Women and attack helicopters

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle about the short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”. I don’t have the skin in the game to judge if the story is hurtful to trans people, but for a number of reasons I was intrigued enough to read the story and found it, at least from a literary perspective, to be quite good. The author is, I understand, suggested to be using a pseudonym. Quite possible; the quality of the writing suggests at least some prior experience with writing (science) fiction. In this case, perhaps twenty years ago this would have been characterised as a story of cyborgs, while today such close coupling between humans and machinery is taken for granted. The way this melding is described I associate with authors such as Charles Stross or Peter Watts (and yes, I realise those are male authors). I struggle to identify precisely what it is in the writing style that ties them together; perhaps something about wars fought remotely, but where the machines at the front have their own ideas about it.

Murray Leinster’s “The Wabbler” can be seen as an early predecessor, but reads, at least now, as more detached. It may have had a stronger impact in the 1940s when semi-autonomous fighting machines were just emerging.

But, to return to the original subject: when the modelling club used to participate at the Hobby Fair in Stockholm, we offered plastic models at cost for families to sit and build together at our table. An observation we made at the time was that the mothers tended to choose attack helicopter models. Perhaps it is indeed true that they have a very feminine combat style.

E.T. (spoilers)

It turned out that neither Honeybuns nor I had actually seen E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial^*, so we decided to shell out a few crowns to YouTube and watch it. It was quite interesting.

One thing which I reacted to quite strongly was how obvious it was that several outdoor scenes were shot in an indoors studio. I presume the controlled environment weighed up for the loss of realism to the film-makers.

Another thing was how very 1980s everything was—as if the film makers had gone out of their way to insert period markers, but of course these were just things that happened to be around at the time.

But, and this is quite important, I got a very different impression of the central conflict of the film when compared to reviews and various references I’ve read, and that is that the mysterious Government Authorities in fact are kind and well-meaning. We find that they are quite happy to let Elliott initiate contact and communicate with E.T.—they have Elliott’s house bugged, to be sure, but they stay out of the way and just monitor what happens. Only when E.T. falls ill do they swoop in, and then in a desperate attempt to save E.T.’s life. All through this they are very respectful to E.T., Elliott, and his family.

The chase of the children by police cars is directly caused by two children (Elliott and Michael) stealing a van, driving away and by that endangering the lives of two technicians, who, as far as we can tell, do not at all threaten anyone, but are only interested in getting out of harm’s way, as they are being dragged behind the stolen van. Indeed, as ”Keys”, the leader of the operation, figures out where the children are headed (to reunite E.T. with its kin), it seems the police chase is called off, as there is no further perceived danger.

Further, the aliens are tacitly understood by all to not be a threat. In recent times it’s rather unusual to see a secret(?, we don’t really know, maybe they’re just not very publicly well-known) government agency portrayed so positively.

Then it is rather weird that they apply human-adapted medication to an alien, whose biochemistry they really don’t know anything about at all. It seems that even in a desperate situation it would be likely to cause more damage to do interventions the consequences of which are completely unknown, than just leaving things to their natural course. That E.T. seemingly dies after its bout with…hypothermia(?) and then comes to life again within minutes suggests that its physiology is, indeed, alien.

^* I was reminded of a class-mate in secondary school, who, based on the film title, decided that “terrestrial” meant “alien”. That “extra” bit must have been taken by him to mean simply “yet another”…

Prometheus

Prometheus had gotten pretty good reviews, so we decided go see it. Oh, but were we let down… So the special effects were pretty good and the 3D wasn’t too awful, but talk about plot holes you can drive spaceships through.
The main problem was that absolutely nothing seemed to have any consequences whatsoever: A discovery that overturns absolutely everything we know of history and biology? No matter, that won’t change measurement methods, technology or anything. You need a crack scientific team to explore a hugely important issue? Just gather random people with all the discrimination of a charter trip to Mallorca. You’re travelling through the galaxy, space and supplies at such a premium that people have to be put into hypersleep? Well, once they wake up, they’ll have all the amenities of a five-star spa hotel. Somebody tries to lock you up, so you had to beat them up and steal the use of expensive and prohibited equipment, leaving it all bloody and infested with parasites? No worries, nobody cares a whit. You have just have major abdominal surgery? No worries, a couple of painkillers will keep the wound from ripping open even if you keep hitting your tummy with every available object on the planet.

