One line from the letter of ideas Heinlein sent to Sturgeon when Sturgeon was blocked keeps coming to me. In discussing the ability to send someone into the past to live in the brain of a citizen of the time he says something about the future being so horrible that “even a time such as this” would be better.
The horrible time Heinlein was referring to was 1962, largely before our institutions fell apart, and (off the top of my head, you guys know I don’t have time to research this every day, and the year is in fact the year I was born) not during any recession or severe economic downturn. The moon program was going on, Europe was recovering from WWII and even in tiny and (to be fair) repressively governed Portugal, things were getting better. They were certainly massively better than when mom was born in 1934, or when dad was born in 1931.
It brought to my mind something someone – was it RES? – said in the comments, yesterday: that even were our “experts” not maliciously misseducated in their time, and pumped with the wrong “theory of everything” their learning would now be out of date.
This is something that even the authors of the golden age, when there were benevolent governments running everything in their futures, never took into account. It is all the more extraordinary they didn’t, because they, themselves, had grown up in a time of massive change (as did I.)
As a kid it was quite normal for me to ask my parents who to do something and be told “I have no idea. We didn’t have that in my day.” These were things like what type of bus pass to buy to go to school downtown. Dad had walked to school. Mom had to make decisions her mom had never made, too, like “At what age will my daughter be allowed to cook on the gas stove?” Her family had only a wooden open fire and it had been different. So I suppose my childhood was closest to those of authors here growing up in the thirties and forties. SURELY they knew that people’s knowledge became outdated fast.
But I don’t think they did. Even as they were positing moon colonies by the seventies, they were underestimating what that rate of change would do to society. There was also this assumption that “at some point society has changed enough.” Even in the Heinlein juveniles, you got this feeling that despite all the rate of change, etc. society was fundamentally stable. The kids didn’t run up against things the parents had no clue of, etc.
There was sort of an underlying assumption we’d find the “right” theory: of energy, of society, of manufacturing, of moon rockets. And then everything would run on rails, provided you learned the “right” way to do it.
Perhaps this was because so many of them were engineers and there are “right techniques” to assemble things.
Anyway, I’m not pounding on golden age writers. Wish we had many more of them today. What came after was the equal and opposite assumption – that everything would fall apart and we’d never put society-dumpty together again.
What I meant to say, though, is that, ultimately, that is the problem with planned societies. Even in a relatively low-change society, it changes too much for anyone to be able to learn something and still be the same way 40 years later. Culturally Portugal was in slow change mode when I was little, but to ask mom how to write a business letter was stupid – she used archaic language and forms no one used anymore.
We get this impression that there was a time when there was no change – the dark ages, or whatever – but it is not true. It seems like that from above, but if you zero in on a decade or a century you see change almost as fast as ours, just in different areas.
Meanwhile, even supposing there WAS no change, it would be almost impossible for statesmen to handle situations in the full knowledge of how it compares to the past and what to do about it.
Look, our president has elicited giggles on the right (perhaps on the left too – but possibly not. They don’t laugh much) because he keeps claiming no president EVAH has faced as serious a situation as he faces now.
I don’t care how much you devalue a Harvard degree, it is impossible the man doesn’t know about presidents during the Great Wars. It’s physically impossible too he doesn’t realize what Lincoln faced.
No, what is at work here is a human thing – yes, I know. I keep hoping they find the birth certificate for Xerpes too – in that past perils seem in retrospect mild and almost ridiculous.
This is because humans perceive the past as a story. No matter how exciting the story, if you know the ending, it seems less riveting/extreme/dangerous. (Show of hands here – how many people reading a thriller get to the point the tension is unbearable and break its back by looking at the ending?) And we know the ending of the past.
It’s like when we were moving from North to South Carolina and both cars broke down by the side of the road, in the middle of the night, filled with our possessions. At the time, this was an awful situation (and it tells you something I don’t remember how we got out of it) but a month later we could tell it to friends as a joke.
Both Heinlein’s comment, and the fact I’m reading a lot of Nero Wolfe short stories (I don’t have time to get immersed in something longer) and keep coming across things about how “it’s the worst times, ever” and “will we ever survive this?” are giving me that sense.
While people are living things they look really scary, but in the history books they become forgone conclusions.
It’s easier for politicians now to discount World War II as something of course we were going to win, but it looked scary enough at the time (particularly the time before WWII when things were closing in and looking darker “the lights are going out all over Europe”) for people to put off or give up on having kids, and for many people to think it was the most horrible time ever.
It’s also easy in retrospect to say “of course I’d have been on the right side.” But I’ll note a lot of the young people saying “of course I’d have opposed the Nazis” are falling for a new version of the old lie. They just got out of the stories of the past that they should oppose people who goosestep and are racist. So, as long as the new evil avoids those tells, they’ll get them like they got their great grandparents. It’s all about youth and the bright new future and the men who’ll be in charge of everything: the best and the brightest.
It can’t be said often enough that even the best and the brightest get old, and their knowledge becomes outdated. Even the best and the brightest have psychological quirks. I don’t care if you were raised inside a cotton ball, you don’t get to be an adult without psychological bruises. And we all have ways of hiding or pouring balm on those bruises. And even the best and the brightest are human, which means – barring time travel, and even then – that for them the past is a story, and what they’re facing is “completely different” because they’re in it.
Which is why, government being a necessary evil (and I’m not going to argue this, not even if Josh K. should come back. If the entire world were the US it would be debatable. The entire world is not and it isn’t) we should keep it as decentralized as possible, and in the hands of as many people as possible. We should also rediscover that whole checks and balances thing. Because humans are fallible, become outdated, and are… well… human.
It is also why we shouldn’t look at our present difficulties and imagine it’s the end of the world or that freedom and prosperity won’t win the day. There have been worse pinches: the black plague comes to mind, but I’m fairly sure things looked as black or blacker at various points in the cold war.
Yeah, we’re in a pinch. Don’t assume we’ll win and stop fighting. But I doubt very much our predicament is the worst ever. It’s just that we don’t know the book has a happy ending. But it might have. And we can work to make it so.
Be not afraid!
According To Hoyt 
This is an excellent essay on multiple levels.
As science fiction writing advice, it’s priceless: what things are changing within your future/alien/fantasy society? What assumptions do people have about their own time and place that are wrong?
And as a guide to life it’s pretty sound, too.
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I’ve gotten annoyed with the “we’re doomed” mindset. I’ll agree that we may going to have rough times ahead *but* over the years I’ve heard too many “we’re doomed” stories.
Japan doesn’t own the US (unlike so many claims that it would).
We aren’t over-populated (unlike how Harry Harrison described the future).
We aren’t in an Ice Age (which *was* forecasted).
And so forth.
I have a pessimistic streak but know it and know that I’ve been wrong in the past.
So why you should I trust other people who claim “we’re all doomed”?
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The hilarious part is being asked to trust people who have repeatedly predicted our doom — and been wrong. Paul Ehrlich comes to mind.
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For several years now I have been reading an excellent book, Robert V. Levine’s The Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist Or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently. I say several years not because I am a slow reader but because the author so frequently quotes twits like Ehrlich as if fonts of wisdom and insight that I keep having to put the book aside lest I hurl it against a wall.
Good book, interesting concept, but really — how am I to take an author seriously if he takes !@#*s like Ehrlich seriously?
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You can’t. Ehrlich’s clownhood is well established.
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The Silent Language by Hall has an extended discussion of time in different cultures and languages – along with some source material used by his contemporary (and I suppose later) SF writers.
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And of course Malthus had no way of predicting the advances in food production, or for that matter a clue that prosperity tends to act as its own limit on population.
I’d have to posit that pretty much anyone who claims “we’re all doomed” has a hidden agenda involving the transfer of wealth or power from someone else to themselves. So, trust isn’t even on the table, or at least shouldn’t be.
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From time to time, I think that we should institute the Old Testament punishment for “False Prophets”. IE if a prophet is wrong *once*, he’s a False Prophet and the sentence is death. [Very Big Evil Grin]
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Already solved that one: you only make predictions that will be able to be judged after your death.
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By stoning?
