100 Years of Boy Scouts

A couple weeks ago, my father pointed an article out to me in the local paper, the Valley Reporter, where there was a brief announcement about a local Boy Scout receiving his Eagle rank. It was exciting for the both of us, because with myself and my brother finishing up our time in scouting by reaching the rank of Eagle, my father, who held out troop together and fostered a solid group of kids in Troop 100 through, left to focus on other things, and we’ve largely been out of the loop when it comes to scouting for almost a decade now.

Yesterday, The Boy Scouts of America celebrated its centennial. The Scouting movement itself is a couple of years older, founded by Robert Baden-Powell in England, before migrating to the United States in 1910 from where it grew through to the 1970s, when membership hit its peak, before declining to the present day. Over that time, Scouting has become a vastly important organization within the United States, and numerous notable members of the public, such as Neil Armstrong, James Brady, Clive Cussler, Robert Gates, Harry Knowles and Robert McNamara, just to name a very few.
In the recent years, the Boy Scouts of America has declined, in membership and in public perception with a number of scandals and lawsuits over its membership, tainting its reputation. My memories, however, of the organization, despite my own issues with the stances that the organization takes, are some of the most precious to me and my family. Wired Magazine published an article yesterday, asking whether the BSA was still a relevant organization. I believe that it is, and I believe that in this day and age, with more options for children and young adults to occupy their time, the Scouting movement is one that is vital to this nation’s character, despite the issues that it has internally.

Amongst the biggest issue is the group’s stance towards homosexuality and atheism within its ranks, amounting to a sort of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, one that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and one that certainly impacted my own scouting career at several points, from having Moretown residents slam their doors in my face while selling popcorn to having people question my own morals, assuming that my beliefs matched those held by the organization. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I have never believed that recognition or participation necessarily equated to compliance or recognition. In any case, none of the regulations really applied to our own troop, and we continued to do everything that we had done before.

What I remember the most from my time as a Boy Scout (Of course, any Eagle Scout will tell you that once you have achieved that rank, you are always an Eagle Scout) is the lessons in character, interpersonal relations and the practical skills that I learned while away at Summer Camp at Mt. Norris every year. I was a bit of a troubled kid at points, and Scouting taught me much when it came to dealing with other people my age, and basic elements of problem solving: skills that are not really emphasized in a school setting, which, in my mind, makes this organization all the more important for children in the United States. But even the basic skills that I learned while earning badges are ones that might come in handy someday: First Aid, Emergency Preparedness, Communications, Personal Fitness, Camping, Climbing, Environmental Science, Geology, Orienteering, Reading and more. I firmly believe that my experience in scouting gave me a well rounded education and background that I would not have had otherwise. It has taught me much, and far beyond the basic skills earned in the pursuit of a Merit Badge, but an appreciation for nature and the outdoors, for science and community, all things that I most likely wouldn’t have been exposed to in the classroom or with life in Moretown.

Where it is asked whether Scouting has a future and purpose at this time and place, I have to pause. I would not trade my experiences in Scouting for anything in the world, as it has made me the person that I am today, but I also believe that the organization needs to change, drastically, as societal norms change as well. The things that the organization has been condemned for have good reason to be, but I don’t believe that either issue clouds Scouting as a whole, nor do I believe that it detracts from what I learned. I see comments and hear people say that they would never allow their children to join a bigoted and backwards organization. I believe that in the larger scheme of things, Scouting falls on the lesser of evils list. While Scouting has its issues, ones that I sincerely hope will be fixed in the future, there are other groups out there that deserve more anger directed towards them for their own policies.

The thing to remember with groups such as this is that it’s not the overall policies that matter to the people, it’s how they are carried out. I was sickened to read that a group of Scouts were booed off the stage during the 2000 Democratic National Convention, because of the sheer narrow-minded and elitist, hypocritical stupidity that it represented. The Boy Scouts on the stage may or may not have been firm believers in the overall rules of their organization, and it troubles me in any instance in which people are judged not for their individual beliefs, but for what they are perceived to represent. How many of those democrats honestly pushed for a restriction of prayer in schools or for gay marriage? Beyond that, Scouting is far more than the problems that it faces. To the people who refuse to be involved, especially the ones who say: “I would join, but…”, I would say that they don’t help the problem, because Scouting isn’t the rules that it is governed by, but it is what the people who belong to it make it. My experiences with Scouting was heavily based on the morals and experiences of my scout masters, and everything that they taught, but in the end, it was I who decided how to incorporate that into a relevant experience that I make use of every day.

This past Christmas, I bought my brother a coffee table book on the history of Scouting, and I was delighted to see his face light up when he opened it. For me, and for my brother (I’m reasonably sure), Scouting gave us some of the best experiences and education in our lives. No rules, controversy or slammed doors can ever take that away from me, or tell me that it was all for naught.

Unit Cohesion in Warfare

Over this past weekend, rather than watching the overpriced millionaires hitting each other, a couple of friends of mine and I spend the weekend gaming, where a particular argument broke out over the role of discipline in the armed forces, over leadership style and just how people should be managed in warfare.

A basic element of warfare is a military that is able and willing to carry out the orders as an extension of that nation’s will or foreign policy. This is a consistent part of the practice of war, an element that is seen throughout the world when it comes to effective forces, and is often a key element in why militaries succeed in their goals. As far back to Egyptian times, early warfare utilized massed infantry tactics, involving large numbers of soldiers working in concert to obtain their objectives, and backed up, usually, by cavalry and archers.

