No Galactic Civilization for You

A recent video by Kurzgesagt asked if modern physics supplied a boundary, an absolute limit, to human expansion into the universe. The answer, apparently, is “yes:” humans cannot travel* beyond our own Local Group of galaxies, because “dark energy” propels other galactic clusters away from us at velocities too great to match. If lightspeed imposes an upper limit on spacecraft – and it must, because faster-than-light objects propagate backward in time, violating causality – we can explore our galaxy and Andromeda and a couple of dozen nearby dwarf galaxies, but no further.

The author presented this as a sad story, from the standpoint of a future “Type III Civilization” that has colonized and exploited the entire Milky Way galaxy. Permit me to say, though, that we twenty-first-century primitives need not mourn, because even creating a galaxy-spanning civilization probably lies beyond humans' capacity. We may develop the means, but I doubt we will ever have the motives to colonize an entire galaxy, let alone the rest of our Local Group.

Sci-fi writers, and historians, have adduced several possible motives for interstellar colonization, none of which seems likely to push us all the way through the Milky Way (100 billion star systems, remember) except perhaps in a distant, post-human future. Let us look in this post at one of them: population growth.

Overpopulation sounds like a reasonable motive for extra-solar colonization, especially when one realizes how rapidly human population has grown in the past couple of centuries – from one billion people in 1800 to more than seven billion today. SF writers like Harry Harrison and Larry Niven, and nonfiction authors like Paul Ehrlich, opined in the 1960s and '70s that the global population was headed for the 20 or 30 billion mark, and that war and famine would necessarily result. Since then, however, human fertility rates have declined, not for Malthusian reasons but as a result of economic growth in poor countries. In a modernizing, industrializing country, it makes more economic sense to have fewer children and educate them than it does to have many untrained children to work in the fields or mines. Smaller families also make more practical sense when access to modern medicine relieves couples of the need for “replacements” for those who die, and when birth control gives women more reliable control over their own fertility.

We have no reliable way of predicting fertility rates in the future, but we can speculate based on historical evidence from the last few thousand years. On that basis high population growth looks more like an anomaly than an inevitable trend. It usually resulted from innovations in food production and medicine, like the adoption of American crops in Europe and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the development of medical antisepsis and antibiotics in the early twentieth century, and the “Green Revolution” in agriculture later in that century. More common is slow growth or stasis,** punctuated by crashes that wipe out several centuries of growth, like the epidemics that beset the early-modern Americas. I think it unlikely that we'll have another pandemic on the scale of the Black Death, but I do note that there are quite a few industrial countries that are losing population to parents' practical economic decisions: Japan, Russia (though poor health is also to blame there), and much of western Europe. Growth is leveling off in formerly underdeveloped nations like India and China. Within the next century, I suspect that the world's demographic growth rate will regress to the historical norm: slow to nonexistent. (The “hockey stick” of demographic growth will, in short, prove part of a sigmoid curve.)

In the longer term, we may see occasional population spurts like those mentioned above, but human historical trends and technological advances both militate against sustained high growth. Short-term growth episodes may eventually leave planet Earth with 20 or 30 billion people, but not for several more centuries. By then, humans should have found ways to house those people here on Earth: constructing denser and more livable cities, environmentally re-engineering desert or tundra for human settlement, and/or building artificial islands and reclaiming land from the sea. Further forward in the future, we will probably find ways to render some of the other worlds in our Solar System, like Venus and Mars, inhabitable by human beings.***

Or, by then, more imminent disasters than population growth will have destroyed us and our works. More on those in another post.

* Technically, spacecraft can travel outside the Local Group, but they cannot reach other galactic clusters – only empty intergalactic space.

** In medieval and early-modern Europe, for instance, any multi-generational population growth at all was considered high.

*** This assumes that space travel becomes as inexpensive in the future as trans-oceanic travel became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the heyday of global travel and colonization.

Them Bones: The Great Old Ones

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

Them Bones, 40-41, 44-46, 65-69:

After spending a few days in Took-His-Time's village, Madison Leake decides it will make a good place to wait for his fellow time travelers, and settles in for a long stay. He hides his carbine, trades in his uniform for a breechcloth, and begins accompanying Took on his fishing trips to the river. During one of these, Took, using a fishing spear tipped with three copper barbs, manages to kill a giant river creature of some kind. Canoemen bring the body ashore: it is a manatee, broad-flippered and flat-tailed, a lily pad still drooping from its bristled mouth. (Nice touch, that.) Madison notes that manatees had nearly gone extinct in his time, even before the nuclear war. Back in the Mississippian era, they are plentiful.

