Just The Caffeine Talking

What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 3

Finally, the whole reason for our trip to Charleston arrived: the great eclipse of 2017! And it was . . . cloudy that morning. The forecast called for overcast skies and a chance of thunderstorms. Uh-oh.

We had picked our rental cottage precisely because it was in the path of totality, so we didn't have to deal with traffic or parking issues. I didn't hear of any major problems in Charleston that day, but anything which reduces stress and bother during a vacation is a good idea.

Fortunately the overcast was thin — so thin that one could still make out the Sun's disk through the official NASA-sanctioned eclipse-viewing glasses we brought. So I could see the moment of "first contact" when the dark shape of the Moon began to cover the Sun. At first it was a slight flattening of the curve on the upper-right-hand side of the solar disk. Over the next hour the Sun looked like a cookie with a bite taken out, then a crescent, and finally narrowed to a bright letter C.

I can't say I noticed any perceptible cooling of the steamy Charleston air as the Moon blocked more and more of the Sun's rays. Apparently the Low Country is just hot in summer, independent of how much solar energy it gets.

I did notice something I remembered from the 1984 eclipse: the light took on a curiously "metallic" quality. Another member of the party suggested that it might be because the Sun, while still bright, was effectively getting smaller, thus making shadows sharper and reflections more precise. It's a good hypothesis, anyway.

Because of the clouds I was switching back and forth between my eclipse glasses and a regular pair of sunglasses, depending on the thickness of the overcast. But just before totality, a window opened up in the clouds overhead, so I had full sunlight at the climax of the eclipse.

All at once, the thin bright curved edge of the Sun disappeared altogether, and suddenly it was night in the middle of the afternoon. I couldn't see any stars or planets because of the clouds, and frankly my attention was just riveted on the halo of the Sun's corona surrounding the black disk of the Moon. The clouds around it looked as they do at sunset — lit pink from the side as light leaked in from beyond the zone of totality.

According to my wife, biologists around the country were collecting data on changes in animal behavior during the eclipse. I did hear some birds singing before the moment of totality, but during the darkness any barking of dogs or agitation of animals was probably due to the noise of fireworks and massed crowds of humans cheering in the distance. For the perfect dramatic effect I could also hear thunder from a storm nearby.

And then . . . day again! As soon as the Sun's edge emerged on the trailing side of the Moon, the streetlights went off and my eyes registered it as "daytime" again. The Sun is bright.

We toasted the Sun's return with cold bottles of Corona (geddit? Corona?), and cooked a pot of gumbo that afternoon as the Moon gradually slid aside. To celebrate the defeat of the Sun-devouring Serpent of Chaos, we had a bottle of cremant de Limoux with our gumbo for dinner, and some more fantastic South Carolina peaches for dessert.

Next time: ships happen!

For two stories of amazing things in space, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 2

Charleston is a fascinating city to visit, but in August its most insistently noticeable feature is the heat. I have ancestors who lived in Charleston before relocating to New Orleans, and now I understand they were looking for a place that wasn't quite so hot and muggy.

The high temperatures really weren't all that hot: upper 80s, maybe breaking 90 at the hottest part of the day. The problem was that the lows at night were only a few degrees lower than the highs. This may be a seasonal problem; there are few places south of Canada which are actually pleasant during August.

I spent my first full day in Charleston being a tourist, and I make no apologies for it. In the morning, I walked around the old part of town with my wife and son before meeting up with my sister and brother-in-law. They had made a great discovery: the grave of one of those Charlestonian ancestors I mentioned above, in the churchyard of the oldest Catholic church in town. The inscriptions were blurred with age, but we could still make out most of the words.

Then we all piled in the car and drove north to the modern industrial part of the city in order to see a piece of history: the submarine Hunley, raised from the sea floor outside the harbor mouth and currently halfway through an exhaustive stabilization and de-corrosion process at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center. The archaeologists have done an amazing job identifying the remains of the crew, even down to pieces of clothing and jewelry.

It's bigger than I had thought, and considerably more sophisticated. I had not known that the Hunley had a snorkel device for air circulation, or a flywheel system so that the whole crew didn't have to keep cranking. The Hunley was a real sub, limited only by the lack of a good propulsion system — and the need to get right next to the ship it was attacking.

