James L. Cambias's Blog, page 30

Full Steam Ahead ��� IN SPACE!

Think steam-powered spaceships are just a "steampunk" retro-fantasy notion? Think again. According to an article in Cosmos Magazine online, engineers are developing a steam-powered robotic asteroid hopper, intended for use in space resource harvesting. You can read the details here.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel would approve.

The Arkad Machine Rolls On

Marshal Zeringue has a fun 'blog with a neat premise: he asks writers what they're reading. To celebrate the launch of Arkad's World, he asked me to contribute an entry. You can see what I'm reading here.

And if you're in Amherst, Massachusetts, tomorrow evening, please stop by Amherst Books for the Arkad's World launch party! There will be reading, signing . . . and cake!*

I'll be doing a lot of bookstore appearances this week, so blogging may be a bit spotty. Please bear with me.

 

*No lie.

 

Firewood Observations

With the recent cold snap in New England I've been burning a lot of firewood. For several years now I've been cutting and splitting my own wood (it's cheaper than joining a health club for exercise), and I've learned quite a bit about firewood. Birch burns like plutonium, beetles will eat all the pine before winter arrives so don't waste your time on it, and oak smells like ketchup when you split it.

One particular thing I've noticed is that fork sections, where a trunk separates into two big limbs, are a pain and a half to cut, and are infuriatingly difficult to split. You wind up with irregularly-shaped pieces which are a bother to stack properly. It's tempting to just leave them on the forest floor to rot. But I don't do that.

Because another thing I've noticed is that those fork sections, being full of strong, high-density wood, make the best fuel. They burn long and give off lots of heat.

Metaphor alert! 

Appropriating the Past

I got my degree in history, and when I got to historical movies, I'm the one indignantly whispering to my seatmate about errors. Though actually I'm pretty charitable: I understand that movies do have budgets and physical limitations. If you're making a World War II movie and can't scrounge up enough M-1 Garand rifles for all the extras playing American soldiers, I won't be upset if some guy in the background is carrying a British or even a German rifle of the period. (But I will be ticked off if he's got an M-16.)

In fact, the thing that moviemakers get wrong which bugs me the most isn't the physical details, it's the attitudes. One of my perennial complaints about historical fiction is how often the main characters have modern opinions and mindsets. In C.S. Forester's wonderful Captain Hornblower series, it does occasionally strain belief how frequently Captain Hornblower displays mid-20th century ideas about early-19th century issues. One reason I utterly love Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series is precisely because his characters have unashamedly Regency-era views. Captain Aubrey in particular is very much a man of his time, even something of a reactionary, but he's still obviously a good man and a great character.

Why is this a problem? Why can't I just enjoy the costumes and quit nitpicking?

I think my objection to Getting History Wrong has the same root as the objections some others express about writers or moviemakers "appropriating" non-American cultures: the past, like other countries, is not just a stage set or a collection of costumes to play with. The past ��� again, like other countries ��� was inhabited by real people, as smart and as moral as ourselves (if not more so).

Making fun of our ancestors for not being clever enough to be born after 1980, or not being enlightened enough to read BuzzFeed, is more than just disrespectful. It's stupid. Having an iPhone doesn't change your essential humanity, so you can learn a lot from Marcus Aurelius, Gautama Buddha, or Hernan Cortez. Understand them on their own terms, just as you should try to understand people from other cultures in the present.

After all, you'll be history yourself, someday.     

        

What's the Big Idea?

This is the Big Idea. Now you know.

New Year's Dinner

I made the traditional New Orleans dinner for New Year's Day: Hoppin' John (=black-eyed peas and rice), Brown Cabbage, and sausage. It came out very well: the Hoppin' John was wonderfully rich, thanks to the goodness of a smoked pork hock, while the sausage was a pretty decent facsimile of andouille (as decent as one can expect from a company in Wisconsin).

The black-eyed peas trace back to the Roman custom of eating lentils; the legend is that you'll get a gold coin during the year for each one you eat. It makes more sense for the coin-shaped lentils than the basically bean-shaped black-eyed peas. There's also a tradition that the cabbage leaves symbolize money, but I don't know how far back that goes. Sausage, I suspect, is simply something that goes well with both beans and cabbage.

Anyway, hope everyone had as good a dinner as I did. Happy New Year!

Welcome to Arkad's World!

Today's the official publication date for my new book Arkad's World! Copies should be hitting the brick-and-mortar stores this week, and are already available for ordering online, so if you're wondering what to do with those gift cards or bundles of cash Santa left in your stocking, wonder no longer.

If you want a signed copy, or would like to hear me reading from the book, here's the plan for my promotional blitzkrieg. At each stop, the first person to compliment my necktie will get a free bonus copy of either A Darkling Sea or Corsair. 

The schedule, as it currently stands:

January 14: Reading and Book Launch party at Amherst Books, 7:00 p.m.

January 15: Reading and autographing at Flights of Fantasy, Albany NY, 7:00 p.m.

