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December 2010 Main Page Mexican-American War Mark II
A big bunch of AH Challenges this time. Soviet-Japanese War in 1939
Comments Section Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
Tom
Cron: Aack. Another defunct computer. Used computers are
really cheap.
People actually tend to give them to me if I’ll take them. So
Turtledove is going the SuperVolcano route, huh. It’ll be interesting
to see if he does his homework. Without Ultra sounds fun, as does the
novel where Japan goes north rather than south. Tyler cried himself
into the presidency? That’s sad. He was a pretty awful president. As I
remember it, he was the first vice president to become president, and
the majority opinion at the time was that the vice president would just
be a kind of caretaker until a president could be chosen, rather than
assuming the powers of the president. He did a lot toward making the
annexation of Texas a front-burner issue, which in turn led to the
Mexican American War, which in turn did a lot to make the Civil War
inevitable. They should have just told him to grow up.
Anthony Docimo: I’m glad to see Exchange on your list of books discovered. Some of the others don’t look bad either. I like the line about US TV treating surfing as something quaint from a culture ludicrously far from New York. Most of the rest of the country tries to ignore New York as much as possible, and when we do think about it we tend to scoff at its pretensions to being the cultural center of the country—maybe wrongly. The Falkland Islands dog was pretty cool. Not as cool as Thylacines, but cool nonetheless. If MacArthur had stayed with his troops? The Japanese would have initially had a propaganda field day. They would have probably tried to sweat him for dirt on the Roosevelt administration and US politics in general. Not sure if they would have gotten any, though he probably knew some. The US would have probably concentrated more on the Central Pacific, rather than going through the Philippines. That wouldn’t make much difference to the end of World War II, but it might make a difference post-War, with a lot more Japanese holdouts and probably a considerable amount of fighting between various resistance groups after the war. Mark Ford: Your grandfather’s comment on election apathy was worth the price of admission. On the cover and the copyright issues from it: Yeah, it was sad. Robert Gill: Yeah. Sometimes even some very cool Dr Who episodes require very large suspensions of disbelief. Your comments to me: The network could have at least had the decency to figure out some mechanism to quickly wrap up the loose ends of FlashForward—maybe a two hour special to clean up the loose ends. Oh well. So many cool fictional worlds that will never get fully explored. I stumbled across a cancelled series called Wonderfalls a few years ago and loved it. I think it was cancelled after just a couple of the thirteen filmed episodes had been aired. Jericho is another good one, though it at least got sort of finished. On Lost: I’ve never watched a complete episode of it. That was a deliberate decision. I decided to wait until the series ended and chat with people I respect to see if the writers could really wrap it up in a satisfying way. On fan fiction: I’ve been tempted to do fanfiction of Firefly or maybe something in the Buffy/Angel universe—maybe even a story or two set in some kind of a grand unified Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Dollhouse universe, if I could figure out how to combine all three of the Whedon-verses convincingly. Hmmm. We have immortal vampires from the Buffy/Angel-verse, personality and memory transfers from Dollhouse. I could easily enough see one of those factors making the old Earth uninhabitable for humans and forcing humanity to colonize the solar system of Firefly. Ah, but the evil behind Wolfram and Hart finds a way to hitch a ride to the new system. Maybe after wiping out or enslaving non-escaping humans on Earth, vampires from Earth try to invade the Firefly system. Maybe we could somehow involve a rediscovery of the Dollhouse technology. Could be fun. On the other hand, I have enough of my own universes to play with that I doubt that I would ever have time to get to it. The Snapshot universe alone has so many potential stories in it that I could spend far more than a lifetime of full time writing and not explore more than a tiny corner of it. Even Exchange is begging for a sequel, and could easily have dozens more stories set in the universe. Too many stories to write. Probably not enough remaining lifespan to write them all. By the way, I have no problem with people writing in the Exchange universe as long as they license whatever they do under Creative Commons as “Derivative Non-commercial work.” The Roman vampire comic sounds like it could be fun. David Johnson: It sounds like Boo was a wonderful cat. Hopefully Norman Bates will never figure out that he doesn’t have to worry about a guard cat anymore. Sorry to hear about the coyote attack. Always hard to lose a good cat. On Exchange: Hopefully POD members will be the only people who know just how much of a Frankenstein’s novel Exchange really is. I worked very hard to erase the scars from when I stitched the arm from Bat Out of Hell onto the shoulder of West Story, then plopped in a little Freedom. In the unlikely event that I ever get famous the issues of POD with the original stories should be worth something. Glad you enjoyed the result. On the GPS bit: Errr, yeah. What you said. And we have yet another bit of library construction craziness. I’ll be amazed if your school doesn’t get itself sued over the handicapped access bit. Your comments to Gill: Yeah, New Orleans had been living on borrowed time for a lot of decades. If I’m remembering an article I read back