A good example of this would be the Assyrian military, under Assurnasirpall II in the 9th century BC. He put together a “formidable Assyrian army [that] was well organized in its infantry and siege arms, but the mobile arm was in transition. The infantry was forced into two main groups: the spearmen and the archers.” (Archer, World History of Warfare, 20) The mobile arm of this military was one of the first introductions of cavalry in warfare, and together, each element represents a significant change in tactics from one to the other, but all must be used in concert with one another, especially as the cavalry forces transitioned from chariots to regular cavalry forces. (Archer, 23.) Furthermore, Archer attests that “It appears the most important reason for Assyrian success was that Assyrian rulers were progressive in importing, incorporating and improving military ideas, expertise and weapons from neighboring and often hostile societies.” (Archer, 23) Thus, an army that is able to improvise and adapt to changing tactics and techniques when it comes to war fighting, seems to be on better footing, not only in incorporating the ideas by adding in new classes of soldiers, but also finding ways in making them work together. Moving across the world to China, one sees that this is much the same, with the Ch’in army from around the same time, which utilized a mainly infantry force, one that adapted to changing conditions.

John Lynn, in his book, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, notes early on that there are similarities in the conduct of Greek soldiers as well: “The aspis protected more than the hoplite who carried it, because it overlapped with the others to form a shield wall that covered the front of the entire phalanx… Other parts of the panoply protected the individual hoplite, but in a sense, his aspis guarded his comrade and the phalanx as a whole, because a gap in the line could prove fatal in battle.” (Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, 6) This helps to reinforce the nature of organized combat and speaks to the necessity for such an organized force. On one hand, it helps to protect the soldiers in the line as they carry out their mission. Soldiers who fled from battle were considered treasonous, and would be punished for letting their comrades down. However, another element of this is purely practical on the part of the commanders: a force that is able to work together and not break down under the stresses of battle is a force that can ultimately succeed in battle, and depends upon the soldiers working together in a unified fashion to protect one another.

There are other dissenting opinions of this, such as through Victor Davis Hanson in Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Ride of Western Power, who asserts that democratic nations are better able to succeed in battle because they have a stake in what they are fighting for. While this certainly can play into part of this argument, as in how the soldiers are motivated for fighting prior to a battle, it seems far more likely that soldiers who are best able to work together are the ones who can best succeed – the Persian military was certainly able to achieve much throughout their military reign, and were bested by soldiers who were simply far more cohesive, using better tactics.

Similar traits continued through the sixteenth century, as firearms and gunpowder began to supplant archers and conventional foot soldiers. Not only did gunpowder weapons revolutionize warfare at that point, it helped to reinforce the need for a disciplined fighting force. While archers could fire at higher rates, firearms themselves utilized chemical power stored within the weapons, allowing soldiers to fire a continual rates without tiring, but also allowing these soldiers to be less skilled, meaning larger armies could be raised. However, the routine steps that were required to utilize these firearms were applied to units as a whole, and thus, the need for an organized military force remained. In this instance, because of the slow rates of fire from soldiers, orchestration from the unit commanders was needed in order to protect the unit, as well as to make that unit an effective offensive force on the battlefield. This so-called gunpowder revolution had a major impact on the battlefield as a whole, with large-scale militaries operating through to the 20th century.

The lessons that can be learned from this are seen through the militaries that have succeeded throughout time: a superior military utilizes a strong, heavily disciplined military that can respond to orders and innovation at the same time. Throughout history, massed infantry units were frequently used, and this discipline and adherence to orders was used to keep these units together in formation. Failure in some cases of even just one person to follow orders and their training could mean problems with the formation as a whole, and the entire tactic and battle could be placed into jeopardy because of that. In modern times, militaries train their soldiers to work as a unit to protect and support their fellow comrades for the very same reason – battles are a complex being that requires coordination on a larger scale, and every part must operate as planned to reach a desired outcome.

Sources: World History of Warfare and Battle: A History of Combat and Culture.

eBooks & Value

Last week, Amazon.com and publishers started going head to head with the business model that Amazon.com has set up for their Kindle eBook store. With the recent release of the Apple iPad, new alternatives have been opened for publishers. With it, there has been a flood of problems and statements from all edges of public opinion about not just the power that Amazon.com seems to be able to field, but also to the very nature of the place of e-books.

The background of the story lies with Amazon’s preference for a lower price for an e-book on their Kindle device. Typically starting at $9.99, one of the major publishers, Macmillan, went to Amazon with new proposals for how to sell their books. From how I understand it, it would introduce a graduated pricing system, starting their new books at $15.99 and gradually dropping the price as demand falls away. This is something that’s already pretty well established in the book industry, with hardcovers of the really big books starting off at $25 to $30, before dropping down to trade paperbacks (Around $15 each) going to or going directly to mass market paperbacks, generally around $7.99 each. There’s a new, taller book (I’m not sure what it is called) that typically runs around $9.99 per copy.

A big part of the issue is that profits that go to the publisher, and eventually, the author, have been cut into, as it is a cheaper way to distribute the book. This made a lot of sense for Amazon.com, because after purchasing a multiple hundred dollar device, because it helps the more economically minded consumers actually use the device. While it’s just a little more than the mass-market paperback, buying a new release book that would normally be $30, for something between $9.99 and $15.99, makes a lot of sense, especially for the consumers who really matter – the ones who buy hundreds of books a year.

