Re: Marketability

On Sat, 9 Sep 2006 15:43:40 +0000 (UTC), James Nicoll wrote:

In article <5ol5g2dbj4r32r5dijf58scl5t12vdimqm@xxxxxxx>,
David Langford <ansible@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 9 Sep 2006 01:46:38 +0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@xxxxxxxxx (James Nicoll)
wrote:

Aside from THRESHOLD and whichever drearfest Bova most recently
published, name a recent SF novel set in the Solar System, off Earth,
between AD 2050 and 2300, with plausible technology and no groveling
to the Great God Singularity.

Um, Alastair Reynolds's =Pushing Ice=? Comet mining, 2057. I understand
that Big Dumb Objects intrude into the scenario but haven't heard anything
about singularity worship. I'm looking forward to reading this one, when
I've finishing studying Gene Wolfe's =Soldier of Sidon= with sufficient
intensity to write a review....

For reasons I cannot go into without spoilers, it doesn't
qualify but it fails to qualify in a way that is still interesting.

The rough model I have in mind is material like IMPERIAL EARTH
or "The Martian Way" [1], which is a subgenre that is nearly gone. Now,
I know it's unreasonable to expect American SF authors to write interesting
material in this field -- indeed, they may well be cognitively incapable
of it [2] -- but surely there's a commonwealther who finds it interesting
enough to write about?

Note that for me, optimism is a vital part of this subgenre.

Actually, I think Kage Baker has a few stories set on Mars but
it's one of those Marses divided between two equally stupid and humourless
ideologies and not one where I could imagine anyone ever smiling (Rather
like everything CJ Cherryh ever wrote).

John Varley's Red Thingie series doesn't count because they have
a magical inventor behind the SuperTech. I was impressed at how quickly
the offworlders became convinced Earth is irredeemably corrupt, though.

A real plus would be a deficiency of magical fusion drives that
can accelerate forever or at least if they do exist, some consideration
of what that technology implies. A 1000 tonne 1 g ship with a 5,000 km/s
exhaust velocity is obviously generating at least 25 trillion watts or
somewhat more power than all humanity does now and in such a way that
investing it in a one thousand tonne package makes economic sense. The
ability to generate at least 25 MW/kg of power plant (and probably much
more, since it is useful to have something other than power plant in a
space ship) will probably have detectable economic effects. It means,
for example, that something with the output of a conventional nuclear
powerplant would fit into a backpack [3].


1: Except that modern authors do not have any excuse for turning to
that particular source of water without considering ones that are
far more easy to exploit and by modern authors, I mean the contrived
conservation subplot in Bova's TITAN. But then, Bova once wrote a
writer's guide to space travel with almost no math in it.

2: The counterproof is not a heated argument but a work of SF in this
field. It's not the technical skills that are lacking but a world-
view that sees the future with anything but horror.

3: Ritual admission that there might be a minimum size well about the
1 GW output level, which also would be interesting.

At the risk (well, certainty) of being dismissed as Donaldian, the problem
is politics and those power levels.

Such fiction is being written, and has been in the recent past. The first
three of the L. Neil Smith books fit the requirement, although the third
one is iffy, and so do Gilliland's "Rosinante" stories and most of Mike
McCollum's output. It isn't being /published/ except via the Web and
various sorts of self-publishing, which of course leads to instant
dismissal from the Professionals. Or by Jim Baen, leading to /sneering/
dismissal.

It isn't being published because the Neilsen-Haydens are exemplary. Think
of it. We're dealing, here, with a consensus that a 5-Kw handgun in the
hands of a private individual, without the magic laying on of hands from
some Government other than that of the United States, is a matter of such
vileness and Pure Evil as to call forth the maximum effort of the Good
People to suppress it. Under that rubric, the only people who could
possibly be permitted to possess a 25-Tw reaction drive must of necessity
be Government other than the American one. This leads immediately either to
polemic every bit as boring as anything Libertarians could come up with
(see Strugatsky, Boris) or the conclusion that, e.g., Junior Assad,
Ayatollah Khameini, Hugo Chavez, and Saddam Hussein are perfectly qualified
possessors of such a device, while General Motors, Halliburton, and the
Republican Party are not. And that latter isn't supportable no matter how
devoted the faith may be, so the stories literally can't be written.

What can be written, and published, is angsty self-criticism of Vileness to
the Other in high literary style (F&SF), "personal interaction" stories
that slide by the power issues with handwaves, and various sorts of
fantasy, which dodge the issue by keeping total power available at the
human-effort level. The situation doesn't look like changing soon.

Regards,
Ric

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

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