in the late 1970s or early 1980s correctly, part of the reason why Katrina didn’t happen much earlier is that there are fifty year cycles in the prevalence and severity of hurricanes and we were in a quiet part of the cycle. The article was from before Andrew and I remember it remarking on foolish it was that we had invested so much on structures that would be vulnerable when we returned to hurricane seasons like the ones in the 1920s. I don’t know if this guy’s theories about a fifty year cycle are still generally accepted, and I’m not even completely sure that I’m remembering the cycle length correctly. I’m discovering that I have to be extremely careful with my on-line comments about anything remotely related to climate lest I ignite yet another of those inane “alarmist” versus “denier” debates on Global Warming. We’ve spent a lot of money on studying climate, and have learned an amazing amount in the last twenty or thirty years, but frankly it’s difficult to find the good stuff among the huge amounts of crap that has been generated. The US decided, correctly, that we needed to know a lot more about climate than we did and started pumping money into the field. That funded some good and very needed research, but it also funded a lot of junk science by fast talkers with PhD behind their names, and a lot of attempts to tie things that had little to do with climate to climate change so that other pieces of the scientific community could get their share of the funding. A study of changes in the distribution of spotted delta wing dung beetles = little chance of funding. Change that to “Climate change: it’s impact on the distribution of…” = the government may very well throw money your way. And it’s quite possible that climate change is affecting the distribution, and that could be important. The problem is that the scientist is now looking for a specific link rather than looking at a range of potential causes, and they have an incentive to find that link because if they don’t the money may very well go away. Oh well. We really do need to get a better handle on climate, though I’m not entirely sure that having a good handle on the specific regional impact of specific climate inputs is necessarily a good thing. If the climate changes there will inevitably be some winners as well as a lot of losers. If the Saudis know that at some specific temperature range Saudi Arabia blooms but Israel become a desert, that’s probably not a good thing to have out there in the public domain. If the Russians know that a climate tweak would extend their growing seasons significantly but turn Northern China into a desert, (or China knew that a change would make arid areas of the north much better for crop growing but would flood Bangladesh) again not such a good thing. And I’m getting off potentially into politics. Backing away carefully. On fan fiction and Eric Flint’s Grantsville: He’s playing this very smart, harnessing the efforts of a community to promoting his series. It’s almost an open source model of writing. It seems to be working well. The 163X series books have eclipsed Island In the Sea of Time and successors, even though Stirling was first with what I consider better books and a more interesting time period to work with. I’ve been pestering my publisher to try something similar with the Exchange universe. It’s almost tailor-made for that kind of thing. We have hundreds of Exchanges, each with its own unique location, problems, and personalities—wide open for stories and without the slightest possibility that I’ll be able to write them all. So far no luck on getting him to let me do that, and frankly it needs to get out there more before it would work to do that anyway. Your comments to Kawato: Yeah, the protagonists in Snapshot definitely have their flaws, but that is quite intentional. Your comments to Sidaway: The small fonts in Sidaway’s zines the last couple of issues were the result of a bit of miscommunication. Because of the mailing costs of sending the zine from Britain he e-mails me PDFs. Somehow his PDF page size got set to tabloid (11 by 17) rather than letter (8.5 by 11). Britain has different standard paper sizes than we do, so it isn’t just a matter of him printing out and seeing that the pages don’t work. In order to get them into the distro I had to print them out at letter size. Result: the zines looked normal to him on the screen, but eye-hurting to us. Hopefully that’s taken care of this issue. Your comments to me: I’m still wrestling with the implications of no satellites, as you probably noticed. I’m glad you liked the YA series book bit. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I used to collect most of them, including the older ones like Rover Boys and original Tom Swift. I unfortunately had to get rid of most of the collection when I moved from a house to an apartment many years ago, but I kept a few favorite series. I’m glad you found the Rick Brant books online. They’re fun as long as you read them with the tech of the period in mind. I had most if not all of the Tom Corbett series at one time, but it wasn’t one of my favorites. On the German and Confederate ‘do better’ scenarios: Yeah, competent governments in either place would probably figure that war equals they lose. On the other hand, in both cases the long-term trends were strongly against them and a substantial part of the political class knew it. In the south, plantation slavery was a dead end because it eventually destroyed soil fertility, which meant that it had to expand to new territory, but it was fresh out of new plantation-friendly territory to expand to, unless they went after Cuba or possibly after more of Mexico, and even then I’m not sure cotton-based plantations would have been viable for long. And the north had virtually boundless growth potential. Long term, the north would