tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17379803211585852542024-03-16T03:19:27.112-04:00Acts of Minor TreasonPhoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.comBlogger1426125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-70964712933685175812018-01-17T16:58:00.000-05:002018-01-17T21:55:03.255-05:00Short SF Review #25: To Bring Down the Steel<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>"To Bring </i>Down<i> the Steel," by Doug Beason</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Appeared in </i>Analog Science Fiction and Fact<i>, October 1993</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">If only our laws weren't so damned intertwined, tied up in self-serving interests; if only things were simpler. Things had been going downhill for years, and it seemed there were only two paths for the nation to follow: we'd either suffocate in the growing heap of conflicting laws, or we'd start over -- wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In retrospect the 1990s were one weird-as-hell time, and not only because I was around to experience them. In the 1990s, the twentieth century as it had been understood up to then fell apart, just like <b>that</b>. The Soviet Union was gone, the Cold War had ended, and people all over were left saying to themselves "well, shit... <i>now</i> what do we do?" At least that's how it feels in retrospect. In the West, the 1990s brought with them a triumphalist 1950s-flavoured optimism, and even though so many of its possibilities were left unrealized, at least those possibilities <i>existed</i>. Politically, the end of the Cold War made the United States a global hegemon, and it's only now, almost thirty years later, that the cracks in its dominance are becoming too large to ignore. At the time, what the US said went, and the world was essentially Washington's to reshape.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Science fiction couldn't <b>not</b> be affected by any of this. Despite what some people would have you think, all art is political, and the implications of a unipolar world -- whether included consciously or unconsciously -- influenced what was written. For me, science fiction of the 1990s is a tantalizing bridge between the present and the past: old enough that it can feel slightly out of sync with the world I know, but recent enough that I can still hear it echoing. Thanks to a trove of 1990s <i>Analog</i>s I came upon the other day, I've had another chance to listen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Doug Beason's "To Bring <i>Down</i> the Steel" is a story you may never have heard of; according to ISFDB, its sole appearance was in the October '93 <i>Analog</i>, a slim volume with its cover dedicated to Grant Callin's "The Carhart Shale," which itself is a more interesting read now that it can be put next to <i>The Martian</i>. It's also one of the few stories I've encountered that has italics in its title.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the not-too-distant future, a space mining corporation named... *sigh* ...<i>MiningCorp</i> is in the business of exploiting asteroids. As the story begins, MiningCorp has delivered five two-kilometre asteroids into various Earth orbits, but is missing the vital breakthroughs that would allow economic exploitation of the asteroids' resources in space. Instead, the company has hit upon a plan to get the rocks down to Earth safely: by encasing them in vacuum spheres that, thanks to the force of external air pressure, would be essentially buoyant when close to Earth sea level. The plan is for these sealed-up asteroids to be delivered to the Sahara Desert, where they would then be mined, but MiningCorp has a problem; the government of the Saharan Hegemony is upping its landing fees and demanding a 100% increase in mining royalties.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Stu Mendez is MiningCorp's man in orbit, and the story is told through his first-person perspective. In a conference call with his boss, a company lawyer, and a suit from the State Department, Mendez asks why the asteroid can't be landed in an American desert, and is reminded that "all the legislation that's paralyzing the mining industry... so many contradictory laws in our country that it's hard to do <i>anything</i>" say it can't. Instead the State Department orders MiningCorp to station the asteroid above the Saharan Hegemony's capital, with the demand that it stick to the original numbers. With the government also tapping all of MiningCorp's private lines, Mendez isn't able to ask his boss directly what he's meant to do... but he figures it out anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The sphere is completed; the retrorockets are ignited; the encased asteroid is eased out of orbit on a long path that will take it over North America, over the Atlantic, out to the Sahara. But the next set of retrorockets fire too soon, and instead the asteroid stops descending over the Appalachians and drifting straight toward Washington. It ends up directly over the United States Capitol, in fact, for maximum symbolism. Mendez's threat is clear -- clear enough that I think it's worth quoting here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">"...Congress, the executive branch, and I guess the judicial branch had better hurry and clear up this regulatory constipation that's strangling our nation. In two days, if the problem isn't fixed, that rock is going to crush Washington DC. There's too much at stake for you to be arguing about this. The only way that rock is going to move is if your country gets its butt in gear and starts getting serious about being competitive again."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The blue circle is two kilometres in diameter, centred on the US Capitol. This was generated by the Google Maps radius tool at <a href="http://obeattie.github.io/gmaps-radius/">obeattie.github.io/gmaps-radius/</a></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">With his threat made, Mendez orders the US government to repeal seven hundred and thirty-eight laws -- described only as "every one of them senseless, every one nearly overturned in Congress but tabled because of pork-politics" -- and I can't help but be reminded of how so many legislators today think things like net neutrality, Medicare, or the numberless programs being crushed by the latest trainwreck of a tax bill are "senseless." The writer reminds us that Mendez isn't a <i>bad guy</i>, really; hell, he even reminds them to evacuate the District of Columbia, because he really has no plan to keep from crushing the government into powder. "But even with a million metric tons of rock dropping onto their lap," he says, "do you <i>really</i> think that will give them enough incentive to turn the country around?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The story ends with two news clippings -- one that, between confirming that MiningCorp got everything it wanted, makes a "Zero Crime Rate in Nation's Capital For Second Straight Month!" boast that <i>really</i> does not look good -- just for starters, consider the consequences being suffered by the evacuated population of Washington, for example, which was 595,000 in 1993, and who haven't been able to go home</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> -- and one that establishes that the US is now using the vacuum spheres as weapons against "an undisclosed foreign country," because that what's the use of that sweet, sweet hegemony without making the entire world serve you? For me, though, what the story <i>really</i> ended with was an exceptionally bad taste in my mouth, and the lesson "if terrorism will enrich you, you should do it, and if you have a power that others lack, you should force other people to do your bidding."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'm confident that's not the author's own reading of the story, but that's the thing with stories, as with anything else -- you can't put vacuum spheres around a story. Politics always find their way in, and what's perfectly straightforward and normal and unremarkable to one person can very easily be horrifying to another. As a story, "To Bring <i>Down</i> the Steel" is shot through with the sort of politics that continue to dominate in the right wing today; it even has the same knee-jerk recognition of the environment as a good thing, <i>I guess</i>, before hitting the whole "<b>we need to stop STRANGLING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT</b>" button again and again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In talking to a friend about this story, she remarked that it was something that could never have been written after 9/11. I agree with that assessment, but want to go a bit beyond it as well -- this is a story that, I think, could <b>only</b> have been written in the 1990s. Like I said, it was one weird-as-hell time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana"; font-weight: bold;">Previous Short SF Reviews:</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#24: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2016/06/short-sf-review-24-perspectives.html">"Perspectives" (W.R. Thompson)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#23: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/04/short-sf-review-23-ministry-of-space.html">"Ministry of Space" (Warren Ellis, <i>et al</i>)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#22: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/02/short-sf-review-22-when-planets-collide.html">"When Planets Collide" (Gold Key Comics)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#21: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/12/short-sf-review-21-you-source-of-tears.html">"You Source of Tears" (Andrew Barton)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#20: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/11/short-sf-review-20-helix.html">"The Helix" (Gerard Rejskind)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#19: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/10/short-sf-review-19-thirst-quenchers.html">"The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#18: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/06/short-sf-review-18-hackers.html">"Hackers" (Rick Cook)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#17: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/02/short-sf-review-17-attached-to-land.html">"Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#16: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/11/short-sf-review-16-great-gizmo-machine.html">"The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#15: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/short-sf-review-15-alien-psychologist.html">"Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#14: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/06/short-sf-review-14-frontliners.html">"The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#13: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/02/short-sf-review-13-second-chance.html">"Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#12: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/01/short-sf-review-12-hades.html">"Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#11: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/10/short-sf-review-11-revolt-of-ants.html">"Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#10: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/09/short-sf-review-10-blessed-are-meekbots.html">"Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#9: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/07/short-sf-review-9-to-make-new.html">"To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#8: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/06/short-sf-review-8-funnel-hawk.html">"Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#7: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/05/short-sf-review-7-testing-one-two-three.html">Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#6: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/05/short-sf-review-6-bite.html">"Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#5: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/04/short-sf-review-5-no-shoulder-to-cry-on.html">"No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#4: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/04/short-sf-review-4-crazy-oil.html">"Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#3: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/03/short-sf-review-3-saturn-game.html">"The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#2: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/02/short-sf-review-2-job-inaction.html">"Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#1: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/01/short-sf-review-1-roachstompers.html">"Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)</a></span></li>
</ul>
Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-37422640699839121412017-12-09T11:14:00.002-05:002017-12-09T11:14:57.164-05:00Tunnel Visions: The Helsinki Metro<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Every once in a while I hop out of Toronto, land in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and look around at different ways of getting around by rail, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHmH1xQ2Pf4">land of confusion</a> that is this twenty-first century, it's almost comforting to know that there's a transit system where smiling is specifically allowed everywhere -- because who doesn't love commuting, am I right? It's a </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">system that reached further than any other, of a system orange like no other is orange, where some stations have </span><b style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">three</b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> names and where you can be connected to the world while in the middle of a tunnel. I didn't know what to expect, not really, especially not from a language that was occasionally as reminiscent of Japanese as it was English -- somewhere there's got to be </span><b style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">someone</b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> spinning conspiracy theories from the similarity of the Japanese </span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">kippu</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> and the Finnish </span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">lippu</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, both of which mean </span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">ticket</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. But no matter what language you're speaking, </span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">metro</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> means </span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">metro</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Metro">Helsinki Metro</a> <b>was</b> the newest of the Nordic countries' three metro systems, the smallest, and the least used -- at least until I remembered that Denmark is also a Nordic country, and that by opening the Copenhagen Metro in 2002, Denmark ruined <i>everything</i> -- but I'm not here to compare so crudely. I've never even been to any of the other ones. Riding it was the first chance I've had to evaluate rapid transit in a country outside the Anglosphere. Some things caught my eye, some things made me wonder, and some things I'd never even considered, let alone see before, but in the end, every metro is meant to move people.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Incidentally, a note: between taking the notes for this project and writing this post, the near-mythical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nsimetro">Länsimetro</a> extension opened, taking service west to Espoo and adding eight new stations to the map. As much as I'd like to incorporate the new bits into this work, flying from Toronto to Helsinki is a <b>bit</b> expensive. Having a system update itself while I'm still evaluating it isn't something I've ever had to worry about for one of these, but I feel like it's appropriate here. Out of all the metro systems I've touched on in this series, the Helsinki Metro took me further than all of them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">A train crosses the Vuosaari Bridge near Rastila station, bound for the western end of the line.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The Helsinki Metro is the northernmost rapid transit system in the world, and unless Reykjavik gets ambitious, that record isn't likely to fall any time soon. Its northernmost station, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellunm%C3%A4ki_metro_station">Mellunmäki</a>, sits at 60 degrees, 14 minutes north, but you'd never know it just standing on the platform there. It's simple, straightforward, unpretentious -- much like the network as a whole. Finland isn't part of Scandinavia, but I can see echoes of that clean, no-nonsense Scandinavian design in the shape of the Metro. At the same time, there's an appealing roughness to it, exemplified to me by stone-strewn trackbeds that look like what you'd find on a regular surface railway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">European systems tend to have a reputation for complexity -- look at the multicoloured spaghetti plates of London, Paris, or Berlin -- but the Helsinki Metro is easy to wrap your head around even if you can't tell the difference between Finnish and Quenya. It's shaped rather like a tuning fork with trains running on two services, M1 and M2, but between Tapiola in the west and Itäkeskus in the east, there's a substantial service overlap. All trains service Rautatientori, connected to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Central_Station">Helsinki Central Station</a> and one of the city's gateways to the rest of the world, and the monolithic Kamppi Centre -- a bit of a change from when I was there, when the overlap ended at Kamppi and only half the trains continued on to Ruoholahti, which was the westernmost point in the system for twenty-four years. It reminded me of Boston's Blue Line, with one end of the line still in the central city.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To be honest, speaking as an Anglophone, the most complex part of the Helsinki Metro was getting the names straight. Names like "Rautatientori" were easy for me to stumble over with my English-language brain, and I often found the stations' Swedish names easier to remember, but that will only take memory so far. While Kamppi's Swedish name is "Kampen" -- not much of a stretch -- a lot of these stations are named not for streets, but neighbourhoods with actual, meaningful names. To an English speaker, Ruoholahti and Gräsviken may look like they have no relation at all, but they both mean the same thing; roughly, "Grass Bay." Helsinki's nature as a bilingual city makes it clear why the stations were named like this, but it's an interesting counterpoint to the other bilingual-city metro I've covered, the Montreal Metro. If Helsinki's naming policy was used there, Côte-Vertu station might be known in English as "Virtue Coast." In the interest of keeping things straightforward, I'll use the Finnish station names throughout this article.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">No, what's really striking about the Helsinki Metro is that more so than a lot of other systems I've used, it feels almost like a system of wormholes. From what I understand, Helsinki didn't start developing in earnest beyond its 19th-century core until the 1970s, and it shows. Take Sörnäinen station, only a few stops away from the central railway station, deep enough in the core to be connected to Helsinki's streetcar network. Two minutes east puts you at Kaisatama, an infill station surrounded by what feels like a completely new urban district under construction. Two minutes past <i>that</i> takes you to Kulosaari, which serves a leafy green island with a quiet, suburban feel. It's a significant difference from Toronto, where subway lines built under former streetcar routes gives a certain continuity to the shape of the city, and where big divergences come mainly from past city boundaries or line extensions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhits9-xyadJO6EHax867xX4UOSg_i03bkMtXyHbihQEv4XnrJ8RDyqmGnczoc5_IcNfG1JFDaD8P8oILdnjR_kLGpWXleuh_VvzBlmr2lO4078Nsuu7vFWdMAcf47KpJRGuMXwcJ7ptxo/s1600/tv16kaivokatu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhits9-xyadJO6EHax867xX4UOSg_i03bkMtXyHbihQEv4XnrJ8RDyqmGnczoc5_IcNfG1JFDaD8P8oILdnjR_kLGpWXleuh_VvzBlmr2lO4078Nsuu7vFWdMAcf47KpJRGuMXwcJ7ptxo/s320/tv16kaivokatu.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Helsinki Central Station, Rautatientori and Kaivokatu, looking east. If only I'd thought to take this picture on a day that <b>wasn't</b> overcast.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The metro is well-integrated with the rest of Helsinki's transit infrastructure. From Rautatientori, for example, you can catch a ring rail service to the airport, one of the commuter trains that reach across much of southern Finland, or long-distance trains to Rovaniemi or even to Russia. Seven of Helsinki's streetcar lines serve Rautatientori as well, connected to the underground station by a transferway in the median of Kaivokatu, similar to the transferway that existed at Yonge and Bloor in Toronto before the construction of the Bloor-Danforth subway. Every station from Ruoholahti to Sörnäinen is served by streetcars, and beyond them, bus connections are available. The level of integration between services is closer to Vancouver's style than Toronto's, though -- whether transferring to a streetcar or a bus from a metro station, there were fare-paid zone lines in between.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Incidentally, one issue about that transferway -- it's not entirely prepared for the sudden, drenching rain that seems to be no stranger to Helsinki, because otherwise my encounter with it during my time there must have been an <i>extremely</i> lucky roll. Hell, if there's more than one streetcar waiting at the stop, and yours is the one parked behind the one in front of the shelters, you'd better be ready to get wet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nevertheless, this integration helps ensure that a lot of people use the metro. In 2016, it carried 64.1 million passengers in a service area with a metropolitan population of 1.4 million, or 45.7 passengers per person per year; this is close to Toronto's figure of 51.3 passengers per person per year. It's not a system that's easy to get lost in, and with only nine stations not served by both lines, if you do take a wrong turn it's easy to correct it. In my experience, the Helsinki Metro didn't demand much cognitive effort to get around. It was only when I was aiming for Mellunmäki or Vuosaari that I ever had to pay attention to where I was going at all, and <b>that's</b> one of the critical tests of a transit system. People have enough to worry about in their lives without having to negotiate a maze of a metro.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Still, if you need some help finding your way, you won't lack for information. This wasn't the first time I'd been on a system that used more than one language, but in many places, the Helsinki Metro is <i>trilingual</i>; beyond the translated station names, the signage is provided in Finnish, Swedish, and English. I even saw one or two that were quadrilingual, with Russian being added into the mix, but these tended to be of the "danger, do not touch" variety. You can get around easily while knowing barely a word of Finnish, because I did, and I do; though I'd recommend at least "anteeksi," because it's better to excuse yourself if you have to navigate a crowd. You'll likely also pick up "kielletty" within the first twenty-four hours, considering how often it shows up in signage.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My only regret is that while an English speaker can tease an understandable meaning out of the Metro's Swedish signage, Swedish doesn't play by the same pronunciation rules. Kulosaari's Swedish name is Brändö, but no matter how much you might want it to be otherwise it only has electric lights, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUTZmSyDErg">not electrolytes</a></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Stations</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Daylight and shadow meet on the Rastila station platform.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I have my suspicions that if I do ever end up accidentally killing myself, it'll probably be in a subway station rushing for a train. See, in Toronto a lot of the system is still not only grounded in a mid-century aesthetic, but a mid-century sense of what's feasible, and what <b>wasn't</b> easily feasible in the 1960s were next-train countdown timers. When I first arrive at my station, the only sense I have of an incoming train is that subtle shift in air pressure and a whispering breeze coming from below -- the sort of information asymmetry that leads me to take the stairs two at a time. Sometimes I hit the platform just as the train's pulling in, sometimes with just enough time for the train's doors to close in my face, and sometimes the wind was just an eastbound train pulling in. The point is that I don't know, and the longer I do it for, the greater my odds of missing a step and breaking my neck.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That wasn't the case in Helsinki, and not <b>only</b> because there I was a tourist with no demands on my time. But I'll get to that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">With the November 2017 opening of the first phase of the Länsimetro extension, there are now twenty-five stations on the Helsinki Metro with another five under construction, from Matinkylä in the west to Mellunmäki and Vuosaari in the east. In August only sixteen of them were open, and I visited all of them. Between them, the stations make a good introduction to design philosophies of the last thirty-five years, from the subterranean entry plaza at Rautatientori to the bright, uplifting combination of earth and sky at Rastila and the cave-like nature of Ruoholahti. You won't find any of Toronto's mid-century washroom aesthetic here, nor the ISO Standard Outer-City Metro Station. There's no architectural sameness, and aside from Herttoniemi, none of them struck me as ugly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Most of the stations are either underground -- and where they're underground, they tend to be deep underground -- or on the surface. The main exception is Kalasatama, an elevated station that stands three or so storeys over a construction zone that looks like it'll be a hyper-modern glass-and-steel neighbourhood in a couple of years. Kalasatama is also one of only two side-platform stations, an artifact of it being an in-fill station built around existing rail; the other, Itäkeskus, serves three tracks from its two platforms as it's where the northern and southern branches diverge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In keeping with its centrality, Rautatientori was my introduction to the system, and my first response was amazement at the sheer scale of the place, with its platform level having as much space available as half a dozen Toronto stations. To a degree the same is true of the other central-city stations, with Kamppi, Ruoholahti, and Helsingin yliopisto in particular sharing this design ethic, feeling less like built environments and more like natural caves that were converted into stations. As cities with metro systems go, Helsinki isn't <b>that</b> large, but these stations could easily accommodate morning crowds at Bloor-Yonge and still have room for a symphony of buskers. There's a good, if sobering, reason for this openness, and it doesn't have anything to do with planning ahead for future demand patterns -- these stations were meant to double as attack shelters. After all, the system first opened in 1982, one year before the world <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident">nearly</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83">stumbled</a> into nuclear war <b>twice</b>, and the Soviet Union was then less than a hundred kilometres away. Still, this gives them a wide-open, welcoming feeling that I've rarely experienced underground.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Even before I entered Rautatientori proper, I was impressed. It reminded me strongly of the Montreal Metro -- maybe that feeling of openness combined with a lot of concrete. Its main entrance is in a sunken plaza beneath the railway station, surrounded by retailers, with enough space to keep rush-hour crows flowing. What's more important, both here and elsewhere, is that there's no need to rush ahead without knowing what's coming. Because the system tells you what's coming.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>The main entrance hall of Rautatientori. And a giant digital billboard with English-language advertising.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Flanking that advertisement, not <i>entirely</i> readable thanks to my phone's camera, are eighteen minutes of train arrival times. There's going to be one bound for Ruoholahti in a minute, then a Vuosaari-bound in three, and another making the trip west in four. With the length of those escalators, I'd be hard-pressed to make it down to the platform in under sixty seconds.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You'll find similar signs outside the other stations, complemented by screens above the platforms themselves counting down the next two trains' arrival times. Plenty of systems do this now, but Helsinki's way stands out because it's optimized for clarity and information. In Toronto, the next train arrival timer is smashed down into the bottom tenth of a TV screen that's otherwise dominated by news, weather, and advertisements -- and that's if there's one of those screens at your end of the platform. In Helsinki I always knew what I was getting into.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Even waiting around was an opportunity to let off stress, because the Helsinki Metro's internet infrastructure is like nothing I've ever seen. Not only was its easily accessible, no-login-needed free wi-fi a lifeline for me, but even with so many other people on the platform hooked into it, the service was faster and smoother than what I often get at home. Considering Finland's telecommunications heritage, I'm not surprised; just impressed. My experience with in-station access in Toronto tends more toward rolling into a station while the page steadfastly refuses to load.