"To Bring Down the Steel," by Doug Beason
Appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, October 1993
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.
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 that. The Soviet Union was gone, the Cold War had ended, and people all over were left saying to themselves "well, shit... now 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 existed. 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.
Science fiction couldn't not 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 Analogs I came upon the other day, I've had another chance to listen.
Doug Beason's "To Bring Down the Steel" is a story you may never have heard of; according to ISFDB, its sole appearance was in the October '93 Analog, 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 The Martian. It's also one of the few stories I've encountered that has italics in its title.
In the not-too-distant future, a space mining corporation named... *sigh* ...MiningCorp 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.
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 anything" 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.
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.
"...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."
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 bad guy, 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 really think that will give them enough incentive to turn the country around?"
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 really 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 -- 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 really 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."
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 Down 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 guess, before hitting the whole "we need to stop STRANGLING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT" button again and again.
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 only have been written in the 1990s. Like I said, it was one weird-as-hell time.
Previous Short SF Reviews:
It's quite possible you've never seen a marine railway - though the concept is nearly two hundred years old, they're not exactly ubiquitous. Marine railways enable maritime traffic to go between two separate bodies of water through the use of a cradle that carries them out of one body of water and into the other. When I was growing up, the closest was the Big Chute Marine Railway in Muskoka, which has incidentally been instrumental in preventing the spread of zebra mussels.This photo is a framegrab from a camcorder video that was taken on July 28, 1991.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
When I was but a lad, my grandfather took me to see the trains - if not riding them from one place to another, then just going to the quiet sidings on a weekend and taking a look at the cars waiting to go somewhere. My hometown Barrie was on a main line between Toronto and northern Ontario before the rails were lifted in the mid-1990s, and on a weekend it was easy to find plenty of boxcars, hopper cars, tanker cars, cabooses, and so on adjacent to what's now Allandale Waterfront GO Station.There were also, on occasion, more unique cars - ones like this railway snowplow, which could be pushed along by the locomotive if the drifts were too heavy to power through. They're not seen as often anymore, I understand; for one, 21st century locomotives have more power than a lot of 20th century workhorses. Pretty eye-catching, though - and that's me standing by it, for a sense of scale. This photo is actually a framegrab from a camcorder video my grandfather took, made on March 16, 1991.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
You never forget your first - convention, that is. Back in the day, before the ubiquity of the internet linked fan communities from coast to coast and continent to continent, conventions were the prime mixers of fans and the places where fandoms were anchored. I didn't get the chance to attend Rustycon 29 in Seattle last week like I'd intended, thanks to western Washington being choked with snow, but on this grey and dismal New Westminster Sunday I thought I'd write a bit about my first convention, or at least the little of it that I can remember.Today it's called Polaris, but twenty years ago it was known as Toronto Trek, being Toronto's preeminent Star Trek convention. In retrospect it's no surprise that this was my first intersection with the convention sphere; it was only because of my age and situation that the next time I crossed paths with that world wouldn't be until ten years later at Anime North. It was one of the many Star Trek conventions that had sprung up in the twenty years following the first such convention, back in 1972, when the syndication of the original series had allowed Star Trek fandom to retain its vitality. My mother took me there, and considering that we had shelves of Star Trek tie-in novels that constituted my first real look at the science fiction genre as well as the entire original run of Star Trek on those Columbia House VHS tapes, there's nothing surprising about that either.
let's see what this galaxy-class starship can do when it's in the middle of a hollywood warehouse
On August 30, 1991, the eastbound Canadian - Via Rail's transcontinental train linking Vancouver and Toronto, since we all know that the Atlantic Ocean starts at Oshawa - made a stop in the small community of Blue River, British Columbia, on the rails between Kamloops and Jasper up in the Interior. Whatever the reason for the stop, it gave the passengers at least a little bit of time to stretch their legs. This image is actually a screen capture of the video my grandfather took with his trusty Camcorder, with some steam curling around one of the dome cars and the train stretching off into the distance.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
It wasn't until very recently that I ever heard of this meme, but now that I have I'm seeing them everywhere - double rainbows, that is. There was a pretty awesome one arching over downtown Vancouver last week. While I wasn't able to capture that one, I did take a photo of another double rainbow; this one over the South End of Barrie, around 1996 or so. That's the problem with film photographs; depending on where you get them developed, there's no assurance there'll be a date stamp on the back.But, still. Double rainbow.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