predominate. In the case of Germany, the Germans were going to be a mid-level power, probably with a chronic balance of payments problem, unless they did something drastic. Now granted, in neither case did war offer a realistic way out of the long-term dilemma, but I can understand the impulse to try to break out of the trap that way. Interesting stuff on Ghostbusters. On Mars Looks Different: the bad news is that tentatively I don’t have a section this distro. The good news is that I’ve restructured it to make a lot more sense and get out of some dead ends I wrote myself into. Hopefully it’ll be back in a distro or two. And now, more Blue Flash. Nice little snippet here. The fact that the key worked is an intriguing development. Looking forward to more. Wesley Kawato: I can’t imagine being without a working computer in the house. People tend to dump still-working computers with me if I’ll take them. I have at least two working laptops and a netbook sitting around that I never use, but that would be available if my laptop went belly up. On morale in World War II: The Germans were getting hit and retreating on all fronts. Historically the prospect of going back on the offensive did wonders for their morale in the leadup the Battle of the Bulge. Granted, militarily the Battle of the Bulge was a stupid thing for the Germans to do. I suspect though, that if they hadn’t done it the bulk of the troops involved would have been siphoned away to stop the devastating Soviet offensive that opened in January 1945 and really scuppered the Germans. They wouldn’t let those troops sit on the West Wall while the Soviets poured into Prussia. Kurt Sidaway: It’s interesting what you can find in out of the way parts of old houses. We found a little bottle labeled “poison” (apparently rat poison) between our floors when we had our ceiling replaced. We also found a big dried up barrel of roofing tar in a remote corner of the basement. I think your analysis of the lack of really deep divisions in the US is pretty much on the mark. Some southerner still have anti-northerner attitudes, and I’m guessing that if they got a ‘no cost’ opportunity to form their own country a significant percentage of them would want to go for it, though there has been enough inter-region migration that I don’t know as there would be a majority in favor in most states. Economically, the south is integrated into the country pretty strongly. The rail system, the highways, and the electric grid are all set up so that it would be difficult to come up with a workable system in the southern states alone. In the case of railroads at least, I’m guessing that was deliberate federal policy. Texas does have an independent power grid, apparently. I don’t know about the road and rail networks. California is in many ways diverging culturally from much of the rest of the country, but the state government is economically a burned-out shell. Ethnically it is going to be predominantly Hispanic in the not too distant future. Just over half of the students in the public schools are of Hispanic origin, as opposed to twenty-some odd percent of Anglo origin, with the rest African American, Asian America or other. How that will work out politically in the long term, I don’t know. Other than possibly Texas, US states are unlikely to mount any significant challenge to federal authority because they are for the most part dependent on federal dollars to remain solvent. If the feds collapse economically, most states would have to cut back drastically and even with that several of the big ones would probably collapse too. It’s not just direct federal support of states either. Think about what happens to California and Texas and parts of Florida if federal aerospace dollars stopped flowing into the economies. What happens to communities with big military bases or big defense contractors? Pretty devastating. What about university towns if the federally-backed student loans stopped flowing? My guess is that if a political or economic collapse happened in the US it would look more like Detroit than the former Soviet Union. The Detroit city government recently decided to or at least was seriously considering formally ending garbage pickup and policing for about twenty percent of the city so they can concentrate limited resources on the more viable areas of the city. That kind of stinks if you own property in the other parts of the city, and it probably isn’t the end of retrenchment there. That kind of thing is going to have an impact on us personally. My aunt’s farms are in a county in Wisconsin where the biggest town (Janesville) has a huge and now apparently closed GM assembly plant, along with a major parts supplier. Collectively the two plants employed around 2000 people in a population of around 50,000. Figure that counting family members that’s close to 20% of the population dependent directly on the two plants. And those were good paying jobs, paying considerably more than the average wages for the area. The auto workers were well-known for spending it at least as fast as they got it, so their spending was probably thirty to forty percent of the local economy. Once unemployment runs out, these guys are going to be looking for jobs elsewhere. Add in businesses that depended on the dollars those workers spent, and you may be talking about as much as half of the local economy going away. As people find jobs elsewhere or can’t pay their mortgages, houses become a glut on the market. Prices fall off a cliff. Since property taxes and sales taxes fund local government, local government has to cut back. Since the cuts will be made on the basis of political clout rather than actual utility of the employees involved, the big cuts will come in useful but less politically protected employees—teachers, firefighters, and law enforcement. Law enforcement is already