultural resemblances, and so isn’t gratuitously vicious and mean-spirited like a Hollywood production would have made it, and this is true of the political theme generally even though it’s clear the politicians are meant to be left-stereotypes of Republicans. Indeed, the real mockery concerning President Wagner and others is directed at general stereotypes of politicians: short-sightedness, mindless personal ambition, obsession with re-election, lack of principles, win-at-all-costs ethics, lack of loyalty to others, grandiosity, opportunism, and a woeful lack of knowledge about vital issues.It doesn’t come across as hackneyed Republican-bashing (like, say, Newsroom).
• While the music was a little jarring in one or two places, in many scenes it was amusing to pick up on a particular melody in the background and only a moment later recognize it as some bombastic Wagner piece.
• The ending sequence is totally unexpected – it can be read as a little preachy, but I give the producers props for making it a commentary on humanity in general and not (say) a cheap shot at Americans, or the West, or capitalism, or some other threadbare Approved Target of Hate which a Hollywood production would have used.

So again, not the greatest film of all time, but definitely worth seeing.

Posted on August 31st, 2012 under Entertainment, Movies, Science Fiction. Tags: Iron Sky, movies, Nazis, Sarah Palin, Science Fiction, Steampunk. Comments: 2

I haven’t seen it on the lfs.org website yet, but word is that In the Shadow of Ares did not win this year’s Prometheus Award.

But that’s okay. I didn’t really expect to win given who we were up against, and I’m thrilled that we were among the finalists – I never expected to get that far when we were nominated.

Posted on July 20th, 2012 under Entertainment, Science Fiction. Tags: In the Shadow of Ares, libertarian, Prometheus, Science Fiction. Comments: 2

I finished The Day of the Triffids on the flight to Krakow on Sunday, and I have to say that Wyndham managed to keep up the quality right until the end. The twist involving Josella should have been pretty obvious, in hindsight, but surprised me anyway given Bill’s fixation with finding the group from the university – it was a wholly effective bit of misdirection.

The ending was a bit of a let-down, in the sense that it just…ends. There’s no big set piece or climax to the story, the characters just ride off into the sunset. I was hoping to find that they’d developed a method of destroying the triffids, or that they’d discovered the truth about the plants’ ability to communicate and (apparently) reason, or the resolution of some of the many mysteries left unresolved. However, given that the story is presented as Bill’s in medias res memoir of the events of the disaster and it’s immediate aftermath, I suppose final answers weren’t to be expected in the time period covered by the story.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

• I found the response of the victims of the “meteor shower” to be both disgusting and interesting — most people just gave up and gave in, but as Bill himself sort-of observes at one point, this is a curiously British failing. They kept expecting “in Micawberesque fashion” that Americans would come and save the day again (remember this was written when WWII was still fresh in every adult’s mind), which encouraged in many of the blinded a mindset of dependence-bred passivity strongly reminiscent of people who ignored evacuation orders during Katrina on the assumption that “the government” would take care of them.
• One glaring omission from his disaster scenario involved radio. Unless the “meteor shower” (in scare-quotes because there was substantial doubt as to the true nature of that event) somehow disrupted the ionosphere for 7-8 years or fried communications systems altogether (while leaving other electrical systems intact), there’s no reason why the protagonists shouldn’t have been in radio communications with others or have had some news of outside areas via those able to use radio communications (such as perhaps the university group in London). The story presumably takes place in the late 1950s or early 1960s, so radio communications would have been both pervasive and accessible even to laymen, and it was shown in the story that electrical power was available to the protagonists even 6 years into the disaster (in the form of electrified fences to keep the triffids out of their compounds). Bill mentions early on (within a day or two of the “meteor shower”) that radio and television frequencies are silent, but it’s hard to believe that that would have continued indefinitely in real life.
• Wyndham handles the descent of London pretty well, I think. The decay is somewhat accelerated, given what we’ve seen with (say) areas like Detroit undergoing “re-wilding” through a couple decades (rather than years) of neglect, but one can pass that off as artistic license. The initial aftermath, with the confusion, chaos turning to tyranny, and finally epidemics of lethal sanitation-related disease, seems all too plausible (again, look at New Orleans after Katrina, and imagine how that situation would have played out without any outside assistance riding to the rescue, however belatedly).
• He also handles Bill’s sense of isolation and loneliness well. It’s one thing to be off doing your own thing under normal conditions, but quite another when you don’t know whether you’ll ever see another living human being again. His relief at rescuing Susan is well done in this context.
• Susan herself is rather amusingly handled. Given what Britain has become since the book was written, the image of a nine-year-old girl deftly handling a firearm and wreaking ruthless vengeance on the killer plants that wiped out her family is delightful.