Waldrop identifies himself as a science fiction writer, but many of his stories don't seem to match the genre's archetypes; almost none feature space travelers, galactic empires, or aliens. Like mainstream SF writers, however, Waldrop knows how to evoke what the fans call “a sense of wonder,” in this case the wonderment one feels at seeing the dead come back to life. The homely details that Waldrop provides about manatees and passenger pigeons, and for that matter the awkward birds in his famous story “The Ugly Chickens,” make these lost creatures resonate with our senses, and impart life to them. Many's the story written about nostalgia, about longing for a vanished past, but few are the authors who can make us nostalgic for vanished species.

The novel returns to this theme a couple of chapters on, when winter arrives in northeastern Louisiana, and with it the first snow, “tick-tick[ing]” (65) on the walls of the huts, blanketing the town. Hamboon Bokulla and Dreaming Killer come to Took's house early that morning with bad news, though Leake doesn't understand what they're saying in such rapid-fire fashion. He nonetheless agrees to accompany the three men to the northwest, past frozen pools and snow-covered trees, four kilometers from his home village. The quartet eventually arrive at a small farming hamlet whose houses and fields have been torn up by something unseen. Took confers with the villagers, then he and Madison and their compadres follow a huge set of footprints to the west.

The group reaches the cause of the disturbance: “A mountain made of hair,” twelve feet high, with protruding tusks and trunk, “tar-drop eyes” (68), and a trumpeting call like a giant tuba. Took addresses the “old one” (67), and bids him depart, lest he capture its spirit with the pipestone he carries. (Clearly, pipes represent powerful items, presumably because they bridge the earthly and spiritual realms.) The creature regards Took and Leake with an enigmatic expression, perhaps weariness, then, very slowly, heads off to the west.

This scene requires a bit of license on Waldrop's part, as we have no evidence that wooly mammoths survived in North America, or anywhere else, into the fourteenth century. Dreaming Killer does say of the colossus “Not many of those left,” but there probably shouldn't be any. On the other hand, Waldrop is beginning to indicate that there are some elements of his Mississippian setting that differentiate it from the real thing, such as pipestone makers that know Greek, and (as we shall see) eccentric tornadoes.

Coming next: Did someone say "eccentric tornadoes"?

Anomalies Accumulate, Storm Clouds Congregate

Them Bones, 47-49, 60-63

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

Back in the 1929 storyline, some new crew members arrive at the mounds. Their leader, Dr. Jameson, is “the color of dust” (48) – light brown eyes, hat, and clothes. He examines the horse bones and cartridge that Bessie and Kincaid discovered, suggests the former might have appeared in a very late Mississippian site, but then concludes the whole anomaly is “a hoax” (48). Despite his limited imagination and dusty appearance, Jameson appears in this chapter to add some color and tension. He says he'll need a drink, which reminds readers that Prohibition is underway and strong drink hard to come by; he reminds Bessie of his “role model,” Roy Andrews, which lets Waldrop mention Andrews's famous fossil dinosaur eggs and evoke the theme of extinction; and he establishes a time limit on the excavation, noting it has been raining upriver for two days. The mounds are on the floodplain, and everyone still remembers the great Flood of '27.

The weather becomes more ominous when we rejoin Bessie and company later in the day, a hot and humid day with clouds piling up to the north. Work has resumed at the site, and Washington and the other diggers have started a “test trench” projecting into the base of the large mound. Bessie sketches the excavation, drawing a grid over the landscape while the work crew reifies that grid with trenches “straight as a ruler” (61). She reflects how long it took the Coles-Creek-era Mississippians to build the mounds, digging up dirt with hoes and carrying it in baskets. Even in discussing the twentieth century Waldrop never lets us stray too far from the past.

Kincaid, Jamison, and Bessie pause late in the day for water. The digging crew have begun a new trench while other workers sift dirt through screens. The male archaeologists have found no signs of an intrusion or other anomalies. Bessie, who has been able to take in the larger picture, has spotted a new peculiarity: the large compound mound consists of two different kinds of dirt, which means that the base was built at one time and the conical second level at another. That, and the horse bones and cartridge in the small mound, and the anomalous siting of the two mounds on the plain rather than the nearby bluff, deepen the mystery.

