Just The Caffeine Talking

A Christmas Tradition

Long-time readers of this 'blog know that I like to put up a link every Christmas to my favorite holiday-themed Web site in the whole world: the NORAD Santa Tracker.

This year, think a moment about the people who created that site. Their normal job is air defense. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year they watch for signs of attack: missiles crossing the Pole aimed at great cities, or (nowadays) airliners full of terrified innocents straying off-course toward national landmarks. 

But one day a year, they can turn their efforts to making some child, in some distant place, feel wonder and delight. (Though someone always has to keep watching the skies. Someone always has to watch.)

Confederacy of Dunces: Ahead of Its TIme

I recently started re-reading John Kennedy Toole's great comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces. For a New Orleanian, it's kind of like Scotsmen reading Burns. It's our "national literature." It's also a very funny book.

And, for the first time, I realized it's a prescient book. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, spends most of his time in his bedroom on Constantinople Street scribbling diatribes in his endless supply of Big Chief tablets, drinking Dr. Nut cola, and practicing onanism. When he ventures out, he wears a hunting cap, flannel shirt, and desert boots to survive the harsh New Orleans winter. He fails hilariously at a series of jobs because of his fantastic self-regard, absurdist attempts at political activism, and general sloth.

Sound familiar? John Kennedy Toole was describing pretty much half the people on the Internet. Overweight, peevish, sharing their thoughts with the world, filled with self-pity, angry because the world refuses to recognize their talents . . . he even got the flannel shirts and boots right! Add a Leatherman tool and a comp. sci. degree and Ignatius is the template for Information Technology professionals from Bangalore to Burbank. Switch the green hunting cap for one of those odd Peruvian knitted hats and he's every stoner activist from Zuccotti Park to Athens.

A Confederacy of Dunces has a reputation as a great portrait of New Orleans in the mid-Twentieth Century, but it also managed something greater: it predicted the future course of American society in general. We are all Ignatius J. Reilly now. 

Wizard Hygiene

This past Sunday I took my family to see The Hobbit at the multiplex. I'm not going to give a full movie review here -- the blogosphere is full of self-appointed cinematic geniuses explaining how they would have done things better. (I even do that myself sometimes, just not today.) If you're interested: I liked it.

I did notice one intriguing little bit of movie stuff which made me chuckle. The film includes a couple of scenes with the eccentric wizard Radagast the Brown -- he's a character mentioned by name in the book, but he never actually appears in the story. To bulk out the movie to trilogy weight, Peter Jackson and his coauthors gave Radagast a speaking role, and cast the always-entertaining Sylvester McCoy to play the part.

When I say Radagast is eccentric, I mean he's really weird. He lives in a sort of treehouse in the forest surrounded by hedgehogs and voles and whatnot, and even keeps a nest of birds under his hat.

He reminded me forcibly of another eccentric fictional wizard: Merlyn, in T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone. If you haven't read that book yet, go find it and read it -- food and sleep are not important, find the book.

If you have read it, you'll remember that when young Arthur (still known as Wart) encounters Merlyn for the first time, the great wizard lives by himself in a little cottage in the forest surrounded by hedgehogs and voles and whatnot, and even lets his owl nest under his hat.

I'm curious, and if anyone knows the answer I'd love to hear it: did the makers of The Hobbit decide to make Radagast a sylvan shut-in with personal care issues because they wanted to give a tip of the hat to England's other great mid-century fantasy author? Or did they do it because White's depiction of Merlyn has become the "default setting" for fantasy wizards?

Think about it: why are fictional wizards so often reclusive and unkempt? You'd think knowing how to do magic would make it easier to win friends and stay clean. I can do those things and I don't know any magic at all except for the "one-ahead" mentalist act.

I guess the idea of the scruffy wizard draws from older traditions of religious ascetics, denying the world and mortifying the flesh. By contrast, the Devil-aided wizard Faust is definitely interested in luxury living and Hot Babes. So showing a person of great power who chooses to live like a bag lady is a way to indicate to the audience that this is one of the Good Wizards.

