Just The Caffeine Talking

In Memoriam

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie —
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find — it’s your own affair —
But… you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!).
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone — wherever it goes — for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we’ve kept ’em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long —
So why in—Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

— Rudyard Kipling

"Astra"

2010-2023

Radio Active

My media presence continues to spread. In addition to podcasts, blogs, and social media, now I'm on AM radio! I was a guest on WHMP in Northampton, talking about (what else?) The Scarab Mission. You can listen to that episode here (my segment starts at the 31 minute mark). 

Megan Zinn, the interviewer, had a great list of questions, and we didn't get to most of them. That's the biggest problem with broadcast media: the very strict time limits. Anyway, this is what I sound like.

Unexpectedly Serious Musings

The economist Robin Hanson has a wonderful wide-ranging curiosity. He developed the "Great Filter" concept for SETI, and wrote a paper about expanding alien civilizations and what it means if we haven't detected them.

Now he's tackling the ideological divide in our society, the so-called "culture war" by examining how it derives from what people consider sacred. Here's his draft paper on the subject, and two posts on his blog Overcoming Bias on the topic. This one is especially useful.

Mr. Hanson's analysis clarified some of my own recent thoughts on the subject. It really does seem as if modern Western society is going through a kind of religious awakening — though in this case the new faith is resolutely anti-theist and goes under a variety of names. "Progressivism," "Social Justice," or maybe "Wokeness." At times I feel like a Roman of the era just before Constantine: a new faith is spreading like wildfire, and like a fire it seems to be consuming many of the things I consider essential to our civilization.

Sometimes a new faith is like Christianity (or the Protestant Reformation) — but too often it winds up more like Robespierre's cult of the Goddess of Reason, or Hong Xiuquan's Heavenly Kingdom. Destroying the old order is easy, but building a new one is hard, especially if you've convinced yourself that anyone who disagrees with you is stupid and evil, and any failures of the new faith must be due to wreckers and saboteurs. That's always a reliable way to wind up with a pyramid of skulls. 

 

 

 

Howard Hughes Vindicated!

DARPA, the Defense Department's official mad-scientist branch, has signed contracts with two companies to develop a super-heavy-lift flying boat for military transport. Here's the article from the US Naval Institute Web site.

Why resurrect a technology which has been sidelined for seventy years? Since the end of World War II flying boats have hung on in a couple of very specialized niches but otherwise they've joined long-range passenger airships in the category of "stuff we don't use any more." The modern world has paved runways everywhere, so airplanes don't need to land on the ocean.

Unless . . . you're the US Navy and Marine Corps, and you're thinking very hard about how you'd fight against a certain large country on the western side of the Pacific. You'd want to use the island chain running from Kamchatka to Australia as a line of unsinkable air bases and combat platforms. You'd want to be able to move forces rapidly around that region, which means you need something faster (and cheaper to replace) than amphibious landing ships. 

Speculation: I expect older ballistic missile submarines will not be scrapped as newer boats replace them. Instead they're going to be repurposed as undersea transports, suitable for rapid, secret deployment of small combat units to islands near Asia.

Arisia 2023

This weekend Boston's biggest annual science fiction convention returns to the Westin Seaport hotel, January 13-16. I'll be there, promoting my rare and eagerly-sought new book The Scarab Mission. I'm also doing several panels and events.

Saturday, January 14

10:00 A.M.: Connecting With Your Kids Through Media — How liking the same nerdy stuff as your kids can draw you closer together.

4:00 P.M.: Overt and Covert Antagonists: Who's More Evil? — Which is worse, a bad guy you don't know about, or one who isn't afraid to make their villainy obvious?

8:30 P.M.: All Words Are Made Up — How to do alien or fantasy languages, what to avoid, and why it's important.

Sunday, January 15 

11:30 A.M.: Reading — I'll be reading some selections from The Scarab Mission.

2:30 P.M.: Gods Walk Among Us — Gods, both real and made-up, as characters in fantasy fiction.

When I'm not in these program events I'll be hanging around. If I can arrange it, there may be some copies of The Scarab Mission available (no guarantees). If that doesn't work out I can provide signed bookplates to paste into your copy when it finally arrives. And of course, I'll sign any of my older work, including games.

See you all at Arisia!

 

Seasonal Music

Note: the Worldbuilding series will continue. I've been busy with other things over the past month but I haven't abandoned it.

It's December, and one of the local radio stations has gone over to an all-Christmas music format for the entire month. As it's one of my presets on the car radio, I wind up listening to that station a fair amount, especially during long commercial blocks on the other channels. Consequently I find myself paying more attention to Christmas songs than at any point in my life up to now.

