Category Archives: Library

The Merchant Princes

Posted on December 18, 2008 | Comments Off on The Merchant Princes

I have read almost all of Charles Stross’s SF, so even though this series is more fantasy than SF, I decided to give it a try. I sort of cherry picked the first book I could find, the fourth one, actually, The Merchant’s War, which is about alternate universes. Three of them. The sword-and-sorcery dialogue was off-putting but the segments without it were compelling enough that I kept thinking about the plots I had read (not all of them, actually) long after I finished.

So I bought the first three installments, The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, and The Clan Corporate, and inhaled them in a week. The heroine is a bit annoying. Not an airhead, but a liberal ditherer who is accident-prone to say the least. But there are other main characters I find more satisfying. After the first three, I reread the fourth one, including the "by-your-leaves" and the "my lady" stuff, and finally understood it all. There’s even what looks like a new, interlocking plot to come that’s actually going to be SF. Alas, the fifth book in the series isn’t due out until April. I’ve preordered it. Waiting is going to be hard. Come on, Charles, hurry up and finish it, okay? (Looks like he has and he’s working on the sixth one, which will be the end. Oh, dear.)

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Conserve Earth, Colonize Space

Posted on December 6, 2008 | Comments Off on Conserve Earth, Colonize Space

Nice sentiment. Makes a great bumper sticker. I used to have one. But the reality? Not so much.

SF author Bruce Sterling: "I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach."

SF author Charles Stross: "Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that’s not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there’s the travel time. Two and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars."

Nevertheless, Stross, at least, foresees a Moon base in twenty years and ten years later, one on Mars. I would add that both will probably be Chinese. American pols are too gutless and greedy.

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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Space

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Possum up de Gum Tree

Posted on November 18, 2008 | Comments Off on Possum up de Gum Tree

This traditional fiddler’s ditty is described as a "wild melody" in H.W. Brand’s 2005 book Andrew Jackson, His Life and Times, which I’m enjoying. It was apparently played for Jackson and his wife, Rachel, to dance to at one of several dinners held in their honor after the defeat of the British at New Orleans in 1814 1815.

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Posted in Library, Scribbles

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A call for more will

Posted on November 15, 2008 | Comments Off on A call for more will

It’s two years old and, therefore, a little dated. No mention of our success in Iraq or Barry’s ascendence to the White House. Nevertheless, Mark Steyn’s America Alone is quite a read. Not a pleasant one, mind you, but worth your time and thought. Unless you buy the Religion of Peace la-de-da, in which case you will find it irritating. Or, needless to say, if you are a recent "revert" to Islam. Though, even then, you might find illuminating the extent to which your co-religionists have succeeded in laying the groundwork for the takeover of Europe and growing agitation in the USA.

Seems non-Islamic America still has a replacement birthrate, which non-Islamic Europe and Canada do not. And American evangelical Protestants like Gov. Sarah Palin continue to thrive and increase, unlike Christians of whatever stripe elsewhere in the West. Not that Hollyweird and the multiculti apologists aren’t trying to make soft secularists of us all, just that they aren’t succeeding. While the West’s fastest-growing religion is Islam, which can reasonably hope to someday outlaw the infidel whores of Hollyweird, and all the feminists and gays. Ironic that, so far, only the evangelicals and conservatives are holding back the hoardes of the Dark Ages. But for how long? About as long as us non-Muslims keep making babies who have the will to resist.

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Who was John Galt?

Posted on October 15, 2008 | Comments Off on Who was John Galt?

Barry is no longer hiding his classic Socialist plan to turn Robin Hood and tax the rich to "spread the wealth" around to benefit his favorite losers. Of course, whenever Dems say they will tax the rich, they usually wind up taxing the middle class, as well, like the plumber who elicited the remark from Barry in the first place–doing the job the Big Media would do if it wasn’t doing Barry propaganda full time. The truly rich have lots of alternatives to avoid extra taxation. The middle class, with fewer options, might just be ready for revolt.

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Saturn’s Children

Posted on October 11, 2008 | Comments Off on Saturn’s Children

I suppose eroticism has always been a part of science fiction, at least in the cover art, though I don’t recall any as explicit as this tale, where a femmebot created to serve humanity’s sexual needs is left to look for love in all the wrong places because humanity has long been extinct. Extinct by it’s own hand, in fact, not through war or environmental disaster, but through selfish unwillingness to replicate–life with pets, instead, and all those forty-two-inch flat-screen boob tubes, I suppose.

I’ve now read three of Stross’s works, this one, Halting State and Singularity Sky. While I enjoyed HS, which is more about the Internet’s future than robotics, and SS had its moments, Saturn’s Children was the most memorable. Not only, or even especially because of the eroticism, but because of the suprisingly bleak assessment of what life beyond Earth really would be like for "pink goo," us, in landscapes and interplanetary propulsion systems awash in deadly radiation where only robots with replaceable parts can thrive.

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Posted in Library, Space

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The Chilling Stars

Posted on October 9, 2008 | Comments Off on The Chilling Stars

NASA, for one, considers unproven Henrik Svensmark’s theory that cosmic rays provide seed nuclei for the low-altitude clouds that keep earth’s temperature low, thus having much more effect on climate than the favorite notion of the carbon dioxide movement. "Speculation," said the agency scientists who recently pronounced the current solar minimum the least since the space age began–meaning the solar wind is subsiding and cosmic rays are increasing.

Svensmark’s and  science writer Nigel Calder’s 2007 book, The Chilling Stars, A New Theory of Climate Change, shows the theory has ample evidence to be respectable, far more than the U.N.’s notion that industrial and automotive carbon dioxide will make the seas rise, the tropics move north, and give the Democrats another tax (carbon footprint) on which to hang their favorite boondoggles. It’s a theory that invites collaboration from scientists as diverse as particle physicists, astronomers and biologists, and it really should interest NASA, as it involves such climate drivers as supernovae and the solar system’s passage through the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.

But, even as a growing bunch of amateur scientists wonder if the sun’s lack of solar-wind-increasing sunspots this year could mean we’re headed for global cooling, even a mini Ice Age, Svensmark isn’t assuming the leadership of a cosmic ray movement. He says it would be "scientifically rash" to use his theory to offer any firm climate forecast for decades ahead. Instead, he’s hard at work searching for even more evidence for it.

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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Space, Weather/Climate

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