If so, I pick my stone to be the chunk that fell off of Eagle Rock last year
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Oddlly enough, the Arabs are indeed a problem, but it’s clear that they aren’t going to buy us out just from the oil.
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Yes, it’s also excellent life advice on a personal level, it’s so true. Our family endured a medical crisis 3 years ago, which left us all crushed and stupefied. Things will never be “normal” again, but we survived and we are alive. The worst did not happen; neither did the best. We survived. Our children will have lives ahead of them. There were days 2-3 years ago when I did not know whether we would even survive; whether our children would survive as we know them. We did not have the mental tools to predict the future just 3 years out. Knowing the ending would have made enduring the crisis a relative snap; in real life, we don’t get that. What would have mitigated the suffering … a wider circle of friends and acquaintances. Not more technology or more medications or anything that you could get from an Ivy education. A wider circle of acquaintance would have been a true help. Something to ponder on a lot of levels.
Thank you.
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This is one of the important themes of LotR — that we cannot know what effect our actions may have, that even small, apparently pointless sacrifices (the Armies of the West in their last stand at the Gates of Mordor) may well matter. I have had to learn to harden my heart (yes, I have one) against the emotions that rise up when I consider how many men and women gave their lives in an apparently pointless attempt to slow the monster’s advance, dying believing their efforts futile.
It requires a major effort to warp one’s head around to the understanding of the insurmountable task faced by America’s Founders, attempting to do what had never before in the history of the world been done. Science historian James Burke has explored this theme in The Day the Universe Changed, looking at the way in which our conception of the universe can seemingly turn on a dime simply because
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4YIiCsnsuw&list=PL9ED93A671A5282EA&index=1
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I have had to learn to harden my heart (yes, I have one) against the emotions that rise up when I consider how many men and women gave their lives in an apparently pointless attempt to slow the monster’s advance, dying believing their efforts futile.
“Because it’s the right thing to do” is often the only thing that keeps good people going.
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Had to laugh when referring to the future being stable an smooth you used the phrase “everything would run on rails.”
Of course our present administration is trying to bring railroads back, seemingly oblivious to the fact that doing so would derail progress.
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I find it incredible that the current California administration wants to spend $2.6 billion to build an initial 130-mile (209 km) segment of high-speed line from Madera to Bakersfield. Madera to Bakersfield?
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This is under the heading of hysteria. It’s not just they haven’t kept up with the present, it’s that they feel everything is out of control. (Talk to some progressives. It doesn’t take long before they start railing on Amazon or facebook, or blogs, or all those people out there doing things they’re not QUALIFIED to do. They seem to hate distributed modernity in all its forms.) So they want to force us to go back to the past they THINK they understand. Part of this is being taught history without voices of the time, but it’s also our entertainment. From the time there was TV on, they get to see a sanitized version of the past and they think “if we can just bring that back.” (It also ties back to European vacations. Most of their Europe-lust comes from the fact they go to Europe ON VACATION so to them it’s idyllic and beautiful, and they want that.)
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Of course it is idyllic and beautiful if you are ON VACATION. lol except for Panama– I could tell you stories– they had to finally institute tourist police so the tourists could be safe–
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Another factor is that these tourists typically experience “life” in those countries in much the same way visitors to Disneyland experience “the American past” in Frontierland: a carefully constructed artifice designed to give the tourist an impression of foreignness without any of the discomforts of actual experience. As has been observed, five-star resorts are largely the same the world over.
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YEP– which is why I like to leave in a country for two years (more or less) to get to know the area– it is the same when you go to different areas of the US.
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Follow the money.
I bet Fienstien’s hubby is in there somewhere.
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Or Senator Reid…
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Or Yes.
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The idea that anyone in Madera wants to go to Bakersfield … or anyone in Bakersfield wants to go to Madera … is laughable. Much less “high speed”.
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I knew a young man from Bakersfield, back in the dark ages :-P
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Its always the Dark Ages in Bakersfield. (I grew up a couple of hours drive from there).
Full of Okies.
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Hey! I lived there through kindergarten. Don’t dis Bakersfield. (family story is, it was so named because it was a day’s wagon travel from the LA area, and a farmer, name of Baker, let people camp out in one of his fields.)
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bearcat | April 9, 2013 at 12:10 pm
> Of course our present administration is trying to bring railroads back, seemingly oblivious to the fact that doing so would derail progress.
“Derail progress” like having to spend three hours in airports for a two-hour flight, instead of a four-hour trip where one can get up and walk around, rather than be crammed into a seat designed for Andersonville inmates; get reasonably-good food, instead of a six-course-meal-in-a-soapdish (if that); and not get gate-raped by Transportation Gestapo pedo-smurfs?
The problem is not High-Speed Rail; the problem is the Leftists running California are not competent to fund, much less build, the blasted thing.
(Someone once asked Patrick McGoohan why The Village’s logo was a bicycle; he replied “It’s an Ironic Symbol of Progress”. When asked how it was that, he replied, “Ask anyone who’s ever been in a traffic jam.”)
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No, the problem with high speed rail is high speed rail. Look, it’s a bad idea to have hard wired routes. And once it starts going you THINK the TSA will be easier for that than for planes? And once the first train blows up you think that they’ll let you get up and walk around? Oh, my.
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There has already been TSA moves on both train and bus transit in the Seattle area– about two years ago.
Not sure what happened, I didn’t really follow, but they laid claim and exercise the ability to do random inspections of passengers.
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It’s difficult for people to note the flow of history around their lives, in the same sense that it’s difficult to observe air, or for fish to notice water.
It is all around us, and we are a part of it – its just the natural order of things.
And we so often fool ourselves into thinking that our minds are multi-dimensional in time, when we are in fact stuck firmly in the present. The past no longer exists (just a ‘story’ as you mentioned) and the future doesn’t exist yet, no matter how we might plan for it.
And I have no reason to wax so philosophical – I’ve had my morning coffee!
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Being closer to WW 2 than everyone else. (I think) It was a near thing, the issue was in doubt, but that generation never waivered, but there was a concern, which isn’t reflected in the literature of the time. The Regular Army had 243,095 men organized into 9 divisions. We were puny compared to most nations. And quite frankly we did not perform that well at the beginning.
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“… quite frankly we did not perform that well at the beginning.”
I admire your gift for understatement. Even cursory knowledge of the first few engagements our forces had in North Africa against the Germans demonstrates why they had no cause to fear us. “Rabble in arms” indeed! At least the movie Patton covers that period, else hardly anyone living today would know of it.
But the beauty of the American system is we learn quickly when necessary. As Rommel is supposed to have said: “The reason Americans do so well in war, is war is chaos, and Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.”
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I rather like, “one of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.”
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And a d-good thing, too, given the perfumed princes composing our doctrine and manuals!
Over to you, Col. K.
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I’m convinced that the (learned) ability to appreciate, enjoy and thrive during chaos is what keeps survivors and conquerors from the dustbin of history and lets them breed the next generation. It’s what keeps the keepers-on keeping on during times of upheaval. This is how fortunes are made and lost and made again. I’m just not sure how it works. Yet.
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“Doctrine” and “manuals” are just another form of Hidebound Traditionalism. >:)
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Or the shorter version: “Americans cheat.”
In war, I like cheating, by the way.
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We don’t cheat.
We change the rules. (There’s no specific rule against reprogramming the simulation, right?)
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Well, if I’m changing the rules, the first one I’m going to change is the rule against changing the rules.
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Ah, Calvin ball!
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Rick Atkinson’s “An Army at Dawn” does a decent job of describing that process. Although I’m still looking for a good discussion of how US Army armor doctrine evolved (really more punctuated equilibrium …) in the years ’42 and ’43.
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The thing about Big Institutions (Government, Business, Unions) is that when they make a mistake it is likely to have BIG consequences. And they will make mistakes … which they will try their damnedest to kick sand over.
I learned long ago that in any organization it is best to have decisions made at the lowest practical level, made by the people who are going to be tasked to live with the results. Choosing a new combat rifle for the infantry? Involve your gunnery sergeants and sgt.s-major as early as possible in the process. They’ll be the ones able to tell you “Yes, it’s a great weapon, so long as it is kept sparkling clean, but your if your average grunt spends two hours a day cleaning his weapon, that rifle isn’t the one he’ll be polishing. And as a general rule, when Charlie ambushes us he doesn’t allow a time out for weapons prep.”