This makes good for the consumer, for sure, but it does impact other elements down the publishing line, and indeed, the bookselling line. Pundits, for years, have been predicting the demise of brick and mortar bookstores with the introduction of online bookstores such as Amazon.com, and with the slowly growing rise of e-books and the Kindle, it’s coming back, and for good reason: bookstores are getting hurt by this new competition. I recently was laid off from Borders when they closed down 200 of their smaller stores in order to consolidate to their larger ones. While there are other issues at stake there, it is clear that people buy far more off of the internet than from in a store. When given a chance, I’ll do the same thing – I can pick up other books cheaper from Amazon’s used bookstore, but also from used bookstores around the area.

This is all part of a larger consumer culture that seems to be pushed along by giants such as Amazon.com, Walmart, Home Depot and other stores: consumers want to pay the lowest possible price for what they want. Bigger stores can make that happen, and we’ve been conditioned to respond to that sort of thing. One of the problems, however, is in how the consumer values the product that they’re intending on buying, and how much the creator, whether it’s a publisher or manufacturer, and there’s a growing gap that’s pushed forward by these larger stores. It’s good for the consumer and good for these stores in particular, but it’s not good for the manufacturer of whatever good you’re trying to buy.

I’m not sure that that is a good thing, because eventually, the manufacturer’s ability to produce will have to be decreased due to lack of profits. In the publishing industry, forcing a publisher to take a smaller cut for their books means that less money could make it to the author, who will either need to sell more books or negotiate a better deal with their publisher. This is even more of a problem when stores, such as Amazon.com sell a majority of your books, and where your entire publishing company has been taken off, as is the case with Macmillan.

I think part of the issue is addressing just how much a publisher should value their e-books, and making customer expectations meet that. Books have a lot that go into them, from editing, layout, marketing and so on, and in a consumer culture where expectations towards lower and lower prices are pushed as well, that particular detail is going to be lost. It would seem that the publishing industry has reached a level where they don’t want to move any further.

How exactly does one value an e-book? I can say with certainty, that I will typically go with the price on the back of the book for a majority of the books that I purchase in a year. I try to find something with a discount, and made use of my employee discount, but once purchased, I know that the book was mine. When it comes to e-books, there are a whole lot of other options, especially with Amazon.com, which essentially sells you a license for the book, which can be revoked at any point. (This happened, somewhat ironically, with the book 1984, recently). This is the same with music and software, and has been around for a while, so I’m not sure why everyone is raising a fuss about it now. Thus, people purchase a product that they cannot transfer or resell as they could the physical product. Even if it is cheaper, I think that even $9.99 isn’t a good value for the consumer, as opposed to my feeling that $25 is a very good value for a physical book in some instances.

Who’s at fault for this? Well, everybody has blamed everybody. The publishers have been blamed for distrupting Amazon’s plans, the consumers have been blamed for wanting low prices, the publishers for demanding too much, and the authors have been blamed for whining and complaining about this. This has always been an issue with business, because there are numerous people who get different cuts, and everybody wants a larger piece of the pie. Personally, I think that the publishers are well within their rights to set the books at whatever price they want – how they value their product – because they are primarily in charge of the creation. Amazon has just enough leverage to force their own prices on the publishers because they account for large portions of the sales. Authors, I think are largely blameless in this, because they simply have no control over how these books are sold, marketed and edited. Consumers, I think, need to have a more realistic value in their heads for what they buy.

The bottom line that I see here is that this row isn’t the end, but in this instance, it’s not unreasonable for a graduated pricing system, as publishers want. While Amazon.com is looking to entice people to their Kindle, I think that there is sufficient momentum on their part for moving people to digital formats. People aren’t necessarily going to be scared away by higher ebook prices, because these higher prices will still be better than the alternatives. Just as casual readers will wait for a year for their favorite author’s book to come out in paperback, the buyers who really matters, the repeat customers who buy a larger volume of books will buy the books as they come out, generally at the regular price, or at the sales price that drops that just a bit. Unfortunately, as Amazon.com has moved to punish a publisher, the authors have been caught as collateral damage.

This, more than ever, just reinforces my desire for a hardcopy book, rather than an e-book. The tactile crap that a lot of people go on about just doesn’t figure into it. When I buy a book at a bookstore, that is my property, not just a piece of data that can be revoked by a company as it sees fit, and I can sell it and return my losses as I need. Plus, I don’t need to worry about a battery for any of the books that I own.

Dollhouse

Last Friday, the final episode of Dollhouse ended, leaving viewers with the end of a story, but like with Firefly, the feeling that there was more to tell. While it certainly wasn’t as much fun as Joss Whedon’s other short-lived wonder Firefly, it outstripped it with potential and stories that really felt like they were going places. Dollhouse is a show that will be missed immensely, and while I was thrilled to see it get a second season, and even happier that the production team was able to get the story wrapped up fairly neatly, there is the inevitable pang of the loss of a good science fiction television show.

