Friday, December 31, 2004

Joseph Joseph Nicholas, London England UK

I want to respond in particular to Greg Benford's article, although it really consists of two distinct arguments yoked uneasily together – speculation on the technological feasibility of manned expeditions to the other plants of the solar system, and a critique of some current British space opera (or "new space opera" as it's called here, meaning harder-edged and less romantic narratives than of yore – no damsels in distress, few aliens, and lots and lots of recomplicated physical and biological concepts). The two don't really have much to do with each other, even though the technological speculation is presented as a sort-of means of realising the fictional planetary conquests.

I'll deal with the space opera comments first. (After all, they come first in the actual article.) Benford says that "The BRS (Banks/Reynolds/Stross) pole seems Libertarian/anarchist, and by Libertarianism I mean anarchism with a police force and a respect for contract law", but this seriously misreads Banks. His "Culture" series is a literal communist utopia, based on the simple realisation that a truly space-faring society would have long ago solved all its energy problems and thus have access to limitless wealth and resources. This is why there is no money in the Culture: there is no scarcity to regulate. (Or even any work, if you don't want to work – "from each according to their abilities (if they feel like it), to each according to their needs (or their greed)". Those who read carefully between the lines of The Excession will realise that the Culture is actually kept running by the AIs.)

Benford gets MacLeod wrong too. "MacLeod is the closest thing to a true classical socialist, as in The Stone Canal. But even MacLeod is all over the board. Though socialism was his earliest fancy, he experiments with multiple social structures." This comes close to confusing the author with his creations. MacLeod is a socialist; but for the purposes of the story (because otherwise there'd be no conflict to drive it forward) it is sometimes necessary for him to place capitalists centre-stage. As in The Stone Canal, the least socialist of all the novels in The Fall Revolution Quartet. (Many people were uncomfortable with the promotion of revolutionary liberation through space travel in his first novel, The Star Fraction, considering the two mutually exclusive – but it is in spirit true to the Gernsbackian notion of "man emancipated by machines", and straight out of the Marxian tradition.)

Turning now to Benford's technological speculation about what's necessary to realise the exploration (and even settlement) of the solar system, I would say that while his programme is impressively worked-out, he's addressing entirely the wrong question. The principal question to be addressed is not whether it's technologically feasible to send a manned mission to Mars (or wherever), but whether there is the political will to do so. I say this because it is only governments which are in a position to invest the sums required across the time horizons required, in the full knowledge that the entire investment might be wasted; corporations cannot. Any board of directors which advised its shareholders that it was preparing to spend squillions a year for the next umpty-ump years on a project to (say) mine the asteroids with no guarantee of a return on the investment (or any returns at all) would soon find itself replaced, and the corporation returned to its original business of selling widgets and making money. Space travel is just too expensive for anyone other than governments, which can borrow at far lower rates of interest than corporations and don't have to worry about shareholder dividends and directors' bonuses – or even making a profit. Corporations won't spend money on manned space exploration, because as far they're concerned it's money wasted.

A chorus of voices will doubtless now remind me of Burt Rutan and Spaceship One, a private corporation boldly going where the government didn't. Rutan's was indeed a very successful venture – to 100 kilometres. 100 kilometres isn't even sub-orbital, and simply demonstrates how much further corporations would have to go, and how much more would have to be spent, before they are anywhere near competing with governments. The fact that bandwagon-jumping Richard Branson wants to offer tours up to 100 kilometres in Rutan's craft only undermines the idea of private spaceflight – by demonstrating both its triviality (day trips to view the curvature of the earth) and its expensiveness (only the very rich would be able to afford it).

(Another chorus of voices – perhaps the same chorus – will doubtless embark on the familiar mantra that private enterprise is inherently leaner and more efficient than governments. I would advise anyone wishing to advance this argument with a Briton to first familiarise themselves with the history of the Conservative government's privatisation of British public corporations in the 1980s and 1990s. In almost every case, the privatised business delivered a worse service at higher cost – and in one case, the rail infrastructure, had to be taken back into public ownership because of its shambolic management and operations. QED.)