The best business plan in the world will crash and burn if the serfs responsible for implementing it don’t buy in; even a mediocre plan can succeed if the serfs get behind it and push.
Still, what’s the point of clawing your way to the top of a Big Institution if, once there, you don’t make the Big Decisions?
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I’m not sure it even matters how current the knowledge of soi disant “leaders” is. They can NEVER know enough to make even educated guesses, let alone ration decisions. And all systems work better when they are allowed to self-correct. Self-govern. That’s the genius of the ideal the Founders aimed for, no matter how widely they missed the mark.
All of it, I tell myself, is a failure of imagination. It seems to me (from my Barcalounger atop Olympus) that no one (except my magnificent self :-) ) appreciates the scope of the problem. Take atmospheric modeling. It seems to me that, in order to get any sort of accurate prediction of global atmospheric behavior, one would have to build a model which was as large, complex, and chaotic as the atmosphere itself — which would in turn engender the same level of uncertainty and error. A vicious circle.
The only proper way of governing ANY system is to design it to be self-governing and THEN STEP BACK. But people who go into politics don’t go into the field to leave people alone. They go in because, at bottom, they want to run other people’s lives. They may think they do it from the purest of motives, but they are sadly mistaken. They do not know enough — they cannot know enough — to make good decisions for anyone but themselves, and even that’s in doubt.
This is known as the knowledge problem.
M
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I must observe that ‘current’ is not the only problem. Even if nothing changed, they could not know enough.
As was observed in “I, Pencil” (here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html), no one knows how to make a pencil.
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For some odd reason, C.S. Lewis’s snarky comment in “Prince Caspian” about what the children were being taught comes to mind. It was “duller than the truest history you ever read, and less true than the most exciting adventure story.”
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I’ve been reading up on the Thirty Years War and the wars against Louis XIV. Let’s just say that the 21st century looks pretty dang peachy compared to that. You can really sympathize with all the people writing at the time who were certain that it was the end of the world, because for large swaths of Europe, it was. The Rhineland-Palatinate (southern Rhine Valley in Germany) didn’t recover its population until after WWII. Sweden lost over half it’s young male population (17-35) to the maw of Gustavus Adolphus’s armies. It was also a period of intense cold and wet weather, causing crop failures.
Other periods did manage to exceed the 1600s, though. As a great prof I worked for put it: “The fourteenth century sucked. Now, for a lot of people the 20th century wasn’t great, and the seventeenth century, if you were in Europe, was pretty damn rough. But the fourteenth century just flat sucked.” I’ve not read anything to contradict his statement.
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A lot of people see the devastation of the World Wars of the 20th Century and think it unprecedented. Well the Thirty Years War was obviously of a lesser magnitude in total death toll, but for the region it was of the same order of magnitude of devastation. All accomplished with horse as transport, and musket and pike as weapons.
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Part of it was the idea of “Progress”, prior to the world wars there was an idea that “Science” and “Reason” were making the World into a much more perfect place.
WWI showed them the massive destruction that Science could bring and the start of WWI seemed to show Europe that “Reason” could not over-ride human stupidity.
Then they tried the “Glorious” League of Nations that would prevent such a terror from happening again.
Of course, the League of Nations failed. Nazi Germany showed them (once again) the terror of “Science” and “Industry”. The Holocaust was industrial murder on a massive scale from a nation thought to be Civilized and Cultured. They saw the future as a choice between Fascism and Communism.
Then the war was ended by one plane dropping one bomb that destroyed a city. Their “Glorious” Science again gave them death and destruction not the “Glorious” Future that they thought It would bring.
They tried again to create their “better” world by creating the United Nations (see RAH’s _Space Cadet_ to see the dream of better world).
We know what happened next. The UN failed to prevent the Cold War and they thought mankind was doomed to either an “unending stalemate” between two giants or a war that could wipe out civilization (or life) from Earth.
IMO their earlier dreams were unrealistic as well as their fears, but thanks to the failure of their dreams and their fears they saw Western Civilization as a failure.
I don’t see Western Civilization as a failure but I sort of see why, to them, the problems of earlier times were minor.
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I vaguely recall a story from years ago in the “when the sleeper wakes” vein. The period of suspended animation was only something like 20-30 years, yet the subject was faced with an overwhelming lack of the background necessary to put simple everyday life in context. As I remember his closing remark was something to the effect of “why did you even wake me up?” and the response from the primary care physician was “I argued that we shouldn’t.”
Then there was a short story by Spider Robinson years ago that caused a great controversy with Analog readers. It wasn’t science fiction you see, so the hardliners bitched loudly. That aside, the premise IIRC was a priest locked up in a third world prison for a number of years only to be freed and brought back to a United States unlike anything he remembered. Timeframe was something under ten years I think. Guy was so unable to fit into modern society that he turned to crime. Luckily he tried to hold up Callahan’s bar.
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Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue has her heroine turned into a fish for fourteen years and trying to cope afterwards. Not well. (That her fiance and daughter were lost to her in that period is one part of it, to be sure.)
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I read that book too– the other books in the same series also deal with the impact of her being gone for that long.
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“He doesn’t know how to use the three seashells!”
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http://www.i-mockery.com/shorts/three-seashells/
HE DOES NOW! >:)
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I don’t think I can ever unsee that.
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1962. Cuban Missile Crisis. Yeah, that year we really thought we were looking at TEOTWAWKI. Over fifty years ago. Wow. Of course, at eight years old, it didn’t register with me. I think that was about the time we started doing duck-and-cover nuclear war drills in school.
And you’d think the number of times I’ve had to walk my mother through buying a book on Amazon would warn me to not make my fictional future world too much like the world I know. But it’s so easy to say “after three nuclear and biological world wars and blah, blah, blah . . . the tech was back up to about where it had been fourteen centuries before . . . ”
Because in ten years it will have changed *again* and my kids will have to show me how to use a phone. (It’s embarrassingly close already!)
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This suggests that one way to muck with people’s heads is to upend most expectations. For example, we used to think that new anti-biotics and such meant The End Of Disease … and we now know that it merely constitutes a breeding program for bigger and nastier microbes,
So, Cinderella marries the Prince … and discovers him to be an abuser, or an indifferent husband & lover, more interested in riding after a fox or puttering in the garden … or the kingdom is invaded by the armies of the Seven Dwarven Lords, her husband slain and she is left to rally the resistance.
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Ohhhh, I like that last one. Especially the notion of evil (for a given value) dwarves invading the kingdom. Or maybe they aren’t evil. Maybe the invasion is in retaliation for something the king and/or prince has done.
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….like sexually assaulting the girl they were protecting?
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You’d have to establish why the Dwarf Lords would care about a young girl in the (presumably) human kingdom, and you may be verging on a dark or even grimdark setting if the girl is the perspective character in this, but that could do quite well. I’d add in something like her role as a long-lost, or a Child of Prophecy, or something similar. For the High Council of the Dwarves to bestir themselves from their mountain fastnesses for the welfare of a single person would need to be explained sufficiently.
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They cared enough to put Sleeping Beauty in a crystal casket, for heaven’s sake– she’s already established as Important.
Make the “seven dwarves” either heirs, spares, or uncles of the High Mucky Mucks. Or make it so they are the High Whatzits– a dwarf has to work, after all.
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I’m confused: how does a dwarven invasion of Cinderella’s kingdom entail Snow White?
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She was goddess of the Seven Dwarven Lords who helped them establish their kingdoms, obviously.
As to why risk squat for a human female … she’s the last descendant of Snow White? Or just employ the universal fantasy motivation: there was this prophecy.