All together, the book is a bit dated (given that it’s 50-odd years old, that’s to be expected), but is still a wholly worthwhile read as a post-apocalypse novel. No zombies, no preachy anti-human moralizing, no cliched premise – the book focuses more on the protagonists’ response to the events than the gee-whizzery of the disaster or the ensuing threats themselves.

Posted on July 4th, 2012 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Uncategorized. Tags: Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham, post-apocalypse, Science Fiction. Comments Off

Sad news: Ray Bradbury has passed away at 91.

I haven’t read anything by him in years, probably since junior high when I voraciously consumed any of his books I could get my hands on. He did however have a big influence on my subsequent science fiction interests, and is one big reason I like Twilight Zone-type material (stories with clever metaphors and unexpected and ironic twists).

The Bradbury story I remember the best is The Veldt. I remember reading it in seventh grade and being shocked at the ending, and yet still amused by the twist involved. Strangely, I’ve never read The Martian Chronicles, a failure I ought to remedy.

Bradbury is also the reason I always carry a notebook with me. I recall reading a magazine article by him when I was 9 or 10 in which he recommended this practice. (I also remember that the article was illustrated with pictures of him amidst the wreckage of the then-being-demolished Apollo launch and service structures – something that gave me some weird deja vu when I saw the dismantled LUT at KSC back in 2002.)

Posted on June 6th, 2012 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction, Writing. Tags: Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction. Comments Off

…our book In the Shadow of Ares is one of the finalists for this year’s Prometheus Award. Sweet.

The Prometheus finalists for Best Novel recognize pro-freedom novels published last year:

• The Children of the Sky (TOR Books) – A sequel to Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and in the same universe as Prometheus-winning A Deepness in the Sky, this novel focuses on advanced humans, stranded and struggling to survive on a low-tech planet populated by Tines, dog-like creatures who are only intelligent when organized in packs. The most libertarian of the three human factions and their local allies must cope with the world’s authoritarian factions to advance peaceful trade over war and coercion.
• The Freedom Maze (Small Beer Press) – Delia Sherman’s young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl in 1960 who is magically sent back to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. With her summer tan, she’s mistaken for a slave herself, learning the hard way about her ancestors’ attitudes and about courage, respect, individual rights and personal responsibility.
• In the Shadow of Ares (Amazon Kindle edition) – This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars, where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict. (more…)

Posted on April 8th, 2012 under Entertainment, politics, Writing. Tags: Award, Human Wave, In the Shadow of Ares, libertarian, Prometheus, Science Fiction. Comments Off

…all those German classes weren’t wasted after all – The Rise of the Fifth Reich? (Did I miss the fourth one?)

Corn’s sensitivity to the possibility that actions Americans do not anticipate based on the very different priorities of policy makers in other parts of the world could radically reshape the global picture animates his article on Germany.  He begins provocatively:

“If Clausewitz is right that “war is the continuation of policy by other means”, then Germany is again at war with Europe, at least in the sense that German policy is trying to achieve in Europe the characteristic objectives of war: the redrawing of international boundaries and the subjugation of foreign peoples….

Germany’s goal?

A constitutionalization of the EU treaties, which would irreversibly institutionalize the current “correlation of forces,” and allow German hegemony in the 27-member European Union to approximate Prussian hegemony in the 27-member Bismarckian Reich.

This is much more exciting than the usual bland pap about European politics one reads in the US, and Corn’s analysis is deeply grounded in what serious people are thinking and writing in Paris, London and Berlin.

Exciting indeed, but I’m not sure if that comment at the end about “serious people” is meant to be irony or not…

As Mead notes, Corn may just be getting over-excited, but it’s still worth considering as a thought experiment. And in my case, it’s interesting as fodder for a future history — if a resurgent Germany dominated the EU like the Zollverein and succeeded in bringing a demographically cratering Russia to heel in exchange for help shoring up its eastern border defenses, etc., what would that world look like in fiction?

Posted on December 3rd, 2011 under Entertainment, politics, Science Fiction. Tags: China, future history, Germany, Russia, Science Fiction, Walter Russell Mead. Comments Off