From the start, Dollhouse has had a rough time, and it is a bit of a wonder that the show made it as far as it did. Delays, reshoots, the show almost never made it out the gate, and slowly limped along from first to second seasons, before the plug was finally pulled. After watching the first episode, I was reminded of one of my favorite science fiction novels, Altered Carbon. In Richard K. Morgan’s first novel, an implant (a stack) is used to download a person’s consciousness and place them into another body as needed, opening a whole world of possibilities for characters and stories. In this instance, it was a noir-ish murder mystery set in the future, with a rich patron hiring the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, to find out why he killed himself.

Dollhouse falls much within the same sort of hard science fiction cyberpunk that Altered Carbon occupies. Some of the plot parts are the same, but at the same time, Dollhouse seems to be very typical of a Whedon show: where possible, there’s a constant reminder of a message that is being put forth by the story. In a way, it is one of the best cautionary tales that I have seen in a very long time, becoming a model of what science fiction should be: a modern day story, wrapped up in an environment that is just out of context enough for an audience to extrapolate some sort of message from the show. It worked well in True Blood, with the issue of same-sex marriage and relationships, and with Battlestar Galactica, for several issues, such as the Iraq War, torture and wartime conduct.

Dollhouse certainly had its ups and downs. The first half of the first season followed an active mission of the day, which worked marginally well. It helped introduce the concept of the Dollhouse, but did little to really delve into the main storyline until the very end of the season, and things really didn’t kick in until viewers hit the unaired episode, Epitaph One, on the DVD set, when the real stakes of the show are laid out: the technology of the Dollhouse will spell the end of the world, if unchecked. Unlike the world that Altered Carbon and its sequels, where there seems to have been a progression and maturing relationship between technology and society, Dollhouse’s work demonstrates the raw, unchecked and irresponsible power that technology can have in the place for those who aren’t ready to wield it. As has often been quoted from Spiderman: With great power comes great responsibility.

In a way, Dollhouse is the perfect story for the last eighteen months. For anybody who has followed the news in the United States, the entire world has fallen onto hard times because of the sheer power that has been wielded by lending firms, largely motivated out of greed and profit. While this crisis hasn’t turned a large part of humanity into mindless zombies, it is an example that so clearly resonates from the TV show, on an even deeper level: corporate greed, a theme that permeates so many other science fiction novels, television shows and movies. Paolo Bachgalupi’s The Windup Girl, Duncan Jones‘ Moon, and even elements of J.J. Abram’s show Fringe share this story element, amongst many others in the genre, helping to demonstrate that science fiction is an incredibly relevant and important segment of the arts.

While I don’t know that Dollhouse rises to the absolute top with the acting and some of the stories, the overall storyline and conception of the show bring it to incredible heights. Not only is it a cautionary tale towards the problems with technology in the wrong hands, it examines other important themes and storylines: the role of consent and individuality, but even the deeper themes of the soul: what is personality, and can it be replicated, duplicated and swapped out like a machine part in a person? Together, these major themes hold up the show and propel it much further than most science fiction shows ever make it. Unfortunately, while the baseline ideas of the show are amongst the best that the genre has to offer, the show faltered in its execution: the slow start to the show, the wooden acting from some of the actors, and the unfinished potential that was shown as the producers rushed to tie off the show. There are hundreds of stories left untold, after watching the finale, Epitaph Two, and I would like to see more from this world, even in other mediums.

While lofty space epics can be fun to watch, with long lasting storylines that bring on years of stories, I don’t know that I’ve actually seen a television show that takes on such personal issues. Dollhouse was the best sort of science fiction series in the way that it acts as a mirror: we see ourselves and how the world functions in very terrifying ways, showing us what is plausible, possible and even probable.

The Constellation Program & The Future of Spaceflight

Over the weekend, it was widely reported that the Obama Administration has proposed cancelling NASA’s next big project, The Constellation Program, which was designed to return humanity to the Moon, but instead, increased NASA’s budget by $6 Billion. The official explanation was that Constellation would largely be a repeat of the Apollo program by returning Americans to the moon, and was rejected by an independent review panel. While there has been a considerable amount of press regarding this, it is most likely better for the US space program as a whole.

I was happy to see President Bush announce the Constellation Program, but in the couple of years since its announcement, it’s become increasingly clear that this was a project that wasn’t going to work in the long run. In the history of space exploration, numerous presidents have used the space program as a way to launch legacies and to bolster public support for their administration, most notably with the Kennedy Administration, as well as the Nixon Administration. Undoubtedly, this was a goal of the second Bush Administration, which faced flagging support as the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were getting worse. This sort of support from an administration isn’t unwarranted, or really unwelcome, but given the absolute complexity of something such as Apollo or Constellation, there needs to be broad public support and administrative support for the program. This worked extremely well during the 1960s, as politicians were able to use the advances of the Soviet Union as a way to link both spaceflight and military technologies together. If the Russians were able to reach the moon first, they would be perceived as being technologically superior. In a world of unorganized terror and irregular warfare, this threat doesn’t exist. While it’s clear that Iran and North Korea has experimented with IRBM and ICBM technology, there isn’t a race to see who’s better. Thus, public and political pressure for a successful moon landing project isn’t behind a push to go to the moon, which will hurt the project in numerous ways, such as budget cuts.