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The tight integration of stations with retail was something I saw again and again in the system -- Helsingin yliopisto's entrance is in the middle of a modest underground mall, reminiscent of Vancouver's Granville station, with everything from a convenience store to a casino -- but with a particular twist to it that I don't often see. Beyond the ubiquitous R-Kioski convenience stores and near-ubiquitous Hesburgers, I could see a grocery store from either the platform or the main entrance of most stations I visited. To me, it echoes how corner grocery stores prospered along streetcar lines, allowing people on their way home to stop in quickly for staples rather than making food shopping a once-a-week, car-filling odyssey.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Not that the system bends its knee to drivers at every opportunity. Unlike North American systems, the Helsinki Metro doesn't feel like it was designed around the primacy of the automobile. Sure, there are allowances for parking, particularly at the terminal stations, but they're nothing compared to the commuter lots you'd find at the ends of the Toronto subway, even adjusting for population differences. Take Vuosaari, with space for two hundred and twenty-two parked cars, and <i>two hundred and forty-three</i> bicycles. At Kulosaari, not too far from the city centre, I counted forty-two spots on a Monday afternoon and a fair number of them were empty. Of course, part of this is a result of shifting priorities; Vuosaari opened for service in 1998, after all. Itäkeskus, one of the original 1982 stations, has room for two hundred and forty bikes and four hundred and twenty cars.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One aspect where the Helsinki Metro doesn't particularly stand apart from other systems I've been on, however, is the cleanliness factor. At first, when I was still taking in the basics, it seemed pretty clean to me, but the more attention I paid the more grit and disorder I saw, and the further I got from central Helsinki the more obvious it became. At Rautatientori, it wasn't much more than an anti-NATO sticker on a free magazine rack, but down the line graffiti and vandalism -- usually scratched into the station benches -- became more common. The trains themselves weren't spotless either, with the usual discarded commuter newspapers and plastic wrap and other crap that had made its way to the floor, the kind you find on pretty much any transit system. Herttoniemi was singularly impressive, in its way; not only was there a big, bright tag on the tunnel wall where an ad would ordinarily go, but someone had tagged the third rail. In fact, referring back to my photos, it appears to have been <b>multiple</b> someones.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>That's... impressive?</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Graffiti taggers looking for blank canvases have a lot of opportunity in Helsinki Metro stations, as well. Compared to other systems I've been on, it felt very ad-light, and not just because I couldn't read most of them. I didn't encounter any station domination campaigns, like how right now in Toronto, Dundas station is entirely given over to a radio station advertising its all-Christmas playlist to such a degree that the ads have escaped the poster borders and are coming out of the walls. Advertisement in the stations tends to be limited to wall-side posters that aren't packed nearly as densely as they <b>could</b> be, given the space, and the video ad screens that line the escalators in the deep underground stations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What struck me most about advertising in the Metro was how much of it -- and here, "much" is "greater than 0%" -- was in English. Granted, most of them were by the same company, and you could make the argument that it takes more mental effort to process something that isn't in your native language, and so English-language ads in a non-Anglophone country get more unconscious attention for free. I couldn't help contrasting it to Toronto, though, where despite the galaxy of languages that lights up this city, pretty much the only things you'll find in the subway that aren't exclusively English are very occasional safety instructions and the rare government advertisement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Fortunately, advertisements aren't the Metro's only diversion; there's a lot of art to be found in the system, from the tiled labyrinth motifs at Ruoholahti to the sharp, metallic "Roots of the City" at Kamppi and to Riikka Puronen's interactive <i><a href="http://taidemuseo.hel.fi/suomi/veisto/veistossivu.html?id=351&sortby=statue">Sirenan kielet</a></i> sculpture just outside Myllypuro, the Metro hasn't been lax in taking advantage of its own blank canvas.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's something to think about while you wait for your next train, unstressed because you know exactly how long you have to wait -- perhaps with a drink you got from one of the platform vending machines. Those machines are everywhere in the system, selling chips, chocolate bars, bottles of pop and energy drinks, and they accept euro coins <b>and</b> credit cards. If only I'd thought to dump all of my leftover change in one before I left the EU. Whatever you sip, just make sure it isn't the hard stuff; the Metro specifically prohibits drinking alcohol aboard.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Equipment</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>M100 car 142 leads a train bound for Mellunmäki at Kontula station.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My first and, honestly, lasting impression of the Helsinki Metro's trains is simple: such <b>orange</b>. Orange exteriors, orange interiors, orange-dominant advertisements, and even the lighting felt tuned to emulate a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-type_main-sequence_star">K-type star</a>. Maybe it's a simple case of complementing colours; blue is one of Finland's national colours, and in the eighteen-hour-long nights that Helsinki gets in winter, orange must stand out. There are three varieties of trains running on the system -- the oldest <a href="https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/M100_(juna)">M100</a> cars came with the system when it opened, the <a href="https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/M200_(juna)">M200s</a> appeared in 2001, and the <a href="https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/M300_(juna)">M300s</a> only entered service in 2016 -- and their differences reflect the last thirty years in metro design.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From a traveller's point of view, the differences are slight. The seats are universally hard plastic without upholstery, and look like the sort of furnishing Ikea might make if they were in the train business. I found the M100 and M200 trains most reminiscent of Vancouver's Mark 2 SkyTrain sets, with trains consisting of multiple individually-articulated cars rather than the whole-train articulation you see on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Rocket">Toronto Rocket</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_S7_and_S8_Stock">London Underground S Stock</a>, and other <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Movia">Bombardier Movia</a> trains. Only the new M300 trains have that kind of end-to-end access, and while they're as orange as the others, observant transit riders can recognize them from the dotted white bicycle silhouettes and from the car numbers that start with "3."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What these trains have in common is that you can hear them coming from a long way off. In Toronto, I'm used to trains announcing themselves with their headlights reflecting off the tunnel walls and the rails, or perhaps a faint gust of wind. In Helsinki, they're preceded by a sharp, distant, keening screech. Considering the vast airiness of the underground stations, it's only natural that the gust front created by an oncoming train would have plenty of space to dissipate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Boarding a Helsinki Metro train feels not so much like stepping into the future as it does stepping into <i>a</i> future, perhaps one that diverged from our timeline at some point in the 1980s. The free internet offered in the stations extends to the trains themselves -- though the station-based and train-based networks are both named "METRO," entertainingly enough -- and rather than a banner of advertisements along the tops of the walls, the ads were served up on video screens. It was a very <i>Total Recall</i> vibe... by which I mean <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Recall_(1990_film)">the objectively superior 1990 version</a>. That movie's scenes were filmed on the Mexico City Metro, but if you wanted to depict a futuristic, non-specifically-located-but-presumably-American transit system, you wouldn't go wrong with Helsinki's.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The only thing that really tripped me up about them was how often the doors opened while the train was still gliding to a stop. Nothing that would imperil rider safety, considering how long those doors take to open, but when Toronto's subways can stop and hesitate for five seconds or longer before the doors wheeze open, it struck me as a bit overeager.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Ease of Access and Ease of Use</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>An array of ticket machines at the entrance to Rautatientori station.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If the Helsinki Metro ever used turnstiles, they're long gone now. In another hint to its modernity, there are no fare barriers in any of the stations, and in fact not even a hint of where you might put them. Passengers ride on the honour system, tapping their fare cards at readers on the way in, and enforced by occasional fare inspections. My experience, while limited, implies they happen fairly regularly. I first encountered inspectors on my fifth or sixth metro trip, whereas in the two years I relied on Vancouver's SkyTrain -- which, at the time, used a similar barrier-free regimen -- I don't recall encountering inspectors even once.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">With no fare barriers, it falls upon riders to make sure they've paid their way before they reach the platform. The ubiquitous R-Kioski stores sell fare media, and you'll find at least one ticket machine at every metro station, though in a pinch you can buy tickers from bus or streetcar drivers, and with the HSL's mobile ticket app, you can buy them on your phone as well. As of this writing, single-use mobile and machine tickets cost €2.90 ($4.39 Canadian, $3.41 USD), which sounds a bit steep at first, but these are all-zone tickets that let you travel everywhere in the Helsinki metropolitan area. I got around on a three-day ticket, clocking in at €18.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This lack of barriers adds to the stations' feeling of openness, though it does mean the sort of integrated transfers that Toronto's in-station streetcar platforms and bus bays don't happen in Helsinki. Instead, bus transfers are organized similarly to the transit exchanges run by TransLink in Metro Vancouver, particularly at Itäkeskus and Vuosaari.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Perhaps as a result of being designed later in the 20th century and perhaps just because of giving a damn in the first place, all Helsinki Metro stations are equipped with elevators for accessibility. Otherwise, platform access is primarily by escalator, some of them seemingly as tall as good-sized buildings. Unlike so many stations in Toronto, where the designers figured that one up escalator and one down escalator was sufficient, the central-city stations are equipped with banks of three or four. Whether they're mostly-up or mostly-down can be adjusted, depending on traffic patterns, but in my experience all but one of them were set to go up, and -- in <a href="https://www.hel.fi/hkl/en/by-metro/instructions-for-passengers/">a FAQ</a> that warms my heart -- Helsinki City Transport, the operator of the Metro, specifically requests that people stand right and walk left. Refreshingly, in a nod to environmental stewardship, the escalators aren't left constantly running; if they don't detect people for long enough, they will stop.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Signage across the system is easy to follow. Destination signs on the trains and above the platforms tell you which tracks go where, even if in August the destination of westbound trains was often hidden beneath blackout paper -- at the time, one of the few indications that the Länsimetro actually existed. Signs pointing to the exit and the emergency stop buttons are easy to find, and each station also comes equipped with an information display that has a map of the station itself with exits marked, a map of the local area and any surrounding points of interest, and a summary of how to ride the Metro in Finnish, Swedish, and English.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>The information display at Mellunmäki station. Somehow I get the impression that not many tourists bother to travel this far. I can't imagine why... I mean, northernmost station! In <b>the world</b>!</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Included in that summary is a request that riders "take note of the Metro train's precise stopping place on the platform." What this means is that the Metro was, like Toronto's Sheppard line, built with future passenger numbers in mind, and four-car trains are often swallowed by platforms that could easily accommodate six cars. The stopping areas are indicated with floor stickers and blue lights, but they're easy things to miss or just not notice if you don't think to look for them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Conclusion</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Elevated tracks soar overhead outside Siilitie station.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Before my first sight of Rautatientori station, when I was worn down from jet lag and the discovery that my baggage had liked Keflavik International Airport so much that it took its own impromptu vacation there, I had no preconceived notions. Everything I knew about the Helsinki Metro came from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is no substitute for experience. For those first few days the Metro was my familiar refuge, a place I could find some peace and connection while I tried not to dwell on whether I'd ever see my big green suitcase again. It was familiar in a way I hadn't expected; there are spots in Rautatientori where all the words you can see are <i>in English</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From the simplicity of the system, to stations that made me forget I was underground, to an integration of art to the extent that one of the entrances to Helsingin yliopisto replicates a cave complete with cave art, I was impressed. Granted, Helsinki locals who have to use the network every day would have a more nuanced opinion, but at no point in the days I used it did I have to deal with stress or troubles that weren't ultimately self-inflicted.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The metro carried me far from the perspectives I usually have, further than any other metro can go, and that's always something to be thankful for.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana"; font-weight: bold;">Previous Tunnel Visions</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2016/08/tunnel-visions-kc-streetcar.html">The KC Streetcar</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2015/06/tunnel-visions-docklands-light-railway.html">The Docklands Light Railway</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/08/tunnel-visions-detroit-people-mover.html">The Detroit People Mover</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/08/tunnel-visions-seattles-link-light-rail.html">Seattle's Link Light Rail</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/07/tunnel-visions-portlands-max-light-rail.html">Portland's MAX Light Rail</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/06/tunnel-visions-seattle-center-monorail.html">The Seattle Center Monorail</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/09/tunnel-visions-bay-area-rapid-transit.html">Bay Area Rapid Transit</a></span></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/06/tunnel-visions-san-franciscos-muni.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">San Francisco's Muni Metro</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/02/tunnel-visions-phoenixs-metro-light.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Phoenix's Metro Light Rail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/tunnel-visions-kenosha-electric-railway.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Kenosha Electric Railway</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/tunnel-visions-vancouvers-skytrain.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Vancouver's SkyTrain</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/03/tunnel-visions-toronto-subway-and-rt.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Toronto Subway and RT</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/01/tunnel-visions-los-angeles-county-metro.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Los Angeles County Metro Rail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/10/tunnel-visions-chicago-l.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Chicago 'L'</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/08/tunnel-visions-torontos-subway-and.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Montreal Metro</span></a></li>
</ul>
Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-13695879902943349152017-11-05T19:27:00.002-05:002017-11-08T00:41:12.318-05:00The Empires We Choose Not to See<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'm going to start with a statement: empires are bad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This isn't something I would have expected to be controversial five years ago because I would have expected people to know, in the same way that pain hurts and fire burns, that empires are bad. There are plenty of people who are well aware of how bad empires are, of course, but they tend to be the victims of empire. The primary beneficiaries of empire -- for those of you keeping score, that's white people in the Western world -- tend to be ignorantly innocent about it at best, and willing participants at worst. It's true that the last five hundred years is in many respects a history of empires, because when you have these organizations exerting their will across oceans and continents, impoverishing some to enrich others, they're going to leave a mark in the historical record. The modern legacy of empire is like the iridium concentration at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_boundary">Cretaceous–</a></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_boundary">Paleogene boundary</a>; a global reminder of devastation and destruction.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But you wouldn't really get that impression from reading science fiction. Space empires have been a fixture of science fiction for practically as long as there has <b>been</b> science fiction, and while they were often meant as enemies -- take the Eddorians in the <i>Lensman</i> series -- science fiction's origins in imperialist states meant that the influence of empire would <i>always</i> be there. The venerable RPG <i>Traveller</i> is anchored around empire, whether it's plucky Terrans fighting against and replacing the aging Vilani Empire or the star-spanning Third Imperium; literary settings like Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium fills the future with a hegemonizing empire that seeks to incorporate all human worlds into its authority, with no exceptions; and the play-by-mail games of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The May/June 1983 issue of <i>The Space Gamer</i> reviews three of them -- <i>Galactic Conflict</i>, <i>Starlord</i>, and <i>Star Venture</i> -- and imperialism is in their bones. Take <i>Starlord</i>, where the players' goal is "to capture the Throne Star and become the Emperor, after which you get to play for free." For everyone else, it cost $2.50 to submit a <i>Starlord</i> turn ($6.11 in 2016 US dollars), which may make <i>Starlord</i> one of the few games where the player had a real monetary incentive for imperialism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Yeah," you might say, "but those are just games." I'd argue that games can shape the way we think and view the world just as much as anything else, and that these play-by-mail games were the precursors of modern <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X">4X</a> games, a genre designation which itself seems pretty innocuous until you think about it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">E<b>x</b>plore, e<b>x</b>pand, e<b>x</b>ploit, e<b>x</b>terminate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The standard playbook of the Earth-based empire, and there it is, copy and pasted into interstellar space, giving you opportunity after opportunity to commit atrocities in the name of winning the game. Practically <i>encouraging</i> you to do it, at times -- take, for example, the Stellar Converter in <i>Master of Orion II</i>. By the time you've researched this late-game weapon, you don't <b>need</b> it, but it lets you follow the example of the one science fiction empire everyone knows: it lets you destroy planets. Using it rewarded you with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dO01h3d2xs">this video</a> and nothing else. No political slaps on the wrist, no anger from the galactic community, just a fresh asteroid belt. I can't count the number of times I did it, because it was easy and quick and I didn't need that planet anyway. But that's the thing about empire: it compromises you. It whispers in your ears. Like Brian Aldiss said in his introduction to the 1973 <i>Galactic Empires</i> anthology, "morality is all very well, but give me luxury every time."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Which brings me to <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellaris_(video_game)">Stellaris</a></i>. <i>Stellaris</i> is the most recent of the 4X games, released by Paradox Entertainment just last year, and may well be the most dense and complex computerized 4X game. As a game it has a lot going for it, but like everything, it has its own unspoken political assumptions. One of those is empire. Not in that the game allows you to build an aggressive, galaxy-spanning empire should you so choose -- but in that it uses "empire" as the default. No matter whether you're fanatic egalitarians running a space United Nations, materialist xenophiles advocating for the light of Science, or a pacifist spiritualist nation seeking to commune with the secrets of the mental realm, the game refers to you as an empire just as it does the xenophobic authoritarians who dream of galactic conquest. It's baked into the tutorial tips and even into the news updates that appear in Steam before you boot up the game itself.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0BdedBoIU3KRkZQdSy_6qEeKP8s2dxsjdLeF8ho5uE7HVggTrnaouFdhqN2HkHAJZONChE1EAC_BEbmAscMKWi3H_pcdjF29KL_cboLPvxlJpIjjVx5ie4j09vkBMCFXh4QaNcsorNe4/s1600/empire-scary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="556" height="269" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0BdedBoIU3KRkZQdSy_6qEeKP8s2dxsjdLeF8ho5uE7HVggTrnaouFdhqN2HkHAJZONChE1EAC_BEbmAscMKWi3H_pcdjF29KL_cboLPvxlJpIjjVx5ie4j09vkBMCFXh4QaNcsorNe4/s320/empire-scary.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Funny, I'd have thought an empire was scary enough on its own.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The concept of empire is further rooted in the way the game works, too. The best government building you can build, which you can have only one of, is called the Empire Capital-Complex. There's an Imperial form of government authority, but in structure -- life terms and hereditary rulership -- it's just a monarchy. Just because a state is democratic doesn't mean it can't also be imperial, but the way they're set up as orthogonal here echoes an idea that's been made to percolate in the Western consciousness for a long time now. Hell, even if you're a fanatically xenophilic democracy that has embraced interstellar immigration for decades, the game <b>still</b> requires you to research a specific technology to get leaders who aren't of your founding species.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's not so much that this is outright nostalgia for empire, I think, so much as it is divorced from the <b>actual</b> nature of empire. Unlike hyperdrives and psionic realms, empires are real things, and yet <i>Stellaris</i> treats it as if it's as neutral as using "lift" instead of "elevator." But there's a lot of hidden nostalgia here, the sort that Aldiss meant when he wrote about luxury. Up until recently, the general public tended to remember empires more easily because empires were the ones who wrote the histories. When they did, they remembered the accoutrements, the displays of wealth and power, and didn't stop to think about where that wealth came from and what that power was used for. (For those of you keeping score at home, the wealth was plundered from other people using that power.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What gets me about <i>Stellaris</i> is that to me, there's a fairly evident disconnect between what was put there consciously and what slipped through unconsciously. One event, for example, has your scout ship discover a planet in the grip of an ice age but with industrial ruins, with the event text commenting on how nobody could understand how a species could be so foolish as to alter their own environment to uninhabitability. Another is how the humans are presented: the default United Nations of Earth, the "hero" humans, begin with a Black woman as leader, and the default Human species portrait is of a woman when in every other game I can think of, it's been a man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Fun fact: originally Humans had "Quick Learners" as a trait. They were only switched in a later patch to being Wasteful.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But you have to look beyond that to get to the unconscious choices, like the use of "empire" as something that's value-neutral. Take the in-game blockers; these are meant as stumbling blocks to your developmental aspirations, where mountain ranges, dense jungles, toxic kelp, or noxious swamps need to be cleared away with advanced technology for you to make use of the resources on the tile they occupy. You're trained for this by the inclusion of unique blockers on your homeworld. There are two kinds. One is industrial ruins, left over from "a past age of progress." This is the other one.</span><br />