Of course, now I'm strongly tempted to write a fantasy about an obsessively tidy and sociable wizard, just to do it.

Real Steampunk Airships, Part 4: The Man Who Counts

The real Golden Age of airships arrived in 1900, when Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched his Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 from a floating hangar on Lake Constance in southern Bavaria.

Zeppelin was from a very old and influential family in the small German kingdom of Wurttemberg. His sovereign sent him to America as an observer during the Civil War, where he made his first balloon ascent. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Zeppelin became a popular hero for leading a daring mission behind enemy lines.

But that war also led to the unification of Germany into the Prussian-dominated German Empire, and as a Wurttemberger Zeppelin was politely frozen out of the highest positions in the new regime. He retired as a Lieutenant General and found himself more or less at loose ends.

So he turned his attention to aviation. Zeppelin had a good technical education from the university at Tubingen, and approached the subject analytically. Zeppelin realized that everyone else was building their airships too small. He proposed to make the square-cube law work to his advantage.

(Everyone know about the square-cube law? If you double the linear dimensions of an object, the surface area increases four times -- the square -- while the volume increases eight times -- the cube.) An airship's weight is all on the surface, but its lift comes from volume. Zeppelin decided to quit messing around with little hundred-foot sausages of rubberized silk and build something that could carry a serious payload. Rather than relying on his own back-of-the-envelope estimates, he hired engineers and used his remaining clout and personal fortune to commission new engines and materials.

His LZ1 was 420 feet long, with 17 gas cells holding 400,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas. The gas cells were contained within an aluminum framework covered with canvas, and the whole thing was powered by two powerful Daimler gasoline engines. It weighed in at about 13 tons.

As with any prototype, there were problems: the ship was overweight, it needed a stronger skeleton, the engines were unreliable, and the whole thing needed better pitch and trim controls. But it flew, and it pointed the way toward the large, fast airships of the next four decades.

Characters in a steampunk adventure who want to fly long distances need something like the LZ1 or its more successful descendant the LZ3 of 1907. These provide space for a decent cast of characters, and the speed and range to let them get into trouble nearly anywhere in the world. In alternate histories, Zeppelin-style airships crowd out airplanes for passenger transport, and somehow manage to avoid becoming obsolete in the jet age.

Real Steampunk Airships, Part 3: Robida's World!

It wasn't until 1884 that a really practical airship took to the skies. La France, built by a pair of French Army Captains, Charles Renaud and Arthur Krebs, is generally considered the first truly dirigible aircraft. It was 165 feet long, with an overall weight of about 2 tons. Most of that weight was taken up by banks of wet-cell batteries providing power for an electric motor driving the ship's tractor propellor. As one might expect, La France's range was quite limited, but it could move at a very respectable 12 miles per hour.

Reynaud and Krebs deserve some bonus Steampunkery Points for the electric drive system, which is much the same as what Captain Nemo used to propel the Nautilus in Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Electrical power also meant they didn't have to worry about a hot exhaust stack or stray spark setting the balloon envelope on fire, which was a serious concern aboard an airship filled with hydrogen.

Retrospectives about "how the future used to be" often reprint some of the amusing illustrations by the French caricaturist Albert Robida. His scenes of top-hatted and mustachioed men flying off to the Opera in their airships are the epitome of steampunk zaniness.

 . . . Except that he wasn't making anything up. If you lived in Paris in 1901, the airship runabout wasn't some cartoonist's fantasy, it was something you could see by looking out of the window. The mustachioed gentleman at the controls was Alberto Santos-Dumont, piloting his Airship #6 to lunch at Maxim's.

Santos-Dumont #6 was about the minimum possible airship that could still fly: it was 109 feet long, with a lifting power of just under a ton. That was enough for a slender Franco-Brazilian aeronaut, possibly a lunch guest, and a gasoline engine pushing it along at about 18 miles per hour over the rooftops of Paris.