And the tension mounts as well when, at chapter's end, a wind blows through the camp, accompanied by the sound of thunder. Bessie and the workers are relieved, but the readers realize they shouldn't be – a storm is coming. Good for Waldrop for taking what might have been a dusty archaeological procedural and adding a bit of external drama to it. Though there's already enough mystery in the mounds to create dramatic tension: who or what built the later section of the larger mound, and whose horse was that anyway?

Coming next: We meet the Great Old One, and perhaps a river manatee or two.

Image above is of Roy Chapman Andrews, ca. 1925, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Microgames and Microworlds

One of the attractions of microgames, as I noted in my entry on Ogre, was their creation of internally-consistent little worlds for the players. Ogre and its sequel, GEV (Microgame 8), created a future in which tanks (and infantry, and armored hovercraft) still dominated land warfare, giving way only to a bigger and better armored vehicle, the cybertank. Invasion of the Air Eaters (Microgame 12), and its deluxe sequel, Air Eaters Strike Back, imagined a near-future Earth united against an exterminatory alien menace, and a victorious human civilization fighting a second invasion 100 years hence. Something in this speculative world spoke to me: I've written an essay on Invasion, as well as a write-up on one of the scenarios from its sequel. Further from home, Chitin (#2) envisioned an alien world where giant, semi-intelligent insects battled one another for food. Rivets (#5) created a similar conflict with a more tongue-in-cheek premise: unintelligent, cartoonish robots fought one another on behalf of automated factories in a future without humans.* And One World, a micro-mini-game included in a two-for-one pack (#14), featured two immobile, Buddha-like gods flinging their children at one another, in the form of blades and clouds and stones. It was the first time my brother and I had encountered something like a modern Euro-game, with an abstract fantasy setting joined to a simple rules system.

In a few cases, a microgame's setting or design proved more interesting than the associated game. This was particularly true of Holy War (#13), designed by Lyn Willis, which took place in a pocket universe created by an intelligent cloud-being named Amtik. Amtik's universe evolved faster than he** could control it, developing stars, planets, life, intelligence, and an interstellar civilization, the Eltani, within a few days. Just as Amtik began deciding to switch off the experiment, the Eltani discovered his sensor ducts, and thus the existence of “God.” This divided them into two warring factions. One, the Holy Band, wanted to ask Amtik not to turn off the universe; the other, the Sunthrowers, wanted to attack him by flinging a star into his ducts. The game simulated the two factions' interstellar war, in which they used fleets of starships to fight one another and shepherd their specialty craft – Pressorships and Emissaries of Prayer – to Amtik's sensor ducts. The universe and its star systems appeared on an innovative map that simulated three dimensions: a grid of large hexes showed the X and Y axes, and a “stack” of smaller hexagons within each larger hex represented the vertical. The rule book also included several pages of notes listing the many types of ships in the game's universe – some created the warp lines that allowed FTL travel, some gave “luck” on die roles, etc. – along with their Eltani names. In gaming terms, Holy War had a lot of appealing “chrome” for its size and price. I never got around to playing the thing, however, and I have read only mixed reviews of actual game play. Perhaps I will give it a try anyway, one of these days.***

Some of the microgames' worlds lacked appeal, and some of the games seemed thrown-together. Olympica (#7) featured a future battle on Mars between U.N. Space marines and slaves of a self-aware computer network, the “Webbies,” who could tunnel under the battlefield. Perhaps the premise appealed to some, but the game didn't do much with it. Those who actually played Olympica (this was part of my “owned-but-never-played” pile) note it was imbalanced in favor of the U.N. Black Hole (#10) pitted two mining companies against one another for control of an asteroid with an embedded black hole, which mainly provided an excuse for a wrap-around battlefield feature. Hot Spot (#15) had two armies of light infantry dueling on the surface of a molten planet, seeking control of large, floating stone platforms called “crustals” - a gimmick that didn't add much to the game's rather generic rules and dynamics. Annihilator (part of #14) was a low-quality rip-off of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker. Dimension Demons (#17) I never purchased or played, but reviewers said it was pretty bad.

Most of the Microgames had a science-fictional or science-fantasy theme, but several of the classics were pure fantasy, notably Melee (#3), Wizard (#6), and Lords of Underearth (#18). At least two of these led to bigger and better things, and all deserve a separate blog entry of their own.