Beyond that, however, is the entire purpose of a moon landing program. The Mercury and Gemini programs were both designed with much different criteria in mind: Could humans go to space, and could humans live in space? The successes of both and the subsequent Apollo program indicated yes, making them an unparalleled success. When it came to Apollo, the end goals are more limited: Could humans land on the moon? While Apollo proved that this was true, it was far more limited, with no aftermath plan put into place, and with fewer tangible results that could come out of it. Once humanity reached the moon, public support slowed, and the last three Apollo missions were cancelled, despite the hardware and training that had gone into them. A repeat of Apollo wouldn’t prove anything new, other than advancing some of the known technologies. Until a good reason is found to return to the lunar service, it shouldn’t be subjected to the constraints of taxpayer whims and political points, and this is what would have happened with Constellation. A return to the moon would be a tremendous boon to the United States, but it would be a superficial one, without real substance.

While this shuts out a lunar moon program on the part of NASA, this does open the doors for private aerospace companies, new and old. Earlier today, NASA announced five companies were receiving large grants, while other companies, such as SpaceX, will be tasked with shuttling people and materials back and forth between the earth and orbit. Private industry will likely be a better choice for space technology, because it is freed from the constraints of public funding and politicians. This doesn’t necessarily mean that NASA will be out of the space business either – several programs that will be brought up will be focusing on robotics and orbital stations, as well as investigating new equipment and technology, which will undoubtedly help create a foundation for further exploration to the moon and solar system.

There are some drawbacks to this. It’ll take longer, which will push the United States back a bit, and it will place some exploration in the hands of machines, rather than people. That, however, is a smaller price to pay if it helps to put the United States and humanity on track to reach the stars on a bit more of a permanent basis. What I can foresee, is a buildup of additional companies such as SpaceX, which will help to build a large industrial and commercial basis for human habitation in space. That, I believe, is incredibly important, especially given the problems with the economy as of late. This would provide the US with a wholly unique industry, something that is badly needed.

The problems with going to space are complicated, and returning to orbit will be a very different thing after twenty years of depending on the space shuttle. Hopefully, these changes will be the start of new priorities for the space agency, and hopefully, exploration to the Moon and Mars won’t be too far behind.

The Forever War and Military Science Fiction

Amongst one of the many books that has come highly recommended to me, especially from my fellow graduate students, was Joe Halderman’s The Forever War. Published in 1974, Halderman’s book is an interesting one, tying together a stiff criticism for the Vietnam War, in which he was a participant and recipient of the Army’s Purple Heart, a look at the future of humanity and a romp through futuristic military battlefields. The book is scattered, to say the least, through these three larger themes, and while the book as a whole is a pretty strong one, reading it brought up some larger issues that I have with the whole of the military science fiction subgenre.

Branching off from the 1980s, humanity has taken to the stars fairly early in its history, travelling the galaxy via collapstars, which fires off a ship around the galaxy. During the course of humanity’s exploration, they come into contact with a race of aliens known as the Taurans, and inevitably, war breaks out. The story’s protagonist, William Mandella, is conscripted into the military, where he’s trained and sent off to the distant front lines to fight, eventually becoming part of the first engagement against the Taurans. With that battle completed, he is shipped home, along with his lover, Marygay Potter, to an Earth that they hardly recognize. After a short period of time, they leave again, rejoin the military and rejoin the fight. Over the next several hundred years (only a couple for them, subjectively), they are retrained, and eventually separated, before one last battle brings Mandella back home, where he is eventually reunited with Marygay.

The book is ultimately lackluster as a military science fiction novel: the action scenes are nothing new, and anyone reading Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War will recognize the basics when it comes to this sort of novel – there are powered suits, the requisite training portion and rise of the protagonist, not to mention the action. Taken at face value, it’s a bit of a miss for me. The biggest saving grace is Halderman’s conceptualization of space warfare, where tactics take days, weeks, even months to carry out, over hundreds of millions of kilometers. This gives the book a bit of a realistic edge that does make it stand apart from other military Science Fiction novels, something that I greatly appreciated.

However, where the book succeeds the most is in Halderman’s look to the future. As Mandela lives out his life through the military actions that he takes, long stretches of his life are relatively slowed down while travelling through space, allowing for jumps in time as he comes back into contact with Earth and sees just how society has changed over time. Upon his first return, humanity has united on Earth, under a largely repressive, Children of Men style world where human civilization has faced enormous hardship under the interstellar war. Leaving the world as it has changed too much for his liking, William and Marygay return to space, to find several major changes as they continue to jump around space. Eventually, the world as they know it has changed completely – humanity has gone from a recognizable society to one where homosexuality is the norm (as a form of population control) to a world where humanity has essentially merged into one asexual entity, with each generation cloned from the last. Elements of this remind me heavily of another book that I’ve been recently reading, Olaf Stapledon’s The First and Last Men, published in the 1930s, and dealing with much the same thing: looking at how humanity as a species and culture will change in the future. Mandela’s vantage point in the military is an interesting story element that allows Halderman to not only tell an interesting story, but present a compelling future for humanity. Another book that I read last year, George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years, noted that society and cultural norms can change vastly over even the period of just one hundred years, and to an extent, that lends Halderman’s and Stapleton’s ideas some reality: what will happen to humanity over the next thousand years, with technological and societal advances altering what is normal? It is here that The Forever War is especially interesting.