Still, the most egregious problem is the lack of understanding of biology. I forget how many films I’ve seen where they analyse the “DNA” of alien creatures. How likely is it that alien life should be DNA-based to begin with? Somehow people seem to have the idea that life is necessarily based on DNA, and once you have DNA, yeah, well, obviously you can combine it any way you see fit to make human-alien hybrids. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the proposal that alien life would come to Earth and start making jellyfish-alien hybrids, or fern-alien hybrids, though that would make at least as much sense, for some infinitesimal value of sense.

There is also a bizarre scene where the archaeologist protagonist starts inserting electrodes into a magically preserved alien head in order to…well, turn it alive again, as far as we can tell. She does it as a routine matter, which makes one wonder how archaeology is performed in the future. I would presume there would be even more protests from indigenous populations not only having their graves robbed but their ancestors turned into reanimated zombies. She then proceeds to put “50 amps” into the head. 50 A! No wonder it explodes.

In the end one was left wondering whether the positive reviews were simply due to Noomi Rapace being in the film, which seems a bit unfair.

Another place to go

Here is another aviation-related museum I intend to visit as soon as I have figured out where it is located: The Sci-Fi Airshow.

You can board the Orion.

H/t Thnidu.

Knowledge online

A well-thumbed copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has long stood in a prominent place on my book shelf. Now it seems it will also have a prominent place in my web bookmarks: it’s going online.

H/t Ny Teknik.

Desperate, hopeless love

Avatar

We have now seen Avatar. I can but agree with former reviews, the story is utterly trite (the protagonist starts with smaller challenges and keeps practicing until he’s ready to meet the Level 20 Boss) but computer generated actors have definitely come of age. I was shaking all over when the film ended.

Some random things that came to mind:

• Jacking into the avatar is visualised with a fly-through of a winding tunnel of lights. This was clearly the effect they spent the least effort on, did they use someone’s screensaver for that?
• But for the rest: The textures, the textures! And the shaders! Amazing levels of detail!
• A veteran marine comes up with the brilliant idea of a cavalry charge against heavy machine guns? They should have brought in some Ewoks to give them tactics training.
• Or logistics. If you are bringing together several thousand warriors with their steeds into a small area, how are you handling the supplies issue? What did the latrine trenches look like?
• While noble, the Na‘vi were savages, so of course they have to hunch over and lean forward to gingerly touch anything exceptional. And bare their teeth and hiss in anger.
• So while they live in harmony with Life, the Universe and Everything, they still have a (male) warrior class. (Chief’s Daughters are always tomboys, so they get to fly and fight too.)
• Sacred music sounds Western European all over the universe.
• Did anyone else feel the Hometree was reminiscent of The Holt in ElfQuest? (And of Lothlórien, and of Endor, and of Athshe. Hmm, a trope, it seems.)
• Jake Sully’s wasted legs were very convincing, were they also computer-generated?
• Michelle Rodriguez is hot.
• I was devastated to find that Sigourney Weaver smokes.
• No longer can a standard single column be used for credits, the full screen width has to be used to fit in all the names.

The Mythos Lives

Mysteriously found in my mailbox: A Colder War.

It would have been even more awesome with Tom Bombadil included

Coolth failure

Visiting my mother I had occasion to watch tv and it so happened that TV6 was running Johnny Mnemonic and I decided to watch. Commercial television, why hasn't it been outlawed yet? Commercial breaks chopping up the plot and I'm pretty sure they actually lost bits of the film, making it even more jarring. Even allowing for that, I was rather disappointed and even more so when I saw that William Gibson himself had written the screenplay, so no corporate script wrangler could be blamed for the results.

The main fault lies in the lack of cool. A major theme in Gibson's cyberpunk works is being cool, and Japanese vatgrown ninjas are the coolest of them all. The Yakuza are maximally inscrutable Orientals with infinite patience. In the original short story there is only one Yakuza assassin and that's because he's so utterly deadly on his own no more are needed—grenade launchers and assault guns are too crude and inelegant to be even contemplated. And Molly (in the film replaced by Jane with uncool shakes for copyright reasons!) shows her übercool by whipping the assassin's ass.

