Just The Caffeine Talking

The Magic Wand

There's a custom among science fiction writers that a story — a "hard SF" story, anyway — should only contain one element of "magic." By magic we mean some effect which is impossible under our current understanding of the universe. Or, if you're really strict, some effect which would be impossible to create with any technology we know of.

So nanotech medical robots are not magic, because we can already make simple autonomous robots and we're starting to do engineering at very small scales. Medical nanobots are speculative technology and may not become available for many decades, but it would be hard to find anyone who considers them impossible.

Faster-than-light travel, teleportation, time travel, and antigravity are magic. They all violate various natural laws, or require materials like "negative matter"* which nobody has the slightest idea how to create. They're about as scientifically plausible as Harry Potter's magic spells.

If those things are magic, what are they doing in science fiction stories, especially so-called "hard SF" stories? Well, there's two reasons for that.

The first reason is that sometimes the magic turns real. When H.G. Wells wrote about atomic power in The World Set Free (1914), nobody had any idea how to actually go about causing a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. "Splitting the atom" was almost a byword for something impossible. (Any Greek classicist would nod in approval.) Thirty years later, nuclear fission was a proven technology.

There are other examples. Semiconductors would have been magic in the 1930s. Rockets shouldn't have been magic, as the basic physics is pretty straightforward, but the New York Times pooh-poohed Robert Goddard's proposal to launch rockets beyond the Earth's atmosphere in 1921, and didn't get around to printing a retraction until 1969.

But of course that's a pretty thin justification, really. "Our understanding of the universe might change and this magic stuff I made up could come true." It happens, but it's not the way to bet.

The second reason to use "magic" is a bit more practical: a touch of magic in a science fiction story allows the author to tell stories that would otherwise be impossible.

Take faster-than-light travel. I'm writing a novel right now about a starship crew visiting a distant star system using an FTL drive I worked out. It follows sciencey-seeming rules, but it's basically magic. Why'd I do it? Why not send my space voyagers off in a relativistic spacecraft instead?

Well, there's some problems with that. While the mad geniuses of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop want to launch probes to Alpha Centauri some time this century, they're talking about something with a mass measured in single-digit grams. Even the lunatic optimists at JPL envisioned launching something no bigger than one ton. There's no way I could send a crew of humans on a mission like that.

I don't anticipate relativistic spacecraft for several centuries, at least. And by the time they become feasible, all the other changes going on will make human society — and even human anatomy and psychology — unrecognizable to present-day humans. So I have the choice of either assuming an unrealistically static society over the next four or five hundred years, or of using magic to send some near-future characters (who think and act in a way that I and my readers can understand) off to the stars.

It gets worse if you want to tell stories about time travel. Right now the only even theoretically possible way to travel in time is to pass very close to a rotating black hole. Which means any time travelers have to be those super-advanced post-human space travelers from the previous paragraph. Which means the story would be about hard-to-understand future people interacting with hard-to-understand people in the past. Which means present-day people won't want to read it.

So: magic. But I try to limit myself. In the present book FTL travel is the only wave of the wand, and I want to stick to that.

 

*Not the same thing as antimatter. You can buy antimatter right now if you have a few billion dollars to spare. It's not magic, just pricey.

 

For a mix of stories with and without magic, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

A Reminder

I'm going to be at Boskone this weekend. My schedule is here.

Random Encounters: Occupied Honolulu

When secret Japanese superweapons caught the American carriers unprepared at sea just after Pearl Harbor, the Pacific was defenseless. Imperial Marines landed on Oahu a few weeks later and the Rising Sun flag now flies over Hawaii. America's still in the fight, but it will take time to rebuild the fleet. The people of Honolulu aren't sure if they can endure that long.

ENCOUNTERS IN OCCUPIED HONOLULU

Roll 1d20 for players moving around the city and environs, 1d10 if they're holed up in Honolulu.