January 17: Reading and signing at Pandemonium Books & Games, Cambridge MA, 7:00 p.m.

January 18: Reading and signing at Annie's Book Stop, Worcester MA, 4:00 p.m.

January 18-20: Panels, autographing, and reading at Arisia 2019, Boston Park Plaza Hotel.

February 1: Reading and signing at Northshire Bookstore, Saratoga Springs NY, 6:00 p.m.

Start the New Year with a rip-roaring old-fashioned science fiction adventure!

Countdown to Arkad

Five days to go before Arkad's World hits the shelves! If you're wondering what to do with that Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card Santa put in your stocking, try the novel that Booklist calls ". . . a feat of world-building: an expansive, believable setting with fascinating aliens, compelling mysteries, and a rich sense of history."

Pop Culture: Hold On to Your Hats!

As cultures develop a large and relatively affluent middle class, they develop what we call "pop culture." The upper class have "high culture" more or less by definition, and the lower class don't have the leisure time or spare wealth to create culture at all.

Tom Wolfe chronicled this in post-WWII America, as people got rich enough to indulge subcultures like custom cars, surfing, and stock car racing. It's a damned shame Mr. Wolfe never got around to examining some other products of that boom: science fiction, comics, and (a bit later) roleplaying games.

It happened elsewhere, too. As Japan became the world's second-biggest economy, Japanese pop culture items like anime, manga, J-pop girl groups, and giant monsters became global phenomena rivaling America's. The same happened for Korea in the 1990s.

Well, in the past twenty years China has acquired a middle class of 340 million people. Three hundred million in Africa are now urban and middle class. A quarter of a billion in India. So the number of pop-culture "consumers" ��� and the number of pop-culture creators ��� has more than tripled worldwide.

This means that American pop culture and European pop culture and Japanese pop culture will soon be joined by equally huge and influential Chinese, Indian, and African creations. Not just new comic books and movies, but new genres. The as-yet-uncreated equivalents of roleplaying games or custom vans.

And not a moment too soon. As anyone paying attention to Hollywood will attest, American media are in a creative slump right now. There are a heck of a lot of remakes, reboots, sequels, and "reimaginings" going on. Not to mention an increasingly frenetic mining of older "properties" for material. A 69-page picture book by Dr. Seuss has spawned two feature-length films, when it originally required some creative padding by Chuck Jones just to make it into a half-hour cartoon.

I can't predict when, but I'm willing to bet that in the next few years an Indian "Bollywood" or Nigerian "Nollywood" film will be a global breakout hit, as big as Star Wars or Harry Potter. Some Latin American or Chinese children's entertainment will be picked up as cheap filler content by global media companies and turn into a huge fad to rival Pokemon.  

For a writer, this is an . . . interesting time. On one hand, translation rights on books now bring in almost as much as the English-language royalties. The downside is that I'm already competing with Cixin Liu for readers in both America and China, and I'm certain he will be followed by a bigger cohort of new talent. And that's just within written science fiction. I'm also competing with other media.

I think one reason science fiction magazines have been having a rocky time in the past few decades is partly due to the sheer amount and variety of other options. Even if you only like science fiction, you still can choose among Japanese anime, Japanese and European comics, Anglophone novels, American films, and European computer games to satisfy your scientifictional craving. That landscape is only going to expand.

It's going to be quite a ride. Let's see what the new Global Nerds can do.

Tales of the Time Patrol: The Wild Bunch

We recently re-watched Sam Peckinpah's famous gritty Western The Wild Bunch. This time around I realized something: at least one of the titular Bunch is a secret agent of the Time Patrol.

The moment of revelation comes when the gang arrive at the headquarters of the corrupt Mexican warlord General Mapache and see the General's brand-new automobile (nobody seems to know exactly what kind of car it is, maybe an early Oldsmobile or Packard). The horse-riding Western bandits goggle at the machine, and then Dutch Engstrom (played by Ernest Borgnine) says "They're gonna use them in the war."

The movie takes place in 1913. Engstrom knows World War I is coming. He is not the simple Old West train-robber he pretends to be. 

Presumably Time Agent "Engstrom" was inserted into 1913 to make sure that Mapache ��� who is clearly getting aid from Germany ��� doesn't rise to become dictator of Mexico. A Mapachista Mexico on America's southern border would strengthen isolationist sentiments in the United States, reducing the amount of help America could provide to the Allies and ensuring that no doughboys get shipped to France.

The result is a Europe dominated by Kaiserine Germany, the German Communist revolution of 1932, followed by the long bitter war between the British Empire and the Marxists, and the deadly atomic war of 1961.

That's a timeline the Time Patrol wants to keep from happening, so "Engstrom's" job was to recruit a gang of gunfighters to get rid of Mapache. He managed it well, faking his own death and time-hopping out in the confusion. The same agent was active throughout the history of the 20th Century, including numerous Time Patrol operations in World War II. He also played a key role in the "Plissken Affair" of a now-deleted 1997.