Politics is largely driven by electoral cycles, which are much shorter than the likely lengths of the envisaged voyages around the solar system – which almost by itself explains the lack of political will to fund them. There may be one or two visionaries scattered throughout government, who are prepared to argue day and night for the conquest of the high frontier (or whatever it's called these days), but they will get little leverage in comparison with those wanting results in the here and now. I'm aware that the Bush administration has agreed incremental year-on-year increases in NASA's budget with the objective of putting manned spaceflight back on the agenda, but this kind of money is inherently vulnerable to other economic factors – more tax cuts for the rich, a need to reduce the budget deficit, a desire for more and/or newer weapons for the military, whatever – and even in the absence of these factors the promised sums are nowhere near enough. How much manned spaceflight would really cost was shown by the first Bush administration's projected expedition to Mars: announced to fanfares, killed off immediately by Congress because of its gargantuan cost. In short: the era of manned spaceflight is over, for good and all, before it ever really began.

(Yes, resource depletion may provide a plausible motive. But see above, under electoral cycles: by the time any government is ready to acknowledge that resources are running out, it will be too late to do anything about the situation. And neither I nor Benford have mentioned the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, which estimates that world oil production may have already passed its peak and from here onwards energy can only become more expensive. When that happens, no one will care about going to Mars.)

On one level, this is a bit of a let-down – I discovered science fiction at about the same time as I started following the Gemini and Apollo missions, and in my boy's mind it was easy to confuse the two: to regard one as the literal transposition of the other. I imagine that lots of other people did too – but as the 1960s wore in into the 1970s, it became clear that there was never intended to be a follow-up to the Moon landings: Apollo was a propaganda stunt, dreamed up by the Kennedy administration in the aftermath of the Bays of Pigs fiasco, to put one over on the Soviet Union. And it succeeded brilliantly – at which point political interest in the whole business virtually evaporated. Imaginings of what might have been, had there been a coherent long-range programme in the first place, such as Stephen Baxter's Voyage, are largely exercises in nostalgia. (I suspect that this aborting of the near-future as it then appeared is in some ways responsible for the rise of the new space opera – adventure in the distant corners of the galaxy on its own is insufficient; it has to be given the trappings of verisimilitude, through new discoveries in biology and physics and a range of socio-political ideologies, to avoid being seen as mere wish-fulfilment.)

But on another level, I do get a little irritated with those who keep promoting manned space exploration as though it has a real future. Grow up! I want to shout at them, Face the bloody facts! Because while facing the facts may be unexciting, it really will save a great deal of disappointment later on.

But let's move on from Benford and the exploration of space – to your short piece on your various encounters with Ronald Reagan. "I'd credit the Pope with the cultural miracle that persuaded Europe that communism was a dead duck," you say, but I don't think the Pope had much input here. As a Pole, he clearly had a higher profile in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, but little actual engagement with the political process (inasmuch as there actually was then a political process in the former Eastern Bloc). On the other hand, though, and despite what the neo-cons like to claim, Star Wars defence systems had nothing to do with it either: Soviet-style communism fell because it was economically rotten, and had been for decades. Gorbachev's desire to offload the drain that the former Eastern Bloc had become stemmed in part from his recognition of this – although it's arguable (albeit counter-factual, and thus unprovable) that if there hadn't been an old guard coup in 1991, attempting to turn back the clock, there might still be a Soviet Union today.

You also refer to "the Queen of England". As a matter of tedious accuracy, there is no such person; she is queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (called the UK for short). England, itself, is merely one of three countries (the other two are Wales and Scotland) which make up Britain. (Great Britain, just for the record, consists of Britain plus the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.) I realise that these distinctions may be of little moment to a US citizen, but using England to mean Wales and Scotland risks seriously pissing off the Welsh and the Scots. It's as if we were to label US citizens as Mexicans or Canadians because Mexico and Canada were also part of North America. Or, for a better example, to describe good ole Southern boys as Yankees.

I shall say little about Iraq – chiefly because anything I do say runs the risk of being out of date almost immediately. (The second US attack on Fallujah is proceeding as I write.) From what you know of my politics, you will not be surprised to hear me say that the invasion was based on a lie; that the toppling of rulers you don't like (irrespective of their behaviour) is contrary to international law; that the neo-cons' plans for the reconstruction of Iraq (inasmuch as they actually had any plans) are a ludicrous fantasy; and that the occupation has made the Middle East more unstable, has irrevocably poisoned relations between the West and the Muslim world, and has made the West more vulnerable to terrorist attack and the world as a whole more dangerous. (QED.)

And my country, America, more brutal, more hypocritical, more arrogant, more isolate, more despised ... and more deservedly so. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

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