And that the data that Johnny is carrying happens to be the cure to all the world's woes? Please…

I briefly considered the point in having a person carry around data in their head, but to be sure, in many cases moving physical media around is faster than wire transfer and for stolen data it makes sense to hide the data inside the person. But the nosebleed effect of stuffing data in your head? It's not like the memory chip grows bigger with the data, you know…

Then of course, technology marches on and having information being faxed in 2021 made me laugh almost as much as the exhortation “Turn on your VCRs!”. The 320 GiB Johnny crams into his head were still upgraded a thousandfold from the “several hundred megabytes” he carried in the original story. And the virtual reality scenes? Too incoherent, but then Gibson never had a really coherent explanation of cyberspace anyway.

Avoiding going native

Some years ago I listened to professor Hans Rosling talking on Sommar. He described how he figured out that the epidemic disease of konzo is caused by insufficiently processed cassava in the diet. Then, apparently to demonstrate the wisdom of indigenous populations, he mentioned that the local population know very well what causes konzo but poverty often requires balancing between not eating at all and eating potentially dangerous cassava. I was dumbstruck. Why couldn't the patients have mentioned that, as they were piling up in the hospital and the (presumably city-bred) medical staff were scratching their heads at the mysterious disease? Didn't the physicians think to ask, were the patients too intimidated by the experts to voice their own knowledge, or did they just not care, as long as they were taken care of?

I had a bit of the same feeling when I recently saw District 9. The aliens had been on Earth for almost 30 years, long enough for humans to have learnt their language, yet no-one in all that time had asked them why they were here. I first thought this was a major plot hole, but considering Rosling's experience, I wonder if it isn't rather an accurate and scathing assessment of human behaviour—we don't care about the motives of refugees that (literally!) descend upon us, we just do what we, for reasons completely our own, decide to be the appropriate thing to do.

Best mashup ever!

That the run on the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope is heavily based on the climactic bomb run in The Dambusters is well known, but never so well demonstrated as in this clip made by HenryvKeiper:

Douglas Adams meme

“He would put on the record of bagpipe music.”

Put a Douglas Adams quote in your blog.

Towel Day

I fixed the frayed border on my big beach towel this morning.

Speculative fiction

The term “speculative fiction” was introduced some time in the 1960s by younger authors that considered “science fiction” to be too restrictive. Fair enough, the genre is certainly fuzzy enough around the edges. However, it never really caught on; possibly it sounded a bit too academically precise. A web magazine that still carries the banner of speculative fiction is Strange Horizons. Fiction, to be sure, but also columns, analyses, art and poetry and with sometimes rather oblique connections to speculative fiction per se, i e it is rather eclectic. So am I, so I certainly don't mind. Go read!

Myopic review

A non-aviation-interested friend was very amused by a review I wrote on The Aviator without ever touching on the human actors. I'll do that trick again…

Christopher Priest's book The Separation [Priest, 2002] is an alternate history with multiple layers. Alternate histories typically build on the premise that one single, but important, thing has been changed relative to “our” universe and the author then attempts to draw out the consequences of that. But, as noted by Christie [1944], everything that happens is the consequence of lots of other things that happened before that so rarely can you just posit that a single thing changed, but other things will have changed as well.

In this review I will, in the spirit of Carter [1985], pick up a throwaway line from the book and speculate over what other changes in the alternate universe had to have taken place in addition to the explicitly stated changes. The passage in question is the following:

Kurt Hofmann was a civilian test pilot working for the Messerschmitt company at a small airfield in eastern Germany. On May 10, 1941, under conditions of immense secrecy, Hofmann piloted the maiden flight of a revolutionary new type of aircraft. It was an experimental fighter powered by as jet turbine engine. The prototype Messerschmitt Me-163 flew at 995 kph (621 mph) before landing safely. This aircraft was widely used on the Russian Front from late in 1943 until the end of hostilities, becoming the standard ground-attack fighter-bomber, It was found to be superior not only to early marques of the Russian MiG-15 jet fighter, but also to the North American Sabre that was entering serviced with the USAAF at the same time.

Now, to work out the differences to our version of the universe, let us just enumerate the superficial differences and then think about the possible reasons for these.

In our universe the Me 163 was a rocket-powered interceptor. It was first flown under rocket power at the large testing site in Peenemünde by well-known test pilot Heini Dittmar; in July 1941 according to Green [1971], on August 13 according to Anderton [1975].

The F-86 Sabre was first flown in October 1947 and the MiG-15 in December the same year [Anderton, 1975], by which time the United States Army Air Forces had become the independent United States Air Force.

