A Longing for the Shorts

"Oh, neat," the Chapters cashier said when I set down the latest issues of Analog and Asimov's. "I didn't even know we carried these." It's slightly paraphrased, since it's been a couple of months, but it's also a slight problem. Short story magazines were once the crucibles of writing in general, and science fiction in particular was first launched from the prewar pulps. Short stories were how many new writers entered the community. It wasn't until the 1970s that the balance started to tip in favor of using one's first novel to break down the clubhouse door.

I can't help but wonder if a lot of that is due to what's happened to the short story magazines themselves. Sure, old stalwarts like the Big Three are still chugging along, but with a fraction of the regular subscribers they had only thirty years ago - according to the PS Form 3256 in the January/February 2012 issue of Analog, its average paid circulation per month over the last year was 29,105, down from 83,000 in 1990 and 104,000 in 1980. Clearly, something is happening. My own theory goes back to that Chapters cashier - that a big part of it is a simple lack of awareness, that a lot of people just don't realize these things even exist.

I mean, for the longest time I didn't. When I was twelve, the Golden Age of science fiction, the only magazine I read was Nintendo Power. In retrospect, now that I've started adding issues from that time period to my collection, my twelve-year-old self wouldn't have had any trouble grasping the content. As it is, the earliest possible date I've been able to establish for encountering a science fiction magazine was the January 2001 issue of Asimov's - and even then I only realized it when the opening chapters of Allen Steele's Coyote had a niggling familiarity to them. It wasn't until 2003 that I found a place that I actually knew to sell them - the Trent University Bookstore. Even then it wasn't until around 2006 that I really started getting into them.

I have since worked to remedy that.

Now that I'm a regular reader of them, my lack of access to them earlier in life is something I regret, in the sense of "what could have been." What things would have been like if my horizons could have been broadened so early, to know that there were things beyond Star Trek and Star Wars and whatever novels I had at the time. The big problem was, and is, availability. My high school library didn't carry them; the Barrie Public Library, to my knowledge, didn't carry them; back in the 1990s, there might not have been anyone selling in them in a place as podunk as Barrie - and when no one sells something, in the pre-web age it was easy to not realize such things existed at all.

So it goes back to people like the cashier, who could find these magazines interesting but honestly have no idea they are around. It's hardly a surprise - the only places I know in Metro Vancouver to find them are Chapters stores and that one magazine store on West 4th in Kits. It's a shame, because I feel there's still a vital niche that short stories can occupy, particularly with the recent rise of e-readers. With the recent successes of the electronic magazines Lightspeed and Redstone, among many others, the medium is far from dead yet. What it still needs, most of all, is to be recognized by its potential audience.

Photo: Smoke People of Cordova Street

It's interesting what the camera can see when you change the default settings at the right time of day. For this picture, looking east along Cordova Street at around 4:30 in the afternoon, I had set my camera to a 0.6 second exposure time to compensate for the generally lessened light so close to sunset. I like the six-pointed star effect that it creates around all the headlights, traffic lights, and light standards, but that's ordinary - what I really like is the way the people in the crosswalk are rendered as blurry clouds of smoke, or in some cases shoes and boots with smoke curling out.

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Waiter, Waiter, There's An Atom in My Water

One of the most precious things in the world a person can have is a sense of perspective - the capability to understand the degree to which something is important in the grand scheme of things. It's precious specifically because the vast majority of people either don't have such a sense, or sorely need to calibrate it. It's easy to make a mountain out of an anthill when you don't really understand mountains, and it's very easy to freak out about nuclear power when you only have a limited grasp of how nuclear power actually works.

In his editorial for the January/February 2012 issue of Analog, Stan Schmidt called for perspective and understanding in the wake of the Fukushima disaster - covering, incidentally, similar ground as I did at the same time - but one thing he wrote struck me in particular. "I live near a nuclear power plant," he wrote, "and I often marvel that a routine plumbing repair there is front-page news; I can't think of any other industry in which such treatment would even be considered."

It only took a couple of days for the Canadian media to prove the accuracy of that. On Wednesday, it was reported in the Globe and Mail - not on the front page, thankfully, but high up in the science/environment section - that the presently inactive Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station, New Brunswick's only nuclear power station, experienced a spill of four to six liters of radioactive heavy water while the plant's moderator was being filled. Note that this was specifically in the reactor building, and it was cleaned up by staff and it's no longer an issue.

Still, for some people, uttering the word "radioactive" in the context of a nuclear plant is like Pavlov ringing one of his little bells. Also on Wednesday, the Globe ran a follow-up article - about the spill of four to six liters of radioactive water inside a nuclear power plant, just so we're clear - about how the Conservation Council of New Brunswick is seeking more information about what happened, because "there are too many unanswered questions."

