Independece Day II
February 25th, 2004 - 7:48 am
Here’s a bit of a follow-up to a debunked story about a “secret Pentagon report” outlining a global warming doomsday scenario (second item in John McCaslin’s column today; the first one is also very interesting).
Check out this tidbit:
“As with past national security assessments, the Department of Defense was presented with a worst-case scenario, not the likely future,” he says. “The Pentagon naturally believes it has to research any possible threat
Its probably H G Wells, I mean, you think that the lack of flu vaccine was a coincidence? The more poeple sneezing, the more available as soldiers in the interplanetary war.
I may have to re-read Footfall. When I read it in High School, I was too much of a newbie to recognize the Tuckerized sci-fi writers.
Tuckerized? What dat mean?
I thought Footfall was quite good. Lucifer’s Hammer was as good, but it lacked the God-knocking-on-the-door prose describing Orion.
Oh, man, I haven’t read those since I was actually in high school. I might need to take a quick trip to the bookstore.
Also, read Pournelle/Niven’s The Mote in God’s Eye for some of the issues that will come up in an alien invasion. In that book we basically encounter them first, but we get our butts kicked because we think that aliens would react like humans would.
Ah, a war they’d actually call me up for (Orbital analysts haven’t been in demand for the WoT).
I can give you an example. If in the coming Batman movie, there was a mention of “the Kane Building” or “Finger Street” (i.e., the names of Batman’s creators), it would be a Tuckerization.
The term comes from a sci-fi writer who liked to use the names of his friends for characters in his stories, as an in-joke.
“Smallville” does this often. Minor characters named Whitney, Swan, and Hamilton are nods to former Superman writers and artists (Whitney Ellsworth, Edmund Hamilton, and Curt Swan).
I highly recommend the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The four book trilogy explains it all fairly well. personal favorite -The Restaurant at the end of the Universe.
I’ll ask them in June, when they’re in town. They might decline to answer, of course…
*g*
Of course, they could always try out Greg Bear’s “The Forge of God” for a snappy scenario.
“General, aliens have arrived and are going to blow up the Earth.”
“OK. What can we do about it?”
“F*** all, sir.”
Niven and Pounelle went the other way. Rather than use the names of people they knew, they changed the names and made friends into characters. Footfall goes further because the authors themselves are in it.
I love Pournelle’s Sparta series. Great sci-fi, great military ficition.
I do believe that P & N are working on a new collaboration.
Hi Karl!
I’d like to suppose we have plans for an asteroid strike — whether directed by aliens or natural bad luck. But since we don’t even have tornado shelters in most urban areas of Texas, I doubt that anyone is making provision for the more unlikely hazard.
In fact, the lack of “civil defense” type preparations — shelters, cots, blankets, canned food, drums of drinking water, etc — seems to me to be a major hole in the WoT planning. An attack on rail or truck transport which might cause the several-day-long hiatus that 9-11 caused air-traffic would SERIOUSLY disrupt … stuff. Y’know. Thingeee. (Don’t listen to me, don’t take me seriously, don’t take this as a suggestion, the foolish infidel yankee is not offering any viable tactical advice, no indeed…)
TO: Stephen Green
RE: Pentago Planning
“It ain’t train’n, if it ain’t rain’n.” — US Army NCO
That’s, pretty much what the Army thinks of the weather; the harsher, the better.
RE: Contingency Planning
“I’d pay good money to read the “alien invasion” defense plan. Wonder if they got Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle to write it?” — Stephen Green
If any of them read Footfall, I’ll wager there are some people like the think-tank described in there, albeit not Niven and Pournelle. Or maybe they’re irregular consultants.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
As I remembered…Here is Aerospace Imagineering’s rendering of the Orion ship MICHAEL from Footfall.
Wild, ain’t it!
Well, from corresponding with jerryp for over a decade, he and Niven have been on the outs with the Whitehouse since Bush I.
They were seriously tight with Reagan (Pournelle’s wife was the first to suggest to him that he go into politics!), which had a LOT to do with him following a strategy of bankrupting the Soviet Union via ratcheting up the technology race (detractors don’t get it that SDI didn’t even have to work, at least not soon, to have it’s successfully intended effect).
The closest to an ‘in’ they’ve had with either of the Bushes was through Quayle during the first Bush admin, and Jerry’s since been ‘read out’ of the GOP by the neocons (not by name, but he’s considered a paleocon, and has no direct access. But .gov domains have appeared in his server logs!
Google up ‘the strategy of technology’ (available for free somewhere within the bowels of jerrypournelle.com) to read about how to defeat enemies in a cold war. They still pass photocopied editions around the War Colleges.
In other Pournelle military SF news, the long-awaited conclusion to the Janissiaries series is in the works, with Eric Flint (who is paleo not a conservative) as co-author.
Since no one answered this: “Tuckerized? What dat mean?”
One of the founders of sf fandom, Bob Tucker, who was doing focal point fanzines back in the Thirties, is still active as his health allows today, and has been continuously active as a fan all the years in between, also wrote many novels, both sf, and mysteries, under his legal name of “Wilson Tucker,” most of which were published between the late Fifties and mid-Seventies; most are quite good, some excellent (The Lincoln Hunters was Hugo-nominated, for example).
Bob made a practice, when editors didn’t stomp on him for trying, of using well-known (for a value of “known to the few hundred people who constituted active science fiction fandom”) fans’ names for minor characters in his stories.
Strictly speaking, doing the same for pros is not “Tuckerizing,” but since the universe of sf fandom, and its interaction with the Rest Of The World, has changed substantially since the Seventies, language changes as well. Besides, most of y’all wouldn’t recognize the Tuckerized names in the first place, which was pretty much the point.
“Fallen Angels,” speaking of the Dr. Dr., is a more recent example of a work that crossed over into outright “faan fiction,” fiction about (actual or imaginery) fans.
Fanac.org is a useful starting place if you have further interest in the history of sf fandom.
http://tvh.rjwest.com/archives/003988.html
I believe it was Greenpeace that was putting out a “secret Pentagon report” on global warming… Now for a fact-check……