Santos-Dumont was almost a pulp science fiction character himself. He was the heir to a vast Brazilian coffee fortune, a self-taught balloon pilot and airship designer, and a style-setting man-about-town. When flying his airship around Paris he couldn't let go of the controls to go fumbling in his waistcoat pocket for his watch (and probably didn't want to risk dropping his timepiece from several hundred feet in the air) -- so his buddy Louis Cartier created a wristwatch, which Santos-Dumont wore for the rest of his life. All the other fashionable gentlemen followed suit.

(Digression: The alert reader may have noticed a pattern in these blog entries. With the sole exception of New Jerseyite Dr. Solomon Andrews, all the pioneers in airships were French. From the Montgolfiers right up to the 1930s, France was the world center of aviation. Even though the Wright Brothers were Americans, most of the early advances in airplane design also came out of France. You can see it in the very names of an airplane's components: the fuselage, the ailerons, the empennage. The Paris Air Show has always been the aviation world's Oscar night. For some reason Americans suffer from a mysterious sort of amnesia regarding French aeronautical pioneers. I don't know why.)

With Santos-Dumont, steampunkery, alternate history, and the real world get into a monumental tangle. At the dawn of the 20th Century, the world really was a steampunk alternate universe, and it was only dragged back to reality by the carnage of World War I.

Next time: The Count!

Real Steampunk Airships, Part 2: Dirigibles!

Balloons could get you up in the air, but they weren't steerable. Various inventors tried to build powered airships which could fly anywhere the pilot wished to go, but during the first half of the 19th Century they were stymied by the massive weight and enormous fuel consumption of available engines. Turns out railroad technology isn't easy to repurpose for aviation.

The first airship which could be called steerable was the one constructed by French inventor Henri Giffard in 1852. Giffard's day job was inventing high-efficiency steam engines, so he was able to create a 3-horsepower power plant small enough to be carried aboard a 144-foot airship.

It almost worked. Giffard's airship could turn and go in circles -- but in even a modest breeze it still drifted downwind even with the stoker shoveling coal into the boiler as fast as he could.

Still, for fictional purposes it's not out of the question to imagine that Giffard was able to squeeze a bit more efficiency out of his engine, or use some of that newfangled petroleum as fuel. So 1852 is about the earliest date for a "realistic" powered airship in fiction. You can have passenger-carrying airships in the 1870s, opening the door to daring airship robberies in the Old West, ex-Confederate airship pirates operating out of secret bases in Brazil, and aerial expeditions to lost lands at the poles.

For a slightly more fantastical steampunk airship, consider the Aereon, built by Dr. Solomon Andrews of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1863. It was supposedly a steerable, controllable airship with no engine at all!

Here's how it worked (in theory). Imagine holding a foam kickboard under the water in a swimming pool. It wants to float upward but you're holding it down. If you tilt it slightly and let go, the board shoots off in the direction of the tilt as it rises to the surface. Evidently Solomon Andrews spent some time as a boy fooling around with pine boards down at the swimming hole, because that's exactly how the Aereon was supposed to work.

The airship consisted of multiple balloons held within a light framework, making a broad and flat shape. The intrepid aeronaut rode in a basket underneath, and controlled the gas valves and ballast. Tilt the nose of the ship up in the direction you want to go, drop some sandbags, and shoot away! Once you reach maximum height, tip the nose down, valve some gas, and glide back down again.

Andrews built it, and flew it in front of a large crowd. Witnesses said the Aereon defied the winds and returned to its takeoff point. The trouble is, it shouldn't have worked. Air isn't as dense as water, so there isn't as much resistance, especially at the slow speeds of an ascending gas balloon.

My guess is that Andrews got lucky with the winds on his maiden flight, knew he'd gotten lucky, and that's why he dismantled the Aereon after its test flight and never took it up again. Otherwise he could have made his fortune and reputation as the Father of Aviation forty years before the Wright Brothers and Count Zeppelin.

An alternate history steampunk story can handwave away the petty objections of aeronautical engineers and their so-called "laws of physics" and fill the skies with clean, fuelless Aereons gliding and darting about. The secret of the Aereon can be the MacGuffin that Sinister Forces are desperate to learn or suppress. The relative independence of an Aereon means it's ideal for sky raiders over the Wild West or the high seas.

 Next time: where's my flying carriage?