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Once Upon A Time, the Queen of the Underworld poisoned the Maiden Goddess (of the moon) for capturing the heart of the Sun Lord, and cast her comatose form in the heart of the Deep, Dark, Wood. Seven Brothers – the first dwarves, cast out from the other mortals for their apparent deformity – chanced upon her as they made their rude way. Taken by her beauty, and mourning her death, they cleared a space in the Wood and raised a mausoleum from crystal they hewed from the living stone. The next morning, the first rays of the dawn sun struck the tomb and reflected the light to the heavens, drawing the attention and person of the Sun Lord. Upon finding his love apparently dead, he wept, and knelt to kiss her once more. His kiss broke the poisonous spell, and the Maiden awoke. The Two thanked the awestruck Brothers, and taught them many secrets. This is why the Dwarves revere the Sun Lord and the Moon Maiden, and make their homes in the high peaks. Their holiest ceremonies take place on the tops of the mountains, under the sun and the moon. This is also why the Dwarves make their homes deep underground, for they have taken enmity against the Queen into their hearts.
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… for they have taken enmity against the Queen into their hearts and determined to despoil her of her realm.
Well done, sir. Cinderella’s FGM is the moon goddess, in which case they invade the kingdom to succor her? Or is Cindy possessed by (an avatar of?) the Queen of the Underworld?
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Um… flip response, there’s only one True Princess.
Serious one, I’m a sleep wimp and running on very little sleep!
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um, they are actually the dark elves and they want the gold back that was extorted from them for the deathgeld for Otter? Sleeping beauty was to be their compensation for the loss, and was to become queen, which is why they saved her from the huntsmen and later tucked her into the crystal casket like Lennin, but she was stolen away by the son of the king, and the elves have drawn together all the legions of hidden folk and giants and will not rest until Troy is sacked. Or wolves devour the moon.
Cindy could be the grand-daughter. Dark elves live a long time and take a long time to come to a conclusion, form a plan and marshal resources. After all, they are talking about enough gold to fill an expandable otter skin, cover it and have still need a ring to cover the nose: just because you humans forget and die doesn’t mean we have to.
(Now gife us back dat gotter-damme-ring!)
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Dark elves as in swartalfr, then.
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And the king is named Elvis. Yes.
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You people are all desssssssspicable.
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Not to mention daffy.
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o.O
narf.
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This is a story about, in part, the power struggle between the malevolent power across the sea to the west, and the vaguely benevolent entity that rules off somewhere to the east, beyond the high mountain range.
The human kingdoms lie on the coast. Prince Charming secretly traffics with the west, and married Cinderella, to sacrifice her for tainted power.
The seven Dwarven lords, kings and wizards, have bound themselves to the entity, along with three Eleven lords. This involves magic, oaths, and a ring made from gold, blood and moonlight. Cinderella is one of maybe nine humans with the potential to do the same, which is why her death, her ritual murder at a certain time and place is worth so much.
Thus the seven Dwarves intervene militarily. They don’t have the fighting power at hand to hold anything, and they don’t manage to rescue Cinderella, but they kill Prince Charming in the raid.
Now Cinderella is in a position she hadn’t planned on, as she buries her husband, deals with the crisis, and thinks about revenge on the Dwarves. Unknown to her, she has now been brought to the attention of things, horrible otherworldly things, inimical to humans and Dwarves, things that no human, Dwarf, or Elf should be forced to deal with. The ‘Fairy Godmother’ is still around, trusted, and who knows what it really is, or what its true agenda and loyalties are.
Snow White is one of the other candidates. The casket was created by various arts to help sustain her life and bring out her full power. She was active in human politics a hundred years ago, plus or minus fifty. Nominally, she was killed as a result of bloody human power politics.
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My mom, a capable and competent woman, refuses to take the train downtown since they made ticket-buying automatic. Part of it is doubtless her age, but since she shows no diminution in faculties, I SUSPECT most of it is just “I’m not going to learn yet another way to do this. NO.”
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Being of a certain age I can sympathize with your mum. After a point you get tired of discovering your knowledge (how to dial information or use the yellow pages) has (once again) become obsolete. The constancy of change and adaptation is wearing, and after a few decades the thrill of novelty becomes tired.
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Dad complains about the internet and his computer. I told him that very few people knows as much about changing tires on split-ring wheels like he does, and he was not conviced it was a good trade-off.
Me personally, I’m learning to make and use a sling, and make steamed puddings. I’ve given up on computers.
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I know enough about split rims to leave them the @#$! alone!
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Heh. I know how to use my phone as a phone, how to use it to listen to radio, how to send and read text messages, and how to take photographs with it. But those are only a fraction of the things one could do with it. I haven’t even tried to figure out the rest. (Was a package, subscription and phone. Nowadays those tend to be cheaper than subscription without the phone here. You can still find fairly simple basic cellphones, meaning there isn’t much more than a phone with which you can send text messages, but the ones which come with those packages are always the newer more complicated models. I suppose so many of the subscribers actually start using the internet and all the other stuff which will fast raise the bill that it pays them to sell the initial package relatively cheaply).
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Which is why I use my phone as a phone. I use my kindle fire for the other stuff.
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I was really annoyed when I went to Best Buy to get a GPS, and the sales guy tried to tell me I really wanted a new phone. After all, I always have my phone with me, blah, blah, blah.
(Not always, and I’m not the only one who drives the car.)
On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 7:22 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > accordingtohoyt commented: “Which is why I use my phone as a phone. I > use my kindle fire for the other stuff.” >
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Yeah. We also have separate GPS and cameras. But it’s not so much “don’t know how to use it,” it’s “I don’t want to run up the internet charges.” We phone and text (text is a G-d send because of mid range hearing loss.) but have other gadgets for other things. Dan only gave up his organizer whatever it was called a couple of years ago.I think he has one on the kindle now. And I can’t read on the phone. Not for ten years, since I turned forty.
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This kind of thing always annoys me, and it happens to me a lot, especially in places like Radio Shack. I frequently want to do something that is “non-standard”, and when I start picking up things, and someone comes over to “help”, I’ll usually wind up asking where to find something, then they’ll ask what I’m doing, and I can’t help myself. I just start explaining, and then they try to sell me something that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m trying to do. I have to learn to start responding with, “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
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I’m still sticking to paper maps, I find it easier to figure out exactly where I am, and which route to take if I can see a wider part of the necessary route all at the same time. On the other hand I rarely need to check things while I’m driving, I look at the map before I start.
Yes, that phone does have GPS too. I have checked where the train was a couple of times, mostly out of boredom, but that’s it. Maybe I should, I do have it with me at all times, and things may get interesting if I one day actually need it. Get lost without any other map or something.
On the other hand, it does have instructions on it too… Oh hell, unless it’s some unlikely scenario like I’m being chased in a strange town by some purse snatcher I should manage by finding those instructions first. And if I were getting chased I would probably be on the phone talking with the local emergency center, not using it to look at a map anyway.
The display is just a touch too small for me to read books on it comfortably. I really do need to buy some sort of reading device or tablet at some point, right now I’m reading ebooks on my (old enough I’d really need an upgrade) desk computer.
And again, using it much for anything but phone calls does get expensive fast. I prefer to know exactly how big my bill is going to be each month, not get surprises.
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I don’t care to read on my cellphone book app either (although I have a bunch of short stories by our dear host to read in the dentist’s office while I wait … ).
However, what I did was buy my favorite wilderness first aid manual in ebook form and made sure it was downloaded locally onto the phone for emergency use.
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“However, what I did was buy my favorite wilderness first aid manual in ebook form and made sure it was downloaded locally onto the phone for emergency use.”
And when your in the wilderness and the battery dies on your phone halfway through reading the first aid instructions, what are you going to do? Plug it into a currant bush?
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You’re, not your.
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The typos seem to be worse than usual today. (Or maybe just the correction posts.)
On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 9:55 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > bearcat commented: “You’re, not your.” >
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It’s the correction posts. GUYS LET IT GO. We are ATH. Typos are us.
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“However, what I did was buy my favorite wilderness first aid manual in ebook form and made sure it was downloaded locally onto the phone for emergency use.”
Excellent idea! I do most of my reading on my phone,now. It has a faster processor than my Kobo Vox, and I get less of the waiting for page turns. However, I do have my e-library backed up on my computer, my external hard drive, and the memory card in my Vox, as well as the memory card in my phone. About every month (when I download the new Baen bundle) I update my backups, so that even if one of the machines crashes catastrophically, I still have a copy somewhere else of my over 2K ebook files.
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You wouldn’t believe the argument I got into once with a salesman who didn’t understand his product as well as I did, and argued with me about whether or not the GPS app would work beyond cell tower range.