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<i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Yeah, <b>nothing</b> political in that choice of description, am I right?</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You have to look at stuff like this to get a sense of the unconscious choices. You have to look at how Martin "Wiz" Anward, one of the people who built <i>Stellaris</i>, apparently saw nothing wrong with wearing a red "MAKE SPACE GREAT AGAIN" hat during the pre-release streams in early 2016, when the Orange One had already told us everything we needed to know about him. You have to look at the things that are, as far as the person who created them are concerned, are so <b>obvious</b> that they don't need any special attention drawn to them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You have to look at the people who believe, uncritically, that empire is a good thing.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-45094722450040809732017-09-11T23:17:00.000-04:002017-09-11T23:17:28.632-04:00Star Trek: The Orville Quest<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This past Sunday night I hunkered down and watched the premiere of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville">The Orville</a></i>, Seth MacFarlane's new sci-fi series, because I hate myself and believe I deserve to suffer. None of the trailers or previews led me to expect greatness, and it certainly wasn't great. I tweeted many of my impressions at the time, and if you're <i>really</i> interested you can do an archive dive, but I feel my first impression is the most critical - it's aggressively mediocre. Still, it's been nibbling at the corners of my brain since I turned off the TV, and it's at least worth talking about.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>The Orville</i> is a unique show in that it is so transparently a <i>Star Trek</i> parody/homage/ripoff. This isn't unique across media, with 1999's <i>Galaxy Quest</i> being the first thing that came to mind when I heard of it, but it's different here. First, <i>Galaxy Quest</i> was a one-off; this is a series, though at least it being live-action means it can't stretch across decades the way <i>Family Guy</i> has. Second, <i>Galaxy Quest</i> knew what it was doing. <i>The Orville</i> doesn't. The fundamental problem with the series is that it's too <i>Galaxy Quest</i> to be <i>Star Trek</i> and too <i>Star Trek</i> to be <i>Galaxy Quest</i>. <i>Galaxy Quest</i> is that it gleefully deconstructed trope after <i>Trek</i> trope, from the captain's penchant for losing his shirt to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbzuu14bGgs">casual interstellar exploration</a> to things that only exist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqRdT8m1Suo">to put the heroes in danger</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>The Orville</i>, on the other hand, is one of the purest examples of the second artist effect I've yet encountered. If you haven't run up against it before, it's a phenomenon described by Charles Stross: the first artist goes outside, beholds the landscape, and paints it, but the second artist goes to the gallery, beholds the first artist's painting, and paints <b>that</b>. It's the artistic equivalent of clone degeneration, and <i>The Orville</i> is shot through with it. Why does the <i>Orville</i> have a navigator <b>and</b> a helmsman? Because the <i>Enterprise</i> did. Why is the <i>Orville</i>'s bridge at the top of its primary hull with a big honking skylight in the roof? Because that's how the <i>Enterprise</i> was. Why does half of the bridge crew go down on away missions? Because that's how things were done on the <i>Enterprise</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>The Orville</i> isn't a parody of <i>Star Trek</i>, even though it has <i>so</i> many opportunities to be. The episode's climax has the <i>Orville</i> under attack from a totally-not-Klingon ship, and the daredevil helmsman flies the ship on a death-defying series of attack runs that look like the video half of a motion simulator ride, weaving around the enemy ship, blasting all the way. It's a lot like a scene that was the climax of a <i>Deep Space Nine</i> episode, where the <i>Defiant</i> makes <a href="https://youtu.be/o-P6L5JGf24?t=1m57s">a death-defying series of attack runs, weaving around the enemy ship, blasting all the way</a>. It was ridiculous then, it's ridiculous now, and yet both series play it completely straight. But even <i>DS9</i> knew enough to keep that bit down to twenty-five seconds. In <i>The Orville</i>, it went on for so long I'm surprised Seth MacFarlane didn't cut away to five minutes of Conway Twitty.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>The Orville</i> isn't a homage to <i>Star Trek</i>, either; from the look and feel of the sets to the fades-to-black before commercial breaks to the <b>same</b> streaming-stars effect in quantum drive, it hews far too close to its source material to be called that. It doesn't poke at the structure it's built around the way <i>Galaxy Quest</i> did, and it wastes its advantage of being made in the future.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The future is of particular importance here. One thing I've seen again and again, both in official commentaries and in some reactions to it, was on the need for optimistic science fiction in this hellscape of a decade. But <i>The Orville</i> doesn't feel like the future because it isn't; it's the future of the 1960s. Sure, the chassis may be smooth and modern-looking, but under the hood there is absolutely nothing that 1967 would be surprised by. Hell, considering how much of the first episode consisted of Captain Ed Mercer, Seth MacFarlane's character, complaining about his ex-wife and his divorce to anyone who would listen, it sometimes feel like it is <i>more honest</i> to 1967 than to 2017.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For all its attempts at being not your father's <i>Star Trek</i>, with a navigator who cares <i>a lot</i> about being able to drink pop on the bridge and a helmsman who casually throws the word "bitch" around, the fact is that this is your father's <i>Star Trek</i> with its hat turned backward, earnestly willing to rap with you all in a most tubular manner. This attitude was made clear in the premiere's first scene, a place-setting shot of New York City in 2417. It's the standard sci-fi city, with monuments like the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge contrasted with supertall skyscrapers, flying cars, and so on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What weren't there were the seawalls. You see, for the past while, my usual encounters with future New York have been through <i>The Expanse</i>, which is everything <i>The Orville</i> isn't. In that series, Manhattan is surrounded by seawalls the size of small apartment buildings. It's a stark image, but given what we know, it's a reasonable extrapolation of what New York might look like in 2350. <i>The Expanse</i> looks ahead with eyes open and unblinking and sees some pretty ugly stuff. <i>The Orville</i> covers its eyes, plugs its ears, and builds its optimistic future with fifty-year-old blueprints.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The thing about <i>The Orville</i> is that there are so many ways MacFarlane could have done it without being what it is. Something that took inspiration from, say, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irresponsible_Captain_Tylor">The Irresponsible Captain Tylor</a></i> would play to his strengths, but <i>The Orville</i> is far too wedded to being <i>Star Trek</i> without <b>being</b> <i>Star Trek</i> that it couldn't go too far without falling apart. It's like the holodeck: one shows up in the episode, and it requires <i>no</i> explanation where <i>Star Trek: The Next Generation</i> took five minutes explaining it, because MacFarlane can rely on audience knowledge. It's also like the holodeck in that beyond the door, the photons and force fields that give illusions substance <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoxHjOTqp3A">dissolve into nothing</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the end, that's all <i>The Orville</i> is, really - thoron fields and duranium shadows.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-50425100175019787632017-03-22T00:00:00.003-04:002017-03-22T11:40:35.124-04:00Tailings of the Golden Age: The Goddess of World 21<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>"The Goddess of World 21," by Henry Slesar</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Appeared in Fantastic Science Fiction, March 1957</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">She was a beauty, all right, by anybody's standards. They stood gaping at her, awed by both the superb contours of her body and by her incredible size. The sun etched her figure sharply against the morning sky. She was something unreal, something out of an alien dream, yet something as real and desirable as a man could know...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">"She's coming for us!" It was a shriek from the first engineer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Nothing like this actually happens in the story.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If there's one overriding statement underlying the vast majority of 1950s cultural artifacts, it's this: "uphold the status quo." Understandable, really. In 1956, the largest and most devastating conflict in history was only twelve years past and the Cold War was already warm to the touch. Throughout the West, marginalized people were fighting for basic rights. It's no surprise that 1950s cultural products aimed at the comfortable white majority, like <i>Leave It to Beaver</i>, depicted uncomplicated, anodyne worlds only faintly related to the one outside the target audience's window. In the 1950s world of cultural repression, political repression, and sexual repression, the unstated drive to maintain the status quo left its stamp everywhere, including the pages of science fiction magazines.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_(magazine)">Fantastic</a></i> was one of the more successful of the post-war magazines, running from 1952 to 1980, and had a reasonable circulation for its day -- more than 30,000 in 1962 and 1963, which beats out <i>Analog</i>'s 2016 numbers. It also ran covers like <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Fantastic_October_1956_front.jpg">this</a>, in case there was any doubt as to its target audience. From 1958 it would be edited by Cele Goldsmith, one of the first woman sf magazine editors, but in 1957 it was run by men and it <b>shows</b>, especially in stories like this one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One thing I've noticed in doing these reviews is the way short science fiction tends to predict concepts that show up shortly thereafter in far more visible ways. Take Tom Ligon's "<a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2009/06/short-sf-review-8-funnel-hawk.html">Funnel Hawk</a>," which is pretty much <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_(1996_film)">Twister</a></i> with a high-performance airplane except made six years before <i>Twister</i>, or Robert Silverberg's 1995 story "Hot Times in Magma City," which did "a volcano erupts in Los Angeles" much, much better than <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano_(1997_film)">Volcano</a></i> would two years later. The 1950s was receptive to stories about huge things. With the theme established by the giant ants in 1954's <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them!">Them!</a></i>, giant women appeared in 1958's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_50_Foot_Woman"><i>Attack of the 50 Foot Woman</i></a> and 1959's <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_30_Foot_Bride_of_Candy_Rock">The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock</a></i>. With the March 1957 <i>Fantastic</i> showing a copyright date of 1956, "The Goddess of World 21" was well ahead of the huge-human curve -- even more so by <b>not</b> including nuclear mutation. That's right: compared to its contemporaries, this story is actually <i>sophisticated</i>!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Just think about that for a second.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, the story. As it's a 1950s story written by a man, it shouldn't be <i>particularly</i> surprising that the protagonist of "The Goddess of World 21" is a man himself -- Stu Champion, syndicated feature columnist for the Universal Press Syndicate, resident of a retrofuture where photon-drive starships share space with typewriters, and where the interstellar media is dominated by newspapers. After writing a column about the spacer myth of Gulliver, a planet "eight times the size of Jupiter" and populated by giants, he meets a "space bum" who claims to have crashed on an uncharted world, only for a "sky-high dame" to <i>literally</i> bend his rocket back into shape. Intrigued, Stu's investigation takes him first to Damon Scully's Space Circus, where the sleazy Scully tries to hire him to find Gulliver so he can turn it into a circus exhibition, and then to Dr. Alvin Domino, pioneer of a revolutionary cellular regeneration technology.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I feel it's worth pointing out here that across this thirty-eight page novella, there are precisely <b>two</b> women with names, and one of them is Stu's secretary Claire, who exists mainly to be called "sweetie." I was honestly surprised the author even bothered to give her a name at all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It turns out that the space bum's helpful giantess is actually Victoria Bray, the first human subject of the regeneration technique. At first it worked great, regrowing three fingers and a thumb lost in an accident, but then she started growing taller and taller, with no end in sight. To prevent "bad publicity" for the regeneration technology -- seriously, that's the argument, that and how "the Earth could only reject a creature such as Victoria had become" -- Domino loads the now 85-foot-tall Victoria onto an interstellar transport and dumps her off on World 21, an isolated planet where "she lives in dreadful loneliness... a forgotten martyr to science."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In what may be the most science-fictional aspect of this story, Stu -- who, remember, is a <i><b>syndicated newspaper columnist</b></i> -- hires a starship on the company tab to take him to World 21, where he meets Victoria herself. Her now-immense stature scares off the starship crew, but Stu chooses to stay. Their blossoming friendship is interrupted by the return of the starship and the discovery that Scully's Space Circus plans to make Victoria the centrepiece of its latest exhibition.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Where do I begin unpacking this story?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The first step is the obvious one -- its rampant sexism! Sure, there only being two female characters in a story focused around a woman is pretty bad, but it gets worse, and it's not just the garden-variety stuff that was more common than air in the 1950s. Take this line, for example: </span><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">"Stu located him behind a beautiful receptionist, a beautiful secretary, and finally, a beautiful mahogany desk."</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> They're certainly meant to be women, considering the "unexamined 1950s social assumptions IN SPACE," and not only do they represent fully <b>half</b> of the women in the story, they are treated with less attention and respect than a <b>desk</b>. Compared to that, Victoria constantly being called a "girl" is water off a duck's back. As far as the magazine's cover copy goes, it's hard for someone to be "Hated By Women--Preyed On By Men" when there are no women of agency present.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This includes Victoria, too. For all that the story is centred on her, she doesn't <b>do</b> anything in it. If she had become, say, a telepathic statue instead of a giantess, the narrative would not need to change <b>at all</b> until the very end, and even then that's only because of the people around her. Throughout the story Victoria is acted on by others, and the only times any characters are ever reacting to her they are just reacting to her existence. When, at the climax, the protagonist Stu becomes a giant himself to defend Victoria against Scully's predatory space circus, she is firmly sidelined by the narrative and reduced to the distressed damsel archetype that filled '50s B-movies. I'm reminded in particular of the 1957 film <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beginning_of_the_End_(film)">Beginning of the End</a></i>, which started out focusing on a woman photojournalist only for her to be shoved aside as soon as the top-billed man entered the narrative. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The narrative is never kind to Victoria at all, especially considering how often she's referred to as "a creature" or "a freak," and you can practically see it build immense justifications for its twisted viewpoints as you watch. For example, when Dr. Domino marooned her on an uncharted world, he built her a small but reasonably comfortable house, a greenhouse, and a power plant. Stu's reaction to this, when Victoria gives him a tour, is that he </span><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">"found his admiration for Dr. Domino increasing with every step."</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Admiration, for a man who exiled a woman because her presence would be <b>inconvenient</b>! It's like men who think they deserve a round of applause for meeting basic standards of human decency.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So much of the story is built around the concept of Victoria's desirability, too, if only because the narrative is so closely tied to its protagonist -- and even that is something that makes it stand out from its contemporaries. In Arthur C. Clarke's 1958 story "Cosmic Casanova," an astronaut is repulsed to discover that the woman he's been long-distance romancing is actually a giantess, and in "At Last My Eyes Have Opened" from Charlton Comics' <i>Out of This World #8</i> in 1958, a man stayed in stasis for a 300-year eugenics experiment to improve upon his girlfriend, only to find... hell, I'll just <i>show</i> you, it's public domain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">The lesson here, presumably, is that men cannot be attracted to people who make them feel small. Baarrff. Also, you have to love how much deadline was obviously involved in naming a valley populated by tall people "Tall Valley."</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There's more to it than this surface stuff, though, and I didn't realize it until after my second read-through. Strip the story down to its basics, remove the jerks and bastards and the "suicidal despair" that Victoria experienced, quite understandably, after having been abandoned to die alone -- an interesting thing emerges.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the context of the story, Victoria is quite literally a self-sufficient woman. All of her material needs are met, she has books and music to exercise her mind, and she learned how to mix local clays to make paint and produces wonderful landscapes. She is a woman that does not need a man, and as soon as I made that connection, <b>everything</b> about this story made sense. My impression of 1950s culture is that it ranked "independent women" as only slightly less threatening than the atom bomb. That's why the story is about taking away her self-sufficiency and her independence. It's why it's about taking a woman who lived in primeval freedom and giving her two choices that both result in her subordination to a man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"The Goddess of World 21" is, at its core, about the demolition of an independent woman. This is only reinforced by the climax, when a standoff between Stu and Damon Scully, who despite being a circus owner managed to obtain <b>atomic artillery</b>, is interrupted by a deus ex machina in the form of two giant alien astronauts appearing from "mythical" Gulliver. They're both male, of course. Their world is described as a peaceful utopia, sure, but look between the lines and you'll find a reassurance to the readers that it doesn't matter how big or powerful a woman appears to be; sooner or later some man will come around to put her in her place.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Would I recommend you read it now? Hell no; there's plenty of good work being done today that isn't focused on upholding the kyriarchy. If you feel you simply must, though, it's available as a double-novel with <i>The Last Days of Thronas</i> on Amazon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>Previous Tailings</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#5 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2016/02/tailings-of-golden-age-5-trouble-with.html">"The Trouble With Telstar" (June 1963)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#4 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2015/03/tailings-of-golden-age-4-industrial.html">"Industrial Revolution" (September 1963)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#3 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/11/tailings-of-golden-age-3-next-door-next.html">"Next Door, Next World" (April 1961)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#2 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/09/tailings-of-golden-age-2-in-imagicon.html">"In the Imagicon" (February 1966)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#1 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/05/tailings-of-golden-age-1-blitz-against.html">"Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)</a></span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-45210728102818958532016-08-27T13:02:00.000-04:002016-08-27T13:02:01.634-04:00Tunnel Visions: The KC Streetcar<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Every once in a while I hop out of Toronto, land in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and look around at different ways of getting around by rail, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Cities aren't supposed to be hollow. Cities are meant to be vibrant places, full of people doing popular things - otherwise, what's even the point of the city existing at all? Nevertheless, over the last seventy years, North America has seen many of its cities hollow out. Some managed to hang on; some, like Toronto, ended the 20th century better off than they'd started. Some, like Kansas City, Missouri, are trying to climb back up.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Like other major North American cities, Kansas City operated a substantial streetcar network in the years immediately following the Second World War, at its height running nearly two hundred <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCC_streetcar">PCC streetcars</a> on a system comparable in length to Toronto's, today. Also like most other major North American cities, Kansas City dismantled its streetcar system in the 1950s as suburbanization and ubiquitous automobile ownership demolished its foundation. Kansas City was especially vulnerable to this because, hell, look at a map - aside from the rivers that frame downtown, there are no appreciable geographic barriers anywhere around it. Kansas City had room to sprawl, and so it sprawled. Rapid transit was hard-pressed in dense cities; in the midcentury Midwest, it didn't have a chance. Some of KC's streetcars found second lives in cities like Toronto or San Francisco, but plenty of them ended up just being scrapped.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That was how rail transit in Kansas City stood for nearly sixty years, but it's different now. North and south, cities are rebuilding lines that previous generations tore out. As I write this, Kansas City is home to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_Streetcar">the newest streetcar system in North America</a> - and it'll only be that way for another couple of weeks, until <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Streetcar">Cincinnati's</a> starts running in early September.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I was in Kansas City to attend the 74th World Science Fiction Convention earlier this month, but I was sure to make time for a brand new streetcar.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>System</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>KC Streetcar #804 pushes north at the edge of the Power & Light District.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The KC Streetcar is, thanks to its newness, a refreshingly uncomplicated system - it's a single line, three and a half kilometers (2.2 miles) long. It spends most of its time on Main Street, crossing over two highways - Kansas City didn't shy away from crashing Interstates through its downtown core - and diverging only to loop through River Market just north of downtown, with each trip beginning and ending outside Union Station. Again, "Tunnel Visions" is a misnomer because at no point does the streetcar's route take it underground; hell, aside from a couple of pedestrian overpasses, it doesn't go under <i>anything</i>. It's a downtown circulator more than anything else, which is understandable. To my eyes, downtown Kansas City is reminiscent of downtown Toronto circa 1975 with more artisanal coffee stores and BBQ restaurants - by which I mean it's full of parking lots where buildings once stood. According to the streetcar's official website, there are more than <a href="http://kcstreetcar.org/route/parking/"><i>twelve thousand</i> parking spots</a> within <b>one block</b> of the line - which is one of the major reasons, I think, that the streetcar felt so empty when I used it during the weekdays; there are only twenty-two thousand people living in downtown Kansas City. I mean, this is a place where the downtown CVS closes at 7 PM.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What struck me as immediately unusual about the setup is how the rails were laid. In Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, and other cities I've been in where street-running streetcars have been retained, the rails generally keep to the inner lanes. In Kansas City, it's the reverse; by and large the streetcars run in the outer lanes. This does come with advantages and disadvantages over the usual setup, as where multiple lanes exist, automobiles can navigate around streetcars and passengers don't have to brave a traffic lane to board or alight. From what I'm told, it doesn't make the setup particularly friendly to cyclists, however; I know of at least one point on a bridge near Union Station where there is very low clearance between the streetcar and the pedestrian wall, and there's at least one sign along the route warning cyclists that if the bike's wheel gets caught in the rail, they may be thrown bodily over the handlebars.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Not that they're <i>always</i> on the outer edge; there is some weaving to accommodate turning lanes and on-street parking, and there are places where there's only one lane, so a streetcar taking on passengers can cause traffic to build up behind it. Just like home. But those cars are faster than the streetcar, they'll get where they're going sooner than anyone on foot will anyway, probably.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Once you're on the streetcar, it's very difficult to get lost. You can't stay on it indefinitely, though, since all riders are required to alight at the Union Station terminus - but nothing stops you from getting right back on. Opportunities for connections are limited, but they do exist; the MAX bus rapid transit system - which replicates some of Kansas City's former streetcar lines - has stops near the line, and the 10th & Main Transit Center permits transfers to some of RideKC's regular bus routes. Streetcar service is a bit limited, though, since they don't have many streetcars to go around; on a day like today (Saturday, August 27), when one streetcar is out of service, they can't run service frequencies better than 10-15 minutes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">During my first experiences with the system found it somewhat empty, but that may be because Kansas City isn't yet a public-transit-all-the-time city like Toronto is. I've seen reports that the KC Streetcar is already exceeding its passenger projections, and my experience at 3:40 PM on a Saturday bears that out; from Metro Center to Union Station, it was standing room only all the way, and even more people boarded there for a trip back north. Fortunately, the streetcars have articulated sections much like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Light_Rail_Vehicle">ALRVs</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Rocket">Toronto Rockets</a> I'm familiar with, so there was always a good place to stand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Stations</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Library Station on a weekday morning.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My first impression of Kansas City's public transportation system, in the form of an hourly bus that left from an unshaded shelter on a concrete median outside Terminal C of Kansas City International Airport, wasn't exactly the best. Some of the stops the bus passed during its forty-minute trip downtown stuck strongly in my mind, because of how unstoplike they were: just a pole signed "METRO STOP" with a route number, a phone number, and a website. No shelter, no bench, not even a square of sidewalk. If you're talking about Barrie, Ontario circa 1991, that's one thing, but it's pretty thin provender for 2016 Kansas City.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">With that in mind, I wasn't expecting much from the streetcar. What I found is that its stations feel like a strange middle ground to me: they're not <i>quite</i> stations, but they're more than just stops. The ones that aren't in their own medians are smoothly integrated into the sidewalk, designed so that they're on the same level as a streetcar to allow step-free access, and built around a central t-shaped shelter. I say "shelter" because there's no better word, but with no walls and a fairly small roof, the shelter that many of them is theoretical at best. While waiting at Kauffman Center during a heavy rainstorm, I had to stand on the far side, off the actual platform, to keep from getting drenched by passing cars.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That's irritating enough, in August - but Kansas City isn't Los Angeles, or Houston, or Miami. For now, at least, it still gets cold in Missouri, and snow does fall. These stations don't have windbreaks. I wouldn't want to be waiting at one during a snowstorm, or even just a cold and windy day. Sure, if service was frequent there might be a tradeoff, but there are plenty of times where you'll be waiting ten minutes or more for a streetcar to roll by.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">On the whole, there's not much eye-catching about these stations. Many of them don't even have advertisements. They're each equipped with screens that count down until the next streetcar arrival, and have posted streetcar route maps and hours of operation. There are bits of public art scattered here and there; the one that most caught my eye was a model perched on top of the Union Station shelter, at once a streetcar and automobile and jetliner. One would think the wings would make it a bit difficult to run something like that on the streets.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Equipment</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">A closer look at the trailing end of streetcar #802.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As you'd expect for a 21st century streetcar system, the KC Streetcar has hit the ground running with modern equipment: it provides service with four (count 'em) CAF Urbos 3 Model 100 streetcars on their first North American appearance, though Cincinnati will use them as well and they're already in service in Edinburgh, Belgrade, and multiple French and Spanish networks. They have that clean, streamlined European design to them, with all the vital equipment hidden away from riders' eyes - it's almost as if they're whispering along on a cushion of air. I do mean <i>whispering</i>, too - these cars are <b>quiet</b>. Coming from Toronto, I'm used for the 1970s-era CLRVs to make my organs rattle whenever I'm sitting in a building <i>next</i> to the line; in Kansas City, it took me a while to realize that streetcars were going by, and I <i>wasn't even noticing</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The streetcars are three-module articulated vehicles, rather like the new Flexity Outlooks running in Toronto, but a bit smaller; they're about 24 meters long, with a rated capacity of 148 when everyone's squeezed in. They're numbered 801 to 804, because this is officially the continuation of Kansas City's previous streetcar system, and the earlier numbers had been used already. It puts the smallness of the KC Streetcar into perspective, though. As I wrote this, at 12:49 on a Saturday morning, there were more than four streetcars running on Toronto's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/509_Harbourfront">509 Harbourfront</a> line, and it's the shortest one on the system!