The Boom

SF writers are supposed to have some skill in predicting the future... well, maybe. Here's one of the most fascinating little periods I see coming in about fifteen years.

My old home town of Perth is changing rather fast, it seems. Construction is booming, property prices went up over thirty percent just last year, it's nearly the most expensive city in Australia (huge change from the sleepy little place on the far side of nowhere when I grew up there). The reason is China. Western Australia is one of the richest mineral regions in the world, has lots of natural gas too, and Perth is its capital. WA growth is going at about %14 per year, which anyone knows, for a developed economy, is insane. China's growth needs lots of minerals and gas, which causes a boom in WA.

So where will this lead? Let's do some simple calculations. China's real GDP is about (roughly, because Chinese figures are notoriously fuzzy) $2 trillion a year. It's growing at between %9 and %10, which mean its economy doubles roughly every seven years. Say it was $2 trillion in 2005... that means it's heading to $4 trillion in 2012. If it keeps it up, it'll be $8 trillion in 2019, and $16 trillion in 2026. The USA, for comparison, is about $12.5 trillion today.

Now of course it's doubtful that China can maintain that pace, because it's easier to grow an immature economy fast than a mature one. The more mature the economy gets, the harder it is to grow fast... which is why western economies are delighted at any growth above %3 per year. Also, China's growth is more dependant on foreign investment, currently running at a ridiculous $60 billion a year. To a $2 trillion economy, $60 billion has a lot of impact. For an $8 trillion dollar economy, less so. There won't be as much money to go around, relatively speaking.

But it's still not unreasonable to assume that that growth could be maintained between 2012 and 2019, and if so, those years will see China add $4 trillion to its economy. Beyond that, even if it slows a little, maybe $6 or $7 trillion. This is going to gobble up a ridiculous quantity of global resources. Mining stocks will soar, metals prices will do crazy things, anyone anywhere in the world living in a resource-rich region, and owning real estate, is going to become wealthy. There's no reason it can't go on a lot longer than that, too. China has 1.3 billion people. If every one of them made as much money as every American, China would be a $50 trillion economy. Instead, today, it's just $2 trillion. This thing has a long way to go yet.

Just China, major hiccups aside, would have a profound impact on the world. But then there's India, which I (and increasingly many others) believe will grow faster and more strongly than China, despite having given up a ten year headstart. India's population will overtake China's at some point before levelling off, so basically, you're looking at China's impact on the global economy, and doubling it. I foresee the years 2020 and beyond seeing China and India between them adding more than $2 trillion (in today's terms) to the global economy each year. For the rest of us who trade with them, it'll be a white knuckle roller coaster ride, with the very real prospect of a great crash, or a series of smaller ones, along the way.

Better yet (or worse, depending on your outlook) that kind of growth is mutually reinforcing. SE Asia is already benefitting from China's rise, and amazingly, India is already a greater net outward investor than inward investor -- it invests more money overseas than overseas invests on it. As they both grow richer, they'll buy global companies, properties, entertainment, and their tourists will flood destinations in their hundreds of millions. SE Asia is best poised to prosper, so that's another 600 million people transitioning from third to first world within a generation (although to be fair, Malaysia and Thailand are already partway there, and Singapore entirely so).

Lots of other developing nations could also benefit. The shift in global economic and political power will be immense, and for some, traumatising. But in particular, that period of 2020-to-2030, should be a crazy ride.

Waterstones

It seems I may have jumped the gun on Crossover's release with Waterstones in the UK -- it's only just now hitting the shelves, I'm informed. Well, I'm pleased that it's happening before Christmas, and I'm informed that at the one or two stores they've been stocked early, they've been doing very well.

Winning the War

Michael Leeden, at the National Review Online, gets it right.

In invading Iraq, it seems that America has had to fight not one war, but three overlapping ones. The first was against Saddam's regime, which was won comfortably. The second was against al-Qaeda and co, the Sunni fundamentalist terrorists, who joined with the more secular Sunni resistance, but always had a separate agenda. From what I read, that war has been pretty much won also, al-Qaeda is vastly unpopular in Iraq, the tribes in al-Anbar have turned on them, Zarqawi is dead, most of their senior leadership have been killed or captured, etc. They retain the capability to blow people up fairly frequently, but that's a miserly definition of victory for them.