Another major element of The Forever War is Halderman’s pointed look at the Vietnam War, no doubt inspired by his own experiences with the US Army. The book is considered a reaction to Starship Troopers, in that it takes a largely anti-military stance throughout most of the book. Mandella is a reluctant soldier, at best, often delegating his responsibilities away to subordinates and avoiding killing when he can help it. But throughout the book, there are examples of Vietnam, as humanity faces an enemy that is largely unknown, never knowing exactly what they are fighting for. More so, it is alluded to in the book that the war was fought simply because it was desired, something that was the main focus of a documentary, Why We Fight, that looked to that central theme in regards to American foreign policy. However, the core focus of this book isn’t the Vietnam War itself, but the soldiers who fight there. Soldiers returning from Vietnam found themselves back home in a strange place, not as heroes of the war, but as murderers and criminals, something horribly unjust, considering that many were conscripted. This is a prime example of how science fiction should function: acting as allegory for current events, pulled out of context. Mandella returns home after hundreds and hundreds of years away from Earth; vast changes occurred while he was away.

The Vietnam comparison, however, is something that bothers me, and helps to underscore a larger issue that I have with military science fiction as a whole, something that I brought up with my review for Old Man’s War: while there is a lot of discussion about the nature of war, there’s very little discussion towards the institution of warfare. Tactics are almost always something out of the Second World War, with plenty of hand to hand combat scenes and all that, but there is very little on the overall impact of warfare. Sometimes, it’s on the soldiers, other times, on society, but there’s very little to bridge the gap. The Forever War does this in part.

Part of my issue comes from my training as a historian, and particularly, in military history. Amongst all of the theorists out there, a number of historians have come up with a number of theories on how warfare works – Clausewitz, Jomini, among others, who have both conflicting and interesting views on the nature of war. I particularly like Clausewitz’s analogy that warfare is simply a duel on a larger scale, and that war is an extension of foreign policy. It makes little sense to me that humanity would simply go to war against an alien race, something fairly common in science fiction. Humanity seems to drop everything and take to the stars with lasers and rockets, but the goals of warfare are never clearly stated? Is it, as Clausewitz suggests, an effort to completely bend an enemy to one’s will, something incredibly difficult when attacking someone profoundly alien and unknown to humanity, or is it something deeper, such as perceived competition for living space, ensuring that humanity will have space to grow? To date, I’ve never found a good military science fiction book that’s really covered that territory, and at times, the genre makes me want to throw things, simply because warfare doesn’t work like that.

Similarly, while powered robotic suits are very cool, the other problem that I have is tactical. Robotic powered armor laden down with guns simply doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, especially when the authors talk much about dropping soldiers onto the planet from orbit in a glorified Omaha Beach scenario, where these soldiers are not only placed into hostile territory, but usually without support: it reminds me very much of airborne doctrine during the Second World War, where highly mobile forces were used to secure areas and wait for heavier things, such as artillery and armor to arrive. It’s a good concept, to be sure, but it’s deeply flawed in that these soldiers are usually out matched by the occupying force. Science Fiction takes many similar themes, but fails to follow up these sort of tactical options in any way that makes sense. Thus far, the best thing that I’ve seen was here, The Physics of Space Battles, which talks much about orbits and how that aspect would work, on a tactical level. Halderman gets some points for interesting scenes and more science to the battles than most, but still misses part of the mark.

Part of that reason might be that The Forever War isn’t really a military science fiction book, despite some of the content. In that instance, the book works wonderfully, hitting all of the marks of a fantastic science fiction novel. Still, I enjoy a good romp with powered armor and shooting, so it works fairly well when it comes to that, but not as much as I’d like.

Remembering Gus Grissom

On January 27th, 1969, the three members of Apollo 1 were conducting a routine test of their spacecraft when the unthinkable happened: a spark, most likely caused by a short in the cockpit wiring and fueled by a pure oxygen environment, caused a flash fire that killed the crew. The tragedy pushed America’s spaceflight ambitions back as many elements of the program had to be redesigned to better crew safety.

The commander for the mission was Gus Grissom, a forty-one year old astronaut who was the likely candidate to become the first man to land on the moon. Born to a Midwestern family in 1926, Grissom joined the US Army Air Corp during the Second World War, but never saw flight time, as the war ended. Using the GI Bill, he attended Purdue University and obtained a degree in Mechanical Engineering. In 1950, with the United States headed back to war with Korea, Grissom rejoined the US Air Force and trained as a pilot, eventually flying 100 combat missions. In 1959, Grissom was summoned to Washington, along with over a hundred other test pilots, where he learned that he was selected for a number of tests to screen out qualified pilots for the newly established space program. In the end, he was one of seven astronauts chosen for the program, who would later be known as the Mercury 7. The next couple of years would see intense training and preparations for the missions. In 1961, John Shepherd Jr. become the first of the Mercury astronauts to be launched into orbit; Grissom would be the second, in the Liberty Bell 7, on July 21st, 1961.

Arguably, Grissom held what was the more important of the two launches. While Shepherd is better known for being the first American in space, Grissom should be better known for the astronaut who proved that American spaceflight was on the right track, and that the flight of the Freedom 7 was not just a lucky break. Grissom demonstrated that spaceflight was a repeatable event, and did so at considerable risk, as his spacecraft was lost when the door blew off after landing. Grissom almost perished in the accident, but was pulled to safety.

Grissom was also scheduled for the second flight of the Gemini Program, but when Alan Shepherd was grounded due to illness, Grissom and astronaut John Young were tasked with the first flight, which launched in 1965. The flight went well, orbiting the earth three times before splashing down, helping to demonstrate that men could do more than merely go into space for short periods of time: the Gemini project helped show that people could live in space, and set the groundwork for Apollo. Following that mission, Grissom and other astronauts helped with the design process for the Apollo module, although their frustrations grew as more errors were discovered with the spacecraft.

