Friends (Romans, Countrymen, Dragon otherkin!) I’ve found Antro the Lifegiver by John Degan, but I haven’t finished it.
Partly it’s going slow because of my not seeing as well as I did in the eighties, and having trouble reading the teeny print of a 60s paperback. (I have new glasses on order. They haven’t arrived yet. And my astigmatism is way off.) I prefer books on the kindle, because they allow me to lie to myself about being older than dirt, I guess. I can put the print at six or seven and never tell anyone (except you guys now.) I mean, eventually it will be at nine and I’ll get a word per page. Maybe they’ll make massive kindles then. Or maybe there will be robotic eyes or something.
Anyway, there might also be the slight thing of the new Dresden files having dropped today, and — um… — anyway, so….
One thing that has occurred to me while reading the beginning is that the science fiction of the mid century is almost all infused with a heavy military subtext. Even when they are not strictly military — like Star Trek — the structure is military and there is a bearing and a behavior to the people that are more military than not.
What do I mean they’re not military in Star Trek? Well, it’s not Starship Troopers style mil sf.
Like most mid-century sf, it’s exploration, but the exploration corps has a military structure.
In that sense, it’s actually pretty interesting, because the earliest, pre or just after WWI sf pulp is the individual genius or group of them, or the lone scientist having a breakthrough. But by the mid century is exploration groups in military format, with ranks…
And there’s something about the way people interact that bespeak military experience.
Oh, I don’t mean there aren’t exceptions. Of course there are. But the basic, most generic, pulp sf is people in vaguely military arrangements.
And it occurred to me this made perfect sense. Most of the authors writing in the fifties and sixties were in fact veterans and likely WWII veterans.
But even those who hadn’t fought for whatever reason, had probably grown up watching World War II movies. As did I, btw, and reading WWII biographies and analysis.
This is because — even though to me at the time it seemed like ancient history, since most of the movies were from when the world was in black and white — I was born less than twenty years after the end of World War Two. This, of course, affected the generation before me.
Not just the various analysis of the war and the embrace or repulsion of war as a method, but the discipline, structure and experience of the war itself.
So the default, low effort writing had military or quasi-military groups.
Equally logically, that is no longer true, unless you’re specifically writing mil sf.
What do I mean by this?
Well, I was thinking there are many things a generation — or two, or three — think it’s “natural” but it’s not. It’s the result of when the genre took off. Or of what was happening in the world at the time.
Now that we live more than say four to five decades, at least a substantial portion of us, and the cultural influence of generations is taking way longer to clear from the culture, it’s important to remember this. It’s important to remember that the circumstances of our childhood are not necessarily more “real” or better than today’s.
We were born in a particular place in history. And it came freighted with baggage of — for it — recent events.
Very different, yes, but then our generation was very different in upbringing from the previous.
It’s important to step back and look at things with a curious eye. Not all difference is wrong. And things change with time. Right now it seems very likely that whoever lands on Mars will be a civilian employee of a privately held corporation. And heaven only knows who the first colonists will be.
None of that matters. Those are details. It’s the will to go, to reach ever farther, to take humanity out of the one single place where we exist and to the stars, so we won’t go extinct by accident or due to the vagaries of climate and circumstance that matters.
Whatever form that pushing forward takes.
Jeff Greason once told he always wondered if the form the expeditions to Mars took was the result of German influence on the space program. And that’s likely true. But it was also a quintessential midcentury project. “If we can defeat the Nazis, we can put a man on the moon.” — Note this was later weaponized into “if we put a man on the moon we can defeat poverty.” None of which made sense. — and the idea that big government and its projection of force were the way to accomplish big things.
In a way this was also the result of the concentration of industry and news and… well, everything that reached its apex mid century.
We live in different times now. In fact so different it’s shocking how far we came in such a relatively short time.
And it doesn’t matter. In the end what matters is getting off this rock. By any means necessary.
According To Hoyt 
Sarah, I think at least some of that is because the closest real world analog to space travel is an ocean voyage. This automatically imposes a structure that carried over from merchant ships into warships and vice versa.
This is why there’s almost always a “navy” feel, and why I think “Space Force” will sooner or later become “SpaceFleet”.
LikeLike
Dear Sarah, if you have to, put a Kindle app up on a 32 inch 4K screen or TV.
LikeLike
Interesting to note they have just uncovered long term exposure to weightlessness can cause permanent brain damage to astronauts. Real, or Nasa trying to limit private companies from exploration? Don’t say they wouldn’t do something like that, covid ya all. But if true we may need artificial gravity before we get there. I for one can wait to leave all the Liberals on this rock.
LikeLike
Yes I know Liberal is a word that has been bastardized by the left in an attempt to hide their Marxism. Yes I know that by definition that Conservatives are the real Liberals and Liberals are just godless Marxist slave masters. Note how kenji the demented squirrel used Jim Crow Laws to justify Hawaii’s gun control laws. A black Justice, using anti black laws to justify gun control. You just can’t make this stuff up.
LikeLike
I started taking DMSO by mouth (1 Tbsp twice a day in water) for various aches and pains and, to my astonishment, my eyesight markedly improved especially in my distance vision. With your sensitive system I’d be very cautious trying it if you decide to do so, but it has definitely helped my arthritis as well. YMMV.
LikeLike
Any source you can recommend? What I have (and used externally) is marked “NOT FOR HUMAN USE” (which, yeah, I know, but I do like to take some precautions).
