Sovereignty

Interesting post by Dan Schrimpsher (via Hobbyspace) on sovereignty, and whether future space colonies could one day achieve it.

I'm not that interested in the philosophical discussion of what sovereignty actually is, because I think it's pretty simple -- today, sovereignty is a state of mind. Like so many things in social currency, it's a shared agreement between people that exists pretty much only in our heads. Modern civilisation is founded on these concepts, concepts like law, and money, and decency, for that matter. All are essentially worthless... except for the worth that we choose to give them. Sovereignty is not controlling one's own resources, because in this globalised age, no one really does that. And most nations, even America, have to take the opinions of other nations into account when formulating all kinds of policies. I think the simplest form of sovereignty left today for a nation is the right to have one's own citizens form a government free from direct outside influence. Everything else is increasingly open to interpretation.

Could future space colonies eventually declare sovereignty? Well sure. But it would take the establishment of separate political institutions, because that's really the only domain of sovereignty left. Would this be likely to happen, say, with the moon? Well it depends on what lunar settlement actually looks like. As I've posted before, lunar settlement will only happen in a big way when prices come down far enough to get the private sector involved... and the public sector has proven incapable of bringing prices down in the first place.

Economically, it would be more important for a lunar colony to be self-sufficient than any Earth nation, because transport costs in space will remain high for a long time -- especially anything that needs to be hauled from a planet like Earth, with heavy gravity and thick atmosphere to contend with. That would create an incentive to base manufacturing and other industries locally, which would attract more settlers... so populations could expand relatively quickly. But how long would it take the various lunar bases to feel any kind of nationalistic unity?

The moon's not very big compared to the Earth, but it's big enough. Bases would have all kinds of different locations, and transport between them might not be all that simple. A lot of the colonies will have different functions too. The biggest ones would be multi-purpose free-hold settlements, where pretty much anyone, private or public, would be free to move in. But then there's public-sector research and science stations, there's possibly mining settlements, and others that are single-function. These settlements would have very different views of their relationship with Earth, and would be comprised of very different kinds of people. Also, not everyone wants to be a permanent resident, lots of time spent in lunar gravity will make your muscles waste, and I'd guess most people would work on rotation shifts -- kind of like oil-rig workers, two months on, two months off. There's also the fact that tourism, being the biggest and first major industry, would impose its own character even on private free-hold settlements, especially where language is an issue. Japanese and Chinese tourists, for example, being less likely to speak English, will be more likely to prefer holidays in settlements where staff speak their own tongues. Others, who speak at least some English, would be less fussy... but certainly there would be some settlements that feel far more 'nationalistic', ethnically speaking.

Another thing... children. Obviously when considering the future of nationalist sentiment, we're talking about the second or third generations, at least. For example, most English settlers who came to Australia continued to consider themselves English until the day they died, as did many of their children. It's only their grandchildren and beyond who began to think of themselves as Australians first. On the moon, we've got no idea what happens when you raise kids in low gravity. My suspicion is that children's growth-processes work something similar to that of plants... no, seriously. They need to fight against gravity, and without gravity, they won't know how to grow. We know long periods of microgravity do bad things to adults' bodies, particularly to bone density. My best guess is that raising kids on the moon will probably be fatal, leading to crippling bone-density problems, organ failure, the works. Maybe children could visit, but anything more than say 20 days a year, and 10 days at a time, would be illegal. They're growing all the time, after all.

How many colonists, even those who spent most of their time on the moon and were more 'lunar' than 'earthlings', would do so if they couldn't raise kids? Or if they had to send their kids to Earth boarding schools, or big orbital facilities with rotational gravity? This would all preclude the development of a nationalistic future generation.