The Hunley points up one of the things which always amazes me about the American Civil War: the tremendous technological innovation that went on. Even the supposedly traditional, agrarian South managed to deploy a number of revolutionary weapons, including the Hunley itself. To my mind, the most startling example of the war's technological fecundity was the duel between the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor. Here's the South's unstoppable high-tech superweapon, and on its second sortie it is met by the North's unstoppable high-tech superweapon. In fiction it would seem implausible, but it happened.

After our visit to the mother of all subs, we had lunch at what can only be described as a hipster diner called the Iron Dog. By this point the ladies and my son were getting worn out, but my brother-in-law and I gamely went back for a second hike around Old Charleston, admiring the famous "single houses" and speculating with a total lack of knowledge about how the style developed.

When we had enough walking we retired to an air-conditioned eatery for some cooling beverages, then picked up some groceries and crossed the spectacular Ravenel Bridge to the rental cottage. Rather than heat up the house we lit the backyard grill (not without some difficulty) and cooked up a feast: sausage, grilled peppers and onions, a pre-marinated boneless leg of lamb, a tomato-and-avocado salad, and seared peaches for dessert. All washed down with a couple of bottles of wine.

Full and happy, we retired for the night, hoping for good weather on the big day.

Next Time: Totality!

 

Two science fiction crime capers go horribly wrong: Outlaws and Aliens, by James L. Cambias.

What I Saw At The Eclipse, Part 1

Until last week I had only ever seen one eclipse before: the annular eclipse of June 1984, which had a path of totality which passed just north of New Orleans, my hometown. That one was pretty neat, so a few years ago when my wife and I learned about the coast-to-coast 2017 eclipse, we started making plans to watch it.

We considered various places along the path of totality, and eventually picked Charleston, South Carolina, as the place to watch the eclipse. We reserved a rental cottage in late 2016, well before all but the nerdiest of popular-science media had started talking about the coming eclipse. (We are sometimes cunning.)

Why Charleston? Various reasons, including the fact that we both have family members who live on the way there, so we could combine the eclipse trip with visits to them. Also the fact that Charleston is an interesting city with a lot of other attractions — so even if the day of the eclipse turned out rainy we'd still have a nice vacation.

We set out on August 17, traveling through Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and a corner of West Virginia all in one day of gonzo driving, before stopping for the night in Winchester, Virginia. I'd been there before — a stop for lunch during an earlier cross-country drive, and knew it was a lovely old town with some good restaurants. Rain kept us from doing much walking about, unfortunately, but we did have a good dinner and slept well.

On the 18th we cruised south through the Shenandoah Valley in glorious weather, and at Roanoke turned southeast to head for North Carolina. If the signs are to be believed, there are plans afoot to build an interstate between Roanoke and Greensboro in North Carolina. The traffic on the little two-lane blacktop highway suggests that a bigger road is overdue on that route . . . but I hope the new interstate won't mean the little towns along the way wind up getting bulldozed.

We visited relatives in Greensboro, and spent the night there. Then, off again in the morning! Our course took us southeast on back roads, as the traffic report indicated some kind of massive accident and traffic jam on I-95. Besides, we had plenty of time and this let us see the scenery of tiny old farming towns.

By mid-day we were getting close to the South Carolina line — and getting hungry. The solution seemed obvious: stop at the next grubby little down-home ultra-authentic small-town Carolina barbecue joint we came across.

Unfortunately, we made an unhappy discovery: there aren't actually very many grubby little down-home ultra-authentic small-town Carolina barbecue joints left in that part of the Carolinas. We passed a couple of closed ones, and one burned-down one, but it wasn't until we reached the enormous commercial strip at the I-95 junction in Florence, South Carolina that we actually found a barbecue place, which looked exactly like all the other fast-food restaurants there. No down-home authenticity. The food was good, though, and we didn't have to worry about ultra-authentic down-home bacteria, so that was all right.

Comfortably stuffed with pulled pork we covered the remaining miles to Charleston, and met a different set of relatives at the rental cottage.

Next Time: An Old Time in the Hot Town.