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COMPLETELY Off Topic, but please note that today is the Eighty-Fifth anniversary of the birth of Tom Lehrer.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/09/whatever-happened-to-tom-lehre
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I shall poison a pigeon in the park today in his honor.
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Back in college, a hallmate pulling all-nighters in archi lab borrowed my Bill Cosby tapes to listen to. When she’d run through them all, I smiled and handed her a tape of the complete Tom Lehrer. Next morning, my door message board was covered with the scrawled lyrics to Vatican Rag – she said she got to that and fell off her stool and made everyone else in the lab listen.
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I read a chilling excerpt recently from a pre-WWII book about Austria. It was a kind of enthusiastic travel guide, all about how great the country was. There was a bit of a problem with the Jews, of course, who simply don’t seem to feel they’re part of society and won’t sign up for the military, for instance. But otherwise it’s a great place: even our poor people are spick-n-span, dressed neatly, with a cheerful attitude. This isn’t the kind of country (not like those other countries) where a mess is tolerated. We love our Fatherland, with an enthusiasm that’s perhaps the more fervent when we suspect it’s in the wrong, because that’s no time to desert our country. It’s just the kind of people we are: loyal and obedient.
I doubt the author was a bad man. He had a grip on some of the things a good person should be on the lookout for, and some of the things a society needs in order to be successful. He had absolutely no idea what direction the truly ugly trouble was about to come from.
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Too few people today comprehend that, at the time, Germany was The Apex of European Civilization. The best scientists, finest machinists, most prominent doctors were German. Some have speculated that the contrast between this popularly held image and the revealed reality of the death camps is what caused the implosion of confidence of Western Civilization.
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Even fewer understand that in 1900, Germany was the second-largest country in Europe, just slightly ahead of Austria-Hungary and behind only Russia. It lost territory to EVERYONE after both wars.
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Notice that the travel book was wrong about Jewish participation in the Austrian military and something of the drive to assimilate – historically going back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire which pre WWII wasn’t that far in the past:
the Austro-Hungarian army was almost alone in its regular promotion of Jews to positions of command.[57] While the Jewish population of the lands of the Dual Monarchy was about five percent, Jews made up nearly eighteen percent of the reserve officer corps Wikipedia this date.
I’m pretty sure the author was in fact a liar and for this lie a bad man.
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There were hundreds of Jewish dead for Germany in WWI. One of Richthoffen’s closest friends (there were rumors zee Baron had a thing for this man’s sister) was Jewish.
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A stinking anti-Semite and a dangerous man, but I’m not convinced he was a bad man as men go. Probably a run-of-the-mill sort who believed stories he’d heard without even imagining he should challenge them — it’s probably what everyone in his family, everyone he went to school with, everyone he worked with thought. Something people very much like ourselves might have erroneously thought, though of course I’d prefer to believe I could never be caught in such a filthy error. What ordinary ideas do I entertain now that someone 100 years from now will be shocked by?
The casual anti-Semitism you encounter in all kinds of books written in the 19th and early 20th centuries is a real eye-popper. You want to shake them and say “Don’t you see what’s coming?”
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I am in the midst of “rereading” Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe adventure (put in quotes because I am doing it via the audiobook.) In it Archie, the narrator and putative hero employs the term “spiggoty” in what is clearly an ethnic slur. In a later book (Too Many Cooks) Archie uses a word that is now so taboo we refer to it by its initial letter, n.
Ah, for a time and place where people were open about their prejudices rather than veiling them in euphemisms and pseudo-solicitude.
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Yes and No Res.
At many times in our history, a term we now consider a “slur” wasn’t seen as a “slur”.
It was just a “descriptor” and prejudices would be seen as “how you treated the *other* not what term you called the *other*”.
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I know my godfather didn’t mean anything more than you’d mean by calling a redhead “red” when he ask “where’d the marker come from?” in a crowded restaurant.
Small town, everybody knows everyone, and there happened to be a black tourist visiting… and my godfather grew up with sheep. Where you have one black sheep for every X in a band.
My folks knew he wasn’t being insulting– and it still utterly scandalized them.
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Probably a run-of-the-mill sort who believed stories he’d heard without even imagining he should challenge them — it’s probably what everyone in his family, everyone he went to school with, everyone he worked with thought.
Scarier– what if he did question them, and they were well enough supported by every (sane?) source?
It’s much more believable if you consider that they didn’t know then what we know now….
I know this happens with decent folks that I know, and part of what apparently makes my family strange is we spend a lot of time considering we may be wrong before throwing in with stuff. There’s probably still some spots– I’ve found a couple since becoming an adult– but what are the ones I can’t see yet?
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I ran across a National Georgraphic from 1935 at a flea market with the article, “In Abyssinia with the Italian Army”, talking about the civilization and happiness the fascist were bringing to that benighted country. We forget that the cognoscenti at the time thought that Mussolini was various fantastic parts of a tom cat, and we should be more like them.
Just, not bad reporters, just terribly naive, stupid and ring led.
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We saw the author presentation on CSpan2’s non-fiction book programming for Bryan Mark Rigg’s Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military. [ https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=12&cad=rja&ved=0CG4QtwIwCw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.c-spanvideo.org%2Fprogram%2F177767-1&ei=aaVkUdXlHYG29gT6i4HAAg&usg=AFQjCNE7uDD9Z1J5fSXS1LGYdKEeFvhucg&bvm=bv.44990110,d.eWU ]
Fascinating hour & a quarter. Many of the soldiers were loyal German citizens, few had any idea of the concentration camps’ purpose (or even existence.) Many served (and served valorously) to prove Jews were faithful to Germany, many believed their service would benefit their families. In one instance a Jewish soldier was selected as the blond-haired, blue-eyed embodiment of Aryan Wehrmacht youth.
As you might expect, your search engine will turn up some fairly undesirable links, so if you have further interest be advised.
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I think I may have given some links to what is told in this before:
http://www.jewishquarterly.org/issuearchive/article8d14.html?articleid=194
about Finnish Jews during the war. Three were awarded the Iron Cross (all refused to accept it).
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One notes that Anschluss meant that Austrian Jews were much more likely to survive the Holocaust, because the anti-Jewish stuff all appeared at once, and they realized their danger.
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Maybe so. I am reminded of Elie Wiesel (from Transylvania) saying (in reaction to folks like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. defending folks like FDR by saying FDR did all he could for the Jews but he couldn’t do much to save Jewish lives) that silence killed his family. That is Mr. Wiesel said that simply talking about the death camps qua death camps on the BBC would have saved some lives. The Allied victories were in sight and the family decided that rather than accept offers to hide the family and so endanger others or take to the country side that they would all survive the move from enforced Ghetto to Concentration Camps until liberated. IIRC Mr. Heinlein has a short with a bartender fleeing instantly while a mushroom cloud rises behind him touching on the utility of bugging out.
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A few years back, folks were sharing news stories that were about the Death Camps.
They were dismissed, because… dude, it’s GERMANY. You seriously peddle that standard warmonger bull splat about GERMANY? Next you’ll tell me the Queen of England is going to marry the Pope.
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There was no hesitation to peddle German atrocity stories during the first World War when dear Prince Albert was a living memory and all the royalty could call each other cousin – including the notion that saw tooth bayonets used by engineering equivalents for wood saws constituted a Hague Convention violation along with lots of stories about what happened in Belgium. Sophie Scholl and Corrie Ten Boom were not so much better informed as better motivated.
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In fact, that’s part of why no one believed the stories about Endlosung — “oh, it’s just more anti-German propaganda; it’s not real”.
Recommended reading: _The New Dealers’ War_, Thomas Fleming. Much to say on what FDR knew, and when he knew it, and how hard he was sucking Uncle Joe’s staff to ensure he couldn’t hear it.
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And everybody remembered that, when ever more outrageous stories came out.
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Mr. Heinlein said some interesting things about Campbell in the same letter. Campbell had a nice editorial on inter alia the subject of the pace of change in which he posits a post WWII contemporary to his writing target drone returns to its base a few years early – before WWII advances and transistors.