So, to start with the Me 163. Clearly what is described is a completely different aircraft. “Our” Me 163 was a diminutive aircraft with a rocket engine with very limited endurance, able to reach great altitude in very short time. Merely redesigning it to use a jet engine would change the design quite considerably, at the very least requiring air intakes and ducts for the engine—or more likely, for two engines. To turn it into a (successful) ground attack aircraft would require a larger aircraft, carrying more fuel, ordinance and, not least, armour. In fact, we would probably end up with something similar to the Me 262, which aircraft is not mentioned in the passage above, though it was considerably more successful in our timeline.

Perhaps the explanation is that in the Separation universe the Me 163 is in fact identical to our Me 262 and the rocket interceptor was never built.

This in turn requires some other things to change. Our Me 262 was not ready to fly under jet power until July 1942 after a protracted design process [Morgan and Weal, 1995]. A jet fighter had flown already in April 1941, the Heinkel 280, but neither it nor the Messerschmitt design got the necessary support from the Reichsluftfahrtministerium [Green, 1970]. The Heinkel design was killed outright and the Me 262 was not a priority project until 1944 or so. Apparently, in the Separation universe, key persons at RLM were more visionary. This would imply, in my mind, that Ernst Udet never became Generalluftzeugmeister or resigned from the post fairly soon. The question is who would replace him. It would have to be a person who would both have the organisational skills to run the technical office of RLM as well as the political skills to stand up to Göring. People such as these would be few and far between in the immediate pre-war Germany. Perhaps Ernst Heinkel could have been one of these, but what would he have been offered to take up this job, instead of his own industry? And would he have been impartial enough to award design contracts to Messerschmitt, one of his hardest competitors? Maybe this could have been achieved if the RLM had been organised more along the principles of the British Ministry of Aircraft Production, more focused on working together for a common cause than backstabbing each other, but this seems to have been utterly antithetical to the very soul of Nazi Germany. But, maybe things will work just by luck and accident, so that Germany has a technically skilled and visionary Generalluftzeugmeister who prioritises the development of a next generation of combat aircraft and that Germany manages to import the metals needed for the exotic alloys necessary for efficient jet engines. They would have to come via neutral countries, perhaps Sweden will increase its trade with Germany and in exchange receive more German military material. There could have been Bf 109s flying in the Swedish air force!

So, with some probability we could imagine German jet fighters actually in service by 1943. Now, what about the MiG-15 and the Sabre? In our time-line they are both second-generation jet aircraft, based on aerodynamics data collected in Germany after the war by the Allies. However, as noted above, we do not have to assume that the planes in the Separation universe match the aircraft with the same names in our timeline, so they could in fact correspond to early Soviet and US jet aircraft designs, such as the Lavochkin La-15 and the Bell P-59 Airacomet, both of which would have been outperformed by almost any German jet aircraft design.

---

Anderton, David. 1975. Jet Fighters, Phoebus Publishing, Ltd.
Carter, Paul. 1985. “The Constitutional Origins of Westly v. Simmons”. Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact (CV)10, October 1985, pp 86–96.
Christie, Agatha. 1944. Towards Zero, Collins.
Green, William. 1970. Warplanes of the Third Reich, Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Green, William. 1971. Rocket Fighter, Random House, Inc.
Morgan, Hugh and Weal, John. 1995. German Jet Aces of World War 2, Osprey Publishing, Ltd.
Priest, Christopher. 2002. The Separation, Scribner.

Tropes

“Trope” is not a word in my active vocabulary, but it may end up there now. In the literary sense it is about recurrent motifs within genres, design patterns if you will, or in other words, why too many fantasy books feel all alike.

TV Tropes is a wiki about tropes not only in television series but in increasingly more tenuously connected areas and as in all good dictionaries, you can browse for much too long, learning the use of the The Worf Effect in X-Men, how Phlebotinum can save the day and why everything happens in New York.

Foresight

All the time we make predictions of the future, many of these never come true and we forget them (until somebody points out what an idiot we were for not signing up Astrid Lindgren or the Beatles). But if you make sufficiently many predictions, some of them will of course come true, and some of these uncannily so.

I've always been struck by how similar to Ronald Reagan president Prexy in John Brunner's The Sheep Look up was, long before Reagan's ascendancy to the presidency. But even more startlingly prophetic is The Onion's satire of George W Bush, just after the 2000 elections: Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over.