1. Roll twice and combine.
2. Plot-advancing encounter: someone or something connected to whatever mission the player-characters are trying to accomplish in occupied Honolulu.
3. Air raid! American carrier-based planes make a night attack, trying to hit the airfield and Japanese ships in the harbor. But bombs sometimes go astray.
4. Black marketeer: he's got cans of genuine Spam, cigarettes from Ecuador, Japanese rifles that fell off a truck . . . and he knows a guy who has anything else you might need. For a price. A steep price.
5. Downed pilot: his reconnaissance plane had to fly low because of cloud cover, and anti-aircraft guns brought it down. The rest of the crew were killed but he parachuted to safety. If the Japanese catch him he's doomed.
6. Historical figure: any real-history person who might have been in the Pacific during World War II. What they're doing in Honolulu is probably a very interesting story.
7. Kenpeitai investigators: 1d6 officers of the Japanese internal-security police force, looking for spies and subversives. They carry pistols and are very persistent.
8. Phantom Eagle: a mysterious figure in a red-white-and-blue costume who stalks the rooftops and back streets of Honolulu, battling crime and the Kenpeitai with fists and super-science. But who is under that mask?
9. Raid! 1d4 truckloads of Japanese soldiers (8 men per truck) armed with rifles, led by a Major and some junior officers. They're here to round everyone up and shoot anyone trying to escape.
10. Typhoon! For the next 2d10 hours, the whole island is lashed by heavy rain and 100-mph winds. The power is out and everyone including the Japanese garrison are indoors waiting for the storm to pass.
11. Gangsters: 1d6 crooks who value money above anything else. (Roll 1d6 — 1-2: Yakuza moving in, 3-5: Pre-war Honolulu syndicate, 6: Shanghai Triads.)
12. German sailors: 2d8 German U-boat crewmen, having a ball on shore leave in Paradise and in no hurry to leave.
13. Giant Robot (Dai-Tetsujin): a menacing armored giant 30 feet tall, armed with 37-millimeter autocannons on each forearm.
14. Gill-men: 1d6 scaly amphibious humanoids fighting for the Emperor. Some say they're the product of bizarre experiments, others claim the Japanese made contact with them on a remote island. Whatever they are, they're very strong and seem to view all humans as prey.
15. Japanese soldiers: 2d6 soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets, led by a junior officer wearing a sword. They are hostile to just about anyone not in an Imperial Army uniform.
16. Labor detail: 3d10 prisoners doing repair work under the eyes of 1d6 Japanese guards carrying submachine guns. The prisoners are a mix of American POWs, civilians arrested on vague charges, and petty crooks from the jails.
17. Marine commandos: 1d6 U.S. Marine commandos who have slipped ashore from a sub in a rubber dinghy to gather intelligence and make contact with the Resistance. They are armed with submachine guns and pistols.
18. Neutral sailors: civilian seamen off of an Argentine-flagged freighter, though none of them have ever set foot in Argentina. Are they spies, smugglers, or something stranger?
19. Resistance cell: a dedicated group of 2d6 people doing intelligence-gathering, sabotage, and assassination while they prepare for the day the Marines hit the beach. (Roll 1d6 — 1: Communist Party of Hawai'i, 2-4: U.S. Loyalists, 5: Mormon Underground, 6: Hawai'ian Monarchists.)
20. Tracks/aftermath: reroll to see what passed recently.

SITUATIONS IN OCCUPIED HONOLULU

Roll 1d6 for each situation, and use the table above to determine who is involved.

1. A desires B
2. A wants to capture B
3. A wants B dead
4. A wants to go somewhere
5. A wants to solve a mystery
6. A wants X

 

For stories which will occupy your attention, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

Kitchen Report: Chinese Braised Pork Belly

Warning: if you are interested in healthy, low-fat recipes, GET OUT NOW!

I discovered this dish, or something very like it, at the Ginger Garden restaurant in Amherst. When I first moved to the area at the dawn of the new millennium, Ginger Garden was a very ordinary Chinese food joint, with a big all-you-can-eat buffet of General Tso's chicken and Hunan beef and lo mein and fried chicken fingers. I sometimes took my daughter there after school when I couldn't face Friendly's yet again. When she stopped going to school in Amherst, I stopped going to the restaurant.

A couple of years ago I went back and was astonished at how much the place had changed. Apparently it's under new ownership and they did a major overhaul of the menu — and the cooking. It's good now. One even sees Chinese students from the local colleges eating there, which wasn't true before.

One of the new dishes on the menu was an amazing dish of pork and green onions, deliciously rich. I enjoyed it immensely and it quickly became one of the things I looked for on the menu at Chinese restaurants. A few other places have it.

I hadn't really thought about making it myself until a specialty butcher shop called Sutter Meats opened in Northampton. It's full of artisanal sausage and free-range pork and locally-sourced chicken and home-schooled beef and the like. It has become my main connection now for things like pigs' feet and duck confit. And one afternoon I noticed that they sold . . . pork belly.

Hmm. I know a pork belly dish I'd like to make, I thought. How hard could it be?

So I bought a couple of pounds and hunted up a recipe on-line, then cooked it for the family. Just recently I made it again for company, so the following account is sort of a hybrid of the two cooking experiences.

First of all, the big confession: if you can get three pounds of pork belly and have all afternoon to spend in the kitchen, this dish is actually very simple. Pig-easy, one might say.

Get three pounds of pork belly with the skin removed. Dice the pork into one-inch by one-half-inch pieces. Put it in a pot of water and bring to a boil, then pour off the water and put the meat aside. (I'm not 100 percent sure if this stage is necessary if you're using good-quality pork belly from a selective butcher, but it doesn't seem to do any harm.)

Then chop up about 1 cubic inch of peeled ginger. Cut half a dozen green onions into three-inch segments (for the bigger ones I cut them in half lengthwise. Use a little oil in the pot and sauté the ginger and onions for just a minute, then add 1 cup of soy sauce, 1 cup of water, 1/4 cup of dry white wine, and some black pepper. Bring the mix to a boil and add 1/3 cup of packed brown sugar. (I've been tempted to try a little molasses in place of the sugar.) Then put the meat in, get it just barely simmering, and let it cook.

For FOUR HOURS.

Stir occasionally.

When it's done, the meat has shrunk a good deal, because of course pork belly is about 75 percent fat and a lot of that is rendered out. Scoop off the layer of clear liquid fat and put it aside. If you can't find a use for a couple of pints of rendered pork fat flavored with ginger, you're just not applying yourself.

The texture was described by my youngest guest as "melty." Yes, you're basically eating cubes of soy-flavored fat, and it's wonderful. Serve over rice or noodles, and for God's sake have some kind of vegetables with it so your gall bladder doesn't try to crawl up your esophagus and run away from home. Cabbage is always good with pork. (The restaurant version had more green onion on the plate. Since the onion cooked with the pork completely disappears into the sauce, I'm betting they stir-fried some more onion and added it at serving time. I may try that, too.)

Verdict: yum.

 

For stories which are also good with pork, buy my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!