I frequently suggest Thinking in Time the uses of history for decision makers as a fun book on the subject. It’s equally interesting if somewhat to me annoying to hear or read all the folks saying that whatever good is associated with Thatcher and Reagan would have happened anyway (a true party line for some parties) but anything unfortunate was due solely to their malevolent influence.
I used to know a pawnbroker who when modern technology came out of pawn would ask his children to demonstrate the use so it could be sold. (Folks never pawned anything with the manual – I suppose today Retrovo and other sources would furnish the manual and so fill the need)
Any insight into changes in Portugal this year and next?
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I probably know less about Portugal than the people reading the news know or think they know. Part of it is the familiar stranger syndrome. Everytime I go there — about once every 3 years — I find that the way I thought things worked is now different. Whether it changed or I did, who knows?
My little village is now a suburban community, which in Europe means tons of stack a prolle apartments, and people who don’t have a past there, and whom I don’t know, by the thousands.
My friends, largely, scattered to the four winds, being in the way of a “lost generation.” A surprising number of the girls (you’d have to know the culture we grew up with to know how weird this is) I grew up with left for other countries.
I am connected by an ever-thinning wedge of ever-more-elderly relatives (failure to reproduce being an European thing) with whom I am increasingly less in contact. The things I read about the country here my mom says are “craziness” which might be true, or might be true FOR HER and in HER REGION.
My brother in an email this week said something about in a decade Portugal resembling the worst of India, but my brother is a notorious pessimist.
So I don’t know what to tell you. I might be able to if I somehow scrape together the funds to go over this summer. In fact I probably will. I’m a writer and a non-conformist. I’m used to looking for tells in everyday life, beneath the stories in the press.
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Did you hear that the Portuguese government is considering forcing public employees to take one month of their pay in treasury bills?
Congratulations on the Prometheus nomination.
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Of course I did — and I don’t think you guys understand the magnitude of potential disaster. More than half the country are public employees.
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Sorry, the introductory phrase was just, yo, hey lemmetellya. I didn’t know the percentage was that high.
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MIGHT be eighty percent. One thing that is hard for Americans to understand about other countries is that there are no “levels” of government so what here would be local employees, are the equivalent of federal.
Let me see: all policemen, all teachers, all doctors, all nurses, inspectors and commerce controllers galore, all of the bureaucracy, including secretaries in all schools… Uh… might be more than half.
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Yes and that’s where some people want to take us.
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From this distance and relying on translations in the popular press it appears the constitutional court is imposing a requirement of fairness – I’ve never seen an operational definition of fairness so I can imagine lots of problems following such a court imposed requirement.
Interesting the ingenuity of politicians in the Euro zone and out on acting as though they controlled their own currency. In lieu of printing money taking purchasing power from bank accounts directly one place or as inferior governments have done in the U.S. of A. going with scrip rather than currency.
The judges ruled that planned cuts in public sector pay and state pensions were unconstitutional as they failed to share the burden fairly emphasis added guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 April 2013
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Forced loans is one of the steps to the collapse of a fiat money. Its right around this point that the government imposes wage and price controls and squashes any use of competing currencies.
a good Gutenberg book on this is _Fiat Money Inflation in France_, by Andrew Dickson White
It is clear, well written and is not long, about 67 pages.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6949/6949-h/6949-h.htm
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A few years back, I got a collection of older SF stories. One of the stories (IIRC written in the 1930’s/1940’s) has a man talking to an editor in 1900’s (IIRC) New York City. The man was trying to convince the editor that his trip to the “future” (ie time the story was written) was real. Part of the problem, for the editor, was how the people of the future took all of the marvelous inventions of the future. The editor pointed out one of his secretaries/clerks who was so in awe about seeing an automobile. He couldn’t believe that “awe” would disappear for the people of the future. [Very Big Grin]
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Thinking back, why shouldn’t the great developments have been in transportation (a plane in every garage! Vacation on the moon!) since that’s where so much development had been in the 18th-early 20th centuries? Communications technology charged along with wires just fine, perhaps with more wireless (pictures? Maybe some day). The logical development would have been more refinement of what had already been invented or improved. Except humans merrily took a right turn at Albuquerque and we have nanotech, tiny music carriers, palm-sized encyclopedia and gossip-spreading devices, and drugs made to match our body chemistry (some chemo). Funny how we tend to do that. :)
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I can’t remember ever reading a sci-fi story from 30 years or more back that guessed how prevalent would be both wifi communication and access to nearly limitless reference material. It’s funny to watch even fairly recent movies and see how many plot devices turned on people’s being incommunicado in ways that–today–would have to be explained by an elaborate set-up. Now, our hero can pop open his laptop in a motel room and pull up obscure data on whatever mystery the plot requires him to have mastered, from ancient history to how to build a bomb at home to the preferred methods for killing a werewolf. Or even pull the same information off of his smartphone in the middle of dinner.
“Ender’s Game,” at least, guessed pretty early how important it might be for ordinary citizens to be engaged in political discussions on-line, to the point that public opinion might swing very quickly in response to the persuasive views of ordinary citizens not employed by professional publications. There was something similar in Donald Kingbury’s “The Moon Goddess and the Son,” which predicted the fall of the Soviet Union as a result of an explosion of universal engagement in a kind of world-wide communications net.
Most sci-fi from 50 years or so ago totally failed to see the revolution about to occur in the role of women.
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And yet, it should be obvious — even without the help of agit prop — from the moment the pill started being in widespread use.
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If I may be permitted a small pun: Screw The Pill — does the phrase “Rosie The Riveter” ring any bells? How about “WASPs”, “WAVESs”, and other such from The Second Unpleasantness?
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After the wars, they went back home. That is what they peddle as the deciding factor, because it’s psychological and it means you have to “keep fighting or it will be lost.” The REALLY important thing was controlling reproduction and hemming it in.
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Funny — didn’t stop any of the females in my family… or many others. (But then, as you may have guessed: I didn’t hang around with “conventional” folk. >;) )
Yes, many returned to lives of quiet desperation — but enough others *didn’t* to get the point across.
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Only a shocker to city-folks.
A lot of “forward looking” stuff, especially these days, is head-bangingly dumb to rural, practical folks.
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The Pill, OTOH, and the push for women to be “Free” by acting like the worst of men… that was an unexpected smack in the face.
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That was rapidly obvious. Pro-abortion organizations, from their foundings, were heavily funded by the Playboy Foundation.
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And eugenicists. Never forget the eugenicists.
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Exactly like the Lady’s Rights folks said would happen– abortion made it easier for men to use and discard women, and the Pill made it yet easier, as well as removing any question that the resulting child was “her problem.”
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My mother was one of those WAVES. Served her entire enlistment in Washington, DC, translating Japanese naval code. Read Japanese (Kanji) very well — helped me with a letter I got from my Japanese pen pal where half of it was in Japanese (she’d had a close call with a Japanese taxi). That was the first time I learned what she did during WWII. I was 16 at the time. As Sarah said, they went back home, got married, had kids, and lived the normal American housewife life of the 1950’s. My mother became a Licensed Practical Nurse when I was 13 (1959), and worked until she was too crippled with arthritis to continue.
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Let me add that “liberation” — i.e. the ability to work or not is a fine thing. However, both the social disapproval of stay at home moms AND the inability of a normal family to survive on one salary (and this is mostly a tax matter) truly get on my nerves. “Liberation” means I have a choice. Not that I have to be both (for the price of one.)
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Most SF does not have a good grasp on the Pill to the current day. Very few writers realize that evolution has shifted to overdrive, and what it is selecting for is a passionate desire for children, or incompetency with, or distaste for, contraception.
They certainly don’t look for what other traits are correlated with them, and so being selected for.
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Mote from Dr. Pournelle and Larry Niven is pushing 40 years back with wifi communication and nearly limitless reference material – the picture of people using their iPad equivalents for work rather than play may be a more fantastic element – aristocrats may be harder working than the rest of us?
Murray Leinster (Will Jenkins) had a Minitel style system with nearly limitless reference material although IIRC wired with a smart terminal in the late 1940’s (A Logic Named Joe 1946)
Dr. Asimov has a quote someplace to the effect that SF writers forecast the obvious.