I've got an unanswered question, right here - do you have any idea how nuclear power generation really works, really?

Presented for your consideration, six liters' worth of containers. I didn't want to waste any water, so just pretend that they're full.

The website of the CCNB describes nuclear power as "not green, not cheap, and not needed" - which, when you consider that "Cutting Greenhouse Gases in NB" is in the same section of the website, tells you the degree to which this organization seems to be rooted in the real world, just like how it claims that Canada reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% below 1990 levels in 2020 is achievable... I suppose technically that's true, in the sense that it doesn't really violate any physical laws, like how I could just lie down in front of the SkyTrain when I go to work. Just because it isn't impossible it doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Too, there's the separate Nuclear Free NB website, which is exactly what you'd expect - the main logo is all red clouds, and the second post is selling bumper stickers carrying the message "FUKUSHIMA: Don't Let It Happen Here!" Because, you know, Fukushima Daiichi didn't experience catastrophe because it was hit by one of the most powerful earthquakes in the last ten thousand years and one of the most powerful tsunamis in the last thousand, and because it had been incompetently managed. People seriously advocating this should first be able to explain a mechanism for how a nuclear plant situated near the coast of the Bay of Fundy, shielded by Nova Scotia from the open Atlantic, far from any active fault lines, could "happen" the way Fukushima did.

Here, they're making perfect the enemy of good. Personally, I consider anti-nuclear organizations like this to be unwitting stooges of the true enemy, the big fossil fuel lobbies. If Point Lepreau was to be decomissioned, what do you think would make up the generating gap? Would it be renewables, or would New Brunswick just follow Germany's sterling example and replace its non-polluting, zero-carbon nuclear infrastructure with dirty, polluting, carbon-heavy coal? Coal's no stranger to New Brunswick - my great-grandfather was a New Brunswick coal miner.

But in the end, these things get traction because too many people have no understanding of how nuclear power plants work. It's not like in Blowups Happen, where constant monitoring and intervention was necessary to keep the plant from going up. Nuclear power is, on the whole, the safest form of power generation we have. Keep in mind that, even almost a year later, no one is known to have died as a result of the Fukushima disaster. Estimates range wildly for the toll of Chernobyl, from 30,000 to 985,000 premature cancer deaths... but compare this to the main alternative, coal power. Earlier this year, a report by the American Lung Association estimated that in the United States alone, thirteen thousand people are killed every year by power plant pollution. At this point, even by Greenpeace's estimate of 200,000 early cancer deaths, American coal plants have killed far more people than did Chernobyl.

We face grave challenges in the years to come, and if we want to have a hope of coming out the other end with any kind of strength, we cannot afford to discard zero-pollution, zero-carbon power generation because it gives some people the willies. The answer to that is education and proper oversight. It would be a dark future indeed that didn't have nuclear power in it.

Photo: Bridging Again the Waters

Construction on the new Port Mann Bridge, providing a more effective link between Surrey and Coquitlam, is proceeding apace and it's looking more and more like the SkyBridge every day. Particularly when you consider the degree to which the old Port Mann Bridge resembles the Patullo Bridge, it's practically as if the planners over there said "yeah, New Westminster is awesome, so let's just copy their style."


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Failing Kyoto After Failing Canadians

I'm not particularly proud to be Canadian right now. It didn't take very long after Dear Leader Harper's mouthpiece announced, mere hours after returning from the Durban conference, that Canada would become the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol for the finger-pointing to start. Much of it is coming from the European Union, China, and India - understandably so, when you consider that by its actions, the government of Canada obviously doesn't care about what other countries think of it. Sure, Harper has since reared up on his hind legs and jawed about how he wants to work to create a solid framework that includes everyone and doesn't give China and India a free pass. It seems to me that he's chosen the most ass-backwards way of going about it. Why should China or India get on board with anything Canada wants now? Canada has demonstrated that it's a delinquent quitter.

Fingers are also being pointed from within the country, too, and one such point particularly infuriated me - from the Globe and Mail, Stephen Gordon's short but stunning "Don’t blame the politicians, Canadians killed Kyoto."

You hear that, Canadians? It's your fault. Yours alone. Your fault that back in 1997, Canada took on emissions reductions targets it had little hope of reaching... because of course that's the platform Chrétien ran on, wasn't it? Your fault that Stephen Harper is a relentless skeptic of Kyoto - I wouldn't be surprised if he was a full-on climate change skeptic, if only because so many people on that side of the spectrum have built this insane conspiratorial structure that betrays either their lack of understanding of the science involved, or their willingness to gamble with the future of the world. Your fault and not the government's. I mean, the people elected the government, so obviously, the people are responsible for what the government does, right?