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I found the streetcar interiors pretty spartan, and I'm not sure if this is a permanent thing or just an artifact of the system being so new. Except for the external "Sprint Wi-Fi" logo on the cars' middle modules, which also advertises the free wireless access that's been implemented along the line and will eventually be activated aboard the streetcars themselves, there are no ads. There <i>was</i> the <a href="http://kcstreetcar.org/how-to-ride/code-of-conduct/">Code of Conduct</a> posting there to educate Kansas Citians on how to use their new ride, though: rules like "no smoking or eating" and "please let people off before you board" and "do not bring weapons onto the streetcar," because that is something that actually has to be spelled out where everyone can see it in the United States.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The streetcars have a few tricks I wasn't expecting, either. Digitized bells aren't anything unusual - bells and streetcars have gone together for more than a hundred years - but Kansas Citians haven't needed to look out for streetcars since 1957, so when necessary, the streetcars can sound more like oncoming freight trains. <i>That</i> gets attention: it made me jump the first time I heard it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Ease of Access and Ease of Use</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Looking toward the unoccupied control cab in the trailing end of streetcar #803.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The KC Streetcar is the easiest system I've ever used, for two reasons: physically speaking, the no-step streetcar access makes it a breeze to board, and for all other respects - it's free. Absolutely, 100% no charge to the people who riding it, which is probably a big factor in <i>why</i> it's gone so far beyond its ridership projections already. Admittedly, that's a good way to get people thinking good things in what may be their first experience with fixed-infrastructure transit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There's plenty of room to move around inside, and there are priority seats and wheelchair-friendly spaces as you'd expect for modern equipment, but it's honestly not that comfortable - not that comfort is <i>that</i> much of a problem, considering how quickly one of these streetcars can do a circuit. Besides, with the articulated sections and the hanging straps, there are plenty of places to stand if you can.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The stop request buttons were a little different than I'm used to, but I can live with that. They're only mounted on poles, which means that every once in a while, they're horizontal. What threw me about them was that it wasn't easy to tell whether or not they worked once I pressed them; I'm used to a stop request button sounding a tone immediately, but the KC Streetcar looks to have gone with waiting until the automated stop announcement has been made for the next station before sounding the request noise. I figure it's the request noise, at least, because I didn't hear it <i>all</i> the time - the only consistent one sounded more like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgVJC9eNb-g">the Sweet Cuppin' Cakes version of Strong Bad</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Since the system is so new, and there aren't that many in the area - St. Louis' <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetroLink_(St._Louis)">MetroLink</a>, clear on the other side of Missouri, is the closest - rider education looks to be one of the agency's big priorities. Still, it was a bit surprising when, before departing Union Station, the streetcar operator spoke to everyone aboard the streetcar, giving a brief overview on how to ride. Even if it made it seem more like a theme park ride than a legitimate piece of public transportation infrastructure, it was a welcome thing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Conclusion</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgizwWHqwAPXOcnl4zm8YzEIN3OFTdiNn5Lt3zKe3Dry9Z6TL-mFSuPx1zTGMzc2ovLxqvLm8FnFD1KNj4DqjFPFEFtbeqiIB0HOjbxgL2VBndazlFC6Z8KQhufuRw79yrDa5uhCqpLqG8/s1600/tv15streetcar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgizwWHqwAPXOcnl4zm8YzEIN3OFTdiNn5Lt3zKe3Dry9Z6TL-mFSuPx1zTGMzc2ovLxqvLm8FnFD1KNj4DqjFPFEFtbeqiIB0HOjbxgL2VBndazlFC6Z8KQhufuRw79yrDa5uhCqpLqG8/s320/tv15streetcar.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">KC Streetcar #801. Look at all its majesty.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One of the big factors in early 20th century urban development was the streetcar suburb: a neighbourhood opened up by a newly-built or expanded streetcar line feeding into the central city. Hell, a lot of them were built <i>by</i> streetcar companies, to ensure future business. Since they were designed with the expectation that people would be making their way on foot when they weren't riding the rails, these neighbourhoods are human-scaled and many remain prosperous today; hell, in Toronto, most of them still have their streetcars.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What Kansas City is trying to do feels like a 21st century inversion of this - using a streetcar to rebuild a downtown, and why not? It's worked elsewhere. When I talked about hollow cities at the beginning of this piece, I was thinking specifically of Kansas City; a downtown doesn't feel right when it's got so many empty buildings, when it's littered with parking lots, when street life seems confined to a mere strip rather than something that spreads through the whole. It's not that surprising, though - look at a map; downtown KC has the look of a psychological island, surrounded by the river and the highways, and those highways weren't built on empty land. There are big rips in the urban fabric there, but the streetcar might be the thing to sew them together again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Whether the streetcar's expansion plans reach fruition, or whether it never goes any further than this - that's always the struggle, isn't it?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana"; font-weight: bold;">Previous Tunnel Visions</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2015/06/tunnel-visions-docklands-light-railway.html">The Docklands Light Railway</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/08/tunnel-visions-detroit-people-mover.html">The Detroit People Mover</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/08/tunnel-visions-seattles-link-light-rail.html">Seattle's Link Light Rail</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/07/tunnel-visions-portlands-max-light-rail.html">Portland's MAX Light Rail</a></span></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/06/tunnel-visions-seattle-center-monorail.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Seattle Center Monorail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/09/tunnel-visions-bay-area-rapid-transit.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Bay Area Rapid Transit</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/06/tunnel-visions-san-franciscos-muni.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">San Francisco's Muni Metro</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/02/tunnel-visions-phoenixs-metro-light.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Phoenix's Metro Light Rail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/tunnel-visions-kenosha-electric-railway.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Kenosha Electric Railway</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/tunnel-visions-vancouvers-skytrain.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Vancouver's SkyTrain</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/03/tunnel-visions-toronto-subway-and-rt.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Toronto Subway and RT</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/01/tunnel-visions-los-angeles-county-metro.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Los Angeles County Metro Rail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/10/tunnel-visions-chicago-l.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Chicago 'L'</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/08/tunnel-visions-torontos-subway-and.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The Montreal Metro</span></a></li>
</ul>
Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-21638148012437290322016-08-22T15:52:00.001-04:002016-08-22T15:55:27.824-04:00Things You Should Totally Read #1<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Recently I realized that I was only reviewing things so that I could criticize them. Not only is that unhelpful, seeing as how a lot of these things are works of short science fiction older than I am, it's unhealthy - constantly seeking out things you don't like only has negative effects, psychologically <i>and</i> physiologically. So in the spirit of being more helpful and more healthy, I've been inspired to start out this irregular series looking at current bits of fiction that I think are good and worth your time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My own bits will be brief, because I'd rather you spend your time with the authors.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Onward!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"<a href="http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2016-3/of-peach-trees-and-coral-red-roses-by-mina-li/">Of Peach Trees and Coral-Red Roses</a>" by Mina Li</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'm not too familiar with Li's work. In fact, this was the first thing of hers I'd read, but when she brings skill like this to the page, I'm certain it won't be the last. This is a fantasy story that I felt did a thought-provoking job at not only inverting the typical fairy-tale-princess setup but weaving deeper meanings into it. I don't know if they were intended by Li or it's just a result of me bringing myself to the table, but good stories aren't inert; they start internal conversations. "Of Peach Trees and Coral-Red Roses" had my brain chugging for a while afterward, so it's successful in that regard. Plus, I know things I didn't know before, like the notions of good fortune associated with peach trees and bamboo. It's a worthwhile story that broadens your horizons, and this is one of them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's free to read at Kaleidotrope, so I suggest you do it!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"<a href="http://magazine.metaphorosis.com/story/2016/the-last-premee-mohamed/">The Last</a>," by Premee Mohamed</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">When I was in high school in Central Ontario they made us read CanLit. <b>So much CanLit.</b> Stories about people in the cold north woods, in the windswept prairies, in the frozen Arctic, people alone and struggling with the angry environment at every turn. If I'd had stories to read like Premee Mohamed's "The Last," I would have enjoyed it a lot more. This story is so <i>very</i> Canadian - drippingly, meltingly so. I mean, it is a story about cowboys that wrangle sentient icebergs. I read this on my smartphone browser and couldn't put it down. It has a fine, polished edge and a cold heart - much like an iceberg, in fact! This will definitely be on my Aurora nomination list for next year, because it is that good. Mohamed is another author I expect to go far in the years ahead.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"<a href="http://www.tor.com/2016/05/18/excerpts-runtime-s-b-divya/">Runtime</a>," by S.B. Divya</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Finally, people are realizing that novellas can stand on their own. "Runtime" is one of the first standalone novellas to come out of Tor.com Publishing, and in the low-word-count constraints of the form S.B. Divya has created a future that <i>feels</i> real, alternatively gleaming and grimy, hopeful and hopeless. It pivots around Marmeg, an eighteen-year-old cyborg who upgrades herself with rebuilt parts rescued from behind dumpsters and can write fresh code in minutes, and her struggle to win a punishing rough-country footrace. It's rich with the technical crunchiness that you might expect from an <i>Analog</i> story, coupled with a good human core. The characters were well-built, and the world felt like a logical extension of the present day, rather than a logical extension of, say, 1977.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I read this one as a physical, printed copy, and I suspect that heightened my like of it even more, but read it however you want to! This one is definitely in the running for a Hugo, and it'll be on my nominating list next year.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-21292310661461827352016-06-25T15:35:00.000-04:002016-06-25T15:35:08.807-04:00A Horizon of Desperate Events<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Black holes are unpleasant things to be around, and that's not just because they're places so warped that mathematics means nothing inside them. All the familiar rules get twisted up around them, and if you're not skillful or you're not paying attention it's easy to end up getting your big, shiny starship <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kVsxVBz1Mg">trapped forever</a>. Given the right black hole, you could cross the event horizon and the only indication would be all the light of the universe winking out behind you. You're perfectly fine, for the moment -- but you're always getting closer to the singularity, the ultimate destructor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is kind of how I feel about modern politics, specifically the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union. Seventeen million people decided it would be a <i>totally rad</i> idea to skim the event horizon, and come now, it couldn't <b>possibly</b> be as bad as the rest of the crew was saying. Except now the universe has gone out behind them, and every trajectory in spacetime leads closer to the singularity, and they're realizing that playing chicken with a black hole is, in fact, not the wisest decision anyone has made.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm seeing commentary pop up now -- Charles Stross, for one, has a good rundown <a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/constitutional-crisis-ahoy.html">here</a> -- that the UK may not have crossed the event horizon after all, that there's still a way out of the situation and a way to stay in the European Union. Whether it's a second referendum to say "actually, about that, wasn't that a capital joke, simply <i>capital</i>" or clauses in the Scottish and Northern Irish constitutions that could give them vetos over leaving the EU if you squint, there's a lot of desperation out there to walk it back.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Personally, I think it's not going to happen. Things have already gone too far for that. A wound can be healed, but it can't be uninflicted. Words, once said, cannot be unsaid. Democracy is an axiom of the United Kingdom <i>and</i> the European Union, and saying "whoops, just kidding!" undermines that whole foundation. I know it would be better for everyone for the UK to stay in the EU; my personal preference is for them to stay.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But they can't, not anymore. Look at it this way: if you took a shit on your boss's desk, how well-disposed do you think she would be to your frantic, frenzied apologies, your begging to not be fired, when she discovered you wiping your ass with a dayplanner? We've all experienced times in our lives where we wish more than anything we could rewind time, use the Omega-13 to correct a single mistake, but that never happened for any of us and I highly doubt it's going to happen for the UK.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The EU is not going to take a punch to the face with a smile. They're going to break the UK to the greatest extent they can, pour encourager les autres. Even as someone whose background is English, who knows people over there who are already broken by this -- I honestly can't say I blame the EU, or that I would do any different were I in its place.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In their way, institutions can be as cold and as mechanical as black holes. We forget that to our peril.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-48524902082777906582016-06-05T20:27:00.000-04:002016-06-05T20:27:43.503-04:00Short SF Review #24: Perspectives<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>"Perspectives," by W.R. Thompson</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Originally published in </i>Analog<i>, November 1983</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">"You realize how dangerously tense things are up here, don't you?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bob looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">"I mean that this is the most stress-filled environment in which humans have ever attempted to live."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The 1980s were interesting times for science fiction. The gosh-wow-isn't-this-gadget-rad-as-heck stories and odes to pocket-protected engineers solving technical problems that had once dominated it were an increasingly smaller part of a larger galaxy. The Space Shuttle had begun to fly, and proved the 1970s dreams of two-week turnarounds and $10-per-pound orbital launch costs to be just that--dreams. The world was becoming more like science fiction every day, but to some science fiction writers, the world was always trying to take it away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A lot of those writers ended up placing stories in <i>Analog</i>, and as a result, many <i>Analog</i> stories in the '80s are built around space boosterism and reflect the anxieties of authors that, just as it had been possible to reach for space, their hands were being slapped away by "budgets" and "physics" and "U.S. Senator William Proxmire (D-WI)," about whom they complained <b>mightily</b>. Stories that come out of this zeitgeist often look rather... <i>warped</i> to modern eyes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">W.R. Thompson's "Perceptions" is one of them. Set in the near future of 1983, so probably ten or fifteen years ago, the United States has set up a lunar colony as the core of a space mining operation. Buffetted and battered by its dependence on Earth and its politicians, a deep vein of uncertainty and stress is piled on to the ordinary concerns of space life--you know, that unless everything keeps working, everyone will die. Into this comes Charles Augustine Hacker, a psychologist sent up to study the effects of stress in the colonial environment. Makes sense, really; a lunar colony runs in completely different circumstances from anything on Earth, and you'd want to have an outside opinion on mission-critical things like psychological stability, for the same reason you'd want air traffic controllers or nuclear reactor technicians to be in good mental health.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But he isn't 100% on board with the idea of space colonization, so in the world of a 1980s <i>Analog</i> story, he is of course the villain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Hacker has an argument behind him -- the colonists act <i>weird</i> to his eyes, beyond their general-but-understandable unwillingness to dwell on the hostility of their environment; they're as sober as a temperance convention, they're careful to a fault, they use jargon-filled slang that implies they'd rather think of themselves as machines. He also has a solution: for the colonists to return to Earth, before their society snaps. The colonial leaders, being the colonial leaders, don't think much of this solution, and when they discover where Hacker's coming from, they immediately make plans to resolve the situation to their benefit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'll admit that the execution of "Perceptions" may suffer from being, as best as I can tell, Thompson's first professional sale. I know that my first sale to <i>Analog</i>, back in 2012, doesn't match up to things I'm creating now. Still, readers can only engage it by how it <i>was</i> executed, and honestly, I still can't decide if the author *intended* the reader to look askance at the story or to take it at its word. When I first read it on the subway, I reached a point where I said to myself "oh, I see what's going on, all these expectations that're being set up are going to get toppled," right until I reached the last line and the tower of expectations stayed defiantly upright.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The story is built around the colonists' realization that Hacker has an ideological axe to grind: specifically, that technological advancement had made civilization more and more stressful, that "technology has destabilized the foundations of life" and "form[s] dangers to life and limb which are beyond human comprehension." The leaders decide he lacks intellectual honesty because he filters things through <i>his</i> viewpoint rather than <i>theirs</i>, and come to the conclusion that abandoning the colony would end up dooming all of humanity to a new Dark Age. So, being calm, rational individuals who are in no way suffering from severe psychological pressure, they decide to give Hacker a nervous breakdown.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Yeah.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That's pretty much how it ends. The colony's director wonders how long it'll be until he can sleep soundly again, even though he's convinced himself that he's saved the colony -- and there's a <i>lot</i> of convincing going on in this story. The colonists convince themselves that they're totally okay, that Hacker is full of shit <b>solely because</b> he has a particular viewpoint, and that all of their actions are worthwhile and justifiable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The key thing that the story appears to gloss over, though? Hacker <b>isn't wrong</b>. The moon <b>is</b> far more hostile than any environment on Earth. Stress <b>can</b> be a real problem, and it <b>can</b> sneak up on you. "<i>I</i> don't feel any tension," says Bob Dubois, the colonial director, as if that settles things. But tension is funny like that, and it's something I can speak to. I've been working the same job for nine years now, but it's only fairly recently that the tension migraines started to appear, and even <i>more</i> recently that I discovered they were tension migraines. You can think you're calm, collected, and in control and be totally unaware that the dam holding back everything has started to buckle.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I thought that this story would end by, in part, vindicating Hacker. Much of the story's middle is a dialogue between two characters justifying the colony's customs to each other, which I read as the characters trying to convince themselves that they were right, that <i>nothing</i> was wrong with them. There's never any self-awareness, never any doubt; the colonists <i>know</i> they are the Good Guys Here. It's like they're terrified to interrogate their own beliefs, in case they discover something they'd rather leave hidden.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In their own way, the colonial leaders are no better than their villain -- but you could make an argument that they're <i>worse</i>. They barely bother seeing if Hacker can be swayed, with the doctor justifying the induced breakdown by saying that he can't be reasoned with. What's left unsaid is that, to all appearances, neither can they.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Perspectives," to me, is greater than the sum of its parts. It's not many stories that leave me thinking for days after I read it, wondering whether the author was pointing to <i>this</i> thing or <b>that</b> one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>what do you mean i haven't used this category for FOUR YEARS woooooow</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana"; font-weight: bold;">Previous Short SF Reviews:</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#23: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/04/short-sf-review-23-ministry-of-space.html">"Ministry of Space" (Warren Ellis, <i>et al</i>)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#22: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/02/short-sf-review-22-when-planets-collide.html">"When Planets Collide" (Gold Key Comics)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#21: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/12/short-sf-review-21-you-source-of-tears.html">"You Source of Tears" (Andrew Barton)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#20: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/11/short-sf-review-20-helix.html">"The Helix" (Gerard Rejskind)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#19: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/10/short-sf-review-19-thirst-quenchers.html">"The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#18: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/06/short-sf-review-18-hackers.html">"Hackers" (Rick Cook)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#17: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/02/short-sf-review-17-attached-to-land.html">"Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#16: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/11/short-sf-review-16-great-gizmo-machine.html">"The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#15: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/short-sf-review-15-alien-psychologist.html">"Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#14: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/06/short-sf-review-14-frontliners.html">"The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#13: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/02/short-sf-review-13-second-chance.html">"Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#12: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/01/short-sf-review-12-hades.html">"Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#11: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/10/short-sf-review-11-revolt-of-ants.html">"Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#10: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/09/short-sf-review-10-blessed-are-meekbots.html">"Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#9: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/07/short-sf-review-9-to-make-new.html">"To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#8: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/06/short-sf-review-8-funnel-hawk.html">"Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#7: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/05/short-sf-review-7-testing-one-two-three.html">Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#6: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/05/short-sf-review-6-bite.html">"Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#5: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/04/short-sf-review-5-no-shoulder-to-cry-on.html">"No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#4: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/04/short-sf-review-4-crazy-oil.html">"Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#3: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/03/short-sf-review-3-saturn-game.html">"The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#2: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/02/short-sf-review-2-job-inaction.html">"Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana";">#1: <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/01/short-sf-review-1-roachstompers.html">"Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)</a></span></li>
</ul>
Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-79477478551695397192016-04-10T13:34:00.000-04:002016-04-10T13:34:05.450-04:00On a Rail to the Future<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If you were to take a measuring tape to one of the many railways embedded in or buried under Toronto's streets -- not recommended, incidentally, because those tracks are heavily used -- you'd find something unique, if a bit pedestrian. Every railway has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge">track gauge</a>, which is just how far apart the rails are. The miniature railways you'll find at certain tourist attractions may have only a fifteen-inch gauge, while the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_6_in_gauge_railway">broad-gauge railways</a> of India, Pakistan, and San Francisco's <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2011/09/tunnel-visions-bay-area-rapid-transit.html">Bay Area Rapid Transit</a> are five and a half feet wide. In Toronto, you'd find that the rails are built to a gauge of 4 feet, 10 7⁄8 inches -- just slightly wider than standard gauge -- and nowhere else in the world will you find operating tracks built to that specification.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's not because Toronto wanted to be unique and special. It goes back to 1861, when the first horsecar lines started operating in the young city; the rails were built with that specific gauge so that the carriages in use at the time could themselves take advantage of the rails. As the streetcar system expanded, the track gauge was maintained so that the same equipment could be used across the entire network, and as the Toronto subway was initially aiming to use streetcar-derived rolling stock, the underground railways use the same track separation because of one decision a hundred and fifty years ago.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why do I bring this up? Because it's a simple illustration of how history echoes; not only can simple choices have wide-ranging consequences, but the past reverberates in the present.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These rails haven't even been used for fifty years, and yet they're still here.</span></i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is not something a lot of people appear to understand. Case in point: Hillary Clinton, the presumptive heir to the Democratic presidential nomination because, well, her last name is "Clinton." Back in 2010, while she was still Secretary of State, she commented on the issue of African economic development, but in the sort of tin-eared way that only a Westerner who thinks history is "just a bunch of things that happened" could.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"For goodness sakes, this is the 21st century," Reuters <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-africa-usa-idUSTRE65D61920100614">quoted Clinton as saying</a>. "We've got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let's make money for everybody."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Think back to rails for a moment. Toronto's unique track gauge is the result of a simple choice a hundred and fifty years ago, but it's not going away. To remove it from the face of Earth would not only mean tearing up eighty-two kilometers of streetcar lines, but the complete re-railing of nearly a hundred kilometers of subway and the retrofitting of hundreds of subway trains and streetcars. It would take a supreme effort to make the gauge go away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Western conquest and occupation of Africa lasted for decades. It carved scars that will never heal. Just as the outlines of the Roman Empire are visible in the shape of the world today, two thousand years later -- hell, there's a legend that says wagon wheel gauges go back to ruts cut by Roman chariots -- in the forty-first century, the damage that the West caused to Africa, and Asia, and, hell, anywhere that <i>wasn't</i> the West, will still be visible.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It will take a supreme effort to for the conquered and oppressed regions of the world to heal. It is not something that can just be "got over." To make a statement like that betrays not only privilege but <i>unthinking</i> privilege, and helps illustrate why Clinton is fortunate she's going against candidates as oozily unlikeable as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">History is loud, and we live in an echo chamber. The voices of the past still whisper today.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-53717851821100314722016-02-10T10:34:00.002-05:002016-02-10T10:34:44.205-05:00Tailings of the Golden Age #5: The Trouble with Telstar<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>"The Trouble with Telstar," by John Berryman</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Appeared in </i>Analog<i>, June 1963</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">These space-jockeys have their own vocabulary, and their own oh, so cool way of playing it during the countdown. I'm pretty familiar with complex components, but they were checking of equipment I never heard of. We had gyros--hell, our <u>gyros</u> had gyros. And we had tanks, and pressures and temperatures and voltages and who-stuck-John. It was all very impressive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Analog</i> doesn't have a reputation as a hard-science magazine for nothing. Open a copy from the 1960s: amidst the stories and John W. Campbell's angry denunciations of scientific orthodoxy, you'll find ads from outfits like Republic Aviation and General Dynamics and Allied Chemical. Analog gained a reputation as being filled with stories about engineers solving technical problem because, to a great degree, that's the audience it was aimed at in the '60s--and that's the audience that John Berryman's "The Trouble with Telstar" was written to appeal to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Mike Seaman has a problem that, presumably for once, doesn't have anything to do with his name. He's one of the top men behind the communication satellites made by Communications Corporation--truly, a staggeringly inspired name, but I've seen ones in real life every bit as ridiculous--and these satellites are failing in a way that can't be pinned down. There's a lot of talk about busted solenoids and backroom back-and-forths about who's responsible, and the story takes its sweet time getting to the point: apparently, it'd be cheaper to send a man (because 1960s) into orbit to repair the satellites. Much of the story deals with Seaman training for his mission and dealing with friction from the established astronauts, who look at him as a jumped-up repairman. Granted, they're not wrong; he's flying the mission not because he's an ideal astronaut candidate, but because he came up with the idea for the orbital repair and his bosses volunteered him. Life in the private sector sure is grand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Once in orbit, Seaman fixes the satellites and there's some brief peril, because there's always got to be some kind of peril. Fortunately, with the production of fresh space debris that <b>totally</b> won't <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome">come back to haunt anyone</a> ever, the day is saved and Our Hero™</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> can claim his reward in the form of his boss's secretary, who only dates astronauts. ("If you haven't made at least three orbits, she won't even have dinner with you.")</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Maybe this would be entertaining to an engineer in 1963 who has to deal with crap like this on a regular basis, but to a non-engineer like myself in 2016 it's just... boring. I can see why Campbell printed it, because John W. Campbell loves him his stories of engineers solving technical problems, but that doesn't change the fact that it's aggressively mediocre. I mean, there wasn't even any quote from it ridiculous enough to stick in my mind for use at the top of this post. It's just inert, but that didn't keep it from being on the cover of the issue it ran in!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now, to be fair, there were some parts in there that struck me as interesting--but only in a historical context; had I read the story in 1963 they would not have stood out. Berryman did earn a nod in that he anticipated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_buoyancy_simulation_as_a_training_aid">neutral buoyancy training</a> for EVAs a couple of years before NASA picked it up. Seaman is launched to orbit in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar">Dyna-Soar</a> spaceplane, which at the time would have placed the story in the late 1960s. In reality the Dyna-Soar program was cancelled six months after the issue disappeared from newsstands, so the story has an unintential alternate history vibe to it now. Berryman's frequent use of "telstar" as a standard noun for a communications satellite felt like a brush with a parallel dictionary, before the terminology of space had settled firmly down into what we have today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As well, the story is only <i>passively</i> sexist, which practically feels like a victory for something printed by John W. Campbell in 1963. The secretary character has no character, is described little beyond "small, dark, intense... pert [and] lively," and the punchline of the story is her being dumped by Seaman: "no dame was worth that ride."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I will note that the <a href="http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?2193">John Berryman</a> who wrote this is not the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berryman">John Berryman</a> who's listed on Wikipedia. Unless you're a weirdo like me reading old magazines for fun, there's no real reason for you to have heard of him; the science-fictional Berryman's career was dominated by short fiction, and trailed off shortly after "The Trouble with Telstar" was written; his last credit is 1986's "The Big Dish," which was also an Analog cover story, and he died in 1988.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If you're <i>really</i> interested, you can read "<a href="http://archive.org/stream/thetroublewithte30679gut/30679.txt">The Trouble with Telstar</a>" for free at Archive.org. There's also a Kindle edition available on Amazon for <b>$5.45</b>, which is utterly ridiculous; the entire June 1963 issue of Analog cost $0.50, and even with fifty years of inflation factored in, that's only $3.91. But unless you have some specific interest in the history of the field, there's not much to recommend spending your time with it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>Previous Tailings</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#4 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2015/03/tailings-of-golden-age-4-industrial.html">"Industrial Revolution" (September 1963)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#3 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/11/tailings-of-golden-age-3-next-door-next.html">"Next Door, Next World" (April 1961)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#2 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/09/tailings-of-golden-age-2-in-imagicon.html">"In the Imagicon" (February 1966)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">#1 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/05/tailings-of-golden-age-1-blitz-against.html">"Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)</a></span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-76484494222605487412015-06-14T20:24:00.000-04:002015-06-15T11:26:48.515-04:00Tunnel Visions: The Docklands Light Railway<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Every once in a while I hop out of Toronto, land in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and look around at different ways of getting around by rail, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">London! Home to the mother of metros, the sprawling <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground">London Underground</a>, opened in 1863 and connecting the core of the Square Mile with the commuter fringes of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-land">Metro-land</a>, and you can't <i>seriously</i> believe I was going to do one of these things about the Underground, can you? Entire <i>books</i> can be, and have been, written about the Underground. Books can be written out <b>individual lines</b> of the Underground, lines which are more complicated and cover more ground than entire <b>systems</b> that have previously appeared in Tunnel Visions. Maybe if I spent a couple of years living in London and using the Tube every day, things would be a bit different, but today it's just not on. I mean, come on. This is the first time I've got out of North America for this. Baby steps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What's far more manageable on a sightseer's budget is the Docklands Light Railway--a network which you could easily miss, even as a transit fan touching down in the capital. It doesn't have the history or the character of the Tube, for sure, and it's not well-known enough to show up in blockbuster movies even when it would make sense to in the narrative--I'm looking at <b>you</b>, <i>Thor: The Dark World</i>--but it is small enough to hold a picture of in one's head, and concise enough for an outlander to get at least an impression of in the course of a week and a half.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That's small in the context of London, of course. What you've got to remember is that London is gargantuan. The DLR... the DLR is less so.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Two DLR trains pass over the waters of Middle Dock in Canary Wharf, above the skyscrapers of the City of London.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As its name suggests, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway">Docklands Light Railway</a> was built to serve the Docklands region in the East End, and not Heathrow Airport. It started running in 1987, when the light rail renaissance saw rails being laid across Europe and even bits of North America, and when the Docklands were still transitioning from being, y'know, <i>docks</i>. Today it reaches across the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and beyond, linking Greenwich and Beckton to London City Airport and the claustrophobic, sweaty subterranean hell that is the Bank-Monument station complex. My friends mocked me about it and my desperation to use alternate routes between platforms after <i>the incident</i>, but that's exactly what it is. Come on, tell me I'm wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By the early 1990s the DLR remained fairly limited, with lines connecting Tower Gateway to Island Gardens at the southern end of the Isle of Dogs and from there to Stratford in the north--though even then, the underground connection to Bank and the eastern extension to Beckton were under construction, as was the station at Canary Wharf. It wasn't until 1999 that it was taken south of the Thames through Greenwich to Lewisham, and it hopped the river again ten years later as part of an extention to Woolwich Arsenal. Today, the system touches on wide areas of East London beyond those pockets served by the Tube or the new Overground, and is big enough that it could be dropped down into a North American city on its own and be one of the continent's larger networks. There are plenty of cities over here that would <i>love</i> to have something like the DLR.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In London, though, it's just another part of the patchwork transit that shuffles people across the capital like so many things that are shuffled. Hell, <a href="http://www.theimportanceofbeingtrivial.com/">Mark Mason</a>--who's famous <i>to me</i> for performing the not-entirely-sane act of walking the extent of the London Underground on foot--doesn't even think it should be considered part of the same system, and he's not wrong. From the technology it uses to the nature of the route, the DLR feels more like some other city's transit system grafted onto London after some marathon urban surgery session. Considering that that feeling holds clear today, almost a year after I first stepped foot on the thing, I'd say there's a firm point to it. Nevertheless, there is noticeable overlap between the DLR and the Underground--automated announcements, for instance, are shared between them, such as the one that often reminds riders to keep their Oyster contactless payment cards separate from others to avoid card clash. Worthwhile advice, incidentally, as I discovered that my Presto contactless payment card did, in fact, cause card clash.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The future will see it tied more tightly into the transit knots that bind the capital together, though. Construction on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail">Crossrail</a>, the mammoth fifteen-billion-pound project that will route even more suburban trains through London from 2018, is advanced enough that I could see the grand shell of the future station at Canary Wharf and the works underway at Custom House and the portal near Canning Town--connections that will further open up east London. Though I don't imagine many tourists will end up that way regardless. For me, my explorations of the DLR made me wonder when someone would take note of my accent and ask what the hell I was doing out there.</span><br />
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<i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">A late-evening DLR train waits beneath the glass roof of Canary Wharf station.</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;">As of this writing, Docklands Light Railway passengers have their choice of forty-five stations to alight at, although Woolwich Arsenal is the odd station out here for being the only one beyond Zone 3 and therefore the only station I never even tried to reach--I mean, <i>come on</i>, if I was going anywhere beyond Zone 3 that wasn't Heathrow, it's be <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEHmVm7kvi4">Cockfosters</a>. Of these, seven link up with the Underground--though Canary Wharf's "link" is more theoretical than actual, considering the tales I've heard of people losing their way between one and the other, and the jet-lagged wandering about I had to do before I found it--and other connections enable transfers to the Overground and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirates_Air_Line_(cable_car)">Emirates Air Line</a>, because I guess there will always be people who want to see the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_O2">Millennium Dome</a> from the air without having to get on an airplane. If you're looking for a plane, though, you can pick one out on the London City Airport departures board they've thoughtfully installed at Platform 3 at Canning Town.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's also substantial integration with mainline National Rail services throughout the system, though I was only to experience it at Lewisham, the terminus of the DLR's branch into Greenwich. When I alighted there, I ran into a tide of people coming from the other end, a veritable Bloor-Yonge transfer's worth of people streaming out of the National Rail station. There were quite a few taxis waiting to pick up fares, but for a suburban transfer station, its commuter parking was surprisingly nonexistent. I come from a Canadian perspective, remember--the suburban stops on Toronto's commuter rail lines feature multi-storey car parks. The only allowance for parking I found nearby was for the Tesco next door, and with a £70 charge for staying longer than three hours, I doubt it's welcoming to commuters. Hell, for that rate you could park in the City, I'd imagine. Though I don't know if there are any parking garages there, between all those old roads with oddly specific names like "Old Jewry" or "Poultry." Not Poultry Road or Poultry Street, mind you--just Poultry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Given that background, I was gratified to discover that the DLR maintains the English tradition of maintaining odd names that made sense a hundred or a thousand years ago. I mean, it'd never occur to me to name a station "Mudchute," especially existing as it does between calm parkland and undoubtedly super-expensive housing on the Isle of Dogs--but hell, there was a chute there for getting rid of mud during construction a hundred and sixty years ago, and it's not likely to have any competition in the name department any time soon, so why not? Just up the line you'll find Crossharbour, which provided a brief reminder of home, because even disgraced British criminals like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Black">Conrad Black</a> need transit stations to lord over, even if he's actually a baron.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One thing that struck me fairly early on about the DLR--in fact, it's the second entry in my notes--is that there are spots where you can easily see one station while in another. Granted, this isn't unheard of outside London, since there are points along Toronto's Bloor-Danforth Line where the lights of the next station are visible in the distance, bright against the tunnel's darkness. But following the pedestrian path through the closely-bounded confines of Millwall Park, Island Gardens Station had only just disappeared behind a bend of foliage when the signs for Mudchute came into view, and East Ferry Road doesn't seem nearly developed enough to sustain a justifiable catchment area for both stations. Aside from a pub advertising cash prizes for trivia night (£1 per person to enroll), it's lined with the sort of brick-solid workmen's homes that have undoubtedly been colonized by professionals who spend their days in Canary Wharf shuffling around other peoples' money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Appropriately enough, then, Canary Wharf refined the concept beyond anything I was familiar with. From its DLR platforms, the station at West India Quays is clearly visible from Canary Wharf, which itself is clearly visible from Heron Quays, to the extent that the Underground connection at the Jubilee Line applies pretty much equally to Canary Wharf and Heron Quays--staying as I was down by Island Gardens, I frequently found it easier to hike to Heron Quays and be one station closer to alighting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That is, if you're able to alight at your station at all. It's a good thing that DLR trains allow passengers to pass from one carriage to the next, as on the Toronto Rocket; at Cutty Sark for Maritime Greenwich (a committee-chosen name if ever there was one) and Elverson Road, the standard DLR trains are actually <i>too long</i> for the platforms, requiring automated announcements reminding riders to move to the center of the train to alight, because allowing people to walk off onto, say, the third rail would be a Bad Thing Indeed™. TfL gets around that by keeping the first two and last two doors shut, but if thirty-two years of life has taught me anything, it's that I'm shocked as hell that you don't see people trying to force them open. Maybe it does happen and the news just doesn't cross the Atlantic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another thing that struck me about the DLR is how much variety there was in the nature of its stations. Not architecturally, I mean--the oldest is younger than I am, and so many of them are trapped in that late-20th century glass-and-steel style that can't hold a candle to the sort of stuff that Leslie Green designed for the Underground a hundred years ago. No, in this case I just mean the way they interact with the cityscape around them. Take, for example, the terminal stations at Bank and Tower Gateway--the former accessed by a five-minute march (I timed it) from the District Line and Circle Line platforms through cramped and overheated passageways, and the latter accessed by a five-minute walk from Tower Hill station, though to be fair I started my clock from the platform, and most of that time was spent getting out of Tower Hill station. Once all the <i>other</i> tourists peeled off toward the Tower of London, the route to Tower Gateway was bright and open and much preferable, honestly, and from it the DLR sets off comfortably above the London streetscape.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Much of the DLR is elevated, at that. Along the Isle of Dogs, it only meets the ground at Mudchute--where a man who looks like he's just come from the modern office, smartly casual dress with a backpack slung over one shoulder, alights with a Sainsbury's bag weighed down to translucency and hurries away past a sign bearing Boris Johnson's promise that it's only seventeen minutes from there to Bank--and then only to sink underground to Island Gardens and thence to Greenwich; before the extension was tunneled under the river, Mudchute and Island Gardens were both elevated stations. Island Gardens, beyond its vaguely-nautical flair, is a bit of an imposing station if only becuse of what I presume are ventilation shafts for the tunnels--if it ever shows up on an episode of <i>Doctor Who</i>, presumably they'll prove to be disguised planetary defense laser cannons or something. Other stations, like Cutty Sark for Maritime Greenwich, are deep enough underground that there's enough room to put the tunnelling shield they used to build it on display, while ones like the Beckton terminus are at ground level.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then there are places like Stratford, and though it's no Stratford International it's still a riot of walkways and platforms connecting to the Central Line and Jubilee Line, the London Overground, National Rail, and three distinct branches of the DLR itself. Ten months on, I remember it mostly as "busy." I managed to find the platform for the DLR branch I wanted just after I left, and even then it only ran as far as Canary Wharf. The thirteen-minute wait for the next train was the longest I experienced in London, and is leagues better than most American transit agencies I've ridden with. After I lived through those lucky minutes and headed away, the train passed construction sites, former Olympic venues, well-maintained greens and buildings with letters falling off the sides. There was a gritty industrial feeling to it all, I thought, much like Scarborough as seen from the RT.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As in Scarborough, it can get cold on the DLR's platforms at night. After 11, when the trains have pulled back to every ten minutes, there's plenty of time for bracing winds off the river to blow in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Equipment</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">A DLR train picks up new passengers at West India Quay station.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If I could only use one word to describe the Docklands Light Railway, it'd be "automated." Like the SkyTrain in Vancouver and like the future bearing down on us like a shotgun full of robot parts, the DLR's trains drive themselves across the network with no direct human intervention outside of the transit control center. At least, that's how it works as an <i>ideal</i>. In reality, automation is still a fickle, finicky thing, for which everyone can thank their jobs for as long as they still have them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Like the SkyTrain, DLR trains can be operated by a human when necessary, and on Monday, August 11, 2014 I witnessed a hell of a lot of DLR trains being operated by humans. The previous night, a disabled train at Westferry and a signal delay had halted movement across the entire DLR network, a delay that lasted at least as long as it took me to ride the Tube from Monument to Bow Road and then walk to Bow Church, where I found two trains frozen at their respective platforms with doors wide open. Even when the system wasn't rebounding from a major collapse, I found my path crossing with human staff fairly often, though generally in the form of fare inspectors. I encountered fare inspectors--they may have been the same person, actually, now that I think about it--on the first two trips I ever took on the DLR.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The trains themselves are fairly unremarkable, and if not for the general '80s-retro blockiness of their design and the English accents in the announcements and among the passengers, I could have been back in Vancouver. Presumably owing to London's present cool and rainy climate, there wasn't much air conditioning that I recall encountering along the system, and if you wanted ventilation you cracked a window as if you were on a bus. Their self-driving nature means that passengers can get a good view down the tracks from the front car, but unlike Vancouver, there's no single seat in the middle that makes you feel like the captain of the train.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Still, the rolling stock is small and personal enough that the "Light Railway" part of the DLR's name isn't just an affectation. They're not that much bigger than the new streetcars that have begun to hit Toronto's streets, and which will be the backbone of this city's light railway network if it ever gets off the ground. Still, I don't imagine that many tourists get out to Tower Hamlets, and there are plenty of politicians out there who would be shocked to find that a city as world-renowned as London is willing and able to build light railway networks where they're called for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>The way up to Tower Gateway, the original Central London terminus of the DLR.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Once I figured out how to get from Canary Wharf Underground station to Canary Wharf DLR station, things were pretty easy-going from there. The Oyster card is pretty foolproof, and I had plenty of chances to practice on the Underground before I made it to the DLR--hell, the biggest issue I encountered was that DLR stations lack turnstiles, and so there'd constantly be the little voice in the back of my head trying to convince me that I'd forgotten to tap my Oyster card and that I'd really rue this day. As I recall, the biggest problem with tapping in ended up boiling down to "where is the Oyster card reader"--at Heron Quays, in particular, it seemed like there were only a couple of readers, set down at a detour from the escalators that took passengers up to the hull-shaped platform. I made sure to tap on the way out, as well, even though I was travelling on a 7-day Travelcard and may not have needed to. But that's the way it goes sometimes. If we didn't do things we didn't need to, the world would be a lot less odd.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Likewise, it's easy to get into DLR stations. The elevated ones I visited all had escalators and elevators, and I'm given to understand that that sort of access holds true for the system as a whole--considering it opened in 1987, when people had actually started to give a shit about other people, I'd expect nothing less. The stations themselves change from side-platform to center-platform with little rhyme or reason--Canary Wharf DLR has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_solution">Spanish solution</a> setup with six platforms, the first time I'd encountered one--but the platforms are all equipped with LED boards telling you where the next three trains are going from there, and how long it'll be until they leave. Still, access isn't ideal--at some elevated stations, like Westferry, changing from one branch to the other means you have to descend from the station to street level, cross a couple of streets, and then climb back to to the far side platform and hope you haven't missed the train.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As long as you're there, though, you'll be able to make it open for you. DLR trains don't necessarily open all of their doors automatically; instead, like the Phoenix Metro and Toronto's newest streetcars, each set of doors comes with a button that you can press to open them, though a lot of the time you'll be preempted by people alighting through the same doors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Signage on the DLR is of the same quality that I encountered on the Underground, and it shares the same Johnston font. Also shared are the "Travel Better London" posters, though some were not entirely as applicable--the "<a href="https://twitter.com/tfl/status/488669602353004545">Remember to Stay Hydrated</a>" one, for starters, which made far more sense in the context of a poorly-ventilated, standing-room-only Metropolitan or District Line train running through 150-year-old tunnels. It stuck with me for a while until I realized the reason it was giving me so much trouble was because "oughta" and "water" don't rhyme in a Canadian accent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">DLR ticket vending machines at Deptford Bridge station.