It's the third war that's the killer, and that's the one that's hotting up now -- the war between Shia and Sunni not just in Iraq, but across the entire Middle East. They don't like each other, and haven't for over a thousand years. Sunnis fear Iran's hegemonic ambition, and have long seen Iraq as a buffer between Iran and the broader, Sunni Middle East. Which is why they've loved Saddam for so long, because he was the tough guy keeping the Shia Iranians from their doorstep, and keeping Iraq on the side of the Sunnis (by killing and torturing the Iraqi Shia (and Sunni Kurds) in their hundreds of thousands).

Democracy in Iraq effectively hands Iraq to the Shia, as the Shia make%60 of the population, which is why so many Sunnis not just in Iraq, but in the broader Middle East, think opposing it is so vital. Most Iraqi Shia don't seem to be interested in becoming a branch of Iranian power, but most Arab Sunnis don't appear to see the distinction. So what is effectively happening now is Iraq has become a proxy war between Sunni and Shia across the region for control of Iraq, and thus the balance of power in the Middle East.

So you can't stabilise the country until the neighbours stop interfering. Winning in Iraq, as the present environment stands, is therefore probably impossible, because neither side seems motivated to stop until the question is decided in finality -- either Iraq back in Sunni control, (meaning another dictatorship), or in Shia control. Iran wants that Shia control to be in the form of their lackeys, like Moqtadr al-Sadr, and probably reckons that the longer the fighting goes on, the more popular he and his kind of Shia extremists will be. The Shia will never allow another Sunni dictator, so the Sunnis are basically kidding themselves, and should really stop while they still have some Sunni influence left in a multi-faith democracy. Otherwise the civil war will be one sided ethnic cleansing, because most of the new Iraqi Army and police are Shia, they form the death squads that account for all the bodies in the street every morning, and if they're truly let of the leash, the Sunnis are finished. They're already leaving the country by one or two thousand a day, by one report I read. An Iraq civil war, if it happens, will basically be the systematic cleansing of Sunnis from Iraq, until there aren't enough of them left to resist. But the Sunnis, by habit, arrogance or desperation, refuse to see it that way, and seem to think they can still win.

So how do you stop the neighbours from interfering? Most Iraqis have demonstrated they'd rather live in peace, but the violent minorities can never be silenced if the weapons, money and fighters keep pouring across the borders. Well the only thing that scares Iran is its own people. Ditto most of the Sunni regimes to the west (Syria is a strange case, a majority-Sunni nation run by a Shia sect that currently takes the side of Iran). As Michael Leeden points out in his article, most Iranians, and especially the ones that count (the young ones) don't like their Mullahs. But the USA has been pretty pitiful in promoting democracy there. Iran's leaders obviously consider themselves protected because the West desperately needs their oil and gas... otherwise America could just blockade them and watch the regime crumble. But right now they've got the West, and America in particular, over a barrel, because they can destabilise Iraq whenever they feel like it, and the West can't do anything similar to them.

That has to change. I personally think that Iran will probably have a civil war of their own if the government collapses, because there are that many fanatics who'd rather die than see their Islamic Republic become a secular democracy. Which would be very sad for the Iranian people, but would be very good news for Iraq, because strife in Iran would suck all the trouble away from its neighbours, and into itself, just as strife in Iraq has done. A lot of the Shia fanatics would head to Iran, and take their money and weapons with them, and leave Iraq alone. The moderates fighting in Iran would also make good allies for moderate Iraqi Shia, and create a common front of Shia opposed to terrorism in all forms. That front would account for the majority of Iraqi and Iranian Shia -- nearly a hundred million people -- and could over time comfortably resist anything the Sunnis threw at them, and be a great ally to freedom loving people everywhere.

Iran was always the key. Even Saddam himself only rose to power because lots of people found him useful to oppose Iranian expansion, whether under the Shah or the Mullahs. If the Iranian equation were altered, Iraq would stand a chance. If the James Baker-led study group doesn't have a plan to actively destabilise the Iranian regime, I don't think Iraq is going anywhere pleasant.