Real Steampunk Airships, Part 1: Balloons!

This little blog series is based on a talk I gave on August 18, 2012, at Pi-Con in Enfield, Connecticut. About a dozen people showed up, which was very gratifying, and I think all of us had a good time.

Airships are the signature technology of steampunk and alternate-history stories. If you look up in the sky and see an airship (that doesn't say "GOODYEAR" on the side), you may have slipped into another reality.

Now, I happen to be a fan of steampunk and alternate histories in general, but I'm also an airship buff. Which means I sometimes get frantic when stories get them wrong. (Actually I get frantic when stories get anything wrong. I spend a lot of time being frantic.)

Flying isn't easy, at least for humans. Flying machines have to do three things. They need lift, they need propulsion, and they need control. Without lift it's not a flying machine, just a car. Without propulsion it just sits there, and without control it's an unguided missile.

Lift is the most obvious, and the one which got the most attention. If nothing is countering the pull of gravity, you're stuck on the ground. There are two ways to generate lift: thrust and buoyancy. With thrust, you generate a push down that counters the pull of gravity. Rockets do it by sheer brute force, but airplanes and helicopters use a more elegant method based on the Bernoulli Effect, in which forward motion creates a difference in pressure between the top and bottom of the wing (or rotor), which generates lift. If you prefer, you can think of this as "suction" rather than thrust.

The second problem is propulsion. Inventors tried all sorts of methods: flapping wings, sails, oars, and hand-cranked propellors. Ultimately the solution had to wait for the development of motors light enough to go aboard flying machines.

The final problem is control, which turned out to be a lot harder than anybody realized. Airships were still grappling with control issues as late as the 1930s, and airplanes simply weren't possible at all until the Wright Brothers figured out that you can't steer an airplane the way you steer a boat.

Buoyant flight came first. The Montgolfier Brothers managed it in 1783 by taking advantage of the difference in density between hot and cold air to create the hot-air balloon. The discovery of lighter-than-air gases like hydrogen, methane, and helium led to the "gas balloons" which were the dominant form of flying machine during the 19th century.

Balloons have been unjustly neglected in steampunk. They were the apex of aerospace technology for nearly a century. Even as late as 1895, when H.G. Wells was writing The Time Machine, he used the balloon as an example of a machine which could travel in three dimensions.

Balloons solved the lift problem, but they ignored both propulsion and control. If you go up in a balloon, you're going wherever the wind decides to take you. You can land if it turns out you're going the wrong way, but that's about your only recourse.

This limited the applications of balloons. They couldn't carry passengers because nobody wanted to buy a ticket to travel in a random direction. Their military applications were important: tethered observation balloons became a key technology. It's worth remembering that some of the first fighter planes in World War I were deployed as "balloon busters" to shoot down enemy observation balloons. Even today unmanned aerostats have a role in military reconnaissance.

I've always been disappointed by how few steampunk writers have made use of balloons in fiction. When Jules Verne wrote his first "Voyage Extraordinare" in 1863, it was Five Weeks in a Balloon, about an aerial expedition across Africa.

If you want daring action sequences, consider the use of balloons to carry messages and refugees out of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 -- lifting off in the dark of night, flying at the mercy of the winds over enemy lines with the whole Prussian Army taking pot-shots, and trying to reach friendly territory before the lifting gas leaks away. That really happened. Parisians must have felt like they were living in a Verne novel.

Even today balloons still test the limits of human flight: just two months ago Felix Baumgartner set a world record for parachute jumping, leaping out of a balloon. Steampunk needs more balloons.

Next time: the first powered airships!

Radical Evolution, by Joel Garreau

(I've also posted this on Goodreads.)

Radical Evolution is a look at how rapid and fundamental advances in technology could produce enormous changes in human life and even in what we define as "human" in a relatively short time. It's by Joel Garreau, a Washington Post writer who wrote two books I enjoyed immensely: The Nine Nations of North America (about regional differences in and around the U.S.A.) and Edge City (about the new urban landscape of suburban development).