At the point of his death, Grissom was one of the United State’s most experienced astronauts, having completed missions on both the Mercury and Gemini projects. The astronauts were integral to the development of the space program, and Grisson’s background in Mechanical engineering, as well as his experience as a test pilot, made him an ideal candidate to lead the way into space. Despite Grissom’s death, space travel did continue onwards, although it would be another two years before Americans would set foot on the moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin manning Apollo 11. There is much speculation that Grissom would have been in charge of that mission, had he survived.

Interestingly, one of the quotes attributed to Grissom sums up one of the harsh realities of space travel: “If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it wll not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” (Gus Grissom, John Barbour et al., Footprints on the Moon, Associated Press, 1969, p 125.)

Source

Caprica

While last week’s start to Caprica, SyFy has launched its second show in its Battlestar Galactica franchise, looking to the roots of the conflict that forced out the Galactica and a small group of refugees across the stars. For me, Battlestar Galactica was an incredible effort, a show that helped redefine science fiction storytelling for the television, and did so in grand style. Following it up would be an incredibly difficult task for the show runners, given the complexity of Battlestar’s stories, but also in the fact that the audience would be entering a show in which they knew the ending, and would undoubtedly disappoint some viewers with unveiling some of the more shrouded elements of the show’s past.
I think Caprica will be a good success for the SyFy channel, and with the pilot, they have demonstrated what is most likely the most important thing with a sequel: creating a new story and mythology, rather than trying to recreate the prior show’s success by running it through a photocopier. Caprica shares some vital links to it’s predecessor show, through some of the vocabulary, locations, characters (The Adams or Adama family in particular) and through one of the main elements of Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons.
What impressed me the most was not so much the continuity of the two shows, but the continuity of storytelling. In the early seasons of Battlestar, critics praised the show for its examination of real life issues in a science fiction background, such as the use of torture in the midst of wartime, military and civilian relations, and the use of terrorist bombings against two sides of any issue. This was a strong element, coupled with other, loftier issues, such as gender identity in science fiction (and in television in general), religion and the responsibilities of leaders. Caprica seems poised to take the helm with this style of storytelling, and where Battlestar was a product of current events out of 2001 through 2003, SyFy’s new show is the product of the past decade.
Where Battlestar Galactica was primarily focused on the survivors of the colonial holocaust and their search for a new home, Caprica is not necessarily limited by those same constraints, instead able to focus on an entirely different set of issues, all the while putting forth a story that will help examine the underlying society and events that preceded the human/cylon war. From the pilot alone, it looks like there will be an entirely new set of stories to tell, themes that Battlestar never touched on, which gives Caprica (thus far) an entirely different tone and feel; themes such as religion and society, immigration and racism and the conflict between a learned, modern society and the tug of older, established belief system. All of these are stories that are highly relevant in today’s society, given the hostility of extremist jihadist movements in the Middle East towards the West, but also our own societal growth spurt with the digital revolution.
One scene that stuck out for me took place shortly after a train bombing killed a number of people, and brought together two families, the Adams and the Greystones, both of whom lost family members in the blast. The bomb was triggered by one of Zoe Greystone’s friends, who shouts out: “The one true God shall drive out the many!”. Extremism has always existed within organized religion, and it is a particularly notable topic considering the age that we live in today. This particular storyline, expanded upon in the pilot, is one that I hope will remain in the show, as the creators work more towards unveiling the vast differences in the different planets of the colonies. Already, viewers can see that there are many sides to the issue, from the legal standpoint to the cultural impact that such violence brings to the table.
At some point on the franchise’s canon, the colonies will be united under one government, and at this stage, there’s clearly quite a bit more in the way of problems between the planets – this was an issue that was only touched on for a couple episodes in Galactica, but it seems to be brought up to the forefront, not only with the religion aspect of the show, but also with the perceptions of others in the form of racism. In this set of worlds, we see a society that is not too dissimilar from our own. While we’re on only one planet, issues with race and religion are prevalent within the United States, as well as across the world, and Caprica shows us that even in space, we will be just as dysfunctional as we are on the ground.
This is the primary strength of science fiction: to examine the world that we live in by taking our everyday problems and taking them out of context, putting them into new stories so that people will read or watch and think about problems in new ways. This has been a trait in the genre for a long time, and Caprica is a shining example of a continuing example of this, much as Battlestar Galactica was when it was first launched. While I still have some doubts that the show will live up to Battlestar, it’s clear that it’s already well on its way towards doing so, because of the changes that the show’s production team have made. Where Battlestar Galactica showed us what would happen to humanity in its darkest hours; Caprica will show us what happens when we are at our best, and between the two shows, it will show us the distance that we can fall, and just how much we can lose.

John Mayer – Battle Studies

John Mayer is an artist whom I have quite a bit of respect and a bit of disdain for over the past couple of years. With the recently released Battle Studies, I’ve been listening over and thinking back on some of his older works while listening to review this album. The end conclusion that I’ve come up with is Battle Studies is an highly mixed album: one with a strong musical component, but one that is at the same time severely lacking when it comes to substance and variety.

