tom moody
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The news from Iraq, our new colony, upkeep of which will have cost Americans $300 billion after the next round of funding goes through (that's a lot of money), has not been good this month. After the White House's "pictures of people smiling and holding up purple fingers" public relations coup, my sense is that everyone, taking their cues from the media, just turned off news from there--"OK they have a democracy now, good, Bush is looking after us and will get us cheap oil, now let's get back to Michael and the boys." (I say "my sense" because I turn on the TV and as soon as I see someone with a suit and poofy hair sitting behind a desk--which is always--I say "I have nothing in common with these people" and testily switch off.) I get my Iraq news from omnibus sites such as Juan Cole, Today in Iraq, and Steve Gilliard's News Blog, which are combing sources other than the US media, which largely dispenses happy talk and administration spin (however, a lot of those sites' material also comes from the back pages of US newspapers). The news is, it's a goddamn slaughterhouse over there.* The Sunni Arabs held power for some 60 years and they're not going to give it up easily to a Shiite-Kurd government. And they have tons of arms and ammo because the US didn't destroy the dumps after the invasion. Evidently Rumsfeld, et al, wanted our pet exiles (Chalabi, et al) to have access to the ordnance to police the country after we handed it over to them. Bush will not give a straight answer to the question: Are we building permanent bases in Iraq or not? I think we have to assume they are. Meanwhile, our volunteer army is being ground down by too much combat without a break. Are these costs worth it so we can control Iraq's oil? Is that the "real world" Cheney and the Neocons say we're living in? Those are the questions we should be discussing.
*" Dozens of bodies found floating in the Tigris river, a nearly successful assassination attempt on interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, yet another lethal car bomb attack (there've been more than 20 in the past week in Baghdad alone), and a civilian helicopter shot down, reportedly culminating in an execution." --per Salon
Sometimes you just feel like sitting down at your electric piano, plugging in that wah-wah pedal, and knocking out a happy little E-tune: [mp3 removed].
Science Fiction Review
joester recommended Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, a 1991 novel that imagines, among other things, a pan-galactic Internet, canine group minds, and these wack ETs called "skroderiders," which are surf-dwelling plants rolling around in mobile pots that have sophisticated cybernetics to do their short-term thinking for them. It's a good book, a bit of a nail biter at the end, and only suffers slightly having the market necessity of two plucky adolescents among the main POV characters. As usual it's more fun to bitch than accentuate the positive so here are some quibbles:
1. SF writers--especially writers of space operas--have a hard time now that it's abundantly clear that relativity and distance will keep the earth isolated forever from the rest of the universe and we're going to have to solve our own problems. Vinge's solution is to imagine the Milky Way as an onion with different layers of spacetime: we're in the "Slow Zone" midway between The Unthinking Depths near the center and The Beyond further out, where faster than light travel is possible. Much of the book takes place in The Beyond, where people (including our descendants) zip hither and thither. I do wish Vinge had bored us with a half-page of Greg Egan-like physics to explain why he thinks all this is possible--for reasons other than to move the story forward.
2. There are a few weird continuity gaps. Most notable is a portentous statement early on in the book that the accidental placement of a human boy in a kindergarten/kennel with one of the abovementioned canine group minds would change the course of galactic history. In fact, their union acts mostly as a drag on the plot. The group mind is bred for mathematical genius but its sole invention is a kind of telepathy amplifier that one of the characters uses and then abruptly stops using. The relationship of boy and dogs is mainly just a cool, slightly offbeat friendship--no hint is given later why it might be important.
3. The mechanics of the canine "telepathy" that enables six dogs to act as one, operate tools, etc. are only sketchily explained. In some places Vinge refers to "mind noise" that passes among the dogs allowing them to share memories and sense data, including tastes and smells. Elsewhere he describes their communication as a vibration through organs called "tympana" which seems to indicate the data is exchanged through high pitched shrieks. Much could be communicated this way--as with our modems--but it's doubtful that smells or other people's internalized memories could be instantly, palpably transmitted. Again, a bit of physics (or biochemistry) might have helped.
Anyway, these are minor points. I'm already absorbed in the prequel, written in 1999, called A Deepness in the Sky. I still believe in science fiction even though much of its Modernist rationale has gone away.