political commentary

One of the things I love about Sf is the idea of a future history. Bob Heinlein (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein) was about the first to think of it that way. In the previous quote from Stross, he sums up are very interesting perspective on current events from a slightly future perspective. It is interesting to speculate on what might be. By looking at the possibilities, we can perhaps avoid some disasters. But then, I am an optimist.

Halting State, Charles Stross

"... And what we're facing is a real headache -- a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon."

Who is we? That's the question you're asking yourself...

" 'We, ' for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in - call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People's Republic of China, and India. America isn't in play -- they've only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we setting up the convergence criteria for Russian ascension to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date, and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. It's exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure -- Europe's -- is in bette shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-modern relatively recently, so their infrastructure is new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So, there's this constant jockeying for position between the three hyper powers while the USA takes time out..."

Halting State, Charles Stross

speaking of COEs:

"Chris and Hackman are trying to outasshole each other." Her lips underscore the dry disapproval of her tone. "When they finish posturing, the lawyers will broker a deal, and the winner gets to dry-hump the loser's leg."

p. 139

Halting State, Charles Stross

faeco-ventilatory intersection

p. 170

LOL!

Halting State, Charles Stross

It's like that first alcoholics anonymous meeting: "Hi, my name is Jack. And I have a code problem."

You're a grown-up, these days. You don't wear a kamikaze pilot's rising sun headband and a tee-shirt that screams DEBUG THIS! and you don't spend your weekends competing in extreme programming slams at a windy campsite in Frankfurt, but it's generally difficult for you to use any machine that doesn't have at least one compiler installed: In fact, you had to stick Python on your phone before you even opened it's address book because not being able to brainwash it left you feeling handicapped, like you were a passenger instead of a pilot. In another age you would have been a railway mechanic or a grease monkey crawling over the spark plugs of a DC-3. This is what you are, and the sad fact is, they can put the code monkey in a suit, but they can't take the code out of the monkey.

p. 163

Halting State, Charles Stross

black-nets - anti-social networking sites

p. 155

What a concept - sites for the underworld. 

off topic

But very interesting is a blog on life in Japan by my friend Jay Melton.

If you are interested in life here, check out
http://blog.jklmelton.net

Halting State, Charles Stross

The sky turns deep blue, the world freezes, and a progress bar marches slowly across it from horizon to horizon. Ethereal runes written in aurorae six hundred kilometers high scrawl across the heavens, UPDATING REALITY, and for a moment your skin crawls with superstitious dread. Someday we're all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday everyone is going to live their lives out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow. You see it coming, slamming towards you out of the future, like the empty white static that is all anyone has ever heard from beyond the stars: a Final Solution to the human condition, an answer to the Fermi paradox, lights on at home and all the windows tightly shuttered. Because it's a thing of beauty,  the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you're a sucker for it: Isn't storytelling what being human is all about?

p. 104

I love the UPDATING REALITY - sort of like the election cmpaign. %^)

Halting State, Charles Stross

It's funny how it takes game space to bring out the poet in you. And it's even funnier how you're embarrassed about letting it show.

p. 103

Blogging these quotes

I read a lot and I read mostly SF and fantasy. I should read more other stuff, but that's the way it is. However, one thing I notice about some of my favorite authors is that they have a way of putting things that seems just right. Often, they can take a scientific concept and put it in a real world context, at least real in the speculative world the author is creating. I often say I want to write these down and so here is the place I am doing it.

One of the reasons I am blogging these quotes is to help me remember them. I think that the somatic modality of typing them into the computer will help me remember them. I hope so. Things slip out of the memory so easily these days. I guess they always did, but now I worry more about it as I get older.

And then again, maybe this is just an effort to put a little discipline into my writing.

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

WHATEVER YOU ARE, BE A GOOD ONE  [seen on a packpack]

p. 406

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

A failure to understand social webbing at an emotional level, Jacobson had found, and so a lack of those emotional restraints that embedding within such webbing requires. But Carl didn't know a single thirteen ho hadn't laughed like a fast-food clown construct when they read those lines. We understand, he told Zooly one drinken night. Fingers snapped out one by one, enumerating, like stabbing implements, finally the blade of a hand. Nationalism. Tribalism. Politics. Religion. Fucking soccer, for Christ's sake. Pacing her apartment living room, furious, like something caged. How could you not understand dynamics that fucking simplistic. It's the rest of you people who don't understand what makes you tick at an emotional fucking level.

p. 273

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

"See once upon a time, " Yavuz was saying, "fear was a unifying force. Back then,  you could make a country string with xenophobia. That's the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can't live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependance and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge's terms a non-adaptive trait.'

p. 248

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead.

p. 201

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

Curtailment of freedom is a powerful social tool and must be deployed as such, with wisdom and restraint. It is therefore vital to distinguish the genuine and the quite complex parameters of what is socially necessary, and the simplistic and emotive demands of a growing popular hysteria. Failure to make this distinction is likely to have unattractive consequences.

- Jacobsen Report

August 2091

p. 107

Introduction

This is the start of a blog to record quotes from things I am reading, and perhaps some thoughs that spring from those quotes.