 

If you want to read about one place I have been to, and another I have never visited because I made it up, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Island of Lost Games: Dream Park

One could write a whole series of blog posts on the theme of "unlikely licensed roleplaying games," and somewhere near the top of that list (but below GURPS Planet Krishna) you would undoubtedly find Mike Pondsmith's Dream Park: The Roleplaying Game, from R. Talsorian Games.

The 1981 novel Dream Park, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, was a fun science fiction/fantasy/mystery set in a futuristic amusement park (called Dream Park, duh) which combines advanced hologram technology (i.e. magic) with elaborate big-budget live-action roleplaying games. In the Dream Park future, game creators are rock star celebrities — well, at least indie rock star level — especially since high-powered computer technology takes the place of the enormous design and programming teams required for real-life games. The novel focuses on a Dream Park company policeman who has to go undercover in an ongoing game in order to solve a murder. The game itself is a wild World War II Cargo Cult fantasy adventure, so the reader can enjoy three simultaneous plot arcs: the mystery, the fantasy game storyline, and the interactions among the players in the game. The authors scored two direct predictive hits: first that games would become an industry rivaling film in scale, and that large audiences would enjoy watching other people play a game.

But while it's fun to read about people playing a game, it's awfully "meta" to actually sit down a play a game in which your characters are people playing a game. (Adding to the meta-ness is the fact that much of the rulebook is written as a guide to the "home tabletop version" of the games played at the "real" Dream Park, with sidebars by some of the characters from the novel, as well as others by Mike Pondsmith and Niven & Barnes.)

Dream Park: The Roleplaying Game was published in 1992, a slim 126-page softcover with a nice color painting on the cover and decent line art inside. R. Talsorian Games always paid more attention to art and book design than their competitors, and it shows.

I think the game was designed to appeal to fans of the novel who might not be familiar with roleplaying games otherwise, because the boilerplate "what is roleplaying?" section at the beginning is quite extensive, especially for 1992, almost a generation after Gygax and Arneson discovered polyhedra. The game comes with two pages of ready-to-run characters, nicely color printed on cardstock. (I never cut mine out.) The "character sheets" are tiny, just 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. Everything is aimed at the most casual of casual gamers.

But there's a solid game-mechanics engine underneath the novice-friendly approach. Everything, including combat, is resolved by rolling a single 6-sided die. You roll and add your skill, your target rolls and adds its Dodge ability, and whoever gets the higher result wins. If it's a task rather than a fight, compare your result to the Difficulty level assigned by the gamemaster. It's simple but not overly so — change the cube to an icosahedron and you've essentially got the D20 engine which currently runs the two most popular roleplaying systems out there.

If you're not satisfied with ready-to-play characters there are 40 pages (a third of the book!) of character-creation rules, with everything from swords to blasters to spells to superpowers. As Pondsmith casually admits in a sidebar, this is really a robust multigenre roleplaying system. All the kids were doing that in those days.

About a quarter of the book is devoted to sample adventures and gamemastering advice. Some of the adventures are ultra-simple one-page scenarios, good for an introduction or a couple of hours around the dining table. But there's also some nice discussion of story beats and how to mix combat scenes, chases, dramatic revelations, and all the panoply of techniques storytellers have devised over the past few millennia. Pondsmith even touches on non-linear "sandbox" style scenario design.

Overall, this is a good game, as one would expect from the man who created Teenagers From Outer Space, Cyberpunk 2020 and Castle Falkenstein. I think one could easily use this as a "starter game" for novices or as the engine for a homebrew game which doesn't easily fit with existing systems. I doubt that Dream Park would stand up to a long-term campaign, though. It seems to have been designed for one-shot scenarios or limited-series adventures like the ones in the novel.

I'm not entirely sure where I picked up Dream Park. The publication date suggests I must have gotten it while I lived in Durham, North Carolina, but it's possible I picked it up at one of my old haunts during a visit to New Orleans. I never played it, but I did write an adventure for the game which I tried to peddle to some of the game magazines I was writing for back then. I don't think I ever sold it; Dream Park just wasn't a popular enough "property" for any magazine to devote space to it. And that, I suspect, sums up the fundamental problem that kept this game from becoming better known. Even a best-selling science fiction novel is not really "big" enough to generate the fanbase to support a game line. Best-selling books move hundreds of thousands of copies. Failed movies and TV shows have millions of viewers. And in 1992, before Kickstarter funding and direct sales over the Internet, a game based on a ten-year-old novel just couldn't make it.