LikeLike
I saw a comment on X to the effect that Star Trek writers seem to have used James Cook and the Endeavour as a template, and that more recent writers seem to understand the template only superficially.
I’d buy that: TV lately is written by people who don’t know anything about anything, for people who don’t know anything about anything.
LikeLike
Star Trek Academy. Free to stream, but so bad that people aren’t even hate-watching it.
Written by illiterate p3rverts, for DEI apparatchiks. Who are also illiterate p3rverts. And stupid.
Also the ship’s bridge looks exactly like a strip club in Las Vegas.
LikeLike
On the one hand, I am tempted to, by spite and contrariness, work out a good way to do a service academy themed sci fi show.
On the other hand, I personally am finding myself massively skeptical of all the schools are mined in the media I consume.
When someone turns a PRC, Korean, or Japanese school into a wizard training program, and especially with some of the plot lines, I sometimes just wonder why.
I’ve never been a school spirit sort of guy, but I have no idea about the training premises for whatever hypothetical scifi service academy.
The gee gaws mean that there are a lot of degrees of freedom for the technical training needed to perform in an organization in science fiction land.
But, presumeably a service academy has a trade between trying to identify and select stubborn people, and trying to do so with bureaucratically compliant people. (I am basically guessing from first principles.)
There’s room for creativity in terms of classroom and field trip exercises, but some inventions simply will not work for a reasonably thoughtful or a reasonably informed audience.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Comment from someone in the industry that big franchises are also becoming jobs programs for favored groups, said in the context of the new ST: Starfleet Academy show.
From the limited number of PR stills it’s pretty obvious it fits Iowahawk’s definition of leftism: the writers have killed the original and are wearing the skin as a garment.
LikeLike
“If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we….”
Because the moonshot was an ENGINEERING PROBLEM. A reasonably solvable thing. The social stuff? That’s a whole ‘nother kettle of worms! Humans is complexicated, they is!
LikeLiked by 2 people
A variant on this is, “We’re the richest country in the world. We ought to have (universal decent housing/other progressive social goal)!”
LikeLike
Genetically, space travel is a gambit with either annihilation of those that travel into space, or modifications of the human species to where it probably wouldn’t be recognized on Earth. Maybe that’s already happened, but unless unquestioning evidence is presented, we’ll never know. It is something writers will theorize about, and the good writers will entertain with their stories.
LikeLike
“…and the idea that big government and its projection of force were the way to accomplish big things.”
Ever notice that Elon is basically using Tom Swift as a model? And it’s working?
LikeLiked by 2 people
I always say the worst thing about the Apollo Program is that it succeeded. Big Government spent billions of our dollars creating a gigantic bureaucracy to accomplish what was essentially the biggest publicity stunt in history. Put A Man On The Moon! They actually exceeded their goal, and put 2 men on the moon. Yay.
Then it was been there, done that, nothing more to see here. Nobody has gone more than 400 miles above the Earth’s surface since 1972. The bureaucracy went on doing Space Stuff but Pournelle’s Iron Law has set in with a vengeance. NASA is run by bean counters and pencil pushers. Engineers are considered a necessary evil to get more funding.
And we are left with the notion that Big Government Programs are The Way To Get Things Done. Even though Big Government is the absolute worst way to do anything. Take the Department Of Education as an example. They spent 40 years and $2 TRILLION and are today’s government schools any better than they were back in 1977? No! They’re far worse. But if you point that out, you Hate Education! The only way to fix the Education Crisis! is to give the Ed Dept even more money to waste! Even though they’re the ones that caused the problem.
I hate bad education and maleducation, therefore I hate the Department Of Education with the fire of a billion exploding stars.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Big government is like a church dedicated to feeding the poor. But when the offering plate gets passed around, even though everybody puts something in, and even though the church parking lot is full of Cadillacs, there’s only nickles and dimes.
And of course the reason is all those people in the congregation with sticky fingers, for when the plate comes by. They put in a nickle and take out the folding money. And all the ones pretending to be poor and collecting ten meals a day, which they then sell to the -actual- poor.
Which is why Tom Swift is working and Karl Marx fails, basically. These days the sticky finger crowd RUNS the church.
Based on what I’m seeing in the news, my feeling based on nothing tangible is that possibly a third of the American government is straight-up graft. So many people with sticky fingers, pilfering. Some steal a little, some steal by the truckload.
The Dept. of Education steals by the train load. That’s what it is for.
Now, I feel I must point out that I am not dumping on the USA. Whatever is going on with you guys, it is as nothing compared to what’s up in Canada.
#CarkMarney’s response to illegal Chinese Communist police stations in Toronto Ontario (and Vancouver, and Montreal, and probably a few more) is not to kick them the f- out of my country (with a thick ear, this is Canada damn it!). No my friends, he’s solving the problem by making them –legal-. Yeah.
LikeLike
In theory, it is reasonable to respond to our allegations of illegality by making stuff legal.
In practice, it feels like our law faculty are a bunch of autistic tim walzes to understand things so poorly that they seriously propose that any arbitrary thing can be legalized or decriminalized.
It is downstream of presuming that older status quo was arbitrary, and that anything could be admissible.
But still, they come across as a bit cognitively impaired, before one realizes that they are lawyers, and not all of them are technologists, and not all of them are military history buffs.
LikeLike