* My brother and I owned Rivets but never played it, and I suspect we would have found it boring. One had to “program” the robots to attack specific enemies, which in practice meant they often failed to find the right target and had to go back to the factory for reprogramming.

** Or she. Amtik's gender was never clearly established.

*** There was apparently an episode of Futurama with a vaguely similar theme, though a smaller scale.

(Above images via http://ixians.blogspot.com/2011/01/holy-war.html and boardgamegeek.com, respectively.)

In the Realm of the Three-Dollar Cybertank: Metagaming's OGRE

For sci-fi fans of a certain age (middle age), the word “ogre” conjures at least one very specific memory: a pocket-sized game containing a two-color folding map, a sheet of flimsy playing counters, and a thin rulebook on whose cover a giant war machine prepared to crush four tanks and hovercraft. Ogre, the first of a series of small, light wargames manufactured by now-defunct Metagaming Concepts, had a price tag ($2.95) low enough to appeal to geeky kids with small allowances.* These microgames had three distinct features: crude, cheap components, a sci-fi or fantasy theme, and a gimmick or special feature adorning their otherwise straightforward move-and-fight rules. Ogre's gimmick was the giant machine featured on the cover: an artificially-intelligent giant tank, the "Ogre" of the title. Each of these cybertanks had, instead of two or three numbers indicating its capabilities, an entire “character sheet” listing the missiles, nuclear cannons, and anti-personnel weapons it carried and how much damage its massive treads had taken. In the game's basic scenario, one player took the role of one of these behemoths, and the other deployed a multi-unit force of ordinary tanks, artillery, armored hovercraft (or GEVs), and infantry, all trying to stop the Ogre from destroying their command center.

Compared to the conventional units in the game, Ogres were nearly indestructible. Every successful “hit” in combat destroyed or at least disabled a regular tank or GEV, but only knocked off one of the Ogre's weapons or injured its treads. Players formed many different strategies to stop the Ogre before it stomped their command center: sweeping the battlefield with immobile but powerful howitzers, swarming the Ogre with fast and fragile GEVs, targeting the cybertank's treads. No method was foolproof, if only because the Ogre player had the advantage of force concentration – having only one unit to protect and maneuver. This wasn't an obvious advantage to my brother and I when we started playing Ogre in 1981; we just thought a giant robot tank with its own character sheet was cool.

Ogre not only launched the Microgames series, it also jump-started the career of its designer, Steve Jackson, who took Ogre with him when he left Metagaming to start his own company. Steve Jackson Games also assumed the rights to GEV, the inevitable sequel game, which added new units (like light tanks and mobile howitzers), more complex terrain, and more scenarios. Some players, myself among them, considered GEV the superior game, though both remain playable. Thereafter, alas, SJG began layering complexities upon a good, simple idea: creating another sequel, Battlesuit, that provided overly-complex rules for infantry-level combat; licensing Ogre miniatures and miniatures rules; and bringing out a Deluxe edition in the late '90s that retailed for about $100. Your Humble Narrator had bailed on the franchise by then. But Ogre had done its job: persuading young sci-fi geeks that a simple game could have strategic depth, and that it could create an imaginative little world of its own.

*My brother and I each got $2.50 a week in the early '80s, which if we pooled it together would pay for a microgame or a D&D module.

The Villages of the Sun

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

Modern Greek, which Madison Leake learned in the Cyprus War, was not a common language in pre-Columbian America, and by "not common" I mean "unheard of." Hearing it spoken by a southeastern Indian almost certainly shocked Mr. Leake. The speaker, who introduces himself as Took-His-Time (a reference to his mother's difficult labor), tells Madison that he learned Greek from a group called the Traders. Waldrop leaves their identity a mystery for the time being. Took notes, with no signs of modesty, that he and his countrymen are fairly sure Madison isn't either a Trader or a local Indian because his “dong isn't whacked,” and circumcision is the norm for both groups. Took's fellow townspeople, meanwhile, are less interested in the newcomer than in his horse, and are delighted when the gelding takes a nibble from an edible plant.