Waterstones Top Ten

Michael Rowley, head SF acquisitions dude for Waterstones in the UK, has put Crossover on his Top Ten SF reads for the year. Also included are Neal Asher, Elizabeth Moon, Gardner Dozois, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Newman, M. John Harrison, Geoff Ryman, and fellow Pyr author Chris Roberson.

Crossover at the Science Fiction Book Club

Crossover is now the first of Pyr's books to be released with the Science Fiction Book Club. I'm pretty excited about it, especially when I look at the November releases, and find myself in the company of Jack McDevitt, David Farland, John Scalzi, Nora Roberts, Lian Hearn, CJ Cherryh, Andre Norton and Jean Rabe. Especially when Lian Hearn is a friend of mine, and CJ Cherryh a major inspiration.

SFRevu Interview and Review

SFRevu have an interview with yours truly, and a review of Crossover, up here.

Good Crossover Review

Another good review at SFF World. I like this kind of review as the reviewer spends a lot of time making observations rather than just recounting what happens.

Interestingly, he suggests that the book can be read as anti the current American political regime. I'm very pleased that he and some others have read it that way, but not because it's what I intended, because it's not. For one thing, the initial draft of what became Crossover was written before President Bush's election. Politically I'm a genuine neutral, I find aspects appealing and detestable in equal measure on both sides of politics, both in Australia and America.

No, the reason I'm pleased is that whatever my own political views, I make an effort to keep them out of my writing. Individual characters may pop up who have views one way or another, but as a reader, nothing annoys me more than heavy-handed authorial narrative twisting events, characters, plot etc all to serve as a diatribe in favour or against a particular political viewpoint. That kind of thing is called propaganda. I hate propaganda in any form, partly because it's the antithesis of entertainment and intelligence both, but also because it's impossible to make any kind of political argument unless you first acknowledge that every political viewpoint comes from somewhere valid. Even the worst aspects of something detestable like racism come from a basic aspect of human tribalism that causes us to demarcate the world into 'us and them'... in this case, by race or skin colour. The end result is horrible, but it comes from something that all of us have, to varying degrees. Anyone who's a sports fan knows a little about instinctive tribalism. Propogandists are incapable of understanding that even bad politics can come from good places, and if you can't understand that, you can't tell an interesting story about it, to my mind. So I'm pleased that anti-Bush folks can read my work as anti-Bush, and I equally hope some pro-Bush folks will read it as pro-Bush. Either could be right. Or wrong.

There's also a comment already fastened onto the review from someone who likes the series (though not as much as the reviewer) but complains that Sandy takes her clothes off too often. Gratuitously.

Well first... what is good sex, if not gratuitous? Secondly, I think there's a huge difference between a narrator perving at a good looking female character, and a viewpoint from the character's own perspective. I've tried to do the latter. Believe it or not, I didn't just chuck the sex in because I wanted to be more commercial and write something with lots of sex (and come to think of it, there's very little sex in the second book, and just a moderate amount in the third). With Sandy, it just seemed to work. We're talking about someone from a very different, self-contained society, bound by none of this society's morals, and made up of individuals who are nowhere near as emotionally developed and complex as we. Sandy's the exception to the latter bit, but I wanted her to be quite naive about human social morals, to feel like an outsider, but not necessarily in a bad way. As a person, she's endlessly curious, and having a brain capable of processing enormous inputs of sensory information (enhanced vision, enhanced hearing, super high-powered neural uplinks) it just seemed to me that sensory stimulation would be something she loves... and has never learned any moral qualms about. And so she loves food, loves music, loves art, and naturally, loves sex. It's meant to represent her humanity, and to some degree, a certain good humoured vulnerability to baser human instincts. I thought it a good antidote to the super-duper high intelligence AI cliche of the android who only likes playing chess and reading science manuals. Sandy's much more into sex, drugs and rock and roll... only without the drugs, they don't really work on her. And if you have enough sex and rock and roll, who needs the drugs anyway?

Crossover Review at SF Crowsnest

Tomas L. Martin reviews Crossover at the SF Crowsnest.

He notes that he likes how Cassandra doesn't succumb to the android cliche of desperately yearning to be human. I've always thought this was a silly cliche for several reasons. For one thing, it's arrogant. Why would anyone necessarily want to be human? It assumes that being anything else would suck.

