Filed under: alt-future, American politics, Speculation | Tags: Alternate history, Civil War, Lincoln
This is inspired by my disgust with HBO for wanting to create a series where the South won the Civil War.
Like we need that right now.
So I’m going to pose the counter: what would the US (and the world) look like if Booth missed, Lincoln was not assassinated, and Andrew Johnson, the second or third worst president we’ve had, never came to power and didn’t totally screw up the Reconstruction?
It’s kinda shocking that this doesn’t get asked more often. Here’s a few places I found it on Google:
Filed under: Real Science Content, science fiction, Speculation, Worldbuilding | Tags: Dune, Real Science Content, science fiction
Just a brief one. I recalled today that a new adaptation of Dune is currently in the works, random deities help us. I’m not a huge fan of the series, but I did like the original Dune, for what it’s worth. It’s gotten rather more humorous as I found that Frank Herbert’s idea of a dune was based more on his coastal Oregon dunes than on the Sahara, that his idea for the sandworms came from maggots eating a mushroom, and the Bene Gesserit and their blue eyes were, erm, inspired by his ingestion of (hopefully) non-wormy mushrooms. Those were the days.
Thing is, I’m a grumpy ecologist. I’m still trying to figure out how you get their metabolism to effectively run backwards so that they exhale/fart oxygen (I guess they breathe in CO2?). And a sandworm hundreds of meters long snacking down on a human is about as close in optimal foraging strategy as humans chasing after individual ants. Ant hives, yes, but individual ants? Anteaters don’t bother with them, and sandworms shouldn’t bother with individual humans thumping across the dunes.
Still, I wanted to have a little fun, it being a hot afternoon in July. So I started thinking about those still-suits, which capture and filter sweat and urine and recycle is so that the wearer can drink it again. Talk about a sweat bath! If you’re wearing one of these damned contraptions, you’re going to get heat stroke in short order, unless there’s some mechanism for getting the heat out of the recycling body fluids and off into the air. I may be wrong, but I think that takes energy? And aren’t electrical signals supposed to attract sandworms? Continue reading
Filed under: alt-future, American politics, disasters, Legacy Systems | Tags: Continuity of Government, Raven Rock, US Government
I wish I could say that I was busy writing a new book, and that’s why I haven’t posted in a month, but really it’s more about life getting in the way of art, or something. One note is that between last April and this April, I wrote 21 responses to environmental documents for the California Native Plant Society and attended way more meetings than that. This isn’t due to the current administration in Washington, but rather more that we’re in (or just past) the height of the current business cycle, so every bad idea for a development has lumbered out of its crypt, demanding a new life. Or, less, poetically, projects are on their second or third go round after having been rejected the last time, because the land was available for cheap, and some developer suckered some investor into buying it on the promise that the land was so cheap they could afford to deal with all the legal hassles this time. And if it doesn’t work this time, there will be a next time as long as the land remains in private hands. But I’m getting side tracked.
I’ve also had some time to do a bit of reading, and I’d recommend Garret Graff’s Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die. It’s a history of the US government’s attempts since Truman to figure out how to save the presidency from a nuclear war, secret undisclosed underground bunkers and all. It’s fun reading if you’re into this kind of thing, and I suspect it does play into modern politics in some ways that the book itself doesn’t go into. Continue reading
Putting the life back in science fiction 