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I was thinking a little of Mote when I wrote that: they did have personal computers, and the ability to call up records of everything they’d done recently, but there wasn’t quite the idea of access to the equivalent of the Library of Congress.
There was something a little like it in “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” since our heroes could all communicate through Mike, and Mike had access to everything.
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Friday.
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Yes, but RAH failed to posit wireless communication, Space travel and living on the moon with an AI supercomputer (which took up a huge room) but they had to communicate with Mike through wired in phones.
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This would actually be difficult in structures on the Moon. Wireless communication doesn’t transmit very far through structures, so it would have to be picked up locally and then sent through the wired infrastructure, which Mike had control of.
The scientists in the lab, if you remember, DID communicate with Earth without them detecting it.
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Yes, TMIAHM had no ubiquitous wireless comms, not just in Luna colony but also Earthside, but in other stories he had non-rich characters owning and using “belt phones” as nonremarkable appliances of daily use. I remember it striking me as “wow-futurey” when I first read it, well before cell phones manifested.
Of course in that same story the cars flew. No I can’t remember which one it was, darn it. One of his juvenile novels.
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Between Planets had what I believe to be Mr. Heinlein’s first use of a cell phone analog – on horseback. Puppet Masters had cell phone analog and flying cars. Methuselah’s Children had tri-phibs IIRC.
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Was Between Planets before Space Cadet? I still haven’t had the chance to read that one (Between Planets, that is).
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You know, I was reading Between Planets the other day and taking it for granted, until it hit me that it was amazingly foresighted.
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Where’s my Dick Tracy two way wrist radio . . . Oh, yeah, I keep it in my purse. That was 1930’s.
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We want bigger screens, too, so it’s a two-way video notepad instead.
That you can attach a typewriter keyboard to, or bring up on the screen, to send letters.
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Last seen at the Tokyo Olympics… staff had wrist cell phones.
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Heinlein stories often included the possibility of a wifi communication of a simple voice or text message. What no one seemed to guess back then was that it would be possible to transmit a ton of data among millions of users all at once. In all the stories I can think of where that scale of communication was possible, the story hook involved some kind of telepathic link or group personality. “More Than Human” or the Zenna Henderson “People” stories come to mind.
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Part of that left turn at Albuquerque was forced on us by the limits of chemical energy. You can’t build single-stage to orbit rockets that are propelled by chemical reactions. We tried building nuclear rockets for a brief period in the space-race, but nuclear energy got tied up with nuclear weaponry, and was eventually taken out of the hands of civilian society (de-facto if not always de-jure).
About the planes in every garage: In 1955, you could buy a Cessna 172 for $8000. (Whatever that works out to with inflation, it ends up being high-end-car range in terms of value). Aircraft were within reach of the middle class. My lower-middle-class grandfather belonged to a club which jointly owned some old barnstormer that Dad remembers going on an occasional trip in. (Grandma was not enthused about flying in that thing.) What changed? Regulations and inspection requirements on all the parts, requirements for ever more sophisticated standards that everything had to meet. It drove aviation out of the hands of the American industrial middle class where it was born and developed.
A bit of a sore point. The reason we got away with the computer revolution (and there were plenty of fumbling attempts to kill it in it’s cradle in the 90’s) was that it happened unexpectedly, and too fast to clamp down on. Also, the capital (laptops, gadgets, chips, nothing larger than a desk) is too small and portable for vast regulatory bureaucracies to attach themselves and clamp down.
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The stuff that isn’t portable, like component manufacturing and chip fabrication, has been moved to Southeast Asia. It’s hard to see how some of those processes would survive in our business climate.
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But it wasn’t the same 172 offered in later years. For an extreme example of change look at the panel on the earliest Beech Bonanza and the most recent. Friend of mine has a Baron but he flies commercial when he’s going any distance.
Then again a nice car today is a better and mostly faster way to travel than an Aeronca Champ even a recent production – the only advantage of the airplane is as the crow flies travel rather than crowded highways.
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When the Feds required eight fuel drains for the new C-172, just because people are not following procedures (1. Shake plane. 2. Shake again. 3. Drain fuel and look for water. 4. If you see water, repeat steps 2-3.), I knew my days of “cheap” flying were doomed. That and avgas hitting $5.00 a gallon.
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And wouldn’t you LOVE to see $5/gal avgas now?
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*grin* We just spent about an hour talking to daddy on the TV, since he’s away at school… my mom is still trying to get use to the idea that her little girl not only has little girls, but has the Enterprise’s screen in her living room.
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When my roomate got his 57″ (or whatever it is) Panasonic plasma TV, we started clling it The Viewscreen. I still insist it needs the lights along the bottom going Bip-a dip-a-dip
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Oh, man, I wish I still had that program… when I was in high school, I set up our home program with this thing that would make those noises randomly while you were typing! It should have been annoying, but my family is geeky enough that we just thought it was awesome.
(Now, the Maiori[sp] warchant I switched in for the start-up sound…that almost had consequences, but just because mom turned on the computer before coffee one day.)
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“It’s also easy in retrospect to say “of course I’d have been on the right side.” But I’ll note a lot of the young people saying “of course I’d have opposed the Nazis” are falling for a new version of the old lie. They just got out of the stories of the past that they should oppose people who goosestep and are racist. So, as long as the new evil avoids those tells, they’ll get them like they got their great grandparents. It’s all about youth and the bright new future and the men who’ll be in charge of everything: the best and the brightest.”
Oddly enough, I see this as evidence of the failure of liberal colleges. The wide-spread “Western Civilization” sequences that appeared after the second World War were, at their base, designed to provide the intellectual framework to defeat any resurgence of Nazism. (I had a colleague who said once, if he were given a random group of 10 people and restricted to quotes from Mein Kampf, he could convince 9 of them to adopt the Nazi position on most issues. (It’s similar to the current way people say they like republican stances on issues until they learn that the stances originate from republicans. ) (I also learned to write in a very discursive field, so apologies for the nested parenthetical remarks.) ) People now teaching those sequences no longer pursue the original purpose, and the classes are treated as annoyances by students instead of fundamental to liberal arts studies. I skip discussion of whether that is deliberate or not.
We’re also facing a 3rd generation issue, as you note; the kids learn _stories_ from the grandparents who have time to tell them. The people from the era of the second war are not grandparents now – they’re great grandparents – frail, rare, and not available to tell stories. But another generation _is_ available to tell stories, and theirs are very different.
The mass-failure of the colleges and the aging-out of the WW2 participants are related, I think. (And, yes, I know things at the colleges have been going to heck for a long time; in the 80s/90s when I was a student, I deliberately avoided profs who took their degrees in the 60s and 70s whenever possible. ) In history sequences (which I am most familiar with), for example, the growth of programs and increased reliance on grad students has caused a years-long change in one very basic teaching element: the teaching of the so-called survey course. The surveys, by and large, are taught by grad students, non-tenured lecturers, and the most junior of the tenure track faculty. These are the people who’ve had the least opportunity and shortest time to ruminate on and distill the essential points for the long-coverage surveys. Senior folk wanted to spend their teaching time, finally, at last, focused on the methods and processes of their subfields rather than teaching surveys which they’d been stuck doing…
My advisor told me a few years ago, that since he’d retired and gone half-blind, he finally had the time to think about and understand why certain things had happened in his field. I don’t think the misuse of faculty resources has diminished. When I did lit reviews, I would see very few senior people attempting the broad-outline sequences and putting their years of insight into the universe of knowledge. (There’s also the transformation of students into tuition paying units, but that’s another story.) As I see it, the people least qualified to teach surveys are teaching surveys, and the older folk, least qualified to teach new methods and processes are teaching those topics. It’s a systemic misallocation of human resources.
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Reading primary source from the 1930s can be quite interesting. And enlightening.
Though some people do come to the correct conclusion quickly:
“By far the stupidest thing done, not only in the last year, but in the last two or three centuries, was the acceptance by the Germans of the Dictatorship of Hitler — to say nothing of Goering.” G. K. Chesterton
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My D. A. (Dear Advisor) said that if he had his way, as a starting TA you’d teach your field. Only after you were ABD would you be allowed to teach a survey, and that only in your area (at Flat State it would be US or Europe since we didn’t have any Asian or African history grad students at the time) and under careful supervision. He also firmly believed that every senior prof should teach one survey section per year (2-2 load).