For all these reasons, I think nationalism on the moon would take a very long time -- probably until they found some medical cure for the above-stated problems... like seriously advanced nano-technology. Mars might be a better candidate, but even there, the gravity is only one-third that of Earth's, and that might not be enough for children either. Big space stations with rotational gravity would solve the gravity problem, and workers could have and raise kids on them, and would probably develop a more united sense of nationalism too, the station being geographically more united. But space stations, no matter how large (and I'm thinking about something that holds in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of people) are owned by someone else -- namely whoever paid to build them, and residents will never be more than renting tenants. Nationalism is predicated on ownership, so that seems an unlikely setting for sovereign movements too.

So I'm not sure we'll be seeing nationalism or separatist movements in this solar system any time soon. Maybe we'll have to wait until faster-than-light travel, and the discovery of Earth-like planets in other solar systems, for that to happen.

Women's Sports

Here's an article in the Seattle Post-intelligencer on the difficulties women's sport finds in getting an audience in the USA.

I occasionally write for a women's basketball magazine on the internet called Fullcourt Press... I haven't done for a while, but I will again soon. I get pocket money only, I do it because it's fun. I like basketball, and I like the way the women play it -- it's technical and intelligent, with an emphasis on technical skills rather than simple size and athleticism.

It's always puzzled me that more people don't watch women's sports. I'm not political about it, I won't watch women on principle, and I hate the local bastardized-basketball for girlies we call netball (I won't repeat the things some top female basketballers have said about netball within my hearing). But some sports are simply more interesting when played by women. Basketball can be, in a good game... although the WNBA and NBA are so different they're almost two different sports. Women's volleyball is vastly superior to men's, because the women actually have rallies. Women's tennis can be too, for similar reasons... though the women's power game is pretty ugly, and my favorite player is Justine Henin-Hardenne, who's 5 foot 5 and plays like Roger Federer, ie: beautifully.

But the author of the above article seems confused about something -- he blames men for the poor ratings of women's sports. However, in America, what little ratings the WNBA gets are %70 male. The biggest problem women's sports face is not that men don't respect them, it's that women don't respect them. Or otherwise aren't interested. That's a hard nut to crack. It's hard to convince anyone that what they're watching, or should be watching, is impressive, if they can't figure it out for themselves. The publisher of Fullcourt Press, Clay Kallam, says often that in the end, people will judge quality objectively. I dunno. I used to watch Perth Breakers (now Perth Lynx) games regularly. They had a player named Gina Stevens, now retired, who had one of the best jumpshots I've ever seen, male or female. She would get on a streak, destroy her opposition, almost make them cry with frustration because there was nothing they could do about it... and the few hundred people in the crowd would yawn, and a few would clap politely. Then the Wildcats -- the men -- would come on, and someone would do something technically very average by comparison (like a dunk in the open court, which if you're 6-8 and athletic is as easy as falling over), and the crowd would go nuts -- men would roar approval, and women would swoon. Sure, Gina Stevens could never have gotten a spot on the men's team, but that's beside the point. Lightweight boxers can't beat heavyweights, but they move faster, throw better combinations, and are usually more entertaining. In America, college sports are even more popular than the pros, even though the standards are lower. There's more to a great sporting contest than simply who could beat who in a head-to-head fight.

Yeah okay, I've been outed -- I'm a sports snob. A lot of viewers, who fancy themselves knowledgeable about sports, don't really know what they're looking at. Once upon a time, white baseball fans in America wouldn't watch black players either, and aside from the general racism of the age, I'm sure a lot, if asked, would have said there wasn't any talent in the black leagues worth watching. People, and sports fans in particular, see what they want to see... or rather, what they expect to see. Until the assumptions of what female athletes actually ARE can be changed, women's sports will continue to struggle.

This is why I love to see those rare sports where women can beat men at the highest level. Motorsports is the main one. I've watched enough women's basketball from close range to know for an objective fact that there's no talent difference between top men and top women -- it's only size and strength that makes the difference. In a contest of pure skill, women have no disadvantage at all. Michelle Wie is fascinating too, because golf is less obviously a candidate for women-beating-men... but still pretty obvious, if you think about it. I think the best hope for women's basketball is that some successful women take motorsports by storm, and maybe Michelle Wie wins or comes close to winning a men's tournament. Then maybe some basketball fans might figure out a few simple things about gender... like Shaquille O'Neal is not a BETTER player than Lauren Jackson, he's just a BIGGER player.