What a world that would be to live in. Doesn't bear much resemblance to this one, though.

Who cares about the future, anyway? Industry is where it's at.

The fact is, it is at the government's feet that this responsibility should be placed, both because of what it has done since 2006 and as the successor of previous governments. Canadian governments have rarely done anything that was of wide-scale, environmental value, or ever really considered the long-term consequences of their decisions. In fact, it was the government - under the aegis of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation - that helped start the suburban explosion in Canada. It was the government that planned and built Ontario's highway systems, which through the magic of induced demand created a vast demand for use which had not been there before. It was the government that let the passenger rail system wither on the vine. It was the government - specifically, the Ontario government, but reflective of government actions nonetheless - that cancelled Toronto's Eglinton West subway project in 1995.

Sure, Canadians have "chosen" to live a lifestyle based on high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions. Really, though, how much of a choice was it for many people? Myself I count as lucky - I don't own a car, I rely exclusively on public transportation for getting around, and according to my latest bill from the City of New Westminster, over the last two months my apartment has consumed 191 kilowatt-hours of electricity - contrast this to the average consumption in the Lower Mainland, roughly 1,483 kilowatt-hours per two months. Granted, my laundry use isn't reflected in those figures, but somehow I doubt that thirty-four minutes of washing machine time and an hour of dryer time would significantly alter those numbers.

As I said, though, I'm lucky, because I had the freedom to choose to live in an area that met my requirements in this regard. A lot of people aren't. Perhaps they live in places that don't have good access to public transit and thus require them to drive, no matter what the person may want. Perhaps they did have a good thing going once, but their job relocated from downtown Vancouver to Langley or Surrey. Perhaps they're just trapped where they are and don't have the financial resources to do anything else.

The government, and past governments, could have made it easier for Canadians to choose to live lifestyles based on low carbon emissions. They didn't. The ultimate responsibility lies with the government, and to say otherwise is to give it a free pass from its misdeeds. The government is supposed to look beyond the everyday that the ordinary people are focused on; it's supposed to look ahead and work for the future.

It failed.

Photo: Under Her Guns

A lot of people took the opportunity to board the Russian missile cruiser Varyag when it was in town for a port visit last month. It's easy to see that some of the most interesting photos would come from the bow, and so it was unsurprisingly packed with people when I came by and failed to get on. With the flagship of the Russian Navy's Pacific Fleet tied up in Vancouver with a SeaBus sailing practically right under her guns, it's interesting to see the degree things have changed over the last twenty years... in some respects, at least.

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A Key to Entertaining Education

Most people of my generation has at least some experience with edutainment games. Primarily at school, but sometime at home as well depending on what our folks wanted to learn, we'd be set in front of the keyboard and given leave to play a "game" that was teaching us something at the same time... the problem is that a lot of the time edutainment games just weren't very good, sacrificing the entertainment aspect for the education aspect. In fairness, though, it's rather difficult to build a non-transparent edutainment game, something that's fun in spite of being educational.

One way to get around this is to build a game that is not itself educational, but which requires learning specific skills in order to succeed. Kerbal Space Program, an awesome spaceflight simulator game I've written about before, is one of these. As your rockets become more and more sophisticated and your flights become more and more ambitious, you can't help but learn about things like orbital mechanics, the way thrust works in a vacuum, and how difficult some things really are to pull off successfully. Like, say, moon landings. So far we've had six successful moon landings, and when you have even a bit of experience with a game like Kerbal Space Program, you know that it's a testament to the skill of everyone from Neil Armstrong to Gene Cernan that not a single moon landing ended with twisted debris strewn across the surface. The most successful of my first six moon landings were qualified by "included the fewest number of explosions." A powered descent on an airless world takes nerves of steel; Neil Armstrong's heart was doing 156 beats per minute during the final descent of Apollo 11. This is not simple stuff.

That, in itself, is an important lesson - building up one's understanding that even if someone knows how to do something, that does not make it easy.

Making a successful Mun landing: hard. Making sure you have enough propellant left to get home: also hard. Going by the crew portraits, I think Jeb is the only one who truly grasps this. Kerbal Space Program is © Squad.

It's easy for us to make grand leaps of logic out of ignorance. To think that anything we don't understand is hard only because we don't understand it, and for someone who knows what they're doing it's child's play. The hard fact is, just because you know how to do a difficult thing doesn't make it stop being difficult, it just makes it stop being practically impossible.

That's a worthwhile education on its own, an idea of what it's really like up there - an appreciation for how difficult some things really are. I'm guilty of that, even just in the context of Kerbal Space Program; I really believed there was a chance that with the smallest fuel tank in the game only one-quarter full, I could not only establish a stable lunar parking orbit but execute the burn to get the crew home. What actually happened was that the fuel was exhausted barely after ascent had begun, and shortly thereafter the Mun gained a new crater. Brutal, unforgiving physics demonstrated how deep in error I was.