Back in 2009, I wrote a post which detailed my disillusionment with the 21st century as it had unfolded up to that point, and looked at the end of the decade as a pessimistic counterweight to the 1990s and 1980s, both of which struck me as more optimistic times - although, being that I'm just 27, my knowledge of the '80s zeitgeist derives mostly from what was written and produced at the time.Apparently I'm wrong. Noel Maurer left a comment taking me to task for projecting my own view onto the spirit of the times in the late '80s and early '90s, and while I take issue with his assertion that the early 1990s recession was worse than the one we're in now - I haven't been able, personally, to find anything that suggests our current economic malaise comes in second place to anything but the Great Depression - he's got a point.I've also picked up a "declinist" vibe from some works of the period, but in the grand scheme I thought those were outliers. Things like 1991's Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn, which also reflects a general attitude towards climate change when it was still popularly considered only as the Greenhouse Effect, or James P. Hogan's 1992 The Multiplex Man, feed into the "end of the West" concept - and while Fallen Angels mires the entire world in radical technophobic ultra-environmentalism, The Multiplex Man goes one further and has the former Eastern Bloc become the new center of technological and economic growth. As for the hope of cold fusion as "one of the big game-changers," S.M. Stirling's 1989 short story "Roachstompers" - despite the other qualities which struck me as somewhat disturbing - looks at the negative consequences of the game being changed in such a big way.So I was wrong about the nature of the time - but that got me thinking. My conception of the past was greatly colored by the attitudes of the works created during them. How, in twenty or thirty years, will the '00s be seen by those who haven't been born yet or are still too young to have any understanding of the decade?Historical events, or the lack of them, may have something to do with that. Part of my conception of the late 1980s as an optimistic time came from the historical awareness there - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and in 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. From where I stand, it seemed as simple as "the threat of nuclear war that you've lived with for forty-five years is over! Why the hell wouldn't you idiots be optimistic?"I can't think of any equivalent historical events for the '00s that would similarly mislead an observer in, say, 2029. Personally, when I sat back to think of positive historically-significant events of the last ten years, the only one I can think of that might qualify is the inauguration of Barack Obama. Even then, the nature of how the remainder of his term unfolds will color the perceptions of future observers. Until at least 2012, we'll only have speculation.I would love for the things we worry about today, like deficits in democracy or environmental damage, to look as quaint in 2030 as 1990's fears of "crime and racial tension." Personally, I don't believe we have that luxury.
I don't remember the 1980s - not really. Born as I was in 1982, and at the tail end of it, what I recall of the decade is isolated flashes, swatches of darkness and light, events that were significant to a child but none that give me perspective today. My first strong memory of the greater world outside of home was Operation Desert Storm, the opening of war against Iraq in January 1991. But I can look back at what was produced at the end of the decade, and when I do, I take from 1989 a sense of optimism. The Cold War had ended, the future seemed wide-open, and technology would transform the world for the benefit of all. Fusion, cold or otherwise, tended to crop up as one of the big game-changers.Ten years later, in 1999, the West was flush from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing vacation from history which was the 1990s. The world was getting more prosperous by the day, it seemed, and liberal democracy had built a foundation that would weather any storm. The twenty-first century was upon us, and through it anything would be possible. I mean, look at it! It's the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY! It's where all the hoverboards and robot buddies and starships and dashing hero captains live! We'd made it fifty years with nuclear weapons without reducing the world to a cinder! Aside from a bit of existential dread about Y2K, I remember 1999 as a time to be optimistic about the way ahead.Today, in 2009, the game is different, and I don't think it's just me. TIME Magazine called the last ten years the Decade from Hell - I prefer "Decade of Broken Dreams," even though some people think it's an excessively purple term. We've seen the twenty-first century, and been blinded by the glare; tasted its fruit, only to have it turn to ashes in our mouths. I can't think of another decade that's ending on as sour a note as this one; of the future ever seeming so dark, I'd have to wear night-vision goggles.For decades, the twenty-first century was implicitly the great beyond, the city on the hill, and there was no alternative to it being a good and decent place where technology would work miracles and all our petty twentieth-century problems would be solved. It was the gateway to the Grand and Shining Future. After all, the crew of the Enterprise didn't have to worry about nuclear war or STDs or poverty in Africa. This was supposed to be the time where we made the first steps toward solving the problems that have bedeviled humanity since the beginning.Ten years, and we've hardly started. What these ten years have taught us is not only that things are worse than we thought, and getting worse faster than we thought they could get, but that people don't even believe things are getting bad - as if the slow death of the Arctic ice cap or the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the ticking timebomb that is the tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gases in melting northern permafrost is on the same plane as the question of whether or not the Shroud of Turin is genuine. Then again, it's hard to care about the environment when you've been fired or laid off or made redundant or what have you and you don't know where you're going to find money for food or rent.For me, the promise of a better future seems, for now, to be hollow. Maybe in 2019, we'll have found new reasons to hope for a better tomorrow.
I'm taking a break from Public Domain Photography content today. Against my better judgement, my desperate search for content has led me to declare today Post Something Old and Embarrassing Day. Fortunately, you lucky, lucky people, I have a great heaping amount of embarrassing things to choose from, and fortunately for me, the vast majority of them will never, ever, ever see the light of day.Back in 1999, when I was sixteen, I was mostly working on improving my writing style. At one point, however, I did take a detour to try my hand at drawing a character. I can't remember the context of the drawing at all, or even if there was ever any context to begin with. This is the result. I didn't do much more afterward. On the plus side, it does give you the opportunity to see what a coworker described as my "engineer's" handwriting. And those red spots on her arms are supposed to be bloody cuts, not rashes or something. As I recall, I used a pencil for the outline and pencil crayons for the color.
I wonder what might've happened had I kept on with it. Maybe by now I could've been beating Tim Buckley at his own game.