Some Thoughts About the French

I like them. Yeah, believe it or not, I managed to spend nearly six months in Paris without coming to dislike its inhabitants. And I found many (though by no means all) of the cliches to be untrue. For one thing, I found the Parisiens actually MORE polite than average... though I suppose that depends on what you define as average. Average for a big western city, anyway. They'll make way for you on the sidewalk, while some others I could name will just barge through. They'll say hello and goodbye when you enter or leave their shop. And, after much cycling on the roads, I found their drivers remarkably courteous where cyclists were concerned.

I think there are mitigating circumstance with me, though. For one thing, I speak a little French, and improved a lot while I was there. Being able to speak some French, or at least making an effort, will dramatically improve attitudes, even if the person in question speaks good English. But the French HATE being jabbered at in English straight off the bat... which if you think about it is not surprising, how would any of us Anglophones like it if a Chinese tourist started asking questions in Mandarin in our home town, just expecting you to understand? I did see a few Anglophone tourists doing that, pretty cluelessly, and I can't say I was all that put out at the snooty reaction.

Also, on my bike -- I ride a road bike, so a lot of the time I'm going as fast or even faster than Parisien traffic. It's the slow bikes they don't like, the ones that get in the way. Those are also at the most risk of being hit, because they don't linger in the driver's vision, they just appear suddenly, like a road obstacle. But I was treated like another car, and given a wider berth than most Australian drivers would bother with -- cyclists are just a part of the culture over there, and no one questions their right to use the road. Better yet, dodging through heavy Parisien traffic can be kind of fun. I played tag with some motor scooters through rush hour jams several times -- first they'd get ahead, then I'd find the small gaps they couldn't fit into and I'd get ahead, and the drivers of the less powerful scooters would get annoyed that I could nearly match them for acceleration if I really sprinted off the lights. Certainly bikes and scooters are way faster than cars in heavy traffic.

On the other hand, it's nice to be back in Australia, too. There's something about a culture where 'tu' and 'vous' (informal and formal address) are concerns in every interaction that will always make my informal Australian brain feel like a foreigner. Australians never quite got the hang of formality, as a concept. Of all the Australian flaws, this is my favorite.

Some other observations of interest about France and Paris; don't believe this stuff about 'low European birth rates', there's kids everywhere in Paris. I read somewhere France is the only Western European nation with a positive birth rate, and I believe it. The only thing more common in Paris than kids, is dogs. They're not all ratty little poodles either, walking in the parks you can come across great packs of bigger dogs that would be quite intimidating if in Australia, where lots of dogs seem to have a meaner streak. But in Paris, they all think they're people, and behave accordingly. With the exception of sniffing each others' backsides. But then, I'm sure a lot of people would if they could. Annoyingly, many Parisiens don't believe in leashes. They practice screaming instead. Many peaceful walks with the family pet involve screaming 'Arrette! Ici! Ici!' at the top of their lungs. The dogs, of course, pay no heed to French threats. Like most world leaders these days.

Also, with racial themes emerging lately in Paris, I was interested to see lots of mixed-race couples -- black and white, but also Asian, Arab, you name it. Many had kids, other young and sexy couples were publicly intimate on park benches or at cafes in that very Parisien way. But Paris has always been like that, I recall the stories about black American jazz musicians who went to Paris in the 1930s, back when they weren't allowed to buy a drink in many of the clubs they played at in America. And in Paris, they were treated like stars, were invited to all the big soirees, had affairs with pretty Parisien socialites, etc. And found it so depressing upon returning to America, they hit the drugs and booze even worse than jazz musicians of that period were usually reputed to. The recent troubles aren't about race or racism as such -- they're about Frenchness. Which is not necessarily a racial concept, although it can be. I think the best way to look at it is this -- the French are culture snobs. If you're black, and play the trumpet well, they'll love you. Arab, and dance the belly dance, ditto. Whatever colour you are, and whatever nation you're from, if you have a strong attachment to a culture of some description and attraction, France will always be friendly. The poor urban Arabs of the riots, however, are stuck -- they're no longer Arab, and would probably hate to live in most Arab nations, but also they're not particularly 'French', at least not as white French people would define it. Their culture is reactionary, contrary, and mass-market popular -- rap and sports gear, real fodder for culture snobs. And the result is like oil and water. Or should that be oil and fire? It's not racism in its most simplistic form. It's culture-ism.