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Nobody listens to grandparents’ stories anymore (see: Abe Simpson) preferring the dramatic visualization of television and movies.
It is probably not a good idea to open the particular can of worms that is Historical Errors in TV & Cinema. Even when they get things ever so right they rarely are able to capture the zeitgeist of an era, and they usually don’t bother about getting things right. (Let’s also leave sealed that can of worms labelled Distortions of History, okay?)
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“It is probably not a good idea to open the particular can of worms that is Historical Errors in TV & Cinema. ”
You mean like all the soldiers in John Wayne’s ‘Hondo’ carrying 45-70’s in 1872? (the 45-70 was developed in 1873)
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The real headdesk moment comes when the guns are mentioned by their model number (Model 1873) in the same conversation where the year (1872) is mentioned.
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I blame Daylight Savings Time.
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RES: I saw both the Kevin Costner “Robin Hood” movie and “Gladiator” with friends who had studied ancient/medieval history. One friend was so disgusted with Robin Hood she walked out after about 15 minutes, and she liked Costner, and the lot of us at “Gladiator” took notes while laughing at its awfulness. At the time, though, I could have pointed to the articles used to help reconstruct the Flavian Amphitheater for that movie.
As for people listening or not to their grandparents, what I see from my social group tends to contradict that. If they have kids at all, anyways. But we’re mostly from small towns in Kansas or Nebraska, so there’s a definite bias in the sample.
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They threatened to throw me out of Shakespeare in Love. EVEN when I stopped making comments and contented myself with sighing and moaning.
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Amusingly, no one seems to have noticed that Gladiator was a remake of Fall of the Roman Empire – Christopher Plummer, Stephen Boyd, Sophia Loren – that was one of those huge Hollywood epic pictures that was probably not any more historically accurate.
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Not only are the problems of the past considered easy and obvious (or at least stated to be such – or why would people keep using the same failed solutions?), but the attitude is often “our ancestors were so stupid, look at all the stupid things they thought, and they were racist/sexist/other-ist, so no one should listen to them.” I think of this as sort of a bloodless cultural revolution – all the things of the past are tainted and thus these opinions are worthless.
Never mind that each era faced its own problems – most of civilization, people were just trying not to starve to death – that was accomplishment enough. (There’s also probably a whole post’s worth discussion on the modern history professor, who is almost always the last person I want to see interpreting human behavior.)
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That’s one thing about the past that is sort of beaten into my head every time I am struggling to integrate stuff that came out of some dude in the Russian Empire in the 1890s – society in the past may have been as stupid and brutal as society today is. But many people in the past were freaking brilliant.
It has taken me most of ten years of learning and research to even reach a decent familiarity with the science of the 1850s-1900s. You’re talking about people who, within a year of working out the periodic table of elements (with nothing in the way of electronic instruments to help them) went on to discover undiscovered elements such as Helium in the atmosphere of the sun using spectroscopy. (Hence the name). (1860’s, continental Europe) And they managed to understand what they were seeing, from amid the theoretical chaos of a period when most of what we know was still being felt out.
And the technology. Look at some of the instruments from the early 1900’s, or 1940’s, before transistors allowed you to stick chips all over it for control purposes. Tell me any of that was “low tech.”
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In terms of society – thinking mostly of a global average. American society has had a period of being pretty civil.
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Two things.
One, is right ways to manufacture something. I know of manufacturing engineers that stress constant improvement. Take a look at, IIRC, Kaizan.
Two, I don’t know that social change must be constant. Even supposing that technical change drives social change, technical progress is not a law of physics. If nothing else, sometimes social change will be enough to undermine the things that innovate technology.
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No, it’s a law of human psychology. We don’t seem liking doing the same things over and over.
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You know better. You’ve seen me argue on the Internet …
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There was sort of an underlying assumption we’d find the “right” theory: of energy, of society, of manufacturing, of moon rockets. And then everything would run on rails, provided you learned the “right” way to do it.
Perhaps this was because so many of them were engineers and there are “right techniques” to assemble things.
If there is a “right way” to assemble moon rockets, we haven’t found it yet. :-P
For that matter, as an engineer, I can say that there are ways that manage to work for what you want them to do (some of them fairly well, some of them marginally, some of them variably until the duct tape comes off and they explode.)
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On a more positive note (I do need to be less negative) – speaking of moon rockets:
Have you guys seen the computer game Kerbal Space Program? If you are at all interested in space, get it. It’s fascinating just how much of the spirit and practice of astronautical engineering the programming team has managed to cram into their sandbox/engineering game.
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The right way to do large, complex and expensive ongoing projects has long eluded people be they solo, partnerships, corporations or the state. There’s a lot of hand waving in the background to make Delos David Harriman sympathetic and a success.
Boeing frex doesn’t know how to build new airplanes – first flight on the 747-400 was followed by grounding and rebuilding and testing for a year. Firmly determined to do it right next time for the 777 the SIL(systems integration lab or iron bird) tested systems as used for the first flight and everything went according to plan. And Boeing decided never to spend that much money pre-flight again. And so we come to the 787.
Fortunately for Boeing – but perhaps sadly for humanity – the Airbus consortium doesn’t have an answer as the A380 parts didn’t matchup for final assembly either – electrical connections missing matchup by some feet in a snap the parts together final assembly scheme.
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Hmm… that reminds me of a quote from Doc Smith’s Skylark Three. One of the Norlaminians was telling Seaton, “There is no need to test it out. Properly built machines work properly.” (Or something close to that, anyway.) So, apparently, Sarah’s statement about the writers of the era believing there was “The right way” to do things has a definite basis.
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“There is no need to test it out. Properly built machines work properly.”
Am I the only one who had a urge to dive under the table to avoid Finagle’s Baleful Eye after reading that?
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Doc Smith is reported to have a knack for picking a properly built car – but only after a scary test drive – perhaps a psi power?
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Two words: “P-51 Mustang”. Zero to flight-capable prototype in *102 days*, no major failings.
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HE 162 Salamander, too. But remember, this was late in the war, and the designers had a lot of practice and had made a lot of mistakes by then.
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IIRC flight capable demands a rather loose use of capable? roll-out yes, powered flight hardly?
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Oh that’s only because the engine didn’t get in til October.
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Just call Saint Vidicon, he’ll protect you from Finagle.
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I read that as Saint Vicodin. Good night Sarah…
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No, I just had an almost overwhelming urge to beat my head on the table.
Oh and to note the name, so as to never buy something from him.
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It is useful, when watching such cheesy ’30s SF as the Flash Gordon serials, to remember that the depictions of rockets (as potatoes with sparklers jammed in) were pretty accurate presentations of what rockets looked like. Even the V2 was pretty laughable by modern standards.
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For that matter, as an engineer, I can say that there are ways that manage to work for what you want them to do (some of them fairly well, some of them marginally, some of them variably until the duct tape comes off and they explode.)
…. like all the various theories of physics work good for the data we’ve got at the time? (chosen as the best example of science-working-like-it’s-supposed-to)
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Thanks for that. I just got back from testifying before the Maine Committee against our own array of idiotic gun control. Very depressing.
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You think that’s depressing? I don’t want to leave CO, I don’t, but our cartoon characters are getting ready to pass a series of “voting” legislation, including same day registration, etc. Apparently despite what I maintain was massive vote shenanigans in 12, they’d like more leeway. Don’t get me started. I keep telling myself we’ll turn this corner without major upheaval, but…
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Despite? Or because of? How many of those “representatives” would have gotten elected in an honest election?
A couple days ago the NY Post had an item about a Bronx city councilman caught manufacturing voters and flipped, ratting out his fellow pols. (Insert “honor among thieves” joke/reference of your choice.)
I wonder about bringing a class action civil rights suit on the grounds of a lack of secure voting procedures constituting an effective denial of voting rights. I would love to see a RICO suit charging politicians with conspiracy to defraud the public for personal enrichment, but since they appoint the judges it is a mere fantasy.
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I keep telling myself we’ll turn this corner without major upheaval, but…
fraid not
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