If you want stories about people who aren't playing games, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

The Climax of That Movie

What is the climactic moment of the movie Star Wars?

Is it the point where the Death Star explodes just as it's about to vaporize the Rebel base? Is it a couple of minutes earlier, when Han Solo swoops in to knock Darth Vader into deep space so that Luke can fire the torpedoes which blow up the Death Star?

Nope.

The climactic moment is about a minute before that: when Luke turns off his targeting device and chooses to rely on The Force to destroy the Death Star. That's the moment when he has become a Jedi Knight, trained or not. Here's a clip (which will probably get taken down as part of the endless war between copyright holders and YouTube).

How do we know this is the climax? The music. Watch it again and pay attention to the music. Up to this point the Rebel attack has been scored by the inimitable John Williams with discordant, menacing music, rather reminiscent of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Luke's moment of uncertainty has a sort of ethereal interlude, heightening suspense.

Then, boom! He makes the choice and the music shifts dramatically to the heroic main title them. We don't really have to see him pull the trigger or watch the Death Star explode. The music already lets us know this is the path to victory. The hero has passed the test of faith.

John Williams is a great storyteller.

 

For a sample of my own storytelling, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens! 

 

 

Book Review: Gravity's Rainbow

For years people have been recommending Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow. So, when I saw a copy on sale at the bookstore a few months ago, I decided to pick it up and see what all the fuss is about. I was prepared to like this book a lot. It's about a bunch of things I'm fascinated by: World War II, rockets, conspiracy theories, and secret history.

The Short Version: Neal Stephenson did it better.

The Alternate Short Version: "Yes, Mr. Pynchon, it is rather amusing how much a rocket resembles a penis, but did you really have to go on about it for 770 pages?"

The Long Version:

Reading Gravity's Rainbow was like being stuck in the back seat of your college roommate's car on a cross-country drive with his stoner hometown friend from middle school sitting next to you endlessly spouting a bunch of faux-profound insights plagiarized from Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn until you snap somewhere west of Kansas City and start flailing at him with the empty Pringles canister.

The book is famous for its satirical humor, but it barely rises above Mad Magazine in actual comedy. We're supposed to laugh because there's a warship named the USS John E. Badass, or because there's a character named Teddy Bloat, or because of the endless parody song lyrics Mr. Pynchon helpfully provides. All it needs is a back-page Spy Vs. Spy comic strip.

We're supposed to be amused because everyone in World War II was, like, totally baked all the time and having kinky sex. Perhaps it was daringly transgressive and liberating and profound in 1973, but now it looks a hell of a lot like an outpouring of petty adolescent rebellion. I can get that for free from my kids.

My chief emotion while grimly plodding through Gravity's Rainbow was puzzlement. I literally don't understand why this book was written. Perhaps I'm so grumpy because I absolutely loved The Crying of Lot 49, which managed to do almost everything Gravity's Rainbow does, in less than a third of the page count.

Now I'm going to reread Cryptonomicon as a palate-cleanser.

 

For an example of works which did not disappoint me, check out my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Why I Don't Worry, Part 2

Last time I explained why I don't lie awake nights worrying that contact with extraterrestrial civilizations will lead to humanity getting conquered by invading alien armies. It's just too hard to be worth the effort.

But what if the aliens don't want to conquer the Earth? What if they just want to wipe us out?

It's actually easier to destroy rival civilizations across interstellar distances than it is to conquer them. Conquest, after all, involves fairly large armies, supplies — and above all, deceleration when the starships reach the target system. Relativisitic warheads don't need any reaction mass or energy to slow down (though they might need a motor for terminal guidance). A few bricks hitting the Earth at 99.9 percent of lightspeed would do as much damage as the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs. (And those bricks could be intelligently targeted to maximize the harm they do.)