All in all, though, I hope France gets its act together someday soon. It really is a nice country, and its people really are good people. It doesn't make it any less fun to make fun of them, of course, but it's always sad to see good things decline.

Appleseed Review

Now there may be people out there who haven't seen the (relatively) new Japanese Appleseed movie, there may be some who couldn't give a stuff, there are undoubtedly some who won't know what the hell I'm talking about. But where everyone else has been raving about Batman Begins or the prospects of the new Superman movie, Appleseed means a hell of a lot more to me, so if I don't write the review, no one will. And yeah, if you haven't seen it and might yet do so -- Spoiler Warning!

Okay, Appleseed is the most prolifically written-in world of Masamune Shirow, who perhaps more famously created Ghost in the Shell. I'm not huge on all manga, but I love Shirow. I don't even agree with all of his ideas. In fact, some strong disagreements with his notions of artificial intelligence in Ghost in the Shell gave at least some of the inspiration for me to create Cassandra Kresnov. But even when presenting a (in my opinion) flawed idea, Shirow has style -- not only is his drawing amazing, his technology awesome and his pages erupting with kinetic energy, but his characters and dialogue are great too. Not many of the hard-technology manga movies seem to pull off character and dialogue at all -- but the original Ghost in the Shell did, kind of, and I was hoping Appleseed might too.

Sadly, they get it all wrong. For starters, the characters' faces are wooden, almost expressionless -- while Shirow's characters are wonderfully expressive on the page. This seems to sum up the attitude of the film toward its characters -- don't worry about who they are, just marvel at their amazing high-kicks. The most fun thing about the star of Shirow's drawn Appleseed, Deunan Knute, is that she's not just superwoman -- she's also a lunatic. Or to be more precise, she's a self-centered, immature, hot-tempered, highly-strung super-brat. All of which, somehow, only makes her more endearing, especially when this very flawed individual does arrive at her occasional moment of great emotional revelation or sympathy for a fellow human being. It means more, coming from Deunan, because we don't always expect it. Because Deunan, of course, is rather like us -- she exhibits all the behavior that our mothers tried hard to stamp out of us when we were little. She does all the stuff we'd love to do, if polite society hadn't told us we shouldn't. Interesting, huh, the recurrence of these character traits not only in Shirow's work, but in other manga too -- in Japan, the least uninhibited society on the planet? You'd think these manga artists were using characters like Deunan as a subconscious pressure-release valve or something...

The movie does the worst thing you can do to Deunan -- by not bothering to develop her fully, they take the easy road, and make her reasonable. Reasonable Deunan is like Indiana Jones with no sense of humor. The one real reaction she got from the cinema audience at my screening was in the training scene where she's knocking off opponents five at-a-time, then drawing little crosses on her arm to keep track -- this scene is taken from Shirow's Appleseed Three. As in the manga, Briareos gets mad at her for making her future partners look stupid. Then paths diverge -- reasonable movie Deunan gets angry at him, for reasonable reasons, because it's a reasonable thing to do. Manga Deunan gets upset that Briareos is upset, and scurries like a scolded little girl to apologise to everyone, then begs him not to hate her anymore. The girl's a little unstable, and Shirow teases her about it like an affectionate uncle to a troublesome niece. But reasonable movie-Deunan becomes Godlike, perfect, gorgeous, so high on her pedestal that she can do no wrong... which doesn't work, because a) it's boring, b) internal contradictions are the soul of drama, and c) flaws are funny. There's no laughs in the movie. Which is sad, because Shirow's Deunan is a hoot. And Shirow's Hitomi is funny too, and Briareos is the king of one liners.