My main complaint with the album, as a whole, is that while Mayer has had an impressive talent curve when it comes to instrumentation, this album dwells far too much on just a couple of themes – loneliness, abandonment; far too much on a ‘Woe is me’ theme that makes me want to throw the something at the guy. While a themed album that deals with these sorts of things is generally a good thing, I found the tone and feel of this album to be far too depressing. It felt self-pitying and at times, a bit pathetic, which might have been part of the point, but those were never traits that I’ve found admirable.

To be fair, several of Mayer’s songs on this album rank amongst some of his best ones:Heartbreak Warfare, Half of My Heart and a cover of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, while there are couple additional mediocre songs, such as Who Says and Assassin. As the title suggests, a number of songs liken the quest for love as something akin to warfare. As someone who’s studied the history of war and gone through heartbreak, it’s a pretty unbalanced perspective. I can see this comparison sitting well with the twenty-something crowd, bobbing their heads while listening in their apartment, a nicely sanitized anthem for our generation.

But that is part of the problem: Mayer’s sound, while greatly improved over the past couple of years, is too soft and easygoing to meet up with anything close to his album title or some of the thematic material therein. Where Mayer is likening heartbreak to Clouds of sulfur in the air/ Bombs are falling everywhere/ It’s heartbreak warfare, there’s a disconnect between the sound and what he’s talking about. Regardless of whether heartbreak is as devestating as warfare (a debatable topic, depending on one’s relationship status), a soft mellow song just doesn’t connect the lyrics to the emotions in the song. Here, it just feels like a dud. In ‘War Of My Life‘, Mayer doesn’t sound like he’s fighting for his life or conveying that sort of song; it feels more like he’s strumming along like the rest of the twenty-somethings who think that they know the devestation of war by what they see on the television screen. In the end, it just feels like this album is called in, not like an air strike, but by the $10 pledge for any number of causes that pledge to end the violence, where it really doesn’t mean that you’re helping the issue beyond missing a little extra cash at the end of the month.

Geek Cred

Geeks like stuff. Lots of it, from books, to memorabilia to collectibles. We hang onto old comic books, with the hope that they’ll one day be worth the millions that a good copy of Action Comics #1 fetches at auction, or out of nostalgic whimsy, looking back on the rosy days of our childhood, when out crushes and favorites weren’t hampered by a modern, cynical viewpoint.

Over this past winter, I bought an X-Box 360 Pro from a fellow 501st member. The price was good, and it’s been something that I’ve had my eyes on for a while. Many of my friends are gamers, and there’s a number of games that I’ve enjoyed playing over the years, but I’ve never gotten any good at almost all of them, simply because I never had a regular opportunity to play games.

This purchase, not counting my computer, marked the first gaming system that I acquired since my very early childhood. My first was a classic Game Boy. It was gray, green and darker green screen and only had a couple of buttons. I had just a handful of games for it: Tetris, Return of the Jedi and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. I loved all of those games, especially Zelda, and played it through high school, when the more advanced gaming systems began to hit the market.

I still have my old Game Boy; it’s sitting on the bookshelf across the living room from me, unused, out of the way, out of batteries. Every now and then, I’ll fire it up and walk around the Koholint Island. When thinking back to my childhood’s geekier moments, this game inevitably played a larger part. I remember very clearly the day that I got it, and promptly, the disappointment at struggling to complete some of the earlier tasks. It would be years before I actually finished the game, not for the lack of trying. It was an exciting game, and for that reason, I still have the unit sitting here around my apartment.

While I’ve been in the loop with gaming in the years between first getting the Game Boy (probably 1991 or 1992, when I was 7 or 8, making this particular unit 18-19 years old – still in good working order, although the screen is blacked out on one side) gaming has exploded in so many ways. Graphics, story, gamplay, etc have changed so much during that time, as has technology. Comparing the Game Boy to my phone, it’s simply amazing to see what has changed in the years since. And, considering the error rate in the X Box 360, my Game Boy is considerably more reliable.

However, I don’t believe that improvements in graphics and computing power are necessarily better, and for this reason, I wouldn’t trade this particular piece of my childhood for anything. It’s a milestone item from my own childhood, something that lends itself a certain amount of geek street credit, as my friends have pulled it off the shelf to stare at it, not having seen one in years.

Thinking back to the things that I’ve accumulated over the years, there’s other similarly geeky things that I’ve found and held onto that I would hold up as pinnacles of my own geekiness. A battered and tattered copy of The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame, Vol 1, edited by Richard Silverberg remains one of my favorite books of all time, although at this point, I’m a little afraid to read it, considering that the book is quite old and somewhat falling apart. I’ve been tempted to buy a new version of it, but haven’t, out of money, attention and the realization that there’s something to the stories that just wouldn’t live up to my memories of them outside of that copy. The same thing applies to my old copy of Ringworld, with its gorgeous cover. A toy Space Shuttle that sits on the window sill above my sink is quite a bit more durable, but equally seeped in memories from the past.

Someday, maybe I will be able to set aside space, time and energy to properly take care of these artifacts from my childhood and from the history of geek-things, putting them under glass to preserve them for others who will hopefully see them and appreciate their impact and meaning in the greater scheme of things. Certainly, other people around the world have put such things into museums, for their cultural impact has been far-ranging and great, inspiring generations of people to live out their fantasies of being able to create and recreate treasured stories from their childhoods.