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Generally speaking--I'd prefer to dispense with the hedging, but I didn't visit them all and I'd rather not rely entirely on fallible memory--DLR stations are equipped with ticket vending machines that allow you to top up your Oyster card by cash, credit, or debit, capable of speaking a panoply of European languages like Polish, French, and Swedish, and they had no problem at all with my North American credit card. Considering the way things are going, though, these may be on the outs in another few years; during my time in London, I kept seeing advertisements and reminders about how riders could use bank cards directly to pay for Tube or DLR fares, without having to first load money onto an Oyster. It's the sort of innovation I'd imagine Toronto picking up in, oh, another forty years or so.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Conclusion</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">A Stratford-bound train waits to depart from the terminus at Beckton.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This write-up was on unfortunate hold for a while--hell, as I write this, it's been nearly ten months since I took off from Heathrow--but I'm still glad I experienced the DLR and the area of London that it serves. I was there for the World Science Fiction Convention, and if it had been anywhere in London but ExCeL, I doubt I'd have wandered into the DLR's territory, something that's probably true for a great majority of the tourists that visit London. It felt off the track beaten by tourists, beyond the places that everyone says you <b>have</b> to go to when you visit there, and consequentially it felt valid to me, more real--that I was experiencing the city as it is when the knots of foreigners aren't gawking, that I could start to feel the pulse of the capital.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Seeing as how I <b>am</b> a foreigner, it's a bit hollow, I know. I don't claim to understand the DLR--a week's worth of disconnected rambles, generally independent of needing to get to a specific place by a specific time, can't match the experience of someone who relies on it from day to day. Having thought about it, though, I feel like no matter where we go in the world, we can only really understand shadows.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Maybe that's enough.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana; font-weight: bold;">Previous Tunnel Visions</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/08/tunnel-visions-detroit-people-mover.html">The Detroit People Mover</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/08/tunnel-visions-seattles-link-light-rail.html">Seattle's Link Light Rail</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/07/tunnel-visions-portlands-max-light-rail.html">Portland's MAX Light Rail</a></span></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/06/tunnel-visions-seattle-center-monorail.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Seattle Center Monorail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/09/tunnel-visions-bay-area-rapid-transit.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bay Area Rapid Transit</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/06/tunnel-visions-san-franciscos-muni.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">San Francisco's Muni Metro</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/02/tunnel-visions-phoenixs-metro-light.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Phoenix's Metro Light Rail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/tunnel-visions-kenosha-electric-railway.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Kenosha Electric Railway</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/tunnel-visions-vancouvers-skytrain.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Vancouver's SkyTrain</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/03/tunnel-visions-toronto-subway-and-rt.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Toronto Subway and RT</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/01/tunnel-visions-los-angeles-county-metro.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Los Angeles County Metro Rail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/10/tunnel-visions-chicago-l.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Chicago 'L'</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/08/tunnel-visions-torontos-subway-and.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Montreal Metro</span></a></li>
</ul>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">this tunnel visions brought to you by liquor and peanuts.</span></i></span></div>
Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-32082596751557526072015-04-09T17:54:00.002-04:002015-04-09T17:54:27.788-04:00Hugo Rockets, Reaction Mass<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's been nearly a week since news of the Hugo nominees dropped, and there have been approximately seventy billion reaction posts and tweets from everyone even tangentially related to the whole mess--so at this point, I figure, my neck is aching and everyone else has said something about it, so why not me? I'm not going to go into deep details; if you're unfamiliar with the situation, suffice it to say that this year's Hugo Award nominations were dominated by a particular voting slate that has, among other things, marked itself as a reaction to the tides in which science fiction's most storied award has been following recently. It's divided between the <b>Sad Puppies</b>, headed by writers Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, and the <b>Rabid Puppies</b>, led by racist, sexist, friend to gators, and all-around loathsome person Theodore Beale, who (surprise, surprise) snaffled multiple nominations for himself under his pseudonym Vox Day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't wade into this morass at all--I have enough stressors in my life as it is, and my social privilege is such that "just ignore it" <i>is</i> a valid option for me. But I will anyway, because as I discovered for the first time last Saturday, I have a personal connection to the Sad Puppies' slate. <i>Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine</i> is up for Best Semiprozine, and this affects me because I have been a slush reader for <i>ASIM</i> for the last seven years--which means that if you sent a story to <i>ASIM</i> at any time since 2008 and got rejected, I may well have been one of the people that said "no" to it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Working with <i>ASIM</i> was my first entry into the world of science fiction, before I'd placed a single story anywhere, well before I'd ever been paid for my words. As I write this there's a new piece of slush in my inbox waiting for my review. I'm happy to be able to be a part of something that people can enjoy, to help make it be as good as it can be.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which is why, when I saw that <i>ASIM</i> had made its first-ever Hugo ballot thanks to the Sad Puppies' efforts, the thing that echoed in my mind was this: <b>your approval fills me with shame</b>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because, as far as I can see it, the Sad Puppies appear to spring out of the same suspicious, conspiratarian view that characterizes so much of modern American culture, and as such is yet another example of Americans ruining everything the rest of us. (When it comes to science fiction fandom, see also the DC in 2017 Worldcon bid Kool-Aid-Manning into a field that was until then divided between Japan, Montreal, and Helsinki, because <b><i>god forbid</i></b> the Americans let the rest of us have <i>one fucking year</i> to ourselves.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Do a search for "Sad Puppies slate" and the first thing you'll find at the top of Google News is a <i>National Review</i> article headlined "Social-Justice Warriors Aren't So Tough When Even Sad Puppies Can Beat Them."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Go exploring for comments from the people involved and you'll see things like Larry Correia's belief that the Hugos have been "politically biased," or that there's "an ongoing culture war between artistic free expression and puritanical bullies,"</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> and his statements from last year that "a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Search for "Sad Puppies" in general and you'll find a lot of stuff framing this not as a gesture to get overlooked works on the ballot, but as a way to stick it to social justice warriors.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence as regards the purity of their motives.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Not that I think that they're bad people, necessarily; I can't speak for everyone, but going by what I've seen and heard, I believe that at least Torgersen really is interested in highlighting works that he sees as not falling into the "Hugo Standard"--but I also believe that he's gone about it in an exceptionally ham-fisted manner.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I believe that he's a modern-day Sorcerer's Apprentice, and he's unleashed something that he was never able to control.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I don't care if the SPs think they're striking a blow for overlooked works. What I care about is that for me, their actions have tainted the entire process. That any award resulting from this would always ask the niggling question "is it <i>really</i> that good, or was it just politically acceptable to a bunch of people gaming the system?" It's true that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are, this year, distinct--but this is the first year this is true, after the Sad Puppies got one of VD's works onto last year's ballot, and which finished sixth behind No Award--but I will also point out that the SP state still includes three nominees from Castalia House, a brand-new publisher established by, and heavily printing, Beale.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I get my voters' ballot. I will take that Best Semiprozine category, and I will not rank <i>ASIM</i>--but I <b>will</b> rank "No Award."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because being tied, even tangentially, to those who think that people like Theodore Beale and John C. Wright represent the best of science fiction makes me feel dirty.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because I don't <b>want</b> your goddamn charity.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-81158910961743824762015-03-28T18:43:00.000-04:002015-03-28T18:43:21.830-04:00Tailings of the Golden Age #4: Industrial Revolution<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>"Industrial Revolution," by "Winston P. Sanders" (aka Poul Anderson)</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Appeared in </i>Analog<i>, September 1963</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He was still gladder when the suits were off. Lieutenant Ziska in dress uniform was stunning, but Ellen in civvies, a fluffy low-cut blouse and close-fitting slacks, was a hydrogen blast. He wanted to roll over and pant, but settled for saying, "Welcome back" and holding her hand rather longer than necessary.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Science fiction of the 1960s, ladeez and germs--when we're talking about science fiction that John W. Campbell bought for Analog, at that time a titan, it could practically be its own subgenre. I've often remarked that the lion's share can be summed up as "white male engineers solving technical problems," and "Industrial Revolution" is a typical specimen--but for all that, it could have been written yesterday, which goes to show how much things <b>don't</b> change in half a century. This is a story about square-jawed, right-thinking, competent men who probably vote Republican versus a starship full of <i>literal</i> Social Justice warriors.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Also, as the representative quote above suggests, it's pretty distractingly sexist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Dateline: the future, somewhere in the asteroid belt. The Sword is one of the first profitable independent concerns out there, an asteroid converted into an industrial outpost, processing gas scooped from Jupiter's atmosphere and turning it into stuff. It's a private enterprise, as we're reminded again and again throughout the story, because this is Campbellian science fiction where government is bad and capitalism is rad. When it comes to its inhabitants, the testosterone is palpable--there's a ten-to-one ratio of men to women on this asteroid because 1960s, and only two of the women are single. Just acknowledging that bit actually makes me feel more emotion than most anything else in the story; imagine how <i>they</i> would feel, millions of kilometers away from anything else, surrounded by men who are no doubt all trying to out-Nice Guy™</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> each other.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Sword's workaday existence is interrupted by the arrival of NASS <i>Altair</i>, a North American warship (yeah, because us up here are falling over ourselves to be Americans--pfft), and the initial action of the story follows Mike Blades, one of the asteroid's VIPs, showing the military bigwigs around and answering their oddly specific questions about radiation shielding and so on. In the meantime, he takes an interest in Lieutenant Ellen Ziska, a "she-Canadian" (???) <i>Altair</i> officer and does his utmost to get into her pants by the tried-and-true juxtaposition of long walks in arboretums and political arguments.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">See, the problem here is that the last election in North America has brought the Social Justice Party to power, with more and more people on Earth getting angry about investing so much money into starting up Belt industries, only to see much of the Belt's profits reinvested into building itself up rather than shipping its raw materials back down the well. So it's pretty much the tired old American Revolution transposed into space, because god forbid you be even slightly creative. Things go sour when the <i>Altair</i> conveniently "loses" a nuclear missile, and it's up to Mike Blades to figure out a way to use his technical savvy to defend the unarmed asteroid from the <i>looters</i> and <i><b>moochers</b></i> trying to take it away.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For what it is, "Industrial Revolution" isn't <i>terrible</i>. It was good enough for John W. Campbell to buy, sure, but just check out <i><a href="http://galacticjourney.dreamwidth.org/">Galactic Journey</a></i> to get a better idea of what Campbell thought "good enough" meant. The best I can think to say about it is "innocuous"--if not for the fact that "Winston P. Sanders" is really Poul Anderson, it would've been long forgotten. ISFDB tells me that it was the second of multiple stories that make up the "Flying Mountains" series, but really... it's average. At best. The motivations of the antagonists are the standard-issue "Earth needs more tax money to pay for welfare" that you see over and over again in science fiction, and the protagonists essentially have no character at all.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Incidentally, I wish there were more stories from this era that approached things from the <i>other</i> side of the political spectrum--I'd love to eviscerate them, but the shadow of the Soviet Union was long in the '60s, I imagine. Even <i>Star Trek</i> didn't get properly communist until the '80s.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>"Industrial Revolution" is <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30971">available for free download</a> via Project Gutenberg.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Previous Tailings</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#3 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/11/tailings-of-golden-age-3-next-door-next.html">"Next Door, Next World" (April 1961)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#2 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/09/tailings-of-golden-age-2-in-imagicon.html">"In the Imagicon" (February 1966)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#1 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/05/tailings-of-golden-age-1-blitz-against.html">"Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)</a></span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-56077600295065142162015-03-19T11:27:00.000-04:002015-03-19T11:27:08.488-04:00Everyone Is Posting Ad Astra Schedules So I Guess I Should Too<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>("My Ad Astra Schedule" would probably have been a more compact title, but a lot of people are probably doing variations of that, too.)</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If you're one of the maybe two people who actually pays attention to this weblog anymore, you may have noticed that I'm going to be putting in an appearance at <a href="http://www.ad-astra.org/">Ad Astra</a>, Toronto's own Richmond Hill-based science fiction convention, early next month. The panel schedules have at last come down from on high, and here's what I'll be up to if you feel like tracking me down for some unfathomable reason.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Saturday</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>A Trillion Is a Statistic</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Room: Markham B</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Panellists: Ian Keeling, Karl Schroeder</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It happens so often in science fiction there's a name for it: "earth-shattering kaboom." From Lensmen to Ender's Game and beyond, sf has been solving problems with genocide for decades. Is this just authorial laziness, motivating heroes with a big enough bang, or is reflective of something dark in the genre's soul?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>The Wisdom of Ages Past: Relevance of Older Science Fiction</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Room: Oakridge</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Panellists: David Lamb, Hayden Trenholm, Nina Munteanu</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The golden age of science fiction still has a solid grip on the minds and dreams of even the youngest readers today. What can we still learn from the greats, and what of their ideas or methods are so outmoded that they can only be appreciated as a history lesson of how the industry used to be?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sunday</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Readings: Andrew Barton & Mike Rimar</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Room: Aurora</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I willn't tell you what'll be happening at the reading on Sunday. It's SOOPER SEKRIT so you'll just have to come.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-35814753511426358642015-01-10T14:47:00.004-05:002015-01-10T14:47:56.974-05:00HD 28185: An Elite Odyssey<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The first time I went to Los Angeles, what struck me was how this place I'd never been to in all my life could be so damn familiar. We see things on our screens and we read them on our pages, and while it's no substitute for experiencing a place with your own senses unmediated by anything, sometimes it's the only way we can make these journeys. As a science fiction writer, that's particularly the case for me--it's unlikely I'll ever leave Earth, and telling stories of far-off places is the best we can hope for. Even knowing these places are <i>real</i> can be staggering enough sometimes: last year I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a telescope, and my first thought on seeing those rings was "my god, it really <i>does</i> look like that."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One place I've visited twice now in print is the HD 28185 system, 138 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus; fourteen years ago we detected a gas giant orbiting in its habitable zone, and it's around that gas giant I've placed Esperanza, setting of the stories "The Paragon of Animals" in the March 2013 issue of <i>Analog</i> and "The Badges of Her Grief" in its March 2015 issue, which is available now--and you should totally go out and <a href="http://www.analogsf.com/">get it</a>! It's a place that feels familiar now, though it's also a place I could never visit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At least, I couldn't until <i>Elite: Dangerous</i> came out. This space flying-trading-pirating-exploring sim, the latest expression of a thirty-year franchise that goes back to vector graphics on the BBC Micro, is set in a one-to-one reproduction of the Milky Way and its four hundred billion stars. For now, it's also likely to be the closest I'll get to exploring the galaxy. With that in mind, given the occasion of "The Badges of Her Grief" seeing print, I went on a "short" pilgrimage to HD 28185--or as it's known in-game, HIP 20723, as <i>E:D</i> seems to have a serious love for the Hipparcos catalogue.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Well, as short as anything measured in light-years can be.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It wasn't THAT much of an odyssey, though. From my home base at Big Harry's Monkey Hangout* in the Jotunheim system, it was a trip of 158 light-years, with a brief stopover in the Ongkuma system to investigate the short-lived slave rebellion there. Seeing as how ships in <i>E:D</i> are capable of flying faster-than-light in normal space due to the magical frameshift drive--a technical necessity for a multiplayer game that, nonetheless, makes me feel <b>dirty</b>--and my Adder can cross 15 light-year gulfs in as many seconds, it was the work of an evening. I didn't even have to leave human space; to my regret, I discovered that HD 28185 is part of the Empire, the requisite society of neo-Roman assbutts that maintains slavery in the 34th century to remind us that they're a bunch of jerks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's not even a particularly interesting system. I was hoping to find things that would fire my imagination--perhaps even an Earthlike planet! What I found would be nothing to write home about if this was any other system--an asteroid belt close to the star and a rocky, ringed world with sulphur dioxide air, a 182 degree surface temperature, and a lonely orbital mining platform above, and at the edge of the system that I could detect, the gas giant HD 28185 b. Only in the stories I write is it called Corazon.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0zHt1PTIIg2yR8c9A9Z0t-p6GXmAvPpo4U20-kITbGvJzV7T3YNlR7CwDEAhfKomkVuMkr0j4NJibjZNY08eIxIEhOB37tpaxlQ1k0bDt1OSQ_3HUFDGIQnALzP9-nR7g6DnqhKnUQw/s1600/corazon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0zHt1PTIIg2yR8c9A9Z0t-p6GXmAvPpo4U20-kITbGvJzV7T3YNlR7CwDEAhfKomkVuMkr0j4NJibjZNY08eIxIEhOB37tpaxlQ1k0bDt1OSQ_3HUFDGIQnALzP9-nR7g6DnqhKnUQw/s1600/corazon.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Not much, is it? Not even so much as a moon. I mean, I was hoping that it would at least have rings. Nevertheless--it had a feeling of <i>reality</i> to it. It's a world we know is out there. It's a place we can speculate about, and in this small way, I can see its face.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'll be back there again, for future stories. For now, I like knowing that it's out there to be found.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>* Which, incidentally, sounds like the sort of name the Culture would give to a space station. So far, it is only rivalled in-game by Norman-Mavis's Bingo Palace and Lucy Young's Orbital Happy Home.</i></span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-40588576945499095812014-12-31T21:39:00.002-05:002014-12-31T21:39:57.805-05:002014: A Year That Existed<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">...even though I rather wish it hadn't. There's not much I have to say--two new stories saw print this year and I made one additional sale that will be hitting the stands in January, which was rad, though I wish those numbers were higher; if you're looking for <i>rejection</i> numbers, I've got that locked down. That was the okay part. The rest of the year was characterized pretty much by death, desensitization, and a yawning sense of dread, like we're all standing on the edge of a thousand-foot drop and pebbles are starting to tumble off the edge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Happy New Year!</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-59007396955088498632014-11-13T13:26:00.000-05:002014-11-13T13:26:12.571-05:00Tailings of the Golden Age #3: Next Door, Next World<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>"Next Door, Next World," by Robert Donald Locke</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Appeared in </i>Analog Science Fact & Fiction<i>, April 1961</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"Lance," said Carolyn.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"Yes?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"You feel it too, don't you?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"Feel what?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"That there is danger involved. That something dreadfully, dreadfully wrong <i>can</i> happen to you while you're out there. No matter what the eggheads say about it." A paroxysm of sobs suddenly racked the girl's slender body. "Oh, darling, don't go!"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fun fact: the above theme of the protagonist being entirely oblivious to everything around him and needing everything to be explained to him will continue throughout this story!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are certain--<i>tics</i>, perhaps--in Golden Age-era science fiction. Epithets like "Space!" and "Unity!" because god forbid anyone encounter the word "fuck" in print, the rah-rah belief that the United States of the 1950s is the social model that will one day be projected over vast swaths of the galaxy, and at least in John W. Campbell's <i>Analog</i>, a focus on square-jawed white male engineers solving technical problems. Robert Donald Locke's "Next Door, Next World feels like a story that was written in the 1940s and features one of the thick-headedest protagonists I've ever tagged along with, and had I not been cooling my heels in a hospital waiting room I doubt I'd have bothered.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Major <strike>Smoke Manmuscle</strike> <strike>Roll Fizzlebeef</strike> Lance Cooper is a "big man with space-tanned features"--and I have to wonder if "space-tanned" is not in fact a euphemism for "chronic radiation poisoning"--set to fly the latest hyperspace rocket out to Groombridge 34. As we learn in a hackneyed groundside scene where his fiancée Carolyn acts the Standard '50s Female routine, full of sobs and requiring a Strong Man's Arms and talking about how women are saner than men because they don't go exploring, hyperspace is something of a dangerous place: one or two flights out of every ten don't come back at all, and sometimes the pilot returns a bit off. But the fears of "this frail, clinging, lovely piece of femininity he wanted so dearly" are nothing next to the Glorious Conquest of Interstellar Space, so away he flies!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He experiences Weird Shit in hyperspace, of course, because what would hyperspace _be_ without that? He feels himself split apart, <i>sees</i> duplicates of his ship outside where there should be nothing at all, but returns to normal space feeling none the worse for wear and after a quick sightseeing expedition, makes the return hop back to Earth where his fiancée Carolyn is waiting for him--except, shock! When he lands, no one recognizes her name, not even her <i>dad</i>, his boss Colonel "Hard-Head" Sagen! Lance immediately jumps to the logical conclusion: everyone is pulling a complicated prank on him. After his experience is declared classified and he's put in a cell, he manages to escape--because <i>of course</i> it's easy as hell to steal a military guard's sidearm and effect escape with it--and goes to his girl's place, looking for answers from her mother.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because <i>of course</i> the best place to go looking for answers after you've broken out of military custody is *the home of the military superior who placed you in custody*! Seeing as how Mrs. Sagen is, you know, <i>intelligent</i>, she alerts the military to Lance's presence--and while he escapes again, he does so fuming about her "double-cross," while I start to wonder if hyperspace pilots are chosen specifically for their expendability.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He returns to the base--because <i>of course</i> they won't look there--and finds that his friends don't recognize him, he remembers things that are no longer the case, and comes to the conclusion that everyone is lying to him. Finally, he's brought before a military psychiatrist and finds out the truth that was pretty apparent from the first word: he's slipped into a parallel universe, where his girlfriend was never born. Apparently this happens a lot.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was at this point that I seriously began to doubt Cooper's bonafides--it's as if someone shaved the stupidest Watson and stuffed him into a starship. Despite being presented with a litany of examples of pilots who came back "off"--wearing the wrong uniform, a man with a mustache he couldn't possibly have grown so fast--and <i>by his own admission being aware of the parallel worlds theory</i>, he does not consider that he might actually be in a parallel world until he's practically <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfft9Jx9gJk">being told his name is Homer Thompson</a>. Nevertheless, driven only by a desire to see his girlfriend again, he takes the Colonel at gunpoint and finagles his way back into his hyperspace ship, and blasts off in the hopes of reaching his own world. Does he make it?