Plot, dialogue, character... it's all connected, in all films or books. Make a bad choice with one, and it can ruin all the others. Here, the exposition is terrible. It's one thing to have a complicated plot -- if that plot leads to high drama and great action, that's fine. But here, the complicated plot is mostly explained and in parts resolved by people standing around talking about it. Exposition-through-drama, otherwise known as 'show, don't tell' is one of the toughest things to do in writing, film or books. Here, they get it very wrong, leading to a very technical attitude to the plot, where all the dots must be connected, including all those dots the audience don't give a stuff about (most of them, I think). Shirow's manga are also very complicated, and often hard to understand, but that's because he doesn't try to join all the dots -- he touches on a clever idea, and leaves it largely unexplained. That idea then hangs there, unresolved, and can be revisited in subsequent readings, which is why I can still reread Shirow manga many times, and have a different experience each time.

In this movie, they try to make everything watertight, which takes an awful amount of pointless effort. It also kills the dialogue, because no one ever says anything that's not an artifact of plot construction. Or in other words, no one is ever just themselves, no one swears, jokes, says something stupid for the hell of it. In Shirow's Appleseed Two, Hitomi and Yoshi are sitting at a bar, pondering the big questions of bioroid/human existence, and Hitomi wonders how to quantify happiness.

"Deunan," she asks as Deunan arrives. "What does happiness mean?"

"Me," says Deunan. "It means me."

I love that, because it's short, sweet, doesn't make literal sense, but you know exactly what she means while learning something very important about Deunan. Also it demonstrates what I said about Shirow purposely not resolving open-ended questions -- the following frame in the manga is of Hitomi and Yoshi, both a little drunk, staring off into space once Deunan has left and puzzling over what the hell she meant. Some themes are best tackled ambiguously. If this movie had taken that approach, it would have freed up so much wasted space, including the wasted characters. Get one thing wrong, you ruin all the rest.

Having said all that, the action sequences are amazing, the mecha fantastic, and the weaponry phenomenal. Unfortunately, the plot and dialogue seems to have been written by people more interested in the workings of heavy-caliber chain guns.

Home again - via Afghanistan

Well I'm back in Adelaide, and bloody hell that's a long flight from Paris. Twenty seven hours including the stops in Singapore and Darwin, and that's not including the three hours of hassle getting my ticket and getting my bike on the plane (for an 80 euro excess baggage charge, which I hadn't had to pay going in the other direction -- thank you Qantas, screw you Air France). French bureaucracy are extremely productive -- at turning one hour waits into two hours, and making a merely difficult situation nearly intolerable. Whatever your problem, a French bureaucrat can reliably be expected to double it.

The highlight of the flight was coming over Afghanistan -- the plane left Paris at 11:15pm, so all the shutters were down and everyone still trying to sleep, but I walked to the back of the plane where the windows by the toilets were available, and spent the next 40 minutes just standing and watching. It was early morning outside, and the sun was low, casting shadows and highlights across the mountains. And what mountains. There were ragged ridges running crazed zigzags across the landscape, all looking sharp enough to cut yourself on. There was new snowfall gleaming in the morning sun, and valleys filled with cloud. And there were sheer, vertical drops that, even from 35,000 feet, looked precipitous.

In the valleys, I could see little villages the same colour as the surrounding red-brown earth -- all the buildings are shaped like squares around a central courtyard, and sometimes these squares join together, like building blocks. I'm sure if I could have flown over two thousand years ago, they would have looked exactly the same. Then there were some broad valleys, including a very impressive, long, straight road that I reckon must have been this one. My compliments to the engineers, and the US government for funding it. Beyond, I'm quite sure, was Kabul, nestled below surrounding mountains.