Having assured himself that Madison isn't dangerous, just lost, Took brings the visitor home for dinner. His pregnant wife Sunflower is preparing a corn-and-meat stew, using heated clay balls to boil the water. This is a nice touch; I know of no other authors who give much thought to the difficulty of cooking with ceramics. The house is full of intricately carved tobacco pipes, and when Madison asks if his host made them, Took replies bashfully “They say I do.” Another nice touch: boasting had its place in Native American societies, but self-deprecating modesty was more common.

Walking around the town before dinner, Took-His-Time introduces Madison and the readers to the local human landscape. The town has a plaza and a temple mound, where Sun Man (the principal chief) lives. Took mentions that social rules prevent Sun Man from passing his title to his lineal successors, an observation Waldrop probably took from the eighteenth-century French colonist Antoine Le Page du Pratz. Pratz was describing the culture of the Natchez Indians, whom we long assumed were the last Mississippian chiefdom, but whom we now suspect were a post-colonial Indian society in Mississippian drag. Since, however, we don't know how inheritance rules worked among medieval Mississippians, Pratz is as good a source as any.

During the tour Took tells Madison that the local villages all worship the Sun and the Woodpecker, whose image adorns their temples. They form a loose confederation which alternately trades and fights with the “Huastecas” west of the Mississippi River. In this continuum the Huastecas (the Aztecs, I presume) apparently expanded earlier and farther north than they did in our own time. All of these Native peoples trade locally-made “gewgaws and doodads” with the Traders, receiving textiles and metal wares in exchange. Took calls the latter “things we're too lazy to make for ourselves,” preserving his people's collective ego by side-stepping their lack of weaving or metallurgical skills.

One of the locals, whom Took calls Hamboon Bokulla, has a heavily tattooed face and hands. He is the leader of the Buzzard Cult, a group of death worshipers who have recently appeared in the Sun Villages. Robert Silverberg, in his writings on the Mound Builders – which I suspect were Waldrop's source for much of the book – notes that there is archaeological evidence for the emergence of such a cult late in the Mississippian era. Silverberg also provided the name “Bokulla,” a primitive hero from a nineteenth-century fantasy novel about the Mound-Builders. (“Hamboon” probably comes from “Hambone,” as I suspect Waldrop liked the idea of a southeastern Indian leader with a folksy Southern name.) Took observes that the Buzzard Cultist do not worship the sun-deity or the Woodpecker. Madison asks his host what he believes in. “I believe supper's ready.”

There may be more historically accurate Native American characters in fiction, but I don't think there are any more agreeable ones.

Coming next: Bessie, Kincaid, and the mysterious mounds.
 

The SFF Year in Review: 2015

Prolific SFF writer Tanith Lee left our mortal plane, at age 67. Linda Nagata completed her Red trilogy, demonstrating that it is still possible to write good military science fiction, provided one writes an actual story rather than erotica about ordnance. Adam Rakunas published a wonderfully competent first sf novel, with only one unbelievable element: the survival of labor unions past the twenty-first century. Alternate history and Philip K. Dick fans were treated to a new Folio Books edition of Man in the High Castle and an Amazon Prime tv series on same. The Nazis certainly were unpleasant fellows! Chris-Rachael Oselund wowed the Geek-o-sphere with her Dune Sandworm spice bread recipe. Quoth Stilgar, "Mmm! Shai-Hulud!" The oxymoronically-named Final Fantasy VII made it to iOS, so one can now play the RPG classic on a phone. Mad Max: Fury Road angered “men's rights” advocates (that's a euphemism for “assholes”) by including some competent female characters. Avengers: Ultron evoked no strong emotions whatever. The long-awaited Sandman movie did not materialize. The Sad/Rabid Puppies' effort to sabotage the Hugo Awards resulted in No Award in several categories. Of the second season of True Detective, we shall not speak, except perhaps in curses. Jessica Jones was awesome, but dark, dark, dark. The scariest super-villains are the unexceptional ones. Those seeking lighter fare found much charm and wit in Otherspace, an updated (and very funny) American version of Red Dwarf. The Anthropocene still grinds on toward its messy, fatal terminus, but in his meticulously-researched guidebook to our worst-case-scenario future, Frank Landis predicted that humanity would survive. Our current civilization - well, not so much. And in her much-hoped-for return to blogging, Ana Mardoll showed that if we do intend to preserve some part of our current civilization, it shouldn't include C.S. Lewis, because he's a wanker.

Oh, and there was some sort of Star Wars or Star Trek movie, too. Star Something, anyway.