At least one conference, featuring the likes of Isaac Asimov and Jill Tarter (I can't find a link to reference it), proposed that launching a salvo of relativistic projectiles would be the optimum strategy for any species which so much as detects another advanced civilization nearby. Get them before they get us!

As with interstellar conquest, I don't buy it. There are sound logical reasons why first strikes across interstellar distances are very bad ideas.

Hi There! Launching an interstellar death-barrage is not something you can hide. The energy output of a relativistic rocket is very bright. Any civilization with immense space-based telescopes (like the kind we're planning to use for detecting extrasolar planets) can spot them at arbitrarily large distances. If the projectiles are launched using some kind of ground-based laser or maser system, the launching beam is like a beacon shining in the direction of the target.

This is important for two reasons.

First, the target world gets some warning that the strike is on its way. That means they can they could launch a counter-strike during the flight time of the projectiles.

(How do they know it's a salvo of projectiles rather than a fleet of friendly starships? The color and brightness of the exhaust reveals the energy output involved; the Doppler shift reveals the acceleration profile and thus the mass of the payload. If someone's launching small objects at very high velocities, it's not a friendly gesture. About the only way to fool the target is to go all-in and launch a very big projectile, at a velocity which might match the mission profile for a starship. But when the "starship" fails to start decelerating, the target system still gets a clue something is amiss, and a slower vehicle could be intercepted.)

Second, other civilizations can also see this happening — civilizations the would-be genocidal lunatics don't know about. And even if you're kind of on the fence about the wisdom of firing off pre-emptive genocidal relativistic kill-vehicle attacks on other civilizations, watching someone else do it would overcome a lot of objections, and move the demonstrated genocidal lunatics to the top of everyone else's hit list. So . . . don't do it.

Time Lag, Again. I think we all agree that attacking a superior civilization is a bad idea, right? Some piddly Kardashev Class I outfit decides to take pot-shots at a big-time Kardashev II crew, they're gonna get messed up but good. Stands to reason.

This means, of course, that if you are a big-time Kardashev II civilization, you really don't have to worry much about the Kardashev I peons bothering you. They may be primitive, but they're not stupid. They know you can mess them up if they start something.

So nobody's going to be shooting at superior civilizations, and nobody's going to be shooting at inferior civilizations, either. What does that leave? Well, you can target civilizations at about your level of technology, just in case they have similar ideas about you.

See the problem yet? Time lag! Suppose you launch your attack at a peer civilization 50 light-years away. Even if the missiles are going nearly the speed of light, they're still going to spend half a century getting there. During which time the target civilization has half a century of technological progress. So if your aggressors are Stalin's Russia, launching the missiles in 1950, the weapons arrive in Clinton's America in 2000, equipped with interceptors which can easily handle them.

This is especially important because of course you can't know just how much progress a distant civilization will make during the transit time. Maybe you're advanced enough to catch them off-guard and wipe them out . . . but maybe you aren't, and now you've got an implacable enemy.

Of course, the odds of even detecting a peer or near-peer civilization are remote. Given the immense age of the universe and the long time-scale of life on Earth, it's highly improbable that any aliens we detect would be close to us in technology. It's far more likely that we'll pick up indications of Godlike Kardashev II civilizations, or send out probes which observe species just figuring out how to make tools, than beings with similar capabilities to our own.

The gods are safe from us, and we're safe from the primitives. So nobody has to get pre-emptively violent.

Deterrence. Once you're capable of building weapons which can strike across interstellar distances, you're also capable of hiding weapons across interstellar distances — tucking away a little counter-strike force in nearby star systems, or deep in the Kuiper Belt. There's no way for an attacker to know in advance if you've got some entertaining surprises in store — and the consequences for that attacker are likely to be dire if you do.

This means that the rational assumption, for anyone interested in keeping their species and civilization intact, is to assume all possible adversaries have just such a counterforce in being. So don't attack them.

If I can think of these things, so can alien strategic planners. And really, it's difficult to imagine any being with the ability to construct interstellar vehicles thinking it's a good idea to launch unprovoked attacks on newly-discovered civilizations. There are simply too many unknowns.

So that's why I don't worry about E.T. trying to wipe us out. Back to whatever you were doing.

 

For stories about primitive and super-advanced extraterrestrials, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!