In Radical Evolution he tackles the potentially world-changing effects of what he calls the "GRIN technologies" -- Genetic engineering, Robotics, Information, and Nanotechnology. Any one of those four fields has the potential to change the world, and the four of them have synergistic effects on each other, so that advances in one can spawn other advances in the others, which create still more advances, and so on in a process of asymptotic technological change Garreau calls "The Curve."

We're reaching a point where those four areas of technology have the potential to change humanity in unprecendented ways. Genetic engineering can make us healthier, longer-lived, and smarter. Robotics and information technology holds the promise of giving humans access to almost infinite amounts of information -- and the possibility of artificial intelligences as smart or smarter than ourselves. And nanotechnology lets us reshape the physical world down to the level of individual atoms. How will we deal with these tremendous changes?

Garreau is a member of the Global Business Network, which is a futurist think-tank kind of like a cross between the Bavarian Illuminati and the Justice League. Their specialty is "scenario planning," a method of boiling the infinite possibilities of the future down into a handful of distinct pathways. He applies that technique to transhumanism in Radical Evolution, showing us three possible outcomes which he nicknames "Heaven," "Hell," and "Prevail."

The "Heaven" scenario is obviously the most rosy. All the optimistic predictions about increased lifespan, increased intelligence, and increased wealth come true, and soon. The people reading Garreau's book will live like gods, and their descendants will pretty much be gods. Amen and hosanna.

The "Hell" scenario centers on the kind of dystopia familiar to readers of cyberpunk science fiction. In the future rich people will have all kinds of neat toys and live forever, poor people will be useless in a world of automation, all this new tech will ravage the environment, and in the background superintelligent artificial intelligences will take over the world and prepare to exterminate us.

And finally there's the "Prevail" scenario, which is sort of "Heaven"-lite. We'll only become semi-godlike, there will be some problems along the way, but we'll rise to the occasion and muddle through.

However, one comes away with the strong suspicion that Garreau isn't presenting these three as possible futures, but rather as a kind of Hegelian "thesis -- antithesis -- synthesis." He's stacking the deck in favor of the "Prevail" scenario, and the result is that the book comes across as more of a polemic in favor of transhumanism than an impartial analysis. It lacks the wisecracking skepticism of Ed Regis's Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, an early investigation into some of the same topics. Regis looked at both the visionaries and the crackpots, and wondered aloud if there was any real difference between them. 

In addition to the author's obvious axe-grinding, the book is too journalistic. It reads like a very long Sunday feature article. Garreau falls into a pattern: he introduces a topic with some historical references (Thoreau, Bacon, Thomas Kuhn), then interviews some of the modern visionaries in whatever technology field he's talking about. He describes people's offices, usually gives some biographical background including the sort of cod-Freudian "telling detail" which fools the reader into thinking they understand the subject's motives, and provides some punchy quotes. Feature-section editors love quotes and biographical details, and descriptions of offices. In his account of computer scientist Jaron Lanier, Garreau somehow manages to spend more than a page talking about driving around New Mexico drinking in biker bars and eating huevos rancheros. It's fine travel writing, but it's kind of out of place.

And like far too much journalism on technical topics, Garreau stints when talking about the actual nitty-gritty details. He explains Moore's Law well enough, but his depictions of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering feel cursory. Now, Joel Garreau is not a scientist, and one could probably argue that it's better to chase down some of the more technical works in the (extremely useful) "Recommended Reading" section of Radical Evolution rather than depend on the author's ability to explain topics in which he has no personal expertise.  

But the book also feels cursory when it delves into the topics Garreau really is something of an expert on: the political, legal, and social issues at stake in his three scenarios. By relying on feature-section quotes from his interview subjects he misses the chance to present their arguments in detail. The result is as insubstantial as a local TV news story: "Here's something which could be very good, or very bad. This person says it will be good [insert clip], this person says it will be bad [insert clip]. Next up: sports and weather!" 

Maybe I'm expecting too much. Garreau applied the same personality-driven journalistic approach to his other two books, both of which I enjoyed immensely, and as a study of the people involved in creating the future -- for good or ill -- it's interesting and entertaining. But it could have been so much more.