And then, finally, the air was so clear I could see all the way down into Pakistan, as the plateau fell away like a set of impossibly rugged steps, and I could see how even the flat Afghan valleys are way above sealevel. Then I went back to my seat, and stopped blocking the toilet door. But I'm always amazed at how on an airplane of more than two hundred people, hardly anyone seemed interested in looking out the window. I wonder if spacetravel, and views of the Earth from orbit, will ever become that mundane that quickly. I don't think so... but then, I'm sure the Wright Brothers could never have imagined anyone would rather sleep through a glorious Afghan morning at 35,000 feet.

The Next Superpower

I had to do an India post at some point. I'll try to keep it shorter than it might be -- there's a lot to talk about. Let's start here. The American media is finally noticing that something amazing is happening in India.

Why is this important to an SF writer? Well, it should be important to all of us, SF writers or taxi drivers. But mostly, it'll shape the future like nothing else, and that's a big part of what SF's about. India's rise is a part of the backdrop in my Cassandra Kresnov Series. It's certainly a part of Ian McDonald's upcoming novel River of Gods, also from Pyr, which is on my to-read list.

Why is India poised to do better than China? Well maybe it's not... but this is my opinion. China has yet to prove it can handle chaos. The modern world is heading toward a state of orchestrated chaos -- free markets, free trade, free flows of information from all parts of the globe. Totalitarian systems struggle to handle chaos, because their adaptability is limited. We saw the South East Asian economic collapse of 1997 happen for precisely this reason. India on the other hand IS chaos. The coming chaotic world will be a yawn to most Indians, it couldn't possibly be more chaotic than what they live with every day. And they already have the foundation for everything a modern nation needs -- democracy, educational institutions, legal system, free press, civil NGOs, etc. It's one thing to try and teach democracy and liberal practises to people whose culture has no experience of it -- India doesn't need to be taught, it's in their cultural genes like it is with Americans or Australians.

India's massive internal diversity also ensures it's almost immune to nationalistic or religious extremism. It's by no means a peaceful country -- there are more minor insurgencies in India than probably any other nation. But this is a nation of many states that could each pass as a nation in their own right, each with their own language, culture, histories, etc. West Bengal is really no more similar to Tamil Nadu than Germany is to Spain. This is also why the much feared religious flareups never hurt the country for too long, because a Hindu from West Bengal is probably going to have more in common with a Bengali Muslim than a Tamil Hindu. Or in other words, regionalism is usually stronger than religious sectarianism. Better yet, whatever the radical fringes, both Indian Hinduism and Islam are amongst the world's more peaceable religions -- Indian Islam is interwoven with thick strands of Sufism, which is mystical, musical and generally peaceful. Indian politics breaks down not only by religion and by region and language/ethnicity, but also by caste, urban/rural, marxist/capitalist, young/old... and there's also the so called 'tribals', who don't seem to fit any of the above very well, just to make things more complicated (hey, it's India). India may be unstable on the small scale, but all those little instabilities balance themselves out on the large scale. In India, EVERYONE's a minority.

There are some nations whose future rise cause me some concerns. China, for one -- if it goes democratic (and surely one day it must) then that'll be a big improvement, but even then, its a relatively homogenous nation known for self-imposed cultural lockstep, and democracies can sometimes fan the flames of nationalism, too. If it remains undemocratic, then at some point, we're going to have trouble. That's just a dead certainty. The only question is what gets here first -- Chinese democracy, or war (hot or cold) with America over regional control, (read Taiwan).

India's rise just doesn't alarm me at all. I can't think of any negatives, only positives. I love the culture, I'm not scared of the peoples' intentions vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and I'm thrilled to think of a great, democratic, economic powerhouse surging right on the MIddle East's doorstep. Whether they'll use their emerging power very effectively or not remains to be seen, Indian politics have always been messy, and there's usually about ten simultaneous scandals running in the newspapers on any given day. But the output that that nation will be capable of in sheer human capital, when they actually have some money behind them, is exciting to think about.