So I tried again, with a bigger fuel tank for the descent module. Wouldn't you know it, not only did I manage to land it safely, but took off again and brought the crew all the way home with just a sliver of fuel, despite the Mun swinging around to screw up my trajectory. That single mission taught me more about how spaceflight really works than an entire childhood spent reading starcharts and science books. There is a certain viscerality when you're actually doing these things, or as close to actuality as you can get through a computer screen.

This is what edutainment should be. Not just games where you shoot enemies by solving mathematical equations at them - things that are fun on their own, but demand comprehension of the underlying subject in order to succeed. That's how new things are learned and lessons are retained. A greater understanding of things like this means a people that's equipped to comprehend the way the world works, and that's just what we need in this sort of century.

Photo: Full Moon Over the Inlet

On Friday evening I watched the full moon rise over the North Shore Mountains. I'd never seen that before, and I'd certainly never been able to see the moon actually moving, but move it did. By the time I got down to the water, it was already high in the sky and shining bright with reflected sunlight. When the Burrard Pacific Breeze came by on its way to the Waterfront Station SeaBus dock, I knew that was all I needed. Vancouver in December can be an enrapturing place, just as long as it isn't raining.

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Unsafe at Any Hypersonic Speed?

War never changes; it just gets more sophisticated. Last month, while the media was doing its utmost to marginalize and pigeonhole the Occupy movement, the United States military conducted a test launch of a new weapon platform: a hypersonic missile, capable of flight at five times the speed of sound, or six thousand kilometers per hour, and faster. This missile, fired from Hawaii, didn't even need half an hour to reach a target 3,700 kilometers away. It's all part of a project intended to give the United States the capacity to strike any target anywhere in the world within an hour and with ten-meter accuracy.

The BBC's reporting on it is rather dry and slim, saying little more than "this happened. Here is a brief explanation of what it is and some of the basic reasons why it happened." What isn't really spoken about is what it means, and that's the truly important thing to consider. For one, it distinctly reminded me of George Friedman's The Next 100 Years, in which he forecasts the Third World War to start in 2050 with attacks by unmanned hypersonic aircraft against the United States, Poland, and the rest of its coalition. The way I see it, hypersonic missiles are poised to reinvent the idea of warfare similar to the way intercontinental ballistic missiles did in the mid-20th century, and destabilize the 21st century political environment.

What really concerns me is how the United States will act when it has a hypersonic monopoly. It would have the ability to strike anyone, anywhere, with practically no warning at all, and whether or not an ability is used has little bearing on how that will be perceived elsewhere. I would imagine that once the United States starts building a hypersonic arsenal, everyone who is not already a staunch US ally will feel more threatened, and be justified in doing so. Missiles that fast can't be intercepted by aircraft, and it would take an extremely lucky shot for anti-aircraft defenses to knock one down. In many, many circumstances, hypersonic missiles would give the United States to strike anywhere it wants with utter impunity.

The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System aboard HMCS Algonquin. With an effective range of two kilometers, it'd have approximately one and one-quarter seconds to shoot down a hypersonic missile moving at Mach 5 before impact.

Sure, to a degree the United States already has this ability; but that's only to a degree. While its bombers can reach anywhere on Earth, a significant chunk of the modern American bomber force is subsonic. Aside from that, there are psychological factors at play: bombers are known, bombers are familiar - and bombers can be shot down. Even stealth aircraft can be shot down, as the Serbs proved back in 1999 when they shot down an F-117 during the NATO bombing campaign. That the United States has the capacity to send a bomber anywhere and drop some bunker-busters if it feels that it needs to doesn't really generate friction on its own.

Hypersonic missiles are a different story. Basically, unless you already operate a ballistic missile defense system, you're not stopping a hypermissile. Sure, you might be able to see it coming, you might be able to get out of its way, but nothing more than that.

Granted, I don't believe - at this point, at least - that the United States really would start using hypermissiles hither and yon outside of extremely unusual circumstances. The point, however, is not what it would do; the point is what it could do, and how that it is perceived by its rivals. It's easy to imagine how states that aren't on the best terms with Washington might see a hypermissile force as an existential threat. The way the reactions to such perceived threats manifest may greatly influence the geopolitical landscape as the century drags on.

Photo: A Columbia Street Rose

I don't know what the story behind this was. All I know is that a couple of weekends ago, someone left a rose on top of the electrical box at Columbia and Church in New Westminster. Perhaps it was a token of some sort; no way to know. It looked nice, though, and it was gone later. That's all I really know.

I'm not even sure if it's actually a rose.

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