An observation: most Christmas music is, of course, about Christmas. We have songs like "The Christmas Song" and "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." (Because it's an Oldies channel, I haven't heard "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" this year.)

However, there's a secret sub-genre of Christmas music which isn't actually about Christmas at all. I have provisionally named this sub-genre "Cold Weather Makeout Songs." The two greatest examples are "Let it Snow" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Neither one actually references Christmas at all, just cold weather and how nice it is to share body heat over a long winter night. Given the typical weather in February in North America, both could quite easily be Valentine's Day songs, but they're lumped in with Christmas all the same.

Adjacent to those two are songs about having more Platonic fun in wintertime. "Winter Wonderland" is best interpreted as a couple drunkenly staggering around in the snow before heading back to the chalet. And of course there's the grand-daddy of them all, the song which has become a synecdoche for the entire holiday season: "Jingle Bells." It isn't a Christmas song, it's about tearing around in a sleigh with your girlfriend and having hilarious slapstick accidents. Basically a 19th-Century snowmobile song. Canoodling by the fire afterward is implied but not stated outright.  

This touches on an issue which has bothered me since about the time I learned to talk: the weird New England chauvinism of American Christmas celebrations. Why the emphasis on snow, sleigh bells, pumpkin pie, et cetera? About two-thirds of the United States are snowless at Christmas — and a pretty big slice of the country is snow-free all winter. Now I realize it's more fun to sing about snow than about chilly rain or fog, but I'd love for someone to write a Christmas song about bonfires on the levees, or midnight Mass, or Christmas tamales. If anybody knows of some examples, let me know so I can pass the word to the local radio station programming manager.

My WorldCon Schedule

In two and a half weeks I'll be in Chicago for ChiCon 8, the 80th World Science Fiction Convention. I offered to participate in programming events, and they're really making me sing for my supper this time.

Thursday, September 1

(all times are CDT)

2:30 P.M.: Writing and Story Development for Tabletop Games. This is a game design panel, obviously, focusing on fitting story to the game system and vice versa.

4:00 P.M.: Virtual Reading. I'll be reading from my forthcoming novel The Scarab Mission via video, so anyone in the world can watch.

5:30 P.M.: Science: The Core of Science Fiction's Sense of Wonder. This panel grapples with the central issue of why and how you can have a whole literary genre based on stories about science.

7:00 P.M.: Stroll With the Stars. Come for a walk with me and some other writers around downtown Chicago. I'll point out some of my favorite buildings and discuss how Chicago influenced my fiction.

Friday, September 2

10:00 A.M.: Really Big Things. A panel on megastructures. I've used some big ones in my fiction, but how big can structures really get?

1:00 P.M.: Table Talk. What used to be called a Kaffeklatsch or a Literary Beer, but now with masks on. I won't tattle if anyone cheats.

4:00 P.M.: March of Time. A virtual panel about the ways SF gets overtaken by real-world discoveries, and how to avoid it.

Saturday, September 3

11:30 A.M.: Re-Engineering the Solar System. A virtual panel discussing how humans — or our successors, whatever they may be — may rebuild the Solar System. 

2:30 P.M.: Tropes as Tools. Tropes aren't the same as cliches, nor are they something one must necessarily avoid. This panel will talk about how to use tropes intelligently to make better fiction.

4:00 P.M.: Autographing. I'll be signing books, bookplates, magazines, or anything my pen can make a mark on.

Sunday, September 4

11:30 A.M.: Science in Science Fiction: The Guesswork of 1946. The panel will look at how writers in 1946 envisioned the future, and try to understand why they made the assumptions and guesses they did. 

2:30 P.M.: The Science and Fiction of Droids. A combination science and literary panel about the long history of robots and AI in science fiction, and how everybody gets it wrong including me.

Whew! During the few moments I can snatch when I won't be doing convention programming, I plan to look up friends, relations and familiar sights in Chicago; satisfy my cravings for deep-dish pizza, proper hot dogs, fried chicken, and other Windy City delights; and hang out in the con suite or the hotel bar to see all the people I've missed for the past three years.

See you all in Chicago!

 

 

 

Increasing Success, Increasing Danger

Note: edited to reflect new information.

The war in Ukraine drags on, and the courage and skill of the Ukrainian defenders continues to astonish the world. As I write, they've just announced a missile strike on the Russian Navy's flagship in the Black Sea, the cruiser Moskva. The Russians are reduced to trying to save face by claiming the ship was damaged through their own incompetence instead of enemy action. All good news.

Which is making me very nervous. The Russian leadership keep doubling down. Their negotiations all seem to be in bad faith, trying to buy time for their wrecked armies to rebuild. But as they lose more and more hardware, and their manpower pool becomes newly-inducted conscripts, I fear the temptation is growing in Moscow to use Russia's most powerful weapon, her nuclear arsenal.