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Well, kinda.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cooper's thickheadedness over his predicament is, I think, another one of those artifacts of older science fiction. Science fiction is built around the projection of current trends into the future, but at the time this story was written, science fiction was still culturally marginal, and so a lot of Golden Age sf feels like they're set in worlds which do not themselves include a cultural legacy of science fiction. I mean, if I got shot through hyperspace and came back to find people I knew were gone and the world was just subtly askew, the notion of parallel universes would be on my theory plate thanks to things like <i>Sliders</i> or the Mirror Universe from <i>Star Trek</i> or actual scientific investigations toward whether a multiverse exists. Lance Cooper, being the resident of a '50s future, doesn't have that cultural background and so looks stupid for never even entertaining the notion.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As for the story itself, it's written in the stilted manner that's common for a lot of sf writing from that era. I mean, things like "Dad opined he'd have walloped the daylights out of me" - who the hell uses words like "opined" in casual conversation? It's no surprise Robert Donald Locke didn't leave a mark on the field--he's got only eleven credits on ISFDB, and this was in fact his last story.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If you're interested, <i>Next Door, Next World</i> is <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26205">available for download on Project Gutenberg</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Previous Tailings</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#2 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/09/tailings-of-golden-age-2-in-imagicon.html">"In the Imagicon" (February 1966)</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#1 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/05/tailings-of-golden-age-1-blitz-against.html">"Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)</a></span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-89376636870165038572014-10-06T23:54:00.000-04:002014-10-06T23:54:20.639-04:00Will No One Stand Up for the White Dudes?<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the few childhood memories that I have managed to hang onto is this: an intense feeling of resentment that the date and time of my mom's wedding meant I wasn't able to watch <i>Ren and Stimpy</i>. Because why hold onto things like the last day I spent with my grandfather before he died--who needs <i>that</i> stuff, amirite? It's strange, though, because I don't really remember watching much of the show at any other point; for pretty much everything Nickelodeon ever put out, to be honest. It's probably that there wasn't much of an opportunity; in my corner of Canada in the early 1990s, the 500-channel universe was still a couple of years away from my house, and our satellite dish was one of those big backyard monsters that looked like what you'd use to beam greetings or dirty limericks to distant stars, and most of the channels ended up getting scrambled after a while anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So I don't have any kind of nostalgia for Nickelodeon. But I know that's not the same for everyone in my age bracket. Recently, because <a href="http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/">James Nicoll</a> wants to make us all suffer, I came across <a href="http://flavorwire.com/480990/pete-pete-was-all-white-people-slimed-author-mathew-klickstein-on-why-ren-and-stimpy-was-better-than-clarissa-and-nickelodeons-diversity-problem">an interview with Matthew Klickstein</a>, some guy I'd never heard of; at first I thought he was a former Nickelodeon star, but no, he's just the author of an "oral history" of Nickelodeon's golden age, because everything sounds more highbrow if you call it an oral history.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some of it is pretty innocuous. But not all of it. Take this bit right here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"[Nickelodeon series <i>Sanjay and Craig</i>] is awkward because there’s actually no reason for that character to be Indian — except for the fact that [Nickelodeon President] Cyma Zarghami and the women who run Nickelodeon now are very obsessed with diversity."</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDx5olI-ZRJQznspR_NAXkfVdLw4palXyahVi4Ln-5CE_Sq0LiDErlVB1vV8-Tz9Qeq-mdIRcGkH-i2lrwVIYHqsZTWR7Ys0Fqj9mvDW5auztrxdAwIOLzbcAACgkE3ZyT3NrKtxmwiFM/s1600/john-cleese-no.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDx5olI-ZRJQznspR_NAXkfVdLw4palXyahVi4Ln-5CE_Sq0LiDErlVB1vV8-Tz9Qeq-mdIRcGkH-i2lrwVIYHqsZTWR7Ys0Fqj9mvDW5auztrxdAwIOLzbcAACgkE3ZyT3NrKtxmwiFM/s1600/john-cleese-no.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Or this!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"Some of these other shows — <i>My Brother and Me</i>, <i>Diego</i>, and <i>Legend of Korra</i> — it’s great that they’re bringing diversity into it now. Fantastic. But you know those shows are not nearly as good as <i>Ren and Stimpy</i>, which was made by all white people!"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Or how about this?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"That's true, that's fine, but why can't [a hypothetical Indian kid in the audience] relate to a white guy too? I was talking with the guy who wrote for DC, and he made a really good point: Why does someone who’s making something about a black person need to be black? Why does someone making a show about an Indian person need to be Indian? Why does someone making a show about women need to be a woman? If you’re making something about an alien, you don’t need to be an alien to do it. That’s ultimately what it comes down to: They will connect with the character no matter what."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">First off, and I can't believe this guy is dense enough to require me saying this, but here goes: you do not need to be an alien in order to make something about aliens because, to the degree that we have thus far been able to measure, THERE ARE NO ALIENS. There are no Zeta Reticulans who have had their culture appropriated into Halloween costumes, no green people from Antares who have been the butt of joke after racist joke. Aliens are <i>blank slates</i> of a sort that <b>DO NOT EXIST</b> in reality. Aliens do not have to come with baggage, and in that, they can be liberating. When you're dealing with actual peoples that <i>actually exist</i>, it behooves you to not fuck things up, buddy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Maybe the reason you don't understand why an Indian kid shouldn't have to relate to a white guy is connected to the fact that, as a white guy yourself, somewhere between A BUTTLOAD and DAMN NEAR ALL of the characters presented on TV have historically been, you guessed it, white guys! You ask why a character has to be Indian--did you ever stop to ask yourself why this other character over here has to be <i>white</i>? Or a <b>guy</b>?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The other day, on the last day of Can-Con in Ottawa, I watched the premier episode of <i>Kagagi</i>. It's a new superhero cartoon series airing on APTN, that stars a First Nations teenager, is built around Native mythology, and was broadcast in 20% Algonquin. You know what? It was rad. You know what's <i>more</i> rad, though? That First Nations kids, kids who have to deal with a historical legacy of being shat on and marginalized and dodging genocide that goes back <b>centuries</b>, have someone to identify with who is like them. Who knows what they're going through. Who <b>understands</b>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which is more than I can expect from this chump.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But he does provide another data point to shore up my hypothesis that anyone who throws the phrase "political correctness" about as a criticism is most likely an asshole.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(Yes, I know that I am, in fact, a white dude as well. I am often--nah, make that <b>eternally</b>--mortified by the actions of many of those to whom I am phenotypically similar.)</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-61678189199339409922014-09-27T10:17:00.000-04:002014-09-27T12:13:15.013-04:00Tailings of the Golden Age #2: In the Imagicon<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>"In the Imagicon," by George Henry Smith</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Appeared in </i>Galaxy Science Fiction<i>, February 1966</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Then Cecily made him feel even sillier by leaning over and kissing his right foot with passionate red lips. "Oh, Dandor! Dandor, I love you so much," she murmured.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dandor resisted the temptation to use one of his newly pampered feet to give her a healthy kick on her round little bottom. He resisted it because even at times like this, when his life with these women began to seem unreal, he tried to be as kind as possible to them. Even when their worship and adoration threatened to bore him to death, he tried to be kind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">So instead of kicking Cecily, he yawned.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm gonna let that quote up there just sink in for a minute.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For a genre that spent so much time yapping on about the future, Golden Age science fiction--in this case, one of the last shoots springing up in the mid-1960s, when the old fields were beginning to wilt beneath the New Wave--spent a hell of a lot of its time rooted in the past. Yeah, I know, science fiction is fundamentally about the time it's written in, and "In the Imagicon" by George Henry Smith--who previously brought us such towering works of literature as 1963's <i><a href="http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?260985">Sexodus!</a></i>--could not be more of a product of the 1960s if it tried. This is the sort of stuff that proto-nerds who aspired to become Don Draper would read. I feel like it's quintessentially of its time, to the degree that it reads almost like a parody of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Leaping into the story, we are introduced to the foppish, indolent Dandor, who is in the process of being fed grapes, getting a pedicure, and being generally worshipped by women--a blonde, a voluptuous brunette, and cuddly twin redheads, and yes those are how they're described and essentially the limits of their characterization, and god damn, man, am I really meant to take this at all seriously? Is this supposed to be a laff-out-loud comedy piece? <i>I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE, SOMEONE HOLD ME</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ahem. Moving on. Dandor's problem is that he's getting awfully <i>bored</i> by being waited on and worshipped in his "palatial palace," because screw you guys, it's 1966, you don't <i>need</i> more descriptive adjectives when you're probably half-drunk by now anyway. So he leaves, back out through the imagicon of the title, and we see Dandor as he really is: a pioneer on the frozen colony world of Nestrond, home of punishing storms and snows and ice wolves, and which really begs the question of why you'd cross light-years to colonize a place that makes Antarctica look appealing. What really makes it intolerable, though, is Nona, his shrew of a wife! Am I right, fellas? The narrative lovingly details her faults--"a big, raw-boned woman with stringy black hair, a broad flat face with thin lips and uneven, yellowish teeth. God but she's ugly, he thought as he stared at her." Now that he's back in the real world, Dandor's got work to do, and he <i>hates</i> it! So he digs up ice moss for the fire, fixes the cattleshed roof to keep the icewolves from attacking their space cows, digs a cesspool, and so on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nestrond, for all intents and purposes, was settled by people who not only made it to the end of the Oregon Trail without dying of dysentery, but found a starship there waiting for them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Disaster strikes in the night when ice wolves attack--six-legged, because alien critters gotta have six legs, otherwise how're you to know they're alien? Dandor manages to see them off thanks to his trusty laser rifle, but not before one of them takes a good chunk out of him; good enough, in fact, to demand that his entire leg be amputated. Because, sure, they have enough technological infrastructure to support stuff like laser rifles and imagicons, but not indoor plumbing or twentieth-century medicine. Presumably Nestrond's colonists are, in fact, survivors of a failed expedition. Maybe they were the advance team and the main ship blew up in orbit--they are in dire straits, with the last of the morphine gone and no anaesthetic more sophisticated than whiskey. Nobody's to say.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Dandor is aghast over the loss of his leg, of course--not because of the pain, not because of how much harder it'll make it to scratch out a life, but because now there'll be no imagicon; he'll belong only to Nona. How, he asks himself, could she treat him this way? Yeah! How could she ever stay by his side in his condition and make him face the world? One has to ask why she even bothers, on a world where there are twenty men for every woman. I mean, she obviously sees something in this guy, or she'd have just walked out while he was on one of his imagicon trips, right? Wouldn't you <i>want</i> to have someone standing by you at a low point like that?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Not our Dandor! He knows just what to do--escape from the dreaded barbs of reality! Half-mad with pain and bleeding out from his as-yet-uncauterized stump, he drags himself until he seals himself up into the imagicon, "more dead than alive," and slowly fades away while the soft voices of his adoring palace women brush against his ears--</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Except, in a plot twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan--who would not be born for another four years, so at least he's not responsible for <i>this</i> one--Dandor wakes up, good as new, in the <i>real world</i>. In the palace. Because, you see, Dandor's palatial palace is reality, and it's <b>Nestrond</b> that's the product of the imagicon! On Earth in the year 22300, Dandor is on top thanks to a plague which killed all but a handful of men--many of whom "had not been able to stand the strain... too many years of having everything and every woman they wanted." Dandor created Nestrond as a place he could find "a taste of hell," without which "how could a man appreciate heaven?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">How could a <i>man</i> appreciate heaven.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because this story is really all about the mens.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I chip away at it, I feel like there's a pool of anti-woman sentiment bubbling underneath. Look at the difference between Earth of 22300, where men are powerful through their rarity and which is depicted as a warm, peaceful, beautiful place, and Nestrond, where women are powerful through their rarity and is explicitly described as a hell on multiple occasions. On Earth, Dandor is "sweetheart" and on Nestrond, he's "idiot." On Earth, he is fed grapes; on Nestrond, he's grudgingly served thin soup, stale bread, and rancid pork.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It almost reads like it's a parody of certain attitudes now. Nestrond reads like the sort of place any given MRA would come up with to describe a feminist world, and I'm confident that what MRAs yearn for is a world where they can all be Dandors. I have to wonder what the <i>women</i> might say if you asked them to describe their world. Are they happy feeding this guy, rubbing his feet, servicing him, when he descends into unreality as soon as they start to bore him? From where I'm sitting, this "heaven" seems pretty damn one-sided.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I put this together, I had a realization: unlike Nona, who is given a rather detailed description to cement the hellishness of Nestrond, we're never actually given a description of <i>Dandor</i>. But I have a pretty good idea.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You want to hear the real punchline, though?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This story made the first ballot for the 1967 Nebula Award.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sheesh.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Previous Tailings</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#1 - <a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2014/05/tailings-of-golden-age-1-blitz-against.html">"Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)</a></span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-78550190185182556962014-09-14T13:59:00.000-04:002014-09-14T13:59:10.513-04:00This Is About Independence<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I was keenly aware last month that it might well be the last time I ever visted the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not that I had foreknowledge of my death--though I hope <i>that's</i> a long way off yet--but because in the not-too-distant future, there may not <b>be</b> a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland anymore. Not if the YES vote in Scotland gets its way. Back in August, things were still at a slow boil: the NO side was consistently polling double-digit leads, and I was one of the few on my side of the Atlantic who even knew the referendum was going ahead. The only evidence I found for it was on my last day in the country, when I found a pro-independence sticker someone had left in Victoria Station.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>The red symbolizes the blood that the newborn Scottish Empire will drown its English oppressors in, no doubt.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Today, everyone's blood is hot. It's less than a week to the vote and anticipation is running high--and on the NO side, so visions of near-apocalyptic problems should Scotland go its own way. From complaints of BBC reporting bias to rumors of MI5 agents in Scotland and whistlestop tours by Westminster's premier talking heads, the English political establishment is throwing all its weight into the "Better Together" camp. No doubt the government will sponsor a last-minute love-in for the Unionist side on Tuesday or Wednesday, much like the Canadian government did in Montreal's Place du Canada just before Quebec voted in 1995.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've seen a lot of speculation that the reason Westminster is throwing so much weight into this is down to North Sea oil, oil that would become Scottish--and that's a pretty damn good motivation for a government to be committed to the unionist side. If Montreal was afloat on a sea of petroleum, I doubt Quebec's referendum would have taken the same trajectory.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But I don't think that's the whole story. It's not just about wealth, or power, I think--it's about fear.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fear of <i>failure</i>. Fear of the idea that Scotland's independence would mean that the United Kingdom, which stood for three centuries against Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Margaret Thatcher's poll taxes, has <i>failed</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Recently, Rachael Acks wrote <a href="http://katsudon.net/?p=3528">a piece about divorce</a> that you should read in any event, because it's rad. As I chewed on it, I realized that with just a few word replacements, it resonates with what's going on in Scotland today. Change "divorce" to "separation" and "screaming arguments" with "civil wars," but the idea that separation means that a country has failed is a strong one. Look at the United States, for instance: in the Hotel America you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. On the face of it, it's ridiculous--no country lasts forever, but what this policy <i>does</i> ensure is that when the United States does fall apart, it will be with screaming and gunfire and the throwing of dishes. I'm confident the States would never see a referendum as peaceful as Scotland's, because there is no place for it in the laws as they currently stand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It echoes with a problem prevalent in our culture, I think; the notion that your life can be cheapened by other's choices. I'll admit there are risks inherent in Scotland going its own way, but there are risks in everything. A lot of the commentary I see from NO supporters, especially English NO supporters, revolves around how they would <i>feel</i> to have the United Kingdom separate--it's such a deep-seated notion that the first phrase I wrote there was "to have the United Kingdom break apart," as if the Scottish referendum is the equivalent of throwing fine china at the floor, and afterward everyone will have to sweep up and make do with what shards are left.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"We're not a failure," Rachael wrote. "Our relationship is not a failure. Because we made each other stronger, better people. We loved and supported each other through thick and thin until we reached a place in our lives where we couldn't support each other in that same way any more. It's time to continue loving and supporting each other in a different way."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Scotland and England made each other stronger, too. But just because a relationship has existed, that inertia alone shouldn't justify why it continues to exist if there's enough reason to reconsider--and with the way the polls have turned toward YES in the past months, a lot of reconsidering has been done up past Hadrian's Wall.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If Scotland chooses independence, it's not a failure of the United Kingdom. It's just a new day.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-86952071404802122392014-09-07T19:05:00.001-04:002014-09-07T19:05:17.489-04:00No Vision So Dangerous...<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The other day I was trying to figure out the best way, should I ever meet him, to piss off <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison">Harlan Ellison</a>™. I mentioned this to the ever-helpful Shaun Duke, who advised me that both of the strategies I offered would likely result in (a) a chewing out--which, honestly, Harlan Ellison™ rarely needs much justification for anyway--and (b) assault, which wouldn't surprise me much either but is really far more trouble than it's worth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You may be wondering why I would want to antagonize a figure like Ellison™. The answer is bound up in four charged words that have hummed with golden anticipation for more than forty years, even if more than a few bulbs have burned out: <i>The Last Dangerous Visions</i>. Never heard of it? If you're not one of the ones plugged into the history of science fiction or the fannish grapevine, there's no reason you <b>should</b> have. That's not how it was meant to be, though.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Let's go back briefly to 1967, when Harlan Ellison™ put out one of the most influential anthologies of the 1960s, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Visions">Dangerous Visions</a></i>. The thirty-three stories it contained were groundbreaking in their time, helping to define what the New Wave of science fiction literature was, and of a sort that were too "dangerous" to be published.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Today, of course, they're innocuous. Well-written, of course, but with the possible exception of one story, there's nothing that wouldn't make it into <i>Clarkesworld</i> or <i>Lightspeed</i> or even <i>Analog</i> today--back in 1967, they would have earned furious ten-page rejection letters from John W. Campbell--but that's the way history unfolds. Ellison™ followed up with the sequel volume <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Again,_Dangerous_Visions">Again, Dangerous Visions</a></i> in 1972, which is definitely a reflection of its time; witness, for example, Kurt Vonnegut's "The Big Space Fuck," set in a world where giant mutated lampreys live in a polluted Lake Erie and the government is launching a rocket full of freeze-dried jizm to the Andromeda Galaxy. Envelope-pushing in its day, perhaps, but in a time where stories like Kij Johnson's "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_(short_story)">Spar</a>" win Nebulas and make the Hugo shortlist, there's almost a quaintness to it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dangerous_Visions">The Last Dangerous Visions</a></i> was to be the capstone of this project, a deep and towering work that would put everything that had come before to shame. Ellison™ talked the project to rarefied heights as he lined up a phalanx of everyone who was anyone in early 1970s science fiction, from old hands like Algis Budrys and George Alec Effinger to brash, young newcomers like Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card. Science fiction fandom waited in anticipation...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">...and waited, and waited. You may note, from your privileged viewpoint here in the 21st century, that of all the ways you might describe writers like McCaffrey and Card, "newcomer" is not one of them. You may also note that with the exception of Card, all those writers have died. In fact, I've gone through the list of contributors that's up on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and of the one hundred and two names, <i>forty-six</i> are definitely dead as of 2014. Many more authors are flagged as having been born in the 1920s and 1930s--Harlan Ellison™ himself turned 80 earlier this year--and it won't take much longer for <i>The Last Dangerous Visions</i> to be a book of ghosts. If you're interested in all the sordid details of its stubborn non-existence, check out Christopher Priest's <i><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20000902203835/http://sf.www.lysator.liu.se/sf_archive/sf-texts/Ansible/Last_Deadloss_Visions,Chris_Priest">The Last Deadloss Visions</a></i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"So what?" you might say. Vaporware isn't anything new; look at <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever">Duke Nukem Forever</a></i>, for example. No, really, look at <i>Duke Nukem Forever</i>. It was to be the pinnacle of a well-liked, boundary-pushing game series, intended to reach new heights of popularity and so on... and look what happened. After fifteen years of being a punchline, it actually <b>came out</b>--something that still surprises me from time to time, honestly--but it couldn't live up to itself. What's more, it had been left behind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The <i>Dangerous Visions</i> series was intended to be the vanguard of a new way of looking at things, an ambassador to show the world that science fiction didn't have to be just about rockets and rayguns and square-jawed white male engineers solving technical problems. But if <i>The Last Dangerous Visions</i> came out tomorrow, it would be a wet firecracker. Sure, the individual stories still have relevance and quality--<i>but not in the context that the book was meant to provide</i>. If anything, the book as a whole would be a time capsule of 1970s science fiction; of interest to a particular subset of fans, sure, but not much more than that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's possible to judge the quality of <i>The Last Dangerous Visions</i> to a degree; a handful of authors did recall their stories from Ellison™ and actually allowed the world to see them, but not many; by my search, there are fifteen ex-<i>TLDV</i> stories out there whose authors lived to see their publication in other places. But only to a degree. The kicker of it is that all these stories <i>exist</i>, sure--in a box in Harlan Ellison™'s house somewhere, for only Harlan Ellison™'s eyes. For any stories, this would be bad enough--but remember that Ellison™ was looking for the best of the best, the state of the art as it was in 1973.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's a hole in science fiction that can be felt only by its absence. A hole that Harlan Ellison™ has refused to sew shut for forty fucking years. He had the capstone of his drive in hand, but for whatever reasons, he fumbled. He fucked it up. Today, <i>The Last Dangerous Visions</i> is irrelevant as anything but a historical curiosity. Given the degree of cultural shift, I'm confident that there is <b>nothing</b> in its evanescent pages that would not pass muster in a magazine today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Beyond that, <i>The Last Dangerous Visions</i> was meant to be a showcase of up-and-coming authors with new perspectives... and that's another thing that hurts. Going through the ISFDB list, I found five authors whose <i>only credit</i> was the story that never appeared in <i>TLDV</i>, and many more whose careers seemed to hit a brick wall in the 1970s. <i>TLDV</i>, had it come out in 1973, would have been groundbreaking, a landmark, something to propel its writers to greater heights. How many stories could have been written, but now never will, because it never materialized?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Again, <i>TLDV</i> would be a forty-year-old snapshot. Writers like Ann Leckie and Seth J. Dickinson, N.K. Jemisin and Benjanun Sriduangkaew--<b>they</b> are some of the people on the genre's forefront today, <b>they</b> are the sort of authors that <i>TLDV</i> was made to showcase. But it didn't, and it never will. At this point I am confident that Harlan Ellison™ will die without completing <i>The Last Dangerous Visions</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's ridiculous. Let me put it into a bit of perspective here: had <i>The Last Dangerous Visions</i> come out when it meant to, all the way back in 1973, this year's Campbell Award winner, Sofia Samatar, would have been two years old. Ann Leckie, who swept every major award for <i>Ancillary Justice</i> this year, was seven. For many other people who are making their mark on the genre today, they wouldn't even be born for years to come.