Two, it assumes that an artificial person (to use the politically correct term, which when dealing with civilised space's most lethal soldier is no dumb thing) would not be human to begin with. Well, that depends on the technology envisaged. Cassandra is the product of technology that mimics human intelligence, and indeed basic human biology. But even if you were a good old fashioned tinpot android (say Commander Data from Star Trek TNG) who's to say that technology mitigates against emotion? What is emotion if not a higher intellectual function? And even if he did feel no emotion, why would someone with no emotion desperately yearn to be human? Isn't yearning an emotion? Wouldn't yearning constitute an irrational and wasteful impulse, if one had no emotion? The whole construct doesn't make sense, except to create a dramatic narrative about humanity that, while sometimes entertaining, is essentially pretty shallow. I mean, doesn't this requirement that friendly AIs should always look up to us, or always want to be like us, constitute a shallow insecurity on our part? Or are we scared that if they don't worship us, they'll want to wipe us out instead?

Which leads to the last point, that someone who desperately wants to be something else is basically insecure. Cassandra just isn't that kind of insecure person. Whatever her various personal issues, she doesn't go in for self-loathing, she's fairly well adjusted, has high self-esteem, etc. She's not a neurotic, self-mutilating mess... and if she were, Crossover might have become a horror novel, because you just don't want someone of her capabilities to be that screwed up. She doesn't think she's superior in any moral sense, but she kind of likes having all these way cool abilities. I mean, who wouldn't?

Useful Idiots

This kind of thing becomes annoying after a while.

I normally don't criticize fellow novelists, but this new book Underground is making for an exasperating trend. Why does the left suppose that totalitarianism comes only from the right? Well, there was Hitler. Good example, save that bit about National Socialism (that socialism thing, wasn't that a leftist concept?) so even that becomes problematic, given that much of the thought behind National Socialism is actually Marxist. Um... Pinochet? Nasty guy, hope he burns in hell, but seriously, on the pecking order of twentieth century dictators, he wouldn't make the top thirty. Military coups tend to be associated with right wing-ism, and probably true, but unless you're talking about Saddam, they usually weren't THAT bad... and the likes of Saddam didn't really have political affiliations anyhow. Saddam wasn't rightist or leftist, he was Saddamist. Or Ba'athist, actually, which... wouldn't you know it, leftist again. And I don't know where you put a guy like Idi Amin... right winger, or just an asshole?

No, for the really, truly appalling dictatorships of the twentieth century (save the dubious Hitler example), you turn left. In the USSR, Stalin killed a quarter of Russia's population all on his own (and was loved for it). Mao did even worse with raw numbers, but China's got more people, so no one seemed to notice. Everyone forgets the million or so Vietnamese who disappeared after Saigon fell. Next door, the Khmer Rouge were appalling on a truly breathtaking scale, I think even Stalin might have refused Pol Pot's phone calls. I shudder to think of how many people have died and continue to die and will continue to die in North Korea... millions and millions, I have no doubt, considering they've been in power fifty years now.

But to certain lefty writers, all this pales in comparison to George Bush and John Howard's vicious regimes. I mean, low taxes and capitalism. How will we survive?

Seriously, I used to be a lefty, and now consider myself a centrist. I dislike much of what I see on the right, but I'm truly appalled by this kind of smell from the left. The reason I was a lefty was that I care for human liberty, and I disliked the right's tendency to beat up on minorities, weirdos, freaks and other strange non-conformists with whom I tend to identify. Yet I'm often left gagging in horror at today's left's incredible moral equivalence, equating Bush with Hitler, Howard with Stalin, and assuming that totalitarianism is primarily a right-wing phenomenon. You don't have to like Bush, Howard and their like, and God knows they do plenty of things I disagree with, but if you can't tell the difference between Bush and Hitler, you're lost, and there is no hope for you.

Yet novels like 'Underground' continue to assume right wing governments will lead to autocracy, and films like V-for-Vendetta assume the same, and BBC mockumentaries like Death of a President portray worlds of authoritarian jackboots just around the corner, and I'm sure if you think hard you can think of other distopian futures invented on the premise that right-wingism leads to dictatorship.