Deterrence? Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the leaders of all the major powers have been taking great pains to make it clear that they won't fight Russia. There won't be any armed response to a nuclear strike. The current economic sanctions are about as bad as they can get. Russia's already a moral pariah. What would the Kremlin have to lose by dropping a "tactical" warhead on Mariupol, or Odessa, or Kyiv itself? If anyone has a good answer to that question I really want to hear it.

 

Endgames

We're all following the progress of the war in Ukraine, bouncing around between hope, fear, and utter bafflement. I'd like to take a step back and think about what the results of this conflict are likely to be. I see five paths, and only one of them is not terrible.

Russian Victory: supposing the Russians solve their logistical and command problems, unleash the full strength of their air force, call in more troops, and grind down the Ukrainians by sheer weight of force. Possibly even nuclear force. What then? Russia remains a pariah state, isolated from the global economy and global society. Ukraine will be a bloody open wound for a generation, drawing in a steady flow of Russian troops and sending home body bags, while Putin's security services revert to the worst Soviet methods on a large scale. Paranoid but protected by its nuclear arsenal, Russia would export terror and subversion to its neighbors. We get a new Cold War, as tense and vicious as the old one.

Ukraine Buys Peace: this, to me, is the most likely outcome but it's not a good one. We have a negotiated settlement which gives Russia control of a big chunk of eastern Ukraine, and possibly puts limits on Ukraine's defenses in the future. Ukraine survives but pays a heavy cost, and Vladimir Putin can claim victory and continue in power. What result? Most of the economic sanctions on Russia remain in place, though there will be more room for countries like China to find loopholes to exploit. Again, we get a reborn Cold War, and Russia continues its campaigns of corruption and subversion in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Ukraine and Putin Hold: the Ukrainians throw back the Russian invasion and Putin decides to cut his losses and accept some fig-leaf settlement. Putin proves better at murdering potential rivals than at planning foreign invasions, and remains in power despite the obvious military defeat. Again, this leads to a revived Cold War, Russia as a pariah, and more low-level meddling. The good news is that Ukraine becomes the bastion of Europe, integrated into the European Union and NATO. The bad news is that we go back to 1980s levels of military expenditure and diplomatic infighting.

Putin Falls: the Russian Duma (we hope) or some ambitious general (we fear) take direct steps to remove Putin from power and call the troops home. Everything gets blamed on the late Vlad, Russia's new leadership promise to behave, and the sanctions get relaxed in stages. Essentially a repeat of the Yeltsin years. This is probably the best possible outcome, so my sincerest best wishes to any Russian leaders reading this. Go for it, dude!

Russia Falls: whoever decides to remove Putin sets off a cascade of coups and power grabs by generals, regional governors, and organized crime bosses. This is basically the situation we all felt lucky to avoid in 1991 — a nuclear-armed superpower descending into chaos. The best result of this scenario is a nasty counter-insurgency campaign by international forces to keep order and secure the missile silos, a perpetually unstable Russian government, lots of small-time strongmen, and China quietly annexes everything east of the Urals. The worst result is terrorists and rogue states getting and using Russian nuclear weapons.

If anyone can come up with another optimistic scenario, I'd love to hear it.

 

Victory Conditions

One of the most baffling things about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to Westerners, is that it seems impossible to succeed. If the Russian army gets badly mauled and driven out, Putin gets forced from power and probably shot in the back of the head. If the Russians somehow manage to occupy the entire vast expanse of Ukraine, then they spend the next decade or more dealing with an insurgency that would make 1980s Afghanistan look like Disney World. And either way the economic sanctions have completely wrecked the Russian economy. 

But . . . that's looking at things from our perspective. From a Western, democratic, free-market, classical liberal perspective. Vladimir Putin is none of those things. He grew up, thrived, and prospered in the Communist Soviet Union. When he took power he tried to combine old Soviet elements with even older traditional Russian nationalist strains. He is not, and has never been a "Westernizer." 

Which means that, from his point of view, Russia as a pariah state, a hermit empire, disconnected from the global economy and isolated from world society . . . is a good thing. Far from being a deterrent to his aggression in Ukraine, it's a fringe benefit.

This is a man who grew up immersed in Soviet teachings about "capitalist decadence" as well as the older Russian suspicion of merchants and outsiders. Like another European political figure, he probably sees himself battling against "international money and finance conspirators." If he can grab Ukraine, eliminate anyone who opposes him, and sweep away three decades of "Western capitalist corruption," leaving Russia poorer, meaner — but purified and authentically Russian once more, he will call it a victory.

We'll see if other Russians agree with him.