stretched enough that the sheriff’s deputies nickname the area one of my aunt’s farms is in “the Wild West”. Get the kinds of things that happen out there happening in more populated areas, and oh boy. A thoroughly nasty area where people take the law into their own hands and the sheriff’s deputies might show up a couple of hours later if there is trouble that involves gunfire. I hope that isn’t the scenario for the future, but unfortunately it is the reality in a lot of places in the US. There are parts of several big cities where the relevant question isn’t what the city government says the law is. It’s what the local street gang says you have to do. And this is getting kind of dreary. Back to our real topic. Thanks for keeping us informed on the Staffordshire Hoard. Very interesting stuff. Your comments to Gill: I had never been interested in fan fiction until lately. If someone wants to write fan fiction in the Exchange universe I’m open to it as long as it’s labeled derivative, non-commercial work under Creative Commons. Until I publish a book in a universe I would of course be pretty upset if somebody else with knowledge of the universe published in it. Your comments to me: Good idea on having Greg comment on Amelia liking science fiction rather than Hannah Montana. There is a reason why Lyle’s shelves are lined with young adult books. You’ll see in a few issues. I probably do need to have somebody comment on it being a bit weird. On the encounter with John Calvin Lewis: I visualize him as being from the older African-American mindset that still considers European culture and expressed ideals as being civilization, while rejecting people of Anglo descent as being hopelessly corrupt. His view is that “God” and “civilization” don’t belong to white people and that African-Americans need to actively assert their ownership of both of those things. That isn’t the way black separatists tended to go in the sixties and seventies, but there was a strain of that kind of thinking in earlier black leaders. I’ll need to figure out some way of working that background in without bogging the story down. Interesting bit about the death of the Prince Imperial in Zululand. Not sure where I would take it from here, and unfortunately nothing worthwhile to add to it. Last Minute Reading: Science news for writers: (Note--let me know if this helps you generate ideas. If it does I'll post stuff like this from time to time. If it bores you, I won't) 1) Plant-eating crocodiles: We all know what a crocodile looks like, but go back to the last part of the age of dinosaurs and you might have a whole different impression of them. Surviving crocodiles are the remnants of a much larger group of related animals that included a group of animals that developed a lifestyle much like early mammals, and teeth that looked so much like mammal teeth that paleontologists thought they were from some bizarre form of mammal until they found more substantial remains. One of the weirdest crocodile offshoots was apparently a plant eater that looked something like an over-sized armadillo. It lived in Madagascar (Yay) shortly before the dinosaurs died off. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-bizarre-fossil-crocodile-dispels-notion.html 2) Lost civilization under the Persian Gulf? During the last ice age, the Persian Gulf was a fertile plain. It may have played a role in the early wanderings of our type of human, the beginnings of civilization and stories of the great flood that are in a lot of cultures. http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20101210/sc_livescience/lostcivilizationmayhaveexistedbeneaththepersiangulf From A Group (Three People) Blog I’m Doing: Old Stories And New I recently checked a book of pulp reprints out of the library and read a few of the short stories, including a fairly long Saint story by Leslie Charteris, one by Dashiell Hammett, and one by Steve Fisher. I was a big fan of the Saint stories in my late teens and I was a little afraid I would be disappointed when I read one as a more mature reader. The story wasn’t quite as good as I remember Saint stories being, but it wasn’t bad. The other two were quite good. This was my first exposure to either authors and I wasn’t disappointed. So how did these stories from the 1930s stack up against modern stories? They probably wouldn’t have gotten published if a new author had put them into today’s market, but they weren’t bad. The prose violated a lot of the conventions that modern writers are taught, with a lot more adjectives than you would expect in a modern story. The vocabulary was richer than I would have expected. Pulps were the popular literature of the day, looked down on by ‘real’ magazines and real writers, but if these stories are any indication the consumers of popular literature were far more literate than most of them are these days. Writing that gets published tends to fit the time it is written. Good writing isn’t a universal thing. These stories were slower paced and more descriptive than a modern story for a similar audience might be because they had an audience with a longer attention span and fewer competing media competing for attention. They had richer vocabulary because their audience had a better vocabulary. They had probably somewhat simpler plots because the relatively simple ones hadn’t been used a hundred times already. Authors didn’t have to go to great lengths to come up with fresh twists on a plot because they had 70 to 80 years less accumulated writing to build on and to make what had originally been a fresh idea into a tired, overused one. It’s been an interesting experience. I’ll probably read more of these stories. I envy the writers their comparatively uncluttered markets and their comparatively large and literate audiences. Posted on Jan 3, 2012. More Stuff For POD Members Only |