In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true. The right, many leftists have noticed, tend to be anti-government (in every respect except gay peoples' bedrooms... but that's another matter). In America, they own guns and treat bureaucrats with contempt. When the jackboots come, these are the people who'll greet them with a hail of bullets. Not that I like the American gun culture (again, another matter)... I'm just sayin'.

Neither does being anti-military and pacifist mean you're less likely to welcome jackboot totalitarianism -- again, quite the opposite. George Orwell put it best in his essay 'Notes on Nationalism' (from a compilation called 'essays', and if you've any interest in Orwell, and consider yourself a centrist like me, buy this book, even if just for 'Notes on Nationalism') where he writes in May 1945 of Pacifism;

"The majority of Pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects, or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred for western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism."

He goes on to say that, "Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis...'

This shouldn't have surprised anyone then, and shouldn't surprise anyone now (and there's a LOT of them about, mostly on the left), because pacifism is ultimately a totalitarian ideology. It has one truth. Any solution with one truth can only be imposed upon the rest of humanity, because humanity will never collectively arrive at this one truth by any other means. The best way to impose the 'one truth' upon fractious, silly humans is through the barrel of a gun.

You can hear echoes of this if you listen to what novels, films or TV like those mentioned here are saying. Right wing governments are bad. Democracy is therefore bad, because people elect these governments. In V-for-Vendetta, the hero delivers a televised speech to we, the ordinary citizens, berating us for having put these jerks in power. Yes you! Why did you vote for these people? You don't know what's good for you. I know better. Wouldn't it just be better for everyone if you just voted how I wanted you to? I can look after you better than you can. Like those English lefties who wrote letters to random American voters during the last election campaign urging them to see the light and vote for Kerry... again with the patronising undertone, 'you don't know what's good for you, see things my way, I'm much wiser than you, poor stupid American...'.

This is how it starts, you see. All that's required for freedom to die is for someone in power to find a sensible reason to suspend it. Right wingers, according to a not-insignificant portion of the left, are killing the planet, waging war left and right, stealing elections and creating an unjust and unequal society. Marx, and then Lenin, had similar problems, and their solution was a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Dictatorship is reasonable, you see, if your opponents don't know what's best, and the ordinary folk can't be trusted to see reason... leftist revolutions, after all, were always elitist, top-down revolutions, never bottom up as Marx expected. The ordinary people were never wise enough to see the true glory of Marx's theories, they had to be guided. The ordinary people will never be wise enough to see the true glory of intellectual 'one truth-isms' at any time. They need to be guided. Or persuaded. Or threatened. Or have electrodes attached to their testicles and...

THIS is why society never sees the totalitarian takeover coming, because it's never the people everyone expects. It's the anti-totalitarians, the ones screaming for freedom, who become the tyrants, in the 'best interests of society'. It's the Robespierres, the champions of social justice against the cruelty of French royalty, who become the madmen with the bloody guillotines. Lenin was liberating Russia from capitalism, Stalin was liberating Russia from Leninism and Trotskyism, Pol Pot was liberating Cambodia from everything bourgeois, Robespierre was liberating France from feudalism, etc. And of course, it's all our fault, we poor, ignorant peasants who couldn't be trusted with the grand vision required to know what's best for society.

To protect us from this totalitarian bullshit, democracy was invented. Democracy is a state of mind, in which all must accept that there IS no one truth, but an approximation of many truths. In a democracy, you must love your enemy. If you have no enemy, you're not IN a democracy. Revolutions are about annihilating your enemy entirely. That's why they usually end up in such a mess. Today's right, whatever you think of them, seem to enjoy the fight. The left seem to hate it, and to wish there was no fight at all. The left accuse the right of loving to have an enemy to fight... and they're correct, right-wingers always expect there will be enemies, and look forward to kicking their ass. Lefties tend to dream of a day when there'll be no enemies... thus John Lennon, singing songs like 'Imagine', which tend to be seen as cuddly and harmless, but should really have been the theme song for Pol Pot's Year Zero, as it advocates almost exactly the same thing. As much as I dislike many of the right's policies, I have to reluctantly concede that the right's democratic credentials of late look far stronger to me than the left's. Most worryingly of all... possibly they've always been.