And those economic growth numbers? Economists have been predicting a slide back to the %5 range for ages, but lately India's been defying them at about %8 -- with the handbrake on. Nothing moves fast in Indian politics, but you have to wonder how fast that engine would hum if the handbrake comes off...

Intelligent Design in The Age

Australian doctor and writer Chris Lawson's been getting mad at Melbourne newspaper The Age for running a bunch of pro-Intelligent Design articles. He's hardly the first person I've heard recently saying The Age is going downhill.

On Intelligent Design -- I think (and Chris seems to agree) that it's a perfectly fine religious theory if that's what you want to believe. But it's not science, and as such, has as much place in a science class as maths does in a music class (or as science does in a church sermon).

Muslim Brotherhood

There's a Washington Times editorial here, reflecting that rapid democratisation of the Middle East might not be such a good thing after all, given the Muslim Brotherhood's impressive showing in recent Egyptian elections. I say -- if they can win power, let them have it.

Democracy has the right to defend itself, sure -- so the previous regime would have the right to deny the Brotherhood power if they moved to outlaw future elections. But democracy, as others have observed, is a process, not a final destination. And ultimately, what makes democracies superior to non-democracies is not that they make less mistakes, but rather that they have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. The only way to defeat the Muslim Brotherhood is for the Egyptian population to decide they don't want them. The only way that'll happen is if they have a period in power, and turn out to be hopeless. Unlike the usual dictatorships, where the people know their leader is useless, but can't do a thing about it.

Look at Iran. If Iran had a proper democratic election (unlike the rigged ones that installed the current bunch of whackos), they'd kick the Mullahs out on the street, and you'd have a bunch of largely-secular politicians with rarely a turban in sight. Why? They've seen what Islamic parties do when they're in power, and they don't like it. This is the constant, swinging pendulum of democracy -- one side has power, people judge their performance, and if they suck, they turn to someone else. I have every confidence that the Muslim Brotherhood would suck pretty bad once they actually had to answer for some real responsibilities. I couldn't imagine their economic policies being very effective, given that ideologues of all stripes usually make lousy economists, and unlike their neighbors, Egypt doesn't have the Middle Eastern curse -- oil revenues -- to safely cover their leaders' utter incompetence.

It might take five years, it might take ten, but ultimately, the only way that the Egyptian population will lose its affection for Islamists is if they've seen them at work, and judged them poorly. (The Iraqis, of course, are learning to dislike Islamists far faster because they keep massacring people, but luckily for Egyptians, the MB is apparently not a violent organisation). This kind of natural evolution in a population's thinking is what democracy is FOR. It might be tough for America for that period, having to deal with a hostile MB government, but so long as real democracy took root in Egypt (and for the MB to be in power, that would suppose it had) that Egyptian government would be spending far more time defending itself from its internal, democratic dissenters than President Mubarak currently does, and wouldn't have the time to indulge in the Middle Eastern leaders' favorite game of 'blame America and Israel for all your problems, not me'.

It also helps to undermine the pervasive Middle Eastern victim mentality, the one where people are further encouraged to blame the West for everything because they genuinely do have no control over their societies themselves. If Egypt voted the MB into power, and the MB were useless, they'd only have themselves to blame... and they'd know it, because most of those voting MB would be anti-American, and thus be expecting everything to improve as soon as fellow anti-Americans are running the country. If it didn't... well, there's no one else left to blame, is there?

This is the only hope for sober realism in the Middle East -- people have to be allowed to make their own mistakes, and pay for them. Yes, paying for those mistakes can be messy, but as many have said, fear of instability in the Middle East has led only to dictators who've made everything worse. Democracy IS messy. That's why it works.

This Rocks

I normally don't give a stuff about motorsport, but more of this could change my mind.