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>That's</b> why I want to piss him off. Because it would move the equation ever-so-slightly back into balance, after what he's done to science fiction.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-27798519991221028532014-08-07T20:01:00.000-04:002014-08-07T20:01:34.992-04:00Tunnel Visions: The Detroit People Mover<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Every once in a while I hop out of Toronto, land in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and look around at different ways of getting around by rail, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Detroit has historically been a bit ambivalent toward higher-order transit. In the early 20th century, when cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston were investing in heavy transit systems, Detroit deftly dodged efforts to build a subway. Early plans to run trains in the medians of the city's major arteries never left the paper they were written on, and by 1956--when Detroit was the fifth-largest city in the United States and even <i>Cleveland</i> was laying rails in the ground--the city's last streetcar line was replaced by buses, since that sort of thing was in style at the time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Detroit's transit deficit wasn't helped by the suburban exodus that took off after the Second World War, and which to some degree continues to this day. Higher-order transit didn't make inroads in the city until 1975, when it joined the <a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/dpmhist.htm">Downtown People Mover Program</a>. The notion of a downtown circulator isn't an unusual one--the Chicago Loop is one of North America's earlier examples, and the closely-spaced stations along the Yonge-University-Spadina line fulfill a similar role in downtown Toronto. Detroit was one of many cities that applied for federal grants through the program, and in the end it was one of only three left standing.<sup>1</sup></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Today, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_People_Mover">Detroit People Mover</a> chugs along, gliding above the streets of downtown Detroit with a sound familiar to those who've ridden the rails in Vancouver or Scarborough, like a whisper from another world about what might have been.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>System</b></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhhPmIbO8ia9TdYc7BkzxYThKhy-U7wb6TzoBgwaKOrPd2LAD_0zRgqiRHqnMCT2FD0aGx9X9elLlr-B1PvRxKpC5H1BdpR7psPw__fGrgvuwO-jSfHTIqn80LUVjgjSu8sLpnFFb8-54/s1600/tv13beaubien.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhhPmIbO8ia9TdYc7BkzxYThKhy-U7wb6TzoBgwaKOrPd2LAD_0zRgqiRHqnMCT2FD0aGx9X9elLlr-B1PvRxKpC5H1BdpR7psPw__fGrgvuwO-jSfHTIqn80LUVjgjSu8sLpnFFb8-54/s1600/tv13beaubien.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>The Detroit People Mover track parallels Beaubien Street in the eastern portion of downtown.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In terms of architecture and general layout, Detroit and Chicago are closely reminiscent of each other; not surprising, as they're both Midwestern cities that first came to prominence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That similarity with Chicago--if you've been there, or if you've read my earlier Tunnel Visions article about it--can also help ground the nature of the Detroit People Mover. Imagine the Loop in downtown Chicago, where trains from half a dozen lines roll in from the outer city and suburbs to deliver their passengers to the core--now remove all of those extra lines that feed passengers into it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The total length of the DPM is barely three miles, strung in a loop that weaves through the skyscrapers of downtown Detroit from GM's headquarters at the Renaissance Center on the riverfront and goes as far north as Grand Circus Park, though it's still well removed from the section of highway that surrounds downtown and is only about a fifteen-minute walk from the river anyway. Also, when I say the route goes <i>through</i> the buildings, I'm being literal--aside from some stations that are built into the sides of certain larger buildings, a significant section of track is entirely enclosed within Cobo Center, an experience that reminded me of the coincidentally-named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrowland_Transit_Authority_PeopleMover">Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover</a> at Disney World and how it passes inside Space Mountain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The system also operates unidirectionally: when it was first opened the trains ran counter-clockwise, but as posters still visible across the network trumpet, it now runs clockwise "and even faster!" While the half-as-wide trackbed makes it easier for the People Mover to filter through downtown Detroit, it does introduce something of a calculus to using it--if you want to go somewhere nearby, but you'd have to ride around the entire loop to reach it, it might just be easier to walk it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the things that struck me as odd about Detroit was how <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Central_Station">Michigan Central Station</a>, the city's former rail hub and now well-known for its "ruin porn" qualities, was rather isolated from downtown. It's 2.5 kilometers from Campus Martius--for a Toronto comparison, it would be as if Union Station was at King and Strachan--and though it was served by streetcars on Michigan Avenue back in the day, and Amtrak ran <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Executive">commuter trains</a> to it until declining ridership forced their cancellation back in 1984, it feels cut off from the fabric today. That leads into one of the big things keeping the People Mover from being anything more than it is: aside from a stop near Rosa Parks Transit Center, where local and suburban buses and even the tunnel bus from Windsor take on passengers, nothing feeds into the People Mover. Even the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEMCOG_Commuter_Rail">prospective commuter rail link</a> between Detroit and Ann Arbor would only go as far as the Amtrak station, and would be dependent on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_M-1_Rail_Line">M-1 streetcar line</a>--which started construction just last week--to connect people with downtown.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As it is, though, a lot of those streetcar riders might just bypass the People Mover anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Stations</b></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaRXDxhwfuhy8QMfdQGqGcZQnbVNkdYX2KiK3zJwnhW-uWZRueEIIgdWl-Vs6sdojaEe6UUzd-q7KmW8ATjrNf8ONnxbMiP08b7xUMTJeubHo0ivpiS7QoVJSXboizKgYK3jhWCyrcOYU/s1600/tv13broadway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaRXDxhwfuhy8QMfdQGqGcZQnbVNkdYX2KiK3zJwnhW-uWZRueEIIgdWl-Vs6sdojaEe6UUzd-q7KmW8ATjrNf8ONnxbMiP08b7xUMTJeubHo0ivpiS7QoVJSXboizKgYK3jhWCyrcOYU/s1600/tv13broadway.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Bask in the 1980s ambience of the People Mover's Broadway station.</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are thirteen stations--for good luck, of course--strung along the Detroit People Mover like pearls, but I don't know many people who board trains via crystallized calcium carbonate retreived from some kind of mollusk, and if you know any pearls that have their own turnstiles you're odder off than even I am. They're all rather small, considering they only have one track to worry about, and are rather short as well. It felt to me like there was the room to <i>maybe</i> squeeze a third car in there, even if passenger numbers justified it, which they <i>don't</i>, and then you'd have to worry about whether or not you should warn alighting passengers to mind the third rail.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Once you're inside, there's not much to them; granted, I didn't visit <i>every</i> station Detroit has to offer, but I think the ones I ended up at were representative. They're entirely unstaffed, which the SkyTrain back west has in common, and each station is well-appointed with public art, but to me they felt somewhat... hollow. Quiet. They're not built with significant traffic in mind, and though stations do have their architectural flourishes, they struck me as rather bare-bones and minimalistic. The ones I travelled through were pretty spotless, but then, it's a lot easier to keep something clean when you don't have a constant stream of people coming through and scuffing things up. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Still, the stations often didn't feel connected to the surrounding neighborhood--this is partially an artifact of how so many of them are built into or adjoining larger buildings, and partially because some of them seem to have been designed specifically so that they don't <i>have</i> to interact with what's around them. My prime experience with this was at Greektown Station, which serves one of downtown Detroit's more touristy enclaves. From the platform there's a staircase that leads down to street level, but when I'd done what I went to Greektown to do and headed back to the People Mover, I found that the door I'd come through was exit-only. There's another entrance, an elevated one connected to the building across the street that houses the Greektown Casino, but for the life of me I <i>could not find it</i>--in the end, it was easier for me to follow the track to the next station. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I only encountered other people on the platforms a handful of times, and Renaissance Center Station was the only one where there would reliably be others waiting with me--and since the RenCen includes a 70-storey hotel, and two different conventions were going on the week I was there, I'm not sure it's representative either. I don't think the GM employees make that much use of it either, given the 1970s-level profusion of parking lots and parking structures nearby. The rest of them made Toronto's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellesmere_(TTC)">Ellesmere Station</a> look like Grand Central.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Equipment</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">An ad-wrapped People Mover train glides over the streetscape.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Detroit is one of three cities that makes use of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_Capacity_Transit_System">ICTS</a><sup>2</sup> as the foundation of its rail transit network, and of those it was the most recent to start them rolling. It uses the same 1980s-era Mark I trains that Vancouver started with and which the Scarborough RT still relies on, but in exclusively two-car trains. Inside the cars seem like they've been left the way they came from the factory, with the walls and seats all resolutely beige, and the exteriors are all taken over by whole-car wrap advertisements. Detroit's cars do have small plastic "armrests" that divide the otherwise wall-length bench seating into groups of ones and twos, something I've never encountered in Vancouver or Scarborough. The operators also seem unusually obsessed with making sure riders don't lean on the doors--one set I found had no fewer than <i>three</i> stickers to that effect, but let's be honest; most people probably don't bother to read them anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Ease of Access and Ease of Use</span></b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJPH1vwT9mawvS59xPemdkyN4cGyTGuAsjCzClUitrgY_qdQn5TptTIqFGW-WKCDneXJ9fSta9L3SM-SPSme5zamzvFKIzLkWo0CmSCBTyQkK2jqdgSZLtEWSJsNOqJLIGWKjv9oT-ZIo/s1600/tv13greektown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJPH1vwT9mawvS59xPemdkyN4cGyTGuAsjCzClUitrgY_qdQn5TptTIqFGW-WKCDneXJ9fSta9L3SM-SPSme5zamzvFKIzLkWo0CmSCBTyQkK2jqdgSZLtEWSJsNOqJLIGWKjv9oT-ZIo/s1600/tv13greektown.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">One would be forgiven for mistaking this for an entrance to Greektown station. It isn't--it really isn't.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One thing that surprised me right off about the People Mover was that unlike transit systems in most other cities I've been to, signage wasn't primarily in the dominant language of the area. There are plenty of examples of trilingual signage on the People Mover, written in English, Spanish, and Arabic--which isn't surprising, given the size of the Chaldean-Assyrian diaspora community in the Detroit area. But there's not much to read, though. System maps seemed few and far between, but then, it's not particularly easy to get lost on a line that loops back on itself again and again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Access to the stations is governed by turnstiles that exclusively eat Detroit People Mover tokens--about the size of a quarter, and one can be yours for the low, low price of $0.75. I can't remember the last time I rode <i>anything</i> with a fare under a dollar... those kiddie back-and-forth rides you'd find in front of mall arcades, maybe. The token vending machines themselves look like the arcade change machines I used as a kid--hell, considering the People Mover opened in 1987, they were probably manufactured by the same company.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As far as my observations went, accessibility was pretty universal across the People Mover stations, with elevator access from street level to the platform. Considering the system was built in the late 1980s, it <i>better </i>have such access--it's not as if it's a product of the benighted, barbarous 1950s.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Conclusion</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Detroit People Mover is, fundamentally, a mover constantly searching for people--and it doesn't always find them. One of my rides was at 10:45 AM on a weekday, through Financial District Station, and aside from me the train was <i>completely</i> empty. During the course of my background research, I found a few sources indicating the People Mover has come close to being shut down, and it wouldn't surprise me if it yet came to pass. I mean, Detroit is full of potential, but right now it's held back by a mountain of problems. When you watch a train glide by a grand, towering, turn-of-the-century skyscraper that is in fact completely empty, or when you look past the platform at a building that's as thoroughly decked out in graffiti as is possible for one that probably doesn't have working elevators anymore, sometimes it feels like you're looking between universes--where the People Mover is an artifact of a city that could have been, quietly rolling above the city that is.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><sup>1</sup> The other two are the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metromover">Metromover</a> in Miami and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville_Skyway">Jacksonville Skyway</a>. Like Detroit, the Jacksonville system lacks major transit connections outside its service area.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><sup>2</sup> Yeah, I know they're calling it "INNOVIA Metro" now, but that's just rebranded corporate bafflegab anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana; font-weight: bold;">Previous Tunnel Visions</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/08/tunnel-visions-seattles-link-light-rail.html">Seattle's Link Light Rail</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/07/tunnel-visions-portlands-max-light-rail.html">Portland's MAX Light Rail</a></span></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.ca/2012/06/tunnel-visions-seattle-center-monorail.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Seattle Center Monorail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/09/tunnel-visions-bay-area-rapid-transit.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bay Area Rapid Transit</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/06/tunnel-visions-san-franciscos-muni.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">San Francisco's Muni Metro</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2011/02/tunnel-visions-phoenixs-metro-light.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Phoenix's Metro Light Rail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/tunnel-visions-kenosha-electric-railway.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Kenosha Electric Railway</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/09/tunnel-visions-vancouvers-skytrain.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Vancouver's SkyTrain</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/03/tunnel-visions-toronto-subway-and-rt.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Toronto Subway and RT</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2010/01/tunnel-visions-los-angeles-county-metro.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Los Angeles County Metro Rail</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/10/tunnel-visions-chicago-l.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Chicago 'L'</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://actsofminortreason.blogspot.com/2009/08/tunnel-visions-torontos-subway-and.html"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Montreal Metro</span></a></li>
</ul>
Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-72695282722808821962014-07-22T12:38:00.000-04:002014-07-22T12:38:06.535-04:00A Fresh Appearance<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There may be one or two of you out there who're interested in what I'm on about. If that's the case, great! My latest short story--well, novelette, really--"Each Night I Dream of Liberty" is now available in the October 2014 issue of <i><a href="http://www.analogsf.com/">Analog</a></i>. You can find it in bookstores and online, and if you're in Toronto you can also pick it up from the Union Fruit Market in Union Station or borrow an electronic copy from the Toronto Public Library.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Also, I've just come back from Detroit and Detcon1. It was pretty rad. Here, I brought back this photo of a seagull for yinz.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fly!</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1737980321158585254.post-24352347063990365022014-05-19T11:34:00.002-04:002014-05-19T13:12:25.099-04:00Tailings of the Golden Age #1: Blitz Against Japan<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>"Blitz Against Japan," by Robert Moore Williams</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>Appeared in </i>Amazing Stories<i>, September 1942</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"Who <u>thought</u> he had developed a secret weapon that was going to end the war," York harshly corrected. "He talks some politician into using pressure in Washington so he could get a trial. He brings his weapon out of Hawaii and installs it on two battleships. He says it will knock planes out of the sky as far as they can be seen, that it will smash the biggest battleship that was ever floated. He takes the battleships out for tests. Blooie! Two battleships gone. Only they were <u>our</u> battleships, the ones on which the weapon had been installed. This might not have been fatal if only the Japs had not chosen the very next day to attack the islands, with every carrier, every cruiser, every destroyer, and every battleship they had, not to mention a couple of hundred transports loaded with troops. We were two battleships short, two ships that might have meant the difference between victory and defeat. That's why we lost the Hawaiian Islands. That's why I'm damning Riemann..."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Here's a fun fact--I bought this issue of <i>Amazing Stories</i> specifically because this was the cover story. I knew it would not be particularly pleasant, and I was not proven wrong.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Picture this: it's Monday, December 8, 1941, smoke is still rising after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and just like <i>that</i> the war that's been raging for two years already has pulled the United States in. It was a conflict that some saw coming--hell, the October 1933 issue of <i>Wonder Stories</i> includes a story that posits the eruption of a war between the US and Japan in 1940--but even if you see the punch coming, that won't make it hurt any less if it hits. That's when you start smarting over it, maybe wondering why it happened at all, but more importantly figuring out how you're going to get back at the guy who swung at you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That's the atmosphere in which Robert Moore Williams wrote the novelette "Blitz Against Japan," a story you've probably never heard of. Appearing as it does in the September 1942 issue of Raymond Palmer's <i>Amazing Stories</i>, which would itself have hit the stands by August at the latest, fresh wounds ooze through this story. Palmer himself called it "inspired and smashing." With the bright light of morning seventy-two years later falling on it, though, its more problematic aspects are thrown into sharp relief--and <i>damn</i> if there aren't a lot of them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Blitz Against Japan" is set in a dark, unpleasant future: specifically, 1943. The Pacific War, at least, is not going well for the United States--Hawaii has been captured, the Pacific Fleet has been sunk, and a gigantic Japanese invasion force is bearing down on the West Coast. We're introduced to our protagonist, Lieutenant Dave York, as he discovers the invasion fleet in a scout plane with a radio shattered in a dogfight with Zero fighters, races to bring the news back to the last American carrier in the Pacific only to find it sinking, runs out of gas within sight of the California coast, and ditches in the water rather than leave his back-seat buddy Red Johnson afloat and alone. They get picked up by a fortuitous seaplane, at least, so it's all good--I mean, except for the whole "the good guys are up against the wall" theme, which is hardly unique to this story. In fact, one of the things that came to mind while reading this story was that this was reminiscent of <i>The Last Starfighter</i>, except with less CGI and a hell of a lot more casual racism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Aside from the near-future setting, the story's main science-fictional element comes after York and Johnson return to land, when Johnson lets slip that his uncle, an inventor and scientist named Reimann, is looking for pilots for a secret weapon project that's <i>so</i> secret not even the US government knows about it--shades of the Manhattan Project, certainly. Reimann, we were told earlier to fill space before York and Johnson were picked up by the seaplane, had invented a weapon--the "radium projector"--capable of destroying planes and battleships with equal ease, but the weapon ended up destroying two US battleships instead... and wouldn't you know it, the Japanese attacked literally <i>the next day</i> and conquered Hawaii! The fact that York blames the conquest on Reimann, and <i>not</i> the monumentally massive intelligence failure that allowed the <i>entire Imperial Japanese Navy</i> to attack Hawaii with <b>complete surprise</b>, says a lot about the care with which this story was put together--though it could also be Williams commenting on Pearl Harbor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So, Riemann has this secret weapon, but he's <i>persona non grata</i> among the military brass because of the battleship incident, and so York and Johnson decide to go AWOL--a capital offense during wartime!--and track down Riemann's secret laboratory, hidden at a horse ranch near San Francisco that Riemann himself owns, because who would <i>ever</i> think to look there? It's there that York discovers the secret weapon: a refined version of the radium projector, a radiation beam which can "accelerate the action of the forces normally present in the metal that cause it to disintegrate." These whiz-bang ray guns come mounted on rocket ships, because in 1942 everyone knew that rocketry was the wave of the future, even if they weren't sure how exactly it would come about. Riemann's rockets, despite having no wings--hell, from the bit visible on the cover, they don't have any control surfaces at all--will be enough to turn the tide of the war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then the Nazi saboteurs, fresh from sabotaging the original radium projectors, show up. That's right, what the hell did you expect? This <i>is</i> a war story after all. Here we also see the only female character in the story, York's girlfriend Rita, who exists primarily to sob, be called "kitten," and follow York to the secret laboratory, thereby leading the Nazi saboteurs right there as well. Thankfully, York received literally <i>seconds</i> of training on these experimental aircraft that bear no resemblance to anything he's ever flown before. It's just in time, because the big Japanese invasion of Los Angeles is proving to be only a feint, but before he can launch the Nazis invade the lab and start monologuing! They even let the characters listen to radio reports about how the Japanese are attacking San Francisco with poison gas--specifically, poison gas "released from thousands of hidden generators," only released after all the Japanese residents were evacuated, and the result of a plan that had taken years of preparation. Because, you know, every Japanese person in the United States was a deadly danger and a sleeper agent for Tokyo. The United States would never do anything so heinous as put innocent civilians in internment camps behind barbed-wire fences, so <i>obviously</i> those civilians must not be innocent at all! Everything falls into place, and the American people can believe they're doing the right thing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That's hardly the way to go, though! The good guys manage to get the upper hand long enough for York to hop into one of these experimental rockets, fire up the engines, induce an oscillation because he's got no idea what he's doing, and slam into the side of a mountain. Wait, no, that's what would <i>really</i> happen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>Video: what <b>really</b> happens when you put an untrained person behind the wheel of a rocket.</i></span></center>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nevertheless, York manages to get the rocket in the air and keep it there. The Japanese fleet has assembled off San Francisco for the invasion, but with almost every plane on the West Coast fighting at Los Angeles, it's up to York to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. He gets a carrier in his sights, triggers the radium projector--and nothing!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then there's one of the mid-scene scene breaks that happened <i>all the goddamn time</i> in 1930s and 1940s pulp stories, and we find it in fact did <i>something</i>. Then we encounter the Japanese, who start talking like characters from racist propaganda, or racist <a href="http://www.misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics397.html">shoe advertisements</a>. ("What happened to honorable carrier?" "Regret that this lowly one must report to honorable admiral that one carrier has been sunk.") I know that the Japanese language is really up about honorifics, but seriously, people. We then get reflections on how one 1940s destroyer could have sunk the Spanish Armada, and seeing as how the only danger York is in comes from his own skill at piloting, Williams had to throw in a final enemy worthy of his newfound power: the head Nazi spy, who appears in one of the other rockets. This epic duel of the fates lasts for an astonishing <i>six paragraphs</i> before the Nazi is shot down, and afterward the conclusion is obvious. The Japanese fleet is annihilated, and with its newfound advanced technology America is <b>on the march</b> for Tokyo.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In all, not exactly the sort of story that had a lot of staying power. Like the pulps themselves were seen by many, it's fundamentally disposable: meant to be read and then chucked away, tied absolutely to its time. It's not particularly strong, science-fictionally speaking--aside from the rockets and the radium projector it's just invasion literature, though SF has historically owed a lot to that genre. Kenneth Hite once described Gernsback's <i>Amazing Stories</i> as being filled with "odes to antigravity machines," and that's the sort of viewpoint that's echoed in "Blitz Against Japan." It's an entire story about how no matter how much we may screw up and get things wrong, if we put our faith in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFHlJ2voJHY">Blast Hardcheese</a>--by which I mean technology--we'll make it through in the end.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Beyond that, it's just <b>weird</b>. The key to suspending any disbelief whatsoever for this story is to understanding the viewpoint of early 1942. In the United States, Japan was by and large a mystery--in his editorial, Palmer mentions that not even photos of the Zero fighter were available for artist Robert Fuqua to use as reference, though aside from minor details in the wing shape it's remarkably accurate. People were willing to believe that Japan was a juggernaut that would roll across the Pacific, that fifth columns of spies and saboteurs would hamper the war effort, and that the United States was weak and vulnerable. From a modern, historical perspective, it's flatly impossible. Japan did not have the resources to overwhelm the United States, but worst-case scenarios will always prosper in wartime.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This story did get one thing right, though: Japan's defeat came by way of nuclear weapons. Just not the kind <i>you're</i> thinking of.</span>Phoebe Bartonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10457452561340581723noreply@blogger.com0