Katherine Legge isn't quite on top of the motorsport world right yet, but she's closing in fast -- she came third in the Formula Atlantics development series in America, had a Formula One test just recently where she posted the second-fasted time of the five invited drivers (the other four all male, of course), has a Champ Car test coming up later this month, but before that, she's now been invited to test drive for the UK A1 Grand Prix team, the first woman ever to do so.

I've got a whole post about this I'm going to write up soon, about how fascinating it is that a sport where women are probably on-average superior to men retains such a macho reputation, and how much fun it'll be to watch those assumptions get blown away. Nothing like a little ideological wreckage to liven up my day. Go Katherine!

SF Realism

Fellow Pyr author Chris Roberson has a post over on his journal about how realistic to make his next SF project. Now for the uninitiated, so called SF 'realists' are called 'mundanes'. They tend to write hard SF, the stuff where the nuts and bolts that hold their spacecraft together have all been geometrically measured, weighed and analysed to make sure it's all technologically feasible, within the rules of physics and science as we understand it. Much of the SF that doesn't conform to those understandings of the possible, get dismissed as fantasy.

I rarely read it. In fact, I'm not all that familiar with the debate itself, because it all seems rather pointless to me. You see, if we pick up the story in the sixteen hundreds, there was this guy called Galileo. He had this crazy idea that went completely against any rational understanding of the universe, that the Earth orbited the sun instead of the other way around. Previous to that, some equally stupid, misguided people had postulated that the Earth was actually round, and not flat as rational people knew for a certainty. Then there came this total nutter called Newton, who had some lunatic notions of an interlocking set of predictable physical rules that dictated all motion in the universe, and then the worst offender against logic of all -- Albert Einstein, who tried to inform us that time and space were all RELATIVE? I mean seriously.

Mundanes try to understand the universe on the assumption that our present understanding is if not perfect, then more or less complete, at least in its basic foundation. For example; no spaceships traveling faster-than-light, because it's 'impossible'. Now don't get me started, or I'll go on about those OTHER crazy idiots, like the Wright Brothers who reckoned they could fly, and Yeager who broke the sound barrier, and Gargarin who got into space... etc. To suppose that our present understanding of the universe is any more fundamentally complete than was, say, the Vatican's when they were threatening to burn poor Galileo at the stake, strikes me as a little silly. We know better than the Vatican did about planetary orbits, sure. But light, time and gravity? The more they discover, the more they realise how much they don't know.

I think that it's far more risky to go around supposing that things aren't possible than to suppose they might be, innovation and discovery have a way of making nay-sayers look silly. Worse, negative assumptions imply a concrete, total knowledge of the subject matter. 'Impossible' is a very final word. I much prefer 'maybe'. It's not so arrogant, for one thing.

The other thing the mundanes miss is that science fiction, even when it's at its most far fetched and silly, is not entirely about the future -- it's about the present. Take a very familiar SF character -- say Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He's an android, he has no emotions. The purpose of Data as a character, and the reason he works for a modern audience, is not because he raises interesting speculations about future technology -- he might do that, but it's beside the point. No, the purpose of Commander Data is that by being what he is, he makes us reflect on what WE are.

This for me is one of the great strengths of SF as a genre, and no other genre can do it. The function of aliens in most dramatic SF is not to speculate about aliens, but rather to use the contrast they provide to examine ourselves -- human beings. You'd never wonder why we have two eyes until you imagine a creature with one, or a million. We'd never wonder why we are like we are unless we imagined something different. And human storytellers have been doing this for ages -- previously it was elves, gods or monsters -- and still is, with fantasy literature. With SF, it's aliens and androids. But in all of them, we are the subject... and for me, that's a very valid, very rational subject to explore.

Anyhow... back to Chris's problems with his spaceship. For me, if you want to read a terrific mix of un-mundane fantasy technology (faster-than-light) combined with hard-edged realism, you can't go past CJ Cherryh's space stuff -- Rimrunners, in particular, is just an amazingly cool book. In her world, faster-than-light is the new mundane.